Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal

1 | 2011 Senses of the South / Référendums populaires

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/5221 DOI : 10.4000/transatlantica.5221 ISSN : 1765-2766

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Référence électronique Transatlantica, 1 | 2011, « Senses of the South / Référendums populaires » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2011, consulté le 29 avril 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/5221 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.5221

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SOMMAIRE

Senses of the South Dossier dirigé par Géraldine Chouard et Jacques Pothier

Senses of the South Géraldine Chouard et Jacques Pothier

The Gastrodynamics of Edna Pontellier’s liberation. Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis

“Key to the highway”: blues records and the great migration Louis Mazzari

Eudora Welty: Sensing the Particular, Revealing the Universal in Her Southern World Pearl McHaney

Tennessee Williams’s post-pastoral Southern gardens in text and on the movie screen Taïna Tuhkunen

“Magic Portraits Drawn by the Sun”: New Orleans, Yellow Fever, and the sense(s) of death in Josh Russell’s Yellow Jack Owen Robinson

Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris Suzanne W. Jones

Référendums populaires Dossier dirigé par Donna Kesselman

Direct Democracy on Election Day: Ballot Measures as Measures of American Democracy Donna Kesselman

Ballot initiatives and the national debate on immigration Mario Menéndez

Issue-Choice, Messaging, and Organizing: A Sociological Approach to Three Ballot Measures in Colorado in 2006 Guillaume Marche

Débat étatsunien sur les statistiques ethno-raciales : l’exemple de la Proposition 54 en Californie Olivier Richomme

Hors-thème

Le monument naturel dans le mythe de l’Ouest chez Washington Irving, Mark Twain et Walt Whitman Delphine Louis-Dimitrov

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Reconnaissances

An Interview with Steven Millhauser Étienne Février

Learning Curve With an Introduction by Françoise Palleau-Papin Mary Caponegro

Varia

Le paysage dans la photographie contemporaine et dans la collection Lamarche-Vadel Au Musée Nicéphore Niépce du 12 février au 15 mai 2011 Eliane de Larminat

Exposition Mitch Epstein : American Power Du 4 mai au 24 juillet 2011, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Géraldine Fasentieux

Mitch Epstein, « American Power» Exposition à la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson du 4 mai 2011 au 24 juillet 2011 Hélène Béade

30 ans de photographie au New York Times Magazine Rencontres d’Arles, été 2011 Anne Lesme

A New York artist’s response to 9/11: Ahron Weiner’s “Cycles of Violence” Géraldine Fasentieux

Exposition Lewis W. Hine : Entretien avec Agnès Sire, Directrice de la Fondation Cartier- Bresson, le 13 octobre 2011 À la Fondation Cartier-Bresson (en partenariat avec la Terra Foundation for American Art), 7 septembre au 18 décembre 2011 Frédéric Perrier

Diane Arbus Au Jeu de Paume, du 18 octobre 2011 au 5 février 2012 (en collaboration avec The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC, New York, et avec la participation du Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, du Fotomuseum Winterthur et du Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam). Anita Béquié

Chester Higgins, New York City, a Young Moslem Woman in Brooklyn, 1990 Fatma Zrann

Actualité de la recherche

“Looking Back: The Past, History and History Writing in Early America and the Atlantic World”, Third EEASA Biannual Conference University Paris-Diderot, Institut Charles V, 9-11 December 2010 Yohanna Alimi

“Imagined Communities, Recuperated Homelands. Rethinking American and Canadian Minority and Exilic Writing” University of Strasbourg, 11-12 March 2011 Sofie De Smyter

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« London-New York : Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Influences in the Arts and Literature » Colloque international, Université Nancy 2, 1-2 avril 2011 Marie Guély-Varcin

Un empire comanche ? E.H.E.S.S., 20 juin 2011 Thomas Grillot

Comptes rendus

Hélène Quanquin, Christine Lorre-Johnston et Sandrine Ferré-Rode, Comment comparer le Canada avec les États-Unis aujourd’hui : Enjeux et pratiques, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009 Laurence Cros

Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner : Les Noirs du coin de la rue, traduction et préface de Célia Bense Ferreira Alves, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Collection « Le sens social », 2010 Catherine Pouzoulet

Claudette Fillard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Naissance du féminisme américain à Seneca Falls, Lyon, ENS Editions, 2009Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, New York, Hill and Wang, 2009 Hélène Quanquin

Glenda Carpio & Werner Sollors, eds., African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges. Amerikastudien/American Studies, vol. 55, n°4, 2010 Ada Savin

Michael Almereyda, Lloyd Fonvielle, Greil Marcus, Kristine McKenna, Amy Taubin, William Eggleston. For Now, Santa Fe, Twin Palm Publishers, 2010 Nathalie Boulouch

Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, De l’esclave au Président. Discours sur les familles noires aux États-Unis, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2010 Guillaume Marche

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Senses of the South Dossier dirigé par Géraldine Chouard et Jacques Pothier

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Senses of the South

Géraldine Chouard et Jacques Pothier

Tell about the South. What it’s like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. (Absalom, Absalom!, 142)

1 Exiled in the Massachusetts winter, Southerner Quentin Compson finds himself repeatedly assaulted by the uncomprehending inquisitiveness of his fellow students. As his roommate, a Canadian, collaborates with him telling fact from legend about the larger than life legendary figure of Thomas Sutpen, he tries to get a sense of the region: What is it? Something you live and breathe in like air? A kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? (Absalom, Absalom!, 289)

2 Over twenty years ago, in “William Faulkner: à vue de nez”, Paul Carmignani focused on the sense of smell in Faulkner by emphasizing that while due attention had been paid to the senses of gazing and hearing, the other three senses deserved as much attention.

3 Countless attempts have been made to make sense of Southern Identity, or The Mind of the South, to use Wilbur Cash’s title. As 2011 marked the 150th anniversary of the outset of the Civil War, scholars are still wrestling to define the American South, still “telling about the South.” A more sensual approach to the issue of race relations at the heart of the Southern contradiction has been tried in this century, with groundbreaking studies such as Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 or Mark M. Smith’s How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, an awareness that now finds its expression in mainstream fiction, as the runaway success of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, a novel haunted by the sensory exclusion of black women who remain at the same time the most accomplished standard bearers of Southern cuisine. No stronger example could be found of the fascinating reversibility of the most repulsive and the most delicious.

4 In The Awakening (1899), Kate Chopin focuses on the sense of taste and uses foodways to define and transgress the social and cultural boundaries of acceptable female behavior as well as to reinscribe woman’s identity through the culinary dimension of her heroine’s life. In “The Gastrodynamics of Edna Pontellier’s liberation,” Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis analyses how the liberating exposure to the Creole culture allows

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Edna Pontellier to assert her agency through culinary practices and how, in general, her journey to self-knowledge is framed through food experiences.

5 Another type of displacement, geographic this time, is analysed simultaneously with hearing in Louis Mazzari’s article, “Key to the highway: blues records and the great migration,” which looks at the way the Delta blues was a musical travel narrative for tens of thousands of people who were leaving the rural South for an unknown, modern and industrial future. His paper explores blues music as an expression of the fluidity of African American society and culture during the Great Depression.

6 Examining how Eudora Welty’s observations lead to her senses of smell, touch, and sound in the stories “June Recital” and “Moon Lake” and “The Demonstrators,” selected letters and her comments on her photographs, mostly taken in the 1930s, Pearl McHaney argues in “Eudora Welty: Sensing the Particular, Revealing the Universal in Her Southern World” that Welty pictures the invisible by her use of the senses, creating a sense of the South that is simultaneously particular and universal.

7 In “Tennessee Williams’s post-pastoral Southern gardens in text and on the movie screen”, Taïna Tuhkunen looks at how the southern states are depicted in film adaptations of five plays by Mississippi-born playwright Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1951 & 1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Suddenly Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) and The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964). Referring to the idea of the pastoral garden developed by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1964), her article highlights Williams’ irreverent representation of the paradigmatic southern garden and takes a close look at the way the 20th century cinema sought to recreate it as a corrupt place.

8 Similar to the tragedy and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the yellow fever outbreaks which devastated New Orleans during the 19th century were also due, in part, to the city’s geographical location and the politics of interested parties. In “‘Magic Portraits Drawn by the Sun’: New Orleans, Yellow Fever, and the Sense(s) of Death in Josh Russell’s Yellow Jack”, Owen Robinson focuses on the novel Yellow Jack by Josh Russell (1999), which paints a complex portrait of this city, its epidemics and its contradictory stories. It examines how the fusing of fiction with an important historical period for the city provides a sophisticated study on the role of visual representation for documenting such horrors whose prose is deeply rooted in the smells and sounds of time and place.

9 In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1999), cultural critic bell hooks argues that “no one seems to know how to tell the story” of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: “that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.” In “Jefferson and Hemings in Paris: The South and the Power of the Senses”, Suzanne Jones explores Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings (1979), the Merchant-Ivory-Jhablava film Jefferson in Paris (1995), the Haid- Andrews TV movie Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000), and Annette Gordon- Reed’s new family history, The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), and postulates a few answers to the questions most often posed about the Jefferson-Hemings liaison.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

CARMIGNANI, Paul, “William Faulkner: à vue de nez”, RFEA 45, 1990, 137-48.

FAULKNER, William, Absalom, Absalom! [1936], New York, Vintage International, 1990. hooks, bell, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, South End Press, 1999.

SMITH, Mark M, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, Chapel Hill, University of Carolina Press, 2006.

STOCKETT, Kathryn, The Help, 2009, New York, Berkley, 2010.

YAEGER, Patricia, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990, University of Chicago Press, 2000.

The Southern Studies Forum

AUTEURS

GÉRALDINE CHOUARD University Paris-Dauphine

JACQUES POTHIER University Versailles Saint Quentin

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The Gastrodynamics of Edna Pontellier’s liberation.1

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis

It is no coincidence that Stanley Kowalski comes back from work and welcomes Stella by throwing a piece of meat on the kitchen table in A Streetcar Named Desire. This gesture, presenting Stanley as the sole survivor of the Stone Age, denotes primitive power and masculinity, because meat, as Bourdieu explains, “is the dish for men” (1984, 192). In a larger perspective the scene symbolizes what patriarchy has communicated through foodways—the traditional distribution of tightly regulated gendered behavior in households. According to an increasing number of contemporary food scholars, food is much more than just nutrition. It is embedded with social, cultural, and symbolic values. Anderson goes so far as to say that “food is rather like language” (2005, 110) as it communicates an array of meanings and identities. From this critical angle, culinary practices have been used in the South since antebellum times to guard gender differences, and especially to reinforce a myth of perfect womanhood. The image of women immersed in domesticity and gratified at the prospect of being useful, submissive and servile defined many a young Southern woman’s existence in the context of foodways and in so doing indoctrinated them into acceptance of traditional inferior roles. Thus, food can be read as a trope signifying gender relations in Southern society. Because dining rituals (both the preparation of food and its consumption) become a symbol of gender, they may become a vehicle for the acceptance or rejection of social identity imposed by a given society. In this article I will attempt to analyze the significance of cooking and dining rituals, through which a writer can address the issue of gendered existence in the South. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin uses foodways to define and transgress the social and cultural boundaries of acceptable female behavior as well as to reinscribe woman’s identity through the culinary dimension of her heroine’s life. The novelist uses eating and dining scenes as metaphors for Edna Pontellier’s search for her female selfhood and, in a broader perspective, as symbols of the major issue of her own fiction—gender trouble in the South. Thus, food studies—

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both cultural studies and sociology of foodways—will be an entry point into the studies of shifting gender relations in The Awakening. Faced with a rigid division of labor, women have often chosen cooking as a creative outlet for their passions. They have written cookbooks as peculiar culinary autobiographical accounts of their gendered existence but they have also used the kitchen-floor and the space of the dining room as a site of rebellion, and food as a weapon against gender dominance. Regardless of region, race, religion or culture, the preparation of food has lain within women’s domain (Goody, 1982, 193). Anthropologists and sociologists have agreed to categorize activities connected with domestic food work as women’s responsibility. Caring for the nourishment of the family as well as for its sustenance stems from the essence of a female. Hence, woman is the nurturing force (Bell and Valentine, 1997, 70). Female sensitivity, empathy and emotionality, are said to naturally enable women to endow foodways with emotional richness; “femininity,” according to Lupton, “involves cooking for others, offering food as love, being highly aware of one’s own body’s needs and those of others for whom one is charged with caring” (1996, 109). Feeding is thus a complicated gendered issue. The South, where “images and practices of food preparation, service, and consumption define women’s lives” is not an exception in this culinary landscape (Prenshaw, 1992, 8). Patriarchal ideology maintained that food preparation was women’s privilege, duty, and personal fulfillment. On the one hand, Southern patriarchs were able to tie women to the domestic sphere by enshrining their role in culinary processes (the goal was achieved by perceiving activities connected with foodways and domesticity as metaphors for the Cult of True Womanhood); on the other hand, “the kitchen and garden have served as arenas where many Southern women [...] have exercised power and creativity” (Prenshaw, 1992, 6). In the case of Edna Pontellier, the central character of The Awakening, food is neither a creative outlet, nor a circumscription of her personhood in the domestic sphere. Rather, various dining experiences become metaphors for her disintegrating marriage; the liberating exposure to Creole culture and Cajuns’ interstitial social position allows Edna to assert her agency through culinary practices; and, in general, her journey to self-knowledge and subjectivity within a marriage that has diminished her to non-personhood is framed through foodways. Edna becomes Mrs. Léonce Pontellier to spite her family and to replace a youthful infatuation for a tragedian with a very tangible man who adores her. Léonce “pleased her; his absolute devotion flattered her. She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken” (Chopin, 1992, 24). From the beginning of her marriage, Edna shares few interests, thoughts or hobbies with her husband, mainly because of Edna’s status as an outsider to Creole society: Edna is Kentucky Presbyterian and Léonce is Louisiana Catholic Creole. Lack of honest communication or any exchange of desires between the spouses is culturally based. This family status quo thus manifests itself in Mr. Pontellier’s frequent visits to clubs in the evenings. During one of the many soirées musicales thatEdna attends at the Ratignolles’ alone without Léonce, she frankly admits to the host “What should I do if he stayed home? We wouldn’t have anything to say to each other” (91). For all his overt affection, love and pampering, Mr. Pontellier does not really care about his wife’s spiritual and emotional well-being. His indifference to her needs is framed in food-references. Mr. Pontellier asserts his dominance in their marriage through dining:

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'Coming back to dinner?' his wife called after him. He halted a moment and shrugged his shoulders. [...] He did not know; perhaps he would return for the early dinner and perhaps he would not. It all depended upon the company which he found over at Klein’s2 and the size of “the game.” He did not say this, but she understood it, and laughed, nodding good-by to him. (3-4) Edna’s laughter, a way of putting a bold face on her utter subjection, symbolizes disintegration of marriage evidenced by Léonce’s rejection of dining together. Mr. Pontellier wants to show everyone that he adores Edna; thus, he frequently sends her boxes “filled with friandises, with luscious and toothsome bits—the finest of fruits, patés, a rare bottle or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance” (9). The choice of bonbons as the main ingredient of the gifts is telling. With the copiousness of chocolates, he sends a message to Edna in particular and the Creole community in general that he can afford to, and wants to spoil and indulge his so-called “better half.” Chocolate, which “is culturally understood as a highly emotionally coded food that inspires feelings of self-indulgence and hedonistic ecstasy” (Lupton, 1996, 36), works perfectly for Léonce. With the gift of bonbons, Léonce thus underscores the feminine weakness in Edna’s personality (she easily yields to bodily temptation).3 Thus the gift becomes another proof of Léonce’s power over Edna. Mrs. Pontellier is used to her husband’s revealing his generosity with baskets of sweet and luxurious products that offer no sustenance. These sweets, lacking nutritious value, demonstrate unsatisfactory relationship between Edna and Léonce. When the gift arrives, she passes around the bonbons and “the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all [declare] that Mr. Pontellier [is] the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier [is] forced to admit that she knew of none better” (Chopin, 1992, 9). The whole ritual of sharing bonbons is a strategy designed by Léonce, because “what is at stake [in gift-giving] is the circulation of one’s future reputation” (Sutton, 2001, 45). Léonce, aware of female vanity, gossiping and sharing, hopes for an audience that would appreciate him as a perfect husband and thus reaffirm Edna in her identity. The sweets can also be seen as one of the echoes of the theme of childhood. Consumption of and fondness for sweets, apart from capturing the pure enjoyment associated with childhood as well as being the energy-booster for exuberant children, may also be seen as a symbol of the heroine’s immaturity and selfishness. Much like a child, who in a contrarian spirit refuses to accept reality for what it is, Edna fails to understand the implications of her actions and take responsibility for them. She marries Léonce with malice aforethought and becomes a disconsolate wife and mother of two. Then, in an act of rebellion, she moves into the pigeon-house for which she receives permission and resources from her husband, has an extramarital affair but is not ready to disregard societal opinions about female sexual freedom. Despite the fact that Edna is no longer a subjugated woman who passively internalizes patriarchal expectations, she is not ready to discover her female subjectivity. The heroine’s final decision, so extolled by feminists as a self-empowering act, rather suggests that she cannot truly express her desires and can only find emancipation in death. Kate Chopin also uses scenes involving food to demonstrate the lack of sincerity, communication and honesty between Edna and Léonce. One dinner particularly can be seen as a sign of the collapse of the Pontelliers’ marriage. Food typically plays a part in domestic quarrels when a husband wants to find fault with his partner’s domestic responsibilities. The easiest way is to denigrate the outcome of the wife’s culinary

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activities, which are allegedly no longer up to prior standards (Lupton, 1996, 61). As Léonce cannot criticize Edna directly, because she does not prepare the food herself, he attacks the culinary abilities of their cook: “This soup is really impossible; it’s strange that woman hasn’t learned yet to make a decent soup. Any free-lunch stand in town serves a better one” (Chopin, 1992, 67). Léonce’s remarks are also aimed at breaking female solidarity across the class and racial boundaries. His direct accusations, which hide covert criticism of his wife’s failing to fulfil her wifely duties, pit Edna against other women. If in the dining room Edna, much like her husband, is the member of the bourgeoisie that oppresses lower social classes and other racial groups, then the space of the kitchen could potentially offer female bonding against patriarchal dominance. Skilfully, Léonce precludes solidarity against patriarchy by equally entangling Edna in Louisiana class and racial categories as in the web of gender relations. The narrator reveals Mr. Pontellier’s further dissatisfaction with the main course: “The fish was scorched. Mr. Pontellier would not touch it. [...] The roast was in some way not to his fancy, and he did not like the manner in which the vegetables were served” (67). The ensuing conversation about the entrée illustrates the claim of two food anthropologists that “the meal itself might be the pretext for airing more deeply rooted dissatisfactions” (qtd. Lupton, 1996, 61): ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘we spend money enough in this house to procure at least one meal a day which a man could eat and retain his self-respect.’ ‘You used to think the cook was a treasure,’ returned Edna, indifferently. ‘Perhaps she was when she first came; but cooks are only human. They need looking after, like any other class of persons that you employ. Suppose I didn’t look after the clerks in my office, just let them run things their own way; they’d soon make a nice mess of me and my business.’ (Chopin, 1992, 68) The criticism of the scorched fish is Léonce’s indirect attack on Edna’s domestic duties —managing servants and running their household. By castigating the dinner, he clearly expresses his dissatisfaction with what he believes to be Edna’s negligence of her wifely obligations. The heroine’s indifferent tone to Léonce’s indirect accusations of her no longer being a valuable position in his household reveals marital breakdown. The conclusion of this food-gender related conflict is not incidental. Leaving the plate untouched, Léonce ostentatiously gets his dinner at the club. Frequent eating out “becomes a public demonstration of an individual’s possession of both economic and cultural capital, phrased as their sense of taste” (Lupton, 1996, 98); however, choosing to eat out could be a means to punish the wife after denigrating her culinary achievements (Warde and Martens, 2000, 47). The case of the Pontelliers demonstrates that similar situations would send ripples through their married life and more importantly would damage Edna’s self-esteem: she is “somewhat familiar with such scenes. They had often made her very unhappy. On a few previous occasions she had been completely deprived of any desire to finish her dinner. Sometimes she had gone into the kitchen to administer a tardy rebuke to the cook” (Chopin, 1992, 68). By depriving Edna of her desire to eat (that is, to follow her natural instinct of self- preservation), Mr. Pontellier weakens her desire to preserve her selfhood and personhood within her wedded state. In order to avert the disintegration of the marriage, Mrs. Pontellier tries fervently to carry out her wifely duties, but to little effect, as arranging a week-menu to please her husband brings the opposite result—the feeling that her actions have little if any sense and value.

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What Mr. Pontellier achieves by ostentatiously dining out, apart from thwarting Edna’s personhood, is a statement of his individualism (Finkelstein 4)4—as a man, and as the head of the family, Léonce can freely choose where, when, and with whom he wants to dine.5 With his decision to eat out at Klein’s hotel, he also shows typical disregard for the values “home-cooked” meals stand for: “meanings of security, familial love and comfort” (Lupton, 1996, 98)—the very values which define women’s lives. Dining together seems to be a casualty of the collapse of the Pontelliers’ marriage. Edna is surely not satisfied with how wifehood limits her personality. Neither does she feel fulfilled in her role as a mother. Motherly feelings seem a contingent category in the reservoir of Edna’s features; she is “not a mother-woman” (Chopin, 1992, 10). Food imagery is used once again to comment on maternity. Those women who are “delicious in the role” of mothers (10) are desirable to patriarchs as they promise to prolong the family trees with their progeny. In contrast to these women, Mrs. Pontellier’s ambiguous maternal feelings are visible in Edna’s intense longing for her children while they are away punctuated by relief resulting from their absence. Sometimes she forgets them; at other times she is “hungry for them” (95). Food, or lack thereof, becomes a metaphor for her conflicted feelings. She herself seems to be domesticated into maternity by the Cult of True Womanhood. Thus for her, motherhood is a responsibility she has been coerced into assuming against her own nature (24). No wonder then, that Edna blames both matrimony and motherhood for the erosion of her personhood. In contradistinction, Adèle Ratignolle is a woman who complacently accepts wifehood and motherhood as two roles defining her existence. A midday dinner at the Ratignolles, from which the harmony of the hosts’ marriage emanates, underscores and intensifies, by virtue of opposition, the disintegration of the Pontelliers’ marriage. Midday dinners are one of the elements of married life that unite the Ratignolles. The couple establish and enhance the harmony of their marriage by sharing food. “The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union” (73). Because “the sharing of food, is a means by which to establish physical commingling, interdependence, and oneness” (Meigs, 1997, 103), the Ratignolles can express their integrity and interconnectedness through this dining ritual. This blending of selves is visible in Adèle’s ability to completely immerse herself in her husband’s stories. She is “keenly interested in everything he [says], laying down her fork the better to listen, chiming in, taking the words out of his mouth” (Chopin, 1992, 74). Not only does Adèle complete her husband, but she also seems to accept complacently the power structure in their family. In order to express Edna’s opinion about the “eating-induced unity” (Meigs, 1997, 95) in the Ratignolle household, the narrator once again resorts to a food metaphor: “a delicious repast, simple, choice, and in every way satisfying” (Chopin, 1992, 74).6 Every woman should be satisfied with—or so the patriarchy would have women believe —such a harmonious union with a man like Monsieur Ratignolle, whose “cheerfulness was unbounded, and […] was matched by his goodness of heart, his broad charity, and common sense” (73). The depression which accompanies Mrs. Pontellier on her way out of the Ratignolles’ house is presumably caused by her realization that such harmony could never satisfy her: “The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted

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her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui” (74). Edna feels no regrets for what she is “missing” in her life, because she pities Madame Ratignolle’s “colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium” (74). Edna is not willing to compromise herself and live blindly content with such a colorless existence. She wants to sample “life’s delirium,” a foretaste of which she has when vacationing at Grand Isle. Grand Isle is where Edna’s female personhood is born and terminated. In the 1870s this ocean resort was a luxurious place outside New Orleans for affluent Creoles to spend their vacation (Toth, 1999, 78). The exotic and seductive landscape of the island, coupled with “an atmosphere of lazy sensuality, few obligations,” dancing and recitations (Toth, 1999, 80), conspired against the better moral judgment of some men and women. To the accompaniment of music, with sensuous interplay of light, and with tables laden with food and drink, Creoles spent their evenings entertaining themselves (Chopin, 1992, 29-30). Those evenings infused with singing, eating and dancing, solidified and preserved Creole culture. Even though no scenes of sexual laxity or dissipation are mentioned in the novel, Creoles’ “entire absence of prudery” (12) and inclinations towards excessive flirting suggest the sensuous nature of Creole men and women alike. This may come as a shock to non-Creole visitors to this paradise on Earth. McCullough sees a connection between social status, female power and erotic agency in Chopin’s portrayal of Creole and white women. She links female erotic power to their ethnic status: “the degree of erotic agency and power Chopin grants her female Creole and Cajun characters is directly related to their ethnic/regional identities” (McCullough, 1999, 208). Creole women unite opposites in their characters: they are more sensuous and more self-aware of their potential than repressed white Southern women, and on the other hand, they are characterized by what Chopin identifies as “a lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable” (Chopin, 1992, 12). In this scenery Mrs. Pontellier comes to life as a woman. Two aspects of this awakening need further analysis: its location and its agent. After a nap in one of the cots on the island Chênière Caminada—caused, quite tellingly, by a feeling of oppression and the stifling atmosphere of the church (46)—in a Sleeping-Beauty fashion, Edna is rescued from lethargy by a male figure.7 Chênière Caminada, apart from Grand Isle with its Creolean flavor, is the site of Edna’s awakening.8 Populated by Cajuns, this island offers a rare opportunity for Edna to challenge gender roles. Edna literally and metaphorically wakes up to her new self in Madame Antoine’s cot. Madame Antoine is a Cajun, a member of an ethnic group which has “remained in between racial, social, and economic categories, making them interstitial figures in both history and fiction” (Hebert-Leiter, 2009, 6) and as such they reveal the complexities of Louisiana social and racial make-up.9 This in-between state not only allows for an exploration of various options, but also makes room for contemplating alternatives which are unacceptable in white-Catholic New Orleans community. After her exposure to morally relaxed, hedonistic and creative Cajun culture, Edna, as Hebert-Leiter persuasively argues, appropriates Cajun ways10 and “in doing so, create[s] a space of desire for [herself]” (2009, 70). Chênière Caminada, along with Creolean Grand Isle, provides space for liberation from patriarchal structures:11 it is in Madame Antoine’s cot that Edna eats her first meal after “awakening.” The meal Madame Antoine has prepared for Edna consists of bread and wine, a combination which assuredly evokes a religious

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dimension. It not only satiates Edna’s hunger, but it also becomes a sort of celebration of a new life/self. However, the risks and the fate of Edna’s liberation are symbolically written on the table where “a cover was laid for one” (Chopin, 1992, 49). Edna’s solitary consumption of bread and wine, precluding solidarity and companionship which could sustain her in her endeavors,12 foreshadows the reasons behind her solitary dinners in the café Catiche out in the New Orleans suburbs. As a rewriting of the tale of Sleeping Beauty, The Awakening offers no happily-ever-after for Edna as the heroine does not want to settle for what patriarchy has to offer. Neither is she ready to accept the consequences of sexual freedom she craves. As a modern spin on the tale of Sleeping Beauty, Edna’s awakening is granted by a male. Retrospectively, she admits to Robert Lebrun, her Creole landlady’s son: “It was you who awoke me last summer out of a life-long, stupid dream” (143). Unlike the fairytale predecessor, Edna is woken up seemingly not by a dominant male figure but by a man serving food. The reversed division of gender roles around food production and consumption is misleading (here it is a man who prepares a meal for a woman), if not falsely supporting Edna in her emancipatory endeavors. In this role Robert is less openly dominating than men from Kentucky—that is Edna’s stern father. However, Robert’s apparent and deceptive abandon of a patriarchal rigorous order—visible in his serving a woman—is a foreshadowing element that would have serious consequences for their future together expressed in their final conversation in the suburban café. This gender role reversal around food preparation simply hides a different codification of the asymmetry between the genders. The meal Robert has prepared for Edna satiates her physical appetite: “He was childishly gratified to discover her appetite, and to see the relish with which she ate the food which he had procured for her” (50). This scene not only alludes to the man as the giver and woman as the recipient of pleasure, but it also explicitly alludes to one appetite (physical hunger) representing another (carnal desire). The same display of enjoyment of food and male company reappears during Edna’s private dinner with Alcée Arobin in her husband’s home. Upon realizing the same (sexual) appetite during the intensely interesting afternoon spent in Arobin’s company, Edna dismisses her admirer (100-01). Quite interestingly, Mrs. Pontellier does not feel guilty of marital infidelity, but she feels she has betrayed Robert which whom she originally shared intimate companionship over food on Chênière Caminada (102). Exposure to Creole culture, which values “freedom of expression” (12), along with Robert’s advances, prompts Edna to reevaluate her position and fulfillment in both marriage and motherhood. Edna’s various deviations from dining customs in her household illustrate her rejection of the role patriarchy has prescribed. First of all, inspired by the Creole freedom of expression, Edna begins “to do as she like[s] and to feel as she like[s] [...] lending herself to any passing caprice” (74-5). Soon she begins “to look with her own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to ‘feed upon opinion’ when her own soul had invited her” (124). This transformation is visible during dinner with Doctor Mandelet, the long-time family physician. Interestingly enough, the circumstances of the dinner may explain Léonce’s acceptance of Edna’s subtle change in conduct: “The dinner was excellent. The claret was warm and the champagne was cold, and under their beneficent influence the threatened unpleasantness melted and vanished with the fumes of the wine” (92). Edna’s radiance, her “warm and energetic” speech and her being “palpitant with the forces of life” (92)—all signs of her budding self-confidence—are left uncommented on

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by her husband. The liberating and relaxing influence of alcohol is a convenient justification of Edna’s behavior for a husband who does not really want to know what is troubling his wife. Alcohol thus transforms a potentially hostile culinary experience into a pleasant evening. The social function of Tuesday afternoons in the Pontellier household is the second dining ritual of Edna’s household which undergoes changes after her return from Grand Isle. Mrs. Pontellier no longer respectfully obeys her husband. She no longer observes her custom of receiving various frequent callers at her home on Tuesdays, which she had “religiously followed since her marriage, six years before” (66). Edna refuses to obediently fulfill the wifely duties imposed on her because of Léonce’s social/ business obligations. Not only does Edna “completely [abandon] her Tuesdays at home, and not return the visits of those who [call] upon her. She [makes] no ineffectual efforts to conduct her household en bonne ménagère, going and coming as it [suits] her fancy” (74-5). More importantly, Edna shows no sign of remorse or guilt about either neglecting her duties or refusing to retain one of the cardinal feminine duties—wifely submissiveness. Interestingly, when confronted by Léonce about her duties, she is defiantly “eating her soup with evident satisfaction” (66). Edna transfers her satisfaction with winning some degree of personal autonomy to her sheer pleasure of consuming soup. The third change in Edna’s conduct is connected with her solitary meals. Often family disruption or marriage disintegration manifests itself in weight loss caused by “a sense of general debilitation and unhappiness that [suppresses people’s] desire for food” (Lupton, 1996, 62). In similar cases in the past when Léonce attempted to punish Edna by leaving her alone at the dinner table, she felt guilty and thus imposed culinary restraint on herself. Upon return from Grand Isle, Edna refuses the literal and metaphorical self-starvation and abnegation attendant upon the image of the perfect lady: “that evening Edna finished her dinner alone, with forced deliberation. Her face was flushed and her eyes flamed with some inward fire that lighted them” (Chopin, 1992, 68). The solitary meal serves as a vehicle of celebration of her newly-discovered personhood. On a later occasion, during Léonce’s absence, she eats a delicious repast, with “a luscious tenderloin broiled a point” and good wine; “the marron glacé [seems] to be just what she wanted” (95). The delicious feeling of knowing what she wants from her life certainly finds representation in the comfort and pleasure of dining alone. Edna Pontellier’s rebellion against the patriarchal definition of her existence climaxes in the final dinner party, before she moves out of her husband’s house (an act which symbolizes Edna’s assertion of freedom from Léonce’s dominance). Realizing that the final dinner represents Edna’s symbolic self-empowerment, Arobin shrewdly calls it “the grand event, the coup d'état” (113). Edna gathers her friends in order to celebrate and share her forging of a new life on her 29th birthday. Much like the impact of the Dionysian mysteries on the participants, Edna’s final dinner frees her from all oppressive restraints and inhibitions—in this case those of patriarchal marriage.As the “food served on special occasions [...] is usually highly ritualized” (Lupton, 1996, 63), the farewell dinner—its preparations, the selection of guests, and the meal itself like communion—seems to fit the paradigm of a religious ritual.13 The prelude to the grand event itself does not occupy a lot of space in the narrative, mainly because the cook and servants are responsible for supplying food for the larder and preparing the dishes, while Edna preoccupies herself with packing her belongings.

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In all religious rituals congregation is essential. Here Edna’s friends assembling to partake in this euphoric dinner constitute a group of ten “selected with discrimination” (Chopin, 1992, 114). The hostess, who unites all the guests, sits at the head of the table, like a priestess. In a social context, food can communicate even more than language itself. The seating arrangement at the table therefore communicates both Edna’s sympathies and possible future life choices.14 Mrs. Pontellier sits between two opposing examples of morality—“Arobin and Monsieur Ratignolle [sitting] on either side of their hostess” (115)—symbolically referring to two conflicting types of manhood Edna has been pitting against each other. In Edna’s preparations of “the grand event” one can trace the Dionysian ambience. In a conversation with Arobin the future hostess reveals: “it will be very fine; all my best of everything—crystal, silver and gold, Sèvres, flowers, music, and champagne to swim in” (113).Before the food, which constitutes the heart of the ritual, the scenery and atmosphere are so sensuous that only synesthesia can do justice to describing the event.15 The synesthetic nature of this socio-culinary event is visible in the interpenetrating effects of the combination of the splendor of the color-coordinated tables (silver, gold, and crystal intermingling), the mandolin music and the scent of roses (115-7). The table itself captures a pronounced Dionysian imagery: There was something extremely gorgeous about the appearance of the table, an effect of splendor conveyed by a cover of pale yellow satin under strips of lace- work. There were wax candles in massive brass candelabra, burning softly under yellow silk shades; full, fragrant roses, yellow and red, abounded. There were silver and gold, as she had said there would be, and crystal which glittered like the gems which the women wore. (115) These elementsof dining create a relaxed and frivolous atmosphere among people who ordinarily might not socialize with each other: “The moments glided on, while a feeling of good fellowship passed around the circle like a mystic cord, holding and binding these people together with jest and laughter” (118). In such Dionysian atmosphere all the guests become what Bourdieu calls bon vivants—people “capable of entering into the generous and familiar … in a conviviality which sweeps away restraints and reticence” (1984, 179). Their eating, drinking and general good spirits create a frivolous and liberated atmosphere which seems to reflect Edna’s “new self.” Even the selection of chairs seems to be an objective correlative of Edna’s new priorities in life. Like the discarded stiff corset of marital relations, “[t]he ordinary stiff dining chairs [...] [are] discarded for the occasion and replaced by the most commodious and luxurious which could be collected throughout the house” (Chopin, 1992, 115). The final dinner radiates with the hostess at the center. Edna begins her farewell/ birthday party as Mrs. Léonce Pontellier with all the religious ritual overtones that would lead her to celebrate herself. In her posture Edna becomes a version of sensually clad Praxiteles’ Knidian Aphrodite: The golden shimmer of Edna’s satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone. (117-8) Such an image of the sumptuous hostess herself, intensified with “a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Edna’s hair, just over the center of

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her forehead” (115), evokes the iconographic image of Aphrodite as the Goddess of Beauty and Love. In her ability to create sexual attraction and take delight in her sensual nature Edna can be identified with Aphrodite.16 Yet beneath the undeniable qualities of the goddess, such as Edna’s beauty, charm, magnetism, ease of comportment, lurks the need to experience life with the loved one. Ennui sneaks in as Edna realizes that her happiness also depends on sharing it with her absent lover: “the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable” (118). Mrs. Léonce Pontellier transgresses the limits of the female role, wanders beyond the conventional conception of a married woman and rejoices in her newly-forged selfhood. That should be the climax, yet the dinner does not end here. The carnivalesque laughter and frolicking, together with the strong emotional and sensual atmosphere, is brought to an end by Victor Lebrun. Victor’s singing and good humor add to the convivial atmosphere of the evening. He becomes the embodiment of Dionysus’ playful, sensual satyr (Easterling, 1997, 38)—he is draped in a white silk scarf, with “the garland of roses [which] transformed him into a vision of Oriental beauty” (Chopin, 1992, 118) singing a love song Edna associates with Robert. Victor’s song relates to the Dionysian dynamic in that it has a similar impact on Edna as satyr’s light and enjoyable performance during mysteries had on the Ancient audience. The principle of satyr’s performance to “bring them [audience] back to their senses” (Easterling, 1997, 38) reverberates in the consequences of Victor’s musical performance. Behind Victor’s song looms the truth which brings on horror and makes Edna strongly aware of her position. Mrs. Pontellier’s ensuing somber mood results from the realization of her inability to go on living the life from before her Grand Isle experience. Her epiphany centers on the disagreement between social demands and her own desires.17 To prevent Victor from torturing her with the song, she puts “her glass so impetuously and blindly upon the table as to shatter it against a carafe” (Chopin, 1992, 120). The spilling of the wine—the nectar of the gods—destroys the atmosphere of conviviality and celebration. In so doing, the spilt wine changes Edna from the semi-goddess and priestess back into her “ordinary” human form. With the wine not consumed to celebrate new life, but rather squandered, in an instant the heroine is reduced from heavenly perfection to mortal fallibility.She is vulnerable again, since, with the awareness of what she has gone through, she cannot go back to living a life of quiet desperation with Léonce. The guests disperse, as they are unable to either understand or help Edna. You are what—and where and with whom—you eat. Thus, the changeability of identity is reflected in dietary habits. Bell and Valentine assert in Consuming Geographies that “changes in identity [...] are articulated on individuals’ plates—affecting not only what is bought to eat and the places from where it is purchased, but also who has prepared it and the spatial dynamics of when and where it is consumed within the home” (1997, 77). Bell and Valentine’s observation finds confirmation in Edna’s dining habits. After the last supper in her husband’s mansion, she moves into a modest pigeon-house with a very small dining-room. In such surroundings Edna welcomes Robert with an ordinary dinner, after his sojourn in Mexico (Chopin, 1992, 133). Her food grows simpler, as she becomes socially degraded. This is the price she has to pay for being more truthful to herself: “[t]here was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual” (124).

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Edna’s solitary dinners in the café Catiche, a garden café out in the suburbs, attest to the fact that the more independent she becomes, the less exquisite the food she eats in less fashionable places. The place in the garden which speaks to her needs is “too modest to attract the attention of people of fashion, and so quiet as to have escaped the notice of those in search of pleasure and dissipation” (139). The Catiche café is also the space where the pivotal conversation between Edna and Robert begins only to continue in the privacy of Edna’s pigeon-house. The scene echoes the ideological implications of the meal Robert procured for Edna on Chênière Caminada. A different codification of gender inequality, which was elegantly masked by Robert performing the feminine task of nurturing through food, rebounds on the lovers’ future. The café Catiche/pigeon house scene announces the breakup of their relationship as Edna refuses to accept the destiny which immerses her in a man’s life, be it that of her husband or lover. Even though in the end the heroine proves that she is not ready to define her destiny without taking into account social opinions, she does not want to be with a man who obliquely reproduces the patriarchal patterns. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin is able to advance feminist ideology through food- related scenes which covertly question gender roles while camouflaging feminist thought in local color discourse. From a tool of patriarchal control, food becomes an avenue for Edna’s questioning of gender boundaries. Dining rituals become a potent signifier of Edna Pontellier’s self-exploration, her gaining of autonomy and her attempts at asserting her personhood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANDERSON, Eugene Newton, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture, New York, New York UP, 2005.

BELL, David, and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where we Eat, London, Routledge, 1997.

BERNARD, Shane, The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, Jackson, University of Mississippi, 2003.

BOLEN, Jean Shinoda, Goddesses in Everywoman:Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives,Harper Collins, 2008.

BOURDIEU, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979),translated from French by Richard Nice, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1984.

CHOPIN, Kate, The Awakening (1899), with an introduction by Marilynne Robinson, New York, Bantam Books, 1992.

EASTERLING, P. E., “A Show for Dionysus” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, P. E. Easterling, ed., Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1997, 36–53.

FINKELSTEIN, Joanne, Dining Out: a Sociology of Modern Manners, New York, New York UP, 1989.

GOODY, Jack, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1982.

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HEBERT-LEITER, Maria, Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 2009.

KNAPP, Bettina, “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Boeuf en Daube’” in Literary Gastronomy, David Bevan, ed., Amsterdam, Radopi, 1988, 29–35.

LUPTON, Deborah, Food, the Body and the Self, London, Sage, 1996.

MCCULLOUGH, Kate, Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women's Fiction, 1885-1914, Stanford, CA., Stanford UP, 1999.

MEIGS, Anna, “Food as a Cultural Construction” in Food and Culture: a Reader,in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, New York, Routledge, 1997, 95–106.

PRENSHAW, Peggy, “Introduction” in Southern Quarterly 30. 2-3 (1992), 6–12.

SUTTON, David, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, Oxford, Berg, 2001.

---, “Synesthesia, Memory, and the Taste of Home” in The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed., Oxford and New York, Berg, 2005, 304–16.

TOTH, Emily, Unveiling Kate Chopin, Jackson, MS., UP of Mississippi, 1999.

WARDE, Alan, and Lydia Martens, Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption, and Pleasure, Cambridge, England, Cambridge UP, 2000.

WIMSATT, Mary Ann. “‘Intellectual Repasts’: The Changing Role of Food in Southern Literature” in The Southern Quarterly 30. 2-3 (Winter-Spring 1992), 63–8.

NOTES

1. The research for the present article was made possible through the generous support of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Institute, Free University, Berlin. The JFKI grant enabled me to conduct extensive research about Southern foodways as well as about the sociology and anthropology of food. 2. “The best hotel, Krantz’s [in Grand Isle], was the model for Klein’s in The Awakening” (Toth, 1999, 78). 3. Quoting a chocolate expert, Lupton remarks that chocolate “is a sign of romance, also symbolizing luxury, decadence, indulgence, reward, sensuousness and femininity” (1996, 35). 4. Finkelstein claims that “dining out is seen as an expression of one’s individuality: we choose to dine out, there is no compulsion to do so; we select a restaurant with food that appeals to our palate and which is within our price range; the event can summarize our knowledge of food and interests in pleasure, status, fashionability and entertainment” (1989, 4). 5. Eating out has class connotations and is gender-limited. In traditional societies women are discouraged from eating out, whereas affluent men can freely enjoy dinners outside their homes (Warde and Martens, 2000, 69). 6. Mary Ann Wimsatt makes interesting comments on the midday-dinner at the Ratignolles’ in her article “‘Intellectual Repasts’: The Changing Role of Food in Southern Literature” (1992, 66). 7. Their conversation after Edna waking up retains the fairytale-like quality: “How many years have I slept ?” she inquired. […] “You have slept precisely one hundred years. I was left here to guard your slumbers ; and for one hundred years I have been out under the shed reading a book. The only evil I couldn’t prevent was to keep a broiled fowl from drying up.”

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“If it has turned to stone, still will I eat it,” said Edna, moving with him into the house. (Chopin, 1992, 49-50) 8. “Sailing across the bay to the Chênière Caminada, Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening—had snapped the night before when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails” (Chopin, 1992, 45). 9. Bernard observes that “the Cajuns can be viewed […] as the product of Anglo-Saxonism, for their eighteenth-century Acadian ancestors were brutally exiled from Nova Scotia by the British government, which viewed the French-Catholic minority as a threat to its North American empire. […] [In Louisiana] they intermarried with other ethnic groups on the semitropical frontier […]. This cross-cultural pollination transformed the region’s white ethnic groups into a single new ethnic group, the Cajuns” (2003, xix). “[C]aught between the cultures, no longer fully Acadian and not fully assimilated Americans,” Cajuns occupy the interstitial social and cultural position “somewhere between white aristocratic Creole and black Louisiana cultures, questioning both social and racial classifications” (Hebert- Leiter, 2009, 11 and 57). 10. Cajuns in Chopin’s fiction are “social creatures, participating in balls that convene the community to partake of food, drink, and music. In class status, they rest below Creoles and are closer to the African American servants’ social status as laborers” (Hebert-Leiter, 2009, 65). Hebert-Leiter also makes interesting comments about Edna using Madame Antoine’s interstitial position of a Cajun to voice her own hidden desires (2009, 71). 11. Hebert-Leiter makes a similar case claiming that Cajuns’ “interstitial position […] becomes the ground for Chopin’s subtle critique of patriarchal structures because this between space allows Edna’s imagination to reach a place beyond Creole society and its dictates” (2009, 71). 12. “One main message of food, everywhere, is solidarity. Eating together means sharing and participating. The word ‘companion’ means ‘bread sharer’ (Latin cum panis)” (Anderson, 2005, 125). 13. Bettina Knapp saw similar paradigmatic references to religious ritual in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. 14. The guest of honor and the seating arrangement during dinner at the Ratignolle’s also betray the hosts’ social sympathies (90). 15. For the connection between food, memories and sensory experiences, see David Sutton, “Synesthesia, Memory, and the Taste of Home” (2005, 305, 311-12). 16. To learn more about the Aphrodite archetype see Jean Shinoda Bolen’s chapter “Aphrodite: Goddess of Love and Beauty, Creative Woman and Lover” in her Goddesses in Everywoman : Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives, Harper Collins, 2008. 17. According to Mary Ann Wimsatt, the outcome of the banquet communicates “the discrepancy between Edna’s public status as wife and mother and her private desire for a freedom that neither illicit love nor sumptuous decor can supply” (1992, 67).

ABSTRACTS

In The Awakening Kate Chopin uses foodways to define and transgress the social and cultural boundaries of acceptable female behavior as well as to reinscribe woman’s identity through the culinary dimension of her heroine’s life. The novelist uses eating and dining scenes as metaphors

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for Edna Pontellier’s search for her female selfhood and, in a broader perspective, as symbols of the major issue of her own fiction—gender trouble in the South. In this article I will analyze how various dining experiences become metaphors for Edna’s disintegrating marriage; how the liberating exposure to Creole culture and Cajuns’ interstitial social position allows Edna to assert her agency through culinary practices; and, in general, how her journey to self-knowledge and subjectivity within a marriage that has diminished her to non-personhood is framed through foodways.

Dans The Awakening, Kate Chopin utilise les traditions culinaires pour définir et transgresser les prescriptions sociales et culturelles qui définissent le comportement féminin traditionnel et acceptable. Elle s’en sert également pour réinscrire l’identité féminine grâce à la dimension culinaire de la vie de son héroïne. L’auteur utilise les scènes de partage de repas comme des métaphores de la recherche d’Edna Pontellier d’une identité propre et, de façon plus large, comme des symboles de la thématique qui s’inscrit au cœur de son récit – les relations problématiques entre hommes et femmes (relations de genre) dans le Sud. Dans cet article, j’analyse comment ces différentes expériences de partage de repas deviennent des métaphores de la détérioration du mariage d’Edna ; comment l’exposition à la culture créole et à la position interstice des Cajuns permettent à Edna de se libérer et de s’affirmer au moyen des pratiques culinaires ; enfin, comment, au sein d’un mariage qui l’a privée de toute identité propre, les pratiques culinaires permettent un parcours vers la découverte de soi et la subjectivité.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Cajun, Culture créole, Idéologie féministe, Kate Chopin, Libération d’Edna Pontellier, relations de genre (féminin/masculin) dans le Sud, The Awakening, Traditions culinaires Keywords: Cajuns, Creole culture, Edna Pontellier’s liberation, feminist ideology, foodways, gendered existence in the South, Kate Chopin, The Awakening

AUTHOR

URSZULA NIEWIADOMSKA-FLIS Assistant Professor Department of American Literature and Culture The Institute of English John Paul II Catholic University of Lubli

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“Key to the highway”: blues records and the great migration

Louis Mazzari

1 A dozen years ago, I was driving through the Delta backcountry below New Orleans, where the Mississippi roils into the Gulf of Mexico, and I picked up a hitch-hiker, a young black man in his mid-twenties standing alone on a long, flat stretch of highway, surrounded by acres of farmland and wild brush and the humid tang of salt air. He told me he was leaving home, for the first time, after three years of oil rigs and unemployment. He asked whether I would mind stopping at his house, so he could pick up some clothes. We turned off the highway onto a mile-long dirt road and into a few dozen cinder-block ranch houses on half a dozen dusty streets. We stopped in front of the house where he and a friend had lived as squatters for a couple of years. I waited in the car while he stuffed all his clothes into a pillow case. He gave a little wave to the few folks on their porches as we rode slowly back up to the highway, but he didn’t want to stop, even at his mother’s home.

2 A few miles down the road, I pulled over by a confluence of Interstates. “Where are you going?” I wondered. “Maybe Detroit,” he ventured, “or maybe Florida.” He thanked me, slid the door shut, and slipped into blinding sunshine.

3 I think of him now when I hear Robert Johnson’s line, “I’m going to California, to my sweet home Chicago” (Johnson). Johnson’s conflation of the two destinations gives his declaration the character of fantasy. It makes something mythological of the idea of travel in the black experience of the Great Migration through the 1920s and 1930s, and in the blues records that accompanied the migrants and suffused their travels with the presence of fatefulness and the urgency of desire, with the loss and humor of the immigrant, with the poignancy of confusion and the sweetness of arrival. The differences and distance between California and Chicago had little meaning in Johnson’s psychic landscape; the distinction between them was overpowered by the overwhelming impulse to leave. That impulse—its causes and the migrants’ response to it—was so powerful that, along the Mississippi today, its echo still sounds.

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4 This essay considers the way those blues records of the 1920s and 1930s reinforced the decisions of poor farmers, sharecroppers, and workingmen and -women to move north. Blues musicians, focusing on a new sense of individual agency, played the soundtrack for the move.

5 The blues addressed the racial oppression and poverty of the black South in a folk idiom through the conduit of popular culture. Without voicing direct protest, this country folk art used the medium of the newest technology to herald a message of modernity from deep within the freedom of its sound.

6 Because of its importance and resonance in our music and poetry, the blues offers a colorful and profound perspective on American culture and society in the twentieth century—and it collaborates on ideas about what constitutes the modern. The tremendous success of blues records from between the world wars sprung from their interplay between folk and mass-market cultures during the 1920s and 1930s as the electronic media began its extraordinary influence on American society and culture. Such influence became a soundtrack for black migrants. Beyond that, as historian Susan Douglas writes, “jazz and the blues didn’t simply ‘reflect’ the African American experience; rather the music itself became the basis on which black culture was built and evolved” (Douglas, 97). These foundational forms of music were flowering just at the moment when mechanical reproduction and broadcasting were becoming widespread. We broaden our view of the twentieth century in America by looking at the ways these black songsters, born at the bottom of a racially ordered society, transformed their sense of rootlessness and alienation into modernist tableaux of movement and persistence.1

7 Early blues records are steeped in the aura of authenticity that adheres to the status of the outsider, a fashionable stance for each generation since the 1920s, in both black and white American culture. Today, we cannot draw any meaningful comparisons in any form of contemporary music with the radically alternative character of race-record blues. The authenticity of race-record blues was created by musicians and singers whose “outsider” world-view developed day-to-day under race-based boundaries written into daily custom and carried emphatically into law, songsters whose “outsider” status was built on notions about the differences between races as determined by nature and God.

8 Black southerners first began trickling north in the 1890s, while white supremacy was being re-institutionalized throughout the region. They were also becoming newly diffident toward their status and their homeland, and both races could sense it. Transience was one sign of a new attitude. In 1910, more than half of all black farmers had moved within the previous four years, and only a third had been in their homes for as long as a year (Grossman, 30). But in spite of the motivation to go, black restlessness had few alternatives to endless rounds of sharecropping different local farms.

9 Since Reconstruction, the ideal of the small farmstead had attracted blacks as much as whites. But where black emphasis on movement, during Reconstruction and the late nineteenth century, had attached to a search for that small homestead, mobility became escape during the 1910s through increasing opportunity in cities south and north. Once black men were welcome to work in northern factories during the war, they had found a direction. And women found they could earn as much as a domestic in the North as they had earned back home in a week. Northern cities captured the imagination of increasingly restless blacks. “The packing houses in Chicago for a while

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seemed to be everything,” said a laborer from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “You could not rest in your bed at night for Chicago.”2

10 “The Negroes just quietly move away without taking their recognized leaders into their confidence any more than they do the white people about them,” remarked one observer. W.E.B. DuBois noted the migrants’ lack of organization (DuBois, 63-66). The Great Migration had no explicit leaders, to be sure, but especially as it continued into the 1930s, leaders-by-example were appearing on race-record blues, proclaiming in music another way of life. Both the sound and style of the songs and the newness of their medium conveyed to migrants a sense that, in spite of everything they had previously been taught, life could change. As these black southerners were quietly picking up and leaving for New York and Detroit, the music they brought with them by the tens of thousands was blues.

11 Through the 1910s, blues songs had been sold in sheet music, but Chicago Defender editors wondered why African Americans were able to buy Caruso but not records by black singers. Until Okeh took a chance in 1920, the record industry did not believe a market existed among blacks. The first blues record, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” caught Okeh completely by surprise. Hoping their experiment would sell a few thousand copies, the company sold seventy-five thousand in a month. Radio broadcasting began in 1920, too, cutting into the sales of phonograph records across the industry. But few radio stations broadcast black music during the Jazz Age, so race records continued to sell, and companies recorded hundreds of black vaudeville and blues singers throughout the decade and sold commercial recordings of blues, gospel music, and sermons to African Americans across the South. The impact was immediate and profound.

12 After emancipation, movement in itself had felt a kind of magic, and the itinerant musician a figure of importance for the generations that followed. Howard Odum pioneered social research among rural blacks in the early 1900s and observed that Perhaps no person is sung more among the negroes than the homeless and friendless wanderer, with his disappointments in love and adventure […] The wandering ‘songster’ takes great pride in thus singing with skill some of his favorite songs; then he can boast of his achievements as ‘a bad man’ with his ‘box.’ As he wanders from negro community to community, he finds lodging and solace. So the negroes at home take up the songs, and sing them to their companions, this constituting perhaps the most effective method of courtship. (Odum, 255-94).

13 Since the 1890s, blues had been carried by itinerant songsters throughout of the South, in barrooms and former slave quarters, in jubilees and on riverboats. It had developed from the worksongs of fieldhands and railroad laborers, who used rhythm to help regulate and sustain the pace of their work, and the blues existed alongside folk songs about mine disasters and steamboat gamblers. But blues songs were less interested in crafting a narrative. What Robert Palmer writes about early bluesman Charley Patton could be extended to the genre as a whole: “Patton found public events truly meaningful only insofar as they impinged on his private world—his perceptions, his feelings” (Palmer, 67).

14 Spirituals had expressed the community’s purpose and direction. “The blues, on the other hand,” writes Angela Davis, “articulated a new valuation of individual emotional needs and desires” (Davis, 4). Always first-person, the blues was not so concerned with a sense of community, or spirituality, or with the functionality of work. The blues was all about personal, individual expression. Richard Wright saw the difference between

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the radically individualized blues and the communal spirituals, the other main descendent of slave music, in terms of class. I’d surmise that the spirituals, so dearly beloved of the Southern American Whites, came from those slaves who were closest to the Big Houses of the plantations where they caught vestiges of Christianity whiffed to them from the Southern Whites’ cruder forms of Baptist or Methodist religions. If the plantations’ house slaves were somewhat remote from Christianity, the field slaves were almost completely beyond the pale […] And it was from them and their descendants that the devil songs called the blues came—that confounding triptych of the convict, the migrant, the rambler, the steel driver, the ditch digger, the roustabout, the pimp, the prostitute, the urban or rural illiterate outsider (Wright, 10).

15 The white image of the blues songster’s restless lifestyle pegged him as lazy and shiftless, irresponsible. But in the black community, a man or woman who survived without working for whites was a character of fascination. Black southerners knew the dangers of moving beyond accepted boundaries the way the bluesman did. To be what in white eyes was a “shiftless” hobo riding the rails meant risking attack dogs in dark trainyards and outwitting the yardbosses. To be “lazy” about fieldwork meant rejecting the rigged game of sharecropping and looking for better odds elsewhere. Wright pointed out that a migrant’s decision to move could in itself be taken as a challenge to white authority (Grossman, 38).

16 Wright’s “devil songs” sang from a moving center. Muddy Waters remembered “Walkin’ Blues” as “the anthem” of the black Delta in the 1930s. “Woke up this mornin’, lookin’ ’round for my shoes / You know I had them mean old walkin’ blues” (Palmer, 147). The ethos of movement sprang from a shifting identity at the heart of many blues personas. It was Robert Johnson’s inheritance, to cite a significant example. Johnson was born in 1911, in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, south of Jackson. Charles Dodd, his mother’s husband, fled to Memphis to avoid a lynch mob. In his absence, a man named Noah Johnson fathered Robert. Robert and his mother, Julia, moved to Memphis a few years later to live with Charles Dodd and his new mistress. By this time, Dodd had changed his name to Spencer. Robert later followed his mother and a new stepfather to Robinsonville, Mississippi. By the time Robert Johnson was killed in 1938, he had used the names Dodd and Spencer at different times and, of course, he also went by the name of his natural father. This background filled Johnson’s records with an intensity of transience. Such blues as Johnson’s gave voice to its listeners’ dislocation, attuned to a country folk in peonage undergoing a radical shift in identity, hurtling into modernity on the Twentieth Century Limited.

17 The restless movement and psychic wandering that filled Johnson’s life and music has since attracted a language of description that sounds like mythology in its sweep—and its impatience with facts and sequence. A liner note on a Big Joe Williams record plainly and succinctly encapsulated his early life: “He learned guitar as a boy and set out on a life of wandering which he has continued to this day” (The Mississippi Blues).

18 For many country blues singers, their wandering lives played the backbeat of their music. Henry Thomas and Amos Easton—called Bumble Bee Slim—are two representative examples, from two generations. Henry Thomas and Bumble Bee Slim form archetypes of transience, whose itinerancy filled their songs. Thomas was of the first generation born into freedom, in 1874, in East Texas near Oklahoma and Louisiana. All through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he wandered the South and Midwest as a hobo songster, and Thomas’s recordings from the 1920s are suffused

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with his life on the road. His masterpiece, “Railroadin’ Some,” isn’t a blues, but a folk song and a modernist composition that uses the blues tone. Thomas creates a soundscape of guitar and reed pipe, simulating a train’s rumble and whistle, achieving a train’s speed and power. The lyric is a narrative created through its sung sequence of cities and towns along the railroad from East Texas to Chicago. Leaving Fort Worth, Texas, and go to Texarkana, And double back to Fort Worth. Come on down to Dallas […] I’m on my way, but I don’t know where. […] Hello, Springfield! I’m on my way, Chicago! Bloomington! Joliet! Giving a highball pass on through! Highball pass on through, sir! Grand Carson! 31st Street Depot! Oak Street Depot! Chicago! (Thomas)

19 Who is the singer? Conductor, engineer, or passengers? Is it the voice of the train itself? Thomas sings a whole chorus in the culmination of cities, merging in the expression and excitement of the new, ending in the joyous shout, “Chicago!”

20 Amos Easton was born at the other end of the South, in Brunswick, Georgia, a generation later, in 1905. Born to an unstable family and restless from early childhood, he ran away from home at fifteen to join Barnum & Bailey’s circus. After two years on the road, he returned to Brunswick, married briefly, then left again, riding the rails north. In 1928, he met bluesmen Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell in Indianapolis, and began playing rent parties and pool halls. By 1931, he was recording, and by 1937, he had recorded more than 150 tunes, including the popular, light novelty number “Greasy Greens” (Cahoon). While “Railroadin’ Some” was a recording of a folk song, “Greasy Greens” was a pop record released, in the mid-1930s, to an audience of both southerners and northward migrants, who felt connected to their homeland through the cheerful associations—both downhome and knowing—and like so much pop culture since, at once sentimental and tongue-in-cheek. Way down South where I was born, They raise them good old greens and corn, Sweet potatoes and black eyed peas, Green tomatoes and pecan trees. Them greens is the best they grow, Them greens taste like home. Soft and easy, good and greasy, I’m crazy about my greasy greens. (Bumble Bee Slim)

21 Migrants trusted the realism, as well responded to the adventure, that they heard in the blues. Some migrants turned to religion. Blues songsters advocated an alternative— movement, speed, and distance were solutions to particular problems. In “When the Levee Breaks,” the freedom of the blues becomes a refrain of escape, movement as a calculus of survival. Here, the blues speaks with the directness of realism. Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good. Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good. When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move. (McCoy and McCoy)

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22 Many songsters expressed movement not as a choice, but as a response to any crisis, whether flood or plague or trouble of any sort. “Going Down to the Station” captures the music’s uncanny mix of exuberance and dread, in the figures of the eagle and the blues—the haunting sense of freedom while fleeing. I’m going down to the station, take that eagle when she runs. I’m going down to the station, take that eagle when she runs. Well, I don’t want to travel, people, but these blues won’t leave me alone.

23 In “Poor Boy, Long Ways From Home,” Gus Cannon recorded a traditional tune—one of the oldest in the genre—that offered a quintessentially American solution—escape to the wilderness, another way of suggesting with Huck Finn to “Light out for the territory.” Been a poor boy and a long way from home, Long way from home. Been a poor boy and a long way from home. I got arrested, no money to buy my fine, Money to buy my fine. I got arrested, no money to buy my fine. I guess I’ll have to catch a Frisco out in this land, Catch a Frisco out. Lord, I guess I’ll have to catch a Frisco out. And if that don’t do, I’m going to try the woods a while, Try the woods a while. (Cannon)

24 Many blues lyrics don’t mention travel or leaving, but their rhythms insist on action. “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” in spite of its lyric’s injunction, is built on a backbeat so propulsive and urgent the effect is of falling forward.

25 Women made the first blues records, and their songs were often informed by vaudeville acts, carnivals, medicine shows, and minstrelsy. Ma Rainey had been touring for twenty-five years before she made her first record in 1923. If bluesmen were often drawn to an image of the shiftless rounder, women blues singers often projected themselves as independent of conventional social and sexual restraints, with a sense of license and taking charge of their own lives. Angela Davis observes, “Sovereignty in sexual matters marked an important divide between life during slavery and life after emancipation […]The focus on sexual love in blues music was thus quite different from the prevailing idealization of romantic love in mainstream popular music” (Davis, 5, 10).

26 Lucille Bogan certainly agreed. “I got something between my legs,” she crowed, “will make a dead man come” (Bogan, “Shave ’Em Dry Blues”). Bogan was one among many women whose songs shouted their desire and anger. Such figures of independence encouraged agency, movement, and the excitement of change. As Paul Garon writes in Blues and the Poetic Spirit, the eroticism of the blues was a vehicle of black liberation. In those moments of most intense passion, be they imaginary or actual, the obsessive nature of eroticism makes itself known. This particular obsession carries with it a promise of freedom that is undeniable: love destroys repression. Eroticism becomes a paradox; a nonlimiting obsession. (Garon, 57)

27 Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace, and Bogan, among others, did not subscribe to the virtues of Victorian convention. “If you mistreat me,” sung Bessie Smith, “I’ll hunt you like a hound” (Smith, “Honey Man Blues”). Smith recorded 252 songs, and in only four is traditional

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marriage mentioned without sarcasm. In “Ticket Agent, Ease Your Window Down,” her man has left her, but in her knowing, urbane way, Smith embodies independence. If he don’t want me, he had no right to stall I can get more men than a passenger train can haul […] I hate a man that don’t play fair and square ’Cause you can get a crooked daddy ’most anywhere. (Smith, “Ticket Agent, Ease Your Window Down”)

28 The blues is superbly suited to express the complications of love and sex, and some of the most powerful poetry in blues records addresses the differing consequences of desire for men and women and the difficulty of their sexual politics. In Bogan’s blues, “Alley Boogie,” the poignancy is more powerful for its realistic, matter-of-fact voice and for its recognition of the ambiguous and refractory quality of desire. Papa got a watch, brother got a ring, sister got an armful from that alley boogie that thing. She’s wild about her boogie, only thing she choose. Now she’s got to do the boogie to buy alley baby some shoes. (Bogan, “Alley Boogie”)

29 The blues was not explicit protest music. One study counts fewer than two percent of all the blues and gospel songs recorded up to 1945 as carrying any political comment at all (Van Rihn, xv). In a context in which no white southerner of any prominence advocated racial equality, the race-record industry shunned statements. As Garon writes, the blues protest was metaphorical and expressionistic: “not so much the social or economic conditions of black life in America, but the effects of these conditions on the mind are expressed in the blues.” Like the spirituals, blues songs projected their dissatisfaction metaphorically. Blues was a genre not descriptive but psychological, not documentary but expressive (Garon, 65). Garon quotes Memphis Slim telling Alan Lomax, in the 1940s, that the “‘blues is a kind of revenge. You know you wanta say something…you wanta signifyin’ like—that’s the blues. . . . [W]e-all fellers, we had a hard time in life an’ like that, and things we couldn’t say or do, so we sign it, I mean we sing’” (Garon, 201). In the late 1960s, friends of William Ferris among the bluesmen in the Mississippi Delta explained the indirect nature of their lyrics. Jasper Love, for instance, talked about the way his grandmother’s hymns, sung during slavery, had contained coded messages about the Underground Railroad. His peers among the Delta bluesmen did the same thing. When Little Willie Foster would sing, “My baby mistreats me,” he was really saying, “My boss mistreats me” (Ferris).

30 Being lyric poetry, the blues does not so much describe its singers’ condition as stake out a complex emotional terrain. It’s often more introspective than accusatory. It often searches as much for guilt as for blame, accepts penance as it urges retribution. The blues singer often reflects on his own complicity in his troubles. In John Dudley’s “Clarksdale Mill Blues,” for example, complaint is inseparable from soul searching and the pain of self-knowledge. Tell me where was you boy when that Clarksdale Mill burned down? You know where I was. Tell me where was you now when that Clarksdale Mill burned down?

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I was standing right there with my face all full of frown. Oh, Lord have mercy—who you telling?— on my wicked, on my wicked soul. Baby, you know I don’t mistreat you. Oh, Lord have mercy on my wicked soul. Wouldn’t mistreat my baby now for my weight in gold. (Dudley, “Clarksdale Mill Blues”)

31 Far from making explicit complaint against racial oppression, blues records virtually ignored white individuals and society. In so doing, blues, barrelhouse music, boogie woogie, and jazz records posited identification with a black culture in the same way that Zora Neale Hurston did in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Both Hurston’s Eatonville and the blues speak from a particularly African-American culture. “Without the blues,” claims Jeff Titon, “the black experience down home would have been significantly closer to white middle-class behavior, making it infinitely more difficult for black people today to find a separate identity in an Afro-American culture distinct from Anglo-American culture” (Titon, 59).

32 Garon sees black working-class blues singers as ridiculing “the repressive norms of the white bourgeoisie, negating bourgeois ideology by the mere act of non-acceptance. Although this form of rejection/negation does not necessarily comprise an effort to change society’s structure, it was, historically, the principal vehicle of poetic revolt for blacks throughout roughly the first third of this century. Other forms of revolt, although existent, did not relate to the black working class on the same level that blues did” (Garon, 54).

33 These sentiments of dissent and retribution exist under the surface of blues music, though, just as spirituals had carried messages of emancipation under the metaphysics of their lyrics. Mississippi Bracy was talking to a woman, only ostensibly in “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” Worked all the summer and all the fall Now I’ve got to take Christmas in my overalls, Going up the country, won’t be back till fall Times get no better, I won’t be back at all. But by and by, I’ll overcome, some sweet day. You treat me like you didn’t know my name, You mistreat me now for another man. But by and by, I’ll overcome, some sweet day. (Bracy)

34 For sure, as he sang about being mistreated, Bracy also has the sharecropping system, and Jim Crow on his mind, too. In “Steady Rollin’ Man,” Robert Johnson sang, “I’m a hardworking man, have been for many long years I know / And some creampuff using my money, whoa, baby, that’ll never be no more” (Johnson, “Steady Rollin’ Man”). There is no hint of racial animosity in any of the lyrics, but it is easy to imagine a white face behind Johnson’s image of a “creampuff.”

35 The blues records of the 1920s and 1930s did not always explicitly exhort the sharecropper and laundress to pick up and move North, but blues songs exuded the attraction of freedom and movement that fueled migrants’ determination to take a strange and uncertain path. Blues records did not so much speak to the ways and means of migrating as fed the urge to movement and liberation (Dudley, “Po’ Boy Blues”).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOGAN, Lucille, “Alley Boogie,” Chicago, Brunswick 7210, 1930.

---, “Shave ’Em Dry Blues,” Columbia/Legacy 65705, 1935.

BRACY, Mississippi, “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” The Mississippi Blues, No. 3, Transition: 1926-1937, Origin Jazz Library OJL-17.

BUMBLE BEE SLIM, “Greasy Greens,” Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1, c. October 1931 to March 1934, Document Records, DOCD 5261.

CAHOON, Brad, “‘Bumble Bee Slim’ Easton (1905-1968),” New Georgia Encyclopedia, http:// www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1656 (accessed July 1, 2011).

CANNON, Gus, “Poor Boy Long Ways From Home,” Paramount 12571, 1927.

DAVIS, Angela Y., Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, New York, Vintage Books, 1999.

DOUGLAS, Susan J., Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

DUBOIS, W.E.B., “The Migration of Negroes,” Crisis 14, 2, June 1917, 63-66.

DUDLEY, John, “Clarksdale Mill Blues,” Southern Journey, vol. 3: 61 Highway Mississippi, Rounder CD 1703, 1959.

---, “Po’ Boy Blues,” Southern Journey, vol. 3: 61 Highway Mississippi, Rounder CD 1703, 1959.

FERRIS, William, Give My Poor Heart Ease : Voices of the Mississippi Blues, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

GROSSMAN, James, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989.

JOHNSON, Robert, “Steady Rollin’ Man,” Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, Sony B000002757.

McCOY, Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie McCOY, “When the Levee Breaks,” Columbia, 1929.

The Mississippi Blues, No. 3, Transition: 1926-1937, Origin Jazz Library OJL-17.

ODUM, Howard W., “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes,” The Journal of American Folklore, 24, 93, July-Sept., 1911, 255-94.

PALMER, Robert, Deep Blues, New York, Penguin Books, 1981.

SMITH, Bessie, “Honey Man Blues,” Columbia 14172-D, 1926.

SMITH, Bessie, “Ticket Agent, Ease Your Window Down,” Columbia 14025-D, 1924.

THOMAS, Henry, “Railroadin’ Some” (C-4623), Vocalion 1443, 1929.

TITON, Jeff Todd, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1977.

VAN RIHN, Guido, Roosevelt’s Blues, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

WRIGHT, Richard, “Foreword,” in Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of the Blues, Toronto, Macmillan Co., 1960.

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NOTES

1. William Ferris makes a grand claim for the music. “Blues are the key to the cultural and intellectual history of the black, the southern, and the American experience,” he writes. “They affirm our spirit through love, protest, spirituality, humor, pathos, and celebration. They are a way of life, forged in the shadow of racism and violence, that teaches us how to endure and survive in the face of adversity.” William Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease : Voices of the Mississippi Blues Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 258. 2. Grossman, 4.

ABSTRACTS

This paper looks at the way “race record” blues of the 1920s and 1930s reinforced the decision of poor farmers, sharecroppers, and working men and women to move to the cities of the North. The theme is the way black southerners used the blues as the soundtrack of the Great Migration. In a sense, the Delta blues was a musical travel narrative for tens of thousands of people who were leaving the rural South for an unknown, modern and industrial future. The paper will explore blues music as an expression of the fluidity of African American society and culture during the Great Depression. While avoiding direct protest, blues singers and musicians—first women, later men—crafted an art form and employed the technology of the phonograph to encourage freedom of movement and choice. At the moment the “race record” industry was being born, and black farmers and families were quietly picking up and leaving the South, the music they traveled with was the blues. The paper will look at examples of blues singers whose records dealt specifically with the Great Migration and consider their influence on listeners.

Cet article considère la manière dont le « race-record » blues des années 1920 et 1930 a renforcé la décision des agriculteurs, des métayers, et des ouvriers Afro-Américains d’émigrer vers les villes du nord. L’objectif général est de montrer comment les Afro-Américains se sont servi du blues comme accompagnement musical pour cette « grande migration ». En un sens, les vinyles de blues représentaient un récit de voyage musical pour des dizaines de milliers de personnes. Les chanteurs et les musiciens de blues ont conçu leur art et ont utilisé la technologie du phonographe en ayant pour but d’encourager la liberté de mouvement et de choix. Enfin, cet article examine en détail des exemples de disques de blues qui traitaient directement de la « grande migration », ainsi que leurs influences sur les musiciens et le public.

INDEX

Keywords: American South, Blues records, Great Migration, modernity, music Mots-clés: disques vinyles de blues, grande migration, modernité, musique, Sud des États-Unis

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AUTHOR

LOUIS MAZZARI

Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Istanbul

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Eudora Welty: Sensing the Particular, Revealing the Universal in Her Southern World

Pearl McHaney

1 In the 1930s, Eudora Welty pursued with equal earnest and talent both fiction and photography and seemed already to be perfecting her visual acuity and its translation into words and image. Of her photograph The Rides, State Fair, for example, Welty cautioned Stuart Wright who was making a portfolio of her photographs, “[T]he Ferris Wheels should be brought out to be right in front of the girls’ eyes to dazzle them like an impossible dream.” Her statement, regarding a photograph taken more than forty years earlier, reveals Welty’s fictional imagination and her metaphorical interpretation, “like an impossible dream,” of what the subjects of the photograph feel standing together before the realistic Ferris wheels. “The eye of the camera,” Welty says, “record[s] what the eye of the photographer is discovering” (Welty, 2009, 307). The unsayable—human emotions, dreams, relationships—that are Welty’s subjects are made visible. “I never doubted,” she wrote, that imagining yourself into other people’s lives is exactly what writing fiction is. I had no hesitation […], only eagerness […]. I rushed in […]. I drove my imagination to put me inside [my] characters on a premise I accepted [for my first story and all others] that the emotions in which all of us are alike involved for life, differ more in degree than in kind. Imagining yourself inside the skin, body, heart, and mind of any other person is the primary feat, but also the absolute necessity. (Welty, 2009, 304)

2 Such imagining of oneself inside another’s “body, heart, and mind” involves all of the senses in order to picture the invisible and say the unsayable.

3 Welty does just this in prose that is poetic, prose that is painted with colors—red, rose, blue, green, silver, black, white, pearly gray, golden-yellow; rich in figurative language, in particular, similes and metaphors; resplendent in sensory images and synaesthesia; and giving of pleasure as it makes the invisible visible. Welty alerts us often to her extraordinary sensitivity for discovering the world for us. In her autobiography One

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Writer’s Beginnings, she writes, “The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there” (1984, 85) as is illustrated by Welty and her interviewer as they once “stood staring into the silent gloom on the cypress swamp in the Natchez Trace” (“A Visit” 86). The interviewer asked, “‘How would you describe that color?’” referring to what was “really there”—“the water’s strange shade of beige beneath the darker brown of tree shadows. ‘Oh, a sort of blue. Like an ink wash,’” Welty answered. “Blue? Ink wash? What was she talking about? And suddenly there it was. [Welty] had seen the color of air” (1996a, 86). Air is often visible in her fiction as well. She describes “the almost-blue shade of mid-morning,” a “horizon-curve against blue air,” and “the soft blue air of seven o'clock in the evening on the Delta” (2009, 3, 264; 1998a, 137). Such sensitivity to hues and tones of air comes perhaps from Welty’s early ambitions to study art and her continuous interest in painting as evidenced in a letter to her friend John Robinson, in which she reports buying colors: “new blue, rose madder, and gamboges yellow” (3 Mar. 1944). In multiple genres, at seemingly every opportunity, Welty gives evidence of seeing color and being sensitive to light.

4 Welty seems to be quite conscious of her use of sensory powers. Referring to the “one thing [that] is consistent among […] many Southern writers, [… that is, feeling] passionately about Place,” Welty says, it is “[n]ot simply in the historical or philosophical connotation of the word,” “but in the sensory, meaning the breathing world of sight and smell and sound, in its earth and water and sky, its time and its seasons” (2009, 245, 165). Paying close attention to what Welty sees with her “tyrannous eye” (Emerson, 1957, 238) and to how her observations lead to her senses of smell, touch, and sound in the stories “June Recital” and “Moon Lake,” letters, commentary on a1930s photograph, and then the stories “A Sketching Trip” and “The Demonstrators,” I argue that Welty pictures the invisible and writes the unsayable by her use of the senses with two results. First, she creates a sense of the South that is simultaneously particular and universal. To illustrate this, I analyze passages especially replete in visual and olfactory senses. Second, Welty’s sensory language gives meaning to the abstract, universal concepts such as joy, love, art, and fear.

The Senses

5 In an interview with cultural historian Homi Bhabha, W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Picture Theory (1994), says, “[L]iterary scholars as spectators, connoisseurs, [are] employing all the senses now[…] [T]hey’re feeling, seeing, smelling something palpable in the text, while visual-arts students are learning to read” (Bhabha). Elsewhere, Mitchell challenges us to consider the difference between visual literacy, that “seeing is reading,” and literary visualcy, that “reading is seeing” (2008b, 11, 13). When we see, we are interpreting signs, making meaning, all of which we ascribe to the action of reading, “visual literacy;” we see; therefore, we read and we read all that we see. Mitchell proposes that we readers attend equally to “visualcy,” to “seeing,” to consider the innate sense of seeing (“visualcy”) as possibly primary to the learned action of reading, “literacy.” Welty, perhaps most successful writers, does not distinguish between literacy and visualcy, primarily because she is reading and seeing simultaneously without particular attention to either (as we breathe and speak without attention to either action). Mitchell offers a third idea that can guide us in an examination of the sensory in Welty’s work when he notes the differences between

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picture and image: that is, a picture can be hung on a wall, an image cannot (2008a, 16). An “image,” says Mitchell, “is what appears in the picture, and what survives [the picture’s] destruction—in memory, in narrative, and in copies and traces of other media” (2008a, 16). Welty reads/sees/experiences the world and oftentimes creates a picture (in her case a painting or a photograph). In writing, Welty accesses the image in the picture, most often through memory and then in the creation of narrative, and in recollecting the senses associated with her literacy, visualcy, and picture making, uses the image in a text, frequently with figurative language that similarly evokes the senses. That Welty accomplishes these multiple, simultaneous feats is evident (without Mitchell’s terminology, of course) in her statement that the writer is always seeing double, two pictures at once in his frame, his and the world’s …; and he works best in a state of constant and subtle and unfooled reference between the two. It is his clear intention—his passion … to make the reader see only one of the pictures—the author’s—under the pleasing illusion that it is the world’s; this enormity is the accomplishment of a good story.” (1998b, 789)

6 What a reader typically “reads” in a story is that which Mitchell names the “picture,” a picture “that is the world’s,” according to Welty, at large in the universe, common to any reader; whereas, the author, Welty, “sees” that which Mitchell names the “image.”

7 The “image” surviving in memory leads us (and Welty) to consider the non-visual sense of smell that Diane Ackerman, essayist and poet, author of A Natural History of the Senses, calls the “mute sense, the one without words” (1990, 6). Ten thousand different odors have been identified, and we absorb odors in our 23,000 breaths a day (Ackerman, 1990, 5, 6). How are these smells rendered visible in texts? Although the “physiological links between smell and language centers are pitifully weak,” writes Ackerman, “[n]ot so the links between the smell and the memory centers, a route that carries us nimbly across time and distance” (1990, 7), as Proust has so convincingly shown. Proust’s madeleines, bells, and sensory powers in general come readily to mind in a discussion of the senses. Proust’s narrator reflects that “when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, … the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, […] in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection” (1934, 36). Ackerman and Edwin T. Morris (Fragrance, Dover, 2002) confirm Proust’s narrative thesis: there are “almost no short-term memory with odors” (qtd. in Ackerman, 1990, 11). Smell relies on long-term memory; smell takes us back to childhood. In Swann’s Way in volume one of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust’s narrator recollects that his aunt’s rooms in Combray that he visited in his youth fascinate our sense of smell, with the countless odours springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and couloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but already humanized, domesticated, confined, and exquisite, … plenishing, domestic smells, … sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells, pious smells, … rooms … saturated with a fine bouquet of a silence … the smell of soot, … the fire, baking like a pie the appetizing smells with which the air of the room was thickly clotted, … [but] I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt. (1934, 38)

8 Proust activates and anthropomorphizes the smells (“roving,” “pious”) that the narrator remembers. Some smells are “lazy” but still “punctual” like the “village

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clock.” This passage not only creates a sense of place that is replete with “the breathing world of sight and smell and sound” that defines place for Welty (2009, 165), but it also illustrates with the concluding smell—“nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity”—Proust’s means of communicating the invisible, unsayable, abstract sense, understood in memory, of the smell of his aunt’s quilt. Only after leading us through myriad, specific, universally-smelled odors is Proust’s narrator able to make us “smell” the “nondescript,” “indigestible,” vaguely “resinous,” “dull,” and “fruity” quilt. Poet that he is, Proust begins with the concrete before offering the abstract.

9 As she reported to Jan Nordby Gretlund in an interview, Welty read, savored even, Swann’s Way and recollected buying the Modern Library edition in the 1940s at Macy’s in New York (Welty, 1996b, 249; Welty, et al., 1984, 11). As in the quoted passage by Proust, Welty’s prose is dense in detail, reliant upon sensory evocation.1 She writes with similes, metaphors, colors, sounds, touches, tastes, and smells creating the sense of the place in which her characters find themselves and then moves to the invisible and unsayable abstractions that heretofore confounded and silenced her characters. Welty and her characters create complex figures of speech drawing on remembered sensory experiences to attempt communication.

Sensing the South

10 Welty’s work is replete with visual (using colors especially) and olfactory images that are specific to the South, often with the visual imagery directly intoning the olfactory, giving readers a sensory experience of the South. Black characters in stories from the 1940s and 60s are “sulphur-yellow” and “golden yellow” with “cottonseed meal” from the ubiquitous cotton gins (Stories 467, 746). The room in her first-published story turns “golden-yellow like some sort of flower” when a lamp is lit, “and the walls smelled of it” (Welty 1998b, 154). In “June Recital,” Cassie Morrison’s mother comes in and out of Cassies’s room “leaving the smell of rose geranium behind for the fan to keep bringing at her” (Welty, 1998b, 347). In her reverie, Cassie recalls how Virgie Rainey would come into the room for piano lessons with Miss Eckhart “carrying a magnolia bloom which she had stolen … carr[ying it] like a hot tureen, and offer[ing] it to Miss Eckhart … [but] magnolias smelled too sweet and heavy for right after breakfast” (Welty, 1998b, 350, 351). Cassie’s olfactory memory carries her from Virgie to Miss Eckhart and then from Miss Eckhart to Mr. Voight who exposes himself to the girls, a memory that makes her bare “her teeth and set them, trying out the frantic look.” She scares herself so that “[l]ike a dreamer dreaming with reservations,” she shifts back to innocence in the present moment to “chang[e] the color” in her tie-dying of a scarf (Welty, 1998b, 358). When Cassie falls into past memories again and recalls Miss Eckhart and then the drowning of Mr. Sissum whom Miss Eckhart loved, Welty writes, “Cassie would rather remember … people … laughing and turning under the blossoming China trees and the heavy crape myrtles that were wound up in honeysuckle. How delicious it all smelled!” (Welty, 1998b, 360).

11 Smell triggers the memory of Cassie’s young brother Loch in a similar manner, a literal smell suggesting an odor in the past. Loch disdainfully thinks, “Cassie was carrying on some girls’ business that … smelled terrible to him, as bad as when she painted a hair- receiver with rosebuds and caught it on fire drying it” (Welty, 1998b,339). Welty also extends a literal sense of smell held in an object, and with it a smell of a particular

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place, into a figurative smell of another place: the telescope that Loch looks through smells “of brass and the drawer of the library table” at first, and then, “with the telescope to his eye he even smelled the house [across the yard] strongly” (Welty, 1998b, 335, 336). A third example illustrates Welty yielding to a confluence of olfactory and aural senses: “Enveloping all that the pupils did [in the house next door that Loch “smells”] … was the smell of cooking. But the smell was wrong, as the pitch of a note could be wrong” (Welty, 1998b, 369). The smell, “wrong, as the pitch of a note could be wrong” is literal, the smell of cabbage that Miss Eckhart, the German piano teacher, cooked in wine—something uncommon in the Southern town’s kitchens.

12 In another story, we read of “four wet black cedars … [that] smelled bitter as smoke” (Welty, 1998b, 100). Elsewhere, Ran McLain senses that “lilies must have been in bloom somewhere near;” when he takes “a full breath of their ether smell: consciousness could go or not” (Welty, 1998b, 454). The colors and smells of the South—cottonseed- meal-yellow, magnolia, honeysuckle, wet cedars—recalled in the characters’ memories suggest the region’s stereotypes by which it is known.

13 In “Moon Lake,” the orphan Easter leads the town girls through the swamp. Welty names the flora and paints visual images with metaphors and similes of past experiences, memories, colors, and smells. The effect, haunting and foreboding, is also typically southern. Their toes exploded the dust that felt like the powder clerks pump into new kid gloves […]They were eye to eye with the finger-shaped leaves of the castor bean plants, put out like those gypsy hands that part the curtains at the back of rolling wagons, and wrinkled and coated over like the fortune-teller’s face. … At the girls’ shoulders Queen Anne’s lace and elderberry and blackberry thickets, loaded heavily with flower and fruit and smelling with the melony smell of snake, overhung the ditch to touch them. The ditches had dried green or blue bottoms, cracked and glazed—like a dropped vase. … Sweet bay and cypress and sweetgum and live oak and swamp maple closing tight made the wall dense …. Closer to the ear than lips could begin words came the swamp sounds—closer to the ear and nearer to the dreaming mind. … Periods of silence seemed hoarse, or the suffering from hoarseness, otherwise inexplicable, as though the world could stop. (Welty, 1998b, 423-4)

14 Castor bean and elderberry plants, sweetgum and live oak trees, the dusty paths, the plants’ “melony smell of snake,” and the “green or blue,” “cracked and glazed” ditches of the swamp specifically evoke the South. After such explicitly identifiable images, follow the abstract swamp sounds that are “nearer to the dreaming mind” than words can successfully convey and “periods of silence” that “seemed hoarse” or even more so than hoarse, which is speech that is not fully silent, “suffering from hoarseness.” Although this description seems unsatisfactory to the narrator, the “periods of silence” are otherwise “inexplicable.” Welty, as does Proust in the passage cited above, begins with specific sensory images and then failing to find an appropriate descriptor, falls into abstractions masked with sensory language.

15 Welty draws on imagery of Southern flowers described in sensory language in her correspondence as well as in her fiction. To John Robinson, the man she loved who was a pilot in World War II’s Mediterranean arena, she wrote of her garden flowers2 and the naturalness of a day at the openings and closings of her letters to contain, perhaps, her fears and worries and elsewhere in the letters to explain the difficulties of writing fiction. When trying to explain something abstract—such as her love for Robinson or art or life itself, Welty also relied upon her garden. She wrote, “I dreamed a student

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came to me and said the Leila camellia was the Mozart of camellias,” in her dream comparing the flower to the composer, which surely evokes not the master’s visage but classical music, perhaps operatic grandeur (3 Mar. 1944). The previous autumn, Welty described “a soft grey day [… with] a delicious smell of mist [….] Today a big beautiful amaryllis opened many flowers—the white kind with pale pink lines, and rose stamens with gold hoods on them, and the most delicious fragrance, like a cool magical something you could drink” (1 Sept. 1943). In this letter, Welty twice describes that which is smelled, the day’s air and the amaryllis, with the adjective “delicious,” drawing on the sense of taste to conjure a fragrance. In these two examples, the camellia and an amaryllis are specific flowers that would typically be recognized, readily called to the mind’s eye. Yet they seem to Welty (in her dream and letter) to require figurative language, a metaphor and a simile. The figures’ vehicles, which by I. A. Richard’s definition should help the reader to understand some aspect of the tenors (in these instances, the blossoms), are more complex than the flowers themselves. Welty reverses the figures, making the subjects clear, and the image that carries the meaning, not concrete, but fantastic, sensory images: classical music and “a cool magical something you could drink.”

Sensing the Abstract

16 In other letters to Robinson in Europe, written from New York City and then from Jackson, the sense of the South seems insufficient for Welty when she is trying to illustrate true abstractions: “I believe two people always have something infinite between them—with care.” How to explain such intimacy that is infinite, intimacy that is not of a particular place and time, but is universal and unending. She distances herself from the man she loves to whom she is writing by positing not themselves but “two people.” She tries to elaborate in her next sentence, but it is disjointed; dashes connect the sensory images with no clear syntax: “The color of a day—one sound—a note—as of a French horn—they stay as real as the stars” (n.d. [July 1944]). What she and Robinson share are the “infinite” abstractions: the color of a day, one musical note, stars. Perhaps what she perceives that they share, which she cannot explain concretely, requires some sort of faith. In spring1945, she wrote about great art and about greatness itself: When you see Perseus [the constellation] tell me how beautiful it is. … I think that just as great art lives, why could not greatness itself live—its vitality green and fresh as ever, like something growing on—branching of itself into the future. […] There’s nothing finite or absolute in [greatness], that it couldn’t live green and flower out in some fine mind away off at any time, through understanding—it seems natural that it should. A sound wave touching a shell on a far shore, or the light coming down from a star, taking centuries—simply the memory of music once… . (19 Mar. 1945)

17 Such a trove of sensory images to explain the subjects of the metaphors: intimacy between two people and great art/greatness itself. The comparisons begin concretely— a note from a French horn, a green, flowering plant—but then become as abstract as the subjects—a star, a sound wave touching a beached shell, the memory of music. For such illusive concepts, Welty draws not on her personal sense of the South, but on intimations of the cosmos.

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18 Welty and her character Delia in “A Sketching Trip” begin in sensing particulars; the sensory experiences lead Welty and her protagonist to discoveries about art, innocence, and joy. In the 1930s, Welty took a photograph of an abandoned home [Fig. 1] of some distant relations of Robinson (Marrs, 2002, 81). Called upon to describe the photograph in 1944, Welty drew upon her long-term memory in recollecting a smell on the occasion of seeing the house. She writes, “It was an evening in November or December, with a wind smelling of night-rain filling the air with blowing leaves and the clouds coming over the sky. [The house] seemed haunted and beautiful at the same time—indeed much had happened in it” (Welty, 2009, 72). Welty had sent the photograph to Vogue in March and followed-up with the descriptive text, including the above recollection, in late May (Polk, 1994, 378). The timing is significant because the photograph is a catalyst for her story “A Sketching Trip” written in spring 1944 and sent out for publication two weeks prior to the photograph’s description for Vogue (Polk, 1994, 371). The haunted and beautiful house, described in nearly identical terms in the fictional and nonfictional texts, is the site of the story within the story, a remembered childhood tale as told by Miss Mews and now retold by the protagonist Delia as she recalls it when her memory is sensorially triggered.

19 The story begins in the past before we know we are reading a memory: “Violence! Violence!”—a dramatic auditory substitution of “Violets! Violets!,” flowers being hawked from the roadside by children (Welty, 2009, 263). Delia soon contextualizes and controls the memory. Welty’s story is of an artist, and Delia notes that the day of the sketching trip is “a day you could touch. It was texture she had always wanted.” She wonders if she can now, as an adult, capture the “texture she had felt as a child at Fergusson’s Wells—then she had first put out her hand and touched what was around her—an outer world. At the time she knew it—that was the remarkable thing. She knew this was discovery; she had reached with her full reach, put out adoring hands and touched the world” (Welty, 2009, 264). Delia’s task for the present day is to recover the past sufficiently to allow her to transform herself back into the wondering, accepting child who sees, smells, touches all and thereby knows the outer world and, holding onto that psychic reality, transfer it back into the present in her painting. She asks herself, “[W]ere you ever able [to show this joy]?—a joy that had no premonition or thinking back, that had neither pity nor calculation or other thought of herself—only touching of the outward pulse, the awareness of a tender surface underneath which flowed and trembled and pressed life itself” (Welty, 2009, 264). As in her letters to Robinson, the syntax is broken with dashes as Welty tries to have her protagonist express an abstract feeling.

20 A painting of the house, in its romantic, “pristine, untouched state” (Welty, 2009, 273) catches Delia’s attention: [I]t was indeed the haunted house she knew and remembered now. … She turned her back on the painting and stood lost, thinking of the haunted house as it was the day she saw it—sun-drenched, light-drenched […] Looking at her memory like a picture of her own, she saw a halfway ruin of a very plain, beautiful, surely rather small Georgian house, the red of a rose. … The roof over the loggias, fallen to the ground, lay leaning against the house, softened, like a coverlet, wrinkling over the hidden steps, and sea-blue. … But it had a story. Miss Mews would tell it. … And what would her story, telling what people did, have come to without the weight of that rose-red brick in the hand, its reach of color into the eyes—the sudden sight, licking like fire at the feet. (Welty, 2009, 274, 276)

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21 Delia looks “at her memory like a picture of her own” and sees the roof “softened, like a coverlet, wrinkling over the hidden steps, and sea-blue.” And “The bricks, baked of the red clay of the place were of a glowing rose,” Welty wrote for Vogue readers as she had in her story, “that seemed to hold light on that first dark day we saw it […] I took some of the fiery bricks home and put them in my garden around a bed of spring bulbs” (Welty, 2009, 72). Welty’s visit to the house, the photograph of that house, and the remembered story recalled from Delia’s memory, are imagined into “A Sketching Trip”—all held in the sensory imprint of the smell of night rain and the look of the air and the rose-red bricks. Welty’s story is created in just the manner of which she wrote to Robinson: “If I feel something and try to say it truly then the easiest way to do it is writing a story” (n.d. [spring 1944]).

22 “A Sketching Trip” is the tale of the haunting of the rose-brick house by the murdered wife and the doubly fatal duel of her lover and husband the story of which the child Delia hears retold on the afternoon of the evening when Mr. Fergusson shoots his wife’s lover Mr. Torrance in the parlor before all the ladies and children, ending for all time the summer respites at Fergusson’s Wells. Without the back and forth of memory and present time, without the figurative language rich with sensory images, “A Sketching Trip” deconstructs into the board game Cluedo/Clue: Mr. Fergusson with a rabbit gun in the parlor. In the story, the porch of the guest house on which people had previously “rocked gayly and competitively as chopping sailboats,” becomes a porch full of rockers […] as all the boxes in the stable stayed full of hens—seemingly busy with bright eyes though they were very still. … [When Mr. Torrance] went by the porch, clearing his throat, the world changed. The way a night breeze in the moonlight suddenly shatters the intricate pattern of quiet within the leafy porch and someone will rise and another will say, “Well—good night!” and no more stories will be told that night before any child stretched listening on the steps—that was how Mr. Torrance revolted their world. (Welty, 2009, 265, 272).

23 This is Delia’s and our warning that the intricate balances of the world—the night breeze in the moonlight, the innocence of children, the certitude of adults—are about to change.

24 Welty’s final story, a Civil Rights story, “The Demonstrators” (1966) illustrates both the particular and the abstract rendered through the senses. The southern place that Welty accepts as ubiquitous for the regions’ writers is made familiar to readers especially through the olfactory and visual senses: the smells of the magnolia, jasmine, honeysuckle, verbena blossoms, the smells of the hot, moist swamps and bayous; the sights of the cotton fields, the black workers, the verdant greens, the blue skies. She also accesses the senses to suggest the difficulty in communicating the abstractions that join or separate humans to or from one another, feelings of bewilderment and of hope, the need to be connected to something in a meaningful way. In “The Demonstrators,” Dr. Strickland, a white man, is led to the mill section of town to save the life of a black woman, Ruby (suggesting the red gemstone, later recognized as his family’s maid). It is hot, dim, and crowded around Ruby’s bed. He removes her “necklace like sharp and pearly teeth,” notices that her nipples “cast shadows that looked like figs,” and the “sweat in the airless room, in the bed, rose … like steam from a kettle already boiling” (Welty, 1998b, 735). There is insufficient light, but when a lamp is brought “closer and closer to the girl,” it was “like something that would devour her” (Welty, 1998b, 738). To gain some clarity of the situation, his senses heightened but confused, Dr. Strickland compares the unfamiliar with sensory images from his world—

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white teeth, figs, steam from a kettle, but he cannot “read” Ruby’s body, and he leaves her bleeding internally.

25 Outside the crowded house, Dr. Strickland sees that the world under “moonlight everywhere” has changed, and he experiences a moment of vertigo when what seem like ghosts of the women in his life stir from a clothesline pinned, he somewhat shockingly realizes, with their discarded dresses “stretched wide-sleeved across the porch … like a child’s drawing of angels” (Welty, 1998b, 741). On his way home, he realizes that “Patience [with the world at large, with the town, and with his family] had made him tired. He was so increasingly tired, so sick and even bored with bitterness, intractability that divided everybody and everything” (Welty, 1998b, 744). These are Welty’s frustrations with the South, its Jim Crow laws, and the murders and disappearances during the Civil Rights struggles. But neither Welty nor her characters can sustain the bitterness that Dr. Strickland names: “[S]uddenly, tonight, things had seemed just the way they used to seem” (Welty, 1998b, 744). He thinks of “some old, trusted, half-forgotten family friend that he had lost sight of since youth. Was it the sensation, now returning, that there was still allowed to everybody on earth a self— savage, death-defying, private? The pounding of his heart was like the assault of hope, throwing itself against him without stop, merciless” (Welty, 1998b, 744-5). Like Delia’s joy, Dr. Strickland’s hope is realized through sensory experiences that are recovered in memory. He felt the pounding of his heart and seeking to understand its cause, he conjures the abstraction of hope assaulting him “throwing itself against him without stop, merciless.” The past, the friend from his youth and Delia’s childhood retreat to Fergusson’s Wells, times of innocence, comes to Delia and Dr. Strickland and saves them from their present crises.

26 As Dr. Strickland drives toward home, he passes Miss Marcia Pope’s “dark window” and notes the “thin as matchstick” gallery columns and the “ornamental” decorations that recall “paper fans held up by acrobats” on the bank building where his father’s and now his offices are. He recognizes a “black cave of trees,” a flagpole that “looked feathery, like the track of a jet that is already gone from the sky,” a water tank “pale as a balloon that might be only tethered there” (Welty, 1998b, 745, 746). He sees “a man lying prone and colorless in the arena of moonlight. / The lights of the car fastened on him and his clothes turned golden yellow. The man looked as if he had been sleeping all day in a bed of flowers and rolled in their pollen …” (Welty, 1998b, 746). Under the night moon, Dr. Strickland’s world is destabilized, fragile, but this same moonlight has made a black man colorless, obliterating the signifying blackness that would condemn the man, Dove, of every trouble that has occurred. Although Dove is a black man, his name suggests the white bird of peace, and Welty’s prose makes him first colorless and then yellow. Light does not give the air “color” as in earlier examples, but robs the black man of signification, perhaps of significance. “Fastened” by the severe headlights that recall a police car’s arresting beams, Dove, no longer black, seems content, a man slumbering in a garden. But no man or woman sleeps among the flowers purposefully. The light has magically turned his overalls golden-yellow, and when Welty breaks the moonlight and the headlight spells, Dr. Strickland makes rational sense of his sensory response (as with the dresses on the clothesline): it is Dove—Ruby’s lover? assailant?— that is “covered his length in cottonseed meal” (Welty, 1998b, 746). Neither Dr. Strickland nor the cottonseed cover can save Dove, however, for “[b]lood laced his head like a net through which he had broken” (Welty, 1998b, 746). In Welty’s story, no street or lunch counter demonstrations take place. Instead, through figurative language plied

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with sensory images, Welty gives a sense of the bitterness, the hope, the secrets, the conflicts that shed blood, realizing both the particulars of the Southern problems and the universal solutions once it can be admitted that one demonstrates even, or especially, by standing by, pretending to be benign.

27 Welty intuits that to “understand the world,” whether it is the world of the South, love, art, or war, whether particular to one place or time or universal and of any or all time, one must “first detect it through the radar net of our senses” (Ackerman, 1990, xv). She states that it must be the job of the writer to present, “steadily visible from its outside, […] a continuous, shapely, pleasing and furnished surface to the eye. … Indeed, great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel” (Welty, 1998b, 784, 810).

First printed in Vogue, 1 Aug. 1944, 103. In Welty, Photographs, “117. Home abandoned, old Natchez Trace / near Clinton / 1930s". Printed with permission of Eudora Welty, LLC, and the University Press of Mississippi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKERMAN, Diane, A Natural History of the Senses, New York, Random House, 1990.

BHABHA, Homi, “Translator Translated,” Interview by W. J. T. Mitchell, http:// prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/interview.html (last accessed on Sept. 8th, 2006.)

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EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, “The Poet,” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ed. Stephen E. Wicher, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1957, 222-41.

MARRS, Suzanne, One Writer’s Imagination, Louisiana UP, 2002.

MITCHELL, W. J. T., “Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science,” Visual Literacy, Ed. James Elkins. New York, Routledge, 2008, 14-29.

---, “Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy,” Visual Literacy, Ed. James Elkins, New York, Routledge, 2008,11-14.

POLK, Noel, Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work, Jackson, UP Mississippi, 1994.

PROUST, Marcel, Swann’s Way, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, New York, Random House, 1934.

WELTY, Eudora, Letters to John Robinson, 1 Sept. 1943, 3 Mar. 1944, n.d. [spring 1944], n.d. [July 1944], 19 Mar. 1945, Eudora Welty Collection. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Archives and Records Services, Jackson, MS.

---, Letter to Stuart Wright, 12 May 1980, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Archives and Records Services, Jackson, MS.

---, One Writer’s Beginnings, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1984.

---, Photographs, Jackson, UP Mississippi, 1989.

---, “A Visit with Eudora Welty,” Interview by Barbara Lazear Ascher, More Conversations with Eudora Welty, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, ed., Jackson, UP Mississippi, 1996, 79-86.

---, “Seeing Real Things,” Interview by Jan Nordby Gretlund, More Conversations with Eudora Welty, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, ed., Jackson, UP Mississippi, 1996, 248-61.

---, Complete Novels, New York, Library of America, 1998.

---, Stories, Essays, & Memoir, New York, Library of America, 1998.

---, Occasions: Selected Writings, Pearl Amelia McHaney, ed., Jackson, UP Mississippi, 2009.

WELTY, Eudora, et al, “The Artist and the Critic,” Conversations with Eudora Welty, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, ed., Jackson, UP Mississippi, 1984, 6-17.

NOTES

1 A comparison of stylistics in Proust’s Swann’s Way with Welty’s Delta Wedding (1998a, 90-336) convincingly illustrates Welty’s appreciation of Proust and suggests that Proust’s prose is at least one of the many influences on Welty’s particular use of compounding figures of speech. 2 Chestina Welty, the author’s mother, was a founder of the first garden club in Jackson, Mississippi, and proudly created a continuous-blooming garden that Welty helped to maintain. I am indebted to Julia Eichelberger for her readings of the Welty-Robinson letters, her presentations at the Welty Centennial conference in Jackson, MS, April 2009 and at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA, May 2009, and for her generous sharing of her transcriptions of several letters. Letters to Stuart Wright and John Robinson are cited with permission of Eudora Welty, LLC and the Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

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ABSTRACTS

Eudora Welty writes poetic prose that is painted with colors—red, rose, blue, green, silver, black, white, pearly gray, golden-yellow, rich in figurative language, and resplendent in sensory images and synaesthesia. Welty’s art illustrates an extraordinary sensitivity for discovering the South, in particular, but also the world at large. Examining how Welty’s observations lead to her senses of smell, touch, and sound in the stories “June Recital” and “Moon Lake,” selected letters and her comments on one of her photographs, and lastly, the stories “A Sketching Trip” and “The Demonstrators,” I argue that Welty pictures the invisible and writes the unsayable by her use of the senses with two results. First, she creates a sense of the South that is simultaneously particular and universal. To illustrate this, I analyze passages especially replete in visual and olfactory senses. Second, Welty’s sensory language gives meaning to the abstract, universal concepts such as joy, love, art, and fear.

La prose poétique de Eudora Welty est peinte en couleurs—rouge, rose, bleu, vert, argent, noir, blanc, gris-perle, jaune doré ; riche en langue figurative, et resplendissante d’images sensorielles caractérisées par leur synesthésie. L'art de Welty démontre la sensibilité extraordinaire de l’auteur, sensibilité mise au service de la découverte du monde en général, et du Sud en particulier. A partir de l’étude des observations de Welty et de la manière dont celles-ci sont dominées par les sens de l'odorat, du toucher, et de l’ouïe dans les nouvelles “June Recital” et “Moon Lake,” dans une sélection de ses lettres et ses commentaires sur une de ses photographie et dans les histoires “A Sketching Trip” et “The Demonstrators”, je démontrerai que Welty dépeint l'invisible et écrit l’imprononçable à travers son emploi des sens, amenant à deux résultats. Tout d'abord, elle créée un paysage sensoriel du Sud qui est à la fois particulier et universel. De manière à illustrer ce phénomène, j’analyse dans mon travail des passages où les références à la vue et à l'odorat sont particulièrement abondantes. Ensuite, le langage sensoriel de Welty lui permet de donner du sens à des concepts universels et abstraits, tels que la joie, l’amour, l’art et la peur.

INDEX

Keywords: Diane Ackerman, Eudora Welty, Marcel Proust, sensory studies, sight, smell, sound, the South, touch, W.J.T. Mitchell, “June Recital, ” photography, ” “A Sketching Trip, ” “Moon Lake, ” “The Demonstrators Mots-clés: Diane Ackerman, études sensorielles, Eudora Welty, le sud, Marcel Proust, odorat, ouïe, photographie, toucher, vue, W.J.T. Mitchell, “A Sketching Trip”, “June Recital”, “Moon Lake”, “The Demonstrators”

AUTHOR

PEARL MCHANEY Associate Professor of EnglishGeorgia State University

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Tennessee Williams’s post-pastoral Southern gardens in text and on the movie screen

Taïna Tuhkunen

The human machine is not no different from the animal machine or the fish machine or the bird machine or the reptile machine or the insect machine! It’s just a whole God damn lot more complicated and consequently more trouble to keep together. Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

1 In The Machine in the Garden, cultural historian Leo Marx summons up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 depiction of a sudden, noisy intrusion of a train into the natural scene which disturbed the tranquility of the peaceful spot in the woods where Hawthorne had been meditating: But, hark! There is the whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous peace. (Marx, 1964, 13)

2 Leo Marx identifies this acoustic incident caused by a train from the city as a major conflict within the American culture—the pastoral ideal on the one hand, industrialization and modern technology on the other—a clash, he claims, which has been resonating through American literature since the July day Hawthorne’s reverie was broken up by the startling entry of a machine into the American Arcadia. Viewing the harsh whistle of the locomotive as something far more than a sound effect, Marx moves on to observe the collapse of the rural design in the works of other major American writers. In a more Southern context, the encounter between the agrarian ideal and the machine culture takes place, he argues, when a monstrous Mississippi steamboat suddenly emerges from the night in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and

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smashes into the raft on which Huck and Jim had been peacefully drifting during their search for freedom, breaking the raft apart. After the examination of a few major works by American authors—including Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain and Fitzgerald—Marx concludes that while raising significant contradictions within American culture, “American writers seldom, if ever, have designed satisfactory resolutions for their pastoral fables” (364). In the end, “the American hero is either dead or totally alienated from society, alone and powerless, like the evicted shepherd in Virgil’s eclogue” (364).

3 In my article, I wish to argue that the tension between the “pastoral” and the “progressive” pinpointed by Leo Marx persists in the form of a creative quarrel through several plays by the acclaimed Southern playwright and poet, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) whose centennial was commemorated across the nation in 2011. Williams’s works are not explicitly mentioned in The Machine in the Garden, but they challenge the underlying pastoral conception of the “American garden” without solving the cultural complexities posed by that very myth. While the wood cabin in Emerson’s Walden; or life in the woods and the southward-floating raft in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn offer “the chance of a temporary return to first things” (69) as Marx writes, Williams’s post-Edenic gardens offer no similar settings for temporary returns to rural happiness. Instead, we are left to make sense out of broken decors and fragmented icons imbued with nostalgia, as well as of the jarring sounds echoing through what Matthew Roudané calls Williams’s “poetic stage moments, moments in which social fact, psychological collapse, and eroticized encounter form a still point in which the imagination, itself, becomes the last refuge for his fated characters” (Roudané, 1997, 1).

4 Bearing in mind Roudané’s perception of imagination as the ultimate shelter or sanctuary, I shall focus briefly on five film adaptations based on the works of the Mississippi-born playwright—A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Suddenly Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) and The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)—to see how the garden imagery and the romanticized Old South “plantation paraphernalia” (Bargainnier, 2006, 245)are reworked into more contemporary cinematographic Souths. For, unlike most mainstream heritage films that tend to represent the American South as an uncorrupted space of equilibrium and easy living, the mid-XXth century film scenarios based on Williams’s works distance themselves from the former, idealized cinematographic Souths, digging through the fine facades into the psychic dissonances of a world struggling with its past.

5 Strikingly enough, the Williamsian garden is permeated, right from the start, with loss and degeneration, also in the acoustic sense of the two words. As illustrated by A Streetcar Named Desire, adapted to the cinema by Elia Kazan, sounds make sense in a number of ways in these fictitious XXth century screen Souths, and even if the “machine in the garden” undoubtedly turns into something more mental or metaphorical than purely technological, both in text and on screen, the startling “shriek” motif is still audible. Not necessarily machine-made, as Elia Kazan’s soundtracks suggest, it remains intimately connected with the anxiety and alienation of the machine-age, submerging the more pleasurable sounds and musical effects with hostile echoes.

6 In A Streetcar Named Desire, the lost plantation “Belle Reve” is first presented in the form of a fading snapshot before the Southern lady is, in the blunt words of a car mechanic

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named Stanley Kowalsky (Marlon Brando), “pulled […] down off them columns” (Williams, 1987, 199). The colored city lights of New Orleans—evocative of the new, urban South—are turned on as the vanishing Old South recedes in front of a gaudier, noisier industrial world. To the dismay of Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), dressed in a dainty garden party outfit in a world pierced by cacophonous jungle cries, her brother- in-law acts like an ape and screeches like a cat, whilst her younger sister Stella (Kim Hunter) turns into a carnal woman ready to “hang back with the brutes” (164). Stella- the-Star’s final fall from the pedestal is dramatized during a memorable saxophone- backed staircase sequence as Alex North’s radically new type of dissonant jazz score backs up Kazan’s camera work, spectacularizing Hunter’s slow, sensuous descent into Brando’s rough and sweaty arms. Similarly to the play text, the diegetic space of the movie echoes with street noises and coarse howls, and with the clamor created by the “psychic train” Blanche is the only protagonist to perceive. Like the anachronistic gun shots that do not belong to the diegetic space of the movie, the locomotive “shrieks” connect the raw post-Arcadian times with the past which, to paraphrase William Faulkner’s oft-quoted words, is never totally dead nor perfectly past.

7 The always already tainted and contaminated Southern garden imagined by Williams is saturated with synaesthesia, a “disorder” particularly well-suited for the cinema. Creating effects where sights, sounds and smells intermingle, the playwright provided movie makers with a rich reservoir of stage directions, an endless webwork of intersections between Southern History, stories, symbols, myths and typologies. Although Williams is far from being the only American author exploiting the rich matrix of Southern traditions and legends, its plantation culture and epic grandeur marked by more or less dutiful Belles, chivalrous gentleman callers and coded manners, his impact has been crucial in bringing the larger-than-life epic South into contact with the more unruly, intimate aesthetics of modern times attached to fusion and movement —most noticeably, by revealing the primitivism and luridness beneath the genteel surface, forcing the South to confront some of its untold stories of decadence, madness, incest and human sacrifice. Yet, while the racial Other seldom surfaces in the screen adaptations of Williams’s works otherwise than via fleeting metaphors or figures, his postbellum South is, markedly enough, a place of decadent whiteness where the enactment of psychological crises still often requires a garden-like environment. Whether a dilapidated plantation house (Baby Doll), an old estate bought by the industrious son of a hobo (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), an indoor garden of a bourgeois town house (Suddenly Last Summer), or an exotic natural garden on a hilltop in Mexico (The Night of the Iguana), Williamsian Souths take us beyond the overdetermined spaces of the canonical southern cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, by creating disorder in the iconic landscapes and by letting the hideous wilderness seep in and merge with the Arcadian garden.

The reptile beneath the porch in The Night of the Iguana

8 In the filmic Southlands based on the works of Tennessee Williams, the present-day world is repeatedly set up against the backdrop of a bygone world of noble fathers, untarnished daughters and seemingly perfect gardens: all well-known features of the American South popularized by the cinema. Yet, what Williams prefers us to see is the creature at the end of its rope, pulling away from the prearranged decor.

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9 This is dramatized most visibly in The Night of the Iguana, a 1964 movie by John Huston where the main protagonist is a defrocked church father, Reverend Shannon (Richard Burton) who, after losing his faith and his pulpit, has ended up as a distressed south-of- the-border tour guide to Mexico. Huston dramatizes the battle between the godly and the lowly through his film by alternating perspectives, moving from the nasty-looking reptile to a jungle hilltop or to a stormy sky and back again to the earth-bound protagonists. After the opening credits which provide a prolonged close-up on an iguana, the camera pans down from the top of a church steeple to a notice board stuck to the ground posting the topic of the day’s sermon (“Spirit of truth”), before cutting to the next scene inside the church where Reverend Shannon’s vociferous yet short-lived mass is about to begin.

10 The subsequent sequence, an addition to Williams’s text, constitutes a cinematographic statement of its own as Shannon is seen through a low-angle shot high in his pulpit as a figure of authority. Soon, however, the hymn-singing parishioners grow uneasy and start leaving the temple before the sermon is halfway through. The words lashed out at the churchgoers by the Reverend collide with the pastoral iconography as the good shepherd—the leading figure of the classic, Virgilian mode also evoked in TheMachine in the Garden—turns into an irate preacher who pursues his flock to the church door with his hollering. It is only after this unexpected prologue that Huston embarks his spectators on a bus journey with an all-female mini-congregation during which the clergyman undergoes a second fall from grace, succumbing to the charms of Charlotte Goodball (Sue Lyon), a 17-year-old sex-hungry kitten, another female predator prowling around the priest, and as Lesley Brill notes in John Huston’s filmmaking, “Iguana often looks like an amplification of the Sartrean idea of hell as other people whom one can neither escape nor make authentic contact with.” (Brill, 1997, 96).

11 Later on, Huston focuses on the eponymous lizard tied up to a pole, pitting the mute beast against the profuse vocalizations of female creatures whose voices constantly disturb the equilibrium of the natural setting in this other film on Hustonian “misfits,” a heterogeneous group composed of Maxine Faulk, the owner of a seedy hotel (Ava Gardner), Hannah Jelkes, a sketch artist (Deborah Kerr) and her moribund poet grandfather (Cyril Delevanti), as well as a busload of pathetic, pious women pursuing Reverend Shannon. For most of the film, the wild animal waiting to be slaughtered for meat is chained to the porch of the jungle-top hotel called “Costa Verde” (“green coast”), so unlike Hawthorne’s “happy valley.” And like the tethered animal, the runaway priest keeps tossing and turning in his own straitjacketed existence. Tied to a hammock by Maxine and Hannah, the two women each of whom represents a facet of Shannon’s dual stance towards sexuality and religion, flesh and spirit, the animal mirrors Shannon’s predicament. The women save the reverend from suicide and the iguana is finally released, but whether the Mexican hilltop, presented as the Garden of Gethsemane for the perpetrator as well as the victim of the holy word ultimately turns into a new Eden or a Golgotha remains a thorny issue.

12 Williams’s animal allegories would hardly be as gripping were they not such convoluted fusions of the savage and the sensual, making it difficult to tell gentility apart from barbarity. The excursion to Mexico in The Night of the Iguana is no exception, although unlike other major plays by Williams, it is not set in Louisiana or in Mississippi, but beyond the geographical borders of the American South. Yet, whatever their exact location on the map, Williamsian characters remain entangled in history, both personal

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and biblical, hauling their private hells along wherever they go. And whilst marked by a definite decline of powerful Daddies, self-sacrificing Big Mamas, sons powerless to pursue their fathers’ legacies and younger women submitted to honor codes, the Williamsian South is also a place of punitive gods, straitjackets, lobotomies and other coercive methods used by society to maintain control. After the emblematic lizard is released and vanishes beneath the shrubs of the Mexican jungle, the ultimate catharsis is doubtful. As Peggy W. Prenshaw claims in her article “The Paradoxical Southern World of Tennessee Williams”, even if Williams is committed to the Romantic view according to which the natural equals the good, his writings are often “far too permeated with a sense of sin, to be able to accept such an idea with equanimity.” (Prenshaw, 1980, 8).

Big Daddy and other enchanting Southern beasts

13 Verticality is given further emphasis in other filmic rereadings of Tennessee Williams’s plays. High and low angle shots continue to reveal the Southerners’ obsession with ascension and descent, namely by means of an ornate elevator in Suddenly Last Summer or a staircase in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a complex signifier and a dramatic site of confrontation already in the 1930s’ Southern blockbusters Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938). The magnificent, central staircase of Twelve Oaks is demolished in Selznick’s superproduction, yet its implicit presence keeps haunting cinema screens in a number of later restagings of the American South still marked by fantasies about stairways to heaven.

14 In Framing the South: Hollywood, Television and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle, Allison Graham writes about Hollywood representations of the South after the 1930s and 1940s: By the mid-1950s, white Americans’ love affair with the plantation myth had undergone several revisions, but the infatuation was as strong as ever. Under the spell of Tennessee Williams, Hollywood modernized its antebellum sets and filmgoers were treated to a new spectacle of southern decay. The mansions, juleps, and magnolias remained, but the residents of the screen South now began to enact the psychological crises of a dwindling subculture (Graham, 2001, 20).

15 While the “new spectacle of southern decay” coincided with a move towards novel predicaments, the degenerated cinematic South was still a world of uplifting, upsetting women—Belles who threw away their XIXth century Victorian masks of gentility. At the same time, as R. Barton Palmer has pointed out, Williams helped popularize “a different kind of masculinity, offering images of desirable, vulnerable, and yet aggressive maleness that profoundly affected American ideas about gender” (Palmer, 1997, 231). This is certainly the case in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, another of Williams’s prize-winning plays adapted to the cinema. Richard Brooks’s 1958 film version of the play centers on the baroque pathology of a Southern family gathered around a cancer-stricken “Big Daddy” (Burl Yves) and his alcoholic, broken-ankled son Brick (Paul Newman), before it re-establishes the power of the fathers at the head of the family. It is Brick Pollitt’s wife, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), the unorthodox Southern Belle and the real “cat” of the story who stands out as the most genuine and truthful character of the tale, and even when Maggie lies about her pregnancy, her animal energy fights off the guilty secrets and the “obnoxious odor of mendacity” which have overtaken the Mississippi Delta’s biggest estate, turning it into a mouse-trap of sorts.

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16 In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the plantation culture, well past its peak, has abandoned its patrician ideals and courtly traditions. No longer occupied by the sons of agrarian forefathers, the big white house emulating ancient Greek dwellings was acquired after years of hard work by a rootless former overseer. Pervaded with the air of ostentatious wealth, malaise and betrayal, the new rural South is best emblematized by Big Daddy Pollitt, the cancerous patriarch and his grandchildren, bred by the elder son Gooper (Jack Carson) and Mae, his ex-Cotton Carnival queen and “fertility monster” spouse (Madeleine Sherwood) who is doing her utmost to ensure that her offspring, the “no- neck monsters” will inherit the mighty Mississippi plantation. Noisy carnivalesque scenes punctuate the film giving it a circus-like rhythm as a result of the grandchildren’s ear-splitting performances of Dixie fanfares meant to entertain the dying patriarch, while adult voices ring through the mansion and its garden “hollering about the truth” as Maggie remarks about the uncivil war raging between the Williamsian loners. Viewed through Maggie’s eyes, Mae’s performance of family bliss and (hetero/)normativity looks more like a Mardi Gras parade, and there is little doubt that it is “Maggie the Cat”—one of the most memorable good bad women and enchanting beasts of the American South—who is the persona through whose voice Williams best derides the voracity and the smug provincialism of the new generation of Southerners installed in the old plantation decor.

17 On the whole, there is something quite Citizen Kanish about Brooks’s way to film Williams’s rags-to-riches story where farming and gardening have ceased to represent the ideal human activity in the Jeffersonian sense of the expression. The farm is now big business in the hands of new Southern daddies, and although the “machine in the garden” is not pictured in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof otherwise than by means of airplanes, convertible cars and bulky station wagons used by the new plantation owners, we understand that the previously rustic South has succumbed to industrialized thinking and become a “factory in the field” prone to mass production. Like the megalomaniac newspaper publisher in his pharaonic Xanadu palace in Orson Wells’s 1941 Citizen Kane, the “Mississippi emperor” hangs on to his godlike kingdom and his own “rosebud” —an empty suitcase that belonged to his traveling worker father who died by the railroad with a smile on his face. It takes, however, the discovery of father Pollitt’s inoperable disease to expose the absurdity of his strive for immortality. The costly statues, mirrors, paintings and other art objects hauled from Europe, piled-up in meaningless heaps in the cellar, offer the perfect setting for the therapeutic confrontation between the dying patriarch and his son, Brick, who finally have the guts to sort their ways through the father’s accumulated possessions and the son’s self-loathing, down to the difficult four-letter word “love.” And, as if to encapsulate the complex moral and sexual dilemmas of the play, Brooks resorts to another Williamsian animal metaphor to put an end to the father-son verbal duel, creating a cathartic instant where the distinction between man and beast is nearly obliterated: “The human animal is a beast that eventually has to die of a crazy hope that one of the things he buys will be life everlasting which it never can be.”

18 Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof closes on a curiously Hollywoodian, un-Williamsian happy ending. Taylor’s Maggie sheds off her cattiness when dashing, angel-like, in her white dress up the grand staircase answering her husband’s call to join him in the upstairs bedroom—to conceive, it is understood, the awaited heir to the estate. Not only does the film restore Brick’s masculinity, purging the plantation bedchamber of previous

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allusions to same-sex desire, but Maggie-Mary’s announcement of her pregnancy reads as a sign of regeneration of the entire Southern family: “A child is coming, sired by Brick out of Maggie the Cat.” Finally, contrary to the two alternate endings Williams wrote for the play, all three Pollitt men in the film agree that Maggie—unlike the child- rearing yet oddly lifeless Mae, collapsed at the foot of the stairs—has “life in her body”. As Brick puts it: “[T]ruth is something desperate and Maggie’s got it. Believe me, it is desperate and she’s got it!”

The jungle-garden in Suddenly Last Summer

19 The quest for “desperate truths” surfaces again in Suddenly Last Summer, a more vicious and a more fantastic Williamsian fable where the central locus is no longer a jungle, nor a Mississippi mansion, but a man-made spot of wilderness within a posh town house in the Garden district of New Orleans. Because of censorship restrictions, still severe in the late 1950s, both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer avoided the taboo topic beneath both plays: homoeroticism and the adjacent Williamsian figure of the “dead queer.” Despite the Production Code Administration’s surveillance of the film adaptations of his texts, Williams’s powerful animal and botanical allegories, as well as his rich realistic and expressionistic techniques seem, however, to have protected the adaptations against the worst watering down of the subplots.

20 In Suddenly Last Summer, a fine New Orleans residence is presented as an entranceway to what lies behind the respectable façade of the old house: a mysterious hinterland created by Sebastian Venable, a dead poet whose haughty, castrating mother, Mrs. Violet Venable (Katharine Hepburn), is committed to transforming his deceased son into a monument. In a characteristically Williamsian mix, Sebastian’s garden blends sights and sounds, utter sophistication and utmost cruelty, and it is this primordial jungle recalling, in Mrs. Venable’s words, the “dawn of creation”—reminiscent of other multisensory “shrubs with vivid trumpet-shaped flowers” (Williams, 2001, 228) in The Night of the Iguana—that leads to other emblematic places. Namely to the Galapagos Islands where Sebastian forced her mother to observe the ghastly spectacle of rapacious, shrieking birds feeding on newly hatched sea turtles. It is only at the end, under the effect of truth-serum that the post-Darwinian substory beneath the animal allegory is revealed and that we learn from Mrs. Venable’s niece Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) how Violet lured young men to satisfy the sexual appetite of her predatory son, before Sebastian died by cannibalism in the hands of those he had exploited sexually.

21 As in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth Taylor is cast in the role of an impetuous, younger Southern woman as a counterforce to a tormented and fragile Adam in an already corrupt garden. It is through flashbacks that we realize Catherine Holly’s tragic transformation into bait, a role of procurer of young men Sebastian used to confer to his mother—the “wicked lady” exuding a “marvelous perfume” of the same kind as the insectivorous plant, Venus flytrap in Sebastian’s garden—before Violet grew too old for the peculiar assignment. Here the corruptive power of “mendacity” seems to be spreading into the field of medicine, as Mrs. Venable seeks to put an end to her niece’s “obscenities” or “babbling” by means of lobotomy.

22 Unlike the film which begins at a mental asylum—ironically named “Lion’s view” where patients are deprived of their vitality, transformed from “wild animals” into robot-like

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creatures without desires or wills of their own—the play begins as Dr. Cukrowics (Montgomery Clift), a famous neurosurgeon, visits Mrs. Venable who is about to make an important donation to the state mental hospital in exchange for an operation to excise Catherine’s recollections of what had happened suddenly, the previous summer. With its intersecting roots that form a dense webwork of biblical, botanical and medical references, Williams’s “garden play” clearly outgrows the confines of the Christian world governed by a single tree of knowledge. And once again, it is the conflicting, mutually incompatible versions of the “truth” that tear the protagonists apart. When entering Sebastian’s garden for the first time, one cannot but agree with the doctor called in to act as an arbiter who finds the Venable garden “well-groomed and, frankly a little terrifying.” Indeed, what makes this patch of indoor wilderness so disquieting is not only the prehistoric trees and insectivorous plants, but the fact that somebody would be so keen on keeping it so well-tended. As Williams’s stage directions emphasize, this is a grotesque garden, a place where human and animal forms intersect with those of plant life, blurring the limits between flora and fauna, between the human and the inhuman, distorting finally the very word “natural”: The interior is blended with a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin. The colours of this jungle-garden are violent, especially since it is steaming with heat after rain. There are massive tree- flowers that suggest organs of a body, torn out, still glistening with undried blood; there are harsh cries and sibilant hissings and trashing sounds in the garden as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of savage nature… (Williams, 1968, 113)

23 As opposed to the formal, symmetrical gardens of the jardin à la française where every tree and shrub is ruled by an attempt to submit nature to the will of man, what prevails in the jungle-garden in Suddenly Last Summer is the aesthetics of disarray. Mankiewicz’s filmic recreation of Williams’s literary grotesqueries takes into account the playwright’s voicing as well as visual strategies, and not only are the “harsh cries” and “sibilant hissings” replaced by Buxton Orr’s suggestive musical score, but the dead poet’s name is pronounced with such spine-chilling precision by his mother that it seems to freeze the hothouse atmosphere of the film. The presence of the dead poet whose life was spent fighting “against the herbaceous border” is evoked through backdrop elements (statues, vanitas) which the characters on the set seem to take no notice of, but which the spectators cannot fail to see, thus establishing a relationship of complicity between the absent master-mind of the garden and the reader-spectator of the movie.

24 At the end, the Venable garden, an allegorical place for Dionysian rituals, including dismemberment and cannibalism, leaves the spectator pondering over the exact nature of sacrifice in Suddenly Last Summer—a play John M. Clum sees as an expression of Williams’s paganism, as yet “another blasphemous Eucharist” (Clum, 1997, 133). For Clum, Sebastian’s garden and its carnivorous plants is the true expression of Williams’s vision of the fallen world, while its operative principle remains hunger and desire. We might add, that like the European settlers who dreamt of a promised land of easy living in the American South, but discovered a semi-tropical garden of discomfort, Tennessee Williams’s South often turns out to be a trap. Shaped as an ambivalent land of bountiful “meta-flora,” his Southern gardens resonate with violence and desire and bear

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“strange fruit”—to employ the metaphor of Billie Holiday’s famous song whose lyrics challenge the very sweetness and freshness of the “pastoral scene of the gallant South”.

Chases through a Southern dollhouse

25 Before leaving Tennessee Williams’s startling gardens, let us note that not all of them ooze with pernicious sensuality. Some of his ruined Edens become, on the contrary, perfect places for the carnivalesque and the tragicomic. Undeniably the best example of the conversion of the aristocratic Southern garden estate into a place of farce is Baby Doll, another of Williams’s plays adapted to the big screen by Elia Kazan in a movie finger-pointed for its carnal suggestiveness by censorship authorities who gave the film a “C” (“condemned”) rating at its release in 1956.

26 Baby Doll opens on a panoramic view on a sterile landscape surrounding an old house in rural Mississippi. The ante-bellum mansion—a decrepit dwelling, a common metonymy for the crumbling Southern culture—becomes the theater for a series of burlesque scenes as the olden and golden civilization is turned into ridicule. Even the retired black men who dawdle around the “doll house” and whose ancestors slaved for the previously prosperous place roll with laughter at the pathetic spectacle offered by the white master, Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), scuttling around most of the film in a vain effort to keep up appearances. The tone is set by the opening sequence, as the spectator is invited to chuckle with the great-grand-sons of “happy darkies” transformed into “happily laughing darkies.”

27 As Kazan’s camera pans closer, the old house is brought to life by the bellowing master of the place—Archie, a cotton-gin owner, a distorted avatar of a Southern gentleman who later destroys the cotton gin of his archrival, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach) in a frantic effort to keep hold of his estate and of his young, whimsical wife (Carroll Baker). The comic irony of the script rises from the public secret beneath Archie’s marriage. When marrying Baby Doll Meighan, Archie had promised her Daddy that he would wait until the bride’s twentieth birthday for the marriage to be consummated. The film begins when the long-awaited day of deflowering has arrived, and Archie, set up as a ludicrous Peeping Tom, is digging a hole through the wall to peer into Baby Doll’s bed chamber. Later on, the spectator is offered Chaplinesque cat-and-mouse scenes full of sexual allusions as Vacarro, the wolfish Italian, literally a “cowman,” is chasing Archie’s virgin wife up to the rotting attic while Archie, the baby-crazed “good old Southern boy” is out trying to avenge the Sicilian. Finally, as the increasingly frantic Archie resorts to guns, he is picked up by the police, and once again the Williamsian plot ends on a question mark as we are left pondering what will become of the characters. Whatever the case, Baby Doll is no longer the thumb-sucking child-woman sleeping in a crib where she was dozing when Archie’s and the spectators’ gaze surprised her.

28 In order to better appreciate the clashing sights and sounds of the South, it may be of interest to know Kazan’s reply when asked about Baby Doll’s ultimate significance: Baby Doll is a black comedy. It has no meaning. It’s chaos; it’s a microcosm of the changing South as I know it and like it. […] Archie Lee is the old, landed aristocracy. The new uneducated drive forward and the fulfillment of self is Baby Doll. And the catalyst between the two is Silva, the hot-shot industrialist whom Tennessee Williams caught in the form of a little cocky sparrow. It’s the story of the South at that time played by small little insects (Young, 1999, 224).

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29 One could indeed claim that rather than forming a string of tableaux vivants, the cinematographic Souths shaped by filmmakers stimulated by Williams’s texts often read as a series of tableaux grouillants, literally “swarming” with poetic detail and allegorical animal activity. Whether a busload of babbling women led by an edgy clergyman (The Night of the Iguana), a group of teeth-gnashing relatives behind the walls of a Southern mansion (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), insectivorous plants amidst the foliage of a well-tended New Orleans garden (Suddenly Last Summer), or men and women shrieking through a ramshackle house somewhere down in Mississippi (Baby Doll), the cinematographic Souths inspired by Tennessee Williams’s plays teem with life—despite the concurrent signs of loss, fall and decay.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

CLUM, John M., “The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth”, in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Matthew C. Roudané, ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

BARGAINNIER, Earl F., “Moonlight-and-Magnolias Myth”, in Myth, Manners, & Memory, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 4, Charles Reagan Wilson, ed., Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

BRILL, Lesley, John Huston’s filmmaking, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

GRAHAM, Allison, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

MARX, Leo, The Machine in the Garden, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000 (1964).

PALMER, R. Barton, “Hollywood in crisis”, in The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Matthew C. Roudané, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1997.

PRENSHAW, Peggy W., “The Paradoxical Southern World of Tennessee Williams” in Tennessee Williams: 13 Essays, Jac Tharpe, ed., Jackson, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 1980.

ROUDANE, Matthew C., dir., The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

WILLIAMS, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays¸ London, Penguin Books, 1987 (1947).

WILLIAMS, Tennessee, “Suddenly Last Summer” (1958) in Baby Doll and Other Plays, London, Penguin Books, 1968.

WILLIAMS, Tennessee, “The Night of the Iguana” (1963) in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2001.

YOUNG, Jeff, Kazan: the Master Director Discusses His Films: Interviews with Elia Kazan, New York, Newmarket Press, 1999.

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RÉSUMÉS

Cette étude se penche sur la représentation du Sud états-unien dans l’adaptation cinématographique de cinq pièces du dramaturge américain originaire du Mississippi, Tennessee Williams: Un tramway nommé désir (Elia Kazan, 1951), La poupée de chair (Elia Kazan, 1956), La chatte sur un toit brûlant (Richard Brooks, 1958), Soudain l’été dernier (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), et La nuit de l’iguane (John Huston, 1964). L’article met en évidence, chez Williams, la représentation irrévérencieuse du paradigmatique jardin sudiste qui, s’il conserve certains de ses attributs classiques et bibliques, ne s’avère pas moins dynamique. En s’appuyant sur la conception du jardin pastoral théorisé par Leo Marx dans The Machine in the Garden (1964), l’auteur s’attarde sur la façon dont le cinéma du milieu du XXe siècle cherchait à recréer le jardin williamsien comme un lieu corrompu et déshumanisé, traversé de cris inquiétants.

This study explores the representation of the American South in the film adaptations of five plays by the Mississippi-born playwright, Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Suddenly Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) and The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964). The article focuses on the disrespectful representations of the paradigmatic Southern garden which remains dynamic while maintaining some of its classic or biblical features. By relying on the conception of the pastoral garden as theorized by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1964), the author pays specific attention to the way mid-XXth century cinema kept recreating Williams’s Southern gardens as a corrupted and dehumanized space pierced through by disquieting shrieks.

INDEX

Keywords : Tennessee Williams, corrupted garden, Southern gardens, animal allegories, Southern Belles, cinema of the South, sights and sounds.

AUTEUR

TAÏNA TUHKUNEN Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

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“Magic Portraits Drawn by the Sun”: New Orleans, Yellow Fever, and the sense(s) of death in Josh Russell’s Yellow Jack

Owen Robinson

Introduction

1 Through the best and worst of times, New Orleans is a particularly sensory city. Its cuisine is as renowned as its music, its architectural beauty as intense as the heat and rain that beat down upon it. The horrors unleashed by Hurricane Katrina and her political partners-in-crime in 2005 and since have reminded the world of the city’s fragility, as well as the particular circumstances of its geography and climate. Accompanying the terrible images of bloated corpses and thousands trapped in an apparently abandoned city were numerous descriptions of the awful sounds and smells of the disaster, the stench of death and neglect exacerbated by the intense heat and stagnating, polluted floodwaters. But this is far from the first New Orleanian disaster to manifest itself through the senses in this way. The series of yellow fever epidemics that devastated New Orleans through the nineteenth century were also the result, in part, of the city’s geographical position, its unforgiving climate, and the policies of interested parties; the fever’s awful death toll was likewise accompanied by a grotesque array of sights, sounds and smells. These horrors are chronicled and dramatised in many forms and in ways that display both various impressions of the significance of yellow fever itself, and of how it figures the city of New Orleans as a site in both the United States and in the wider Americas. There are too many examples to discuss in detail here, and rather than present a survey, as such, I am going to take as my main focus Josh Russell’s 1999 novel Yellow Jack, after looking briefly at the narrative presence or absence of the disease in some contemporary accounts. My focus, therefore, will be on yellow fever, rather than Katrina, but I would like to allow some space for consideration of how the

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two forms of disaster inform each other and inform the city, its population, and the wider region(s).

2 Josh Russell, professor of creative writing at Georgia State University in Atlanta, is the author of two historical novels and several short stories set in New Orleans. His most recent book, My Bright Midnight (2010), charts the experiences of a German émigré to the city in the 1930s and ’40s, which become ever more complex and troubled as the United States gets increasingly involved in the Second World War. My focus here, however, is on the story of another New Orleanian who has fled from Europe around a century earlier, in Russell’s first novel, Yellow Jack (1999). This fine, under-acknowledged book at once offers a harrowing portrait of the yellow fever epidemics of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and a study of the representations of the city and its peculiarly sensory disaster. The fictional protagonist, Claude Marchand, is a Paris wastrel taken under the wing of the early pioneer of photography, Louis Daguerre, the non-fictional self- professed inventor of the daguerrotype. Following a violent dispute over professional secrets being divulged to a prostitute and others of ill repute, Marchand steals his master’s prototype camera and flees to New Orleans, where after an initial spell of squatting and street banditry he sets up business as a maker of portraits, and becomes entrenched in a web of erotic intrigue, drug addiction, and the city’s sense of itself in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. The novel gives a steamy, torrid account of his overlapping relationships with Millicent, a mixed-race prostitute whom he meets at a creole ball and sets up home with, and Vivian Marmu, the daughter of one of his most prominent patrons, who is disturbingly (even to Marchand) young when they begin their relationship, and who eventually becomes his wife. Inextricably bound up with his complex personal life is his career as a photographer of the city and its inhabitants. At times both courted and scorned, Marchand’s story brings us into contact with figures at every level of New Orleans society, from robbers and street urchins, to doctors and businessmen, to the mayor, before his own death several years after his arrival in the city, as foretold in the book’s opening pages (we might say, indeed, that a “sense of death” pervades the novel from the outset, as we are always conscious of Marchand’s demise). We are given a detailed, finely wrought depiction of the conditions of life in New Orleans in the decades after the Louisiana Purchase, and of the class, gender and racial codes that govern its people. Perhaps most vividly of all, Yellow Jack evokes the horror of the titular disease and the catastrophic toll it takes on New Orleans. Marchand’s camera captures the haunting images of his own doomed life, and the fever-ravaged city living and dying around him. As Marchand makes “soliotype” memorial images of the dead, his perceptions and experiences are ever more influenced by the noxious chemicals he uses for his trade, and the opium that he smokes. Meanwhile the city is overwhelmed by the smoke from tar burnt in futile attempts to keep “Mister Jack” at bay, and the smells of death become ever more unbearable. As well as providing an intense fictional encounter with a formative period in New Orleans’s history, Yellow Jack is a sophisticated study of the role of visual imagery in documenting such horrors, whose prose is steeped in the smells and sounds of the time and place. This article, then, will discuss this novel’s intense engagement with the various “senses” of a very particular Southern place.

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Talking and not talking about the “fever topic”

3 Alongside cholera, smallpox, and other deadly diseases, yellow fever ravaged New Orleans throughout the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, much as it laid waste to countless sites throughout the Americas and further afield. The city’s position in almost impossibly swampy terrain between the Mississippi in its final convoluted stages, and Lake Pontchartrain, in the wider context of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, rendered it extremely humid during the summer months, and essentially water-bound, notwithstanding its ostensibly inland site. Furthermore, its growing importance as a trading centre in the region, crucial to economic interests to both its north and its south, made it a major urban centre, as well as a place with significant transient, temporary population groups connected to the vessels that joined New Orleans to the wider world in ever-shifting terms. This combination of environmental, geographical, demographic and economic circumstances made it particularly vulnerable to the ravages of so-called “Yellow Jack,” and ultimately the disease took the lives of over 40,000 New Orleanians, and 100,000 Louisianians overall (Campanella, 2008, 26). The epidemics varied in frequency and ferocity, but major outbreaks blighted the city with terrifying force at numerous points throughout the nineteenth century. A single summer, that of 1853, saw almost ten per cent of New Orleans’ population—that is, some ten thousand people—killed (Kelman, 87-9). As well as the sheer scale of the death tolls, and the agony of those who suffered, the symptoms were an horrific assault on the senses of those dying and those trying to live on in the sick city. Jaundice gave the disease its disarmingly colourful name, while what Ari Kelman has called “yellow fever’s signature symptom” was black vomit caused by gastrointestinal hemorrhaging (Kelman, 2006, 90-1). Those spared by “Mister Jack” then had to live in a city ill- equipped, and at times insufficiently motivated, to deal with its consequences: woefully inadequate hospitals and morgues, overwhelmed graveyards and cemeteries, and the constant stench of death and disease. Appalling sanitary conditions, extreme heat, and stagnant water all contributed to the sensory horrors, and directly rendered the city more vulnerable to the disease itself by providing an ideal breeding ground for the mosquitoes which were only proved to be its carriers at the turn of the century (Campanella, 2008, 234).

4 Meanwhile, the city’s leaders and advocates would frequently attempt to play down or even deny the presence of the disease, for fear of damaging trade, and the narrative presence—or absence—of yellow fever is a fascinating and grim tale in itself (Kelman, 2006, 94-99). During that particularly terrible summer of 1853, for instance, Bennet Dowler, in his “Geographical, Commercial, Geological, and Sanitary” Tableaux of New Orleans argued strenuously against threatened quarantine regulations that could stifle economic prospects. He expounds colourfully on the reasons why “[t]he climate, geographical position and natural advantages of New Orleans, are guaranties of what she ought to be, and will be” (Dowler, 1853, 3), and like other advocates of the city’s potential greatness, does not hold back with the historical examples it would purportedly supersede should free-market capitalism be allowed to flourish unimpeded: A city, to become permanently great, ought not only to be situated in a genial climate, but it ought to have the sea before it, gemmed with islands like Cuba and other West Indian Islands, and a thousand armed river behind it, reaching through a vast extent of latitude and longitude. It ought also to be situated in an alluvial

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plain, exuberant with food and the raw materials for raiment. Babylon flourished on the alluvial plain of the Euphrates; Nivenah on the Tigris; Thebes, Memphis, and twenty-thousand cities and towns, on the Nile—rivers and plains incomparably inferior to the river and valley on which New Orleans stands…(6)

5 Dowler is as strenuous in his denial of the dangers of the city’s position and conditions as he is in his promotion of their commercial advantages, suggesting that “[t]here is not, probably, any considerable city in North or in South America, including the West Indies, whose sanitary history is so favorable as that of New Orleans, until near the close of the last century,” before proclaiming from on high that “this author asserts that from the end of October to the beginning of June, there is in both town and country but little sickness, and that death but rarely occurs” (23). Even as it conveniently avoids those summer months in which sickness and death demonstrably occurred on a huge scale, this is a strikingly cavalier statement to be made in this of all years.

6 As Ari Kelman discusses, such fears on the part of New Orleans political, commercial and journalistic elites were not without foundation on their own terms, as trade inevitably suffered greatly during epidemics: business stayed away, and thousands of the city’s workers perished (Kelman, 2006, 94). Visiting writers, or those less immediately concerned with finances, unsurprisingly often took a somewhat different view on the ethics of the narrative of yellow fever, however. An important figure from the early-nineteenth century, the architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe, gives a forceful account of the dialogue between official and commercial narratives on the one hand, and word on the street on the other, following the arrival in July 1819 of a stricken ship from “the Havanna” and the deaths of two of its sailors in New Orleans itself: From that time rumors of yellow fever cases became daily more frequent, & by the beginning of August it was a matter of notoriety that the disease did exist. Every notice, however, of the calamity was carefully kept out of the newspapers. I asked one of the editors from what motive this omission arose; his answer was, that the principal profit of a newspaper arising from advertisements, the merchants, their principal customers, had absolutely forbid the least notice of fever, under a threat that their custom should otherwise be withdrawn; thus sacrificing to commercial policy the lives of all those who, believing from the silence of the public papers that no danger existed, might come to the city (Latrobe, 1951, 146).

7 Having pertinently noted the relationship between commercial self-interest, public silence, and the fact that in this case rumour was more accurate than the official line, Latrobe himself fell victim to yellow fever and died the following year. It is also worth noting that, effectively and fatally silent though the New Orleans press may have tended to be during outbreaks, “newspapers in rival Northern ports, particularly New York, document[ed] New Orleans’ yellow fever miseries enthusiastically” (Campanella, 2008, 35). Alert to the dangers, Latrobe himself cannot count as one of the “sacrificed” that he describes, but nonetheless his account of this situation and his exchange with the newspaper editor is chilling, and indicative of what was to come periodically on an even greater level as the century wore on, both in terms of the disease itself, and of the ways in which New Orleanians talked, or didn’t talk, about it—narrative relations that Josh Russell dramatises in Yellow Jack.

8 Of particular interest for my purposes in this article is the point that these travelling commentators would frequently discuss yellow fever in the city in terms that appeal to, or perhaps appal, the senses. Thomas K. Wharton, an Englishman long resident in the

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United States when he came to New Orleans in the 1850s, offers impassioned accounts in his journal of the progress of the disease as he encounters and hears of it in the city, as well as reporting disturbing new rumours of its resurgence in key trading sites such as Havana, noting that the fever “has raged so long in Cuba that with our total disregard of Quarantine regulations it would be next to a miracle if we escaped it” (Wharton, 1999, 41). Wharton often laces his descriptions with vividly sensory evocations: his entry for September 27, 1854, for instance, reads “Every thing damp, clammy and blighted with mold & mildew. No wonder the epidemic conditions so bad” (47). He bemoans the lack of wind: there is, he says [n]o motion to carry off the gases of a populous, damp and almost tropical city. Still the general health has been good, and the West India plague, yellow fever, or whatever it may be named has been kept out—by Quarantine. This, rigidly enforced, would save New Orleans a world of sorrow, yet there are hundreds so infatuated as still to deny its efficiency (145, underlining in original).

9 These points, along with broadsides against the irresponsible denials of figures like Dowler, and the recklessness of the “strangers who persist in rushing to the city in quest of situations, which is simply suicide” (179, underlining in original), cumulatively amount to a powerful rebuttal of the more “official” line, not least through providing ample narrative of the physicality of the devastation as clearly evidenced in the city’s streets and houses.

10 The visiting “Manhattaner,” A. Oakey Hall, writing in 1851, noted that New Orleanians of all stripes regarded the fever with varying degrees of attention according to the time of year, or stage in the economic cycle: Throughout the winter in New Orleans the “fever topic” rather drags in conversational circles. To the “old inhabitants” it is an old story; to the unacclimated it is like allusions to that first promissory note due six months hence which figures on the books of a young tradesman. But when cloaks and thick coats disappear, and pedestrians contemptuously kick about the stray lumps of coal occasionally met with; and the suns of latter May crisp the tops of new carriages, discussions upon the fever are agitated (Hall, 1851, 66).

11 The mixture of complacency and economic self-interest during the disease’s fallow periods is described in lively terms by Hall here, and he perhaps disingenuously emphasises that he is writing for a “literary world” which he does not wish to “bore” with medical or sociological details, notwithstanding his having suffered and survived the fever himself (65). This said, his notes from experience on “how one feels under an attack of yellow fever” are vivid: after perhaps disingenuously suggesting that anyone who has had a hangover will have some idea of it, he tells us that A civil war is raging in the stomach, while the temples and the pulse beat a tatoo [sic] for the engagement. The head feels as if filled with molten lead which is burning the eyeballs. The back is like an unhinged door. You seem infatuated with a desire to immortalize yourself by a discovery of perpetual motion, and influenced thereby toss from side to side like a rudderless vessel off the banks of Newfoundland. Daylight becomes a nuisance. The most fascinating of tongues loses its eloquence (69).

12 These accounts and many others provide awful testimony to the public and private lives of “Mister Jack” in New Orleans. Having in effect been given free reign by the self- interested silence or denials of official or commercial narratives, the journals of residents and travellers, as well as the compelling suggestion of rumor and other subversive accounts, work hard to expose his malign presence. These richly Bahktinian

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dialogues of denial and exposure, of the undermining of official silence by popular voice, of the physical and psychological horrors of the disease and its broader effects on the community, and of New Orleans’ place in the wider region, are major concerns of Russell’s Yellow Jack. As the doctor Victor Benton puts it to his friend, the protagonist Marchand, “No city can be free of Yellow Fever while quarantines are bought and sold, animals are left rotting where they die, and people are not stopped from dumping their shit into the streets” (Russell, 1999, 211). Russell adds a particularly intriguing ingredient to the mix, however: photography, and the connotations it has for the relationships between art, truth, life, the senses, and human motivation.

The interpenetration of the senses in Yellow Jack

13 Yellow Jack is a complex novel, somewhat Faulknerian in its weaving of the narratives of a late-twentieth-century art historian, the diary entries of Marchand’s octoroon wife/ lover Millicent, and, most prominently, the detailed but unreliable and in some ways impossible narrative of Claude Marchand himself. These narratives unknowingly inform and contradict each other, at times telling quite different versions of the same events, but they are linked in their dependence on, indeed obsession with, sensory effects. Movement, thought, action are described in rich, sensory terms throughout. For instance, soon after his arrival in the city, Marchand wanders the streets, listening to the cathedral’s bells chiming: Just after they sounded four o’clock I followed my nose down an alley and found a baker stacking fragrant wands of bread into his cart. Swooning from the brown smell I begged him for a batard and he spat at me. I produced the pistol with which I had intended to murder Daguerre. I felt no guilt, the weapon was harmless: I’d fired its only ball at an angel who stuck out her tongue at me [in a vision]. The baker cried out as if shot, then fainted. I took as many loaves as I could carry. Hidden in my tobacco shop, I gorged on bread, the cannons giving cadence to my chewing, and the sun rose dully behind black clouds (Russell, 1999, 20).

14 This is an example of the novel’s intertwining of its characters’ sensory pursuits (here the pursuit of food) with the continual mixing of sensory effects in their description. Emphasis is placed on Marchand’s being led by his sense of smell before “swooning from the brown smell,” but sound and vision become as imperative as the imagined shooting is vocalised by the baker, and the fever-fighting cannons (about which more later) and grim sunrise inform his frenzied eating. Indeed, it seems at times as though every sentence evokes or appeals to the senses, and part of the novel’s narrative opulence, and the decadent, ragged glory of the city it describes, comes from the heady precision of these images and mixture of senses that they appeal to: “Louisiana sunlight,” Marchand tells us, for instance, “is heavy and golden and warm, like Armagnac” (51). Atmosphere and mood are frequently described in terms that gain much from gradual, skilful accumulation. When we are told, around a third of the way through the novel, that “the air smelled of a coming storm,” we can divine by this stage that this refers both to the vigilante suppression of a rumoured slave rebellion in the city, and the similarly threatful weather (77). Personal appearance, sometimes racial, is likewise described with minute sensitivity to colour: a love rival’s eyes are described as “beady and the color of shit” (106); Millicent’s skin has “a hint of purple”; the stark image, in an opium den, of “a woman so dark her edges lacked definition fellat[ing] a man white as chalk, his prick flashing and disappearing as she nodded” (80).

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15 All this, and many other examples, would be rich enough were it simply a means of description. However, the world in which Yellow Jack plays out is itself a confusion of the senses, the layered, sensual language evoking a time and place in which sight merges potently with sound and with smell and with taste and with touch. This both illuminates the portrayal of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans itself—a wildly hedonistic cauldron of sex, drugs, food, death, and early photography in this telling— and infuses the key concerns of the relationship between art and life, the slippage between historical narrative and personal account, and, not least, the sheer horror unleashed by “Mister Jack” on a city already always in a state of transition. Marchand’s arrival in New Orleans is figured as a brutal assault on the senses. Already suffering from having “vomited my weight several times over” on the Atlantic crossing, he describes his approach as even grimmer: “We took in supplies and cargo in Haiti, then crossed the Gulf of Mexico and aimed up the Mississippi. I became ill in a new way— drenching sweats, black vomit, visions even more vivid than those I’d experienced on the open sea” (18-9). At the docks he avoids being embroiled in a tax and tariff dispute involving bananas, and finds himself in a kind of hell: I counted the bells ring ten times. Stinking smoke cocooned the lamps and I wondered if I’d died and gone to the Hell my father promised. When I finally met another man on the street he was masked. For a moment I was sure he was a bandit, but he crossed the narrow avenue to avoid me. I was watching his back fade into the fog when the cannons began to boom, rattling the boards covering the windows of the shop I stood before. The masks and guns and fire made sudden sense—it was July and I had arrived during America’s violent celebration of independence (19).

16 As the firing of cannons, burning of barrels of tar and wearing of masks continues into August, Marchand comes to realise that they are “not props from an independence celebration but futile attempts at fighting the fever that’d rattled in my chest and come forth as coughs of inky syrup” (21-2). Marchand is arriving during a perceived carnival of sorts, a death hilarious whose mixture of terror and inadvertent celebration offers a sinister take on this New Orleanian standard. This is here much inflected by the yellow fever that the black vomit suggests Claude himself has arrived with, which presumably inoculates him against it in the contagious years to come. The hellish confusion of the scene, confused further by Marchand’s mania, is registered in a potent mixture of sensory images, setting up a model for further such episodes to come. Though Claude survives Yellow Jack himself, his accounts of its ravaging of the city are increasingly heightened by his use of opium and his inhalation of the mercury he uses to develop his daguerreotypes (which he calls “soliotypes”). On one such occasion, just after an intense and disturbing sexual encounter with the fifteen-year-old Vivian Marmu, Marchand tells us that The opium took quick effect and pictures began to flash behind my eyelids—Vivian with her bloody stocking clamped between her thighs, Millicent with her face buried in the pillows. I shook my head and heard my eyes rattle in their sockets. Smoke curled from pipes in gauzy question marks and my mind added questions before them (80).

17 Again, sight and sound, and real and imagined horrors, become muddled, as Marchand finds himself in a Saint Louis Cemetery Number 1 so overwhelmed with new inhabitants that the priests toss handfuls of dirt from their pockets onto the coffins, having “no time to bend and fetch.” As he overhears a couple in the dark agonise over the burial of their young son, Marchand tells us that “a rope of smoke hung like a ghost above each flambeau. Black columns flecked with orange embers rose from burning tar

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barrels and brindled the sky. I felt fingers closing around my throat and ran from the graveyard” (81). This confluence of opium smoke and the oppressive thick black smoke from the tar continually burned by the city in the mistaken belief that it would ward off the fever occurs again and again, the garish “orange plumes” of the tar barrels setting off associated reveries of smell and touch. Marchand suggests that the plumes from the barrels are the smoking pipes of giants, as though New Orleans is intoxicating itself into a reckless denial of death even as its inhabitants die in their hundreds and thousands (24, 28).

18 And in some senses, of course, it is. New Orleans’ pleasures are overwhelmingly sensory, and there is a feeling in the early stages of the novel that those braving the city despite the fearsome summer and the fever are playing games that indulge in the immediately satisfying rewards of life: the crowd at a ball in 1838 “were a jolly gang; an epidemic was not enough to make them sad,” and it is here that Claude meets “a naked girl […] supine across the table, covered with meats and fruit” (25). This is Millicent, with whom Marchand will have much food-infused sex during the course of their turbulent, complex relationship, often described in terms that require at least two senses for full effect, boldness of colour matching extremity of taste here, for instance: “I slid a sliver of golden papaya flash across her ribs, followed its trail with my tongue into her sharp armpit” (55). Food and drink are everywhere in this novel, tastes and smells at times defining the journeys or rendezvous of characters: Marchand pursues a gossip columnist on café trails, occasionally ending at a plateful of oysters; people constantly make, buy, or eat cakes; Millicent’s balcony is so invaded by the chocolate and butter smells from a nearby pastry shop that “my cheese began to taste like a sweet” (117). Russell allows images to repeat and build a cumulative effect: the orange plumes and black smoke, and Millicent’s touch of purple, for instance, but also this cornucopia of smells and tastes that suffuses everything. This creates a narrative plenitude and density that does much to provide the claustrophobic, trapped atmosphere of the novel, and gives a sense of great detail even though, in truth, the narrative rattles along at a fair speed. Perhaps the most explicit linking of illicit sex and rich food smells involves coffee. At one stage, Marchand rents a room above a coffee importer’s warehouse for he and Vivian to use, in “the district fronting the docks” already heady with the sights, sounds and smells of a place full of cotton, sugar cane and bananas being unloaded, and the comings and goings of “whores and drunken sailors”: The smell of roasting coffee beans was overwhelming. It saturated the bed linen, the bread we brought to eat, the wine we drank, our clothes […]. Once I brought a book home from the room. Sitting with Millicent the next day I opened it and the smell of coffee rose from its pages. I pulled Millicent from her chair and onto the floor. “What on earth were you reading?” she said as we lay panting among knotted shirts and torn skirts (98-9).

19 It could almost be the book we are reading, so suffused is it with these same smells, not to mention the sexuality that so closely accompanies it. Marchand does not tell us if his sudden ardour is inspired by uncontrollable urges triggered by the smell of coffee, or a more prosaic need to avoid interrogation on the unexpectedly pungent pages; either way, sex, scent, and food are evidently inextricable.

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Sight, the “soliotype,” and the art of death

20 Above all else, however, sight, the visual, and visual art is at the centre of this novel’s sensory overload. Claude Marchand is, after all, a self-styled pioneer of “the marvel” his original master Louis Daguerre “named […] like an explorer would an island— daguerreotype,” but which Claude insists on calling “soliotype” (17). Having fallen out with Daguerre, the assistant Marchand, who in his telling is fundamental in the development of the process, vandalises his studio and flees to New Orleans with one of their prototype cameras. He begins exploiting this mysterious art in various ways almost as soon as he arrives, before, indeed, Daguerre has made his famous “announcement” of his discovery in Paris. From the beginning, the soliotype’s status as “art” is discussed by Marchand and his associates, by his customers, by the newspapers, and by the latter day art historian whose exhibition commentary serves as fascinating counterpoint to Marchand and Millicent’s narratives. It is Millicent who coins his original advertising slogan “Magic Portraits Drawn by the Sun,” and who dismisses Claude’s objection that it is in fact science that makes this art wonderful with the commercial point that “Telling someone there is no magic is a quick route to poverty” (40). Millicent herself is, at least at first, in thrall to the “magic” of the soliotype. Looking at the nude portrait Marchand has made of her, she muses “It is two mirrors at once […].Tilt it one way and you see the past, tilt it another and you see the present” (26). The miniature-painter Peter is in no doubt as to the potentially dangerous importance of the process, saying “This soliotype of yours provides a perfect representation of Nature […]. There are those who believe such perfection is an insult to God” (27). Peter himself serves as a literal example of the portrait painter transplanted by the photographer, as he is kicked out of the house—and the narrative— by Millicent, in favour of Claude. The unidentified author of the “guide” to a collection of Marchand soliotypes considers him one of the great neglected masters of photography, and this series of commentaries both seeks to reinstate his artistic reputation and to piece together his life from the scant resources available. Indeed, the slippages between what the art historian knows, or, more often, does not know, and what we come to know through our voyeuristic access to Claude’s and Millicent’s narratives is another of the novel’s major concerns: to what extent can the historian, or indeed any constructor of an historical narrative (including the critic, and indeed the novelist, by implication), give us anything like a lived life? From the beginning, Marchand’s “art” is the subject of multiple, clashing voices regarding its status, its motivations, and its effects.

21 At first, Marchand enjoys the success inspired by the sheer novelty of the soliotype, as New Orleanian socialites forsake traditional painting for his “magic sun portraits.” As soon as his now rival Daguerre makes his announcement in Paris, however, the technology, at least, of this early form of photography is available to everyone, and numerous less skilled rivals spring up in New Orleans. In the early days, in the late-1830s, for his “official” work Marchand is more or less content to make people’s portraits, and while he is diligent in his labours, not to mention contemptuous of his sitters’ pretensions, this is for the most part a commercial exercise. Indeed, as he feels that “art is not realistic history” it doesn’t even occur to him to make “views” of the city until his friend, the doctor Victor Benton, asks him to make some in order to “convince [his fiancée] Susanna that New Orleans is as much a city as Boston—there’s a

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challenge worthy of your goal to build a high wall between art and reality” (121-2). The “guide” nonetheless gives great credit to these early works, as it does the two nudes in the forest that are praised by the guide for their formal skill; Marchand, however, has been more concerned with his encounters with the women in question: one he has sex with on the spot, while the other is the ten-year-old Vivian Marmu, with whom he becomes obsessed, to say the least. It would be a mistake to suggest that Marchand is unconcerned with artistic integrity, or a legacy, but his attitude towards his work—and in particular to that work which others, both contemporary and much later, often consider to be his most innovative and important—is frequently at odds with the integrity and legacy he is purported to have. There are two many fine examples of this to go through here, so I shall discuss just a couple, that in particular pose questions about the role of the photographer, or the artist more generally, and the particular limitations and possibilities of the daguerrotype/soliotype process—and particularly as they relate to death and its representation.

22 An image which the guide calls “Spirit Portrait of Charlotte Marmu Standing Behind Her Daughter Vivian, 1845” is lauded as showing “how a master like Marchand could transform one of the daguerreotype’s shortcomings into a wonderful effect” (179). This shortcoming is the singularity of each daguerreotype, and the need for subjects to remain still while the exposure is still elapsing: there is no “negative” from which copies can be made, the unique image being created by the exposure to light of chemicals on the plate which is itself then the final and only product. Because of the time needed for the image to form on the plate, any movement on the part of the subject will produce a blurred image. Marchand is apparently exploiting this rather clumsy facet of the process to produce the ghostly effect described—made all the more spooky as the mourning Mrs Marmu herself died only a few days after the image was produced. As the guide would have it, Marchand brilliantly captures the fragility of life in the sick city, depicting Mrs Marmu moving between worlds. A few pages later, however, Claude himself describes his irritation as when he “was sure she’d made all needed adjustments, […] when I removed the lens cover Charlotte Marmu briskly stepped from the portrait’s frame”, leading to a “botched” picture (186). His irritation at having to take another, “perfect” picture is then trumped by Mrs Marmu forcing her daughter to promise never to marry him, so it is probably safe to say that pushing the boundaries of the visual arts is not foremost in Marchand’s mind as he produces this feted image. The guide is similarly impressed with a series of pictures that Marchand produces to document the chopping down of trees thought to harbour yellow fever, again exploiting the inadequacies of the daguerreotype to show the full descent of thirteen trees at once. Marchand himself, however, is again fatalistic about shots he knows will be “ruined” by the motion of the trees, and takes them only because he is being paid to (225-6). Marchand and Victor Benton argue about the worth of such images: Victor thinks them beautiful, as “The movement doesn’t ruin it. Quite the opposite, I think. The motion you’ve recorded goes on forever in the mind of whoever looks at the trees falling,” but Claude continues to insist that “The soliotype is a success only when a moment is preserved in a motionless frame” (227). Victor, one might posit, is arguably more visionary as regards Marchand’s art than the artist himself—indeed, some of the techniques, indeed even some of the shots themselves, that the guide attributes to Marchand are actually at the instigation, and occasionally even the hand, of Victor Benton.

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23 More than anything else, Marchand’s camera, and indeed the concentration of Marchand himself, are trained upon the awful ravages of the dreaded Yellow Jack, and the rumors, misapprehensions, and catastrophic denials of epidemic by city authorities, business leaders, and the press: “Some claimed hundreds were dying every day, their bodies burned at night by the mayor’s henchmen to hide the epidemic. Others claimed only immigrants, poor and dirty, were susceptible. Twice-a-day bathing became a fad; stevedores and chimney sweeps were sweet with perfumed soap” (72). Susan Sontag, in On Photography, suggests that:

In fact, photography first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes […].The flâneur is not attracted to the city’s official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer “apprehends,” as a detective apprehends a criminal (Sontag, 1977, 55-6).

24 Very much the armed flâneur that Sontag describes, Marchand walks the streets of New Orleans, “French” and “American” quarters alike, taking pictures of yellow placards on the doors of infected houses, men unloading barrels of tar and loading cannons, stonecutters working on gravestones, the bloated carcasses of rats and dogs left rotting in the streets whose stench is almost too much for Marchand to bear (Russell, 1999, 152-3). What he documents, again at least partly at the instigation of Victor Benton, is very much the “unofficial reality” that the city authorities and some quarters of the press want to cover up. “Photographs furnish evidence,” says Sontag. “Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it […]. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture” (Sontag, 1977, 5). Marchand’s images stand in direct contradiction to the lies of the city leaders and their apologists, and indeed Benton mounts an exhibition with the goal of showing the true situation in all its horror. In ways perhaps reminiscent of the images of flooded lots filled with school buses that could have been used to transport people out of harm’s way in 2005, these pictures of Marchand’s implicitly expose the corruption, self interest and/or incompetence that is surely at least as responsible for the terrible death toll, through actively encouraging people to come to and stay in New Orleans, as the atrocious sanitary conditions and ignorance that allow the disease to fester and spread so virulently. And insofar as “all photographs are memento mori […whose taking] is to participate in another’s person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability” (Sontag, 1977, 15), the pictures also serve as grim tribute to the dead and the dying, whether or not this was actually intended by Marchand himself.

25 Meanwhile, “the dead queued up like nightmare devils and waited for their turn at me” (Russell, 1999, 153-4). In his own time, Marchand becomes most known as a maker of “memorial portraits,” pictures of the recently deceased brought along by grieving relatives and posed in lifelike images that may seem in outrageously bad taste to us, but were considered a legitimate means of mourning in this time and place, as the “guide” tells us (71). Sontag notes that “the ethical content of photographs is fragile” (Sontag, 1977, 21), and Marchand himself fluctuates on the moral validity of these pictures (or perhaps his ability to keep taking them), at one stage refusing to take them anymore

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before essentially being forced to start again or go out of business: though Mister Jack may be bad for the city’s commerce generally, he brings boom time for the memorialist. After a time, Marchand is “numbed by the sheer number of dead I helped pose for the camera. [...] New Orleanians were just as numb as I. They looked at portraits of relations living and dead with the same emotion” (Russell, 1999, 73). This never-ending parade of grotesques that Marchand must photograph makes for painful, hard-hitting reading, the musings on artistic responsibility and sensibility, and the complexities of commercial considerations that are intrinsically linked to these whether we like it or not, among the most anguished in the novel.

26 In 1831, the visiting traveller Henry Tudor reckoned that he had arrived at “the head- quarters of Death” as soon as he disembarked in New Orleans (Kelman, 2006, 91). The rank smells, awful sights, terrible sounds and even horribly tangible tastes of mass death, and the heartbreaking effects on those left behind, are what ultimately linger most from reading this rather devastating novel. It does, of course, portray a particular time and place, and yellow fever is thankfully long gone from New Orleans. But the horror of awful death and appalling political and economic betrayal on such a mass scale is, of course, not a preserve of the nineteenth century either. Published in 1999, Yellow Jack obviously does not refer to Katrina, but reading it now, it is hard not to relate some of its scenes to those we know or may even have experienced from 2005 and after. Its concerns with the relationships between art and life, life and death, death and art, are universal, perhaps made all the more so because most readers see, hear, smell, feel and taste, and Russell excels in exploiting this in bringing the horror home to us. Lest we feel too glum, though, we also tend to eat, drink, have sex and make merry, and the book’s exuberant portrayal of these crucial facets of New Orleans, then and now, is almost as marked, so there is, in typically New Orleanian fashion, plenty of relief to be found within the squalor.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

BAKHTIN, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist, ed., trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981.

BIBLER, Michael P., “Always the Tragic Jezebel,” Southern Cultures vol. 14, University of North Carolina, 6-27.

CAMPANELLA, Richard, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans, Lafayette, Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana, 2008.

DOWLER, Bennet, M.D., Tableaux of New Orleans, New Orleans, Daily Delta Office, 1853.

HALL, A. Oakey, The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of ‘Crescent City’ Life, New York, J. S. Redfeild, and New Orleans, J. C. Morgan, 1851.

KELMAN, Ari, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006.

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LATROBE, Benjamin Henry Boneval, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary & Sketches, 1818-1820, Samuel Wilson Jr., ed., New York, Columbia University Press, 1951.

MACKAY, Alex, The Western World; or, Travels in the United States in 1846-47: Exhibiting Them in their Latest Development Social, Political, and Industrial; Including a Chapter on California. With a New Map of the United States, Showing their Recent Acquisitions, and a Map of California, vol. 2, London, Richard Bentley, 1849.

NEIHART, Ben, “Russell’s ’Jack’—Powerfully Fragile,” Baltimore Sun, August 15, 1999, http:// articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-08-15/entertainment/9908170404_1_josh-russell-new-orleans- yellow-jack (last accessed on November 18th, 2011).

RUSSELL, Josh, Yellow Jack, New York, Norton, 1999.

SONTAG, Susan, On Photography, London, Allen Lane, 1977.

WHARTON, Thomas K., Queen of the South: New Orleans, 1853-1862, the Journal of Thomas K. Wharton, Samuel Wilson, Jr., Patricia Brady & Lynn D. Adams, eds., New Orleans, Historic New Orleans Collection, 1999.

WINTER, Max, review in Time Out New York, quoted on flyleaf of Russell, 1999.

WOODS, Larry D., review in Nashville Tennessean, quoted on flyleaf of Russell, 1999.

RÉSUMÉS

Dans un certain sens comparables à la tragédie et aux conséquences de l'ouragan Katrina en 2005, les séries d’épidémies de fièvre jaune qui dévastèrent La Nouvelle-Orléans au cours du XIXe siècle furent aussi — du moins partiellement — le résultat de la situation géographique de la ville, de son climat insupportable et de la politique des milieux intéressés; de manière semblable, la rage de cette fièvre ravageuse était accompagnée d’un ensemble grotesque d’images, de bruits et d’odeurs. Dans cet essai, je me limite au roman Yellow Jack de Josh Russell, qui, publié en 1999, trace le portrait complexe de cette ville du milieu du XIXe siècle, de ses épidémies de fièvre et de ses récits contradictoires. Yellow Jack ne procure pas seulement une rencontre intense de fiction avec une importante phase historique de la ville mais aussi une étude sophistiquée sur le rôle de la représentation visuelle pour la documentation de telles horreurs, dont la prose est profondément enracinée dans les odeurs et les bruits du temps et du lieu. Cet article traitera donc du profond engagement du roman avec les différentes “modalités sensuelles” d’un lieu particulier des États du Sud.

In ways comparable to the horrors of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in 2005, the series of yellow fever epidemics that devastated New Orleans through the nineteenth century were also the result, in part, of the city’s geographical position, its unforgiving climate, and the policies of interested parties; the fever’s awful death toll was likewise accompanied by a grotesque array of sights, sounds and smells. This article will focus upon Josh Russell’s 1999 novel Yellow Jack, which provides a complex portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century city, its fever epidemics, and its conflicting narratives. As well as providing an intense fictional encounter with a formative period in New Orleans’s history, Yellow Jack is a sophisticated study of the role of visual imagery in documenting such horrors, whose prose is steeped in the smells and sounds of the time and place. This article, then, will discuss this novel’s intense engagement with the various “senses” of a very particular Southern place.

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INDEX

Keywords : Josh Russell, Yellow Jack, New Orleans, yellow fever, photography, senses Mots-clés : Josh Russell, Yellow Jack, La Nouvelle-Orléans, fièvre jaune, photographie, les sens

AUTEUR

OWEN ROBINSON University of Essex

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Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris

Suzanne W. Jones

1 In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic bell hooks argues that “no one seems to know how to tell the story” of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: “that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.” Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if told, would explain how sexuality could serve as “a force subverting and disrupting power relations, unsettling the oppressor/oppressed paradigm” (57-58). By rethinking and reimagining the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, contemporary novelists, filmmakers, and historians have exposed this “suppressed story,” the bare bones of which were first made public in 1802 by journalist James Callendar during Jefferson’s first term as U.S. President and then covered up by professional historians for almost 175 years.

2 As novelist Ralph Ellison pointed out, historical fiction must sometimes serve as the repository for historical truth when the collective historical memory has repressed the facts. In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud’s best-selling novel Sally Hemings allowed readers to enter the mind and heart of the shadowy figure that historian Fawn Brodie had brought back into the public consciousness in 1974, and in so doing enabled readers to believe that Jefferson might have had a long-term relationship with her. Chase- Riboud’s fictional portrait clearly upset Jefferson’s defenders, but the word that CBS might make the novel into a miniseries unnerved them, causing historians Virginius Dabney and Dumas Malone to intervene. Although they claimed that they were worried about historical accuracy, historian Annette Gordon-Reed believes that they were even more worried by the nature of the medium itself: “If a beautiful woman appears on screen as a capable and trustworthy person, […] all talk about impossibility [of a liaison] would be rendered meaningless” (Jefferson and Hemings, 182-83). Over fifteen years later, the film and the miniseries that eventually were produced have proved

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Gordon-Reed right. Today visitors to Jefferson’s Monticello routinely view, seemingly without surprise or dismay, a twenty-minute documentary that briefly mentions the liaison.

3 In examining four representations that have shaped the public acceptance and understanding of Jefferson and Hemings’ relationship, I am limiting my analysis to the crucial twenty-six-month period in Paris (1787-89), when Jefferson first came to know Hemings as a young woman, rather than the girl he remembered from Monticello. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings, the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film Jefferson in Paris (1995), the Haid-Andrews TV movie Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000), and Annette Gordon-Reed’s prize-winning family history The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), all postulate answers to the questions most often asked about the beginning of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison: What attracted Thomas Jefferson to Sally Hemings? What attracted Hemings to Jefferson? Why would Jefferson give up the cosmopolitan artist Maria Cosway for a relationship with a slave? Why would Hemings leave France, where she was a free woman, to return to slavery in Virginia? Could a slave owner love a slave? Could a slave love her enslaver? That these final questions are always generalized in this way—with, as Gordon-Reed points out, the erasure of individual identities—illustrates the difficulty of representing such a relationship, or getting beyond what bell hooks terms the “oppressed/oppressor paradigm.” Some might ask, why try? What’s the point, especially if the result were to obscure the effects of the power dynamic? Jefferson was the enslaver, Hemings the enslaved; he was white, she was black; he had absolute control over her, she none over him.

4 Such a reduction of the two people to symbols inherent in the power relationship induced by slavery and to prevailing ideas about racial identification does little to penetrate the historical mystery of their intimate relationship. As historian Winthrop Jordon concludes, “we are left to guess, without explicit evidence, that Thomas Jefferson found Sally Hemings at least enough one of his own to permit a sexual relationship. Her appearance, dress, demeanor, and diction may well have been sufficiently close to his world to permit him to engage with her intimately with whatever complicated combination of such emotions as affection and dominance we will never know” (“Redux”, 50). While Sally Hemings would not have thought of herself as white, she may not have thought of herself simply as black or contemplated “the uses of black solidarity” among people of African ancestry no matter their skin tone, (Gordon-Reed, Hemingses, 335). Similarly although Jefferson may have written in Notes on the State of Virginia that dark-skinned people were unattractive and intellectually inferior (137-141), he surrounded himself with racially mixed people at Monticello. Winthrop Jordan points out that Jefferson treated all members of the extended Hemings family “as standing in a different category than all his other slaves” (“Redux”, 48), perhaps because they were blood kin to his wife Martha. He gave them certain freedoms within their slave status, allowing them to earn their own money, housing them away from the slaves who labored in his fields down the mountain, and training them to be skilled artisans: for example, Sally’s uncle John became a master carpenter and her brother James a French chef. Jefferson’s Monticello was in some respects a world apart, a place where Gordon-Reed argues that Jefferson shaped the Hemings family members to his needs (Hemingses, 115).

5 The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings may never have begun had she not come to Paris. Although Jefferson requested that an older female slave

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escort his daughter to Paris, fourteen-year old Sally accompanied Mary (known as Polly), and because of Polly’s bond with Sally, Jefferson decided she should remain. A century later, Henry Adams argued that Jefferson was able “to breathe with perfect satisfaction nowhere except in the liberal, literary, and scientific air of Paris in 1789” (101). American artists and scholars have long viewed the French as a people who value the aesthete and the intellectual; Americans marginalized or discriminated against in the U.S. have long perceived Paris as a place where they can live and love as they please. If Paris matched Jefferson’s cosmopolitan tastes, it also brought the widowed Virginian into close personal contact with his young slave Sally, while at the same time putting her in a position to claim her freedom. With no wife to take care of his servants’ well-being while he was minister to France, Jefferson was put in the position of buying Sally’s clothes and seeing to her inoculation against smallpox, roles which Gordon-Reed speculates raised the level of intimacy between them (Hemingses, 299). She argues that for many reasons “the quality and substance of their conversations had to have been different” than it would have been in Virginia (Hemingses, 270). Jefferson read French but spoke it poorly so he may have been drawn to those in his household, like Sally Hemings and her brother James, with whom he could speak English, especially since Sally brought news from home. Hemings was legally free in France and for the first time in her life, she earned wages for her work, which may have made her see herself differently. Many years later her son Madison recounted in his reminiscences that Thomas Jefferson had to bargain with his slave Sally Hemings to get her to return to Virginia. Historian Philip Morgan notes her “influence over Jefferson” as well, giving as evidence that she gained “the freedom of all her children, the only case of an entire enslaved Monticello family achieving freedom” (77).

6 The novelist and screenwriters who represent the beginning of their relationship in Paris often turn to the senses and to the cultural context of eighteenth-century Virginia, just as the historian Gordon-Reed does, to imagine the motivations behind Jefferson’s and Hemings’s seemingly paradoxical behaviors. Although no likeness of Sally Hemings survives, we know that she was Jefferson’s deceased wife’s half-sister, that she had only one-quarter African ancestry, that she was described as beautiful by both blacks and whites, and that in 1830 she was listed in the U.S. Census as white. Jefferson’s former slave Isaac Jefferson described her as “mighty near white” with “straight hair down her back.” Chase-Riboud’s novel depends on the visual (Hemings’s “pale complexion,” and her resemblance to Jefferson’s deceased wife) and the auditory (her “soft Virginia accent,” described as “a relief to his ears from the harsh beauty of the French”) to make the fictional case for Jefferson’s attraction to Sally Hemings (90-91), while the more visual and auditory medium of film exaggerates Hemings’s African features and renders her speech as different in order to mark her slave status for viewers.

7 What the novel Sally Hemings allows for that the films, Jefferson in Paris and Sally Hemings, do not, at least as they are cast and directed, is for the reader to imagine the quite likely possibility that Sally Hemings physically resembled Thomas Jefferson’s wife, her half sister. Martha Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, had six children with his mulatto slave Elizabeth Hemings when he was a widower. In the novel, such a statement of resemblance does not depend on casting and so ironically the predominately white racial ancestry of Sally Hemings can be more realistically evoked by the written word. In the made-for-television movie, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, Sam Neil, who plays Thomas Jefferson, is mesmerized when he first sees Sally

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Hemings, asking his slave/servant James, Sally’s brother, who she is. This scene perfectly captures the uncanny feeling Jefferson may have experienced on seeing Sally Hemings in Paris. Actor Sam Neil is depicted as initially glimpsing her reflection in a mirror, almost as if his wife were brought back from another world. Later when he verbalizes his thoughts to Sally (“You look exactly like my wife. The resemblance is uncanny”), I suspect that most viewers are struck, not by the possibility of physical similarity but by racial difference, given the actress Carmen Ejogo’s African features and skin tone. Ejogo’s mother is Scottish and her father Nigerian. Although she is breathtakingly beautiful, all I could think when I heard these lines was that she did not resemble Martha Jefferson. Indeed my students, both black and white, laughed at this line when they saw the movie. Unlike fiction, film fixes the visual image, offering what literary critic Fredric Jameson calls “a translation” and therefore paradoxically something “closer to language” than reality in presenting a “materialized subjectivity” (3).

8 Leni Sorenson, a researcher at Monticello and historical consultant for Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, could not picture Ejogo as resembling Martha Jefferson either. Sorenson, who is herself biracial, thought Ejogo, despite her beauty, was miscast. As historical consultant, Sorenson raised this concern before filming began but to no avail. Screenwriter Tina Andrews and director Charles Haid had involved Sorenson in the making of the mini-series only after the casting was complete, as if the historical facts of Sally Hemings’s racial ancestry were not important. Sorenson was similarly dismayed about the casting of Thandie Newton in Jefferson in Paris, although she was not the historical consultant for that film. Like Ejogo, Newton is biracial; her mother is British and her father Zimbabwean. Sorenson worries that such casting does not reflect the “nuances” of the historical truth of Sally Hemings’s racial and familial ancestry and so perpetuates the myth than one “can always tell if someone has African ancestry”—a myth first born of white fear of impurity and later sometimes spread out of African American desire for racial solidarity.

9 Unlike Chase-Riboud, who renders Sally Hemings’ speech like that of the white characters in her novel, in the film Jefferson in Paris Ruth Prawer Jhabvala creates a slave dialect for Hemings. She and her fellow British filmmakers drew a bright line between their well-spoken Jefferson and his slave, using Sally’s highly inflected speech, ungrammatical and singsong, to remind both Jefferson and their audience of plantation life at Monticello. In making this choice, their Sally Hemings entertains Jefferson and thus becomes, as more than one reviewer noted, the stereotypical “pickaninny” (Zibart) distracting the master with song and dance. Interestingly, historian Gordon- Reed believes that speech patterns may have been one more way that Sally Hemings actually reminded Jefferson of Martha. Besides resembling each other physically, half- sisters can resemble each other “in the tone and timbre of voice, and mannerisms.” Furthermore, Gordon-Reed points out that “even before they were together in Paris, the Hemingses and Jeffersons lived in close proximity to one another and interacted on a daily basis, creating as this did all over the South, a mixed culture of shared language, expressions, sayings, and norms of presentation.” She argues that Hemings’s “manner of speaking was probably not markedly different from either of theirs,” offering as evidence Henry Lee’s comments that Jefferson’s diction was “far from perfect” and Patsy Jefferson’s “phonetic spelling of ‘windows’ as ‘winders’” in a letter describing the beautiful stained-glass “winders” she had seen in French cathedrals (Hemingses, 284).

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10 British filmmakers’ decision to render Sally Hemings’s speech as so different from Jefferson’s in Jefferson in Paris may stem from a desire to find as many ways as possible to remind viewers of Hemings’s slave status and surely originates in stereotypical notions about the differences between white masters and black slaves, fostered no doubt by American local colorists’ early renderings. Gordon-Reed believes such representations “grew out of a desire to cast African Americans as alien beings, in much the same way that Jim Crow was designed to communicate the message of essential differences between the races” (Hemingses, 285). A decade after Jefferson in Paris was released, historian Melvin Patrick Ely’s recent research reveals how much alike the idioms and speech patterns of slaves and masters actually were through his analysis of the letters and other documents written by white and black residents of Prince Edward County, Virginia, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (290-95).

11 Despite filmmakers’ reliance on their audience’s senses of sight and hearing to reveal identity, racial ancestry is not always audible or visible. Chase-Riboud makes this doubly plain by opening her novel with the perspective of Nathan Langdon, the 1830 white census taker, who is “unnerved” by Sally Hemings’s physical beauty and startled to discover that she is “fair enough to be his [own] mother” (8). Nathan becomes the first in a series of characters—historical and fictional—that Chase-Riboud employs to emphasize not just Sally Hemings’s physical appearance but her alluring presence. Chase-Riboud’s purpose is not so much to “insinuate into the consciousness of white readers the humanity of a people they otherwise constructed as subhuman” (8), which as Ann DuCille argues was the strategy of earlier African American writers who employed the mulatta figure, but to conjure a very specific individual, Sally Hemings, whom white male historians had reduced to an abstraction. By using Nathan as a doppelgänger for Thomas Jefferson, Chase-Riboud doubles her chances of convincing white readers why Jefferson would have chosen as his life partner Sally Hemings when as Nathan points out, “he could have chosen any white woman alive” (8). Not only does Chase-Riboud depict Sally as “the most beautiful woman” Nathan had ever seen (8), but she depicts Nathan as “charmed” by her “art of conversation” (13) and captivated by the sound of her voice, which “floated like silk scarves, sweeping and billowing the simple everyday language into a honeyed intimacy” (12).

12 Nathan, who is half Sally’s age, literally becomes addicted to her presence, returning day after day until he convinces himself he has fabricated her race on the census form, not to protect Jefferson from miscegenation, his original reason, but to protect Hemings, a freed slave, from having to leave Virginia and proximity to him. This behavior provides another possible similarity to Jefferson who freed his children with Sally, but not Sally herself, leaving that task to his white daughter Martha (Patsy). Virginia law required freed slaves to leave the state unless special permission was granted by the state legislature. In the novel, after Sally spurns Nathan when she discovers that he has falsified her race, he becomes obsessed with her and her relationship with Jefferson, interviewing all who might have met her. Thus he becomes the first in a long line of historians, amateur and professional, many at first determined to suppress her story, others more recently to penetrate the mystery of her allure. Chase-Riboud constructs this subplot so that meeting Sally Hemings changes Nathan’s life, just as it altered Jefferson’s. Throughout the novel, Chase-Riboud repeatedly has historical characters from John Adams to Jefferson’s daughter Patsy note Sally’s

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resemblance to Martha Jefferson, no doubt as preparation for her representation of Jefferson and Hemings’s first sexual encounter, a scene in which Jefferson unconsciously calls Sally “Martha.”

13 In the novel, their relationship is set up as fated on both sides. Because Sally’s mother, grandmother, and sisters have all had liaisons with white men, Chase-Riboud represents Sally as having the power to “hasten or delay” the start of their sexual relationship, but “powerless” to stop it (103). During Jefferson’s travels in Dusseldorf after Sally Hemings’s arrival in Paris, he saw Van der Werff’s painting of the Biblical story of Sarah giving the slave Hagar to Abraham and in a letter to Maria Cosway he recounted how moved he was by the tableau. Chase-Riboud imagines that after Dusseldorf, Jefferson thought of Sally “often with a growing sense of fatality” (117). In a flashback Chase-Riboud positions Sally in the room of the dying Martha Jefferson, who allegedly made her husband promise not to remarry, thereby placing Jefferson in the position of taking a mistress in order to honor his wife’s dying wish that her daughters not have a stepmother.

14 Chase-Riboud’s representation of the beginning of their relationship, like the screenplays of Jhabvala and Andrews, breaks the link with a master-slave narrative of forcible sex, even as it reminds readers of Sally Hemings’s slave status. The novel complicates the one-dimensional racial concerns by raising matters of social class. A French character who does not know that Sally is African American, although she does know she is a servant, admires her grace, expecting “her manners and gentleness and soft, charmingly accented French” to convey a “breeding” that will “surely attract a gentleman of property and improve her station in life” (112). By the time Jefferson leaves Paris for Monticello in 1789, two years after Sally’s arrival, Chase-Riboud, like screenwriter Tina Andrews, represents Sally Hemings as a French lady with a southern accent, who reminds Jefferson of both the beautiful “rare objects” (130) that he purchased in Paris and the “sweet breath” (89) that draws him to Monticello: A small, exquisite, heavy-breasted, slim-waisted body had emerged from the coltish and countrified adolescent of a year ago. She had honed her natural grace and inborn elegance on the examples of the most fashionable ladies of Pathemont and Paris on whom she spied incessantly and indecently, and had developed a lust for clothes and a taste for finery that went with such examples. She had lessons in French, in music, dressmaking. In her seclusion, Sally was better read than most ladies (130).

15 Whether she lived at Jefferson’s residence, the Hôtel de Langeac on the Champs- Elysées, as the novel and films suggest, or at his daughters’ boarding school, Abbaye de Panthemont, is unknown. In Madison Hemings’s remembrance of his mother, he remarked how often she spoke of life in France, proof perhaps that Sally Hemings was changed by her sojourn there.

16 To one degree or another, in the filmic and fictional renderings of their liaison and in Gordon-Reed’s history, Jefferson, like Pygmalion, creates Hemings into his ideal life partner. Near the end of his stay in France, Jefferson wrote to an American female friend contrasting American angels with European Amazons: an angel let the man in her life take the lead and make the important decisions affecting their lives. She accepted his well-tempered dominance and a show of his love and desire to protect her and their family. The dreaded Amazons, on the other hand were politically and socially assertive women who sought self-fulfillment outside of the home, challenging men in what was supposed to be an exclusively male domain.

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17 Thus Gordon-Reed speculates that when Thomas Jefferson left Paris, Sally Hemings, not Maria Cosway, “represented the place and way of life he expected to return to [...] a shared universe in which he would be the unquestioned center.” In Jefferson in Paris, a crucial scene binding Jefferson to Hemings and creating a distance between Jefferson and Cosway is set in the Virginia garden Jefferson created at the Hôtel de Langeac. Dumas Malone speculated that the very existence of this garden betrays Jefferson’s homesickness for Monticello. The film portrays Jefferson and Hemings’s shared delight at roasting fresh corn in the garden as a past time that is much too rustic for Cosway’s refined tastes and a shared provincial pleasure that gives her a different impression of both Jefferson and his relationship with Hemings.

18 Interestingly neither Chase-Riboud, Jhabvala, nor Andrews suggests that Sally’s attraction to Thomas was physical, perhaps because of the thirty-year age difference, perhaps because prevailing narratives and contemporary racial ideologies have rendered this interpretation unimaginable. Instead Chase-Riboud imagines that as a teenager far from home Sally sees Thomas, a powerful man in his 40s, as a protector. Jhabvala spotlights as attractive Jefferson’s influential position, both at home and abroad. Tina Andrews portrays Sally as an eager pupil to Jefferson, a willing teacher— knowledgeable in all subjects from language and ideas to manners and haute couture. Only historian Gordon-Reed posits that Sally may have been physically attracted to Jefferson given the physical features of her racially mixed family members and the fact that all of the Hemings women had long-term relationships with either high-status white males or white workers or racially mixed servants from other plantations. Thus just as the 1979 novel and the 2000 television movie exhibit the social and political concerns of their day, Gordon-Reed’s 2008 version of the story reflects America’s current fascination with the racially-mixed figure and a willingness to move beyond the racial dichotomies of the late twentieth century.

19 Despite the best intentions to recreate the Hemings-Jefferson affair so that viewers could imagine the unimaginable, some stereotypical notions about racial identity creep into the filmic representations of Hemings and writers of both the novel and the TV script cannot imagine the mature Hemings as other than a champion of black causes or a standard bearer for women’s rights, unsurprising echoes of the social and political context in which they were written. Only Gordon Reed allows Sally Hemings to remain an angel in Jefferson’s house. But like the writers of both the film, the TV movie, and the novel, Gordon Reed must depart from the usual reliance on historical facts about Sally Hemings to make her so. Since no letters or diaries have been found that reveal the nature of their relationship, Gordon-Reed relies on the social context and the documented history of Jefferson’s contemporaries to paint her portrait: older men marrying much younger women (by today’s standards underage teenage girls) and southern white widowers’ long-term common-law marriages to black housekeepers. By accumulating this evidence, she makes the case for her readers that Jefferson’s liaison with a much younger woman was not out of the ordinary, that a long-term relationship with a woman of color was within the norm of southern plantation society, and that his attraction was based on something more than sex. Gordon-Reed views Sally Hemings’s return to Virginia as reasoned, not coerced, a way for a slave to become the mistress of Monticello and see her children freed. Gordon-Reed makes her case by stepping away from her historical “narrative” (her phrasing) to construct an argument for a loving relationship in four chapters (14-17) at the center of her Hemings family history. Her

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attempt may be closer to the dynamic of Hemings and Jefferson’s relationship than that of the novelist and the screenwriters, but it is still an imagined life. While Chase-Riboud and Tina Andrews perhaps make the older Sally Hemings more sympathetic to black readers and audiences by representing an increasing emotional distance from Jefferson and a growing feeling of black solidarity (in the novel Hemings attends Nat Turner’s trial; in the TV movie she aids runaway slaves), Gordon-Reed locates sympathy for Hemings in her role as slave mother of the master’s child—in the bargain her son Madison said that she struck with Jefferson, to return to Monticello only if he freed the child conceived in Paris.

20 In Eric Foner’s review of The Hemingses of Monticello, he points out that although “most scholars are likely to agree with Gordon-Reed’s conclusion that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s seven children (of whom three died in infancy),” he believes that her portrait of the “enduring romance” (his phrase, not hers) is questionable (17). But in attempting to diminish her representation of their relationship, he never even mentions some of her most compelling arguments, many having to do with the power of the senses, which may have led to their mutual attraction, and the power of traditional gender roles that may have sustained it. Has Gordon-Reed been too early influenced by her reading of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel? Or has Eric Foner’s thinking been indelibly marked by the very master narrative that Gordon-Reed seeks to unsettle? What is clear is that each generation of novelists, screenwriters, and historians, to one degree or another, continues to fashion the Jefferson-Hemings narrative in a way that reveals, not surprisingly, as much about the preoccupations of their own era as those of the eighteenth century. But what is remarkable about these four representations is that a novelist, two screenwriters, and a historian have finally unsettled the old oppressor-oppressed paradigm and in doing so revealed the humanity of Sally Hemings and the humanness of Thomas Jefferson.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

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BERLIN, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998.

BEAR, James A., Jr. ed., Jefferson at Monticello, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1967.

BERARDINELLI, James, Review of Jefferson in Paris, 1995, http://www.reelviews.net/movies/j/ jefferson.html (last accessed on June 28, 2009).

BRODIE, Fawn M, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, New York, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1974.

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BURGOYNE, Robert, The Hollywood Historical Film, Hoboken, NJ, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

BURNSTEIN, Andrew, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1996.

CHASE-RIBOUD, Barbara, Sally Hemings, New York, Viking Press, 1979.

DABNEY, Virginius, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal, New York, Dodd and Mead, 1981.

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DECKER, William Merrill, “Americans in Europe: Henry James to the Present,” The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera, eds., New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 127-44.

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DUCILLE, Ann, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.

EBERT, Roger, Review of Jefferson in Paris, 7 April 1995, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com (last accessed on June 28, 2009).

ELLISON, Ralph, William STYRON, Robert Penn WARREN, and C. Vann WOODWARD, “A Discussion: The Uses of History in Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 1.2, spring 1969.

ELY, Melvin Patrick, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, New York, Knopf, 2004.

FOX-GENOVESE, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

FONER, Eric, “The Master and the Mistress,” New York Times Book Review, 5 October 2008, 17.

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GOMEZ, Michael, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

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HEMINGS, Madison, “Reminiscences of Madison Hemings,” [1873], Included as Appendix 1, Part 1 in Fawn M. Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, New York, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1974.

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JONES, Suzanne, Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

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MORGAN, Philip D., “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c 1700-1820,” in Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1999.

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THORNTON, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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AUTEUR

SUZANNE W. JONES University of Richmond

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Référendums populaires Dossier dirigé par Donna Kesselman

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Direct Democracy on Election Day: Ballot Measures as Measures of American Democracy

Donna Kesselman

1 Election 2008 has been meat for pundits and social scientists revisiting so much common political wisdom. One previously assumed given is the American electorate’s presumed lack of “civic engagement”, notably low Election Day turnouts. Did the highest participation rate in a century denote renewed commitment to the nation’s governing institutions and leadership? One area of vibrant activism though, prior to the 2008 groundswell and since, has received less attention, that of direct democracy. Measures placed on ballots and hotly contested in two thirds of American states point to the changing nature of citizen participation in elections, if not a “remaking of social and political life”. (Zukin, Keeter et al., 2002) The phenomenon is also related to generational change: at least until its decisive role in the 2008 presidentials, youth has moved away from traditional forms of representative democracy. (Mutz, 2006) Recourse to plebiscitary devices has had contradictory repercussions upon electoral processes: traditional mandates of officials and parties have been challenged, while direct democracy’s newfound legitimacy have drawn citizens back to the polls. (Skocpol, Fiorina, 1999)

2 A closer look at local slates and stakes reveals underlying trends in American civilization and political stratagems which are hardly perceptible when viewed through the sole, media-focused yet necessarily distorted prism of presidential elections.

Wedge Issues, Democracy and What Not

3 Among the measures most energizing state voters, this dossier proposes three in-depth studies: immigration reform, same-sex marriage and “ethno-racial statistics”. Due to their controversial nature they may be instrumentalized as electoral tactics, aimed at splitting apart or creating a “wedge” in an adversary’s support base.

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4 Mario Menendez explores local plebiscitary drives in light of longer term evolutions of immigration rights. State-level ballot initiatives concerned with—generally attempting to stigmatize—immigrants have placed pressure upon federal legislators and policy formulation, subtly interacting with national security. Liberals have also used them to their own tactical ends, such as bringing Latino voters back to the Democratic fold: their defection in 2004 had been a factor in turning the tide. Exploiting bitterness of the Bush administration’s infamous ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids, which rounded up and deported immigrant workers and families, then helped divide Republicans: some legislators backed the president’s immigration reform, others opposed it. The quandary was detrimental to 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain, from the Mexican border state of Arizona.

5 Guillaume Marche gives insight into the complex societal underpinnings of same-sex marriage, appearing on state ballots since 2004. Republicans positioned gay marriage to serve multiple political aims. The quintessential wedge splintered conservative religious Democratic constituencies, such as Hispanic Catholics and the working class (Miller, 2008), while functioning as a GOTV—get out the vote—tactic to mobilize the conservative Republican base. George W. Bush’s pledge to support a constitutional ban is widely accredited with pushing him over the top in swing states such as Ohio. Based on ground research in Colorado, Marche proposes a campaign-based political interpretation as an alternative to the reductionist narrative of gay marriage poised uniquely in the terms of sex, religion and morality. His comparison with another wedge measure placed on the Colorado 2006 mid-term ballot but by liberals, one calling for an increase in the minimum wage, illustrates the interaction between social and economic issues in American politics.

6 In his study of “ethno-racial” statistics, whose legality and legitimacy California voters decided in Proposition 54 (2003), Olivier Richomme brings out the stakes around this so-called identity politics issue whose introduction in France has been suggested, notably with the aim of implementing policies of anti-discrimination, resulting, for the moment, in polemical debate. The piece explores the strengths and drawbacks of popular plebiscites as democratic forum of debate in the United States.

7 First, though, an introduction provides readers with basic definitions, facts and figures, including a ballot measures update and review of recent scholarship.

Direct Democracy on Election Day: An Overview

A Progressive Era Legacy

8 Concerned with the floundering state of American democracy, what they perceived as the ills of government and over-riding corporate—notably railroad and oil company— influence upon electoral politics, Progressive Era educators and reformers promoted the virtues of plebiscitary devices in the American states: the initiative, the referendum, the recall. By gathering a prescribed number of valid signatures of registered voters, issues raised on Election Day would harness the popular will and involve ordinary citizens in policymaking.1 A century later, direct lawmaking has experienced regained popularity. Since 1980 statewide ballot measures have numbered over 900, with thousands more at city and county levels. Measures, also called propositions, are umbrella terms. Today 38 states authorize at least some form of direct

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democracy, 24 states plus the District of Columbia allow for ballot “initiatives”. The number of state-wide measures began shooting up in 2000, to reach a record 204 in 2006. The drop in 2008 (153 measures) follows the usual pattern in presidential election years while also raising expectations for a return to mainstream electoralism, riding on Obama coat-tails. The number did rise in some states in 2008, like Colorado. The total climbed to 184 in 38 states2 in the 2010 midterm year, with a notable decrease in the specific category of citizen legislative initiatives. The 2010 approval rate of 64% was in between 60% in 2008 and 67% rate in 2004 and 2006: overall “yes” votes are consistently more frequent than “no” votes. Of the forty-two initiatives on the ballot—new laws placed on the ballot by citizen petitions—43% were approved (the average approval rate for new-law initiatives is 41%). Of the 113 propositions placed on the ballot by legislatures, 73% were approved: as usual, voters were almost twice as likely to approve legislative measures than citizen petitions.

9 Ballot questions have been certified for spots on 8 statewide ballots in 2011 (as of August 25). Historically, odd-numbered election years feature significantly fewer measures than even-numbered years. Since 1970 odd-numbered years have had an average of 46. In 2009, voters cast their ballots on a grand total of 32 questions, a comparable figure, for the moment, to 2011. (For electoral statistics, see: Initiative & Referendum Institute, Ballotpedia, National Conference of State Legislatures, Waters 2003, The Initiative and Referendum Almanac.)

10 Among the various forms of citizen lawmaking, ballot initiatives, whereby petitioners place a piece of legislation (statute law) or constitutional amendment before an electorate, are most common.3 They may be direct legislation initiatives, which are immediately binding, or indirect: imposed by voters for consideration on state legislature or municipal council agendas. The other common device, popular referendums, is the process by which voters can overturn disputed legislation (or a section of a law) enacted by a governing body. The denomination “popular” distinguishes them from the traditional procedure of referendum, which seeks public approval but originates in state legislatures, introduced by an elected official or appointed constitutional revision commission, though the media often confuses the two. Circulation periods, the time allotted to petitioners to obtain the minimum amount of required signatures, vary from 60 days in Massachusetts to four years in Florida or no time limits at all, as in Arkansas, Ohio or Utah. There has been no correlation established between the length of the circulation period and the amount of petitions that ultimately appear on the ballot, but very few petitions make it to Election Day.

11 Completing the tripartite mechanisms of direct democracy is the recall: the procedure by which voters can remove an elected official from office. While rarely used, one case is worth noting: in October 2003 California voters recalled California’s Democratic governor Gray Davis and replaced him with Republican actor-businessman turned politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger.4 The year 2011 has seen recall elections emerge as a fateful arena of political standoff. Activists began circulating recall petitions for Republican senators in the days following Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) bill’s to strip collective bargaining rights of most public employee unions, which spurred state Capitol occupation and protests in February and March, reminiscent of Vietnam War- era fury. Among the nine subsequent recalls were five Republicans having voted for Walker’s bill and some of the 14 Democratic Senators who had fled the state in

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February in opposition to this curb on labor rights. Ultimately, Democrats picked up two seats but were unable to wrest majority Senate control away from the GOP, which now holds a narrow 17-16 majority, previously a 19-14 edge. The nine recall elections in Wisconsin this year were the largest ever in the nation’s history. Previously, in nearly 100 years there had been only 20 recall attempts, 13 successful. Collectively, more than $31 million was spent on the recalls, largely from outside conservative groups, unions and others. The Democratic Party is pushing ahead with its plans to recall Walker next year.

12 Direct democracy provides grassroots perspective on evolutions in American society, shades of nuance to what is considered its ideological war-mongering, gauged by conservative and liberal hues. While electorally pertinent, these distinctions should not to be overstated given that fundamental political values—free market, individual rights, the role of the state—are more commonly shared in the United States than in other Western nations (Lowi, Ginsberg, Shepsle, 2008, 252). The dichotomy is arguably more significant than systematic partisan reference to the two mainstream parties, though no set of coherent philosophical principles defines or unites either group. Among other significant causal factors of public opinion are local political environments, which ballot measures help to produce.

13 Citizen lawmaking is a privileged tool for grasping the American political psyche—how individual attitudes and behaviors interact with politics—and the reflexive tactical adaptations by parties and interests groups. Observers gain more acute perceptions than the American public’s portrayal as “polarized” into two kinds of states—red conservative Republican or blue liberal Democrat—, following suit of presidential electoral votes… thereby relativisingcatchy, media-hype/sound-bite characterizations, all the more so when they are semi-official and self-serving, as G.W. Bush’s confident Karl Rove’s year 2000 prediction of a “permanent Republican majority” or what would be fleeting reference to an Obama realignment. Direct democracy is a gauge of both impetuous outrage and incremental change in American public opinion.

Ballot Measures and Trends: 2008-2011

14 Ballot measures have been battlegrounds of choice for America’s alleged culture wars; notably for conservative intent on mobilizing “moral voters”. Thus, in 2008, Arkansas rebuffed adoption by gay partners; the wording goes even further to apply to any unmarried couples. New anti-gay marriage bans were also voted in Arizona, California (by a slim 52 to 48% margin) and Florida (by a whopping 62 to 38%). By November 2008, 41 states5 had passed “Defense of Marriage” Acts—DOMAs—or constitutional Amendments, most of which define marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

15 On a more progressive note, all three November 2008 election-day measures aimed at restricting abortion rights went down in defeat. California voters snubbed a constitutional amendment requiring physicians to notify parents or legal guardians of abortions involving a minor. An all-out ban with great ideological implications went down three to one in Colorado (73% against): the state constitution would have defined human life from “the moment of fertilization”. A second attempt was pushed back in 2010 by a larger margin (79%).6 In 2008 South Dakota defeated an amendment to constitutionally ban abortions, excluding those performed in the extreme circumstances of rape, incest, a woman’s health, also charging doctors performing

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abortions with criminal penalties (prison and fine). This attempt followed more stringently worded pro-life measures in the previous two legislative sessions, but which had been rejected by voters in this albeit conservative heartland state. Similar anti- abortion efforts that year in Montana and Missouri did not collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. A 2010 measure passed in Alaska, though quite moderate: it forbids minors from getting an abortion without a doctor informing at least one parent before moving forward with the procedure. This weathervane will test the social conservative winds once again in a 2011 Mississippi measure which would “Define[s] human personhood as beginning at the moment of fertilization”.

16 Following a decade of pro-life advances at both local and federal levels (Merchant, 2008), the defeat of several test cases, alongside Obama’s two liberally-leaning Supreme Court nominations may jeopardize, or at least force their sponsors to reorganize, their planned Supreme Court showdown over the doctrine of privacy rights and a Roe v. Wade-abortions rights reversal.7 Such electoral setbacks also illustrate the gap which separates a conservative Republican Party apparatus, under pressure from an increasingly vocal and organized far-right, and small-town America’s shift to more middle ground on social issues like abortion. A parallel observation may be made about Democrats: despite the party leadership’s staunchly liberal stance, Democrat voters do not unanimously support abortion under all circumstances, Catholic Hispanics being a case in point (Pew Research Center, August 2006). The forms and grounds of public opinion change with the times, and even cultural wars must be carefully framed within their particular political and also polemical environments (Lakoff, 2004).

17 Anti-immigrant offensives were pushed back in the two states where they were run in 2008. California massively voted down the so-called Safe Neighborhoods Act: opponents denounced its “gang related and drug crime” frame as euphemism for minority and immigrant youth baiting. And yet, as explained below by Menendez, previous measures had successfully solicited California voters to curtail undocumented immigrant rights, such as access to public services. Even Arizona, despite its history of anti-immigrant ballot measures, rejected tighter sanctions in 2008 for undocumented workers as well as employers knowingly hiring them, procedures which incite discrimination against immigrants generally. Retrospectively, the proposed measure and zealous campaigning were harbingers of the current, national attention-drawing immigrant bashing in this state.

18 Though constitutionally Congress enjoys the power of the purse, initiatives give voters a direct say in state-level spending. Money matters—and it has taken on new dimensions since the September 2008 financial meltdown. Even in this crisis-ridden context, two thirds of government expenditure mandates were approved that year, including fifteen statewide government bond issues for programs costing over $13 billion. Despite the state’s ongoing budget crisis, California voters approved high-speed rail transportation to link its coastal and inland cities and construction of children’s hospitals. Montana voted higher taxes to support state Universities while North Dakota and Massachusetts refused to lower personal and/or corporate income tax rates, entailing public service cutbacks. In 2010, 19 of 21 state bond issues were voted in nine states, including libraries and educational buildings in Alaska, water projects and dental care in Maine and pre-K (Kindergarten) education in New Mexico. Since the stock-market crisis, entailing bank bailouts and emergency recovery spending, state constitutional balanced budget amendments may dampen such mega-projects. What

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stand out nevertheless are these outright plebiscites for public infrastructure and services—counter-intuitive to the widely portrayed anti-government, free-market image of Americans.

19 Direct democracy impacts America’s system of multilevel, interactive checks and balances government. For instance, voters approved California’s Proposition 11 in 2008: congressional district boundaries will subsequently be drawn by an independent citizen redistricting commission, following existing procedures in Indiana. A ballot issue proposing to repeal the measure went down in defeat in 2010 (59.5%) while another measure, named the “Voters First Act”, gave the citizen commission specific mandate by setting out criteria for drawing-up districts.8 Legislative and congressional redistricting take place in every state in the wake of the federal census every ten years, the last one being in 2010. Measures about redistricting were on ballots that year not just in California, but also Florida and Oklahoma. Florida’s constitutional amendments 5 and 6 were approved to ensure that legislative district boundary-drawing establish “fairness,” are “as equal in population as feasible” and use “city, county and geographical boundaries”. Oklahoma State Question 748 reformed, by enlarging membership of, the previously instituted commission.

20 These claims to more responsive, representative institutions are popular repudiations of the bi-partisan—though ethically questionable—practice of “partisan gerrymandering”, whereby state legislative majorities turn to their own political advantage their power to reapportion congressional districts (Lowi, Ginsberg, Shepsle, 2008). The California, Florida and Oklahoma votes are worthy of Progressive Era expectations, as are term limits imposed by voters upon elected officials in twenty state legislatures since the early 1990s; six were subsequently overturned or declared unconstitutional by courts. Thus, while citizen lawmaking may check the work of legislators, the “people” do not necessarily have the last word: statute laws, even when introduced through popular initiative, must face judicial review under state and federal constitutions.

21 Gay marriage illustrates the complex intermingling of direct democracy, federalism, and institutional checks & balances. California’s 2008 constitutional amendment, which exclusively defines marriage as between one man and one woman, trumped the state Supreme Court’s previous May 2008 ruling which had confirmed the legality of a San Francisco city ordinance on same-sex marriage.9 Gay-rights lawsuits then challenged Proposition 8, also in view of upholding the legal status of thousands of couples having married during the five-month interim. A California state Supreme Court decision subsequently upheld the voter-approved constitutional ban, but it was then challenged in federal court (Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 3:09-cv-02292). In August 2010 the federal District Court judge ruled that California’s ban by state constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage was an unconstitutional violation of civil rights by national standards and that marriages could resume on August 18, 2010. But the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals then stayed the ruling pending appeal, where the lower decision was then appealed once year later (as this article goes to press, decision still pending).

22 The stage is being set for a landmark Supreme Court constitutional interpretation. Article IV, Section 1’s “Full Faith and Credit” clause clearly dictates that each state must honor the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of other states, such as marriages or drivers’ licenses. Thus a contradiction lies in the coexistence today

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between a majority of state DOMAs and legal recognition in five states—four in the northeast: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and most recently in New York in July 2011, henceforth the largest state where gay and lesbian couples can wed, giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum—plus Iowa, Washington D.C. and the Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon. In these cases, legalization was introduced through legislation and court ruling. Eleven states have created legal unions that, while not called marriages, offer varying subsets of corresponding rights and responsibilities under local jurisdictions.10 Legislation recognizing same-sex marriage in Maine was subsequently overturned by ballot measure in 2009; in all 31 states where the issue has been put directly to a popular vote, the result has been bans. Congress itself complicated matters in 1996 when the Defense of Marriage Act declared that states are not obliged to recognize same-sex marriages, even if legal in another state.

23 21st century direct democracy may ultimately materialize the progressive strategy of constructing national social rights from the bottom, state-level up. Thus after successful 2006 mid-terms ballot measures more than half the states had introduced minimum wage hikes above the national rate, which had not been raised in a decade. This nationally coordinated liberal wedge issue campaign and its momentum—ten of the 17 tightest races had minimum wage initiatives on the ballot—helped usher in the 110th Congress Democratic majority and its clear mandate for national minimum wage increase, which was voted in 2007. Likewise, local support gathered for stem-cell research ballot initiatives has built momentum towards legalization through federal legislation.11 It was a factor in candidate Obama’s campaign promise and then partial satisfaction, when the president approved federal funding in a March 2009 executive order, thereby undoing his predecessor’s 2001 prohibition.

24 In all cases, the stakes are high: in addition to their own emotional power and, notably, social conservatives’ legendary organizational skills (Huret, 2008), ballot measures are embraced by lobbies and broad-based associative networks, entailing big-dollar financing (Deysine, 2006).

Democratic or Not?

25 Aspirations for direct popular input into public affairs challenge the philosophical virtues of representative democracy. The “people”—as collective voice and agency—, is displaced by alternative forums of debate and participatory governance, including individualized technology outlets like internet voting. Proponents, non-governmental organizations in particular, also acclaim direct democracy as an action-forcer: means of pressuring legislators to take action on controversial issues. Scholars have acknowledged its ability to increase the population’s “social capital”. Some have made clarion calls to replace the structures of western representative democracy, “to substitute the simplicity of majority rule by referendum for what must seem to many frustrated Americans the arcane, ineffective, out-of-date model of the Constitution” (Smith and Tolbert, 2007, 146-47).

26 There are detractors of course, though less vocal. First there is the classical denunciation of the referendum process: coined in such a way as to elicit the desired response, the advantage inevitably goes to he who asks the question. One current example in the U.S. concerns so-called civil rights initiatives. They typically assert that state institutions “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to,

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any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting” (see successful 2006 Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, MCFI: Amercian Civil Rights Institute, 2009). The implied notion of “equal treatment” appeals to equality-conscious citizens, notably minorities. But idealized wording of colorblind institutions has a history of masking de facto discrimination in the United States. Such was the case when California (1996) and Washington (1998) civil rights initiatives resulted in removal of affirmative action measures, ultimately decreasing minority student populations attending professional—law, medicine—degree programs. The Michigan MCFI was challenged in federal courts for violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act by deceptively misappropriating the term “civil rights”. Sponsors were charged with systematic voter fraud for soliciting petition signatures with claims that a yes-vote would favor affirmative action or using questions such as “Do you oppose racism?” Certainly, despite projections by the initiatives’ major promoter, conservative activist and American Civil Rights Institute president Ward Connerly, there was no “Super Tuesday for Equal Rights” in 2008: while passing in Nebraska, Colorado’s civil rights initiative was defeated, and others did not make the ballot in Arizona, Missouri, and Oklahoma. In any event, courts have acknowledged their constitutionality and affirmative action has been weakened by these effective bans on race and gender-based preferential treatment as well as their ideologically charged campaigns. In a 2010 comeback, the measure passed by 59% in Arizona: proposed within the anti-immigration furor surrounding a state law, it has helped to fuel already flaming local political moods.

27 However forthright the endeavor, the democratic content of direct consultation is questionable; notably when complex issues are inevitably framed in simplistic fashion. Are voters qualified to evaluate the long-term repercussions of policies? (Zimmerman, 1986) California, the most populous state and direct democracy locomotive is once again a case in point: 2008’s Proposition 7 called for clean energy and utilities to generate 20% of electric power from renewable energy by 2010. Interviews carried out during the month preceding the November election12 illustrate how even voters most likely to grasp the stakes, including those who read about issues, are educated in technical fields or committed to environmental issues, found it hard to make up their minds. Difficulties compounded when facts and cogent argumentation gave way to suggestion and speculation due to programmed dis- and over-information. Both proponents and opponents of Proposition 7 portrayed themselves as avid environmentalists. “Yes vote” ads quoted Nobel-Prize winning scientists advocating alternative energy sources… Opponents denounced Proposition 7 as a “costly, flawed, poorly written energy scheme” (leaflet in possession of author). Prop 7 failed.

28 Also problematical for democracy is the point to which ballot measures, like candidate elections, have become high-profile communication jamborees—3.4 million dollars in partisan videos for Proposition 7 alone. In 2010, a total of $379 million was spent, according to December 2010 campaign finance reports. Statewide contributions ranged from Iowa’s $41,250 to California’s $217,342,328. Then there is the billion-dollar petition-drive market. Far from the romantic image of street-corner activists hailing down concerned citizens to promote a worthy cause, the bustling business collects signatures for a fee.

29 In view of California elections 2011, the distribution giant Amazon pumped millions into paying signature collection for a referendum to voters and advertising to ward off

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budget measures requiring sales tax for on-line retailers. State Sen. Loni Hancock, D- Berkeley, objected: “The initiative and referendum process has increasingly been hijacked by large corporations for measures that would benefit their companies and business.” The mere threat already impacted the legislative process, for the state budget bill was subsequently amended and weakened this particular taxing prerogative (San Francisco Chronicle, August 26, 2011).

30 This brings us full circle. Charges of undue dominance of corporate interests are being echoed once again, one century later, but this time aimed at ballot measures themselves. For progressives, sky-rocketing price tags favor elites and their ability to impact electoral outcome, if not simply to buy legislation at the ballot box (Boehmke, 2005; Smith, Tolbert, 2007). Empirical research, however, does not conclusively support such accusations of undue corporate dominance over labor and other popular interests. Passage rates are actually low in so-called David v. Goliath contests, where citizen groups are outspent: corporate interests are not necessarily successful in getting their views to prevail. Likewise, disproportionate funding can often be traced to lack of meaningful support generated by citizen group campaigns (McConville, 2006, 277-79).

31 One must not lose sight of the opportunity costs incurred by these privately financed mega-operations. Labor organizations, for instance, gain at best pyrrhic victories when valuable resources are diverted. Such was the case for the “Paycheck Protection” schemes placed on ballots since the 1990s: the AFL-CIO succeeded in pushing back these attempts to restrict labor union participation in political campaigns, but at a hefty cost to organizing war chests (Kesselman, 1999). Another anti-labor statute initiative in 2001 turned Wyoming into a Right-to-Work State, further limiting already restrictive federal labor laws on unionization. It was one of the most costly ballot campaigns in history and thus an outright defeat for labor. In addition to the specific question at hand, the longer-term impact of weakening Labor’s finances explicitly counts among its adversaries’ multiple political aims.

32 In addition to ideological scorn—“mob rule”, the tyranny of the majority—many legislators have criticized direct democracy based upon precedent: plebiscitary lawmaking impinges state congresses’ prerogatives in passing future laws. California’s path-breaking Proposition 13 capped property taxes in 1978 and triggered off the modern initiative wave: it has been subsequently blamed for declining public services, notably California’s once exemplary educational system (Schrag, 1998). The ambiguous nature of direct democracy as countervailing power also lies in its difficulties to establish the veritable will of the people. A 2002 National Conference of State Legislatures concludes that states without the initiative process should not consider adopting it and that: the initiative has evolved from its early days as a grassroots tool to enhance representative democracy into a tool that is too often exploited by special interests. The initiative lacks critical elements of the legislative process and can have both intended and unintended effects on the ability of the representative democratic process to comprehensively develop policies and priorities. (NCSL 2002, I&R Task Force on the current state of the initiative process, quoted in Boehm, 2005, 10)

33 Public support of the initiative process nevertheless remains high. According to surveys, citizens in initiative states believe themselves to be competent to decide ballot questions and likewise consider the publicly-initiated lawmaking to be no less problematic or corrupted than the legislative process (Boehm, 2005).

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Scholarship on Ballot Measures

34 Recent scholarship has focused on the indirect effects of populist mechanisms. What are the “spillover effects” of issues and campaigns upon participation and voting behavior? (Magelby, 1984) Emotionally charged issues dealing with family values and fundamental rights have mobilized voters, in this nation known for high abstention rates, and influenced electoral outcomes. Playing the “race card” in ballot measures that stigmatize illegal immigrants induced many voters, even Independent and Democratic, to elect a Republican governor in California in 1994 (see Menendez below). Of course, establishing specific causal relationships is complex. Contrary to widely held assumptions, gay-marriage measures on 2004 ballots may not have been the factor of Bush’s decisive taking of Ohio. It has been argued that participation that year rose proportionally in every state, even where gay marriage was not on the ballot (Abramowitz, 2004).

35 As they spill over onto broader electoral agendas, ballot measures impact voter decisions in other races. Political scientists have set out the factors affecting candidate choices: personal characteristics (including incumbency, character, name recognition—e.g. Schwarzenegger); program but especially single issues; party loyalty. A recent hypothesis posits how ballot measures elevate certain issues to the point of establishing a set of voting criteria: they spillover to voter judgments with regards to a candidate’s association with these particular issues (Nicholson, 2005). Following the correlating “visibility hypothesis”, ballots have the greatest impact at midterm, without the centralizing effect of the presidential contest, and in “down ballot” races like Congress or state offices. Subsequently, the alleged existence of Democratic or Republican party “mindsets”—tending to fuse all levels of party politics—is over-stated, particularly in direct-democracy states enjoying vibrant electoral environments of their own (Nicholson, 2005).

36 Scholars of secondary or indirect levels of political processes have recast the debate: it traditionally opposes direct versus representative paradigms in terms of their respective democratic contents. Thus, plebiscites have had positive indirect effects upon turnout (midterm and presidential elections) and confidence in government, enhancing political knowledge as well. This is consistent with democratic Progressive Era norms, as with civic engagement studies notions of a voting population’s social capital (Putnam, 2000; Skocpol, Fiorina, 1999). What’s more, political parties in initiative states are more energized while membership is higher in citizen and not-for-profit interests groups (Smith, Tolbert, 2007). Such groups are more involved in “outside” or membership-intensive tactics, like organized protests and electioneering, giving preference to shaping public opinion and expanding their roots in longer-term constituencies (Boehmke, 2005).

37 Ballot access and campaigns contribute to the restructuring of politics and popular pressure. It is a complex phenomenon, which arguably derails representative institutions when circumventing legislatures, while tending to strengthen American democratic life.

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Telltale Signs and Political Testing Grounds?

38 There are fewer statewide ballot measures during odd-numbered years when no federal elections take place, but those introduced in seven states in 2009 were nonetheless significant. During the 2010 mid-terms year they were integral parts of broader political trends.

39 One issue not yet dealt with here evinces the great diversity of local cultures in the United States and state legislation under federalism, that of marijuana.13 While federal law outlaws all cannabis use and numerous states continue to inflict criminal charges, marijuana initiatives in states, counties or cities, since the 1970s, are aimed at liberalizing or in some way decriminalizing its use, possession, and/or sale. Use is already decriminalized14 in Massachusetts (2008), Colorado, Michigan and more surprisingly in Utah (2000)—but supporters outspent opponents in this state 40 to 1. Similar measures were rejected, however, in South Dakota, Oregon, Alaska, Nevada, Ohio. An initiative in 2008 did not receive enough signatures in Washington State. Marijuana is decriminalized by law in California, where almost all legal penalties have been removed. Yet on November 2, 2010, California’s high profile Proposition 19 was defeated, and thus its outward legalization for personal cultivation, possession and transportation. For University of Southern California’s Initiative & Referendum Institute, while favoring legalization in principle, voters disapproved of some applications such as local in lieu of state regulatory frameworks and the authorization of workplace use, with the burden of proof of “actually impairing” job performance placed upon employers. Support for medical use of marijuana, though, has grown slowly but surely, voted in over a dozen states. It was approved by voters in 2010 in Arizona but voted down in South Dakota.15 A defeated 2010 Oregon measure continues to allow medical use but thus did not take the next step to further institutionalize its regulation by licensing farmers and authorizing research in state agencies to develop quality control standards. Ground research carried out among low-wage populations in California in 2011 indicate that being authorized to obtain a “medical marijuana card” has become an objective for a portion of this population, with subsequent consequences in terms of individualization and de-politization.

40 The Arizona Proposition 107 Civil Rights initiative which, as we have seen, actually discriminates against minorities by eliminating affirmative action, fits into the current local maelstrom. Arizona’s 2010 anti-immigrant law (SB 1070) has polarized American politics by attempting to limit immigrant rights in the name of states’ rights. Supporters across the nation blame immigrants for many woes, like unemployment or drug-trafficking. Detractors denounce the law for opening the door to racial profiling: any individual may be questioned about their immigration status based upon the arbitrary criterion of “reasonable suspicion”. The AFL-CIO labor federation has joined this condemnation saying that SB 1070 also targets workers’ rights: an employer confronted with Latino workers’ complaints, be they in the form of picket lines or lawsuit—could simply call on police to arrest the workers under the claim of reasonable suspicion (Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, 2010). Also criticized is the challenge to federal government prerogatives of immigration control as Arizona state public employees are henceforth granted enforcement powers. Immigration rights crystallize the raising of racism’s ugly head in the U.S.A. today.

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41 Ballot measures were ostensibly instrumentalized in 2010 by conservative campaigns coordinated to undermine national liberal agendas, and notably president Obama’s. The “card check” system of unionization is a priority for U.S. Labor: it would facilitate the ability for workers to unionize by signing-up in lieu of the complex voting system many claim favors employer intimidation practices. It was endorsed by presidential candidate Barack Obama. In November 2010, Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah passed constitutional amendments requiring secret elections for union elections. All four measures were sponsored by state legislatures and meant to circumvent attempts to encourage unionization through federal law. In another anti-worker move, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring a supermajority for the legislature to increase benefits for public worker retirement systems. A November 2011 ballot measure in Ohio attempts to quell Wisconsin’s anti-union groundswell. During the recalls the Huffington Post wrote (10 August, 2011): the “stand by Wisconsin Republicans against a massive effort to oust them from power could reverberate across the country as the battle over union rights and the conservative revolution heads toward the 2012 presidential race”. Ohio Issue 2 “would repeal a measure which limits collective bargaining for public employees in the state”, introduced here in the wake of the Wisconsin governor’s union-busting onslaught.

42 Inconspicuously since 2008, in anticipation of any nationally mandated and/or federal public health plan, local measures have been introduced to bar this route. They prohibit any statute law or regulation requiring people to have health insurance or penalizing them for paying their health bills with their own money, thereby proclaiming an individual’s “right to pay” for private insurance. Missouri voters approved such a measure during the 2010 August primary election by 71%: somewhat symbolic given, as is common in primaries, a very low turnout, but entering the institutional books nonetheless. The following November, voters in Arizona and Oklahoma followed suit, while Colorado voters rejected the measure. The “yes votes” are formally at odds with the key provision of the historical 2010 Affordable Health Care Act which would make it mandatory for citizens to procure health insurance or face fines by 2014 (White House, 2010). They served as political foundation for the incoming Republican majority 112th Congressional vote to rescind the law (not followed in the Senate). A telling measure will be before voters in Ohio in November 2011: posterior to the 2010 law it would “exempt residents of Ohio from national health care mandates.” In light of such persistent state-level defiance a Supreme Court showdown might decide the ultimate fate of Obamacare.

43 The overall conservative-leaning 2010 ballot issues year may or may not have been “tea party-fueled”, as the Initiative & Referendum Institute claims (Ballotwatch, 2010). As we have attempted to show, factors at play in local political playing fields are complex, multiple and in constant evolution. More fundamentally, though, the resurgence of “states’ rights” as vehicles for thwarting the acquisition of nationally attributed social rights harks back to less glorious eras of the American political legacy, be it in the name of denying citizenship to slaves or collective worker organization. Whatever the ideological tint, state-level political environments, especially through the use of direct democracy, are powerful tools for consensus-building. They are privileged vantage points for grasping the underlying dynamics of American politics and citizenship.

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SKOCPOL, Theda et Morris P. FIORINA (eds.), Civic Engagement in American Democracy, New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2009.

WATERS, M. Dane, The Initiative and Referendum Almanac: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the Initiative and Referendum Process, Raleigh Durham, North Carolina, Caroline University Press, 2003.

White House 2010, www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/23/whats-health-care-bill.

ZUKIN, Cliff, KEETER, Scott, ANDOLINA, Molly, JENKINS, Krista, DELLI CARPINI, Michael X., A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civil Life, and the Changing American Citizen, College Park, Md., The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2002.

Websites (last consulted January 2011)

American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, www.afl-cio.org. American Civil Rights Institute, http://www.acri.org/. Ballotpedia, http://ballotpedia.org/. Citizen and Democracy Project (the), www.citizendemocracy.net. Initiative & Referendum Institute, University of Southern California, www.iandrinstitute.org, notably: “Ballotwatch”, “Initiative Use 1902-2008”, “Are Ballot Propositions Spilling over onto Candidate Elections?”, “Election 2008: Mixed Results”, “Election 2010 Preview: Not About the Economy”. Council for Latin American Advancement 2010, AFL-CIO, www.lclaa.org/aflcio.org.html. National Conference of State Legislatures, http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/. Pride at Work, AFL-CIO, www.prideatwork.org.

NOTES

1. The modern U.S. system of initiative and referendum originated in the state of Oregon in 1902, when the Oregon Legislative Assembly adopted it by an overwhelming majority and ran its first initiative in 1904. The “Oregon System”, as it was at first known, subsequently spread to many other states to become one of the signature reforms of the Progressive Era. 2. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming. 3. The most active states with regards to ballot initiatives since they were introduced in 1904 are, in order, Oregon, California, Colorado, North Dakota, Arizona. 4. On October 7, 2003, Gray Davis was removed from office by 55.4% of the state electorate voting “Yes”, in favor of a recall. The second question on the ballot, whose validity would hinge upon

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the result of the first, elected Schwarzenegger as his successor with 48.6%, the clear frontrunner among 135 candidates. Though permitted under state law, in this exceptional instance no primary election was held to determine which candidates would represent the major parties. Previous California governors, including Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson, had faced recall attempts, but which were unsuccessful. 5. State Constitutional amendment bans have been voted in 29 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. 6. The 2010 Colorado Fetal Personhood, Amendment 62 read: “An amendment to the Colorado Constitution applying the term ‘person’ as used in those provisions of the Colorado Constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice and due process of law, to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.” 7. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, was the 1973 landmark United States Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion. The Court held that the constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman’s decision to have an abortion. 8. Proposition 20 imposed upon the commission to redraw congressional district boundaries, previously created by Proposition 11, the notion of “community of interest”, defined as “a contiguous population which shares common social and economic interests that should be included within a single district for purposes of its effective and fair representation. Examples of such shared interests are those common to an urban area, an industrial area, or an agricultural area, and those common to areas in which the people share similar living standards, use the same transportation facilities, have similar work opportunities, or have access to the same media of communication relevant to the election process.” 9. For a history of the Gay Marriage issue, especially in California preceding 2008, see Kenneth P. MILLER, 2008, “The Democratic Coalition’s Religious Divide: Why California Voters Supported Obama but Not Same-Sex Marriage”, Revue Française d’Études Américaines, n°119, 46-62. 10. The 11 states are: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Washington. Attempts to introduce same-sex marriage have not succeeded in New York; however in 2008 New York Governor David Paterson issued a directive requiring that all state agencies recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. 11. A citizen-initiated initiative to amend the Missouri Constitution to ban stem-cell research did not appear on the 2010 state ballot for lack of qualifying signatures. 12. Random interviews of 43 eligible voters. 13. Marijuana initiatives pertain to the legal status of marijuana. They generally liberalize or in some way decriminalize its use, possession, and/or sale in a particular state. This may be restricted to medical prescription or personal use for adults, accompanied by counselling for minors. 14. Decriminalized cannabis may incur, depending on the local law, civil fines, drug education, or drug treatment in place of incarceration and/or criminal charges for possession of small amounts of cannabis. In other cases, various cannabis offenses have been made the lowest priority for law enforcement. Movements support efforts ranging from reducing penalties for cannabis-related offenses to removing all penalties related to cannabis, including sale and cultivation. 15. While cannabis for recreational use is illegal in most parts of the world, its use as a medicine is legal in a number of territories, including Canada, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Italy, Finland, and Portugal.

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RÉSUMÉS

Ballot Measures (or Propositions) are a form of Progressive Era direct democracy which has regained momentum in recent years. Re-energizing voters in the 38 U. S. states where they raise grassroots and often controversial “wedge issues”, they also have spill-over effects in other areas of politics and civil engagement. This introduction provides background information about their workings and an update on recent stakes in local political environments: it introduces in-depth studies published in this issue of Transatlantica.

INDEX

Keywords : Ballot measures, ballot initiatives, direct democracy, elections, U.S. politics, liberalism, conservatism, federalism, Supreme Court.

AUTEUR

DONNA KESSELMAN University Paris East Créteil

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Ballot initiatives and the national debate on immigration

Mario Menéndez

1 Referendums and initiatives have become important means of influencing public policy in the United States at both municipal and state levels. Since the mid 1970s, issues such as affirmative action, tax and educational reforms, the environment, abortion, gay rights and immigration have affected the political process in over half the states. Direct plebiscitary democracy also occurs in thousands of cities, counties and towns and yet, no equivalent exists at the national level. These consultations are thus normally perceived through their impact on the local sphere, therefore making a clear-cut distinction with national government. Our aim is to bring to light the profound repercussions that local initiatives and referendums around specific sensitive political issues, such as illegal immigration, have had on federal legislation and policy formulation with regards to social welfare and national security.

2 Voted in 1994, California’s Proposition 187 was a citizen’s ballot measure to adopt legislation restrictive of social security rights for immigrants. Ballot measures can be broken down into two categories. The Direct Initiative consists of draft legislation which state citizens place on the ballot, after collecting the required number of signatures. The Indirect Initiative follows the same procedure but for placement on the state legislature agenda for consideration. The second option is the Referendum. Popular referendum is the process by which specific legislation that was passed by their legislature is submitted to the public for rejection. Legislative referendum is when an elected official, the state legislature, an appointed constitutional revision commission or other government body proposes a state constitutional amendment to the people. Seen by many as the most representative means of direct participation in the country’s political life, the initiative is the more common of the two. Initiative and the referendum procedures only exist at local or state levels.

3 Proposition 187, also known as “Save Our State”, passed with 58.8% of the vote and was the first in a long series of subsequent ballot initiatives proposed to citizens of southwestern states, particularly Arizona and California, over the last decade.1 The 1994 initiative’s main provisions excluded illegal aliens from most state funded public

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services. Unauthorized immigrants were prohibited from receiving public health care and their children were forbidden access to elementary, secondary and post-secondary public school education. Provisions 1, 4 and 9 redefined the role of state and local government agencies having to deal with illegal aliens. The agencies were required to create a notification system preventing access to public benefits and/or services by unauthorized aliens, transmit their reports to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and allow the State Attorney General to keep track of them. Law enforcement officers had to verify the citizenship status of any arrested individual suspected of being in the United States illegally and report their findings to the INS.

4 The questions raised by Proposition 187 concerning illegal immigration and the reasons of its spilling into the political arena came at a moment in the early 1990s when, after a thriving economy in the 1980s, California had to face a recession, accompanied by fears of massive job loss. Many Californians believed that the growing state Latino immigrant population during the 1970s and 1980s was the main cause of downturns they had to endure. Employed in the agricultural sector of the border states, labor migrants had become a constant feature of the economic landscape for most of the XX° century.

Migration and the labor market

5 The Second World War engendered fundamental transformations in the industrial and agricultural sectors of the American economy. The war effort required extended labor force participation while creating a vacuum in certain areas of production due to departing enlisted men. The agricultural sector of the Southwest was the first hit. American officials approached the Mexican government during the last months of 1941 regarding the possibilities of hiring agricultural workers. The executive agreement that was signed on August 4, 1942, by the two governments opened the way for wide scale migration of farm workers. The newly signed Bracero Program was a temporary wartime labor effort tailored to the needs of an agricultural establishment who saw in it a dependable, cheap labor force.2

6 In 1943 the program came under the jurisdiction of the War Manpower Commission which also hired workers from the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica and Canada. Not all braceros worked in agriculture. During the war period, thirty-two railroad companies requested and obtained Mexican track workers. More than 80,000 Mexican braceros were recruited for the railroads, half of them working for the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines. The program was a boom to the country’s agricultural sector and especially to the borders states. From 1942 to 1947 Mexican workers made up 70% (220,000 persons) of the total program labor force, the majority of them in California.3 The original agreement stipulated that the program was supposed to come to an end once hostilities were over but Congress, under pressure from the agricultural lobby, allowed it to continue until 1964. Texas growers and ranchers snubbed the Bracero agreement but favored an open border policy giving employers a freer hand in the recruiting procedures undertaken by private labor contractors. The number of braceros in 1960 totaled 122,755 dropping to 30,152 two years later.4 California is only one example, hiring practices in other states were not that different. The farm industry employed non-unionized Mexican workers and kept a heavy hand over wages but the creation in 1962 by César Chávez of the National Farm Workers Association, later the United Farm Workers Union, would change the hiring practices of the agricultural

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sector. Created by the U.S. government, the Bracero program supplied 4.6 million Mexicans as cheap labor to the agricultural sector of the Southwest in the twenty-two years of its existence and paved the way for future illegal immigration.

7 Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s illegal immigrants continued to migrate to the United States in search of jobs without much harassment from the INS even while the country’s immigration policy was becoming more restrictive. The so-called “silent invasion” underway was not new and had never been characterized by the federal government as a danger to American workers. Undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America provided the much-needed low-wage labor in agriculture but also in construction, hotel and domestic services sectors. The rise in Central American migration was rooted not only in economic disparities but also political conflicts. In 1986 the per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Costa Rica was $1,971 and that of Honduras, the poorest country of the region, $780. In the United States it was $16,710.5 Moving north was of economic advantage but those crossing the southern border fleeing armed conflicts in their home land inevitably made them political refugees. However as many of these conflicts were part of U.S. anti-communist foreign policy strategy in the area, Washington never acknowledged the real status of those displaced persons. The potential political refugee or asylum seeker thus became an illegal immigrant, turning him into a much easier target for the INS.6

8 The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was supposed to put an end to this situation but in reality Washington ended up playing a different role.7The first part of the new law tackled the unlawful employment of aliens and unfair immigration- related employment practices. Employers were required not only to verify the identity and employment eligibility of the workers but also to complete and send to the INS officers form I-9 proving the legal status of the person. Employers who did not apply the rules, those continuing to hire illegal immigrants or not checking their status, could face fines and even imprisonment. In reality those sanctions were rarely implemented. Title II concerned the legalization process and program, while Title III did not establish a temporary agricultural workers program but modified the existing H-2 visa program.

9 Legalization of status took the form of an amnesty program. It granted a Temporary resident status to those undocumented aliens who were present in the United States prior to January 1, 1982. Nineteen months after having obtained the Temporary resident status they were able to apply for a Permanent legal status. There were no numerical limits applied and some 3 million undocumented aliens obtained a legal status, but some requirements were imposed. They had to have some knowledge of English, of American history as well as the basic structures of government. If these conditions were not met the Permanent legal status was not denied but applicants had to prove they were actively working to do so.8 Restrictions concerning access to federal funded legal programs were nevertheless applied to those persons who had succeeded in obtaining legal status. Legal immigrants were excluded from the Medicaid program and receiving food stamps during a five-year period.

10 Concerning the specific situation of workers in the agricultural sector, the new law significantly modified the H2 visa category created in 1943 with the Bracero program. H2 visas were conceived for unskilled or skilled laborers to work on a seasonal basis but two new categories were created. The H2-A specifically concerned seasonal agricultural workers while the H2-B visa was extended to sectors such as construction, forestry and

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other services. In both cases the holder of one of the two visas could only stay in the country for a maximum of 3 years. A 350,000 ceiling for agricultural workers was set but once they had obtained the H-2A visa they could eventually move on to other sectors, leaving the possibility for others to come. The jobs concerned attracted few American workers given low wage standards and poor working conditions, which left a job gap for migrant workers, legal and illegal, to fill. The IRCA and the amnesty program temporarily reduced the number of illegal workers in the U.S. but could not reverse recruitment patterns in the agricultural sector that increasingly relied on cheap labor. To a great extent hiring practices of the agricultural sector were responsible for growing numbers of illegals and the anti-immigration response it created.

11 Fears revolving around the issue of illegal immigrants escalated in early 1994 when the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States and Mexico came into effect. The treaty ratified a number of economic agreements that already existed between the three countries but, instead of phasing them out only stepped up the development of maquiladoras or twin plants. Created in the early 1960s on the Mexican side of the border, maquiladoras are duty-free assembly plants that re- export finished products back to the country of origin. In 1994 there were 2,085 maquiladoras employing 582,000 persons, with wages amounting to an average hourly $1.82, eight times less than those earned in the United States.9 One criticism voiced against NAFTA was the absence of immigration from the agreement: the subsequent wage disparities between countries would only encourage illegal labor migration and further endanger the already weak California economy.

Ballot initiatives as a political tool

12 By the 1990s the context of economic globalization, the opening of borders and the implementation of the free trade agreement triggered an unexpected chain reaction against illegal as well as legal immigrants to California. Unspoken concerns revolved around the prospect that wage disparities would create a massive exodus up North, taking local jobs, and that factories and other assembly plants would delocalize South. In both cases the final result was the same, the Mexican worker would take advantage of the situation and endanger the U.S. economy. The “other”, the “illegal” was not only across the border but also inside the country; now the “enemy” had to be fought to preserve California’s prosperity and that of its citizens. Proposition 187 concentrated the debate not only on how illegal immigrants were distorting the character and values of the nation but also on the economic consequences for the state of California and the disengagement of the federal government from its responsibility. Other states, Arizona and Florida, followed the Californian example proposing ballot initiatives of their own.

13 Proposition 187 occurred at a time when the United States was facing new foreign policy challenges. Between 1993 and 1994, the U.S. Coast Guards intercepted 27,473 Haitians and 40,795 Cubans boat people off the Florida coast. A new kind of invasion of the United States was taking place which forced the federal government to take drastic action to safeguard lives and basic values of the nation.10 On February 26, 1993 occurred the first terrorist attack against the Trade World Center by Islamic extremists allegedly linked to Iraq and Pakistan. While in no way related to the situation in California the act exacerbated anti-immigrant bias. It revealed the inefficiency of national security

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agencies and the need for state-level intervention. Security and cultural values became euphemisms to stigmatize and back against immigration.

14 Though not a new fear, immigration perceived as a cultural threat began to take on new proportions due to demographic changes within Border States. Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Washington D.C. based organization working to end illegal immigration and reduce as much as possible the authorization of legal immigrants, seized upon Proposition 187 to battle against the “reconquista” by the Mexican immigrants of America’s long lost southern territory. Proposition 187 was not only conceived as a means of reducing social security rights for immigrants. It was a warning signal against the dangers of ethnic separatism as a socio-political reality, one which would entail catastrophic consequences for the nation’s quickly evolving cultural identity. For many Americans the nation’s new multicultural diversity would exacerbate problems in such areas as the family and make effective assimilation impossible.11

15 While growing numbers of immigrants undeniably impacted economic and social realities, in addition to state policies, the apocalyptic image of the United States losing its culture and homogeneity was not based on any rational approach to such issues. Studies conducted during the late 1980s and early 1990s did conclude that the phenomenon needed to be reconsidered within the changing international political context.12 At the same time claims by Proposition 187 promoters and anti-immigrant groups that high levels of aliens entering the country, mostly Latinos, was detrimental to economies and the social cohesion of the states concerned, were never convincingly born out.13

16 Soon after being voted, Proposition 187 was challenged on the legal grounds that it violated a 1982 Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, that declared that children of illegal immigrants were entitled to public education. The new ruling distinctly stipulated that federal funded welfare services could not be refused by the state as a way to regulate immigration, which fell under federal government jurisdiction. The rulings against the implementation of Proposition 187 or any other state mandated policy made it clear that Washington had to act. On 22 August 1996 President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA),14 better known as the Welfare Reform Act, and a month later the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).15 These two laws recast the debate around Proposition 187 at the level of federal government.

17 Many organizations and community activists considered this the end of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, commonly known as welfare, introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt 60 years earlier. For them, the controversial legislation represented a deep-going restructuration of the nation’s welfare system as well as of immigrants’ rights. The new law denied undocumented immigrants the right to receive food stamps if they were not U.S. citizens, a prohibition extended even to legal refugees and asylees during their first five years in the country. The Republican controlled House and Senate, however, went further than expected in legalizing some provisions of Proposition 187 by granting state and local governments authority to deny assistance to legal immigrants under state and local programs. Legal immigrants were thus deprived of Medicaid health coverage for a five-year period. Just two months before Clinton’s re-election his administration adopted the demagogic rhetoric of

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states rights with regards to the respective roles of local, state and federal government, access to welfare services and immigration rights.

18 After redefining national welfare policy, Congress implemented Proposition 187’s other major aim: the crusade against illegal immigrants. Most protective provisions of legal immigration were omitted from the IIRIRA, including some of the toughest measures ever taken towards illegal immigration while modifying existing refugee and asylum procedures.16 One of the most controversial sections of the new law, Title I, concerned three main goals of Proposition 187—border control, legal entry and interior enforcement. The new act answered one of the recurrent quandaries confronting Californians throughout the 1994 referendum campaign with regards to the security of the state and its citizens: who was in charge; what were the respective prerogatives of government at federal and state levels. The answer came in terms of substantial increases in numbers of Border Patrol agents, 5,000 over five years, and budgeting for the construction of a $12 million, 14-mile triple fence between Mexico and the U.S. to deter illegal entry. If IIRIRA laid out this major overhaul of the INS an even more significant part of the law went unnoticed.

19 Up until this time border and immigration control were relegated to the exclusive authority of the federal government. Title 1 of the law henceforth authorized the U.S. Attorney General to enter new agreements with the various states in order to enhance immigration supervision. Under the new law, State officials, who are not INS personnel, but were trained by federal agents, were now allowed to carry out any type of investigation, apprehend and detain aliens. This provision resulted in a grey zone of multiple interpretations as to whether state or federal agents detained ultimate responsibility, and demonstrated how Washington responded to questions raised by Proposition 187. From the outset, FAIR argued that this new partnership between state and local law enforcement agencies with the INS needed to be rapidly implemented if the federal government were to put an end to illegal immigration. The new procedures went further than expected when providing that local City Councils could have their law enforcement personnel trained by INS agents to arrest illegal aliens and so play an active role in border protection.

20 During the late 1990s the immigration debate would focus on the economic and social opportunities it could offer to the Border States as to the nation; 9-11 changed all of this. Approved by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the newly created Department of Homeland Security made border security, the control of immigration and the fight against terrorism the nation’s top priority.17 Even though Title IV modified some previous provisions it is not an immigration law per se. The new era ushered in by the law nevertheless affected the perception most Americans had of the immigrant, legal or illegal.

21 The wave of ballot initiatives which reemerged with new energy across the country took place in this environment. This time not only illegal but all immigrants, regardless of their status or nationality, became targets of public hostility.18 Ballot initiatives had previously been instrumentalized to impede mass migration via the exclusion of legal and illegal migrants from social and economic programs. After 9-11, state and federal policies began incorporating immigration control into a broader and more intricate gameplan, that of the War on Terror against the “other”: the alien, the immigrant as a potential terrorist and danger to the country’s well-being.

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22 This new portrayal made it easier for anti-immigrant groups to promote a certain number of ballot initiatives restricting access to welfare services or demanding stricter identity control. Immigration continued to be poised as a cultural and economic threat that undermined the basic values of the nation but the reasons for contesting it had changed. In November 2004, Arizona’s Proposition 200 “Protect Arizona Now” passed with 56% of the votes. It limited public benefits to U.S. citizens and empowered state citizens to sue state and local governments for not addressing immigration violations. Proponents claimed that the subsequent millions of dollars in state savings could be devoted to strengthening border security, thereby sending a clear message to illegal immigrants that they were not welcomed. Proposition 200 went one step further than 187 in proposing that proof of citizenship be presented when registering to vote and that a photo ID be shown at the polls. One problem remained, that aside from a passport there is no national official ID in the U.S. It was resolved by the REAL ID Act of 2005.19

23 The new law’s Title II stated that before issuing an ID card states have to meet a number of Federal requirements such as a photo identity document, proof of the person’s social security account number and documentation showing the person’s name and address of principal residence and date of birth. This type of information is required in many countries for the delivery of official ID. What is disturbing here is the blatantly repressive scope of the procedure which links immigration to national security, directly inspired by state-level ballot initiatives. The law modified the eligibility criteria for asylum, limited judicial review concerning immigration decisions, allowed the expeditious construction of militarized barriers between the U.S. and Mexico and widely expanded the definition of “terror related activities”, making an alien inadmissible or deportable as well as ineligible for certain forms of relief.20 During the 2006 mid-term elections, a number of immigrant related ballot initiatives were placed before voters in Arizona, California and Colorado. Some of them failed to obtain the number of signatures required to appear on the ballot while those in Arizona passed with more than 70% of the vote.

24 In California one of the two initiatives failed to obtain the number of required signatures while the other did not pass. Colorado’s Initiative 55, “Defend Colorado Now”, is a case of its own. The initiative proposed to reduce welfare services for illegal immigrants and to prohibit immigrants that are not lawful state residents from receiving locally funded public benefits. The initiative was subsequently declared unconstitutional by the Colorado Supreme Court on the ground that ballot initiatives cannot address more than one issue at a time. But in a special session of the state legislature a new bill including the initiative’s main provisions was passed into law. In doing so the state seized prerogatives in immigration and security which, according to the accepted reading of U.S. Constitutional mandate, was relegated to the federal government.

25 In Arizona four ballot initiatives related to immigration were proposed in November 2006. Two concerned courts and legal rights. Proposition 100, approved with 78% of the votes, denied bail to persons charged of felony if that person is an illegal. Proposition 102 denying civil lawsuit awards in any civil action to persons who are in the U.S. in violation of federal immigration law received 74% of the votes. The English Only Movement, fueled by growing anti-immigrant sentiment over a decade in border-states was successful in abolishing bilingual education in public schools. The movement went

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a step further when backing Arizona’s Proposition 103 that would make English the official language of the state. The initiative, passing with 74%, required government to preserve, protect and enhance English. And yet, few are aware that the federal Constitution does not prescribe English as the official language of the United States. Proposition 300 provided that only citizens and legal residents are entitled to in-state college and university tuition waivers, financial assistance as well as childcare assistance. It was backed by 71% of voters. These propositions do nothing more than transcribe into local policy the guidelines of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. Thus ballot measures became the vector of the Clinton administration’s New Federalism, continuing the trend introduced by his Republican predecessors of giving power back to the states.

Conclusion

26 We see here how the course of economic and security issues launched with Proposition 187 would become a distinctive and component part of the country’s political landscape. Ballot measures may also be understood as a means for local voters to express their hostility and challenge U.S. government inaction on immigration reform. Does this mean that all initiatives, to the extent that this form of direct democracy expresses the people’s will on specific political issues, are necessarily valid?

27 If so, what does this say about immigrant rights and their restrictions in some states? Are Latinos that much different from other immigrant groups or is it only that they are the most visible? The 1960s civil rights movement and ethnic revival resulted in the extended attribution of social benefits. But, over the last 20 years, the importance of ethnicity as a vehicle of social leverage has weakened. At the same time, the geographical concentration of groups, Asians in the California metropolitan areas and Latinos close to the Mexican border, has increased the visibility of foreign cultures and lifestyles, not to mention job market competition. It is perceived by many ballot initiative supporters as a separatist menace. According to Ballotwatch21 the number of ballot initiatives related to immigration in the 2008 elections was quite low. Arizona’s “Stop Illegal Hiring” was an initiative to stop businesses hiring of illegal immigrants and increase legal penalties for immigrants who use false identities while California’s proposal would have increased penalties for all undocumented aliens arrested on felony charges. And both initiatives failed. Could this point to new trends or only a temporary lull before a new xenophobic storm? The tensions surrounding immigration will not just fade away. As the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group and one of the youngest, Latinos continue to be vulnerable and presented as a threat to the economic stability of the border states and the nation’s security. And this at a time of crisis, including its irresistible inclinations towards scapegoating.

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NOTES

1. Aside from Arizona and California, three other states—Colorado, North Dakota and Oregon— have the highest number of ballot initiatives proposals. Not all of them are related to immigration. 2. CRAIG, Richard B., The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1971, 37-40. 3. VAGNOUX, Isabelle, Les États-Unis et le Mexique. Histoire d’une relation tumultueuse, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2003, 257-58. 4. CRAIG, op.cit., 182. 5. SCHOULTZ, Lars, “Central America and the Politicization of U.S. Immigration Policy”, in Christopher Mitchell (ed), Western Hemisphere Immigration and United States Foreign Policy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, 157-219. 6. The U.S. government gives refugee and asylum status if the person is considered to be persecuted. 7. Immigration Reform and Control Act, IRCA, November 6 1986 (Public Law 99-603), U.S. Statutes at Large, 1986, v.100, Part 4, Washington DC, GPO, 1989. 8. HOMER, Matt, “The Ephemeral Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986: Its Formation, Failure and Future Implications”, Hinckley Journal of Politics, v.8, 2007, 45-52. 9. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Statistics, Office of Productivity and Technology. Washington D.C., 1999. Mexican Business Monthly, September 1999 and Maquiladora Industry Analysis, September 1999. 10. CASTRO, Max J., “Cuba the Continuing Crisis”, The North-South Agenda, n°13, April 1995, 4. Lieutenant Commander David A. CINALLI, “Why the Government is Increasingly Depending on the Coast Guard as an Important Player in National Security”, Washington D.C., CSC, 1997, 9-13. 11. GLAZER, Nathan, “The Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States” in Myron Weiner and Tadashi Hanami (eds.), Temporary Workers or Future Citizens? Japanese and U.S. Migration Policies, New York, New York University Press, 1998, 68-71. 12. STANTON RUSSELL, Sharon, “Migration Patterns of U.S. Foreign Policy Interest” in Michael S. Teitelbaum, and Myron Weiner (eds.), Threatened Peoples, Threatened Borders, New York, W.W. Norton, 1995, 39-87. 13. BEAN, Frank D., Robert G. CUSHING and Charles W. HAYNES, “The Changing Demography of US Immigration Flows” in Klaus J. Blade and Myron Weiner (eds.), Migration Past, Migration Future, Oxford, Bergham Books, 1997, 120-52. 14. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, PRWORA, August 22, 1996, (Public Law 104-193), U.S. Statutes at Large, 1996, v.110, Part 3, Washington DC, GPO, 1997, 2105-355. 15. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, IIRIRA, September 30, 1996, (Public Law 104-208), U.S. Statutes at Large, 1996, v.110, Part 4, Washington DC, GPO, 1997, 3009-546. 16. MENÉNDEZ, Mario, “Réfugiés politiques, demandeurs d’asile dans la législation américaine: 1945-2000, de Truman à Clinton”, in Catherine Collomp, and Mario Menéndez (eds.), Exilés et réfugiés politiques aux États-Unis 1789-2000, Paris, éditions du CNRS, 2003. 17. Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, USA PATRIOT Act, October 26, 2001, (Public Law 107-56), U.S. Statutes at Large, 2001 v.115, Part 1 , Washington DC, GPO, 2002, 272-402. 18. GARZA de la, Rodolfo, “Understanding Contemporary Immigration Debates: The Need for a Multidimensional Approach”, SSRC, http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/de_la_Garza.

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19. REAL ID Act, May 11, 2005, (Public Law 109-13), U.S. Statutes at Large, 2005. 20. GARCIA, Michael John, Margaret MIKYUNG LEE & Todd TATELMAN, “Immigration: Analysis of the Major Provisisons of H.R. 418, the REAL ID Act of 2005”, CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress, February 2, 2005, 2-34. 21. A University of Southern California institute that monitors and analyses ballot proposals.

RÉSUMÉS

En 1994, l’État de la Californie approuve la proposition 187 qui restreint l’accès des immigrés illégaux aux services sociaux et aux écoles. Les démarches locales entreprises via les referendums touchent de plus en plus l’immigration illégale et les conséquences économiques sur les politiques des États concernés mais aussi débouchent sur le désengagement de l’État fédéral. Avec les nouvelles législations de 1996, la politique migratoire et celle des droits sociaux ont été fortement modifiées par le Congrès américain qui semble suivre et appliquer une politique de plus en plus restrictive dans la lignée de la proposition 187. La période après les attentats du 11 septembre ne fait que renforcer le besoin de sécurité nationale ainsi que la perception de l’immigré comme un danger. D’où une augmentation de propositions dans certains États, comme l’Arizona en 2006, qui visent à contrôler et à restreindre davantage les droits des immigrés.

Proposition 187 voted by Californians in 1994 was the first in a long series of ballot initiatives proposed by other states limiting access to welfare programs and education to illegal immigrants. Local initiatives and referendums on sensitive political issues, such as illegal immigration, their economic consequences in states and on the disengagement of the federal government have influenced the shaping of future federal legislation and policy formulation. As of 1996 new laws related to immigration and access to welfare benefits followed the main guidelines of Proposition 187; since the 9-11 attacks national security has become the main axis of immigration laws. Recent ballot initiatives have reinforced the perception of the immigrant as a national and cultural danger as Arizona’s Proposition 103 and the English Only Movement did in 2006.

AUTEUR

MARIO MENÉNDEZ Institut d’Études Politiques de Rennes

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Issue-Choice, Messaging, and Organizing: A Sociological Approach to Three Ballot Measures in Colorado in 2006

Guillaume Marche

1 The 2008 and 2010 elections are an index of profound political change in the United States. In the wake of these historical presidential and mid-term elections, it is important to keep sight of previous election cycles, and 2006 was significant on more than one count—not only at the federal level, but also at that of the states. In particular, 2006 was an important stage in the decade-long trend toward the development of ballot measures. One of the states which contributed to the upward trend is Colorado, where voters were consulted on fourteen measures in the 2006 and 2008 ballots, up from six in 2004 and ten in 2002. This state thus appears as an interesting laboratory for studying the significance of ballot initiatives and referendums. The focus of this article is not to debate the pros and cons of the process itself, whether or not they are a reliable way of getting policy enacted or of making up for the shortcomings of representative democracy.1 We mean rather to approach the issue through a sociological lens, in order to assess the significance of this form of participatory democracy for social movements by examining the involvement of civil society in ballot-measure campaigns. As placing issues on the ballot has proved rather efficient for the conservative Right to push its agenda in American politics, one may indeed wonder whether progressive social movements are also able to use popular plebiscites to their own advantage. Or on the contrary, are they somehow at the mercy of whatever conservative measures get put on the ballot? More generally, the question is whether progressive social movement organizations manage to use ballot campaigns to advance their own goals, or whether they have to defensively tailor their action— hence to some extent their agenda—to the conservative ballot onslaught.

2 Colorado is an interesting case to study these issues, due to the presence on the 2006 ballot of two progressive measures with antagonistic fates: an initiative to raise the

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state’s minimum wage, which passed by 53 percent of the vote, and a referendum for the creation of domestic partnerships, which was defeated by the same margin,2 while an initiative to ban same-sex marriage was approved by 56 percent. Such a situation may seem contradictory, or at least paradoxical. That is why the context and reasons for such a contrasted outcome require close scrutiny. These two examples are also instructive for sociological investigation of social movements, as they challenge the researcher to determine whether the success of a ballot-measure campaign is premised upon issue-choice, messaging, or organizing. This contribution neither purports to assess the significance of ballot initiatives in terms of local—versus federal or national— democracy, nor attempts to situate the 2006 ballot initiative campaign in Colorado in the more general political context of the United States, as political scientists do. Rather it takes a microscopic, narrow-angle look at the 2006 campaign on these two issues, in order to gauge what it implied for the progressive social movement organizations which participated in it. This article is thus based on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Denver in March and April 2008, during which we had 22 interviews with 24 progressive social movement leaders, organizers and participants who contributed to the 2006 ballot-measure campaign.3 These non-directive interviews offer enlightening insights into participants’ experience of the 2006 campaign and hence into the strategic challenges posed by ballot measures. Confronting this first-hand material with political science literature on ballot measures and sociological social-movement theory thus provides an opportunity to tackle a seldom-studied aspect of ballot measures.

Initiative and referendum in Colorado: the 2006 ballot

3 Putting an initiative on the ballot in Colorado is a relatively easy process, as this state has one of the lowest qualification thresholds. According to the state Constitution, “signatures by registered electors in an amount equal to at least five percent of the total number of votes cast for all candidates for the office of Secretary of State at the previous general election shall be required to propose any measure by petition” (Colorado State Constitution V, 1:2). In other words, for citizens to put an initiative on the 2006 ballot they merely needed to collect 68,000 voter signatures (currently 76,000). Among the eighteen states which authorize both initiative and referendum Colorado is one of the four—along with Massachusetts, Missouri, and North Dakota—in which qualifying for the ballot is easiest (Initiative and Referendum Institute, 2006). This is partly due to the fact that the standard by which the threshold is defined—a proportion of votes cast for electing the Secretary of State—is attached to a candidate election which usually draws the least participation (Hazouri: interview; Colorado Secretary of State, 2002, 100-04). As a result Colorado has the fourth highest rate of successful constitutional amendment initiatives—the only three states with higher rates being Florida, Oregon, and California (Initiative and Referendum Institute, 2006).

4 Measures can also be submitted to the people’s approval by the Colorado General Assembly (state Congress): submitting a change in an existing statute (law) to referendum requires a simple majority in both houses,4 whereas constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority. The difference between initiatives and referendums is essentially that the former are meant to create new law, whereas the latter may only concern already existing law.5 Furthermore, whether statutory or constitutional, a referendum can also be mandated by popular petition with the same

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number of signatures as for an initiative—“five percent of the total number of votes cast for all candidates for the office of the Secretary of State at the previous general election” (Colorado State Constitution V, 1:3). In effect, most constitutional amendments in Colorado are approved through popular initiative, whereas most state assembly-initiated referendums concern statutory measures.

5 Amendment 42, the measure to raise the state’s minimum wage, was put on the 2006 ballot as an initiative in a concerted effort by a liberal coalition of four organizations: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC), and 9to5 National Organization of Working Women (9to5). Colorado was one of six states—along with Arizona, Montana, Missouri, Nevada, and Ohio—where indexing the state’s minimum wage to inflation was victoriously placed on the ballot that year (Initiative and Referendum Institute, 2006). In Colorado the measure was not statutory, but an amendment to write the minimum wage raise and indexing into Article XVIII of the constitution, a particularly bold—and divisive— strategy.6 There was indeed heated debate among the supporters of a minimum wage increase not only as to how much it should be raised from the $5.15 federal rate—to $6.85 an hour, more, or less—, but also as to whether making it a constitutional amendment was a wise choice.

6 The anti-gay marriage ballot initiative, Amendment 43, which originated with Focus on the Family, a national conservative religious group based in Colorado Springs, has a somewhat more complex history. It was launched in the wake of the 2004 general election, when a record number of eleven states passed constitutional gay marriage bans.7 In 2006 such measures appeared on ballots in eight additional states, including Colorado.8 Focus on the Family had originally targeted a broad exclusion, barring same- sex couples from other types of official recognition, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions, as well as marriage—as in nine of the eleven states which passed anti-gay marriage amendments two years earlier. Opponents of the measure had referred to this as the “dirty version” of the proposed amendment—the “clean version” narrowing the ban to marriage only, as supported for example by the Catholic Church. That was when gay rights advocates decided to launch an initiative for a constitutional amendment to create domestic partnerships. This initiative, filed as Amendment 45,9 was conceived so as to “goad the opponents [of gay rights] into filing the ‘dirty version’—because there would be people in their constituency that would be so upset that we were advancing the idea of partnerships, that they would want to bring the more extreme version to the ballot,” says Pat Steadman, a political consultant with Mendez and Steadman who was one of the campaign’s main drivers (interview). The “dirty version” in other words seemed easier to defeat in the polls than the “clean version”. Also in the plan, in the likely event that the gay-marriage ban was passed, should voters approve both its “dirty version” and Amendment 45, the result would be a constitutional impasse to be solved by the judiciary. This would thus provide an opportunity to have the gay- marriage constitutional ban struck down by the state’s Supreme Court, which would not only amount to defeating the local attack on gay rights, but even to striking a victory in the national battle for the recognition of same-sex couples (Steadman: interview). The anti-gay marriage amendment however was ultimately qualified in its “clean version”, known as Amendment 43.10 As a consequence the Amendment 45 initiative was withdrawn by its promoters, who instead called upon the Colorado

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General Assembly to submit a referendum measure legalizing domestic partnerships, which eventually became known as Referendum I (Zeller 2006).11

7 Colorado voters in 2006 were thus faced with both Referendum I and Amendment 43, the “clean version” of the gay-marriage ban. As Colorado in 2006 was one of the many states where the legislature had already passed a statutory ban on same-sex marriage,12 adding an identical constitutional ban would serve little actual purpose in denying same-sex couples the right to marry, save making the ban more difficult to overturn either in the polls, or by the state’s Supreme Court (D. Smith, DeSantis and Kassel, 2006, 80).13 A constitutional amendment in other words actually added little to the existing statutory definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman: there is thus little question that its promoters intended Amendment 43 as a “wedge issue” aimed at dividing up the Democratic Party’s voting base (Shaw: interview).14 On the contrary, Referendum I originated as a defensive tactic to oppose a severe attack on the recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, rather than as a deliberate plan to enforce liberal policy. It was crafted as an experiment: countering an anti-gay marriage amendment with an alternative “yes” campaign, a more effective plebiscitary device than the unsuccessful “no” campaigns which had been led in all other states where gay-marriage bans had been proposed (Brewer: interview).

8 Progressive movements are generally less prone to putting measures on the ballot than their conservative opponents, who have successfully exploited this political tactic for years. Part of why the Colorado 2006 case is highly interesting, is indeed due to the coexistence of two successful ballot initiatives—one put out by the progressive Left, minimum wage, another by the conservative Right, gay marriage—and one defensive referendum which failed to impair the latter. Since our focus here is not the motives of conservative movements in devising ballot measures, but the impact of such measures upon progressive social movements, we based our study on fieldwork conducted in March and April 2008 in Denver, where we approached organizations, leaders, and activists involved in the 2006 campaigns in favor of the minimum-wage raise (Amendment 42) and of domestic partnerships (Referendum I), and against the gay- marriage ban (Amendment 43). It is worth noting that there was not much of a campaign against Amendment 43, since promoting Referendum I was the main strategy used to undercut the ban on same-sex unions.15 We had interviews with people who collected petition signatures and registered voters,16 went door-to-door canvassing or phone-banking, sent letters and e-mails, created events to attract media visibility, participated in press-conferences and debates, created and distributed voting guides,17 or coordinated any such efforts.

Ballot measures and the significance of issue-choice

9 In assessing the political significance of ballot initiatives political scientists usually address the so-called “spill-over effect” whereby voters’ decisions on ballot propositions spill over onto their choice in the simultaneous candidate elections (Schauffler and Morgan, 1996; Makin, 2006). Some scholars have thus evinced ballot measures’ impact in increasing turnout at the polls (Tolbert, Grummel and D. Smith, 2001), highlighting the fact that their effect on voter participation is stronger in mid- term elections, which have relatively low-key national media exposure (M. Smith, 2001). This is pertinent for our study of the 2006 ballot, a national mid-term election,

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but with particularly high stakes for turn-out in Colorado since it coincided with a gubernatorial election. Other scholars focus on ballot measures’ “priming effect”— namely their capacity to boost the support of voters who are most susceptible to go to the polls for the candidates whom they perceive to be in sync with their views on the issue at hand (D. Smith, DeSantis and Kassel, 2006). These scholars approach ballot measures as a get-out-the-vote tool, not so much in quantitative terms—increasing overall participation—as in qualitative terms—polarizing partisan alignments and securing the votes of a party’s core constituency.

10 This would seem to be the case of Amendment 42, as its placement on the ballot was influenced by opinion poll results showing it was likely to function as an incentive for liberal voters (Hanna: interview), and it is reported to have been “part of a coordinated campaign to increase support for Democratic candidates and possibly influence the balance of power in the U.S. House and Senate” (Initiative and Referendum Institute, 2007, 1). Observations of Amendment 42 suggest that in such direct democracy campaigns, the issues on the ballot matter less than the underlying tactical aim they are meant to serve—i.e. to introduce sharp political divisions. Daniel Klawitter, who is now a religious outreach organizer with the Front Range Economic Strategy Center (FRESC),18 was involved in the 2006 Amendment 42 campaign as a union representative in the health-care division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). In candidate elections, he reports, you usually campaign for “the lesser of two evils,” but the minimum-wage campaign issue “was so clear” (interview). Indeed, whereas the legislative process is based upon bargaining and compromise through the successive readings of a bill within legislative bodies (Jones: interview), with ballot measures “you can’t compromise, you can’t really discuss, it’s an all-or-nothing measure. You either vote it all up, or vote it all down,” says Michael Huttner, executive director of ProgressNow.org (interview).19 Amendment 42 may thus be interpreted as an attempt to raise a wedge issue in order to boost the liberal vote, with a significant degree of success since 2006 marks a historic victory for Colorado’s Democratic Party, which confirmed its majority in both houses of the General Assembly and replaced Republican Governor Bill Owens with a Democrat, Bill Ritter, the first time since 1958 that the Democratic Party held the governorship and a majority in both state legislative houses (Gathright and Hartman, 2006).

11 Referendum I (pro-domestic partnership) differs from Amendment 42 (pro-minimum wage) in this respect, insofar as Amendment 43 was aimed at bringing out same-sex marriage as a wedge issue, whereas Referendum I was a tactical firewall against Amendment 43. That is why its promoters played down the partisan divide and instead insisted that “having a domestic partnership is an issue that can affect anyone regardless of whether they are a Democrat, or a Republican,” in the words of Ru Johnson, African American outreach coordinator with Coloradans for Fairness and Equality (CFFE), the umbrella organization which steered the Referendum I campaign (interview). Of course, ballot campaigns do tend to highlight ideological fault lines, so that voters will take an unambiguous stance on the issues, and although CFFE refused to see Referendum I in partisan terms, it had to make voters get a clear-cut sense of what it identified the stakes to be: “basic legal rights”. The campaign however took care to not situate that fault line with regards to partisan politics: CFFE’s executive director Sean Duffy is notoriously Republican—he used to be a close advisor to former Governor Bill Owens—and the campaign in fact aimed at bridging the partisan divide. Its

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target audience was the middle of the political spectrum: “There was this very fine line; in American politics we have this moveable middle,” says Denise Whinnen, one of the leading strategists in CFFE who is now deputy director of community relations at the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado (GLFC).20 “And it was that middle that we needed to talk to and convince that this was a just and fair argument” (interview). In essence, by claiming that domestic partnership is not marriage but a matter of basic legal rights, the Referendum I campaign endeavored to short-circuit the wedge-issue strategy of Amendment 43’s promoters.

12 Furthermore, although Amendment 43 was successful insofar as it passed, the 2006 election in Colorado resulted more generally in severe defeat for the Republican Party. This suggests that ballot measures function politically in paradoxical ways: on the one hand, the overall result implies that significant numbers of Democratic voters said “yes” to Amendment 43 and “no” to domestic partnerships; but on the other hand, one cannot discount the importance of Republicans’ voting the opposite way on these two ballot measures. This means that the Republican vote, no less than the Democratic vote, should never be regarded as monolithic. As elsewhere in the West, Republicans in Colorado adhere to a strong libertarian streak, and though the state is home to what Bill Vandenberg, executive director of the Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC),21 calls “the Vatican of the evangelical Right”—namely Colorado Springs, home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and several other evangelical institutions—it is also one of the nation’s least religiously observant states, he notes: “Western states have a reputation of conservatism, but a lot of it is privacy and keep your laws off my body” (interview). For example, Colorado, which in 1893 was among the first states to grant women full suffrage, is certainly not one of the states with the harshest restrictions on women’s access to abortion (Guttmacher Institute, 2010). The notion that same-sex unions are an effective wedge issue for getting out the conservative vote therefore must be subject to caution: this is seen in Colorado in 2006 as in the 2004 presidential election for example (Ansolabehere and Stewart, 2005; Egan and Sherrill, 2006, 6; Hillygus and Shields, 2005; Langer and Cohen, 2005).

13 The three ballot measures under scrutiny in our study would therefore lead to mutually contradictory conclusions if studied from the angle of their get-out-the-vote potential. What this discrepancy suggests is that analyzing ballot measures mainly as voter mobilization tools fails to reveal their deeper political import.

14 The other main angle from which political scientists approach ballot measures is voter education. Quantitative political science literature documents a positive impact of ballot measure on voters’ engagement and knowledge (Tolbert, McNeal and D. Smith, 2003; M. Smith, 2002). “When elections permit people to make choices on substantive issues, politics might seem more relevant to their lives, and their interest in it could be piqued,” writes Mark Smith (2002, 894). One way of wondering whether ballot measures foster voter education is to examine whether they provide the public with enough information to incite them to vote. The 2006 Colorado case holds mitigated lessons on this count. For example, Cathryn Hazouri, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado, which endorsed both Amendment 42 and Referendum I, and officially opposed Amendment 43, explains that the internal language used by the ACLU differed from its public language. For example, although the ACLU of Colorado has a poverty and economic justice policy—unlike the national ACLU, which is not involved in economic issues—there was some internal debate about

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whether the organization should endorse Amendment 42, and the winning argument was one which reconciled economic and cultural issues: “People who are constantly concerned about making decisions about food and clothes, or food and transportation don’t have the stamina, usually, to enforce their civil liberties and civil rights, and it’s only fair that they should have the same ability to do that as anyone else;” likewise, “if a gay person can’t decide to love whomever he or she wants, the fact that they may make a hundred dollars an hour doesn’t make any difference, because they will have to behave in a furtive manner, they will have to hide and lie, and that can’t be a very pleasant life” (interview). In other words, cultural rights and economic justice are inseparable. However, she confesses, “I’m very pragmatic: winning the ballot was more important than educating voters, because of the immediate effect it would have on these populations. So I try to link the issues to the general public later” (interview). Thus, in order to avoid upsetting potential supporters of increasing the minimum wage by bringing up fairness to LGBT people, or the reverse, the ACLU abstained from educating voters on what is an important element of its conception of civil liberties and fundamental rights. In this case, consequently, the short-term goal of winning the ballot tends to outweigh that of deepening and broadening voters’ understanding of the very issues about which they are consulted.

15 But ballot measures also raise some more fundamental issues as regards voter education. They may actually be rather deceptive, as the 2008 campaign in Colorado illustrates. The movement led by Ward Connerly was promoting an anti-affirmative action initiative to be placed on the ballot in 2008, which was entitled “Colorado Civil Rights Initiative”; petition-gatherers were able to collect signatures from supporters of racial and ethnic fairness—who do support affirmative action—for an initiative actually meant to do away with it (Vandenberg: interview; Frosch, 2008).22 But aside from sometimes disorienting voters about the issues, ballot measures can spread erroneous ideas about institutional processes. Like many other activists, for instance, Hazouri is wary of initiatives and referendums which amend the constitution. “Having the constitution amended so easily isn’t good government,” she claims. That is why she not only deplores a history of voters being confused, or actually deceived, on the issues themselves, but she also believes that the signature threshold should be higher for constitutional initiatives than for statutory ones, that the number of signatures required should be broken down by district so as to make sure that initiatives reflect a statewide desire to change the constitution, and that a qualified majority in the polls should be necessary for changing the constitution (interview).23 However, as a result of the state’s lax amending process, writes Dennis Polhill, “[p]robably about one-quarter of Colorado’s 42 initiated constitutional amendments could have been statutes instead” (2006, 6). What this means is that, although the plebiscitary process can be educative in itself, as voters become more informed about certain issues and more engaged in the outcome of voting, it has several drawbacks: one is to narrowly define and thus oversimplify complex issues, another is to create confusion about political institutions.

16 This explains why active participants in ballot campaigns sometimes consider constitutional amendment measures to be a double-edged sword. From a strategic point of view, Rich Jones, director of policy and research at The Bell Policy Center,24 recalls that the proposal to write the minimum-wage increase into the constitution cost the campaign the endorsements of almost all Colorado newspapers’ editorial boards (interview). This, he thinks, accounts for Amendment 42’s relatively narrow margin compared to opinion polls prior to the ballot (Jones, 2006). Katie Groke, then public

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affairs coordinator at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, is wary of amending the constitution for a somewhat more fundamental reason: since constitutional jurisprudence is the basis of women’s access to abortion in the United States, activists in the pro-choice movement, she thinks, ought to address any constitutional change with caution (interview).25 In-depth voter education would require setting constitutional law in context. Instead, acknowledges Terri McMaster, director of Lutheran Advocacy Ministry (LAM) of Colorado,26 even though her organization justified writing the minimum-wage increase in the constitution by saying “it’s close enough to a human right that it belongs in the constitution,” the real motivation was one of political expediency: “we don’t trust our politicians not to undo it in some time, so we put it in the constitution to make it permanent” (interview).

17 These shortcomings of ballot measures in educating voters explain why several campaigners we interviewed favor seeking change through the legislative process rather than through direct democracy.27 Katie Groke thus notes that, although he is known for not being pro-choice, Governor Ritter in 2007 signed into law a bill legalizing access to emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault.28 Pat Steadman likewise refers to the successful passage of a change in the state’s employment non- discrimination act (ENDA) adding sexual orientation and gender expression to the list of protected categories,29 as an illustration that the state legislature is a safer venue for promoting LGBT rights than appealing to the voters. The same year, the legislature also passed a bill making second-parent adoption available to same-sex couples—that is to say allowing the same-sex partner of a biological parent to adopt.30 “I’ve kind of had it with the idea of counting on the electorate to do the right thing, because they’re too easily swayed by wedge politics, emotional issues, and fear, and misinformation,” Steadman says. Issues of economic inequality, or environmental problems, he adds, “are harder to distort: people have a more fixed concept of what it is—a minimum wage, or open-space conservation—than something with which they’re not as familiar. Marriage, they thought they were familiar with, and they would vote for that” (interview). Steadman here draws a distinction between issues voters do know about and issues they think they know about, which throws into doubt the very notion of voter education. Political scientist Mark Smith’s analysis at once coincides with, and helps qualify, Steadman’s skepticism, as he points to the difference between voters’ “knowledge” of issues, and their “ability” to make informed decisions about them (2002, 896). Without disowning the quantitative data indicating that ballot measures do contribute to increasing political knowledge, Smith indeed calls for evaluations of the process to pay attention to such qualitative factors as “whether initiatives undermine minority rights” and “whether voters make informed decisions on initiatives” in particular (2002, 901).

18 Furthermore, the prevalence of homophobia among the general public, for example, suggests that there is a bias against putting cultural rights before the electorate. But at the same time, the example of minimum wage implies that there may be deterrents against promoting economic issues before the legislature, where the restaurant industry enjoys much stronger support than among the Colorado population at large (Jones: interview).31 In addition to these structural problems, Steadman’s remark also suggests that cultural issues are particularly dependent on the short-term context. Referendum I’s defeat is thus often partly ascribed to its coincidence with the New Jersey Lewis v. Harris ruling on October 25, 2006. Two years after the introduction of domestic partnerships, the Supreme Court of that state ruled that it was

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unconstitutional under the state constitution’s equal protection clause to deny same- sex couples the rights afforded married couples (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006).32 Thus, just two weeks before the 2006 ballot, this development gave credibility to the claim by Referendum I’s opponents that saying domestic partnership is not marriage was a sham, and that the measure was in effect intended as the first step toward legalizing same-sex marriage (De Cambra: interview; Kim, 2006b). Referendum I’s chances of approval were also hampered by the Ted Haggard scandal, which erupted five days before the November 7, 2006 ballot.33 Ironically, Michael Jones—the male escort who had got paid for sexual intercourse by Haggard and decided to expose him— did so in the belief that he would thus discredit his client and, in turn, the anti-gay marriage initiative he actively supported (Quintero, 2006). He contributed instead to what Bobby Clark, deputy director of ProgressNowAction,34 calls the “ick” factor which played out against the domestic-partnership referendum: “The Ted Haggard story reminded people that gay people have sex and that that isn’t a good thing” (interview). Hypotheses about the impact of last-minute context changes seem to be confirmed by the sudden drop in support for Referendum I which was measured by opinion polls within the week prior to Election Day (Zeller, 2006; Frank, 2006; Kim, 2006a).

19 Mobilizing around ballot measures therefore raises important inner conflicts for social movements. Ballot measures’ significance of course cannot be subsumed to their immediate purpose. Aside from the short-term objective of winning victories on specific issues, one of the apparent potential benefits of participating in such campaigns is to educate the citizenry on social movements’ long-term goals. However, given the questions assailing the effectiveness of voter education in ballot campaigns, one may wonder whether they do not instead trap progressive social-movement organizations into campaigning that diverts their resources from their original mission. Social movements’ aim indeed goes beyond making strategic gains on a given issue or set of issues, or on behalf of a given group of people: they may be defined as forms of collective action mobilized by conflict and geared toward redefining the terms of a society’s social contract (Touraine, 1988; Melucci, 1996). Educating the citizenry then is an integral part of what they are about. This is true of minority-based social movements fighting for recognition: recognition demands not only that marginalized groups be allowed at the table, but also that the terms of the conversation be altered to accommodate them (Taylor, 1994; Ferree et al., 2002). From this theoretical standpoint, minority-based social movements are about challenging the boundaries of inclusion: this necessarily involves redefining social norms through contentious, democratic deliberation, and hence challenging power relations (Guidry and Sawyer, 2003; Mouffe, 1996). And this appears to be just as true of social movements driven by economic inequality, as they call into question the very definition of fairness in the distribution of material resources, by submitting it to the same contentious deliberation.

20 As a democratic process which does not quite hold its promise of enhancing citizens’ ability to grasp the ins and outs of issues, ballot measures seem to put a premium on— in Habermassian terms—“mass opinion” rather than “public opinion”, the former being “a pathological condition” of the public sphere in which opinion is controlled and exchanged asymmetrically (Staats, 2004, 586). Ballot measures may in this sense be regarded as a diversion of social movements’ resources, since they put a lot of stress on progressive organizations, beyond the results they may yield. Taking once again the internal ACLU debates as to whether to endorse Amendment 42, one recurrent issue, as Cathryn Hazouri recalls, was whether the proposed raise—approximately 30 percent—

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was sufficient or not: “What we really wanted was a real living wage—but the decision we had to make was: do we want to have half the loaf, or do we want to stay out of it because it’s not the whole loaf?” (interview). Also considering the political quandary as to whether incremental gains fundamentally undermine long-term strategic goals, Pat Steadman and Jeff Thormodsgaard, who both actively campaigned for Referendum I, likewise report that several LGBT organizations and spokespeople—including among the Colorado Stonewall Democrats35—had mixed feelings about Referendum I because it was not full marriage (interview). In other words, not only do ballot measures fall short of what Alberto Melucci calls the “symbolic challenge” of social movements (1985), but they also apparently fail to deliver in terms of social movements’ instrumental goals.

Social-movement strategy: issue-choice and messaging

21 These remarks point out the need to analytically distinguish between issue choice and messaging, for seldom do the strategic short-term goals which a social movement embraces at any given time fully coincide with its overarching agenda. As Hazouri aptly puts it, “half a loaf now isn’t bad, if you can get the other half later. You’re not selling out—you’re just buying less at the moment” (interview). In other words, issue-choice— as opposed to longer-term strategic considerations—is perhaps not the most pertinent criterion for assessing the significance of ballot measures for social movements.

22 What on the other hand are the lessons to be learned from the way in which political messages were articulated in the 2006 ballot-measure campaign in Colorado? For a better understanding of social movements, a striking difference is to be noted between the campaigns for Amendment 42 and for Referendum I: the former was personalized, in that it crafted its message in such a way as to highlight its concrete implications for real-life people, whereas the latter treated it as a more abstract matter of principle. The minimum-wage campaign was focused on informing the public about the personal experience and difficulties of people living at minimum wage. Here is how Linda Meric, national executive director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women (9to5),36 describes one way her organization campaigned for Amendment 42: Our members shared their stories with reporters about what it was like to try to work at minimum wage and to support your family. We utilized that to do a few things. One is to put a human face—this really is an issue that affects people—but also to debunk a little bit the myths that are out there about who earns the minimum wage: you know, some of the business groups will constantly say that minimum- wage earners are just teenagers flipping hamburgers for their first job, and it’s not the truth—the people who are working at minimum wage are 9to5 members who are women trying to support children on these jobs, and having a very hard time (interview, emphasis mine).

23 Noteworthy in this statement is the direct relationship it establishes between the stated tactical device—“put a human face”—and the perceived truth of the matter —“debunk the myths”. Other organizations in the campaign also provided the media with real-life stories of people struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage, such as Jeffrey Edwards, a member of ACORN who was featured in an in-depth Denver Post article one week before the ballot (McGhee, 2006).37 His story was included in “Seven Days at Minimum Wage”, a video blog co-sponsored by ACORN and the AFL-CIO, and hosted by Roseanne Barr, the actress playing the lead character in the soap opera

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Roseanne in the 1990s, whose ongoing popularity helped publicize the individual stories in the video blog.38

24 To better grasp the strategic significance of this personalized campaign, one may turn to the sociological theory of collective action frames. Initiated in particular by sociologists Robert Benford and David Snow, framing theory approaches participants in social movements “as signifying agents actively engaged in the production of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers” (Benford and Snow, 2000, 613). Frames are the meanings, the narratives by which movement actors make sense of their collective action (Benford and Snow, 1992, 137). They fall into three categories: diagnostic (whereby actors interpret the causes of the situation they intend to change), prognostic (which formulate the intended outcomes), and motivational (which provide actors with significant reasons for mobilizing) (Benford and Snow, 2000, 617-18). The examples above suggest that the minimum-wage campaign’s strategy displayed a high level of congruence between the various frames within which it operated. It provided its audience with an analysis of current social ills (diagnostic frame), an easily accessible way to redress them (prognostic frame), and a good reason to identify and feel personally concerned with the issue at hand (motivational frame), all of which were articulated in mutually consistent terms.

25 The picture is strikingly different with the domestic-partnership campaign, due to the political risks of being explicit about homosexuality. Says Denise Whinnen: We tried to do things differently than what had been done in any other state, and the message was that this was basic legal rights. So we actually went through the statutes and looked at the kinds of things that same-gender partners were not allowed to participate in legally, and we made cases for things like hospital visitation, things that will happen around wills and probate, what will happen with children. We really tried to take the inflammatory rhetoric and emotional pieces out, and said “these are just basic legal rights, things that people should be able to do together in a partnership.” (interview)

26 The point of this strategy was to deflect the opponents of LGBT rights’ most extreme rhetoric by articulating the issue in language that was meant to defuse it. The justification was also that in order to pass, Referendum I must be made palatable to voting blocs which could not be taken for granted as favoring LGBT rights. Maria De Cambra, who was then outreach coordinator with the Latino community for Coloradans for Fairness and Equality and is currently program director at Latina Initiative,39 found it crucial to make domestic partnerships a “human issue” rather than a “gay issue”. The point was to emphasize Latinos’ belief in human rights, in order to avoid the widespread reluctance among Latinos to explicitly discuss homosexuality—a reluctance which all too often generates the stereotype that “Latinos don’t like gays” (interview).

27 But more generally, Whinnen insists, It was a deliberate strategy to try something different from what had been tried in other states. What had been tried in other states clearly wasn’t working, because we were losing every single ballot in the country, so making the emotional appeal did not work, it was not enough to move people, so we were trying to find what people need to hear to think about this in a different way (interview).

28 The domestic-partnership campaign therefore developed a universalizing frame: establishing some degree of interpersonal identification between voters and the potential beneficiaries of the measure was to be achieved by adapting the image of the latter to the allegedly universal reference frame of the former, and certainly not by

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attempting to bring mainstream voters to understand the particularized experience of same-sex couples. To put it plainly, the message was intentionally normalized. But the main point of making a legal-rights argument was to frame the issue as an abstract one, and thus deflect the dangers of discussing the potentially disturbing specifics of a same-sex couple’s experience. Therefore what people needed to hear, strategists of the Referendum I campaign gauged, was indeed not about homosexuality. Every participant at every level in the campaign was thus cautiously instructed that “it’s basic legal rights, it’s not marriage,” points Jeff Thormodsgaard. He also recalls for example that, though gay and an official spokesperson for the campaign, he was not expected to use his identity as a discussion point when addressing audiences, for instance by referring to his own, real-life experience (interview).

29 The universalizing legal-rights argument cast the issue in normative terms, since the norm in democracy is for all individuals to enjoy equal rights. The legal-rights argument was thus tantamount to claiming that this issue could and should be widely approved, on a principled basis, at the polls. There wasindeed a strong rationale for this strategy, since throughout the 2006 run-up it was realistic to expect Amendment 43 to be backed by a majority of voters (Merritt, 2006). Domestic-partnership campaign organizers understood that for many, perhaps most Colorado voters there was something almost obvious to saying marriage is between a man and a woman—“like saying the sky is blue,” says Michael Huttner (interview)—so Referendum I was intentionally framed in “conservative” terms. Thormodsgaard goes so far as to say “it was a campaign geared toward Republicans, run by a Republican, a very conservatively oriented message—messaging was very Republican” (interview). The whole point was indeed to target people who would vote “yes” on Amendment 43 anyway to vote “yes” on Referendum I as well.40 Michael Brewer, who is currently the executive director of the Brett Family Foundation,41 was then the legal director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of Colorado (The Center) and a consultant with the Referendum I campaign in charge of disseminating campaign material to the clergy statewide. He makes a case for the mainstreaming, dehomosexualizing message which was chosen, by claiming it was a simple matter of demographics and arithmetic: the LGBT community is very small, and was not even unanimous about Referendum I—one minority will not settle for less than marriage, another considers that marriage and civil unions have a class bias and ought therefore not to be goals of the LGBT movement. This further enhanced the need to address a predominantly straight, presumably mainstream electorate if Referendum I was to muster the support of more than fifty percent of voters (interview).

30 The universalizing frame resulted in one television ad featuring a man in a hospital corridor, saying nothing but looking deeply anguished, with voice-over explaining how couples deprived of official recognition may be separated in times of difficulty: “What if the doors were shut simply because you were gay? No matter who you are, commitment is commitment. Learn more about Referendum I.”42 Bobby Clark is at odds with the fact that this and other pro-domestic partnership ads never showed actual same-sex couples: “It was very difficult to make an issue [whose language] is about gay couples not about gay couples, so it had to be about gay couples” (interview). On the contrary, one anti-Referendum I advertisement featured a gay couple visiting an attorney to make legal arrangements securing their rights as a couple: the scenario is a conversation between the three characters where the gay couple discuss their issues—

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hospital visitation, home-owning, funeral arrangements—and the attorney reassures them, until a voice-over concludes: “Gay activists want you to believe domestic partnerships are about benefits, but they already have those legal rights. Coloradans are fair, but we don’t want counterfeit marriage. Vote ‘yes’ on Amendment 43 and ‘no’ on Referendum I.”43 The anti-domestic partnership advertisement was thus paradoxically more embodied, less abstract and removed from same-sex couples’ real- life concerns than the one in support.

31 Benford and Snow’s definition brings light to the significance of frames: “collective action frames are action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization,” they write (2000, 614). Striking in this statement is the parallel it draws between objective considerations (“meanings”, “legitimate”), and subjective ones (“beliefs”, “inspire”). This suggests that collective action frames may be all the more effective as the two converge, an insight confirmed by the sociology of identity and subjectivity (Calhoun, 1994; Dubet, 1994). To some extent the meanings in the motivational frame used by the Referendum I campaign in order to legitimate a “yes” vote was at odds with the beliefs in the diagnostic and prognostic frames which inspired the activists. Ru Johnson expresses this feeling when she compares the Amendment 42 and Referendum I campaigns: Minimum wage? It’s simple: we want to raise the minimum wage. Why do we want to raise the minimum wage? Because people are not making enough money—that’s also something that can be seen as having a lot of passion in it, whereas domestic partnership: that was seen from the beginning as a very legislative initiative.

32 Her discourse actually abounds with terms denoting enthusiasm when referring to the former campaign, and terms denoting caution when referring to the latter (interview). According to Johnson, whereas the minimum-wage campaign made for actors’ subjective involvement in their message, the domestic-partnership campaign used a frame which distanced, or alienated actors from their message. This suggests, to borrow another set of concepts from framing theory, that the set of meanings used by the Referendum I campaign specifically in order to carry out its collective action—its “organizational frame”—was at odds with some of its actors’ deeply held beliefs about the significance of the mobilization to which they were contributing—the campaign’s “master frame” (Benford and Snow, 1992, 138; 2000, 619).

33 One may argue, however, that the rights-based strategy was not fundamentally flawed, for Amendment 43—which the proposed creation of domestic partnerships was initially meant to counter—passed, but not by a landslide and with a significantly narrower margin than in several other states.44 Moreover, Referendum I in fact came fairly close to passing, since it failed by fewer than 40,000 votes (Colorado Secretary of State, 2006). The outcome of the vote, moreover, was affected by a series of technical problems with voting machines on Election Day, which prevented approximately 15 to 20,000 people in Denver in particular—one of the state’s most liberal constituencies—from either voting, or having their ballots counted (Brewer: interview; Merritt and Human, 2006). Additionally the creation of new voting locations, vote-centers, in application of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, resulted in many disoriented voters not finding their polls, discouragingly long lines in some places, and some vote-centers running out of ballots (Hazouri: interview; Fair Vote Colorado, 2006; Pew Center on the States, 2006), which presumably cost Referendum I additional votes of support.

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34 On a more symbolical plane, Michael Brewer actually considers the mere fact that its opponents could not afford to disregard Referendum I altogether, but had to actively fight it in order to secure the passage of Amendment 43, as a victory in itself: “It bugged the hell out of them,” he comments. “I’m glad we did it, I think we could have done better, I think we could have won, I really do, but I’m really glad we did it” (interview).45 The symbolical spin-off of a result in the polls can indeed be very important, as suggested by Linda Meric, who claims that the degree of public discourse and awareness generated by the Amendment 42 campaign has increased 9to5’s credibility with elected officials in the legislature, for example: it became easier to generate legislative support for the three bills it successfully advocated in 2008.46 Besides, Jane Feustel, who is a community organizer at Colorado Progressive Action and actively participated in the Amendment 42 campaign,47 claims that victory in the polls is not always what matters the most, by pointing to the anti-gay marriage amendment in neighboring Arizona. Most observers ascribe its 2006 defeat to its broad language: Arizona Proposition 107 specified that “no legal status for unmarried persons shall be created or recognized by [the] state or its political subdivisions that is similar to that of marriage” (emphasis mine), thereby making it impossible for different-sex couples as well as same-sex couples to seek official recognition other than marriage.48 Noting that the anti-Proposition 107 campaign emphasized how its passage would affect straight couples, because that was the angle with the broadest appeal, Feustel concludes that they may have won in the polls, but they lost politically by failing to address issues of equality for LGBT people (interview). Thus a short-term electoral victory may, in the longer term, end up not serving LGBT rights.

35 Conversely this implies that, even though it lost in the polls, Referendum I could pay off in the longer run if it engaged voters in significant political conversations. But the question is whether a public debate on LGBT rights actually occurred. Bobby Clark’s assessment is that for most Coloradans the campaign existed in the commercials they saw on television. You’d go to parties, nobody talked about it. It was as if it didn’t exist: it existed in commercials, but there was no movement to it. […] It was not really that the message was not a good message, it’s more that the idea of this never really worked itself into the social—into the public dialogue. (interview)

36 This statement is but one of the clearest articulations of a broadly shared feeling among our interviewees.

37 The subsequent question which arises is therefore what makes it possible to engage voters in significant conversations that would, if not guarantee victory in the polls, at least allow for some in-depth voter-education. Is it predicated on the message? Our previous remarks and Clark’s assessment suggest that such is not the case: framing Referendum I in terms of basic legal rights was in part meant to do, and could have done, just that. As a matter of fact, the minimum-wage Amendment 42 campaign did not carry a message of radical social transformation, either, but instead painted its opponents as special-interest groups and appealed to a common-sense notion: “hard work deserves fair pay” (Colorado Progressive Coalition 2006).49 So there was something rather mainstream about its message too. And yet, one of the clear outcomes of our field research is that the minimum-wage campaign did generate significant political debate. Our first conclusion was that an instrumental analysis of ballot measures’ impact upon electoral politics does not allow us to grasp the full political meaning of ballot measures; what our perspective on campaign frames has just shown,

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furthermore, is that messaging, no more than issue-choice, exhausts the matter of ballot measure’s sociological significance with regard to social movements.

Civic engagement and the political significance of organizing

38 These remarks address the issue of how campaigns relate to audiences, which is not only a matter of messaging, but also of organizing. Katie Groke cites people who would have actually benefited from domestic partnerships but did not feel concerned enough to go to the polls, concluding that no vote can be taken for granted. Extending the matter to the anti-abortion ballot initiative which the pro-choice movement was facing in the 2008 ballot, she claims: Just because people come and buy pills from us doesn’t mean they’re going to vote on our issues: we have to earn their vote, we have to kiss their ass, basically, to make it feel like it’s the end of the world for them—and we have to make it so personal to their specific person that they get it: it’s like dating! Getting someone to go to the polls is like getting someone to go on a date with you. (interview)

39 Beyond its humorous bluntness and exaggeration, the statement is particularly interesting in that the amorous comparison lays the emphasis on how personal a commitment voting is, and the very term “earn” points to the effort involved. Likewise, Jeff Thormodsgaard claims that the Referendum I campaign basically took the LGBT vote for granted, therefore abstained from spending resources to mobilize its own base, and hence alienated it: “The message also ostracized the community to a certain degree —ostracized the community from really jumping on board” (interview). These considerations differ from the notion developed above about campaigners being alienated from their own message. The point here is the status of the LGBT community as audience, rather than protagonist of the campaign, though the two are interrelated.

40 Like other interviewees, Groke understands the rationale for reaching out to the moveable middle of the electorate by providing it with a harmless interpretation of the domestic-partnership ballot measure, but that, she claims, is “what you do after you motivate your base.” Her argument is that the LGBT community was the campaign’s core constituency, who “live next door to the mushy middle, or their sister is the mushy middle, or they have friends in the mushy middle. So if you’re not educating them on the message, and why it’s so important and they should get to the polls, they’re not talking to these people who might not already be convinced” (interview). Interesting in this statement is that it criticizes CFFE’s strategy in terms strikingly similar to those quoted above by Denise Whinnen to justify it: it was all a matter of hitting the “mushy” or “moveable” middle. But whereas Whinnen referred to messaging, Groke here tackles a question of organizing: for her the LGBT community should have been the campaign’s primary audience so that they may have become its most dedicated promoters. In terms of framing theory, the campaign’s frame seems to have lacked resonance, which Benford and Snow define as “the extent to which [a frame] resonates with the life world of adherents and constituents as well as bystanders” (1992, 140). In this instance, by failing to identify the LGBT community as its constituency, the campaign missed an opportunity for LGBT protagonists to convey to the broader audience a frame endowed with narrative fidelity, which is the degree to which “proffered framings […] resonate with their targets’ cultural narratives” (2000,

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622). As highlighted by Benford and Snow, frames are indeed not given, but negotiated (2000, 614-18): they are at once the starting point and already the result of collective action. What is at stake here is therefore a matter of organizing in order to mobilize.

41 By comparison, organizing to mobilize core audiences is what the Amendment 42 campaign paid a lot of attention to. Jane Feustel’s job for example was part of an effort funded by Women’s Voices Women Vote50 to target single-women voters. Throughout the 2006 run-up she canvassed on behalf of the Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC) in areas that were not covered by other ballot-measure campaigns or by candidate campaigns, such as Aurora, a lower-income Eastern suburb of Denver.51 Aurora was targeted as a traditionally Republican constituency, based on analyses showing that this was due to lack of voting on the part of lower-income people, rather than to actual across-the-board conservative preferences (interview). Feustel thus clearly participated in a get-out-the-vote effort; however bringing low-income voters to the polls was not just a matter of winning a short-term victory, but of enfranchising a whole segment of the electorate. For 9to5, as well as CPC and ACORN, voter registration and education is part of the regular agenda, so ballot measures in a sense serve as one more opportunity to register new voters and educate low-propensity voters, says Linda Meric. In 2006, 9to5 thus campaigned for Amendment 42 in such places as Commerce City, a low-income community with typically infrequent or unregistered voters who are also among the people most closely concerned with issues of minimum wage (Meric: interview).

42 Enfranchising unregistered or low-propensity voters demands substantial organizational efforts. Lindsey Hodel is the coordinator of the 501(c)(3) Roundtable,52 which in 2006 directly addressed 30,000 registered low-propensity voters to inform them about voting by mail, which significantly increased the likelihood that they would actually vote. These voters received literature by mail, followed up by two phone-calls, a procedure which usually yields an average response rate of 0.5 to 2 percent. This effort led 1,300 such voters to register to vote by mail, a response rate of approximately 5 percent. The 501(c)(3) Roundtable also endeavors to incite citizens to hold their elected officials accountable, a long-term voter-education process requiring organizations to keep their constituencies informed about issues between election cycles (interview). What this example shows is not so much whether ballot measures imply get-out-the-vote tactics, for in a sense they are always somehow bound to. The question rather is how social-movement organizations get out the vote, and for what purpose.

43 From this point of view, issue-choice and messaging are but two tools for “inspiring people” (Vandenberg: interview) to overcome their distaste of politics and politicians if need be. For Ben Hanna, head organizer at Denver ACORN, one of the organizations which initiated Amendment 42, “when you can tie something like that—something that’s going to directly affect somebody—to voting, then it starts to take it out of the realm of like, ‘that is politics, and this is my life’” (interview). The challenge is therefore to reconcile voters with voting, not by artificially enhancing partisan divides, but by bridging the gap between the realm of the political and the realm of experience. Thus, Meric testifies, when ballot campaigns politicize issues which do make a difference in people’s lives, they become an efficient way for people to “enter an organization and get excited. On minimum wage [9to5] recruited new members, some of them became board members who now speak out and are helping to lead other

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organizing campaigns that we’re involved in” (interview). For Hanna likewise, campaigning on minimum wage was a way to build a sustainable organization of people who know how to do everything I know how to do, so that ACORN members, if I get hit by a bus, are still going to be able to sit down and put together an action, negotiate with a target, understand what a legislative campaign looks like, register voters, do turn-out—all the things that staff at any organization know how to do.

44 Campaigning for Amendment 42 thus provided a particularly strong incentive, hence a good opportunity to empower a constituency by “mak[ing] sure that low and moderate- income families know how to struggle effectively on their own behalf” (Hanna: interview). So, like several other organizations, 9to5 and ACORN do not approach ballot measures simply as electoral or instrumental goals to reach, but include them in their broader enfranchising agenda.

45 If the 2006 ballot measures in Colorado were to be approached strictly from an electoral viewpoint, the difference between the Amendment 42 and Referendum I campaigns would seem essentially one of partisanship: because minimum wage was put on the ballot by the Left, it generated partisan confrontation and a strong incentive for the left of the political spectrum to mobilize, thus helping the Democrats keep their majority in the state legislature and win the Governorship.53 According to this logic, because Referendum I was put on the ballot merely as a reaction against Amendment 43, which was partisan in origin and intent, it was never meant to be politicized in partisan terms;therefore the campaign was very cautious never to identify itself as a progressive campaign—any more than as an LGBT campaign—and it failed in an election where the electorate was split along party lines. But tactical considerations should not make us lose sight of the significance of longer-term strategies: the effort of organizations like ACORN or 9to5 to raise the minimum wage was not a short-term political “fix”, but part of a long-term investment—since at least 1996—to actually improve living conditions for their constituents (Meric: interview). For Lindsey Hodel, whereas partisan and candidates’ campaigns may have seen minimum wage as a way to turn out Democratic voters, we saw that as a way of improving the quality of life for Coloradans—that’s a key difference in approach, and a key reason why non partisan community-based groups are important: we do tie issues to election, and we can use the election process to get real policy gains for people who are often directly affected by poor policy. (interview)

46 This statement is interestingly built on opposing “elections” with“policy”, but Hodel’s point is that the two terms can be reconciled. Far from stigmatizing ballot measures as electoral ploys which divert progressive organizations from their mission, she perceives them as means to translate politics into achieving policy thanks to voter empowerment.

47 In sociological terms, the domestic-partnership campaign tended to separate its protagonists and its audience, whereas the minimum-wage campaign was geared toward bridging that gap by empowering audiences to become actors. To identify the origin of that difference, one must turn to the two campaigns’ repertoires of action and organizing modes. The experience of Michael Huttner offers a good vantage point for comparing the ways in which they were conducted, since his organization, ProgressNow.org, volunteered support for both campaigns. ProgressNow.org boasts of having provided the minimum-wage campaign with sixty to seventy percent of its

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volunteers through an “online-to-offline” device whereby a website was set up for people to sign up in support of Amendment 42 or of Referendum I and their e-mail addresses were then forwarded to the appropriate campaigns, which could then contact them as volunteers. Huttner notes that the domestic-partnership campaign made very little use of this resource. He additionally recalls the difficulties his organization encountered when interacting with Coloradans for Fairness and Equality. This, he believes, was due to the organization’s heavily bureaucratic structure, which occasionally caused delay in the writing out of press releases, for example, because any message from CFFE had to be reviewed by several people before being made public.54 As a result, says Huttner, the campaign’s overly top-down management caused it to lose efficiency. This seems paradoxical insofar as CFFE’s organizational structure was designed with a view to ensuring maximum coordination, by avoiding the randomness and messiness which sometimes impair grassroots collective action. But, Huttner insists, if it had been organized in a bottom-up way, the domestic-partnership campaign could have taken full advantage of the technological tools his organization offers, such as a database of 365,000 sympathetic voters which allows a campaign to send out reminders about turning in their absentee-ballots before the deadline, or information about their specific voting location (interview).

48 Grassroots organizing is the core of the Colorado Progressive Coalition’s idea of social movement. For Bill Vandenberg, its executive director, CPC: prioritizes rooting in communities and talking to people at their door, over the phone, at their congregation, at their community organization, at their school, at their beauty salon or their barber-shop: we’ll talk to people where they are about what issues make a difference in their lives. And we will work to move policy from that direction, whereas some people sit in a room, and they will poll on some issues and figure out ‘oh, this looks popular, let’s run that’ (interview).

49 Grassroots then does not mean unplanned or spontaneous: there is organization and leadership behind it, in part thanks to think-tanks such as The Bell, which play a decisive role in producing the precise scientific data to be used as crucial debating points (Colwell, 2006). The point is that grassroots means that the relationship between leadership (protagonists) and constituency (audience) is reciprocal and horizontal, not one-way and vertical. Concretely, while it operated on a narrow budget of less than $500,000—to be compared with the close to triple budget of Respect Colorado’s Constitution, the organization leading the campaign against Amendment 42— Coloradans for a Fair Minimum Wage spent most of its funds on direct mail to voters and its door-to-door campaign (Vandenberg: interview; Milstead, 2006a; Milstead, 2006b). Vandenberg goes on to contrast the cost of a field campaign with that of “consultants, TV-ad buyers, people producing the commercials, pollsters, the people who are producing the over-priced glossy materials that are going to get mailed out, the robocalls.” CPC and other organizations’ expertise in going door to door and talking to people, he believes, is what made it possible for Coloradans for a Fair Minimum Wage to win Amendment 42 despite being outspent almost three to one by its opponents (interview).

50 This model of campaigning stands in sharp contrast with Coloradans for Fairness and Equality’s highly professional staff and $4.2 million budget. Vandenberg claims that “they had a ton of consultants that did a lot of polling, but in the end it didn’t pass because it didn’t really have a strong field presence on the ground” (Vandenberg: interview). This assessment is confirmed by several campaigners for CFFE: whereas

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field campaigning was initially emphasized during the first semester of 2006 in order to gather petitions for Amendment 45 (Glennon: interview), it was interrupted during the Summer—when it became certain that the “dirty version” of the gay-marriage ban was not making it onto the ballot and Amendment 45 was consequently withdrawn. At this time polling results were very encouraging, so that there was a reasonably optimistic sense that voters knew about Referendum I and would support it in the polls, provided the public’s attention be sustained (Clark: interview; Brewer: interview). So “the campaign became increasingly focused primarily on a paid-media effort,” says Clark (interview), and the issue was on the public’s mind. Morris Price, national leadership development officer at the Gill Foundation, a major LGBT community leader who was a CFFE volunteer, recalls: there was a whole population [within the gay community] who really thought that as long as they talked about it and they felt confident about it, it was the same thing as changing it. But if you asked them had they registered to vote? ‘No’. Had you moved your vote from one place to the next when you moved so that it would be updated? ‘Oh no, I haven’t done that yet.’ They would take it for granted that the process would automatically work in their favor and that this would be won (interview).

51 While essentially agreeing with the way the campaign was run, Price corroborates the lack of civic engagement which other, more critical interviewees blame on the top- down nature of CFFE. Clark, for instance, recalls a widespread, albeit diffuse sense among the LGBT community that, since advertisements were to be seen on television, somehow the issue was being taken care of (interview).

52 Conversely, while emphasizing that a mainstreaming message was the proper choice for the Referendum I campaign, Michael Brewer holds that what the campaign did not do was connect well with the GLBT community in an organic, grassroots way. And I think that ultimately that hurt it. Not that it was a question of messaging, but the energy behind the campaign would have been different and more effective had even the small number of people within the GLBT community been more deeply engaged. (interview)

53 Price recalls mobilizing to create such engagement among African Americans and among younger gays: the latter especially was an audience of great potential which had yet to be tapped. At one event he organized, his father, a straight black man in his sixties, spoke out vibrantly to an African American audience against Amendment 43; at another event in a gay bar, patrons who would register to vote would get a free drink coupon (interview). But such grassroots efforts remained low-key and uncoordinated, whereas, says Brewer, “after [the signature-gathering] effort was completed, I don’t think that there was an effective effort by the campaign to keep [the volunteers] engaged. They did their job, and went back to their daily lives, and the professional campaign took over” (interview). The issue of civic engagement is thus literally one of movement: on the contrary, our interviewees’ descriptions of the domestic-partnership campaign convey a static image of a mass organizing effort which, instead of getting the rank and file excited or mobilized, ultimately existed independently from them.

54 The two campaigns’ approaches to the media sum up the differences we have explored so far. Referendum I relied on paid media, buying advertisement time on television in particular, whereas the Amendment 42 campaign—partly for lack of sufficient funds, but also out of strategic choice—preferred “earned” media, creating events to draw the media’s attention and get coverage. When the petitions for Amendment 42 were

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brought to the Secretary of State’s office on August 3, 2006, for example, the countless boxes containing them were physically carried in by several dozen marchers wearing ACORN t-shirts, who held a public rally and delivered speeches on the state Capitol’s front-steps (Henley, 2006).55 Thus, whereas the domestic-partnership audience was only on the receiving end of the media effort, continuity is what characterized the relationship between the minimum-wage campaign’s audience and protagonists. To put it differently, the former treated voters as clients, whereas the latter regarded them as potential actors who needed to be engaged.

55 This is partly due to structural factors. The coalition which initiated Amendment 42 was made up of fairly long-standing grassroots organizations, whereas the LGBT community in Colorado is essentially structured on the ground by social institutions while its political matters rest in the hands of delegates in the Democratic Party and sympathetic government bodies, or at the Gill Foundation and its 501(c)(4) branch Gill Action.56 The minimum-wage coalition thus had experience investing some of its resources in grants and stipends to community organizations to wage the campaign, building an infrastructure that would continue to exist all the way to Election Day and beyond (Vandenberg: interview): it used the ballot campaign’s short-term imperatives to serve the long-term goal of community-based movement-building. The domestic- partnership umbrella organization, on the contrary, was a purely ad hoc endeavor devoid of prior existence, let alone an overall movement-building political agenda. Hence Michael Brewer’s deepest regret about the Referendum I campaign is “that it wasn’t used at the same time to build an infrastructure which would have strengthened the GLBT community, which would have strengthened the ongoing process of community organization both in the GLBT community and beyond the GLBT community” (interview). In other words, the minimum-wage campaign was nurtured by, and reinforced, an already existing grassroots social-movement field, whereas the domestic-partnership campaign failed to be seized as an opportunity to create such a social-movement field.

56 Commitment and active civic engagement are key to social movement building, which was not ignored by CFFE. Denise Whinnen for instance says: I do understand that we probably could have done some more work on the ground; we were part of collaborative efforts that were happening on the ground, so we felt like we—through these collaborations—met our goals in terms of who we were door-knocking to, who we were talking to via the phone: we did hit those targets. (interview)

57 CFFE indeed dedicated significant resources to its coalition-building effort, with outreach coordinators to various constituencies, such as ethnic or religious communities. The job of Maria De Cambra, CFFE’s outreach coordinator with the Latino community, was to call Latino organizations and leaders, attend Latino community events in order to “educate that community on the issues and then ask them to support actively the work that we were doing.” Her efforts yielded more than seventy endorsements from top Latino community leaders (De Cambra: interview). Nevertheless, getting endorsements is not tantamount to securing commitment. And because of its top-down structure CFFE requested backing, but did not integrate its supporters into the strategic initiative.57 As a result, the endorsements—numerous and significant though they were—could not amount to engagement on the part of the constituencies in question. For Michael Brewer, who was in charge of the faith-based outreach, getting formal endorsements is not sufficient, because it “is no substitute for

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going into a church community, talking to members of that church community, preaching to them, distributing materials to them after a church service—that did not happen [in the Referendum I campaign]” (interview). Ru Johnson, who participated in CFFE’s outreach to the African American community, likewise expresses surprise that many resources were not tapped into: “cultural institutions, faith-based institutions, the Pan-Hellenic council—Black fraternities and sororities—the Black poetry scene in Denver, which is very liberal, very gay, very active—that’s a resource that we did not explore, and that would have made a difference” (interview).

58 So even within coalition-building an analytical distinction should be made between top-down and grassroots organizing. It corresponds to very tangible differences in social movement structure and repertoire of action, which in turn link up to longer- term processes of movement continuity, as illustrated in this statement by Ben Hanna: The more that you get people kind of pulled in—so the people that voted on minimum wage, that were pulled into organizations and deep in relationships with people and talk about voting and other issues etcetera—I think then it’s easier to start having conversations and finding some common ground on some of the issues that traditionally would be seen as more divisive. For example in our communities, a lot of our members are older African Americans, devoutly religious, and a lot of people come up to us and say ‘so your members are basically against GLBT rights.’ But I actually don’t think that’s true. […] A lot of our members who came from the Civil Rights movement get civil rights, and if you sit down and have a conversation, people can see where there’s common ground, and where there are ties that bond, and you find them in the most unlikely places. So it’s just a matter of making sure our members have those kinds of conversations with members of other organizations (interview).

59 Particularly interesting in this statement is the recurrence of the word “conversation”— defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an “interchange of thoughts and words”—, which indeed implies parity and reciprocity. This suggests that coalition- building must meet these two criteria if apparently impassable barriers are to be surmounted or brought down, rather than circumvented. But just as importantly, “conversation” also implies an interpersonal interaction, which brings us back to our remarks above concerning personalized politics, seen now from the vantage point of organizing.

60 Ru Johnson thus recalls going to Amendment 42 rallies with “a dozen people on that stage telling about how they don’t have health-care, how they’re not able to pay their rent etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” and feeling that “there was this element of passion that was missing” in the Referendum I campaign. From the standpoint of framing, this is due—as we have seen—to the political risk involved in talking about LGBT issues, which were put forth in fairly abstract and subtle terms by the domestic-partnership campaign. However, Johnson believes, “if we could have added some more passion, and some more personal conviction, personal commitment to the [Referendum I] movement in terms of our display of that, we would have been able to reach a lot, a lot more people” (interview). This is of particular relevance at this point in our analysis, because it paradoxically leads us to draw a distinction between a personalized message and a personalized repertoire of action. The domestic-partnership campaign was indeed intentionally disimpassioned, insofar as its organizers were intent on making sure that Referendum I did not become a vote for or against homosexuality. Interestingly Johnson does not challenge that, even as she deplores the lack of passion in the campaign. When evoking minimum-wage rallies with people sharing their experience,

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she says: “Those are very passionate issues, but at the same time we know someone who stood in the waiting-room while their partner died in a hospital but they weren’t able to visit them. But it’s difficult to convey that message when in the first place this is seen as a rough, tough, and sturdy legislative campaign” (interview). As a matter of fact stories of people standing in the waiting-room while their partners died were part of the Referendum I campaign’s message—in the above-mentioned “waiting-room” television advertisement for instance—and Johnson probably draws her inspiration for this example from such advertisements and arguments. But Johnson aptly says it is “difficult”, not “impossible”, to convey that message, so the issue is less what message to convey than how to convey it. What she means to point out is therefore not so much a lack of passion in the message, as of embodiment of that message in people and their experience.

61 As this example shows, framing is indeed predicated upon a movement’s repertoire of action, which is in turn inseparable from its organizational operating mode (Hunt, Benford and Snow, 1994). But whereas our fieldwork clearly imputes the shortcomings of the domestic-partnership campaign to its top-down structure, the 2006 experience seems to have generated some awareness of these issues. For instance, even though the Gill Foundation and Gill Action were not technically in charge of the Referendum I campaign, they were closely linked with it, especially in material terms of funding and staff, but also symbolically due to the Gill Foundation’s visibility as the state’s largest, most funded LGBT organization. Although Coloradans for Fairness and Equality disbanded, the Gill Foundation has since been operating in a context marked by the outcome of the 2006 domestic-partnership campaign and outcome. And it has engaged in more authentic coalition-building efforts than CFFE did in 2006. The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado (GLFC), a Gill Foundation program which only funds non-LGBT progressive and cultural initiatives in Colorado, has since 2006 reinforced its contribution to the Colorado Community Organizing Collaborative (CCOC), a collaborative effort among nine community organizations in Colorado to foster grassroots community organizing in the fields of health-care reform, immigrant rights, educational reform, economic justice, and affirmative action.58 According to Denise Whinnen, this is an attempt for various organizations to learn how to work cross-issue, and at the same time it was a change for foundations in terms of not calling the shots, not pushing the agenda, not to encourage a mission drift at these organizations, but really working on a level playing field where there wasn’t so much power dynamic going on, so that they would learn ‘how can we really best support these organizations’ work, and their very needs’. So it was the first time that philanthropic and organizing people started to figure out how to work more effectively on a level playing field, versus ‘we have all the money and we want you to do all the work’ (interview).

62 Although CCOC was launched in 2004, it was then still in its infancy, and “we were still in the very beginning stages of understanding collaboration,” says Whinnen (interview). This suggests that coalition-building lessons were learned from the 2006 Referendum I campaign (Gurule: interview).

63 As coalition-building illustrates, the existence of a deeply-ingrained grassroots organizing structure was therefore a precondition for progressive movements in Colorado to be able to appropriate the 2006 ballot campaigns in such a way as to serve their agenda, rather than be diverted from it. Our fieldwork shows that the

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preexistence of a personalized form of social movement organizing is not simply a crucial strategic advantage for convincing ordinary people to cast their votes either one way or the other. When there was a social movement field with organizations doing grassroots enfranchisement and civic engagement as part of their habitual agenda, these organizations could indeed use ballot measures to give such work urgency, hence momentum, and public exposure. Ballot measures were thus part of a natural continuum with this work; but ballot measures could not create such a field ex nihilo. In other words, for ballot measures to be productive for progressive social movements, the organizing needs to have happened before an issue is on the ballot, so that a ballot issue campaign should correspond to in-depth organizing, rather than merely reactive, short-term, ad hoc activism. If we envision the 2006 situation sociologically from the standpoint of social movements, there is therefore little question that spending on long-term organizing is more worthwhile than purchasing thirty-second television ads in an emergency situation. According to Huttner, for instance, the budget of an organization like ProgressNow.org for five permanent staff- members year-long is equivalent to the cost of five days of television ads in September of an election year (interview). Thus, in order to grasp ballot measures’ significance for progressive social movements it is critical to envision them in terms of forms of organizing and repertoires of action which underlie the campaigns.

Conclusion: the importance of long-term grassroots organizing

64 Studying the minimum-wage and domestic-partnership campaigns in Colorado in 2006 convincingly presents ballot measures as both a challenge and a double-edged sword for progressive social movements. They may either divert the action of social- movement organizations from their long-term goals, or, if campaigns are driven through an authentic grassroots effort, they can become an opportunity for placing their politics in the voters’ hands, thus answering the Progressive Era call for citizen lawmaking. At any rate, ballot measures never quite amount to direct democracy, because voter education is never foolproof, but they do have the potential for empowering voters to make conscious, informed political decisions about issues that matter to them. A crucial question is therefore what kind of organizing underlies a ballot campaign: its deeper political significance can be reliably interpreted from whether the campaign is an isolated, ad hoc, somewhat reactive endeavor, or part of a broader grassroots movement with a longer-term agenda. Thus, social movement organizing modes and repertoires of action are the appropriate angle for a sociological assessment of the significance of ballot measures. To put it differently, what happens in the polls is most often but the electoral tip of an iceberg whose less visible foundations are the work which social-movement organizations do outside of, or in between, election cycles.

65 The recurrence of ballot measures in such places as Colorado is an ongoing source of stress for progressive social-movement organizations. It drains sizeable resources into often reactive politics. But at the same time, direct democracy not only keeps their supporters mobilized, which may avoid their slipping into complacent inactivity: it also puts a premium on long-term, grassroots movement-building. That is precisely the type of grassroots organizing which the Right has been so efficient at developing, through

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churches in particular, since the 1970s, and which contributes to their success in initiating ballot measures. This suggests how crucial it is for progressive social movements to look and learn from conservatives, who have proven to be masters at mobilizing from the bottom up.

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ANNEXES

Appendix 1: list of interviews

Conducted in 2008

Name Date Title Organization

Brewer, Michael April 2, (2008) Executive Brett Family Foundation 2008 Director

(2006) Legal Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Director Community Center of Colorado (The Center)

Clark, Bobby April 3, Deputy Director ProgressNowAction 2008

De Cambra, April 1, (2008) Program Coordinator Latina Initiative Maria 2008 (2006) Hispanic / Latino Outreach Coloradans for Fairness and Equality Director (CFFE)

Feustel, Jane April 1, Community Organizer Colorado Progressive Action (CPA) 2008

Glennon, Hope April 4, Volunteer Coloradans for Fairness and 2008 Equality (CFFE)

Groke, Katie April 3, Public Affairs Coordinator Planned Parenthood of the Rocky 2008 Mountains (PPRM)

Gurule, Dusti April 3, Executive Director Latina Initiative 2008

Hanna, Ben March State Director for Colorado Association of Community 28, 2008 Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)

Hazouri, Cathryn April 2, Executive Director American Civil Liberties Union 2008 (ACLU) of Colorado

Hodel, Lindsey April 2, Field Director Colorado Progressive Coalition 2008 (CPC)

Huttner, Michael April 1, Executive Director ProgressNow.org 2008

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Johnson, James April 4, (2008) Civic Engagement Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC) 2008 Director

(2006) Political Director Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105

Johnson, Ru March Volunteer Coordinator and Get- Coloradans for Fairness and 31, 2008 out-the-Vote Director for Equality (CFFE) District 2

Jones, Rich April 3, Director of Policy and Research Bell Policy Center (The Bell) 2008

Klawitter, Daniel April 3, (2008) Religious Outreach Organizer FRESC: Good Jobs, Strong 2008 Communities

(2006) Union Organizer for Mental Service Employees International Healthcare Workers Union (SEIU) Local 105

Kron, Joanne April 4, Communications Officer Gill Foundation 2008 Gill Action

McMaster, Terry April 4, Director Lutheran Advocacy Ministry 2008 (LAM) of Colorado

Meric, Linda March National Executive Director 9to5 National Organization of 31, 2008 Working Women

Price, Morris April 1, (2008) Program Officer Gill Foundation 2008 (2006) Volunteer Coloradans for Fairness and Equality (CFFE)

Shaw, Jeffrey April 5, Chairman Colorado Stonewall Democrats 2008

Steadman, Pat March Political Consultant Mendez & Steadman 29, 2008

Thormodsgaard, March Political Consultant Mendez & Steadman Jeff 29, 2008

Vandenberg, Bill March Co-Executive Director Colorado Progressive Coalition 28, 2008 (CPC)

Whinnen, Denise April 4, (2008) Deputy Director Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado (GLFC) 2008 (2006) Deputy Director Coloradans for Fairness and Equality (CFFE)

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Appendix 2: list of organizations

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Bell Policy Center (The Bell) Brett Family Foundation Coloradans for a Fair Minimum Wage Coloradans for Fairness and Equality (CFFE) Colorado Community Organizing Collaborative (CCOC) Colorado Progressive Action (CPA) Colorado Progressive Coalition (CPC) Colorado Stonewall Democrats 501(c)(3) Roundtable Front Range Economic Strategy Center / FRESC: Good Jobs, Strong Communities Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado (GLFC) Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Community Center of Colorado (The Center) Gill Action Gill Foundation Latina Initiative Let Justice Roll Lutheran Advocacy Ministry (LAM) of Colorado Mendez & Steadman 9to5 National Organization of Working Women Philanthropic Community Organizing Collaborative (PCOC) Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains ProgressNowAction ProgressNow.org Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105 Women’s Voices Women’s Vote

Appendix 3: interview support questions

On the 2006 campaign

How did you / your organization get involved in the 2006 ballot measure campaign? What was your / your organization’s contribution to the 2006 campaign? You / your organization focused primarily on the minimum wage [domestic partnership] campaign; did you / it also contribute to the domestic partnership [minimum wage] campaign? Did you see a lot of coalition take place between the domestic partnership and minimum wage campaigns in 2006? What types of campaign events did you / your organization put together? Did you find that the campaign for Referendum I / Amendment 42 was defensive, or offensive? Do you think certain things should have been done differently?

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On the political significance of ballot measures

Did campaigning on a ballot measure differ from the type of work you / your organization usually do(es)? Do you think ballot measures are basically get-out-the-vote strategies that benefit political parties rather than progressive movements? Do you see the campaign on ballot measures having long-term effects on progressive movement organizing—beneficial, or detrimental ones? Does campaigning on ballot measures somehow force organizations like yours to adopt short-term, rather than long-term strategies? Does campaigning on ballot measures somehow force organizations like yours to adopt defensive, rather than offensive strategies? Would you agree that having to campaign about ballot measures tends to divert progressive social movements’ energies away from the real work they should do? Do you see ballot measures as a way to effectively advance progressive causes?

NOTES

1. Such is the focus of a wealth of political science literature on the topic—discussed in this issue by Donna Kesselman. 2. We wish to thank Donna Kesselman for pointing out this coincidence, and thus launching us on this stimulating case-study. 3. A list of interviewees and organizations, and the interviews’ support questions are provided in the appendices to this article. 4. Popular approval then substitutes for gubernatorial signature (Colorado State Constitution V, 1:4). 5. “The ‘citizen referendum’ came in two forms. The ‘citizen initiative’ was invented to address legislative omissions, while the ‘referendum petition’ was invented to address legislative commissions (acts that overreach).” (Polhill 2006, 3; emphasis mine) 6. “Amendment 42. Colorado Minimum Wage: An amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning the state minimum wage, and, in connection therewith, increasing Colorado’s minimum wage to $ 6.85 per hour, adjusted annually for inflation, and providing that no more than $ 3.02 per hour in tip income may be used to offset the minimum wage of employees who regularly receive tips.” (source: Colorado Legislative Council, “Chronological Listing of Ballot Issues”: http://www.leg.state.co.us/lcs/ballothistory.nsf [unless specified otherwise all Web pages were last visited on August 2, 2010]) 7. These were: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah; additionally, Louisiana and Arkansas passed such amendments at a different date. 8. These were: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin; additionally, Alabama passed such an amendment at a different date. 9. “Amendment 45. Domestic Partnerships: An amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning the establishment of domestic partnerships, and, in connection therewith, declaring that domestic partnerships do not affect the institution of marriage between one man and one woman, stating that notwithstanding any other provision of law a domestic partnership is established as a unique and valid relationship between eligible adults of the same sex and is not similar to marriage, and directing the general assembly to enact implementing legislation

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consistent with the responsibilities, benefits, and protections and licensing provisions for domestic partnerships set forth in House Bill 06-1344 as passed by the Colorado general assembly.” (source: ibid.) 10. “Amendment 43. Marriage: An amendment to the Colorado constitution, concerning marriage, and, in connection therewith, specifying that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Colorado.” (source: ibid.) 11. “Referendum I. Domestic Partnerships: Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado Revised Statutes to authorize domestic partnerships, and, in connection therewith, enacting the ‘Colorado Domestic Partnership Benefits And Responsibilities Act’ to extend to same-sex couples in a domestic partnership the benefits, protections, and responsibilities that are granted by Colorado law to spouses, providing the conditions under which a license for a domestic partnership may be issued and the criteria under which a domestic partnership may be dissolved, making provisions for implementation of the act, and providing that a domestic partnership is not a marriage, which consists of the union of one man and one woman?” (source: ibid.) 12. In 2000 the Colorado General Assembly passed HB00-1249 “An Act Concerning Strengthening of the Marriage Relationship” which specifies that “a marriage is valid in this state if […] it is only between one man and one woman” (source: Office of Legislative Legal Services, “Session Laws of Colorado”, Denver, Colorado General Assembly, http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/olls/ session_laws_of_colorado.htm). 13. As a matter of fact, in 2008, all three states where marriage-related constitutional amendments were on the ballot, and got approved—Arizona, California and Florida—already had statutory bans on same-sex unions. Florida’s Proposition 2 had been three years in the making, and Arizona’s Proposition 102 was a renewed attempt after Proposition 105 failed in 2006, but California’s Proposition 8 is different insofar as it was a response to the state Supreme Court’s May 2008 decision In re Marriage Cases, which struck down the state’s statutory ban, making California the second state after Massachusetts to legalize same-sex marriage. So, whereas proponents of the gay-marriage ban in Massachusetts had decided not to put a constitutional amendment in the 2008 ballot—after failing to do so in 2006—for fear of a defeat, California’s Proposition 8 was a successful attempt to reverse in the polls the judicial legalization of same-sex marriage. For an interpretation of the 2008 California Proposition 8 vote in terms of a religious divide within the Democratic electorate see Miller. 14. On “wedge issues” see the contribution by Donna Kesselman in this issue. 15. The organization coordinating that campaign was alternatively called Say No to 43 and Don’t Mess with Marriage, and worked on a relatively low budget of $ 350,000—compared to the $ 900,000 budget of Coloradans for Marriage, which led the campaign both for Amendment 43 and against Referendum I, and the $ 4.2 million budget of the campaign for Referendum I (Kim, 2006b). 16. The two were sometimes done at the same time, since one must be a registered voter to sign a petition. Signatures were gathered at civic venues such as political events, but also at festivals, farmers’ markets etc. 17. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Latina Initiative for example created a bilingual voting guide; ProgressNow.org and the Bell Policy Center made theirs available online and printed them out for door-to-door distribution and to be handed out near polling stations: the Bell issued 10,000 copies of its voting guide, ProgressNow.org issued 300,000 copies. 18. FRESC was created by the Denver Area Labor Federation, the AFL-CIO’s central labor council for the Denver metropolitan Area, and is now identified as “FRESC: Good Jobs, Strong Communities”. It is a nonprofit organization which coordinates community-based efforts of the labor movement and the no-profit sector to improve living, working, and housing standards (see: http://www.fresc.org).

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19. ProgressNow.org is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide progressive campaigns and organizations in Colorado with online and communication tools (see: http://www.progressnow.org). 20. The Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado is a program of the Gill Foundation, whose goal is to provide funding for progressive and cultural nonprofit organizations and programs in Colorado. The Gill Foundation was created by Tim Gill, a wealthy businessman from Colorado who is gay and decided to come out in support of gay and lesbian rights in the wake of the 1992 Amendment 2, a ballot initiative which made it unconstitutional to set up anti-discrimination policies inclusive of sexual orientation (Amendment 2 was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans in 1996). Whereas the Gill Foundation specifically focuses on LGBT rights, the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado targets non-LGBT organizations (see: http:// www.gillfoundation.org and http://www.gillfoundation.org/glfchome). 21. The Colorado Progressive Coalition engages in a wide variety of political activities to promote racial justice, health care, fair taxes, and voter empowerment, including sponsoring ballot measures such as Amendment 42 in 2006 (see: http://www.progressivecoalition.org). 22. The proposed amendment (Amendment 46) on the 2008 ballot was entitled “Discrimination and Preferential Treatment by Governments” (source: Colorado Legislative Council, “2008 Ballot Analysis Text & Deadlines”: http://www.leg.state.co.us/LCS/InitRefr/0708InitRefr.nsf/ 89FB842D0401C52087256CBC00650696). It was defeated by a narrow margin (50.7 percent). 23. On geographical biases in the ballot-initiative process, see: D. Smith 2007, 1402-16. For a critical assessment of the initiative and referendum process, see: Magleby. 24. The Bell Policy Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit progressive public policy center, a think- tank doing research and advocacy on policies to promote opportunity in Colorado (see: http:// www.bellpolicy.org). 25. The issue was particularly acute as in the 2008 election Amendment 48 proposed to amend the constitution of Colorado to define a human egg as a person “from the moment of fertilization” (source: Colorado Legislative Council, “2008 Ballot Analysis Text & Deadlines”). It was defeated by a broad margin (73.2 percent) in 2008. A similar measure, Amendment 62, was defeated by a comparable margin (71 percent) in 2010. 26. Lutheran Advocacy Ministry is one of twenty state public policy offices of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), and it conducts grassroots legislative advocacy mainly on issues of poverty, but also on such cultural issues as the death penalty (see: http://www.lam- co.org). 27. On citizens’ confusion with regard to ballot measures, see: Gastil, Reedy, and Wells 1440-49. On the interplay between ballot measures and the legislative process, see: D. Smith, 2001. 28. SB07-060 “An Act Concerning the Availability of Emergency Contraception to a Survivor of a Sexual Assault” (source: Office of Legislative Legal Services, “Session Laws of Colorado”, Denver, Colorado General Assembly, http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/olls/ session_laws_of_colorado.htm). 29. SB07-025 “An Act Concerning the Expansion of Employment Nondiscrimination Protections, and Making an Appropriation therefor” (source: ibid.). 30. HB07-1330 “An Act Concerning the Second-Parent Adoption of a Child of a Sole Legal Parent” (source: ibid.). 31. Quantitative studies nevertheless suggest that ballot measures do not intrinsically discriminate against minorities (Donovan and Bowler, 1998; Hajnal, Gerber and Louch, 2002). 32. Following Lewis v. Harris, New Jersey created civil unions in February 2007, but its domestic partnership statute remains in place. 33. It was revealed that Ted Haggard, pastor and founder of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and arch opponent of LGBT rights, had regularly been having paid sexual encounters with a male prostitute.

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34. ProgressNowAction is an extension of ProgressNow.org (see footnote 14). The latter is a nonprofit organization whose donors benefit from tax-exemptions under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which means that it may not, “as a substantial part of its activities, attempt to influence legislation […] or participate to any extent in a political campaign for or against any candidate for public office” (Internal Revenue Service, Publication 557: Tax-Exempt Status for Your Organization (June 2008), chapter 3: “Section 501(c)(3) Organizations”, http:// www.irs.gov/publications/p557/ch03.html). To circumvent this limitation ProgressNow.org set up a separate organization under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, which grants tax exemptions for organization which are “not organized for profit and [are] operated only to promote social welfare”: provided that it “is organized exclusively to promote social welfare” a 501(c)(4) organization “may still obtain exemption even if it participates legally in some political activity on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office” (Ibid., chapter 4: “Other Section 501(c) Organizations”, http://www.irs.gov/publications/p557/ch04.html). ProgressNowAction is thus legally able to participate more directly in political campaigns, and to lobby for legislation. 35. The Colorado Stonewall Democrats is the state affiliate of the LGBT network within the Democratic Party (see: http://www.stonewalldems.org). 36. 9to5, National Association of Working Women was founded in 1973—its Colorado affiliate in 1996—and defines its mission as building “a movement to achieve economic justice, by engaging directly affected women to improve working conditions” (see: http://www.9to5.org). 37. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is an organization of low- and moderate-income families, which was created in 1970 (its Colorado affiliate in 1977), and works on such issues as wages, credits, housing, public schools, through direct action, negotiation, legislative advocacy and voter participation (see: http://www.acorn.org). In 2008 and 2009 ACORN was at the center of a controversy when conservative Republicans accused it of encouraging tax evasion and prostitution, so that Congress decided to deny it federal subsidies; hostility and lack of funds caused ACORN to all but cease its activity in 2010. 38. “Seven Days at Minimum Wage”, http://www.sevendaysatminimumwage.org (last accessed October 8, 2009). 39. The Latina Initiative was created in 2002 in order to enhance the civic involvement of Latinas in Colorado (see: http://www.latinainitiative.org). 40. By that time however, the above-mentioned constitutional impasse was not the campaign’s goal anymore, since the provisions of Amendment 43 and Referendum I could coexist (Zeller, 2006): the goal had become the actual creation of domestic partnerships. 41. The Brett Family Foundation is a private charity organization which provides funding for Colorado nonprofits working for social justice, and charities serving disadvantaged people in Boulder (see: http://www.brettfoundation.org). 42. The advertisement may be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjlV9nzPu_A. 43. The advertisement may be viewed at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y3rpPn3IN0. 44. Gay-marriage bans were approved by comparable margins in Virginia (57 percent) and Wisconsin (59 percent), but with much higher margins in Idaho (63 percent), South Carolina (78 percent) and Tennessee (81 percent). Only South Dakota passed it by a somewhat narrower margin (52 percent). 45. As a matter of fact, the anti-gay marriage amendment’s defeat in Arizona—the only state where this happened—is partly ascribed to the very presence of Referendum I on the ballot in Colorado, since it drained conservative funds and energies away from Arizona into neighboring Colorado in order to secure the effectiveness of Amendment 43 by making sure that referendum I should get defeated (Brewer: interview). A similar constitutional amendment was approved in 2008 (see footnotes 13 above and 48 below).

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46. One grants protection for employees sharing wage information, to help fight against pay discrimination. The second one provides accommodation for breast-feeding on the workplace, which helps secure mothers’ early return to work. The third one expands unemployment insurance benefits to workers who lose their job because they relocate with an active-duty military spouse (Meric: interview). 47. Colorado Progressive Action is the 501(c)(4) arm of the Colorado Progressive Coalition (see footnote 29). 48. “Proposition 107: An initiative measure proposing an amendment to the constitution of Arizona by adding Article XXX relating to the protection of marriage” (source: Arizona Secretary of State, “2006 General Election Ballot Measures”, http://www.azsos.gov/election/2006/General/ ballotmeasures.htm). As a matter of fact, Proposition 102, which got approved in the 2008 ballot, did not affect the recognition of unmarried different-sex couples as it merely stated “only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state” (source: Arizona Secretary of State, “2008 Ballot Measure / Proposition Information”, http:// www.azsos.gov/election/2008/general/BallotMeasurePage.htm). 49. The catch-phrase was visible on all campaign material distributed by the various organizations involved in the campaign. 50. Women’s Voices Women Vote is a national organization dedicated to improving the electoral participation of unmarried women, one of the demographics least represented in elections (see: http://www.wvwv.org). 51. Of the organizations we approached, CPC, 9to5, Latina Initiative and the ACLU are the only four which campaigned both on minimum wage and domestic partnership, though not evenly: CPC thus campaigned primarily on minimum wage, but carried domestic-partnership literature door to door. Besides, other organizations, such as SEIU, supported both ballot measures and opposed Amendment 43 (Klawitter: interview, James Johnson: interview). 52. The 501(c)(3) Roundtable is a coalition of Colorado nonpartisan nonprofit organizations committed to increasing their membership’s civic participation. 53. For an argument about the sustained relevance of partisanship, see Brewer. 54. In all fairness, it must again be noted that there are structural reasons for the Referendum I campaign’s being more top-down than the Amendment 42 campaign. As stated earlier by Ru Johnson, the issues involved in the recognition of same-sex couples were relatively abstract and subtle to argue for, whereas the rationale for raising the minimum wage was easy for rank-and- file voters to grasp (interview). This partly explains why there was so much caution on the part of CFFE to monitor the message for domestic partnership, which could easily be distorted into what it was not—namely marriage. 55. A video of the event may be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UfnBE0hPA. 56. On 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations see footnote 33. 57. On the contrary, Coloradans for a Fair Minimum Wage’s faith-based outreach translated in religious organizations being decision-making partners in the minimum-wage campaign (McMaster: interview; Klawitter: interview). A good illustration of this coalition-building work is Let Justice Roll, a coalition of 92 faith and community organizations for a fair living wage, in which ACORN, CPC, and the AFL-CIO take part (see: http://letjusticeroll.org). 58. CCOC is funded by the Philanthropic Community Organizing Collaborative (PCOC), itself a program of eleven foundations—including the Gill Foundation and the Ford Foundation—which is meant to channel philanthropic funding toward collaborative endeavors among community organizing groups working for social justice (see: http://www.piton.org/index.cfm? fuseaction=Content.Support_to_Community_Organizing).

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RÉSUMÉS

Cet article étudie deux campagnes référendaires au Colorado en 2006, qui obtinrent des résultats apparemment contradictoires. L’analyse de cet exemple particulier permet de tirer des enseignements sur les conséquences pour les mouvements sociaux progressistes de ces formes de démocratie directe : détournent-elles les mouvements sociaux de leurs objectifs à long terme, ou bien leur permettent-elles de faire progresser leur cause auprès de l’électorat ? En nous appuyant sur une enquête qualitative de terrain menée en mars et avril 2008, nous montrons, à l’aide de la théorie des cadres interprétatifs (framing theory), que la réponse à cette question est principalement à chercher dans les formes de mobilisation mises en œuvre, plutôt que dans la nature des questions soumises à référendum ou dans la conception des messages de campagne.

This article examines the coincidence of apparently contradictory ballot measure results in Colorado in 2006 as a case study of the significance of this form of direct democracy for progressive social movements: are ballot measures an opportunity or a hindrance for progressive organizing? Based on qualitative fieldwork in Denver in March and April 2008, we use framing theory to argue that whether ballot measure campaigns divert the action of social-movement organizations from their long-term goals, or allow them to pursue them by empowering voters is more dependent on the forms of organizing, than on issue-choice or messaging.

INDEX

Keywords : ballot measures, social movements, framing theory, wedge issues, empowerment, grassroots organizing Mots-clés : référendums locaux, mouvements sociaux, théorie des cadres interprétatifs, questions clivantes, capacité des acteurs sociaux de passer à l’action (empowerment), mobilisation de la base

AUTEUR

GUILLAUME MARCHE Université Paris-Est Créteil

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Débat étatsunien sur les statistiques ethno-raciales : l’exemple de la Proposition 54 en Californie

Olivier Richomme

Les paradoxes de la démocratie directe : l’occasion manquée de la Proposition 54

Alors que la polémique continue en France concernant l’éventualité de créer des statistiques ethno-raciales, il parait opportun de s’intéresser aux problématiques développées dans les pays qui possèdent déjà un tel système. Aux États-Unis, ce qui caractérise le débat concernant ces statistiques est le très faible niveau de contestation de leur omniprésence. Alors que les politiques antidiscriminatoires sont loin de faire l’unanimité, il semble exister un consensus quand à la nécessité de classer les Américains suivant des catégories ethniques et/ou raciales1. Les occasions de voir émerger un débat public sur la question sont extrêmement rares et ponctuelles. Toutefois, en 2003, lors d’un référendum d’initiative populaire, les électeurs californiens ont dû, pour la première fois, se prononcer sur la question épineuse de l’utilité de cette classification ethno-raciale. Cette campagne électorale nous éclaire sur les thèmes et enjeux du débat étatsunien concernant ces statistiques et les politiques antidiscriminatoires qui en dépendent. Mais surtout elle illustre les difficultés à ouvrir un débat de fond sur la question de la taxonomie ethno-raciale. Cette question légitime, d’un intérêt politique majeur, reste marquée par des clivages partisans et n’arrive pas à faire jaillir une réflexion d’ensemble sur la représentation identitaire et politique même lorsque l’occasion se présente. Loin de penser que cette forme de classification des individus au sein d’une société est a priori dangereuse, l’opinion américaine se distingue plutôt par un tabou inverse, à savoir l’impossibilité de penser l’absence de classification et l’impossibilité discursive de faire émerger un débat public sur la légitimité de cette classification2. En effet, les statistiques ethno-raciales existent depuis la fondation des États-Unis, notamment à cause du rôle centrale de l’esclavage

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dans le contrat social et économique de la jeune république, et font partie des institutions politiques et de la tradition administrative de gouvernance. En Californie, ce sont les conservateurs, notamment l’American Institute for Civil Rights et son fondateur Ward Connerly, fort des succès de leurs référendums d’initiative populaire qui mirent fin à l’affirmative action dans le domaine public en Californie en 1996, avec la Proposition 209, et en 1998 dans l’État de Washington, qui innovèrent et tentèrent d’amender la Constitution de l’État afin de rendre illégales certaines formes de classification ethno-raciale émanant des pouvoirs publics. Pour ce faire l’institut concocta un amendement qui, après avoir rassemblé plus d’un million de signatures, fut soumis au Californiens sous la forme d’un référendum d’initiative populaire lors de l’élection anticipée de 20033. Initialement appelé CRECNO, (acronyme pour « Classifying by Race, Ethnicity, Color and National Origin »), ce texte fut habilement rebaptisé « Racial Privacy Initiative », soit, pour être clair, un référendum pour la protection de l’« intimité raciale » ou du droit de ne pas faire de son identité ethno-raciale une chose publique. Cette reformulation est intéressante car elle joue sur le thème de l’intime qui est très mobilisateur pour l’aile la plus conservatrice du parti républicain au sein de laquelle l’intervention des pouvoir publics et de l’État est perçue comme une invasion de la sphère privée4. Plusieurs mois avant l’élection, et surtout avant la campagne éclair et peu conventionnelle de l’élection qui allait par ailleurs destituer le gouverneur Gray Davis de son poste, la Proposition était donnée gagnante par certains instituts de sondage avec une avance confortable (48% contre 33%). Jusqu’en septembre 2003, la Proposition 54 était en tête dans le sondage multilingue des votants de Californie, même au sein de chaque groupe ethno-racial5. En effet, les « Latinos » étaient 46% à être en faveur du projet d’amendement de la constitution alors que 33% se déclaraient contre. Ces chiffres étaient de 41% favorables et 33% défavorables chez les « Africains- américains », 31% pour et 25% contre chez les Blancs et 42% pour et 40% contre chez les Asiatiques6. Pourtant, le 7 octobre 2003, les Californiens allaient désavouer le projet d’amendement par 64% des voix contre 36%. À travers ces chiffres, on voit bien que les électeurs californiens sont de prime abord suspicieux de cette classification. Paradoxalement, ils votèrent largement à l’inverse de leur réaction initiale. Ce renversement de situation s’explique par la politisation du débat autour de la proposition 54. La question légitime de l’existence même des statistiques ethno-raciales et de leur rôle dans la société américaine fut bien vite écartée par les défenseurs des droits des minorités au motif que la classification ethno-raciale était nécessaire pour la recherche médicale. Loin d’être présentées comme un enjeu politique, les statistiques ethno-raciales furent présentées comme une nécessité scientifique et, partant, incontestable. L’occasion d’avoir un débat de fond sur la nature de cette classification et son rôle au sein de la société ne dura même pas le temps de cette campagne référendaire extrêmement rapide.

Discours juridiques, politiques et scientifiques

Ce qui frappe l’observateur des États-Unis est le fait qu’il existe une grande disjonction entre l’absence de races humaines prônée par la communauté scientifique et les normes sociales à travers lesquelles les populations construisent leurs vies ou leurs institutions. De la même façon, il existe une disjonction entre le caractère suspect de toute classification ethno-raciale dans la jurisprudence américaine, sa légitimité dans la

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vie des citoyens du pays et le fonctionnement des institutions. Cette classification s’est multipliée à la suite du mouvement pour les droits civiques afin de lutter efficacement contre la discrimination. Cependant, les politiques d’affirmative action, malgré une certaine popularité et des résultats tangibles, restent controversées depuis leur origine. En effet,ces politiques de promotions des minorités ethno-raciales censées corriger les pratiques discriminatoires historiques sont souvent perçues comme une entorse au principe méritocratique, même au sein des groupes pouvant potentiellement bénéficier de ces politiques. C’est pour cette raison que dans la jurisprudence des droits civiques, la classification ethno-raciale est suspecte et ne peut être tolérée que de façon temporaire et afin de remédier à un préjudice clairement identifié. La preuve doit être faite qu’une pratique discriminatoire ne peut être corrigée efficacement qu’à travers une politique publique exclusivement conçue pour répondre à un problème spécifique (narrowly tailored) et correspondant a un « intérêt gouvernemental impérieux » (compelling state interest), telle que la lutte contre la discrimination ethno-raciale. L’utilisation des statistiques ethno-raciales ne peut être justifiée que dans ce cadre précis et l’augmentation de la représentation des minorités n’est pas un but en soit, même si elle peut être justifié dans un but de diversité. Toutefois, si le poids normatif du droit et du discours juridique est primordial aux États-Unis, pour comprendre les rouages de la rhétorique égalitaire et pourquoi elle s’articule essentiellement autour de la question de l’identité ethno-raciale, il faut admettre que cette analyse n’est pas suffisante. En effet, la mise en discours de l’égalité passe aussi par le débat public et politique qui se trouve parfois assez éloigné des considérations du juge. En effet, la justice américaine semble s’accorder sur le fait que la classification ethno-raciale est par nature suspecte et doit être soumise à un contrôle juridique fort, voire le plus strict possible (strict scrutiny). Or, on se rend très vite compte que, dans le débat public et dans le champ politique, une telle position est extrêmement minoritaire. Car il apparait que les statistiques ethno-raciales essentielles aux politiques antidiscriminatoires sont devenues l’outil essentiel sur lequel repose le discours égalitaire. La société étatsunienne semble se satisfaire de réduire la question de l’égalité à la réduction des disparités entre groupes ethno-raciaux. La lutte contre l’inégalité n’y est presque toujours mentionnée qu’en ses termes dans la mesure ou les autres formes de lutte contre les inégalités de genre, d’âge ou de classe s’inspirent en grande partie de la rhétorique de l’expérience d’émancipation des Africains- américains, centrale dans la construction des rapports sociaux aux États-Unis. Il semble donc que la prégnance du prisme ethno-racial ait pris le pas sur toute autre interprétation, fut elle sociale ou économique. Pour certains, cette multiplication sans fin des statistiques dans tous les domaines de la vie des citoyens américains, même dans le but de lutter contre la discrimination, est considérée comme anathème au projet d’une société débarrassée des concepts « ethnisant » et « racisant » qui était bel et bien le projet originel du mouvement pour les droits civiques puisque ce dernier entendait débarrasser le pays de toute division raciale entre individus. Ce thème est pourtant devenu la chasse gardée des conservateurs, du moins les plus téméraires d’entre eux, ceux qui, élus dans des circonscriptions très à droite, ne craignent pas d’être taxés de vouloir maintenir la discrimination. Pour des raisons historiques et organisationnelles, le Parti démocrate a fait de la défense des politiques de traitement préférentiel des minorités un atout électoral auprès des communautés minoritaires7. C’est, partant, de la droite conservatrice qu’il faudra attendre une remise en question du statu quo. Mais puisque

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l’attaque frontale contre les politiques de traitement préférentiel de type affirmative action comporte des risques politiques lourds, les conservateurs tentent de se rabattre sur les statistiques sans lesquelles ces politiques publiques ne seraient pas possible. Et puisque le démantèlement de la classification ethno-raciale ne semble aboutir par le biais juridique c’est par le biais de la démocratie directe que les activistes tentent, dans les États qui offrent cette possibilité, de contourner le processus législatif qu’ils jugent peu propice à produire des projets de loi controversés car politiquement trop risqués. La tentative en Californie, en 2003, d’abolir certaines formes de classifications ethno- raciales par le biais d’un référendum d’initiative populaire (Proposition 54), s’est non seulement soldé par un échec mais cet exemple illustre de façon flagrante le fossé entre la théorie juridique de justification des traitements préférentiels et le débat public. La classification ethno-raciale est perçue a priori comme le plus grand vecteur d’égalité et affirmer le contraire représente un risque politique très important pour n’importe quel élu, en particulier s’il est démocrate puisque le parti de l’âne est perçu depuis les années soixante comme le parti de l’expansion du droit des minorités et le Parti républicain a bâti sa stratégie sudiste sur cette perception. Mais au delà du clientélisme politique, la classification ethno-raciale tire sa légitimité d’un discours scientifique qui n’a jamais rompu complètement avec les préceptes du dix-neuvième siècle et cette légitimité est si forte que l’on n’hésite pas, encore aujourd’hui, à s’aventurer sur le terrain scientifique et médical pour la défendre. Rarement le lien entre discours scientifique et discours politique en ce qui concerne le concept de « race » ne fut plus évident que lors de la campagne de l’élection anticipée de 2003, où le débat sociétal tant attendu quant à l’utilité de la classification ethno-raciale n’eut jamais lieu, enseveli qu’il fut sous le poids du tabou politique et d’une ethno-racisation légitimée par le discours scientifique et médical qui réussit à faire des statistiques basées sur les concepts d’« ethnie » et de « race » des questions de vie ou de mort.

La Proposition 54

Les détails du projet d’amendement

Avant d’analyser les déboires de cet échec électoral, il convient de s’arrêter sur le texte proprement dit du projet d’amendement. Chaque État de l’Union récolte des statistiques sur l’identité « ethnique » et « raciale » pour des raisons diverses et variées mais en général dans un but antidiscriminatoire, et souvent cette pratique est dictée par le gouvernement fédéral même si celui-ci n’a pas l’autorité pour imposer sa propre classification, c’est-à-dire celle de la directive 15 de l’Office of Management and Budget8. Il tente en générale de forcer les États récalcitrant en menaçant de couper les aides financières fédérales sans nécessairement y parvenir puisque ces derniers sont très défiants vis-à-vis de leur autonomie et de leur souveraineté. Les gouvernements fédérés amassent donc des statistiques ethno-raciales sans que celles-ci ne soient ordonnées par Washington afin de mener leurs propres politiques publiques et sont très jaloux de cette prérogative9. En Californie, par exemple, l’État collecte les statistiques « ethno-raciales » des candidats dans chaque université, et ce, même s’ils ne s’inscrivent pas dans cet établissement. La Constitution de Californie permet l’utilisation de questionnaires produisant des statistiques ethno- raciales. Toutefois, depuis le passage de Proposition 209 en 1996, la Constitution,

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reprenant le vocabulaire de la loi pour les droits civiques de 1964 en en déformant le contexte, interdit, dans le domaine public, tout traitement préférentiel sur une base ethnique, raciale, de couleur de peau ou d’origine nationale. Persuadé d’après les études d’opinion que les Californiens étaient hostiles à la classification ethno-raciale nécessaire aux statistiques, l’American Civil Rights Institute proposa un nouveau référendum d’initiative populaire. Ce dernier, la Proposition 54, aurait interdit, à partir du 1er janvier 2005, au gouvernement et à l’administration de Californie de classer les personnes suivant leur identité ethnique, raciale, leur couleur de peau ou leur origine nationale10. Cette mesure présentait, cependant, des exceptions. Premièrement, cette interdiction ne concernait pas les statistiques ordonnées par le gouvernement fédéral, ou les programmes dépendant du financement fédéral. Deuxièmement, cette interdiction ne pouvait aller à l’encontre des décisions de justice déjà en place avant le passage de l’amendement constitutionnel. Troisièmement, cette prohibition ne s’appliquait pas aux descriptions physiques des forces de l’ordre, au choix des policiers infiltrant des groupes, et à la ségrégation carcérale11. Quatrièmement, cette interdiction ne concernait pas les données statistiques nécessaires à la recherche médicale. Et cinquièmement, certaines statistiques ethno- raciales du ministère de l’emploi et du logement (Department of Fair Employment and Housing, DFEH) restaient légales jusqu’en 2014. De surcroît, ce texte permettait aussi au législateur (par un vote des deux tiers de chaque chambre), avec l’aval du gouverneur, d’approuver la collecte de statistiques ethno-raciales afin de répondre à un intérêt gouvernemental impérieux. Il apparait donc que la grande majorité des statistiques ethno-raciales collectées par les différents services de la fonction publique de l’État de Californie n’étaient pas concernées par cette mesure puisqu’elles étaient subordonnées aux décisions du gouvernement fédéral. Seraient donc restées intactes toutes les statistiques : dans le domaine de l’emploi afin de répondre aux programmes fédéraux de lutte contre la discrimination ; dans le domaine de l’éducation publique du premier et deuxième cycle en raison des examens réalisés afin d’évaluer l’écart entre les groupes ethno-raciaux12 ; dans le troisième cycle (University of California, California State University et community colleges) puisque ce dernier bénéficie du financement fédéral lui permettant de collecter les statistiques ethno-raciales de ses étudiants et de ses employés ; dans de nombreux domaines de l’assistance publique tels que les cures de désintoxication, les hôpitaux psychiatriques ou bien les différents systèmes d’aide alimentaire aux personnes démunies (Food Stamps, etc.) dont les statistiques ethno-raciales sont ordonnées par le gouvernement fédéral ; enfin la police est aussi amenée à maintenir un système de statistiques ethno-raciales afin de répondre à différentes lois fédérales. Le DFEH étant chargé de faire respecter les lois fédérales anti-discriminatoires, une grande partie de ces statistiques ethno-raciales n’auraient pas subi de changement avec le passage de la Proposition 54. En ce qui concerne les statistiques qui n’étaient pas liées à une loi fédérale, le DFEH aurait pu les poursuivre jusqu’en 2014, date à laquelle le législateur aurait pu maintenir ces activités. Certaines statistiques auraient toutefois été interdites par le projet d’amendement. Par exemple, toute entreprise sous contrat avec l’État n’aurait plus pu récolter de statistiques ethno-raciales ou concernant l’origine nationale. Il en allait de même pour les activités et examens des écoles publiques spécifiques à l’État de Californie ; pour les candidats (non inscrits) dans les University of California et les California State

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Universty ; les élèves de lycée participant à des activités organisées par les UCs ; les étudiant de troisième cycle participant au programme d’effacement de leur prêt étudiant ; les étudiants passant les concours d’enseignement (teaching credentials). Enfin, de par la formulation du texte, les effets concernant certains dispositifs restaient flous avec leur application dépendant de l’interprétation de l’amendement par la justice et le législateur. Par exemple, les données démographiques de l’État de Californie ne se basent pas que sur les résultats du recensement. L’État de Californie utilise les estimations fournies par l’Unité de recherche démographique (Demographic Research Unit ou DRU) du ministère des Finances de l’État. De plus, une fois compilées, les données du recensement (et toutes les autres statistiques récoltées afin de répondre aux exigences fédérales) servent à de nombreuses politiques publiques. Il n’était pas clair dans quelle mesure et dans quel but les données démographiques auraient pu être utilisées. Par exemple, les criminologues se demandaient si, bien que la police ait eu le droit de décrire physiquement des suspects, les taux de criminalité par groupe ethno- racial auraient été maintenus. Mais, le domaine le plus controversé, resta celui de la recherche médicale. Concernant cette exception, une très grande majorité de professionnels de santé ne furent pas convaincus que le texte leur garantissait le maintien des différentes applications de la classification en médecine. Le texte semblait assez vague pour pouvoir être interprété ultérieurement par la justice ou le législateur comme interdisant la collecte des statistiques dans certains domaines utiles ou pouvant se révéler cruciaux pour des questions de santé publique. Comment, par exemple, suivre l’évolution du taux de diabète des enfants hispaniques si de telles statistiques étaient interdites dans les hôpitaux publics sous prétexte que l’État ne peut participer à la classification ethno-raciale de sa population ? Ces arguments contre la Proposition 54 furent exprimés et résumés dans le guide officiel des électeurs de Californie qui, pour chaque Proposition soumise au jugement des électeurs,présente les opinions des deux camps13. Dans un texte rédigé par Jacqueline Jacobberger (présidente de la ligue des électrices de Californie déjà très impliquée dans la lutte contre la Proposition 209), John C. Lewin (président de l’Association médicale de Californie), et Robert M. Pearl (du géant de l’assurance maladie Kaiser Permanente), les détracteurs de la Proposition 54 expliquent que cet amendement proposé à la Constitution de l’État représente une atteinte au droit à l’information. Cette classification ethno-raciale est une source d’information primordiale dans le domaine du suivi des maladies infectieuses par exemple. Les auteurs expliquèrent donc que « si une épidémie se déclarait dans un groupe, nous devrions pouvoir l’identifier et la contenir avant qu’elle ne s’étendît à la population générale »14. Ce point, qui ne fut soulevé par aucun intellectuel de renom ou aucun media de masse, rappelle étrangement le vieux mythe xénophobe des groupes ethno-raciaux qui contamineraient la population de leurs maladies contagieuses15. Par conséquent, suivant cet argument, une maladie se déclarant aux États-Unis ne pourrait pas être enrayée sans classer la population en groupes ethno-raciaux16. Une telle situation de ségrégation épidémiologique semble pourtant bien improbable17. Les détracteurs de la Proposition 54 enfoncent le clou en précisant que « l’exception médicale » contenue dans le projet d’amendement permet seulement de classer les patients individuellement et ne permet pas de classer « les populations afin de prévenir les maladies », et citent des organisations médicales prestigieuses opposées à la Proposition (telles que l’Académie des médecins de famille de Californie ( California

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Academy of Family Physicians), l’Académie américaine de pédiatrie (American Academy of Pediatrics), l’Association de Californie de la santé (California Healthcare Association), ou l’Association californienne des hôpitaux publics (California Association of Public Hospitals). Il n’en demeure pas moins que la l’utilité de telles statistiques face à la prévention des maladies reste contestée dans d’autres milieux scientifiques18. L’opposition s’appuie ainsi sur les travaux de deux généticiens, Susanne Haga et J. Craig Venter, pour déclarer qu’appliquer des catégories « dépassées » à l’interprétation des données scientifiques pourrait mener à des conclusion erronées et biologiquement insignifiantes. L’équipe de Jaccobberger affirme pourtant que « les femmes blanches ont un taux de cancer du sein supérieur » (sans préciser par rapport à qui), « les Asiatique-américains ont un risque plus grand de contracter l’hépatite B » (sans préciser par rapport à qui), « les Hispaniques sont plus susceptibles de mourir des causes liées au diabète » et les « Afro-américains ont un plus fort taux de décès dû aux maladies cardiaques » (toujours sans préciser par rapport à qui)19. Et de conclure : « cette information [obtenue par la classification ethno-raciale] sauve des vies ». L’argument est de taille. Et pour appuyer cette conclusion, les opposants à la Proposition 54 rappellent que plus de 40 autres groupes se joignent à eux telles l’Association américaine des maladies du cœur (American Heart Association), Action contre le cancer du Sein (Breast Cancer Action), ou encore la Coalition hispanique pour une Californie en bonne santé (Latino Coalition for a Healthy California). L’argument de Ward Connerly en faveur de la Proposition 54 est qu’il est primordial de se souvenir de l’origine raciste de cette forme de classification et d’apprendre des erreurs de l’histoire, de l’eugénisme et du national socialisme. De plus, d’après lui, la discussion autour de la multiracialité a démontré que l’idée de races pures et hermétiques est caduque20. Mais ces arguments firent pâle figure à côté de cette déferlante scientifique. De plus, l’équipe de Jacobberger put s’enorgueillir de bénéficier du soutien d’autres associations judiciaires ou policières qui estimèrent que le texte de la Proposition laissait la porte ouverte à un démantèlement du système judiciaire21. Les rues seraient donc moins sûres si la justice ne disposait pas de statistiques criminelles classées par groupe ethno-racial. Le milieu éducatif se sentit aussi menacé et apporta sa pièce à l’édifice (grâce notamment à ses puissants syndicats) et Jacobberger et ses collègues expliquèrent que le California Public School Accountabily Act fut mis en place pour s’assurer que les écoles réduisaient l’écart scolaire (achievement gap) entre les différents groupes ethno-raciaux et que le passage de la Proposition 54 ne permettrait pas de vérifier que les établissements scolaires feraient correctement leur travail22. Les électeurs devaient donc choisir entre deux textes radicalement opposés. D’un côté, un projet d’amendement qui dénonçait la classification ethno-raciale révolue et héritée d’un autre temps, ainsi que l’immixtion du gouvernement dans le domaine de l’identité personnelle et intime de chacun. Mais, ne pouvant poursuivre ce raisonnement jusqu’au bout, les auteurs de la Proposition 54 y inclurent de nombreuses exceptions plus ou moins claires. De l’autre côté, une coalition très vaste de représentants d’associations, de syndicats et de corporations professionnelles respectées des électeurs : la justice, l’éducation et la santé. Le passage de la Proposition 54 équivaudrait à une censure de l’information. Une information nécessaire et qui sauve des vies.

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La nature des débats référendaires

Il faut signaler à ce moment de notre étude que les arguments résumés de façon succincte par les deux camps et présentés aux Californiens dans le guide électoral ne peuvent tenir lieu de réel débat sociétal. Et ce pour plusieurs raisons qui ont trait à la nature même des référendums d’initiative populaire. Premièrement, peu d’électeurs parcourent ces guides qui sont souvent épais puisque le nombre de référendums, locaux notamment, semble augmenter à chaque élection ou presque. Deuxièmement, ces argumentaires sont écrits par des groupes politiques peu objectifs, voire non indépendants, dont le rôle n’est pas d’éduquer le lecteur mais bien de le convaincre. Troisièmement, et c’est peut-être là la plus grande faiblesse du système référendaire tel qu’il se présente en Californie, les textes de référendums sont presque toujours obscurs, opaques voir incompréhensibles. La genèse tortueuse de ces textes qui sont le plus souvent le résultat de circonstances politiques fait qu’ils sont très peu propices à stimuler le débat démocratique. Soit ils sont écrits de façon trop rapide pour répondre à un impératif politique, ils sont confus et prêtent parfois le flanc au recours en justice. Soit ils sont écrits avec soin par des spécialistes du droit mais dans ce cas il n’est pas rare qu’ils soient formulés de façon à occulter le but réel de leurs auteurs. Car dans la majorité des cas le but du référendum est bien de « court-circuiter » le système législatif. En effet, pour des sujets parfois techniques et souvent complexes, les auteurs tentent souvent de camoufler la controverse qu’ils pourraient susciter dans un jargon juridique et législatif qui rend le texte abscond. Tant et si bien que même les professionnels de la politique californienne doivent eux-mêmes souvent s’en remettre à leurs collègues lobbyistes ou attachés parlementaires spécialistes de la question afin d’entrevoir les possibles conséquences de chaque amendement constitutionnel. C’est pour cette raison aussi que l’argumentaire est si important puisque de nombreux électeurs se déterminent simplement grâce au nom des organisations soutenant ou opposant le projet. En fait, les référendums d’initiative populaire sont par nature de très mauvais vecteurs de débat politique de fond23. Enfin, avant de revenir à la dynamique politique qui caractérisa cette élection, il nous faut rappeler que la chute spectaculaire du projet d’amendement dans les sondages et sa défaite finale furent aussi déterminées en partie par le contexte de cette élection exceptionnelle à bien des égards.

Le contexte de l’élection

Dans l’espace de quelques mois la tendance s’inversa complètement vis-à-vis de la Proposition 54. Comment expliquer un tel revirement de situation ? Il faut avoir à l’esprit tout d’abord le contexte complexe de cette élection exceptionnelle. Rappelons que le système de référendum d’initiative populaire californien, dans lequel l’argent joue un rôle primordial notamment dans la récolte des signatures, permit de destituer, lors de la même élection, un gouverneur, par la voie démocratique, onze mois seulement après que celui-ci ait été réélu. Darrell Issa, riche homme d’affaire et membre de la chambre des représentants du Congrès pour la très conservatrice 49ème circonscription de Californie, lança sa campagne de révocation du gouverneur Davis en payant des « suburban warriors »24, ces partisans fidèles que la droite américaine sait si bien mobiliser en Californie du Sud, afin de collecter le million de signatures nécessaires

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pour lancer le référendum, pensant qu’il serait candidat si le processus aboutissait. Hélas, ce dernier lui échappa et il fut vite écarté de la campagne par les mastodontes du Parti républicain, surtout lorsque Arnold Schwarzenegger et Tom McClintock se portèrent candidats. Le camp démocrate tenta d’enrailler le vote de destitution mais après moult péripéties judiciaires le référendum fut avalisé par la justice et la Proposition 54, initialement prévue pour les primaires de mars 2004, se retrouva projetée dans cette arène électorale qui prit un peu les Californiens au dépourvu. Le projet d’amendement de la Constitution fut donc pris au milieu d’une élection du gouverneur à quelques 135 candidats et une campagne éclair de deux mois. Ajoutons à cela une controverse concernant les bulletins de vote qui étaient les mêmes que ceux utilisés lors du fiasco floridien de l’élection présidentielle de 200025, et on comprend vite que cette cacophonie électorale n’était pas propice à créer les conditions sereines d’un débat de fond26. Ensuite, et c’est un point essentiel, la Proposition 54 est arrivée sur l’échiquier politique au moment de l’élection de destitution, ce qui avait pour conséquence de jeter de l’ombre sur le débat de fond27. En effet, toute campagne électorale américaine est en générale déjà marquée par des enjeux ethno-raciaux ou communautaires. Puisque les minorités votent traditionnellement démocrate, l’enjeu électoral visant à courtiser les électeurs noirs et surtout hispaniques dans le cas de la Californie, est de taille28. Gray Davis, dans un ultime fait d’armes, s’empressa de signer un projet de loi visant à permettre aux sans-papiers californiens d’obtenir un permis de conduire, espérant ainsi recueillir quelques électeurs de dernière minutes dans la communauté hispanique, celle-ci comptant en son sein la très grande majorité des sans-papiers29. Cette décision eut pour effet de relancer le débat sur l’immigration illégale, question à connotation ethno-raciale puisque l’immigration illégale est perçue comme un problème hispanique30. De plus, une autre source de controverse émana de la présidente de la branche californienne du NAACP, Alice Huffman, qui accusa Schwarzenegger d’être raciste et d’avoir été influencé par l’appartenance de son père au Parti nazi en Autriche31. Il faut aussi ajouter à tout cela le scandale du financement de la campagne de Cruz Bustamante, le gouverneur adjoint, accusé d’avoir bénéficié de façon illégale de contributions très importantes de tribus amérindiennes32. On le voit bien, la politique californienne regorge de considérations communautaires et les participants connaissent le pouvoir mobilisateur de thèmes aussi passionnels. La Proposition 54, qui visait à éliminer certaines formes de classification ethno-raciale émanant des pouvoirs publics, envenima la situation et allait se retrouver elle-même prisonnière des conditions politiques du moment. L’American Civil Rights Institute est une organisation conservatrice très proche du Parti républicain au sein duquel elle compte ses principaux donateurs. Le niveau d’antipathie vis-à-vis de Gray Davis et ses scandales financiers de gestion de l’argent public, était si élevé que le Parti républicain voyait dans cette élection une opportunité de reprendre la direction de l’État le plus peuplé et le plus riche de l’Union, mais aussi un État dont la branche législative est traditionnellement contrôlée par les démocrates. Or, la Proposition 54 de l’ACRI était tout à fait le genre de controverse dont le camp républicain se serait passé. Très vite, les analystes politiques ont supposé que la Proposition 54 était susceptible de motiver de nombreuses personnes issues des groupes minoritaires à aller aux urnes, ce qui faisait le jeu de Davis, qui avait été réélu in extremis en 2002 grâce notamment à l’apport des voix des Africains-américains et des Hispaniques33. Le Parti républicain, qui dans son ensemble n’était déjà pas très favorable à la Proposition 5434,

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prit très vite ses distances avec Ward Connerly qui se retrouva esseulé face à un Parti démocrate et une opposition très bien organisée (et financée), et ayant tiré les enseignements de son échec lors de la campagne sur la Proposition 209. La campagne en faveur de la Proposition 54 devait lutter contre les attaques de Cruz Bustamante, le gouverneur adjoint, candidat démocrate à la succession de Gray Davis, qui la prit pour cible à travers une lourde campagne télévisuelle espérant ainsi motiver la base de son parti. Et par conséquent, le référendum devait aussi lutter contre les pressions politiques du camp de Schwarzenegger qui voyait dans la Proposition un obstacle à son élection puisque susceptible de mobiliser l’adversaire35. Car sans le soutien unanime du Parti conservateur, ses chances de gagner l’élection s’étaient considérablement amoindries36. Toutefois, ce contexte n’explique qu’en partie le sort de la Proposition 54. Car s’il offre un début d’explication quant à la défaite dans les urnes, il n’explique pas pourquoi les questions légitimes soulevées par ce projet d’amendement, à savoir le rôle de la classification ethno-raciale dans la société américaine, allaient être complètement et définitivement passées sous silence. Au-delà du caractère chaotique de l’élection et des entrecroisements des intérêts de partis et des candidats, il est essentiel de noter qu’il n’y eut même pas un semblant de débat sur le thème de cette classification. Ce « silence assourdissant » est si remarquable que nous nous devons d’en chercher les implications et les explications.

L’absence de débat public sur la classification ethno- raciale et le rôle du Parti démocrate

L’épisode californien nous en dit long sur la conceptualisation de la notion de race aux États-Unis et sur les limites du débat public et politique quant à l’instrumentalisation de la classification ethno-raciale. En fait, de débat il ne fut jamais vraiment question. Aucun journaliste, homme politique ou intellectuel de renom ne sembla vouloir considérer la possibilité que l’utilisation de la classification n’était pas la pierre angulaire de la justice et de l’égalité dans le système démocratique américain. Les hommes politiques, républicains et démocrates, se sont vite rendu compte qu’ils risquaient de se mettre à dos une grande partie de l’opinion publique s’ils remettaient en cause ce marqueur identitaire très fort que représentent les statistiques ethno- raciales. Car la Proposition 54 se vit très rapidement taxée de « prohibition de l’information » (Information Ban). Pourtant, très peu d’universitaires ou d’intellectuels crurent bon d’intervenir afin de demander de quel genre d’information il était question. L’information était-elle de nature biologique ? Ou bien l’information était-elle de nature sociologique avec des implications biologiques ? Cette question est primordiale et est au cœur du débat scientifique aux États-Unis, comme l’illustrent les discussions sur l’émergence de la pharmacogénétique et de l’identification ethno- raciale par l’ADN37. Les scientifiques américains ne semblent pas avoir atteint un consensus sur la nature même du concept de race et un débat approfondi s’impose afin de déterminer pour quelles raisons la classification ethno-raciale doit être maintenue, si tant est qu’elle le doive38. Ce débat public pourtant légitime n’eut pas lieu car cette question personne ne la posa et la Proposition 54 disparut très vite sous le rouleau compresseur de l’argument médical qui avançait que l’absence de classification empêchait les chercheurs d’étudier les maladies et les médecins de guérir les Californiens. Dans un spot publicitaire, Everett C.

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Koop, ancien ministre de la santé (Surgeon General of the United States), déclara, sans sourciller, que la classification ethno-raciale était « une affaire de vie ou de mort » ! Dès lors, même s’ils avaient été avancés, les arguments épistémologiques ou philosophiques sur la nature du concept de race n’auraient surement pas suffit à lancer le débat si le public était persuadé que de telles statistiques permettaient de sauver des vies. Le gouverneur adjoint Cruz Bustamante, candidat institutionnel du Parti démocrate, allait même voir dans la Proposition 54, et l’engouement qu’elle pouvait susciter, un support pour sa campagne39. Il fut accusé notamment de contourner la loi sur le financement des campagnes électorales40 en bénéficiant de très grosses sommes d’argent provenant des groupes de pression amérindiens41, enrichis par l’industrie des casinos, à travers un organisme censé combattre la Proposition 5442. Fort de ces quelques 4 millions de dollars supplémentaires, il lança une série de publicités télévisées43, très diffusées, affirmant que la classification ethno-raciale était source d’information médicale et sauvait des vies, en particulier celles des minorités qui sont plus susceptibles d’être en mauvaise santé, sous-entendant ainsi que la santé publique était un sujet plus important pour les minorités44. Afin de lutter contre cette déferlante médiatique Ward Connerly fit lui aussi appel à ses relations pour financer sa campagne de façon plutôt opaque45. De nombreux universitaires et chercheurs savent pertinemment que bien des pays de par le monde n’ont pas recours à la classification ethno-raciale et que l’on n’y est pas forcément plus mal soigné. Les États-Unis dépensent pour leur système de santé deux fois plus que les autres pays industrialisés pour des résultats plus médiocres, comme en atteste entre autres l’espérance de vie ou le taux de mortalité infantile46. Ils savent qu’un système de couverture maladie universelle gommerait une grande partie des disparités de santé entre les différents groupes sociaux et c’est une des raisons qui a poussé le président Obama à passer sa réforme de l’assurance maladie en 201047. Pourtant, les seuls médecins qui prirent la parole confirmèrent l’argument médical en faveur de la classification ethno-raciale. Les historiens des sciences, les sociologues et autres intellectuels restèrent tellement discrets que l’on peut se demander s’ils n’acquiesçaient pas par leur silence. C’est que le Parti démocrate et les associations progressistes proches du parti firent de la Proposition 54 leur étendard contre le retour des conservateurs, de Ward Connerly et du fantôme de la défaite face à la Proposition 209. La Proposition 54 fut habilement liée par le camp progressiste au vote de destitution du gouverneur démocrate puisqu’il se déroulait en même temps. Ces deux événements allaient être présentés inlassablement comme deux attaques simultanées et combinées de la droite conservatrice : l’une contre le Parti démocrate, l’autre contre les minorités48. Le Parti démocrate tenta ainsi de renforcer un peu plus l’adage selon lequel il est l’allié des minorités. Toute personne suggérant que la Proposition 54 ne représentait pas nécessairement la fin de la médecine moderne se retrouvait isolée et risquait de se voir taxée au mieux de conservateur, au pire de raciste. Et apparaître comme raciste, ou au moins ne pas être clairement en faveur des minorités ethno- raciales, est très souvent pour les élus démocrates perçu comme un véritable risque politique. Seuls certains républicains peuvent se risquer à s’opposer aux intérêts des groupes minoritaires sans perdre tout crédit vis-à-vis de leur électorat. Toutefois, si Connerly est financé et instrumentalisé par les conservateurs, il n’en demeure pas moins que sa question était d’un point de vue intellectuel on ne peut plus légitime. Au- delà des clivages politiques, la Proposition 54 présentait à la société américaine une question essentielle qui ne fut finalement pas posée. Les porte-paroles de la gauche américaine se sont arc-boutés, régurgitant l’argument médical sans en digérer les

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implications épistémologiques. L’utilisation des statistiques ethno-raciales dans le domaine de la santé publique et de la médecine leurs octroie une légitimité scientifique, qu’elles n’ont d’ailleurs jamais vraiment perdu aux États-Unis, et de laquelle résulte le droit d’intervenir sur l’homme non plus à partir de ce qu’il est par statut mais de ce qu’il est par nature, selon sa constitution. Suggérer que les statistiques ethno-raciales dans les études médicales ne seraient qu’une donnée démographique, au même tire que l’âge ou le sexe, fait courir le risque de réifier le concept de races humaines en le biologisant. Par exemple, on pouvait apprendre dans les pamphlets du très actif Syndicat américain des libertés civils (ACLU), association progressiste qui fait par ailleurs un travail remarquable : « Le cancer du sein, les problèmes cardiaques, la mortalité infantile, l’anémie falciforme, le cancer de la prostate, le Sida, la tuberculose et le cancer des cervicales sont seulement quelques-unes des maladies qui nous affligent différemment en fonction de notre race »49. L’identité ethno-raciale n’est plus qu’une vérité médicale avérée, un concept scientifique sans équivoque ni controverse. Ces arguments allaient être repris par la presse, notamment le San Francisco Chronicle, qui prit officiellement position contre la Proposition 54 en ces termes : Pire, la Proposition 54 interdit la collecte d’informations qui sont essentielles pour la santé publique. Elle contient une exception très étroite pour « les patients et les sujets de la recherche médicale » mais elle interdirait la prise en compte de l’identité raciale sur les certificats de naissance et de décès, ainsi que d’autres données démographiques vitales pour les organismes de santé publique. L’ignorance est la mère de tous les vices. Votez non à la Proposition 5450. Refuser de classer les être humains sur une base « ethnique » ou « raciale » serait donc source d’ignorance51. L’identité ethno-raciale représente une source d’information. Pourtant, si ce présupposé est vrai, personne ne prit le temps de définir de quel genre d’information il s’agissait. Une information de nature génétique ? Ou bien une information de nature sociologique ? Ou bien une information d’une toute autre nature ? Il semble que la conception américaine de la médecine ne fasse pas la part belle à la sociologie. Les considérations génétiques et « biologisantes » y sont omniprésentes et un débat sur la nature de l’information créée par la classification ethno-raciale aurait pu, aurait dû, clarifier ou du moins amener sur le devant de la scène politique et du débat public cette interrogation primordiale.

Conclusion : rôle du discours scientifique dans le débat politique et identitaire

Les données médicales, et à travers elles les statistiques ethno-raciales, sont perçues comme des données de nature biologique, forcément objectives et, partant, incontestables. Cependant, la classification ethno-raciale est avant tout une considération d’ordre politique. Ne pouvant se résoudre à remettre en cause cette classification, ou du moins à entamer une réflexion sur les implications philosophiques mais aussi pratiques de cette dernière, l’opinion américaine et la classe politique se sont contentées d’instrumentaliser le discours scientifique ambiant afin de maintenir cette perspective. La société étatsunienne semble entretenir, à travers cette essentialisation de la médecine, une certaine « désociologisation » de l’identitaire en ce qui concerne le concept de race. A travers la Proposition 54, comme à travers la commercialisation de médicaments « ethniques » tels que le Bidil52, on peut observer le

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rôle du discours scientifique et ses points d’ancrage profonds sur la pensée identitaire et sur l’organisation politique de la société états-unienne. Ce silence rédhibitoire face aux questions soulevées par le référendum d’initiative populaire illustre les limites d’une autocritique sociologique états-unienne face au besoin presque irrépressible de légitimation d’une classification ethno-raciale sans laquelle il n’existe pas de progrès scientifique, d’accès au savoir et, surtout, de socle identitaire. Les Californiens virent dans la Proposition 54 une atteinte à leurs identités personnelles et leur sens identitaire collectif, menacé de disparaître. Car cette classification semble bel et bien représenter pour les Américains une voie privilégiée de la connaissance de soi et de l’Autre.

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NOTES

1. LONG, Emmet (ed.), Affirmative Action, New York, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1996; POST Robert & ROGIN, Michael (eds.), Race and Representation: Affirmative Action, New York, Zone Books, 1998; CAHN, Steven M (ed.), The Affirmative Action Debate, New York & London, Routledge, 2002. 2. Les critiques se limitent souvent à remettre en question les politiques publiques et non la classification en elle-même. STEEL, Shelby, The Content of Our Character, New York, Harper Perenial, 1991 ; Ceux qui attaquent la classification directement perdent souvent leur légitimité politique en étant trop ouvertement instrumentalisés par les conservateurs. CONNERLY, Ward, Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences, San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2000. 3. FEARS, Darryl, « Calif. Activist Seeks End To Identification by Race », Washington Post, 5 juillet 2003, A1. 4. McGRIRR, Lisa, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the American Right, Princeton University Press, 2002.

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5. MAGAGNINI, Stephen, « Poll bucks prior surveys, sees Prop. 54 winning », Sacramento Bee, 26 septembre 2003, A3. Ce sondage fut effectué dans six langues. 6. Notons tout de même un bémol à cette étude car 44% des Blancs étaient encore indécis. 7. Sur la structure et la culture de coalition du Parti démocrate basé sur les caucus cf. par exemple FREEMAN, Jo, « The Political Culture of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party », Political Science Quarterly, vol. 101, n°3, 1986, 327-56. 8. Cette directive, adoptée par le Ministère du commerce dont dépend le Bureau du recensement, est devenue la norme fédérale en matière de catégorisation ethno-raciale. U.S. OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET, « Directive nº15, Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting », Federal Regulations, 1978, vol. 43, n°19, 260. 9. Pour une discussion plus approfondi du système de statistiques ethno-raciales de l’État de Californie cf. RICHOMME, Olivier, « La classification « ethno-raciale » des statistiques démographiques aux États-Unis », Annales de démographie historique, 2007, nº1, 177-202. 10. La question de l’origine nationale est parfois assimilée à la classification ethno-raciale alors qu’elle ne soulève pas les mêmes questions épistémologiques. De plus, l’origine nationale ne fait pas réellement partie de la controverse car aux États-Unis c’est à travers le prisme du pentagone ethno-racial qu’est envisagée la question de l’Autre. 11. Entre temps, la Cour suprême a déclaré que la ségrégation carcérale était difficilement justifiable aux yeux de la Constitution au grand dam des syndicats de gardiens et de responsables de l’administration pénitentiaire qui voient la ségrégation comme le seul moyen de garantir la sécurité des prisonniers. Aux États-Unis, de nombreux gangs s’organisent autour de l’identité communautaire, géographique et ethno-raciale. SAVAGE, David G. & Warren, Jenifer, « Justices Reject Segregation in State’s Prisons », Los Angeles Times, 24 février 2005, A1. 12. Aux États-Unis, les familles remplissent des fiches de renseignement en début de chaque année scolaire (dès le plus jeune âge) sur lesquels figure l’identité ethno-raciale des enfants. Généralement remplies par les parents, il est possible qu’elles soient remplies par l’enseignant. Il semble aussi qu’une fois arrivés au lycée les élèves puissent remplir leur fiche de renseignement tout seul. Ces données sont une part essentielle de la politique « No Child Left Behind » lancée par le président Bush qui vise, entre autres choses, à travers des examens nationaux standardisés, à évaluer l’écart entre les groupes ethno-raciaux dans le but, évidemment, de le réduire. 13. CALIFORNIA STATEWIDE SPECIAL ELECTION, Tuesday October 7th 2003, Official Voter Information Guide,Possession de l’auteur. 14. Ibid. 15. Ce thème est notamment très présent dans les arguments de justification des restrictions à l’immigration de 1921, 1924 et 1929 ainsi que dans le discours eugéniste qui l’accompagnait. Cf. par exemple HALL, Prescott F, Immigration and its Effects upon the United States, New York, Henry Holt, 1906. 16. La classification d’après l’origine nationale soulève moins de controverse dans l’épidémiologie même si elle peut s’avérer aussi réductrice. 17. Cf. notamment les travaux de Nancy Krieger qui en appelle à une perspective « écosociale » du racisme, ou une « épidémiologie sociale ». Expression révélatrice puisqu’elle sous entend que certains épidémiologistes américains envisagent leur discipline comme dépourvue de toute considération sociale. La conséquence directe de ce manque de contextualisation sociale est la profusion de travaux réduisant l’environnement à une catégorie socioprofessionnelle dans lesquels il n’est pas question d’observer les « expressions biologiques de la racisation ou du sexage ». KRIEGER, Nancy, « Does Racism Harm Health? Did Child Abuse Exist Before 1962? On Explicit Questions, Critical Science, and Current Controversies: An Ecosocial Perspective », American Journal of Public Health, février 2003, vol. 93, nº2, 194-99; « A Glossary for social epidemiology », Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, October 2001, vol. 55,693-700;

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« Discrimination and Health », in BERKAMN, Lisa F. et KAWACHI, Ichiro (dir.). Social Epidemiology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, 36-75. 18. On observe, pour certaines maladies, des probabilités en fonction des zones géographiques du globe (zones extrêmement imprécises par définition) que la médecine états-unienne réinterprète en groupes ethno-raciaux. Beta-thalassémie est ainsi devenue aux États-Unis une maladie génétique dépistée principalement chez les Noirs car sa probabilité d’occurrence est forte en Afrique de l’Ouest. Or, tous les Noirs américains ne sont pas descendants de population d’Afrique de l’Ouest. De plus, cette maladie se retrouve aussi en Méditerranée et en Asie du Sud- est. La médecine américaine opère ici un raccourci intellectuel entre zones géographiques, héritage génétique et races humaines qui renforce l’assise biologique de ces dernières. Pour une critique de l’usage racisant de la génétique cf. ZACK, Naomi, Philosophy of Science and Race, New York & London, Routledge, 2002. 19. D’un point de vue épidémiologique ces groups englobent des populations extrêmement variées. L’identité ethno-raciale est perçue comme une donnée démographique et souvent comme le dénominateur le plus significatif. D’autres facteurs tels que l’activité sportive, les habitudes alimentaires, l’origine étrangère, la catégorie socioprofessionnelle, le niveau d’études, le revenu, l’absence ou le type d’assurance maladie, les données géographiques et les conditions de vie ne sont que rarement prises en compte, et donc très rarement recoupées avec l’identité ethno-raciale, et ce, même pour des études concernant des pathologies fortement influencées par les facteurs environnementaux. Pour plus de détails concernant les multiples facteurs masqués par l’utilisation des catégories raciales dans les études médicales cf. WILLIAMS, David R., LAVIZZO-MOUREY, Risa et WARREN, Rueben C., « The Concept of Race and Health Status in America », Public Health Report, janvier-février 1994, vol. 109, 26-41. 20. SPICKARD, Paul R., « The Illogic of American Racial Categories », in ROOT, Maria P., Racially Mixed People in America, Newbury Park, London, New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1992. 21. Tels que l’Anti-Defamation League et Asian Law Alliance. 22. Les organisations apportant leur soutien dans le guide officiel de l’électeur furent : l’Association des enseignants de Californie (California Teachers Association), la Fédération californienne des enseignants (California Federation of Teachers), la branche californienne de l’Association des parents d’élèves (California State PTA), l’Université de Californie (University of California ou UC) et Jack O’Conell le State Superintendent of Schools. 23. Le dernier exemple en date est la Proposition 11 censée, selon Arnold Schwarzenegger, régler le problème de gouvernance de l’État. Cet amendement à la constitution créa une commission indépendante constituée de citoyens ordinaires chargés de redécouper les circonscriptions électorales. Or, pour traiter un sujet aussi politique et aussi complexe en si peu de temps la commission a dû s’en remettre à des experts. Un tel sujet mériterait une réflexion de fond sur la crise de la représentation politique. 24. McGRIRR, op. cit., 2002. 25. Rappelons qu’après six longues semaines d’imbroglio juridique la Cour suprême avait ordonné l’arrêt du recompte de Floride, donnant ainsi la victoire à Georges W. Bush sur Al Gore, par 537 voix. La Cour avait estimé que les États n’étaient pas tenus de fournir des conditions uniformes en matière de système électoral. Cf. Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000) ; Certains journalistes estiment, qu’en 2000, 40 000 votes n’auraient pu être pris en considération, la grande majorité étant des bulletins de vote émanant de personnes afro-américaines ou hispaniques. Editorial, « The Recall Reargued », New York Times, 23 septembre 2003, A30. 26. Trois semaines avant l’échéance électorale, et alors que quelques 300 000 personnes avaient déjà voté par procuration, la cour d’appel fédérale du 9ème circuit suspendit l’élection jusqu’à nouvel ordre (proposant même de la repousser jusqu’en mars 2004) car la cour déclara, comme le soulignaient le Syndicat des libertés civiles (American Civil Liberties Union) et d’autres plaignants, que l’élection ne serait pas équitable de par la nature des bulletins de vote que 44% des

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Californiens devaient utiliser. MURPHY, Dean E., « California’s Vote Delayed by Court over Punch Cards », New York Times, 16 septembre 2003, A1 ; Les représentants de l’État de Californie ont eux- mêmes reconnu que les anciennes machines à cartes perforées « engendrent plus d’erreurs que les nouveaux systèmes ». 27. MURPHY, Dean E., « Affirmative Action Foe’s Latest Effort Complicates California Recall », New York Times, 3 août 2003, 1-13. 28. Même s’il est maintenant clair que les Hispaniques sont loin de représenter un bloc monolithique, en particulier sur les questions morales ou familiales pour lesquelles une partie de la communauté se positionne de façon traditionnelle et conservatrice. HENDRICKS, Tyche, « Latinos Activists gear up to register, get out vote », San Francisco Chronicle, 13 août 2003, A16; Del OLMO, Franck, « Now Latinos Are in the Driver’s Seat », Los Angeles Times, 27 juillet 2003, M5. 29. LeDUFF, Charlie, « Ethnic Issue in California Recall Play Out at Latino Parade », New York Times, 8 septembre 2003, A19. 30. HADDOCK, Vicky, « Politics and Race », San Francisco Chronicle, 28 septembre 2003, p.D3; SCHRAG, Peter, « In California, White Men Are the Silent Plurality », New York Times, 14 septembre 2003, 3. 31. COILE, Zachary, « Question on NAACP boss’ racism charge », San Francisco Chronicle, 3 octobre 2003, A14. 32. SIMON, Mark, « Indian campaign donations in the spotlight », San Francisco Chronicle, 24 septembre 2003, A18. 33. TROUNSON, Rebecca, HELFAND, Duke & BUSTILLO, Miguel, « Racial Data Measure May Be a Wild Card in Election », Los Angeles Times, 15 août 2003, A30; SCHRAG, Peter, « Race and gubernatorial recall: Can they be linked? ». Sacramento Bee, 30 juillet 2003, B7; SCHEVITZ, Tanya, « Recall’s Strange Bedfellow », San Francisco Chronicle, 29 juillet 2003, A11. 34. Par exemple, la Proposition 54, qui fut présentée comme l’héritier de la Proposition 209, ne faisait même pas l’unanimité chez les auteurs de cette dernière. En effet, Glynn Custred (président du mouvement Americans Against Discrimination and Preference) et Thomas Wood (directeur de la très conservatrice California Association of Scholars) ne prirent pas du tout les mêmes positions vis-à-vis de la Proposition 54. Le premier y était favorable en tant que nouvelle pièce à l’édifice entamé par la Proposition 209 ; le second y était opposé justement parce que les statistiques ethno-raciales permettaient, selon lui, de s’assurer que la loi interdisant l’affirmative action ne soit pas détournée. Cf. NELSON, Jennifer, « A Reluctant No On 54: We Need The Boxes », San Francisco Gate, 8 septembre 2003, Disponible à l’adresse : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi ?file =/gate/archive/2003/09/08/jnelson.DTL (page consultée le 23 avril 2009). (Notons au passage que Madame Nelson était l’attachée de presse de la campagne pour la Proposition 209 en 1996). 35. MORAIN, Dan, « Prop. 54 Sponsor Concedes Passage Is Now Unlikely », Los Angeles Times, 7 septembre 2003, A1. 36. Ward Connerly nous a confié dans un entretien qu’il recevait des coups de fils de représentants du Parti républicain lui expliquant qu’ils approuvaient sa démarche mais que pour des raisons électorales ils ne pouvaient l’appuyer publiquement. Entretien avec Ward CONNERLY, Directeur et fondateur du American Civil Rights Institute, le 31 août 2005 à Sacramento, CA. 37. En 2005, la Food And Drug Administration a autorisé la mise sur le marché du premier médicament pour traiter l’insuffisance cardiaque spécifiquement destiné aux « Afro- Américains ». RAHEMTULLA, Talsin & BHOPA, Raj, « Pharmacogenetics and ethnically targeted therapies: New drug BiDil marks the return of biology to the debate aboutrace and ethnicity », British Medical Journal, vol. 330, 7 mai 2005, 1036-37. WADE, Nicholas, « Race Is Seen as Real Guide To Track Roots of Disease », New York Times, 30 juillet 2002, F1; « For Sale: A DNA Test To Measure Racial Mix », New York Times, 1er octobre 2002,

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F.4; « Scientists differ on genetics of race », International Herald Tribune, 28 octobre 2004, 6; « Race- Based Medicine Continued… », New York Times, 14 novembre 2004, 4-12. 38. Pour plus de précisions sur ces questions cf. notamment MORNING, Ann, 2009, "Toward a Sociology of Racial Conceptualization for the 21st Century, Social Forces 87(3), 1167-92. 39. RAINE, George, « Bustamante airs first anti-Prop. 54 ad », San Francisco Chronicle, 18 septembre 2003, A12. 40. Une loi de 2000 qui fut adoptée suite à un référendum d’initiative populaire, Proposition 34, qui limitait les contributions aux candidats du vote en destitution à 21 200 dollars par donneur. 41. Cette tactique allait s’avérer contre productive pour les tribus opérant les casinos. Les tribus du sud de la Californie étaient favorables à une participation active dans la campagne référendaire alors que les tribus du nord étaient plus réservées. Ces dernières avaient raison car les scandales du financement des campagnes ternirent leur image de « lobby exonéré d’impôts » et fournirent un argument de campagne de taille pour Schwarzenegger qui promit de réformer le statut des casinos amérindiens, notamment en les imposant fiscalement à la mesure de leurs bénéfices. WALTER, Dan, « Tribes lose high-stakes political gamble in recall election », Sacramento Bee, 20 octobre 2003, A3. 42. ROJAS, Aurelio, « Bustamante to shift disputed donations. The $3.8 million move to fight Prop. 54 aims to quiet his critics », Sacramento Bee, 7 septembre 2003, A1. La justice ordonna à Bustamante de ne pas utiliser cet argent même dans le cadre de la Proposition 54. Cf. BERTHELSEN, Christian, « Bustamante told not to use loophole », San Francisco Chronicle, 23 septembre 2003, A1. Ce dernier s’entêta pourtant et poursuivit sa campagne anti-Proposition 54 prétextant qu’il ne pouvait arrêter ses spots publicitaires sans rompre son contrat avec les chaînes de télévision, réduisant ainsi chaque jour les chances de la Proposition 54. Cf. MORAIN, Dan & RUBIN, Joel, « Bustamante Ads Still on the Air », Los Angeles Times, 25 septembre 2003, A26. 43. Les spots publicitaires sont incontournables lors des campagnes électorales dans un État aussi peuplé que la Californie. Dans des États plus petits les moyens plus traditionnels permettent de toucher une partie non négligeable de l’électorat. 44. COILE, Zachary, « Tribes add millions to McClintock, Bustamante», San Francisco Chronicle, 27 septembre 2003, A18. 45. Il reçut notamment des contributions significatives (1,7 millions de dollars) et secrètes de Rupert Murdoch, Joseph Coors ou encore Jerry Hume. Après que la Commission des pratiques politiques équitables (Fair Political Practice Commission), la même commission qui porta plainte contre Cruz Bustamante, ait porté plainte pour non divulgation des donations de campagne, ACRI dut payer 95 000 dollars d’amende lors d’un règlement à l’amiable. BERTHELSEN, Christian, « Prop. 54’s big-money backers revealed », San Francisco Chronicle, 19 mai 2005, B2. 46. WEBBER, Henry S., « The Failure of Health Care Reform: An Essay Review»,The Social Service Review, vol. 69, n 2, juin 1995, 318. 47. Les minorités sont surreprésentées dans la population sans assurance maladie. U.S. CENSUS, « Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007», 2008, http:// www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf (page consultée le 24 mai 2011). 48. Tous les opposants au vote de destitution ne manquèrent pas d’incorporer la Proposition 54 à leur combat contre les conservateurs, liant parfois directement le vote de destitution et la Proposition 54 à la lutte pour les droits civiques. SAMPLE, Herbert A., « Jesse Jackson fights recall and Prop. 54», Sacramento Bee, 17 septembre 2003, A3. 49. Pamphlet distribué par le ACLU de Californie du Sud, possession de l’auteur. 50. Editorial, « The San Francisco Chronicles Recommends/ PROP 54, Racial data: No », San Francisco Chronicle, 5 octobre 2003, E8. Le Chronicle fut d’ailleurs précédé par le San Diego Union- Tribune, qui est pourtant un journal beaucoup plus conservateur. Editorial, « No on Prop. 54; Poorly-crafted law is wrought with problems », San Diego-Union Tribune, 29 septembre 2003, B6.

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51. Ce terme d’ignorance pour dénigrer l’absence de classification et de statistiques sera le leitmotiv de l’opposition à la Proposition 54. Cf. par exemple, BENNER, Laurence A., « Prop. 54 ; A dangerous veil of ignorance », San Diego-Union Tribune, 1 octobre 2003, B7. 52. Cf. note 36.

RÉSUMÉS

Aux États-Unis, les occasions de voir émerger un débat public sur la légitimité des classifications ethniques et/ou raciales de la population américaine sont extrêmement rares et ponctuelles. Toutefois, en 2003, lors d’un référendum d’initiative populaire, les électeurs californiens ont pu se prononcer sur la question controversée de l’utilité d’une telle classification. Cette campagne électorale, à de nombreux égards atypique, nous éclaire tout de même sur les thèmes et enjeux du débat étatsunien concernant ces statistiques et les politiques publiques qui en dépendent. Mais surtout, elle illustre les difficultés à ouvrir un débat de fond sur la question de la taxonomie ethno-raciale. Cette question, d’un intérêt politique majeur, reste marquée par de profonds clivages partisans et, même lorsque l’occasion se présente, la société américaine s’avère peu disposée à se lancer dans une véritable réflexion sur la nature de la représentation identitaire et politique engendrée par les statistiques ethno-raciales.

In the U.S., public debates about the legitimacy of the classification of the American population along ethno-racial lines are quite rare. However, in 2003, voters in California had the opportunity to express their views on the necessity of this form of classification via referendum. This campaign was in many ways atypical but it still illustrates the complex and controversial nature of the debate about ethno-racial classification and the public policies relying on it. Moreover, it shows how difficult it is to launch a real political debate about ethno-racial taxonomy. This question is tangled in deep partisan divisions and, even when the opportunity presents itself, the American society seems unwilling to start any serious discussion about the very nature of the identities and the political representations created by ethno-racial statistics.

AUTEUR

OLIVIER RICHOMME Université Lyon 2

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Hors-thème

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Le monument naturel dans le mythe de l’Ouest chez Washington Irving, Mark Twain et Walt Whitman

Delphine Louis-Dimitrov

1 Une antinomie profonde semble opposer les grands espaces de l’Ouest américain au motif du monument. Dans ses diverses dimensions — architecturale, commémorative, voire sépulcrale — ce dernier est un emblème de l’Ancien Continent et paraît incompatible avec l’image de la jeune nation américaine. L’historicité de celle-ci, qui se veut prospective, vient s’inscrire dans un espace dont le caractère sauvage est revendiqué. Pourtant, c’est bien autour du paradigme du monument que se construit l’image de l’Ouest, comme en témoigne la référence fréquente à des monuments dans le nom même de nombreux sites de l’Ouest (tels que Monument Valley, Cathedral Valley, Cathedral Rock, Temple of the Sun, Arches et Cathedral Spires, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns). Ce rapport analogique entre espace naturel et architecture s’édifie aussi dans les textes. Les trois récits de voyages qui seront étudiés ici, A Tour on the Prairies (1835) de Washington Irving, Roughing It (1872) de Mark Twain et Specimen Days (1882) de Walt Whitman mettent en lumière la fonction centrale du paradigme du monument naturel dans la construction d’un espace américain appelé à donner corps à une nation en quête de fondement organique. Ils invitent à considérer les enjeux esthétiques et politiques de la transposition de ce motif sur le sol américain.

2 Sous la plume d’Irving, Twain et Whitman, c’est paradoxalement dans un rapport d’analogie avec l’architecture européenne que se structure l’espace sauvage de l’Ouest, le paradigme du monument naturel ayant tout d’abord pour fonction de combler ce qui, face au modèle européen, apparaît comme une lacune à la fois culturelle et esthétique. Le motif du monument contribue ainsi à l’édification d’une vision unifiée et glorieuse de la nature sauvage et permet ce faisant la mise en forme d’un patrimoine naturel où s’incarnent les valeurs collectives sur lesquelles se construit l’identité singulière de la nation américaine. Si le monument naturel accomplit une fonction de patrimoine, c’est aussi en ce qu’il offre à la nation un ancrage dans les profondeurs du temps, ancrage géologique et métaphoriquement historique qui prend sens dans la

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relation d’émulation qui subsiste encore entre l’Amérique et l’Europe à la fin du XIXe siècle. Point de jonction de l’espace, de la politique et de la littérature, la monumentalité de l’Ouest se fait enfin incarnation de la démocratie américaine et, simultanément, principe d’écriture.

Combler la vacance esthétique et culturelle du territoire

3 Le motif du monument fait figure d’intrus dans la représentation de l’Ouest. L’identité américaine se construit en effet autour de l’image d’un territoire en grande partie sauvage, support d’une vision téléologique de l’histoire héritée de la conquête puritaine. Aux antipodes des associations mémorielles traditionnellement associées aux monuments européens, la nature sauvage inspire une vision prospective de l’histoire américaine. Un poème d’Archibald MacLeish, « America was promises », publié en 1939, rappelle l’importance de l’opposition entre monument et terres sauvages dans l’image mythique et originelle que l’Amérique oppose à l’Europe : East were the Dead kings and the remembered sepulchres: West was the grass. [...] And all beautiful All before us America was always promises. (MacLeish, 323-24)

4 Les monuments que constituent symboliquement les rois morts et les sépultures de l’Est désignent par métonymie les vieilles nations européennes, tandis que l’Amérique s’identifie à l’ouverture des terres sauvages et vacantes de l’Ouest. Or dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle, l’Amérique fait sien le motif du monument. À cette époque où la formation de l’identité nationale représente un enjeu primordial, l’Europe constitue non seulement un vis-à-vis dans une relation d’émulation, mais aussi une grille de lecture par laquelle appréhender l’expérience américaine.

5 L’Ouest est un espace à géométrie variable qui, au fil de la progression de la Frontière, vient à recouvrir des paysages très différents — forêts luxuriantes, grandes plaines, déserts et sites rocheux du Far West. En dépit de cette disparité, le monument apparaît comme un modèle structurant dans la représentation de chacun de ces paysages et se révèle transposable de l’un à l’autre. Il est en ce sens un paradigme qui sous-tend la construction de l’image de l’Ouest. Ce motif est omniprésent dans A Tour on the Prairies, récit dans lequel Washington Irving relate son séjour sur la Frontière entrepris en 1832 en direction de Fort Gibson, dans l’actuel Oklahoma. Un rapport analogique s’établit ici entre les deux continents, le monument étant ce schème par lequel l’espace américain est abordé et surtout structuré. Lui sont comparés aussi bien les éléments saillants du relief rocheux que l’immensité plate et ouverte des plaines et du désert, investie de ces attributs du monument que sont la grandeur et la majesté. Tout au long du récit, la désignation de la prairie fait intervenir des notions d’immensité, de perfection esthétique et de grandeur morale, notions traditionnellement associées aux monuments architecturaux1. C’est cette résonance du monument et du monumental qui permet à un même paradigme de recouvrir des éléments apparemment antinomiques. Ainsi, alors que la découpe des blocs rocheux est assimilée aux ruines d’une forteresse

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mauresque (« the ruin of some Moorish castle », 82) et la forêt à un cachot (« our ‘close dungeon of innumerous boughs’ », 131) ou à une cathédrale gothique (« the stained windows and clustering columns of a Gothic cathedral », 33), l’arrière-plan même de ce relief acquiert une dimension monumentale : After a toilsome march [...] we emerged upon a grand prairie. Here one of the characteristic scenes of the Far West broke upon us. An immense extent of grassy undulating, or as it is termed, rolling country with here and there a clump of trees, dimly seen in the distance like a ship at sea; the landscape deriving sublimity from its vastness and simplicity. To the south west on the summit of a hill was a singular crest of broken rocks resembling a ruined fortress. It reminded me of the ruin of some Moorish castle crowning a height in the midst of a lonely Spanish landscape. To this hill we gave the name of Cliff Castle. (A Tour on the Prairies, 82)

6 Emblème de l’Ouest (« one of the characteristic scenes of the Far West »), l’immensité océanique de la prairie sur laquelle se découpe l’image des ruines mauresques porte elle-même, du simple fait de sa vacance (« vastness and simplicity »), les attributs du monument (« grand », « sublimity »). Le regard du narrateur construit ainsi un espace réversible où le monument et le monumental se répondent pour enserrer l’espace tout entier dans un même paradigme.

7 Sans doute la monumentalité de l’Ouest vient-elle aussi contrer la perception d’une lacune à la fois culturelle et esthétique de l’espace. À l’aune de l’Europe, l’Ouest présente un manque. Tout en célébrant le caractère sauvage de la prairie, le narrateur déplore en effet qu’elle soit dépourvue de ces monuments — châteaux, clochers, tourelles — dont il situe l’archétype dans les paysages d’Europe : « It was altogether a wild scene [...]. The prairies [...] only want here and there a village spire, the battlements of a castle, or the turrets of an old family mansion rising from among the trees, to rival the most ornamented scenery of Europe. » (A Tour on the Prairies, 83-84). Comme dans Letters from an American Farmer (1782) de Crèvecœur et dans le texte fondateur de Cole, « Essay on American Scenery » (1836), l’appréhension de l’espace américain passe chez Irving par sa confrontation aux paysages culturels des nations européennes. Ceux-ci tiennent lieu de référence pour une Amérique à la recherche de son propre modèle paysager, le « paysage américain » n’étant pas une donnée mais l’objet d’une quête (Brunet-Griffith, 15).

8 Derrière le regret d’une carence, c’est aussi la nostalgie d’Irving qui s’exprime ici — nostalgie d’une Europe où il a préalablement séjourné et qui lui offre un idiome, une grille de lecture lui permettant d’appréhender l’espace et de l’orner métaphoriquement de ces monuments qui lui font défaut. L’analogie s’inscrit dans une logique de réminiscence, comme en témoigne la récurrence du verbe « to remind » qui introduit maintes figures de monuments dans le récit, par exemple l’image des ruines de forteresse mauresque dont le souvenir est éveillé par une crête rocheuse (82). L’explorateur se place paradoxalement dans une logique de pèlerinage, dont le sens est tant national qu’individuel. Le précédent que constituent ses séjours en Europe apparaît comme la métaphore du passé européen où l’aventure américaine trouve son origine. Pour l’Amérique comme pour le narrateur, l’Europe représente un système de référence auquel le présent se rapporte inévitablement.

9 Bien qu’enivré par le mouvement qui l’entraîne vers l’ouest, le narrateur de Roughing It fait lui aussi retour vers les héritages européens pour décrire son expérience, s’inspirant notamment de sites médiévaux évoqués dans The Innocents Abroad (164). Il perçoit ainsi Echo Canyon comme une cité médiévale, désigne ses trouées comme des

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rues bordées de « murs perpendiculaires » et compare ses sommets à des tours de château fort, comme si nul autre idiome que celui du monument n’était disponible pour décrire cet espace : « [Echo Canyon] was like a long, smooth, narrow street, with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in many places, and turreted like mediæval castles. » (Roughing It, 602) La désignation géologique du canyon (« coarse conglomerate ») se trouve ici mise au service d’une représentation imaginaire structurée autour d’un emblème de la civilisation européenne.

10 Combler la vacance esthétique et culturelle du territoire, c’est aussi en rendre la saisie possible. Irving évoque, a contrario, la désorientation causée par l’absence de points de repères, ainsi que l’impossibilité de structurer l’espace : I now found myself in the midst of a lonely waste in which the prospect was bounded by undulating swells of land, naked and uniform, where, from the deficiency of land marks and distinct features an inexperienced man may become bewildered and lose his way as readily as in the wastes of an ocean. [...] To one unaccustomed to it, there is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude of a prairie. The loneliness of a forest seems nothing to it. There the view is shut in by trees, and the imagination is left free to picture some livelier scene beyond. But here we have an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation ; we feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world. [...] The silence of the waste was now and then broken by the cry of a distant flock of pelicans stalking like spectres about a shallow pool. Sometimes by the sinister croaking of a raven in the air, while occasionally a scoundrel wolf would scour off from before me and having attained a safe distance, would sit down and howl and whine with tones that gave a dreariness to the surrounding solitude. (A Tour on the Prairies, 134)

11 La désorientation qui menace le voyageur est synonyme d’ensauvagement (« to bewilder »). À la perte des points de repère géographiques et culturels qui structurent le paysage, répond en effet le risque d’une errance aux limites de la civilisation, voire de l’humain. Tout se passe comme si la vacance ne pouvait être peuplée que par les créatures sauvages, presque fantastiques, dont le cri vient briser le silence de la prairie. Le terme de « solitude », qui désigne une étendue désertique, vient rejoindre ici son sens originel de « loneliness ». La vacance de la prairie se caractérise de fait par l’absence de toute trace humaine (« an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence »), d’indices de passage et de mémoire du paysage. Aussi sa résistance à la description (« something inexpressibly lonely ») se double-t-elle de mutisme (« the silence of the waste »). Dépourvu de tout signe et de toute architecture, l’espace ne peut signifier.

12 Le rapport d’analogie avec l’architecture européenne qu’établit le paradigme du monument permet donc de structurer l’espace sauvage de l’Ouest, alors même que l’Amérique revendique le caractère incomparable de son territoire et en fait le socle d’une destinée unique, exceptionnelle, foncièrement différente de l’histoire des nations européennes.

Le monument naturel comme patrimoine

13 L’emprunt paradoxal du paradigme du monument pour désigner la wilderness l’érige en patrimoine. À la manière du patrimoine architectural où s’incarnent l’histoire et la culture d’un peuple, le monument naturel offre en effet une représentation symbolique

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à un ensemble de valeurs sur lesquelles la nation fonde son identité ainsi que la revendication d’une destinée singulière, lui permettant par là même de s’unir autour de celles-ci. Suivant la définition qu’en propose Benedict Anderson, la nation est en effet une « communauté politique imaginée », un « artefact culturel » issu des représentations collectives : « [...] nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. » (Anderson, 4). Aussi l’image du monument contribue-t- elle à donner corps à la nation. De la fin de la période révolutionnaire jusqu’aux prémices de la Guerre de Sécession, l’appropriation symbolique du territoire, qui passe par la projection sur celui-ci d’un ensemble de significations et de valeurs, constitue un enjeu majeur pour une Amérique en quête de fondement organique, l’héritage laissé par les Pères fondateurs étant celui d’une identité abstraite, constitutionnelle et juridique. Le monument naturel contribue à combler cette lacune ; il apparaît en effet comme l’instrument d’une appropriation symbolique de l’espace passant par la valorisation (au sens fort de désignation symbolique d’un ensemble de valeurs) et la consécration de la nature sauvage. Ce faisant, il offre à la nation ce modèle paysager si recherché, apte à donner corps à son identité singulière.

14 Dans les descriptions de A Tour on the Prairies, l’appropriation symbolique de l’espace s’effectue au prix de deux paradoxes, celui de la représentation du sauvage au moyen d’un emblème de la civilisation et celui de l’union dans un même paradigme des deux visages antinomiques de la Frontière, sa splendeur et son hostilité. Cette unification du sauvage se manifeste par exemple dans la description des forêts. Si leur magnificence suggère au narrateur l’image d’une cathédrale (33), leur dévastation évoque à son esprit un treillis de fer forgé : « I shall not easily forget the mortal toil, and the vexations of flesh and spirit that we underwent occasionally, in our wanderings through the cross timber. It was like struggling through forests of cast iron. » (96) Cette icône de l’architecture européenne qu’est le fer forgé offre paradoxalement une image domestiquée de la forêt, lieu ornementé jusque dans sa désolation.

15 Ces tensions culminent dans la représentation de l’Indien, incarnation humaine de la nature sauvage. Il se présente tantôt comme une figure de l’autre, rejeté dans un en deçà de l’humanité et donc hors de la nation, tantôt comme l’image du bon sauvage, porteur d’une pureté naturelle que l’Amérique revendique et qu’elle oppose à la corruption du contre-modèle que constituent cette fois les vieilles nations européennes (Marienstras, 176-83). En lui s’incarnent l’innocence originelle et l’hostilité qui composent les deux visages de la Frontière. Chez Irving, ces deux aspects antagonistes se rejoignent et se réconcilient dans le paradigme du monument. Représenté de manière idéalisée, l’Indien statufié apparaît comme une allégorie paradoxale, un monument à la gloire de l’état sauvage : « To add to the wildness of the scene, several Osage Indians [...] were mingled among the men. Three of them came and seated themselves by our fire. They watched every thing that was going on round them in silence, and looked like figures of monumental bronze. » (35) Plus loin, sa réduction métonymique à un buste l’identifie à cet attribut qu’est sa noblesse : « I could not but admire the finely shaped heads and busts of these savages, and their graceful attitudes and expressive gestures [...]. » (117). Or, même déchue de sa grandeur, la figure de l’Indien reste monumentale, comme en témoigne la description d’un personnage métis, mi-Indien mi-« homme blanc », épave ou ruine humaine (« wreck », « broken to pieces ») qui incarne les duretés de la vie sauvage : « Though in the prime of life, and of

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a robust frame and apparently iron constitution yet, by his own account he was little better than a mere wreck. He was, in fact, a living monument of the hardships of wild frontier life. » (123). Du « monumental bronze » au « living monument of the hardships of wild frontier life », l’Indien statufié demeure une allégorie de la Frontière. Cette continuité s’effectue par le jeu d’un glissement sémantique allant du sens propre du terme de monument (édifice, statue), utilisé comme comparaison ou métaphore, au sens dérivé de symbole ou d’incarnation d’une qualité abstraite. L’image unifiée du monument que présente le texte d’Irving apparaît ainsi comme une construction, un fait d’écriture qui joue de glissements sémantiques pour réconcilier les aspects contradictoires de la Frontière, sa grandeur et son hostilité.

16 L’image unifiée et glorieuse du sauvage renvoie métaphoriquement à des valeurs nationales. La noblesse de la nature sauvage suggérée par le motif du monument fait contre-point à la fausse noblesse de l’aristocratie européenne, dénoncée de façon récurrente dans les textes américains depuis la période révolutionnaire et tout au long du XIXe siècle. C’est une noblesse naturelle et donc compatible avec les idéaux démocratiques qui est ici revendiquée, bien qu’elle s’exprime parfois par des analogies avec des images emblématiques de la noblesse de classe, associées à l’Europe. Irving compare ainsi la prairie à un paysage architectural, labyrinthe naturel (« the labyrinths of the forest », 129) ou parc de château : After a gloomy and unruly night the morning dawned bright and clear, and a glorious sunshine transformed the whole landscape, as if by magic. The late dreary wilderness brightened into a fine open country with stately groves and clumps of oaks of a gigantic size, some of which stood singly as if planted for ornament and shade in the midst of rich meadows, while our horses scattered about and grazing under them gave to the whole the air of a noble park. (A Tour on the Prairies, 81)

17 La noblesse de ce parc (« fine », « stately », « ornament », « noble park ») procède de la transfiguration opérée par une lumière rédemptrice, symbole d’une transcendance divine qui, depuis la période puritaine, s’unit étroitement à l’appréhension de la nature et de la destinée américaine. La contribution des chevaux à ce tableau est également signifiante. À l’instar des Indiens devenus bustes ou statues et dont la noblesse est celle de l’homme à l’état de nature (« the wild chivalry of the prairies » ; « the glorious independence of man in a savage state », 28), les animaux de la prairie apparaissent ici comme les symboles d’une noblesse naturelle et sauvage. Un cheval capturé se trouve ainsi comparé, un peu plus loin, à une figure princière (« A stage hero, representing the despair of a captive prince, could not have played his part more dramatically. There was absolutely a moral grandeur in it. », 94) et un bison à un monarque (« [...] two or three bulls bringing up the rear, the last of whom, from his enormous size and venerable frontlet and beard of sunburnt hair, looked like the patriarch of the herd and as if he might long have reigned the monarch of the prairie. », 135-36). En mettant en lumière la grandeur de la nature sauvage, le paradigme du monument naturel donne forme à une valeur politique, éminemment démocratique, et contribue de la sorte à l’incorporation de la nation dans l’image de l’Ouest.

18 En dépit des différences de registre majeures qui séparent les deux textes, l’interprétation démocratique de la noblesse du paysage décrit par Irving trouve un écho dans Roughing It. La description du lac Tahoe, aux chapitres 31 et 32, prend la forme d’une série de tableaux enchâssés dans une structure narrative, vignettes qui sont autant de morceaux de bravoure stylistiques composés de nombreux topoï. S’ils s’inspirent de traditions iconographiques disparates, leur horizon d’attente commun

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est celui d’une perception mythique des emblèmes de l’Ouest. Investi de valeurs nationales, érigé en symbole, le lac se fait monument.

19 Le cadrage interprétatif du paysage précède l’apparition du lac. La beauté de celui-ci, connue d’avance, est placée d’emblée sous le signe du merveilleux naturel, composante populaire de l’art paysager américain (« We had heard a world of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe », 649). Source d’enchantement, la noblesse doublement proclamée du paysage tient à sa monumentalité, suggérée par l’immensité de la circonférence du lac et, sur l’axe de la verticale, par des images de murs et de tours : [...] at last the Lake burst upon us—a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled-in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still! It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. (Roughing It, 649-50)

20 L’horizon interprétatif de cette vision du lac, convoqué de manière très appuyée par l’image d’une toile tendue dans un cadre et par la référence explicite à la photographie, est celui de l’iconographie, avide de lacs et de montagnes, issue des grandes missions d’exploration réalisées dans les années 1860-1880. Emblème du merveilleux de l’Ouest sauvage, espace légendaire, le lac Tahoe devient alors un objet de prédilection pour les photographes et les peintres. Cette vogue, déjà engagée avant la parution de Roughing It en 1872 — comme en témoigne la présence de huit toiles représentant ce lac parmi les quarante-et-une présentées par John Ross Key lors d’une exposition en octobre 1870 (Lekisch, 108) — atteint son paroxysme dans les années qui suivent, avec notamment A Storm on the Lake, Lake Tahoe (c.1873-1878) de Carleton Watkins, pour la photographie, ainsi que, pour la peinture, Reflections (Lake Tahoe) de Gilbert Munger (c. 1873-1874), Lake Tahoe (1873) de Thomas Moran, et View of Lake Tahoe Looking Across Emerald Bay (1874) de Thomas Hill.

21 Bien au-delà du simple emprunt d’un idiome en vogue, la métaphore des montagnes « photographiées » sur le lac témoigne de ce que les merveilles de l’Ouest représentées en image et diffusées à l’Est sont une réalité inscrite sur place, l’image devenant par conséquent redondance du site. L’Ouest mythique est cette photographie que le touriste peut arpenter, dont il peut faire l’expérience in situ. La réciproque cependant est que pour qui s’est abreuvé à cette culture iconographique, le paysage réel s’appréhende comme une image. D’édifice, le monument se change ironiquement en image plate, en simple surface, pour finalement se confondre avec ses représentations. Du texte d’Irving à celui de Twain, un glissement s’effectue donc de la comparaison ou métaphore architecturale à la métaphore iconique, la monumentalité du site étant alors acquise et donc plus implicite. Ce qui fait la force mythique du paysage est désormais la capacité de sa monumentalité à faire image, à se confondre avec l’image fascinante qui circule à l’Est2.

22 L’image ainsi contemplée par le voyageur est en fait un artefact culturel structuré autour d’un faisceau de symboles. La présence des montagnes qui enserrent le lac contribue à projeter sur le paysage des significations politiques. Emblèmes de majesté, de permanence et d’indépendance, les montagnes sont porteuses de connotations républicaines dans l’iconographie du XIXe siècle (Miller, 268). Nobles, soustraites à

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l’inconstance de la nature, elles constituent ici le cadre symbolique d’un paysage dont la grandeur tient à nouveau à sa capacité à faire image : The forest about us was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature’s mood; and its circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with land-slides, cloven by cañons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. (Roughing It, 653)

23 L’immensité de l’espace, ainsi que les dômes montagneux qui enserrent le lac, suggèrent une monumentalité qui, bien que grandiose, ne suscite pas l’effroi du sublime burkien. C’est celle d’un sublime domestiqué, contenu, comme en témoignent le cadrage et la miniaturisation de l’image, aussi panoramique soit-elle, ainsi que la réduction des éléments naturels à un costume, voire à des accessoires. Il y a là un trait caractéristique de la peinture de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, où William McKendree Bryant perçoit une redéfinition du sublime : celui-ci ne prend plus la forme d’un déchaînement des éléments mais devient synonyme d’autorité et de permanence : « simple, severe, unchanging grandeur » (McKendree Bryant, 81).

24 L’équivalence métonymique entre le paysage monumental et la nation se resserre dans la suite de la description. Leitmotiv du courant luministe qui se développe dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, la surface réfléchissante du lac s’inscrit dans un cadrage interprétatif très marqué, alors que le lac se fait surface de projection du ciel étoilé : « As the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and pains. » (650). L’image se referme ici littéralement sur elle-même, sous l’effet conjugué de l’obscurité qui clôture la vision (« the darkness closed down ») et de la réflexion des étoiles sur la surface de l’eau, pour produire un paysage tautologique où le lac ne fait que redoubler l’image du ciel. Ce cadrage visuel va de pair avec un cadrage du sens, l’alliance des termes « star » et « spangled », n’étant pas sans faire écho à un certain poème de Francis Scott Key3.

25 Au-delà des connotations spécifiques de ce scintillement d’étoiles, les effets de lumière associent à la monumentalité du lac un symbolisme religieux qui s’exprime dans un style précieux, chargé de topoï : At the first break of dawn we were always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits. [...] While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete. (Roughing It, 653)

26 L’image que constitue métaphoriquement le paysage se compose sous les yeux des voyageurs devenus spectateurs. Le paysage semble se peindre peu à peu, s’organiser tel un cosmos qui émerge du chaos sous l’effet d’une lumière conquérante et libératrice, manifestation d’une présence divine (« the glory of the sun », « the conquering light ») qui s’exprime aussi dans le motif puritain des commencements (« dawn »). Les registres religieux et artistique fusionnent dans la polysémie du terme « glory », qui désigne à la fois la gloire divine et un halo de lumière. Comme dans la description du parc dans le texte d’Irving, le paysage porte les signes d’une présence providentielle qui s’enracine dans l’imaginaire puritain, où la nature est le lieu d’une théophanie indissociable de la vision téléologique de l’histoire américaine (Bercovitch, 152-53). L’expérience propre

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du narrateur cède ici la place à un faisceau d’images devenues clichés, sortes de passages obligés de la description de l’Ouest mythique.

27 La perception du sacré dans la nature, telle qu’elle se manifeste au XIXe siècle, excède les limites de l’héritage puritain pour exprimer des enjeux romantiques et transcendantalistes qui se rejoignent dans la recherche d’une émancipation du sentiment religieux, récusant les structures qui le canalisent. Dans le prolongement de Coleridge, Emerson célèbre ainsi dans Nature (1836) l’appréhension du divin au sein de la nature : « ‘A Gothic Church’, said Coleridge, ‘is a petrified religion’ » (30) ; « The aspect of nature is devout. [...] The happiest man is he who learns from Nature the lesson of worship. » (40). Or si la valeur spirituelle du monument religieux se trouve ainsi partiellement récusée, c’est au profit d’une célébration de la nature qui, paradoxalement, reprend à son compte le motif du monument.

28 La conviction que la nature constitue un texte sacré où se déchiffre la destinée providentielle de l’Amérique trouve en effet un support dans l’image de la cathédrale naturelle, particulièrement en vogue au XIXe siècle4. La comparaison d’éléments du paysage de l’Ouest (rocs ou forêts) à des piliers, voûtes ou vitraux, est récurrente dans les récits de voyages et les romans qui paraissent en Amérique à cette époque. Irving exprime ainsi le sentiment du sacré que lui inspire une forêt de l’actuel Oklahoma en la comparant à une cathédrale gothique : We were overshadowed by lofty trees, with straight smooth trunks, like stately columns, and as the glancing rays of the sun shone through the transparent leaves, tinted with the many coloured hues of autumn, I was reminded of the effect of sunshine among the stained windows and clustering columns of a Gothic cathedral. Indeed there is a grandeur and solemnity in some of our spacious forests of the West that awaken in me the same feeling I have experienced in those vast and venerable piles, and the sound of the wind sweeping through them, supplies occasionally the deep breathings of the organ. (A Tour on the Prairies, 33)

29 La forêt de l’Ouest, que la nation perçoit déjà comme son patrimoine (« our spacious forests of the West »), est le lieu d’une manifestation symbolique du divin, à l’instar de la wilderness originelle des colons puritains. Cooper, dans The Pioneers, assimile de même un sous-bois partiellement déforesté à l’architecture d’un temple (« [...] a wide space of many acres was cleared, which might be likened to the dome of a mighty temple, to which the maples formed the columns, their tops composing the capitals and the heavens the arch. », 224). Whitman, dans un fragment de Specimen Days intitulé « Loafing in the Woods », utilise quant à lui la métaphore des colonnes pour désigner des pins — « the tall straight columns of the plentiful bronze-topt pines » (876). L’assimilation de la forêt à une cathédrale est tout aussi fréquente dans la peinture, en particulier dans les années 1850-18605. La photographie exploite elle aussi le thème de la cathédrale naturelle, comme en témoigne un cliché de Carleton Watkins, « Cathedral Mountain » (1865) qui, pris en direction du ciel, accentue l’immensité vertigineuse du roc (Brunet et Griffith, 29). La récurrence de cette thématique tout au long du XIXe siècle est telle que le narrateur de The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, en 1876 déjà, peut la traiter comme un cliché romantique : It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree trunks of their forest temple, and upon the varnished foliage and festooning vines. (Tom Sawyer, 90)

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30 Le style emprunté de ce passage où tout n’est qu’imitation ludique signale l’ironie du narrateur envers des images qu’il perçoit comme surannées. Dans un tout autre registre et avec une ironie beaucoup plus sombre, Stephen Crane enfin, au chapitre III de The Red Badge of Courage (1895), détourne l’image de la cathédrale naturelle pour la transposer dans un univers de violence et de mort : « After a time the brigade was halted in the cathedral light of a forest. [...] Through the aisles of the wood could be seen the floating smoke from their rifles. » (21).

31 L’image de la cathédrale naturelle est porteuse de ces tensions non résolues qui sont sous-jacentes au mythe de l’Ouest dans son ensemble. Si elle est en effet le support d’une intuition du divin au sein de la nature, elle en contredit l’immédiateté en la replaçant métaphoriquement dans un cadre architectural et institutionnel, comme si la manifestation du divin ne pouvait se saisir ni s’exprimer en dehors de ce cadre. Éminemment structurée, la cathédrale gothique incarne, historiquement aussi bien que symboliquement, une religion institutionnalisée qui paraît incompatible avec l’idée d’une théophanie naturelle. Et par un autre paradoxe, l’inscription de la spiritualité dans la nature, que revendique l’Amérique, s’incarne ici dans un motif foncièrement européen.

32 Pourtant, au-delà de ces contradictions et en dépit de la logique de réminiscence exprimée par Irving, l’image de la cathédrale naturelle place implicitement la nature dans une antériorité par rapport à l’architecture gothique. Dans le passage de A Tour on the Prairies où survient l’image de la cathédrale, la métamorphose, sous le regard du narrateur, du végétal en minéral (des troncs en piliers de pierre) semble confirmer la notion d’une continuité entre l’architecture naturelle des forêts et la structure des cathédrales. Cette perception est explicite chez Emerson qui, dans son essai « History », soutient que le gothique plonge ses racines dans l’architecture des forêts : The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade, as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir, and spruce. (« History », 245-46)

33 C’est une double vision qui se manifeste ici, l’image de la cathédrale gothique venant se superposer à celle des bois qui en sont l’origine. L’anamnèse suscitée par la contemplation de la forêt impose au regard du promeneur l’évidence d’une généalogie du gothique, dont l’ancêtre serait l’architecture des forêts. En prêtant ainsi au gothique une origine organique, Emerson fait écho aux théories architecturales selon lesquelles les piliers et les voûtes des cathédrales gothiques s’inspirent de la convergence de la cime des arbres dans une forêt. C’est ce qu’affirmait notamment le géologue écossais James Hall dans son Essay on the Origins, History and Principles of Gothic Architecture (1813), qui développe une théorie qu’il avait avancée dès 1785.

34 En dépit des contradictions qui la traversent, l’image de la cathédrale naturelle représente donc une consécration de la nature sauvage, celle-ci étant désignée non

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seulement comme origine de l’architecture gothique mais aussi comme lieu de spiritualité à part entière. Les riches forêts du continent américain paraissent ainsi pouvoir rivaliser sans peine avec les plus grandes cathédrales d’Europe qui n’en présentent somme toute qu’une imitation, aussi grandiose soit-elle. Les noms de « Cathedral Spires » et de « Cathedral Rock », choisis lors des missions géologiques de l’Ouest, respectivement en 1862 et 1863, pour désigner deux sites de la vallée de Yosemite, répondent à cette volonté qu’a alors l’Amérique d’opposer au patrimoine architectural des nations européennes un patrimoine naturel qui donne corps à son identité.

Ancrer la nation dans l’histoire

35 Si le patrimoine désigne l’incarnation symbolique d’un ensemble de valeurs auxquelles la nation peut s’identifier, il définit également cette dernière comme patrie, comme « pays du père » ; il renvoie aux héritages, aux lignées et donc à cette profondeur historique qui fait défaut à la jeune nation. La représentation de l’Ouest au moyen du paradigme du monument naturel et en particulier de l’image de la cathédrale opère précisément cet ancrage dans l’histoire dont le besoin s’exprime si vivement tout au long du XIXe siècle. Certes, la temporalité dans laquelle l’Amérique vient ainsi s’ancrer au travers des monuments n’est pas celle des communautés ; mais l’histoire naturelle se substitue symboliquement à la profondeur historique. Le statut juridique de « national monument », défini par le Antiquities Act de 1906 — initialement conçu pour protéger des sites historiques, mais que le président Theodore Roosevelt interprète d’emblée en termes géologiques6 — témoigne ainsi de la perception du patrimoine naturel en termes d’héritage historique (antiquities).

36 La temporalité géologique glisse aisément du domaine scientifique à celui du mythe, faisant des monuments naturels la clef de voûte d’un imaginaire des origines dont l’importance ne cesse de croître au cours du XIXe siècle. La géologie, alors en plein essor, se trouve mise au service de la logique d’émulation par laquelle s’opposent les deux continents. L’année précisément où Twain publie Roughing It, en 1872, paraît Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, texte dans lequel le géologue Clarence King prétend avoir trouvé la trace de cataclysmes plus anciens et plus terribles que ceux qu’ait jamais connus l’Ancien Continent (Trachtenberg, 18). L’Amérique revendique ainsi des racines plus anciennes que celles de l’Europe ; elle oppose en outre à la profondeur de l’histoire celle, bien plus profonde, de la temporalité géologique.

37 L’omniprésence des images de monuments naturels au XIXe siècle recouvre une fascination pour la matière minérale, des grandes parois rocheuses jusqu’aux fossiles. Dans la minéralité, c’est la profondeur de la temporalité géologique qui retient l’imagination, comme le révèlent les grandes missions d’exploration de l’Ouest des années 1860-1880, qui mêlent une logique de prospection géologique à une démarche esthétique de mise en images, par la photographie et par la peinture. François Brunet et Bronwyn Griffith, qui ont consacré une exposition aux photographies réalisées dans le cadre de ces missions par Timothy O’Sullivan, John K. Hillers, William H. Jackson et Carleton E. Watkins, soulignent que ces clichés, marqués par une profusion de vues morphologiques et de détails géologiques, nourrissent une fascination pour la monumentalité rocheuse de l’Ouest, en particulier les vues de Carleton E. Watkins, qui offrent en très grand format ou sous forme stéréoscopique l’image de gigantesques

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falaises et de dômes (Brunet et Griffith, 23, 15)7. Ils montrent aussi combien les prises de vue réalisées par ces photographes, en des sites comme Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde ou les chutes de la Snake River, sacralisent les paysages en insistant sur l’immensité de l’espace et sur la verticalité des falaises, leur bichromie mettant de plus en valeur « l’aspect sculptural quasi abstrait des formations géologiques » (51, 29). Dans l’iconographie qui naît de ces missions d’exploration, l’approche esthétique et les considérations géologiques et environnementales apparaissent comme inextricables et dialoguent l’une avec l’autre. Les travaux de certains peintres, ceux de Thomas Moran par exemple, sont ainsi réalisés à l’occasion de missions de prospection géologique et contribuent eux-mêmes à justifier auprès des instances dirigeantes la création de parcs nationaux visant à préserver ce patrimoine naturel8.

38 Le vertige qui saisit le narrateur de Roughing It, du haut d’un canyon des Rocheuses ou au pied d’une falaise se jetant dans le lac Tahoe (« the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space—rose up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular [...] » 654), ainsi que l’insistance sur la forme et la minéralité même du roc, témoignent de la fascination qu’exercent les grandes parois rocheuses. La vision de celles-ci suscite en effet une dérive dans un imaginaire historique qui se nourrit d’éléments exogènes. Elle révèle une proximité symbolique de la géologie et de l’histoire. Depuis un sommet des Rocheuses, la monumentalité des montagnes évoque ainsi un tableau historique, la scène d’une convention royale : [...] about us was gathered a convention of Nature’s Kings that stood ten, twelve and even thirteen thousand feet high—grand old fellows who would have to stoop to Mount Washington, in the twilight. [...] It seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas and continents stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze. (Roughing It, 598)

39 Quelques lignes plus loin, l’idée de souveraineté qu’inspire au narrateur le spectacle vertigineux perçu depuis un col fait intervenir l’image d’un sultan : At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look over. These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them [...]. (Ibid.)

40 Dans ces deux passages, le vertige des hauteurs se double d’une expansion illimitée dans l’horizontalité de l’espace qui mène le regard hors cadre pour exprimer un sentiment de domination sur le continent tout entier. Par le jeu d’une analogie avec l’Ancien Continent, terre de rois et de sultans, la puissance massive du roc se convertit ici en termes de pouvoir politique ou religieux, en tout cas institutionnalisé.

41 La fusion symbolique de l’histoire et de la géologie se manifeste plus encore dans l’imaginaire minier qui hante Roughing It. Sorte de monument inversé, la mine s’ouvre vers des profondeurs géologiques aussi bien que temporelles, l’intérieur de la terre se faisant métaphore d’une antériorité historique. Les mines viennent ici s’inscrire dans une géographie symbolique qui s’organise autour de noms mythiques : une mine et la région alentour reçoivent ainsi le nom de Humboldt, explorateur qui fut l’un des premiers à cartographier ce qui allait devenir le territoire mythique des gisements d’or9. Les noms donnés aux diverses mines, réelles ou fantasmées, composent une

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isotopie qui renvoie aux mythes fondateurs et aux symboles de la nation américaine : « the Gray Eagle », « the Columbiana » ou « the Great Republic », par exemple (Roughing It, 685). C’est une topographie de l’imaginaire national qui semble se dessiner ici, par laquelle l’histoire se convertit en termes de profondeur géologique, et réciproquement la profondeur géologique en termes historiques.

42 L’imaginaire géologique et minier qui s’exprime dans Roughing It se rattache aussi, hors-texte, aux conditions même de la genèse de l’œuvre de Twain et à une donnée fondamentale de son inspiration. Son écriture en effet semble prise entre deux lieux fondateurs. Le premier, bien connu, est le Mississippi, où il retourna chercher l’impulsion nécessaire à l’achèvement de Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Le second est Quarry Farm, résidence de sa belle-famille à Elmira (New York), où il rédigea la majeure partie de ses œuvres, à commencer par RoughingIt (composé en 1870-71). Dans les bois qui entouraient le manoir, à proximité de la fameuse cabane octogonale de l’écrivain construite en 1874, se trouvait une carrière, espace onirique où Twain, dès 1870, consacra son temps libre à faire des fouilles avec son ami Joe Goodman en vue de constituer une collection de fossiles. Comme le relate son biographe Albert Bigelow Paine, Both of them had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum. They imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period, and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions, developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having together a joyful good time. (Paine, 436)

43 C’est bien un imaginaire géologique qu’alimente cette passion pour les fossiles, un espace à la fois extrêmement concret et onirique donnant l’illusion de pouvoir contempler et toucher un passé enfoui dans des profondeurs immémoriales.

44 Dans Specimen Days, les montagnes renvoient elles aussi à une nature primitive, ainsi qu’en témoigne le fragment intitulé « America’s Back-Bone ». Comme chez Twain, le panorama perçu depuis un sommet des Rocheuses offre une image d’expansion qui excède le cadrage visuel que constituent les chaînes de montagnes pour irradier tout l’horizon : I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, [...] 10.000 feet above sea-level. At this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me. Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim distance, or fade on the horizon. We have now reach’d, penetrated the Rockies [...]; and though these chains spread away in every direction, specially north and south, thousands and thousands farther, I have seen specimens of the utmost of them, and know henceforth at least what they are, and what they look like. Not themselves alone, for they typify stretches and areas of half the globe—are, in fact, the vertebrae or back-bone of our hemisphere. As the anatomists say a man is only a spine, topp’d, footed, breasted and radiated, so the whole Western world is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains. In south America they are the Andes, in Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras, and in our States they go under different names. (Specimen Days, 857-58)

45 L’expansion dans l’espace se révèle ici indissociable d’une descente dans les profondeurs de l’histoire naturelle. Dans cette anatomie monumentale, l’image de la colonne vertébrale minéralisée convertit en effet les Rocheuses en immense fossile et fait coïncider le minéral et l’organique pour transformer le vestige géologique en

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centre névralgique de l’hémisphère nord, du continent américain, voire du globe tout entier. Elle convertit par ailleurs les images de murs rocheux qui pourraient constituer un cloisonnement en symbole de radiation et d’expansion horizontale. Loin de se réduire à une structure morte, le fossile apparaît ici comme le principe d’une énergie fondamentale.

46 Cette énergie primitive est celle de la minéralité élémentaire du roc. Specimen Days révèle une fascination pour les monolithes, pour la matière minérale perçue dans toute sa puissance — « the savage power of the scene » (fragment « An Hour on Kenosha Summit », 855). Il paraît significatif que la métaphore du monument (« dome », « natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft », 856) coexiste souvent dans ce texte avec une désignation géologique (« monolithic », « yellow granite », 855-56). La fascination exercée par le monolithe tient, chez Whitman, à l’union du monumental et d’une matière élémentaire, de l’immensément grand et de la pureté primitive de l’élément brut. Elle se traduit dans la syntaxe par des phrases nominales, bien que parfois immensément longues, qui explorent la monumentalité du paysage et en déclinent les attributs. Une phrase d’une douzaine de lignes suit ainsi le cours d’un canyon pour s’achever sur la vision fascinée de l’immensité et de la simplicité des monolithes : « the huge rightly-named Dome-rock—and as we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine. » (855). Un peu plus loin, l’énumération des formes architecturales du relief se double de celle de ses teintes : « As we speed again, the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft—then long stretches of straight-upright palisades, rhinoceros color—then gamboge and tinted chromos. » (856). Dans ces phrases nominales, l’image se suffit à elle-même, indépendamment de toute prédication ; son sens paraît immanent et la fascination qu’elle exerce, absolue.

47 La plénitude et la simplicité des monolithes renvoient à une « nature primitive » totalement dénuée de tout artifice mais qui n’en participe pas moins de cette poétique que la monumentalité de l’Ouest inspire à Whitman. Il l’évoque dans un fragment intitulé « An Egotistical Find » : “I have found the law of my own poems,” was the unspoken but more and more decided feeling that came to me as I pass’d, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon—this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel’d play of primitive Nature [...]. (Specimen Days, 855)

48 À l’instar des animaux monumentaux — éléphant et rhinocéros — qui portent métaphoriquement les attributs du paysage (« elephantine », « rhinoceros color »), les monolithes sont chargés d’une énergie primitive et sauvage dont le poète fait un principe d’écriture. Ils offrent l’image de l’absolu, de l’élémentaire, du primitif. L’« absence d’art », c’est-à-dire d’artifice et de construction, place ici le monument naturel aux antipodes du monument architectural. Mais comme le ferait celui-ci, le monument naturel, en vertu de sa minéralité élémentaire, offre à l’Amérique une profondeur temporelle inscrite dans l’espace, une mémoire visible.

49 Or l’historicité du monument naturel est double : à la dimension rétrospective de l’ancrage dans l’histoire s’ajoute une valeur prospective. Le verbe monere, d’où vient le terme de monument, implique déjà cette double orientation temporelle, puisqu’il associe à la mémoire une idée d’avertissement et d’exhortation, ainsi qu’une fonction d’instruction et d’inspiration. Cette polysémie se retrouve dans la notion de monument, dont l’une des acceptions, obsolète, ajoute à la fonction d’identification celle

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d’avertissement et de présage : « a thing that serves as identification ; a mark, sign. Also : a thing that gives warning ; a portent. » (O.E.D., article « monument », 5). Le monument est ce qui fait penser à un objet qui peut être situé dans le passé ou dans l’avenir10. Telle est précisément l’ambivalence des monolithes de l’Ouest : alors même que la minéralité élémentaire et primitive du roc renvoie à une origine immémoriale, littéralement pré-historique, ceux-ci sont chargés d’une valeur d’anticipation et d’exhortation. Les grandes parois rocheuses servent ainsi de surface de projection au discours providentialiste et eschatologique issu du puritanisme, qui trouve un nouveau souffle avec l’idéologie de la Destinée Manifeste dans les années 1840, sans pour autant s’y réduire.

50 Dans l’iconographie du XIXe siècle, chez les peintres de la Hudson River School, c’est par une monumentalité qui se confond avec le sublime que s’exprime l’idée de providence, clef de voûte de l’inscription de l’identité américaine dans la nature. Ce symbolisme simultanément religieux et national, avec lequel joue Twain dans une description du lac Tahoe embrasé (Roughing It, 655-56), passe par la représentation d’une nature colossale, originelle et ultime. Albert Bierstadt, qui étend à l’Ouest cette vision qui chez ses prédécesseurs avait pour objet les paysages de l’Est, présente par exemple dans « A storm in the Rocky Mountains. Mount Rosalie » (1866) une nature à l’image de la Création, scène du combat de l’ombre et de la lumière. L’intérêt pour la géologie qui se développe à l’occasion des grandes missions d’exploration ne fait que renforcer la perception providentialiste du relief de l’Ouest. Le caractère originel du roc semble le rattacher à un passé biblique et de ce fait justifier la mission providentielle de l’Amérique. La théorie du géologue Clarence King aboutit ainsi à l’idée que puisque la nature américaine laisse percevoir le temps de la création, elle est porteuse d’une mission divine.

51 Le paradigme du monument naturel résout donc la contradiction entre la définition de la nation par son accomplissement futur et le besoin simultané de se donner un passé, de s’ancrer dans l’histoire. C’est en vertu de ce lien intrinsèque du passé et de l’avenir dans le monument naturel que Whitman peut faire de celui-ci la métaphore même de la démocratie américaine. Si en effet l’Ouest monumental en constitue le socle nourricier, il en dit également l’accomplissement à venir. Dans un fragment de « Notes Left Over » intitulé « Monuments—The Past and Present », Whitman réinterprète l’identification de la démocratie américaine à une monumentalité prospective, court-circuitant pour ainsi dire l’étape de l’identification de la destinée nationale à la nature. L’association symbolique de la nation au territoire est alors si étroite dans l’imaginaire national qu’elle se passe de référence explicite. Aussi Whitman peut-il faire l’ellipse du monument naturel pour présenter la démocratie elle-même comme un monument à part entière : If you go to Europe, to say nothing of Asia, more ancient and massive still, you cannot stir without meeting venerable mementos—cathedrals, ruins of temples, castles, monuments of the great, statues and paintings, far, far beyond anything America can ever expect to produce, haunts of heroes long dead, saints, poets, divinities, with deepest associations of ages. But here in the New World, while those we can never emulate, we have more than those to build, and far more greatly to build. I am not sure but the day for conventional monuments, statues, memorials, &c., has pass’d away—and that they are henceforth superfluous and vulgar. An enlarged general superior humanity, partly indeed resulting from those, we are to build. European, Asiatic greatness are in the past. Vaster and subtler, America, combining, justifying the past, yet works for a grander future, in living democratic

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forms. Here too are indicated the paths for our national bards. Other times, other lands, have had their missions—Art, War, Ecclesiasticism, Literature, Discovery, Trade, Architecture, &c., &c.—but that grand future is the enclosing purport of the United States. (« Notes Left Over », 1071)

52 Whitman ne situe pas l’opposition entre l’Ancien et le Nouveau Continent dans la présence ou dans l’absence de monuments, mais dans la nature et l’historicité symbolique de ces derniers. Faisant écho à l’opposition que posait Thomas Cole entre les « associations » mémorielles des paysages européens (« deepest associations of ages », écrit Whitman) et celles, ouvertes vers l’avenir, de l’espace américain, il renouvelle cette thématique en jouant sur les implications temporelles du terme de monument pour opposer au sein de cette notion deux formes d’historicité radicalement opposées. Si en effet les monuments « conventionnels » d’Europe et d’Asie sont perçus comme de simples « mementos », autrement dit comme une mémoire morte, à l’inverse la monumentalité américaine se conçoit comme l’intégration du passé dans un accomplissement orienté vers l’avenir (« Vaster and subtler, America, combining, justifying the past, yet works for a grander future, in living democratic forms »). Ce que l’Amérique oppose aux monuments de l’Ancien Monde, ce ne sont pas simplement ses monuments naturels ; c’est surtout sa propre monumentalité, celle de sa démocratie, qui s’ouvre vers un accomplissement futur. Le paradigme du monument se déplace ainsi de l’espace vers l’histoire. Le monument naturel cède la place au monument national — au monument qu’est la nation.

« That vast Something [...] combining the real and the ideal » : du principe politique au principe d’écriture

53 Dans Specimen Days, la monumentalité de l’Ouest se fait volontiers idiome politique pour désigner les principes de la démocratie américaine, son peuple (« the bulk of the people », 868) ainsi que ses dirigeants. À l’image du monument naturel qui allie dans une même grandeur le réel et l’idéal (« that vast Something [...] combining the real and the ideal », 853), ces derniers sont à la fois communs (« average ») et immensément grands (« vast spred », « towering high »), tournés vers le réel et vers l’idéal : « Then is it not subtly they [the prairies] who have given us our leading modern Americans, Lincoln and Grant?—vast-spread, average men—their foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet [...] with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering high as any. » (853-54) C’est cette analogie profonde qui fait de l’immensité de la prairie un terrain propice à l’épanouissement de la démocratie américaine : « “[...] this favor’d central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America’s distinctive ideas and distinctive realities.” » (854)

54 Si l’Ouest de Whitman est bien un monument politique, ce n’est pas au sens d’un tombeau, d’un panthéon national qui serait sépulcral, mais au sens d’un lieu matriciel où s’enracine la démocratie — son socle nourricier, le lieu où s’engendrent les principes démocratiques et où naissent les grands hommes. C’est un principe de génération et de régénération sans lequel la démocratie américaine ne saurait prospérer : Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as Art is. Something is required to temper both—to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity. [...] American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices—through the dense

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streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life—must either be fibered, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm- scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part—to be its health-element and beauty-element—to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World. (Specimen Days, 925-26)

55 La relation entre l’Ouest et la démocratie américaine, dont Whitman se plaît ici à décliner les multiples visages dans leur forme la plus concrète, ne se réduit pas à une simple synecdoque. Réserve d’air pur, de soleil, d’énergie végétale et animale, et enfin de beauté, l’Ouest représente bien plutôt un principe de salubrité, la condition de survie, en un sens d’abord physique, de cet organisme vivant qu’est la démocratie.

56 Sans doute le sentiment d’expansion, de liberté et d’indépendance qui saisit les occupants de la calèche de Roughing It face à l’immensité du continent est-il l’expression de ce lien étroit entre l’espace de l’Ouest et la démocratie qui se noue dans l’imaginaire national avec la première grande vague de l’expansion vers l’ouest, dans les années 1830. « Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings ! » (561), conclut le narrateur après avoir évoqué l’ivresse de la traversée de l’immensité sauvage. Irving déjà célèbre la force vivifiante de l’Ouest et en proclame l’efficace politique : « We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe ; it appears to me that a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity and self dependence most in unison with our political institutions. » (44). Plus qu’une simple icône de la démocratie, l’Ouest en est l’école, le vivier, la terre nourricière. Si, suivant une logique que soulignait Montesquieu dans L’Esprit des lois, la géographie détermine l’idiosyncrasie des peuples et l’orientation politique des nations, ce n’est pas simplement une relation d’influence qui s’exprime chez les auteurs américains et en particulier chez Whitman, mais plutôt une relation organique, symbiotique, la démocratie et l’espace formant un tout vivant.

57 L’Ouest est une réserve d’énergie aussi bien physique et politique qu’esthétique. La revendication, récurrente au XIXe siècle, d’une littérature nationale qui parachèverait l’édifice national trouve dans le paradigme du monumental un idiome privilégié. Ainsi, Longfellow, par la voix d’un personnage de Kavanagh, A Tale (1849), appelle-t-il de ses vœux une littérature épique, à la mesure du territoire, des idées et du progrès américains : “[...] we want a national literature commensurate with our mountains and rivers,— commensurate with Niagara, and the Alleghanies, and the Great Lakes!” [...] “We want a national epic that shall correspond to the size of the country; that shall be to all other epics what Banvard’s Panorama of the Mississippi is to all other paintings, —the largest in the world!” [...] “We want a national drama in which the scope enough shall be given to our gigantic ideas, and to the unparalleled activity and progress of our people!” [...] “In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies!” (Kavanagh, A Tale, 84-85)

58 Cette littérature hirsute et sauvage (« shaggy and unshorn »), à l’image des bisons qui font trembler la prairie, serait pour Longfellow l’expression la plus adéquate d’une

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nation qui considère l’immensité sauvage de son territoire comme une valeur culturelle et artistique.

59 Roughing It répond pour sa part à la monumentalité de l’espace par la forme hyperbolique du tall tale, récit exubérant où les faits sont amplifiés, souvent lancés d’une voix tonitruante, et où le langage s’émancipe du carcan des dictionnaires et autres grammaires. Pour le narrateur, la rencontre de l’Ouest va de pair avec un apprentissage linguistique, celui d’une langue et d’un mode d’expression (le vernaculaire et le tall tale) initialement exclus des livres (« the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains. », 559). Objet encombrant, source de nombreux tourments, le dictionnaire qui leste les bagages des voyageurs se révèle inutile à la compréhension et à l’usage de cette langue dialectale découverte en chemin. L’apprentissage du tall tale et la rencontre du vernaculaire des plaines et des montagnes, auquel le récit donne ici une légitimité littéraire (« And so the first question we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers, was always, “Which is him?” The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some day. », 566), préparent l’exubérance et l’agrammaticalité de la langue de Huckleberry Finn, dans laquelle l’Amérique reconnaîtra a posteriori son patrimoine.

60 Faisant écho à l’appel de Longfellow, Whitman enfin, dans un fragment intitulé « Mississippi Valley Literature », en appelle aux bardes pour célébrer la mission que l’Amérique doit accomplir et réclame une écriture animée par l’énergie primitive et sauvage de l’Ouest (« a great throbbing, vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature [...] », 867), aux antipodes de la littérature « anachronique », « absurde » et « étriquée » (« little and cramp’d », 866) importée d’Europe. Il définit une esthétique libérée des carcans, monumentale au sens où elle emprunterait les caractéristiques du monument naturel : The pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers—will they ever appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art? (Specimen Days, 866)

61 Cette union du réel et de l’idéal qui définit le monument naturel et la démocratie américaine est donc aussi un principe d’écriture, fréquemment revendiqué dans Specimen Days. Whitman l’explicite dans ce passage où il réclame une esthétique alliant l’immensité du territoire, assimilée au « réel », à une histoire qui relève de l’« idéal » : [...] a great throbbing, vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature, in constructing which the Plains, the Prairies, and the Mississippi river [...] should be the concrete background, and America’s humanity, passions, struggles, hopes, there and now [...] should furnish the lambent fire, the ideal. (Ibid.)

62 Cette union du réel et de l’idéal, et plus largement l’esthétique qu’inspire à Whitman (dans le fragment « An Egotistical “Find” ») la monumentalité de l’espace (« I have found the law of my own poems », 855), excèdent le symbolisme national. La verticalité des grandes parois rocheuses (« the almost perpendicular sides ») et la plénitude de la matière minérale (« rocks, rocks, rocks »), tout en renvoyant à un passé primitif et immémorial dont l’énergie est toujours vive et à la mission providentielle de l’Amérique, s’ouvrent vers une transcendance esthétique qui échappe à toute temporalité :

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“I have found the law of my own poems,” was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass’d, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon—this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel’d play of primitive Nature—the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles—the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness—the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high —at their tops now and then huge masses pois’d, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. (Specimen Days, 855-56)

63 À l’opposé des formes étriquées et contraintes (« cramped ») rejetées par Whitman, l’esthétique monumentale trouve dans l’immensité de l’espace et dans la plénitude de la matière minérale le modèle d’une liberté et d’une amplitude fondamentales (« absolute uncrampedness »). C’est à nouveau l’union du réel et de l’idéal qu’exprime Whitman dans cette description de la monumentalité rocheuse de l’Ouest, pour désigner cette fois-ci la rencontre de la plénitude massive du roc (« plenitude of material », « huge masses ») et des hauteurs diaphanes, simplement esquissées, placées à la limite du sensible, symboles peut-être d’une ouverture métaphysique (« fantastic », « transparent », « faint », « with only the outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible »).

64 Dans un autre fragment (« New Senses, New Joys ») où le regard suit l’élévation du roc vers le ciel (« those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead », 856), Whitman évoque l’épanouissement spirituel suscité par cette vision : [...] a typical Rocky Mountain cañon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains [...] tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen—all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can. (Specimen Days, 856)

65 Le monument naturel se présente au poète comme une structure ouverte, un temple sans chapiteau, le lieu d’une expansion conjointe de la sensibilité et de la spiritualité irréductible au sentiment que procurent les édifices religieux et les formes artistiques d’Europe. Élémentaires et pourtant grandioses et subtiles, (« those grandest and subtlest element emotions »), ces passions de l’âme sont à l’image des monuments naturels en lesquels s’allient le réel et l’idéal.

66 Le jeu de correspondances entre l’individu et le continent qui caractérise la vision de Whitman dans son ensemble permet à la poétique à laquelle conduit cette émotion esthétique d’être qualifiée d’« égotiste » alors même qu’elle prend pour objet la définition d’une écriture à proprement parler américaine — « An egotistical Find » étant précisément le titre du fragment où Whitman proclame la découverte de son art poétique. L’incorporation de la démocratie dans l’espace de l’Ouest, telle qu’elle s’accomplit dans Specimen Days, ne peut fonctionner sans l’union inextricable de l’expérience esthétique, de la découverte de soi et de la célébration de l’Amérique. Dans l’image whitmanienne du monument naturel se rejoignent donc l’atemporel et l’historique, l’individu et la nation, la sensibilité et le politique.

Conclusion

67 Sur fond de convergence dans l’admiration des merveilles de l’Ouest, l’interprétation de la monumentalité qui ressort de ces trois récits de voyages diffère grandement de

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l’un à l’autre. L’analogie avec les monuments européens qui prédomine chez Irving cède la place chez Twain à une monumentalité qui est surtout la métaphore des temps immémoriaux de la géologie. Whitman quant à lui, tout en partageant la fascination de Twain pour les profondeurs géologiques, monumentalise non plus seulement l’espace mais surtout l’idéal démocratique qui s’y incarne et en procède. Le caractère grandiose du paysage est désormais le garant de la perpétuation de la démocratie et constitue ainsi un monument qui fait référence à l’avenir plus qu’au passé.

68 Les multiples visages du monument naturel et la résonance en eux de problématiques nationales témoignent de la fonction centrale de l’Ouest dans les représentations symboliques de la nation au cours du XIXe siècle. Avec la conquête et l’exploration de l’Ouest, ainsi qu’avec le sectionalisme qui à partir du milieu du siècle interdit à la Nouvelle Angleterre d’offrir une image consensuelle, le centre symbolique de la nation américaine se déplace d’est en ouest. Les espaces sauvages de l’Ouest présentent une image régénérée de la nation qui trouve précisément dans le paradigme du monument naturel un support privilégié. Les textes de Twain et de Whitman témoignent de la permanence du mythe dans la seconde moitié du siècle, alors même que l’Ouest s’ouvre peu à peu à un afflux de touristes et de voyageurs, laissant percevoir derrière l’idéal une réalité de plus en plus multiple.

69 Si les monuments naturels contribuent dans les trois récits à faire de l’Ouest un espace mythique, c’est d’abord parce qu’ils se présentent comme un espace atemporel, exempt des tensions de l’histoire, mais qui pourtant rend compte de l’historicité de la nation américaine, de son ancrage dans le passé et de son orientation vers un accomplissement futur ; c’est aussi parce qu’ils contribuent à en édifier une image idéale et à le faire apparaître comme un lieu rêvé, comme un temple sacré, comme un territoire grandiose, simultanément originel et ultime. C’est encore parce que le paradigme du monument naturel répond à des contradictions majeures qui s’expriment dans les représentations collectives de la nation américaine, la fonction du mythe étant précisément, comme l’a montré Claude Lévi-Strauss, de résoudre ou d’occulter les tensions de l’histoire. La figure du monument unifie en effet l’espace sauvage et en réconcilie ces deux visages que sont la grandeur et l’hostilité. Elle donne sens à la définition simultanée de la nation par son ancrage dans le passé et par son accomplissement à venir. Dans son interprétation whitmanienne, elle voudrait enfin résoudre la tension entre la célébration de la nature sauvage et sa nécessaire domestication dès lors qu’il s’agit de lui imposer un cadrage ou une structure, ne serait- ce que par les mots. Sans doute est-ce par la revendication d’une esthétique qui serait à l’image des monuments naturels que Specimen Days réinterprète le plus profondément le mythe de l’Ouest. Whitman exprime l’utopie d’une écriture fondamentalement monumentale qui célébrerait le sauvage, le primitif, l’élémentaire, sans leur imposer les schèmes de la civilisation. Utopie littéraire aussi bien que politique qui repose sur une contradiction sous-jacente au mythe de l’Ouest depuis l’origine — l’idée que l’on pourrait saisir la wilderness sans l’abolir.

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BRUNET, François et Bronwyn GRIFFITH, Visions de l’Ouest. Photographies de l’exploration américaine, 1860-1880, Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2007.

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---, Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [1883, 1876], in Mississippi Writings, New York, The Library of America, 1982.

WHITMAN, Walt, « Notes Left Over » [1892] and Specimen Days [1882], in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, New York, The Library of America, 1982.

NOTES

1. Ces associations sont en effet récurrentes dans le récit d’Irving : « grandeur » (33), « moral grandeur » (94), « grand » (82), « stately » (81), « high and stately » (87), « immense » (82, 134), « vast » (33, 83, 87, 131), « vastness » (82), « beautiful » (40, 87, 112, 131), « magnificent » (44, 83), « glorious » (65, 81, 87), « solemnity » (33), « sublimity » (82). 2. Je dois l’interprétation proposée dans ce paragraphe à un rapporteur anonyme que je tiens à remercier ici. 3. Ce poème fut écrit en 1814 à la suite de la guerre américano-britannique de 1812, en hommage à ceux qui défendirent Fort McHenry à Baltimore et y firent flotter le drapeau américain, contre l’acharnement britannique. Très vite, il est mis en musique et entre dans le répertoire national en tant que chant populaire. Sa popularité s’affirme dans les années qui précèdent la Guerre de Sécession, période pendant laquelle il est joué en de multiples occasions patriotiques. Ce n’est cependant qu’en 1931 qu’il deviendra hymne national. 4. L’image de la cathédrale naturelle n’est pas propre à l’imaginaire américain. En France et en Allemagne, elle hante les lettres et la philosophie depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle, lorsque Goethe compare la cathédrale gothique à un arbre divin qui s’élance vers le ciel, jusqu’à la fin du XIXe, où Nietzsche souligne encore l’influence des forêts sur la structure des cathédrales. Dans l’intervalle, le thème de la parenté entre la cathédrale gothique et la nature inspire de manière notoire Chateaubriand, Schelling, Hegel et Hölderlin. L’image de la cathédrale s’affirme alors comme une composante majeure de la pensée romantique et, avec la redécouverte du gothique, vient nourrir les nationalismes européens en s’érigeant en manifestation du génie d’un peuple. Voir à ce propos le développement de Jacques Darriulat : http://www.jdarriulat.net/ Introductionphiloesth/MoyenAge/Cathedrale.html (mis en ligne le 29 octobre 2007 ; page consultée le 10 décembre 2010). 5. Allan M. Axelrad mentionne l’importance, dans la peinture de cette époque (chez des peintres comme George Inness, Worthington Whittredge, Albert Bierstadt, Asher Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, George Hetzel, John Frederick Kensett, Thomas Moran et William Trost Richards), de la lumière filtrée par les arbres et de la présence de troncs semblables à des piliers ; il souligne aussi la verticalité de nombre de ces toiles. 6. La loi de 1906 donnait au Président le pouvoir de définir les sites historiques à protéger (« historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States ») et visait entre autres à préserver les vestiges indiens. Or entre 1906 et 1909, le Président Roosevelt utilise cette loi pour protéger des sites naturels, comme par exemple celui du Grand Canyon. Voir à ce propos l’analyse de Stephan Fisch, National Approaches to the Governance of Historical Heritage over Time. A Comparative Report, Amsterdam, IOS Press, 2008. 205. 7. Exposition « Visions de l’Ouest : photographies de l’exploration américaine, 1860-1880 », Musée d’Art américain de Giverny, 10 juillet-31 octobre 2007. 8. Le parc national de Yellowstone est créé en 1872. Parc régional depuis 1864, Yosemite devient parc national en 1890.

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9. Alexander von Humboldt eut une influence très grande sur William Gilpin (1813-1892), qui élabora une théorie selon laquelle le centre du monde, mine d’or pur, se situait en Amérique (à Centropolis, aussi appelée Gilpintown). (Savinel, 77) 10. Monere porte la racine indo-européenne men (penser). On retrouve ce lien intrinsèque du monument avec la pensée dans le terme allemand de Denkmal (monument), qui renvoie à denken, penser.

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article s’intéresse à la fonction de l’image du monument naturel dans les représentations de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, et plus particulièrement dans trois récits de voyages, A Tour on the Prairies de Washington Irving, Roughing It de Mark Twain et Specimen Days de Walt Whitman. Icône des vieilles nations européennes, le monument est paradoxalement omniprésent dans les représentations de l’espace sauvage et y fait figure de paradigme structurant. Il s’agit d’analyser conjointement les enjeux esthétiques et politiques de sa transposition sur le sol américain. On montrera ainsi comment ce motif autour duquel se construit le paysage de l’Ouest se fait aussi incarnation de la démocratie américaine et, simultanément, principe d’écriture.

This article deals with the image of the natural monument and considers its function in 19th- century representations of the West, especially in three travel narratives—A Tour on the Prairies by Washington Irving, Roughing It by Mark Twain and Specimen Days by Walt Whitman. An emblem of the old European nations, the monument is paradoxically omnipresent in the representations of the Western wilderness and appears as a structuring paradigm. The purpose of this reflexion is to analyse jointly the aesthetic and political implications of its transposition onto the American soil. Indeed, this motive on which the construction of the Western landscape is based also appears as the embodiment of American democracy while defining a writing principle.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Monuments, Ouest, géologie, patrimoine, nation, démocratie, cathédrale, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain Keywords : Monuments, West, geology, patrimony, nation, democracy, cathedral, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain Thèmes : Hors-thème

AUTEUR

DELPHINE LOUIS-DIMITROV Institut Catholique de Paris, Faculté des Lettres

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Reconnaissances

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An Interview with Steven Millhauser

Étienne Février

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This interview was conducted by email between May 23rd and July 29th 2011. The interview also includes three questions that Nathalie Cochoy asked Steven Millhauser.

Etienne Février : I would like to begin this interview with a question about architecture. Images of architecture appear frequently in your fiction, from Martin Dressler to more recent collections like Dangerous Laughter. In that collection’s “thirteen stories,” we find a tower reaching all the way to heaven, a life-size replica of a town so precise that even the “levels of salt in the saltshakers” match those of the original town, and a series of outwardly expanding domes—covering a house, first, and eventually an entire country. Am I right to think that you use architecture as a means of expressing the artist’s simultaneous desire to conquer the world and escape from it ? Steven Millhauser: It’s certainly fair to think that, so long as I’m not limited to a single use. Sometimes my monstrous architectural images are meant to express only America’s love of vastness—vast bridges, vast buildings, vast works of art to embody the vastness of the land. Sometimes they’re meant to suggest an aggressive human desire to create larger and larger structures, as if, once begun, the urge to immensity can’t be stopped. And sometimes it’s the sheer pleasure of invention that drives me to dream up impossible forms of architecture, which then haunt me with meanings I can’t entirely fathom.

EF: It seems to me that the particular kinds of architecture you create are far more than mere aggregates of stone and mortar : the people leaving the department store in “The Dream of the Consortium” cannot see the world in the same way as they did before. They “have the absurd sensation that [they] have entered still another department,” and so they begin to search for a way out. Do museum-like architectures in your fiction ultimately reveal

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the artificiality of real life ? Or do characters need to walk through these structures in order to rediscover the value of the most subdued elements of ordinary life? SM: Those museum-like structures behave differently in different stories. In “The Dream of the Consortium,” the artificial world is so powerful that it infects the outside world, at least for a time. More often it works the other way—immersion in a world-within-a-world brings characters back to the first world with new eyes. What these structures always do is challenge the outer world in some way. Are you real, world? they whisper. Realer than I am?

EF: You have been called “a maker of myth.” Would you agree with this assessment? Do you consider that myths belong to some other world, beyond the reach of man, or are they intertwined in the texture of the most banal situations or events? SM: I’d be happy to agree with it if I knew what it meant. It sounds like a good thing to be called a maker of myth, though I suspect it’s only a way of saying that my work doesn’t fit the criteria of conventional realistic fiction. Myths that belong to some other world hold no interest for me. If I create fictional other worlds, it’s only in order to penetrate the one world that interests me.

EF: Which world would it be? I am thinking of “The Tower.” The story resounds with mythic whispers about the “hidden flaw” of the Tower—a building that rises “higher than the smoke of sacrificial fires.” Here the mythic dimension is the only yardstick men have to account for the mysterious essence of the Tower—it truly becomes the horizon of mankind. SM Which world ? The astonishing one presented to me by my senses, the world that I relentlessly question in my stories. It’s true enough that I borrow myths when they suit my purposes. Here, among other things, I was trying to present a heaven that is desperately longed for but is finally less interesting than the world far below. But the most vital place of all is the structure that joins the two worlds: the ephemeral tower itself, the embodiment of desire.

EF: Michel Collot has suggested two possible ways of looking at the real. We may focus on telling those details that can be told, on pointing to those objects that are clearly defined and identifiable, or alternatively, we may sink into the unnamable quality of things. [“Deux façons du regard […]: l’une qui découpe dans le réel des objets clairement définis et identifiés ; l’autre qui s’enfonce dans l’opacité non nommable de la chose.”] In your fiction, are you conscious of this opposition between clear-cut distinction and a vague attraction to the unfathomable substance of the world? Could this have anything to do with why your stories often emphasize the banal? I am thinking, for example, of the phosphorescent quality of a white fridge in the night, of a bike leaning against a wall, of a baseball bat left lying in a backyard… SM: I’m definitely conscious of such oppositions. What is a thing, an object? Is it a collection of precise details, which express and reveal the object, or do those details serve to reveal something hidden that lies behind or within the details? My interest in the banal has many explanations, but one is that the banal is never banal, but contains its own beauty, like a familiar word that suddenly reveals its strangeness.

EF: Yet it seems to me that in most of your stories, the narrators focus on the banal, but also on the sudden crises or on the unexpected elements that emerge in the midst of, or from, the banal and disrupt it. Such strangeness stands against the cloth of the banal, and has an existence of its own, separated from that of the banal. Would you agree? SM: I do agree. Disruption is at the center of many of my stories—and what is disruption if not the sudden emergence of strangeness from the ordinary?

EF: Quite often in your work you switch back and forth, or rather you oscillate, between imitation and invention, realism and imagination. Does this oscillation constitute or

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otherwise help you to bring about a new avenue of approach to what you call “the blazing thing that deserves the name of reality”? SM: It’s interesting to me that you describe what I do as oscillation, since I think of myself as often doing something a bit different: beginning in a conventional way, a way that seems to promise the familiar pleasures or boredoms of realist fiction, and then swerving into something else. But whether I do what I think I do, or in fact oscillate, it’s indeed a method that helps me get at whatever it is I’m trying to get at.

EF: Once, when asked to describe your work, you responded by calling it “enigmatic realism.” Could you expand a little on this enigmatic answer? What is the place of the mysterious in your exploration of the real? Revelation, or clarification, seems to play an important role in your work. How do you articulate revelation in tandem with your profound respect for the shadowy sides of the real? SM: I was trying to be as enigmatic as possible. But you’re right that revelation, by which I mean something like a secular version of religious vision, feels crucial to my sense of art. I would even argue that the end of all art is revelation. But because there is no final truth to be revealed, no godhead hidden behind the forms of Nature, the revelation can at best shadow forth an intimation of something that can be shown in no other way—or perhaps, if I may adopt your terms, it might be said that revelation, far from dispersing the shadowy sides of the real, reveals precisely those shadowy sides. Is this an enigmatic answer? I hope so.

EF: In an interview you talk about the idea/vision dichotomy : “If I truly wanted to present ideas, I’d write essays. What drives me to write a story is something closer to a picture or vision that I want to complete. I understand that this picture isn’t without meaning, but the meaning is buried in it and works in subterranean ways.” Do your short stories, like your creators’ miniatures or museum-like architectures, reiterate the importance of leaving a picture incomplete so as to endow meaning with a mysterious, metamorphic life of its own? SM: I don’t adhere to a relentless esthetic of incompletion, if that’s what you mean. But yes, of course, certain kinds of completion are harmful. What’s important is finding the necessary balance between the exhaustive, on the one hand, and the suggestive, on the other. I wouldn’t trust a writer who claimed to know exactly how this is done.

EF: In the end of “The Room in the Attic” David, the narrator, clearly sees in his mind objects that he has yet never seen, but only touched in the dark. Am I right to think that this short story explores the genesis of vision? Here pictures are created through the sense of touch and acquire a life of their own—like in “The Wizard of West Orange.” More generally, do you agree that most of your stories have to do with the creation of images? SM: “The Room in the Attic” certainly plays with the notion of the genesis of vision, but that’s only part of what it does—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it does this in a particular way, controlled by the nature of a particular story. Remember, the story portrays a bizarre adolescent love affair, in which the erotic is stimulated by the absence of touch. It’s about a particular development of the imagination, under the grotesque conditions of this story. And it’s significant that when David at last has a choice, he chooses not to see—partly because he doesn’t want to be disillusioned, and partly because he understands that he has created an imaginary girl who is far more desirable, perhaps far more real, than the somewhat tedious girl who threatens him with actual existence. I don’t think I can say whether most of my stories have to do with the creation of images—it’s probably fair to say that I simply don’t know whether that is true.

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EF: Yet all artists in your stories create images—they are makers of miniatures and of automatons, they are painters, architects, cartoonists and animators, showmen, illusionists… SM: I believe logic is on your side. If it’s true that all artists in my stories create images, and if it’s true that I’m an artist, then it has to be true that what I create is images. What isn’t true is that I think of myself primarily as an image-maker. I tend to think of myself as someone who takes disparate elements and arranges them in a significant order. If you argue that an ordering of elements is simply another way of saying “image,” then once again you’re absolutely right.

EF: Your stories often alternate between things that are exposed or revealed and things that are concealed. How do you articulate those polar opposites—if only they are polar opposites? Why are you so keen on the intermediary zones of chiaroscuro? SM: Any work of art struggles with the forces of revelation and concealment. In a sense, a work of art is nothing but a battle between those forces. To reveal everything would be to create an infinite work. Even Jehovah limited himself to a finite universe. To conceal everything would be to create nothing, to create silence. Since total revelation is impossible, and total concealment intolerable, it’s precisely in the chiaroscuro zones that the truth of things is likely to be found.

EF: Characters seem to play seriously as well as dangerously in your fiction. In “Dangerous Laughter,” for instance, a girl literally dies of laughter; it all began with a simple game played by restless teenagers. What is the place of games in your work? SM: I’ve always loved games, and what I particularly love about them is the way they mix the serious and the playful. You know it’s a game, only a game, and yet at the same time it’s the most important thing in the world—it replaces the world, as you play. And I like the kinds of restriction and freedom represented by rules. The more you think about games, the more you can’t help thinking about art.

EF: Some of your stories question the very notion of game and bring to light its shadowy contours. Quite often, game merges with dream and obsession. For example, would you say that Martin Dressler is playing? SM: He’s playing, and he is fanatically serious. When I conceived that book, one thing I hoped to do was imagine my way into someone as different from myself as possible: a practical man, a builder. But I soon realized that my practical man cared nothing about the practical and everything about the fulfillment of a more and more impossible dream. He might as well be building a soaring structure of words.

EF: Reading “A Precursor of the Cinema,” “Eisenheim the Illusionist” and also Martin Dressler one may have the impression that you use the Nineteenth Century and more specifically the fin-de-siècle atmosphere as an unmapped territory, in which your narrators can draw fresh and new connections, and explore untrodden paths. In this perspective, that portion of the real called “Nineteenth Century” seems to be synonymous, in your fiction, with a moment of historical time when creation was particularly free and fruitful. Would you please tell me more about this interest in—or fascination for—this “turn of the century” atmosphere? SM: I’ve set stories in the early nineteenth century, the early eighteenth century, the late fifteenth century—but yes, the end of the nineteenth century has a special fascination for me. It’s a time, particularly in America, particularly in New York, when immense structures were built—the first skyscrapers, the great amusement parks, the formidable Brooklyn Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world, with towers that soared higher than any contemporary structure except

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the spire of Trinity Church. It’s the time of the great Edison inventions, when it seemed as if every year a new wonder was revealed. It’s the time of the invention of a new art form, motion pictures. It’s a time favorable to a particular kind of all- inclusive structure, the kind that embraces an abundance of disparate things—I’m thinking of world expositions (like the one in Paris in 1889, in Chicago in 1893), of vast department stores. Most of all, it’s a time that’s close enough to our own to seem recognizable, while it remains distant enough to seem dreamlike. The mixture of the actual and the fantastic—the end of the nineteenth century has all the characteristics of a great work of fiction.

EF: Another thought-provoking aspect of Nineteenth Century in your fiction is the way it leads descriptions to fully engage with reality. Everything happening then seems probable, and gives the impression of being a familiar story, whereas it is in fact an invention, related by fictitious narrators. One reason for this may be that, as you mentioned earlier, this century is at the same time remote and close to our own. For instance, in “A Precursor of the Cinema,” the “Verisimilist movement,” and the “Transgressive movement” are trompe- l’oeil movements that fit very well in the picture of Nineteenth Century artistic evolution [“The Transgressive movement began with a handful of disaffected Verisimilists who felt that the realist program of versimilism did not go far enough.”] Do you use the past as a lens to create a context of plausible unreality, allowing you to keep a balance between imitation and invention? SM: I like the phrase “plausible unreality,” so long as it’s understood that the unreal, in itself, has no interest for me. Invention, fantasy, dream, all these are techniques in the service of the real. Then again, the merely plausible, the merely probable, is not what I’m after. What am I after? Let’s call it the place where invention and imitation intersect, resulting in implausible reality. But yes: the past, when I occasionally turn to it, allows me exactly the balance you mention. It’s as if history is a metrical form that restricts me in certain ways and releases me in others.

EF: I would like to ask you a question about the historical references you use in your work. In “The Wizard of West Orange,” you recreate the atmosphere of Thomas Edison’s laboratory, the Wizard of Menlo Park. “The Little Kingdom of Franklyn Payne” evokes the life and work of a cartoonist and animator reminding the reader of Winsor McCay. “Balloon Flight, 1870” alludes to an actual historical event—a messenger leaving Paris with a balloon to fly above the Prussian lines and join Gambetta and the French army in Tours. And “Kaspar Hauser Speaks” conjures up the—written—voice of Kaspar. In all these examples, you seem to use a historical reference only to better depart from it, and to reveal another facet of reality. Is this process of deviance what you have in mind when you choose a historical reference? SM: Yes and no. I have two things in mind when I write a story based on a historical period. One is a faithful reproduction, or let’s say a careful illusion of faithful reproduction, of the period. This itself leads to a seductive paradox, since any reproduction of a vanished world, a world that no longer exists, begins to merge with the world of dream. The other thing I have in mind is just what you suggest—a swerving away, a disruption, in order to express something that can be expressed in no other way. Then again, both of these methods—the method of meticulous reproduction, the method of disruption—are exactly what I use when I’m writing about the present.

EF: There seems to be a pattern that is deeply embedded in your fiction: the creation of a tension between polar opposites. Quite often, characters and plot seem to be pulled in opposite directions. To quote but a few examples, the characters of “Beneath the Cellars of Our Town” need to go from below (the tunnels) to above (the town, the towers) and vice

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versa in order to fully exist. The same is true in “The Other Town,” where the inhabitants like to go from one town to the other—both being scrupulously identical. In the same way, the artists and creators in your fiction are often caught in between creation and destruction, frenzy and silence. The teenagers in “Dangerous Laughter” or “The Room in the Attic” try to keep their balance, between July and September, childhood and adulthood. Is it because you want to explore moments of choice, or moments of crisis when different paths are suddenly opened and not yet explored? SM: You’re making me realize how present these patterns of opposition are in my work ! I’ll have to be slyer, in the future. But yes, what you say is definitely part of the reason. The other part is something harder to define—my sense that patterns of opposition really do exist in the world and in the minds of human beings and therefore represent a kind of biochemical justification for similar patterns found in works of fiction.

EF: In an interview you present “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” in a simple way, saying that you missed opening cartoons at the cinema and that you seized the chance to start your collection with one. Yet it seems to me that this story is also a revealing means of starting your collection, in the sense that it celebrates the demiurgic magic of the act of writing. Indeed, by turning an animated cartoon—images and sound—into words, you seem to challenge the genre of the cartoon, or of story-telling, by revealing the violence that lies beneath comedy and by showing that the lines of a cartoon or a story can indeed acquire a third dimension and inhabit the world. Do you agree that this story is also a celebration of the power of words? SM: I agree. It’s certainly that. A cartoon celebrates the power of images, and this story does its best to steal that power and place it entirely within words. You could even argue that the story is an attempt to destroy the very world it appears to be creating. The story undermines the cartoon in another way as well—it infects the cartoon, here and there, with psychological descriptions that are alien to the image- world of cartoons but typical of realist fiction.

EF: I would like to ask some questions about the craft of writing. In your stories, there is usually a complicated set of problems expressed with some extraordinary clarity. Is this combination of precision and complexity in your work something that you have to work at consciously? SM: Exactly what brings a story into being remains elusive to me. I’m happy to let it remain elusive. Certainly, once a story has emerged from wherever stories emerge, I work at it relentlessly so that it can become itself as completely as possible. I’m conscious of achieving or failing to achieve certain effects, but that consciousness is often little more than an almost physiological sense of rightness or wrongness. At a certain stage of revision I’m definitely aware of trying to make my language more precise, but the struggle for precision is itself controlled by something deeper that I can’t define and don’t question. And precision is a tricky business. As your own Robbe-Grillet once put it: “Rien n’est plus fantastique que la précision.” As for complexity: complexity alone holds no interest for me. But a precise complexity, a vital complexity—now that is something worth striving for.

EF: You often resort to lists in your short stories. Although the juxtaposition of words often appears heterogeneous, do you organize words according to a certain pattern? SM: Any system for creating lists would quickly reveal itself as tediously mechanical. But a complete lack of system, a randomness, would be just as bad. The crucial thing about a list is that it must suggest the exhaustive without the possibility of being exhaustive. The exhilarating challenge is to combine smallness and vastness—to imply vastness through smallness, completeness through incompleteness. The items

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in a list must also harmonize and clash with one another in a way that remains lively, even though a list is inherently boring. A list is a kind of exercise in overcoming impossibilities—that’s what I find so seductive.

EF: In Dangerous Laughter, the maker of miniatures “seemed to sense dimly, just out of reach beyond his inner sight, a farther kingdom. […] He confessed to himself that it was less a seeing than a desire gradually hardening into a certainty.” Do you feel the same way when you are starting a story? That is, do you know beforehand where you are heading, or do you follow your desire to write until it coalesces into a finished piece of work? Do you start with a small, single image in your mind and then enlarge it or explore it, or do you set out more or less with a grasp of the whole? SM: When I was in my early twenties, I began writing as soon as I had a single image and a vague sense of what I wanted to do. It’s a very youthful, very clumsy way of going about it. I now don’t begin until I know a great deal about the still unwritten story, though I don’t know and don’t want to know everything. To put it another way : the business of knowing only a little, and then knowing a little more, and a little more, now takes place almost entirely in my mind, as well as in notebook jottings, as I slowly prepare for the act of writing. To write down a story while not knowing anything about it, not having any idea at all where you are going, strikes me as ludicrous. It’s also not believable. Writers like to claim such things all the time, but I remain skeptical.

EF: In “A Change in Fashion,” logic is pushed to its last possible end. “After the age of Revelation came the Age of Concealment,” the first line indicates. And indeed dresses start concealing the female body, more and more, until they “merge with architecture” and some of them become small houses. Logic eventually collapses with a humorous twist, as men realize that dresses are actually empty—women are chatting in a kitchen. Did you start with a clear idea of the trajectory the story would take, or did you discover its evolution gradually, in the course of writing? SM: I began by trying to imagine what an extreme revolution in clothing might be like. Exactly why I tried to imagine such a thing is a mystery to me. The principle of concealment came early and led inevitably to the method of increasing size. If things like bridges and buildings have gotten larger and larger in the course of time, why not clothes? The precise trajectory was worked out slowly, partly in notebook jottings over a number of weeks, and partly as I read several books about the history of clothing styles, the history of hairstyles, and so on. I knew, before writing out the slowly evolving story, that it would end in collapse, but the exact terms of the collapse came to me only in the act of writing.

EF: Your story “In the Reign of Harad IV” follows the steps of a maker of miniatures along his wayward journey into realms never before discovered, sinking “below the crust of the visible.” The story insists on the journey itself, in an evocative and concrete way, telling how the master proceeds, step by step, cautiously and patiently respecting the rules of his craft: “He began as always with a simple object.” Keeping in mind that for the author of Edwin Mullhouse any attempt at a biographical reading may appear preposterous, to what extent could we see in the numerous artists and creators of your stories a reflection of the way you approach the craft of writing? SM: I’d describe it as dangerous rather than preposterous. It’s of course impossible for me to write about an artist without being aware that I myself am an artist writing about an artist. But this isn’t the same as representing myself in a story. Some of my artists are close to what I think I am, others are a little piece of me, others have

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nothing to do with me at all. Am I Eisenheim? Am I Eschenburg? Am I J. Franklin Payne? But I think these are questions for others to answer.

EF: Yet regardless of the actual characters or persons, most of the artists in your work reveal the paradoxical contiguity between creation and destruction (Sarabee’s radical trajectory ends up in flames), and are animated by a deep restlessness, leading them towards unknown territories, constantly running the risk of collapsing under the weight of their own excess. To what extent does this apply to your own appreciation and practice of art? SM: You know me almost too well. Art is a passion or it’s nothing. And any passion is a restlessness, a violent reckless striving, which left unchecked leads to excess and destruction. First the Liebesnacht, then the Liebestod. For me, a successful work of art is a ferocious pressure released into a form. You feel the form and the pressure— both.

EF: In a number of your stories you deal with artists obsessed by certain patterns. Thus Heinrich Graum “accumulated a gallery of some six hundred heads, many of them in grotesque states of incompletion.” Is there a gallery of unfinished works and drafts haunting your desk or filing cabinets? SM: I’m afraid I’m about to disappoint you. It sounds very fine, very romantic, that gallery of incomplete heads. But I tend to finish what I set out to do. Then again, there are various ghosts of half-imagined works drifting through the corridors of my imagination, and every once in a while I come upon one—with a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of exhilaration.

EF: Would you agree that in your books you go along the same paths, only in different worlds? SM: I tend to resist any statement, however reasonable, however generous, about what it is I do. Any such statement makes me want to do something else. I suppose it’s often the case that I go along the same paths, in different worlds. But don’t I sometimes go along different paths, in the same world?

EF: Do characters ever run away from you and take on unexpected identities? SM: This happens in the preliminary stage, when I’m dreaming my way into a story without yet permitting myself to write it down. Characters change, events change, a kind of fluidity runs through everything. But gradually things become less unsettled, the parts begin to relate more clearly to one another, sentences begin to form. This doesn’t mean that later discoveries and surprises don’t happen. But “run away”—that sounds easy, like the sort of thing that happens to someone who’s drunk at a party and wants to tell you a story. It has nothing to do with the ferocity of art.

EF: Do you think there is something about American fiction that sets it apart from other bodies of literature in the world? Along these lines, do you think of yourself as an “American” writer? Or like Martin Dressler, an “American” dreamer? SM: I’m wary in general of large definitions, grand statements. American fiction is many things. But one strain in it is the impulse to set off in search of new territory, the desire to explore the unknown. You see this repeatedly in the fiction of Melville and Poe—to say nothing of Huck’s voyage down the Mississippi. The tall tale is part of the same impulse. American realism has a brilliance of its own, but it’s finally no more than a late variety of a nineteenth-century French experiment. As for me, I like to think of myself as a writer—period. Any adjective threatens to constrict me. Then again, of course I’m an American writer, rather than a Chinese writer, in the sense

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that I grew up in American towns, among American sights and smells, and in the deeper sense that my thoughts take shape as a series of linguistic events known as the American variation of English.

EF: The novella Enchanted Night can be seen as an elaboration on the short story “Clair de Lune.” You once explained to Marc Chénetier that “what [you] wanted most to do, in the novella, was experiment with many points of view,” which is precisely what the format of the short story does not allow. You have mainly been publishing collections of short stories in recent years ; are there any other literary “elaborations” you would like to carry out? SM: I don’t know how stories come to me. I sit and wait. I dare them not to come. I pretend not to care. I pray to gods whose existence I reject. This is my usual state, between acts of writing, and it’s as far as possible from a sense of future projects I’d like to carry out. Length has little to do with it. It’s true I’m attracted to small forms, with their sharp constraints and their invitations to disruption, but if I were seized by the need to write a three-thousand-page novel, I wouldn’t hesitate. I believe I’ve both answered and evaded your question.

EF: We will thus end this interview with another chiraroscuro, in between revelation and concealment. Thank you very much, dear Sir, for your generosity, patience and precision while answering my questions. Nathalie Cochoy: Although the sense of an imminent visual revelation is often noticeable in your stories, it seems to me that an interest in the wonderful potentialities of touch also pervades your work. Or rather, an interest in the suggestiveness of a fleeting contact with the elusive, metamorphic surfaces of the world. In Dangerous Laughter in particular, this delicate yet sensuous “brushing” against the real seems incarnated in the narrators’ encounters with Clara Schiller’s skin, Isabel’s “warm forearm” or the “silken lining” of the “haptograph.” Could we go as far as to relate this distant yet intimate contact with the unknown mysteries of the real to the “coincidence” between the very physicality of words (the “skin” of discourse: its scars or blanks, its repetitive creases, its sharply outlined tattoos…) and the malleable surfaces of the world? SM: Until I began assembling the stories of Dangerous Laughter, I hadn’t realized that a number of them were concerned with the sense of touch. I believe this can partly be explained as my attempt to overcome a habit of relying too thoroughly on my visual imagination. But yes, the tactile invites the kind of relation you suggest. Words seem to bring you the world, in ways no one is clear about, but they also bring you themselves—you might almost say that the more vividly the world seems to come to you through words, the more aware you are of the look and sound of these strange non-objects. They disappear into the things they name, and at the same time they assert themselves, they make themselves felt. The analogy with touch isn’t difficult to make. The very skin that brings you something of the world also brings you an awareness of itself. To touch something is to be touched. The act creates your skin. I don’t know whether this is the precise relation between words and world that you were asking about, but it’s one that your question brought to mind.

NC: It seems to me that the narrators’ restless need to “touch” the real and ceaselessly invent new means of approaching its unfathomable mysteries also foreshadows the way in which your words “inhabit” the world. In your descriptions, the most ordinary elements of life seem to shine with an extraordinary radiance. Visual details vibrate with some timeless intensity, as if independently from one another. The poetic force of your descriptions then seems to stem from a wish to pay attention to the most commonplace things, events or people—to see the invisible. In the magnificent story entitled “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” you seem to draw a portrait in absentia of all those who exist only in the traces of

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what they failed to be—next to nothing. In this sense, would you say that you are a committed writer? SM: In this sense, definitely yes. In “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” the act of not-noticing is equated with the crime of murder. But though I wish, as you say, to pay attention to commonplace things, I see no reason to restrict my attention only to them. I’d argue that my desire to pay attention to the commonplace is no different from my desire to invent exotic worlds. The ordinary and the extra-ordinary keep turning into each other. The fantastic—taken seriously—is finally only another form of realism. Both are attempts at showing forth the real. Both are attempts at revelation.

NC: In your stories, the narrative voice often evolves towards the voice of rumor. This collective voice often admits its inability to name the truth adequately and resorts to negations, hesitations or contradictions in order to show its dread and its desire to fix meaning. In “History of a Disturbance,” however, the narrative voice paradoxically relates its evolution towards silence. In his constant questioning of the most banal statements, the narrator seems to see the world better. He notices the strangeness of the most familiar details— “the faint liquidity green cast by the little glass swan on the windowsill,” the “two glasses of wine on the wicker table,” “a finger with purple nail polish”… As the clichéd sentence “Do you see what I’m trying to say?” seems to imply, could we go as far as to say that the questioning of language intensifies our vision of the real? SM: The story invites you to make that leap, though it’s also true that the narrator is meant to sound like a quiet madman. And his questioning of language is so extreme that he finally rejects language in favor of pure sensation, which he claims is distorted by words. A sinister argument ! But it’s also very attractive, since words are continually contracting and hardening, though they go on as if they’re alive. In all this, I’m assuming that there is something that deserves the name of “real” and that language is a crucial way of getting at it. To question language is therefore inevitably to ask about its relation to the real, and in that sense to intensify our vision of the real. I suppose I think of the story as a paradox: I’ve invented a character who questions language by means of language, who argues for silence by uttering an extended monologue. It’s also an attack on what I’ve spent my life doing. It says: Wouldn’t it have been better to be silent ? The story is my attempt to answer that terrifying question.

INDEX

Subjects: Reconnaissances

AUTHOR

ÉTIENNE FÉVRIER Université Toulouse 2-Le Mirail

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Learning Curve With an Introduction by Françoise Palleau-Papin

Mary Caponegro

“What’s the matter with Mary Caponegro ?” Françoise Palleau-Papin

1 Were I to introduce Mary Caponegro formally, in an official biographical notice, it would go something like this: Mary Caponegro is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard College, where William Gaddis once taught. She is the author of five works of fiction: Tales from the Next Village (Lost Roads, 1985), The Star Cafe (Scribner, 1990), Five Doubts (Marsilio, 1998), The Complexities of Intimacy (Coffee House, 2001), and All Fall Down (Coffee House, 2009). She is the recipient of the General Electric Award, The Rome Prize in Literature, The Bruno Arcudi Award, and the Charles Flint Kellog Award. Her fiction has been anthologized in You've Got to Read This, The Italian American Reader, A Convergence of Birds, Wild Dreams, and Heads and Tales. That being said, I would have yet said nothing of Mary Caponegro’s true matter: her light touch and her grit, her wit and deadpan humor, her capacity to deal with the most realistic concerns in a way that allows us to look at them anew, as if from another planet. And most of all, her sense of the craft of writing. She adapts her style to a great variety of topics, but there is a recognizable touch in her writing, the signature of her craft, even when she assumes the voice of another poet, as in the story “Because I Could Not Stop For Death.” In that piece, the narrator appropriates the voice of Emily Dickinson, risen from the dead to comment on a box the artist Joseph Cornell has made in her honor. An authorial narrator stresses the penmanship of the poet in a reflexive comment on the art of writing: “A woman carefully placing the nib of her pen in an inkwell, transferring it to a white rectangular surface, making marks in a hand slanted far to the right, then taking the same pen and putting a line through some of the marks she has made.”1 With similar precision, Mary Caponegro is a master at switching rhythm, at diving deep into the flows of a sentence as into a series of obsessions, then lackadaisically changing pace and tone, to follow the meanderings of a character’s mind.

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2 Many of her characters are troubled people. They feel ill at ease in the world, and question the reality of things, which does not mean, however, that they are grim or depressive. On the contrary, their portrayal humorously reverses our expectations and returns to us an image of our own ideals and successes as somehow unfit or strange. Following in the footsteps of William Gaddis (who taught a course at Bard on what he called “the literature of failure” with his customary sense of provocation), she leads us to ponder on what it is, exactly, that we call a successful life. Her narrators have a great deal of distance, and they may be “falsely and childishly naïve, but perversely so,” as Marc Chénetier, her French translator, aptly comments.2 Her sense of the uncanny finds a poetic and lyrical expression in her dissections of family life in The Complexities of Intimacy. Her writing displays a rare blend of humor and empathy, eroticism and otherworldly spirit, realism and surrealism. Her stories can be like fables, full of the wonder of Eastern antiquity, as in Tales from the Next Village, or oddly immersed in the prosaic life of contemporary misfits, as in All Fall Down. In Five Doubts, she creates a collage by juxtaposing the diary of the artist Cellini with his set of fictive characters, “an Etruscan Catechism” and tombola images as well as various forms of art, in order to explore the workings of the imagination as expressed in art.

3 She is currently at work on Chinese Chocolate, a novel about growing up as an Italian- American Catholic in suburbia in the sixties, when ethnicity elicited more ambivalence than pride. The novel is much more conventional than Caponegro's earlier work, though it also employs surrealist gestures within its more mimetic framework, and yet it retains the author's stylistic complexity. The formation of attitudes about gender and sexuality is the core of the novel's concerns, but without any of the preconstructions and preconceptions of the kind we are all too familiar with. This is a Bildungsroman that does not gloss over the past or explain the mysteries of experience. Caponegro casts a fresh eye on the sixties, and her alert tone and sharp style are manifest in the following excerpt from her novel.

“Learning Curve” Mary Caponegro

4 Abbie Hofman’s instructions for gipping Ma Bell are explicit. If the capitalist matriarch owns every phone, then clearly those phoning should share in the dividends. Why not spell out how to beat the system? But who would guess some of Hoffman’s most eager readers were students at St. Rose of Lima? Two girls in plaid skirts fumble with penny and cardboard while a third girl reads out the appropriate passages from Steal this Book, and soon enough the only phone booth in the whole school features an out of order sign. At assembly the following day, the principal asks that whoever disrupted the mechanism make herself known. No one confesses; Darcy won’t let them. It’s just a venial sin anyway, she insists, even if augmented by passively lying: sin of omission tacked onto a sin of commission. In any case the crime is too conspicuous to try again.

5 This conspicuousness is due in part to the aforementioned fact that the three-story brick building houses exactly one public phone booth. There are standard rotary phones on the desk in the nurse’s office, the principal’s office and one or two other administrative offices, but these are for school business, parental summons, emergencies; if extracurricular calls were desired, a girl would require a dime. She would have to situate herself here at the bottom of the first floor stairwell near the

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exit, close the accordion-style glass door, seat herself, insert the dime, then place the tip of her index finger inside a series of seven consecutive holes among the ten located equidistantly on the round plastic dial, listening as the mechanism rotated forward and back, the duration of rotation dependent of course on the relative proximity of the particular letter or number to the terminus of the series, itself marked by a small piece of metal hardware and the sound of a tiny metallic click. No student thinks of these movements as troublesome or excessive, but to be prevented from doing so : that is indeed troublesome—and all the more so for the tiny administrative staff, who must of course open their phones to the girls until the out of order sign is obviated.

6 Leave it to someone community-minded to imagine what marvelous things a repaired phone can do to atone for its prior misuse by hooligans, among whom the guileless Janice would never suspect were included Victoria Corrigan and Virginia Postodellafuoco. You could count on one hand—well, in fact on two fingers—the number of times this phone has been used for political purposes. The first has obviously already occurred and been sanctioned. The second will sanction itself, in a convoluted fashion, after Janice supplies the catalyst— Janice who is the most conscientious—and decorous—of objectors, Janice whose honor roll status makes clear her objections are sincere and substantial and can’t be dismissed by adults as mere acting out, Janice whose ambitions extend beyond being a good student, good Catholic, good girl. (Too goody goody a girl, if you ask me, says Darcy). But even the other more gullible girls of St. Rose find it hard to project such a grown-up yet wholesome ambition as being a good citizen. Yet Janice has heeded a call as insistent as Joan of Arc’s, and decided that fingers too young to be counted among those held high in a V at Yasgur’s Farm, i.e. fingers not yet permitted to push down a lever to vote, nevertheless need not be entirely idle.

7 Thus Ginny finds herself once again at the first floor phone booth, feeling even more tentative than when she was performing an illegal act, this time engaged by an actual dime rather than penny and cardboard, in the unlikely circumstance of dialing the local Democratic headquarters, because Janice has offered her own services to the McGovern campaign, and casually suggested that Ginny might, if she cared to, do likewise.

8 Ginny admires Janice, no matter what Darcy thinks. She admires the noble, extracurricular use to which Janice puts her skills, though of course she resents the example it sets. After all, one can’t loll about in one’s fluffy pink robe, mooning over song lyrics and gorging on twinkies, and still have the focus to cite the exact number of Vietnam war casualties, the number of deaths, the number of troops, number by which troops were recently reduced, available details about what the formerly missing-in- action soldiers endured. Clearly, Janice has not confined her research, or her prayers, to the one man who matched her MIA bracelet.

9 “The more the merrier, right, Ginny? The more people involved, the more chance for change.” “I guess so. I mean, if you say so. If my folks will let me, that is.” It’s easy enough to perform the formalities of dialing and giving her name and arranging the time, with Janice beaming by her side, but once she’s transacted this bold move, Ginny anticipates her parents’ disapproval. She feels trapped now, remembering that even in Pete Seeger’s rousing anthem, “If” precedes “I had a hammer.” (She can see Sister Catherine John at the blackboard dismantling the clause: present contrafactual conditional with relative protasis). Even a whiff of Seeger’s “smell of freedom” had

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been intoxicating enough to convince Ginny she had the right to support her own causes and make her own choices, long before she had her own transport.

10 Be realistic; cancel it now. Why even bother to ask? It certainly won’t be worth the hassle. But she will feel guilty—she’ll feel like a total schmuck to disappoint Janice. She is being ridiculous; she knows she is, pacing back and forth from the phone booth to her locker, hoping that no one will notice. Just go get it over with. Even when she finally puts in the dime, she has no idea whether she’ll dial her mother to ask permission (which obviously should have been done in advance) or call back the local Democratic headquarters to renege, but when her racing mind tells her that one call is better than two—that if she calls mom, who will surely forbid her to go, then she’ll have to call back the volunteers to renege anyway, she repeats the sequence of numbers that Janice had originally given her.

11 “Excuse me, my name is Virginia Postodellafuoco—I said, Postodel—yes that’s P as in Peter, o as in Oscar, s… I was scheduled to help out at headquarters after school today, but my… parents won’t let me, I’m sorry, I… I have to cancel.” The voice on the other end is a bit brusque—Ginny hears other phones ringing in the background—but not unsympathetic. “Alright then, we understand. When you’re eighteen, call us back! There’s always the next election!” Their understanding stings even more than disgust would have. And now she will have to confess to Janice as well, but worse still, that confession will reinforce a lie, and Virginia begins to feel overwhelmed and sabotaged by her wish to become involved, to make one lousy civic gesture. Study period is almost over, and soon Ginny will have to gather her things and get on the bus. Irrationally, she feels she’ll be less of a hypocrite if she supports her claim after-the-fact, if she empirically obtains information so as to be able to tell Janice (and to have told the McGovern volunteers) not what she assumes, but what is actually fact.

12 So she goes back for a third time into the booth, tugging the dial in the sequence of two letters followed by five numbers that constitutes her family’s phone exchange. The act is both tedious and automatic. She is perversely curious, now that the entire venture is utterly hypothetical, with nothing concretely riding on yes or no. Her mother answers after four rings and hearing her daughter’s voice, asks, “Is anything wrong; do you want to be picked up?” Just blurt it out; get it over with. “Mom, Janice told me the Democratic Convention is taking high school volunteers to help out with paperwork for a few hours. Janice’s going with a bunch of other girls. I was just wondering if…”

13 “Do what you think is right, Ginny,” her mother says crisply, with without any extrapolation. “Let me know where to pick you up later.”

14 Virginia Postodellafuoco is stunned by this permission, this lack of resistance. This is the second time in recent memory that Mrs P. has not acted predictably: first dismissing a man’s touch as inconsequential, and now offering a gesture of social autonomy. Ginny feels like a dog on the cusp of discovering its leash is imaginary—or perhaps less like the dog than the master —for instance each member of Vicki’s family, absurdly still jumping over the ghost of a gate in their kitchen even after the dog is instead penned outside—thus prevented from drinking from the toilet bowl or practicing other objectionable habits that eventually necessitated being penned in to the kitchen in the first place.

15 But it would be asinine to renege on reneging, to call back and say, “Guess what, I can come do my share after all!”—yet again spelling the endless name—“I convinced my mom and dad !”—dissembling that she’d been persuasive instead of pusillanimous. She

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can’t bring herself to make that third call, just takes the bus home feeling triply stupid. Unable to face Janice, she leaves a note: another layer of cowardice. The walk from the bus stop, usually endless, feels insufficiently long. Would that the fresh air could buffer her from the inevitable.

16 “I thought you were staying after school,” her mother says, clearly surprised. How could she possibly begin to explain?

17 “I decided against it.” Mrs. Postodellafuoco peers into her daughter’s face for a clue to this reversal but finds no information, while Virginia in spite of herself hopes her mother’s bemusement will transmute to approval for this craven act in duty’s disguise.

18 Like a dog. Like a master. Or a carnivore trained against nature not to salivate in the presence of meat should the calendar read Friday or Ash Wednesday or any of the remaining thirty-nine days of Lent—and thus unable to adjust once the taboo is lifted, she stands there unhinged—paralyzed by this voluptuous, treacherous thing called free will. After so many years of lip service, it has mutated from a two-word phrase inside a pale blue Baltimore Catechism to a tangible, sensual entity that unfortunately tastes nothing like chocolate; unless chocolate were mixed with castor oil instead of milk, or a chocolate so dark it had acquired the density of lead, or as if Hershey’s inverted the Cracker Jacks gimmick—offering every unsuspecting tongue a stigmata-worthy nail in place of a delightful, diminutive toy. How had the ethics of calling Headquarters back, let alone actually going, become so impossibly awkward? She can’t stomach the feeling it gives her even now. And her mother is no help, says nothing: no “all for the best” or “isn’t that strange?” or “I’ll never figure you out, Virginia.” Just that gaze. That perplexed gaze.

19 She will punish her mother for giving permission, for being so inconsistent, for putting her in such a discombobulating position, though these very permissions are what she has always craved. It is no sin to distract herself from her own shame, is it ? Especially if the distraction is a kind of… political gesture: confronting her parents'prejudice, so as to convert it in one fell swoop—on behalf of the Democratic campaign. She will start with her mother, during preparation for dinner.

20 “What if I married a black man? What then?”

21 “What are you talking about, Ginny? Where did this come from?”

22 “If I met someone and fell in love—who was black.”

23 “That would hurt your father very much, for one thing.”

24 Dad, whose TV screen screens him from the tone and detail of the conversation, overhears only the bones of her question—assumes it’s a game, and as usual he’s more than willing to play along. “Better a Jew so you bring us some money!”

25 Mom carries on at reduced volume. “You’ll marry a nice boy from an Italian family if you know what’s good for you. ”

26 “I’m not sure dad is so keen on that idea; he didn’t seem as excited as Nonna when she brought it up in Calabria years ago.”

27 “You know what I mean: an Italian-American boy from a good family here in the States.”

28 The unspoken coda of “not too Italian though” is mentally audible to Ginny, as she listlessly peels the potatoes and carrots her mother has assigned her.

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29 “That man who walked by and touched you, Virginia… he wasn’t black, was he?” Ginny ignores her.

30 “Virginia, I asked you a question.”

31 “What man…? Oh, you mean the other day, at the phone booth?”

32 “What other man would I be talking about?”

33 Ginny bends to retrieve the slivers of vegetable skin that had fallen to the floor while she’d stood peeling over the mouth of the Rubbermaid garbage can. “No. I think he was just very tan.” Her mother is obviously unconvinced and annoyed, but thankfully does not pursue the matter further.

34 These were confession’s easiest sins to dispense with: I lied to mother three times, I was mean to my sister twice, I was fresh to Sister in class—for the more you piled on these predictable venial sins, the more likely you were to fill your confessional plate, as it were, and thus be spared telling the man in the robe through the screen all the things you were really concerned about, and therefore least likely to enunciate, and would probably never renounce: I touched myself, Father—I lost track of how many times— every night, as I pictured the dangerous bald man, the sensuous black man, the really cute boy at the dance who unfortunately never asked to dance with me. And once, Father, just once, I even thought of my sister’s boyfriend.

35 Not even to your Uncle Renzo would you confide these incredibly private transgressions, although among all the priests in the diocese he was the most sympatico —and though you strongly suspected that Vicki and Janie and Maggie and Darcy in their own respective cocoons of desire, were probably picturing Renzo as she did the bald man, the black man, the boy at the dance.

NOTES

1. In A Convergence of Birds : Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, Jonathan Safran Foer, ed., New York, Distributed Art Publishers, 2001, 157. 2. Marc Chénetier, « Mary Caponegro : L’esprit de la matière », Cahiers Charles V n° 29 (déc. 2000), 256, my translation.

INDEX

Subjects: Reconnaissances

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Varia

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Le paysage dans la photographie contemporaine et dans la collection Lamarche-Vadel Au Musée Nicéphore Niépce du 12 février au 15 mai 2011

Eliane de Larminat

1 « BLV 4, conversations entre œuvres » (commissariat Sonia Floriant) et « Nouvelles frontières, le paysage dans la photographie contemporaine » (commissariat François Cheval), du 12 février au 15 mai 2011 au Musée Nicéphore Niépce.

2 Depuis que la collection photographique de Bernard Lamarche-Vadel y a été déposée en 2003, le musée Nicéphore Niépce s’est attaché à mettre en valeur ce fonds par des expositions intitulées [BLV]. Dans [BLV 4], ce sont trois « conversations entre œuvres » qui ont été proposées du 12 février au 15 mai 2011. Simultanément, et à l’autre extrémité du premier étage du musée, a été présentée une « exposition-dossier » intitulée « Nouvelles frontières, le paysage dans la photographie contemporaine ».

3 L’ampleur de la sélection, bien que pertinente (Mario Giacomelli, Lewis Baltz, Claire Chevrier et Bertrand Meunier), justifie difficilement la qualification de « dossier » de cette seconde exposition d’une trentaine d’images, qui laisse sur sa faim le visiteur qui s’attendait à un panorama.

4 Et pourtant, si la synthèse semble lacunaire, c’est bien sur le mode d’un panorama que l’ensemble est conçu, comme en réponse à la première « conversation entre œuvres » présentée dans l’exposition [BLV]. Cette « conversation » met en effet en dialogue, par- dessus le temps mais au sein de la modernité, quelques pièces « historiques » de la collection (Yosemite Valley de Carleton Watkins, The Steerage d’Alfred Stieglitz) avec des œuvres contemporaines de la constitution de la collection, annoncées comme conceptuelles (des images de la série San Quentin Point de Lewis Baltz, une photographie documentant une marche d’Hamish Fulton), en passant par des images « documentaires » urbaines de Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott et William Klein, que l’on classerait moins facilement dans la catégorie du paysage si on les rencontrait isolément.

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5 La collection Lamarche-Vadel fait une large part au paysage américain. Watkins et Stieglitz sont ici réunis à la manière de deux pionniers de la photographie (l’image de la foule dans The Steerage étant présentée comme une invention de la ville comme paysage), mais le propos n’est pas historique ; l’accrochage prend en effet le parti d’un dialogue des œuvres, dans une perspective moderniste qui décontextualise de manière assumée les œuvres « historiques » pour les arrimer à la modernité. Le rapprochement de ces images chronologiquement distantes tisse entre elles d’autres rapports : l’irruption de l’urbain comme phénomène de la modernité ; le passage d’un regard et d’une nature « vierges », à un paysage pénétré par la ville, puis devenu signe apocalyptique du séjour humain ; la tension entre art et document, rendue plus urgente par la découverte d’un paysage non seulement souillé mais déformé jusqu’à l’informe ; le passage du lac miroir de Watkins à des approches plus conceptuelles, qui remettent en cause la possibilité d’inscrire le paysage dans une seule image (ce dont témoigne le choix de présenter une série de Baltz1), voire dans une image tout court : chez Fulton, l’image ne sert qu’à évoquer la seule véritable inscription, celle du marcheur dans le paysage.

6 De toutes ces tensions et évolutions, Lewis Baltz, auquel Lamarche-Vadel a consacré un livre en 19932, apparaît comme le catalyseur. C’est donc tout naturellement que son oeuvre fait la transition entre la première salle et, à l’autre bout de l’étage, l’exposition « Nouvelles frontières » (qui comprend six de ses images, également tirées du fonds Lamarche-Vadel). Il en est aussi la clé ; les seuls photographes dont les oeuvres sont accrochées sur le même mur, selon un principe d'alternance, sont Lewis Baltz et Claire Chevrier. Aux décharges de Baltz répondent les vues surplombantes de périphéries urbaines égyptiennes de Chevrier. Mais surtout, Baltz l’Américain devient un point d’articulation entre l’œuvre de Mario Giacomelli et celle des deux Français partis explorer de nouvelles frontières à l’Est, en Égypte, en Inde, en Chine.

7 Les images de Giacomelli qui sont montrées (tirées des séries Presa di coscienza sulla natura 3et La buona terra) sont celles, bien connues, des champs des Marches creusés et recreusés de sillons, vus d’avion – un dispositif qui annonce l’earth art. Dans ces images sans perspectives, presque abstraites, qui ressemblent à des eaux-fortes, en format portrait aussi bien que paysage, la terre est palimpseste, signe du labeur humain. En regard est accrochée une image de Bertrand Meunier (d’ailleurs choisie pour illustrer l’exposition). Elle est divisée en deux parties égales, ciel blanchâtre et terre nue, par un horizon invisible où un village disparaît (ou apparaît ?) dans le brouillard. Entre la terre de Giacomelli et celle de Meunier, il y a en fait les décharges de Baltz, dont les premiers plans se détachent, avec une netteté cruelle, de la fumée qui menace l’image comme le monde. Le no man’s land de Baltz (à propos duquel Lamarche-Vadel a même parlé d’un point de vue de chien4) permet de passer de la terre humanisée de Giacomelli au paysage anthropisé photographié par Meunier et Chevrier.

8 En effet, plus encore que la couleur ou le grand format (qui malgré le sujet ne versent pas dans l’exotisme), ce qui apparaît dans le paysage contemporain c’est la présence directe de l’homme. Giacomelli et Baltz montraient les traces de l’homme ; Chevrier et Meunier en montrent l’habitat. Meunier va jusqu’à travailler le paysage chinois contemporain, suivant un code occidental, comme fond d’une figure, dans des portraits en format paysage ; les arrière-plans y sont à la fois décor d'une scène et témoins d'une situation environnementale.

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9 Dans le paysage photographique de Chevrier et Meunier, ce qui est représenté est en effet le paysage mondialisé, dans sa réalité urbaine et environnementale. Les images de Meunier, qui disent la fin des paysans chinois, sont toujours clivées, que ce soit en deux plans superposés, ou entre figure et fond. On y lit une aliénation, mais aussi comme la tentative d’imposer un ordre qui endiguerait l’environnement pollué, mélangé, impur. La disparition du paysage pur prend chez Chevrier la forme d’un milieu hybride, à la fois urbain et naturel5. La nature s’immisce dans l’urbain ; ce paysage n’est pas pour autant chaotique, il présente une structure propre qui est comme une version analysable du self-structured land visé par Baltz6.

10 Baltz apparaît donc comme un passeur entre une photographie que l’on peut considérer comme historique, maintenant qu’elle fait partie d’une collection achevée, et une photographie véritablement contemporaine. François Cheval, conservateur du musée, insiste dans sa présentation de l’exposition « Nouvelles frontières » sur le caractère dévasté du paysage contemporain. Cette exposition d’images contemporaines prolonge donc le propos de la « conversation entre œuvres », qui était structurée par l’opposition entre deux visions de la Californie : la pureté d’un lac-miroir avec Watkins, et une décharge avec Baltz.

11 La partie « conversation » pose ainsi les bases formelles et historiques des thèmes abordés dans la partie « dossier », avec une cohérence qui compense dans une certaine mesure le caractère lacunaire du deuxième volet. Le diptyque présenté ici, bien que n’étant pas formellement établi au musée, n’en semble pas moins être l’unité d’articulation d’un propos esthétique et historique qui fait de Lewis Baltz l’origine essentielle de la photographie de paysage contemporaine.

Bertrand Meunier Paysans ordinaires 2006 © Bertrand Meunier / Tendance Floue

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Bertrand Meunier Paysans ordinaires 2006 © Bertrand Meunier / Tendance Floue

NOTES

1. « Photographs apprehend the surfaces of a world fixed in time and viewpoint, specific surfaces whose literalness and immediacy make it difficult to extrapolate accurate and reasonable generalizations about the world that exists outside the borders of the photograph. Which is only to say that photographs, taken individually, have very limited powers to define the world. […] My own solution to the problem of the veracity of photographs is to make the series, not the single image, the unit of work. » Lewis Baltz, dans Landscape : Theory, New York, Lustrum Press, 1980, 26. 2. Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Lewis Baltz, Paris, La Différence, 1993. 3. http://www.mariogiacomelli.it/75_presa.html 4. « À voir, oui, ces photographies le sont, mais dans des devenirs contenus par le regard, flairer, fouir, gratter, manger, boire, arracher, se vautrer, musarder, survoler, se cacher, expulser. » Lamarche-Vadel, op. cit., 29. 5. http://www.clairechevrier.net/ Voir en particulier les sections « limites », « paysage miniature » et « paysage-ville ». 6. « The land was a visible record of its use. This residue was an implicit order which was neither pictorial nor non-pictorial. As a photographic subject it was self-structured. » Lewis Baltz, op. cit., 26.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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Exposition Mitch Epstein : American Power Du 4 mai au 24 juillet 2011, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Géraldine Fasentieux

Photo reproduite avec l’aimable autorisation de la Fondation HCB

1 En 2003, le documentariste américain Mitch Epstein reçoit une commande du New York Times, qui lui demande de photographier la destruction de Cheshire, un village d’environ 300 habitants dans l’Ohio. Le village, contaminé par la centrale thermique voisine doit être abandonné et rayé de la carte en raison d’une catastrophe écologique. L’AEP (American Electric Power), propriétaire de la centrale, dédommage les habitants

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afin que ceux-ci déménagent et s’engagent à ne jamais les poursuivre en cas de problèmes de santé liés aux produits toxiques relâchés dans la nature par la centrale de l'AEP, ni à se plaindre auprès des médias. Pour le photographe, « la société s’achetait un avenir à l’abri de poursuites judiciaires. » Il assiste, incrédule, à ce jeu de massacre. « La destruction était si rapide et si facile que je devais me répéter que j’avais sous les yeux des maisons réelles, pas des jouets en carton. […] De retour à New York, il me fut impossible d’oublier Cheshire » raconte-t-il. C’est un visage, celui d’une irréductible octogénaire, Beulah Hern, dite « Boots », qui laisse sur le photographe « l’empreinte la plus profonde ». Refusant de vendre sa maison, elle se protège par des caméras de surveillance et son arme rangée dans la poche latérale de son fauteuil relax.

Beulah Hern, dite « Boots », Cheshire, Ohio, 2004. Droits réservés.

2 Frappé par la situation dramatique des résidents qui voient leur maison rasée en quelques minutes, Mitch Epstein décide alors d’enquêter sur la production et la consommation d’énergie aux États-Unis, afin de tenter de comprendre leur influence sur le paysage et la société américaine. C’est ainsi que naît le projet American Power, titre de l’exposition présentée à la fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson du 4 mai au 24 juillet 2011, et aussi du catalogue éponyme de 63 photographies prises entre 2003 et 2008 dans vingt-cinq États, qui montrent les sites de production énergétique ou leurs environs, et surtout, leur impact sur le paysage américain. « Je voulais photographier la relation qui existe entre la société américaine et le paysage américain » écrit Epstein. Comme son titre l’indique, cette série donne à voir la relation entre énergie et pouvoir, afin d’interroger, selon les mots du photographe, « la mainmise de l’homme sur la nature, et sa conquête à n’importe quel prix ». Ce travail lui vaut d’obtenir le prix Pictet, qui récompense les messages d’envergure environnementale globale. Ce que l’on peut voir comme l’essence du capitalisme irresponsable qui conduit à des catastrophes nucléaires comme Tchernobyl ou Fukushima est ainsi présenté sur les cimaises de la fondation. L’accrochage reprend l’exact déroulé de l’ouvrage.

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Raffinerie BP à Carson, Californie, 2007. COPYRIGHT Black River Productions, Ltd. / Mitch Epstein. Photo reproduite avec l’aimable autorisation de la Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.

3 Pour effectuer ce travail, le photographe doit faire face à de nombreuses tentatives de dissuasion, comme si montrer une certaine réalité peu glorieuse constituait une menace. tout au long de mon travail sur American Power, j’ai souffert d’un harcèlement systématique. À maintes reprises, les forces de police m’ont chassé alors que je n’avais commis aucun délit. Avec pour résultat qu’entre 2003 et 2008 — une période qui a coïncidé avec l’ère Bush — quasiment partout où j’allais aux États-Unis pour travailler, j’avais la peur au ventre. L’explication, c’est que mes intentions contrecarraient les intérêts de l’industrie, qui étaient soutenus par le département de la Sécurité intérieure. Je voulais rendre le dossier de l’énergie plus transparent, tandis que les grosses sociétés qui produisaient l’énergie et leurs interlocuteurs gouvernementaux s’enveloppaient d’une atmosphère de secret.

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4 Certes, les images qui font froid dans le dos sont nombreuses, car la quiétude qui en émane est rompue par une menace sourde, une présence devenue tout aussi familière que le paysage naturel. Les lieux de production d’énergie font partie d’un décor quotidien pour certains, un background que l’on semble presque oublier. C’est ainsi que l’on peut voir les gigantesques cheminées servir de toile de fond à l’arrière d’un jardin joliment entretenu, et où, d’après la propriétaire, le photographe aura « la plus belle vue sur les tours de refroidissement ». Les clichés montrent les centrales dans un paysage naturel où l’homme continue à vivre comme si de rien n’était. Des centrales thermiques ou nucléaires côtoient le terrain de foot d’un lycée en Virginie, ou encore des plages où les gens se baignent ou pêchent tranquillement en Californie ou en Floride. Les éoliennes qui font désormais partie du décor se veulent plus rassurantes. Ce qui est frappant, c’est que les hommes semblent composer de façon naturelle avec ce décor insolite, voire effrayant, et surtout dangereux, dont les conséquences néfastes peuvent parfois être irréversibles.

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Lycée de Poca et centrale thermique d’Amos, Virginie Occidentale, 2004. COPYRIGHT Black River Productions, Ltd. / Mitch Epstein. Photo reproduite avec l’aimable autorisation de la Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

5 A travers l’objectif de l’appareil photo, les images apparaissent d’une beauté monumentale. En regardant les somptueux panoramas dévastés, le spectateur prend conscience de la transformation et de la dégradation du paysage qui découlent de la production d’énergie. Ses découvertes des dégâts que subissent les paysages américains incitent Mitch Epstein à « réévaluer à la fois [son] sens de la légitimité et l’idéologie américaine de la Destinée manifeste ».

Photo reproduite avec l’aimable autorisation de la Fondation HCB

6 Chacune des images présentées est un choc visuel, qui provoque un sentiment d’écœurement devant la cupidité de l’industrie et son indifférence à l’égard de l’environnement. Parce que le rêve américain de confort matériel a fini « par exiger plus d’énergie que le pays n’en pouvait fournir », Mitch Epstein invite le visiteur à

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« tenir compte de [ses] devoirs envers la nature et envers les autres hommes, et pas seulement de [ses] droits individuels.»

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

EPSTEIN, Mitch, American Power, Göttingen, Steidl, 2011.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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Mitch Epstein, « American Power» Exposition1 à la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson du 4 mai 2011 au 24 juillet 2011

Hélène Béade

1 La fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson a eu la primeur d’exposer du 4 mai au 24 juillet l’intégralité de la série « American Power » de Mitch Epstein2, troisième volet d’une trilogie amorcée au milieu des années 19903. Cette série, publiée par Steidl en 2009, a reçu le prix Pictet4 (prix international de photographie sur la durabilité environnementale) quelques jours après la catastrophe de Fukushima. Il est encore possible de voir certains clichés à la Tate Modern à Londres jusqu’au 31 mars 2012 dans le cadre de l’exposition : « Photography: New Documentary Forms»5 .

2 Le premier volet, intitulé « The City » (1995-1999), est une série sur la frontière floue entre espace public et privé dans la ville de New York. Le deuxième,devenu culte, « Family Business » (2000-2003), est un portrait multimédia du père de Mitch Epstein et de la liquidation du commerce familial suite à un incendie (Holyoke, Massachusetts). Enfin, le troisième volet, « American Power », est celui qui va retenir ici notre attention.

Genèse du projet

3 En 2003, Mitch Epstein reçoit une commande du New York Times Sunday Magazine6 : on lui demande de photographier une petite ville de l’Ohio, Cheshire, sur le point de devenir ville fantôme. Sa spécificité est de posséder une des plus grandes centrales électriques au charbon, propriété de l’American Electric Power. Les émissions bleues provenant de l’usine génèrent un grand nombre d’inquiétudes. L’entreprise ne peut nier que les limites posées par le « Clean Air Act »7 sont transgressées. Pour couper court, elle finit par proposer en 2002 d’acheter pour vingt millions de dollars l’intégralité de la ville … et donc d’une certaine manière le silence de ses deux cents habitants8.

4 Mitch Epstein photographie pendant quelques semaines la destruction de la ville. Sa rencontre avec une dizaine de récalcitrants, notamment avec une octogénaire, Beulah

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Hern, est décisive9 (Fig.110 et Fig.211). Cette expérience marquante donne l’idée à Mitch Epstein d’un nouveau projet autofinancé de très grande envergure. Il se lance au printemps 2004 dans une forme de « tourisme énergétique », en quête de paysages ayant un lien avec la production et la consommation d’énergie sous toutes ses formes12. Le but du photographe est de « photographier la relation qui existe entre la société américaine et le paysage américain, l’énergie étant le maillon central… »13. Il est donc important pour Epstein de couvrir le territoire dans son ensemble. Pour ce faire, il fait des recherches approfondies sur le web et crée une immense carte dans son studio new-yorkais14.

Un projet de grande envergure

5 Le périple dure cinq ans. Mitch Epstein se rend dans 25 États15. Le résultat de cette odyssée est une monographie (Fig.3) composée de 63 photographies couleur, « American Power », titre dont l’ambiguïté est inhérente à la polysémie du mot « power » en anglais. Le spectateur découvre donc cette exposition dans un état d’esprit contradictoire mais avec une certitude : dès le départ, il est un témoin engagé malgré lui.

L’exposition

6 Les clichés sont exposés sur deux étages dans le même ordre que ceux de la monographie.

7 Seule la photographie d’ouverture que découvre le spectateur au premier étage de la fondation Cartier-Bresson (Fig.416) est en grand format. C’est certainement aussi la plus reprise dans la presse, la plus exposée. Sa composition par plan, sa lumière rasante et dorée, le camaïeu coloré de la végétation, la subtilité de sa gamme de gris, lui confèrent un aspect pictural. Elle rappelle étrangement les tableaux de Constable mais aussi ceux de l’école de Barbizon. Cependant, ce traitement apparaît vite comme un outil de trompe-l’œil, pour mieux révéler l’enjeu dramatique de l’image. L’opposition entre avant et arrière-plan (qui apparaît dans une gamme de gris proche du filigrane) exprime une menace sourde, à peine voilée. Dans ce même esprit d’opposition, on remarque le jeu d’échelles entre la tôle de l’habitation, simple, et la grandeur de l’industrie. Les petites dimensions de la remise au pied de l’arbre renforcent l’effet d’échelle, ce qui la ramène au statut de maquette. Le contenu narratif de l’image renforce la dimension dramaturgique de la scène et appelle la projection du spectateur. L’idée suggérée de la catastrophe (omniprésente, écrasante) annule par sa seule allusion discrète la quiétude bucolique esquissée au premier plan.

8 Tous les clichés suivants exposés à la fondation sont de petite taille17. Peut-être est-ce lié à la nature même du lieu d’exposition qui ne permet pas de présenter des tirages monumentaux. Ou bien est-il apparu plus important de présenter l’œuvre dans son intégralité, plus de 60 photographies. On peut le regretter. Dans la prise de vue des paysages se faisant à une distance importante18, de 800 mètres à plus d’1,5 kilomètre, Mitch Epstein a opté pour la chambre photographique, un grand format (20X25cm) ce qui permet d’obtenir des clichés de la meilleure définition possible mais également de maîtriser précisément la géométrie de l’image. Ces caractéristiques techniques offrent

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l’avantage de pouvoir faire des tirages de format spectaculaire (environ 1,80 m par à peu près 2,30m19). Or, la taille choisie ici pour les tirages n’exploite pas totalement le potentiel du medium choisi.

9 La photographie « Poca High School and Amos Plant », West Virginia 2004 (Fig.520), un peu plus loin, est à associer à la « Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004 » (Fig.4). Elle doit être considérée comme son pendant. Même lieu, ville et centrale, même principe de construction narrative par opposition subtile, mais hautement efficace. L’image est structurée par des lignes, des bandes horizontales cette fois. Cela produit le même effet que la composition par plan. La bande inférieure de l’image, majoritaire en surface, contient une scène issue d’un registre quotidien et rassurant. A cette bande s’ajoute subtilement une autre contenant la réalité nucléaire et toute sa potentialité négative. Il est à noter que cette tension dramaturgique reste contenue et potentielle. On parle de potentiel électrique : pourrait-on parler de potentiel visuel, narratif, de borne positive et de borne négative pour une image ? La composition de l’image semble être en forte corrélation avec la thématique du livre (énergie, « Power » ?). La centrale fait partie du paysage, les habitants ne prêtent pas attention au danger potentiel. On est frappé par l’apparente normalité, la banalité de l’action du premier plan : posés comme des figurines, des personnages jouent au football américain, activité sportive populaire référentielle de la culture américaine (inscription du nom du club, éléments vernaculaires). Une fois de plus, cette scène est confrontée à la présence plutôt « discrète » dans l’image, bien qu’inévitable visuellement, de la centrale électrique qui suggère ici aussi la menace sourde et la potentialité de la catastrophe. Mais étrangement, seul le spectateur, guidé par Mitch Epstein, semble conscient de cette menace.

10 Cette crainte sera confirmée quelques années plus tard. Sur le site Internet intitulé « What is American Power ? »21, il est possible de cliquer sur certaines images. Les commentaires sont édifiants et offrent une perspective bien plus large. Concernant cette photographie, on apprend qu’en 2008 (soit quatre ans après ces deux prises de vue) un nuage chimique bleu flottait au-dessus de la vallée Kanawha car la quantité d’acide sulfurique dans l’air était quatre fois supérieure à la normale. Cette pollution était émise par la centrale électrique John E. Amos appartenant à l’AEP (American Electric Power), l’une des plus grandes centrales au monde. Après un accord en 2007 avec l’EPA,22 cette dernière ayant pourtant installé deux systèmes de désulfuration ou « épurateurs » à la centrale pour réduire presque toutes les émissions de dioxyde de soufre, du mercure, un troisième est en construction. Malgré les épurateurs, les nouvelles cheminées envoient encore d’autres émissions (tel que du dioxyde de carbone) dans l’air. Dans « Rancho Seco, Nuclear Power Plant », Herald California 2005 (Fig.6 23) le 11 spectateur assiste à une célébration de baptêmes en Californie au bord d’un lac où les tours de refroidissement de la centrale nucléaire Rancho Seco trônent au loin.

12 L’image picturale intitulée « Biloxi », Mississippi 2005 (Fig.724) fait étrangement écho aux eaux-fortes de Goya (Fig.8). Mais contrairement aux photographies précédentes, celle-ci n’est plus construite sur la tension potentielle de la catastrophe mais sur son résultat. La tension est réelle. L’énergie, la violence du phénomène est toujours présente dans l’image contenue dans les éléments détruits, toujours en suspens, en tension. Serait-ce une exagération de parler de photographie « énergétique » ?

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13 De même le cliché intitulé « Ocean Warwick Oil Platform » (Fig.925) comprend les éléments de la catastrophe. Les précisions données sur le site « What is American Power » donnent le contexte de la scène. En 2005, l’amarre de la plate-forme de forage pétrolier nommée Ocean Warwick fut arrachée et le derrick fut emporté par l’ouragan Katrina environ 100 kilomètres plus loin à Dauphine Island (Alabama), où elle échoua lacérée, mutilée, trop endommagée pour être réparée. Les fonctionnaires de l’industrie affirmèrent que Katrina n’avait pas causé de marée noire significative, cependant le service de gestion des minéraux des Etats-Unis (U.S. Minerals Management Service) signala dans un rapport que plus de trois millions de litres (741.000 gallons) de pétrole avaient fui des équipements situés au large des côtes. Or les garde-côtes considèrent qu’une fuite de plus de 370.000 litres (100.000 gallons) correspond à une marée noire majeure. Au printemps 2010, le quota indiquant « une marée noire majeure » fut dépassé quotidiennement pendant presque trois mois dans le Golfe du Mexique suite à l’explosion de la plate-forme Deepwater Horizon. En tout, ce fut plus d’ 1,5 milliard de litres (348.000.000 gallons). L’expert Robert Lea compara les opérations de nettoyage de BP à « l’équivalent d’un exercice d’alerte à incendie avec du papier toilette et des seaux».

14 La fascination exercée sur le spectateur ici ne peut que se doubler d’un sentiment d’effroi. A chaque fois, c’est la même désorientation qui domine : le spectateur est troublé par sa fascination ambiguë pour ces paysages qui désignent la société de consommation et la subliment. Toutefois Epstein use peu de cette technique, très présente dans la photographie contemporaine de paysage.

15 L’image « Altamont Pass Wind Farm », California II, 2007 (Fig.10) est construite par bandes horizontales et fonctionne sur une opposition (terrain de golf en avant-plan et éoliennes en arrière-plan) ce qui rend la photographie très lisible et le message clair. Cette fois le procédé d’opposition n’est plus au service d’une dramaturgie de la catastrophe mais plutôt de l’absurde ou de l’illusoire.

Quelques pistes de reflexion

Un témoignage de l’ère Bush-Cheney

16 Le voyage photographique d’Epstein, témoignage de l’ère Bush-Cheney, décrit un mode de vie bien réel pour nombre de petites villes des Etats-Unis. Tours de refroidissement, cheminées d’usines à charbon, mine etc. font désormais partie de paysages apparemment plutôt tranquilles. Pourtant, il n’a pas été aisé de photographier ces nouveaux temples de la production énergétique, en réalité bien protégés (Fig.1126).

17 Si au départ, Epstein souhaitait faire un portrait des différents paysages liés à la production ou à la consommation d’énergie, très vite s’est posée la question de l’équilibre entre les différentes « puissances » en jeu (des gouvernements, grandes entreprises, de la nature, de la communauté, de l’artiste) mais aussi la question de la sécurité27. Aaron Schuman développe ce point dans Aperture : « Epstein a découvert que, dans l’Amérique contemporaine, ce n’est plus la nature mais notre ‘usage brutal’ de la nature qui est agressivement protégé […] Les intérêts des entreprises couplés à la paranoïa postérieure aux évènements du 11 septembre et à l’idée persistante que la photographie constitue une menace à la sécurité et détient par conséquent un pouvoir mystérieux »28. Pendant ce projet, Epstein a été constamment harcelé, arrêté,

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interrogé29. On peut déceler en effet cette tension et cette inquiétude dans les photographies précédentes.

Paysage et Pouvoir

18 Depuis ses origines, la photographie américaine de paysage n’est pas neutre. L’approche de Mitch Epstein du paysage américain est assez proche de la vision de W.J.T. Mitchell dans son essai « Landscape and Power »30 où il écrit que « le paysage est un instrument du pouvoir culturel, peut-être même un agent du pouvoir (c’est du moins fréquemment ainsi qu’il se représente) indépendant des intentions humaines »31. Il nous engage à penser « à ce que nous avons fait et à ce que nous faisons à notre environnement, et ce que l’environnement à son tour nous fait ». Ce recueil examine « la manière dont le paysage circule, comme medium d’échange, site d’appropriation visuelle, convergence permettant la formation d’une identité»32. Mitchell développe l’idée selon laquelle le paysage est « intimement lié à des discours impérialistes»33 et est une question plus globale.

Une question globale

19 Epstein développe une série de questionnements sur le paysage américain34. En Amérique du Nord, de nombreux photographes s’intéressent à l’impact de l’homme sur le paysage, au paysage de la destruction. Ils vont bien plus loin que Mitch Epstein qui a une approche très allusive du paysage. La photographie nord-américaine offre une vision de plus en plus inquiète du paysage.

20 Toutefois, cette réflexion doit, semble-t-il, être élargie à une échelle plus vaste. Le travail de Mitch Epstein trouve en effet un écho important dans la production de paysages photographiques contemporains. Citons par exemple le cliché « Ratcliffe-on- Soar Power Station, Nottinghamshire » extrait de la série « We English » de Simon Roberts (Fig.10). Cette importance croissante donnée au paysage n’est pas étonnante : elle ne fait que refléter une prise de conscience grandissante de la crise environnementale. Le paysage réhabilité (les photographies de paysage à visée « environnementale » appelées pendant longtemps ‘dirty pictures’) s’enrichit donc de nouvelles problématiques économiques, politiques et écologiques et la frontière entre « paysage » et « environnement » est de plus en plus floue.

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Fig.3

Fig.8

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Fig.10

NOTES

1. Exposition réalisée en collaboration avec la Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne et la collection Astrid Van Der Meerschen, Bruxelles. 2. Réalisateur et photographe américain. Dans les années 1970, il suit les cours de Garry Winogrand à Cooper Union. Influencé par Eggleston, il est l’un des premiers photographes à penser que la photographie couleur peut être élevée au rang d’art (cf Recreation : American Photographs - 1973-1988). Dans les années 1980, il voyage en Inde et au Vietnam. Les clichés de ses explorations personnelles de l’Asie sont rassemblés dans le livre In Pursuit of India and Vietnam : A Book Of Changes. 3. Les trois séries ont été réalisées aux États-Unis. 4. Voir le site consacré au Prix Pictet : http://www.pictet.com/fr/home/about/sustainability/ prix_pictet.html 5. http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/newdocumentary%20forms/default.shtm 6. A ce sujet, on peut lire l’article d’Adam Goodheart, intitulé « Something in the air » publié dans le New York Times le 8 février 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/magazine/something- in-the-air.html?scp=1&sq=cheshire+ohio+american+electric+power&st=nyt 7. Ce texte de loi passé par le Congrès en 1970 définit les objectifs et la responsabilité de l’EPA pour préserver la qualité de l’air et protéger la couche d’ozone. Amendé en 1990, il a depuis très peu changé.

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8. Voir à ce sujet, « Utility Buys Town It Choked, Lock, Stock and Blue Plume », par Katerine Q. Seelye, New York Times, 13 mai 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/us/utility-buys-town- it-choked-lock-stock-and-blue-plume.html 9. Voir à ce propos l’interview de Mitch Epstein par Richard B.Woodward d’octobre 2009 dans Bomb Magazine : « Meeting Boots and watching the Cheshire houses being demolished were what got me started on this project[…] It spooked me. It made me want to explore how power had created this perverse situation where people were potentially poisoned and then given a fee to leave their homes and keep their mouths shut. » http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3355 10. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/9 11. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/10 12. « I gave myself the rule that there had to be some direct relationship to energy in every picture I made— either production or consumption. » 13. « I wanted to photograph the relationship between American society and the American landscape, and energy was the Lip-chin—this much I gleaned from Cheshire ». Voir postface American Power publié par Steidl. 14. Ibid cité. 15. « I wanted a diversity of energy sources and I wanted the project to have geographical breadth. Going to every region of the country became important. I followed the path of the Columbia River, from near Portland all the way up to Hanford and Washington State, where there’s a series of dams made by the army corps of Engineers. I drove the Ohio River from just west of Charleston, West Virginia, and all the way up, just short of Pittsburgh, which is just one coal-fired power plant after another. I went to all the regions in California that had wind, from the Altamont Pass to Palm Springs. I went to photograph the Alaska pipeline and drove along most of it, all the way from Valdez going north up into the Dalton Pass. » Randy Kennedy, « Capturing a Nation’s Thirst for Energy », New York Times, 9 octobre 2009. http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/arts/design/10epstein.html 16. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/1 17. taille non mentionnée 18. « This project was about not getting in », in Randy Kennedy, « Capturing a Nation’s Thirst for Energy », New York Times, 9 octobre 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/arts/design/ 10epstein.html 19. 70X 92 inches 20. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/2 21. http://whatisamericanpower.com/ 22. Environmental Protection Agency 23. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/17 24. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/28 25. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/27 26. http://whatisamericanpower.com/#/photo/12 27. « The project began about energy, but quickly became about power in all its dimensions—not only voltage power, but governmental and corporate power. The power of nature. The power of community. An artist’s power. American Power came to mean all these things and question their balance. » Voir l’interview de Mitch Epstein par Richard B.Woodwar, octobre 2009, Bomb Magazine : http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3355 28. « Mitch Epstein has discovered that, within contemporary America, it is no longer nature, but our ‘brutal use’ of nature that is aggressively protected […] the pervasive influence of both corporate interests and paranoia in post-9/11 America, but also the resilient perception that photography constitutes a threat to security, and therefore retains its own mysterious power. » Aaron Schuman, Mitch Epstein : American work, Aperture n° 192, Automne 2008.

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29. Au nom de la loi antiterroriste adoptée le 25 octobre 2001 (« USA PATRIOT Act »). On peut lire à ce sujet : Will Potter, Green is the New Red : An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, City Lights Books, San Francisco, avril 2011. 30. WJT Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Second Edition), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002 [1994]. 31. « would ask not just what landscape « is » or « means » but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice. Landscape (…) is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as) independent of human intentions. » in WJT Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Second Edition), Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002 [1994], 1-2. 32. « What we have done and are doing to our environment, what the environment in turn does to us (…) landscape is a dynamic medium, in which ‘we live and move’ […] the essays in this collection examine the way landscapes circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of the identity. », ibid, 2. 33. « At a minimum we need to explore the possibility that the representation of the landscape is not only a matter of internal politics and national or class ideology but an international, global phenomenon, intimately bound up with the discourses of imperialism. » ibid, 9. 34. « En regardant le paysage, j’ai vu combien ce dernier reflète des choix faits par ma génération et par celle qui m’a précédé. J’ai ressenti l’importance de communiquer cela, d’engager un débat auprès d’un public plus large (…) Je me suis demandé ce qu’être américain signifiait aujourd’hui et quels choix nous devions faire. C’est difficile pour l’esprit américain, renégat, de s’adapter à cette nouvelle ère où la coopération sociale est plus importante que les droits individuels ». « Les blessures que j’ai découvertes dans le paysage américain m’ont forcé à reconsidérer à la fois mon sens de la légitimité et l’idéologie américaine de la Destinée Manifeste […] Ne pourrions-nous pas, nous Américains, tenir compte de nos devoirs envers la nature et envers les autres hommes, et pas seulement de nos droits individuels ? ». Voir la postface de American Power de Mitch Epstein publié par Steidl (traduction de l’américain par Elisabeth Peellaert).

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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30 ans de photographie au New York Times Magazine Rencontres d’Arles, été 2011

Anne Lesme

NOTE DE L'AUTEUR

Les Photographies du New York Times Magazine, Rencontres d’Arles, du 4 juillet au 4 septembre 2011, chapelle Sainte-Anne, place de la République.

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« Les photographies du New York Times Magazine », Chapelle Sainte-Anne, Arles, 4 juillet – 4 septembre 2011

Kathy Ryan – directrice de la photographie du New York Times Magazine – et Lesley A. Martin, commissaires d’exposition. Visite d’exposition, le 7 juillet 2011.

1 Dans le cadre d’une thématique placée sous le signe du « document »1, les Rencontres d’Arles de l’été 2011 offrent une exposition inédite en l’honneur des trente ans du New

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York Times Magazine. Onze installations dans la chapelle Sainte-Anne d’Arles permettent au visiteur de mesurer la diversité photographique à l’œuvre dans le supplément hebdomadaire du célèbre quotidien nord-américain2. Photojournalisme, photographie de mode, de sport, portraits d’acteurs, commandes spécifiques et portfolios sont présentés avec un souci éditorial qu’il n’est plus rare de trouver dans la scénographie des expositions de photographies. Ainsi, en complément des tirages de grand ou moyen format, il est permis de voir certaines planches contacts, de lire des correspondances ou des témoignages de photographes, de directeurs artistiques, de rédacteurs, des extraits de carnets de voyage. Puis, tout au long de la nef de l’église, un fac-similé des pages du magazine présente l’intégralité du reportage publié. Le texte d’introduction de chaque installation éclaire sur les conditions de production des images, leur contexte historique, la demande faite au photographe, son intention ou celle du rédacteur en chef3.

2 Le regard se perd d’abord un peu dans les dédales des expositions dont la plupart sont accrochées dans les chapelles latérales, celle sur Times Square figurant dans le chœur de l’église. Organisées par thèmes – « Mode et mélange de style », « Une réponse au 11 septembre », « Mission : Times Square », « Grands acteurs » – ou bien centrées sur l’œuvre de plusieurs photographes aux missions et aux styles très différents – Gilles Peress, Ryan McGinley, Lynsey Addario, Simon Norfolk, Paolo Pellegrin, Gregory Crewdson, Sebastião Salgado –, les installations se laissent d’abord voir en totalité puis l’on ne peut s’empêcher de revenir sur les plus troublantes ou les plus marquantes qui sont autant de coups de cœur photographiques.

3 Kathy Ryan4, commissaire de l’exposition – en partenariat avec Lesley Martin d’Aperture Foundation – et rédactrice en chef de la photographie au New York Times Magazine, a eu l’occasion de donner durant la semaine d’ouverture des Rencontres (4-10 juillet) quelques clés de lecture pour mieux cerner l’objectif que se donne le magazine à la recherche de la « bonne photo » ou du « bon reportage »5. Outre des qualités essentielles, relatives à la capacité à saisir et à jouer avec la lumière, la couleur ou bien le noir et blanc, à un sens de la composition aigu et à une maîtrise technique exemplaire pour exprimer visuellement une idée, un mot revient sans cesse, celui de l’originalité du regard du photographe, quel que soit par ailleurs son sujet : « People have a certain kind of individual point of view and the best photographers have that point of view very focused and a very strong idea of what they want to find, either in a character portrait or out in the field, covering a story »6.

4 La quête du photographe devient celle de la rédactrice à la recherche d’un angle de vue inédit sur un sujet : « Every assignment is different but for many assignments it’s about imagination. Who’s got a point of view that would just go against expectation on the subject? Because whenever we can delight readers when they open the magazine and find something they did not expect, that’s number one »7. C’est cette question qui préside à une technique que Kathy Ryan affectionne particulièrement, celle du « cross- assigning ». Le fait de confier à des photographes connus pour leur pratique artistique singulière une mission dans un univers qui leur est peu habituel apparaît comme une source de créativité souvent encouragée dans le magazine. « Many artists leap at the chance because it’s just something different and creative. People love to be asked to do something different »8. Il en est ainsi d’une commande dans l’univers de la mode confiée notamment à Lee Friedlander et Nan Goldin9.

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5 À sa manière de street photographer, Lee Friedlander organise le chaos des coulisses de la mode en créant des motifs nouveaux, pareils au grouillement frénétique d’une ruche où s’affairent les ouvrières — maquilleuses, coiffeuses, habilleuses, photographes…— sans jamais perdre de vue les missions de chacun des protagonistes. Le motif des mains est omniprésent et semble dire la prédation à l’œuvre lorsque l’appareil cible de très jeunes mannequins dont certains paraissent des enfants—impression accentuée lorsque les prises de vue sont réalisées en plongée.

6 Faisant face aux clichés en noir et blanc de Lee Friedlander, surgissent les couleurs tour à tour chaudes ou froides du reportage de Nan Goldin sur un jeune mannequin à la dérive, James King10. Lolita fragile à la beauté troublante, James inspire la photographe, qui admet reconnaître en elle les comportements autodestructeurs de sa jeunesse : « James and I connected very quickly. I understood her, in some ways, because of my own youth and history. She was very self-destructive. I had this kind of caring for her, as if she were my child, and I really wanted to help her »11. Elle inspire aussi la romancière Jennifer Egan, qui travaille en binôme avec la photographe dans ce picture- essay, et dont le texte de couverture est accrocheur, en phase avec les clichés : « She has a look that’s earned her runway jobs, magazine covers, tens of thousands of dollars and a shot at celebrity. All she’s lost is her youth.»12 En août 2011, seize ans plus tard, James, devenue actrice, s’exprime sur cette période de sa vie dans les colonnes du magazine qui, fait rare, donne la parole aux sujets photographiés : « I was working with these masters in fashion and photography and learning from brilliant, creative people from around the world. (…) I felt like some people wanted a piece of me, wanted to take something from me. I felt they wanted to sexualize me »13. La photo de couverture14, aux tons chauds et lumineux, toute en tension, offre un flagrant contraste avec nombre d’images de la série prises dans un contexte le plus souvent informel : le modèle, allongé sur le ventre, les jambes repliées dans les coulisses d’un défilé pour Karl Lagerfeld, fume une cigarette ; James est maquillée, parfaitement apprêtée, elle se sait regardée. À l’opposé de cette image, assise sur les genoux de son petit ami Kyle, elle laisse voir un corps de pantin désarticulé, las, ses paupières sont closes, son expression désabusée, elle est épuisée, le champagne coule à flots, et le spectateur reconstruit malgré lui une histoire dont il ignore tout, mais que ces clichés, dans leur force évocatrice, poussent irrésistiblement à inventer.

7 Dans un registre radicalement différent, l’espace d’exposition consacré au 11 septembre 2001 à New York permet d’envisager le processus photographique de façon totale, de la survenue d’un événement traumatisant à la publication d’un reportage de 106 pages – soit l’intégralité du magazine –, douze jours15 après la diffusion par la presse du monde entier de quantités de clichés dont certains marquent encore la mémoire collective. Comment, face à un événement à l’onde de choc émotionnelle si forte, aux répercussions politiques planétaires, répondre à l’impératif maintes fois répété de K. Ryan : « to break the expected pattern of representation, with something deeper », « to find an unexpected approach », « trying every week something fresh, new, original »16 ?

8 La mise en scène de cette partie d’exposition est remarquable dans son souci de communiquer au visiteur les éléments d’appréciation d’un processus à l’œuvre, dans un climat de déréliction, couplé à une conscience professionnelle exacerbée par des circonstances douloureuses. Pendant plusieurs jours, l’équipe du magazine travaille sans relâche. C’est en ces termes qu’Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., directeur du groupe New

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York Times Company, s’adressera par courrier aux équipes qui réussissent à sortir le numéro du journal au lendemain de la tragédie, dans des conditions matérielles et psychologiques extrêmement difficiles : « To our remarkable reporters, editors, photographers, graphic artists, and newsroom support staff, you have the gratitude and admiration of all of us. »17 Une des questions centrales qui occupe la rédaction est l’image de couverture ; elle sera l’aboutissement d’un travail complexe de réflexion et de trucage photographique visant à ériger deux faisceaux lumineux en lieu et place des tours jumelles effondrées. La photographie publiée, Phantom Towers, a été conçue par les artistes Paul Myoda et Julian LaVerdiere à partir d’une photo originale de Fred Conrad. Elle est retouchée sur Photoshop, afin que le faisceau de lumière blanche, qui traversait horizontalement l’image prise en début de soirée d’une barge sur le fleuve Hudson, puisse être orienté à la verticale puis dupliqué, sans avoir recours à un montage composite. « It’s an emotional response more than anything. Those towers are like ghost limbs; we can feel them even though they are not there anymore. […] We realized that the best thing we can do to help is an artistic gesture that might offer consolation or a sense of security or hope »18, confie Julian LaVerdiere dans les colonnes du magazine. Un an plus tard et de manière désormais rituelle, l’idée prendra corps, et de véritables colonnes de lumière (88 projecteurs), Tribute of Light, s’élèveront à côté de l’emplacement du World Trade Center, en guise de mémorial pour commémorer le 11 septembre19.

Couverture du New York Times Magazine, 23 septembre 2001.

9 Outre les photographies citées, la vision de l’Iran de Gilles Peress au tout début des années 80, les puits de pétrole en feu du Koweït de Sebastião Salgado, le Darfour de Paolo Pellegrin ou dans un tout autre registre ses photos d’acteurs qui défient les codes de représentation des clichés de célébrités – Leonardo DiCaprio ou Kate Winslet –, l’univers hoppérien de Gregory Crewdson avec sa « Dream House » et bien d’autres encore, montrent à quel point les grands noms de la photographie ont contribué à la

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notoriété du New York Times Magazine – et inversement. Peut-être aurait-on apprécié une information ou une place particulière consacrée à l’émergence de nouveaux talents, passés – photographes devenus célèbres, mais découverts par le magazine – ou contemporains, d’autant que le magazine dit en faire un axe majeur de sa politique, par la voix de sa directrice de la photographie : « To be successful, a magazine has to be a mix of big names and totally unknown. A big part of the photo editor is discovery, a lot of work with students of the ICP20. We are looking for new work all the time, for new looks bringing fresh points of view»21. L’exposition n’en reste pas moins très riche, en termes de contenu mais aussi dans ses modalités de présentation.

10 Liens : http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html http://www.rencontres-arles.com

11 Publication : The New York Times Magazine Photographs, Edited by Kathy Ryan. Preface by Gerald Marzorati, Aperture, 2011. Crédits photographiques : figs. 1 et 2 Anne Lesme ; fig.3, avec l’aimable autorisation du New York Times Magazine.

NOTES

1. Avec « Robert Capa, Chim (David Saymour), Gerda Taro : La valise mexicaine ». 2. Exposition complétée par une présentation de commandes photographiques et articles de fond importants qui ont jalonné les 30 ans du magazine, au cloître Saint-Trophime. Fac-similés présentés sur deux longues rangées. 3. Voir l’interview de Kathy Ryan accordée à La Lettre de la Photographie.com : http:// lalettredelaphotographie.com/archives/by_date/2011-07-06/3243/kathy-ryan-and-the-new- york-times-magazine 4. Sous sa direction, le magazine a remporté de nombreux prix : Pictures of the Year, World Press Photo, The Society of Publication Designers ou The Overseas Press Club. Kathy Ryan est rédactrice en chef de la photographie au New York Times Magazine depuis 1985, après avoir travaillé à l’agence Sygma. Elle a remporté le prix Canon Best Picture Editor of the Year au festival Visa pour l’Image de Perpignan en 1997 et a été nommée Picture Editor of the Year aux Lucie Awards en 2003. 5. Visite d’exposition avec les commissaires Kathy Ryan et Lesley A. Martin, le 7 juillet 2011 ; Débat-rencontre : « La photographie peut-elle faire vendre des journaux en 2011 ? » (New York Times Magazine, Télérama, le Monde Mag), avec Kathy Ryan, le 8 juillet 2011. 6. Kathy Ryan, http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6151(page consultée en août 2011). 7. Kathy Ryan, 7 juillet 2011, Arles. 8. Kathy Ryan, 7 juillet 2011, Arles. 9. Ainsi qu’à Jeff Koons, Roger Ballen, Alfred Seiland et Malick Sidibé. 10. La série s’est vendue à $ 37,087 le 28 juin 2002 (estimation : entre $ 22,545 - $ 30,060) chez Christies, http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=1827218 (page consultée en août 2011). 11. Propos cités dans l’exposition. 12. « At 16, a Model’s life », New York Times Magazine, 4 février 1996.

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13. 18 août 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/21/magazine/ Mag-21Thinking.html?ref=magazine#6 (lien actif en août 2011) 14. http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/goldin_nan.php (lien actif en août 2011). 15. Le 23 septembre 2001. 16. Kathy Ryan, 7 et 8 juillet 2011, Arles. 17. Reproduit dans l’exposition. 18. “Filling the Void”, New York Times Magazine, 23 September 2001. 19. La première installation a lieu entre le 11 mars et le 14 avril 2002 et la photographie fait la Une du New York Times le 12 mars. 20. ICP : International Center of Photograpy, New York City. ICP School : http://www.icp.org/ school (lien actif en août 2011). 21. Kathy Ryan, 8 juillet 2011, Arles.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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A New York artist’s response to 9/11: Ahron Weiner’s “Cycles of Violence”

Géraldine Fasentieux

Ahron Weiner and the first “decollage” of the series : Projection. Courtesy of the artist.

1 The series entitled “Cycles of Violence” is a ten-piece visual narrative of advertising manipulations or more exactly “decollages,” that New York-based artist Ahron Weiner created and photographed in the streets of New York City. These images are meant to

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explore the causes, events, implications and ongoing tragedy of 9/11, thus portraying the ultimate violence of which today’s world is capable.

2 The decollage process is an evolution of AdInfinitum©, a photographic series of decaying outdoor advertisements Ahron Weiner began shooting during the three years he spent in Prague from 2001 to 2004. With AdInfinitum©, as its name indicates, the artist challenges the timeliness and obsolescence of advertising, and its very purpose, by creating a new and artistic afterlife for the images and words contained in them.

3 What is particularly striking is that Ahron Weiner’s images are achieved by breaking down rather than putting together, however the juxtapositions are by no means arbitrary. Even though each image speaks vividly on its own, together they form a narrative that tells the story of 9/11.

4 The cycle was originally shown on an outdoor scaffold installation on Adams Street, Brooklyn, at the Dumbo Arts Festival on September 2010. Each image, printed as a 3.5′ x 2′ poster, repeated six times across the scaffolding, ending with the first image. The notion of cyclicality inherent in the work thus punctuates the never-ending nature of history.

The ten images that compose “Cycles of Violence” : Projection / Impact / Chaos / Carnage / Collapse / The Death of Liberty / Aftermath / Invasion / Insurgency / Sacrifice. Courtesy of the artist.

Ahron Weiner, N° 2, Impact. Courtesy of the artist.

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Ahron Weiner, N° 5, Carnage. Courtesy of the artist.

Ahron Weiner, N° 7, Aftermath. Courtesy of the artist.

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Ahron Weiner, N° 10, Sacrifice. Courtesy of the artist.

GF: You are a born and bred New Yorker, but you weren’t in New York City on 9/11. How did you learn about the events and how did you feel? AW: I was living and working in Prague at the time. My wife was still living in NY— she was pregnant with our second child, and working in Midtown NYC. I received a phone call from her as I was on my way back to the office from a client meeting—she said “we’re under attack” and went on to explain that two planes had just hit the Twin Towers. I arrived back at my office in time to watch the first building collapse. Everything about it was beyond comprehension. Watching it unfold on television was surreal. Being away from my wife, son, family, friends, unsure what was happening (it was several hours before I was able to get in touch with anyone) was terrible.

GF: How was 9/11 perceived overseas? AW: Based on my experiences in Prague, there seemed to be a tremendous amount of outrage over the attack on civilians, an outpouring of sympathy, and strong support for the US. As our country “responded” with renewed military efforts in the Middle East, I watched that support erode rather quickly.

GF: How did you start working on the Cycles of Violence project? AW: I didn’t set out to create a series on 9/11. I’d decollaged and shot each of these images over a two-month period—and viewed each of them as an individual image—I didn’t see them as a narrative. The 2010 Dumbo Arts Festival accepted my proposal for a 140’ long AdInfinitum© installation on an outdoor scaffold. The festival was in late September. I was trying to figure out a narrative idea for the installation, and with September approaching, 9/11 was on my mind. It all clicked together one night.

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GF: Do your history and advertising backgrounds influence your technique? AW: Yes. The fact that I’ve been working in advertising my entire career (I currently run a NY-based ad agency named Our Man In Havana), certainly influences this all. My early AdInfinitum© work in Prague was born out of my interest in what happened to advertising once its commercial purpose has expired.

GF: How do you feel when you “dig” through layers of paper into the city walls? AW: I find the process of tearing through layers of old advertising posters cathartic, and I enjoy creating visual art out of something that is ubiquitous and largely ignored.

GF: Is it more exciting to work in the streets than in a studio? AW: It’s certainly more amusing. I’ve had a number of encounters with the police. Most of the time, they want to make sure I’m going to clean up after myself. Once, I was cited for ‘criminal mischief’ and ‘endangering the welfare of a minor’ (my 12- year-old son, who was helping me work one evening). That last one wasn’t amusing. I get wonderful comments from passers-by. Many think I was hired by a construction company to clean these scaffolds—my favorite comment was “man, you’ve got a SHIT job.” Priceless.

GF: You take risks when you tear away pieces for you could mess up your work. Why don’t you ever want to put a piece back or add some meaningful piece? AW: I don’t see it as risk-taking—destruction is the cornerstone of my creative process. I don’t start with any pre-conceived notion or goal in mind—I just tear through the layers of street advertising posters in front of me. I call the process Semiotic Archaeology—digging through layers of words and images to create new juxtapositions and meanings. Alexander McQueen said “I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.” Having worked in advertising for the past 18 years, I’m very familiar with my medium. Adding pieces back or combining images from different places would be cheating.

GF: Is it the discovery process that fascinates you? Do you feel like an explorer or an ethnologist? AW: It’s a process of exploration and discovery, but at a deeper level, it’s a wonderful ethnological study. Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message.” With the average city dweller being exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages a day, I think the message is the medium we live in.

GF: Walter Benjamin said of French artist Jacques Villeglé that he was a « releveur de traces de civilisation ». Do you feel like that? AW: Absolutely. Working in this medium has led me to work with found objects— rusted metal, wire, old newspapers, sea shells, coffee filters. We live in a disposable era, which is an unfortunate thing. When I look around, I see potential in everything.

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View of the installation. Courtesy of the artist.

GF: The fact that your work was presented on a scaffold made it hard to see and many passers-by must have missed it. Did you choose that place on purpose? Did you want to challenge the viewers? AW: Yes. My original “Cycles of Violence” installation ran on 140 feet of scaffolding, 30 feet up from the street. My goal was to blur the line between advertising and art— by installing my art (which is made out of advertising) in the same way that street advertising hangs in urban settings. It was quite effective—most people walked by without noticing—which I took as a sign of success. Every once in a while, people would stop, look, and realize they’d “discovered” an art installation that was “hidden” right out in the open. It was great to see that as well. It’s been a year since the installation came down, and I’m still meeting people who remember the piece. It is estimated that the “average” US consumer is exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages a day. From an early age, we've trained ourselves to filter out most of this “noise,” to the point that the masses are largely unaware of the role advertising plays in our culture at large, in their lives, purchase decisions, sense of self-worth, etc… There’s a wonderful passage in D.F. Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. An “old timer” at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting gets up and shares the following parable with a room full of newbies: “This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ and swim away.” This parable captures my sentiments regarding advertising. I see advertising as the fabric of our culture—omnipresent, and largely invisible. One of the goals of my AdInfinitum© series is to call attention to advertising, and invite people to consider it anew—both as art, and its broader role in our lives.

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GF: Not long ago, world-famous violinist Joshua Bell played as a street musician on a Stradivarius and people actually ignored him. So it seems that people are not only blind but also deaf. Do you think people are jaded? AW: Jaded. Blind. Deaf. Dead. To me, Bell’s performance symbolizes that art is all around us, at all times. The onus is on the individual to take the time to look, to listen, to consider, interpret anew. One of the goals of AdInfinitum© is to call attention to this—ask people to take another look at advertising—as something familiar and largely ignored at a conscious level—in an entirely new context.

GF: Half of the images that compose the “Cycles of Violence” depict the aftermath of the event. Do you think the mental states of the aftermath are particularly relevant? AW: They’re every bit as relevant as the events of 9/11 itself. None of this happened in a vacuum. Planes were hijacked and crashed into buildings by people with an agenda. Beyond the loss of life and material damage—which were devastating—they changed the way we think, the way we live. Ten years later, the US is still at war overseas—ostensibly to prevent this from happening again. These attacks seeded fear and doubt in the minds of the public. Security levels continue to climb. Since the attacks, we’re not allowed to take anything with a sharp edge (including nail clippers) on planes. After that asshole tried to light his shoe on fire, we have to take our shoes off as part of security screening. The attempted Gatorade bombers in London ensured we can’t take more than 3 ounces of liquid in our carry-on luggage. That douchebag who smuggled a bomb in his underwear ensured that we’re practically strip searched before each flight. I think security is important, but I believe these acts are largely symbolic. It’s just forcing terrorists to get more creative.

GF: Do you think that some historical events cannot be represented? AW: I think anything can be represented—and has. With that said, I think conveying the emotional weight or quality of certain events is impossible. Images of events are representations—a step removed from the original. My grandmother was one of the 3,000 who survived the Auschwitz death march, and I grew up listening to her stories of life before the war and life in the camps. From her stories, and my experiences at home and in school, I grew up with what I believed to be a well-developed understanding of the tragedy of the Holocaust. When I moved to Prague and started traveling around Eastern Europe to document former Jewish sites in various states of decay, I realized that for all my knowledge— facts, figures, dates, names of my relatives who were murdered—I had absolutely no clue what the experience was like, and never would.

GF: Even though representation is ultimately beyond experience, can we somehow convey some of the emotional weight of experience through art? AW: We can try, but it’s up to the viewer to decode it. Some people are more aware, more interested, feel things more deeply than others. I see this as an extremely personal matter—I’m not sure that any single piece of art (or anything for that matter) has a universally-accepted meaning—definitions are based on each individual’s perspective, cognitive ability, emotional intellect.

GF: Do you intend to show your “Cycles of Violence” on the tenth anniversary of 9/11? AW: A decade provides a bit of distance from the events of the day, and is certainly a time for reflection. I’ll be showing Cycles of Violence in two shows this September—a 10th anniversary 9/11 memorial show at the Freyberger Gallery, Penn State Berks and

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at a show at the Dershowitz Gallery at Industry City Brooklyn exploring artists’ reaction to terrorism.

GF: Can you tell me about your most recent projects? AW: I’ve been spending a lot of time on Bible AdInfinitum©, a series that uses advertising decollage to unearth a new vision of the Old Testament. I have over 30 images, starting with The Creation of Man through to Joshua, King David and Samson and Delilah.

5 Ahron Weiner interviewed by Geraldine Fasentieux, New York City, August 2011.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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Exposition Lewis W. Hine : Entretien avec Agnès Sire, Directrice de la Fondation Cartier-Bresson, le 13 octobre 2011 À la Fondation Cartier-Bresson (en partenariat avec la Terra Foundation for American Art), 7 septembre au 18 décembre 2011

Frédéric Perrier

Une famille italienne à la recherche d’un bagage égaré, Ellis Island, 1905 © Lewis Hine / collection George Eastman House, Rochester

F.P : Agnès Sire, pourquoi avoir choisi de consacrer une exposition à Lewis Hine ? A.S : La programmation est très intuitive, je l’assume. J’en parle avec la Présidente de la Fondation, Martine Franck Cartier-Bresson, et nous sommes en général d’accord. Cela faisait plusieurs années que je voulais monter une exposition sur Lewis Hine mais la George Eastman House [où se trouvent les tirages de Lewis Hine déposés par Walter Rosenblum, alors Président de la Photo League] ne nous proposait que des

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expositions de tirages modernes, et notre seule institution n’était pas suffisante pour mettre en branle toutes les recherches d’archives disponibles aux États-Unis. Mais la Fundaciòn Mapfre à Madrid ainsi que le Nederlands Fotomuseum à Rotterdam se sont intéressés à ce projet : Alison Norsdtröm, Conservatrice de la George Eastman House à Rochester, a alors considéré qu’avec trois lieux en Europe, une exposition pouvait être organisée. Nous sommes donc partis tous les trois à Rochester en juin 2009.

F.P : Comment s’est opéré le choix des clichés déposés à la George Eastman House ? A.S : La George Eastman House a récupéré le fonds de la Photo League. Dans les tirages réservés, nous avons sélectionné les plus modernes possibles et écarté parmi les anciens ceux qui étaient trop abîmés. Par ailleurs, l’espace de la fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson n’est pas très grand mais nous avons quand même réussi à exposer 160 tirages, car ils sont de petit format. Nous avons décidé de ne travailler qu’avec la George Eastman House qui possède le fonds le plus riche. On aurait pu également emprunter des tirages au MoMA de New York ainsi qu' au Metropolitan, mais cela aurait engendré des coûts supplémentaires.

F.P : Cette collaboration entre musées est-elle une chose habituelle à la Fondation Cartier- Bresson ? A.S : Oui, tout à fait. L’exposition Irvin Penn, par exemple, avait été faite en collaboration avec le Musée de l’Élysée, à Lausanne et les œuvres provenaient du Getty. Pour les grandes expositions comme celles-ci, qui doivent traverser l’Atlantique, il faut être plusieurs car le transport des photographies des États-Unis vers l’Europe coûte très cher.

F.P : Parmi les photographes de son époque, comme définiriez-vous Lewis Hine ? Quel est pour vous son trait le plus marquant ? A.S : Je pense que les sujets qu’il a traités sont d’une très grande actualité, c’est aussi cela qui fait que les gens s’y intéressent. Le public se rend compte que le travail des enfants existe toujours, de même que l’immigration. Le fait d’avoir traité ses sujets comme un militant est intéressant. Hine défendait vraiment une cause : lorsqu’il travaillait pour le National Child Labor Committee, ce qu’il cherchait n’était autre que l’abolition du travail des enfants. C’était quelqu’un de très déterminé. On a toujours dit que s’il n’avait pas participé à la FSA [Farm Security Administration], c’est parce qu’il ne voulait pas se défaire de ses négatifs et renoncer à ses prérogatives. Il voulait choisir lui-même ses photos diffusées dans la presse afin de défendre la cause à laquelle il croyait. Il ne faisait pas des beaux tirages comme on en faisait à l’époque, cela ne l’intéressait pas. Ce n’est pas pour autant qu’il se moquait de leur qualité, car bien sûr, il prêtait tout à fait attention à leur composition.

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Fileuse dans une usine de Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1913 © Lewis Hine / collection George Eastman House, Rochester

F.P : On sait que lorsque Lewis Hine travaillait à l’Ethical Culture School à New York, il a amené ses classes au 291, la galerie de Stieglitz, qui fut à l’origine du courant « pictorialiste ». Pouvez-vous nous expliquer la différence d'approche entre ces deux types photographes ? A.S : Stieglitz travaillait énormément ses tirages et traitait la photographie un peu comme une peinture, en soignant toutes les nuances. Il ne se préoccupait pas de sujets sociaux même s’il a fait beaucoup pour faire évoluer la photographie en tant que médium. Stieglitz et Hine avaient des préoccupations aux antipodes l’une de l’autre.

F.P : Vous vous rappelez qu’en 1939, il y a eu une rétrospective sur l’œuvre de Lewis Hine organisée par Elizabeth McCausland et Berenice Abbott au Riverside Museum de New York et qui n’a pas eu le succès escompté – la photo n’était pas sans doute ce qu’elle était aujourd’hui, mais Hine était-il le seul photographe intéressé par le documentaire social à l’époque ? A.S : Il y en a d’autres qui se sont intéressés à ce sujet, comme l’Écossais Thomas Annan à la fin du 19e siècle, mais aussi le Danois Jacob Riis, immigré aux États-Unis et aîné de vingt ans de Lewis Hine. Jacob Riis est peut-être moins direct. Je trouve que Hine a une modernité dans sa frontalité, sa façon de saisir les regards. C’était un exploit, vu les appareils avec lesquels il travaillait qui étaient eux aussi assez démodés. Il s’agissait d’appareils en bois qu’il fallait dévisser à chaque fois que l’on voulait passer du vertical à l’horizontal. Il aurait pu travailler avec un matériel plus moderne.

F.P : Est-ce qu’il y a des photographes contemporains que l’on peut rapprocher de Lewis Hine ? A.S : Sebastião Salgado, le photographe Brésilien qui a aussi photographié les migrants, les mineurs ou bien les victimes de la famine, d’une part. Le premier livre de Hine traite de l’homme au travail [Men at Work], ce qui est aussi le cas de Salgado, qui photographie également, comme lui, les réfugiés. Cependant leur style est très différent : Salgado est presque pictorialiste en ce sens qu’il travaille beaucoup la lumière, l'éclairage. Hine lui ne cherchait pas trop cet effet. En plus, il n’en n’avait

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guère les moyens car comme il le dit, lorsqu’il photographiait à Ellis Island, le temps qu’il retourne son appareil, les gens avaient disparu. Pire encore, derrière la fumée de son flash à la poudre de magnésium, il ne les voyait plus. Eugene Smith, le photojournaliste Américain qui comme Hine a photographié la ville de Pittsburgh, a aussi suivi cette thématique. Mais Smith est plus proche de Salgado, qui retravaillait également beaucoup ses tirages. Cela ne veut pas dire que Lewis Hine ne le faisait pas, mais il voulait qu’ils soient selon ses termes « plus réels que la réalité elle-même ». La réalité n’était pas forcément jolie et il ne voulait pas l’enjoliver. Lorsqu’il fait de la photographie de rue, Hine se rapproche plus de la spontanéité d’Helen Levitt.

Empire State Building avec « la boule » de levage, vers 1930-1931 © Lewis Hine / collection George Eastman House, Rochester

F.P : Est-ce qu’il y a une période chez Lewis Hine qui vous intéresse plus qu’une autre ? A.S : Oui, ses photos du New Deal, les dernières images de l’exposition, qui malheureusement ne sont pas très nombreuses. J’aime beaucoup ses photos des Noirs, celles d’Ellis Island, et celles des enfants au travail. Je rappellerai enfin que lorsqu’il sillonnait les États-Unis pour le National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine était un véritable enquêteur. Il prenait des notes sur tout ce qu’il voyait. Par exemple, la hauteur des boutons de sa veste lui permettait de mesurer les enfants. C’était un bonhomme mince et fluet, dont la petite taille lui permettait cette complicité avec eux, perceptible dans les images. Il utilisait aussi d’autres subterfuges pour s’introduire sur les lieux où travaillaient les enfants.

F.P : Oui, il se faisait passer pour un vendeur de Bibles ou un agent d’assurances… Dernière question enfin, comment est reçue cette exposition ? A.S : Le public est très réceptif, intéressé. Nous avons eu près de 7000 visiteurs dès le premier mois, ce qui très encourageant.

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INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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Diane Arbus Au Jeu de Paume, du 18 octobre 2011 au 5 février 2012 (en collaboration avec The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC, New York, et avec la participation du Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, du Fotomuseum Winterthur et du Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam).

Anita Béquié

« If we are all freaks the task is to become as much as possible the freak we are. »1

1 Diane Arbus (New York, 1923 – 1971) commença à travailler dans les années 1950 avec son mari Allan Arbus comme photographe de mode. Mais très vite elle se détourna de cet univers et commença, seule, à faire des portraits plus personnels, plus audacieux, plus perturbants. Elle parvint peu à peu à révéler les imperfections et les combats intrinsèques de ses sujets, et par métonymie, de la société américaine de son temps.

2 Le travail de Diane Arbus se situe toujours à la frontière, aux frontières. Aux frontières qui séparent la personnalité privée de l'image publique, aux frontières qui séparent les gens ordinaires des gens extra-ordinaires. Grand nombre de ses portraits les plus saisissants sont une représentation sans détour de gens marginaux, et sa façon de les donner à voir est tout aussi déstabilisante que les modèles eux-mêmes. Elle a exploré leurs identités diverses, et les a présentés comme des personnages complexes, mais bel et bien humains. Le jeune homme en bigoudis qui fixe l'objectif est étrange et singulier sous bien des aspects : ses sourcils sont épilés, ses yeux maquillés, et ses ongles vernis. Il se prépare sans doute à se transformer en femme. Néanmoins, sa main – qui apparaît gigantesque sur la photo – la forme de sa mâchoire, tout indique que la supercherie ne dupera personne. Et son regard, certes direct, mais empli de tristesse, est un aveu silencieux mais résolu de l'échec inévitable de sa métamorphose.

3 Par la frontalité de ses photographies, Diane Arbus est également parvenue à mettre en lumière les failles que ses modèles « ordinaires » s'efforçaient, au quotidien, de garder secrètes. Bousculant les classifications habituelles, elle a, grâce à son regard si particulier, inventé une nouvelle communauté de gens étranges, communauté dans laquelle les attardés mentaux, les nains, les nudistes, les hermaphrodites, les bourgeois et les gens ordinaires partagent les murs des musées, ou les pages des livres. Comme l'a

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écrit Susan Sontag, “The subjects of Arbus’s photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of the same village. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America.”2 Et leurs points communs, de façon inattendue, se mettent à exister. Diane Arbus avait raison en déclarant : “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”3

4 L'exposition proposée par le Jeu de Paume (Paris 8°) du 18 octobre 2011 au 5 février 2012 nous permet de voir rassemblée, pour la première fois en France, l'œuvre remarquable de Diane Arbus. En effet, plus de deux cents photographies sont présentées, et le spectateur découvre ainsi un corpus qui ne se limite pas aux freaks, souvent considérés comme emblématiques de son art.Les portraits les plus connus, de format carré, aux bords flous et au cadrage resserré autour du modèle sont bien présents, mais cette exposition rend également hommage aux photographies plus anciennes, et permet donc d'apprécier l'étendue de sa production.

5 Le tout est organisé sobrement, les photographies ne sont accompagnées d'aucun commentaire. Une note sur le mur d'entrée explique ce choix, tout comme est annoncée la décision de ne pas classer les images de façon thématique ou chronologique : « A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. »4

6 Si l'exposition est riche et le travail d'Arbus passionnant, on peut cependant regretter l'absence de fil conducteur. Les tirages se suivent et ne se ressemblent pas, diverses photographies prises dans le cadre d’un même projet se trouvent à plusieurs salles d'écart (c’est le cas notamment des deux photographies qu'elle avait prises pour illustrer son article « Two American Families » écrit pour le Sunday Times Magazine de Londres : A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968 et A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. 19665) et le choix de ne pas présenter les photographies de façon chronologique rend peu perceptible l'évolution pourtant si importante que son travail a connue. En effet, en 1962, Arbus change d'appareil photo et décide de travailler avec un Rolleiflex 6x6 (elle utilisait jusqu'alors un appareil 35 mm, plus maniable). Ce changement est capital : le temps de pose est plus long, l'objet plus encombrant, les sujets font plus que jamais partie intégrante du processus photographique. Les formats carrés et la frontalité qui deviennent la marque de fabrique de Diane Arbus sont intrinsèquement liés à ce changement d'appareil. Les clichés antérieurs ont un grain plus important, un format différent, une atmosphère certes déjà marquée, mais pas encore si facilement identifiable.

7 Enfin, la visite se termine par quelques salles qui exposent le parcours de Diane Arbus, offrant de nombreux éléments d’information sur son travail pour les magazines et sur l’évolution de sa technique (notamment son changement d'appareil photo). Il est peut- être dommage que ces informations ne soient communiquées qu'à la fin, tout d'abord parce qu'elles auraient pu enrichir la visite de ceux qui découvraient Arbus pour la première fois, mais aussi parce que le visiteur, après avoir évolué dans les salles bondées, n'aura peut-être pas le courage de prolonger sa rencontre avec l'artiste. Il aurait été sans doute plus judicieux d'intégrer ces précisions au sein même de l'exposition, comme cela avait été le cas lors de la rétrospective Diane Arbus : Revelations qui était notamment passée par Londres en 2005-2006.6

8 Cela dit, le Jeu de Paume nous offre une exposition d'une grande richesse, inédite en France. Le regard de Diane Arbus reste, quarante ans après sa mort, d'une justesse et d'une franchise indiscutables, et pose aujourd'hui encore les questions de l'identité et

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du paraître. Les personnages fixés par le flash d'Arbus et présentés à nous aujourd'hui sont à jamais grotesques, à jamais fragiles. Ils sont figés et resteront pour toujours ce que Diane Arbus a détecté, un jour, chez eux. Comme l'a écrit Nan Goldin : Arbus didn't necessarily want to show people as they wanted to be seen, but needed to unmask them, strip away their layer of self-illusion, and so her subjects stand both as themselves and as projections of them.7

9 Diane Arbus a montré que les différences entre les personnes intégrées dans la société et celles qui en sont exclues sont plus ténues qu'il n'y paraît ; elle a su révéler une sincérité et une dignité bouleversantes chez un nain mexicain photographié dans sa chambre d'hôtel à New York,8 alors que le roi et la reine d'un bal du troisième âge, éblouis par le flash, portant leurs couronnes de travers et des tenues ridicules, semblent incarner le grotesque.9 De même, les enfants, habituellement sujets de prédilection pour représenter l'innocence et la joie, sont photographiés sans compassion : les jumelles apparaissent quasi fantomatiques dans leurs tenues identiques, et le contraste prononcé de la photo, tout comme le cadrage, ne font qu'accentuer la rigidité de leur posture.10 Quant à l'enfant maigrichon qui tient une grenade en plastique et regarde l'objectif de façon crispée,11 il n'a rien lui non plus des écoliers de Doisneau. Le cadrage relativement large accentue d'autant plus sa maigreur et son isolement. Son regard, droit dans l'objectif, semble nous interroger. Savait-il qu'un jour, il serait à l'affiche d'une telle exposition ?

10 Chez Diane Arbus, la représentation du genre humain est toujours surprenante, et le visiteur est forcé de réviser son jugement, de changer son propre regard. Qui sommes- nous ? Qu'est-ce que la normalité ? Où se situer ? Autant de questions que l'on a en tête en quittant ce somptueux bâtiment et en repartant à travers le jardin des Tuileries.

NOTES

1. Diane Arbus, 1960 Notebook (No. 4), as quoted by Sandra S. Phillips, “The Question of Belief” in Diane Arbus Revelations, London, Jonathan Cape, 2003, 54. 2. Susan Sontag, On Photography, [1977], (London : Penguin Classics, 2002), 47. 3. Diane Arbus, An Aperture Monograph, Millerton, New York, Aperture, 1972, 15. 4. Diane Arbus, “Five photographs by Diane Arbus,” Artforum, May 1971, 64, as quoted in Sandra S. Philips, op. cit., 58. 5. http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_westchester_family_full.html http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_brooklyn_family_full.html 6. Compte rendu de l'exposition à cette adresse : http://transatlantica.revues.org/594 7. Nan Goldin, “Diane Arbus”, in Elisabeth Bronfen, ed., Nobuyoshi Araki, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Sammlung Goetz, München, 1997, 95. 8. http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_dwarf_full.html 9. http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_king_and_queen_full.html 10. http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_twins_full.html 11. http://masters-of-photography.com/A/arbus/arbus_hand_grenade_full.html

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INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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Chester Higgins, New York City, a Young Moslem Woman in Brooklyn, 1990

Fatma Zrann

1 Né en 1946, Chester Higgins est l’un des photographes majeurs de sa génération. Témoin de périodes phares de l'histoire politique et artistique noire américaine, il explore à travers ses images l’identité culturelle des Africains-Américains. Son rapport à la photographie a été fortement influencé par sa rencontre avec P.H. Polk (1898-1985), photographe officiel du Tuskegee Institute, (le premier établissement

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d'enseignement afro-américain fondé en 1881 en Alabama). Tandis que Higgins fut en son temps le portraitiste de la population rurale et de la classe moyenne noires, Chester Higgins Jr. est le photographe contemporain des Africains-Américains et de la diaspora africaine. Inspirées par le panafricanisme de Marcus Garvey, ses images répondent à une quête identitaire de groupe, visant à se définir de façon autonome.

2 Sa carrière débute en 1975 au New York Times, où il couvre des événements politiques et sociaux majeurs telle que la révolte des étudiants noirs en 1965, en Alabama, la lutte pour les droits civiques, ou encore l'accès à l'indépendance des pays africains. L'ensemble de son œuvre, qui s’étend sur près d’un demi-siècle, offre un vaste panorama de l’histoire de la photographie noire et américaine.

3 De son propre aveu, Chester Higgins Jr. s’est orienté vers le photojournalisme pour l'engagement politique et social qui définit le genre, lui permettant notamment d'explorer visuellement les modes d'exercice du pouvoir. Après avoir sillonné le continent africain, joignant le texte à l'image, il a écrit plusieurs livres illustrés (« photo essays ») sur l'Afrique et sa diaspora, tels que Drums of Life : A Photographic Essay on the Black Man in America (1974) et Echo of the Spirit : A Photographer’s Journey (2004). Publié en 1994, Feeling the Spirit : Searching the World for the People of Africa décline les modes d'intégration de la culture africaine à travers le monde, par le biais d'images centrées sur ses rites et pratiques. Ce portrait, New York City, a Young Moslem Woman in Brooklyn (1990), en est l'expression manifeste.

4 L’objectif se fixe ici sur le visage d'une femme noire, dont on ne voit que les grands yeux noirs, le reste de son visage étant couvert par le voile blanc qu’elle porte. Couleur de peau et affiliation religieuse se trouvent ainsi efficacement recentrées autour d'une forte opposition entre noir et blanc, renforcée par une prise de vue frontale, en gros plan. L'expression des yeux de cette femme, dont les autres traits physiques sont rendus invisibles par le port du voile, retient l’attention et invite le spectateur à s'interroger sur son identité et son statut.

5 Ce portrait doit être replacé dans le cadre du mouvement anti-islamique qui s'est développé lors de la guerre du Golfe de 1990-1991. Présentée en février 2001 dans le cadre de l’exposition Committed to the Image : Contemporary African American Photographers au Brooklyn Museum of Art de New York, elle invitait chacun à porter un nouveau regard sur cette communauté, au-delà des clichés qui lui sont habituellement attachés. C'est sans doute le sens qu'il faut attribuer à l'expression « Empowering the Eye »1 de Barbara Head Millstein, commissaire de l’exposition, qui désigne la montée en puissance du regard du sujet comme du spectateur.

6 Pour Chester Higgins, l’appareil photographique est un outil qui permet l'exploration d'une identité en quête d'elle-même. Mettre le voile – selon les principes de l’islam –, c’est refuser de se faire connaître et reconnaître. En se laissant photographier avec le voile, la femme musulmane réclame ici la reconnaissance de son identité religieuse dans une période où les musulmans américains – bien qu’ils forment la troisième religion nationale après le christianisme et le judaïsme2 – sont sujets à diverses formes d’ostracisme, après avoir été longtemps quasi invisibles au sein de la société américaine. Plutôt que le signe d'une réclusion dont elle serait la victime, le voile est porté d’une manière librement consentie et même comme une pièce vestimentaire qui la met en valeur. Caché mais ouvert, ce visage laisse deviner la beauté de cette « jeune musulmane de Brooklyn, » irréductible à son appartenance sociale ou religieuse. Ainsi

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« transformée en valeur esthétique »3, pour reprendre l'expression d'Elvan Zabunyan, la couleur se fait le vecteur d'une nouvelle perception de l'autre.

7 « There is no camera that can make a picture. [...] Only your eyes can make a picture. »4écrivait P.H. Polk. Photographe engagé, Chester Higgings nous somme de regarder ce que ses yeux ont vu derrière l’objectif de son appareil photo.

NOTES

1. Clyde Taylor, « Empowering the Eye », dans Barbara Head Millstein, in Committed to the Image : Contemporary Black Photographers, catalogue d’exposition, New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2001, 12. 2. The American Graduation Survey, Self Described Religious Identification of U.S Adult Population, 1990-2001, http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/images/image004.gif 3. Elvan Zabunyan, Black is a Color, Paris, Dis Voir, 2004, 81. 4. Chester Higgins Jr., « P.H. Polk and Me », The Crisis, décembre 1998, 40.

INDEX

Thèmes : Trans’Arts

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Actualité de la recherche

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“Looking Back: The Past, History and History Writing in Early America and the Atlantic World”, Third EEASA Biannual Conference University Paris-Diderot, Institut Charles V, 9-11 December 2010

Yohanna Alimi

1 The third biannual conference of the European Early American Studies Association (EEASA) was held in Paris at the Institut Charles V (Université Paris-Diderot) on Thursday December 9, Friday December 10 and Saturday December 11, 2010. It was co- hosted by Université Paris-Diderot and Université Versailles-St Quentin, and locally organized by REDEHJA (Réseau pour le Développement Européen de l’Histoire de la Jeune Amérique). After holding its previous conference in Venice in December 2008 on “Amity, Enmity and Emotions”, the EEASA conference met for the second time in Paris, building on an active international network of scholars of Early American history and the Atlantic World. More than thirty scholars and doctoral students from Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel gathered as part of this event, which was well- attended by colleagues from Paris universities as well. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Paris- Diderot), the current president of EEASA, was the main organiser of the 2010 event, together with Lauric Henneton (Versailles-St Quentin). In what required major organisational skills given the size of the conference, they were assisted by doctoral students, among whom Jean-Baptiste Goyard and Anne-Claire Levy.

2 The conference turned to a reflection on the past and its multi-layered construction within the broad time frame, 1607-1865. This large-scale event1 invited researchers to engage in critical investigation of the multi-faceted perceptions of the past, history and history-writing in Early America within the Atlantic context. Over the course of the three days, the participants examined the way different understandings of the early “past” were conceptualized, idealized, redefined, rediscovered or preserved, and analyzed the ideological implications of complex, multiple and often conflicting views of the past. The presentations also addressed the emergence of historical consciousness

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over the period, and showed that the different visions of history often implied conflicting views of human nature. Among the wide range of implications of this topic, the participants were finally led to reflect on their own practice of history-writing and engaged in fruitful debates about their own interpretations of their objects of study.

3 The first half-day session was devoted to a graduate session. Four Ph.D. candidates gave papers about their work in progress and received comments by three professors of the Program Committee: Trevor Burnard (Warwick University), Allan Potofsky (Université Paris-Diderot) and Naomi Wulf (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle). The conference itself was inaugurated with the presentation of a research project conducted at the University of Sherbrooke by Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec and Léon Robichaud. This was actually the first time they presented the bilingual version of their website about marronage in Saint Domingue. On this online platform, the users can have access to an extensive database containing primary material about marronage and make use of thousands of digitized documents (prison lists and slave advertisements) for research or pedagogical purposes. Both scholars explained that their intention was to offer a new framework of analysis of marronage in Saint Domingue by making primary material accessible to all users. This website thus provides both a research tool for historians of slavery in the French Atlantic world and a useful online resource to teach this topic by engaging directly with historical sources. The first day of the conference ended with a first keynote address delivered by Trevor Burnard (Warwick University). His talk was a call for reflection on the transformational impact of a pivotal period in early American history (1690-1750) that has often been neglected by historians but which deserved closer scrutiny to better understand the contextual stakes of the later decades of American history.

4 The second day of the conference opened with a second keynote address delivered by Allan Potofsky (University Paris-Diderot) and focused on the idea of the mythical view of the past through the lens of Thomas Jefferson’s idealized vision of eighteenth- century Paris. Following Potofsky’s address, the morning session ended with the first panel made of two papers exploring the use of the ancient past in national and personal constructions. Susan Branson (Syracuse University) demonstrated how and why the Americans of the early national period, who generally looked to classical Greece and Rome for architectural inspiration, came to be influenced by ancient Egypt. She argued that the Americans of this period turned to the Egyptian past and reappropriated its style at a time when national identity was in the making. The notions of permanence, stability or monumentality of the Egyptian architectural style were precisely what led the Americans to employ the Egyptian past when erecting national public buildings. Catherine Kerrison (Villanova University) examined the thought of Thomas Jefferson’s daughter and focused on the role of the ancient past in the construction of her identity. She showed how Martha Jefferson Randolph looked back to different pasts (Jansenism, the Scottish Enlightenment and classicism) and synthesized those various influences to construct a unique and personal view of American womanhood that differed from the other dominant paradigms of female life in Early America.

5 The next set of papers confronted different philosophies of history in the eighteenth century. Lucia Bergamasco (Université d’Orléans) first examined John Adams’s sense of the past and showed that his disenchanted vision of history stemmed from a quite cynical view of human nature. She also highlighted Adams’s propensity to discuss past events in his letters in which he often tried to deconstruct the myths surrounding the

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history of the American Revolution and also attempted to vindicate his own place in national history. The following paper given by Johann Neem (Western Washington University) was in direct dialogue with the previous talk. It explored Thomas Jefferson’s conception of history, which radically differed from Adams’s. Johann Neem argued that Jefferson’s idealistic and optimistic perception of human nature stood in sharp contrast with previous understandings of the true nature of man. In Jefferson’s view, sinfulness was a product of history. In America, human beings could return to their original goodness and to a purer form of society. By moving away from corrupt European society, the Americans had returned to nature and could make use of their unique ability to choose the most virtuous leaders to lead their society. The third paper of this session was given by Mark Spencer (Brock University, Ontario), who investigated the origins of the philosophy of history of the American Enlightenment by evaluating the impact of Hume’s History of England on the historical thought of the Americans of the Revolutionary era.

6 The last session of the day focused on the relative impact of 1776, a founding landmark in American history, and explored how the spirit of the American Revolution was invoked, imagined and re-invented in the early national period. Sam Haynes (University of Texas at Arlington) first examined the way the Anglo-Texans were influenced by American revolutionary heritage in their own struggle against Mexico in 1835 and 1836. Haynes argued that the Anglo-Texans not only drew inspiration from the American Revolution by appropriating the American revolutionary language to articulate their own grievances, but also used the memory of the American revolutionary past to justify and give momentum to their resistance movement against Mexico. The following talk given by Michael Zuckerman (University of Pennsylvania) re-opened the historiographical debate about the relative radicalism of the American Revolution. In a paper entitled “The Stifling of the Spirit of ‘76”, Michael Zuckerman rejected the assumption that the American Revolution had transformative short-term implications. The audience engaged in a very lively discussion of Michael Zuckerman’s argument during the ensuing debate. Carine Lounissi (Université de Rouen) then addressed the conception of 1776 as a “beginning” in her analysis of the interpretations of American colonial political contracts during the (pre-) Revolution. She showed how American colonists recreated beginnings by elaborating a mythical version of their history as a people.

7 The third and final day of the conference opened with a third and last keynote address delivered by Peter Mancall (University of Southern California). His talk, entitled “How Europeans Thought about the American Past, for Example, 1580-1730”, offered a reversal of the overall theme of the conference, as it developed a reflection on European models of history inspired by Colonial America and the importance of perspective when looking at the past.

8 The following papers were given in a session examining how the Americans of the early nineteenth century looked back to the past and advocated a return to the primitive as a solution to social ills or to secure the advancements of the American civilization. Jeffrey Mullins (St. Cloud State University) showed that, in fear of degeneration and the dangers brought by the refinements of civilization, the American reformers of the antebellum period called people to embrace the practices of the past and return to the physical culture of earlier times to secure the progress of the American society. However, Jeffrey Mullins pointed out the difficulty for Americans to embrace the

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practices of the “savage” people due to the racial tensions shaping their society. Michael Zakim (Tel Aviv University) examined how physical culture was also embraced by Americans to address the anxieties provoked by the emergence of a new social and economic order in the mid-nineteenth century. Physical education would not only be a way to halt the physical decay that threatened civilized and urban Americans, but it would also bring social order and civic virtue back again in the modern American society. Both scholars showed that the moment when Americans were the most concerned with spurring on progress was also a time when they looked backward and embraced the past to build a brighter future for themselves.

9 Finally, three scholars of the early nineteenth century shifted away from the intellectual approach to the past and addressed a different understanding of history. They highlighted the emergence of a historical consciousness at the turn of the century, which took the form of an emotional and material attachment to the past. First, Seth Cotlar (Willamette University) decided to explore the nostalgic sensibility in the United States in the 1820s. He argued that the feeling of nostalgia felt by some Americans was not some vain emotion that should be discarded by historians. The melancholy felt by Americans such as John Fanning Watson should be reassessed as a meaningful historic register that conveyed a critical assessment about the present time. In her paper entitled “The Local, the National and the Antiquarian”, Anne Verplanck (Penn State University) investigated the role of a group of Americans who collected, circulated and published historical material in the emergence of a national historical consciousness in the early nineteenth century. In collecting and preserving this material, she argued, these men participated in the making of early national history. Finally, Whitney Martinko (University of Virginia) explained that, in antebellum culture, history and progress were not at odds—they even coexisted as compatible features of the American landscape. Indeed, at the turn of the nineteenth century, some Americans wished to keep history visible in the landscape even in the context of a changing world. They believed that improvement should not be condemned and that progress did not mean erasing the past. Therefore, these Americans meant to preserve and save historical evidence in certain sites or buildings while not standing in the way of progress.

10 As signified in the lively discussions, the conference provided the paper-givers and the audience with a renewed understanding of Early America, not solely as a “beginning” but viewed retrospectively. The object of enquiry went beyond intellectual history, in approaches that delved into the social, political and cultural history of American beginnings. It demonstrated how the past has often been the object of contested definitions and a stake in the power relations in Early America within the Atlantic context. From an organizational point of view, it confirmed an interest in a European venue for Early American Studies. The next EEASA conference will be held in Bayreuth, Germany in December 2012 and address the question of “Empires and Imagination in Early America and the Atlantic World”.

11 The program of the conference is available online at: http://www.redehja.eu The website about marronage in Saint Domingue presented at this conference is a project co-directed by Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec and Léon Robichaud, and supported by the French Atlantic History Group (McGill University, Mellon Foundation) in collaboration with the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of the University of Sherbrooke. The website is available at: http://www.marronnage.info

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For more information on the EEASA: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/cas/eeasa For more details on the activities of REDEHJA: http://www.redehja.eu

NOTES

1. Given the organization of the conference in double sets of parallel panels, the author of the present report can only offer a presentation of the sessions she attended.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

YOHANNA ALIMI Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3

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“Imagined Communities, Recuperated Homelands. Rethinking American and Canadian Minority and Exilic Writing” University of Strasbourg, 11-12 March 2011

Sofie De Smyter

1 The question “Where are you from?”, which is often heard at conferences, foregrounds the link between identity and location. This link proved constitutive of Imagined Communities, Recuperated Homelands, a conference that was organized by Professors Monica Manolescu and Charlotte Sturgess and took place at the University of Strasbourg on the eleventh and twelfth of March 2011. At the heart of the conference was the way Canadian and North American minority and exilic writing questions and reconceptualises fixed notions of “identity,”“home” and “belonging.” The discussions were haunted by both spatial and temporal dualisms, and by such related oppositions as “insider” vs. “outsider” and “rooted” vs. “rootless”. The fact that the notions cannot be rigidly separated was forcefully reaffirmed, and emphasis was put on border crossing as well as the potentially creative role played by the liminal—something that was beautifully illustrated by the conference poster as well. Linda Gass’s quilt Split Personality, as stated on the artist’s website, portrays a San Francisco wetland and a salt-pond separated by a man-made channel.

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Linda Gass, Split Personality (quilt), 2006 ©

2 The fact that the wetland and the once-wetland are divided by water is highly significant considering that water is never a clear border but rather a liminal zone, connecting rather than separating. As such, the quilt perfectly illustrated the border crossing that was at the heart of the conference. For the first time, the University of Strasbourg united specialists on Canadian and North American writing. Several speakers crossed and questioned the border generally maintained between the two literatures, as well as many of the other dichotomies related to their interest in exilic and minority writing.

Day 1: Friday, March 11th 2011

3 The opening address by Jean-Jacques Chardin, director of the research team “Recherches sur le monde anglophone”, reasserted the need to discuss notions of home and belonging in an increasingly transnational world and called brief attention to the crisis in the humanities. Jean-Jacques Chardin confirmed the importance of initiatives and open discussion in the field of the humanities as well as the need to question borders and margins with respect to constructions of (national) identity and the way the latter is recuperated in and reshaped by minority literatures.

4 Jean-Jacques Chardin’s introduction was followed by the conference’s first keynote address, which was delivered by Dr. Larissa Lai—writer, poet, literary critic and lecturer at the University of British Columbia. As the title of her lecture indicates, “How to Do 'You': Methods of Asian/Indigenous Relation” tried to envision positive relationships between Asian and Indigenous people in Canada, keeping in mind their complex historical connection with the Europeans. Even though Asian and Indigenous people interacted long before the Europeans came, the (imposed) label “Asian Canadian”

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unambiguously marks the complexity of the Asian predicament: they are both settlers asserting Canada’s neo-colonial relations with Indigenous people and colonial subjects who have suffered under the Canadian state. In her attempt to work towards a less dichotomous way of thinking about Asian and Indigenous people, Larissa Lai focused on two multimedia performances as potential answers to the question “How to Do 'You'?”. The first project she concentrated on was “How We Forgot Here” by the Toronto-based Movement Project, the second one David Kang’s “How to Feed a Piano”, which problematizes notions of agency. The former performance, which brought to the stage a fictional airline where Indigenous people are in control of movement, was shown to provide a productive platform to stage diverse stories of movement and connect the different kinds of displacement and violence experienced by (im)migrants and Indigenous people.

Session 1: “Communities and Margins”

5 Displacement was also at the centre of the first session, which united four papers on “Communities and Margins”. David Stirrup (University of Kent, Canterbury) read two novels by Native North American writers Thomas King and Eric Gansworth in order to investigate how they use art to open up considerations of homeland, belonging and citizenship.

6 Hans Bak (Radboud University, Nijmegen) focused on one visual and two literary representations of the flight from slavery and Canada as an imagined utopia, and questioned the tension between nostalgia for a lost homeland and an imagined community in exile. Hans Bak’s corpus—works by African-American painter Jacob Lawrence, African-American novelist Ishmael Reed and Canadian author Lawrence Hill —further reflected his insistence on questioning existing margins.

7 Françoise Kral (Université Paris Ouest) discussed Benedict Anderson’s and Arjun Appadurai’s reflections on communities to consider the impact and status of recently constructed networks. If communities are understood as impossible to break away from, how can one interpret virtual communities from which one can disconnect at any time and in which the individual is but a link? The discussion was connected to works by Kiran Desai and Jhumpa Lahiri, and followed by comments on the changing status of “hypermodernity”, which does not seem to be that far removed anymore from real life.

8 Martin Kuester (University of Marburg) centred on Jan Guenther Braun’s Somewhere Else, a lesbian Mennonite novel. By doing so, he drew attention not only to the writing of an existing religious and linguistic minority, but also to a double marginalization within that community as a result of gender-related issues. What especially came out from this session was the complex and loaded character of the notion “community” and the need to continue to question it as well as its margins.

Session 2: “Unsettling Cartographies”

9 The second session of the day was called “Unsettling Cartographies” and brought together five papers that—in different ways—reflected on notions of belonging and mapping (oneself) as problematized by minority and exilic writing. Ada Savin (Université de Versailles) discussed Cristina Garcia’s The Agüero Sisters and the book’s convoluted links between the human body and body politics, and between home and

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exile. She presented the graft as a central metaphor and trope, and drew attention to language to further question the possibility of ever being fully “at home”

10 Pilar Cuder-Dominguez (University of Huelva) focused on the immigrant’s process of psychological mapmaking and mapbreaking. She used Malashri Lal’s distinction to examine Nalini Warriar’s The Enemy Within and present the book’s portrayal of mapmaking with respect to a protagonist who is doubly marginalized—both as an immigrant and as a woman.

11 Virginia Ricard (Université Bordeaux 3) shed light on the writings of the almost forgotten Jewish American writer Ludwig Lewisohn, and in particular on his novel The Island Within, which, as suggested by the title, can be read as a representation of the protagonist’s inner life. Virginia Ricard focused on the way community is represented in the novel, on the trope of the island and on the book’s critique of assimilation.

12 Paule Lévy (Université de Versailles) offered an in-depth discussion of Korea-born, American novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, a book that defies easy categorisation due to its manifold narrative ruptures and unfixed boundaries. As the narrator explores her own genealogy, she inscribes missing narratives into official history and powerfully evokes the history of colonisation. Paule Lévy showed how the book’s unfaithful transcription and translation emphasize its problematic relationship with its readers.

13 The last speaker of the day, Lianne Moyes (Université de Montréal) completed the circle by returning to Larissa Lai’s discussion of the relationship between Indigenous people and immigrants in Canada. Lianne Moyes’s paper dealt with Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin, a novel that represents the Oka Crisis from the point of view of a non-native woman of Guyanese heritage who befriends a Native woman. The book explores (dis)similarities in the self- and other-constructions of immigrants and First Nations people, as well as Canada’s reluctance to acknowledge its colonial history. The book, it was argued, can be read as an allegory of the relationship between Canada and First Nations in the sense that Canadians are always dominant. Linking the several papers was the idea that, despite the desire to find an individual and communal sense of self, it is impossible to ever be fully “at home”.

Day 2: Saturday, March 12th 2011

14 The second day was opened by Deborah Madsen (University of Geneva), the second keynote speaker, who presented a paper entitled “The Rhetoric of Double Allegiance: Imagined Communities in North American Diasporic Chinese Literatures”. Deborah Madsen zoomed in on one of the conference’s most strongly targeted questions, “Where are you from?”, and suggested that mainstream diasporic Chinese literature answers the question with “neither (here) – nor (there)” i.e. with a double negative denying the migrant a sense of belonging. This “Orientalist airport paradigm”, which can be found in novels by Amy Tan and Wayson Choy, is consonant with the dominant ideology in suggesting it is only possible to have one affiliation and in restating the nationalistic desire to belong either “here” or “there”. Deborah Madsen suggested to exchange that rhetoric for a “both-and paradigm” as exemplified by works by Fred Wah and Larissa Lai. Rather than repeating the illusion of an imaginary, fixed homeland, these authors play with the conventions of nationalism and accentuate that the migrant can never return. Emphasis was put on multiple national affiliations, and

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on transnational forms of immigrant belonging. The discussion that ensued found itself confronted with the inability to completely dismiss dualistic oppositions, as the “both- and paradigm” also consists of two elements, which are inevitably suggestive of essence and stability.

Session 3: “Borders, Borderlands, Homelands”

15 The attention to “Borders, Borderlands, Homelands” continued in the conference’s third session, which was opened by Yves-Charles Grandjeat (Université Bordeaux 3) and his discussion of Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came With Them. Yves-Charles Grandjeat paid close attention to the chronotope of the barrio and illustrated the ways identity and space are interconnected in this strongly emplaced narrative. At the heart of his discussion was the idea that there is no time before exile, that loss is what links the characters and that loss as such can be seen as fiction’s main catalyst.

16 Cristina Ghiban-Mocanu (University of Iasi) continued Yves-Charles Grandjeat’s exploration of Chicano/a literature by dealing with the writing of Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros and their use of neplanta (i.e. the liminal) as a literary topos, functioning both as actual space and as metaphor.

17 Michel Feith (Université de Nantes), like Yves-Charles Grandjeat, considered the importance of fiction writing to imagining the self and community. His focus was on the figure of the trickster and intertextuality in contemporary Native American minority writing, more specifically in Louis Owens’s Nightland and Dark River, and their problematization of notions of authenticity and (Native) identity.

18 Marie-Agnès Gay (Université Lyon 3) offered an intriguing reading of Shawn Wong’s Homebase, a fourth generation Chinese-American coming-of-age story centred on the essentialist quest for identity. The quest that is at the heart of the novel was shown to be destabilized by the text’s multiple uncanny passages as well as its poetics of defamiliarization, both of which stress the inescapable persistence of the in-between. At the heart of this session was the notion of the liminal and the fact that it can function both as a critique and as a creative force.

Session 4: “Immigration, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism”

19 The fourth and final session aimed at exploring “Immigration, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism” and started with Belén Martín-Lucas’s (University of Vigo) investigation of a Canadian (The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto) and American (Stealing Buddah’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen) fictional response to one of the ultimate classics of displacement, i.e. Little House on the Prairie. Both Hiromi Goto’s and Bich Minh Nguyen’s novels were shown to present critical evaluations of processes of racialization and of racism in Ingalls Wilder’s text.

20 Claire Omohovère (Université de Montpellier) accentuated the similarities between two novels dealing with the problems experienced by teenagers trying to grow up in a marginal(ized) community, one Indian (Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed), another Mennonite (Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness). The prominent place attributed to modernity as well as the novels’ energy and humour proved to be of central importance.

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21 Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour (Université Paris Ouest) presented a paper on “Jamaica Kincaid’s Regressive Writing” based on The Autobiography of My Mother. Again, the return to a pre-colonial past proved impossible and, as a result, the protagonist found herself trapped and isolated in her mind. Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour underlined the importance of the text’s narrative strategies in its portrayal of the oscillation between regression and opening up to language and communication.

22 Anca-Raluca Radu (University of Gottingen) brought the conference to a close with her reading of What We All Long For by Caribbean-born Dionne Brand. Anca-Raluca Radu contrasted the first generation’s acceptation of their categorisation as hyphenated people in the multicultural Canadian mosaic with the younger generation’s search for forms of community that surpass ethnic belonging. The speaker underlined the importance of “new cosmopolitanism,” which puts forward “bricolated identities” and processes of change, and can be opposed to multiculturalism and its reliance on the binary opposition between a white Canadian “we” and a non-white, visible “other.” This question was a common thread in the session, as all the papers focused on ways of avoiding the trap of thinking about belonging in a dualistic way.

Conclusion

23 Coming from a multitude of places and belonging to a wide variety of communities, the conference speakers and audience gathered in Strasbourg formed an imagined community that considerably added to understanding the complex nature of home, belonging and (individual and communal) identity, and the way those notions are problematized in and by North American and Canadian minority and exilic writing. Even though the participants represented different disciplines and brought their own interests to the discussion, the borders seemingly separating them were easily crossed, leading to an interesting array of cross-fertilizations. Michel Feith’s discussion of the trickster, for instance, added to Anca-Raluca Radu’s discussion of What We All Long For and was strongly related to exchanges on many of the other novels as well, as several of them stressed the importance of border crossing and the inescapable persistence of the liminal. Important as well was the idea of double marginalization (e.g. Claire Omhovère, Martin Kuester, Pilar Cuder-Dominguez), which confirmed the need to profoundly question the dynamics within given communities and the complex workings of insider- outsider politics. Another purpose common to all participants was to reassert the importance of language and writing. Attention was repeatedly drawn to the central role story-telling plays in “recuperating” a sense of self and community, while at the same time stressing the unreliability of language, as illustrated by the books’ transgressive narrative techniques. The diversity of novels discussed—American, Canadian, old, contemporary, canonical, marginal—led to an agreement on the need to continue to challenge notions of authenticity and community, and move towards a new paradigm that acknowledges the plural nature of our affiliations. What matters most is not to find an unequivocal “either-or” answer to the question “Where are you from?” but to share stories of movement and allow different forms of displacement and diverse (traumatic) experiences of (forced) movement to interact—a process of exchange that was embodied by the conference itself.

24 Conference website: http://monica.manolescu.free.fr/conference2011.html Linda Gass’s website: http://www.lindagass.com/

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INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

SOFIE DE SMYTER Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

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« London-New York : Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Influences in the Arts and Literature » Colloque international, Université Nancy 2, 1-2 avril 2011

Marie Guély-Varcin

1 Le colloque « London-New York: Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Influences in the Arts and Literature », organisé par Claudine Armand (Université Nancy 2), Pierre Degott et Jean-Philippe Heberlé (Université Paul Verlaine - Metz), avait pour but de confronter les influences croisées des deux villes dans les arts et la littérature, dans une perspective interdisciplinaire. Correspondant aux domaines d’étude des groupes de recherche IDEA (Interdisciplinarité Dans les Études Anglophones, Nancy-Université) et Écritures (Université Paul Verlaine – Metz), quatre sessions se sont tenues : littérature (roman et théâtre), musique populaire et opéra, art et architecture, et comédie musicale.

2 Claudine Armand, avec Pierre Degott et Jean-Philippe Heberlé, ont tour à tour introduit les différentes sessions par un historique retraçant l’évolution des échanges interculturels entre les deux pays. L’intervention liminaire de Pierre Degott a ouvert le colloque. Il a expliqué comment, dès la période coloniale, la vie culturelle de Londres influençait celle de New York, pour ensuite remarquer comment la ville anglaise s’inspira graduellement des contextes new-yorkais, inversant le rapport dominant- dominé initié lors des premières étapes de la colonisation. Claudine Armand a ensuite présenté un phénomène identique dans les arts plastiques et l’architecture : elle a retracé l'évolution de la peinture américaine en relation avec cette « transatlanticité », essentiellement depuis la fondation de la Royal Academy jusqu’à la période contemporaine. Enfin, Jean-Philippe Heberlé a montré comment certains musiciens de jazz anglais viennent désormais vivre, enregistrer, ou trouver l'inspiration à New York. En ce qui concerne la comédie musicale, les échanges et transferts culturels sont très nombreux, les compositeurs des deux pays s'influençant mutuellement. Les trois intervenants ont ainsi démontré comment une même tendance a pu se dessiner dans les différents domaines du monde artistique—le passage de l’influence anglaise aux

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États-Unis à l’influence américaine en Angleterre—, aboutissant à une véritable collaboration entre les artistes des deux villes dans les différents milieux artistiques. Une inter-émulation s’est donc établie entre les deux pays, chacun devenant source d’expérimentation et de stimulation pour l’autre.

Séance 1. Littérature (roman et théâtre)

3 Jessica Allen Hanssen (University of Norland, Norvège) a ouvert la première demi- journée, consacrée à la littérature, avec une communication intitulée « Negotiating the Exchange : The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon, Gent. and the Politics of Cross Atlantic Culture ». Elle a démontré que Washington Irving ne put vraiment voir l’Amérique qu’une fois qu’il l’avait quittée pour l’Angleterre, où il fut marqué par un sentiment de solitude et d’isolement. Cela lui permit de se distancier des deux pays afin de créer un nouveau style d’écriture, à un moment où les Américains éprouvaient le besoin de créer leur propre littérature et de voir certains stéréotypes les concernant corrigés, alors que ses écrits étaient tout d’abord destinés à un public anglais. Sous le pseudonyme de George Crayon, Washington Irving s’exprima à travers la pastorale pour montrer l’Angleterre sous un jour nouveau en prenant subtilement partie pour ses compatriotes. L’originalité de ce travail lui permit, en devenant le père du genre de la nouvelle, d’imposer la littérature américaine dans le monde littéraire. En opposant le « Nouveau Monde » à un monde plus ancien, soit deux mondes aux valeurs différentes (« the Established » vs. « the Frontier »), il devint le premier Américain à être acclamé comme « homme de lettres ».

4 Quittant la thématique de l’exil, Joanna Storalek (Cardinal Selfan Wyszynsky University, Varsovie, Pologne) a proposé une communication intitulée « New York and London as Artistic Labyrinths in Detective Fiction : Quest for Identity and Tempetuous Human Relations in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Martin Amis’s London Fields and Money ». En comparant ces deux auteurs, Joanna Storalek a montré comment la ville reflète ou influence le fonctionnement des protagonistes. New York apparaît comme un labyrinthe dans lequel se perd le narrateur à la recherche de son identité, alors que Londres ressemble à une ville que condamne une menace lancinante. Par son traitement métaphysique, New York permet au narrateur et au lecteur de découvrir à quel point leur ignorance sur eux-mêmes est grande alors que, dans les romans de Martin Amis, le point de vue du personnage qui n’est plus capable de distinguer la fiction de la réalité est contrebalancé par celui d'un observateur avisé et critique de la société qui l’entoure. Selon Joanna Storalek, tandis que New York serait le labyrinthe symbolisant le questionnement intérieur du narrateur de New York Trilogy, Londres serait la représentation d’un monde en déclin, illustré par les personnages de London Fields et Money, qui concentrent tous les troubles et maux qui frappent la société actuelle.

Séance 2. Musique populaire et opéra

5 L’après-midi était consacrée à la scène musicale. Elle s’est ouverte sur une communication de Jérémy Tranmer (Nancy-Université) : « No Future in London, No Past in New York : Punk as a Transatlantic Phenomenon ». L’intervenant a montré que les interactions incessantes entre la scène new-yorkaise et londonienne sont

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révélatrices de deux modes de pensée bien distincts. Dès sa naissance, le punk américain fut présenté comme un phénomène de mode alors que les Punks britanniques étaient très souvent engagés politiquement, de par le contexte de crise que vivait l’Angleterre à la fin des années 1970. Selon Jérémy Tranmer, ce mouvement y reflétait le malaise politique ambiant et une forme d’anti-américanisme sous-jacent. À l’inverse, et aux yeux de nombreux Punks américains, la scène britannique était violente et considérée comme une forme d’expression inférieure. C’est cette compétition qui a permis une constante émulation entre les deux communautés punks. Jeremy Tranmer a en outre souligné l’aspect remarquable de cette contre-culture, à savoir la rapidité à laquelle elle se propagea, principalement par le biais des concerts et sans l’aide de la télévision, dont elle était exclue.

6 Sans quitter le mouvement punk, Justin Wadlow (Université de Picardie) a insisté sur le caractère chaotique de la relation entre les États-Unis et l’Angleterre dans une communication intitulée « I am so bored with the USA » et sous-titrée « Du meurtre du père à une possible réconciliation ». Selon Justin Wadlow, le titre de la chanson des Clash exprime le rejet du modèle américain par les Anglais, alors que c’est à New York que naquit le mouvement punk. D’après les Punks britanniques, New York incarnait un dangereux ennemi pour les Anglais, ou bien la figure tutélaire dont ils devaient s’affranchir. Cependant, Justin Wadlow a rappelé qu’un rapprochement entre les deux pays s’amorça lorsque l’Anglais Malcolm MacLaren décida de travailler l’esthétique vestimentaire inspirée par le T-shirt tagué de Richard Hell, chanteur américain. Mais la réconciliation fut réalisée par les Clash qui, en pleine crise artistique, retrouvèrent leur inspiration à New York en 1981, où la diversité culturelle leur redonna goût aux expérimentations musicales. Suivirent de nombreuses et fructueuses interactions entre les deux pays avec Brian Eno, illustrant la continuation des échanges, qui se poursuivirent jusque dans les années 1990.

7 Changeant radicalement de genre musical, Angela Fodale (Université La Sapienza, Rome, Italie) a abordé à nouveau la thématique du déracinement salvateur avec sa communication « The Rake’s Progress : le dernier ouvrage de l’exil américain de Auden », expliquant le rôle de l’exil dans l’œuvre de W.H. Auden. Bien que cet éloignement ait été très controversé par les Britanniques, Auden le considérait comme productif pour son œuvre. Selon Angela Fodale, les États-Unis et la solitude qu’il y chercha lui redonnèrent la capacité à écrire et lui inspirèrent une poésie fondée sur un questionnement intérieur. Découvrant l’opéra grâce à Chester Kallman, W.H. Auden écrivit le livret de The Rake’s Progress. Le questionnement existentialiste d’Auden se retrouve à travers les quatre personnages représentant les quatre fonctions de la psyché selon Jung. Avec The Rake’s Progress, Auden aborda un sujet anglais mais il conserva la dualité entre l’Angleterre et l’Amérique, notamment en présentant New York comme une ville pleine de possibilités en terme d’ascension sociale, mais tout aussi illusoire que la machine censée transformer la pierre en pain dans The Rake’s Progress. Angela Fodale a enfin rappelé que, lorsqu’il retourna en Europe, Auden choisit de vivre une nouvelle situation d’exil en s’installant en Autriche. Ainsi, son intérêt pour cette forme d’isolement grandit, car il la considérait comme nécessaire à son développement créatif.

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Séance 3. Art et architecture

8 Dédiée aux arts visuels et à l’architecture au XXe siècle, la matinée suivante permit de croiser les regards sur divers médiums. Dans une communication intitulée « New Age Situationists ? Artists’ Response to City Surveillance in London and New York », Penelope Cain (artiste multimédia originaire de Sydney, Australie) s’est interrogée sur le regard que portent les artistes londoniens et new-yorkais sur la télésurveillance, omniprésente dans les deux capitales. S’appuyant sur les travaux des Situationnistes et les écrits théoriques de Guy Debord, elle a analysé quelques œuvres qui mettent en lumière la manipulation de l’individu dans la sphère publique. Il est ressorti de ces analyses que les artistes londoniens se montrent plus subversifs que les artistes new- yorkais dans leur dénonciation de la télésurveillance. Penelope Cain a également évoqué une autre forme de contrôle, la « sousveillance », terme inventé par Steve Mann, qui est une sorte de panoptique inversé. Il s’agit là de remettre en question un État omniscient et omniprésent à travers ce système panoptique mis en place des deux côtés de l’Atlantique.

9 Autre regard : celui du photographe dans l’espace londonien et new-yorkais. Dans sa communication sur « New York-London : the Crossing-over of a Modernist Conception of Photography », Mathilde Bertrand (Université de Poitiers) a démontré à quel point le New York moderniste a été un catalyseur pour les photographes de Londres. En 1940 New York devint la capitale de la photographie lorsqu’une section « photographie » ouvrit au MoMA, ce qui conféra une légitimité artistique au médium. La photographie en tant que forme d’art devint un moyen d’expression institutionnalisé à New York, où la communauté de photographes était très active, alors que la reconnaissance de la photographie comme art nécessita beaucoup plus de temps à Londres. Mathilde Bertrand a rappelé que deux magazines d’art importants virent alors le jour en Angleterre : Creative Camera et Album, qui énonçaient le projet moderniste. Motivés par cette voie, les photographes des deux pays se sont mutuellement influencés en organisant des rencontres à New York, avant que la photographie ne s’institutionnalise à Londres sur le modèle américain, en trouvant une place dans les musées britanniques.

10 Hélène Ibata (Université de Strasbourg) a ensuite présenté une communication intitulée « Staying on the Edge? From New York Graffiti to London Street Art ». Né dans les années 1970 à New York, le graffiti est remarquable de par la spontanéité de son développement, très autonome, et par la stimulation résultant de la compétition entre les tagueurs. Ainsi, la fugacité de l’œuvre, repeinte pour être supprimée ou recouverte par un tagueur rival, caractérise les graffiti. Hélène Ibata a rappelé que les municipalités de Londres et New York ont toutes deux condamné les graffiti comme une activité illégale, New York se montrant plus intransigeante en mettant en pratique une politique de tolérance zéro. Les deux villes ont néanmoins désigné des espaces d’expression libres consacrés aux graffiti dans des entrepôts désaffectés notamment, offrant un nouveau lieu d’exposition, ce qui a motivé le développement des galeries avant-gardistes. Les graffiti sont devenus peu à peu une forme d’art reconnue, plus ouverte que les formes d’art dites traditionnelles. Selon Hélène Ibata, les deux villes diffèrent cependant : les graffiti de New York sont majoritairement des messages individualistes, alors que ceux de Londres cherchent plus à transmettre des messages politiques, marquant un lien plus fort entre tag et art — lien qu’illustre bien l’œuvre de Banksy.

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11 Des graffiti dans l’espace urbain aux graffiti dans le métro — la communication de Roselyne Théron (Université de Nancy) portait sur le Subway new-yorkais et l’Underground londonien, envisagés comme « vecteurs d’une politique artistique assumée depuis plus d’un siècle ». Roselyne Théron a rappelé que la composante transatlantique fut perceptible dès la conception du métro londonien, à travers une collaboration entre l’Angleterre et les États-Unis. Il fut aussi rapidement question d’introduire l’art dans la vie de tous les jours en décorant les stations de métro américaines sur le modèle des londoniennes. Le développement architectural basé sur l’idée plus récente de faire venir la lumière dans les stations de métro est aussi important à Londres qu’à New York, tandis que les deux capitales mettent en place des programmes ayant pour but de développer l’art dans le métro. Selon Roselyne Théron, les programmes lancés par Londres semblent plus formatés, alors que New York cherche à refléter l’aspect cosmopolite de la ville en encourageant la diversité culturelle et ethnique.

12 La séance de cette matinée s’est achevée par une communication intitulée « London Flat, Manhattan Studio of Jimi Hendrix », centrée autour du musicien Jimi Hendrix, figure emblématique du croisement et des influences entre Londres et New York. Marie-Paule MacDonald (The School of Architecture, University of Waterloo, Canada) s’est intéressée à ce personnage mythique à travers les lieux que l’artiste investit dans les deux capitales (appartements, studios d’enregistrement, salles de concerts), les contacts qu’il y noua et ses influences dans le monde de la musique et de l’architecture. Ce musicien américain, qui vécut à Londres et à New York, utilisait des espaces « ordinaires », en contraste avec les événements musicaux « extraordinaires » qu’il cherchait à créer. Jimi Hendrix se montra avant-gardiste par son style musical et sa manière de jouer. Aux États-Unis, il créa son propre studio en sous-sol de son logement, qui contrastait avec son appartement de Londres, situé dans un immeuble de style géorgien.

Séance 4. La Comédie Musicale

13 Après l'art et l'architecture, l'ultime séance du colloque a été consacrée à la comédie musicale. Dans sa communication, « Shakespeare beyond Shakespeare : A Midsummer Night’s Dream et le populaire dans deux comédies musicales américaines », Claire Bardelmann (Université Paul Verlaine – Metz) a étudié le mode de récupération culturel de la pièce de Shakespeare par la culture de masse, notamment à travers l’opéra Swingin’ the Dreams (1939), comédie de Broadway. Swingin’ the Dreams est une adaptation très libre de A Midsummer Night’s Dream qui découle de l’hybridation scénique et culturelle dont procède le genre de la comédie musicale. Comme l’a souligné Claire Bardelmann, sa réceptionpar le grand public fut désastreuse : la comédie musicale ne fut représentée que treize fois, pendant qu’une autre adaptation de la même pièce de Shakespeare, Voices from Syracuse, remportait un grand succès. L’analyse de Claire Bardelmann démontre que la grande qualité musicale de Swingin’ the Dreams est indéniable mais trop complexe pour être comprise et appréciée du grand public, et la démesure ainsi que le manque d’équilibre de l’ensemble serait à l’origine des critiques. D’autres reproches émis par les critiques de 1939 portaient sur le fait que des acteurs noirs puissent jouer du Shakespeare, qui plus est avec des acteurs blancs. Voices from Syracuse correspondait donc mieux à l’imagerie populaire américaine. Il est

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alors intéressant de s’interroger sur la façon dont Swingin’ the Dreams s’appropria le modèle classique anglais pour mettre en valeur la subculture noire américaine par l’hybridation de Shakespeare et du jazz, Swingin’ the Dreams étant né peu après la Renaissance de Harlem.

14 S’intéressant à la comédie musicale au XIXe siècle, Brian Thompson (The Chinese University of Hong-Kong) a évoqué le minstrel show, une forme d’expression apparue aux États-Unis en 1842. Dans sa communication, « London, New York and the Politics of Musical Theatre during the U.S. Civil War », il a rappelé que le genre du minstrel show s’exporta en Angleterre pendant la Guerre de Sécession : les théâtres à New York furent fermés pendant le conflit, ce qui incita les artistes américains à partir pour Londres. Brian Thompson a évoqué la trajectoire de deux artistes, James Unsworth et Henri Drayton, qui illustre l’aspect transatlantique de ces spectacles. La particularité du travail de James Unsworth résidait dans le fait qu’il utilisait la comédie à des fins politiques pour commenter l’actualité tant à New York qu’à Londres, en fonction du pays où il donnait sa représentation. Quant à Henri Drayton, il mit en place le « drawing-room opera comedy » avec sa femme. Ces représentations, données dans l’intimité des salons privés, remportèrent autant de succès en Angleterre qu’aux États- Unis où les Drayton se produisirent à partir de 1859, et où la nouveauté du format, notamment les chansons en anglais, fut très appréciée. Comme l’a enfin rappelé Brian Thompson, les représentations variaient en fonction du pays dans lequel le couple se trouvait, si bien que leurs spectacles s’enrichirent au cours des nouveaux allers-retours qu’ils firent entre l’Angleterre et les États-Unis.

15 Dans le prolongement des interventions, ce colloque international a donné lieu à des échanges féconds entre les différents intervenants mais aussi avec un auditoire varié, rassemblant enseignants-chercheurs, étudiants et membres de la Bibliothèque Américaine de Nancy. La dimension internationale du colloque, la diversité disciplinaire des intervenants, ainsi que les regards croisés portés sur les arts et la littérature ont contribué à expliquer les manières dont New York et Londres s'influencèrent ou continuent de s'influencer dans ces domaines. Enfin, les temps d’échanges ont bien montré à quel point le métissage et l'hybridation des cultures vont souvent de pair avec l'importance de l'exil et du déplacement, préalable à l'observation et à l'analyse de ce qui caractérise une culture plutôt qu'une autre.

ANNEXES

Lien vers le programme du colloque : http://jsbak.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/ london-new-york-program.pdf

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

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AUTEUR

MARIE GUÉLY-VARCIN Nancy-Université

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Un empire comanche ? E.H.E.S.S., 20 juin 2011

Thomas Grillot

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR

Conférence de Pekka Hämäläinen, associate professor à l’Université de Californie à Santa Barbara, co-organisée le lundi 20 juin 2011 à l’EHESS par le Centre d’Études Nord- Américaines (CENA) de l’EHESS et le Réseau pour le Développement Européen de l’Histoire de la Jeune Amérique (REDEHJA), à l’initiative de Cécile Vidal (EHESS, CENA) et de Naomi Wulf (Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, Redehja) Présentation de l’ouvrage The Comanche Empire (Yale UP, 2008), suivie de trois commentaires par Emmanuel Désveaux, EHESS, Institut Marcel Mauss, Christophe Giudicelli, Université de Paris III, MASCIPO, et Gilles Havard, CNRS, MASCIPO.

1 Voir l’histoire nord-américaine depuis le sud-ouest des États-Unis : voilà une stratégie qui depuis une vingtaine d’années provoque des réécritures historiques approfondies, souvent audacieuses, et presque toujours liées à une réévaluation du rôle des populations indigènes. Jusqu’où ce révisionnisme, appuyé sur une méthodologie éclectique et une nouvelle approche du concept de zones-frontières (borderlands) peut- il aller ? C’est la question que la conférence donnée par le professeur de l'Université de Californie à Santa Barbara Pekka Hämälainen au Centre d’études nord-américaines de l’E.H.E.S.S. le 20 juin 2011 a permis d’aborder.

2 L’ouvrage de P. Hämälainen, Comanche Empire (non traduit en français), couronné de 14 prix historiques, propose en effet une relecture radicale des interactions entre peuples indigènes et colonisateurs européens dans la vaste région qui s’étend des plaines du Nouveau Mexique jusqu’au Rio Grande et du fleuve Arkansas jusqu’au golfe du Mexique. Unifiant ce territoire longtemps considérée par l’historiographie comme un entre- deux, P. Hämälainen identifie un ensemble de pratiques sociales, culturelles, politiques, inspirées par un peuple qui entre sur la scène historique au début du 18ème siècle et la domine jusqu’au milieu du siècle suivant : les Comanches. Cette domination offre, explique-t-il, toutes les caractéristiques d’un empire, qu’il nomme du terme espagnol

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de Comanchería. Tout en s’appuyant sur les analyses socio-économiques des zones- frontières1, P. Hämälainen en renverse ainsi le présupposé de marginalité : c’est la centralité du pouvoir comanche dans la région qui ressort de son étude, la longue portée d’une influence qui s’exerce des Rocheuses au Mississippi et aux Plaines du Nord pendant près de 150 ans, et, corrélativement, la marginalité des empires coloniaux euro-américains.

3 Lorsque les Comanches arrivent dans la région vers 1700, il ne s’agit pas d’une simple migration : ce peuple issu des contreforts des Rocheuses met en œuvre un véritable projet colonial qui aboutit, un siècle plus tard, à une hégémonie de type impérial sur le plus grand domaine indigène du nord du continent. La réalisation de ce projet témoigne des capacités d’adaptation exceptionnelle des Comanches : c’est la maîtrise de technologies militaires empruntées qui leur permet d’écarter les autres peuples indigènes comme les Apaches, mais aussi la maîtrise des équilibres écologiques, en particulier ceux qui gouvernent les troupeaux de bisons. À l’aide du cheval et du fusil, ils poussent devant eux des peuples semi-sédentaires auxquels ils imposent des guerres de mouvement destructrices et, pour les Comanches, victorieuses. Si le niveau de la « bande » reste opérant pendant toute la période, les Comanches qui se divisent en deux grands blocs à l’est et à l’Ouest de leur domaine, se montrent également capables de coordonner leurs mouvements. Le cycle annuel de leurs déplacements permet d’assurer l’alternance entre dispersion et regroupements, propice aux conseils inter- bandes, aux négociations diplomatiques et à la planification commune, voire à la sélection de chefs puissants, sinon hégémoniques. On peut alors parler de confédération comanche.

4 L’histoire de ceux qui se pensent comme les « seigneurs des Plaines » ne se réduit pourtant ni à l’organisation de la luttes avec d’autres peuples indigènes, ni même à la violence guerrière (P. Hämälainen évoque néanmoins des périodes de « guerre totale »). Au-delà d’une brillante adaptation à un environnement nouveau et conflictuel, il faut voir dans leur réussite la mise en œuvre d’une stratégie de contrôle et d’extraction. Leur hégémonie se caractérise ainsi par l’alternance raisonnée entre raids et pillages, et diplomatie et commerce, amenant une exploitation systématique de la région et la captation à leur profit de ses principaux réseaux d’échanges. Elle leur permet de jouer le rôle fondamental de diffuseurs de chevaux volés aux Espagnols, qui remontent à travers eux jusque dans les Plaines du nord. Ils sont bel et bien le modèle de toutes les sociétés équestres des Plaines. Sur cette base, ils transforment les provinces du nord du Mexique en zones vassales, hinterland d’où sont régulièrement emmenés en esclavage des centaines d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants qui alimentent la croissance de la population et des richesses comanches. En 1786, les autorités espagnoles se voient contraintes de traiter avec ce puissant voisin qui parvient à isoler presque totalement les colonies du Nouveau-Mexique et du Texas. Mais cet accord, accepté par les Comanches en raison de difficultés internes temporaires, ne dure pas : ils conservent leur indépendance, restent agressivement dominants, et impériaux.

5 Il ne s’agit pas, dans Comanche Empire, de raconter une conquête mais d’expliquer son caractère durable, puisque les Comanches ne sont pas remplacés par un autre peuple indigène. Ils sont, de fait, plus qu’une simple société prédatrice. Leur adaptabilité se transforme en hégémonie parce qu’ils se montrent aptes à organiser durablement la région, divisant les provinces mexicaines pour mieux les exploiter, et manipulant, à côté des armes, les éléments d’un soft power avant la lettre. Conscients de leur

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supériorité, qui transforme leur langue en lingua franca du commerce, et les voient imités jusque dans leur style vestimentaire, ils accueillent aussi dans leur domaine des tribus alliées, semi-vassalisées. À l’intérieur de ce domaine dans lequel nul ne peut s’aventurer sans leur accord, ils font régner ce que P. Hämälainen n’hésite pas à appeler une « paix comanche », pour lui la marque incontestable de leur organisation impériale.

6 L’empire comanche est donc centré sur lui-même. Il n’est pas le simple bénéficiaire des faiblesses des empires français, espagnol ou américain. Il s’effondre sous son propre poids, même si l’avancée américaine joue un rôle non-négligeable dans la vitesse de cet effondrement. Les troupeaux de bisons, trop sollicités, se font de moins en moins nombreux à partir du début du 19ème siècle. Les succès contre l’empire espagnol puis le Mexique indépendant (les raids comanches, pénètrent de plus en plus loin sur son territoire jusqu’à aboutir à l’occupation semi-permanente de secteurs de l’État du Coahuila) entraînent l’arrivée massive des Américains. En 1825, déçus de la défection de Mexico qui les abandonne face aux Comanches, les élites du Texas ouvrent leurs frontières aux citoyens américains, espérant transformer leurs colonies en zones tampons contre les Comanches. Avec l’indépendance du Texas, puis la guerre américano-mexicaine de 1846-1848, l’étau se resserre autour de la Comanchería. En 1875, après la fin du répit offert par la guerre de Sécession et une situation climatique favorable, les Comanches, affamés et pressés de toutes parts, sont contraints à accepter la relégation dans le Territoire indien, futur Oklahoma.

7 Un empire en remplace un autre, mais surtout un empire en prépare un autre : le cas des Comanches invite à repenser la manière dont les États-Unis ont pu s’appuyer sur des expériences hégémoniques antérieures et indigènes pour s’étendre, puisque, de toute évidence, les Comanches les ont précédés dans le Sud-ouest, qui était au surplus loin d’être une terre vierge de toute construction politique. Le cas s’est présenté ailleurs : avec la confédération de Powhatan, celle des Iroquois, ou l’hégémonie sioux dans les Plaines du Nord. Dans ces trois cas, comme dans le Sud-ouest sous les Comanches, un empire indigène a crée vides et divisions propres à faciliter la pénétration ultérieure des Euro-américains.

8 Dans cette grande synthèse révisionniste, ce qui a frappé avant tout les commentateurs, c’est la notion même d’empire. Pour Emmanuel Désveaux (EHESS, Institut Marcel Mauss), l’empire suppose un pouvoir central. Gilles Havard (CNRS, MASCIPO) remarque de son côté l’absence de frontières nettes, tandis que l’existence de structures politiques englobantes lui paraît mal assurée. Il pointe cependant la force de la thèse et le caractère heuristique de la notion, et évoque la possibilité qu’elle rencontre un succès comparable à celui qu’a connu la notion de middle ground mise en avant par Richard White dans la région des Grands Lacs2. Christophe Giudicelli (Université de Paris III, MASCIPO) reconnaît l’existence d’un impérialisme indigène mais éprouve lui aussi des difficultés à percevoir une véritable structure impériale dans la société comanche. L’échelle d’analyse, qui délaisse le niveau local pour s’intéresser de préférences à de grands agrégats, Comanches, Français, Espagnols, Américains, Apaches, et à des régions immenses, lui semble favoriser dans une certaine mesure une rationalisation a posteriori des évolutions sociales et géopolitiques de la région. E. Désveaux s’interroge quant à lui sur les causes de l’effondrement : les Comanches n’ont- ils pas été manipulés par les Américains face au Mexique ? Pour tous, la thèse de P. Hämäläinen aurait pu bénéficier de la comparaison avec d’autres peuples indigènes

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hégémoniques à travers les Amériques et s’inspirer des nombreuses études d’ethnogenèse au sein des empires euro-américains. Les Comanches, d’ailleurs, sont-ils si différents des autres « barbares » que les Espagnols identifiaient aux différentes marges de leur empire américain ?

9 Un second trait appelle le commentaire des participants : c’est l’insistance de P. Hämäläinen sur le rôle structurant de la violence dans l’histoire du Sud-ouest, à rebours peut-être des études de l’accommodation qui ont fleuri dans le domaine consacré aux indigènes des Amériques. Est-ce à dire, se demande C. Giudicelli, qu’il rejette la notion de métissage ? Pour G. Havard, Comanche Empire, avec son insistance sur le caractère planifié des conflits et la rationalité économique des acteurs, fait fi des soubassements culturels de la violence, et ignore l’existence d’un ethos guerrier dans les Plaines. Il remarque d’ailleurs la part mineure (un chapitre) directement dévolue dans l’ouvrage à l’analyse de la société et de la culture comanches.

10 À ce deuxième ensemble de questions, P. Hämäläinen répond en défendant l’idée que les raids comanches, étalés sur plus d’un siècle ne peuvent être expliquée uniquement par la pratique culturelle de la vengeance3 et que des enjeux économiques sont manifestement à l’œuvre. Le concept d’empire peut effectivement poser problème. Dépourvus de pouvoir central, de bureaucratie, d’armées permanentes, d’un appareil de propagande ou même de colonies proprement dites, la Comanchería représente un exemple d’empire très atypique. La difficulté de démontrer clairement une intentionnalité, un projet impérial dans les traces laissées par les Comanches, ne doit cependant pas faire oublier l’essentiel : l’établissement de la Comanchería comme un espace structuré, coexistant avec d’autres entités politiques, et qui, en les exploitant, devient en peu de temps un centre de pouvoir incontournable. Le concept d’empire et l’insistance sur son aspect économique servent donc à révéler une histoire oubliée par une historiographie centrée sur la conquête américaine et les Plaines du Nord. Il sert aussi à mettre au jour des structures (patterns), notamment politiques et économiques, qui avaient jusque là échappé aux historiens, fascinés avant tout par l’image fantasmatique du guerrier indien.

11 La discussion suscitée par Comanche Empire révèle, quant à elle, les tensions inhérentes au projet révisionniste qui s’est fait jour dans l’historiographie du Sud-ouest américain, et plus largement dans l’histoire dite « coloniale » de l’Amérique du nord. En proposant de placer au cœur des évolutions écologiques et géopolitiques de la région, la capacité d’action (agency) supérieure d’un peuple indigène, P. Hämäläinen propose une histoire paradoxalement classique de grandeur et de décadence. Cette synthèse audacieuse dépend cependant d’un équilibre entre histoire et anthropologie, échelle macro et micro, et, en définitive, de la capacité à révéler dans les sources un point de vue indigène sur lequel un accord est encore loin d’avoir émergé entre historien-nes.

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NOTES

1. Comanche Empire cite en particulier James F. Brooks (Captives & cousins : slavery, kinship, and community in the Southwest borderlands, Williamsburg, Virginia, University of North Carolina Press, 2002) et Gary Clayton Anderson (The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830 : ethnogenesis and reinvention, Norman , University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 2. Richard White, Le Middle ground : Indiens, empires et républiques dans la région des Grands Lacs, 1650-181, Toulouse, Anacharsis, 2009. 3. Une thèse dont il rappelle qu’elle est défendue par un autre spécialiste de la région, Brian DeLay dans War of a thousand deserts : Indian raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008.

INDEX

Thèmes : Actualité de la recherche

AUTEUR

THOMAS GRILLOT CENA, EHESS

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Comptes rendus

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Hélène Quanquin, Christine Lorre- Johnston et Sandrine Ferré-Rode, Comment comparer le Canada avec les États-Unis aujourd’hui : Enjeux et pratiques, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009

Laurence Cros

1 Cet ouvrage collectif reprend les communications présentées lors de journées d’études organisées par les auteures en avril et octobre 2006, sous l’égide du Centre de recherche sur l’Amérique du Nord (CRAN) de l’Université de Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle.

2 L’introduction met en place le cadre théorique dans lequel s’organise la comparaison entre Canada et États-Unis et note que celle-ci est avant tout le fait de chercheurs canadiens. Un des intérêts de l’ouvrage est que la réflexion comparatiste est ici menée hors du cadre nord-américain, apportant ainsi un point de vue extérieur qui brise le tête-à-tête entre les deux pays. L’autre intérêt est de mêler les apports de plusieurs disciplines (littérature, histoire et sciences politiques) qui contribuent à la démarche comparatiste et permettent d’explorer des thèmes communs via des approches différentes.

3 Pour donner une unité aux objets disparates de ces diverses disciplines, les auteures se sont attachées à faire apparaître trois grands thèmes (politique, espace, et migration) qui structurent l’ouvrage.

4 En préambule à ces trois parties, Richard Cavell de l’université de Colombie britannique propose une réinterprétation de l’article de Marshall McLuhan, « Canada : The Borderline Case » (1967). McLuhan insistait alors sur l’importance du Canada comme « contre-environnement » à l’hégémonie sociale, politique et culturelle des États-Unis. Selon McLuhan, l’identité du Canada est une identité « software », à l’opposé de

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l’identité « hardware » des États-Unis : il s’agit d’une identité discrète perpétuellement en cours d’accomplissement, de définition et de médiation entre des éléments disparates et de multiples frontières intérieures. Pour McLuhan, cette identité constituait le modèle idéal pour le monde électronique du village planétaire. Généralisant à partir de la réflexion de McLuhan, Cavell montre que dans notre monde globalisé caractérisé par le flux continu de l’information électronique, les zones frontières ne sont plus à la périphérie des systèmes mais en deviennent le centre, de même que le local peut devenir le global. Il s’agit d’une relecture riche de l’article de McLuhan, qui en reprend les éléments essentiels tout en apportant de très nombreuses références plus contemporaines, qui permettent d’élargir la réflexion comparatiste sur les identités nationales dans le temps (des années 1960 à aujourd’hui) et dans l’espace (au-delà du cadre Canada/États-Unis).

5 La première partie, intitulée « Espace politique et modèle américain : échanges et influences », met l’accent sur la dimension politique de la comparaison entre les deux pays, plus particulièrement sur les processus d’influence, d’échange, et d’opposition.

6 Marine Le Puloch montre la convergence entre les décisions judiciaires américaines et canadiennes concernant le titre autochtone de propriétés foncières. Celui-ci se fonde sur l’héritage britannique partagé ainsi que sur une vision du monde eurocentriste, qui fait de la « doctrine de la découverte », utilisée par le juge Marshall en 1823 et reprise par les Canadiens en 1887, le fondement de la souveraineté sur le sol. L’article conclut que les deux pays continuent d’entretenir une relation coloniale avec les peuples autochtones.

7 De même, Yannick Meunier dans son article sur « Les premières mesures de protection des sites autochtones » montre que l’influence des États-Unis sur le Canada s’observe dans les pratiques de pillage des sites indiens, mais aussi dans l’adoption en 1927 par le Canada d’un amendement à la Loi sur les Indiens qui s’inspire de l’appareil législatif états-unien. Pourtant, influence se conjugue avec rivalité, puisque la loi canadienne inspirée de la loi américaine de 1906 sur les antiquités vise avant tout à faire cesser l’exportation du patrimoine autochtone canadien vers les États-Unis.

8 L’article de Salah Oueslati sur les groupes d’intérêt public (GIP) montre que l’héritage institutionnel et les valeurs politiques différentes du Canada et des États-Unis génèrent plus de divergences que de convergences. Dans les deux pays, les GIP jouent un rôle grandissant pour représenter des groupes jusque là exclus du processus politique. Néanmoins, ils sont plus puissants aux États-Unis du fait de la méfiance vis-à-vis de l’autorité publique et de l’existence du bipartisme. Au Canada, leur utilité est plus limitée par la conviction que l’État est le meilleur garant de l’intérêt général et par la pratique du multipartisme. Le fonctionnement en est aussi très différent avec, aux États-Unis, une concentration de leur action sur le Congrès et un recours fréquent au contentieux devant les tribunaux, là où, au Canada, ils visent plutôt une collaboration consensuelle avec les hauts fonctionnaires.

9 Enfin, Andrew Ives, dans son étude des élections canadiennes de 1911 et 1988, qui ont porté sur la question du libre-échange avec les États-Unis, revient au thème de l’influence, en montrant à quel point la peur de l’influence états-unienne constitue une thématique centrale du débat politique au Canada. L’analyse réfute l’idée d’une évolution des Canadiens au cours du siècle vers l’acceptation du libre-échange.

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10 La deuxième partie interroge la part de convergence et de divergence dans le rapport à l’espace réel ou imaginaire aux États-Unis et au Canada.

11 Hélène Harter note que le développement parallèle des banlieues dans les deux pays après 1945 peut laisser croire à l’existence d’un modèle urbain nord-américain. Néanmoins il existe des signes importants de distinction (seul un tiers des Canadiens vivent en banlieue contre la moitié des Américains, avec des centres-villes plus attrayants, sans ghettos et un taux de crime violent beaucoup plus bas au Canada) qui indiquent que les particularismes nationaux se traduisent par une identité spécifique des villes canadiennes au sein du modèle nord-américain.

12 L’article de Laurence Gervais-Linon est centré sur le développement de la gentrification de ce modèle urbain commun. Néanmoins, elle note que les contextes nationaux spécifiques ont mené à des interprétations divergentes du phénomène ; aux États-Unis, on trouve une interprétation économique du différentiel de loyer et une théorie de la revanche des classes moyennes ; au Canada domine une interprétation socioculturelle qui insiste sur l’émergence d’une nouvelle classe moyenne plus créatrice, s’émancipant de la monotonie et des valeurs de la banlieue.

13 Dans son article sur la géographie canadienne dans Affliction de Russell Banks, Claire Omhovère compare le rôle joué par la géographie dans la littérature au Canada et aux États-Unis. Si la littérature américaine a tendance à donner à la géographie une fonction descriptive, la littérature canadienne développe souvent une véritable poétique de l’espace. Le roman de l’Américain Russell Banks, à cet égard, se distingue en accordant un rôle essentiel à la géographie non seulement comme décor mais aussi comme élément à part entière de la cohérence narrative.

14 La troisième partie propose une comparaison des rapports que les immigrés entretiennent avec le Canada et les États-Unis.

15 L’article de Sandrine Ferré-Rode, qui analyse les témoignages d’immigrés noirs au Canada, rassemblés dans The Refugee de Benjamin Drew (1856), montre que le Canada est perçu comme le monde de la liberté et de la probité, contrairement aux États-Unis, vus comme le pays de la tyrannie et de l’hypocrisie. Néanmoins les témoignages nuancent ce portrait flatteur du Canada : celui-ci n’est pas le pays de cocagne rêvé et les Noirs y sont confrontés à un racisme ordinaire. Le Sud des Etats-Unis reste la patrie dont on regrette le climat et la qualité de vie. Cette nostalgie explique que nombre d’immigrés noirs aient regagné le Sud des États-Unis après l’abolition de l’esclavage.

16 À première vue, on retrouve cette même vision d’un Canada comme second choix décevant par rapport à l’Amérique rêvée dans les récits de vie d’exilés allemands fuyant le nazisme qu’a analysés Patrick Farges. En effet, nombre de ces émigrés sont venus au Canada par défaut, faute de pouvoir immigrer aux États-Unis. Au départ le Canada fait donc figure de pis-aller, mais le discours change lorsque l’exilé s’est approprié ce pays non choisi. Des années après, les exilés du nazisme apprécient finalement d’être venus dans ce Canada converti entretemps au multiculturalisme, qui permet aux immigrants de « garder un accent ».

17 L’article de Christine Lorre-Johnston compare deux romans sino-canadien et sino- américain et souligne leurs convergences lorsqu’ils permettent de revenir sur le « grand récit des Amériques » dans une perspective continentale ; mais ce faisant, ils révèlent les spécificités propres à chaque littérature : le roman sino-canadien, pour faire le récit longtemps gardé secret du racisme dont les Chinois ont été victimes au

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Canada ; le roman sino-américain pour souligner l’importance de la mémoire individuelle plus que collective.

18 Enfin François Durpaire analyse l’identité transnationale de la communauté noire francophone du Canada. Selon lui, les immigrants ne se perçoivent pas comme une diaspora, mais comme une métaspora, portant en elle non seulement l’Afrique d’origine mais aussi tous les lieux de transition qui l’ont menée au Canada. L’article montre que les catégories traditionnelles d’ethnie, religion et langue explosent dans cette nouvelle communauté transnationale, l’essentiel étant le brassage et le métissage. Enfin l’article montre que cette communauté s’oppose à une conception étroite de la francophonie comme québécoise « pure laine », et préfère alors migrer vers les États-Unis. Il y a donc une porosité de la frontière entre le Canada et les États-Unis, les migrants s’installant d’abord à Montréal, puis à Toronto, puis enfin dans une métropole états-unienne, dans un processus d’intégration progressive au sein d’une Amérique du Nord perçue comme un tout transnational.

19 Il s’agit d’un ouvrage stimulant et intéressant. Chaque article couvre de façon détaillée son propre thème selon l’épistémologie de sa discipline. Le lecteur, qu’il soit historien, politiste, ou littéraire, ne trouvera bien sûr pas le même intérêt à tous les articles. Néanmoins, la démarche commune de la comparaison qui apparait directement ou indirectement dans tous les articles unifie le côté à première vue disparate de l’ouvrage et permet d’apprécier la relation complexe du Canada aux États-Unis, qui oscille entre influence et opposition, convergence et divergence. L’ouvrage met ainsi en lumière la fragilité de l’identité canadienne, objet de questionnement constant depuis la naissance du pays, et qui se définit en grande partie par le biais de la comparaison avec les États- Unis. La relecture particulièrement réussie de McLuhan fournit un apport théorique précieux et enrichit beaucoup la réflexion sur la comparaison.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

LAURENCE CROS Université Paris-Diderot

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Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner : Les Noirs du coin de la rue, traduction et préface de Célia Bense Ferreira Alves, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Collection « Le sens social », 2010

Catherine Pouzoulet

1 Initialement publiée en 1967, la monographie d’Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner : A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men, s’est imposée comme un classique de la sociologie urbaine américaine, qui, dans cette nouvelle parution aux Presses Universitaires de Rennes, est maintenant accessible au public français dans la traduction de Célia Bense Ferreira Alves, sociologue à l’Université Paris VIII. Enrichi d’une longue préface de la traductrice et accompagné d’une introduction et d’une annexe méthodologique de l’auteur, ce texte constitue un excellent document de travail sur le contexte politique des années soixante et sur la méthodologie d’une enquête sociologique.

2 Le travail de terrain qu’entreprend en effet Elliot Liebow en 1962 dans le cadre de la préparation d’une thèse de doctorat en anthropologie de la Catholic University of America s’inscrit dans un projet plus large, une enquête sur l’éducation des enfants dans les familles à bas revenus du District de Columbia conduite par le Health and Welfare Council grâce à une subvention du National Institute of Mental Health. Créé en 1949, cet organisme fédéral avait reçu en effet de généreux financements pour mener « au plan national une analyse et une réévaluation objectives et complètes des problèmes économiques et humains liés à la santé mentale » (13) à la suite de l’adoption en 1955 d’une loi sur l’étude de la santé mentale (Mental Health Study Act). De fait, l’Institut met en place au début des années soixante des centres de recherche sur « la schizophrénie, la santé mentale des enfants et des familles, le suicide, la délinquance, les questions de santé mentale des minorités et les problèmes urbains » (13). Cette volonté affirmée de

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résoudre les problèmes sociaux en les abordant de manière scientifique allait devenir une démarche caractéristique du « libéralisme » de l’ère Kennedy-Johnson. Tally’s Corner porte ainsi la marque d’une confiance dans le « social engineering » : cette capacité réformatrice du gouvernement fédéral souleva de grands espoirs avant d’être démentie par les émeutes urbaines de la fin des années soixante et par la radicalisation des militants noirs. Elle fut ensuite désavouée par les nouveaux conservateurs qui contestaient le principe même de l’activisme gouvernemental en matière sociale.

3 Elliot Liebow s’est ainsi trouvé recruté pour conduire, au sein d’une enquête sur les conditions de vie des enfants de milieux défavorisés, un travail de terrain novateur autour des « hommes de la rue » d’un quartier pauvre de Washington, D.C. (le terme de ghetto ne sera jamais employé), qui jusque-là n’avaient fait, à la différence des femmes et des enfants concernés par les mesures d’aide sociale (en particulier le programme AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children), l’objet d’aucune étude sérieuse. À un moment donc où les pouvoirs publics entreprenaient de mobiliser ressources publiques et privées « dans un effort concerté d’éradiquer du pays la délinquance et la dépendance » (29), il avait paru urgent aux chercheurs de corriger la myopie des études antérieures qui tendaient à négliger l’homme noir de classe populaire, parce qu’il était moins visible et accessible, et que de surcroît, il était considéré « comme une personne ne nécessitant pas ou ne méritant pas l’aide de la société » (30). On avait de ce fait eu trop tendance jusque-là à donner une représentation des familles noires vivant dans la pauvreté comme d’un « monde peuplé de femmes et d’enfants » (30). Mais la guerre contre la pauvreté déclarée par l’administration Johnson s’accommodait mal de données aussi lacunaires sur les classes populaires. Et il n’était pas possible de continuer à définir l’homme adulte comme « absent », ou à le dépeindre comme « une sorte de figure fantomatique qui entre et sort de la vie de chacun des membres de la famille » (30).

4 C’est à la suggestion du directeur du projet qu’Elliot Liebow choisit donc de s’intéresser à ces hommes noirs « du coin de la rue », reprenant ainsi une étude pionnière de William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society, qui, le premier, en 1955, avait fait de ces intersections de rue, où traditionnellement dans un plan en damier s’implantent des commerces, un objet sociologique à part entière. Mais plus que l’ethnographie d’un lieu physique, ce que recherche Liebow est un point d’ancrage où il lui soit donné d’observer l’ensemble des activités sociales des habitants du quartier. Comme le fait remarquer la traductrice dans sa préface, « le street corner sert à la fois de lieu de rencontre, d’échange d’informations, de reconnaissance et d’évaluation, de forum, de refuge, de cadre pour un ensemble d’activités légales ou illégales, publiques ou privées » (15).

5 Liebow a reçu pour toute consigne de trouver un quartier qui puisse être « un bon endroit pour se mouiller les pieds » (142). La ville de Washington, lieu de passage des migrants noirs en provenance du Sud, particulièrement des États de la côte est (Alabama, Géorgie, Caroline du Nord et du Sud, Virginie), a déjà connu une transformation démographique radicale qui a donné aux Noirs la majorité de la population (452 000 Noirs sur une population totale de 791 000 habitants selon les chiffres de 1962). Liebow connaît bien la capitale et a été témoin de ce processus de succession raciale dans le quartier pauvre où il a lui-même grandi. Né en 1925 de parents juifs, immigrés de l’Europe de l’Est (sa mère était originaire de Lettonie et son père de Russie), il avait été témoin du racisme contre les Noirs mais s’était également

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familiarisé avec eux, qui constituaient une partie de la clientèle de l’épicerie de son père. C’est donc naturellement qu’il choisit de réaliser son enquête de terrain dans un quartier noir de la ville. L’injonction « allez là-bas et comportez vous en anthropologue » (142) le laisse d’abord perplexe, mais très vite, ayant choisi d’explorer un quartier pauvre situé dans le deuxième arrondissement de la capitale, son attention se porte sur un carry out, l’un de ces magasins de vente à emporter qui sert à la fois d’épicerie, de débit de boisson et de restauration rapide. Il abandonne alors son idée initiale de conduire ses recherches dans une succession de terrains et de s’attacher à reconstituer une série de généalogies et d’histoires de vies, et choisit, dans la lignée des grandes monographies de l’École de Chicago, de prendre ce carry out comme unité de lieu où conduire son observation participante. Dans ce décor, les hommes du quartier viennent chercher une « sociabilité sans effort » : « chaque homme vient là principalement parce qu’il connaît ceux qui y seront également. Il vient pour boire et manger, apprécier une discussion facile, apprendre ce qui s’est passé, chahuter, regarder les femmes et badiner avec elles, voir « ce qui se passe » et passer le temps » (39).

6 C’est ainsi que de janvier 1962 à juillet 1963, Liebow vient régulièrement « traîner » dans ce carry out. Il y rencontre et apprend à y connaître un certain nombre d’habitués auxquels il donne des noms fictifs pour protéger leur anonymat, tel le Tally du titre, un homme de trente ans né à Atlanta et arrivé à D. C. en 1954, qui n’a jamais été scolarisé et vit d’expédients, principalement, comme beaucoup de ces hommes noirs, dans le bâtiment où il travaille de manière irrégulière. Liebow précise dans son introduction qu’en huit ans passés à Washington, Tally a eu huit enfants, trois de sa femme et cinq autres avec cinq femmes différentes (39). Pourtant, si des bribes de biographies nous sont ainsi fournies dans l’introduction sur quelques protagonistes de cette étude (Tally, Sea Cat, Richard, Leroy…), ce qui fait l’originalité de Tally’s Corner est le refus d’une trame narrative et le choix d’une organisation thématique qui permet en fait de voir ces hommes dans la diversité de leurs rôles sociaux : soutiens de famille (« Des hommes et des emplois », chapitre 1), pères (« Des pères sans enfants », chapitre 2), maris (« Maris et femmes », chapitre 3), amants (« Amants et exploiteurs », chapitre 4), amis (« Amis et réseaux », chapitre 5), avant de livrer dans une annexe méthodologique (« Retour sur une expérience de terrain »), comme l’avait fait Whyte avant lui dans Street Corner Society , une « profession de foi » (26) : Liebow y donne des éléments biographiques et décrit la façon dont il a procédé pour mener à bien son enquête et établir une relation de confiance avec les habitants du quartier.

7 Si Tally’s Corner est ainsi devenu une sorte de modèle de l’enquête ethnographique, ce n’est pas tant, comme le souligne Célia Bense Ferreira Alves dans une préface qui met particulièrement bien en valeur les enjeux de ce texte, « par les méthodes de collecte des données utilisées que par les techniques de restitution auxquelles recourt l’auteur » (23). Dans la tradition des monographies des tenants de la tradition de Chicago, Liebow fonde son enquête sur l’observation participante de ce quartier noir en se rendant chaque jour, pendant un an et demi, à ce coin de rue, et en partageant les activités des habitués du carry out, où il lui arrive aussi d’être témoin de certaines scènes ou conversations. Il n’habite pas le quartier, et une fois rentré chez lui, il consigne toutes ses observations. Mais Liebow précise bien dès son introduction qu’il ne prétend pas à la représentativité de la « petite vingtaine d’hommes noirs qui partagent et utilisent, comme point de base de leurs agissements, un coin de rue dans le deuxième arrondissement de Washington » (33), pas plus qu’il ne cherche à tester une hypothèse

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particulière. Il cherche seulement à « donner un sens a posteriori » (33) à ce qu’il lui a été donné d’observer, mais en adoptant ce qu’il appelle « un point de vue interne » (34), c’est à dire en « [organisant] les matériaux autour des relations entre père et enfant, mari et femme, ami et amant » de la façon dont ces hommes eux-mêmes pourraient les organiser (34).

8 Cette empathie que Liebow a éprouvée avant de la faire partager à ses lecteurs fait de lui un « ethnographe engagé » (27), car le chercheur, sans renoncer à une nécessaire distance critique, veut donner une compréhension affinée du comportement de ces hommes et femmes noirs pauvres, loin des stéréotypes négatifs, véhiculés notamment par le rapport Moynihan, qui vient d’être publié au moment où Liebow rédige son analyse, et qui a suscité une grande polémique sur la stigmatisation de la famille noire, déstructurée et pathogène. Au contraire, Liebow montre, dès son premier chapitre, comment l’exploitation économique et la précarisation dont ces hommes noirs sont victimes de père en fils, parce que la discrimination raciale les confine à des emplois mal rémunérés, non qualifiés et saisonniers, affectent profondément tous les aspects de leur personnalité et conditionnent leur vie, les rendant inaptes à fonder une famille et à entretenir des relations stables avec la mère de leurs enfants. En amenant le lecteur à reconsidérer ses idées préconçues sur le rapport de ces hommes noirs au travail ou à la famille, Liebow semble entretenir « un dialogue permanent avec Daniel Moynihan » (23) et remet en question une à une toutes les représentations que le rapport de ce dernier avait pu contribuer à répandre dans l’opinion, pour montrer comment ces hommes dans l’adversité « survivent et font preuve de résilience » (24), dans leurs relations avec les femmes ou leurs amis. Par dessus tout, ces hommes cherchent à masquer l’échec qu’ils sont voués à connaître dans le travail comme dans leur mariage, en ne pouvant, avec un emploi précaire, subvenir à leurs besoins ni à ceux de leur famille. Liebow conteste aussi la notion de « culture de la pauvreté » pour mettre au contraire l’accent sur ce qu’il y a de commun entre ces hommes et le reste de la société, en dépit des conditions particulièrement dures qu’ils subissent. Dans sa conclusion en particulier, Liebow nie farouchement l’idée d’une « transmission culturelle » de père en fils : « ce qui semble être un processus culturel dynamique et autosuffisant est, tout au moins en partie, une pièce assez simple de la machine sociale qui fabrique, de façon assez mécanique, des sosies produits indépendamment. La question est de savoir comment changer les conditions qui, parce qu’elles garantissent l’échec, font que le fils est fait à l’image du père » (136).

9 La réponse, pour Liebow, est clairement du côté des pouvoirs publics et des programmes sociaux qu’ils doivent mettre en œuvre pour permettre à ces hommes noirs d’accéder à une bonne éducation puis à un emploi bien rémunéré : « La pauvreté est bien une véritable cible si l’on veut tenter de faire en sorte que les Noirs des classes populaires baignent « dans le cours normal de la vie américaine. […] Si l’on veut que ce mode de vie change, il faut changer cet élément central. On doit donner à l’homme noir, comme à tout un chacun, les compétences nécessaires pour gagner sa vie et l’occasion de mettre ces compétences à l’œuvre » (136-137).

10 Plus de quarante après sa première publication, Tally’s Corner garde toute sa pertinence et reste aussi un texte singulier qui dresse de manière très détaillée, et finalement rare en sciences sociales, tant aux États-Unis qu’en France, malgré les émeutes urbaines récentes, une chronique de la vie dans les ghettos. Le plus difficile dans cette édition en français était de trouver le bon niveau de langue avec cette façon si particulière dont

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Liebow restitue le discours tenu par ces hommes « du coin de la rue » et insère leurs propos, dans de longues citations, mais aussi parfois au sein d’une même phrase, dans son analyse scientifique. Au-delà des choix de traduction auxquels il a été procédé, la façon dont Célia Bense Ferreira Alves met en lumière tout le contexte politique mais aussi historiographique et épistémologique de cette monographie rend l’enquête de Liebow d’autant plus intéressante que ses thématiques — pauvreté urbaine, précarisation et crise de la masculinité, désorganisation familiale — sont toujours d’actualité.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

CATHERINE POUZOULET Université Charles de Gaulle- Lille III

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Claudette Fillard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Naissance du féminisme américain à Seneca Falls, Lyon, ENS Editions, 2009 Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, New York, Hill and Wang, 2009

Hélène Quanquin

1 « I am in favor of universal suffrage—indeed, I do not know that I should be permitted to live in my own house if I were not. »1. C’est ainsi que Henry B. Stanton présente en 1866, lors de la 26e réunion annuelle de la Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, sa position sur le suffrage universel qui agite alors les organisations abolitionnistes. En effet, si Stanton est un abolitionniste et un homme politique connu à l’époque, sa femme, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, l’a depuis plusieurs années dépassé en renommée : elle est, depuis la fin des années 1840, l’une des forces intellectuelles et politiques qui animent le mouvement américain pour les droits des femmes. Sa personnalité et son énergie hors du commun — « larger than life », écrit à son sujet Lori D. Ginzberg (3) — sont également de notoriété publique, ce qui explique l’hilarité que déclenchent les propos de Henry B. Stanton chez son auditoire.

2 Claudette Fillard rappelle que, malgré l’importance d’Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) dans l’histoire des femmes et de leurs droits aux États-Unis, celle-ci « demeura longtemps méconnue, voire inconnue aux États-Unis et à plus forte raison en France » (13). Ces dernières années cependant, des ouvrages importants parus aux États-Unis ont permis de peindre un portrait plus juste de Stanton et de ses idées, aidés en cela par le travail colossal de collecte et de dépouillement d’archives entrepris par Ann D. Gordon et Patricia Holland2. Ces travaux ont mis en évidence la contribution

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essentielle de Stanton à la pensée féministe américaine, mais aussi l’inscription de celle-ci dans les débats de son époque3.

3 Dans Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Naissance du féminisme américain à Seneca Falls, publié dans la collection des Fondamentaux du féminisme anglo-saxon d’ENS Éditions, Claudette Fillard s’est donné la lourde tâche de restituer les débuts de la pensée féministe de Stanton à travers douze textes qui couvrent la première partie de sa vie, de son enfance — par le biais de deux documents issus de son autobiographie4 — jusqu’au milieu des années 1850. Pour Claudette Fillard, il s’agit dans cet ouvrage de rendre compte de « la dynamique d’une trajectoire : celle d’un féminisme et d’une féministe en voie de construction » (12). Le choix, pertinent, des documents permet ainsi de suivre le cheminement de la réflexion de Stanton sur les droits des femmes, ainsi que sa modernité, par exemple sur la question du divorce dans un article publié dans The Lily en avril 1850 (texte 9). Réclamant que soit accordé aux femmes mariées à des alcooliques le droit de divorcer, elle y affirme également que « [s]i, comme c’est à présent le cas, il est loisible à tous d’entrer librement dans le mariage de manière irréfléchie, tous devraient, tout aussi librement et de manière réfléchie, être autorisés à en sortir » (142). Sur cette question, Stanton continua à « militer avec obstination » (77), le plus souvent contre la majorité de ses contemporains militants pour les droits des femmes. Outre le texte le plus célèbre de Stanton, la « Déclaration de sentiments » (texte 6), adoptée lors de la première Convention pour les droits des femmes de Seneca Falls en juillet 1848, on trouve trois extraits de son autobiographie (textes 1 à 3), deux discours (textes 8 et 12) et quelques lettres.

4 Cette sélection variée, servie par des traductions le plus souvent précises et élégantes et un appareil critique conséquent, offre un éventail assez large de la production de Stanton, de ses débuts en tant que féministe, mais aussi de sa personnalité, par exemple dans la lettre qu’elle adresse à Lucretia Mott en octobre 1852 pour lui annoncer la naissance de sa première fille et cinquième enfant (texte 10)5. L’ajout en fin d’ouvrage d’extraits d’un autre discours important de Stanton, « La solitude du moi » — “The solitude of self” —, prononcé en janvier 1892 devant la Commission des Affaires juridiques du Congrès, permet enfin de mesurer à la fois les évolutions, mais aussi les constantes de la pensée de Stanton. Claudette Fillard en offre une lecture liée à l’isolement croissant de Stanton au sein du mouvement féministe de l’époque, revers de son iconoclastie et de son individualisme forcené.

5 Si l’ouvrage de Claudette Fillard est une introduction utile à la pensée de Stanton pour des lecteurs français qui souhaiteraient (re)découvrir les fondements du féminisme américain, la perspective adoptée, celle de la « naissance du féminisme américain », faisant de la Convention de Seneca Falls un « moment inaugural » (11), mérite d’être nuancée. Depuis de nombreuses années, la question des origines du féminisme américain revient en effet avec insistance dans les travaux des historiennes des femmes aux États-Unis. Dans un précédent ouvrage au titre évocateur, Untidy Origins : A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Lori D. Ginzberg a ainsi démontré que les débuts du féminisme américain ne pouvaient être exclusivement circonscrits ni à Seneca Falls ni même au mouvement abolitionniste. Les travaux en cours de Lisa Tetrault sur ce qu’elle nomme « a feminist origins myth » ajoutent une pierre importante à l’édifice de déconstruction du récit officiel auquel Stanton et Susan B. Anthony participèrent activement, en décrivant comment, pendant la période de la Reconstruction, elles firent de la Convention de

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Seneca Falls un mythe, notamment en réponse aux divisions du mouvement réformateur sur la question du droit de vote des femmes.

6 Une autre question que pose le recueil de textes tient à la façon dont Claudette Fillard interprète les manques, les erreurs, et les limites de la pensée de Stanton et décrit les allusions récurrentes dans ses écrits à la situation inique qui prive les femmes d’un droit de vote accordé à certains groupes d’hommes pourtant inférieurs par leur origine ethnique ou raciale, ou leur classe sociale. L’analyse proposée ne permet en effet pas d’évaluer avec précision leur centralité dans l’idéologie de Stanton. Comme le démontrent deux articles récents, celle-ci est liée aux théories racialistes en vogue aux États-Unis après la Guerre de Sécession, mais également à la position particulière de Stanton par rapport à l’abolitionnisme6.

7 Car contrairement à ce que suggère Claudette Fillard lorsqu’elle affirme qu’« en 1847, Elizabeth Cady Stanton est convaincue qu’un même combat unit esclaves et femmes, et que seule l’émancipation des uns et des autres serait digne des idéaux fondateurs de la république américaine » (49), et contrairement aussi à ce que Stanton elle-même a voulu laisser croire, celle-ci n’a jamais milité activement dans le mouvement abolitionniste. C’est l’un des fils directeurs de la biographie écrite par Lori D. Ginzberg, pour laquelle cette position particulière, à la marge, explique à la fois la force et les limites de la pensée féministe de Stanton : « For her, the story of slavery and the emancipation of the slaves would serve primarily as a lesson in women’s own status, degradations, and rights. » (47). Dès la Convention mondiale contre l’esclavage de Londres en juin 1840, Stanton établit une hiérarchie inverse de celle de la plupart de ses contemporaines soucieuses des droits des femmes mais également investies dans le combat contre l’esclavage, comme Lucretia Mott, les sœurs Grimké, Abby Kelley Foster, ou encore un peu plus tard Lucy Stone, et fait du genre sa grille de lecture privilégiée — « th[e] insistence on the logic of universal womanhood and a world divided exclusively by gender » (85). Le propos de Lori D. Ginzberg n’est en aucun cas de démontrer un lien inhérent entre féminisme et racisme, ou encore l’incompatibilité du féminisme et de l’abolitionnisme, mais plutôt de s’interroger sur leurs liens et les conditions d’émergence d’une pensée et d’un mouvement féministes autonomes.

8 Le paradoxe de la vie de Stanton, que décrit de façon très convaincante Elizabeth Cady Stanton : An American Life, courte biographie extrêmement bien écrite, réside dans une série de tensions : entre son statut de pionnière — « Stanton was the first person to devote her considerable intellect solely to developing the philosophy and promoting the cause of woman’s rights. » (11) — et son inscription dans les débats et les évolutions de son temps, ce qu’évoque le sous-titre, « An American Life » ; entre sa centralité dans la pensée féministe américaine de son temps, mais aussi contemporaine, et sa position à la marge — due à son origine sociale privilégiée, qui la distingue d’un grand nombre de réformateurs de l’époque ; à sa méconnaissance de la question raciale ; au lien qu’elle établit immédiatement entre droit de vote et droits des femmes (61) ; à son horreur aussi des « conventions », lieux privilégiés de débats au XIXe siècle ; entre, enfin, « son absolutisme » concernant les droits des femmes et les limites de « son imagination politique », qui l’empêchèrent d’envisager que d’autres « identités collectives » (193) pouvaient également et légitimement influencer les revendications d’un changement social et politique.

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NOTES

1. The National Anti-Slavery Standard, 8 décembre 1866, volume XXVII, n°31, 1. 2. Les archives de Stanton et Anthony ont fait l’objet d’une publication exhaustive sur microfiches (The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Wilmington, Del. : Scholarly Resources, 1991). Cinq volumes ont été publiés (Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1997-2009). Un sixième et dernier volume est en cours de publication. 3. Outre la biographie de Lori D. Ginzberg, on mentionnera l’ouvrage de Kathi Kern sur les liens entre Stanton et la religion, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001 ; et la collection d’articles rassemblés par Ellen Carol DuBois et Richard Cándida Smith, dans Elizabeth Cady Stanton Feminist as Thinker : A Reader in Documents and Essays, New York, New York University Press, 2007. 4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897, Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1993 (1898). 5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton donna naissance à 7 enfants. 6. Christine Stansell, « Missed Connections: Abolitionist Feminism in the Nineteenth Century » in Ellen Carol DuBois ans Richard Cándida Smith, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, New York: New York University Press, 2007, 32-49; Michele Mitchell, « “Lower Orders,” Racial Hierarchies, and Rights Rhetoric: Evolutionary Echoes in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Thought during the Late 1860s », in Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, New York, New York University Press, 2007, 128-51.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

HÉLÈNE QUANQUIN Sorbonne-Nouvelle

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Glenda Carpio & Werner Sollors, eds., African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges. Amerikastudien/ American Studies, vol. 55, n°4, 2010

Ada Savin

1 This special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies edited by Glenda Carpio and Werner Sollors offers an embarrassment of riches. First and foremost, the reader discovers an exceptional gathering of hitherto unknown primary sources: five short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, two of her previously unpublished letters as well as new texts by Jamaica Kincaid and Ishmael Reed are printed here for the first time. The volume also includes several scholarly articles casting new perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance and/or envisaging new directions and new challenges in African American Literary Studies.

2 Findings are usually the fruit of chance and the discovery of the Hurston short stories is no exception. Glenda Carpio and Werner Sollors chanced upon the documents while perusing microfilms in search of original material for their course on Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright at Harvard University in 2010. They came upon “The Book of Harlem”, “Monkey Junk” and “The Back Room” (all found in the Pittsburgh Courier, 1927). The other two stories, “The Country in the Woman” (1927) and “She Rock” (1933) had been detected by M. Genevieve West who introduces the two short stories in this issue. None of the five pieces were included in The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr in 1996.

3 The surprise of the editors was twofold since these rediscovered stories bring out an unfamiliar aspect of the Harlem Renaissance author—the urban Zora. Here is Carpio and Sollors’ comment: The stories were set in the New York City of the Harlem Renaissance; they reminded us less of the canonical Hurston than of authors like Rudolph Fisher and

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Nella Larsen, who are more closely associated with stories of migration from the country to the city and with sophisticated novels of manners in urban settings.

4 In “The Book of Harlem”, “Monkey Junk” and “She Rock”, the spunky clash between urban language and mock biblical tone, between the sacred and the profane, between the serious and the humorous evokes the role and voice of the African American folk preacher confronted with the urban environment. “The Country in the Woman” is a vivid and humorous portrayal of the shift in male/female relations after the Black migration to the North. Of the five stories, “The Back Room” is the most unexpected. Here is a short excerpt: West 139th street at ten p.m. Rich fur wraps tripping up the steps of the well furnished home in the two hundred block. Sedans, coaches, coupes, roadsters. Inside fine gowns and tuxedos, marcel waves and glitter. People who seemed to belong to every race on earth—Harlem’s upper class had gathered there her beauty and chivalry.

5 One would be hard put to recognize in these lines the Southern folk writer and author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. As the editors suggest, “Zora Neale Hurston also could have become the Harlem novelist of the 1920s.”

6 The two hitherto unpublished letters, addressed respectively to Robert Redfield (1936) and Alan Lomax (1937), evince Hurston’s Janus-faced personality. In the 1936 letter, the writer-anthropologist expresses her enthusiasm for the rich material that remains to be unearthed and collected in the West Indies. A year later, Zora, “the mudslinging word warrior” writes a blistering letter to Alan Lomax, the famous folklorist.

7 In “America”, an autobiographical essay prompted by the newly published Hurston stories, Kincaid confesses her mixed feelings—dislike and admiration—for the Harlem Renaissance writer. Reflecting on American and African American literature, she concludes that “there simply is nothing more American than the African American”.

8 The critical articles included in this issue complement the “New Texts” section and position themselves within the ongoing debate on the future of African American Literary Studies. Daphne Brooks’ path-breaking article on Zora Neale Hurston’s sonic performances analyses the writer’s vocal recordings as archival and ethnographic endeavors. In “‘Black Renaissance’: A Brief History of the Concept,” Ernest Julius Mitchell II traces the shifts in terminology from “Negro Renaissance” to “Harlem Renaissance” and, more recently, to “Black Renaissance” (1919 through the early 1970s). The author implies that the term “Black Renaissance” conceives the artistic movement as both international and interracial.

9 Frank Mehring’s contribution, “The Visual Harlem Renaissance; or, Winold Reiss in Mexico”, throws light on the German American artist whose disappointment with the United States led him to move to Mexico, his Promised Land (“Mexico Diary” 1920). Upon his return, he was asked by Alain Locke to illustrate The New Negro (1925). Mehring argues that Reiss’ stylistic development during the Harlem Renaissance bears the mark of his transatlantic and Latin American detours.

10 Kenneth Warren’s short provocative piece entitled “On What Was African American Literature?” considers that the Civil Rights Movement’s relative success “eroded the real basis of representation that had been African American literature’s raison d’être.” Having pronounced the demise of African American literature (with Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, 1974 as the last work written in this tradition), Warren does not discuss the paths taken by African American writers in the past few decades. One possible direction

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is suggested in Beatty’s recent novel Slumberland (2008), which grafts African American history onto Germany, before and after reunification. George Blaustein’s “Flight to Germany: Paul Beatty, the Color Line, and the Berlin Wall” ultimately looks at “the structural affinities” between Warren’s question, “what was African American literature?” and a more general one: “what was American literature?”

11 Building on recent developments in African American Literary Studies, George Hutchinson’s “American Transnationalism and the Romance of Race” advocates the adoption of an international perspective that would transcend the North American assumptions on race, while retaining the national framing of culture as an important parameter. Hutchinson discusses McKay’s Banjo, Cape Verdean-American identity, the emergence of Afro-Deutsch identity in the late 20th century, and a memoir by Anita Reynolds whose life in Europe and Morocco between 1928 and 1940 was instrumental in shaping her views on race.

12 The richness and the variety of this special issue of Amerikastudien /American Studies are ample proof of the vitality of African American Literary Studies on both sides of the Atlantic. As for the recent Zora Neale Hurston findings, they are an incentive for scholars to do “some more digging in her garden”—as well as in other writers’ secret gardens.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

ADA SAVIN University of Versailles

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Michael Almereyda, Lloyd Fonvielle, Greil Marcus, Kristine McKenna, Amy Taubin, William Eggleston. For Now, Santa Fe, Twin Palm Publishers, 2010

Nathalie Boulouch

1 Que peut-on dire de nouveau sur la photographie de William Eggleston ? Depuis l’importante exposition rétrospective organisée en 2008 par le Whitney Museum de New York et la Haus der Kunst de Munich1, deux méthodes ont été récemment adoptées par l’édition pour maintenir une actualité sur le photographe. Exhumer la production noir et blanc peut être un moyen de renouveler l’attention du public tandis que révéler des photographies couleurs jusqu’alors écartées par les sélections du photographe en est un autre. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit de montrer des corpus peu connus voire inédits ; bref, des images qui n’ont pas contribué en leur temps à construire la figure tutélaire que William Eggleston représente aujourd’hui. Ainsi, tandis que les éditions Steidl publient Before Color2 à la suite d’une exposition de clichés noir et blanc (1960-1974) présentée par la galerie Cheim & Read en 20043, les éditions Twin Palms diffusent un ensemble de photographies inédites choisies par Michael Almereyda, le réalisateur de William Eggleston in The Real World (2005)4. Pour lui, l’objectif était de pénétrer dans la partie non visible, non publiée, du flot de photographies en couleurs produites en quatre décennies. Sur la production d’environ 35 000 images, il en a sélectionné 88, datant pour une bonne part du début des années 1970 et allant jusqu’aux années 2000 pour les plus récentes.

2 Outre l’intérêt commercial, aisément concevable, pour les éditeurs et, au-delà, pour le marché de la photographie, qu’apporte cet ouvrage ? Assurément, le plaisir du lecteur car la publication, de grand format, est de qualité remarquable. Le parti-pris éditorial a été en quelque sorte de rejouer, en l’inversant, l’effet du Willian Eggleston Guide publié par le Museum of Modern Art en 1976 à l’occasion de l’exposition qui a introduit le

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photographe de Memphis alors quasiment inconnu dans le cénacle artistique. Ici, l’appareil de textes est repoussé en fin d’ouvrage, pour laisser s’imposer d’emblée la présence des images. Au fil des pages tournées, une troublante familiarité se fait sentir entre les photographies bien connues d’Eggleston et celles sorties de la « jungle des archives » selon l’expression d’Almereyda. En postface, celui-ci recontextualise et explicite son travail de sélection. Il y confirme ce qui se perçoit dans la seule observation initiale. L’ensemble photographique où les images font la part belle à l’intimité familiale (la femme, les enfants du photographe, les parents et amis proches) réitère l’effet d’« album de famille » et insiste sur cette dimension que John Szarkowski avait pointée dans son texte d’introduction de 1976 comme un argument critique, en défendant la comparaison avec la pratique des photographes amateurs travaillant avec des films pour diapositives Kodachrome. Quant aux autres textes, ils éclairent chacun la démarche d’Eggleston. Faisant le récit d’une rencontre à Memphis en 1971, Lloyd Fonvielle permet de saisir la personnalité du photographe, fasciné par la télévision, tandis qu’un entretien avec Kristine McKenna réalisé en 1994 à Los Angeles mentionne l’importance référentielle de quelques films comme Bonnie and Clyde d’Arthur Penn et North by Northwest d’Alfred Hitchcock. L’ouvrage comporte également un court texte de Greil Marcus et un essai d’Amy Taubin sur le travail vidéo Stranded in Canton réalisé en 1973-1974 avec une caméra Sony Porta-Pak.

3 Au final, on ne peut que se réjouir que ce beau livre élargisse le corpus connu ; mais il conforte plus qu’il ne transforme la connaissance du travail du photographe. Selon les dires de Michael Almereyda, il s’agissait de publier les « faces B ». Celles-ci, finalement, viennent souvent expliciter le choix des « faces A » qui, depuis les années 1980, ont imposé Eggleston comme une référence majeure pour des générations de photographes qui ont fait de la couleur leur moyen d’expression.

NOTES

1. Elisabeth Sussman et Thomas Weski, William Eggleston. Democratic Camera. Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, New York/Munich, Whitney Museum of American Art/Haus der Kunst, 2008. 2. Chris Burnside, John Cheim, Howard Read, Thomas Weski (éd.), Before Color, Göttingen, Steidl, 2010. 3. William Eggleston : Precolor, 8 janvier-21 février 2004, Gallerie Cheim & Read, New York. 4. Michael Almereyda/High Line Productions. Disponible en DVD.

INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

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AUTEUR

NATHALIE BOULOUCH Université Rennes 2

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Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, De l’esclave au Président. Discours sur les familles noires aux États-Unis, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2010

Guillaume Marche

1 Préfacé par le sociologue Loïc Wacquant, l’ouvrage d’Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry propose une étude historiographique approfondie analysant les regards portés sur les familles noires aux États-Unis des débuts de l’esclavage jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Le sujet embrassé est encore plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît, puisqu’il ne s’agit pas simplement de dérouler le récit linéaire de l’évolution d’un ensemble de représentations historiquement déterminées. Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry met ses lecteurs en présence d’un objet d’étude multidimensionnel qui lui donne la possibilité d’explorer l’histoire afro-américaine dans son ensemble. Il s’agit en particulier d’interroger les termes mêmes de la recherche : que signifient par exemple les termes « noir », « afro-américain », « africain américain » ? Peut-on ou doit-on encore parler d’identification raciale, ou bien faut-il dépasser la catégorie de « race » pour envisager la population américaine d’origine africaine en termes socio-économiques ? En quoi l’étude de pratiques privées telles que les configurations et les structures familiales permet-elle de saisir les questions politiques qui sont posées à ce groupe ethno-racial ?

2 L’auteure part d’une évolution en trois phases : après les avoir dénigrées comme étant une déviation pathologique ou dangereuse du modèle blanc dominant, les discours sur les familles noires se sont employés à reconnaître en elles un modèle alternatif marqué par sa différence vis-à-vis du schéma de la famille nucléaire et facteur de résilience culturelle pour les Noirs. Dans un troisième temps, les familles noires ont été envisagées en termes de complexité et de diversité, dont une opposition binaire famille nucléaire blanche / famille noire élargie ne suffit à rendre compte. Cette évolution s’écrit en parallèle avec trois grands moments de l’histoire afro-américaine — le long temps de l’esclavage du début du XVIIe siècle au milieu du XIXe siècle, la migration du Sud vers le Nord de la fin de la Reconstruction aux années 1960, la situation

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d’infériorité économique résultant de la ségrégation résidentielle de facto des années 1960 à aujourd’hui — qui constituent l’architecture de l’ouvrage. Le livre croise ces deux temporalités pour contextualiser la première par rapport à la seconde.

3 Ainsi Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry montre-t-elle non seulement que l’on n’écrit pas sur les familles noires de la même manière selon l’époque, mais également que cette écriture constitue un important enjeu politique : on ne développe pas le même discours politique sur le statut des Afro-Américains selon que l’on décrit les familles noires esclaves comme étant totalement soumises à la volonté des propriétaires, ou bien comme constituant des espaces de résistance. Mettre en avant les racines culturelles africaines supposées des configurations familiales noires au tournant du XXe siècle permet d’affirmer une certaine fierté noire, voire une position nationaliste, tandis que l’étude des facteurs sociaux exogènes conditionnant les différences entre les familles noires et blanches, et entre les familles noires elles-mêmes — comme le firent notamment les sociologues W.E.B. DuBois et Franklin Frazier — reflète l’expression d’une posture plutôt intégrationniste ouverte sur le progrès social des Noirs aux États- Unis.

4 L’ouvrage met en outre l’accent sur la rupture historiographique représentée par les années 1960 et les changements induits par le mouvement pour les droits civiques. Dans le contexte d’un tournant épistémologique où se pratiquait une histoire « vue d’en bas », le point de vue des Afro-Américains était privilégié et ce, d’autant plus que les politiques intégrationnistes permettaient à davantage de Noirs d’accéder à l’enseignement supérieur et à la recherche. Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry analyse notamment les positionnements antagonistes dans le sillage du rapport sur la famille afro-américaine rédigé par Daniel P. Moynihan pour l’administration Johnson et publié en 1965, selon lequel les familles noires seraient dysfonctionnelles — et facteurs de pauvreté — car matriarcales. L’ouvrage contextualise le débat opposant les tenants de l’assimilation des Noirs au modèle américain — c'est-à-dire blanc — aux tenants d’une identité afro-américaine spécifique. L’enjeu à la fois politique et épistémologique est alors de savoir s’il faut insister sur les déterminismes conditionnant la différence entre les configurations familiales noires et blanches, ou bien affirmer que les structures familiales reflètent la capacité d’action (agency) des Afro-Américains. Hélène Le Dantec- Lowry montre ainsi que la construction des familles noires comme objet d’étude est tributaire d’orientations méthodologiques ou théoriques, et même de choix thématiques qu’il convient d’historiciser et qui se prêtent à une interprétation politique.

5 Dans chacune des trois parties de l’ouvrage, l’auteure met en avant le caractère heuristique de la prise en compte croisée des notions de genre et de classe. Envisager les rapports entre les sexes ou entre les classes au sein du groupe afro-américain permet en effet de sortir l’étude des familles noires d’une comparaison duelle entre familles noires et blanches, et, plus largement, de dégager l’analyse de la question raciale aux États-Unis de l’opposition binaire Blancs / Noirs. De la même manière, les monographies se concentrant sur une région explorent souvent des terrains moins connus et offrent ainsi une vision plus complexe des conditions sociales réelles dans lesquelles se constituent les familles noires — qu’il s’agisse de l’expérience de l’esclavage, de la migration ou de la pauvreté au sein des ghettos. L’un des points centraux de l’ouvrage consiste, d’une part, à affirmer que les discours sur les familles noires tombent dans le schématisme lorsqu’ils totalisent « la » famille noire et, d’autre

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part, à montrer que les discours tendant à pathologiser les familles noires se sont construits précisément au moment où de plus en plus de familles américaines échappaient au modèle nucléaire censé incarner la norme : la désignation de la déviance supposée des familles noires servit ainsi à renforcer la norme incarnée par une famille blanche idéalisée, au moment même où elle était fortement remise en cause dans les faits.

6 Le livre suggère donc l’idée d’un progrès dans la précision et dans l’appréhension de la complexité des enjeux. Par exemple, depuis les années 1990, des monographies portant notamment sur des régions frontalières ont montré que certaines familles élargies avaient maintenu des échanges Nord-Sud — échanges épistolaires et visites familiales — ou favorisé des migrations à rebours du Nord vers le Sud, si bien que l’expérience migratoire n’est en réalité ni uniforme ni univoque : sa compréhension s’affine grâce à la prise en compte de variations temporelles et spatiales. L’auteure consacre des pages particulièrement intéressantes à la question des pratiques mémorielles, volontaires ou non — telles les habitudes culinaires — au sein des familles noires : ces pratiques sont souvent le fait des femmes, qui jouent un rôle de passeuses ou de relais mémoriels. Mais elle présente aussi les familles noires comme un chantier de recherche qui n’est jamais complètement abouti. En particulier, les discours scientifiques s’enrichissent de leur interdisciplinarité : le dialogue entre histoire et sociologie est constamment en filigrane. De même, l’auteure montre comment les discours émanant de journalistes ou de décideurs politiques s’ancrent dans des contextes particuliers — telle la « culture de la dépendance » supposée des familles noires monoparentales vis-à-vis de l’aide sociale, au moment même, les années 1980, où l’État s’en désengageait fortement — tandis qu’ils créent des conditions politiques qui influent à leur tour sur les discours scientifiques. Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry invite ainsi à ne « pas essentialiser le concept de ‘famille’ » (197) lorsqu’il s’agit d’envisager le rôle des femmes et des mères, afin de ne pas naturaliser le modèle de la famille nucléaire. Outre les facteurs de genre et de classe, il convient pour ce faire de prendre en compte la diversité des lieux, la succession des générations et l’interaction entre elles, ainsi que le travail de mémoire.

7 En abordant l’historiographie des Afro-Américains sous l’angle des familles noires, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry prend donc la famille comme un bon indicateur de la persistance de la pertinence des identités ethno-raciales : à condition qu’elle ne soit pas prise dans un sens étroit, totalisant et univoque, la notion de « race » permet, en injectant un point de vue culturel, de rendre compte de l’expérience afro-américaine de manière plus riche que ne sauraient le faire les approches strictement socio- économiques. Cet ouvrage propose donc non seulement une synthèse très richement documentée de l’état de la littérature historique et sociologique sur le sujet, mais il soulève d’importantes questions politiques, théoriques et méthodologiques. On peut regretter la présence d’anglicismes dans la rédaction et certaines interprétations sont sans doute discutables — notamment l’idée selon laquelle l’usage des termes « désorganisation » ou « démoralisation » serait nécessairement péjoratif dans la littérature sociologique de l’École de Chicago (93-94 en particulier) — mais l’ouvrage propose à la fois des questionnements épistémologiques approfondis, de la part d’une spécialiste reconnue des études afro-américaines, et des mises en contexte de l’histoire des États-Unis et de l’histoire des Noirs qui le rendent abordable et stimulant pour les lecteurs non spécialistes de ces deux champs.

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INDEX

Thèmes : Recensions

AUTEUR

GUILLAUME MARCHE Université Paris-Est Créteil

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