European journal of American studies

7-1 | 2012 Spring 2012

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/9449 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.9449 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 7-1 | 2012, “Spring 2012” [Online], Online since 02 January 2012, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/9449; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.9449

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Stiff Man-Child Walking: Derrida’s Economy of Secrecy and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” Michael Wainwright

Foundation Networks and American Hegemony Inderjeet Parmar

« Writing into a Void » : Charles Bukowski and the Little Magazines Abel Debritto

“I’m Just a Cowboy”: Transnational Identities of the Borderlands in Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Matthew Carter

Robert Adams in Transatlantic Review: Archiving the Barbary Captive and Traveller Stephen F. Wolfe

A Lost Opportunity : The Flawed Implementation of Assertive Multilateralism (1991-1993) James D. Boys

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A Stiff Man-Child Walking: Derrida’s Economy of Secrecy and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”

Michael Wainwright

Aye—no. No—aye, for I must be nothing, Therefore no “no,” for I resign to thee. Now, mark me how I will undo myself. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, 4.1.200–02. Not that it really does connect and yet not that it really does not. Gertrude Stein, “What is English Literature,” 17.

1 In Given Time (1992), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) not only discusses the socioeconomic prescience of Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–1867) “La fausse monnaie” (1869), but also anticipates his own thoughts in On the Name (1995) concerning the economy of secrecy. Retrospectively applying these economic contemplations to Baudelaire’s prose poem— an exercise that Derrida does not undertake—both invests in the speculation engendered by “La fausse monnaie” and recommends that retrospective application to works with comparable avant-la-lettre tendencies, such as William Faulkner’s (1897– 1962) “Barn Burning” (1938). Both texts exhibit what Richard Rorty would call a poststructural “lubriciousness of the tangled” (126), but while a Derridean analysis of “La fausse monnaie” identifies the surrender of authorial control behind this complex indeterminacy, a similar examination emphasizes the failure of Faulknerians to recognize the same form of acquiescence in “Barn Burning.” This inability undermines their laudable attempts to reveal the liberal politics of Faulkner’s text. By examining Derrida’s economy of secrecy, the following essay traces this critical failure, reappraises Faulkner’s canonical short story, and redresses the interpretive balance in his favor.

2 The inviolable (or absolute) secret connotes an open rather than a hidden truth, explains Derrida in On the Name, and is therefore a paradoxical secret without secret. This obvious enigma fills the reader with desire:

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When all hypotheses are permitted, groundless and ad infinitum, about the meaning of a text, or the final intentions of an author, whose person is no more represented than nonrepresented by a character or by a narrator, by a poetic friend or fictional sentence, which detaches itself from its presumed source and thus remains locked way [au secret], when there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret behind the surface of a textual manifestation (and it is this situation which I would call text or trace), when it is the call [appel] of this secret, … which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself which keeps our passion aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. (29)

3 The absolute secret, like an unbreakable code, encourages endless hypotheses of impassioned interpretation. Literary worth is the open secret of absolute secrecy allied to and against which the revealable (or conditional) secret inscribes a marked contrast.

4 The relationship between what is inviolable and what is revealable has political ramifications for Derrida. Absolute secrecy arises from a reserve of unfathomable information, while conditional secrecy depends on a store of potential knowledge. Proprietorship of a revealable secret privileges its owner with “a phantasmatic power over others” (30) and this surplus potential can support interpersonal structures of an undemocratic nature. Inviolable secrecy, however, as its openness suggests, cannot fall foul of individual speculation, and this economic neutrality makes literature a democratic form of expression. “Through its aporetic structure,” writes Alex Segal, absolute secrecy “displaces the use of (conditional) secrecy to attain power and is thereby tied to democracy” (190).

5 The aporia of the inviolable secret, which connotes the gap between the actually communicated and the intended but inexpressible communication, separates a writer from his work. An author cannot decrypt the absolute mysteries of his texts anymore than a reader of those texts can. Hence, as Nils Clausson observes, one of the consequences of poststructuralist theories of language and textuality has been to render problematical the commonsense idea that the author’s intentions are a wholly reliable guide either to recovering the true meaning of a text, what the writer supposedly put there, or to correcting misinterpretations of a text, readings wrongly read into a text by errant or arrant readers. (109)

6 Breaking with the power of mastery, the inviolable secret is a form of literary gift, where gifting implies benevolence without return. Literature is an absolutely secret donation that thanks or another form of payment cannot recognize. Essential affinity between the aporetic essences of literature and the gift both identifies a literary work with and frees that work from its author. “Suppose that X, something or someone (a trace, a work, an institution, a child), bears your name, that is to say, your title,” posits Derrida in On the Name. “The naïve rendering or common illusion [fantasme courant] is that you have given your name to X, thus all that returns to X, in a direct or indirect way, in a straight or oblique line, returns to you, as a profit for your narcissism. But,” cautions Derrida, as you are not your name, nor your title, and given that, as the name or title, X does very well without you or your life, that is, without the place toward which something could return—just as that is the definition and the very possibility of every trace, and of all names and all titles, so your narcissism is frustrated a priori by that from which it profits or hopes to profit. Conversely, suppose that X did not want your name or your title; suppose that, for one reason or another, X broke free from it and chose himself another name, working a kind of repeated severance from the originary severance; then your narcissism, doubly injured, will find itself

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all the more enriched precisely on account of this: that which bears, has borne, will bear your name seems sufficiently free, powerful, creative, and autonomous to live alone and radically to do without you and your name. (12–13)

7 This converse supposition implies that “the ability to disappear in your name” is what “returns to your name.” The absolute secrecy that frees a text from its authorial seal is at the same time the condition that augments the authorial self (or auctoritas). “In the two cases of this same divided passion,” states Derrida, “it is impossible to dissociate the greatest profit and the greatest privation” (13).

8 Literature can survive without authorship—indeed, the unattributed work of logographers (or ghost writers) and the secrecy of anonymous authors (attributed to “anon”) instantiate the durability of autonomous texts—but although the author can disappear into the inviolable privacy of literary ownership, the greater the autonomy of a text, the greater the possibility of intentionality behind that break from creative purpose. “For Derrida,” as Segal stresses, “attention to authorial intention is a fundamental guardrail in the interpretation of texts” (191). The relationship opened between text and author by absolute secrecy, which allies the aporetic structures of literature and the gift, exhibits paradoxical degrees of authorial responsibility.

9 At one extreme, authorship is an irresponsible activity; the inviolable secrets of literature leave the field of expression open. In this regard, argues Derrida in On the Name, secrecy ties the destiny of literature “to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.)” (28). From this perspective, as Derrida contends in “Before the Law” (1991), the literary domain “is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything.” To say all is “to totalize by formalizing, but to say everything is also to break out of [franchir] prohibitions. To affranchise oneself [s’affranchir]—in every field where law can lay down the law” (36).

10 At the other extreme, authorship is a responsible activity; the propositional nature of a work is an authorial duty. Unscrupulous literature, whether perfunctorily penned or knowingly produced, can spread unethical or politically fallacious messages through the accepted protocols of semiotics and the traditional meanings of (Saussurean) signs. Thus, the Derridean focus on authorial intention, as Segal insists, “no more consigns literary interpretation to unbridled subjectivism and pure arbitrariness than it severs literature from ethical or political accountability” (206 n5).

11 Literature is at once the complete responsibility of an author and an appeal to the democratic spirit. Although usually a singular creation of an individual, which no one can gainsay, and therefore a secret matter of inviolable control, a literary creation nevertheless leaves the propositional intent of that absolute accountability open to public scrutiny. “Responsibility must be infinite. That’s why I always feel not responsible enough” (48–49), admits Derrida in “following theory” (2003), because I’m finite and because there are an infinite number of others to whom or for whom or from whom I should be responsible. I’m always not responsible enough, and responsibility is infinite or it is not, but I cannot be responsible to some extent in the strict sense of “responsibility.” (49)

12 That is why, he maintains, “I always feel guilty” (49). The double bind of textual accountability, as pursued by Derrida in “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism” (1996), can thereby challenge the standard yet ironic concept of “politics and

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democracy as openness—where all are equal and where the public realm is open to all— which tends to deny, efface or prohibit the secret” (80).

13 After a typically elliptical introduction, as though the boundaries of Given Time testify to the related works that lie beyond its margins, Derrida approaches the textual accountability of Baudelaire’s prose poem from its title. “The referential structure of a title,” admits Derrida, “is always very tricky” (84)—and “La fausse monnaie” is no exception. On the one hand, this heading refers to the phenomenon of counterfeit money, “a sign without value, if not without meaning.” On the other hand, this heading refers to the subsequent narrative, “this text here, this story of counterfeit money” (85). “The title of a text,” observes Segal, “would seem to be connected to its demarcation, its identity. Yet Derrida argues that in so far as counterfeit money is illegal, the title of ‘Counterfeit Money’ is without title” (194). Ordinarily, an introductory heading both identifies and begins a text, but according to Derrida’s thesis in “Before the Law,” “the power and import of a title have an essential relationship with something like the law” (188–89). The illegality of forged currency means that “La fausse monnaie” is without a valid heading. “Barn Burning,” as the title of Faulkner’s short story, which refers at once to a transgressive activity and the narrative that follows, engenders a similar dehiscence. A reference to an illegal act, and so courting a break with lawful power, “Barn Burning” is another title without title.1

14 Opening from its titular framework to reveal two friends emerging from another frame, the door of a tobacconist’s shop in Paris, Baudelaire’s prose poem immediately arouses speculation with the behavior of the narrator’s colleague. “As we were walking from a tobacconist’s,” recalls the narrator, “my friend carefully sorted out his change: into the left pocket of his waistcoat he slipped the small gold coins, into the right, the small silver coins; into the left pocket of his breeches, a mass of large copper coins, and finally, into the right, a two-franc silver piece he had examined with noticeable attention” (48–49).2 The two men shortly encountered “a beggar who tremblingly held out his hat to us.” Each man handed over a coin. “My friend’s offering,” concedes the narrator, “was much larger than mine.” Embarrassed, he pointed out this discrepancy to his colleague, but his friend dismissed the issue nonchalantly: “it was the counterfeit coin” (49). This rejoinder about the silver piece that had caught his colleague’s attention only minutes earlier perplexes the narrator. Moreover, as Derrida explains of another structuring device, “the narration is framed in such a way that, like the narrator, we are the friend’s debtors, but to the paradoxical extent that we live on the very credit we are obliged to extend to him. Whether or not we take him at his word,” continues Derrida, “we have only his word. We are at once his debtor and his creditor” (151). The reader partakes of the narrator’s viewpoint and must ask, as the narrator does, why his colleague made his admission about the silver coin. Credence, as a matter of speculation, and credit, as the issue of acclaim, are suddenly at stake.

15 “Here,” argues Derrida in Given Time, “we can speculate and extend credit: at least three hypotheses, but in fact a series of innumerable prognostications” (149), arise. According to one premise, as the narrator first believes, his colleague has lied “to justify his own largesse” in donating an amount that “might serve as the germ for several day’s capital, in the hands of a poor, small-time speculator” (49). Putting this reasoning another way, his friend is not only modest, but is also sensitive to the narrator’s self-reflective qualms concerning his own meanness. Into the narrator’s “miserable brain” (49), however, comes another thought. Did his colleague merely wish

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to enjoy the possible consequences of giving a mendicant counterfeit money? The man might not recognize the coin as a forgery and be arrested when trying to spend it. Alternatively, the next recipient of the coin might not recognize it as counterfeit and the beggar might prosper. Just as the narrator reaches this seemingly unjust conclusion about his friend’s motive, his colleague “brusquely breaks into his reverie,” repeating the narrator’s contention. “Yes, you are right,” he confesses, “there is no sweeter pleasure than surprising a man by giving him more than his hopes allowed” (50). In the light of this admittance, the colleague’s declaration signifies what Derrida calls “a surplus of naïve triumph and boastfulness close to cynicism”; as a corollary, the narrator’s friend has gratuitously accredited himself through secretive reckoning, which for Derrida amounts to this: So, you recognize how good I am at treating myself to the greatest pleasure; well, I am even sharper than that: I bought myself the greatest pleasure at the lowest price: you give me credit, but I speculate even better than you think. (149)

16 Crucially, these two conjectures, the first concerning self-effacing altruism, the second concerning self-interested arrogance, exhibit a relationship that classical dialectics cannot resolve; “on the contrary,” as Derrida expounds, “they superimpose themselves on each other, they accumulate like a capital of true or (perhaps) counterfeit money that may produce interest; they overdetermine each other in the ellipsis of the declaration.” Each conjecture “is justifiable and each has a certain right to be credited, accredited. This,” he concludes, “is the phenomenon without phenomenality of counterfeit money” (149)—and the third of Derrida’s immediate prognostications.

17 In “Barn Burning,” the unnamed, heterodiegetic, and inviolably secret narrator begins his tale by introducing both “the Justice of the Peace’s court” and the seemingly inconsistent detail that this room “smelled of cheese” (3). Due lawful process has in fact seconded a general store. Colonel Sartoris (or Sarty) Snopes’s growing awareness of his surroundings, his father’s (Abner’s) appearance before the justice, and the notion that Sarty is both young enough and too young to be the bearer of an important conditional secret—privileged knowledge that his father and elder brother might also hold—slowly announce themselves as significant narratological details within this peculiar ambiance of law, law enforcement, and the economics of exchange.

18 Mr. Harris, a local landowner, recounts the events concerning his tenant Abner Snopes that culminated in these proceedings. Snopes’s “hog got into my corn,” he tells the court. “I caught it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that would hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it,” recounts Harris, “I gave him enough wire to patch up his pen. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled on to the spool in his yard,” maintains Snopes’s landlord. “I told him he could have the hog when he paid me a dollar pound fee (3–4). That evening, continues Harris, “a strange nigger” (4) came to collect Snopes’s pig. Having paid the fine, and with the pig in tow, this intermediary then delivered a message: “He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.” Rather at a loss, Harris asked the African American to repeat himself, but the tenor of the message remained the same. “That whut he say to tell you,” the man replied. “Wood and hay kin burn” (4).

19 The transitive relations that marked this communication—the human links in its chain —simultaneously indict Abner for and absolve him from responsibility for the message. Harris being the origin of this evidence, rather than the unknown messenger, further

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weakens its legitimacy before the law. The justice’s repeated call to produce the African American in person testifies to this flaw in Harris’s suit against Snopes. Be that as it may, attests Harris, “that night my barn burned. I got the stock out but I lost the barn” (4).

20 From Harris’s point of view, Snopes has slaked his annoyance through the impropriety of barn burning, an act of dissent he hopes to cloud in conditional secrecy, but without further personal evidence to offer the court, Harris must produce another witness. He knows Snopes’s eldest son will be as secretive before the court as his father is, so he calls Sarty to testify. Harris hopes Sarty is still innocent enough to reveal his father’s conditional secret in the name of truth. Sarty, however, says nothing other than whispering his full name. Faced with a silent minor in his court, the justice asks Harris incredulously, “Do you want me to question this boy?” Harris’s conflict of responsibilities to the law, which he recognizes with a “violently, explosively” stated acquiescence to the justice’s implicit expectation, falls in Abner Snopes’s favor. With no independent witness, the justice dismisses the case against Snopes, but nevertheless orders him to take his “wagon and get out of this country before dark” (5). The expectancy induced by the title of Faulkner’s story is maintained and the reader is free to speculate whether “Barn Burning” will reveal the currently inviolable secret about the cause of Harris’s fire, which (in the case of a criminal act) the perpetrator would hold in conditional secrecy.

21 Thus, as with “La fausse monnaie,” a supposedly revealable secret empowers its holder in “Barn Burning.” Furthermore, as with Baudelaire’s prose poem, the narrative frame leaves Faulkner’s reader paradoxically indebted to the African-American messenger. At once this man’s debtor and creditor, was Harris (and, in turn, the reader) to have taken the relayed message as a warning or as an expression of inevitable intention? The reserves of deconstructive energy, the secretive traces interwoven throughout the surface textuality of “Barn Burning,” not only pose this question, but also imply that, whatever the answer, the message from this stranger is a curious form of gift.

22 The intelligent and contradictory readings and writings unraveled and spun by Faulknerians in response to “Barn Burning” acknowledge and draw on this paradoxical resource with the hypothesis that Abner is unlikely to send an African American on Snopes business and the inferable consequences of this improbable event regarding Abner’s racial lineage. The work of John Duvall provides an apposite entrance into these discussions. “As [Richard] Godden has pointed out,” and as Duvall appreciates, “everything about Abner is associated with blackness—his black hat and frockcoat, but most particularly his relationship with fire. Faulkner’s repeated use of the term ‘niggard’ to describe the fire that Abner burns for his family,” notes Duvall, “serves as wordplay that both points toward, even as its etymological difference deflects attention away from, ‘nigger’” (115). Duvall, however, takes Godden’s argument further. “I wish to suggest that the story’s ‘strange nigger,’” he writes, is actually in the store where the hearing takes place and is the very figure of the man in black, Abner Snopes. Since almost the only person Abner would trust with a dollar is himself (or closekin), it seems plausible that Abner (or perhaps his eldest son) blackened up in order to collect his hog and deliver his warning in person without being recognized. (115)

23 Duvall immediately acknowledges “one logical and one textual” weakness to his proposal of a blacked up Abner. “An immediate objection,” he admits, “might be that surely Harris would recognize such a ruse and would be immediately able to distinguish

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an artificial from an authentic black.” Duvall paraphrases the relevant section of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft (1993) to answer this point. “Audiences of minstrel shows in the nineteenth century often were completely fooled by the racial masquerade,” states Duvall, “and assumed that the white performers who entertained them were actually black” (115). The text-based objection submits that Sarty’s plea when Abner intends to burn his next employer’s barn—“‘Ain’t you going to even send a nigger?’ he cried. ‘At least you sent a nigger before”’ (21)—undercuts Duvall’s conjecture. In response, Duvall contends that “the detail of the black man carrying a warning is one Sarty more likely learned about from Harris’s testimony” (115–16). Abner’s youngest boy “effectively knows no more about the identity of the ‘strange’ black than the reader”; his question “in no way proves that he had first-hand knowledge about his father actually sending a racially black messenger to Harris” (116).

24 Nonetheless, and perhaps because the cultural mediation of race is his focus, Duvall misses the logical and textual objection to his thesis, the obvious reason why a blackface Abner would not have fooled Harris: that something other, that sign divorced from race, that Achilles’ heel in terms of mimicry; namely, Abner’s “stiff and ruthless limp” (8). That his secretive eldest son—presumably the Flem of Faulkner’s subsequent fiction, but on the evidence of “Barn Burning” the absolutely secret scion who goes unnamed, while the younger Colonel Sartoris causes consternation among Mississippians aware of the Civil War provenance associated with this name—is the only candidate for the unknown African American other than an unknown African American. The absolute secrecy of appellative anonymity qualifies Abner’s firstborn son for the role of Duvall’s messenger.

25 Even so, from the perspective of deconstructive potential within the text, whether the messenger is Abner or not is less relevant than both Godden and Duvall’s laudatory efforts in identifying the language and metaphors that stand in almost secret contrast to the ostensible meaning of “Barn Burning.” These critical exertions do not allow the explicit, central, and dominant implications of the text to drive their critical readings and writings. In racial terms, according to the spectrum of responses from this scholarship, Abner might be white, black passing (intentionally or not) for white, white artificially made up to be black, or black passing (intentionally or not) for white artificially passing for black. The preeminent inference from these interpretations evinces Faulkner’s gift of ethical potential in “Barn Burning.” Cynics might rate this contention as academically gratuitous but, as Derrida argues in“following theory,” there is no law restricting the limits of carefully considered criticism. “There are ethics,” he avers, “precisely because there is this contradiction, because there is no rule” (31) to reading literature. That Faulkner’s short story subversively blurs the sociopolitical boundaries, distinctions that it purportedly and simultaneously clearly supports, promotes “Barn Burning” as a worthy ethical resource. Faulkner’s propositional intention is the firm historicization of this short story within the ostensible setting of the 1890s but as implicitly questioned from the late 1930s.

26 Literary critics have often underestimated historically as well as politically this type of chronotopic superimposition. The debate concerning countercultural hope in the face of reactionary cultural standards remains a priority for postcolonial literary criticism and Derridean musings about secrecy and literature can positively contribute to this aspect of Faulkner studies; for, as Clausson insists, “if we are going to follow Fredric Jameson’s injunction to ‘always historicize,’” then “we must first, as [Herman] Rapaport

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has insisted, read ‘with the kind of dedication to reading that has not been in evidence in the history that could been called the eclipsing of deconstruction’” (125). Clausson shares with Rapaport, whose careful reassessment of poststructuralism in The Theory Mess (2001) is Clausson’s principal corroborative resource, a practical goal. According to Clausson, their common aim concerns what deconstruction can offer to the practice of literary studies at a juncture when the turn to history and culture, in the varied forms of new historicism, Marxism, and cultural, gender, post-colonial, ethnic, race and queer studies, has had the unfortunate (and not always unintended) consequence of framing the practice of literary studies as an either/or proposition. (108)

27 This frame is “either a cultural/historical criticism of political engagement with issues of race, gender and ethnicity, or an apolitical retreat into hermetic formalism, with a focus on the text itself and on aesthetics” (108). Deconstruction does not denote a “negative demonstration that the binaries ‘cancel’ out one another in a bottomless pit of meanings endlessly deferred,” stresses Clausson, because “the next step is to ask: Why these particular binaries? and Why these binaries in this particular historical context?” (124). This approach heeds Derrida’s advice in Writing and Difference (1967): once the limit of a binary opposition “makes itself felt,” the critic must “question systematically and rigorously the history” (358) of the signs and concepts constituting that delimitation.

28 If sterilization does not result from this poststructuralist “action” (358)—if, in other words, the impasse inherent to texts constructed from blatant oppositions, such as in the racist or misogynistic tract, does not materialize—then these binaries must be thoroughly analyzed. These two steps, as followed by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark (1992) and Susan Gubar in Racechanges (1997), provide more contemplative grist to Duvall’s interpretation of “Barn Burning.” Specifically, Morrison’s work on figurative blackness and Africanist presence in the canonical literature of white writers and Gubar’s study of racial metamorphosis in art inform Duvall’s thoughts about artificially passing for black. Yet, while these critical sources show how “artists from widely divergent ideological backgrounds…meditate on racial privilege and privation as well as on the disequilibrium of race,” Duvall does “see limitations to their projects inasmuch as they always identify white writers’ engagements with blackness as a problem or a failure.” On the one hand, “Morrison typically identifies a failure in aesthetic design” (106). On the other hand, Gubar judges “every white appropriation of blackness” to “be a net loss in the search for a more ethical understanding of race” (106–07). Duvall sympathizes with each of these views, but believes “they may be only half right, because there is also something potentially productive in such appropriations.” Crucially, as Faulkner’s literature so often connotes, “there are in- between characters” (107), whom the endeavors of Morrison and Gubar necessarily leave hidden in the secretive Faulknerian shadows. Particularly appropriate to Duvall’s cause are Faulkner’s “Caucasians who instantiate blackness in ways that complicate the Southern racial binarism. These presumptively white characters come to embody black culture,” he argues, “where ‘black’ is not exactly race any longer, but (because it is the South) it is not exactly not race either” (107).

29 Indeed, Duvall implicitly identifies the first two steps of Derridean problematization from Writing and Difference in Gubar’s thesis, but implicitly censures her conclusions as the opening of other binaries (or dialectical opposites) that provide the literary critic with little exploratory scope. “Despite Gubar’s attempts to work dialectically,” regrets

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Duvall, “in the last instance her recurring conclusion is that black impersonations of whiteness are, if not always politically useful, at least justifiable, while white impersonations of blackness are inevitably gestures of bad faith” (107 n1). In contrast, Duvall wishes to show how “Faulkner’s use of figurative blackness is literally productive because it allows him a way to map imbricated relations between one form of otherness (racial) and other forms of otherness (gender/sexuality and class). More importantly,” maintains Duvall, “it allows Faulkner’s readers to see that, whatever the residual racism of William Faulkner, his narratives negotiate racial struggle even when race seems absent from their field of vision; these narratives are, in other words,” he concludes, “racialized in a way that enables a critical purchase on whiteness” (108).

30 Presence through visual absence, of course, accords with the theme of secrecy, and Duvall recognizes the intersections of minoritarian otherness with majoritarian concepts, but Derridean thoughts about the secrets of literature ultimately indict Duvall’s criticism because he unintentionally and tacitly accuses Faulkner of authorial timidity. “Barn Burning,” implies Duvall, feints toward but draws back from the relinquishment of auctoritas, a retreat with which Derrida does not charge “La fausse monnaie.” Despite the less explicit manner in which Faulkner approaches the theme of secrecy, Duvall understands “Barn Burning” to direct the reader to Faulkner’s knowing insertion of an absolute secret. Unlike this short story, “La fausse monnaie” is a figuration of secrecy that Baudelaire allows to escape from authorial control. In question, then, is the absolute secrecy concerning a conditional secret. For Duvall, the mediation that interposes between Abner Snopes and Harris—who never directly and explicitly exchange words in “Barn Burning”—is the deferral of Snopes’s communication to a different or “other” voice so strange that Harris requires and demands the repetition of that message. This différance, which amounts to an unnecessary supplement to Harris’s repeated testimony during the courtroom hearing, points to authorial intervention. “Too much of what is not stated about this individual who is identified as African American doesn’t quite hold together,” thinks Duvall. “Is he a stranger or, as the locution seems to suggest, odd or unusual?” (115). Within the context of “Barn Burning,” Duvall implicitly suggests, the word “strange” gratuitously exhibits the twofold proprietorship (or split ownership) that Mikhail Bakhtin attributes to all words prior to individual appropriation. “The word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language,” argues Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel” (1934), “but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (294).

31 Duvall’s interpretation of this strange locution, of this unusual style of speaking, must be in part a syntactical response, a critical reaction that places not the justice of the peace but Faulkner as the other proprietor of Harris’s utterance. As in poetry, syntax can, through repetition or the subtle modulations of reiteration, act as a signifying element in prose, and the second instance of Harris’s description of the African- American messenger does display a reiterative alteration. “He was a strange nigger, I tell you,” expostulates Harris. The repetition of the opening phrase is a syntactical manipulation that emphasizes the importance of the designation “strange,” while the addition of the post-caesura clause turns Harris’s original declaration into a rhythmically evocative one. To use musical notation, a three-four time signature breaks Harris’s reiterated statement into three bars, each of which contains three crochets: “He was a / strange nig-ger / I tell you.” The attendant beat creates an association between the words “He,” “strange,” and “I.” This correspondence imposes a

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strangeness not only to “He,” but also to “I.” Working together, Harris’s declarations bespeak a syntactical manipulation to Duvall that at once highlights the adjective “strange” and implies that the marshalling of the “He”-“strange”-“I” correspondence comes from an individual other than Harris. With synonyms for “strange” contesting for explicit usage and inscribing that word with ambiguity, adjectival significance within a syntactical context presumably adds to that multifariously singular content to suggest a propositional attitude on Faulkner’s behalf. “Strange” is a matter of authorial responsibility, a propositional intervention, and the strange “I” is Faulkner. The author, implies Duvall, resorts to a gratuitous gift. Faulkner, as if unwilling to forsake complete responsibility for the secret without secret of absolute secrecy; cannot help but deny some irresponsibility toward authorship.

32 A further extrapolation from this interpretation of Duvall’s criticism draws on the Derridean understanding that if an inviolable secret is to affirmatively displace a conditional secret, then that dislocation needs no advertisement. In Duvall’s reading of “Barn Burning,” the authorial voice interposes the “strange” epithet into Harris’s testimony and this intervention (or revelatory addition) deflates the impassionate effect of Faulkner’s text. Duvall certainly does not intend this conclusion. Worse, the absolute secret that undermines the use of the word “nigger” by Harris, Abner, and Sarty—an essentially radical secrecy in the face of unreconstructed views—loses its displacement value with regard to the conditional secret that empowers Abner’s phantasmatic and contradictory power to level (however briefly) the hierarchical construct of landlord over tenant.

33 Recognition of the deconstructive potential within “Barn Burning” for which the author has intentional responsibility, however, should acknowledge Faulkner’s concomitant disavowal of auctoritas. This is where Duvall falls short. Reading Faulkner’s fiction, texts that pregnantly evince poststructural tendencies avant la lettre, encourages critical projection beyond and interpolation between the inculcated terms and oppositions of American culture. In keeping with the aporetic structure of the absolute secret, Abner is somewhat of the spectral interstice, as Godden’s earlier cited argument should suggest. The Abner who makes “a small fire, neat, niggard almost” (7), is almost a “nigger,” but that he learnt this fieldcraft during the American Civil War when “in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray” (7), simultaneously places Abner between polar opposites. Color and the grayscale resulting from a mixture of black and white signify these poles. This interstitial existence is an implicit strangeness—a different kind of in-between than Godden and Duvall contemplate. That Abner is a “bloodless” (8) corpse, or “stiff” (4, 5, 8, etc.), who is practically always on the move further suggests that Snopes haunts this intermediate space. Moreover, he can inhabit both extremes of the ontological spectrum at the same time, as his behavior testifies. Abner is stubborn to his superiors, yet they deem him a flexible and willing extractor of revenge and avoider of the law. Attire that is “at once formal and burlesque” (20) is characteristic of these opposites, as is the peculiar double nature of his physical actions. In leaving Harris’s land after the hearing, Abner mounts his wagon, sits down, and then strikes his mules “two savage blows with the peeled willow, but withoutheat.” This action “was not even sadistic; it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause his descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reining back in the same movement” (6; emphasis added).

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34 Abner’s presence, which always seems to carry two or more interpretations, compounds his deconstructive reserve, so that he is both a familiar type (the Heimliche) to the communities through which he passes and an unwelcome visitation (the Unheimliche). Abner is a nonwarrantor whose repeated moves from landlord to landlord facilitate and symbolize the economic cycle of exchange, but an unusually rebellious one—Karl Marx dismissed the political potential or usefulness of the lumpenproletariat —who invariably reappears in the southern economy after critically devaluing his use- value to one landlord as a persistently irritating revenant within the sociopolitical environment he necessarily but unwillingly helps to maintain. At the heart of Abner’s figuration, then, is a dialogic that constructs and haunts his cultural surroundings with an otherness beyond the intention of double inscription. Any landlord is a host— Abner’s necessary but despised proprietor—while Abner is that landlord’s accepted guest upon his farmland—a tenant who always moves before authority can pin him down for malfeasance. These visitation rights augment Abner’s (non)authorial self.

35 Duvall’s juxtaposition of Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” with Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (1940) certainly “underscore[s] the economic slavery experienced alike by black and white sharecroppers” (113). Nevertheless, while Abner suffers in the master-slave dialectic, he is a radically ambiguous participant in these relations, as Duvall’s own language unconsciously (and therefore secretly) adumbrates. “The class lesson that Abner Snopes tries to teach his son Sarty,” professes Duvall, “is uncannily similar to the one Dave begins to learn” (114 [emphasis added]) in Wright’s short story. Abner, as Sarty acknowledges, is substantially insubstantial: he exhibits “that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow” (10); his presence is that of a “depthless” and “harsh silhouette” (14); he is both without depth and of a depth without bottom. From a capitalist perspective, Abner Snopes is one of the insubstantial men who comprise the lumpenproletariat, yet he continually speculates on speculation in a manner that costs his warrantors their ease.3

36 The narrator of Baudelaire’s prose poem, notes Derrida, “speculates on what can happen to capital in a capital during the age of money, more precisely, in the age of value as monetary sign” (124). In Faulkner’s short story, the threat of barn burning intervenes between the capitalist speculation of a series of warrantors and the actions of a nonwarrantor supposedly precluded from this kind of speculation. In fact, fire, or going up in smoke, is crucial to both tales. The events of “La fausse monnaie” arise from the two men leaving a tobacconist’s shop, with the narrator’s colleague presumably having bought some tobacco, and possibly having received a counterfeit coin in the exchange. Not bothering to complain to the shopkeeper betrays a tendency toward conspicuous consumption in keeping with what Derrida calls the “pure and luxurious” (Given 107) gratification afforded by cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoking. Each act is an appropriation of surplus-value. In contrast, Abner Snopes does not smoke, nor does any member of his family. This non-habit prefigures Flem Snopes’s behavior in The Hamlet (1940). “Have a cigar,” landowner Will Varner tells his dirt farmer one day. “I don’t use them” (750), Flem replies. “‘Just chew, hah?’ Varner said,” in reference to Flem’s habitually masticating jaws. “I chew up a nickel now and then until the suption is out of it,” states Flem. “But I aint never lit a match to one yet” (751).

37 If the speculative thoughts engendered by “La fausse monnaie,” as Derrida argues in Given Time, “are a guide back to” an “archaic originarity, which we have left behind or

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allowed to become perverted, in a non-Marxist socialism” (66), then Baudelaire’s anti- mercantilism finds an American echo in Faulkner’s retrospective anti-capitalism. Whereas “La fausse monnaie” concerns the urban economy of bourgeois and mendicant, “Barn Burning” concerns the rural economy of warrantor and nonwarrantor. Faulkner’s tale pursues this version of non-Marxist socialism more concertedly than Baudelaire’s short prose poem can. The surplus generated when the labor of a dirt farmer in the American south exceeds subsistence is ceded to the economic upper class. Hence, from one landowner to the next, Abner Snopes interprets the barn as a symbol of proprietary excess. A valuable commodity in its own right, the barn stores the surplus crop from Abner’s rented land and the other material possessions (or “stock”) of his economic master. No wonder his threatened response is to reduce that excess to ashes. Barn burning by a nonwarrantor is a form of conspicuous consumption from a socioeconomic class of people whose societal status should ensure their preclusion from genuine indulgence. Arson foretells of Abner’s supposed pleasure in taking from his landlord more than a nonwarrantor’s rights allow. His assumed crimes are interpreted by warrantors as illegal expropriations (rather than reductive reappropriations) of surplus-value. Ostensibly, Abner is a white dirt farmer who rents the land he works, but implicitly he is a barnburner, the master of a conditional secret that trails behind him as a reserve on which Abner draws only if slighted by his landlord.

38 The economies of secrecy and capital come markedly to the fore in relation to Snopes’s next employer, who from Abner’s viewpoint “aims to begin tomorrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months” (9), when he visits Major de Spain’s mansion for the first time. “Watching him,” Sarty remarks “the absolutely undeviating course which his father held,” and cannot help but see “the stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood in the drive and which his father could have avoided by a simple change of stride” (10). Despite a warrantee in the form of Major de Spain’s servant trying to bar the nonwarrantor’s entrance to the mansion, Abner tramps in through the major’s front door. Sarty notices “the prints of the stiff foot on the door jamb” and watches “them appear on the pale rug behind the machinelike deliberation of the foot” (11). They leave a track representative of a mutual antagonism that not only associates Abner’s privation with the major’s conspicuous consumption, but also prefigures the two men’s relationship. Abner only halts when his presence calls forth the major’s wife. “Wiping cake or biscuit dough from her hands with a towel”(12)—a sign of comestible delights to come that Snopes “domesticity” can never have witnessed—she stares “at the tracks on the blond rug with an expression of incredulous amazement” (12). The way in which Abner disrupts Major de Spain’s mansion with this simple, curt, uncompromising visit, the briefest of sojourns in which the “formal and burlesque” (20) state of his broadcloth coat hovers with the “friction-glazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies” (11) over the horse muck on the French carpet, is that of an annoying insect that enters and leaves a property according to its own precepts. Snopes’s stiff leg seems either “to bear (or transmit) twice the weight which the body compassed” (11). Abner’s contradictory impression is at once a burden to himself and an implicit message to his new landlord.

39 Abner plans to be both as obvious (or open) and unfathomable (or secretive) for Major de Spain as he has been for the major’s predecessors. His unaccountable visit to the mansion is soon conflated in the eyes of Harris’s successor by the Snopeses’ successfully unsuccessful effort to clean the dung-soiled rug. This task, which is communicated to

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Abner by a “Negro youth” (12) he does not know—and therefore in an inversion of the message supposedly transmitted to Harris about barn burning—leaves the carpet in a different yet similarly damaged state. The original tracks “were gone,” but “where they had been were now long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a lilliputian mowing machine” (14). In replacing the offensively dark with the offensively pale, these new marks follow the course of the old ones. Abner’s presence, which will “not to be dwarfed by anything” (11), leaves an incongruously Lilliputian but potentially ineradicable trace on the major’s conspicuous possession, which came “all the way from France” (13) at the cost of “a hundred dollars” (18). The marks on this rug, of course, do not redress the balance between the tenant and his landlord, as the “pallets” (14) that separate the sleeping Snopeses from the dirt floor of their rented ex- slave cabin attest; rather, they would seem to presage the economic retribution of another burning barn.

40 That Abner’s presence succeeds in shaking hierarchical structures is again apparent after the damaging restoration of the rug. The major attempts to fine his tenant “twenty bushels of corn” (16) against his crop for the botched cleaning. Gender reversal speaks for Abner’s effect on this occasion: Major de Spain makes his demand in the “trembling” “shaking” of a “woman” (15). Abner not deigning to reply through face-to- face communication, but unwilling to produce a greater surplus for his landlord than his original contract stipulates, sues the major for overstepping his lawful bounds. Abner may be a nonwarrantor, with all the disadvantages of that class, yet successive landlords fail to crush his self-possession. With a wagon his only material object of exchange-value, the practically impecunious Abner rates his ontological right to master himself as invaluable. His self-assessment mirrors that of his supposed superiors, as the inverted play of frames in “Barn Burning” avers. For, after his initial visit to Major de Spain’s house, Abner rematerializes against the background of the cabin where his family are meant to live. Sarty’s “father appeared at the door” of the shack, “framed against that shabbiness, as he had been against that other bland perfection, impervious to either” (13). Although a fleetingly insubstantial shadow of the major, whom Sarty will later see as “the white man…emerging from a white door down the hall” (23) of his mansion, Abner is a substantial presence to his youngest son.

41 Both of no depth and without depth, the only substantial threat to Abner, the only manner of his substantiation as a barnburner, lies with Sarty. Abner, who will not communicate with his masters through his own voice, might be betrayed by the voice of his youngest son. “You were fixing to tell them,” he accuses Sarty after the Harris hearing. “You would have told him” (8). Torn between his feeling that Abner’s complainants “wanted only truth, justice” (8), and “the old grief of blood” (3), Sarty’s silence before the justice at once safeguards Abner’s conditional secret—leaving Abner free to haunt prospective masters as a potential arsonist—and defends the boy against an act of perjury. The secret conjectured about the Snopes patriarch remains hidden and, despite physical chastisement for what Abner deemed to be wavering loyalty, Sarty affords himself the hope that “forever” his father is “done satisfied now” (6).

42 Abner, though, experiences no such relief; in fact, Sarty is a growing concern—both a boy who will be a financial asset to his father and a youth who will cause his father anxiety. Filial disloyalty is an aspect to the Oedipal dilemma that Abner has negotiated successfully with his eldest son, whose reticence reassures his father, but which remains an unresolved issue with his youngest boy. The poststructuralist

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interpretation of the Oedipus complex particularly heeds the role of language in this situation. “Pay systematic attention,” counsels Derrida in Dissemination (1972), “to the permanence of a Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of logos, to the paternal position. Not that this happens especially and exclusively in Plato. Everyone knows this or can easily imagine it,” he contends. “But the fact that ‘Platonism,’ which sets up the whole of Western metaphysics in its conceptuality, should not escape the generality of this structural constraint, and even illustrates it with incomparable subtlety and force,” he asserts, “stands out as all the more significant” (76). Thus, in an anachronism, “the ‘speaking subject’ is the father of his speech. And one would quickly realize that this is no metaphor, at least not in the sense of any common, conventional effect of rhetoric. Logos is a son, then,” reasons Derrida, “a son that would be destroyed by his very presence without the present attendance of his father. His father who answers. His father who speaks for him” (77).

43 Abner’s silence toward his warrantors, which says everything about the power of dirt farmers disenfranchised from the land on which they live and work, speaks for Sarty at the two justice hearings. On each occasion, Sarty fails in his struggle to overcome his father’s presence and so fails to father his own logos. Rent bidirectionally when called to testify, the boy’s stream of consciousness, unmediated by Faulkner’s absolutely secret narrator, and in silent agreement with but in simultaneous repudiation of his father, also pulls in two directions. With ellipses doubly enhancing the sense of interiority, Sarty’s secret thoughts at the Harris hearing exemplify this repeated conundrum: “(our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!)” (3) is a statement that can point to Abner as much as to Harris. This strange doubleness toward the father characterizes the inheritance of an ironically paternal trait that appears to arise from the secret machinations of biological inheritance: for, alongside Abner’s two sons stand sisters who are “twins” (23).

44 Certainly, as Noel Polk argues, Sarty’s conundrum “crystallizes and encapsulates the dilemma of nearly all children in Faulkner,” descendents who “get caught in the crossfire between contending but mutually reifying structures that demand their obedience” (28). Polk identifies these cultural manifestations as the courthouse and the mansion. With particular reference to “Barn Burning,” these “political and economic bastions of the symbolic order,” believes Polk, “are much more likely to conspire to maintain his father in his familial place of localized dominance over Sarty than to free him from them” (27); as a corollary, “for Sarty and his family, Ab is the law” (28), and Abner’s progeny inhabit what Polk calls Faulkner’s “dark house”—property within the property of their parents, such children “have no commerce with the courthouse except as it stands beyond and validates the power of the father” (29).

45 Notwithstanding the coherence of Polk’s thesis, his sense of “contending” does not fully acknowledge the ambiguous lure of affranchisement, the Derridean understanding from On the Name of breaking free of prohibitions, that threatens to tear Sarty apart rather than meld him into a congruous whole. Having taken Major de Spain to court, and with the justice’s decision to lower the major’s compensation, Sarty hopes in conditional secrecy for an “economic” cessation of his father’s antagonistic nature. “Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish,” he thinks, “—corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses—gone, done with for ever and ever” (17; emphasis added). Sarty has lived his short life in perpetual motion with his family constantly moving toward their next, unnamed, and therefore never fully

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localized location; he is a communal stranger; he is an impersonal working component in the economic cycle of exchange. The ruling somewhat in Abner’s favor might end this itinerancy, muses Sarty. He even allows himself the joy of a finite future infinitely construed—that unending satisfaction he had wished on his father after the Harris trial —but events soon abort his youthful thoughts of settlement (in all its forms).

46 Unsatisfied by the judgment against Major de Spain, unreconstructed in his attitude toward warrantors, Abner risks no gratuitous communication before taking his revenge. He even threatens to tie Sarty up, as a safeguard against the revelation of his conditional secret concerning the razing of the major’s barn, if his wife will not keep the boy within their cabin. She does as ordered, but with his hopes for a settled life disrupted, Sarty escapes his mother, takes on the role of messenger of “truth, justice” (8), and freely delivers (or gifts) a warning to the major. In responding to this message, Major de Spain becomes as depthless as the figure Abner Snopes projects, the landlord’s “furious silhouette” standing out against “the tranquil early summer night sky” (24). That the outcome to Sarty’s message is another absolute secret that glimmers almost indistinguishably on the surface of Faulkner’s text therefore comes as little surprise. Three gunshots ring out. The boy’s cry of “Pap! Pap!” (14), followed by his past tense assertion that his father “was brave” (14), possibly point to the major’s deadly uncovering of Abner’s conditional secret. Maybe the major kills Abner and/or Abner’s eldest son, but the literary critic, no matter how scrupulous in his analysis, will never know for sure. Hence, whichever reading suits the scholar, the profound reserve of deconstructive energy in “Barn Burning” impassions Faulkner’s text until its narratological end.

47 The stiffness of Abner, the man with “the cold, dead voice” (21), a dead man limping (— and is that a lie maintained throughout, a conditional secret not even suspected by the narrator who relates how “a Confederate provost’s man’s musket ball had taken” Abner “in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago” [5]?—) is doubled by the “little stiff” that the “cold” but “walking” (25) Sarty now manifests.4 The reader can speculate whether Sarty Snopes, as a direct descendant of Abner is racially white, black passing (intentionally or not) for white, white artificially black, or black passing (intentionally or not) for white artificially passing for black, or whether Sarty’s conscience betrays his mother’s infidelity, but beyond such considerations “Barn Burning” closes with a young, and therefore still maturing, character headed toward an ever widening horizon.

48 Sarty Snopes does not figure messianicism as Joe Christmas does in Faulkner’s earlier Light in August (1932), but evokes the messianic with his steps toward a never to be realized messianicity. Thanks to its inviolable secrecy, argues Derrida, literature immanently conjures the imminently democratic; this prospect of the ever-presently democratic from present democracy is the messianic proper. This form of messianism is, as Derrida’s essay on “Faith and Knowledge” elucidates, “without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration” (17). The messianism of theology, what Derrida calls “messianicism,” looks forward to a messiah’s coming as a foreseeable event, but the atheologically messianic emerges only when “no anticipation sees it coming” (17). “Breaking with the present,” explains Segal, “the secret (and with it the gift and literature) testifies to such a radical future, as do the groundless and ad infinitum hypotheses to which the secret gives rise about the literary text, hypotheses never to be verified or falsified in any present” (193). Segal turns to John Caputo to

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corroborate this interpretation of Derridean thinking. “The ‘messianic secret’ is, there is no secret and the Messiah is never going to show up,” confirms Caputo: “Derrida’s secret is not some hyperousiological high he has had and that he now whispers in our ear. Far from it. To be ‘in on the secret’ does not mean you know anything, that you are ‘in the know’—but rather in the ‘no,’ non-savoir” (102).

49 The profound emanations of literature, which paradoxically lie on the surface of its texture, are depthless arrivals that gesture toward an unrealizable future. Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie,” which overtly considers secrecy and voluntary donation, is therefore noticeably immanent, with the messianic, the ever-presently democratic, as a necessity of its own critical analysis. Sarty Snopes’s untold journey, which projects beyond and therefore breaks through the frame of “Barn Burning,” undoubtedly sounds a political note too. Fire speaks to Abner, according to the narrator, “as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing” (7– 8). Abner may be an arsonist, but that insinuation does not damn him in everybody’s judgment. “The burning of a barn by an impoverished cropper,” as Godden maintains in William Faulkner (2007), “directs a quasi-political resentment against an institutional structure associated with a seemingly unchangeable form of labor exploitation.” The poorest among Abner’s coevals may regard his supposed actions as “a utopian hope,” while his wealthier counterparts may “tacitly hypothesize a disguised crime” (15), but the result of such speculation is both an over- and undervaluation of the revolutionary potential unwittingly invested in some nonwarrantors by their warrantors. The hopes of the next generation of nonwarrantors, suggests “Barn Burning,” are tied to the power of absolute secrecy to displace the authority of conditional secrets.

50 Thus, Faulkner’s short story ends with the non-messianicism of a spectral man-child— whose delineation both invites and defies the demarcations of race and social status, allying him with the African-American cause by distancing himself from superordinate warranteeism—not coming toward but walking away from the reader under the “slow constellations” (25) an overarching sky. The economy of secrecy rather than race enables Faulkner to “map imbricated relations” between multifarious forms of otherness. The secrets of Colonel Sartoris Snopes, the inviolable and revealable secrets that authorize and censure a democracy to come, thereby propel this figure beyond the frame of this particular tale and toward an infinitely unrealizable hope, a future without horizon, as his non-reappearance in the Faulknerian canon silently implies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambrose, Douglas. Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004. 259–422.

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Baudelaire, Charles. “La fausse monnaie.” Petits poèmes en prose. Ed. Melvin Zimmerman. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1968. 48–50.

Clausson, Nils. “Practicing Deconstruction, Again: Blindness, Insight and the Lovely Treachery of Words in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man.’” College Literature 34.1 (Winter 2007): 106–28.

Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1991. 181–220.

———. Dissemination. 1972. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone, 2000.

———. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Religion: Cultural Memory in the Present. Trans. Samuel Weber. Ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 1–78.

———. “following theory / Jacques Derrida.” life.after.theory. Ed. Michael Payne and John Schad. London: Continuum, 2003. 1–51.

———. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

———. On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

———. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Ed. Simon Critchley. London: Routledge, 1996. 77–88.

———. Writing and Difference. 1967. London: Routledge, 2001.

Duvall, John N. “‘A Strange Nigger’: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness.” The Faulkner Journal 22.1/2 (Fall 2006/Spring 2007): 106–19.

Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1995. 3–25.

Godden, Richard. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

———. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words. Princeton, MI: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Polk, Noel. Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

Rapaport, Herman. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Segal, Alex. “Deconstruction, Radical Secrecy, andThe Secret Agent.” Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (Summer 2008): 189–208.

Shakespeare, William. King Richard II. Ed. Andrew Gurr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Stein, Gertrude. “What is English Literature.” Lectures in America. Introduction Wendy Steiner. London: Virago, 1988. 11–55.

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NOTES

1. Segal—whose reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) help to inspire the present essay, and also following Derrida’s lead—comes to a similar conclusion with respect to Conrad’s novel. “The title of the text—The Secret Agent—referring to something that breaks with law,” reasons Segal, “is like the title of ‘Counterfeit Money’ as Derrida analyzes it, a title without title” (196). 2. Translations from “La fausse monnaie” are my own. 3. Mississippian sociologist Henry Hughes (1829–1862) uses the terms “warranteeism,” “warrantor,” “nonwarrantor,” and “warrantee” in his Treatise on Sociology (1854). Although Hughes, as his biographer Douglas Ambrose explains, “did not represent a dominant tendency in antebellum southern thought” (7), his conclusions in this regard found pertinence following the war. White Americans should be superordinate warrantors, African Americans should be subordinate warrantees, thought Hughes, and the small percentage of white Americans with no property would be nonwarrantors. 4. If Abner has been simulating a limp, then he could play the role of African- American messenger as Duvall supposes.

ABSTRACTS

Working from Jacques Derrida’s contentions about secrecy and authorial responsibility, and paying brief but specific attention to Charles Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie” (1869), as suggested by Derridean concerns over capitalist economics, this article studies the manner in which the inviolable and conditional secrets of William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” (1938) reveal the poststructural tendencies avant la lettre of this leading American modernist. While Faulkner scholars have focused on the ambivalent language and metaphors deployed in this short story, they have not formerly traced the manner in which “Barn Burning” incites a sense of deconstructive criticism, and have thereby failed to acknowledge Faulkner’s attendant authorial irresponsibility. This article redresses this critical imbalance.

INDEX

Keywords: deconstruction, inviolable (absolute) secrecy, Poststructuralism, revealable (conditional) secrecy

AUTHORS

MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

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Foundation Networks and American Hegemony

Inderjeet Parmar

Introduction

1 Thomas Risse-Kappen suggests that the impact of transnational groups is too infrequently researched. That is, more study is needed of the domestic and international conditions in which such groups succeed/fail.1 While there are more such studies since 1995,2 there remains a failure to consider the significance of American philanthropic foundations to building and embedding American hegemony. There are insights provided by studying foundations’ roles in US hegemony building that we do not perceive when we neglect those organisations. In particular, the foundations constructed and sustained the rich texture of cooperative social, intellectual and political relations between key actors and institutions supportive of specific modes of thought that promoted US hegemony. Foundations also fostered and developed the attractive power-knowledge networks that not only radiated intellectual influence but also attracted some of the most creative minds. Finally, liberal internationalist foundations fostered globalism even when the American state was ‘isolationist’, and when US influence abroad unwelcome.

2 “Hegemony” here is understood as a set of processes by which a group, class or state – through a combination of persuasion and coercion – is able to attain “buy in” from other groups, classes or states for its own objectives, values and interests. In order to establish hegemony, the hegemonic power or group normally culturally, intellectually, financially, or militarily penetrates the target group or society/state, thereby providing significant impetus in socialising elements in the target group. While there is a bargain struck between hegemonic forces and target groups, it is normally characterised by inequality of rewards. This is a broad concept of hegemony that is supported by Gramscians and liberals.3

3 This article makes two empirical claims about the processes of American hegemony- construction and draws significant theoretical conclusions that undermine

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conventional ways of viewing state-private relations as well as blurring the distinction between domestic forces and international factors as determinants of political outcomes. Bridging both sets of relations – state/private and inside out/outside in – is the “elite network”, a technology of power, in the present case, funded, fostered and sustained by philanthropic foundation largesse. The first and general empirical claim is that philanthropic foundations were/are significant forces in American society and, equally importantly, their significance in American hegemony building lay in their sustained, long-term cooperative relationship with the American state. The second, more specific, empirical claim is that through such sustained cooperation, the foundations helped to build national, international and global institutions and networks through which American hegemony was, at the very least, attempted. The latter process evidences the most significant impact of US foundations – the building of the domestic and international infrastructure for liberal internationalism which has transformed into a kind of “social neoliberalism”.4 The theoretical conclusions follow from these claims: the sustained and deep cooperation between the state and foundations suggests that we must revise our views of “how power works” in the United States and therefore influences its foreign relations. Realist and neo-Realist accounts of power are undermined by the long-term mutual dependence of state and foundation in building/attempting American hegemony, a relationship within which the state has benefited significantly from the apparently private character of the foundations. The evidence presented below also challenges other accounts of state- private relations that posit either sharply-drawn boundaries between state/society or adversarial relations – most specifically realism/statism, neopluralism and instrumental Marxism.5 Instead, the evidence suggests the greater usefulness of accounts that blur public-private boundaries. Although there are several such approaches – parastates, epistemic communities, corporatism, and foreign policy establishment - a neo-Gramscian approach offers a more comprehensive understanding of state-private relations and American power. This approach sees power as increased through cooperation. Although international factors played key roles in changing the external and domestic behaviour of the American state, domestic elite internationalist groups also played vital roles, in cooperation with the state, by building the preconditions for US globalism: mobilising elite/mass opinion, promoting the intellectual bases, institutions, and networks that undergirded globalism, creating/ improving the state’s knowledge/research capacities at critical times, and building international institutions in which they worked to embed American values/interests.6 This tends further to undermine realist accounts without suggesting that state power is irrelevant or unimportant. Finally, the “elite network” concept, in addition to showing how interpenetrated are the state and elite private groups, also shows how elite networks collapse or at least blur the distinctions between domestic society and international affairs. Therefore, the article shows that elite networks, consisting of state officials and private citizens are powerful means by which foreign policy shifts may be prepared, elite and mass opinion primed and mobilised, new consensus built, ‘old’ forces marginalised, and US hegemony constructed. In sum, the article builds on and synthesises the conceptualisations of Risse-Kappen – inside/outside, state-private, and the importance of transnational relations - and Haas – epistemic communities and networks,7 but within a broader neo-Gramscian framework.

4 This article, first, suggests the foundations’ significance; secondly, briefly discusses theoretical approaches conducive to understanding cooperative state- private

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relationships; thirdly, discusses the foundations’ use of networks to promote their influence and to build hegemony. Thereafter, the article considers the empirical evidence of the foundations’ roles in America’s rise to globalism in three historical phases (1920s-1950s, 1930s-1970s, and since the late 1980s) and at three levels (domestic, international and global). Finally, it moves to a conclusion.

The Foundations’ Significance

5 American hegemony was neither attempted nor constructed only on coercive or corporate power but also, and in combination with, the nation’s socialisation capabilities as embodied in various kinds of frequently-neglected but influential non- state actor.8 Specifically, this article focuses on the role in America’s rise to globalism of philanthropic foundations – especially the so-called ‘Big 3’, Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller, the philosophies of which were formed at the turn of the twentieth- century. Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropy led the way to “scientific giving”, and Ford more or less followed when it became nationally and globally active in the early 1950s. Pragmatic and utilitarian, elitist and technocratic in outlook, the foundations aimed to invest in ideas and “put knowledge to work” to reform society, economy and politics at home and abroad. With endowments in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the Big 3 championed generating positivistic ‘scientific’ knowledge that would be of practical use to policymakers, urban planners, and state-builders. Self-confident, optimistic and armed with the findings of social sciences like sociology, economics and political science, foundation leaders rarely consulted those at whom their programmes of reform were targeted and on whose behalf they claimed to be acting.9

6 In effect, the major foundations played critical roles in constructing national, international and global institutional structures that first, boosted US federal executive power at a time when the federal government was weak and the individual states of the union strong, actively undermining and marginalising parochialism and ‘isolationism’ and promoting liberal internationalism; secondly, foundations played significant roles in promoting American power in and through newly-constructed informal and formal international organisations; and finally, since the 1980s, they promoted an increasingly ‘global’ set of institutions that may constitute a nascent ‘global civil society’.10 The latter represents at a global level the project of a century ago that the foundations embarked upon at home: at a time of weak federal/global institutions and strong states, to strengthen the former at the expense of the latter and build a sustainable national/ global civil society. The reconstruction and partial transfer of sovereignty – from states of the union to Washington, DC, and from other national states to global institutions,11 is the underlying logic of these developments. The foundations’ principal technology was, and is, the ‘network’, specifically the heavily politicised knowledge network.

7 Non-state actors have frequently been identified as critical to US power and to global politics.12 Specifically, the roles of America’s foremost philanthropic foundations have been neglected, even in studies that otherwise emphasise the importance of non-state actors. Yet, as this article makes clear, studying foundations provides insights into the ‘mindset’ and activities of America’s hegemony- planners and –builders over time, and indicates foundations’ strategic significance in mediating and articulating components of the US state and private elites, in cohering the foreign policy ‘establishment’. Four characteristics – or “fictions” - of the Big 3 foundations account for their significance,

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all related to their apparent independence: first, the “non-state” fiction, at odds with their trustees’ ‘statist’ mindset and their governmental connections; secondly, the “non-political” fiction, despite connections with both main political parties; thirdly, the “non-business” fiction, irrespective of corporate directorships and income- sources among trustees; and finally, the “scientific/non-ideological” fiction, despite attachment to the ideology of Americanism as liberal internationalism.13 Additionally, their adaptability and sense of historic mission – changing tactics, same programme14 – meant that they successfully negotiated their way through the frequently hostile environment and turbulence of American domestic politics and the equally turbulent wider world. Such ability during the isolationist 1920s and 1930s provides insights into how foundation programmes and tactics would successfully adapt in states designated as ‘anti-American’ during the cold war era. In each such case, foundations showed significant tenacity, tact and adaptability in allying with any non-hostile public agency that furthered their goals and prepared for a future more permissive climate.

8 Holding such fictions as articles of faith permits foundations to act as unifiers of a political system divided by sovereignties, characterised by mass democracy, and group competition. Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies mediate between the concerns of state, big business, party politics and foreign policy-related academia; articulate a divided system; and constitute and create forums for constructing elite consensus and forward policy planning. Nevertheless, foundation networks did not always succeed and, importantly, were most successful in conditions of crisis15 – such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the sudden outbreak of the Korean War, and after the end of the cold war. However, the foundations have been adept at network- building during non-crises and are well prepared to interpret and promote crises as opportunities to policymakers and public alike.16

9 America’s journey to global leadership – hegemony - may be tracked through the rise of the major foundations through three overlapping but distinct stages/levels, with each stage socialising elites at home and abroad, and embedding liberalism into national and international institutions: stage 1, at domestic level, from the 1920s to the 1950s, during which the foundations helped construct the domestic hegemony of liberal internationalism, marginalised isolationism, and built up the institutional capacities of the federal government, especially in foreign affairs; stage 2 from the 1930s to 1970s during which foundations helped integrate American and foreign elites and, very significantly, developed formal and informal international organisations for elites’ socialisation and integration; and stage 3 from the late 1980s when foundations have been strategically important in attempting to build ‘global civil society’ particularly in fostering ‘democratic’ forums ‘challenging’ neo-liberal globalisation.17 Underpinning the century-long ‘hegemonic project’ is liberal internationalism though it is also clear that this school of thought and action represented a fairly ‘nationalist internationalism’. 18 The international/global orders constructed or aimed at were, and are, congenial to American economic and other interests.19

Theoretical approaches

10 The indispensability of private elite organizations to state legitimacy are central to this study. The cooperative inter-relationship of the American state with elite foreign affairs organizations blurs the distinction between the public and private sectors and

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calls into question theories (such as neopluralism, statism, and instrumental Marxism)20 that advance a zero-sum view of power. Cooperative state-private elite networks have played a powerful historical role in mobilizing for US global expansionism and such network construction is best explained by concepts that emphasise shared and mutual state-private elite interests. The advantages to the state of such arrangements were/are that official policy objectives – overseas intelligence gathering, promotion of pro-American interests – could be advanced by purportedly unofficial means.21 American foundations were/are, particularly close to the state and, therefore, provide illustrative cases of public-private “bridging” organisations.

11 According to Mann, one of the most significant powers of the modern state is its infrastructural capacity, in addition to its coercive power. That is, the state reaches deeply into its “own” society and draws upon popular legitimacy, in addition to tax revenues.22 Gramsci, conversely, maintains that dominant classesestablish private institutions fundamental to state power.23 Elite self-organisation and the organization of private life by state agencies creates the basis of interpenetrated organizations and networks, with far-reaching consequences, forcing scholars to reconceptualise state- private relations to better understand “how power works” in democracies.

12 This article, therefore, explores four major conceptualizations that emphasise state- private cooperation and then goes on to suggest that, despite their strengths, their insights may be comprehensively subsumed within a neo-Gramscian analysis. The role of the following four conceptualisations, therefore, is principally to place a lot more empirical/historical flesh on what are broader, more abstract Gramscian categories.

The Establishment

13 According to Hodgson, the “Establishment” works behind the scenes and is composed of three core groups: internationally-minded lawyers, bankers and corporate executives from New York; government officials from Washington, DC; and elite university academics and foundation heads. These three groups were united, Hodgson argues, by a common history (WWII /cold war), policy (internationalism), aspiration (world leadership), instinct (centrist), and technique (working through the federal executive).24

14 The US foreign policy Establishment is a self-recruiting bi-partisan group exercising practical influence on defence and foreign policy. Hodgson’s conceptualisation fits neatly the foreign policy roles of the Big 3 foundations, which saw themselves as bipartisan, ideology-free, opposed to isolationism but supportive liberal- internationalism, as well as working to attain and maintain American global leadership. Foundation leaders were drawn from similar elite backgrounds to those of Hodgson’s Establishment. Hodgson identifies the cohesive elite forces in American society that bridge the gap between state and society. Although neo-Gramscians – whose perspective is detailed below - would expect an historic bloc to be broader than Hodgson’s Establishment – for example, to include labour and racial minorities – they find Hodgson’s concept useful within a broader formulation because it permits specific historicisation of Gramscian abstractions. It also shows that non-Gramscians too recognise that there is indeed disproportionate power wielded by unrepresentative elites working outside the constitutional processes.

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The Corporatist School

15 Sharing common elements with this approach, corporatism offers a number of different insights to state-society relations. Corporatism is a variant of weak-state pluralist theory. However, corporatism emphasizes mechanisms for conflict- management and collaboration between functional blocs (corporations, government, organized labour). Functional blocs cooperate better to manage economic affairs and socio-political transformations, to promote political stability.25

16 The corporatist analysis fits within a neo-Gramscian framework. Indeed, corporatists such as Ferguson and McCormick, allude to the connections between the two perspectives. Ferguson actually uses the term ‘historic bloc’ for the New Deal coalition built by President Roosevelt.26 The enlightened self-image of the “organisational sector” accords with Gramscian “state spirit” while corporatists’ emphasis on the coalescence of interests between internationally-oriented, capital-intensive industries and financial institutions, as well as organised labour – are fundamental elements of Gramsci’s historic bloc. What is missing, however, is any compelling account of the role of intellectuals in the American system,27 a major advantage of Gramscian analysis.

Para-states

17 The Progressive era witnessed the rise of a variety of reform-oriented organisations, including professional associations and foundations, which attempted to relieve poverty, promote moral renewal, reform government/politics, and transform America’s world role.28 Eldon Eisenach calls these organizations “parastates” because they stood for the “national public good”, whereas the main political parties and legislatures were corrupt and parochial. Working outside the established channels of the party machine and electoral politics, parastates favoured extending federal executive authority.29

18 Parastates made no distinction between themselves and “the state” which they saw in Hegelian terms: the state, constructed by and of the people, and requiring obedience. The “good citizen”, therefore, is “state-oriented”, seeking to achieve a larger public good. But this, in the Progressive era, was the aspiration blocked by corrupt and parochial parties and legislatures, while the federal executive and a mobilisable public offered opportunities. The interests of a weak federal state and of active parastates coalesced around opinion mobilization: the parastates would educate public opinion behind a reformist agenda at home, through a strong federal state, and the export of American values abroad. “Good citizens” would staff the most statist public offices and exercise citizenship in publicly oriented private organizations.

19 Eisenach’s approach resonates with the role of twentieth-century American foundations and with Gramscian theory: parastates’ state-orientation is remarkably similar to Gramsci’s state spirit, suggesting that Gramsci’s concepts offer insights to analysing power in the US. However, the greater comprehensiveness of Gramsci’s theoretical framework effectively subsumes but also effectively articulates the concepts outlined above, permitting thereby a more comprehensive, coherent, and critical study of power.

20 Establishment-men, corporatist organisational sector-ists, and parastates may see themselves as neutral and disinterested but Gramscian analysis allows us better to

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contextualise and interrogate such self-images, especially by assessing those individuals and groups within the structure of economic, political and ideological power.

Epistemic Communities

21 Epistemic communities are networks of specialists with a common world view about cause and effect relationships which relate to their domain of expertise, and common political values about the type of policies to which they should be applied.30 Epistemic communities are value/knowledge based special interests in the pluralistic mould, seeking to influence the state, with influence, if any, flowing from the private group to the state. However, a more nuanced version of the concept may be more helpful to this study.

22 One aspect of the concept of epistemic communities argues for a “two-tier” dynamic within knowledge groups: the first tier consists of government officials, international agencies, and corporate executives; the second of academics, lawyers, and journalists. Both tiers share a common conceptual framework but operate within an agreed division of labour: government officials have access to policymaking and use the second tier to publicise/disseminate their ideas and to legitimate them as “objective and scientific”, as well as to elaborate on public officials’ ideas. Additionally, the second tier’s ideas were brought to government officials and decision-makers as evidence of a growing consensus.

23 When such interactions are successfully concluded, they lead to the institutionalization of the epistemic community’s “policy paradigm” and incorporation of experts into direct state service.31

24 As intellectuals, think tanks and university research institutes were and are such key features of US foreign cultural affairs, it is clear that state-private networks may be conceptualized within the epistemic community model. In relation to Gramscian thought, however, the epistemic communities concept is limited – it contains no general theory of power or the state nor of the interconnections of ‘multiple’ sources of power in the corporate economy, the academy, and so on. Placed in a Gramscian context, however, it becomes a more usable empirical concept that says something about the precise character of state-private networks.

A neo-Gramscian perspective

25 Although the four concepts agree on most matters, they divide on the issue of locating the sources of the elite. Hodgson’s Establishment and the corporatists’ organizational sector are the most economistic; the former two favour the idea that elites are, in part, sourced from capital-intensive, international manufacturers and banks. By so doing, the two relevant concepts move closer to a more radical interpretation of power. In addition, Gramsci’s little-examined notion of “state spirit” – which is further explained below – offers a new insight into understanding state-society relations that, to be sure, is hinted at in several of the four concepts examined above but never satisfactorily articulated.

26 The Gramscian view, though founded on an economistic analysis of power, makes a radical departure by noting the existence of important protective layers of pro-

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bourgeois ideology and institutions that shape consciousness in favour of the status quo. Gramsci located ideological, political and cultural struggle more centrally into Marxist thought, thereby elevating the role of intellectuals.

27 Gramsci argues that there is no simple way objectively to define capitalist interests – in economic or political terms – and that interests are a matter of debate and interpretation. It is the role of “organic intellectuals” to develop and disseminate dominant ideas, to make “commonsense” what are, in reality, ideas that principally support the ruling class.

28 Politics and the state are not automatic reflections of unequal class relations but sites of struggle between rival ideas and regimes. Through bargaining and building enduring coalitions that cut across class and ethno- racial cleavages, is formed the dominant concept that underlies a particular set of political and economic arrangements, a regime. As political regimes – or hegemonic projects and alliances - are made up of cross-class coalitions, they require public opinion mobilizations to convince the masses – or at least a critical proportion of them – that they have a stake in current arrangements. In short, the coalition – or historic bloc – is generated and sustained by the “consent of the governed”, under the hegemonic leadership of politicians and intellectuals of the capitalist class.

29 As popular consent is so vital to political arrangements, it is engineered32 by elites through numerous channels that involve the state and organizations that Hodgson’s Establishment, the corporatists’ organizational sector, Eisenach’s parastates and the epistemic communities would recognise: elite universities, the CFR, and the major foundations.

30 Hegemony is constructed by an alliance of state elites and private ruling class organizations in order to undermine the old order and to usher in the new. Central to the motivation of private elites is Gramsci’s concept of “state spirit” which infuses every successful social movement. State spirit inspires leaders to take personally the concerns of the nation and state, and to subordinate narrow interests to the broader interests of the state/nation. State-spirited leaders contextualize themselves in the broad sweep of national and global historical development: their outlook “presupposes ‘continuity’, either with the past… or with the future….”33 Such leaders and intellectuals may even come to believe “that they are the State…”34

Network building: the foundations’ principal function

31 Integrating elites behind particular hegemonic projects has been the foundations’ principal long-term function. Foundations have constructed domestic and international knowledge networks, both as ends in themselves and as means to their ends. Networks are a technology of power that produces significant hegemonic outcomes. Briefly, networks are “systems of coordinated research, disseminated and published results, study and often graduate level teaching, intellectual exchange, and financing, across national boundaries.”35 Networks normally include official policy- makers and perform two broad but vital functions: internal and external.

32 Internal functions refer to what the network does as a system of scholar, knowledge, and money flows, inter-institutional connections, and as a source of attraction. For example, one of the functions of networks is to incorporate and socialise scholars

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through providing research funds and career-building structures such as professional societies, conferences, and journals. Networks build careers and as individuals progress through the ranks, the structural probabilities for radically different thinking rapidly diminish. Added to this is the increasingly policy-oriented or at least utilitarian character of academic knowledge production – favoured by foundations – that scholars are (structurally) socialised or incentivised to conduct. Therefore, such socialising structures tend to have politically-moderating effects on scholars, scholarship and political action.36

33 External functions refers to the external image of the network’s members as sources of symbolic capital, producers of prestigious, legitimate knowledge taken seriously by all, especially policy-makers.37 Foundation-funded knowledge networks clearly regulate the “free” market of ideas, the intellectual environment within which “thinkable thought” occurs38 which affects the network’s ability to reproduce itself by assimilating new generations of scholars, strengthen self-awareness, reinforce common language and codes and, importantly, to engage in intellectual combat with opponents. A key function – the ‘darker’ side of the publicly-declared purpose of philanthropy - is more controversial and is publicly unstated: to bolster US hegemony by promoting specific forms of cooperation and integration for achieving nationalistic, rather than philanthropic, ends.

34 Together, the internal and external functions of foundations were/are the basis of elite integration and of others’ marginalisation. In periods of crisis, however, when old ideas appear inadequate in addressing problems, foundations incorporate critical thinkers to contribute to problem-solving. In the process, however, some radicals are incorporated, ‘domesticated’ and rendered “safe”.

35 Networks distribute material rewards and incentives, bestow status and prestige, that powerfully motivate particular kinds of research. Materially and honorifically, networks are hierarchical systems. They, therefore, become important sources of symbolic capital and radiate intellectual influence. Symbolic capital, in turn, helps strengthen the influence of networks in their role as gatekeepers of ideas, bestowers of legitimacy for certain kinds of thinking, implicitly or explicitly undermining others. This combines to produce political influence, moving network members and organisations closer to the centres of power.

36 The Big 3 behaved this way because they are a part of the American ‘power elite’,39 especially significant within the east coast foreign policy ‘establishment’.40 The major foundations are outgrowths of the corporate giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organisations imbued with the ‘scientific spirit’ of the Progressive era.41 They mobilised scientific knowledge to manage the potentially catastrophic socio-political effects of socio-economic change: industrialisation, mass immigration, urbanisation and the attendant rise of radical political movements.42 They also pioneered scientific ‘giving’, management, and social engineering to inaugurate a reformed economic and political order.43

37 Additionally, the foundations are unrepresentative elite institutions: their trustees affiliated with Wall St. banks and law firms, service in the State Department, connections with the leaders of both main political parties, the national press, and ‘Ivy League’ universities.44 Demographically, their trustees have been overwhelmingly male, white Anglo-Saxon protestants (Wasps), educated at elite schools and universities, and patrons of exclusive clubs.45 By the 1920s, such groups believed that they, American

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elite, had ‘come of age’ and were fit to lead the world: America was more advanced industrially and socially, more open and democratic, and generally more dynamic. Opposed to moribund empires and atheistic communism, for east coast elites America represented a new way forward for a world of peace and prosperity.46 American internationalism, embedded in American-led international organisations, was the way forward.47

38 This article provides examples to argue that foundations, in cooperation with the state, played critical roles in America’s rise to global hegemony, and achieved this in part through building coalitions that comprised intellectuals (academics, students), state agencies, corporation executives, organised labour, racial minorities, and others. Such networks bridged state-private and inside-outside divisions and show that state power with (rather than over or against) private elite action created the bases of American hegemony. The article is structured according to the periodisation presented above: 1920s-1950s, national/domestic network-building for liberal internationalism and marginalising isolationism; 1930s-1970s, international network-building; and 1980s- present, global network-building. Network-building as a socialising instrument did not, by itself, generate US ‘hegemony’ though it was a pre-condition of it. The flows of material incentives – grants, jobs, fellowships - integral to network-building clearly played a role. Both foundation network-building and the rise of America to globalism were also symbiotically connected to catalytic global events: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, for example; the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 and the adoption of NSC-68;48 9-11. Such catalytic events afforded precious opportunities to those forces that were best prepared to take advantage of the spaces opened up for ‘new’ thinking, often considered ‘unthinkable’ before the ‘crisis’.

National Networks, 1920s-1950s

39 This period witnessed a massive effort at national network-building by foundations in the United States. Rockefeller and Carnegie funded liberal internationalist/anti- isolationist think tanks, university research institutes, and publicity organisations: CFR (1921), Foreign Policy Association (FPA, 1918), League of Nations Association (1923), and numerous World Affairs Councils.49 Such efforts of the interwar years indicate foundations’ adaptability to hostile domestic political conditions: to zealously foster a counter-hegemony against isolationism and for internationalism, patiently awaiting the day when their message would be sympathetically received. By so doing, the foundations built an historic bloc behind the hegemonic project of liberal internationalist globalism (and anti-isolationism), that consisted of corporations, organised labour, intellectuals/students, and racial minorities, for example. Such groupings, with their varied interests, were leashed to the globalist vision that included an open trading system, full employment, anti-fascism abroad and anti-racism at home, and world peace underwritten by American power. Thus, their vision was global, paying little heed to the so-called domestic/international divide.

40 Concretely to promote liberal internationalism, Carnegie philanthropies supported numerous universities in establishing foreign affairs/international relations courses in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as local library ‘international corners’ and radio broadcasts across the country.50 The crowning achievements of this ‘movement’ were the Yale Institute of International Studies51 and the programmes established at Princeton under

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the leadership of Edward Meade Earle: together, Yale and Princeton led the way in establishing international relations as an academic discipline and, even more significantly, in establishing Realism – the centrality and inevitability of power politics and the necessity of American global interventionism - as the discipline’s dominant postwar paradigm.52The Yale Institute’s ‘independent’ status also helped legitimize its views. Specifically, there was little public acknowledgement of its continuous connections with either the Foundation or with the American state. The Institute trained hundreds of undergraduates and dozens of graduate students for state service or academia - furthering the influence of its Realist approach. By 1948, YIIS began a journal, World Politics, and ran one of the most prestigious programmes of postgraduate research and training in America.53 Well-known IR alumni include Bernard C. Cohen, Lucian Pye and William C. Olson.54 Other alumni went on to join important US foreign policy-related institutions such as the CFR, FPA, Foreign Service, and State Department.55 The experience of the Yale Institute demonstrates the valued place of utilitarian knowledge-production in Rockefeller’s priorities, as well as the importance of building powerful national networks based on “centres of excellence”.

41 Additionally, the early stirrings of the massive postwar Area Studies phenomenon were the work of the big foundations from as early as the 1930s, in the case of Soviet Studies, 56 as was their postwar development and maturity. Asian, African, and Latin American Studies thrived as those regions became objects of American attention due to their strategic location, raw materials, market potential, or place in cold war competition. For example, a Carnegie Corporation internal report by Columbia University historian, Nathaniel Peffer, concluded that, “the [Rockefeller and Carnegie- funded American] Institute [of Pacific Relations, AIPR] has been the means of increasing consciousness of the Far East in the United States.” Peffer credited the AIPR with having inspired the increased teaching of Pacific area studies and the establishment of Far Eastern departments in schools, colleges and universities, a claim also backed up by more recent scholarship.57 After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the AIPR became an essential part of the administration’s war effort. Its research programme was increasingly “determined by Government needs” because the AIPR was the “only agency [with] considerable … information about the area.”58 As the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic Services, and the armed forces increased their demand for the AIPR’s research and knowledge, the Corporation stepped up its support.59

42 Located at prestigious universities such as Harvard, Columbia and Chicago, area studies programmes featured funded chairs, departments, professional associations, conferences, doctoral students and research fellowships.60 Relatively small investments had powerful ‘multiplier’ effects as the symbolic power of the Ivy league encouraged other elite and non-elite universities to invest in their own area studies programmes.61 The foundations’ efforts in this area were assisted by regular advice and encouragement by an enlarged postwar State Department that yearned for trained graduate students for public service and a more internationally-conscious American public. The State Department more closely oriented the teaching of IR at Yale, for example, to the Department’s concerns. In 1944, a committee investigated “what the educational process can do to produce good decision-makers in the field of international relations”, mainly to improve the calibre of graduate students entering government service and to provide in-service training to practising diplomats.62

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43 In addition, the strongly pro-interventionist foundations actively funded in the mid- to late-1930s campaigns to ‘educate’ various elements of elite opinion, particularly pacifist and isolationist students at leading universities, and regional notables in isolationist parts of the United States.63 The League of Nations Association, for example, which was heavily funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsored college-based Model League of Nations Assemblies and ran national competitions for school children.64 The aim was “to train an elite to think, feel and act internationally.”65

44 By 1939, when the isolationist-interventionist debates were at their most fierce, the foundations’ funded organisations to press the case for American belligerence and to crush the case for isolation and neutrality, such as the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (CDAAA) and the Fight For Freedom (FFF). The pro-interventionist and anti-isolationist CDAAA and FFF reached out to numerous groups in American society, including organised labour and, for the first time, African-Americans.66 The warhawks organised black branches in Harlem and Chicago, alongside two chapters at historically-black universities (Howard and Lincoln). Having few connections with the black masses, they sought to mobilise the leaders of black opinion - trades union leaders (A. Philip Randolph), churchmen (Adam Clayton Powell), academics (Ralph Bunche), and newspaper editors.67

45 The CDAAA/FFF black mobilisation campaign linked the fight against Hitlerism with the struggle against domestic racial discrimination. The warhawks' leaders were highly critical of America's past record in racial matters, and hoped to wean black Americans away from perceived 'indifference' to Hitlerism or active support for isolationism and communism.68 In addition, they saw continuing racial discrimination in the defence industries as divisive and inefficient as it diminished maximum production efforts. It was in this area that FFF, in particular, made a significant contribution by supporting President Roosevelt' s Executive Order 8802 (in 1941) banning such discrimination. It is also clear that the warhawks recognised the importance attached to domestic US race relations by the peoples of Asia and Africa, and used the opportunities offered by the War to try to promote civil rights reforms.69

46 The effects of work among black Americans provided elite blacks a forum to express their views, linked to a national organisation; made an important contribution to debate in the black press; established a potential channel for recruiting black leaders into the American state; and challenged community indifference and/or isolationism. Finally, the lesson learned by east coast elites from the experience must be appreciated: domestic racial matters were now considered in the context of America's global image, further undermining the ‘separation’ of domestic and global affairs.70

47 In combination, the above efforts – foundation investments in knowledge networks and their multiplier effects – helped to promote liberal internationalism and to marginalise isolationism, and helped boost the knowledge/research capacities of the Department of State. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that those networks were the necessary pre-conditions for America’s rise to globalism, not the ‘cause’: the ‘causes’ were in great part dependent on catalytic events and, even more importantly, the way national political leaders interpreted ‘catalytic’ events as opportunities for promulgating radical alterations to the foreign policy ‘status quo’. It was, and is, the combination of prior preparation and organisational capacity, not to mention ‘missionary zeal’, with the successful ‘selling’ of a plausible interpretation of spectacular events, usually attacks

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represented as a longer-term existential threat that demands a response, that leads to radical foreign policy shifts.

International Networks, 1930s-1950s

48 Foundations’ national and international network-building initiatives were not clearly distinct as the typology/periodisation used here might suggest. Indeed, foundation leaders and their counterparts in their funded organisations agreed that their ‘national’ strategies dovetailed with their international hegemonic objectives. Herein lies a key point: that the Big 3 foundations and their networks were involved in a self- conscious hegemonic project for globalism and against isolationism; their domestic activities were aimed at promoting the idea that America was dependent on, and connected to, the world and could no longer ignore world affairs. If America – the self- evident good country of the ‘chosen people’71 – did not ‘nip’ global threats in the bud, it would suffer economic hardships and threats of (or actual) military attack, as the forces of ‘evil’ would dominate the globe.72 Indeed, the overall US-stated aim in the definitive cold war justification, NSC-68, recognises a desire “to foster a world environment in which the American system can flourish”, to be achieved through containing the USSR but also, “a policy we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat …. [a] policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community” of US-dominated organisations, such as the IMF, World Bank, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and so on.73 Interventionism made (common) sense as the world was getting smaller.74 It was seen by US state and private elites that leadership of international organisations constituted “from an American vantage a desirable world order.”75 And in those world orders, international organisations were rarely permitted independent powers and the US always (and unsurprisingly) “sought to protect its interests.” To Craig Murphy and Robert Cox, international organisations – such as the International Labour Organisation and the League of Nations, represent the international institutional architecture for capitalist accumulation regimes.76 Relatedly, James T. Shotwell, Columbia University historian and Carnegie Endowment representative at the ILO, noted quite explicitly the pro-capitalist and anti-communist aims of the organisation, in an article entitled nothing less than, “The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution”. In it, he argued that the Bolshevik revolution, worker unrest, and political instability across Europe forced labour issues onto the Paris Peace Conference’s agenda. Subsequently, peacemakers worked to “prove to the workers of the world that the principles of social justice might be established under the capitalist system”.77

49 Those messages were relayed with all the skills and experience of modern advertising techniques, from the crucible of personal conversations to the radio, from the local library to the lecture theatre, from the board room to the factory floor,78 from White mid-western isolationist heartlands to African-American enclaves in Chicago and New York City.79

50 The foundations’ international network-building was as strategic as their national enterprises. As Rockefeller officials noted when selecting London-based colleges (such as the London School of Economics) for investment, that city’s institutions were already part of a world-wide imperial network that offered significant advantages. Influencing the questions and methods of research at the heart of the British Empire meant multiplier effects across the globe.80

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51 The major American foundations also played key roles in generating several international organisations in and through which their ideas and values could be expressed and the idea of international governance could be normalised, especially after the US senate’s non-ratification of the League of Nations. Creating international forums for discussing labour conditions, scientific papers, trade, legal norms, war debts, reparations, war, and peace, provided opportunities for US elites to promote their own positions but also to try and cooperate in advancing non-nationalist, anti- colonial, and non-communist arguments. Despite the idealistic character of the declarations of American internationalists, and of their more recent supporters,81 this was a bid for hegemony. As Ikenberry notes, “Hegemonic control emerges when foreign elites buy into the [potential] hegemon’s vision of international order and accept it as their own…”82 He further notes that “the ability to forge a consensus among national elites on the normative underpinnings of order is an important if elusive dimension of hegemonic power.” Such persuasion is conducted by “direct contact with elites in these states, including contact via diplomatic channels, cultural exchanges, and foreign study.”83 He might have added private international organisations to that list. For American internationalists, building international organisations was for the purposes of what later became known as “track two” diplomacy, where state and other elites meet informally to air differences during protracted international negotiations between states.84

52 It is unsurprising, therefore, that the foundations funded the long-term cooperative efforts of the American CFR with its British counterpart, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House).85 Founded as two branches of one Institute of International Affairs, the CFR and Chatham House became national organisations in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, their cooperation developed and became ‘special’: they were champions of Anglo-American cooperation and, indeed, alliance, as the best way of combating ‘aggressors’ and securing world peace and prosperity. They established joint conferences and study groups from the 1920s right into the cold war, informal and semi-formal diplomacy that shadowed their official counterparts in their respective governments – for example, on naval matters, trade, war debts, postwar issues in the Pacific region, etc… While they did not ‘resolve’ problems, they created spaces within which policy-oriented elites were able frankly to air their grievances and indicate how much political room for manouvre their respective governments enjoyed. They also created and reinforced habits of Anglo-American cooperation and dialogue. During the Second World War – the high point of the CFR-RIIA’s cooperation – the two groups’ leaders together and with their respective governments planned the postwar international institutional architecture that became known as the Bretton Woods system: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, or World Bank) and the United Nations.86 In regard to the latter, the role of the CFR as an organisation, and of Isaiah Bowman, is well- documented. It is clear that, for Bowman and the CFR, the UN was for the maintenance of national security and international organisation would be the route to avoiding “conventional forms of imperialism.”87 American power would be exercised through an American-led “international” system.

53 Building, and modelled, on that core cooperation between CFR and RIIA, there developed from the 1920s momentum behind an institutes-of-international affairs ‘movement’. Institutes developed in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa

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as well as Italy, Belgium, Holland, Germany and France. Adapted to their own domestic conditions, these institutes received funding from the major American foundations,88 because their general aims were similar to the foundations’ own conception of international affairs at a time of increasing nationalist rivalries, economic autarchy, and military conflict: to increase international dialogue to avert war and economic depression, and to build international habits of mind and activity.89 As Dobell and Willmott conclude, the institutes represented the founding generation of a “transnational elite” that went onto play important roles in laying the foundations of the contemporary world order.90

54 Even more than that, however, foundation elites aimed at building international associations of democratic countries as bulwarks against aggression and militarism. Their schemes are interesting as they have, since the end of the cold war, once again become fashionable. Today’s US-mooted ‘community/concert/league of democracies’91 (and the less well-known but interesting ‘Anglosphere’)92 had its 1930s counterpart: Federal Union. Championed by New York Times journalist, Clarence Streit, and Chatham House’s Lionel Curtis, Federal Union (FU, between Britain – and its imperial subjects, America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Scandinavian nations) was conceived of as a union of democratic, peace-loving, nations of ‘advanced’ peoples, a 1930s version of democratic peace theory in action.93 Of course, despite high levels of sympathy among British and American elites, including Prime Minister Churchill, Federal Union never came about. Nevertheless, it provides an insight to what Anglo- American elites thought about the world and how they sought to act upon it. And the moving spirits behind the movement were part of the American foundations’ far-flung but well-connected networks. This was at a time of crisis for the League of Nations which had been powerless to prevent Nazi and other aggressions, and a time of exploration of various schemes for ‘world order’. When war-time discussions began – within and between CFR-RIIA and their respective foreign offices – the core ideas/ values of FU played an important role.94 The leaders of the institutes of international affairs movement and Federal Union overlapped, as did their funding sources. Together, they made more dense the elite international networks through which American foundation leaders sought to embed their values in the international system. 95

55 American foundations were major supporters of international cooperation in informal, private associations. Such associations took the form of institutes of international affairs; the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR, backed by the Big 3 till its destruction by McCarthyites in the 1950s for allegedly “losing” China)96 for discussions between the powers of the Pacific rim, including imperial Britain; supporting the social justice aims of the International Labour Organisation (ILO, Carnegie was particularly active in this respect),97 and even building international legal institutions such as the Permanent Court of Justice (once again, a significant Carnegie-backed project). American philanthropy also supported the International Studies Conference (ISC) of the League of Nations’ International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) which, by 1945, had developed into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). While James Shotwell of the Carnegie Endowment served as the American committee’s chairman (1932-43), the ISC and IIIC both received generous funding from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.98

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56 The foundations were themselves international organisations or, rather national organisations with international reach. The CEIP, for example, had a European office in Paris as well as representation in Geneva (the headquarters of the League of Nations). The Rockefeller Foundation was internationally-oriented from its earliest days, particularly in relation to its work on illness and disease, but also its work with the American churches at home and overseas.99 The Carnegie Corporation, which was particularly active within ‘British’ Africa, had offices right across the continent.100

57 Finally, the foundation-supported ‘area studies’ programmes provided an additional avenue for ‘thickening’ American elite networks with other countries and strategic world regions. John Ikenberry, referring to the building of the British empire in India, states that “A necessary condition for the emergence of both informal and formal empire is the explicit, physical penetration of peripheral society by metropolitan agents. Whether officials, soldiers, traders, financiers, or missionaries [to these add professors, research fellows and doctoral students] these agents serve as the medium through which socialization occurs.”101 Postwar US-based area studies programmes provide an excellent example of such “socialisation”.

58 Building on American domestic area studies networks – with their attendant professional societies, journals, and conferences – foundations funded network- construction in target regions and countries. That is, foundations encouraged field- based studies by American scholars in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as building prestigious “centres of excellence” and expertise in those regions.102 Doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships were established, beginning a flow or circulation of scholars and students around US elite university-based networks, with the usual multiplier effects.103 Whole careers were built by the tremendous levels of funding from the Ford Foundation through its Foreign Areas Fellowship Programme, for example. These networks helped to create and sustain bonds of scholarly cooperation between elite American universities area studies (and other) programmes, the US Department of State, and strategic overseas regions.104

59 It was through such network flows – of money, scholars, and ideas – that “modernisation” theory was established as the paradigm for the economic development of “backward” countries during the 1950s to 1970s period.105 Strongly driven by cold war competition, as well as the historic American desire for global hegemony, modernisers favoured market-oriented, non-nationalist and non- communist roads to economic development in the Third World. An excellent example of such thinking, and its underlying political assumptions, is represented in a confidential 1954 memorandum to CIA director, Allen Dulles, from Max Millikan and Walt Rostow. In it, they argue that the American economy can continue to grow only if the world economy grows. Specifically, the “underdeveloped” regions needed “the mobilization of capital; the development of ‘know-how’,” among other things. For the latter, Millikan and Rostow recommended “international collaborations between universities, management associations, medical societies, and trade unions for education, research, and training.” All this could only be achieved through a system of international organisation, including the UN and the ILO. Although denying any intention of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, Millikan and Rostow added that the United States must develop “an [international] environment in which societies which directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve.”106

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60 Collaborations between Ford-funded American economists and Indonesian economists in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, had profound effects on that nation’s political and economic development, especially after the overthrow of the leftist-nationalist, Sukarno, in 1966.107 Similar outcomes may also be noted with regard to Rockefeller and Ford funded social scientists in Chile before and after the military coup by General Pinochet in 1973.108 The ideological, ideational, and institutional collaborations at the heart of these networks integrated Third World elites, or at least important sections of them, into American (and western) networks, promoting non-national, cosmopolitan logics among them as well as the promise of well-funded research programmes and prestigious careers.

61 American power advanced during the twentieth-century in large measure due to the indefatigable efforts of liberal internationalists to construct rules-based international associations that were frequently US-led but which also permitted the expression of others’ national interests and viewpoints. Writing about the 1950s, Ikenberry argues that the United States “turned power into order and domination into legitimate authority.”109 It is argued here that the hectic programme of 1950s international organisation-building was conducted by many who had cut their teeth on building the ILO or IPR or ISC or Federal Union in the 1920s and 1930s or by foundation funded wartime planners attached to the CFR or FPA. They had been dedicated to this activity since the US Senate’s refusal to permit American membership of the League of Nations in 1920. Yet, they educated and socialised Americans at home for internationalism and committed money and time to fostering habits and institutions of international collaboration, a kind of counter-hegemony within the very heartlands of isolationism. 110 After World War I, the political space within the US, Britain and France for internationalism was indeed narrow: nationalism was the order of the day ideologically and economically. After 1945, however, the domestic space for internationalism – ideologically and economically – was broad: no return to the 1930s was considered possible, let alone desirable. Ideological preferences and material incentives lay in internationalism; hence the success of post-1945 efforts at a rules-based international order. In effect, this process “embedded liberalism” into the very fabric of the international order.111 The need of a hegemon, however, remained and the United States was willing to shoulder the “responsibility” of global leadership.

Global networks

62 The historical experience of building national and international networks finds its contemporary expression in the hectic bid to create a global order that suits, extends and defends globalising capitalism, a system of “market democracies”, headed by the United States.112 As Thomas Friedman argues, the world today is characterised by “integration and webs” as well as an unequal distribution of benefits. Effective globalisation requires a global institutional architecture as well as a supportive global civil society, more or less for the same reasons that an industrialising and ‘nationalising’ America 100 years ago required a national civil society – a series of densely networked publics composed of strategic minorities – to provide its social base. The Big 3 foundations, among other newer American foundations, are at the very heart of these developments today. They are actively supporting existing international organisations and promoting new organisations more suited to global conditions, as they see them and wish them to

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develop. The overall strategy remains unchanged, even as programmes and personnel change: Americanised or American-led globalisation remains the aim. It is also clear, however, that American foundations are not alone in this venture, though they remain the most significant.

63 American philanthropy, by virtually every measure, tops the world league, although foundations are now a feature of practically every continent. There has been a proliferation in the number of US foundations, the variety of grant-making activities, and total philanthropic assets. Since 1987 the number of foundations in the U.S. has grown from 28,000 to about 50,000. The new foundations hold some of the enormous growth in wealth that has been created recently in the US. Their assets have expanded from $115 billion in 1987 to over $300 billion today. Their international giving also topped $3 billion in 2002. Record increases in international philanthropic giving have been recorded since the mid-1990s, due to a strong world economy and the rise of new fortunes, especially Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation, as witnessed by the formation of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, however, dealt a temporary blow to the trend, although they also focused greater attention among foundations to the global sources of domestic problems, especially the role of poverty and inequality.113

64 Increasingly, like their US counterparts, European, Japanese and Australian foundations are engaging in international activities. There are over 60,000 foundations currently operating in the “old 15” EU states. In Italy, of the over 3000 foundations surveyed by the European Foundation Centre (EFC), half were founded after 1999. Over 40% of German foundations were set up in the decade up to 2004. Their combined assets total over £100 billion, with the Wellcome Trust topping the league with assets of £10 billion. Increasingly, European foundations are engaging in cross-border and global activities, with 30% already doing so and 68% expressing an interest in doing so in the future. Further legal reforms to simplify and incentivise international philanthropy is the subject of reform campaigns backed by the major foundation networks. The EFC’s Europe in The World initiative – to project European philanthropic and political- cultural influence onto a global stage to compete with and complement the Americans – is the principal motor behind new developments that have seen increased linkages between European foundations and international organisations (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, United Nations Children’s Fund, UN Development Program), corporations (such as Shell), and an array of global networks such as Community Philanthropy Initiative, Transatlantic Community Foundation Network, the World Development Movement, and the Network of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation. The world is dense with foundations, foundation networks, and networks of networks.114

65 In the era of America’s rise to globalism, the foundations constructed and promoted, at home and abroad, liberal-internationalist versions of Americanism. In the era of globalisation, they promote a “transnationalised” Americanism that backs the neo- liberal project but seeks to blunt its harsher edges.115 The foundations today are replicating their historical strategies at home and abroad; they seek to protect the existing system of power by engaging in activities to ameliorate the negative consequences of that very system of which they are a central component and beneficiaries.116 As a “Break-out session [on] Globalization” at a meeting of the International Network for Strategic Philanthropy (INSP) concluded, “foundations

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portfolios have benefited from globalization.”117 At the beginning of the twentieth- century, the foundations targetted the alleviation of domestic poverty and the slum – brought on by American urbanisation and capitalist industrialisation; today they focus on the world-wide social fallout of neo-liberal globalisation strategies.118

66 The IMF and the World Bank are widely considered, along with the US Treasury, to be the motors of neoliberal globalisation.119 The former two organisations – formed at Bretton Woods in 1944-45 with full support from the Rockefeller/Carnegie foundations – continue to garner sponsorship and sustenance from east coast philanthropy. As is shown below, the World Bank has received grants from the Ford Foundation, while David Rockefeller has been a consistent IMF stalwart.120

67 As was historically the case when American foundations often carried out programmes that the state would not or could not, it is also the case today – with the dramatic loss of state legitimacy associated with the rise of free market liberalism, privatisation, etc… - that non-state actors are scurrying to perform key functions. The proliferation of domestic and international non-governmental organisations, the rise of the “third sector”, is partly explained by the “rollback” of state social support programmes in the wake of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Offsetting the fallout of increasing gaps between rich and poor has become a key foundation task, especially by backing “pivotal institutions that can shape behaviour away from risk factors and dangerous directions [i.e., anti-Americanism and anti-globalisation protests],” according to the Carnegie Corporation.121 Part of the solution is seen to lie in “promoting democracy, market reform and the creation of civil institutions…”122, that is, in the neo-liberal project itself. Carnegie actively promoted, during the 1990s, “Partnerships for Global Development”, headed by prestigious academics, scientists and politicians, that promoted liberalisation of markets as a core concern. Contrary to Peet et al, neo-liberal globalisation’s foundation-backers do not see a wide gulf between neo-liberalism and its critics: by their social amelioration policies, they hope/claim to promote the market and social justice.123

68 In the same vein, the Rockefeller Foundation declared in 1985 that social inequality reduction lay at the heart of its economic developmental concerns. In 1999, the incoming president of RF, former vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, Gordon Conway, stressed that the foundation had two priorities: “first, to understand the processes of change spurred by globalization and second, to find ways that the poor and excluded will not be left out.” Inherent in both foundations’ attitudes is the taken- for-granted neo-liberal character of globalisation.124 Therefore, it is unsurprising that the third of what some may call an “unholy trinity”, the Ford Foundation, granted the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, $150,000 to assist “economists and officials of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania [to] develop plans to transform their economies and integrate them into the world economy.”125 To examine the consequences of market reforms, the Rockefeller Foundation administered a project, at a cost of $150,000, toward “an exploration on trade liberalization and its impacts on poor farmers.”126

69 The American foundations are important supporters of the key engines of the globalisation process, as their records show. For example, Ford awarded a grant of $400,000 to the World Bank to fund the latter’s “Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest to develop the capacity of microfinance institutions and improve member donor practices in supporting microfinance.”127 Microfinance is a strategy for lifting into the marketplace those too poor to get loans from mainstream commercial banks.

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In 1999, RF granted $800,000 to the World Bank’s Economic Development Institute for economic growth acceleration strategies.128 Further Ford grants were made in 2003 to institutions that try to build interconnections between large Western corporations and small enterprises in the third world.129 During the 1990s, the head of the Rockefeller family – David Rockefeller – offered unconditional support for the International Monetary Fund’s global programmes: without the IMF, the world would return to the economic crises of the 1930s and the threat of global economic and military conflicts.130 A grant of $250,000 aimed to finance “strategic workshops and meetings among Asian government officials, academics and civil society groups on the governance of the World Trade Organisation”, another motor of globalisation processes.131

70 The American foundations are globalising forces in their own right too – historically and today.132 They consciously finance and strengthen global knowledge networks between universities, think tanks, research centres, government agencies, and philanthropies.133 The International Network for Strategic Philanthropy (INSP) – set up by the German Bertelsmann Foundation – with US foundations’ support – encourages the global spread of philanthropy. The (American) Philanthropy Initiative, Inc., aims to ensure the “strategic and systematic investment of private philanthropic resources to address complex, interconnected manifestations of chronic underdevelopment” At the forefront of encouraging global giving are the American Big Three. RF has backed several initiatives to train a new generation of global givers, “promising leaders in the field of philanthropy and civil society.” Similar programmes are run by the Ford, Hewlett, Kellogg and Charles Stewart Mott Foundations. Even philanthropy- strengthening groups have access to a network of support groups such as the Council on Foundations and the European Foundation Center. The global givers are further networked with regional and national philanthropies, such as the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, and to international networks and associations, such as the World Economic Forum, which in turn, has its own global social investors programme. 134

71 In that context, the grants information that follows proves to be just the tip of a very large iceberg. The Ford Foundation granted $400,000 to the Academy for the Development of Philanthropy in Poland (ADPP) – which grew out of a USAID project - in order to strengthen foundations locally. A Ford grant of $220,000 supports efforts to link-up Polish and Belarusian NGOs. Relatedly, Ford awarded $500,000 to the Brazilian Association of NGOs to help organise the World Social Forum (WSF), a body that tries to develop “social and economic alternatives to current patterns of globalization.”135

72 The Ford Foundation is an enthusiastic though controversial supporter of the World Social Forum (WSF), an international network of liberal-reformist globalisers. Indeed, private corporate and philanthropic funders are the second largest donors to the WSF, acting as a brake on WSF’s critique of capitalist globalisation.136 FF has invested well over $1,000,000 directly in WSF to help it organise events and globally to disseminate its message.137 At its third annual meeting, WSF attracted 100,000 delegates from 156 countries – feminists, trades unionists, church-men and so on. According to Michael Edwards, director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society unit, WSF has changed the “terms of the debate about globalization…. There’s [now] an inescapable public debate about the role of corporations and the distribution of globalization’s benefits…. largely due to the W.S.F. crew.”138 WSF, with the FF’s and others’ sponsorship, promotes critiques of some of the “negative side effects of market

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liberalization: growing economic disparity, the privatization of health care and environmental degradation.” The ultimate aim, according to Ford’s Edwards, is a “global civil society” the influence of which would bear comparison to the impact of the Bretton Woods system formed in World War II.139 WSF aims to construct “an alternative development model and to construct a new form of globalization,” as opposed to rejecting globalisation per se.140 A Carnegie Corporation grant of $25,000 assists “dialogue on globalization between representatives of the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum.”141 A Ford grant to the London School of Economics of $500,000 aims to help scholars explore “the depth of global governance and its accountability to a polity,” another reformist measure promoted by all three major US foundations.142

73 The WSF, however, is the subject of much criticism. For example, MumbaiResistance, a radical Indian organisation opposed to capitalist globalisation, argues that the WSF is funded by western agencies “to mitigate the disastrous projects of development cooperation and structural adjustment programmes” they have themselves organised. 143 It is claimed that the sponsors of the WSF have co-opted anti-globalisation forces and channelled them away from “direct and militant confrontation… into discussions and debates that are often sterile, and mostly unfocused and aimless.” Some participants at WSF meetings complain that they are expected mostly to “listen” to WSF leaders rather than to participate; the aim was “putting a human face on globalization.” The World Bank refers to the WSF as “a maturing social movement” and the Bank’s officials have been granted observer status at WSF meetings. WSF’s supporters include Brazil’s President Lula, head of the Workers’ Party and proponent of IMF policies and US free trade agreements, and opponent of peasants’ land struggles. WSF is, ultimately, a “safety valve” trying to blunt the harsher edges of capitalist globalisation.144 The 2004 organisers of WSF meetings, in Mumbai, India, refused Ford’s donations because of Ford’s role in India’s Green Revolution which created and exacerbated the problems of poor farmers.145 Gramscians argue that the major states, global corporations and philanthropies and other forces are a “a nascent historic bloc” that develop policy and “propagate the ideology of globalization”, even within organisations that are promoted as alternatives to it.146

A New American-led Networked World Order

74 Though the foundations’ vision and operations may be more ‘transnational’ today, their attachment to US global leadership remains undiminished. Therefore, recognition of the power of global networks – an aspect of America’s ‘soft power’ – is now central to American foreign policy, especially noticeable since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, who appointed Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter to the directorship of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Slaughter has been advancing the networked power concept, in which America has the edge over other powers, since the 1990s. Her book, A New World Order (2003), leadership (with John Ikenberry) of the, in part, Ford Foundation-funded147 Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS, 2004-06) which promoted to policymakers intergovernmental networks as a means of global influence, and article in Foreign Affairs (2009), suggests that the Obama administration will formalise a long-standing practice: state-led networks that collaborate with and mobilise elite private networks. “…[T]he measure of power is connectedness,”

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Slaughter contends, and “… the state with the most connections will be the central player, able to set the global agenda…. Here, the United States has a clear and sustainable edge… The twenty-first century looks increasingly like another American century….”148

75 Unsurprisingly, in the Princeton Project’s Final report, Slaughter and Ikenberry urged the United States to mobilize the power of its global networks: “We should establish and institutionalize networks of national, regional, and local government officials and nongovernmental representatives to create numerous channels for [democratic] nations and others to work on common problems and to communicate and inculcate the values and practices that safeguard liberty under law”.149 The aim is to intersect “international institutions and domestic governments… institutions providing incentives and pressure to help conquer dysfunctional levels of corruption and bolster the rule of law…”150 State-private networks in deep collaboration – a development that the foundations have been fostering for decades. As Ford’s Michael Edwards notes, though states make treaties, “transnational networks are essential to enforce compliance….”151

76 There is an expansive sense of “America” in the Princeton Project’s reportwhen it argues that “U.S. borders [should] be defined for some purposes as extending to the port of shipment rather than the port of entry….[American officials should also]… strengthen the quality and capacity of a foreign government to control its territory and enforce its laws,” a necessary corollary to “defining our borders beyond those established by land and sea.”152

Conclusion

77 Networks are powerful instruments that produce hegemonic results. Foundations’ networks have played powerful roles in their own right, merely by virtue of being. Powerful systems for socialising and integrating intellectual talent, they are also the producers of prestigious knowledge as well as strategic gatekeepers. They draw people in and marginalise others. They give full meaning to the expression that “knowledge is power”.

78 American hegemony, or at least concerted attempts at it over the past nearly 100 years, is in part built on the focused and systematic work of foundations’ network-building activities, alongside the material incentives that network funders offer, and the prestige membership in them confers. Even so, the role of crises or catalytic events is critical; it provides the impetus for policy shifts or for the allocation of even larger resources behind a particular programme.

79 Within those contexts, foundation network building developed from national, through international, to global proportions. The foundations are now trying to do at the global level – a system of relatively strong states but weak international institutions and global civil society – what they successfully achieved (in alliance with other social, economic and political forces) within the United States over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. The United States was at that time characterised by strong states and a weak federal centre with little that could be called a ‘civil society’ at the national level. At the core of their activities remains their attachment to networks, their master technology that, they claim, stands above business interest, politics, the

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American state, and ideology. Their fictions remain intact to this day. Of course, they also remain American organisations, wedded to the largest American global corporations, the American state, and to an enlightened, but nevertheless, selfish approach to world politics, attempting still to promote and consolidate American hegemony within what they consider “a benign international environment”.

80 This article shows the degree to which American power is best understood as an intense collaboration between the state and private elites, thus undermining Realist and pluralist accounts of power. The former’s focus on state power and the latter’s on the power of private special interests does not sit well with the evidence presented above. This is not to argue that state power has withered away; it is rather to emphasise that the operation of power pays little heed to either/or propositions. Herein lies the significance of Gramsci’s concept of state spirit that transcends the state-private divide and coheres the American hegemony-building project. State spirit also speaks to the issue of “inside/outside” factors in political outcomes. This article shows increasingly internationally and globally oriented groups, rooted in an American liberal vision of a seamless domestic and global order, actively constructing US hegemony, blurring the so-called state-private divide. Realism is undermined to a degree as domestic forces – state and private – develop a vision and build an international order in line with Americanism, and not only the ‘logic’ of the interstate system.153

81 Network power coheres the American hegemonic project and has also permitted/ furnished the institutional agility required to navigate crises. The state-private network operations discussed above show how foundations coped with the isolationist 1920s and 1930s, when they were politically marginal, to the extent that they fostered counter-hegemonic networks capable of taking advantage of political opportunities afforded by crises, such as the 1930s depression and the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, as well as during the Cold War and post-Cold war periods. That is, they have proved adaptable, successful organisations essential to the development and exercise of American hegemony.

NOTES

1. T. Risse-Kappen, Bringing Transnational Relations Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2. Ronit, K., and V. Schneider, eds. Private Organizations in Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2000) ; Josselin, D. and W. Wallace eds. 2001. Non-State Actors in World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 3. Hoare Q., and G. Nowell-Smith, eds., Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); Ikenberry, 2006. G.J. Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). 4. P.G. Cerny, “Embedding Neoliberalism” Journal of International Trade and Development 2 (1), (2006):1-46

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5. Instrumental Marxists posit the idea that state apparatuses are “colonized” by dominant classes suggesting the state has little if any autonomy or goals of its own; R. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1973). 6. R. Wade, “US Hegemony and the World Bank,” Review of International Political Economy 9 (2) 2002: 201-229 argues that hegemony is built in part through dominant groups persuading subordinate groups that the social system will benefit all or most of them. The present analysis argues hegemony is also a process of developing consensus among dominant groups themselves and of institution-building more effectively to embed dominant groups’ values/interests. 7. Risse-Kappen, Bringing Transnational Relations Back In, 1995; P. Haas, ”Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination. International Organization 46 (1) 1992:1-35 8. Ikenberry, Liberal Order, 2006. 9. I. Parmar, “American foundations and the development of international knowledge networks”, Global Networks 2 (1) 2002:13-30 10. R. Cox, “Civil society at the turn of the millennium”, Review of International Studies 25: 7 indicates two broad understandings of civil society, top-down elite power and bottom-up movements for change. The former is favoured here: it refers to the process by which dominant groups “form an intellectual and cultural hegemony which secures acquiescence in the capitalist order among the bulk of the population.” The latter, bottom-up version is the one that is favoured by the foundations and their supporters: that civil society is the site for subordinate groups to build “a counterhegemony that aspires to… displace the erstwhile hegemonic order”. 11. Sinclair, A., and M. Byers, “When US Scholars Speak of ‘Sovereignty’, What Do They Mean?” Political Studies 55 (2) 2007:318-340 12. Iriye, Akira. 2002. Global Community. London: University of California Press. Keohane, R and J. Nye, Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Anne- Marie Slaughter, New World Order (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); A. Vogel, “Who’s making global civil society?” The British Journal of Sociology 57 (4) 2006:635-655. 13. Cox, “Civil society at the turn of the millennium,” 1999, 10. 14. J. Khor (associate director, Rockefeller Foundation) n.d. but ca 2008. “Innovations in Philanthropy: The RF’s Perspective,” in Knowledge@SMU at http://www.knowledge.smu.edu.sg/ index.cfm (accessed 22 February 2008) 15. Haas 1992, 3. Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination The present article differs from Haas’s pluralism and the lack of articulation of epistemic communities with other aspects of power, especially the power of the purse, and the rather casual way in which Haas suggests that knowledge networks “emerge” in response to “demand” (p.4) without examining the precise mechanisms by which effective demand for information is distributed and whether there are any agencies that both generate demand and foster the growth and development of suppliers of knowledge. Haas implicitly works within a notion of a free market of ideas. This article argues that certain strategic institutions with financial power try to foresee problems and issues, foster the scholars and institutions that may assist in problem- conceptualisation and solution. 16. I. Parmar, “Catalysing Events, Think Tanks and American Foreign Policy Shifts,” Government and Opposition 40 (1):1-26. 17. Khor n.d. “Innovations in Philanthropy: The RF’s Perspective,” 18. S. Herman, Eleven Against War (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1969). 19. S. Bromley, American Power and the Prospects for International Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). 20. P. Dunleavy and B. O’Leary, eds., Theories of the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); Evans, P.B., and T. Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); R. Miliband, State in Capitalist Society, 1973; for a direct test of all three theories, see I. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).

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21. Scott, J.S., and K.J. Walters, “Supporting the Wave”, Global Society 14 (2) 2000:254-5. 22. M. Mann, States, War, and Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 23. Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Selections, 1971. 24. G. Hodgson, “The Establishment,” Foreign Policy 9 1972-3: 3-40; quotation, 4-5. 25. M.J. Hogan, “Corporatism,” Diplomatic History 10 1986: 363-372 Hawley 1978, 309-320; E.W. Hawley, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism’”, Business History Review 12 (3) 1978: 309-320. 26. T. Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal,” International Organization 38 (1) 1984: 41-94; quotation, 46. 27. Wala is a notable exception: M. Wala, The CFR and American Foreign Policy During the Early Cold War (Oxford: Berghahn, 1994). 28. Link, A.S., and R.L. McCormick. 1983. Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Il.: Harlan Davidson, 1983); W.E. Leuchtenberg, “Progressivism and Imperialism,“ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 1952-53: 483-504. 29. E. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism. (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 1994). 30. Haas 1992, “Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” 2. 31. Drake, W., and K. Nicolaidis, “Ideas, Interests and Institutionalization,” International Organization 46 (1) 1992: 37-70. 32. I. Parmar, “Engineering consent”: the CEIP and the Mobilisation of American Public Opinion, 1939-1945,” Review of International Studies 26 (1) 2000:35-48. 33. Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Selections, 1971, 146-147. 34. Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Selections, 1971, 16. 35. I. Parmar, “American foundations and the development of international knowledge networks,” Global Networks 2 (1) 2002:13. 36. See for example, R.J. Brym, Intellectuals and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980); Nakhaie, M.R., and R. Brym, “The Political Attitudes of Canadian Professors,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 24 (3) 1999: 329-353. No argument is made here to suggest that scholars knowingly act as foundations’ willing ‘agents’ by accepting grants, posts etc.. The argument is made that foundations establish funded networks precisely to provide opportunities to conduct research on problems they have defined and using methodologies they favour yielding results in a form that may be useful to policymakers or practitioners. Given the necessity of research funding, well- funded foundation networks are extremely attractive to scholars. 37. D. Swartz, Culture and Power (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1997). 38. L. Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1965). 39. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). 40. Hodgson, “The Establishment,” 1972-3;K. Bird, The Chairman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 41. Link and McCormick, Progressivism, 1983. 42. R.F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism (Boston: GK Hall 1980). 43. M. Walker, Makers of the American Century (London: Vintage, 2001), 54-57. 44. B. Whitaker, The Foundations (London: Methuen, 1974); W. Nielsen, The Big Foundations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); J. Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003). 45. I. Parmar (forthcoming), especially chapter 2, Foundations of the American Century (New York: Columbia University Press 2012). 46. E.S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 47. N.M. Butler, Across the Busy Years (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1940). 48. J. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 1983). 49. R.A. Divine, Second Chance (New York: Atheneum, 1967).

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50. Parmar, “Engineering consent,” 2000. 51. P. Ramos, The Role of the YIIS in the Construction of the US National Security Ideology, 1935-51 (Ph.D. diss., University of Manchester, UK, 2003. 52. Olson, W.C., and A.J.R. Groom, International Relations Then and Now (London: Routledge, 1992). 53. Olson and Groom, International Relations Then and Now, 1992, 118. 54. Ramos, Role of the YIIS, 2003, Appendix C,.372. 55. Ramos, Role of the YIIS, 2003, 243. 56. D.C. Engerman, “New Society, New Scholarship.’: Soviet Studies Programmes in Interwar America,” Minerva 37 (1) 1999:45-64. 57. N. Peffer, “Memorandum on Carnegie Corporation Grants in the Field of International Relations,” 17 April, 1942, 16; in CC Grant Files Box 187: International Relations. Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. The AIPR was an institutional member of the ACIS whose work at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton led to the North Atlantic Relations conferences, in an attempt to create an Atlantic version of the IPR. See also, P.F. Hooper, “The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,” Pacific Affairs 61 (1) 1988: 98-121. 58. Record of Interview, Dollard to Wm. W. Lockwood and W.L. Holland, 6 March 1942; CC Grant Files, Box 182 (AIPR). 59. Letter, Henry James to W.A. Jessup (both CC), 7 April 1942; and letter, Lockwood to Robert M. Lester (CC), 21 January 1943; CC Grant Files, Box 182. 60. Parmar, “American foundations and the development of international knowledge networks,”; B. Cumings, “Boundary Displacement,” in C. Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire (New York: Free Press, 1998), 159-188. 61. G. Almond, Ventures in Political Science (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002),42. 62. Ramos, Role of the YIIS, 2003, 245. 63. I. Parmar, “Mobilizing American for an Internationalist Foreign Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 13 1999: 337-373. 64. D. Gorman, “Transatlantic Internationalism,” paper presented at the Transatlantic Studies Association conference, University of Dundee, July 2008; paper in author’s possession. 65. Divine, Second Chance, 1967, 19. 66. M.L. Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1968). 67. Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004, 710-731. 68. A.S. Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941-1960 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 39. 69. H. Agar, A Time For Greatness (New York: Little, Brown 1942), 42. 70. M.L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 71. E.C. Luck, Mixed Messages(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), especially chapter 2, the title of which is “A Special Nation, Peerless and Indispensable”. 72. I. Parmar, “Edward Meade Earle and the Rise of Realism in the US Academy,” Working Paper 3/01, 2001. Manchester: Department of Government, University of Manchester, UK.; Butler, Across the Busy Years, 1940. Butler held the view that the United States was “the keeper of the conscience of democracy”; cited by Luck, Mixed Messages, 1999, 21. 73. National Security Council-68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”, the April 1950 seminal Cold War blueprint, the main author of which was Paul Nitze. 74. N.J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1942). 75. J. Ruggie, “Third Try at World Order?” Political Science Quarterly 109 (4) 1994: 553-571. 76. C. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); R.W. Cox, “Labor and Hegemony,” International Organization. 31 (3) 1977: 385-424. 77. J.T. Shotwell, “The ILO as an Alternative to Violent Revolution,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 166 (March) 1933,18.

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78. Parmar, “Engineering consent,” 2000; G. Scott-Smith, Networks of Empire (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). 79. Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004; Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II, 1968. 80. D. Fisher, “Rockefeller philanthropy and the British Empire,” History of Education: 7, 1978:129-43. 81. Iriye, Global Community, 2002. 82. G.J. Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 53. Of course, material factors also play a key role in the process. 83. Ikenberry, Liberal Order, 2006, 56; 57. 84. Iriye, Global Community, 2002, 28. 85. Bosco, A. and C. Navari, eds., Chatham House and British Foreign Policy (London: Lothian Foundation Press, 1994). 86. Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004; Shoup, L. and W. Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). 87. Bowman cited in Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004, 123. 88. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace CEIP, Institutes of International Affairs (New York: CEIP, 1953). 89. Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004. 90. Dobell, P.C. and R. Willmott, “John Holmes,” International Journal 33 (1) 1977-78: 104-114; quotation, 109-110. 91. T. Carothers, “A League of Their Own,” Foreign Policy July-August, 2008; see also, Ikenberry, G.J. and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson SPIA, 2006). 92. J. Lloyd, “The Anglosphere Project,” New Statesman 13 March, 2000; S. Vucetic, The Anglosphere. A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) for an excellent analysis of the Anglosphere. Interestingly, this concept is supported by historian Robert Conquest, former critic of US power, Christopher Hitchens, and former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. 93. M.W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80 1986: 1151-1169. The Princeton Project on National Security, headed by Ikenberry and Slaughter is a champion of DPT. Both Ikenberry and Doyle also acknowledge that Federal Union was an early expression of the underlying assumptions of democratic peace theory. 94. Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004. 95. Parmar, Think Tanks, 2004. 96. J.N. Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations, Asian Scholars and American Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974); Hooper, “The Institute of Pacific Relations,” 1988. 97. In particular, James T. Shotwell, Columbia University historian and CEIP leader, was active in the formation of the ILO in 1919 and in the US labour movement; Parmar, “Engineering consent,” 2000, 43. 98. G. Murray, “Intellectual Co-operation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 235 (September) 1944: 1-9, 7. According to Murray, Carnegie and Rockefeller funding came second only to that of the French government. 99. See, for example, E.R. Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men (London: University of California Press, 1979); and M. Cueto, ed., Missionaries of Science(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 100. E.J. Murphy, Creative Philanthropy (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1976). 101. Ikenberry, Liberal Order, 2006, 73. Butler, Across the Busy Years, 1940, 101, referred to this process as “intellectual interpenetration”. 102. E.H. Berman, The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American foreign policy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983). 103. Cumings, “Boundary Displacement,” 1998, 171.

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104. Berman, The influence of the Carnegie…, 1983. 105. N. Gilman, Mandarinsof the Future (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 106. Millikan and Rostow, 1998. 107. Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, forthcoming 2012. 108. Parmar, Foundations of the American Century, forthcoming 2012. 109. Ikenberry, Liberal Order, 2006, 2. 110. Divine, Second Chance, 1967. 111. Ruggie, “Third Try at World Order?” 1982. 112. T. Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes (London: Penguin, 2003), 5. 113. “… it is evident that terrorists draw much of their support and justification from those who are, or perceive themselves as, unjustly impoverished….” So wrote the president of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2002. The current global financial crisis has also depleted foundations’ income. 114. Scott, J.S., and K.J. Walters, “Supporting the Wave,” Global Society 14 (2) 2000:254-45, 256. 115. Arnove, R.F. and N. Pinede, n.d., “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” unpublished paper in the author’s possession. 116. Anheier, HK and S. Daly, “Philanthropic Foundations,” in H.K. Anheier et al, eds., Global Civil Society 2004-05 (London: Sage, 2004), 169, argue that foundations hold “substantial investments in the global capital market … [which is] considered responsible for many of the social and economic imbalances that global civil society seeks to address”. 117. “Break-out session Globalization”, INSP Plenary Meeting,” March 22, 2002. 118. J.D. Wolfensohn, Development and Poverty Reduction (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004). 119. J. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002). 120. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, 2002; S. Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 121. David Hamburg, CC president (1983-1997), cited by Arnove and Pinede, “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” 10; emphasis added. 122. Arnove and Pinede, “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” 13. 123. R. Peet, Unholy Trinity (London: Zed Books, 2003), 14. 124. Arnove and Pinede, “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” 19. That there are alternatives – based on fair trade, as opposed to free trade, etc…, see Peet 2003 et al. 125. Arnove and Pinede, “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” 29. 126. Rockefeller Global Inclusion Programme, October 2003; www.Rockfound.org. 127. Ford Foundation website at www.Fordfound.org; grant awarded in 2003. 128. Arnove and Pinede, “Revisiting the ‘Big Three’ Foundations,” 22. 129. The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum received $100,000 to “build, study and promote mutually advantageous business links between large corporations and small or microenterprises worldwide;” www.Fordfound.org. 130. David Rockefeller, “Why we need the IMF,” Hoover Institution Public Policy Inquiry; originally published in the Wall Street Journal, May 1 1998. 131. WWW.Fordfound.org; granted in 2003 to the Third World Network Berhad, Malaysia. 132. See for example the report of the Foundations of Globalisation International Conference, University of Manchester, November 2003; www.les.man.ac.uk/government/events/ foundations_finalreport.pdf 133. Ford granted $350,000 to Yale University in 2003 to fund “the research practice and outreach activities of the Center for Cities and Globalization and to strengthen an interdisciplinary network on globalization.” 134. The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc., Global Social Investing (Boston: TPI, Inc., 2001), pp.4-5; pp. 37-42. 135. All three grants in 2003; Ford website; TPI, 20. 136. L. Diaz, “Resources for Creating Another World,” Development 49 2006: 93-101.

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137. Ford gave $153,000 to Internews Interactive, Inc., as part of its “Bridge Initiative on Globalization,” to assist the WSF to communicate with the World Economic Forum. 138. S. Charle, “Another Way,” Ford Foundation Report, Spring 2003. 139. Charle, “Another Way,” 2003. M. Edwards, Civil Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 14, argues “humanizing capitalism” is the WSF’s principal role. 140. J.G. Lopez, “Green Globalization,” Ford Foundation Report, Summer 2003. 141. CC Grants for Globalization Initiatives; CC website. 142. Grant to the LSE Foundation, 2003; Ford website. 143. Diaz, “Resources for Creating Another World,” 2006. 144. MumbaiResistance Against Imperialist Globalization and War; www.mumbairesistance.org. 145. The Guardian.co.uk, 17 January 2004; L. Jordan, “The Ford Foundation and the WSF,” 15 January 2004 in openDemocracy at www.opendemocracy.net; both sites accessed 3 April 2009. The WSF did accept Ford-funded delegates. WSF is also run by a co-opted, rather than elected, organizing committee; see M. Morgan, “Overcoming the Imperial Subject: The WSF and Counter Hegemonic Strategies for a Post-Political Age,” paper presented at IR conference at METU, Ankara, 18-20 June 2008. 146. Cox, “Civil society at the turn of the millennium,” 1999, 11-12. 147. Ford donated $240,000 towards the enterprise; I. Parmar, “Foreign Policy Fusion,” International Politics 46 (2/3) 2009:177-209. 148. A-M. Slaughter, “America’s Edge,”. Foreign Affairs 88, 2009:94-113. 149. Ikenberry and Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law, 2006, 7. 150. Ikenberry and Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law, 2006, 23. 151. Edwards, Civil Society, 2004, 92. 152. Ikenberry and Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty, 2006, 57. 153. Ikenberry, Liberal Order, 2006; Bromley, American Power and the Prospects for InternationalOrder, 2008.

ABSTRACTS

The major American foundations constructed and sustained the rich texture of cooperative social, intellectual and political relations between key actors and institutions supportive of specific modes of thought that promoted US hegemony. Foundations also fostered and developed the attractive power-knowledge networks that not only radiated intellectual influence but also attracted some of the most creative minds. Finally, liberal internationalist foundations fostered globalism even when the American state was ‘isolationist’, and when US influence abroad unwelcome. Their significance in American hegemony building lay in their sustained, long-term cooperative relationship with the American state through which they helped build national, international and global institutions and networks. The latter process evidences the most significant impact of US foundations – the building of the domestic and international infrastructure for liberal internationalism which has transformed into a kind of “social neoliberalism”. Theoretical conclusions follow from these claims: the sustained and deep cooperation between the state and foundations suggests that we must revise our views of “how power works” in the United States and therefore influences its foreign relations. Therefore, the article shows that elite networks, consisting of state officials and private citizens are powerful means by which foreign policy shifts

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may be prepared, elite and mass opinion primed and mobilised, new consensus built, ‘old’ forces marginalised, and US hegemony constructed.

INDEX

Keywords: Philanthropic foundations; US hegemony; elite knowledge networks; Rockefeller; Ford; Carnegie

AUTHOR

INDERJEET PARMAR University of Manchester

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« Writing into a Void » : Charles Bukowski and the Little Magazines

Abel Debritto

1 Charles Bukowski was a genuine product of the small press, and the little magazines were the ideal arena to satisfy his perennial urge to be published. A hyper-prolific author, Bukowski indiscriminately submitted material to all kinds of literary ventures: conservative, avant-garde, or “sewing circle” periodicals; furthermore, he considered the highbrow journals as valid an outlet as any other, and not only did he praise them in print, but he also unremittingly sent his poetry to them throughout the years. His work, including poems, short-stories, reviews, essays, “ranters,” manifestos, letters, blurbs, doodles and drawings were faithfully reproduced by the “little” or “mimeo” editors, the underground press and by different literary movements, such as the Beats, the Black Mountaineers, or the New York Schools, even though Bukowski overtly professed no allegiance to any of them. As a matter of fact, despite the enthusiastic reception of his material in the mid to late 60s, Bukowski was noticeably disgruntled with most editors’ approach to publishing as he despised their purported slovenliness and the poor quality of their productions, and he duly voiced his discontent in print.

2 The significance of the “littles” in Bukowski’s early literary career has been largely overlooked to date. The little magazines, as opposed to quarterlies and journals, encouraged experimentation and promoted new authors, hence becoming the most appropriate breeding ground for unknown writers such as Bukowski, whose work was largely unconventional. Unlike the academic quarterlies, the little magazines were not subsidized, which resulted in their ephemeral nature. Indeed, a great number of “littles” disappeared after their inaugural issue, and the fact that they seldom broke even deterred many editors from publishing them on a regular basis. Bukowski’s hunger for exposure might explain his appearance in hundreds of these short-lived periodicals. His perseverance was to be eventually rewarded since he was acclaimed “King of the Underground” and “an American legend” by the end of the 60s (Fox, “Living” 57; Katz 1848). His early publications are crucial to understanding the subsequent recognition of his work.

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3 There was not an abundance of “littles” in the early to mid 50s as The New Critics and Modernism-influenced journals still prevailed upon the literary arena. However, by the late 50s, several events and new movements, such as the Beats, the Black Mountaineers, the “San Francisco Renaissance,” the Objectivists, the Deep Image poets or the several waves of “New York Schools” paved the way for the literary explosion that was to take place in the 60s, reaching a peak in 1966 with the so-called mimeograph revolution. This surge of non-mainstream publications in the late 50s was instrumental in Bukowski’s career as it literally multiplied his exposure in the small press and little magazine circles, apart from constituting his first major stepping-stone to popularity. Nevertheless, Bukowski had already been published in the “littles” in the 40s and mid 50s. Discussing the literary context where he edged his way into success is essential to fully grasp his evolution in the alternative press.

4 During the 40s and the 50s, the American literary scene was the realm of the highbrow quarterlies. The most prestigious journals––Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review or Southern Review, all of them subsidized by universities––were strongly influenced by The New Critics, whose primary function was that of criticism. During the late 40s, the medieval and Renaissance cultures had a powerful impact on the “Berkeley Renaissance” group. It is not known whether Bukowski submitted to those journals, but his unpublished correspondence and some late poems show that he was particularlyattracted to the critical articles featured in those periodicals, especially in the case of the Kenyon Review.

5 In the early 50s, many editors of little magazines still believed in Modernism as a role model to be followed, and they constantly quoted T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound to express their views concerning publishing. The Partisan Review, the Hudson Review or Poetry were obvious examples of magazines still entrenched in the tradition, while emerging “littles” such as Circle, The Ark, Goad, Inferno, Origin or Golden Goose were trying to break loose from those Modernist reins. Though Bukowski submitted to both Cid Corman’s Origin and The Ark, his work was not accepted, whereas Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Goodman, William Everson, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams and Robert Duncan were all published in The Ark in 1947.

6 By the mid 50s, it was evident that a huge change was imminent. Years later, Bukowski reminisced about this period thus: “It is difficult to say exactly when the Revolution began, but roughly I’d judge about 1955 ... and the effect of it has reached into and over the sacred ivy walls and even out into the streets of Man” (“Introduction” 1). Quite possibly, Bukowski was thinking of the “San Francisco Renaissance,” which, although conceived in the 40s by Kenneth Rexroth, became noticeably popular in October 1955 with the Six Gallery Reading, where Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was first read in public. Several Beat-related events took place in the following years, preceded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore opening in 1953: Howl and the first issue of the cult magazine Semina were published in 1956; Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the Evergreen Review were premiered in 1957; William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Beatitude and Big Table came out in 1959.

7 As critic Jim Burns succinctly put it, “many of the initial beat documents first appeared in print around 1957, [and] a peak was reached in, roughly, 1960” (84). It was a fruitful period that heralded the literary explosion of the mid 60s. Kostelanetz explained that “the years 1958-9 represented the beginning of a revival in American culture ... Some of the potentially important new eclectic quarterlies made their debuts in that season” (26). The first seminal “littles” from this period were Tuli Kupferberg’s Birth (1957),

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John Wieners’ Measure (1957), Robert Bly’s The Fifties (1958), LeRoi Jones’ Yugen (1958), Jack Spicer’s J (1959), John Bryan’s Renaissance (1961) and LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima’s Floating Bear (1961). Coincidentally enough, the outcrop of these key alternative publications took place when an increasing number of “littles” began to accept and publish Bukowski’s work, as illustrated in the following graphs:

Graph 1, based on the chronological timeline designed by Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, displays the total number of the main periodicals published from 1950 to 1970, clearly showing an upward pattern beginning circa 1957 which would reach its peak in 1964-66.

Graph 2, based on all the Bukowski bibliographies published to date and on several hundred periodicals located in American libraries, indicates the chronological total number of magazine titles as well as the total number of magazine issues which published Bukowski’s work from 1950 to 1970. As in graph 1, the increase in publications becomes evident in the late 50s.

8 While the Modernism-influenced journals were being displaced by the emerging Beat publications, other literary movements were taking shape all across the United States or they unequivocally consolidated their relevance on the literary scene. Such was the case, on the one hand, of the Black Mountaineers, with Charles Olson and Robert

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Creeley as their main figures, and the Objectivists––also called second-generation Modernists––on the other, led by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Their main literary publications were the already mentioned Origin (1951) and The Fifties (1958), as well as the Black Mountain Review (1954), Trobar (1960), El Corno Emplumado [The Plumed Horn] (1962) or Wild Dog (1963), among many others. The last two periodicals featured Bukowski’s contributions several times in the 60s.

9 The creation of new schools was definitely encouraged during this period: The Deep Image school, including authors such as Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Clayton Eshleman and Diane Wakoski, published Matter, Some/thing, or Caterpillar and other little magazines, where Bukowski’s poetry was printed. In New York, there were several waves of the commonly called “NewYork Schools.” The main figures of the different New York School generations were John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Joe Brainard or Ted Berrigan, and the magazines that represented these schools were Folder (1953), White Dove Review (1959), Fuck You (1962), “C” (1963) or Angel Hair (1966). The late 50s could be described as a volcano about to erupt. Undoubtedly, all those new schools, groups and periodicals were paving the way for a change that would release the literary scene from the overbearing control of the academic quarterlies and the last vestiges of Modernism.

10 Many critics believe that the subsequent literary “revolution” of the 60s could be compared to the one that took place at the beginning of the 20th century, when there was a noticeable surge of new literary magazines: The Little Review, where James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in installments and where the “Foreign Editor” was none other than Ezra Pound, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the Double Dealer, Contact, Blast, The Dial, Anvil or The Hound and Horn were some of the major “littles” published during that period in the United States, and they all appeared to focus on publishing the best new literature available. Hence, some studies downplay the significance of the so-called revolution of the 60s by stating that it was a mere repetition of an earlier, perhaps more influential, revolution.

11 Whether the repetition of a previous pattern or not, the 60s did outnumber the “littles” published in the previous decades. The increasing number of magazines responded to several factors, the main ones being the low cost of new printing technologies and the fact that no special training was required to operate a mimeograph machine. For instance, by the mid 60s, young students could publish a mimeographed “little” in a matter of days in their parents’ garage or back yard spending as little as 50 or 75 dollars in the process.

12 James Boyer May put out a most valuable directory in his Trace magazine, which indexed most of the “littles” published in America and in England on a yearly basis. The 1953 directory listed 190 magazines, and the 1970 one, 665 (Brownson 387). According to a different source, the 1952 directory had 152 magazines, and the 1956 one, 247; by 1963, there were 747 little magazines and small presses, and then they really took off and proliferated in greater numbers (May 383), which eventually led to the 665 “littles” listed in the 1970 directory––small presses were not included in that figure. The outpouring of little magazines during the 60s is evident, as graph 3 shows. If it is taken into account that most “littles” were abysmally short-lived, the total number of magazines compiled in the 1970 directory is simply astounding as the great majority were probably new ventures.

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Graph 3, based on Trace’s annual directory, displays the total number of periodicals published from 1952 to 1970. The upward pattern is visibly similar to the one shown in graphs 1 and 2.

13 Naturally, the enormous quantity of “littles” published during this period did not equate with quality. Many critical voices, as early as the mid 60s, complained that the huge number of magazines resulted in both mediocrity and apathy. Most mimeographed “littles” were similar in appearance and the printed poetry was remarkably amateurish; indeed, very few magazines stood out: “while so many specimens currently exist, only a handful are worth examining” (Boyers 51). Bukowski himself criticized the fact that most “littles” and “mimeos” oftentimes published below par material, including his own.

14 The mimeograph revolution is generally considered the peak of the literary upheaval of the 60s. Nevertheless, as is the case when defining “little magazines” or “small press,” “mimeo revolution” is a misleading term; on the one hand, as Clay explains, “well over half the materials produced under its banner were not strictly produced on the mimeograph machine” (15). As a matter of fact, there was a substantial increase of offset “littles” in the 60s, eventually exceeding the total number of “mimeos.” On the other hand, though it is usually said that the “mimeo revolution” took place circa 1965, many editors had been publishing mimeographed magazines for a long time. For instance, the first “mimeo,” Gyroscope, dates back to 1929. A milestone “little” from the 40s, The Ark (1947), was also a “mimeo.” J (1959) and Beatitude (1959) were equally mimeographed, as well as Simbolica (1959), Merlin’s Magic (1961), or the Anagogic & Paideumic Review (1961),whichfeatured Bukowski’s work.

15 The “mimeos” were relatively easy to produce and extremely inexpensive. As Ed Sanders, editor of Fuck You, one of the most representative magazines of the period, recalled, “printing was affordable, very, very affordable. For like $10 you could publish a poetry magazine and give it out or sell it at your poetry readings” (L. Smith, “Remembering” 119). According to other editors, such as Douglas Blazek, the cost could be anywhere between 75 and 125 dollars. At any rate, the production cost of the “mimeos” was not excessive to most poets and editors, and financial concerns did not prevent them from becoming publishers, which contributed––considerably so––to the proliferation of these periodicals.

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16 Another feature of the “mimeos,” and one that especially delighted Bukowski, was its sense of immediacy. Though quality was not always taken into account, speed played a fundamental role in assembling “mimeos.” Since operating a mimeograph did not require technical skills, flyers or broadsides could be completedin an hour, and a chapbook could take a day at the very most. Bukowski was usually harsh on most editors, but he did praise those who were quick to print his work, such as Evelyn Thorne and Will Tullos (Epos) or Roy Miller and George Hitchcock (San Francisco Review). For this reason, he was pleased with the “mimeo” editors, as he would be with John Bryan and his underground newspaper, Open City: “I like ACTION. I mean, you know how some of the mags move, something very deadening about it ... that’s one reason I have been writing a column a week for Open City––so far. ACTION. It jumps from the typewriter onto the page. I hand it to Bryan, ZAP, it EXPLODES,” Bukowski explained to editor Charles Potts in 1968 (Poems Written 38).

17 Though biographer Neeli Cherkovski––somewhat romantically––argues that “the poor paper stocks the editors used and the careless printing jobs were statements of their disdain for established journals” (158), it was quite possible that those editors simply put the immediate, affordable nature of their magazines before any other consideration. The fact that “mimeos” were clumsily produced did not mean that their editors were criticizing the so-called slick journals. The “disdain” that Cherkovski mentions could be taken as a consequence of the means involved in putting together a mimeographed periodical, but hardly as a raison d’etre. As Bukowski suggests: “The ‘Mimeo’ Revolution is sometimes more revolting than revolutionary––printing hasty faded careless and misspelled poems and stories. Yet I do suppose that the very lack of pressure and expense does create a freedom from which arises some good hotbed literature” (“Who’s Big” 9). Rather than giving shape to well-crafted artifacts, perhaps the main motivation of the “mimeo” editors was distributing art diligently.

18 d.a. levy did disdain the established journals, though, and he made it abundantly clear in his work. All studies cite levy as the central figure of the “mimeo revolution,” as “one of the truly unique and authentic spirits” of the movement (Clay 48). Besides his several publishing ventures––where Bukowski’s work was featured––levy’s main contribution was his unshakeable effort to establish a well-connected circle of editors willing to circulate the best new literature available. levy, who defined himself as a “poeteditorpublisher,” soon set up, without institutional or corporate support, an efficient editorial network with Morris Edelson (Quixote), Douglas Blazek (Olé), and D.R. Wagner (Runcible Spoon, Moonstones). Incidentally, all those “mimeos” published Bukowski. Some editors, such as D.R. Wagner or Morris Edelson, printed his poems more than once in different magazines; in Blazek’s case, he published Bukowski in all Olé issues. Taking into account that “Blazek emerged as the editor of the ‘mimeo revolution’ ... [And] Olé attained legendary proportions” (Mangelsdorff 36), the fact that Bukowski became increasingly popular makes perfect sense.

19 Blazek, levy, Wagner and Edelson were not the only “mimeo” editors to champion Bukowski. The Marrahwannah Quarterly, Olé, Runcible Spoon, Kauri, Intrepid, Magazine, Poetry Newsletter, Grande Ronde Review, Litmus, Blitz, Salted Feathers, Wild Dog, Aspects, Floating Bear, Poetry Review and Fuck You: A Magazine for the Arts are usually listed as the most representative magazines of the period. All of them, save the last four titles, showcased Bukowski’s work in their pages; it is evident that those editors appreciated his poetry, almost reverently so, and their magazines

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unequivocally contributed to turn him into a well-known figure in the alternative literary scene.

20 Despite the exposure received in the “littles” that flourished during the 50s and exploded into the revolution of the 60s, and despite the fact that his work was generously distributed via the network of “mimeo” editors, Bukowski professed no allegiance to any movement or school. He saw himself as a literary outsider who took Ezra Pound’s “do your work” motto literally; the “littles,” newspapers, “mimeos,” and small presses were outlets for his prolific output, and he indiscriminately submitted to all of them. It is wrong to assume that he felt closer to leftist, iconoclastic or dissenting ventures because he also submitted to right-wing or conservative publications and academic journals. Not surprisingly, representatives of all schools, groups, and trends accepted and extensively published his literary production.

21 For instance, though his name was appropriated by Beat-oriented publications such as Beatitude (1960) or The Outsider (1961), or by “littles” that supported well-established writers––The San Francisco Review (1958) ––and even though critics claimed that “Bukowski is the most beat of all beats, the apotheosis of Beatnikism” (Fox, A Critical 10), it would be difficult to prove that Bukowski was a Beat, a confessional or a staunch supporter of the counter-culture ideology. In addition, he 1always claimed to be apolitical, and the closest he ever felt to Communism was when Dorothy Healey paid him a visit in 1966 and he gave her inscribed copies of his most recent books, Cold Dogs in the Courtyard and Crucifix in a Deathhand. At the risk of repetition, Bukowski was indeed an outsider who was not interested in schools of any kind. As Al Purdy, a Canadian poet who extensively corresponded with Bukowski in the 60s, put it, “[Bukowski] bears little relation to the snug coteries of Olsen-Duncan-Creeley, and even less to such academic pilchards as Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell” (137). Poet Jack Conroy, editor of the legendary Anvil magazine, was even more categorical than Purdy: “[Bukowski] cannot be classified or yoked with any other poet, living or dead” (5). Yet, as most biographies and studies point out, Bukowski’s attitude, by his own admission, resembled that of Robinson Jeffers, one of the very few contemporary authors that he ever praised in print.

22 Bukowski himself expressed on several occasions his dislike of any literary group or school: “To me, the entire poetic scene seems dominated by obvious and soulless and ridiculous and lonely jackasses. from the university group at the one end to the beat mob at the other … they go from creators to being entertainers” (Perkins 16-17). Bukowski was merciless in his criticism, and no group was spared: “Those Black Mountain School snobs, let them smell their own turds! The Kenyon boys, let them write their celluloid senseless inoffensive poems” (Living 58). However, Bukowski’s comments should not be taken literally. He did enjoy the critical articles published in the Kenyon Review and he wrote several poems where he overtly praised them, such as “Kenyon Review, after the sandstorm” or “the Kenyon Review and other matters.” In fact, Bukowski admired some of the big “littles” and he even contended that those periodicals were better than most “littles.” Furthermore, Bukowski submitted to dozens of quarterlies throughout his career, and a large number of respected journals accepted his poetry.

23 Bukowski and the “littles” had a passionate, stormy, mutually rewarding love/hate relationship. He criticized them unrelentingly and, yet, he needed them as the ideal arena for his staggering literary output. One of the main functions of the “littles” as an

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outlet was that of satisfying Bukowski’s voracious need to be published. Several of the editors who released his work in the early 60s recall that urge to appear in print. Edward Van Aelstyn, who edited the Northwest Review before it was temporarily suppressed in 1964, stressed that he was “amazed and amused at how passionate he was, and how eager he was to make contact with anyone who would appreciate his work” (“N. R. / Bukowski”). George Kimball, who co-edited Grist magazine with John Fowler and Charles Plymell in the mid 60s, reminisced that Bukowski “was writing pretty much daily, making up for lost time, as it were, and had a pretty substantial backlog of material and was always looking for new exposure in magazines he found to his liking” (Kimball).

24 Biographer Howard Sounes claimed that Judson Crews––a prolific author and editor himself––had explained to him that Bukowski’s obsession to achieve literary recognition could reach suicidal heights: “[Bukowski] wrote to me and said to please publish his poems, else he was going to commit suicide” (qtd. in Sounes, Locked 36). When asked about this particular exchange, Sounes replied that “I haven't got the [suicide] letter ... My source was Judson Crews himself, who no longer had the letter either” (“More Buk”). It is not known whether Bukowski actually wrote that missive to Crews or not, but Bukowski submitted frequently to him in the early to mid 50s, and in 1953 he told Crews: “I’ll be honest with you. You might as well keep those poems as long as you want to because when you send them back I’ll throw them away” (Ransom, 4 Nov. 1953). Though this might be taken as a means of putting pressure on Crews to publish those poems, and also as an unintended tribute to his beloved Li Po, who burned his own poetry and sailed it down the river, the suicidal tone is conspicuous by its absence. In any case, Bukowski’s perseverance was eventually rewarded when Crews published one of his short poems in The Naked Ear in late 1957.

25 During the 50s, Bukowski was painfully aware of the crucial fact that only the “littles” would publish his work steadily. He had been previously––and constantly––rejected by mainstream magazines in the 40s such as The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s or Esquire. Bukowski knew that the “littles” championed new authors and fearlessly printed radical, obscene, or controversial material. In a 1966 essay about the “littles” of the time, Bukowski argued that “many of us ... continue to submit and get published in the best of the ‘littles’ because they are the only remaining platforms of truth and good art in a very frightened and sick Age” (“Who’s Big” 9). Bukowski did not want to conform to the strict rules, principles and guidelines of the quarterlies; his goal, if any, was to remain faithful to his own literary instincts, and the “littles” were, again, the most appropriate outlet. Indeed, as Freedland concluded in an erotic periodical, “Buk is little known outside of the most gung-ho literary set because he insists on giving all his work away to the ‘little magazines’ of the avant-garde” (94). Years later, when Black Sparrow Press regularly published Bukowski, he received several offers from important New York publishing houses. However, he chose to remain loyal to the small press and declined all those financially tempting offers.

26 By defining himself out of those major publishers, Bukowski focused all his efforts on the “littles.” He submitted his work––mostly poetry, though occasionally fiction as well––to any literary magazine. The directory published in J. B. May’s Trace was especially useful to Bukowski as it listed hundreds of new periodicals each year. Since Bukowski had made it abundantly clear that he did not care about schools, groups or literary movements, he tried most of the newly listed “littles” in Trace’s directory, even

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the ones he criticized harshly. His then friend Jory Sherman summarized Bukowski’s approach quite accurately: “Bukowski was indiscriminate when he began publishing his poetry” (13). For instance, he submitted to “littles” favoring traditional verse: Simbolica, Flame, Scimitar and Song, Epos or Descant, among many others; the poem printed in Flame was an unusual rhyming artifact, or a “rhymer,” as Bukowski mockingly called them. One of the poems published in Descant was so unbukowskian that a long-time Bukowski collector thought it was a misattribution: “then the kelp, bitumen, alabaster, seashells / held court, and then came the shadows, / dark as walls under a dying sun: and bellicose and / vicious the sea pounded the sinking ships” (“Export” 26). Likewise, Bukowski stated in several letters that most of the poems published in Epos were too “poetic” or “fancy,” while the work printed in Simbolica and Scimitar and Song seemed to be written by 19th century authors. However, in spite of the traditional nature of these magazines, the hunger for recognition was definitely stronger than any other consideration.

27 Similarly, Bukowski tried well-established magazines or academic journals such as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review, Esquire, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Evergreen Review, Beloit Poetry Journal or Impetus. Though he was not particularly successful with this group of magazines, he submitted to them on several occasions. Bukowski also sent poetry to Beat publications (Beatitude, The Ark), experimental “littles” (Semina), early mimeographed periodicals (Anagogic & Paideumic Review, Merlin’s Magic), racehorse ventures (American Turf Monthly), or magazines distributed in barbershops only (Dare). He also submitted to little “littles” such as The Naked Ear, and others so rare that they are not listed in any checklist, directory or online resource: Maestro Insana’s Review, Aristotle’s Animals, Le Petit Sphinx, Wheel, or Aquarius, to mention only a few.

28 Most of these “littles” were hastily produced and their readership was limited as their circulation rarely exceeded the three hundred copies. Moreover, their editors lacked funds to publish them periodically and many of them simply disappeared after the first or the second issue. As Gregor argues, “Bukowski would produce volumes of poetry and send them out to be sucked up by the little press industry; they would instantly fall into a deep hole of obscurity and unavailability” (32). Though this is a rather broad generalization––“littles” are accessible in libraries––it does attest to the fleeting nature of many of the little magazines that Bukowski submitted to during this period, and to the difficulty––or even impossibility––in locating some of them.

29 Bukowski’s relentless literary bombardment was finally rewarded––although slowly so in the late 50s. However, in the early 60s the huge, efficient network of independent editors across the United States began to widely publish him as a “new” voice on the literary scene. As Miles explains, “the same names of contributors occurred time and again [in the “littles”], but none so frequently as Charles Bukowski” (1). Poet and friend John Thomas interviewed Bukowski in 1967 for the underground newspaper Los Angeles Free Press; Thomas was aware that the burgeoning Bukowski cult had its roots deeply entrenched in the “littles” and the small press: “For years, nearly every little poetry magazine on the rack has had some of Bukowski’s work on exhibit. He’s in the good ones, he’s in the asswipers, he’s in those sad little one-shot collections from the bleakest corners of Scribbler’s Limbo” (12). Bukowski’s presence in the “littles” had become an undeniable––almost too persistent––reality.

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30 From the five publications in 1957 to the 41 issues featuring his work in 1969, reaching a peak of 73 periodical appearances in 1968, Bukowski was in 263 separate magazines, totaling 444 issues, in this period (see graph 2, p. 4). Critics were indeed surprised, even aghast, at the number of editors willing to publish Bukowski: “Since he began chopping out poetry at age 35, he has appeared in every important ‘little’ from one coast to the other,” or “he is, indeed, almost ubiquitous in that select circle of ephemeral but important, off-set, hand-set, and nowadays mimeographed, avant garde journals” (Katz 1848; Taylor 16). These and many other examples point out in the same direction: Bukowski is generallycited as the most widely published poet in the American alternative literary scene in the 60s. He was, critics concluded, the little magazine and small press poet par excellence.

31 Although Bukowski is usually tagged as a poet, “author” would be indeed a more accurate term. His poetry was unflaggingly promoted, but his short-stories, letters, drawings and doodles, or essays were printed as well. For instance, Targets, Kauri, Intrepid, El Corno Emplumado, Olé, Intermission, Understatement, Renaissance or Down Here published Bukowski’s letters in their main pages. Editor Michael Perkins liked his correspondence so much that he put out a lengthy selection––thirty pages––of the Charles Bukowski / Tom McNamara letters in Down Here. Some magazines, such as Coastlines or The Outsider, ran excerpts from his letters in the Contributors’ Notes section in place of the customary biographical note. His letters were also used as short biographies in some of his early chapbooks, as introductions to other authors’ books, or as stand-alone essays. Furthermore, many editors noticed the increasing presence of his correspondence in the “littles,” and they proceeded to pen parodies of his epistolary style, such as Felix Pollak’s “A Letter from Chuck Buck,” or Phyllis Onstott Arone’s “Life Is a Handkerchief Full of Snot, By Quarrels Bubullski.”

32 The fact that little magazine editors published Bukowski extensively and championed his work tirelessly was met with skepticism and harsh criticism on occasion. Quantity did not always equate with quality in Bukowski’s case. “Doubtless the most valid criticism of Bukowski is that he has published too much, i.e too much bad stuff” (Dorbin 25). J. Smith maintains that his gigantic output “contain[s] much dross” (15). Other critics have accused Bukowski of being a mere typist, hence his massive, monotonous, coarse, non-literary production. 1Not surprisingly, his output has earned him the dubious distinction of “America’s sewer Shakespeare” (Edelson 3) or such unflattering depictions as “sloppy Narcissus,” “lazy bum with intellectual flair,” or “poet laureate of sleaze” (qtd. in Freyermuth 22). It goes without saying that it was not mandatory for editors to publish Bukowski’s mediocre material; he wrote countless below average poems and stories, and any sensible editor would not have printed them.

33 However, editors were aware of Bukowski’s growing popularity in the underground literary scene, and they rightly surmised that their magazines could benefit from publishing him––even his subpar poetry or fiction. As Grist co-editor reminisced, “his name already carried a certain cachet in what was essentially still a pretty small club, so it was good for us publish him” (Kimball). This pattern could reach absurd heights: the editor of Entrails magazine printed the second page of a poem believing it to be complete, even though it clearly made no sense, and the same excised version was reprinted a year later in an anthology. No one seemed to notice. Bukowski’s apparently unselfish attitude could be easily glorified: “[Bukowski] helped countless little magazine editors to keep their shoestring operations afloat, as an act of contribution to

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the profession and service to the community” (Saunders). It is highly unlikely that Bukowski ever wanted to help the “profession” or the “community” deliberately. He did not object to editors taking advantage of his popularity, but he definitely did not intend to help their “littles” when he submitted to them. He simply needed an outlet, and magazines required immediate funds in order to survive. It was indeed a mutually rewarding relationship.

34 Since Bukowski appeared in so many periodicals, profits could be expected. Nevertheless, as publishing a little magazine brought about a financial loss by definition, the only payment most authors ever received were their contributor’s copies. As Bukowski somehow humorously put it in a letter to J. B. May: “I’ve earned 47$ in 20 years of writing, and I think that’s 2$ a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces and typewriters)” (Fullerton, 13 Dec. 1959). In 1965, Bukowski mentioned similar figures: “[I] haven’t made a dime on poetry ... I’ve only been writing poetry since I was 35––about ten years ago, and I figure about ten cents a year would be very good pay ... I did get $2 for a poem once ... and when I was young and used to go the short story––$25 for one from Story and ten bucks for one from Portfolio. so I’ve made around $80 writing” (Screams 175). It is evident, then, that being published in the “littles” was not lucrative. However, Bukowski was paid larger amounts in the late 60s, especially for his contributions to the erotic press. For instance, the “sex papers” paid him 25 dollars per prose column, and the so-called girlie or skin magazines sent him a 200 or 300 dollar check for each short-story. Those were not substantial amounts, but to Bukowski they were infinitely larger than the non-payment from most “littles.”

35 Even though Bukowski knew that the “littles” would not make him any wealthier, he was perfectly aware that they were the most logical outlet for his massive production, and he was grateful to them for having contributed to make his voice popular in the alternative literary circles. Yet, his assessment of the “littles” published during the late 50s and the 60s was––save very few cases––outright virulent. The following tirade, published in 1963, sums up his view on the subject: [Literary magazines] are a scurvy lot, most of them, run by homosexuals, madmen, posers, people with acne, fast-buckers, snivelers, religious old ladies, whippers of hounds and so forth. Mail out a selection of poetry and chances are: a. you won’t get it back. b. you’ll get it back with a promise of publication but it will never be published. c. your work will be returned, after some years, without either a rejection slip or a note. d. they will think you a genius and they will come to your door to look at you and drink your beer and talk. e. you will get semi-literary letters from divorced ladies with children or from ladies with various maladies such as: 1. missing leg. 2. overfat butt. 3. a love for Henry James. 4. a stock of old poems about the sea and the moon. (“Untitled Contribution” 43)

36 The very few “littles” that Bukowski ever praised were those that stressed immediacy and printed his work in record time. Most of the remaining ones were the target of his wrath. He was particularly vexed at the apparent sloppiness of many editors. He could not understand why it took some of them months or years to reply––if they replied––to his inquiries. As Bukowski told editor Jon Webb, “in 1956 I sent Experiment a handful of

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poems that (which) they accepted, and now 5 years later they tell me they are going to publish one of them, which is delayed reaction if I ever saw any” (McCormick, 1961). Similarly, In/Sert or Olivant were extremely slow to publish him or they simply kept his work and did not print it, without a single note of explanation. This seemed to be a common situation during this period as Bukowski complained about it with resignation: “There are 10 or 12 other magazines that have accepted my stuff but ... there is an immense lag in some cases between acceptance and publication. Much of this type of thing makes one feel as if he were writing into a void” (Screams 11). In some extreme instances, the “immense lag” was followed by a return of material already accepted for publication––as both Folder and Existaria did in the late 50s. This practice especially infuriated Bukowski, as the unpublished correspondence from the period reveals. Interestingly, he committed the same editorial sin––that of returning previously accepted poetry––when he co-edited Harlequin in 1957.

37 Bukowski’s stance remained virtually unchanged throughout his career, professing no love for the hastily produced periodicals that zealously published him. He complained to J. B. May that “the littles are an irresponsible bunch guided by young men ... starting with fiery ideals and large ideas ... and finally putting out a tacked-together, hacked- together poor selection of typographically botched poems before getting married and disappearing from the scene” (Fullerton, 2 Jan. 1960). A decade later, Bukowski claimed that the “littles” from the 50s were “a much finer stomping ground” than the contemporary literary magazines because they had become “a dumping ground of very poor literature and poetry” (“Dirty” 76). In 1973, in a rather predictable volte-face, Bukowski compared the “littles” of the 70s to their predecessors, though he chose to praise the ones from the beginning of the century instead of those from the 50s, denoting his preference for the “littles” from any period to the current ones, as if he were completely disenchanted with the magazines he was submitting to at the time. Almost two decades later, his view was the same: “[A] guy says he’s starting up a mag ... [and] you send him something. And then the ‘magazine’ arrives ... It’s just sheets of paper run off a mimeo machine and stapled together. Not even a cover” (Reach 208). Indeed, the situation worsened considerably during the so-called xerox revolution of the 90s because photocopying allowed most editors to produce magazines in an inexpensive and immediate fashion.

38 Despite Bukowski’s somewhat harsh criticism of the “littles,” uncalled for on occasion, they were undoubtedly instrumental in enhancing his reputation as a writer and helping him become the most published author of the 60s. Bukowski himself did acknowledge that some “littles,” such as Olé, the Wormwood Review or The Outsider, were particularly relevant; he considered that their contribution to the literary magazine revolution of the 60s was disproportionately larger than the insignificant role of a myriad “littles” that had been long forgotten, and he even lavished praise on them by claiming that they “print[ed] a living and electric literature” (“Who’s Big” 9). Had it not been for his regular appearances in those periodicals, and experience the ensuing feedback which allowed him to fully blossom as an author, Bukowski might not have achieved such a popular status by the late 60s, when he was hailed as a “cult figure” (Miles 174). Bukowski was an unmistakable product of the small press, an unparalleled phenomenon in the “littles” that proliferated in the United States during the 60s, and their impact on his early career proved to be invaluable in both developing his talent and turning him into an international icon.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Elliott, and Mary Kinzie, eds. The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. Yonkers, N.Y.: The Pushcart Press, 1978.

Arone, Phyllis Onstott. “Life Is A Handkerchief Full Of Snot, By Quarrels Bubullski.” The Sixties 9 (Spring 1967): 67-68.

Basinski, Michael. 1“His Wife, the Painter, the Old Man on the Corner and Waste Basket.” Sure. TheCharles Bukowski Newsletter 7 (1993): 40-43.

Boyers, Robert. “The Little Magazine in Its Place: Literary Culture and Anarchy.” Anderson and Kinzie 50-67.

Brownson, Charles W. “Access to Little Magazines.” RQ 22.4 (Summer 1983): 375-87.

Bukowksi, Charles. “Dirty Old Man Confesses.” Adam Oct. 1971: 11, 71-81.

—. “Export.” Descant 6.1 (Fall 1961): 26.

—. Introduction. Skull Juices. By Douglas Blazek. San Francisco, CA: twowindows press, 1970.

—. Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1995.

—. Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window. Ed. Charles Potts, and Darrell Kerr. Glendale, CA: Poetry X/Change, 1968.

—. Reach for the Sun. Selected Letters 1978-1994. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1999.

—. Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

—. Untitled contribution. “Little Magazines in America: A Symposium.” Mainstream 16.6 (June 1963): 43-45.

—. “Who’s Big in the ‘Littles.’” Literary Times Winter 1966: 9.

Burns, Jim. “Tracking Down the Beats: A Preliminary Survey.” The Private Library Summer 1973: 83-100.

Cherkovski, Neeli. Hank. The Life of Charles Bukowski. New York: Random House, 1991.

Clay, Steven, and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980. New York: The New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998.

Conroy, Jack. “A Skidrow Poet.” American Book Collector 16.6 (1966): 5.

Dorbin, Sanford.“Charles Bukowski and the Little Mag/Small Press Movement.” Soundings: Collections of the University Library 2.1 (May 1970): 17-32.

1Edelson, Morris. Introduction. A Bukowski Sampler. Third Printing. By Bukowski. Houston, TX: Quixote Press, 1983. 3-8.

Fox, Hugh. Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Bibliographical Study. Third Printing. Los Angeles: Abyss Publications, 1969.

—. “The Living Underground: Charles Bukowski.” TheNorth American Review 254 (Fall 1969): 57-58.

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Freedland, Nat. “Buk - The Bogart of the Poets.” Knight Sept. 1969: 92-97.

1Freyermuth S., Gundolf. “That’s It.” A Final Visit With Charles Bukowski. Xlibris Corporation, 2000.

Fullerton: James Boyer May/Amsberry Poetry Collection, University Archives & Special Collections, Pollak Library, CSU, Fullerton.

Gregor, David. “Collecting Charles Bukowski.” Firsts 5.1 (Jan. 1995): 28-34.

Katz, Bill. “Bukowski – King of the meat and cement poets.” Library Journal 95.10 (15 May 1970): 1848.

Kimball, George. “Grist / Bukowski.” E-mail to the author. 28 Nov. 2008.

Kostelanetz, Richard. “New Literary Periodicals.” Margins 8 (1973): 21-31.

Kruchkow, Diane, and Curt Johnson, eds. Green Isle in the Sea. An Informal History of the Alternative Press, 1960-85. Highland Park, IL: December Press, 1986.

McCormick: Outsider Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

Mangelsdorf, Richard. “I Still Think About Olé Magazine.” Margins 13 (1974): 36-37, 74.

May, James Boyer. “On Trace.” Anderson and Kinzie. 376-87.

Miles, Barry. Charles Bukowski. London: Virgin Books Ltd., 2005.

Perkins, Michael. “Charles Bukowski: The Angry Poet.” In New York 1.17 (1967): 15-18, 30.

Pollak, Felix. “A Letter From Chuck Buck.” The Smith 7 (15 Oct. 1966): 40-47.

Purdy, Al. “Outsider of the Year.” Evidence 8 (1964): 137-138.

Ransom: Judson Crews Papers (Box 2, Folder 4), Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Saunders, Jack. Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 2001.

Sherman, Jory. Bukowski: Friendship, Fame & Bestial Myth. Georgia: Blue Horse Publications, 1981.

Smith, Jules. Art, Survival and So Forth. The Poetry of Charles Bukowski. East Yorkshire: Wrecking Ball Press, 2000.

Smith, Larry. “Remembering levy: Ed Sanders Interview, September 13, 2003.” d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution. Ed. Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg. Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press, 2007. 119-26.

Sounes, Howard. Charles Bukowski. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. New York: Grove Press, 1998.

—. “More Buk.” E-mail to the author. 20 Jan. 2008.

Taylor, William E. “Introducing Charles Bukowski.” Florida Education 42. 9 (May 1965): 16.

Thomas, John. “This Floundering Old Bastard Is the Best Damn Poet in Town.” Los Angeles Free Press 3 Mar. 1967: 12-13.

Van Aelstyn, Edward. “Northwest Review / Bukowski.” E-mail to the author. 24 May 2007.

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ABSTRACTS

The little magazines were instrumental in turning Charles Bukowski into a hugely popular figure in American letters and, yet, their significance in Bukowski’s early career has been largely overlooked. For Bukowski, the little magazines were the ideal outlet for his prolific output, and their editors, who saw him as a spiritual leader, championed his work so vehemently that he eventually became the most published author of the 1960s––his indisputable rise to fame in the alternative literary scene is displayed in the graphs provided. Bukowski’s position was ambiguous: he needed those periodicals to satisfy his hunger for exposure and recognition and, yet, he attacked their editors for their allegedly unskillful productions, especially in the case of the mimeographs. This previously uncharted territory is illustrated by means of a critical and historical journey through the main magazines of the period, stressing how zealously they published Bukowski’s work and helped him become an international icon.

INDEX

Keywords: Charles Bukowski, little magazines, mimeograph, periodicals, small press

AUTHOR

ABEL DEBRITTO Fulbright scholar at Brown [email protected]

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“I’m Just a Cowboy”: Transnational Identities of the Borderlands in Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

Matthew Carter

1 This article regards the contemporary “border” Western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), as a transnational film. Aside from the collaboration of U.S. and Mexican personnel on the film’s production – the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, a number of the actors, creative contributors, and technicians are Hispanics – there is a stylistic acknowledgement of transnationality in the fact that the film’s dialogue is in both English and Spanish. The same is true of the chapter headings that announce the sections of the film. It can also be considered transnational in its presentation of cultural identity. In part, it deals with the various ethnic groups – Hispanic, Chicano, Mestizo, and Mexican – that the “official” history of the borderlands so often neglects, and that, so the charge goes, the frontier mythology and the Western genre often reduce to Orientalist, unflattering, or outright insulting stereotypes. Not only does Three Burials explode such stereotypes – it explodes the whole notion of a “border” through its presentation of various characters and their relationships, all of which cross “borders” of one kind or another: marital, lawful, political, social, economic, cultural, or racial.

2 This article offers a close textual analysis of Three Burials, exploring some of the different narrative strategies employed by the film’s director and star, Tommy Lee Jones, in his realisation of Arriaga’s script. It considers the film’s formal characteristics and its thematic content, suggesting that both aspects utilise the plot motifs and iconography of the traditional Western genre in order to self-consciously address the relationship of the frontier mythology and the borderlands, particularly these aspects that focus on the figure of the Anglo-American hero. The article argues that these two interrelated, though hardly indistinguishable, aspects of Three Burials constitute a deliberate deconstruction of this mythology. This, in turn, illuminates the film’s

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transnational re-visioning of the region’s cultural geography in terms that coincide with the views of scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Gloria Anzaldúa.

3 As a historian, Limerick has long asserted the need for a more complex and more honest understanding of the borderlands. She argues that, for much of the twentieth century, Anglo-America has been “fixed on the definition of the frontier drawn from the imaginative reconstruction of the story of the United States and its westward expansion” (Limerick, Something 87). Like many scholars writing under the collective banner of the New Western History, Limerick seeks to deconstruct the “interpretive straightjacket” of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” (Etulain 108). Interestingly, she points out that, despite the “spectre” presented by Turner, “North America has, in fact, had two strong traditions in the use of the term” (Limerick, Something 87). On the one hand, of course, there is the “idea of the frontier” which, as an “extremely well established … cultural common property,” pertains to a Turnerian ideal, a space “where white settlers entered a zone of ‘free’ land and opportunity” (Limerick, Something 87). On the other, she describes a much less familiar, though “much more realistic usage of la frontera,” which describes the cultural complexities and personal experiences along “the borderlands between Mexico and the United States” (Limerick, Something 87-88).

4 As a concept, la frontera stands opposed to the frontier’s “imaginative reconstruction” by giving the lie to its grand narrative of optimism and of hardy pioneers transforming wilderness into civilisation. Instead, the concept exposes a darker, more complex “legacy of conquest” (using Limerick’s own terminology), including ethnic cleansing, expropriation, and environmental despoliation. Its story is driven less by dashing Anglo-American heroes on horseback than by brutal monopolists, exploiters, and warmongers – men whose twisted ideals left little room for morality. According to Limerick, it is this complex descriptive that constitutes the “real”history of the American West. Consequently, when it comes to a historical reassessment of the borderlands through la frontera, Limerick insists upon there being “no illusion of vacancy, of triumphal conclusions, or of simplicity” (Something 88).

5 Limerick presses the importance of the history of the borderlands as part of the complex cultural geography of the United States. “The [Anglo] American conquest of the borderlands [is] an essential element in the story of expansion,” she insists, “to be compared and contrasted with the conquest of Indians” (Limerick, Legacy 253-54). She further suggests that, for much of the twentieth century, “Hispanic history remained on the edges of Western American history” (Legacy 253-54). Her approach is one which seeks to highlight the cultural-ideological machinations that lay behind this elision from the “official” discourse, and which seeks to re-engage the reader with a Hispanic culture now in its “proper place at the centre of Western American history” (Legacy 255).

6 With specific regard to la frontera, it is Limerick’s belief that “the conquered and controlled borderland continued to exist only in the imagination . . . the Mexican border was a social fiction that neither nature nor people in search of opportunity observed” (Legacy 251). She draws our attention to the contemporary borderlands as a troubled region with ongoing “conflicts over the restriction of immigration, with disputes over water flow and environmental pollution”; ultimately, she describes “a zone where an industrialised nation shares a long land border with a nation much- burdened by poverty” (Limerick, Something 88).

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7 Anzaldúa’s poetic and highly personalised writing further illuminates Limerick’s descriptions of la frontera’s “legacy of conquest” by shifting the traditional parameters of historiographic concern. She displays a sense of the frustration and fear held by the local communities – the “little people” – among whom she lived and grew up and with whom she identifies her personal history. Her reminiscences of her childhood and self- identification with cultural otherness as a mestiza share pages with long passages of non-translated Spanish dialogue, thus ramifying the reality of the borderlands as linguistically polyglot, a “melting pot” of myriad cultures, identities, and voices – voices that have, themselves, invariably become subsumed under the “official” Anglo- American discourse. The result of her work is part poetry, part literary criticism, and part history. Of course, the fact that Anzaldúa does write in Spanish as well as English (and other indigenous languages such as Nahua) provides us with an analogue to Three Burials’ own dialogism. But this is not the only point of comparison.

8 Anzaldúa writes from the perspective of an intellectual who is at once a woman, a Tejana, and a lesbian. Therefore, for her, borders are primarily cultural. Just as the border between the U.S. and Mexico defines the two nations in geo-political terms, so it symbolises the imagined borders separating cultural identities. Anzaldúa’s perspective is that of a member of several ethnicities who have suffered from discrimination and who continue to struggle for recognition. She also identifies herself as a Chicana, one of the “dispossessed,” whose ancestors “lost their land and, overnight, became foreigners” after the “white imperialist takeover” and who are now regarded as interlopers in their own land (Anzaldúa 28). In order to consolidate their hegemony, the Anglo-American population has either forgotten that the Chicanos once “owned” the country or else bluntly claim that the Southwest is theirs by right of conquest and is to be protected by force from the “incursion” of the Mexican “other.”

9 What she seeks to remind us is that one hundred and fifty years ago the border separating Mexico and the U.S. simply did not exist and the people of the area moved across the Rio Grande at will – in some indigenous cultures they still do. Her account of the contemporary borderlands, however, is one of trauma for those “mojados” who, “without the benefit of bridges . . . float on inflatable rafts across el rio Grande, or wade or swim across naked, clutching their clothes over their heads” (Anzaldúa 33). For her, the U.S-Mexico border, es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of revision. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens, - whether they posses documents or not … The only legitimate inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (25-26)

10 Anzaldúa’s language elicits a powerful imagery of the border as an open wound – “una herida abierta” – her emotive language exploding the repressed history of the U.S.- Mexico border. This finds a consonance with Limerick’s idea of the border as a “social

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fiction”. However, for the tens of thousands of people – “los atravesados” – who attempt to cross it illegally year-in year-out, this “fiction” seems all too real: Barefoot and uneducated, Mexicans with hands like boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge creating what [Ronald] Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has caused a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country. (33)

11 Anzaldúa conflates the personal with the political, thereby casting doubt over the possibility of a stable subjectivity. Identity proves as porous and uncertain as the concept of a border that cleanly and unambiguously separates nations, the “Third World” from the “first.” Her conception of a “border culture” borne painfully of an uneasy synthesis between “two worlds merging” is one that highlights the fallacy of geo-political attempts to establish a border along national or racial lines, a binary to “distinguish us from them.” In la frontera, nothing could be further from Turner’s “closed” frontier and his distinct “national character.”

12 An attempt to distinguish “us from them” is personified (and undermined) in Three Burials through the character of Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). A bigoted and sexually- frustrated agent of the Border Patrol, Norton clearly sees himself as a defender of the Anglo-American territory who violently resists the Mexican “transgressors.” For him the border must be defended with a paranoid (even pathological) zeal. In one particularly telling scene, we find Norton involved in a round-up of Mexican “border jumpers.” During the group’s detainment, Norton pursues a woman who attempts to flee; after a lengthy chase he launches himself at her, roughly tackling her to the ground and punching her hard in the face, breaking her nose.

13 Overall, the film’s depiction of the brutalisation of “border jumpers” at the hands of the Border Patrol, combined with the establishment’s callous attitude toward the eponymous Melquiades “Mel” Estrada’s (Julio Cesar Cedillo) death, comprise a shocking indictment of Anglo-America’s relationship with Mexico. Indeed, the official response to Mel’s death exposes a cynical racist dictum: “Your life only matters if you are white.” The metonym is reinforced during the scene at the graveyard. When asked by the grave digger what Mel’s surname is, Deputy Antonio (Brent Smiga) merely shrugs his shoulders and replies, “Mexico?” It is as if, as a nation, Mexico is to be regarded as one homogenous mass. As individuals, one Mexican is the same as another and, perhaps: “The only good Mexican is a dead Mexican”? This callousness is summarised neatly in a subsequent scene that depicts Mel’s grave, where the smallest of markers simply reads: “Melquiades, Mexico.”

14 Scholars like Limerick and Anzaldúa have sought a less culturally anaemic and more socially relevant set of discourses on the borderlands. As far as Limerick is concerned, such discourses remain predominantly ethnocentric in character and are written by and for Anglo-Americans. “If the idea of la frontera had anywhere near the standing of the idea of the frontier,” she argues, “we would be well launched toward self- understanding, directed toward a realistic view of this nation’s position in the hemisphere and in the world” (Limerick, Something 88).

15 When it comes to popular culture’s role in facilitating this “realistic view,” Limerick has been far from optimistic. For her, Hollywood has done little to critique the frontier myth. On the contrary, she insists that, historically, the Western genre has actively and straightforwardly endorsed and engendered a triumphalist Anglo-American perspective. Its imagined recreation of the frontier is one that consistently fails to deal

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with what she calls “the risks inherent in the word” that work as a “reduction of a multisided convergence of various peoples into a model of the two sides of a frontier line” (Something 94). Where she places Hollywood’s West as something firmly enthralled to the “fantasy” of the mythic frontier, the complex “reality” of la frontera typically remains, for her, outside the genre’s dominant ideological purview (Something 88-92).

16 It should not be enough, however, to consider the Western genre as either historically vacant or ideologically monolithic: a tawdry form which endlessly replicates the mythic binarism and triumphalism of Anglo-American frontier narratives. Such beliefs underestimate the enormous complexity with which the myth is dealt with in the genre and disregard the ideological contradictions and transnational concerns inherent even in some of the most ostensibly triumphalist and ethnocentric of Westerns. Naturally, Limerick is not oblivious to the complex movements within some spheres of popular culture, and I in no way wish to accuse her of a “blinkered” perspective. In fairness, she makes both an appeal to, and a prediction of, historical transfers into North America’s collective conscience: If the velocity of the movement of ideas from frontier historians to popular culture remains constant, somewhere in the next century, we might expect the popular usage of the word [frontier] to begin to reckon with the complexity of the westward movement and its consequences. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, the term might undergo a crucial shift, toward the reality of la frontera and away from the fantasy of the frontier. That shift in meaning will be the measure of great change in this nation’s understanding of its own origins. (92)

17 In light of a film like Three Burials, Limerick would appear somewhat prescient in her remarks. And one can certainly consider Three Burials one of a small but growing number of films that offer an imaginative and a highly-critical reassessment of the mythology of the American frontier as the Anglo-centric “story of the United States” by intentionally foregrounding the formal and thematic limitations of its terms.

18 In the discussions of the so-called “contemporary” Western, John Sayles’ masterful Lone Star (1996) remains the prominent and oft-cited example of transnationalism in the cinematic Western. The film highlights the intersections among racial, ethnic, and social groups by locating itself geographically along the Rio Grande, in a fictional Texas border town aptly named Frontera. In a representative scene, the town’s history teacher, Pilar Cruz (Elizabeth Pena), answers angry parents’ protestations regarding the possible import into the school’s curriculum of Mexican and Hispanic cultures extending beyond anything other than cookery classes. “We’re not changing anything,” she replies, “We’re just trying to present a more complete picture.” In the end, this is what Lone Star tries to articulate – “a more complete picture” – a breaking down of borders, both geographical and cultural, as they have been established by the binarism of frontier mythology. It is, therefore, representative of the fact that the United States is a polyglot as well as culturally-diverse society, its identity “shaped” from the beginning by the interaction of different cultures (Magowan 20-31; Schultz 261-281).

19 This article contends that Three Burials can be read along similar lines. To a certain extent, the film does depict the borderlands as an in-between space, one that is not simply defined as a line drawn between two distinct and wholly different countries, societies, cultures. Instead, it is depicted as a space with its own character and meaning, one that is inseparable from history and myth. By applying the concept of la frontera to Three Burials, we can interpret the film’s ideological agenda as one that explores the traumatic “legacy of conquest” by which the U.S.-Mexico border has been

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historically and geo-politically constructed asymmetrically along cultural and racial lines. It is, therefore, an important addition to the realisation of la frontera in popular American culture. This kind of analysis allows us to explore how this border has been ideologically reified as a binary divide through frontier mythology and used as a prism for historical (mis)understanding.

20 Perhaps the most immediately apparent of Three Burials’ narrative strategies is the peculiar temporal and spatial disjuncture apparent in the first half of the film. This section of the story is pieced together by interspersing “contemporary” action with sequences from the past, so that we learn only very gradually what happened to Melquiades, follow ranch foreman Pete Perkins’ (Tommy Lee Jones) reactions of grief and anger over his friend’s untimely death, and gradually build up a picture of their initial meeting and developing friendship.

21 Typically narrated through multiple perspectives and challenging the conventions of so-called “mainstream” filmmaking, disjointed plots have become something of an authorial trademark for Arriaga. His other notable credits as screenwriter include a trilogy of collaborations with the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu: the critically acclaimed Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006). All these films express, to a greater or lesser degree, transnational concerns. Arriaga’s singular writing style translates into the semiotic code of the films produced from his scripts, actively confusing their visual grammar and forcing audiences and critics alike to reassess their conceptualisations of “time” and “space.” In the case of Three Burials, it is not unusual for up to three different temporal and spatial frames to be simultaneously intermingled through multiple characters’ perspectives.

22 It is well-known how sound, continuity editing, causally coherent narrative and closure, have all developed to become the established conventions of cinematic realism or the so-called classical narrative cinema (Cook and Bernink 226). This style of filmmaking has come to dominate film production in Hollywood. If Roland Barthes was correct in claiming that ideology works as a contemporary mythology, then the overall ideological aim of the classical realist aesthetic is to efface its own constructedness and to pass itself off as somehow natural. Of course, the narrative strategy apparent in the first half of Three Burials actively works to undermine such pretensions and, initially, draw us away from the story toward the way the story is being told, toward its arbitrariness as a textual construct.1

23 Taking the commonly-held position that “realism” does not reflect but rather constructs reality, we can say that counter-narrative or alternative styles react against the conventions of “realism,” typically serving to make us more aware of these conventions and to question their ideological assumptions (Lapsley and Westlake 156-181). We should, of course, also consider the ideological implications of the counter-narrative itself. To this end, Three Burials displays a highly self-reflexive attitude toward the classical Western’s alleged collusion between cinematic realism and frontier mythology. Consequently there is a strong intertextual relay apparent in Three Burial’s confrontation with and contestation of these various modes of ideological expression.

24 The film’s aesthetic is, as a result, essentially anti-mythic. However, such a position is no guarantor of extrication from the discourses of myth or myth-making. Nor, indeed, is it an exemption from the assertion of an ideological position. Such assertion is, of course, usually denied by the producer of artistic realism as surely as it is denied by the historiographer. However, it seems axiomatic that the revelation of an ideological

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position is one that is actively sought by the producer of alternative cinemas as something wilfully exposed through counter-narrative techniques rather than disavowed through causally coherent narrative realism.

25 Three Burials possesses a frenetic pace engendered by its formal structure, which makes it difficult to establish a coherent sense of either time or space. When related to its thematic and ideological content, these formal aspects of the film represent time and space in terms that encompass not only the geographical, but the political, the cultural, and the historical as well. Set in both Southwest Texas and Northern Mexico and including a cast of characters from both these regions, Three Burials actively confuses the concept of a national identity. It does this by highlighting the arbitrary nature of such identities in as much as they are defined historically by culture and race, and geo- politically through borders.

26 The film addresses these thematic concerns in terms of frontier mythology through its recourse to certain tropes, formulas, and stereotypes of the cinematic Western: the hero’s “Code,” the revenge motif, the shootout, the cowboy, horses, guns, the physical location of the Southwest desert and the Rio Grande, and the journey into a Mexico of the North American Imaginary (de Orellana 1993).2 Ultimately, the film depicts communities inhabiting a cultural and geographical space which is not officially recognised by U.S. political institutions or typically explored through the discourses that narrate its history. As a consequence, it is difficult to think of the borderlands with much of a degree of sobriety. Because of this, it could be suggested that Three Burials exemplifies the approach adopted by David Harvey toward a philosophy of cinema.

27 “Of all the art forms,” writes Harvey, “[cinema] has perhaps the most robust capacity to handle intertwining themes of space and time in instructive ways” (308). He elaborates on this by suggesting that “the serial use of images, and the ability to cut back and forth across space and time, frees it from many of the normal [artistic] constraints” (Harvey 380). In support of his assertions, Harvey draws directly on the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, particularly his concept of “poetic space” in relation to the narrative construction of individual identity. He quotes Bachelard to the effect that “We think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability” (Harvey 217). Bachelard states very clearly that even if we want to “detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realise that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery” (Leach 85). Harvey extends these ideas to encompass the cinema by suggesting that time is represented “as memories of experienced places and spaces” and, furthermore, that “history must indeed give way to poetry, time to space, as the fundamental material of social expression. The spatial image (particularly the evidence of the photograph) then asserts an important power over history” (Harvey 218).

28 Harvey’s approach enables him to highlight important insights regarding the specific potential of cinema to signify history in terms of emotion and memory through its unique recourse to visual imagery and the editing process. Consequently, in Three Burials there is the appearance of a modernist-style collage of fractured memories that can be understood as attempts at capturing a “sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability.” These images are juxtaposed to shape a narrative complexity that weaves together a number of seemingly disparate temporal events and character

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motivations by focusing on a single, violent act: the death of Mel at the hands of Norton.

29 It should be noted that our access to Mel is largely mediated through the subjective memories of Pete, who acts as a prism through which we interpret and attempt to decipher the unfolding events of the narrative; other than that, we know Mel only posthumously as a corpse. It is also significant that these memories arise from a grief- stricken man whose own grasp of reality progressively deteriorates following his shock at the news of Mel’s death. Therefore, the act of remembering in Three Burials is essentially unreliable and is accompanied by the process of mourning as an attempt to recover from a personal trauma. But for Pete, it is his very memories that actively constitute his trauma.

30 In an illuminating essay on traumatic capture in the cinematic Western, Janet Walker relays this trope’s commonality within the genre as a whole. Analysing such diverse films as The Searchers (1956), Pursued (1947), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Lone Star, she outlines in some detail the effect that the concept of trauma has on cinematic ‘realism’ in its profound potential for re-interpreting the history of the American West through film: A prominent subgroup of westerns [are] made up of what I’ll call “traumatic westerns,” in which past events of a catastrophic nature are represented so as to challenge both the realist representational strategies of a genre that so often trades on historical authenticity and the ideological precepts of Manifest Destiny. Traumatic westerns, it might be said, are counter-realistic and counter-historical. They are those films in which the contradictions of American conquest - a kind of generalised trauma - become invested in particular narrative scenarios. (Walker 220-21)

31 There are strong a priori grounds for suggesting that Three Burials continues in this “prominent subgroup.” Pete’s memories (relayed in the form of a series of flashbacks) appear to operate, not only as another counter-narrative strategy against realism, but also (by utilising the approach taken by Harvey) as cinematic examples of Bachelard’s concept of “poetic space.” In other words, his memories are a “sequence of fixations” through which Pete attempts to “place” his friend, as it were, and construct a sense of psychological “stability,” an identity for Mel and, ultimately, himself. It is an attempt to determine “spaces of the being’s stability” that are removed from temporality, contingency, and chance: “fixations” expunged from the chaotic flux of “real” experience and recast or, rather, re-remembered in mythic terms.

32 The film’s self-reflexivity proves fundamental in this regard as it highlights the process whereby identity is constructed through narrative. One such indicative moment – a scene where Pete and Mel are herding cattle together – provides an example. Here, cinematographer Chris Menges’ camera encompasses the epic landscape of the Texas Southwest in slow, broad sweeps. Heat-hazed long shots fix these attractive images “as memories of experienced places and spaces,” whilst composer Marco Beltrami’s gentle music imbues the whole scene with a romanticised, timeless air. We then cut to a contemporary shot of Pete sitting, brooding in his lodging, at once indicating that this has been his subjective memory of Mel and not objective reality. Shot in a traditionally realist style, these memories are devoid of the disjointed editing of the film’s contemporary action sequences within which they are framed and are, instead, permeated throughout with a mixture of nostalgia, eulogy, and a “black and white” morality. Even Pete’s engineering of a tryst for himself and Mel with two married

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women, the local waitress Rachel (Melissa Leo) and Norton’s own wife Lou Ann (January Jones), when depicted (or, more properly, remembered) in such terms, takes on an innocent air, despite the obvious moral issue of crossing the “border” of marital fidelity.

33 Such narrative simplicity is, of course, undercut by framing Pete’s flashbacks within and (on occasion) throughout with the chronologically disjointed scenes showing the actions and memories of other prominent characters, Norton chief among them. Norton’s memories clearly differ from those of Pete’s in both mood and composition. Here the mythic simplicity is replaced by a series of complex, often repetitive flashbacks of the circumstances leading up to his part in Mel’s death. These are relayed in disorientating fashion with staccato bursts of varying lengths that invade the contemporary action of the narrative at seemingly random points. For instance, in one scene we see Norton responding to the sound of rifle fire. He is aiming at something off-screen but there is no accompanying reverse-shot to illuminate what is contained within his point-of-view. Another quick moment revealed earlier in the narrative sees a panicked Norton burying Mel’s body in a scratch-dug hole. (Of course, this is chronologically illogical as it is revealed before the revelation of his shooting of Mel.) Another such moment is framed between shots of Norton gazing after Lou Ann as she heads into a shopping mall, the colour of her red miniskirt apparently enough to trigger his memory: a very brief hand-held shot reveals Norton looking at his shaking, blood-stained hands as he kneels over Mel’s body. A cut forward in time to a close-up shot showing Norton’s pained expression, his eyes watering, not only frames the flashback but it also reveals his trauma regarding the dreadful psychological consequences of taking another man’s life.

34 Walker suggests that, in “traumatic westerns . . . past events elude the realist register to suggest another way of knowing, one marked by ellipsis, uncertainty, and repetition” (220). Such marks are apparent in Three Burials and are relayed through its numerous flashbacks and multi-layered diegesis. Indeed, in one particular moment, the film itself becomes involved in the process of constructing historical memory in, significantly included as a (disembodied) flashback, the single scene shot solely from Mel’s perspective’ – this is the moment of his death. As the camera pans downward to provide an overhead shot of Mel dismounting from his horse, it is revealed that he was protecting his goats from a prowling coyote (hence the gunshots heard by Norton) and is himself subsequently gunned-down by Norton’s return-fire. The tragic nature of his death is thus enhanced by the realisation that not only did he not deserve such an end but, as he lay dying, Mel never knew who or what hit him.

35 When taken together (and accepting that the structure of the film would deliberately seek to deny this possibility), these sequences revealing the moment of Mel’s death constitute what one would typically refer to in the Western as the “shootout.” But far from a repetition of an ahistorical genre convention, Three Burials’ denies the viewers both the immediacy and the catharsis commonly attributed to the gunfight. In both mythic and real terms, not only is Mel’s death senseless, but it becomes apparent that Norton does not really see who he is firing at either. Busy masturbating to Hustler when he is first alerted to the sound of rifle fire, he panics and responds with shots of his own. And, if we are to believe that he fired out of a genuine sense of self-defence, then his assigned mythical role as “villain” is hereby rendered problematic. Despite his obvious craven cowardice and generally objectionable personality, like everybody else

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in the borderlands, Norton exists within the chaotic, intersecting flux of emotion and action that constitutes real life. One can no more “fix” him generically than Pete can “fix” Mel’s identity through subjective recollections.

36 According to Bachelard, the quality of memories is that they “are motionless,” and “the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are” (Harvey 217). However, it is important to point out that none of the flashbacks in Three Burials serve a traditional purpose. This is to say, none of the memories give us any objective clarity on events. Instead, they serve only to confuse, becoming thoroughly unsound. Norton’s recollections are rendered as trauma through staccato editing and disorientating camera movement, whilst Pete’s are, as the product of trauma, acts of attempted displacement. They are events re-imagined through a romantic aesthetic that is itself profoundly undermined by the confusing nature of the film’s spatial and temporal narrative patterns.

37 The issue then arises as to how much we really know about Mel – nothing terribly objective at any rate. However, such subjective spatial “fixations” within the narrative as offered through Pete’s memories work to emphasise his bond with Mel as something almost innocent and pure, or at least this is the indication; as something removed from the complexities and frustrations of “real” experience and laced with the harmonious simplicity of myth. They act as a counter-point to the recollections of Norton, but, despite their ostensible realism remain very much a product of the same trauma, which Walker refers to as “the catastrophic past event” (220).

38 Bachelard’s and Harvey’s views are perhaps best illustrated in Three Burials in what proves to be the last, and probably the most significant, of Pete’s flashbacks. In a scene established by a shot of a lake at sunset, we find Pete and Mel sitting together gazing out across the calm waters. It is here that we gain crucial knowledge of Mel’s proud boast to Pete of a home and family back in his native Mexico, a small village he calls Jimenez. Harvey’s idea of the significance of the “spatial image” (specifically, the “evidence of the photograph”) finds a powerful consonance here as Mel shows Pete a photograph purporting to depict himself, his wife Evelia, and their three children. It is his assertion of both an identity and of a history for himself through visual recourse to a family that he claims not to have seen in over five years.

39 As the scene continues, Mel goes on to note with unmistakable pride that his youngest son is “gonna be a damn good cowboy,” and yet this pride is tempered by a constant fear of the possibility of death, a fear that we know to have been already realised. In a broader social sense, as a “wetback” Mel worries about being arrested or, worse still, shot by the Border Patrol. And it is at this point in the narrative that he asks Pete to promise that, should he die “over here,” he will return his body to Jimenez. Of course, this scene is like all the others: a moment selected by Pete and re-enacted for us at a particular point in the narrative to suit a particular purpose. And this purpose is to both explain and justify Pete’s kidnapping of Norton, the disinterring of Mel’s body, and his immanent embarking on a quixotic journey across the border into “Old Mexico.” It is not, strictly speaking, Mel’s assertion then; rather, it is Pete’s attempt to give his dead friend a voice – “stability” – to speak for him as it were.

40 In addition to the above, the scene provides the narrative impetus for Pete to assume the mythic role of the lone hero who will head into the wilderness in order to deal justice to his dead friend’s killer. Before the flashback draws to a close, Mel draws Pete a map so he can locate Jimenez. As the narrative segues into its second half,

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accompanied by the inter-title “The Journey/El Viaje,” Pete will use this map and the photograph to inform Mel’s wife of her husband’s passing, and honour his pledge to his dead friend.

41 Assessing the role of the hero in Three Burials necessarily engages us with an exploration of Pete’s character. His occupation as a ranch foreman, together with his assumption of the role of heroic defender of his dead friend’s honour, comprises two key elements of the Western genre: the image of the cowboy and the revenge motif. The film trades on these elements in order to present us with its particular deconstruction of frontier mythology.

42 The significance of the cowboy in relation to the Western lies at the heart of Anglo- America’s myth of itself. The cowboy is usually envisioned as a lone hero on horseback, one who lives by his own honour “Code”: tough, courageous, and quick on the draw. He typically defends civilisation against the savage forces of the wilderness and revenge often provides the impetus behind the hero’s showdown with the villain. Ultimately, however, the hero is also a part of the world of the villain. His past, if not exactly the same, is in many ways related to this figurative savage. Consequently, the embryonic civilisation, whose very existence depends upon such a figure, ultimately rejects his violence once he has vanquished the savage forces that have threatened it. The hero is essentially an abject figure, suffered by civilisation and morally ambiguous at best and a figure threatening atavistic regression at worst. With the wilderness providing him with the territory in which he can live out this mythic identity, the cowboy is thus a profoundly existential figure in a profoundly existential landscape.

43 This article has already discussed how the counter-narrative style engendered by Three Burials’ formal strategies offer a brutal deconstruction of cinematic realism. It is ironic, therefore, that in many ways the film’s most interesting aspect comes at the moment that this counter-narrative style is completely abandoned. At this intermediate point, the film segues into a more traditional aesthetic style of cinematic realism.

44 Having overheard a conversation between Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) and Border Patrol Captain Gomez (Mel Rodriguez) that implicates Norton in the killing of Melquiades, Rachel comes to inform Pete “who killed that Mexican.” Pete gazes out into the surrounding wilderness of his lonely farmstead and the romantic backdrop subsumes him, almost as if it is etching the knowledge of what he must do into his very soul. The mythic West is to provide him (or so he thinks) with the method by which Norton will be brought to justice. This is confirmed in Pete’s mind when Belmont refuses his angry demand that he arrest Norton. The killing of his best friend is to be ignored by the forces of law and, with this realisation, Pete undergoes his transformation: the man who is brought to a standstill by his grief is transformed into the vengeful hero. With this we are in recognisable Western territory: when the lawful representatives of civilisation are unable, or, in this case, unwilling to mete out justice, the gunfighter springs into action.

45 In Three Burials it is, of course, the borderlands that provide the geography in which Pete can live out his mythic role as the hero. Its constitution of semi-arid deserts, rugged mountains, and deep canyons likens itself to the historical epic and immediately begs comparison with the aesthetic qualities of Westerns past, the Monument Valley terrain of John Ford or the apocalyptic deserts of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. The film’s intertextual relay makes clear the role that the Western narrative plays, not only in structuring mythic accounts of the historical past but also

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in its creation of a sense of individual identity. In this regard, Three Burials once more refers back to the Westerns of the past: fusing existentialism with the historical epic, incorporating at once the thematic legacies of Bud Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks and, once again, Ford.

46 A journey into such a territory evokes a journey back in time. Pickup trucks are replaced by horses and roads are replaced by mountains and desert tracks. At times, this effect of a temporal shift is depicted in Three Burials with no small sense of humour. Belmont, who hates Pete mainly because both men share a relationship with Rachel (Belmont’s resentment perhaps growing in the face of his own sexual impotency), accidentally drives his truck into a ditch. The pursuit of Pete is to be a horseback affair. His prowess as the leader of the manhunt is quickly ridiculed. When discussing plans to detain Pete before he can make it into Mexico, Belmont enquires hopefully of Gomez, “What about the heat-seeking radar ya’ll got?” With perfect comic timing, Gomez replies, “It don’t work.”

47 Pete’s journey is filmed with striking long-takes of mountainous terrain that dwarfs his small convoy of three horses and a pack-mule. It is at this moment that Pete’s own associations with the wilderness become visually manifested: Belmont, whilst crouching from a vantage point, trains his rifle sight on Pete. He hesitates, and then releases his finger from the trigger before finally watching Pete disappear behind a rock face, as if merging with the landscape itself. Belmont’s failure to shoot him reaffirms his impotency. More significantly, he is quick to realise the ethical consequences should he kill Pete. He subsequently extricates himself from the manhunt. In a more abstract sense, he extricates himself from the frontier myth, and his role in the narrative effectively comes to an end.

48 Meanwhile, Pete’s journey becomes increasingly perverse. Mel’s body inevitably begins to rot in the desert heat, resembling less and less the person that it once was. Pete’s vain attempts to preserve the body as best he can become increasingly farcical: burning off ants with kerosene, pouring anti-freeze down the cadaver’s throat, and even a drunken attempt to comb its hair with a garden fork. Such dark humour is accompanied in equal measure by more traditional moments of danger and fear. Whilst trekking round a mountain gorge, one of Pete’s horse’s panics, slips, and proceeds to cascade down the edge and fall to its death. In another, particularly upsetting scene, an unnamed old blind man (Levon Helm) whom Pete and Norton come across on their journey asks Pete to shoot him because his son “has got of cancer” and “won’t be comin’ back” to look after him – a life lived alone and in darkness is more than he can bear.

49 Of more significance is the way in which Three Burials works to conflate the personal with the political. In other words, the film’s ideological concern with the grand social themes of frontier mythology, justice, morality, violence, and redemption become focused on the individual. Looked at in this way, Mel’s pauper life and ignominious death comes to symbolise social attitudes as a whole. His ill-treatment thus becomes a mirror reflecting broader social truths about the relations between Mexico and the U.S. In his own way, Pete tries to rectify this by inverting the terms under which the oppressor and the oppressed operate. He takes Norton to Mel’s adobe hut, makes him sit in his chair, wear his work clothes, and even makes him drink from Mel’s cup. It is as if by forcing Norton to exist in Mel’s space, he can force him to see from Mel’s perspective. Overall, it is Mel’s body which best exemplifies this conflation,

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representing as it does the ultimate sign of putrefaction: the corpse of an unwanted and unknown vaquero, a horrible, rotting memento mori for Anglo-America to reflect upon.3

50 As already mentioned, it is once Pete decides to adopt the role of the hero and cast Norton in the role of the villain that the complex temporality which has dominated the narrative of the film’s first part is completely abandoned. It has also been suggested that the film’s assumption of the form and iconography of the Western in its second part is undertaken with the self-conscious agenda of deconstructing the genre’s mythology from within. Of course, the self-conscious irony of the film’s ideology would be lost if the film merely replicated the traditional narrative form and iconography of the Western. Hence, the film contradicts the myth that informed the genre it adopts in its second part. The narrative complexity remains but now it is in the contrast between form and meaning that the film acquires its depth and seriousness. Or, rather, it both deconstructs the mythology and shows, in a form that imitates the myth, the fate of the man who follows it.

51 This fate is finally laid bare when Pete arrives in Coahuilla. To his dismay, none of the locals seem to have heard of Jimenez. When Pete finally tracks down Evelia (whose name turns out to be Rosa), she claims never to have heard of Melquiades Estrada, let alone admits to being his wife. She angrily demands how Pete managed to get hold of a photograph of her and her children and that Pete leave before he gets her into trouble with her husband. (Rosa’s angry reaction perhaps indicates that she may indeed have encountered Mel in a sexual capacity, but not that of husband and wife.)

52 After days of fruitless searching, Pete comes across a dilapidated old shack in the middle of the Mexican desert and proclaims it to be Jimenez. Pete’s obsessive delusion has, by this point in the narrative, convinced him of the reality of the photo handed to him by Mel. Harvey writes that “photographs are now construed as evidence of a real history, no matter what the truth of that history may have been. The image is, in short, proof of the reality, and images can be constructed and manipulated” (312). We now know that Pete’s only reference to the real – the photograph purporting to depict Mel with his wife and children – is revealed to be a lie. As if to confound his delusions further, he produces the photograph once more and holds it out to Norton. A reverse- shot from Norton’s perspective reveals it to us in detail for the first time.4 Aside from the fact that Pete is holding it sideways, disorientating our perception from the outset, upon close inspection the photo shows only Rosa and her three children – one has to look hard to see a shadowy figure in the far background. We presume this is Mel, but it could just as easily be anybody.

53 This harsh reality is as clear to Norton as it is to the audience, and we begin to feel a tremendous sense of sympathy for Pete’s increasingly desperate situation. Pete is unable or, perhaps, unwilling to accept the truth of the situation as this would involve denying the validity of the heroic role in which he has cast himself. As Pete and Norton go about recreating Jimenez, it is, just as Harvey relates, “a willingness to search for identity, home, and history” (312). Mel may not have any of these things but Pete is determined to create them for him. His final act is to reconstruct in the flimsiest of forms the home that Mel claimed but which did not exist. It is his final attempt to create a space of stability for the doomed man, a final resting place for his friend.

54 What of the enigma of Melquiades himself? I have already discussed how our access to him is mediated almost exclusively through Pete’s subjective memories, and it is, as a

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consequence of this, difficult to ascertain much of his personal history. Nevertheless, one can hypothesise, and it does indeed become evident, that Mel created an imaginary home and family – a mythic “space” for himself – something he desired but which never actually existed. In relation to the North American Imaginary, Octavio Paz notes how the U.S. has defined Mexico as a place onto which its own imagined fantasies of cultural and racial otherness could be played out: In general, Americans have not looked for Mexico in Mexico; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests – and these are what they have found. In short, the history of our relationship is the history of a stubborn deceit, usually involuntary though not always so. (Paz 358)

55 If this can be said of the Americans’ cultural (mis)perceptions of Mexico, then Three Burials’ significance lies in the way it inverts this “stubborn deceit,” revealing it to work equally upon Mexico’s cultural (mis)perceptions of the U.S. If we reiterate Limerick’s suggestion that “the Mexican border was a social fiction that neither nature nor people in search of opportunity observed,” then we could say that when Mel first arrives at Pete’s West Texas cattle ranch, he arrives out of two interdependent social fictions. The first of these is that which concerns the “conquered and controlled borderland,” which Mel has crossed over presumably in search of work; the second constitutes the mythic discourse that has influenced popular cultural perceptions of the American West. When Mel declares – “I’m just a cowboy” – he is not only looking for employment. In mythic terms he is asserting an identity that has its roots firmly in the rhetoric of popular frontier mythology and its attendant cultural, political, and historical functions. In seeking economic and social “opportunity,” he is playing into the “American Dream,” itself a “social fiction” that, like the cowboy, is firmly rooted in the popular cultural mindset of America. In existential terms, Paz also relates that, in any civilisation, “[t]here is no meaning, there is a search for meaning” (353). Such sentiments relate to Three Burials’ use of narrative to evoke its underlying tension, juxtaposing the human desire for meaning with its absence.

56 For his part, Norton is purged by confrontation with his own shortcomings. His brutal and torturous journey ends with him being forced at gunpoint by Pete to beg forgiveness for the killing of Mel. Indeed, his heartfelt and pained outpourings of grief and regret leave us with little doubt that, despite Lou Ann’s declared belief, he is not “beyond redemption.” Instead of meeting his end at Pete’s hands, Norton is let go. Pete cannot bring himself to kill Norton probably because this would mean a violation of the “Code” by which Pete has constructed his heroic persona. By the same token, Norton is the enemy whose existence has defined Pete and given meaning to his mythic quest. He is also, in the final instance, the closest thing to family that Pete has. In a final touching scene moments before he leaves, Pete says to Norton, “You can keep the horse . . . son.” As if to confirm his redemption, Norton calls after Pete, asking if he is “gonna be alright?” A close-up of Norton’s battered face showing genuine compassion for his erstwhile captor is thus the last image we see. We are also left to ponder how he will make his way back across the border to his empty home – parted from Lou Ann, the wife who has left him to go back to the city life she had abandoned in Cincinnati.

57 So Pete rides off, betrayed by a mythic identity that did not exist as surely as Mel’s professed identity did not. He wanders into a borderland that is neither myth nor reality, nor even a conflicted mixture of the two, lying in-between – a nowhere man, a fugitive cut-off from both the U.S. and Mexico. He has lost his relationship with Rachel, who refuses to leave her husband Bob (Richard Jones) for either Belmont or Pete.

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Actually, Rachel comes across as the most philosophical of the characters in the film. Unlike Pete, she accepts the complex and contradictory identities that reflect the complexities of the borderlands. To her, they seem complimentary rather than contradictory, a state of mind that completely eludes Pete (and most of the other characters for that matter); she says to Pete, “You just don’t understand.” Such an attitude enables her to accept Belmont’s impotence and Bob’s mixture of jealousy and complacency, all the while assuring Pete that “You’re the one for me. The only one I love!” She will not exchange this tangible reality, nor buy into Pete’s fantasy of marriage, an offer he makes from across the border when drunk. Thus Rachel shatters Pete’s last-ditch effort to realise a mythic identity and completes his personal failure. He has become a lost soul, like Ethan Edwards at the conclusion of John Ford’s The Searchers: unmoored in a figurative borderland, unable to adapt to civilisation, and, ultimately, lost in the wilderness.

58 The overall tone of Three Burials might strike one as rather melancholic. If this is so, it is because the latent history of the borderlands forms a major part of the vast “legacy of conquest” that characterised the Anglo-American settlement of the West. The New Western History is surely correct in suggesting that, for the most part, official history sought to conceal the brutal acts of conquest required in advancing U.S. claims of national, cultural, and racial hegemony throughout the Southwest. It is of little surprise therefore that the issue of the U.S.-Mexico border has received scant attention in popular culture, let alone the Western genre. This article concludes with a reiteration of Limerick’s insistence that, for much of the twentieth century, “Hispanic history remained on the edges of Western American history.” As already discussed, her account is one which highlights the cultural-ideological machinations that lay behind this elision from the “official” discourses of history, seeking to re-engage her readers with a Hispanic culture now in its “proper place at the centre of Western American history.” However, if the fates of the various characters in Three Burials teach us anything, it is that we should be wary of claiming a centre of history, especially along the contentious borderlands. In this regard, Paz alludes to the notion of a de-centred subject, suggesting that social alienation “is now a condition shared by all men”: We Mexicans have always lived on the periphery of history. Now the centre or nucleus of world society has disintegrated and everyone – including the European and the North American – is a peripheral being. We are all living on the margin because there is no longer any centre. (170)

59 Such seems to be the fate of Pete and Mel, although it relates to all the characters, the differences are only of degree. The characters that populate Three Burials’ spaces play out international issues as personal traumas. This is done through recourse to a dangerously outmoded grid of cultural references informed by the American frontier. Of all the characters, Pete suffers from its effects most directly. Unlike Rachel and even Belmont to an extent, he is, in the final instance, “inseparable from [this] fiction . . . condemned to invent a mask and to discover afterward that the mask is [his] true visage” (Paz 216).

60 However, if the narrative is a failure on an individual level, then this failure forcefully illuminates the myth of the West as a romantic delusion – “a mask” – possessing destructive power for contemporary Americans. On a broader political-allegorical, and even a deeply human level, this exposure engendered by the narrative is a success. For, in utilising the recognisable tropes and motifs of popular expressions of the frontier and subverting them, Three Burials suggests a broader and a more inclusive telling of

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one of the most controversial and disputed areas of the present-day U.S., and this is surely a good thing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS CITED:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands - la Frontera: the New Mestiza [1987]. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers [1972]. London: Vintage, 1993.

Cook, Pam, and Mieke Bernink. The Cinema Book. London: British Film Institute, 1999. de Orellana, Margarita. “The Incursion of North American Fictional Cinema 1911-1917 into the Mexican Revolution.” Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas. Eds. John King, Ana M. Lopez & Manuel Alvarado. London: British Film Institute, 1993. 2-14.

Etulain, Richard W., ed. Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Etulain, Richard W., Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990.

Lapsley, Robert, and Michel Westlake. Film Theory: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

Leach, Neil, ed. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 1997.

Limerick, Patricia N., Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000.

Limerick, Patricia N., The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987.

Magowan, Kim. “‘Blood Only Means What You Let It’: Incest and Miscegenation in John Sayles’ Lone Star,” Film Quarterly 57.1 (2003): 20-31.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. London: Penguin, 1990.

Pomeroy, Earl. “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41.4 (1955): 579-600.

Schultz, Kimberly. “Challenging Legends, Complicating Borderlines: The Concept of ‘Frontera’ in John Sayles’s Lone Star,” Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History. Eds. Peter C. Rollins & John E. O’Connor. Lexington: the University Press of Kentucky, 2005. 261-281.

Walker, Janet. “Captive Images in the Traumatic Western: The Searchers, Pursued, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Lone Star.” Westerns: Films Through History. Ed. Janet Walker. London: British Film Institute, 2001. 219-251.

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FILMS

Amores Perros. Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Perf. Emilio Echevarría, Gael García Bernal, Goya Toledo, Álvaro Guerrero. Nu Vision/Lions Gate Films, 2000.

Babel. Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Perf. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Mohamed Akhzam, Peter Wight. Paramount Vantage, 2006.

Los Tres Entierros de Melquiades Estrada/The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Dir. Tommy Lee Jones. Perf. Tommy Lee Jones, Barry Pepper, Julio Cedillo, January Jones. EuropaCorp, 2005.

Lone Star. Dir. John Sayles. Perf. Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Pena, Kris Kristofferson, Matthew McConaughey. Columbia TriStar, 1996.

Once Upon a Time in the West. Dir. Sergio Leone. Perf. Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards. Paramount, 1968.

Pursued. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. Robert Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Judith Anderson, Harry Carey Jr. Warner Bros., 1947.

The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Perf. John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood, Henry Brandon. Warner Bros., 1956.

21 Grams. Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Perf. Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Danny Huston, Benicio Del Toro. Focus features, 2003.

NOTES

1. This is undeniably a postmodern trait. However, the filmmakers’ style here is not to be dismissed as mere pastiche. On the contrary, and as I go on to argue below, its portrayal of the myth of the West as a romantic delusion possessing destructive power for contemporary Americans, is rendered in terms that are too intensely serious to be regarded as pastiche. Instead, the question impressed upon us early in the film by the narrative strategy is not so much what is happening (or, rather, what has happened) but, rather, why is it being relayed to us in the fashion that it is? 2. De Orellana’s excellent analysis looks at U.S. cinematic efforts to cover the armed phase of the Mexican revolution together with its deployment of a range of racial and gendered stereotypes by which Anglo-Americans could “read” the Mexican “other.” 3. However, we should not be too quick to re-assert our own binary, depicting (albeit in inverted terms) one nation simply as victims of another’s brutal oppression. Such a reading would overlook the intelligent way in which Three Burials operates. As Limerick rightly points out one should not slip into the habit of “taking point of view for granted.” She reminds us that “Hispanics - like Indians, Anglos, and every other group - could be victims as well as victimisers, and [that] the meanings of the past could seem, at times, to be riding a seesaw” (Limerick, Legacy 257). Again, it is Three Burial’s narrative concern with borders and the crossing of those borders which illustrates this intelligence. For instance, the film is ironic in that it inverts an historical phenomenon by having its Anglo-American protagonist attempt to enter Mexico illegally. Pete enlists the help of a Mexican (the same man who, earlier, we see “helping” the group who are detained by the Border Patrol) who smuggles illegal Mexican immigrants over the Rio Grande - for a fee. Upon quoting Pete $1000 for his assistance, Pete scoffs, “I don’t have a thousand dollars.” “No, not one thousand,” replies the smuggler, “three thousand: one for you, one for the Gringo, and one for the dead guy!” Pete eventually bargains his horse for passage but, in a broader sense, what this scene reveals is the extortionate amount “wetbacks” are charged by

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gangsters in this regard. As an organised crime, people trafficking is a booming economy, intimately connected to cross-border drug trafficking, and largely set up by unscrupulous Mexicans in order to financially exploit the desperation of their fellow countrymen and women. 4. In the flashback, which constitutes Pete’s memory, there is a split second shot on the photograph as Mel hands it over. I would suggest that, at this point in the narrative, we have no real reason to suspect its legitimacy.

ABSTRACTS

As a problematic in-between space of racial antagonisms, liminal identities, and violence, the borderlands of the American Southwest prove fertile grounds for scrutinising Anglo-America’s national frontier mythology and, therefore, its own sense of history and cultural identity. This article explores the extent to which the “contemporary” border Western, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005),challenges Hollywood’s cinematic hegemony in this regard. It argues that with Three Burials comes a sophisticated challenge to the cinema’s characteristic and mythic forms and to the racial assumptions that have traditionally bedevilled relations between Mexico and the USA. Transnational themes bring these issues to the fore and modify the terms in which they are represented and, therefore, imagined.

INDEX

Keywords: film, Frontier, genre, Mexico, national identity, Southwest, transnationalism, United States., Western

AUTHOR

MATTHEW CARTER University of Essex

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Robert Adams in Transatlantic Review: Archiving the Barbary Captive and Traveller

Stephen F. Wolfe

“Travelling is always a travelling in traces, is always the pursuit of traces to be followed and read, and that the reading of these traces is more of an adventure than travelling itself” (Pfister, 30)

1 In 1817, in the May and July issues of the North American Review, Jared Sparks set out to challenge the veracity of The Narrative of Robert Adams, an American sailor who was wrecked on the western coast of Africa, whose story had been published in London in 1816. At this time Jared Sparks was acting editor of the North American Review and seeking to make a name for himself in American letters. Sparks had been born in Willington, Connecticut, in 1789, studied in public schools, worked for a time as a carpenter, and then became a schoolteacher. In 1809-1811 he attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Harvard University (A.B. 1815 and A.M. 1818). He had studied theology at Harvard and was college tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy from 1817 to 1819. In contrast, Robert Adams, first known as Benjamin Rose, was an American sailor found destitute on the streets of London in 1815. He had a fascinating story to tell: he had been shipwrecked off the Northwest Coast of Africa, taken captive and enslaved more than once. He had crossed the Sahara, spent six months in captivity in Timbuctoo, and was later ransomed by the British consul. He returned to America via Cadiz and London, where he presented himself as a Barbary Coast Captive and a Christian slave, and the first “Christian” man to have lived in Timbuctoo for generations.

2 These two men’s trajectories could not have been more different: Sparks would become President of Harvard and one of the most important early American historians, while Adams would sail away from the city of London, disappearing without a trace, but the Narrative of Robert Adams would be published on both sides of the Atlantic and in Europe, over the next 20 years creating controversy throughout its publication history

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(C. H. Adams, A Critical Edition, lvii). I want to examine constructions of this text by its two London editors and then its reconstructions by various reviewers as it criss-crossed the Atlantic. By reading the narrative transatlantically, we can examine its role in public debates about exploration, Timbuctoo, trade routes in Northern Africa, race, and authorship in the first decades of the 19th century. The text also gives us an indication of the ways in which people and texts circulated within the transatlantic region. The narrative, wherever and whenever it came to rest, located “Robert Adams” within sets of conflicting discourses and medial representations: Adams could be a trustworthy narrator within the discourses of travel and empirical authentication, or a fraudulent figure with a story to sell within the well-known Barbary Coast captivity narrative, or perhaps both?

I

3 Adams was an American sailor who was “found” by Simon Cock, one of the text’s editors, wandering the streets of London in 1815. His story of shipwreck, captivity, enslavement, brutal treatment, and attempts to convert him to Islam seemed an excellent opportunity for the Committee of Merchant Traders to Africa to make a contribution to the popular Barbary Coast captivity narrative.1 The figure of Adams is shadowy from the first: he is described as a destitute beggar (9), and a man not “fair” skinned, perhaps black.2

4 Additionally he is an unwilling narrator whose memory is not always clear. Therefore, his two amanuenses have, at different times, to verify the details of his wanderings in the desert and his visit to Timbuctoo through detailed questioning and a long pedagogical format. The two editors’ commentaries emphasize accumulative details and geographical accuracy in their reconstruction of Adams’ story. The first editor is Mr. Joseph Dupuis, the British Vice-Consul in Morocco who paid Adams’ ransom and put him on a boat, first to Cadiz and then to London in 1814. The second editor is Simon Cock, who worked for the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. Dupuis provides many of the Notes for the 1816 text, verifying descriptions of places, people, and ethnographic practices, based upon his own personal experience in Africa. Simon Cock is the framing “as told to narrator” of The Narrative of Robert Adams; he had published previous pamphlets defending free trade, including the slave trade, and had worked with various shipping companies in Liverpool and London on behalf of companies participating in the “triangular trade” with Africa. It is Cock who writes the first draft of Adams’ “narrative” and sets up the initial set of interviews with “gentlemen who interest themselves in African affairs,” “scientists,” and members of the Admiralty and the government (13). He was also responsible for editing the entire volume for publication.3

5 Additionally, Adams was not able to narrate a “continuous and strait-forward story” (11) but only to answer questions put to him, first by Dupuis in 1810 in Africa, and then in 1815-16 in London. The editors had to construct Adams’ “story” from fragments. Thus, Cock felt the need to bring in a group of “scientific and respectable gentleman” to interview Adams, seeking verification of details and geographical descriptions of Africa. This highly mediated captivity narrative is presented in the form of gathered information, focusing on Adams’ journey and stay in Timbuctoo.

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6 In fact, the geographical information in the text is continually compared with that supplied in Mungo Park’s text (see footnote 1) (11, 68-97, 127-135). The map at the beginning of the Adams text is the same map as in the Park text, drawn by Major James Rennell, a respected geographer. The map is supplementary, in Jacques Derrida´s sense, in that it both adds to and substitutes for the written text (144-45), tracing the moving subject of the travel narrative onto a static map. Additionally, the commentary, notes, and appendix that frame the four-chapter Robert Adams narrative suggestively trace the figure of Park just below the surface of Adams’ text, just as Adams’ route or movements are traced on the fixed form of the Park map. Printing choices seem to confirm this – in the words of a contemporary English review by John Barrow, the Adams text is “on a footing with the two volumes of Park: it is accordingly printed in a uniform manner with those volumes” (Quarterly Review, Jan. 1816 473).4 John Murray was the publisher for the Admiralty and of the Quarterly Review.

7 The palimpsestic character of the book, with its use of Rennell’s map and elaborate editorial details, added to its reliability for the audience but also put the two texts “on an equal footing”; both formed part of an “archive” in which the writing up of the “story” stabilizes the narrator, his observations and his actions within a reified text. In the London text, authentication is more important than storytelling: the objective seems to be to locate a subject and his narrative within discourses that will lend credibility to the subject himself and to the editors. Through the accumulation of details, consistency had to be established within disciplinary frameworks such as natural history, ethnographic reportage, and previous historical and geographic knowledge as recorded in other texts. The object of this sort of rhetorical formation, is to make this performative narrative of a dislocated sailor into a didactic text by creating a privileged space of enunciation before a group of examiners (Wilson 49). Bruno Latour argues that a knowledge of places and peoples “at a distance” relied on assemblages of evidence such as maps, measurements of distance and time, journals, and specimens gathered together in metropolitan “centres of calculation” (Latour 220). These urban clearing houses of data, such as Kew Gardens, the British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society, and the other societies for geographical exploration founded during the late 17th and throughout the 18th centuries were places to catalogue and stabilize the “immutable mobiles” of travel for the purpose of comparison and the “accurate representation” of distant places for the purposes of scientific study (Latour 215-250)

8 The two editors set up an over-determining discourse that is constantly mediating between Adams’ travels and his ability to communicate. Since Adams cannot read or write, it is a construction and verification of his “evidence” as well as of his spoken words for the reader. At certain points in the text, both editors’ notes on the same passage offer an embedded double commentary, setting text inside texts (79-80). This is complicated by Cock’s choice of a third-person narrative “voice” in the four-chapter Adams narrative section of the book (26-67). In contrast to the Adams narrative, in “Introductory Details Respecting Robert Adams” (8-19) by Cock and in Dupuis’s “Notes and Illustrations of Adams Narrative” (68-105) each editor speaks in the first person. Adams’ own words are framed within comments and questions in the editors’ “own words”. The four-chapter Adams narrative is presented within the editors’ five-part structure of authentication: an introductory chapter by Cock; the map and its “Advertisement” by Rennell; the notes and illustrations at the end of the text by

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Dupuis; and two additional appendices, one by an unnamed member of the African Committee and another by Dupuis.

9 In The Unvarnished Truth, Personal Narrative in Nineteenth Century America, Ann Fabian argues that “extensive appendices were common in African travel narratives, particularly when explorers claimed credit for significant discoveries, but the appendices in Adams’s book were designed as much to prove the man a plausible narrator as to document his discoveries” (29). The editors create a set of framing discourses and notes, or in Michael de Certeau’s useful phrase, “referential testimonies” (31) – texts and people that establish “common opinion,” providing accepted facts about the geography, customs, and ethnography of Northwest Africa. Also, it is interesting to note that the actual details of Adams’ shipwreck, capture, suffering, wanderings in the desert, and eventual ransom do not play as important a part in this narrative as in other Barbary Coast narratives of the same period published in Britain and America.5

10 The book begins with a process of negotiation involving a continual exchange of discursive performances in which the created speaker/author Robert Adams, his editors, and his questioners produce “a mutual and mutable” recognition within representational discourses. The terms of cultural engagement “whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively” at the beginning of the text (Bhabha 5). It is both a place of encounter and a site of the attempted authentication of difference in which “anxieties of authenticity” (Burnham 172) are acted out. There is a consistent tension between Robert Adams, a Barbary captive and a ransomed sailor, and Adams the undefined “other” of mixed race and uncertain origin but with “scientific and documentary” evidence that is of interest to his audience. By setting out to prove the reliability of the narrator and his geographic and chronological memory, the editors, Cock and Dupuis, demonstrate a set of strategies or “styles” that both reveal and disguise Adams’ identity.

11 Additionally, the staging of Adams’ performance takes place on a set of medial borders. I have used the word “staging” with some care, in that the narrative does not begin with “the Adams narrative” but with questions about previous sightings of the ransomed sailor in Africa, Cadiz, and then in London. In other places in the text, Adams dissolves into the shipwrecked sailor Benjamin Rose, who journeyed to Timbuctoo (17,70,106) and was ransomed. The text’s opening section also constitutes a continual process of finding and reorienting Adams within his own story and to the needs of his auditors. One detail is quite important here: Adams, if he was a sailor, would have been literate, since “seamen were substantially literate” during this period (Blum 144-6). The text demonstrates the ways in which the two editors negotiate between their presentation of Adams’ story and the possible representations of evidence and authentication that must accompany his narrative of enslavement, his knowledge of geography, exploration, and history. For example, Adams’ knowledge of distance and direction is based on the following commonplace analogy: “Being a sailor, he observed, he had the habit of noticing the course he was steering at sea; and therefore found no difficulty in doing so, when traversing the Deserts of Africa, which looked like the sea in a calm” (Adams 12). The negotiation takes place within a discursive contact zone, in which the narrators are testing Adams “stylistic indices” to see which will best reveal the accuracy of “speaker’s” words within the available discourses of his “collaborative” editors and interrogators.

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12 What is odd, and what both Dupuis and Cock admit is problematic, is not how to represent “Robert Adams” within an “orientalist” archive but how to account for Adams’ inconsistencies of appearance and behaviour—the man has been “seen” a number of times between 1810 and 1815, but he seems to float away from affiliation with any community and he moves between racial categories and linguistic markers. Adams has told Cock that he wants only to return to the Hudson Valley in New York, yet he does seem to realize that his narrative would be of interest to an “audience of scientific and commercial” gentlemen in London and is willing to stay to satisfy their thirst for details “too curious to be suppressed” (Adams 14). Cock informs the readers that Adams appears and reappears in London from his first sighting in October 1815 to the publication of the text in 1816. And then later in 1816, Adams disappears again, not staying to collect his promised royalties, nor is there any record of him returning to New York State (xvi-ii, 162-182).

II

13 As suggested above, Adams’ alterity becomes more and more complicated as the narrative develops. In his opening “Introductory Details Respecting Robert Adams,” relating his first encounter with Adams in Africa in 1810, Dupuis describes him as having the appearance, features and dress perfectly resembling those of “an Arab” and speaking a mixture of Arabic and broken English. The appearance, features and dress of this man upon his arrival at Mogador, so perfectly resembled those of an Arab, or rather of a Shilluh, his head being shaved, and his beard scanty and black, that I had difficulty at first in believing him to be a Christian. When I spoke to him in English, he answered me in a mixture of Arabic and broken English, and sometimes in Arabic only. At this early period I could not help remarking that his pronunciation of Arabic resembled that of a Negro, but concluded that it was occasioned by his intercourse with Negro slaves. Like most other Christians after a long captivity and severe treatment among the Arabs, he appeared upon his first arrival exceedingly stupid and insensible; and he scarcely spoke to any one. (15)

14 Paul Baepler argues that this comment displays “a fear that the boundary of identity is closely linked to language and that language acquisition – particularly under the duress of captivity – comes perilously close to cultural assimilation” (1999 42). But it also introduces the uncertain ways the narrator’s race is presented in the text. Adams’ “appearance, features and dress . . . so perfectly resembled those of an Arab, or rather of a Shilluh, . . . that [Dupuis] has difficulty at first believing him to be Christian,” and he is mistaken for a Moor. Also, early in the text, Dupuis accounts for Adams’ “colour” by a reference to his complex family history: “he was born up river of New York, where his father lived,” while “his mother was a Mulatto, which circumstance his features and complexion seem to confirm” (17). In an aside, one editor states that Adams is a “very dark man, with short curly black hair” (47) while his Arab captors single him out as white (55,60), and both editors assert that he is the first “white man” to visit Timbuctoo. Later in the text there is an imbrication of ethnicity and language when Dupuis asserts that Adams’ “pronunciation of Arabic was at all times indistinct, and often quite incorrect” (75), but that Adams “did know something of the Negro language” of Africa (91).

15 The editors create a lone, multilingual sailor who might pass unnoticed in foreign lands, yet they are not quite comfortable with such a construction. Adams is clearly not

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the man of moral courage, self-sacrifice, and immediately recognizable authority that the editors sought and that later generations of commentators on African exploration would venerate. They seem aware of this by drawing attention to Adams’ moral choices: he did not convert to Islam, nor was he “cowardly”; instead he offered resistance to the demands of his African captors (55-56, 61-63).

16 But his appearance to Africans is also significantly variable. Dupuis asserts that the African tribes who had held Adams captive “had never seen a white man before”. Adams’s alterity is framed in categorical terms: for example, Dupuis notes that “I do not imagine that the curiosity of the Negroes can have been excited so much on account of Adams’s colour, as because he was a Christian, and a Christian slave, which would naturally be to them a source of great astonishment” (89). In fact, he is called by one group of his captors in Africa “a Christian who never prayed” (57). “Christian” was a coded word for “white” in the Barbary Coast captivity narratives, novels, and plays published between the 16th and the 19th centuries. The consul asserts that the Negroes of Africa must have seen, in caravans from the Barbary states, many Moors of a “complexion quite as light as that of Adams” (89). Thus it has been assumed that Adams is racially Creole or “mulatto” (ix, 89, Baepler 1995 25).

17 While the stress is on Adams’ shifting identity, the ways in which his editors have created Adams’ silences are even more problematic: both fascinating and frustrating (98-99 for a return to the scene above, but with a slightly different commentary by Dupuis). As suggested above, the editors say that “the narrative was drawn from Adams, not as a continuous and strait-forward story, but in answer to the detached, and often unconnected, questions of the Editor, or of any gentlemen who happened to be present at his examinations ” (11). There is, in the words of critic David Johnston, “ the rigorous impossibility of deciding who or what Adams might have been—outside, perhaps, his status as a curiosity, which is well documented” (363).

18 In fact, the role of “curiosity” and the aesthetics of curiosity in the literature and intellectual history of the late 17th through early 19th century in England are complex. In her fine study Curiosity, A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry, Barbara M. Benedict has demonstrated that “the question confronting spectators and readers of curious explorations and experiments was whether to believe the writer” and travellers had long aroused suspicion because homebound readers could not verify their tales. Writers during the period deliberately invited the reader’s scepticism as a way of verifying their own credibility (28). The editors seek to transform the narrator’s “eager and systematic curiosity” (Adams 80) into a scientific empirical narrative.

19 For Cock, Adams has to be provided with a personal history and narrative credibility so that his descriptions can be collected and accumulated “systematically” into a stable archive of material. Both editors sought to authenticate the man who was captured, sold into slavery, and ransomed under the name of Benjamin Rose in 1810. They do this in their introductory chapter by close questioning, having him chart his routes on existing maps, providing details of the physical features of the Moorish and Negro tribes, and then providing detailed descriptions of his travels to Timbuctoo, Wed-Noon, El Kabla.

20 The editors also argue repeatedly that Adams is an artless narrator who speaks “with utmost simplicity” in a language which has the “internal marks of truth” (16, 111). He has resisted the “temptation (no slight one for an ignorant sailor) of exciting the wonder of the credulous, or the sympathy of the compassionate, by filling his story

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with miraculous adventures, or overcharged pictures of suffering” (111). Adams “is rather subordinate to the circumstances of his story, than himself the prominent feature of it; and almost every part of his Narrative is strictly in nature, and unpretending” (111): he is “too ignorant to invent himself” (109).

21 As indicated above, Simon Cock finds it necessary to introduce a set of socially and scientifically qualified members of the African Association, the Royal Society, and Parliament to interrogate and inspect Adams. Dupuis writes that he did the same sort of thing five years before to establish the credibility of Adams, except that he then enlisted the aid of nomadic traders who had been to Timbuctoo. Additionally, the process requires that the editors collate existing written texts with Adams’ observations. They place his travel narrative within an existing archive of travel journals, maps, and earlier plans to seek the source of the Niger River and the search for Timbuctoo. Their chief points of comparison are the previously published expeditions of Mungo Park, which comprise most of the “Notes and Illustrations” section of Adams’ narrative. These editors are listening to Adams while reading Mungo Park (71-2). But most importantly, other narratives, maps, and geographic and ethnological readings can be located “on the existing network so that a representation of the distant world can be constructed in the metropolis” (Leask 21).

22 The narrative begins with a description of a found narrator – a beggar and a seaman. He is, as the editors agree, a “curious character” – the secretive and marginal other who violates racial and social categories. He is most importantly a sailor: a figure of inter- and transnational movement who participated in the shifting production and exchange of labour during this period (Linebaugh 402-450, Blum 138-142) and whose disturbing hybridity haunts the text. In the first two sections of this paper it has been argued that the editors use such a figure to intervene in a public debate at the end of the Napoleonic Wars between the interests of “scientific exploration,” international trade and commercial development in Northeast Africa. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Adams text was an indication of how credulous English “gentleman of science and commerce” could be when their own interests were served by “creditable testimony” (Barrow 472). The popularity of the text was an example of “unregulated curiosity”(472) masking the ambitious self-interest of the Company of Merchant Traders to Africa and The African Association. And by May 1817 another narrative by Adams had come to light, which Jared Sparks was to publish in the North American Review.

III

23 Jared Sparks was at this point the acting editor of the North American Review, and in May and July of 1817 he devoted two articles to Adams: the first is an earlier version of the Adams narrative “collected from Adams in Cadiz, . . . before he went to London” (147), and the other his critical review of the London edition of the Adams text of 1816. Sparks states, in his short introduction to the first version of Adams’ narrative, that the original version of the narrative had been “withheld from the publick, because the writer . . . found reasons for suspecting the veracity of Adams, particularly in regard to what he says about Tombuctoo, and of his travels among the negroes” (147). The first narrative was taken down from Adams’ testimony in Cadiz in 1814 and can be confirmed by Samuel A. Storrow (179-179). But now that the London edition will soon be published in the United States, he wants his readers to have access to both texts and

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for them to understand the reasons that the second narrative has “excited such curiosity… on the other side of the Atlantic” (147).

24 Sparks frames his assessment of the first narrative within an interesting comment about current interest in Timbuctoo “about which so much has been said and conjectured, and so little is known” (147), and then remarks upon the political, economic, and scientific desire to explore the Maghreb for trade and missionary colonization that developed after the Napoleonic Wars and the Anglo-American War of 1812 to 1815. He states in May 1817 “our readers will doubtless recollect the notice taken of it in a late number of the Edinburgh, and of the Quarterly Review, and also in several other English publications” (147). Sparks then publishes Adams’ first short narrative without commentary. This narrative is written in the first person, and has no footnotes or editorial apparatus. The focus is on personal observations, geographical descriptions, social customs, and the simple naming of plants and animals in quite simple language. Sparks acknowledges that this short text has the authority of a witness and that that Adams may have been captured and transported to Timbuctoo. Living there for nine months, Adams may have had some freedom to move about the city, but he was a slave and, according to Sparks, misread what he saw. The great trading centre of legend described as a centralized state controlled by one “Negro” prince and this is improbable, Sparks suggests.

25 When later in July, Sparks published his second article, it was a review of the British edition of the Adams’ text, published in Boston by Wells and Lilly in 1817. Now Sparks places the text within a different set of contexts. He compares Adams’ descriptions of African geography, Timbuctoo, and social customs with known representations from previous historical texts of British, Spanish, Moorish, Muslim, and Turkish origin. He is setting himself against the London editors of Adams’ second text demonstrating his own knowledge of exploration texts and classical scholarship. Sparks finds both versions of Adams’ text unreliable, containing information that cannot be verified in existing written texts or journals of exploration.

26 Both Adams texts are “a fiction, and a gross attempt to impose on the credulity of the publick” (162). Jared Sparks looks at measurable differences, temporal dislocations, “verifiable information” available from previous sources about Timbuctoo, and the political and cultural realities surrounding Adams’ text. He shows that there is no connection between Adams’ descriptions of Timbuctoo and the city as described and recorded in books of history or exploration. He points to the difference between “facts” known about Timbuctoo or the course of the Niger River, and “fictions” created by Adams’ editors to meet the needs of their readers. Adams has the talent to disguise both his ethnicity and his own purposes. Both the first and second texts are “an imposture” (181) but more importantly, his English audience were deceiving themselves. Their desire to expand commerce and missionary colonialism in Africa has caused them to embrace the Adams narrative with “unbounded curiosity” (166).

27 Sparks’ use of the discourse of curiosity exposes two different uses of it in the rhetoric of transatlantic evaluations of popular narratives of travel and exploration in the early 19th century. First, there is the ideal of the transparency of difference, a conviction that much could be revealed to the reader and reviewer by clear questions and honest answers – all could be reasonably explained and well-ordered. Foreign differences were subject to “rational articulation,” analysis, and negotiation. This clashed with a different mindset that suggested the role of the reader and reviewer was to expose the

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hidden machinations and justifications of individuals and institutions. These narratives are the public expression of how individuals or institutions present their own self- interested desires through a popular appeal to exotic or singular objects and places (Leask 4, 15-53). Thus, the English editors and reviewers of Adams’ text embody unregulated “curiosity” by failing to differentiate and sustain a hierarchy of values (Benedict 233-237), while Sparks can penetrate and demonstrate his own inquisitiveness by exposing the foreign policy interests of the British who wanted to develop commerce and promote missionary work in trans-Saharan Africa.

28 Another way to examine these responses to the Adams text and the discourse of curiosity is through the interesting argument of Michael Heffernan in his essay “A Dream as Frail as Those of Ancient Time: the In-credible Geographies of Timbuctoo.” The article focuses upon texts of exploration and travel in the 18th and early 19 th centuries as they depicted Timbuctoo. Timbuctoo became an “idealized mythical site: the byword for unimaginable distance, remoteness, and isolation” and past riches (206). Heffernan shows how Timbuctoo was widely accepted as “the idea of a great desert metropolis, the heart of a vast African trading empire,” and that a trans-Saharan trade in gold, spices, and slaves was worth great sums, providing a glimpse “into the possibilities of the penetration of Africa and the continent’s unlimited riches” (206). Additionally, a trading system could be established along rivers such as the Niger or the Congo, as cities along these rivers would become “oases of affluence” for whatever European country has managed to establish its credibility and geographic expertise in the exploration of Timbuctoo.

29 In England, in the first two decades of the 19th century, four texts stood out as focusing on the search for the headwaters of the Niger River and Timbuctoo: Mungo Park’s two books, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) and A Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the Year 1805; and James Grey Jackson’s two reports in his An Account of the Empire of Marocco, and the District of Suse: compiled from miscellaneous observations made during a long residence in, and various journeys through these countries; to which is added, an accurate and interesting account of Timbuctoo, the great europium of central Africa, published in London in 1809 and in Philadelphia in 1810, and his second volume, An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa, Territories in the Interior of Africa (1820), which was an extensive revision of the first volume. There were also narratives of American shipwrecked sailors who claimed second-hand knowledge of the area, such as James Riley, John Foss, Charles Cochelet, and Judah Paddock. But this is exactly what made Adams’ narrative so appealing: he had first-hand knowledge and his narrative did not seek to intervene in debates about Abolition.

30 Heffernan scrutinizes how geographical information in the period was influenced by a complex rhetoric focused on a moral assessment of the explorer/narrator; particularly the latter’s race and his social status. He also argues that an intense battle raged at the beginning of the 19th century between London and Paris to assess the rival claims to knowledge of and authority over North West Africa. There was an attempt to integrate travel and scientific discourses through a careful assessment of the training and character of the explorer. Heffernan uses the Adams narrative as one example of how easy it was to dismiss certain forms of “evidence” collected about a place like Timbuctoo by focusing on the “moral character” of the explorer: Adams was illiterate, he was assumed to be “not white,” and therefore he could have no grounding in European geographic knowledge (209). Heffernan discusses in detail a “storm of

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controversy” that erupted around Adams’ text in France led by the French reviewer Edme Jomard. Jomard argued that Adams’ illiteracy meant that he could not be aware of European geographical knowledge at the time, let alone Arab descriptions of Africa from earlier periods. Also, Adams’ “blackness” set him “outside” the Anglo-European scientific models of credibility. Heffernan also argues that the rivalry caused a flagrantly partisan desire in France to belittle achievements verified by “scientific authorities” in England. I am applying this same kind of analysis to American writers after 1814 such as Sparks, while developing the argument in a different direction by focusing on themes of Authority and Curiosity within transatlantic contexts.

31 While Adams’ race was certainly problematic for his French and American audiences, the debate about the text was also a transatlantic one. Adams was a source trusted by the British scientific establishment and by certain British foreign policy interests. However, both France and America had recently fought a war with Britain and wanted to make the Adams narrative a focus for close scrutiny and censure, both concerning African exploration and commercial ambition but also as a test of national character. In literary and popular reviews in both countries the text was not creditable, but the question of who had the right to travel and “explore” with political and moral authority in the Mediterranean was. The issue of what kind of materials and testimony could be brought back from distant lands to enter the archives of organizations such as the British African Association or the records of the Royal Society addressed matters of authority and the contested nature of what comprised legitimate geographical knowledge. Jared Sparks was not the only one to find the narrator “morally inappropriate” in the coded language of the time. As I argued above, the constructions of Adams’s alterity made him a changeable presence: sometimes an enslaved Christian sailor (white), sometimes mistaken for a “Negro Tribesmen”; sometimes a beggar on the streets of London claiming “British/American” citizenship; while at other times an American sailor Benjamin Rose travelling under the name of Robert Adams.7 He was the flip side of the explorer, who some thought should travel in national uniform, collecting “specimens,” making careful “scientific observations,” while recording it all in a to-be-published journal or narrative of his travels.

32 For example, in An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa, Territories in the Interior of Africa, James Grey Jackson reprints a letter he wrote on December 19, 1817 to The Quarterly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts, edited at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In it, he criticizes Adams for inaccurate information about La Mar Zarak or the Red River in the southern confines of the Sahara and the details of the palace of the ruler of Timbuctoo. The La Mar Zarak of Adams, if any such river exists, may be a corruption of Saga el Humra, i.e. the Red Stream, a river in the southern confines of Sahara, nearly in the same longitude with Timbuctoo. This river the late Emperor of Marocco, Muley Yezzid, announced as the southern boundary of his dominions; but from the accounts which I have had of it, it was not of that magnitude which Adams ascribes to the Mar Zarak, nor was it precisely in the neighbourhood of Timbuctoo, when I was a resident in South Barbary: rivers, however, which pass through sandy or desert districts, often change their courses in the space of twenty-four hours, by the drifting of the moving sands impelled by the wind; instances of which I have myself often witnessed. . . . The state in which he has represented Timbuctoo, is, I think, extremely inaccurate; and being a slave, it is more than probable, that he was placed in a Fondaque, or Caravansera, belonging to the King, which he mistook for his palace; but that his

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narrative should be deemed inaccurate, because he has described the town of Timbuctoo to be under the sovereignty of a Negro prince, is to me incomprehensible. The various sources of information that I have investigated, uniformly declare that sovereign to be a Negro, and that his name in the year 1800, was Woolo. This account, it appears, is confirmed by Adams, who says, Woolo was King of Timbuctoo in 1810, and that he was then old and grey headed. (435-36)

33 In this long extract, Jackson emphasises Adams’ lack of geographical knowledge and experience, and that his perspective on Timbuctoo as that of a “slave.”

34 In his second review of Adams’ narrative, Sparks suggests that the London edition of the Adams text can be explained by British Imperial policy. The elaborate edition of the Adams narrative published in London and the interrogation by a “distinguished” group of interrogators hides “an uncommon enthusiasm” in England on the subject of Africa. Africa has called forth two principles of the human mind, “sympathy and curiosity” (163-4). Sparks places British “sympathy” for Africa within the contexts of the Abolitionist movement in Britain arguing that philanthropy and benevolence might end the trade in African and Christian slaves on the coastal regions and in the interior of Africa. But Sparks finds that “curiosity” has defined a new “revival of letters in Europe—the resuscitation of commerce—the formation of political establishments—the new relations” between nations with a new “tide of discovery” and adventurous projects in Britain and Europe (166). Sparks sets the British, and by implication European, “commercial, scientifick [sic], and political” enterprises of mercantilism and colonialism within the African context, calling attention to the “old account of the wealth and magnificence of Timbuctoo and the course and termination of the Niger” (166-7). In contrast, the British have over excited their own curiosity with the desire to “extend their researches into a country, which was known only for its deserts, and the piracies, barbarism, and stupidity of its inhabitants” (166).

35 Jared Sparks then offers his own close reading of contemporary accounts of Northwest Africa, comparing them to Adams’ text. He also uses the testimony of James Grey Jackson whose first-hand account does not square with Adams’ narrative. Sparks also makes brief reference to another American shipwrecked sailor, Captain James Riley, and his “recently published” narrative. Furthermore, he quotes a letter from Mr. Storrow of Boston, who examined Adams at Cadiz, stating that Adams “was not the stupid, unthinking, simple being, which we are led to suppose him from the remarks of the London editor” (170).

36 Two issues are intertwined around this question of curiosity and authority: whose evidence, map, experience is to be believed and whose political and social authority can be trusted to edit and record it? Do the editors, Cock and Dupuis, demonstrate disinterested “curiosity” and does their “source” have the geographic, linguistic, historical, and ethnographic knowledge to have his text placed in the record of the African Association, for example? Secondly, Adams’ character is central for Sparks: he is a “fabricator” of the “marvellous,” “romantick,” and fictional (174). Sparks argues that Adams was “disposed” to take advantage of other people’s credulity. Thus it was important that Simon Cock and Joseph Dupuis tried to establish Adams’ moral probity. Sparks argues that all those men in London, whether explorers, merchants, geographers, scientists, leaders of the Abolitionist movement, or administrators and investors in the African Association, the African Institution, and the Merchant Association Trading with the Interior of Africa made Adams’ evidence into an embodiment of their own desire, their own mercantile colonial agendas.8 I think we

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can now see that Adams may have taken them in, but they aided and abetted him, especially the members of the Merchant Association Trading with the Interior of Africa.

37 Sparks ends his review with a report of his search for Adams’ family records in Hudson, New York. He can find no written “authority” for Adams’ claims of family settlement there, or of a ship named “Charles” sailing from that port in May or June of 1810 (182), when Adams claims he begun his journey. Sparks’ desire is to usurp Adams’ archival authority by attacking the writer’s identity, moral character, and text. To quote Barbara Benedict’s generalization about the intellectual history of the period, “curiosity thus denotes both the ambitious penetration of the unknown and the astute penetration of the untrue” (Benedict, 19): curious writers and reviewers challenge curious travellers, adventurers, and explorers. The trick for both archivist and critical reviewer was to balance self-effacement and self-assertion. It is this tension that Nigel Leask discusses so thoroughly in travel writing of the period, showing that there was a difference between the merely “curious” and the “aesthetics of curiosity” (1-54).

38 Within the construction of the European “orientalist” archive, there was a social boundary defining what could be said, what could be seen, and how the explorer/ traveller might present “evidence” for preservation in the archive (Said 19-22). Such an archive, as other critics have argued, was not always convincing, nor was it available to all cultures or societies, but it was established and maintained through the demarcation of identity and difference within a transatlantic pattern of textual circulation. Also, I have argued that archives can help establish, through the recording of and systematization of language and evidence, a discourse used to interrogate the authority of the archive itself.

39 Finally, Simon Cock positioned the Adams Narrative at a well-chosen historical moment in which the interests of merchants, missionaries, and explorers came together in an attempt to open North West African markets to “civilizing commerce” to counter the effects of piracy and the slave trade in the Maghreb. Two organizations, the English Abolition Society and the English Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, both shared the discourse of “enlightened capitalism” in which new kinds of raw materials were to be found, traded, and sold in Africa rather than slaves. The “barbaric traffic” in people was to be replaced by a “profitable and enlightened commerce” (Gould 40-42). This argument, which was shared by both abolitionists and scientific explorers, was also connected to a public discourse about honouring existing treaties and establishing clearly articulated trade routes along both the coasts and into the interior of Africa. On both sides of the Atlantic, the roles of the reviewer and explorer were changing and being debated, and within these negotiations new forms of public curiosity were defined.

40 The research and writing of portions of this paper began at the Vera Harmsworth Library, Oxford University while I was a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and I wish to thank their gracious and helpful staff. Colleagues at the University of Tromsø in the Border Aesthetics Research Project have read a version of the paper and I have benefited greatly from their suggestions. In a forthcoming article, I have analysed only American Barbary Coast narratives of the early Nineteenth century as they write race and erase race on their captive body (American Studies in Scandinavia, 43:2, 2012).

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Adams, C. H. ed. The Narrative of Robert Adams, A Barbary Captive: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Allison, Robert The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Barrow, John. Riley, An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American brig Commerce, wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the month of August, 1815; with an Account of the Sufferings of her surviving Officers and Crew, who were enslaved by the wandering Arabs on the Great African Desert, or Zahahrah &c., Quarterly Review, January 1817, 287-321. Print.

- - -. The Narrative of Robert Adams, a Sailor, who was wrecked in the Year 1810, on the Western Coast of Africa, was detained three Years in Slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and resided several Months of that Period in the City of Tombuctoo; with a Map, Notes, and an Appendix, Quarterly Review, January 1816, 453-75. Print.

- - -. Smith, Mémoire sur la Nécessité et les Moyens de faire cesser les Pirateries des Etats Barbaresques. Reçu, considéré, et adopté à Paris en Septembre—à Turin le14Octobre, 1814—à Vienne durant le Congrès; Walter Croker, A Letter to a Member of Parliament on the Slavery of the Christians at Algiers; Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli, in Africa, from the original Correspondence, in the possession of the Family of the late Richard Tully, Esq. the British Consul; comprising authentic Memoirs and Anecdotes of the reigning Bashaw, Sedi Useph, his Family, and various Persons of distinction; an Account of the Domestic Manners of the Moors, Arabs, and Turks, &c.; Keating, Travels in Europe and Africa; comprising a Journey through France, Spain, and Portugal, to Morocco, with the particular Account of that Empire, &c.; Macgill, An Account of Tunis, of its Government, Manners, Customs, and Antiquities; especially of its Productions, Manufactures, and Commerce, Quarterly Review, April 1816, 139-83. Print.

Baepler, Paul. "The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture". Early American Literature 39(2) (1995) 217-246. Print.

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Blum, Hester. “Pirated Tars, Piratical Texts: Barbary Captivity and AmericanSea Narratives”Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, (Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2003): 133-158. Print.

Brezina, J. C. "A Nation in Chains: Barbary Captives and American Identity". Captivating Subjects, Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. J. A. W. Haslam and Julia M. Wright. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.201-219. Print.

Burnham, M. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861. Hanover: New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1997. Print.

Chandler, James. England in 1819. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Print.

Chaplin, Joyce E. “Knowing the Ocean, Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge” Science and Empire in the Atlantic World.Ed. by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, London: Routledge, 2008. 73-96. Print.

Clissold, Stephen. The Barbary Slaves. London: Paul Elek, 1977. Print.

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Colley, Linda. Captives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. Print.

- - -. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, A Woman in World History New York: Anchor Books, 2008. Print.

Curtin, Philip. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action 1780-1850. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Print.

De Certeau, M. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brain Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print.

Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976, corrected edition 1998. Print.

Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth, Personal Narrative in Nineteenth Century America. Standford: Standford University Press, 2000. Print.

Heffernan, Michael. “ A dream as frail as those of ancient Time' : the in-credible geographies of Timbuctoo” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (19 2001): 203 – 225. Print.

Helmers, M. and Mazzeo, T. “Introduction: Travel and the Body” Journal of NarrativeTheory. 35, 3, (Fall 2005): 267-276. Print.

Jackson J. An Account of the Empire of Morocco, and the Districts of Suse and Tafilelt; Compiled from Miscellaneous Observations made during a Long Residence in, and Various Journeys through, these Countries to which is added an Account of Africa, and an Interesting Account of Timbuctoo, the Great Emporium of Central Africa London: 2nd edition, W Bulmer and Co., 1811. Print.

Jackson J. An account of Timbuctoo and Housa, Territories in the Interior of Africa, by El Hage Abd Salam Shabeeny; with Notes, Critical and Explanatory. To which is added, Letters descriptive of Travels through West and South Barbary, and Across the Mountains of Atlas; also, Fragments, Notes, and Anecdotes; Specimens of Arabic Epistolary Style etc. etc. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820. Print.

Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press 1987. Print.

Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. London: Hill and Wang, 2007. Print.

Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770-1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Linebaugh, P. The London Hanged, Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Verso, 2006. Print.

Montgromery, B. "White Captives, African Slaves: A Drama of Abolition." Eighteenth-Century Studies 27(4, 1994): 615-630. Print.

Paddock, Judah. Narrative of the shipwreck of the ship Oswego, on the Coast of South Barbary, and of the Sufferings of the Master and the Crew while in Bondage among the Arabs: Interspersed with Numerous Remarks upon the Country and its Inhabitants, and Concerning the Peculiar Perils of that Coast. London: Longman, Hurst, and Rees, 1818. Print.

Park, Mungo. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. Durham and London, Duke University Press, Reprint of 1799 edition, 2000. Print.

Pfister, Manfred “Travelling in the Traces of . . . Italian Spaces and the Traces of the Other” Sites of Exchange, Europe Crossroads and Fault lines. Ed. Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2006. 25-38. Print.

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Riley, James. (1817). An Authentic Narrative of the loss of the American Brig Commerce, wrecked on the western coast of Africa, in the month of August, 1815, with an account of the sufferings of her surviving officers and crew, enslaved by the wandering Arabs on the great African desert, or Zahahrah; and observations historical, geographical, &c. made during the travels of the author, while a slave to the Arabs, and in the empire of Morocco. London, John Murray based upon the American edition New York: James Riley, 1817. Print.

Riley, James. Sufferings in Africa based upon a mid-nineteenth century edition of Captain’s book. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007. (This edition is abridged but easily available. It deletes about one third of the text that focuses on Sidi Hamet’s narrative of a journey to Timbuctoo and Riley’s chapter condemning the slave trade in America. Print.

Rojas, M. E. “Insults Unpunished’: Barbary Captives, American Slaves, and the Negotiation of Liberty.” Early American Studies 38(2,2003): 159-186. Print.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Print.

Wilson, Scott. Cultural Materialism, Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Print.

NOTES

1. There had been an earlier text of Adams’ narrative, which was written down in Africa in 1810 as an “as told to narrative” but not published because of questions about its veracity. It did appear in the United States in an article in the North American Review, “Interior of Africa”, May 1817, edited by Jared Sparks. It will be discussed in the second part of this paper. The text was published first in England, in 1816; in Boston, Paris, and Stockholm in 1817; and in Amsterdam in 1818. It was anthologized in Boston in abbreviated form in 1842, 43, 46, and 48, following the text of 1816. The London text was published by John Murray in a uniform edition with Mungo Park’s A Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the Year 1805 (published in 1815, also by John Murray), with a fold-out map, an elaborate table of contents, chapter headings, and paper and type face as used in Park’s book. The text also had the same format and publisher as the publications of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, and of the Records of the African Association. In 2005 the British 1816 edition was published as the Narrative of Robert Adams, A Barbary Captive A Critical Edition edited by Charles Hansford Adams. All internal citations will be to this edition labelled Adams throughout, as will the reviews of Jared Sparks that are included as an appendix. 2. “Even on land, sailors looked different. Their rocking gait, sunburned skin, lash-scarred bodies, outlandish clothing, and eventually tattoos gave them away, and their argot was quite deliberately designed to exclude outsiders” (75) – Joyce E. Chaplin, “Knowing the Ocean, Benjamin Franklin and the Circulation of Atlantic Knowledge.” Linda Colley also comments on the appearance of sailors in the period: they were often deeply tanned and wore pigtails and many were mulattos who lived in a world apart, a “generation that differed from all the world” (cited by Colley, 14). They formed their own communities which were usually more equalitarian and which had knowledge of maps, charts, boats and the sea as well as foreign lands. But most important their language was usually a set of pidgin languages or lexical expressions, which deliberately excluded outsiders. See Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, A Woman in World History. Additionally, she states that “in mid-eighteenth century English the use `dark´ as a description of complexion, like `black´, possessed no necessary racial connotations” (315). 3. Simon Cock (1774? -1837) identifies himself in three or four different ways in his published works: as Secretary of the London Dock Company, or in 1821 as a “London Merchant”, or in the

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Adams text as working “in the African Office of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa”. In the Bodleian Catalogue there are 11 pamphlets and texts attributed to S. Cock or Simon Cock. They include testimony before a Parliamentary Committee in which Cock argues for an increase in the number of slaves carried in boats run by commercial slave traders. In another his views can be seen to be representative of Liverpool Merchants who dealt in slaves and other goods in the slave trade triangle. A nineteenth-century biographical dictionary lists Cock working in London and Liverpool, and dying in 1837 in Chiswick. Charles Hansford states in “a critical edition” of the Adams text that Cock gave evidence to Parliamentary Committees investigating the Slave Trade in 1815-1816. 4. Barrow summarizes Adams’ narrative of shipwreck, captivity and a journey to Timbuctoo. He then turns his attention to Adams’ knowledge of geography and natural history, commenting on his mysterious background and mentioning that the he had been one of the “gentlemen” asked to question Adams. Barrow has reviewed Adams descriptions of Timbuctoo, comparing them with earlier historical accounts, and then states, “no reasonable doubt can be entertained of the general accuracy of Adam’s narrative” (Quarterly Review, Jan., 1816, 472). For Barrow, too, the figure of Mungo Park endures in the narrative. 5. The text also makes little reference to the abolition of the slave trade, a commonplace in American Barbary Coast Captivity narratives of the period, but here there are detailed discussions of the African slave trade in both the narrative and in the notes. See for example, James Riley’s An Authentic Narrative of the loss of the American Brig Commerce, wrecked on the western coast of Africa, in the month of August, 1815, with an account of the sufferings of her surviving officers and crew, who were enslaved by the wandering Arabs on the great African desert, or Zahahrah; and observations historical, geographical, &c. made during the travels of the author, while a slave to the Arabs, and in the empire of Morocco (1817), and Judah Paddock´s Narrative of the shipwreck of the ship Oswego, on the coast of south Barbary, and of the sufferings of the master and the crew while in bondage among the Arabs; interspersed with numerous remarks upon the country and its inhabitants, and concerning the peculiar perils of that coast (1818). All three texts were published on both sides of the Atlantic within two years of each other; each author claimed to have been born in Hudson, New York, and to have left from that port before being shipwrecked off the Atlantic Coast of Africa. 7. The question of Adams’ ethnicity and his position as “slave” was complicated also by the public debate about the actions of the lone explorer in Africa: should he travel incognito, disguising his European identity, language, religion, and scientific equipment, or should he be all kitted out in military uniform or “European dress”. This debate was going on in the writings of Jackson, Barrow, members of the African Association, and within the periodicals in which reviews of exploration texts were printed (see Heffernan, 214-216). See Jackson for a contemporary response, which contradicts Heffernan’s reading of some of the sources. See Jackson’s An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa, Territoriesin the Interior of Africa, 1820, (“Preface” viii- ix, 135-6, 266-272). 8. The American press and the American government, during and after the Anglo-American War of 1812-14, supported “free trade” with the Barbary States and all along the Northwest Atlantic Coast of Africa. American historians such as Frank Lambert argue that the War rhetoric created a binary opposition between British mercantile colonialism, coded “piracy” and American free trade (Lambert, 6, 195-198).

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RÉSUMÉS

This paper discusses the reception of a Barbary Coast Captivity Narrative by Robert Adams, published in 1816. The text has often been mentioned in studies of the Barbary Coast narrative but not as a document of a transatlantic discourse about African exploration, ethnography, and colonial development. The creation of Adams text and the creation of the Adams archive will be the subject of the paper as seen by contemporary sources on both sides of the Atlantic. The creation of the Adams narration in the city of London is played off again in the reception of the Adams narrative in Boston. Each set of textual “editors” and reviewers attempt to use the text to intervene in a debate about Timbuctoo, the future of African exploration, and the ways a literary “curiosity” is placed within the aesthetic and ideological needs of emerging discourses of African exploration and racial representation in the first decades of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic.

INDEX

Keywords : Robert Adams, Barbary Coast Narrative, transatlantic, archive, centres of calculation, travel literature, Jared Sparks, nationalism, narration, Africa, Abolition, Timbuctoo.

AUTEUR

STEPHEN F. WOLFE University of Tromsø

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A Lost Opportunity : The Flawed Implementation of Assertive Multilateralism (1991-1993)

James D. Boys

1 Bill Clinton did not seek the presidency to initiate an activist foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War, but instead to champion domestic affairs and economic renewal. However, his foreign policy advisers entered office with their own, often differing, interpretations of the United States’ position in the post-Cold War era. After the unity demonstrated by the Gulf War, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations advocated a tactic of Assertive Multilateralism with which to provide international leadership. This acknowledged President George H.W. Bush’s approach to foreign policy and was viewed as a way to reduce costs, casualties and American exposure in overseas deployments. Despite these hopes, Assertive Multilateralism did not prevail – why was this the case? Twenty years on, this paper analyses the concept of Assertive Multilateralism, and specifically, the challenges posed to its continued implementation by the Somali mission. The paper finds that unrealistic mission expectations, the prioritizing of domestic agendas, and an inability to control the mission narrative all contributed to cause a fundamental shift in the United States’ implementation of foreign policy and raised doubts over its continued commitment to the United Nations. Ultimately, the events in Somalia ensured that foreign policy become a tool with which to attack an administration focused on domestic affairs and unwilling to expend political capital on overseas operations.

2 Given the historic junction at which the Clinton Administration came to power it is surprising that more has not been written on its foreign policy initiatives. Nancy Soderberg noted in 2005 “no insider of the Clinton White House has discussed the broad challenges involving the use of force and diplomacy faced by the administration.” Such a pattern continues, with no former Clinton official having adequately addressed the administration’s development of foreign policy. Accordingly, the administration risks being viewed as merely the age ‘between the Bushes’, between a Cold War and a War on Terror. However, President Clinton’s time in office coincided with historic global

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events and his handling of them was crucial to the development of world politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century. A consideration of policy documents and interviews with former members of the Clinton national security team reveal an administration seeking to define America’s role in the rapidly changing world.1 As Richard Sale notes, “the popular image of Bill Clinton as a foreign policy leader is one of a man who was tardy, vacillating, irresolute, always timidly reluctant to use force and heading an administration lacking in singleness of focus or ruthlessness of drive.”2 Only by attempting to understand the efforts of the Clinton Administration to address the challenges of the post-Cold War era and devise policy with which to address it, can we hope to comprehend the reasoning behind the actions of his successors, both of whom inherited Clinton-era policies and practices, including the rejection of Assertive Multilateralism.

3 Although the term ‘Assertive Multilateralism’ is credited to Madeline Albright it was a philosophy of international leadership that the Clinton Administration inherited from the previous Bush White House. Under George H. W. Bush, the United States had led United Nations’ multilateral operations to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and to relieve hunger in Somalia. These missions had lent credence to Bush’s concept of a New World Order. Such an approach to foreign policy owed much to the character of the president as well as to timing. George H. W. Bush was by nature a team player who had developed relations with heads of state and foreign dignitaries since his days as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and as Director of Central Intelligence. He was, therefore, well positioned to lead a multilateral coalition and maximize the historical timing associated with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. For most of its existence, the United Nations had been stymied by the Cold War stalemate, but with the collapse of the Soviet system, an opportunity beckoned for the U.N. to fulfill its original mandate. The United Nations appeared to offer a new vehicle for international operations in the 1990s that enabled the United States to lead from the front, whilst reducing its defense expenditure as part of a much anticipated peace dividend. During the 1991 Gulf War and initially in Somalia, this was a bi-partisan model for foreign policy, advocated by a Republican President and endorsed by a Democratic Congress. It was an approach to policy that Bush’s successor intended to continue, with every expectation of continued bi-partisan support.

4 When Bill Clinton succeeded President Bush, he named Madeleine Albright as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. A member of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council, Albright had spent the 1980s as a faculty member at Georgetown University, developing the concepts that she would later christen ‘Assertive Multilateralism.’3 Her concept was that if the United States no longer had the political will nor the resources to act as a global policeman, it was in America’s interests to form coalitions to do so. It meant, “that when America acted with others, [America] should lead in establishing goals and ensuring success.”4 Vitally, however, this did not preclude unilateral action in self-defense or in defense of vital interests. Albright was adamant that Assertive Multilateralism was a tactic not a goal and was, therefore, an acceptance of President Bush’s actions in the 1991 Gulf War. Accordingly, it was an approach that should have received strong bi-partisan support. However, the Somali mission was the last gasp of the internationalist Republican generation as personified by President Bush, whose approach to policy implementation had garnered Republican support in Congress, but which came under attack once it was adopted by the Clinton Administration. Richard Nixon referred to Assertive Multilateralism as “naïve gobbledygook.”5 Clinton’s critics

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attacked the tactic as ideologically driven and interpreted the phrase to imply that the administration intended to subcontract U.S. foreign policy to the United Nations. The Clinton Administration, they claimed, believed “American unilateralism was the principal sin to be avoided, as if to atone for a shameful past.”6 Albright, however, insisted to a House subcommittee as late as June 1993 that Assertive Multilateralism was in America’s best interests.7 Soon, however, the administration was forced to explain where U.S. interests lay in Somalia.

5 The plight of the Somali people became apparent to the world during 1992, whilst America’s attention was on the presidential campaign.8 On the few occasions that foreign policy was addressed, Somalia was not considered a priority when contrasted with crises evolving in Bosnia, the former Soviet Union, China, Haiti, the Middle East and Iraq. Despite the lack of attention on the campaign, on April 24, the United States approved U.N. Resolution 751, establishing the United Nations Operation in Somalia (U.N.O.S.O.M.) and provided almost half of the emergency relief materials.9 These efforts, however, were severely hampered as relief flights were looted, food convoys hijacked and workers assaulted, causing questions to be asked in Congress about the potential for direct military action.10 The unwillingness of the United States to dispatch troops to aid the humanitarian effort undermined President Bush’s concept of a ‘New World Order,’ but the administration’s inaction owed much to domestic politics and electoral timing. Throughout the 1992 campaign George H.W. Bush was forced to act in response to allegations that he was a ‘foreign policy president’ with little regard for the economic woes of the country. Once his plans for a second term had been thwarted, he returned to the multilateral approach to foreign policy that had been at the heart of his presidency. On December 9, 1992, the first American troops landed in Somalia under the auspices of Security Council Resolution 794, as U.N.O.S.O.M. gave way to United Task Force (U.N.I.T.A.F.), codenamed Operation Restore Hope. Between December 1992 and March 1993, U.N.I.T.A.F. saved countless lives in Somalia and delivered supplies to those in need. The short-term aspects of the plan succeeded, enabling the U.S. commitment to end, as U.N. Resolution 814 concluded the U.N.I.T.A.F. mission and gave rise to U.N.O.S.O.M.II.11 This reduced the American force from 25,000 to just 1,100 rapid reaction troops and 3,000 logistical support personnel. The American withdrawal, however, emboldened Somali warlords, including General Mohammed Aidiid, who targeted the multinational peacekeeping force, resulting in the deaths of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers. On October 3, 1993, Task Force Ranger, an American Special Forces unit dispatched specifically to apprehend Aidiid, became embroiled in a mission that should have taken no longer than an hour but dragged on throughout the night, as two Black Hawk helicopters were lost. The ensuing battle cost 18 American lives in the worst single day for battlefield casualties of the entire Clinton Presidency. It caused the abandonment of Assertive Multilateralism as a model of policy implementation, the eventual departure of the U.N. Secretary General and led to a reappraisal of the use of the United Nations by the United States in future overseas ventures.

6 Why did this happen? Similar events in Vietnam and subsequently in Iran and Afghanistan failed to cause such a reversal in policy.12 Why then, did these casualty rates, which were in line with overall expectations, cause such a fundamental shift in direction? The explanation is contained in a series of flaws inherent in the Somali mission, the failure of two administrations to prioritize Somalia at the expense of domestic affairs and the Clinton Administration’s inability to control the narrative of the mission in a rapidly changing geo-political landscape. These elements contributed

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to ensure not only the failure of an otherwise successful operation in Somalia, but also the demise of an otherwise successful tactic of Assertive Multilateralism.

1.1 Mission Flaws

7 The model for Assertive Multilateralism was the 1991 Gulf War, initiated to repel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. This was a clearly defined mission with defined operational limits. Once these were achieved the mission ended. Despite the success in the Gulf, the Somali operation proved to be a very different mission, in which unrealistic expectations proved to be critical. The key elements that made an assertive multilateral tactic a success in the 1991 Gulf War were absent in the design of the Somali mission. The planning was too truncated; the decision to deploy was based on emotion not logic and the United States did not retain control of the mission as the operation’s parameters were altered to incorporate the ambitions of the United Nation’s Secretary General. These flaws in the design of the Somali mission contributed to undermine the continued feasibility of Assertive Multilateralism.

8 First, truncated planning was a contributing factor in the failure of the Somalia mission, which compromised the deployment and led to doubts over the viability of Assertive Multilateralism. On November 20, 1992 the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee began a series of four meetings on Somali at which Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz suggested deploying ground troops. Five days later, on November 25, President Bush decided that U.S. combat troops should lead an international force to Somalia.13Famine and disease were claiming up to 1,000 Somali lives a day but the White House claimed it could establish order and be out by Bush’s last day in office, January 20, 1993.14 The Pentagon demurred, believing that the operation could take at least six months. Defense Secretary Cheney advised the president, “we can’t have it both ways. We can’t get in there fully until mid-December. And the job won’t be done by January 19.”15 The president, however, initiated the deployment despite objections from his senior military advisers. The out-going team conceded that the Clinton Administration was being handed “a difficult situation” as the withdrawal of the American contingent before Inauguration Day was now considered “unrealistic.”16 The operation was initiated only after the president had lost his bid for re-election, decided upon in four rapidly held meetings at the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council, implemented with little time for a consultation with Congress and the mission’s timescale was in flux before the troops had been dispatched.17 The planning and preparation that had defined an assertive, multilateral approach in the build up to the 1991 Gulf War were clearly lacking in this instance.

9 Also absent was a rational reason for intervention as policy makers relied on emotion and ignored pragmatic advice. In 1991 an assertive multilateral approach had succeeded because nations recognized the potential threat created by a policy of appeasement in the Persian Gulf and the threat that this posed to oil supplies. No such explanation existed to justify the decision to deploy in Somalia. Instead, the decision was based on emotion in a classic example of what became known as ‘the CNN effect’; an emotional response to images of starving Somalis compelled President Bush to support the U.N. mission and a similar reaction to images of murdered American troops led to the end of U.S. involvement the following year.18 Between these two events emotion

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continued to play a role in the Clinton Administration’s approach to the mission as key advisers pursued a quintessential American liberal tradition at the expense of pragmatism.

10 As President Bush’s final multilateral mission had crept into a subsequent administration without having devised an exit strategy, the incoming Clinton foreign policy team was forced to develop an ad hoc strategy to deal with the situation. Dick Moose, designated Under-Secretary of State for Management, was tasked with devising a Presidential Study Directive (P.S.D.) examining options in Somalia. He recommended withdrawal. However, when this blunt report received a muted response from Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger,19 “he suspected he was saying something that they did not want to hear.”20 Lake and Berger were proponents of a humanitarian led foreign policy and feared that Moose’s suggestion may return Somalia to its previous state of anarchy. Such action was anathema to the two men, who both valued the American liberal tradition of trying to export goodwill and a better life to the Third World. Lake in particular had a special interest in the plight of Africa and was committed to the operation’s completion. Moose’s advice, however, should have been heeded, as events in Somalia became the nadir of foreign intervention for the entire Clinton presidency.

11 In making policy based on emotion, the out-going Bush national security team ensured that the Somali operation was flawed from the beginning. Their actions meant that the Clinton Administration, so determined to focus on the domestic renewal of America, assumed office with 25,000 troops deployed in an ill conceived, rapidly executed mission. This was compounded by the emotional, ideological determination of key members of the Clinton Administration to reject pragmatic policy options and pursue a policy that bore no resemblance to anything that had been espoused on the campaign trail, and which had no place in their Grand Strategy policy that eventually emerged. The reliance on emotion ensured that lessons from the previous successful adoption of an assertive multilateral approach were ignored as the United States surrendered control of the mission in Somalia.

12 In 1991, the United States took the lead in the implementation of the U.N. mission to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. The U.S. had taken an assertive, multilateral approach and led a coalition to achieve its stated goals. Once these had been completed, the mission ended. In Somalia, the mission appeared to have succeeded by spring 1993. This led the United States to hand over operational command and to withdraw the majority of its forces as U.N.I.T.A.F. morphed into U.N.O.S.O.M.II on May 4, 1993. However, this was the latest in a series of hastily made decisions regarding the Somali operation. The Clinton Administration had endorsed Security Council Resolution 814, which authorized the U.N. to rebuild Somalia, as it enabled the withdrawal of most American troops. It had, however, meant that a small number of American forces remained in Somalia and that the U.S. was no longer in control of the mission parameters, which had changed considerably. Leaving personnel in Somalia ensured that the United States retained a lingering commitment to a mission that was of no importance to the administration. The mission remained multilateral at this point, but U.S. involvement was anything but assertive. Retaining a commitment, however small, guaranteed that what was initiated under Resolution 814 became associated with the Clinton Administration, despite the lead taken on the issue by the U.N. Secretary General, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose personality and

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commitment to social engineering led to a shift in the mission parameters and to the final key flaw in the mission plan.

13 By the Secretary General’s design, U.N.O.S.O.M.II utilized expanded enforcement power and included a mandate to disarm Somali factions. The new mission went beyond providing humanitarian relief and committed the U.N. to stabilizing Somalia, restoring law and order, creating an infrastructure and helping to establish representative government. Under Resolution 814, therefore, the United Nations attempted to build a new nation from the ruins of Somalia. It was this concept of Nation Building that proved to be contentious and so detrimental to the Clinton Administration. However, this was a United Nations’ policy and was neither initiated nor imposed by the White House.21 Indeed, as the transition to U.N.O.S.O.M.II ensured that American forces were cut substantially, and because the operation was going to plan, few in Washington voiced concern. Even the House of Representatives, which presented many subsequent challenges to the foreign policy endeavors of the Clinton White House, decisively passed a resolution “endorsing the nation building mission and favoring the use of American troops to support it, for several years if necessary.”22 Such endorsements were quickly forgotten following the American deaths in Somalia, as the recriminations poisoned relations between Washington and the U.N. in the years that followed. However, the Somali mission was never a priority of the Clinton White House and had been inherited from the previous Bush Administration. Nation Building was a goal of the U.N. and was endorsed by the Clinton Administration and Congress only once the majority of American troops had been withdrawn.23 This was clarified in a letter President Clinton sent to Congress in which he spelt out his position: “We went to Somalia on a humanitarian mission…The U.S. military mission is not now nor was it ever one of nation building.”24 This was not a policy that could be used to justify any American fatalities, and meant the events in Somalia ended any hopes of relying on the U.N. to handle future ethnic conflicts. It also ended the administration’s ability to utilize a tactic of Assertive Multilateralism.25

14 The key components that had made an assertive multilateral tactic a success in the 1991 Gulf War were absent in the design of the Somali mission. The planning was truncated; the decision to deploy was based on emotion rather than pragmatism and the United States did not retain control of the entire mission as the mission parameters were altered to incorporate the ambitions of the United Nations’ Secretary General. These flaws within the Somali mission contributed to the demise of Assertive Multilateralism as a viable policy option for the United States as their impact was irrevocably tied to domestic politics.

1.2 The Impact of Domestic politics

15 Flaws in the Somali mission plan were not sufficient to end the U.S. commitment to Assertive Multilateralism. These problems were exacerbated by the failure of the Bush and Clinton Administrations to prioritize the challenges in Somalia and instead, focus on domestic issues. For Bush, this entailed reducing his focus on foreign affairs as he sought re-election during a recession. Following his failed re-election bid Bush was determined to demonstrate benevolence during the interregnum that extended to the Somali people but not necessarily to the incoming administration. For the Clinton Administration, Somalia was seen as a problem to be dealt with by the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council and kept away from the president.

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Madeleine Albright could advocate Assertive Multilateralism, but the White House had domestic priorities. This created a self-perpetuating situation; inattention to the Somali mission due to a focus on domestic priorities contributed to American fatalities. This tragedy then ensured that political adversaries were able to exploit the Somali debacle for their own ends and derail the administration’s domestic policy programs.

16 The first domestic challenge to the continuation of Assertive Multilateralism arose during the presidential election of 1992. President George H.W. Bush benefited greatly from his implementation of an assertive multilateral approach to the 1991 Gulf War, securing not only a military victory, but also an approval rating of 90%.26 This caused senior Democrats to avoid the upcoming election, increasing his hopes for a second term. By 1992, however, the American economy was in recession.Bush’s decision to raise taxes ensured he faced a challenge not only from the Democratic Party, but also from the right of the Republican Party by Pat Buchanan, forcing Bush to adopt a far less internationalist approach to secure the nomination. The Clinton campaign focused on the economy, campaigning to Bush’s left on domestic matters and to his right on foreign affairs.27 Assailed from left and right, the president appeared indecisive. The campaign sought to “blunt Bush’s advantage on [foreign affairs] and in boxing terms, keep a left jab in his face,” ensuring that President Bush was so worried about being seen as a foreign policy president, “he failed to take advantage of his strengths.”28

17 These factors ensured that calls for the United States to intervene in Somalia throughout 1992 went unheeded until after the election. It was the misfortune of the Somali people to be suffering at a time when President Bush could ill-afford to demonstrate compassion for foreign nationals. Only after his defeat did President Bush declare the Somali deployment, “necessary to address a major humanitarian calamity and avert related threats to international peace and security and protect the safety of Americans and others engaged in relief operations.”29 Left unexplained was the timing of the deployment, which international agencies and members of Congress had requested throughout 1992.30 Having allowed the issue to drift and deteriorate throughout the election, the White House acted only once the president was beyond the will of the electorate, ensuring the deployment was “a major intervention, undertaken by a lame-duck president, without congressional authority and not in response to a local invitation.”31 By failing to secure a viable exit strategy, President Bush inadvertently provided the conditions for political disaster and an end to bi- partisan support for Assertive Multilateralism. This was exacerbated by a presidential transition that has, in retrospect, been viewed as one the most disorganized in U.S. history.

18 Having called for a more pro-active U.S. foreign policy throughout the campaign, there was little that President-Elect Clinton could say in opposition to Bush’s plans.32 Bush and Clinton discussed the Somali operation once during the transition, whilst Bush’s National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft kept in touch with Sandy Berger, head of Clintons’ foreign policy transition team. However, there was no mutual formulation of policy and no one was asking the Clinton team for ideas or approval.33 The failure of the incoming and outgoing administrations to agree on the scope of the mission and on exit strategies did much to undermine the continued utilization of Assertive Multilateralism once the mission faltered. Once this occurred, the lack of attention afforded by both administrations to the deployment became all the more apparent. The Bush Administration’s decision to intervene in Somalia was agreed at the Deputies

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Committee of the National Security Council, a process that continued under the Clinton Administration as the Deputies Committee, rather than the full National Security Council, oversaw events in Somalia.34 There was no Principals Meetings on Somalia until tragedy had struck because “the operation seemed to be going well. The mission seemed to be on track for transfer to the U.N., with U.S. forces scheduled to be out by early to mid-1994.”35 This ensured that Cabinet-level officials were “not sufficiently attentive”36 to the Somali operation and that President Clinton was removed from the policymaking process in the initial stages of the deployment. This reinforced a view of the president as being inattentive to foreign policy and involved only in domestic political affairs.

19 During the summer of 1993 the Clinton Administration was preparing its health care reform plans, as designed by a committee headed by the First Lady, Hillary Clinton. Her involvement ensured that this was both political and personal, and any crisis risked diverting attention from this flagship agenda.37 Accordingly, Clinton’s domestic advisers were clear on what they wanted the foreign policy team to do with Somalia: “Hand over the job of keeping order to a United Nations peacekeeping force, soon.”38 This reflected the real focus of the administration, which did not lie in the Horn of Africa, but rather in implementing domestic legislation, especially the First Lady’s health care reforms. The White House was adamant that nothing should impede this, and certainly not a foreign policy initiative inherited from the previous administration. This was placed at risk when, having withdrawn 20,000 troops from Somalia, President Clinton acquiesced to the recommendation of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, and the Deputies Committee to deploy Task Force Ranger to Somalia to prevent further losses to the U.N. detachment.39 Once more, a rapid decision, made at a sub- Cabinet level drew American forces deeper into a land where U.S. interests were impossible to define and in an operation that had nothing to do with the administration’s priorities. President Clinton’s anger at the subsequent U.S. deaths in Somalia reflected his realization that the incident threatened to dominate the news to the detriment of his health care proposals and his entire presidency.40 President Clinton’s fears were realized in a TIME/CNN poll that indicated only 43% support for a continued U.S. presence in Somalia, down from 79% in January 1993.41 As the American death toll climbed, public support for the mission waned. The American public’s regard for the Clinton Administration’s overall foreign policy suffered from the events in Somalia, as approval ratings tumbled to 34%.42 Americans viewed the Somali mission as a repeat of the 1982 intervention in Beirut – another operation to keep a peace that did not exist.

20 The Bush and Clinton Administrations failed to prioritize the Somali mission and instead, focused on domestic issues relating to elections and presidential legacies.43 The lack of adequate policy coordination during the interregnum exacerbated this, meaning the Clinton team inherited a challenge to their efforts to enact health care reform. Until the morning of October 3, 1993 the Somali operation was on track as far as the Americans were concerned. One tragic event caused a shift in U.S. foreign policy that had been initiated by a president of one party and continued by the president of another. The Clinton Administration had advocated a pro-active policy of Assertive Multilateralism but the events in Somalia demonstrated “a cavernous gap between the administration’s soaring rhetoric and its much more judicious actions.”44

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1.3 Inability to Control the Mission Narrative

21 Due to the timing of the mission, the Somali operation fell between two administrations and as such there was a lack of commitment to the cause in the Clinton White House. The inability of the White House to control the narrative in Somalia and to counter criticism of the mission, proved to be a serious impediment to the continued viability of Assertive Multilateralism. It had not been a campaign priority and threatened to divert attention from the domestic agenda. A fundamental problem for the Clinton Administration was that the Bush White House presented the mission as a simple one of humanitarian necessity. However, Operation Restore Hope was a far more complex and perilous undertaking than was conveyed to the American public.45 Once Operation Restore Hope (U.N.I.T.A.F.) was ended and the majority of U.S. troops returned home, the American public, and indeed many in the White House forgot about Somalia. After the handover of control in May 1993, President Clinton welcomed home a number of American servicemen at a ceremony on the White House lawn, telling his troops, “You have proved that American leadership can help to mobilize international action to create a better world.”46 Whilst the event was intended to honour the troops, the administration also sought to project Bill Clinton as a credible Commander-in-Chief. It was also part of the mission narrative: U.S. troops had deployed, delivered aid and returned within six months. However, once the Special Forces were ordered into Somalia in August with the ensuing fatalities, the narrative became more difficult to explain. Instead of successfully portraying the U.N. mission and the U.S. Ranger deployment as two distinct elements, the lines became blurred. The White House was unable to convey the narrative of these two distinct missions, one of relief and the other, reciprocity, ensuring that the true nature of American intentions was called into question, along with the competence of the administration.

22 The deaths caused the House Appropriations Committee moved to impede future humanitarian operations by demanding that presidents give fifteen days notice before dispatching troops and provide estimated costs, projected duration, the goals and defined U.S. interest. These moves, by a Democratically controlled Congress, reinforced growing concerns about President Clinton’s ability to serve as Commander-in-Chief. President Clinton was in the difficult situation of having to address and rectify mistakes made by both his own team and by members of the Bush Administration. “The Somalia tragedy shocked Clinton into talking control of his foreign policy and his bureaucracy.”47 Clinton ordered all U.S. troops out of Somalia by March 31, 1994 and dispatched a contingent of 1,700 troops to Somalia to facilitate the withdrawal. As Anthony Lake conceded, the decision made itself: “To do otherwise would have made it open season on Americans around the world. The potential message: Kill and humiliate our people and the United States will immediately retreat.”48 The President’s decision prevented a revolt in Congress, where legislators welcomed the firm deadline for withdrawal, which many viewed as a declaration of independence from the U.N., its Secretary General and his policy of Nation Building. The notion of blaming the incident on the U.N. became doctrinal, as the administration and members of Congress implicated Boutros-Ghali. Yet despite assurances that U.S. troops would never again be placed under U.N. command, all involved knew that Task Force Ranger had been under direct U.S. command at all times. The top U.N. official in Somalia was an American, and it was he, Admiral Howe, who most sought the deployment of Task Force Ranger to

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Mogadishu. There was no escaping the fact that “Task Force Ranger was a wholly American production.”49

23 The administration’s inability to control the mission narrative was exacerbated by a deliberate distortion of events and intentions, as the Somalia mission and the attending tactic of Assertive Multilateralism were utilized by Clinton’s opponents in their effort to regain the White House. The Somali debacle contributed to the Republican victory in the 1994 mid-term elections and the new Senate Majority Leader, Bob Dole, focused on foreign policy in his bid to defeat Clinton in the 1996 Presidential election. He claimed that under Clinton, “U.S. foreign policy [had] been marked by inconsistency, incoherence, lack of purpose, and a reluctance to lead.” To Dole, the choice was stark, “to allow international organizations to call the shots as in Somalia, or to make multilateral groupings work for American interests, as in Operation Desert Storm.”50 This effort to re-write history by removing mention of the Bush Administration and blurring the sequence of events in 1993 became a mantra for critics of Assertive Multilateralism, which included former presidents. George H.W. Bush noted, “After I left office the mission changed into trying to bring the Somali warlords to justice. It was classic mission creep...When the starvation was ended, we should have brought our troops home and let the U.N. peacekeeping force take over.”51 What the Clinton Administration failed to convey was that this is precisely what happened. 20,000 U.S. troops had left Somalia on schedule, leaving 1,100 troops under a U.N. rapid reaction team and 3,000 support personnel. Only when the safety of the U.N. mission was called into question was Task Force Ranger dispatched. Like Bush, Richard Nixon described the mission in Somalia as being “a lesson in how not to conduct U.S. foreign policy,” and insisted that America should discern a way of “using the U.N. not being used by it.”52 Nixon’s former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger noted, “the new Clinton Administration reduced the number of American troops from 28,000 to 4,000…as a result of the new mission, a battle took place, costing a score of American lives.”53 However, neither Nixon nor Kissinger accurately addressed the situation. The U.S. commitment to U.N.O.S.O.M. II was minimal, most U.S troops had withdrawn once the U.N. took control of the mission and the events of October 3 had occurred in a bid to apprehend forces that had murdered U.N. troops. This was a distinction lost on many, including the former president and his secretary of state, as well as those in Congress who had initially voted in favor of the U.N.O.S.O.M. II mission. Former Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum noted, “Whoever won the election in 1992 would have had to face a tough choice in 1993 regarding Somalia…The Bush people might have made a different choice than Clinton, and just pulled out, but they can’t now say that they could have avoided that choice.”54 When President Clinton responded to the Bush criticism he clearly had to restrain himself. “It may have been naive for anyone to seriously assert in the beginning you could go into a situation as politically and militarily charged as that one, give people food, turn around and leave, and expect everything to be hunky-dory.”55

1.4 Key Implications

24 The Somali mission had implications not only for politics and policy, but also for personnel and operations. It was recognized that “the scale of the foreign policy reversals in Somalia destroyed the administration’s willingness to pursue foreign policy goals aggressively.”56 It led to a change in philosophy at the White House and

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destroyed the administration’s capacity to advocate an approach of Assertive Multilateralism in the future. Just as President Bush had delayed a deployment due to the 1992 election cycle, so too did the 1994 and 1996 elections impact the administration’s thinking as it sought to extract itself from Somalia. The policy response to the Somali mission and the attendant concept of Assertive Multilateralism took the form of Presidential Decision Directive 25: ‘Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations.’ (PDD-25) Delivered to the president in May 1994, this was the first comprehensive policy on multilateral peace operations in the post-Cold War era. It developed new standards to determine future participation in peacekeeping operations and restated the importance of Congressional support for such missions. The report concluded that whilst peacekeeping should remain a component of U.S. foreign policy, it would be “a part of our national security strategy, not the centrepiece.”57 Early drafts of this document had considered an expansion of U.N. operations with the U.S. being committed to support such engagements militarily, economically and politically as well as support for a standing U.N. army and the placing of U.S. forces under United Nations’ command. Such policies became politically untenable following the events in Somalia, which caused a re-write that clarified the position of the administration with regard to command and control of American forces in U.N. operations: “The President will never relinquish command of U.S. forces. That is inviolable.”58 The Somalia mission “interrupted an important policy debate upon the use of peacekeeping troops in operations. People had been very enthusiastic about the concept but it was seen as a bad idea after Somalia, and there was a pulling back from this idea from that point onwards.”59 A State Department official said “We’ll get back to it at some point and hopefully some sort of concept of collaborative action with the U.N. will emerge, but it is not going to be what it was.”60 Despite this hopeful assertion, U.S. policy towards the United Nations failed to recover from the incident and resulted in a relationship of mutual suspicion that still endures. The divisions between the United Nations and the United States that became apparent during the administration of George W. Bush, over issues of rendition and the war in Iraq, had their origins, therefore, in the early years of the Clinton era.61

25 The fallout from Somalia impacted not only the philosophical embrace of Assertive Multilateralism but also the administration’s capacity to engage overseas in any form of multilateral action. “The events in Somalia created on over-hang that was a consistent reminder in other events…It provided a realization that future losses or casualties would produce a response in Congress similar to that provided by the events in Mogadishu.”62 The crisis and the Congressional reaction ensured that President Clinton was initially unable to recommend a deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia under a U.N. peacekeeping role, for fear of crossing “the Mogadishu Line”63. Just as Somalis had suffered throughout 1992, the suffering in Bosnia continued due to the repercussions of perceived failings in U.S. foreign policy. Similarly, the fallout from Somalia coincided with the massacres in Rwanda, as the U.N. plan to send 5,500 troops to alleviate the situation was vetoed by Madeline Albright, operating under instructions from Washington. Despite protests from the White House that the plan had received limited support from other nations, the reality was that “it was politically impossible to go into central Africa” following the events in Somalia.64 Indeed, the publication of PDD-25 was a tacit admission that whilst the Clinton Administration may have wanted to solve the world’s problems, neither the United States nor the international community had the resources or the mandate to do so. Nancy Soderberg

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noted, “After Somali there was just no enthusiasm for putting troops on the ground anywhere. I think it delayed aggressive engagement in Bosnia, it certainly delayed any response in Rwanda, but I don’t think we ever really stepped away from multilateralism, it was more a question of assessing where multilateralism worked and where it didn’t work.”65 Involvement in future peacekeeping operations required that vital national or allied interests be at stake and that a clear commitment to win existed. “Peacekeeping is not at the center of our foreign or defense policies,”66 Anthony Lake asserted in February 1994, reversing the administration’s initial policy.

1.5 Conclusion

26 Assertive Multilateralism appeared to offer the domestically focused Clinton administration a method by which to address economic renewal whilst still adopting what it viewed as a bi-partisan approach to maintaining a global presence. The Clinton Administration saw this as a way to spread expenditure, casualties and the focus of hostility away from the United States and on to the shoulders of a global organization that had the potential to live up to its mandate in the post-Cold War era. However, this was predicated on the false belief that the American people would tolerate casualties in distant lands when no national interest was at stake and that Congress would continue its Cold War era support of the president in matters of world affairs. Neither assumption proved to be viable as the administration’s efforts to initiate a policy of Assertive Multilateralism met Congressional opposition in the face of public dismay over the deaths in Somalia. Somalia proved to be the start of a new decade of conflict as bitter infighting, civil wars and intra-national conflicts dominated the 1990s. Rather than reinforcing American efforts to export human rights and to engage in conflict resolution, the events in Somalia served to convince Americans that such internal disputes were of no concern to the world’s sole superpower. The Somali mission lacked a clear objective beyond its initial intervention, something Anthony Lake recognized only in retrospect: “In 1993 we in the Clinton Administration inherited a situation without a strategy or a timetable. And sadly, as we struggled with key issues, we probably made an ill-defined mission worse.”67

27 President Clinton may have sought to define a new foreign policy for a new geopolitical age, but his willingness to delegate foreign policy to his advisers, whilst he focused on the domestic policy, reinforced the perception that he was disengaged from the foreign policy decision-making process. The debacle in Somalia blighted Clinton’s first year in office. The initial deployment had worked as planned. It was only after American Special Forces were dispatched, months after the initial deployment had been withdrawn, that the decisive casualties were inflicted within a matter of hours. Had this not occurred, Assertive Multilateralism may have been a far more viable option. It had not meant to encapsulate the administration’s entire approach to foreign policy, but it had been the approach with which to engage with the United Nations in multilateral operations.68 Events in Somalia, however, confirmed President Clinton’s worst fears about foreign policy being “a murky business, outside the reach of domestic presidential control, with greater possibility for negatives than positives, out of which relatively little good could come.”69 President Clinton found that the world continued to impede on his time as “the end of the Cold War heralded not an end to history but rather, a host of unexpected threats, some new and others ancient.”70 The entire political establishment learnt an important lesson; there would be no further

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deployment of ground forces to locations where U.S. national interest did not exist or could not be adequately defined – peacekeeping operations were not considered a justifiable cause for American casualties. The deaths of 18 American servicemen on 3 October 1993 proved to be instrumental in ending a brief era of bi-partisan support for multilateral operations under United Nation’s mandates and caused the Clinton Administration to fundamentally reconsider its commitment to the organization and to peacekeeping operations in general.

NOTES

1. Interviews have been conducted with Anthony Lake (National Security Adviser 1993-1997), Leon Fuerth (National Security Adviser to Vice President Gore 1993-2001), Nancy Soderberg (Member of the National Security Council 1993-1996) and Morton Halperin (Pentagon 1993, NSC 1994). 2. Richard Sale, Clinton’s Secret Wars, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), xi. 3. Michael Dobbs, Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 349. 4. Madeleine Albright, Madame Secretary, A Memoir (London: Macmillan Press, 2003), 176. 5. Richard Nixon, Beyond Peace (New York: Random House, 1994), 32 6. Peter W. Rodman, Director of National Security Programs, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, quoted in Steven Erlanger, “The U.S. and the U.N.; Now, Who Needs Whom More?” New York Times, 7 July 1996, D5. 7. Madeleine Albright, “Myths of Peace-keeping,” Statement before the Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 24 June 1993, cited in U.S. Department of State Dispatch 4, no. 26 (24 June 1993), 464. 8. By early 1992 Somalia had descended into anarchy with no recognisable, functioning government or legal infrastructure. Foreign nationals were evacuated as up to 30,000 Somali’s perished from malnutrition and conflict. See U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Consideration of Miscellaneous Bills and Resolutions, Vol.2, 19 February 1992, 120. 9. For the official United Nations record on the mission, see United Nations Operation in Somalia Mission Background, available at the United Nations, http://www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/ unosomi.htm. See also The United States Army in Somalia, http://www.history.army.mil/ brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm 10. See U.S. House of Representatives, Select committee on Hunger, Somalia: Case for Action, (22 July 1992); U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, A Review of U.S. Policy and Current Events in Kenya, Malawi, and Somalia (23 June, 1992). 11. For the official United Nations record on this mission see Completed Peacekeeping Operations: UNOSOM II, available at the United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/ unosom2.htm. 12. President Nixon was re-elected despite the deaths of 20,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam in his first term. 15 deaths convinced President Clinton to leave Somalia. See Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “Clinton Administration Proving Reluctant World Cop,” The Washington Post, 17 October 1993.

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13. George Bush, “Humanitarian Mission to Somalia,” Department of State Dispatch (4 December 1992) 14. See William J. Clinton, My Life (London: Hutchinson, 2004), 550 and Bruce W. Nelan, “Taking on the Thugs,” Time Magazine, 140/24, 14 December 1992, 26. 15. Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 565. 16. Martin Fletcher, “U.S. Troops Ready to Land in Mogadishu,” The Times, 2 December 1992, 12. 17. Congress did not approve the Somali mission until after Bush left office. The Senate voted to approve on 4 February 1993 and the House voted in favour on 25 May 1993. 18. See Lee H. Hamilton with Jordan Tama, A Creative Tension: The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, 2002), 27. 19. Anthony Lake served as National Security Adviser (1993-1997). Berger served as Deputy National Security Adviser (1993-1997) and National Security Adviser (1997-2001). 20. David Halberstam, War In A Time Of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals (New York; Scribner, 2001), 254. 21. The White House was happy to offer support for the nation building exercise but nothing more: “The process of nation building in Somalia will take some time…we owe it to ourselves – and to Somalia – to help UNSCOM succeed.” See Peter Tarnoff, “U.S. Policy in Somalia,” Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 29 July 1993, cited in U.S. Department of State Dispatch 4, no.32, 9 August 1993, 23-24. 22. George J. Church, ‘Anatomy of a Disaster,’ Time Magazine 142/16, 18 October 1993, 40. 23. Due to the prevalence of regional clans, the viability of developing a functioning state in Somalia was always going to be a challenge. See I.M. Lewis, Somali Culture, History and Social Institutions (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1981) and Richard H. Shultz, Jr., “State Disintegration and Ethnic Conflict: A Framework for Analysis,” in Annals (September 1995), 75-88. 24. Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, vol.1 (1993), Message to the Congress Transmitting a Report on Somalia, 13 October 1993, 1740. 25. Thomas Omestad, “Foreign Policy and Campaign ‘96,” Foreign Policy 105 (Winter 1996/1997) 43. 26. Halberstam, War In A Time Of Peace,9. 27. See E.J. Dionne, “Clinton Turns Sights to Foreign Policy,” Washington Post, 29 July 1992, A1. 28. Author’s interview with Anthony Lake, 14 September 2004. 29. President George H.W. Bush, Letter to Congressional Leaders on the Situation in Somalia, 10 December1992. 30. In June 1992 a bi-partisan group of eighty-eight members of Congress urged the president to make relief efforts in Somalia his ‘highest priority,’ see U.S. House of Representatives: Select Committee on Hunger, Somalia: Case for Action (22 July, 1992), 85-87. 31. William G. Hyland, Clinton’s World: Remaking American Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 1999), 53. 32. See John M. Goshko, “U.N. Orders U.S.-Led Military Force in Somalia,” Washington Post, 4 December 1992, A1. 33. Bush’s national security adviser Bent Scowcroft advised Nancy Soderberg “Don’t worry. We’ll have the troops out by January 20.” Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, 36. 34. Author’s interview with Leon Fuerth, 8 June 2004. By 3 October 1993 the NSC had held 38 Principal Committee Meetings (none of which had addressed Somalia) and 60 Deputies Committee meetings (9 of which had addressed Somalia). 35. Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, 38. 36. Warren Christopher, quoted in Michael R. Gordon with John H. Cushman Jr. “After Supporting Hunt for Aidid, U.S. Is Blaming U.N. for Losses,” New York Times, 18 October 1993, A1.

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37. The Health Care Bill was sent to the Hill on 27 October 1993, with momentum having been lost when the president had to deal with the death of the soldiers in Somalia. 38. George J. Church, “His Seven Most Urgent Decisions,” Time Magazine 141/4, 25 January 1993, 20. 39. Gordon with Cushman Jr. “After Supporting Hunt for Aidid, U.S. Is Blaming U.N. for Losses,” A1. 40. The president reportedly exploded, “I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two- bit pricks.” See George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human, A Political Education (New York: Little and Brown, 1999), 214. 41. J.F.O. McAllister, “When to Go, When to Stay,” Time Magazine 142/14, 4 October 1993, 40. 42. Gallup Poll, November, 1993, quoted in Diane Hollern Harvey, “The Public’s View of Clinton,” in The Post-Modern Presidency: Bill Clinton’s Legacy in U.S. Politics, ed. Steven E. Schier (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 128. 43. An internal Clinton Administration report concluded “the policy had been largely left in the hands of midlevel officials as it shifted from a humanitarian mission…towards a military effort… While Lake had kept the president informed…the principles never sat down among themselves, or with the president, to review the shift.” See Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, 36. 44. Jonathan Clarke, “Contempt for Foreign Policy is Showing,” Los Angeles Times, 26 October 1993, B7. 45. Mohamed Sahnoun, Somalia: The Missed Opportunities (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1994) 46. George J. Church, “Somalia, Mission Half Accomplished,” Time Magazine 141/20, 17 May 1993, 42. 47. Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, 40 48. Anthony Lake, Six Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 129. 49. See Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, “Somalia and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention,” Foreign Affairs 75 (March-April 1996), 73 and Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down (London: Bantam, Press, 1999), 487. 50. Bob Dole, “Shaping America’s Global Future,” Foreign Policy, Issue 98, (Spring 1995) 35. 51. George Bush, “All The Best, George Bush”: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999), 580. 52. Nixon, Beyond Peace, 36 53. Henry Kissinger, Does American Need A Foreign Policy? Towards A Diplomacy for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Simon Schuster, 2001), 266. 54. Thomas L. Friedman, “A Broken Truce: Clinton vs. Bush In Global Policy,” New York Times, 17 October 1993, A1. 55. Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, vol. 2 (1993), 1753. 56. James Adams,“Clinton Foreign Policyin Tatters,” Sunday Times, 17 October1993, Overseas Section. 57. Lake, Six Nightmares, 153. 58. Press Briefing by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Director of Strategic Plans and Policy General Wesley Clarke, The White House, 5 May 1994. 59. Author’s interview with Morton Halperin, 22 June 2004. 60. Gordon with Friedman, “Details of U.S. Raid in Somalia: Success So Near, a Loss So Deep,” A1. 61. James D. Boys, “What’s So Extraordinary About Rendition?” The International Journal of Human Rights, 15/4, May 2011, 591. 62. Author’s Interview With Leon Fuerth, June 8, 2004 63. Clarke and Herbert, “Somalia and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention”, 70.

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64. Mike Sheehan, military adviser to Madeleine Albright, quoted in Dobbs, Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey, 356. 65. Author’s Interview With Nancy Soderberg, 26 May 2004. 66. Anthony Lake, ‘The Limits of Peacekeeping,’ New York Times, 6 February 1994, Sec IV, 17. 67. Lake, Six Nightmares, 166. 68. Author’s Interview With Nancy Soderberg, 26 May 2004. 69. Halberstam, War In A Time Of Peace, 264. 70. Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars: An Insider’s Account of the White House Years (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 60.

INDEX

Keywords: Assertive Multilateralism, Gulf War, National Security Council, Somalia, Task Force Ranger, United Nations

AUTHORS

JAMES D. BOYS Senior Visiting Research FellowKing’s College London Associate ProfessorRichmond University London

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