Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Campbell, Peter

postwar period, Hungary, for example, had more in common with its co-imperial-
ist power Austria then it did with Tsarist Russia. Thus, why consider the two
regions side-by-side? At the very least, it would have been useful for the authors to
have addressed the hotly contested issue of defining the borders (mental and geo-
graphic) of Eastern Europe, rather than to have simply subsumed East European
countries within the Russian sphere of history.
This complaint notwithstanding, I highly recommend Turizm to historians
concerned with such issues as transnational developments in leisure and consumer
culture, as well as the role of culture (broadly understood) in modern nation and
state building. Filled with rich detail and analysis, Gorsuch and Koenker’s volume
successfully brings tourism history, and the socialist experience of modernity, out
of the historical ghetto and into the mainstream—where they both belong.
Michelle A. Standley
New York University
Eugene Gogol, Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism (Eugene,
Oregon: Resource Publications, 2004).
Raya Dunayevskaya (Rae Spiegel) was born in the Ukraine in 1910. In 1922 she
moved to Chicago with her family, where she joined the Communist youth organ-
ization the Young Workers League, and worked in the offices of the American
Negro Labour Congress’ paper, the Negro Champion. Expelled in 1928 for
Trotskyism, she served as Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in Mexico in the late
1930s. In the early 1940s, as a member of the Workers Party, Dunayevskaya joined
forces with C.L.R. James, perhaps best known for his history of the Haitian slave
revolt, The Black Jacobins. Known as the State-Capitalist Tendency, in 1945 they
became the Johnson (James) - Forest (Dunayevskaya) Tendency. Along with co-
leader Grace Lee, they led the Tendency in the Workers Party, then as a minority
in the Socialist Workers Party, then as an independent group. In 1955 the
Tendency split apart, with Dunayevskaya and her followers creating the paperNews
and Letters, which continues to this day. Dunayeskaya herself died in 1987.
Eugene Gogol’s work Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist Humanism
presents Dunayevskaya’s ideas by means of long quotations and a minimum of his
own analysis. In this work Gogol, who was one of Dunayevskaya’s secretaries in
the 1980s and the editor of News and Letters from 1980 to 1992, is not so much
writer as reporter. At times Gogol himself is almost invisible, in one sense an
admirable act of self-effacement, in another a worrisome abdication of his respon-
sibilities as author. The book is repetitive, at times frustratingly so. We are present-
ed with aspects of Dunayevskaya’s life and work over and over again, yet come
away from the book knowing remarkably little about her, or about many of the peo-
Book Reviews204
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 204
ple who worked with and supported her. We are left as much with an iconic figure
as with a flesh and blood human being.
In 1976 Raya Dunayevskaya described other left thinkers as “a lot of
nobodies who call themselves Marxists” (233). Most readers will find a writer and
activist who critiqued the vanguard party and the elitism of more important revo-
lutionaries than herself claiming to have gone beyond them a bit hard to take.
Gogol claims, as did Dunayevskaya herself, that the theory of state capitalism as
applied to the Soviet Union under Stalin was her theory. Dunayevskaya may have
been the theory’s most important and insightful advocate—Tony Cliff supporters
may disagree—but the reader needs to know that the Industrial Workers of the
World, the Council Communists, and other leftists had theorized the Soviet Union
as state capitalist years before Dunayevskaya developed her theory. The lack of
generosity here, the failure to acknowledge that Dunayevskaya was the inheritor of
the work of other leftists, is a troubling, but not surprising assertion about a woman
who claimed to be the only Marxist of her generation to understand Marx (215).
In addition, Gogol provides the reader with little sense of Dunayevskaya’s
place in the mid-twentieth century sweep of Marxist humanism. For Gogol, other
advocates of Marxist humanism do not exist, because Dunayevskaya created
Marxist Humanism with a capital ‘H’. A quick perusal of the Marxist Internet
Archives (MIA) site provides the reader with a better sense of Dunayevskaya and
her place than does Gogol’s book. The MIA acknowledges Gogol’s point that
Dunayevskaya played a crucial role in disseminating the concept of Marxist human-
ism by providing the first English translation of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, but it goes
beyond him by locating her in relation to the ex-Stalinist academics who theorized
Marxist humanism in the era of the New Left. Gogol’s index has no entries for
Ernst Bloch, C. Wright Mills, Marshall Berman, Isaac Deutscher, Edward
Thompson, or a number of other prominent thinkers and writers. Even Erich
Fromm, a longtime correspondent and confidante of Dunayevskaya, is missing.
Only Hegel and Marx scholars will understand, and likely appreciate, long,
detailed discussions of Hegel’s absolutes, Hegel’s dialectics and the centrality of the
concept of double negation. Gogol gets so immersed in Dunayevskaya’s own
immersion in Hegel that he does not allow the reader to come up for air, or to stand
back and appreciate the ways in which Dunayevskaya’s Marxist Humanism allowed
her to refute postmodernism. Gogol begins by observing that “much postmodern
thought denies the idea of revolution, denounces any revolutionary role for dialec-
tical thought, and questions the existence of revolutionary subjectivity” (1), but fails
to fully develop the insight in the body of the book. More relevant to many read-
ers than Hegel’s brilliance and his profound influence on Marx is the book’s indi-
rect revelation of Dunayevskaya’s critique of the falsity of much postmodern criti-
cism of Marxism, especially the aspect of postmodernism that condemns Marx for
positing the working class as the subject of history. Dunayevskaya, before post-
modernism was well known in North America, had already negated its critique by
Left History 12.2 205
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pointing out that in the project of overthrowing capitalism’s rule the problem is that
the working class and the peasantry have not been the subject of history, not that
they have. By the 1960s Dunayevskaya and News and Letters were already positing
African Americans, youth, and women as the subjects of history, and actively par-
ticipating in their struggles. Dunayevskaya understood that postmodernism is one
of the ‘cultural substitutes’ for genuine revolution put in place by people excusing
their failure to fight for the total reorganization of capitalist society (225).
The truth, eloquence and continuing relevance of Raya Dunayevskaya’s
impressive body of work is here, but the reader will need to be patient and open-
minded. Readers up to the challenge will discover Dunayevskaya’s brilliant obser-
vation that Marx’s labour theory of value is really a value theory of labour. They
will come to appreciate Dunayevskaya’s powerful evocation of the need to realize
the innate abilities of the world’s men and women through the negation of class
rule, racism, and misogyny. They will be impressed by Dunayevskaya’s insistence
that News and Letters be a paper edited by a wage worker that features the voices of
workers, women, people of colour, inmates, and other prisoners of the Capitalist
Dream. For these reasons alone Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism
is well worth reading. Readers may emerge from the experience uneasy at Gogol’s
unquestioning adulation of Dunayevskaya, but willing to concede that she points us
beyond totalitarianism, rampant capitalism and postmodernism to a more human
future.
Peter Campbell
Queen’s University
Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties
in African History (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006).
The ambition suggested in Bonny Ibhawoh’s Imperialism and Human Rights is a bit
misleading as the book focuses closely on colonial Nigeria and not the entire con-
tinent, but the issues raised here fit in the bigger discussion among historians who
are trying to map the antecedents of the human rights movement. Ibhawoh traces
the uses of a rights discourse by colonial elites against the colonial government. His
aim is twofold: first, to demonstrate that a rights discourse was appropriated by
Africans who used it to position themselves politically across a broad array of con-
tested issues such as antislavery, property rights, the colonial legal system and cus-
tomary law, and, second, to interrogate the politics of this rights discourse which
often shored up the interests of a colonial elite against other indigenous political
powers.
In concluding his study, Ibhawoh wryly remarks that the practitioners of
the rights discourse who acceded to power after independence abandoned this pol-
Book Reviews206
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Eugene Gogol - Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism

Flaherty, Jane

provide a partial treatment of imagined social and national identities in this bor-
derlands region. It also serves as a good starting point for further inquiry.
Michelle Rhodes—University College of the Fraser Valley
Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican
Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
Mark A. Lause, an Associate Professor of history at the University of Cincinnati,
has distinguished himself as a keen analyst of the insurgencies that influenced
mainstream politics throughout the nineteenth century. He continues this schol-
arship with his fine study of the National Reform Association (NRA). This organ-
ization carried to the fore the concerns working class Americans had for land
reform. Lause argues effectively that the “NRA’s agrarianism formed a persistent
and underlying theme for the later working-class movement” (129). Lause demon-
strates how the agrarian movement of the antebellum period succeeded in secur-
ing the “Republican” Homestead Act of 1862, and also laid the ideological
groundwork for the rise of fraternal organizations of the postbellum period. With
this work, Lause demonstrates the intellectual connection between agitation that
‘peaked’ in the years 1850-52, with the later movements known as Greenbackism,
the Single Tax proposal of Henry George, and other “non-electoral communitar-
ian, socialist musings” that gripped national politics in the late-nineteenth century.
But the organization’s influence also helped to “mobilize public opinion strong
enough to topple the slaveholders’ party from office” (133). Thus we find in
Lause’s work a critical link between antebellum political agitation and the social
radicalism of the late-nineteenth century.
The leaders of the National Reform Association understood initially that
“theirs was but a partial white, urban, Anglo-American perspective on the work-
ing-class experience” (2). Yet, their message, according to Lause, appealed to a
broader segment of the working class then the anti-monopoly rhetoric of the
Locofocos. National Reformers advocated three principal and inter-related meas-
ures. First, they pushed at the state level for debt reform and the end of proper-
ty seizures. Second, homestead legislation that would “permit the free settlement
of the landless on the public domain.” Third, reformers wanted to eliminate spec-
ulation by limiting the amount of land any one individual could own (3). As the
NRA spread from an eastern, urban, working-class movement into the Midwest
and West, they embraced another set of “secondary” or “auxiliary” movements,
including the ten-hour workday, direct election of government officers, and “abo-
lition of practices ranging from the Electoral College to slavery.” According to
Lause, National Reformers also consistently defended newcomers to the country,
urged peace, and fostered international associations” (3). While most scholars
focus on the impact these undercurrents had on the Democratic Party, Lause con-
tends that it was the Republican Party that benefited most (but ultimately learned
Book Reviews136
the least) from the ideals expressed through this movement (112-123). Though no
formal membership lists of this organization survive, their influence spread
nationally through newspapers and local congresses and workers’ organizations
throughout the East and ‘West’ (upper Midwest).
Lause refutes the long-standing notion the northern workers remained indif-
fe rent to abolitionist calls for emancipation and civil dignity for A f r i c a n -
Americans. “Land reform,” Lause insists, “became a multiracial movement
through the direct and deliberate efforts of NRA leaders” (82). The NRA leader-
ship rejected “racial supremacy” as a unifying factor, instead insisting that the
NRA felt “frustration with an early abolitionist tendency to idealize the lot of ‘free
labour’.” The NRA instead linked “free homes for people” to “freedom from the
curse of chattel slavery” (78-80). “Most fundamentally,” Lause argues, “the NRA’s
successful embedding of land reform into an emerging ideology of “free labour”
thoroughly transformed the way working people in “free states” saw the question
(5). It was the agitation for land reform that helped create a broader public con-
sensus for the cause of abolitionism.
The title of this book may initially confuse readers more familiar with the
expansionist Young America movement. In one brief paragraph Lause differen-
tiates between ‘his’ Young America movement and the other one that is well
known for its embrace of Manifest Destiny. “The NRA called itself ‘Young
America’ to reecho the concerns of ‘Young Europe’ … This has caused some con-
fusion among scholars because the label is also applied to an expansionist literary
circle” centered on John O’Sullivan and the Democratic Review. Lause explains that
“participants in the agrarian ‘Young America’ and the expansionist ‘Young
America’ shared an earlier proclivity for the party of Andrew Jackson and roman-
tic vision of American destiny, but what they advocated was not only different but
mutually exclusive” (76). This corrective needs to appear sooner, because the
‘other’ Young America movement has received far more attention from scholars,
most recently in a paper by Yontan Eyal in Civil War History. Lause should have
done a better job of distinguishing these separate groups who shared the same
name, and rose to prominence during the same period.
He also would have helped his readers if he had added a brief summary of
the groups through which the NRA exerted its influence. This reader found the
various acronyms and names of different reformers confusing. Finally, Lause
expends little ink on the biographies of the individual leaders of the NRA, a sur-
prise since he wrote a fine political biography of James B. Weaver. We learn little
about George Henry Evans or Lucius A. Hine. NRA reformer Alvan E. Bovay
emerged as one of the ‘Ripon Founders’ of the Republican Party, yet Lause does
not show clearly how this one individual evolved from agrarian activist to Black
Republican. This represents a lamentable loss since history, more than anything
else, attempts to explain how ideas shaped events and people. Lause did not illu-
minate the human aspect of this story.
Left History 12.1 137
Because of these limitations, I would caution against assigning this book to
undergraduates, unless they have a strong background in labour and political his-
tory. Even graduate students will need a brief introduction before they jump in.
Despite these limitations, Lause once again does a great job of showing the depth
of political currents during this period. He demonstrates the link between ante-
bellum land reform ideals and the rise of post-bellum radicalism, and carries the
political history of period beyond the constraints of sectional strife.
Jane Flaherty—Texas A&M University
Shelton Stro m q u i s t , Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive
Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
In Reinventing “The People” Stromquist offers an elegant synthesis of recent work on
the Progressive movement and a nuanced analysis of the importance of class for
understanding reform. Integrating scholarship in political, urban, women’s, and
labour history with insightful archival investigations, Stromquist captures key ten-
sions at the heart of progressivism. Most reformers responded to the dislocations
and unrest generated by industrial capitalism with proposals to renew democracy
and promote social harmony while minimizing the importance of class. Radical,
labour-oriented reformers, however, struggled to maintain a focus on economic
inequalities against a middle-class core of activists. The latter worked to empow-
er “the people” even as they excluded recent immigrants and African Americans
from full citizenship. Ultimately, violent clashes between labour and capital from
1909 through 1914 and during the immediate postwar period shook Progressives’
faith in prospects for cross-class harmony. Yet Stromquist argues that progres-
sivism left a fundamental legacy to twentieth-century liberalism: a denial that struc-
tural class inequalities matter in American society.
Stromquist defines the Progressive movement primarily in terms of ideology
and networks. Drawing significantly on republican ideology, early twentieth-cen-
tury reformers hoped to redefine ‘the people’ in order to exclude corrupting influ-
ences such as party bosses and corporate monopolists. A new language of reform,
shaped especially by muckraking journalists, stressed social harmony and the need
to transcend class differences. Progressives also created networks across diverse
communities, which Stromquist perceptively reconstructs. Linking settlement
houses, social work conferences, the National Consumers League, the National
Child Labour Committee, Women’s Trade Union League, and the Progressive
Party of 1912, Stromquist connects reformers who advanced a common vision of
civic harmony. Middle-class activists dominated these largely nonpartisan reform
networks. At times, women organized along lines of shared feminine identities to
bridge class divisions. But Stromquist is also sensitive to assertions of defiance by
working-class women, as during the ‘uprising of the 20,000’.
Book Reviews138


Mark A. Lause - Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican Community

Dorfman, Ben

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude is the sequel to their Empire (2000)—
Empire being one of the rare books to cross the line between academics and ‘pop-
ular’ literature, largely via the interests of leftists and global reform movements.
The theses of Empire were on one hand original and on the other hand an amal-
gamation of already-existing literature from Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser,
Foucault, and various sociological and cultural studies in globalization. As the cur-
rent reviewer noted in his review of Empire, that book may represent the work of
postmodern Marxism par excellence (see Left History 8.2). The essential move in
Empire was to renovate Marxist theory via an Althusserian emphasis on intellectu-
al labour, considerations of modes of post-industrial production and the positing
of a radical asymmetry and shifting multiplicity in productive identities. Herein,
Marx’s bourgeoisie and proletariat became inter- and transnationalized (tendencies
already present in much of Marx’s work), replaced, as such, by ‘empire’ and ‘mul-
titude’. ‘Empire’ is the global system understood in what might be thought of as
fully global terms. ‘Empire’ is all material and immaterial experiences, commodi-
ties, and identities viewed in connection with the shifting and multiplicitous net-
works that produce them. The innovation on Marxist theory is that ‘empire’ plays
the role of Marx’s bourgeoisie. In the global age, Hardt and Negri assert, it is the
system that profits and reproduces itself, gaining more power at the same time that
it sets up the terms of its own demise. The role of the proletariat is played by
‘multitude’. ‘Multitude’ is the human producers of empire who variously find
themselves exploited by it yet establish a common identity in the course of that
exploitation.
As a book, Multitude is the story of multitude as well as an exercise in
speculation on its possibilities. Hardt and Negri are clear to differentiate multitude
from ‘the people’. Compared with ‘multitude’, ‘the people’ presumes levels of
identity and experiential homogeneity that Hardt and Negri seek to deny. Instead,
multitude is asymmetrical and relative wherein actors assume multiple identities,
organize themselves in diverse ways and refract their experiences through the var-
ied communicative mediums and modes of experience. The diversity of those
experiences and mediums define multitude’s collectivity. According to Hardt and
Negri, the history of multitude was forged in the transition in various parts of the
world from industrial to post-industrial economics, and then again in the joining
of post-industrial, industrial, and agricultural economies into a single global pro-
ductive and consumptive systematic. As an interconnected system founded upon
multiplicitous and shifting identities, this system (‘empire’) exercises what Hardt
and Negri term ‘biopolitical power’. This is a thoroughgoing ability to create and
react to multiple identities and subjectivities. Hardt and Negri posit ‘biopolitical
power’ as taking into account all dimensions of human experience, from, e.g., the
Left History 12.1 171
life of the environment to communicative experience to structures of political
administration and bureaucracy.
What gives Multitude perhaps its highest level of value is its ability to syn-
thesize and express in direct terms sentiments held by many educated publics con-
cerning the contemporary global order. This is especially the case in the wake of
September 11. Central to the text is the relatively simple but nonetheless provoca-
tive assertion that the contemporary world is a world of war and conflict. Hardt
and Negri comprehend this in traditional military terms as well as in terms of
guerrilla conflict, terrorism and the multiple ‘swarm’ organized global protest
movements and events (Seattle 1999, e.g., remains their paragon in this regard).
Beyond dematerialized and radically inter- and transnationalized economic net-
works, the global state of conflict is, in Hardt and Negri’s estimation, empire’s
most effective tool. It goes a long way toward providing and reinforcing the iden-
tities of global socio-cultural groupings. This is both in terms of stabilizing long-
term, existing identities, accentuating nuances within long-term, existing identities
as well as effecting strategic self recodings. Change the conflict, Multitude suggests,
and so change the terrain of global identities. This is especially the case in the age
of decentred, mobile conflicts based on decentred terrorist cells and multiple
protest movements functioning via temporary, shifting and strategic alliances.
It is within the decentred nature of empire and the concordant decen-
tring of its war/conflict machine that multitude’s possibilities lay. Firstly, as posit-
ed by Hardt and Negri, the imperial war machine exists only because of the mul-
tiple modes of resistance against it. As such, empire is always in pursuit of its sub-
jects whose diversity empire guarantees because empire, in turn, is based on mul-
titude’s multiplicity. To this extent, multitude always carries the seeds and practices
of democracy; multitude is based on social communication across a plane consti-
tuted of social equals organized in relation to the interests produced because of
and in reaction to biopolitical control. Empire thus provides multitude with the
opportunity to transform structures of global exploitation into structures of
reform and higher levels of egalitarianism. Furthermore, due to its diverse nature,
multitude maintains the possibility of avoiding varieties of absolutism. A degree
of conflict is built into the multitude due to its asymmetrical nature. Herein, Hardt
and Negri propose, multitude is automatically opposed to totalitarian structures
and systems. The end of empire and the victory of multitude will not bring a
utopia. It will, however, commence an age of global democratic practice con-
joined with the opportunity for fairer distributions of wealth and resources com-
bined with a sensitivity to the relativity of cultural values.
Though having written widely-read books (by academic standards),
Hardt and Negri’s writing style is not for everyone. As with Empire, Multitude is
filled with vast historical claims—claims about the history of democracy, social-
ism, industrialization, and post-industrialization. At the level of specialized study,
each of these claims would have to be compared with existing scholarly literature.
Book Reviews172
Multitude is also filled with short anecdotes intended to illustrate the authors’ quite
grand arguments. These anecdotes sometimes fall short in that regard, coming off
as trite rather than illustrative. Finally, certain of the authors’ propositions are
inadequately thought through. Discussing the possibility of a global representa-
tive body, or global parliament, Hardt and Negri suggest that such a body might
be constituted via either Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or in terms of
‘civilizations’ (as opposed to simple population counts, which India and China
would dominate). These ideas are not explored, however, leaving it unclear how
multitude might organize itself at the level of institutionalized democracy. Finally,
Hardt and Negri end Multitude with the assertion that love, in fact, should be the
ultimate, guiding principle of multitude. As they define it, love is the joy brought
by “expansive encounters and continuous collabourations” (351). Perhaps, but
this definition lacks the power of theses concerning politics, desire and econom-
ics developed by, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari. Here, the power of capital is to pro-
duce desire. This desire is then taken as psychological, at which point it becomes
understood as unavoidable and demanding political and social management.
Discourses concerning ‘collabouration’ and ‘encounters’ seem a bit weak in the
knees by comparison.
To concentrate on such points, however, is to miss the ultimate value of
Multitude. This value is the text’s synthesis of a set of broad-based concerns with
social justice and contemporary geo-politics apprehended through theoretical
matrices encapsulating large swaths of Marxist, post-Marxist, and postmodern
theory. In this sense, Multitude—which should be read in conjunction with Empire-
—represents a work that goes a long way toward defining an early-twenty-first cen-
tury Zeitgeist. Its claims are contestable. As an attempt to develop a thesis con-
cerning the “general state of things” in our times, however, Multitude is nothing
less than indispensable.
Ben Dorfman—Aalborg University
Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease
in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Prostitution, Race, and Politics covers the advent and elaboration of contagious dis-
eases leg i s l ation in four British colonies—India, the Straits Settlements
(Singapore), Hong Kong, and Queensland (Australia). The attempt to police sex-
ual relations in these key colonial sites centred on the regulation of prostitution—
the registration of prostituted women, their inspection for venereal disease, and
their sanitary detention if found to be in a contagious state. Pioneered in the early-
nineteenth century, this way of managing sexual relations across the gender, class,
and/or racial divides was by the second half of the century a systematic and char-
acteristic feature of British imperial rule. Modern medical science was accompa-
nied not only by the inevitable authoritarianism, but also by the ideology of racial
Left History 12.1 173


Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - Multitude - War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire

Chung, Yuehtsen Juliette

Zwia Lipkin - Useless to the State: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in
Nationalist Nanjing, 1927-1937; Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation - Faults and Frontiers of
Better Breeding in Modern America

Chen, Yong

Xiaolan Bao - Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment
Workers in New York City, 1948–92; Moon-Kie Jung - Reworking Race: The Making of
Hawaii’s Interracial Labor Movement

Merithew, Caroline Waldron

Clearly, like Filipino and Japanese workers in Hawaii, Chinese women gar-
ment union members in New York did not discard or diminish their cultural identi-
ty even during the most intense moment of their unionism. Although the two stud-
ies do not answer all the questions that we have had about the relationship between
race and class in American history, they offer convincing evidence to support Jung’s
forcefully articulated notion that class and race do not necessarily have to be or are
mutually exclusive in the consciousness of workers and in the development of labour
movement. Finally, Bao’s work reminds us that to fully appreciate how the two
dimensions of race and class intersected, we also need to take a gendered perspec-
tive, a perspective that could also further enrich Jung’s analysis of class and race.
Yong Chen
University of California, Irvine
Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the
United States, 1848-1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
Scholars of the American West have long argued that looking east changes the dom-
inant narrative of North American history. While profoundly important, this body
of work has remained predominately regional in focus. In her recent study, Najia
Aarim-Heriot moves beyond regionalism by adeptly arguing that the history of
African-Americans and Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century must be incor-
porated into a national narrative (regardless of where, in what numbers or the direct
contact these groups had with one another). Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and
Racial Anxiety in the United States enlarges the historiographical frame by making three
arguments that contribute to our understanding of American racism as a country-
wide phenomenon. First, Aarim-Heriot maintains that Sinophobia and anti-Black
prejudice were indelibly linked. Second, she suggests that their linkage had repercus-
sions for the nation (not just the western United States) and shaped the discourse of
the Civil War and Reconstruction. Third, she shows that this critical period—a peri-
od when nineteenth century migration to the U.S. was at a temporary low—was as
much about immigration as it was about emancipation.
Aarim-Heriot explores the antebellum period to hint at the possibility,
albeit slim, of an alternative story to the tragic one that she tells. Before 1850, for
example, while racism was part of the legal and constitutional frameworks of feder-
al, state and local governments, immigrants and Blacks were less closely linked than
they would become. Black codes were least prevalent in California where, up until
the discovery of gold, the state both welcomed immigrants and had not codified laws
which curtailed African-American migration. Without hindsight, the author hints, a
welcoming multiracial state might have expanded. Aarim-Heriot uses the admission
of Oregon (the only free state that requested admission to the US with an explicitly
Left History 12.2 173
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 173
anti-Black exclusion) to make her point about possibility. Senators in Washington
DC did not comment on the exclusion but rather were struck with another innova-
tion: the differentiation of Chinese from other immigrants—something an Ohio
lawmaker called a “novelty” (56).
In her challenge to the historiographical regionalism which divides the his-
tories of African-Americans and Chinese in the nineteenth century, Aarim-Heriot
argues on two levels. The author’s claim that her study is unique in the tracing of
racial nativism’s national scope is overstated. The meticulous accounting, however,
of the impact that western states played in the political history of the US is excep-
tional. For example, the analysis of Dred Scott v. Sandford is one of the most impor-
tant contributions the book makes. The legal, political, social, and cultural repercus-
sions of the Dred Scott decision are well known. In acknowledging its central place,
Aarim-Heriot goes beyond previous interpretations of the Supreme Court’s ruling
by showing its impact before and after the war. Aarim-Heriot connects the majori-
ty opinion in Dred Scott with the arguments made against the Chinese in California’s
People v. Hall (decided three years earlier). She then ties the wording of the 1870
Naturalization Statute, which envisioned a citizen as Black and white, with the lan-
guage in Dred Scott. In both the court case and the new statue, citizenship was based
on race. While the Supreme Court had confined citizenship to whites alone, the
1870 law precluded the Chinese altogether by defining belonging in terms of black-
ness and whiteness. As Aarim-Heriot writes, “The 1870 statute would serve to legit-
imize the anti-Asian cast of American law and immigration policy for more than sev-
enty years” (152).
The Naturalization Statue came in the midst of Reconstruction and Aarim-
Heriot’s most significant contribution to the field is her analysis of this period. The
author shows that Reconstruction was as much about immigration as it was about
African American freedom. By writing from this perspective, the study adds nuance
to the notion of Reconstruction as the possible Second American Revolution. Just
as the founding fathers, most Radical Republicans were as concerned with immigra-
tion as they were with slavery. In making her story about racism, a national one,
Aarim-Heriot follows the contradictory posturing of the Radical Republicans. These
men were divided over the question of Chinese immigration. Besides Charles
Sumner, who singularly saw the moment after the Civil War as an opportunity to
both remove the term ‘white’ from immigration law (which was part of the 1790
Naturalization Act) and legislate Black equal citizenship in the Reconstruction
Amendments, few of his colleagues had such vision. Those who did question anti-
Chinese legislation did not do so as a rejection of Sinophobia but rather for fear of
what the move would do to U.S.-Chinese relations. Aarim-Heriot’s assertions are
compelling here. The author shows that at this crucial moment when Americans
were attempting to legislate the position and degree of freedom of Blacks, they were
also reflecting on (and trying to alter) the type of presence Chinese immigrants and
Asian-Americans could have in the US.
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Left History 12.2 175
Chinese Immigrants, African-Americans, and Racial Anxiety also gives interesting
insight into the relationship between foreign policy and immigration restriction in
the early post-bellum moment. The study shows how important the 1868
Burlingame Treaty between China and the US was to shaping the debate.
Burlingame prohibited forced labor (the ‘coolie’ trade), acknowledged the natural
right of migration, and denied the right of Chinese subjects to become naturalized
American citizens. Both the possibilities and the contradictions of the law were used
by judges, lawmakers, and immigrants themselves to point out the need for more
clarification in policy. Aarim-Heriot returns to these points throughout the book as
she weaves her analysis to its culmination: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion law. She con-
vincingly shows that the Exclusion Law was not only the beginning of an era, which
others have suggested, but the culmination of a decades-long course that had an
increasingly predictable outcome. This study, therefore, serves as a corrective to
accepted periodization in immigration history. A periodization starting with 1882
and ending with the 1924 Johnson Reed act which set strict quotas on European
immigrants and made initial distinctions between racial and ethnic groups now
seems more problematic.
Because Chinese Immigrants, African-Americans, and Racial Anxiety is told from
the top down, the study’s arguments are, at times, overdrawn and claim more than
the documents warrant. Though it is a minor point, the book’s organization could
use further editorial advice. The eleven short thematic chapters might be combined
in a way that would be more beneficial to Aarim-Heriot’s challenge to historiograph-
ical regionalism. In the end, this book provides a new framework for understand-
ing nineteenth century anti-Chinese sentiment. Aarim-Heriot’s research and the way
she connects her sources should help historians think about racism beyond the bira-
cial paradigm which has entrenched us for too long.
Caroline Waldron Merithew
University of Dayton
José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure
in a California Town 1880-1960 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 2006).
José M. Alamillo traces the historical development of a Mexican community in the
lemon industry’s company town of Corona, California. This community would alter
their status from marginalized citrus workers to politically engaged agents of change.
In writing up the history, Alamillo’s study teaches lessons on processes of social
change and the shifting formation of racial, ethnic, gender, and class identities.
Further, the book’s analysis provides insight on the creativity and persistence which
subjugated groups rely upon to actualize social equality.
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 175


Najia Aarim-Heriot - Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial
Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882

Hayday, Matthew

essary background and a comprehensive annotated bibliography for further reading
makes Archibald’s text all the more accessible to students.
Ruth Percy
University of Toronto
Ramsay Cook, The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
Released in between Max and Monique Nemni’s Young Trudeau and John English’s
Citizen of the World, Ramsay Cook’s memoir of his friendship with Pierre Elliott
Trudeau, The Teeth of Time, attracted only a modest amount of media attention.
Written with access to Trudeau’s personal papers, the aforementioned biographies
delve into his early intellectual formation and his journey to federal politics. Cook,
who turned down offers to write such a biography of his friend, has instead pro-
vided us with a more personal take on the man whom he met in 1961 at the wed-
ding of Jacqueline and Blair Neatby, and with whom he remained friends for forty
years. The resulting product is a fascinating exploration of the careers of two men
who sought to explain Quebec to English-speaking Canada, one as historian, one
as politician, and both as public intellectuals.
Ramsay Cook’s place in the Canadian historical profession needs little
explanation. A quick leaf through the pages of Nation, Ideas, Identities: Essays in
Honour of Ramsay Cook gives a brief, but impressive overview of the current gener-
ation of Canadian historians who trained under this redoubtable academic. In
many ways, The Teeth of Time serves two parallel purposes, providing personal
insights into Pierre Trudeau, while also giving us greater insight into the intellectu-
al and political development of Cook himself, as he developed his understanding of
Quebec, the Canadian constitution, and English-French relations. The two men
shared much in common in terms of their political beliefs, but they worked within
different spheres. While both would move from an early attachment to the feder-
al New Democratic Party (NDP) into the Liberal fold, Trudeau the politician and
Cook the historian would not always march in lockstep on their interpretation of
how best to respond to political crises. At no point was this more evident than in
the October Crisis of 1970.
Cook devotes a particularly significant amount of attention to Trudeau’s
handling of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorist attacks in Montreal
of October 1970, which comprises Chapter Four of his book. For Cook, who
wrote an MA thesis on the history of civil liberties in Canada, in which he called for
the replacement of the War Measures Act with less repressive legislation, the invo-
cation of this same Act by the Prime Minister was cause for deep concern, as it was
for so much of Canada’s left-wing academic community. For many, the invocation
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of the Act remains a permanent stain on Trudeau’s record as an advocate of civil
liberties. Cook wrestles with this aspect of Trudeau’s legacy, and remains conflict-
ed. Although he trusts his friend’s judgment on the severity of the crisis, he won-
ders whether special legislation passed through Parliament might have been more
appropriate. Clearly Trudeau wrestled with this decision as well, as is clear from
Cook’s account of a November 1970 meeting he had with the Prime Minister and
a group of academics in which Trudeau attempted to clarify the reasons for the gov-
ernment’s decision. Although Cook remains ambivalent about what Gérard
Pelletier later termed “la moins mauvaise solution” to the crisis, he also defends
Trudeau’s motivations against those who claim, falsely in Cook’s opinion, that this
decision was forced by Trudeau on Premier Robert Bourassa and Montreal mayor
Jean Drapeau, rather than the other way around.
It is somehow prescient that The Teeth of Time was published just months
before the Canadian parliament passed a resolution recognizing that the Québécois
people constitute a ‘nation’. Indeed, it was concern that this type of resolution
would be given legal weight which led Ramsay Cook to leave the NDP in the 1960s,
when it was advocating such policies, to follow Pierre Trudeau, who adamantly
rejected any constitutional move which would lead to special status for any
province. The first two chapters of his book, covering this period of the Cook-
Trudeau friendship in the 1960s, Cook’s most active period as a public commenta-
tor on Quebec issues (including a brief stint as a speechwriter for Trudeau), are a
fascinating study in how historians can become engaged in Canadian public debate.
There have been few English-speaking scholars since Cook who have made such a
concerted effort to engage with Quebec history and political science, and yet it is
precisely this type of bridge-building which has made his work so important to
Canadian historiography.
If there is a weakness to the book, it is that the final two chapters, which
cover everything from the October Crisis to Trudeau’s passing in September 2000,
are much more fragmentary in nature than the preceding ones. This is likely a
reflection of the less frequent contact enjoyed by the two men in the later years of
their relationship. However, after reading detailed accounts of meetings from when
Trudeau was considering entering the Liberal leadership race, it is hard not to be
disappointed that there are not equivalent tales from the period when the
Constitution was being adopted, or the Meech Lake Accord years.
The Teeth of Time is a very personal interpretation of the man who was Prime
Minister for sixteen years, written by a man who is also nearing the end of a long and
distinguished academic career. It is reflective in nature, without being maudlin.
Readers will enjoy some of the more personal glimpses of a man often termed arro-
gant by his critics – an assessment that Cook vigorously disputes, contending that
Trudeau was only arrogant with those who asked him questions out of the desire to
score political points, rather than to actually hear what he had to say. Images of a
judo-wrestling Prime Minister are contrasted against some revealing glimpses into
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the author himself, most notably a naked shouting match with a former Ontario
Premier in the Glendon College gym (oddly, not the one who recently skinny-dipped
with CBC comedian Rick Mercer). As a contribution to Canadian political and intel-
lectual history, and as a commentary on public engagement by intellectuals, The Teeth
of Time is a valuable, and often entertaining, addition to the literature.
Matthew Hayday
University of Guelph
William Tetley, The October Crisis, 1970: An Insider’s View (Montreal & Kingston,
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).
Before opening the book, my initial reaction was, “Not another book on the 1970
October Crisis!” There is a sense that so much has been written on this tragic event
and if someone decides to publish a book on this, he has something new to reveal.
Unfortunately this book does not bring a new perspective on this event that cap-
tured Canadians’ attention in 1970. Even the author seems to have anticipated my
reaction and those of others since he devoted a portion of his introduction to a jus-
tification for the publication of another book on the October Crisis.
I have to confess that I expected a lot from this book since the author was
a member of Premier Robert Bourassa’s cabinet. At that time, he was Minister of
Financial Institutions. Although William Tetley warns his readers that his book is
“not a work of history … it is a commentary on a particular event …” (XXV), I
was disappointed because the book does not contain many new elements that
would make this a must read. In the author’s defence, I should mention that he
refers occasionally to his personal diary. Also, the book is the result of a careful
reading of every book, article and official report that has been published on the
issue since 1970.
William Tetley’s book is divided into twenty-one chapters, including a
conclusion, around a series of issues such as the calling out of the army, the invo-
cation of the War Measures Act, the conduct of the federal and provincial govern-
ments and the Duchaîne report. For those who want to learn anything about how
the Provincial Liberal party, the caucus, the Cabinet, the inner circle surrounding
Premier Bourassa and the Premier himself experienced these difficult events, the
reader will be disappointed. Although the author has included excerpts from a
diary that he kept during the Crisis, I wished he would have written more from the
perspective of being an elected official and a Cabinet member and revealed more
about the states of mind of those who surrounded him, other politicians and the
Cabinet. From time to time, Tetley mentioned that he approved the decisions
made by Premier Bourassa such as not negotiating with the Front de libération du
Québec, calling in the army, or asking the federal government to invoke the War
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Ramsay Cook - The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Hogeveen, Bryan

adds considerably to the more general history of the communist left in Canada.
Lévesque must also account for Corbin’s interesting role as a woman lit-
tle interested in the woman question. Corbin’s radical identification, as she points
out, clearly took shape around class and ethnicity, not gender. Unlike Becky Buhay
and some other communist women, she was not very involved in the Women’s
Department, and her organizing efforts were for a time focused on male-dominat-
ed resource industries. This was not really a contradiction, though, for the Party
did have a strong attraction for women and men alike whose sense of injustice was
shaped from reading and experience that saw class as the primary and overriding
contradiction of capitalist society. Moreover, as a single woman, Corbin was unen-
cumbered by the tasks of familial care that limited the participation of many other
female comrades. Lévesque also does a good job of placing Corbin generationally
within the communist movement, another means of understanding her brand of
radicalism. Corbin was not part of the founding group of the early 1920s, but
joined late in the decade, at precisely the time the party was becoming Stalinized,
and also during a period—the Depression—when the party faced both state repres-
sion and the intense immiseration of working people. All these factors created an
activist who believed fervently in class struggle, and also in the wisdom of the
Comintern and Canadian Party leadership; Corbin never deviated from the party
line and she was selfless in her dedication to party goals, even serving a jail sentence
after the Rouyn strike.
In the final resort, Lévesque tries to help us understand this sense of com-
mitment and sacrifice without romanticizing Corbin, whose uncritical dedication to
a Party increasingly intolerant of criticism could also been interpreted more nega-
tively. This biography thus makes an important addition to the existing literature on
the communist party in Canada, offering us both a tantalizing view of one commu-
nist life but also a better sense of the difficult and tumultuous times that made her
the communist she was.
Joan Sangster
Trent University
Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Common discourse suggests that ‘caught’ signifies a capture or seizing hold of
some intended object (a fish, for example). But it also denotes contraction (catch-
ing a cold), arresting (the flashing light caught my eye), to attend (catching a show)
and, but certainly not limited to, become popular (catch on). Common to all this
is the idea of grabbing, holding or encircling. As such, Caught is an apt title for
Tamara Myers’ book subtitled Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945.
Against the backdrop of a rapidly morphing social, economic and political ethos,
Left History 12.2 187
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Myers explores the regulation of adolescent girls as embodied girls. Caught is a
superbly researched monograph that is written in a clear and accessible style.
Thematically organized, the book affords a nuanced gaze into transitions and shifts
in the philosophies, traditions, and practices that targeted the lives of recalcitrant
female adolescents. I am certain that this book will make a genuine impact on
socio-legal and historical scholarship.
A thorough analysis of over 1000 juvenile court records, statistical sum-
maries and annual reports, allows Myers to explore the juvenile justice system’s rela-
tionship to the ‘modern girl.’ She ponders how Montrealers came to identify seem-
ingly aberrant conduct with delinquency, as well as, what the identity ‘delinquent’
meant for the thousands of Montreal girls who became inmates of reform schools
or who were brought before juvenile court judges. This book joins a growing body
of literature that examines the regulation of girls and women. Joan Sangster, Franca
Iacovetta, Carolyn Strange, Dorothy Chunn and others have similarly examined
how ‘profound structural changes’ significantly impacted the lives of girls and
women. Indeed, industrialization, as Strange has suggested, drew significant num-
bers of adolescent girls from the ostensible comfort of their urban and rural homes
into the city where they did not idly whittle away the non-working hours; but
instead found movie theatres and dance halls beckoned as seductive spaces to
spend their time and earnings. The reform elite considered it tragic that girls took
to finding jobs in the city and (on the street) instead of devoting themselves “to the
church and convent” and “spending their earnings on leisure rather than their fam-
ilies, sleeping late rather than attending mass…” (4). As a result of their traversing
space deemed unsuitable for respectable girls; many young girls were on a collision
course with parents, police, social workers and religious officials over what was
considered virtue befitting female youth. For many officials, insertion into such
dens of immorality was apriori evidence of sexual misdeeds. And there was no
greater grievous wrong than losing one’s virginity before marriage. Myers maintains
that since losing one’s virginity was a mortal sin, rescuing the fallen girls became
paramount. Once fallen, of course, reformers condemned these girls as a menace
to the modern city. Various modes of addressing and governing the Montreal girl
problem emerged throughout the period covered by this book; including reform
schools, the juvenile delinquents court, probation and governance by maternal
reformers. Myers explores the latter in chapter four: a definite strength of this vol-
ume.
To this familiar narrative Myers adds significantly. To date, Ontario has
served as the seeming epicentre of Canadian juvenile justice developments.
Moreover, historians, such as those listed above, have spilled much ink attempting
to discern the structural shifts which alerted (southern) Ontario’s parents and
reformers that their girls demanded greater vigilance. Indeed, other than the incom-
parable work of Jean Trépanier, Anglophone readers know very little about how
developments inside of Quebec influenced and gave rise to the Juvenile
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Delinquents Act and inspired other significant justice developments. Myers is clear
that juvenile justice in this country “was not simply an Ontario reform effort” (29).
Caught offers an unprecedented window into the day-to-day operations of the
Montreal court and the experiences of its female clientele. While Myers is certain
that the city ‘took part fully in the North American juvenile justice movement’ she
is equally clear that what emerged was contoured by “specific social, cultural, polit-
ical contexts that would in turn determine how delinquent girls experienced both
regulation and justice” (21).
The horizon of meaning and experience of juvenile justice in Montreal
was historically shaped by situational economic, social and political conditions:
especially Quebec’s ‘national question’. Myers skillfully navigates her way through
the complex rise of the French-Canadian nationalism as it coincided with and
impacted upon the juvenile court. Specifically, recalcitrant ‘girls’ lifestyle changes
collided historically with growing concern that the French-Canadian nation was in
trouble; “as nationalists fretted that the traditional family, the French language, and
religious observance were on the wane, girls seemed at the root of the problem” (8).
While the ‘national’ and ‘race’ questions in Quebec gave rise “to a system [of jus-
tice] imbued with the tensions and weight of dueling nations” (5), the issue of reli-
gion was synchronous. Chapter two, for example, explores how juvenile justice for
Montreal’s girls “began in a nineteenth century Catholic convent reform school”
(37). Myers claims that the “confession or religious orientation of institutions for
delinquent and neglected children is … an example of the dramatic rise of the
Catholic Church in Quebec society, especially in the realm of social services in the
period 1850-1870” (27). Surprisingly, however, when the juvenile court was inau-
gurated in 1912 the author maintains that although “responsibility for Montreal’s
long-standing reform and industrial schools fell to Catholic orders, the Quebec
juvenile justice system would take a secular turn with the establishment of the
Montreal Juvenile Delinquents’ Court in 1912” (65).
Myers’ excellent work confronts the disciplinary nexus of religion, law and
culture as it intersected on the sexed body of the adolescent female. For Myers, the
body serves as the backdrop against which powerful actors set out their hopes for
Quebec. Highlighted at this juncture is the signifier of a troubled nation, race, and
religion: girls’ bodies as they were inserted into an evanescent milieu. Recent years
have seen the development of a tremendous and exciting body of research on this
topic; which includes work by Iris Marion Young, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler,
and Donna Haraway. This epistemology problematizes the female body and, as
such, has demanded that feminists reconsider the interconnection between nation,
culture, and the contingencies of the symbolic order which intrude upon and make-
up the body. What implications does this recent feminist body theorizing have for
historical research centred on adolescent juvenile offenders (not artificially limited
to females; boys too possess a body, even if it has not garnered the same degree of
attention); a domain of inquiry that, as Myers clearly demonstrates in chapter six,
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confronts the intersections of the body, the social and gender? Indeed, Butler main-
tains that bodies are politically constituted and manifest permutations of body
extending beyond the normative binary framework. The ‘body’, then, is made and,
as such, is the fulcrum on which the binary is constituted and is the material on
which the symbolic order acts. Although any mention of this burgeoning theoret-
ical literature is conspicuous by its silence, Myers is seemingly attune to this femi-
nist epistemological project. For example, she maintains that ‘girls’ bodies were
barometers of the future’ and that “parents and juvenile justice officials saw bodies
that could not be constrained or constrained, that left home for paid works that
swayed suggestively to modern music, and that were seemingly available for
exploitation by men” (7). Contrasting this ‘deflowered’ and ‘unclean’ body was the
respectable non-sexed corporeal.
I cannot but conclude that this is a significant work; one whose focus and
sophisticated analysis will no doubt resonate with a diversity of scholars engaged in
both traditional and interdisciplinary research focused on contemporary and histor-
ical contexts.
Bryan Hogeveen
University of Alberta
Robert Gagnon, Questions d’égouts: Santé publique, infrastructures et urbanisation à Montréal
au XIXème siècle (Montréal: Boréal, 2006).
Much has been made of the poor sanitary condition of nineteenth century
Montreal. With its rapid industrial growth at mid-century and its frequently flood-
ed working-class slums, mortality rates in what was then Canada’s largest city
dwarfed those in the rest of British North America. Outbreaks of cholera, small-
pox, and tuberculosis left staggering death tolls that often ignited social tensions.
Meanwhile, the stench of waste, human and otherwise, plagued daily life in the city,
and struck a dissonant chord against the marvel of the city’s industrial and commer-
cial development. Sanitary reformers like Philip Carpenter and, later, Herbert
Brown Ames, stirred public attention by emphasizing the links between poor sani-
tary conditions, poverty, and disease. That this state of affairs existed in the shad-
ows of Canada’s most visible opulence was particularly galling to many urban
reformers.
Questions d’égouts, by Université du Québec à Montréal historian Robert
Gagnon, explores how the transformation of scientific and political discourses sur-
rounding drainage and sanitation played out in Montreal during the middle decades
of the nineteenth century. The study is contextualized in two ways. First, Gagnon
shows how the emergence of sanitary reform movement coincided with the rising
authority of professionally trained experts. Secondly, he explores the way projects
undertaken to improve drainage in the city played into the development of its urban
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Tamara Myers - Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945

Pack, Sasha D.

David Porter, ed. - Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution,
2nd ed.; Robin Adèle Greeley, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War

Wilde, Alexander

accounts of workers who took over factories and put them back into operation,
groups who occupied vacant buildings and transformed them into community cen-
tres, doctors and nurses who refused to stop providing health care services, neigh-
bourhood assemblies that created popular kitchens, and members of community
organisations who established barter networks and other collective activities. The
collective actions that are the focus of the book transgressed the state’s delineated
space in the name of social justice thus, as the accounts clearly indicate, experienc-
ing persecution and harassment from the authorities.
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina is a powerful and inspira-
tional book as it gives voices to the voiceless. The testimonies included uncover
the strategies implemented by the participants to survive, challenge, and resist thus
contributing an important element to our understanding of Argentina’s recent past.
Firsthand accounts from below, they reveal the day-to-day struggles involved in the
construction of new social spaces and the creation of alternative forms of partici-
pation in an attempt to achieve a more loving, egalitarian and inclusive society. In
a much broader sense, by bringing to the forefront the words and actions of the
movements’ protagonists this book not only uncovers the devastating effects of
neo-liberal policies in Latin America but also provides strong evidence that an alter-
native world is not only possible but being constructed day by day.
Patricia Juarez-Dappe
California State University, Northridge.
Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-
1988 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
Thirty years ago, Henry Rousso, then a young historian with a budding interest in
France’s Vichy regime, was contemplating how recently-opened World War II
archives might throw light on economic policy during that period. But fascinated
by the burgeoning public interest at the time in the Occupation years, he made his
subject not the history of Vichy itself but rather how it was remembered in subse-
quent decades. His magisterialVichy Syndrome (1987; English trans. 1991) and other
publications have shown how a society’s remembered past can shape its present
and helped establish the flourishing field of social memory.
This wonderful book by Steve Stern is a major contribution to this field
and a convincing demonstration of how social memory can illuminate fundamen-
tal aspects of a whole historical period. Like Rousso, Stern was impressed by how
the conflictive recent past was expressed in irruptions of divided memories, in his
case during a year of research in Chile in 1996-97, a time when the country’s long
‘transition’ to democracy seemed stalled. He was also struck, like Rousso, by the
moral dimension of these memories, which related to truth and justice and to both
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personal and national conscience. It was, he writes, a moment in which Chile’s cul-
ture seemed to oscillate, “as if caught in moral schizophrenia…between prudence
and convulsion” (xxix).
In this setting, Stern defined four ‘emblematic memories’ that seemed to
encompass the large divisions of remembered experience since the 1973 military
coup against Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity: memories as Rupture, as
Salvation, as a Closed Box, and as Persecution and Awakening. In this book he
demonstrates how these memories (captured in an ‘ethnographic present’) emerged
historically during the Pinochet dictatorship, through the watershed 1988 plebiscite
that marked the beginning of Chile’s transition. Memory as Rupture captures the
before-and-after framing of supporters of the Popular Unity and of those identify-
ing with Chile’s historical republican traditions, against the dictatorship’s authoritar-
ian ambitions. It was also the narrative that dominated international opinion initial-
ly and, indeed, long after.
The coup was remembered as Salvation—from godless Communism,
social polarization and economic chaos—not only by the political Right but, as
Stern suggests from contemporary evidence, very likely by a majority of the popu-
lation until the economic crisis of the early 1980s. By then it had already been
undermined by undeniable evidence of the dictatorship’s brutal violations of
human rights, documented and publicized by a courageous multi-faceted move-
ment in civil society. This gave rise to a new social memory among those favour-
ing the new authoritarian order, constructed around keeping the dark past in a
Closed Box of purposeful forgetfulness.
Stern gives rich texture to all these emblematic memories in his unfolding
analysis, particularly that of Persecution and Awakening, which framed the experi-
ence of those who dared to oppose the dictatorship and found their lives changed
within the new social solidarities they helped forge. As Pinochet’s regime was
unprecedented in Chilean history (even recognizing its oft-forgotten earlier
episodes of repression), so too was the moral resistance that arose to combat it,
based in the defence of human rights and in the broad political opposition that coa-
lesced during the 1980s. Stern brilliantly evokes this social memory as he moves
from individual lives at the grassroots through a wide array of specific organization-
al experiences to public collective action, in the provinces as well as Santiago.
This book is political as well as social history of a high order, but ‘memo-
ry’ is a particularly suggestive and apt framing for Chile’s experience. In the face of
the dictatorship’s systematic lies about its brutal practices, abetted by complicit
media and a supine judiciary, ‘memory’ already arose in the late 1970s as a con-
scious, defiant challenge to the official ‘reality’ depicted in government propagan-
da. Stern also shows how different memories were constructed and ‘performed’,
by the regime as well as the opposition, and buttressed by carefully-analyzed con-
temporary polls and other sources, how the moods they reflected persuasively
structure periodization of these years. In all he makes a strong case for the real sig-
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nificance of the more ineffable resources of power—values, beliefs, perceptions,
information, communications—that were wielded by both sides and eventually
shaped the outcome of the 1988 plebiscite.
Perhaps Stern’s most important achievement in this book is to have inter-
preted this whole period as history. With scholarly rigor and an impressive array of
contemporary sources, he has stepped back from earlier accounts and produced an
analytical narrative driven by actors and events that is notably fresh, even when
most readers know how the story turns out. His consideration of Pinochet’s social
support and “battle to win Chilean hearts and minds”—a battle his regime “waged
and won, and then waged and lost” (1)—modifies many existing interpretations
(and offers new insight into continuities since 1988). Stern historicizes the human
rights movement, asking why its exposés “seemed to fall on apathetic ears” for so
long (138, cf. 196, 218), and shows why its moral appeals only gained traction later.
He not only uses contemporary press sources to great effect but also provides a
persuasive history of the media’s changing role through the period, as alternative
publications gradually reached a greater public. He goes a long way toward inte-
grating the varied international influences—often considered partially and for lim-
ited periods—that shaped national developments throughout these years.
In all, this is an impressive synthesis based on prodigious research. Stern
has provided an exemplary twenty-page essay on sources, and more than 90 pages
of endnotes are studded with insightful brief commentaries (e.g. on death-and-dis-
appearance and torture figures, 392-95). Some of the ‘Afterwords’ that follow each
chapter succeed better than others, and Stern’s stylistic insistence on a memory
vocabulary (“memory knots,” “memory voices,” “memory clock,” etc.) can some-
times be distracting, but these are cavils. His focus on social memory, which allows
him to consider the moral and subjective elements of human experience, together
with his historian’s sensitivity to indeterminacy and human agency make this a com-
pelling interpretation of how Chileans lived the Pinochet years.
Alexander Wilde
Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India, 1919-1943:
Dialectics of Real and a Possible History (Kolkata: Seribann, 2006).
This is a work of remarkable clarity that manages to steer between the rock of anti-
communism and the hard place of Stalinism while contributing a fresh approach to
a complex problem and understanding that the history of the Communist
International (Comintern) in India is a many-sided difficulty. Sobhanlal Datta
Gupta is not someone who attempts to hide his independent Marxist approach
from the reader. The author notes “this book is an attempt to explore the gray
Book Reviews212
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 212


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