Berube Stops Blogging

Posted on January 9, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I actually knew this was coming through various ultra-secret intelligence sources. I think it’s fair to say now that most blogs have a fairly definite life cycle. Most never really outlast a brief initial burst of enthusiasm, but those that do last rarely hold on for more than about three or four years without either transmogrifying into some other kind of format (a group blog, a paid gig of some kind).

Mostly blogs ebb and flow with the life rhythms of their creator. Graduate students with blogs get deep into their dissertations, or finish a dissertation, and decide to put aside a blog. Babies arrive, or people get seriously ill. Work makes new demands, and takes energies away from a blog.

However, I think there’s also something about the form itself that poses a problem, and that the problem has gotten more acute as blogging has evolved as a practice. A self-aware blog writer eventually starts to recognize static or repetitive patterns in their posting that threaten to devolve into schtick. Readers may not object: in fact, the larger and more stable a community of readers a blogger has, the more they may in fact come to rely on the blogger to merely convene or spark a rolling conversation among commenters, to be the rhetorical equivalent of comfort food.

For anyone hoping to sharpen and complicate their own writing, or to use a blog for exploration and discovery, however, this repetition and cumulative expectation can become a problem. I’ve talked here before about how much I find my sense of humor drains out of me when I’m writing here, because I’ve gotten trapped by compulsive reasonableness. When I write in this format, I find that my humor is sharpest when it’s snarky and a bit cruel (I don’t think this is true in person), so I often put it aside. There are times where that and other self-imposed limits and expectations frustrate me as a writer and even a thinker, however.

I’ve also hit a point where I’m frustrated by the rigidity of discussions across the blogosphere. I honestly see a big difference between the kinds of conversations about academia that used to happen in the comments of the Invisible Adjunct’s site and the meta-conversations about academic and disciplinary issues that now roll across a range of blogs, from Erin O’Connor to the Valve to Long Sunday and so on. We’ve gone past the point where many conversations had the plasticity to go in unexpected directions. We’ve gotten instead to the point where many participants in the meta-discussion are defending fixed terrain, sometimes terrain that they’re paid to defend by institutions with a largely instrumental interest in blogs as extensions of some larger project.

So I have to say I was recently tempted to go the way of things Berubean, and close up shop. I don’t think I will just yet. There are still a lot of things I enjoy about blogging: conversations I find rewarding, discoveries to be made, skills to be honed. Plus if I don’t blog, I’m going to start excessively unloading on anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot with my opinions about everything under the sun. For their sake, I’ll keep this outlet going.

Posted in Blogging | 12 Comments

My Wicked, Wicked Ways

Posted on January 8, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I’m back from both my holiday travels and from a post-holiday trip to Atlanta to attend the American Historical Association meetings.

I have a confession: in Atlanta, I did one of the most perverse, inexplicable things that I’ve ever done in my life.

I attended the AHA business meeting for the first time since I started graduate school many moons ago. No, no, worse than that. I actually said something at it. That, my friends, is as true and sad a revelation of compulsive bigmouthery as you’re ever likely to encounter.

Now keep in mind that a goodly proportion of the historical profession has the good sense to stay away from the AHA meeting, period. I give the current staff and officers of the AHA a lot of credit for streamlining the process of registering, being a member and so on: it’s become a very efficient organization in those terms. The meeting program has gotten a bit more interesting, a bit lighter in leaden sessions of six people reading in a monotone from papers. However, the main reasons to attend (as in the case of other major professional associations in the humanities) are still to interview, to be interviewed, to see friends, and possibly to visit a nice city.

Given that this year’s meeting was in Atlanta, a city that I’m not particularly fond of, in a set of hotels that are thoroughly charmless (the Marriot Marquis is like LA’s Bonaventure Hotel redesigned by a Soviet bloc architect with a surplus of concrete and tacky carpeting on his hands). It was also in the most depressingly featureless and modular part of Atlanta (the Peachtree Center area), so that kind of knocked reason #4 out of the running. (Atlanta’s lack of appeal took a further knock when the city incomprehensibly decided to station police in between the Marquis and the Hilton to prevent jaywalking, eventually nailing prestigious historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and hauling him off to jail.)

I was there mostly for yet another reason, because I’d been asked to be part of a panel and had said yes. I’d been asked to go to the business meeting to help support a resolution on speech codes, so I reluctantly trundled down there. (Missing, I might add, a really good part of the movie Army of Darkness on a local Atlanta TV station.)

If I had to update Dante’s Inferno for the 21st Century, I’d definitely make one of the circles of hell into an endless faculty meeting governed by the most intricate version of Robert’s Rules of Order that one could possibly imagine. The business meeting was a little appetizer-sized taste of what such a fate might be like.

So we got through various reports and to the speech code resolution. That discussion wasn’t substantially worse than the average faculty meeting, I suppose (which is not a compliment). One critic of the resolution made the standard-issue complaint that the resolution lacked sufficient appreciation of the complexity of the problem. This is a standard maneuver in all academic discourse: I do it, we all do it, and sometimes with justification. On the other hand, when one is talking about a parliamentary-style resolution designed to express the general view of a professional association, a twenty-page pseudo-statutory code designed to cover all possible particulars is not exactly what is needed. Another critic of the resolution offered a different standard-issue academic tactic, which is to not bother reading the thing being debated, which in this case meant assuming that the resolution rejected all possible speech codes, rules about civility, and so on, when in fact it only expressed opposition to the use of speech codes to constrain academic freedom.

Anyway, that ended with an amendment to the resolution that more or less rendered it irrelevant.

Then we had an intricate discussion of a highly technical demand that the AHA subscribe to a union-related informational service, where the symbolic difference between commanding the AHA to subscribe and urgently requesting that it consider subscribing appeared to matter substantially to some of the participants in the discussion.

I grimly hung on, figuring that if I’d been there this long I ought to stay until the end. The end was a resolution against the Iraq war. James Sheehan offered the objection that I ended up echoing, namely, that an organization like the AHA has a limited amount of political capital to expend (Sheehan said “moral capital”, I said “political capital”) and that this is best expended on matters directly proximate to the professional interests of the organization.

Let’s get real here: the attempt to make the resolution relevant to the direct professional interests of historians was pretty thin once we got to the part that urged members to support a speedy end to the Iraq war. If that’s directly relevant to an umbrella organization of historians, then next year we ought to consider a full battery of resolutions on global warming, urban poverty, globalization, CEO salaries, abortion rights, the minimum wage and so on. I could construct very similar and sincere arguments about how these are urgent and important matters for historians to take a position on as a profession.

I added that it seems to me that the AHA ought to be a very “big tent” in political terms, which means not committing it to political positions that are not directly relevant to professionalism that even a small proportion of its membership might find objectionable.

There are totally legitimate objections to this argument, but I have to say that the one moment where I went from being basically bemused by the meeting to engaged irritation was when two defenders of the Iraq war resolution spoke against what Sheehan had said and I had seconded.

The first scholar’s rambling objections included, as I understood it, a blanket objection to the entire concept of limits in terms of available time, institutional resources and labor to moral or political energies. That’s a fantastically efficient route to ceaseless political defeat, if so.

The second objection annoyed me more: it was a classic assembling of the left-wing circular firing squad. Here you’ve got a room where every single person is an opponent of the war, and endorses the specific complaints in the preamble of the resolution, where probably everybody sitting there would come to a protest, and many would support an organization like Historians Against the War. So what do you do? Misrepresent the modest objections of the few who question the specific form of a resolution based on a specific understanding of the specific institution of the AHA. In this case, what the scholar defending the resolution said (I think it was Warren Goldstein, but I’m not sure) was that those of us opposed to the resolution were claiming that all professional activities must be completely divorced from any expression of citizen activism. Look, you want to march at a demonstration under a banner that says, “Historians Against the War”, that’s completely and utterly ok. I’m writing here at this blog as a historian and scholar against the war: my professionalism and my arguments against the war are intertwined in all sorts of ways.

I’m just saying that if an umbrella organization intended to speak for everyone in a given discipline takes this position, then I don’t see why it should not take a hundred similar positions on matters of urgent public concern. Except, of course, that the AHA really doesn’t have any influence to speak of on such matters (a specific organization like Historians Against the War has far more, in my view, precisely because it is focused around a particular issue), and becomes all the more irrelevant for every such position it takes. It seems to me that this is just a reprise of where academic activism went wrong in the 1970s and 1980s: when the real targets of politics become too remote and well-protected from the relatively comfortable precincts that academic intellectuals inhabit, then turn to the institutions most closely at hand (universities and professional institutions) as proxy targets. It’s easy enough to mobilize them as a paper army, particularly through a meeting that only the perverse and the committed attend, but the only real consequence of said mobilization is a bleeding out of any professional particularity to such an organization and a loss of the ability to credibly claim to be a big tent that welcomes all possible configurations of practice and principle.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 8 Comments

Housekeeping Notice and Holiday Wishes

Posted on December 22, 2006 by Timothy Burke

While I’m not actively updating for the coming week, I’ve disabled new registrations, as I’ve had my first bout of serious comment spam in the last week. (I gather other WordPress blogs protected by registration systems had the same issues in the past week.)

Happy holidays to you all!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

War and Peace, Horn of Africa Edition

Posted on December 14, 2006 by Timothy Burke

One of the major stories out of Africa that almost no one seems to know about is the political, military and social history of the Horn of Africa in the last three decades. This is despite the fact of Black Hawk Down and so on.

I’m as culpable as anyone: I tend to give Ethiopian history a wide berth in my courses, as it is a deep literature that is (to my eye) somewhat set aside from the wider Africanist scholarship by virtue of its depth and particularism.

With all the attention to Darfur, Rwanda and other major crises in Africa, it’s still kind of odd that the international community (and the chattering classes here in the US) essentially let the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea simply slide by without much commentary. It was, to an eerie extent, a strong local parallel to World War I, both in the military particulars in the conflict and in the total pointlessness of it all. It had trench warfare with artillery and tank combat, massive casualties and extremely heavy fighting, and the frankly petty kinds of claims about national sovereignty and territorial authority that were involved in World War I.

In a way, I suppose I’m glad that the international community passed it by, as I don’t think there’s much anyone could have done about it anyway. But here we are again, facing another such conflict in the same region in the face: Ethiopia vs. the Islamist forces in Somalia. This is a good case where the simple-mindedness of neoconservative interventionism and realism really come up against their limits.

There is a need to imagine, somehow, that there is an avenue for intervention, some ability to negotiate a better outcome. If I have a grievance against diplomatic history as it has traditionally been written, it is that it invests in interstate processes a determinative power that is unwarranted. Simply put, this is a case (like quite a few others in the 20th Century) where states are central actors and yet I think there is almost no role for outside state (or interstate) actors to do much of anything that matters.

There certainly isn’t a simple moral position available to those who want to be players in the situation. Side with Ethiopia’s current rulers, with their dedicated hostility to liberal ideals of freedom and justice? With Somalia’s Islamicists? With the utterly bogus “legitimate” regime in Baidoa, that makes Vichy France look like a wildly popular and authentic government in tune with the entirety of its national citizenry?

To some degree, it really doesn’t matter who the United States sides with in an active way. Our earlier 1990s involvement in Somalia showed that (as does our current Iraq misadventure). Our military power provides little long-term ability to produce desired outcomes. And in this situation, even “soft power”, if we had any left, is worth almost nothing. The best thing I can suggest is staying a long distance away save to exercise direct and massive power at the few sites where our unmistakeable direct interests are involved. E.g., what I would suggest is that we contact the Islamicists in Somalia, say “As long as you don’t shelter people directly tied to al-Qaeda, we have no dog in this fight”, and mean it. If they do shelter individuals that we have a strong, unambiguous and unquestionable interest in, do your best to hit them directly. Don’t feed weapons and support to the Ethiopians, who are at best unreliable allies.

The alternative is yet another blow-back situation, where we try to perform sensitive surgery with blunt instruments and find ourselves shocked! shocked! that it rebounds against us. The truth is that the power states can apply consciously is nothing against either the complicatedly unconscious or ungoverned power of global economic and social institutions or against the power of local social histories. The sooner we recognize the narrow band within which deliberately applied state and interstate power actually produces meaningfully predictable results, the better off we’ll be. That’s not the “realism” of Kissinger et al, which basically translates to “We don’t want to worry about moral arguments”. The neoconservatives and radicals are right to reject that. It’s the realism of history and society, about understanding what kind of instruments state and interstate policy are, and the outcomes to which they meaningfully correspond.

Posted in Africa, Politics | 9 Comments

Antibooks

Posted on December 11, 2006 by Timothy Burke

Since some of the other cool kids are looking at LibraryThing’s Unsuggester, I thought I’d add a few comments.

I think John Emerson is basically right that it has to do with the peculiar sample at LibraryThing in the first place. I’ve basically observed from my own catalog that there are three very strong subsets of LibraryThing cataloguers, with a fourth minor variant.

The three major groupings that I can see are: SF/fantasy, political theory and philosophy (usually leftish), and Christian (whose catalogs are also often documents of their homeschooling projects). The fourth smaller category are academic book collections, though a lot of the academics who catalog there tend to do a couple of hundred books out of what are probably larger collections and stop there. (My own is still missing about 1,500 or more books from downstairs in our house.) There are also some collections which are very heavy on chick-lit and self-help books, I think.

So I’ve found, like John Holbo, if I enter almost any SF/fantasy title in the Unsuggester, almost all of the anti-books are theology and Christian-related. There are some curious exceptions. CJ Cherryh’s Downbelow Station fetches up a real dog’s breakfast of anti-books. Some Christian stuff, but also some chick-lit. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe not unexpectedly turns the mapping on its head: the top two anti-books for it are de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life and Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

You can find some non-genre works that different clusters of LT cataloguers all tend to own where the anti-books are really odd, where it is hard to make a lot of sense about the relationship. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the anti-book of works as diverse as Kevin Mitnick’s book on computer security, Anne Rice’s vampire novels, guides to Java programming, the Harry Potter books, and Nora Roberts novels. Marx’s Capital is the anti-book of works of historical fiction, fantasy, Stephen King novels, and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Works of humor, interestingly enough, tend to be anti-booked by Christian and theological writing just as much as fantasy and SF are. But then, so is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Like John Emerson, I’m sure this is largely a function of how well walled-off various LibraryThing catalogs are from each other, not necessarily a good description of communities and practices of readership at large in American or global culture.

It’s also a function of the threshold of 75 owners for anti-book recommendations. I’m guessing that there are a lot of titles at LT that have 5-50 owners, that there is a “long tail” of books, some of them pretty notable, that somehow just aren’t heavily represented in the pre-existing clusters of motivated cataloguers.

Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 10 Comments

The History of Virtual Worlds

Posted on December 1, 2006 by Timothy Burke

I’m going for a first-time event here: a triple cross-post here, Cliopatria and Terra Nova. I’m at a meeting on law and virtual worlds at the New York Law School, and there’s a really interesting panel discussion of methodologies in virtual worlds. Douglas Thomas just pointed out that when we talk about qualitative methods in virtual world research, we always tend to define that as ethnography, when there are other kinds of qualitative methods that are potentially important, including history.

I think that’s right, and it struck me how odd it is that I, as a historian, generally talk about virtual worlds methodology in terms of my habitual dissatisfaction with the tendency of anthropology to visit its own ethical obsessions on all discussions of ethnography as a method. I don’t talk about historical narratives or events in virtual worlds, even though what I think is most interesting about virtual worlds is that they are historical, processual, dynamic, iterative.

So what are the methodological challenges of tracing events and processes over time in virtual worlds? Well, part of the problem is that some of the richest quantitative or empirical kinds of data imaginable have been until very recently held privately by developers. Star Wars: Galaxies extensively tracked the history of the construction of housing within their gameworld, but without access to the developer’s data, the only systematic conclusions you can make about that process depend upon personal (or pooled) observations and reports. A historian of virtual worlds to date would need to have been there to say much of anything about many of the structural histories of importance.

But this is even true for a narrative of events within games. If a 25-year old graduate student came to me and said, “I want to write about the history of events within Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, about the narrative evolution of the games, about key episodic things that happened”, I’d pretty much say that this graduate student is in a worse situation than a historian of modern Africa. The textual sources are going to be extremely difficult to recover in a thorough way because there are both too many and too few; a lot of the rest will only be knowable through oral historical work, or through questioning people through email. I know about Dread Lord Days, and about the way Arwic was in Asheron’s Call before secure trading was introduced, and about about Sunny in LambdaMOO and so on. I know about the fetuspult in Dawn. I was there for it all. So I could write that history as an eyewitness, from the perspective of experience. Of course, I could add some sustained archival research, because I know to use keywords like “fetuspult” and “Arwic”.

I had a discussion earlier today about a parallel problem in simulations of emergent phenomena, which also seem deeply historical and processual by their nature. It seems to me that knowledge production around such simulations often requires experience, you have to watch a simulation again and again to begin to understand the range of variability in its evolution over time.

So I’m powerfully convinced that the history of any given virtual world, and the history of all virtual worlds, is a crucial part of knowing them in qualitative sense. But I’m also struck that this is actually harder to know than the already-difficult methodological challenges of my major field of specialization, African history, and for various reasons is also harder to know than the general history of online and new media, which are archived in ways that experience and events in virtual worlds is not.

Posted in Academia, Games and Gaming | 6 Comments

History 87 Development and Modern Africa

Posted on November 29, 2006 by Timothy Burke

This is the latest version of this course that I’ve taught. I still need to make some of the specific selections of reading material on a number of these texts: I’m trying to get small but potent samples of a number of writers and perspectives. I keep being struck at how hard it is to get a really concentrated and short reading that reflects the postmodernist critique of progress, save through its application in critiques of “development discourse” in Week Eight of this class.

I’m also still weighing the specific issues to examine at the end of the semester. I’m happy with the quality of materials I can draw on with regard to wildlife management and conservation, HIV-AIDS, and cellphones. The river blindness literature is pretty dry, but since it’s an interestingly “successful” campaign, I’d like to include it. Other suggestions of specific topics are welcome, since even if I don’t focus on them through readings, I’ll add them to the list of suggested research topics.

This syllabus is also a pretty good snapshot of something I try very hard to do in a lot of classes, which is to keep both “postmodernist” or theoretical approaches and pragmatic or practicioner approaches to a topic like “development” in the same frame without subordinating one to the other. Usually, it seems to me, the “development discourse” crowd sets up the discussion in a kind of master framework in which the character of development as discourse is a kind of axiomatic given, but the reply from within the debate among people invested from development is just as unsatisfying, a kind of shrug and dismissal. It seems to me that you can consider development as a concept which has a deep and often poorly understood set of intellectual and institutional roots without assuming that this investigation exposes development as a “construct” whose internal premises no longer need to be debated in an open-ended or sympathetic manner.

————–
History 87
Development and Modern Africa
Spring 2007
Professor Burke

This course is an intellectual and institutional history of “development” and its application to Africa since the late 19th Century. We will examine both concepts and practices of development historically in order to gain perspective on contemporary debates between practicioners, reformers, and skeptics about the prospects and meaning of “development” in 21st Century Africa.

The reading load for the course is fairly heavy and will require attentive management. Students will complete two short response papers early in the semester and then move towards working in stages on a longer research assignment in the second half of the semester. We will have “poster sessions” in which students will present abbreviated overviews of their research in the final two class meetings of the semester. The course is built around discussion, and as a result, class attendance and participation are also an important part of the assessment of student performance.

Books for purchase

Monica van Beusekom, Negotiating Development
Walter Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts
George Packer, The Village of Waiting
Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty
William Easterly, White Man’s Burden

Week 1
Progress as an Idea
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, selection
J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, selection
Marshall Berman, “Faust: The First Developer”, in Rahnema, ed., The Post-Development Reader
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, short selection

Week 2
18th and 19th Century Visions of Progress
Short selections from Condorcet, Turgot, Kant, Smith, Marx, Spencer, Mill, and Darwin

Week 3
Critics of Progress in the Counter-Enlightenment
Short selections from Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Malthus
Kevin Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites
Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, short selection
Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Chapter 2

Response paper #1 on “progress” due at the beginning of class.

Week 4
Colonial Visions of Development
John Seeley, The Expansion of England, selection
Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, selection
Charles Rey, Monarch of All I Survey, selection
“Mister Johnson”

Week 5
Colonialism and the Origins of the Developmental State
Monica Van Beusekom, Negotiating Development, all
Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940, Chapter Three
Michael Mahoney, “Colonial and Anticolonial Development Ideologies in Mozambique, 1930-1977”, in David Engerman, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War

Week 6
Modernization Theory, Dependency Theory and Postwar Development
Walter Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, Chapter 1
Michael Adas, “Modernization Theory and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological Standards of Social Achievement and Human Progress”, in David Engerman, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War
Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Chapter 1
United Nations, “Declaration on Social Progress and Development”, 1969

Response paper #2 due at the beginning of class

Week 7
Structural Adjustment, Neoliberalism and African Economic Decline
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity

Week 8
Development as Discourse
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts, all
Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works, Chapter Nine
Arturo Escobar, “The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Through Development”, in Rahnema, ed., The Post-Development Reader
Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary, short selection

Topic for research paper due

Week 9
Experiences of Development
George Packer, The Village of Waiting, all
Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War, selection
Michael Maren, The Road to Hell, Chapter 1-3
Robert Klitgaard, Tropical Gangsters, Chapter Six

Week 10
Experiences of Development II
Daniel Smith, A Culture of Corruption
Harry West, Kupilikula, Chapter 25
Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, Chapter 4
Donald Moore, Suffering For Territory: Race, Place and Power in Zimbabwe, Chapter 2

Week 11
Optimists and Practicioners
Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, all
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, short selection
World Bank, World Development Report 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World, selection
Francis Rubin, A Basic Guide to Evaluation For Development Workers, short selection
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, short selection

Initial bibliography for research paper due

Week 12
Pessimists and Critics
William Easterly, White Man’s Burden, all
Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, selection
“Darwin’s Nightmare”

Abstract and 1-page literature review essay due.

Week 13
Topics I: HIV-AIDS, wildlife management; student presentations

Week 14
Topics II: Cellphones and rural markets, river blindness; student presentations

Posted in Academia, Africa | 10 Comments

The Years of Rice and Salt

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Timothy Burke

A couple of people responding in the “Production of History” thread have suggested Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt for the week on time travel and alternate history. The suggestion is a great one, and I love the book.

As long as it’s on my mind, though, I’ll explore an issue it raised for me. One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot when it comes to counterfactuals is how to get beyond the kind of counterfactual built on the logic of “for want of a nail”, where a single discrete event is given a plausibly different outcome and then a different set of macrohistorical circumstances is derived in a linear causal chain from that outcome. E.g., Lee winning at Gettysburg, and so on.

The problem with this kind of counterfactual is that the further one gets away from the single contingent event, the more tenuously reasoned the argument becomes. Victory at Gettysburg becomes victory in the Civil War? Very possible. Then what? Two nations? Eventual negotiations for reunification on favorable terms to the South? (Isn’t that what ultimately happened after Reconstruction anyway?) Northern capital overwhelming the Southern economy anyway? Whatever your analytic framework for interpreting the Civil War itself tends to dictate what you think the consequences of a different outcome in the war might be.

This is the only way we know how to write a counterfactual essay or book, however. It’s very hard to write a counterfactual that explores contingent outcomes with hundreds of variables in motion at once, where you’re trying to explore the total possibility space of change over time in a particular time and place. You could argue that a study like Ken Pomeranz’ The Great Divergence amounts to an unannounced counterfactual of this kind, given that he is trying to write about a huge number of important variables in comparing China and Western Europe in the transition to modernity. It’s pretty tough to do.

Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is one of the few works I’ve seen that tries to go beyond, “What if the South won the Civil War”? Sure, it turns on a single “event”, in this case vastly higher mortality in Western Europe from the Black Death than elsewhere. Robinson tries to keep a very broad perspective on the consequences, however. Much more so than Steven Barnes in his alternate history series (Lion’s Blood, Zulu Heart that deals with Western Europeans being enslaved in America by Africans and Arabs, I think, but both authors ultimately have the same problem, which is that they don’t know how to think sequentially through a history which is both alternate and alterate, e.g., in which a non-Western society changes over time without the dominance of the West.

This is a problem for more than Robinson and Barnes. One of my favorite examples that I like to raise in my courses is Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney’s mix of nationalism and Marxism requires him to argue that had Europe not underdeveloped Africa, it would have developed into a parallel form of modern industrial capitalism on its own. But Rodney also argues that Western domination of African societies, first in the slave trade and later in colonialism, was essential for the development of capitalism and modernity. So would African societies have had their own imperialism that would have allowed their parallel alternate modernity to come into being? Against whom?

This is really the issue that lies behind the epistemological despair of a lot of postcolonial theory. You can’t unthink the West, you can’t really imagine the systematic difference of non-Western societies in a counterfactual way, in terms of what they might have developed into. Barnes doesn’t really think about what African or Middle Eastern slave systems might have been had they been exported into an Atlantic world: he simply changes the color and names of the masters and slaves. He can’t really imagine what “Shaka” would have been had he been part of a dominant global civilization, save an angry militarist, can’t derive the full alternate history of “Zuluness” had it never been encapsulated within a British-dominated South Africa.

Robinson’s work is more ambitious by far, and strays more interestingly into trying to think about what a Muslim-Chinese global society would have been. But what’s interestingly is that in the end, that society essentially transits into modernity on roughly the same terms and with the same basic geist as Europe did. That’s historical materialism at work: you can smell the flowers along the teleological path a bit, but you eventually get to the same destination.

To write a counterfactual that took a non-Western society to a different telos is the imaginative equivalent of creating a plausibly alien extraterrestrial society. If you don’t hardwire in some kind of universality (human or sentient) into such an effort, you literally can’t do it: you’re trying to represent something that is by definition unrepresentable. Again, this is why postcolonial theory works itself into such an intricate state of intellectual constipation, because it assumes that the non-West without the West cannot be represented within the Western logos and yet deeply desires the capacity to make such a representation. I do think it’s possible to write an imaginative counterfactual, however, in which a non-Western society comes to something other than modernity with dark faces and different names. I think it would read something more like Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Arete (or Paul Park’s Celestis) than The Years of Rice and Salt, however.

Posted in Africa, Books | 18 Comments

The Nut Hand

Posted on November 20, 2006 by Timothy Burke

Just a quick note as long as I’m in a pop-culture frame of mind: go see Casino Royale.

I think it’s actually the best Bond film ever, and as I’m a certified worshipper at the temple of the Connery Bond, that’s saying a lot.

Posted in Popular Culture | 9 Comments

Oh, While I’m At It

Posted on November 20, 2006 by Timothy Burke

On Civil War #5 (which really was just plain bad), this rewriting is a must-read.

Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Oh, While I’m At It