Brubeck's Jeepers Creepers

I've been listening to this old standard incessantly for the last 24 hours, and never realized that Brubeck recorded it live! A silly song like this is really better with the lyrics, however.

My Little Suede Shoes Live

"My Little Suede Shoes" has long been one of my favorite Charlie Parker numbers, even if it is not remarkable in its structure. It's an adorable melody with a sense of playfulness and wit that shows Parker at his best in a Latin vein. The band here even quotes the melody from another old favorite, "Jeepers Creepers," sure to delight all fans of jazz and Armstrong.

Dexter Gordon & Kenny Drew & Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen

I'm really enjoying this today, particularly the second song, "Fried Bananas" (based on the changes of "It Could Happen To You"). It's a delight to hear Niels-Henning and Kenny Drew live with another jazz legend. I believe the drummer is the legendary South African Makaya Ntshoko, too. I need to find some books on the Jazz Diaspora in Europe...

Carmen's Not For Me

Carmen McRae has long been one of the jazz singers I've meant to fully explore. She's always highly recommended and she certainly possesses an interesting voice. Here she is singing one of my favorite standards, accompanying herself on piano, I believe. She slows down the tune while accentuating its playfulness. Chet Baker could never do this. What she's lacking in the acrobatic vocal display of Ella or Dinah, she makes up for in an earthy tone. 

Rambling Thoughts on Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca

         The goal of Terraciano’s monograph is to examine history of the Ñudzahui primarily through the native-language documents written by members of the Ñudzahui nobility and then study the impact of the Spanish and colonialism. Terraciano combines these sources with linguistic, textual, and visual techniques and Spanish colonial sources to analyze change and continuity in the region’s sociopolitical structure, religious practices, gender dynamics, land tenure, and self-ascription as Ñudzahui.

        Like Farriss and Spalding, Terraciano illustrates how colonial control of the Ñudzahui, who were divided into multiple kingdoms united by interdynastic marriages to connect yuhuitayu, came to rely on local patterns of sociopolitical system that gradually changed. The Ñudzahui nobility acted on behalf of their own interests while also representing their communities through reciprocal obligations or religious festivals. Their religious traditions persisted in the veneration of Catholic saints, their images, and All Saints’ Day. In addition to change and continuity in religion, gender roles also shifted from the preconquest patterns of acceptance of women rulers to the colonial practice of privileging males in these interdynastic marriages in cabildos instituted by the colonial state. Systems of land tenure also changed as Ñudzahui elites leased it to Spaniards, increasingly bought and sold land, donated it to religious institutions, or corporate landholding in the form of Catholic confraternities developed.

            While explaining all the aforementioned processes, the significance of and level of detail Terraciano uncovers from Ñudzahui testaments, inventories, letters, and church-related sources provides, as the author asserts, a new lens with view to view the construction of Ñudzahui identity in light of similar studies of the Yucatec Maya or Nahua. Native-language sources as used by the author are by nature limited by their origins with the nobility of the ethnolinguistic group, but it raises important questions on ethnogenesis within colonial Mexican indigenous populations, particularly in ways that may differ from the Nahua and Yucatec Maya examples Terraciano alludes to for comparable examples in Mesoamerica.

            A particularly effective aspect of Terraciano’s history lies in the innovative methods employed to interpret visual sources, particularly codices and lienzos. Admitting that the visual sources examined were not intended to explain the entirety of Ñudzahui cosmology to outsiders, he nonetheless interprets visual evidence through religious symbolism and stylistic patterns to detect social values and the impact of colonialism. For instance, the importance of the reed mat with two seated figures, male and female, with multiple pairs arranged vertically to represent genealogical ties, becomes part of the author’s argument about the role of these earlier pictorial writings in recording origins of dynasties, as well as the importance of women. Gestures of the hand, size and dressing styles of depicted forms, and even the appearance of European-style doors in images of palaces also pertain to social relations.

Styles of dress, like the adoption by men of the Ñudzahui to European clothes instead of the previous loincloth, likewise assist in the monograph’s chronology of Spanish and European influences. By the end of the 16^th century, when writing in the Roman alphabet became the dominant method, pictorial writing motifs recur in church-related documents that probably demonstrate continuity and change in Ñudzahui Christianity. The best example of this is depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary across from each other in heaven with gestures and gender pairing reminiscent of pictorial drawings of noble married couples as mother or father.

       On the other hand, one potential limitation or conceptual problem arose for the end of the colonial period. Terraciano situates his conclusions in opposition to Farriss’s, arguing that the late colonial period did not assert itself as a “second conquest” for Ñudzahui communities. One cannot help but wonder if non-native language records could have shed light on the ways Bourbon reforms or the increase in Spanish leasing of land and non-native dominance of trade and merchant activity undermined Ñudzahui nobility or economic autonomy in other ways, even if the region did not attract a significant number of Spaniards or obrajes. Was inequality within Ñudzahui communities exacerbated by 18^th century changes of non-native control of trade and the subordinate incorporation of the group into a money economy? Were relations with mestizos or people of African descent similar for both Ñudzahui nobility and commoners by the late colonial period? Native-language sources may not answer these questions or will leave lacunae.

I Love You, Porgy

I was listening to Bill Evans's short-lived trio with Jack DeJohnette and Eddie Gomez again, and somehow I missed the utter pulchritude of this solo piano rendition of "I Loves You, Porgy." I hate the title, but the music is pure ethereal beauty. While this recording may not be as famous as the legendary Village Vanguard trio recording, the cascading musical explorations of Bill are nothing short of soul-searching. I may have to revisit his solo recordings...

Anthropology and the Paradox of Decolonization

           Linda Tuwihai Smith’s decolonizing methodologies of research for indigenous communities provide a framework with which to analyze Waskar Ari’s historical Earth Politics, Kirsch’s Reverse Anthropology, and Bacigalupo’s Thunder Shaman. Smith’s recognition of research’s ties to colonial expansion and imperialism, plus engaging with indigenous ways of knowing, challenges scholars to consider their positionality and relationship with their subjects. The works of Ari, Kirsch, and Bacigalupo exemplify the need for a decolonizing approach that can contribute to indigenous movements, and while each author contributes to that vision, the paradoxical nature of decolonized academic research persists. Issues such as liberalism as the framework for making claims, particularly for environmental struggles, may not be reconcilable with the goals of decolonization. This indicates that decolonization is a constant struggle that may never be achieved by any academic discipline, but can shape research in needed ways for building alternatives. Decolonization in an academic context should be seen as a constant struggle in which the racial, gendered, and class origins of research shape methodology but the act of decolonizing a field remain a constant orientation of anthropology.

            Ari’s Earth Politics, a history of the Alcaldes Mayores Particulares movement in 20th century Bolivia through a study of four male leaders, written by an indigenous scholar, is a good place to start. Ari endeavored to demonstrate how Aymara and Quechua-speaking Bolivians developed an independent politics combining land rights, spirituality, and ethnic preservation. The AMP drew from colonial-era laws and land titles to defend their communal lands, make claims, and resist assimilationist policies from the liberal state or the labor movement to de-Indianize their communities. Ari’s study contributes to decolonial research by conceptualizing a mode of thought or analysis for AMP leaders that possesses its own rational basis. Furthermore, the subjects of Ari’s analysis, drew on colonial-era legislation to assert their political movement, as legitimating an Indian republic. According to Smith, coloniality, or imperialism, is a lived experience and Earth Politics verifies it in the context of Aymara and Quechua-speaking Bolivia, specifying it as caste society in which internal colonialism operates (Ari, 11). He also carries out what Smith called for by incorporating indigenous ways of knowing into the text. AMP leaders, such as Toribio Miranda, conceived of land rights, Aymara religiosity, and colonial-era laws through Aymara ideas, for example, sumaqamaña (Ari, 84). Ari’s sources also include indigenous ways of knowing since he utilized memoirs and testimonies by historical actors, allowing their memories of AMP activism shape his narrative.

The notion of a simple binary of Indian versus non-Indian breaks down due to Ari’s inclusion of gender as a category of analysis, another important aspect of research Smith identified in the intersections of race and gender (Smith, 46). Gender shapes perceptions of “Indianness,” particularly dress, which meant men could sometimes shift between cholo and Indian categories. The very fluidity of Aymara and Quechua identities, as well as cholo working-class, also challenges simplistic binaries or notions of authenticity (Ari, 145). The religious and political components of earth politics in this context similarly defy essentialist explanation. Catholicism, the labor struggle among farm workers, struggles against urban segregation, and resistance to state projects of mestizaje or “de-Indianizing” all speak to a heterogeneous body of thought encapsulated by the AMP. Unfortunately, the question of where to go persists with Ari’s decolonizing history. His work illustrates that detailed historical studies of indigenous populations, Andean or otherwise, can be done. But in so doing, male historical actors are still privileged, though gender as a factor in the structure of the AMP, plus its activism against sexism from the state, is included.

            A similar decolonizing approach by Bacigalupo’s Thunder Shaman attempts to address history and indigenous epistemologies among the Mapuche. Bacigalupo, who like Ari, accounts for her own positionality in relation to her subject, a shaman named Francisca, developed a close relationship with Francisca over several years of research in Millali, Chile. Her shared hybrid identity with Rosa, for instance, created a point of contact while destabilizing essentialist assumptions (Bacigalupo, 22). Likewise, she approached the book as a bible co-produced by Francisca, for future Mapuche. A thunder shaman, or machi, possesses a form of historical consciousness that perceives time differently, opting for multitemporality, shaping history through dreams, trance, and spirits (Bacigalupo, 70). Thus, shamanic or machi historical consciousness and epistemology differs from positivistic Western narratives of history. Bacigalupa’s shaman is a practitioner of a form of cosmopolitics which combines social, political, and ecological factors (Bacigalupo, 164).

Furthermore, the history produced by shamans, often relying on memory, also challenges official or state documents and legal discourse to exceed, subvert and avoid the state archive, while drawing on indigenous grafismo and inscriptions (Bacigalupo, 132). Bacigalupo identifies a form of perspectivism and new ontologies in shamanic histories, since the machi are associated with collective ancestors and historical individuals, such as Rosa who lived in the “before time” period in the late 19th century. Mapuche views of capitalism and sorcery and their history as subjugated peoples by the state also contains a counter-narrative that alludes to the settlers as the barbarians (Bacigalupo, 59). These aforementioned aspects of Bacigalupo’s writing indicate a noble endeavor to include indigenous ways of being, systems of knowledge, and contribute to Mapuche social movements by elucidating one approach Mapuche have to history..

            Despite writing Thunder Shaman as a bible of Francisca’s work, Bacigalupo does not fully explore the question of shamanic historical consciousness in the contemporary struggles of the Mapuche over environmental and land concerns. Therefore, while writing from the lens of shamanic historical consciousness, which she argues does not follow a wingka historical narrative, she does not apply her research to contemporary issues, such as timber companies, except for distinguishing Francisca’s approach to timber companies as rejecting the frame liberalism requires of indigeneity (Bacigalupa, 165). For Smith, this would be a weakness in Bacigalupo’s ethnographic research, for not applying the results of research to contemporary conflicts with timber companies. Nonetheless, Mapuche shamanic historical consciousness undoubtedly shapes Mapuche activism and relations with the state today, and by producing a bible of Francisca recognizes the necessity for decolonizing research to contribute something that includes the subject’s testimony, acknowledges the author’s position in relation to the community while including indigenous ways of knowing. In this sense, Thunder Shaman fulfills some of the goals of decolonizing methodologies.

            Stuart Kirsch’s Reverse Anthropology, explores Yonggom indigenous analysis in Papua New Guinea. The act of positioning his work as a reversal of anthropology by foregrounding Yonggom modes of thinking constitutes a decolonizing project, or at least the promise of it. He also identifies this as aligning ethnography with social movements (Kirsch, 3). Kirsch focuses on social relations and unrequited reciprocity through Yonggom ritual, magic, myth, and relations with the Ok Tedi mine. He begins the study by subverting stereotypes of Melanesia as a land with history, showing how the region’s exchange networks with the rest of the world predate colonialism, although the focus on birds of paradise trade networks still privileges the West. However, in that relationship, Kirsch identifies the importance of Melanesian trade and colonialism for the rise of conservation (Kirsch, 36). Consequently, a more robust history of Papua New Guinea is still needed for decolonizing research that explores the region’s connections to Southeast Asia and Australia before European contact.

After establishing that Papua New Guinea was and remains connected to the broader world and shaped, through birds of paradise feather trade and colonialism, the rise of conservation movements, Kirsch endeavors to locate Yonggom and Muyu ritual, magic, and analysis of contemporary problems through the lens of reverse anthropology. For Kirsch, the Melanesian definition of social relations, which incorporates non-humans as beings with agency, is built around reciprocity. Their mode of thought shapes relations with their environmental. Komon komon hunting magic, for example, works as persuasion that acknowledge interagentivity. Yonggom practices of totemism and perspectivism, according to Kirsch, are defined through social relations as well (Kirsch, 75).

The community’s relationship with the mining corporation, which has irrevocably damaged the environment, becomes the focus of Kirsch’s argument of ethnography aligning with the movements of indigenous communities, applying research and indigenous epistemologies for ways of rethinking or finding solutions to conflicts like mining corporations and environmental impact. For the Yonggom, the corporation is responsible for not just pollution of the river, but a larger set of problems related to unrequited reciprocity with the community and environment. This constitutes corporate sorcery (Kirsch, 120). Corporate science ignores social relations, not seeing the hybrid combination of social relations and things (Kirsch, 129). The loss of a finger, for example, provides grounds for claim making and demands for compensation (Kirsch, 122). With this approach, Reverse Anthropology, though somewhat romanticized, commits ethnographic research to decolonizing projects and indigenous political movements. The damage of the mining operation and the corporate scientific studies that see resolution only in terms of monetary compensation, which ignores social relations among various beings, can become a generative moment for legal and environmental struggles that seek to subvert naturalism. In that respect, indigenous analysis, as used by Kirsch, can take on decolonizing results and methodology.

In summation, Smith’s call for decolonizing methodologies for research on indigenous peoples remains relevant. Researchers must confront the power dynamics and origin of research in colonialism, incorporate indigenous ways of thinking, avoid essentialism, promote indigenous researchers, and contribute their research to something beyond producing or reproducing knowledge. Bacigalupo, Kirsch, and Ari accomplish this to varying degrees, but it is not clear one can ever fully decolonize a field or area of study. Decolonization should be understood as a process that does not end with promoting indigenous research and using indigenous epistemologies, but one in which power dynamics of research are fully accounted for to challenge power. Decolonizing a discipline, in short, requires constant evaluation of the discipline’s methodology, history, conclusions, and is best as an ideal for research.

Bibliography

Bacigalupo, Ana M. Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia, 2016.

Kirsch, Stuart. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Smith, Linda T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 1999.

Ari, Chachaki W. Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia's Indigenous Intellectuals, 2014.

It Could Happen To You in Scandinavia

Kenny Drew's Trio does one of my favorite standards, "It Could Happen To You." This trio, featuring Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, has an impeccable sense of rhythm and knows how to make the standards sound contemporary. This trio never, to my knowledge, ventured into the 'new thing,' but they demonstrate the vitality of straightahead jazz and the European jazz scene.

Rambling Thoughts on the Amazon

Heather Roller’s Amazonian Routes analyzes indigenous mobility and resilience during the second half of the 18th century in northern Brazil. Focusing her study on the period of the Directorate, when mission settlements transitioned to the control of secular authorities, Roller explores the nuances of resistance, resilience, and ethnogenesis. The impact of the transition to secular rule, the importance of expeditions as opportunities for mobility and agency among Indians, the role of Indians in the founding of descimentos, absentees as part of the pattern of mobility, and struggles for autonomy in the aftermath of the Directorate’s abolition are the examples of Roller’s argument of an interplay between mobility and community as part and parcel of Indian resilience and adaptation to colonialism.

The impact of the transition to the Directorate, in addition to the role of expeditions on behalf of the colonial state, marked a shift in which attempts were made to impose Portuguese, establish forms of labor tribute through state-sponsored collecting expeditions around the region for cacao and other profitable material while attempting to control the movement of the population in the various settlements. Instead of seeing the labor requirements on lengthy expeditions as part of a process of colonial domination, Roller presents evidence of Indian agency through expeditions as a means of traveling to other communities, as opportunities to avoid other settlement obligations. In a similar fashion, Indios aldeados, often with the connivance of local administrators, took advantage of absenteeism to avoid obligations in one community by moving to others. New settlements, or descimentos, also became important for communities as gente nova were incorporated into communities. Furthermore, mixed-race people and non-natives joined these flexible settlements, complicating the question of service obligations and vagrancy.

Concluding with the impact of privatization of land and enterprises previously managed by povoações after the Directorate is terminated, Roller alludes to the problem of seeing Amazonian indigenous communities as only victims rather than resilient peoples whose mobility complemented community formation. Indigenous communities took advantage of their environment, as well as the colonial state itself, to retain or form new relationships. Viewing the history of the region solely through the lens of Indian flight from colonial incursions omits the plethora of strategies indigenous communities exploited in their colonial sphere.

Roller’s use of textual sources, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her monograph, exemplifies how one can write the history of peoples who did not leave written records. Reading between the lines of the testimonies of native crewmen in forest collecting expeditions, for example, the author can give voice, albeit mediated, to Indian men. Although not an unbiased source, these testimonies provide some insight into the ways indigenous men voluntarily joined forays that meant several months away from their families. Moreover, they voice the concerns of native men against cabos (or their complicity with them) directly, buttressing her larger argument of indigenous resilience and mobility as complementary factors.

Equally important to Roller’s argument, the role of environment in unique ecosystem in which mobility is required due to the soil and one in which commercial agriculture is limited in the 18th century, also raises important questions on the nature of colonialism in northern Brazil and social formation among the myriad indigenous communities. Like Spalding in the Andes, who saw the Andean geography as one necessitating reciprocal relations, the riverine geography is indispensable to northern Brazil. Mobility, aided by rivers and streams, facilitated social connections across a large region, creating links across a vast waterway system the Portuguese could not completely control. Though not positing an environmentally determinist explanation, Roller achieves a fine balance between environment shaping social formation as a factor in indigenous resilience. 

Colonial Maya of the Yucatan

Another short assignment for a class...

Nancy Farriss’s Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival endeavors to elucidate the process of colonization in the Yucatan from the perspective of the Maya themselves. Using traditional historical sources in addition to fieldwork, archaeological resources, and ethnographic writings, the author is able to formulate certain arguments on Maya social organization before conquest and clarify patterns of continuity and change in the social order during colonialism. The bulk of Farriss’s argument revolves around the notions of reciprocity and social bonds within fragmented polities that were rooted in extended family kinship and elites who presided over military and religious rituals as a source of legitimacy. Because of the lack of exportable resources and unattractive climate, Spanish colonial intrusion into the Yucatan was less devastating, incomplete, and the Spanish relied on the batabs and other Maya elites to enforce tribute and labor drafts to the small non-Indian population, gradually incorporating aspects of Maya preconquest social bonds into the colonial state and the Mayanized Christianity.

This aforementioned process left the Maya, though still unequal and exploited in colonial Yucatan, in a better position to preserve or retain past social and religious patterns with some degree of autonomy through the republicas de indios or the ever-present option of flight beyond the colonial frontier. According to Farriss, until the Bourbon reforms and liberal notions in the late 1700s and 19th century led to the growth of haciendas and changes in colonial governance that undermined adaptive strategies of Maya elites, Maya groups were able to retain access to land, continue certain forms of social bonds that made local Indian elites important in their communities, and avoid some of the harsher fates of Amerindian populations in other regions of Spanish America by remaining numerically superior. In short, the Maya were able to remain mobile corporate groups without being closed to colonial society. 

One particular problem in Farriss’s analysis is the problematic use of the ethnographic present to make assertions about the preconquest or colonial present. For example, Farriss cites a conversation with a 20th century Maya farmer who chooses not to send his child to school because his son will remain an “Indian.” This is supposed to match the Maya patterns of the colonial era of rarely escaping the stigmata of caste, an argument buttressed by the Spanish policy of not incorporating Maya nobility into colonial elite. However, if Farriss is also correct about the number of Maya who became mestizos and pardos without necessarily possessing racial mixture, does it not illustrate Maya escaping the caste category of Indian? Furthermore, as criados and naborías, “Indians” could escape some forms of caste tribute by entering a legal limbo category that also entailed socializing with mestizos, pardos, and some Spanish, even if they continued milpa agriculture on their own land or as tenants on haciendas. 

Moreover, the example of the Lacandon as an “unconquered” Maya group who exemplify certain Maya preconquest social norms in a smaller scale through patrilineal kinship are another potentially problematic use of the ethnographic present. If the Lacandon are descendants of Mayas who fled to unpacified frontiers and the bush to escape Spanish colonial rule, and, as Farriss asserts, their forms of social bonds have changed due to adaptation and flight, how reliable are they as possible models of past Maya conventions? Likewise, the Chilam Balam documents, cited as insightful ways into how the conquest-era Maya elite perceived themselves in their new role in society through a Christianized Maya cosmology and mythology, may not be useful for understanding preconquest social patterns, especially if the Maya elite’s origin during postconquest period were within the Mexican auxiliary forces during the conquest or former displaced elites or lineages. The larger question of broader Mesoamerican social patterns also raises questions as to what constitutes “Maya” in a fragmented and diverse region like the Yucatan. 

Arab and Seljuq Conquests

Another undergraduate class writing assignment...I'm embarrassed by this stuff but might as well...

Parallels in the Arab and Seljuq Conquests

            Both the Arab conquerors and Seljuq Turks were nomadic peoples who established states controlling agrarian populations in the Middle East. Since both groups originated among populations without centralized states, which includes bureaucracies, standing armies, and large urban centers, the process chosen by Arabs and Turks to build states reveals how pastoralist nomads played an essential role in new forms of state formation. For both conquering peoples, adoption of local customs, the incorporation of religion for moral legitimacy, and alliances with urban elites and the landed aristocracy were necessary to establish enduring states, as well as dependency to a certain degree on slave soldiers, or mamluks. However, the states established by the Arabs and Seljuqs were often short-lived, especially the Seljuq Sultanate, but the institutions of the state were upheld by successor states throughout the Middle East for centuries.

            The Seljuqs, Turkic-speaking nomads from Central Asia, left the steppes in the early 11^th century as war bands. Around 1025, the Seljuqs acted as military guardians of Khurasan for the Ghaznavids, a state established by mamluks in Afghanistan. From their humble beginnings as steppe warriors for the Ghaznavids, they defeated them after a 15 year guerrilla war to establish their own state. With their own territory, Khurasan, the Seljuqs used their religious identity as Sunnis who would save the powerless Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad to rally support from Central Asian pastoralists and local peoples of Iraq, Iran, and Khurasan. After taking Baghdad in 1055, they struck a deal with the Abbasid caliph, who still had some legitimacy to the Sunnis opposed to the Fatimid Shia in Egypt. This agreement included the caliph recognizing the Seljuq leadership as legitimate politically while relinquishing all political power himself, thereby creating a special title of sultan for the Seljuqs and keeping only nominal power.

This aforementioned deal, mutually beneficial to the Abbasid caliphs and Seljuqs eager for political legitimacy in the region, only came about through active Seljuq courting of the ulama in the cities. Without instituting state policies that supported Islamic learning through the establishment of madrasas, places of learning, and waqfs, or charitable foundations from Seljuq elites for the ulama or other needs, the ulama would not have given the additional support for religious and political legitimacy. Indeed, by the 11^th century, the ulama and specifically, the qadi, had attained enough influence and power that their support must have been sought by any state wanting legitimacy. The state support of the ulama led to an enduring political system through which religion and the state were irreparably tied in urban areas, as well as in terms of land distribution through the iqta, or redistribution of land to military commanders. These aspects of the Seljuq sultanate would live on in later dynasties and successor states, such as the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt, a state founded by military slaves themselves.

Unfortunately for the Seljuq dynasty, the pastoralist traditions of leadership, such as the primus inter pares ideal and decentralized leadership, led to no stable system of succession. By the third generation, feuds within the ruling house of the dynasty caused political fragmentation as the empire was carved into successor states. These newer states maintained the same institutions, however, regarding slave soldiers, waqfs, the iqta, and courting the favor of the ulama. The pastoralist, decentralized lifestyle and system of inheritance prevented the ruling house from maintaining a centralized empire, but the institutions fostered under this dynasty persisted under small Seljuq states that were expanding across Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert in 1071 and other regions of the Islamic world.

The Arab pastoralists who conquered the Middle East after the death of the prophet Muhammad in the 7^th century also developed new institutions to maintain a centralized political system. While the Seljuqs worked through the ulama, the Arab conquerors relied on their status as Muslims to unify warring Arab factions and differentiate themselves from the conquered dhimmis, or non-Muslims. Arab rulers did not encourage conversion to Islam, which provided them a constant source of revenue through the jizya tax. The diwan and the military garrisons also established ways to transcend tribal divisions by distributing wealth to Arab soldiers and, for some time under the Umayyad dynasty, separated the Arab elite from the conquered peoples.

This gradual assimilation of Arabs into the society of the conquered peoples went both ways, with fusion of pre-existing philosophy, architecture, art, and music from both the Arab tribes and the conquered peoples of North Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, this vast cultural complex developed into something one can only call Islamic because of its cosmopolitan nature and high degree of cultural miscegenation. While adopting cultural practices of the conquered peoples, the Ummayad rulers maintained their separate Arab identity through patronage of poetry that romanticized desert life and their nomadic past. Subsequent Arab dynasties would also maintain a separate Arab identity rooted in Islam and common ancestry, such as the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad’s claim to legitimate rule from their descent from al-Abbas, an uncle of the prophet Muhammad.

Moreover, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates also adopted political ideology of the conquered peoples. The Abbasids, for instance, appropriated Persian imperial symbolism and ideology after the conquest of Iran and the collapse of the Sassanians during the initial Arab conquest. The first Arabs to adopt Persian imperial ceremonies were actually Arab governors in Kufa and Basra, who likely adopted these practices to stabilize Arab military rule over the conquered peoples of Iran and Iraq. The caliph also came to resemble more and more an emperor because of the custom of isolating him, thereby elevating the position and inculcating a sense of awe. Furthermore, the Abbasids built their capital Baghdad near Ctesiphon, the former imperial capital of the Sassanian state, clearly to assert their imperial legacy and tradition to legitimize their rule. Baghdad was also planned as a circle, another political symbol asserting imperial perfection for their subjects. In addition, the construction of monumental architecture such as excessively extravagant palaces, mosques, or the Abbasid imperial capital in Samarra all indicate clear political symbols of the power of the caliphate. Instead of deriving their power solely from moral claims, the Abbasid caliphate increasingly became just another empire in a region with a long history of imperial ideology and symbolism embedded in court rituals, architecture, and displays of power.

Another way pastoralist-descended Arabs built enduring states was tolerance and incorporation of non-Muslims into the political system and the creation of a core bureaucracy. Christians and Jews, for example, were taxed through the jizya, but their religious leaders became their mediators between the Arab state and themselves. For instance, Arab ruling elites worked through Jewish community leaders in Fatimid Cairo such as the Gaon to keep the political machine functioning. Christian and Jews were also allowed to participate in the state itself, as bureaucrats, advisors, and agents of the state, which ensured that Arab Muslim dynasties were not solely unjust despots imposing their rule on servile populations. The Fatimids, as a Shia dynasty in a sea of Sunni Islam, best exemplify this tolerance and willingness to employ non-Arabs in service to a centralized state apparatus. The ulama naturally played a significant role in Arab dynasties as well, but, in the case of the Abbasids, usually outside of the caliph’s court because of its decadent and immoral entertainment. The importance of religious identity among people cannot be neglected, since Muslims began to see themselves as a pious community, or ummah, led by the ulama, during this period.

A contrasting case to both the Seljuqs and Arabs, the Mongols, illustrate one extreme direction pastoralist nomads took in administering conquered agrarian peoples. Their rise in the 13^th century under Temujin depended on extreme violence in the form of massacres, uniting all Mongols under his army, and adopting military innovations to conquer most of Eurasia. Temujin’s success in uniting Mongol tribes under one army, however, did not lead to a permanent, centralized state spanning across Eurasia from northern China to the Middle East, however. Their pastoralist ways, internal divisions, and political fragmentation was inevitable as the empire broke into separate khanates across Eurasia that assimilated into the conquered societies. Thus, unlike the Seljuqs and Arab pastoralists, the extreme violence but assimilationist policies of Mongol conquerors led to a multitude of short-lived states across a vast territory impossible to centralize. The Seljuqs and Arab nomads had pre-existing, centuries-old traditions of political centralization and religious institutions to manipulate that allowed their states in the Middle East to last longer and leave new political innovations, such as mamluks.

Therefore, state formation among pastoral nomads in the Middle East reveals how these decentralized peoples constructed states using religion, cooperation and cooptation of local peoples, embracing pluralistic societies, and adopting cultural and political systems already present among conquered peoples. With the aforementioned approaches, the Arab and Seljuq elite were able to establish a political framework for future states, even if their own collapsed within a few generations. The Seljuqs perhaps best exemplify this, since the decentralized nature of the steppe continued to hinder full centralization under the ruling sultan. The Mongol empire, which on the other hand also adopted local practices of conquered peoples, could not survive since their empire was too expansive and because of an absence of political legitimacy beyond fear instilled in subject peoples due to their massacres. The Mongols lacked a clear religious or political claim to legitimacy that would unite all under a single banner, and they left little new developments in state formation.

The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930

Rebecca Earle’s The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930 endeavors to examine the use of the Indian in elite constructions of the nation in Spanish America’s long nineteenth century. Earle’s book investigates this pattern in Spanish American elite creole nationalism via national history, museums, archaeology, iconography, genealogical metaphors, literature, art, folklore, and conceptions of citizenship and the “Indian problem.” Earle builds on the argument of David Brading about the Aztec past as a central part of Mexican nationalism but with a larger Latin America focus for parallels in elite discourse on nation and identity. In addition, Earle is influenced by Benedict Anderson’s work on the nation and imagined communities as well as other scholarship on nationalism to make a few bold claims on Spanish America as an innovator in nationalism and not behind the wheel in comparison to Europe.

Beginning with the independence struggles, Earle’s text examines the use of the feather-crowned Indian princess, Inca sun symbols across South America, narratives of Spanish conquest and colonialism as three centuries of tyranny, and the preconquest era as a past of freedom for revolutionaries. Hence, romanticized notions of the Incas or the preconquest societies as idealized groups wronged by Spanish colonialism became part of the invented past for a creole nationalism. However, Earle is careful to note how this changed over time as liberals and conservatives in various moments and locations appropriated the pre-colonial societies while maintaining their own elite positions and access to power, regardless of the lofty rhetoric used in praise of the preconquest civilizations or the metaphorical use of the Indian as a step-father in the patria. This pattern of continuing to privilege Iberian cultural practices in Spanish America while simultaneously appropriating the Indian as national symbol remains a constant throughout the period, even if masked in the language of cosmic race or mestizaje as in the case of Vasconcelos or attempts to “Mexicanize” the Indian under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas.

            Two major weaknesses of Earle’s book consist in the inconsistent and weak inclusion of the Spanish Caribbean and the negligence of Afro-descendants in the nations she examines. Surely, part of this reflects the different conditions in the Caribbean such as later dates of independence, but certain parallels continue in those regions where the indigenous population was no longer a factor. For instance, the appeal of the Taino in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico has been part of national myths, not to mention the Museo del Hombre in Santo Domingo’s extensive pre-conquest Hispaniolan artifacts. Although Earle briefly mentions the use of the Indian in pro-independence Cuban sentiments in the middle of the 19^th century, a fuller inclusion of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic would have added some nuance to her narrative as well as the role of race in regions with large populations of African descent like the Caribbean.

Furthermore, Earle’s book does not mention Afro-Latin Amerca at all, despite the presence of Afro-descendants in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, and studies of these population’s relationship with the state, immigration, racial theories, and modernity. Basic questions pertaining to differences in elite nationalisms regarding black populations or how creoles of African descent contemplated the nation and its relationship with indigenous communities are not considered here at all. The well-studied examples of the Liberals in Colombia and their relationship with Afro-Colombians would have provided an interesting example of how political parties in Spanish America approached the subject of popular liberalism or how they interacted with Conservatives or indigenous communities in defining the nation-state, for example. Were there parallels in elite imaginations of the patria’s vision of the Indian and black populations? Were there counterhegemonic forms of nationalist expression or resistance that united Indians and Afro-Latin Americans? Without including at least tangentially some of these questions, studying the role of the Indian in elite ideological formulations of the state obscures ideas of the nation. 

Slavery, Emancipation, and Antigua

Again with the class writing assignments, this time on post-emancipation Antigua.

Natasha Lightfoot’s Troubling Freedom examines the process of emancipation in 19^th century Antigua, a small sugar colony where conditions for emancipated peoples permitted fewer options for flight from the plantocracy. Unlike Jamaica, Trinidad, or other British colonies in the region, the freed people of Antigua, because most of the arable land was under the control of sugar plantations, did not have easy access to developing into a peasantry. Nonetheless, Lightfoot’s use of a variety of sources, ranging from newspapers and planters’ records to colonial government documents and travelers’ accounts, suggests freed people envisioned freedom and fought for it, albeit in ways that were sometimes contradictory or reproduced patterns of inequality, as the experience of Barbudans during the 1858 riots demonstrates.

Lightfoot’s suggestive account of postemancipation Antigua places gender at the center. While building on the arguments of Mimi Sheller, Thomas Holt, and other scholars of emancipation in the Caribbean, Lightfoot challenges common readings of uprisings and revolts as male, undermining traditional notions of overt slave resistance as a masculine endeavor. The prominence of women in the 1858 uprising, for example, exemplifies the significance of women as historical actors in postemancipation Antigua. Furthermore, women’s prominence in markets, trade, and labor on the estates indicates the complex process of freedom as neither teleological nor complete. For instance, the work of Moravian missionaries and attempts to limit market activity and non-monogamous relations directly targeted women, as did the low wages and exploitation on plantations after the Contract Law of 1834. Black men, through ideas of domesticity and patriarchal family models promoted by missionaries, also contributed to the marginalization of black working women, buttressing Lightfoot’s introduction of her monograph as an unromanticized reading of resistance.

However, in spite of allusions to freed people’s belief in certain rights not explicitly promised by the state, Lightfoot does not delve deeper into the question of popular democracy Sheller intriguingly argues for in the case of Haiti’s piquets or Jamaica’s Morant Bay Uprising movements. Obeah, spirituality, consumption, leisure and women’s agency are well integrated into Lightfoot’s account, but perhaps discussion of collective organizations in free villages could have strengthened Lightfoot’s conclusions on the 1858 uprising as an expression of the masses while reinforcing the importance of women in the public sphere. Moreover, were there other forms of collective organizing or bargaining besides itinerant labor gangs, such as agricultural societies or cooperatives to work land held by free villages? These questions, particularly in the case of Antigua and Barbuda, raise so many pertinent issues regarding labor, race, and democracy that may hint at alternative conceptions of the state and society.

Turning Slaves into Citizens: Revolutionary Guadeloupe and Caribbean Colombia

Again, I find myself posting old class assignments as blog posts. This one is a short assignment for a history class on slavery in the Atlantic World. 

            Caribbean Colombia and the French colony of Guadeloupe demonstrate comparable cases of the development of republicanism and citizenship tied to emancipation. Although the process of slave emancipation in these locations differed, both Guadeloupe and Colombia exemplify republicanism’s emancipatory trajectories in which citizenship was equated with military service, masculine virtue, and fealty to the state. Indeed, Laurent Dubois’s evocative argument pertaining to the appeal of republicanism to people of African descent in Guadeloupe finds undeniable resonance in the works of Marixa, Lasso, Aline Helg and Jason McGraw on Afro-Colombians. The two areas also exhibit the dilemma of a citizen-soldier model for emancipation and political rights in a republican government as well as illustrating the importance of national independence in these settings.

            Republicanism’s equation with abolition began in Guadeloupe during the course of the French Revolution. According to Laurent Dubois, enslaved insurgents in Guadeloupe expressed themselves by acting uninvited in the name of France.[1] For example, in 1793, a slave revolt at Trois-Rivières was justified by its participants in the name of the French Republic, defending it against royalist planters.[2] Steadily, French Republican officials in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe began to rely even further on slaves and free men of color as soldiers in order to preserve the colonies, a development that favored the ascension to higher military ranks for men of African descent while disrupting the plantation economy.[3] This notion of a citizen-soldier fighting in defense of France was tied to republican virtues of masculinity and part of the justification for citizenship or political rights. Dubois describes emancipation in this context as a transition from slavery to manhood, to become Republican husbands and soldiers.[4]

In return for emancipation and the rights of citizenship, former slaves were expected to fulfill the labor needs of a plantation colony, leading to coercive labor policies in both Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe. Influenced by Condorcet and Enlightenment thought, Victor Hugues and his successors prevented democratic rule in the colony, justifying it on the debt of former slaves to France to learn the value of work and produce commodities necessary for the colonial economy.[5] Indeed, administrators assumed freedpeople were degraded by slavery and lacking the skills necessary to participate in elections until a period of tutelage through service and labor on the plantations prepared them to enjoy the political rights contained in citizenship.[6] Accordingly, attempts by freedpeople to avoid plantation work were perceived as ungrateful and undeserving behavior of citizenship, and racialized cultural explanations adopted by Hugues to explain his lack of success in restoring the plantation economy revealed the persistence of racial discrimination.[7]

In Caribbean Colombia, a region in which people of African descent comprised the majority of the population, Marixa Lasso argues for a similar dynamic in which citizenship and emancipation are irrevocably tied with the republican nation. The prominence of men of African descent in the wars of independence in the region provided a path to emancipation while the wartime economic disruptions created opportunities for enslaved people to escape bondage.[8] Pardo or Afro-Colombian men were included in the Colombian national body because the Spanish Cortes of 1810 refused to grant them citizenship, creating an ideological wedge between Creole elites and Spain that favored the wars of independence as white Creoles and people of African descent pushed for an inclusive national body in opposition to the tyranny of Spanish colonial rule.[9] Resembling the French Republic’s emancipation and extension of rights for men of African descent who joined their cause against royalists and the British, Afro-Colombians joined white Creoles in the wars of independence because of opportunities for freedom and rights not recognized by Spain. In so doing, Creoles and pardos came to define the republic with liberty, emancipation, and racially inclusive legal practices, bestowing citizenship rights to men without regards to color. In fact, Afro-Colombians such as prominent veteran of the wars of independence Padilla envisioned a racially harmonious republic in which service to the patria was the main criterion of status rather than the legacy of racial hierarchies from the colonial past.[10] The nationalist character of Colombia’s republicanism also acted as a safeguard for Afro-Colombian’s political rights because the state was required to, at least rhetorically, support racial equality and commit to emancipation, albeit often through a gradualist approach such as free womb laws. This important distinction aided Afro-Colombians while people of color in Guadeloupe saw a reversal once France restored slavery. Intriguingly, like the eventual leaders of Haiti, Guadeloupe’s soldiers of African descent also considered national independence as a method of ensuring their rights.[11] This may be suggestive of the importance of nationalism for consolidating republican discourse’s promise of racial equality. McGraw argues persuasively for this association of equality in the Colombian context of public manumissions blending civic and religious holiday characteristics.[12]

Public manumission ceremonies and rituals became increasingly important ways to assert the connection between republican liberty and slave emancipation.[13] Concurring with Lasso, McGraw contextualizes public manumissions of the 1840s and 1850s in conceptions of republicanism, arguing that these public manumissions sought to create rituals of civic participation and embody the egalitarian rhetoric of citizenship in which all Colombian men were to enjoy.[14] Similar to revolutionary France’s emancipation of slaves, freedpeople were expected to show gratitude to the gift of the state.[15] Likewise, these rituals of citizenship after the 1848 decree of president Mosquera privileged the strongest and youngest slaves for freedom, tying masculinity, virility, and republican virtue of industry to freedom.[16] Besides identifying republicanism with emancipation, industry, and Colombian independence, public manumissions also served to include free people of color while simultaneously demonstrating that those who behaved honorably and obeyed authority would be guaranteed their rights.[17] Subsequently, emancipation in Colombia was also tied with a new liberal democratic conception of citizenship during the presidency of José Hilario López, achieving complete abolition and universal male suffrage.[18]

Whereas the final emancipation of slaves in Colombia did not occur until the 1850s, Guadeloupe’s former slaves were reenslaved from 1802 until 1848. Despite these differing paths to emancipation, a shared convergence of republicanism with emancipation and inclusion of men of African descent connects the two regions to broader patterns of emancipation. In both cases, a republicanist discourse of freedom excludes women from becoming citizen-soldiers capable of embodying masculine virtues, thereby justifying the removal of women of color from formal political participation. Similarly, a shared condescension from the Colombian state to the emancipated, displayed by their minimizing of the agency of Afro-Colombians in resisting slavery, imposed a specific meaning of freedom from above. The same dynamic emerges in Guadeloupe, where enslaved insurgents appropriated the discourse of republicanism and the French Revolution to assert their own rights, but still faced state attempts to monitor and control their labor, movement, and exercise of aforementioned republican rights. For Afro-Colombians, enduring discrimination contradicted the promise of racial equality embedded in Colombian independence and official discourse of racial harmony, although the wars of independence and other measures ensured the majority were already free before the final 1851 emancipation decree.

In addition, the predicament of governing a racially mixed and diverse population arose both in Guadeloupe and 19^th century Colombia. While espousing liberal values and sentiments, Bolivar’s attempts to institute a semi-monarchical constitution exemplify the persistence of racial fears, especially poignant in light of the recent Haitian Revolution. Skepticism of republicanism’s applicability in a racially mixed population illustrate what Aline Helg alludes to as the fear of a black political power and race war, or pardocracia.[19] Lasso refers to this as a concern stemming from white Creoles’ reading of Rousseau’s views on factional politics. Thus, the need to unify an ethnically diverse population led to the development of mestizaje as an ideal. Additionally, white Creoles such as Bolivar endeavored to change the constitution due to aforementioned racial concerns.[20] In Guadeloupe, Hugues also justified his autocratic rule of Guadeloupe on the grounds of its diverse population of whites, blacks of various African ethnic origins, and people of color, each group allegedly opposed to the other.[21] Mestizaje was not a goal of state policy in Guadeloupe, but a similar concern with the inapplicability of republican principles in a heterogeneous society in which whites were a minority ties revolutionary-era Guadeloupe to Colombia’s paradoxical association of republicanism with racial equality.

In summation, republicanism predicated on the aforementioned citizen-soldier model in which the state identifies itself with emancipation resulted in contradictory practices. Men of African descent were able to lay claim to political rights on the grounds of their military service and manhood. However, it failed to ensure access to equality in practice while perpetuating patriarchal conceptions of society. Concerns among white elites or politicians regarding the participation of blacks in the exercise of authority or the specter of race war further restricted the meaning of freedom by weakening explicit racial grievances or pushing gradual emancipation in Colombia. In Guadeloupe, where a nationalist struggle did not materialize, the metropole’s decision to revoke emancipation led to re-enslavement. Afro-Colombians, however, were able to justify their demands for racial equality and freedom in accordance with national republican notions, though white elites, as well as gender and social limitations of Afro-Colombian military veterans’ could weaken attempts to express their grievances as a racial group.

Bibliography

Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Helg, Aline. "Simón Bolívar and the Spectre of "Pardocracia": José Padilla in Post-Independence Cartagena." Journal of Latin American Studies 35, no. 3 (2003): 447-71.

Lasso, Marixa. "Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832." The American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 336-61.

McGraw, Jason. "Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia," Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 268-288.

---

[1] Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 89.

[2] Ibid, 129.

[3] Ibid, 148.

[4] Ibid, 162.

[5] Ibid, 185.

[6] Ibid, 180.

[7] Ibid, 198.

[8] Marixa Lasso, "Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832."  The American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 353.

[9] Ibid, 344.

[10] Aline Helg, "Simón Bolívar and the Spectre of "Pardocracia": José Padilla in Post-Independence Cartagena." Journal of Latin American Studies 35, no. 3 (2003): 453.

[11] Dubois, 387.

[12] Jason McGraw, "Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia," Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 272.

[13] Lasso, 348.

[14] McGraw, 280.

[15] Ibid, 281.

[16] Ibid, 280.

[17] Ibid, 282.

[18] Ibid, 277.

[19] Helg, 455.

[20] Lasso, 350.

[21] Dubois, 286.

Chicago Jazz

The following is another simple class assignment based on a chapter from a cultural history of jazz in Chicago. The main purpose of the short assignment was to summarize a reading and offer some questions or different interpretations. The one thing I learned from this book, as well as several articles and texts on Chicago's jazz scene, is how detailed and important "jazz studies" can be.

“The Evolution of South Side Chicago Jazz,” from Kenney’s Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, overviews the shifts in jazz music and performance in 1920s Chicago. According to Kenney, jazz music was increasingly professionalized through cabaret performances, stylistic expectations of dress, specialized musical training through formal or informal means, new repertoire that included more popular songs, the rise of a star system instead of folk anonymity, and instrumental virtuosity, perhaps best exemplified in the skills of Louis Armstrong. 

The movement of jazz musicians to Chicago led to performing for mixed audiences, absorption of Anglo-American musical culture, exposure to formal music theory, and “calculated primitivism” to appeal to some of the tastes and expectations of white audiences. Furthermore, African American composers, performers, and songwriters contributed to the standardization of twelve-bar blues, in addition to adopting faster tempos. In short, jazz’s evolution on the South Side contributed to a professionalization of jazz musicians and a commitment to music and instrumental virtuosity. 

In addition, the regional diversity of Chicago as well as its black population’s heterogeneity appears to have been a major factor in the evolution of jazz. Lil Hardin, for instance, did not come from New Orleans, and brought with her piano skills a formal music education background. Earl Hines also did not come from Louisiana, and black migrants to Chicago who were natives of the North or possessed a formal musical education, assisted in the professionalization of jazz, musical talent, and performance. 

Moreover, the diversity of Chicago’s white population similarly contributed to jazz. Armstrong, for example, studied with a German teacher, plus other jazz artists of the studied clarinet under Franz Schoepp, who also taught Benny Goodman. Chicago, though segregated, proved conducive to music education and a blending of musical cultures.

Rambling Essay on Naipaul's Mimic Men

Below is an awkward essay I wrote on Naipaul's Mimic Men. I think I lost a sense of direction while writing this (while trying to bring in a little bit of Glissant and some other writings from the literature course), but anything Naipaul is interesting, so I hope this isn't too horrible.

V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men allows for thought-provoking contemplation of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Guha’s “The migrant’s Time.” As a novelist of Caribbean origins, Naipaul’s upbringing in a racially and culturally mixed Trinidadian society invites analysis from fellow-Caribbean author Glissant’s concepts. In addition, Guha’s article on the migrant experience is relevant to the protagonist of the novel, Ralph Singh, who experiences exile or the migrant life in London. However, both Glissantian Poetics of Relation and Guha’s Migrant’s Time miss the universalistic implications of Naipaul’s oeuvre. A close reading of The Mimic Men therefore challenges the reader to think beyond the experiences of exile or migration while providing an example to think critically through rhizomatic approaches to identity from Glissant. This essay will begin with Guha’s heterogeneous temporalities and migration, applying it critically to Naipaul before examining Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in the context of Ralph Singh, a deracinated Indo-Caribbean migrant (or exile) living in a Kensington hotel. The significance of mimicry in this context will shed light on relationality as a contradictory tactic against totalitarian roots.

Guha’s notion of migrant’s time brings to the forefront the temporal and spatial configuration of a migrant. The temporal and spatial ousting, or feeling of adrift is central (Guha 156). According to Guha, “There is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intelligible to each other except by temporalizing their experience of being together” (156). The importance of temporality in shaping community or sense of belonging is central to Ralph Singh, narrator and author of the fictive memoir which constitutes The Mimic Men. By shifting chronologically in his memoir, Singh temporalizes his experience of childhood in Isabella, the fictionalized Trinidad of Naipaul’s youth, as well as imbuing his university student days in England and experience as a politician in his island homeland with spatio-temporal attributes that resist linearity. Accordingly, for Singh, it never occurred to him “that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life" (Naipaul 293). The end of writing his memoir in such a manner that resists linearity while functioning as an additional part of his life, speaks volumes to the heterogeneous temporalities embedded in the structure of the novel. The multiple temporalities of the novel also functions to show the inability of Singh to connect or relate with those around him. For example, during his youth in Isabella, he often dreams of an imagined Indo-Aryan ancestry in Asia which, though only a few generations removed, cannot be found in the disorder of the Caribbean colonial society that developed from slavery (146). Imagining an Aryan past allows for Singh to claim some kinship or relation to a distant past, which also disconnects him from the rest of Isabella. Thus, because of a lack of similar spatio-temporal overlap with other people of Isabella, Singh experiences a mismatch in the black and white world of the colonial Caribbean.

Even before arriving in England, the indeterminateness of Singh’s ethnic community in Isabella is central to his feeling of being shipwrecked. Once in London, he feels, “Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter” (32). This sense of being adrift, beginning in the island of his birth, illustrates the spatio-temporal disconnect between Singh and those he was socialized with in Isabella.  However, this feeling of disconnect lingers in England, the colonial metropole. Guha wrote of a mismatch of the migrant’s everydayness and that of their host community (Guha 158). Singh’s experience as a student and later exile appears to affirm that experience. However, Singh also experiences a sense of freedom in London, where “There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship" (Naipaul 24). Despite this relative freedom from his past experience as a colonial subject in Isabella, he chooses to perpetuate the limited expression and stereotypical roles assigned to the colonized subject. His experience of “assimilation” is one of mimetic play, assimilating into what the metropole made open to subjects as a colonial dandy. Singh’s inexorable drift and attempt to assimilate mark him as alien, per Guha (Guha 159). Naipaul’s protagonist is unable to connect with those around him in Isabella, despite a shared mimetic relationship with regards to the colonial metropole, nor is he able to find connection in London, where the illusion of connection and the individual cells of urban life create disorder (Naipaul 22). Significantly, intimacy, particularly sexual relationships and Singh’s marriage, do not allow him to express deeper kinship or transcend the individual (22).

Perhaps most intriguing to Guha, Singh’s experience of youth of and politics in creole Isabella is one of disorder and half-societies, imitating ideas and slogans of England in a context of inapplicability. Guha saw creole societies as spaces of creative overcoming of translation (Guha 159). For Singh, however, the ‘creole’ space of Isabella represented racial, ethnic, political, and social disorder. Disorder, wrought by colonialism, slavery and mimicry of the metropole, leads to Singh declaring the following:

A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes. (Naipaul 248)

In other words, the creole character of Isabella made Singh feel alienated and castaway, but also removed from his Indian roots. Mixed-race characters also cause a similar feeling for Singh, who sees them as contributing to the disorderly nature of a colonial society in which ties to the landscape are inorganic, even for descendants of indigenous Caribs absorbed by intermarriage (146). Thus, creole nature of society in Isabella is inextricably woven into Singh’s search for order, only to find disorder in the colony and seat of Empire. Furthermore, this serves to illustrate the complexity of migrant’s time for those of double Diasporas, as descendants of Indian indentured laborers in the Caribbean who later move to England. The uprootedness and heterogeneous temporalities of such communities speaks to a larger problem of identity that can be experienced by non-migrants as well.

However, Glissant’s concept of poetics of relation may be more useful for reconsidering rootedness, movement, and identity for double or triple Diasporas, such as Singh. For Glissant, relations are to be found in a rhizome-like sense of rootedness, or one without totalitarian roots. In other words, each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other, acting as a kind of anticonformism (Glissant 11). According to Glissant, “Thus the particular resists a generalizing universal and soon begets specific and local senses of identity, in concentric circles (provinces then nations)” (14). Glissantian reconceptualization of identity and rootedness is inherently flexible, creating room for Indo-Caribbean identity within the spectrum of Caribbean cultures. In addition, relation is made up of shared knowledge, which undoubtedly reflects the shared experiences of people of a variety of racial or ethnic backgrounds in Isabella. In The Mimic Men, such a perspective is not on the table, although the shared knowledge of Singh and his classmates at the Imperial School, including his black political partner, Browne, indicate a relationality based on colonialism. This, in turn, demonstrates Glissant’s argument on the totalitarian root of colonialism, which in turn shaped the totalitarian drive for a single root in postcolonial nationalism (14). The limitations of such a totalitarian root appear in Singh’s experience, particularly with regards to the continued dependence on England reducing the meaning of independence to playacting (Naipaul 227).

Singh does not experience Isabella through a rhizomatic approach, despite his birth there, and as an alienated colonial subject, whose education inculcates the importance of England, does not identify with the landscape or people of the island. Indeed, he marvels at the cohesion of Isabella:
I had never thought of obedience as a problem. Now it seemed to me the miracle of society. Given our situation, anarchy was endless, unless we acted right away. But on power and the consolidation of passing power we wasted our energies, until the bigger truth came: that in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, no link between man and the landscape, a society not held together by common interests, there was no true internal source of power, and that no power was real which did not come from the outside. Such was the controlled chaos we had, with such enthusiasm, brought upon ourselves. (246)

Colonialism is the force that held it together, creating a controlled chaos in which Singh believed himself to be adrift. Attempting to fill the vacuum left by decolonization with a totalitarian root of nationalism only exacerbated the contradictions of a society in which politicians appropriated concepts and slogans of the metropole without thought. Socialism, or nationalization, for instance, characterize the misplaced mimicry of kinship to England that does not rethink the implications of non-Caribbean ideas in a Caribbean reality. Thus, the socialism of Singh and Browne disappears after the first issue of their paper (223). For Singh, "The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost” (10).

Intriguingly, Glissant’s concept of internal exile is perhaps most relevant to the experience of Singh. Glissant defines it as occurring to individuals living where solutions concerning the relationship of community to its surroundings are not consented to by the community as a whole (Glissant 19). For The Mimic Men, Singh’s experiences internal exile within Isabella because of the entrenched racial divisions that separate the population from determining its relationship to the island as a whole. Divided by generation, race, and class, Singh cannot identify with Isabella but becomes an exile from his home. As a child, the family home was to be kept separate from the intrusion of school and community, which gradually infiltrates his experience without his or his family’s consent through exposure to the interiority of life for other racial groups, particularly working-class black Browne and French Creole Deschampsneufs. By not opening himself to a rhizome-like understanding of relation, Singh is unable to escape the internal exile of his youth or career as a politician, eventually choosing permanent exile in a Kensington hotel. As mentioned previously, the heterogeneous temporalities put forth by Guha help to illuminate why Singh’s struggles to assimilate or find kinship in London. An internal alienation and exile also explains why Singh encounters similarly exiled Londoners who are playing with social identities, political affiliations, or rebelliousness, such as university students playing at being iconoclasts (Naipaul 50). Playacting of meaning does not confer kinship, or lasting kinship, for neither Singh nor the white characters he encounters in London.

On the universal features of rootedness, however, Glissantian poetics of relation elucidate the struggle against a totalitarian root as well as the struggle of internal exile. Moreover, a rhizomatic understanding of rootedness and belonging also presents to us the mimicry at work in English society, such as the aforementioned university students. Indeed, while birth “on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder", London was not a refuge (141). In fact, Singh finds himself dreaming of landscapes he knew before after settling in London, the very “escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from" (36). In London he is not a Londoner, nor in Isabella does he belong. Mimetic expressions of identity do not allow for an escape from this conundrum. Similarly, numerous white characters, including English-born residents, are adrift metaphorically or socially. The other residents of the hotel in which Singh decides to take permanent residence are described as follows:

But we who belong here are neither maimed nor very old. Three-quarters of the men here are of my age; they have responsible jobs to which they go off in their motorcars every morning. We are people who for one reason or another have withdrawn, from our respective countries, from the city where we find ourselves, from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our lives. I cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It comforts me to think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and thousands like ourselves (296).

Singh’s co-residents, in a building designed for temporary living, find solace and belonging in a space defined by transience. They have chosen to simplify their lives and remove themselves from their nationalities, cities, and families, deliberately choosing non-relation with established or conventional forms of belonging. The residents of the hotel, through a shared space that allows for individual expression, have some semblance of rootedness, despite the transitory nature of the space they occupy. A rhizomatic construct of identity aids in understanding the broadly shared experience of alienation and mimicry in social roles that occurs in a colonial setting or the center of Empire.

In summation, Guha’s Migrant’s Time and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation pave the path for deeper interpretation of The Mimic Men while suffering their own limitations. The experience of Singh, both internal exile in Isabella and exile in London, challenges Guha’s conceptions by looking at individual displacement from local vantage points or afar. Glissantian concepts such as internal exile assist in interpreting Singh’s displacement in the land of his birth, while perhaps speaking to the general conditions of life in the city which, despite the conglomeration of people, prove illusory for kinship. Mimetic expressions of being and belonging allow for one to perform the roles forced upon on, or to temporarily endeavor to create or define meaning, albeit of an illusory nature for Singh. Utilizing the figure of rhizome roots rather than a singular root permits the identification with a multiplicity of origins or ties, pertinent to creolization and a “disorderly” society such as Isabella. Undoubtedly, inclusion of white characters in the novel contributes to thinking about migration and movement broadly, including forms of rootedness and rootlessness among Singh’s housemates in the hotel. Mimicry of social conventions, roles, or family do not create authentic forms of being for Singh, even when in relation to other forms, because it helps prevent one from expressing an authentic individualized self, albeit one that still requires relationality and flux.