Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Cherneski, JanaLee

this distrust? 
Finally, perhaps Brandenberger pushes his arguments about russocentrism 
too far. He acknowledges tensions, contradictions, and dualities among notions 
of internationalism and of russocentrism. Perhaps these contradictions and 
dualities would have made an interesting and revealing focus. 
Still, the book is an ambitious and extensive study which provides a major 
contribution to the surprisingly understudied and insufficiently understood, yet 
crucial theme of ideology under Stalin, especially through the war years and 
beyond. His presentation of the controversy and scandal surrounding the 
History of the Kazakh SSR and of the Short Course on the History of the USSR 
are fascinating. Brandenberger is to be highly comrnended for wrestling 
through an enormous amount of extremely varied material and shaping it into 
a coherent and accessible argument and study. 
Tracy McDonald 
McMaster University 
Peter Ives, Gramsci S Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and 
the Frankjiurt School (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 
The last 30 years have seen an explosion of writings on Antonio Gramsci in 
almost all social science and humanities disciplines - so much so that short of 
fresh applications of a 'Gramscian' method to the study of specific contexts, 
one might conclude there is little new to say about Gramsci's thought itself. Yet 
a newly adapted theoretical reading of Gramsci's ideas is exactly what Peter 
Ives strives to present in Gramsci k Politics of Language. What results is not 
just another book on Gramsci, but rather a unique reading of Gramsci's work 
through a wide-ranging interdisciplinary engagement with history, linguistics, 
and Marxist philosophies of language, culture, and social and political thought. 
Ives investigates the connection between Gramsci's linguistic and political 
concepts by simultaneously explaining the way they relate internally through- 
out Gramsci's thought, historically contextualizing the linguistic debates 
Gramsci had with his contemporaries, and bringing his particular reading of 
Gramscian political and linguistic philosophy into a theoretical dialogue with 
the works of other influential (but unknown to Gramsci) Marxist theorists of 
the era. 
The book's overarching argument focuses on proving that the ideas 
Gramsci developed in his early training in linguistics and his engagements with 
Italian language politics, are complementary to (and influenced) the cultivation 
of his better known contributions - hegemony, organic intellectuals, the war of 
manoeuvrelwar of position, the philosophy of praxis - more commonly asso- 
186 Reviews 
ciated with Gramsci's later studies of history, culture, and politics, Ives devel- 
ops three concepts central to Gramsci's philosophy of language -'normative 
grammar,' 'spontaneous' or 'immanent' grammar, and 'translation' - and 
explains their relevance to Gramsci's linguistic and political projects. This is a 
significant and well-argued contribution to an under-discussed area of Gramsci 
scholarship. However, Ives aspires to something much more ambitious than to 
prove the straightforward but important observation that Gramsci's theories of 
language and politics are interconnected. Complementing his basic argument is 
the development of a uniquely Gramscian theory of language that is unlike the 
implicit treatments of language by other Marxist thinkers and also subtly dif- 
ferent than those theories of specifically Gramscian-influenced thinkers such as 
Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. On this front, Ives brilliantly coins the 
term 'vernacular materialism.' A play on 'vulgar Marxism' and a response to 
essentialist and economistic readings of Gramsci, this nuanced and versatile 
phrase emphasizes the important elements of the Gramscian theory of language 
for which Ives argues. This includes the observation that language is more than 
a set of isolated, formal linguistic elements and consequently the science of 
language should practice contextual 'living' philology; an emphasis on the role 
of 'faith' and the 'vernacular' in political praxis; and, most importantly, the 
argument that there is a direct connection between discourse and Marxist con- 
cerns, leading to the claim that any investigation of language must be bound up 
with issues of power and social control. What develops is a theory that has 
more positive implications for theorizing spaces of resistance than those 
offered by the Frankfurt school. 
Underpinning Ives's main argument is a complex attempt to translate 
Gramsci's fragmentary theories into a productive dialogue with theories of lan- 
guage and politics of other neo-Marxist thinkers including Mikhail Bakhtin, 
Valentin Voloshinov, Pave1 Medvedev, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, 
Max Horkheimer, and Jiirgen Habermas. What is notable about this project is 
that it does not merely systematically compare Gramsci with these thinkers but 
uses them "to cast Gramsci's particular emphases in greater relief.. . [and] con- 
nect his perspective to contemporary issues in social thought" (100). Thus the 
book is not just another reading of Gramsci, but also a collection of insights 
into the other theoretical works with which it engages; these insights are linked 
by penetrating questions pinpointing issues that continue to be relevant to us 
today. For example, in chapter one Ives presents the problem of the formation 
of a 'collective popular will' and reads Gramsci for an answer to how "homo- 
geneity and multiplicity [are] transformed into a collective unity" (36). In chap- 
ter two Ives addresses this question by tracing the similarities between Gramsci 
and Voloshinov in order to better substantiate and understand the implications 
of Gramsci's theory of language as it connects interactions between individual 
and collective agency. Engaging Bakhtin, the problem is intelligently re- 
Left History 10.1 187 
framed and asked as "can Gramsci's hegemony be dialogical in Bakhtin's 
sense?' (54). What follows is less an explication of Gramsci through Bhaktin 
and more a unique elucidation of Bhaktin's own theories through Gramsci. 
These types of engagements occur throughout the latter half of the book and 
readers looking for a traditional analysis of Gramsci, or for a basic political- 
linguistic explication of his work, will likely complain that these theoretical 
ventures distract from the original argument. Such readers, however, should not 
abandon the book but focus their attention on the first half, which is more than 
capable of answering their questions. However, the latter half remains a well- 
organized demonstration of the implications of Ives's basic argument, and the- 
orists from a wide range of academic disciplines will appreciate the insightful 
readings and theoretical connections it makes. 
One should note that the book is based on Ives' doctoral dissertation and 
inevitably inherits some of the stylistic problems that are typical of the genre. 
Being very scholarly, as well as designed to meet the requirements of a disser- 
tation, it can sometimes be technically dense. The potentially more serious 
varieties of this problem are counteracted by the fact that, for the most part, 
Ives perceptively demonstrates what is at stake in the debates he presents and 
clearly situates his observations in the context of past studies. But, conversely, 
some complex arguments, such as Benjamin's idea of allegory as a structuring 
principle of language and history, are explained but oversimplified. These 
seemingly contradictory criticisms result from the ambitious layering of Ives' 
argument, which is both a strength and a weakness. For example, the theoreti- 
cal conversations in the chapter on Gramsci and Benjamin are tricky to follow. 
This is not due to lack of clear explanation but because Ives introduces so many 
interconnected ideas that some important observations remain underdeveloped. 
Each of his chapters not only tackles thinkers upon which many full-length 
books have been written, but also develops intriguing readings and applications 
for the study at hand, introducing many arguments that are worth expanding 
into larger works. Inevitably the book thus raises unanswered questions, but the 
fact that Ives gestures toward unexplored possibilities and prudently leaves 
them in play means that readers are stimulated to think further about the cur- 
rent relevance of his claims without losing sight of his main arguments. 
Lastly, Ives makes an important observation about translation that also 
applies to his own work: "translation aims at changing the languages involved, 
both the source language and the target language" (133). Dialogically reading 
Gramsci against other works is a process of translation that transforms both 
works in question. Academics might wonder if Gramsci's work has been too 
favorably translated in support of Ives' argument. However, given the unor- 
ganized and fragmentary state of Gramsci's prison notebooks, anyone serious- 
ly considering this claim can easily be accused of begging the question. It is 
more interesting to consider how the translator is implicated in, and what he or 
188 Reviews 
she contributes to, the translation. What does this work say of Ives himself? 
Acting as translator, Ives' own thoughts and opinions inevitably influence the 
material with which he has worked. The clarity of his arguments, the insight 
with which they are accompanied, and the connections he makes between the- 
ories indicate he has the potential to produce promising theoretical works. In 
the fbture, it will be particularly interesting to see if Ives attempts to 'translate' 
or operationalise his theories for the site-specific contexts of contemporary 
social movements. 
JanaLee Cherneski 
Wolfson College, Oxford University 
Carl Freedman, The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics 
of Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 
Today, cultural domains are at the forefront of political debate. In the United 
States, right-wing commentators claim great liberal conspiracies in Hollywood 
and in the media while on the left, critics have felt it necessary to launch a radio 
station to counter right-wing talk radio. In Canada we see these issues play out 
over opinions about the CBC and regarding funding to university programmes 
in the arts. In The Incomplete Projects, the Marxist literary critic Carl 
Freedman argues that in light of the current unprecedented economic and polit- 
ical dominance of capitalism, culture is a domain that offers an opportunity for 
Marxists to think politically again. It is here, drawing on Marx, that Freedman 
offers the study of culture as a strategy to destabilize right-wing dominance. 
The book is separated into two parts. The first is more theoretical, serving 
to situate the rest of the essays as part of three "Incomplete Projects." The first 
of Freedman's incomplete projects is capitalism. Capitalism is incomplete 
because it has not "hit the wall" of environmental destruction or revolution 
which Marxists have long predicted. Because capitalism continues to exist, 
Marxism continues to be essential for understanding the world today and thus 
represents the second incomplete and ongoing project. The final incomplete 
project is modernity. Freedman asserts that while modernity can most easily be 
defined as the era dominated by the capitalist mode of production, capitalism 
is an economic category, and as such, Marxism can, at best, problematize the 
economic dimension of modernity. Thus Freedman legitimizes using Jiirgen 
Habermas and other theorists outside of the Marxist canon to explore questions 
of culture. 
The second part of the book is an empirical demonstration of the theoreti- 
cal directions of the first. Collected here are seven previously published essays 


Peter Ives — Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School

Webb, Todd

Left History 9.2 229 
field. 
If one had to point to any weaknesses in this study, I would say that I 
sometimes wanted to hear the sources speak more clearly for themselves. I 
wanted to read, for instance, the words of band members as they appealed to 
Indian Affairs, or those of self-satisfied Indian agents as they rejected their 
appeals. More substantively, some might suggest that Brownlie is over ambi- 
tious with this project; that one is hard-pressed to cover the history of treaty 
rights, band politics, the organization of First Nations relief, health care, edu- 
cation, and even Native participation in fairs in some 150 pages. 
On the other hand, what might be seen as a limitation might also be this 
book's unique appeal. What it offers is the "big picture" of a small picture. 
When I finished it, I felt I could imagine the day-to-day life of an interwar 
reserve in greater totality than was previously possible. Given most scholars' 
on-going preference for narrowly defined projects of historical research, this 
"slice-of-life" study comes as a welcome addition to the historiography. More 
than this, this is the kind of book you could give to an undergraduate class and 
have them walk away with a solid understanding of the grievances which 
underlie modem Aboriginal rights movements. And, in light of Brownlie's own 
commitment to "dismantl[ing] colonialism in Canada" (1 54), I would think that 
broadly educating the next generation would be seen as a most worthy goal. 
Sharon Wall 
University of British Columbia 
l For instance, in a 1994 CO-authored article, Brownlie took issue with those historians 
who "go beyond the argument for the recognition of Native agency to one that uses evi- 
dence of Native resilience and strength to soften, and at times to deny, the impact of 
colonialism, and thus, implicitly, to absolve its perpetrators." Clearly Brownlie does not 
wish to do this here. Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm, "Desperately Seeking 
Absolution: Native Agency as Colonialist Alibi?'Canadian Historical Review 75.4 
(Dec 1994): 543-556. 
James Holstun, EhudS Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution 
(London: Verso, 2000). 
EhudS Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution is an engaging and 
sometimes enraging book. Holstun sets out to prove that the popular praxis of 
labouring people played a crucial role in shaping the English Civil War. He 
also attempts to demonstrate that the Civil War constituted the first capitalist 
and anti-capitalist revolution of the modem period. Finally, Holstun argues 
that the experiences of radical, lower-class men and women in the 1640s and 
1650s can help activists in the twenty-first century better understand their own 
230 Reviews 
struggles. In effect, Ehudk Dagger is an attempt to rewrite the history of the 
seventeenth-century England in terms of modem class conflict. 
Holstun admits that this is not a book that most historians will recognize 
as standard narrative history. His overtly presentist approach to much of the 
material he discusses is proof enough of that statement. So too is the fact that 
this account of the English Revolution is very long on historiographical 
polemic and very short on causal explanation. There is no attempt here to give 
a new view of the entire course of the Civil War. The first section of the book 
consists of a defence of a Marxist approach to the history of Stuart and 
Interregnum England and a scathing critique of what Holstun terms the anti- 
communist approach of Conrad Russell and his fellow revisionists on the one 
hand and the new historicists and post-revisionists on the other. In the second 
section Holstun attempts to rescue five radical "projects in human emancipa- 
tion" from the scrap heap of neo-conservative historiography. He examines 
John Felton's assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, the role 
played by the Agitators in the New Model Army before and during the Putney 
Debates of 1647, the strange career of the Fifth Monarchy prophet Anna 
Trapnel, the diehard republican Edward Sexby and his tyrannicide tract Killing 
Noe Murder, and the communistic ideology and practices of Gerrard 
Winstanley and the Diggers. 
The first part of Ehud b Dagger begins with Cornet George Joyce's abduc- 
tion of Charles I in June 1647 and his dramatic declaration that the authority 
and power for this action came from the cavalry troop "behind me". For 
Holstun this episode represents that appeal to the authority of martial praxis 
that resonated through the rest of the 1640s and 1650s among such diverse 
groups as the Levellers, Fifth Monarchists and the Diggers in their attacks on 
the ruling order. Holstun not only uses Cornet Joyce's brief moment of promi- 
nence in 1647 to illustrate the agency of lower-class actors in the English 
Revolution, but also to signal his own disdain for the revisionist, new histori- 
cist and post-revisionist approaches to the history of the period. His critique of 
revisionism is by far the strongest section in the book. Holstun effectively 
shows up the many theoretical limitations and inconsistencies of Conrad 
Russell, John Morrill, Mark Kishlansky, Kevin Sharpe and J.C.D. Clark. His 
analysis of the three-kingdom (or multiple kingdom) explanation for the out- 
break of hostilities in England in 1642 is particularly perceptive. Too often, 
Holstun notes, this paradigm has been used in opposition to a social change 
explanation of the road to the Civil War. He quite rightly points out that "what 
looks like a unified and imperial Scots nation from the English side of the bor- 
der probably feels like a complex and divided Scots society on the other" (32). 
Holstun also takes aim at the revisionists' reliance on contingency in order to 
explain why everything fell apart in the early 1640s, especially in regard to the 
psychological peculiarities of 'that man of blood' Charles I. Such modes of 
Left History 9.2 23 1 
argument, Holstun points out, are often based on counterfactuals - if Charles I 
had not been king, would things have turned out differently? - which tend to 
"open charmingly oblique prospects on a historian's fantasy life" (40) but serve 
little other purpose. He is on less sure ground when he begins to link revi- 
sionism to a larger, rather shadowy anti-Marxist, anticommunist and anti-pop- 
ulist conspiracy that will culminate in "a full-scale capitalist assault on British 
and American public education itself ..." (44). It is a lurid image, but, stated 
rather than proven, it could very well be as much a fantasy as seventeenth-cen- 
tury England without Charles I. A later counterfactual, this time around the 
question of land reform and the political stability of the Commonwealth, also 
demonstrates that Holstun sometimes does not practice what he preaches. His 
argument in chapter three, that the supporters of the new historicism and post- 
revisionism tend to ignore questions of economy and class as much as the revi- 
sionists, carries more conviction. 
Having done a demolition job on the revisionists, post-revisionists, and 
new historicists, in his fourth chapter Holstun gets to the heart of the matter, 
arguing that "the English Revolution was a class struggle ... the struggle among 
various groups that were endeavouring to maintain or transform the relations 
of production" (87-8). Here he moves onto more controversial ground. He 
argues that the old Marxist standby of base and superstructure was manifested 
primarily in the religious discourse of seventeenth-century England. Fears of 
the middle and upper classes around 'superstructural' changes to the ecclesias- 
tical order were linked to fears of the 'basic' (economic) changes that would 
inevitably follow. The Diggers and other radical groups, in contrast, were 
attempting to transform an oppressive economy and state into an egalitarian 
Kingdom of God on Earth. In making this argument, Holstun follows and sup- 
ports the more general thesis first put forward by Brian Manning. Holstun, like 
Manning, writes that the overall political nature of the English Revolution can- 
not be understood without serious class analysis. Despite Holstun's theoretical 
creativity, however, this argument remains as problematic as the revisionists 
suggest. Radicals such as John Lilburne, John Wildman, Mary Cary and 
Thomas Venner certainly fought the good fight for the small producer. 
Nevertheless, a serious doubt remains as to whether those radicals were at all 
representative of the English people, outside of the quite exceptional contexts 
of London sectarianism and the New Model Army. Holstun does not come to 
grips with this issue in any sustained fashion. 
The second part of Ehud's Dagger moves into the realm of history as 
opposed to historiography. In each of these five chapters Holstun attempts to 
highlight the role of class and oppositional conflict in the outbreak and course 
of the Civil War and to prove that, despite the revisionist line, contingency 
alone cannot explain seventeenth-century England. Working from a close 
reading of manuscript poems and chap books, chapter five convincingly 
232 Reviews 
demonstrates that John Felton's murder of the Duke of Buckingham was a gen- 
uinely ideological act of opposition to the regime of Charles I, or, at least, that 
it was received and interpreted as such by plebeian poets and writers after the 
deed was done. In proving his case, Holstun resurrects a world of vaguely and 
sometimes plainly treasonous talk. In one striking example he describes John 
Milton's former tutor, Alexander Gill the Younger, in his cups in the cellar of 
Trinity College, Oxford saying, amongst other things, that Buckingham had 
gone to hell to meet King James. As Holstun remarks "Star Chamber tried and 
censured him, threatened a fine and his ears, then dismissed him with tempo- 
rary loss of liberty and offke" (174). This case study is a model of historical 
and literary analysis. Chapters seven and nine, dealing with Anna Trapnel and 
the Diggers respectively, also provide much food for thought. Holstun's dis- 
cussion of Trapnel's effort to integrate female praxis and Fifth Monarchy oppo- 
sition to Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate and his defense of the Diggers' main 
spokesman, Gerrard Winstanley, against charges of being an anti-urban, reac- 
tionary crank are persuasive exercises in reclamation. 
The other two chapters in the second half of the book highlight both the 
strengths and weaknesses of Holstun's scholarship. Referring to the Agitators 
of the New Model Army as "New Model Soviets" takes anachronism about as 
far as it can go and there is very little that historians of the Putney Debates will 
find particularly new in chapter six. The latter criticism does not apply to 
Holstun's study of Edward Sexby. Tracking Sexby's efforts to forge an 
alliance among the remnants of the Leveller movement, the exiled Royalists 
and the kingdom of Spain, aimed at assassinating Oliver Cromwell and over- 
throwing the Protectorate, Holstun constructs a spirited and thoroughly docu- 
mented narrative of the desperate struggle of one ex-Agitator to redeem the 
'good old cause' of English republicanism. His analysis of Sexby's tract 
Killing Noe Murder is insightful: here was a pro-republican and anti-tyrannical 
work that drew not only on that elite, Renaissance discourse studied by J.G.A. 
Pocock, but also on the more popular language of the Reformation. Following 
this richly contextualized account of lower-class agency, Holstun's argument 
that Sexby's plot was doomed from the beginning because he made no plans 
for a seventeenth-century version of the dictatorship of the proletariat is over- 
ly reductionist. 
Despite its relatively minor flaws, Ehud 5 Dagger is a welcome correction 
to the revisionist, post-revisionist and new historicist approaches to the English 
Civil War. Holstun's many theoretical and historiographical insights and argu- 
ments will give scholars of both the Left and the Right much to think about for 
years to come. 
Todd Webb 
York University 


James Holstun — Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution

Partner, Nancy

Reading, Writing, Getting It Right: 
A Response to David Leeson's "Cutting Through History" 
Nancy Partner 
It is important to keep in mind that the essay which provoked this experiment 
in historical surrealism, "The Burden of History," by Hayden White was first 
published in 1966 which is now a long time ago. But one can make the same 
point about many of Hayden White's most thoughtful and important essays 
although the "long time ago" becomes twenty years shorter when considering 
the major statements on narrative collected in The Content of the Form in 1987. 
Still, it is worth pondering the slow ruminative process of the collective his- 
torical discipline when Hayden White's name is now known by every histori- 
an everywhere and still most commonly associated with Metahistory of 1973, 
his most frequently cited work with the most marginal implications for ongo- 
ing historical writing. Throughout all this time, historians have tended to read 
White guided by an all-enveloping willful reading error about the implicit 
reading instruction running through all of his work. I regularly encounter the 
same reading error when I assign students the book by Aristotle commonly 
called the Poetics. This is a book which might alternatively and accurately be 
titled On Fiction or On Narrative Fiction, but students, even with forceful 
prompting away from this error, tend to read it as How To Write A Tragedy: 
Rules And Guidelines For The Aspiring Author. Aristotle's book is a work of 
theoretical analysis which explains which elements of fictional composition 
are fundamental to this art form and which are secondary, how the fundamen- 
tal elements work to produce the most serious intellectual and aesthetic ends of 
literature, and only in the most remote educational sense can the book be con- 
sidered prescriptive. The Poetics is about how the component elements of fic- 
tional narrative produce their effects when analysed in the light of serious aims, 
not about how to write narrative fictions following a rote "how to" guide. The 
difference here is important and it is a clear and distinct one. 
The same distinction applies to all of Hayden White's work on historical 
writing: even though he sometimes drifts into a teasing assertiveness, a mis- 
chief making Lpater les bourgeois historians whom he, quite justifiably, textu- 
ally conjures up as resistant readers, resisting his ideas, in need of a kick-start 
in a new direction. His essays are about how historical writing works at a 
deeply analysed level, not How to Write Up-To-Date History By Imitating 
Fiction. The brunt of White's historical theoretical project, all of it, is that his- 
torical knowledge is a written knowledge: history is that form of complex 
prose (either straightforwardly narrative or narrative by implication, its subject 
matter being time-situated by definition) whose writerlreader contract is truth- 
44 
O Left Histovy 
10.1 (FalVWinter 2004) 
Reading, Writing, Getting It Right 45 
claim and which offers itself as an addition to knowledge of the past. 
Therefore, a serious understanding of history requires close scrutiny of how 
complex narrative prose works, at every level, to produce its truth-claim effects 
of representation and meaningfulness. Writing about complex events with a 
historical intention ("reader, this account is offered as true") has always pro- 
duced narratives that are remarkably similar to contemporary fictional litera- 
ture recounting similar persons and actions - epics of war and adventure, con- 
flict in the state, heroic or saintly lives. In the pre-professional past, historians 
were self-educated as writers on a curriculum of admired fiction. Only with the 
professionalization of history within university auspices has the historian 
become a writer rnalgrk lui, a writer by accident almost, an imitative writer 
naively or unknowingly denying his imitations. The near total neglect or delib- 
erate ignorance of tropological language and narrative structure, anything "lit- 
erary," on the part of historians which White addressed in the 1960s, and 
decades after that, tempted him to some provocative tactics in his early essays, 
just to jolt someone out there into paying attention. One would think that after 
some thirty years of the linguistic turn, historians might by now have learned 
to recognize rhetorical strategies for what they, rhetorically, are and not read 
earnest literal messages where mild shock tactics were intended. 
"The Burden of History" is genuinely the term that David Leeson chooses 
for it - a "manifesto" addressed to a professional cadre of historians and their 
institutional self-perpetuation which White regards (or did in 1966) as "perhaps 
the conservative discipline par excellence." But this up front challenge to his 
historian colleagues (and it is easy to forget that White is a medieval historian 
by training, and speaks always as one of "us," with that special freedom) is not 
precisely one of "political radicalism" as Leeson insists. The conservatism 
White deplores is intellectual in the old large sense, a cultural conservatism of 
unselfconscious narrow-minded outlook, which is perfectly at home among 
historians of both left- and right-wing politics. The looming threat implicit in 
this "kind of willful methodological naivetk" that informs the training and deep 
assumptions of historical practice is that "history itself may lose its status as an 
autonomous and self-authenticating mode of thought." What White wants is 
something very difficult, probably impossible to ask of an institutionalized 
practice, but that has made some improbable steps in his direction since "The 
Burden" was written: that historians use their historical awareness to disman- 
tle the deep complacencies of their discipline and try to reconstitute it at "a 
higher kind of intellectual inquiry," closer both to art and to science, and yet 
without giving up entirely on its special cultural work of producing knowledge 
of the past to a high standard of evidentiary rigor. 
I was startled, in rereading "The Burden of History" for this commentary 
to find how strangely prescient White was, in some completely unexpected 
ways, about the "disease" of history which, in 1966 and in agreement with 
46 Partner 
Norman 0. Brown could be disdained as the very type of neurotic fixation, rep- 
etition compulsion, and destructive subservience to past and outmoded forms. 
The disease factor isolated here was not merely the objective persistence of 
oppressive institutions but "the way of looking at the world which gives to 
these outmoded forms their specious authority," and interiorizes submission to 
them - the deepest opposite to any form of liberation, personal or political. 
History, White charges, is thus complicit with anti-liberatory forces of every 
kind because its very "way of looking at the world" validates the continuity of 
the past, and it does this with redoubled effect in thoughtlessly adopting deeply 
traditional and conventional literary forms as its mode of expression. 
There is something at first sympathetic and funny, but soon eye-rolling 
exasperating, about David Leeson's utterly silly experiments with scissors, 
paper-folding, and computerized cut-and-paste techniques. Inflicting random, 
meaningless, pointless dgcoupage damages on conventional historical texts, he 
discovers (!) that the results are random, meaningless, and pointless. His choice 
of surrealist or Dadaist modes of art (why? when White was trying to urge his- 
torians to engage imaginatively with developments in literature contemporary 
with themselves?) was either deliberately silly or, more likely, a set-up to 
"prove" that historians don't have to pay attention to anything White has said 
because the results of doing so are an unintelligible mess of cut-up paper. It 
feels patronizing, yet embarrassingly necessary, to point out to the author that 
the reason that surrealism, Dadaism, cubism, impressionism, realism, etc., are 
modes of is because the artists had created coherent meaningful vocabular- 
ies (visual or verbal) to express ideas which could not otherwise be conveyed. 
Leeson's "cut-ups" are just the author being the class cut-up. His own language 
betrays a tin ear and a smart-aleck's taste in discourse: "So, then: so what? I'm 
glad I asked: I think my cut-ups raise questions about Hayden White's whole 
project - that's what." The smartest guy in the sixth grade - that's what. 
Turning back to White's intense and relentless critique after Leeson's 
smirky criticism of surrealism and Dada (again, why? and to what purpose?) 
and cute references to Frankenstein, one wonders what motivated this little 
project and its shallow, finger-flipping outrage. White was challenging histori- 
ans to locate new governing metaphors to provide illumination and coherence 
to accounts of the past: "to entertain seriously those creative distortions offered 
by minds capable of looking at the past with the same seriousness as ourselves 
but with different affective and intellectual orientations." It is obvious that his 
essay is as fresh and salient now as it was when first published, and needs to 
be read again, and seriously this time. 


Reading, Writing, Getting It Right: A Response to David Leeson's "Cutting Through History"

West, Christopher

Homophile Fictions: Fan Writing, Science Fiction, and the Birth of Gay Communities in Post-war America

Leeson, David

Cutting Through History: Hayden White, William S. Burroughs, and Surrealistic Battle Narratives

Stutje, Jan-Willem

Ernest Mandel in Resistance: Revolutionary Socialists in Belgium, 1940-1945

Soucie, Camille

Left History 10.1 175 
talist and pro-family activists. If she would dig deeper, Childers would find that 
these groups' memberships often overlapped and that their official propaganda 
was quite similar at times, especially concerning gender issues and in promot- 
ing a gendered vision of the state based on fatherhood and motherhood. While 
natalist and familialist groups were quite different in the period preceding the 
Great War, they often joined forces and shared the same leadership in the inter- 
war period and Vichy. Talmy's artificial distinction between the two camps 
obscures this fact and is made, perhaps, for his own political purposes in rela- 
tion to his position with the National Union of Family Associations at the time 
of his book's publication in the early 1960s. Further research into the organi- 
zations and the men behind them (often fathers of large families themselves) 
and less reliance on secondary sources such as Talmy's would have gone far in 
correcting this and other generalizations about those in and out of government 
who advanced the cause of fathers, large families, and the birthrate. 
These minor critiques aside, Fathers, Families, and the State in France 
remains an important book and provides a significant and path-brealung cor- 
rective to the historiography of both the Vichy regime and the late Third 
Republic; it does indeed show how gendered constructions of fatherhood and 
masculinity indelibly shaped notions of citizenship, political participation, and 
social value and should be of great interest to European historians interested in 
questions of gender, family, the state, and social politics. 
Cheryl Koos 
California State University, Los Angeles 
Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds., Right-Wing Women: From 
Conservatives to Extremists Around the World (New York: Routledge, 2002). 
Like many other areas of history, studies of the right have largely overlooked 
women's participation. While we might secretly wish for women in the Ku 
Klux Klan, or Pauline Hansen, founder of Australia's extreme right One Nation 
Party, to remain "hidden from history," the editors of Right-mng Women warn 
that we neglect right-wing women at our peril. Unlike earlier studies of women 
on the right that portrayed such women as "dupes of men" suffering from false 
consciousness, more recent work, including the essays in this volume, stresses 
that women are active participants in these movements who knowingly support 
right-wing agendas. The editors make clear accordingly that their main purpose 
in compiling this volume is to understand the right's appeal to women and the 
176 Reviews 
challenge it poses to feminism, and to use the knowledge gained to further 
"anti-right-wing practice" (1). 
The collection bills itself as the first "globally comparative, interdiscipli- 
nary volume on right-wing women ever" (l). It includes contributions from 
scholars across the social sciences and humanities on women engaged in right- 
wing activities from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Right- Wing 
Women contains articles on women who participated in Italian, British, and 
Brazilian fascist organizations, in Hindu and Afrikaner nationalist movements, 
in the Spanish and Greek civil wars, as well as women in a variety of right- 
wing movements in France, Germany, Chile, Mexico, and contemporary 
Australia, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States. Most of the contemporary arti- 
cles place the development of the right and women's participation in these 
movements in historical perspective. The variety of subjects across time and 
space will suggest to those unfamiliar with studies of right-wing women how 
active women are on the right and the richness of this field of inquiry. 
In their very u s e l l  introduction, the editors discuss many of the themes 
that appear in the book. This is a dificult task in part because of the range of 
subjects considered in the collection. One of the first questions the editors 
address is the problem of defining "the right" across time and space, and in dif- 
ferent national contexts that often lack the easy left/right binary to which 
Western scholars are accustomed. Another question they raise is how to explain 
the right's appeal to women and the various roles that women play in right- 
wing movements. Much of the appeal lies in the fact that the right espouses 
essentialist ideas about gender that reflect right-wing women's belief in the 
"natural" differences that exist between women and men. But, the significance 
of this difference takes many forms; for example, women and men are some- 
times seen as complements to each other and therefore as equal but different, 
or they can be perceived as dissimilar and inherently unequal. Some right-wing 
women endorse this inequality as the means to women's emancipation: by 
allowing women to embrace their "true nature," they see patriarchy as provid- 
ing women with a freedom denied them by the feminist movement. Women 
play a variety of roles in right-wing movements from grassroots workers to 
public leaders and political candidates. Interestingly, many of the issues sur- 
rounding women's participation in right-wing groups mirror those of women's 
participation in progressive organizations. Questions about women's relegation 
to the rank-and-file, debates about the value of separate women's sections in 
right-wing groups, and the differences between how women and men perceive 
women's contribution, appear in many of the articles. The differences between 
women's activism in progressive and right-wing movements can become 
blurred, particularly when right-wing women pursue goals similar to those of 
feminism, such as suffkage or equal pay for equal work. The editors, and many 
of the authors, note the need to distinguish the exercise of women's agency, 
Left History 10.1 177 
women's empowerment, and their political mobilization from feminist efforts 
on behalf of women's liberation. 
The difficulty the editors face in pulling the collection together also lies in 
the fact that the authors have such a wide variety of perspectives. Some write 
about their subjects with clear disdain. For others, there is a sense of grudging 
admiration for women who exert agency, experience empowerment, and carve 
space for themselves. (For example, compare Winter's discussion of Pauline 
Hanson and other right-wing women politicians in Australia with Gallucci's 
treatment of Margherita Sarfatti or Karam's portrayal of Islamic feminists in 
Egypt.) The editors' call for feminists to understand the right in order to better 
combat it would not sit well with all of the authors, particularly those who see 
right-wing nationalist movements as vehicles for opposing Western imperial- 
ism. Some of the authors even suggest that the women they are studying are, in 
fact, feminist. In an article on Margherita Sarfatti, biographer and lover of 
Mussolini and active member of the Italian Fascist Party, Carole Gallucci asks 
whether it is not possible to be both a fascist and a feminist? While she con- 
cedes that reconciling the two is "seemingly impossible in practice" (27), she 
suggests that Sarfatti tried to reconcile women's rights with support for an 
oppressive regime. Azza Karam, in an article on activist women in Egypt, 
applies the term Islamist feminist to women who themselves reject the term 
feminist because of the negative associations the term has with the West. Using 
the term feminist for women who reject it is one thing, if what we are talking 
about is feminism by another name. But, as Karam herself observes, the tenets 
of some of the women she writes about "are a secular feminist's nightmare" 
(228). The idea that women should be obedient and passive, and conform to 
"natures" that destine them to be wives and mothers, is hard to reconcile with 
feminism, even of the nineteenth-century maternal feminist variety. 
The editors note that they ". . .did not produce this book to present a homo- 
geneous feminist perspective on right-wing women; instead we desire to ren- 
der accessible a heterogeneity of feminist debates and positions within this 
growing field of enquiry" (2). The articles in Right-Wing Women certainly 
resist easy summary. Yet, while the range of perspectives offered by the authors 
make the collection eclectic and somewhat difficult, they also render it very 
thought provoking. This book will be of interest to anyone studying the right 
for it restores to history women's significant participation in a wide range of 
right-wing movements over the past century. In addition, Right-Wing Women 
will be particularly useful to those studying women's activism, whether on the 
left or the right, for it forces historians to think long and hard about their cate- 
gories. While we need to understand feminism as a living thing dependant on 
time and place, we have to be careful about stretching the term beyond its 
breaking point. If we can include women like Karam's Islamist feminists with- 
in our "feminisms", then we are conflating women's agency, activism, and 
178 Reviews 
empowerment with feminism and the term begins to lose its meaning and 
power. 
Camille Soucie 
Seneca College 
Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003). 
In his introduction to this well-written, soundly researched, and beautifully 
illustrated book Craig Heron claims that he never intended to write a book on 
"Booze." We are lucky that he did. Heron's book is a terrific contribution to the 
histories of working-class culture, masculinity, and alcohol. This masterful sur- 
vey covers early taverns, social occasions involving drinking, campaigns for 
moderation, temperance and prohibition, the business of alcohol production, 
the role of labour and unions, the regulatory regimes that developed in Canada 
after prohibition, the rise of the "disease" model of alcoholism, the emergence 
of beer parlours and cocktail lounges, the increase in women's drinking, the 
extra regulations and discrimination faced by aboriginal drinkers, and the 
impact of immigration on drinking patterns. Heron's carehlly organized 
research accounts for the morass of regional differences without confusion, and 
he also draws extensive comparisons between Canada, the United States, and 
European countries. 
In pre-industrial Canada, Heron shows, drinking was extremely common. 
Taverns were ubiquitous and customers helped themselves from a pail of 
whiskey at the door of their local shopkeepers. Many people made their own 
alcohol from spruce, dandelions, and hops. Neighbors drank at work bees and 
canal workers, loggers and fur traders all demanded whiskey in return for their 
labour. Heron contends that heavy drinking was a way of solidifying bonds 
between men. He argues that rugged masculinity was enacted through drunken 
brawls, but that alcohol consumption gave license to these performances, rather 
than initiating them. 
In the first half of the nineteenth century, temperance movements attract- 
ed a fairly broad range of "common" people, including farmers, shopkeepers, 
and journalists as well as members of the "respectable" working class. The 
movement sometimes critiqued upper-class drinkers, but temperance cam- 
paigns were dominated by the image of the "working-class drunkard who 
drank up his wages, left his children starving and beat his wife" (64). Heron 
argues that temperance distracted people from the larger economic forces of 
industrialization that were uprooting many lives by proposing an easy solution 
to poverty and criminality. Nonetheless, the effects were dramatic - drinking 


Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, eds. — Right-Eng Women: From Conservatives to Extremists Around the World

Stein, Marc

Crossing Borders: Memories, Dreams, Fantasies, and Nightmares of the History Job Market

Sheinin, David

RE VIEWS 
John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US. 
in Panama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 
This is a skilled and inventive combination of history and investigative jour- 
nalism. Inspired by the violent 1989 US invasion of Panama, and 
Washington's lies surrounding it, John Lindsay-Poland set out to uncover what 
he calls a hidden history of American imperialism in Panama. What he finds 
is fascinating. But what he calls hidden is accurate only in part. To be sure, 
Lindsay-Poland uncovers vital new details of the US exploitation of Panama 
during the Cold War. This book is particularly strong on the terrifying use of 
the Canal Zone to test depleted uranium and toxic arms; chemical weapons 
testing on the isthmus began in 1923 and lasted almost five decades. But part 
of what hidden history means to Lindsay-Poland rings of the tortured path 
many American liberals take to come to terms with imperial violence. US pres- 
ident George Bush justified the Panama invasion on the basis of threats against 
an American woman by Panamanian soldiers. "But the very next day," 
Lindsay-Poland writes, an American human rights worker was stabbed in 
Guatemala City on military orders. During the 1980s, the author continues, the 
US had given military support to the Guatemalan government. Putting two and 
two together, Lindsay-Poland found that President Bush's rationale for the 
invasion of Panama now "rang false" (1). Forty years past the start of the war 
in Vietnam, liberal Americans are still shocked to discover that their political 
leaders are lying to them about imperial violence committed in their names. As 
much as anything else, Lindsay-Poland's hidden history concerns what the 
author seems not to have known about US foreign policy before 1990, and 
should have. Just as there is an ongoing complicity of some American liberals 
in Washington's imperial project, there is an ongoing scholarship of "discov- 
ery" that is now more than forty-years old. 
A chapter on American interventions between 1856 and 1925 highlights 
American racism and how it shaped medical research and treatments, particu- 
larly with regard to yellow fever. The analysis of race is excellent; it is unfor- 
tunate that the author drops this theme after this chapter. There is a chapter on 
the relationship between the US government and the Panamanian military dur- 
ing the 1970s and 1980s, with a special emphasis on the drug war. But the most 
important contributions are chapters on the history of chemical weapons test- 
ing and on American conceptions of wildlife and environment as a function of 
empire. The case of Agent Orange testing typifies the American approach to 
Panama as a dumping ground. In 1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, the 
US Army began experimenting with the toxic defoliant in Panama. One wit- 
212 Reviews 
ness saw US Special Forces drop Agent Orange in 1969 or 1970 and "watched 
the jungle disappear over the next few days" (72). The result was high levels 
of Agent Orange in coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean, in Gatun Lake, and likely 
in other parts of Panama used for recreation and vacationing. Lindsay-Poland's 
is the first public report on the use of Agent Orange outside of Southeast Asia. 
While in this and other cases of chemical weapons testing Emperors in the 
Jungle cites cases of Americans whose health was severely compromised as a 
result, there is very little discussion or evidence of how the damage affected 
Panamanians. There is a stirring chapter on Project Plowshare, a US govern- 
ment plan in the 1950s and 1960s to use nuclear explosions to build a new sea- 
level waterway through Panama without locks. The plan never came to fruition 
but the arrogance of Cold War era US imperialism is shown by the author to 
have never been greater. 
Lindsay-Poland offers a concluding chapter that discusses changes in US 
military strategy in Panama during the twentieth century. He argues effective- 
ly that American military interests shifted over time to de-emphasize the strate- 
gic defence of the canal and to focus more and more on Panama as a testing 
range. He also revisits an important theme from the first chapter, the place of 
race in US imperialism. The return to race so late in the book highlights oppor- 
tunities lost by the author. At the end of the day, driven by his stated and under- 
standable outrage over US government lies, this book is more exceptional 
expose than connected historical analysis of US ifnperialism in Panama. While 
all chapters are strong, and some are excellent, there is little to join them 
methodologically beyond the violence of imperialism. While research in US 
sources is well done and thorough, the book is based on very little primary 
research in Panama. Further, not only does Lindsay-Poland not tie Panamanian 
problems in the face of American brutality, like racism and sexual violence, to 
key book themes, but there is no discussion of popular Panamanian responses 
or resistance to imperialism. What did Panamanians think of their exposure to 
dangerous chemicals over the years? How did they respond? Based almost 
exclusively on first rate research in the United States and focusing on an analy- 
sis of American policy and action, this book sets aside the notion that imperi- 
alism functions as a dynamic interaction between dominant and subject peo- 
ples. 
David Sheinin 
Trent University 


John Lindsay-Poland — Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US. in Panama

Ammirante, Julian

164 Reviews 
way for a parade of disillusioning policies and practical, usually opportunistic, 
'turns', all of which meant that Bob and Queenie Laxer's heartfelt commitment 
to revolutionary social transformation was destined to be stillborn. What their 
children lived through as a consequence is at times quite sad. There is no doubt 
that it colours the depiction of communism and individual communists in this 
book, where what remains most poignant in recollection is place and family, 
and where what seems distant and distorted are the politics that had promised 
a wider authenticity, encircling all of humanity. Would that it could have been 
different. 
Bryan D. Palmer 
Trent University 
Irwin Silber, Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, The Communist Who 
Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports (Philadelphia: Temple 
University Press, 2003). 
Professional baseball has a long-documented history of racial bigotry. This his- 
tory runs contrary to two of the great myths on which the game has always 
relied. First, that in sport, every effort consistent with sportsmanship must be 
spent to achieve victory - to run faster and leap higher. Second, that in busi- 
ness, for the pursuit of profits one must be indifferent to emotive inclination 
that can potentially distract one from achieving the bottom line. The ultimate 
objective therefore is to win championships and market share. However, the 
Jim Crow laws against black athletes that began to fall in 1947 and the preju- 
dices that have since persisted belie these conventions. Major League Baseball 
sells the colourful eccentricity of its athletes, both on and off the field, who 
supposedly adhere or adhered to these sporting and economic principles. 
Individuals such as Babe Ruth, Pete Rose, Bill Veeck, and George 
Steinbrenner, some of American baseball's most beloved characters and icons, 
have personified the ideals of competition and success. The myths that these 
characters embody are so powerful that the meaning of baseball's colour barri- 
er is difficult to grasp, as participants and observers alike evince a preference 
for the comfort of shared prejudice over the basic rigours of unfettered compe- 
tition. 
The story of the Negro Leagues and the black players who could have 
gone on to be remembered as some of the best baseballers in history if they had 
only been given the chance by their white major league counterparts, is a well- 
documented one, both in academe and in popular media. Thus, one might 
imagine that Press Box Red, a collection of interviews with the largely 
Left History 10.1 165 
unknown Lester Rodney, is merely a typical critique of American Major 
League Baseball's bigoted past. In fact, this book is a crisp reminder that the 
golden age of baseball and pro-sports in America in general was not nearly as 
simple as many would like to believe. Perhaps more importantly, this book is a 
testimony that sport has always been a matter of deep social significance and 
that the never-ending battle for social justice can be successfully waged from 
the most unexpected of spaces. 
What makes this book of particular interest is that Lester Rodney was a 
"Red" - a communist who inhabited the New York press boxes and covered 
sports with a professional but extraordinary perspective. Rodney was not sim- 
ply a commentator on what was perhaps the most significant American sports 
story of the century, the Jackie Robinson saga, but a catalyst. The Robinson 
story as usually told, justifiably credits Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch 
Rickey with the courage and inspiration to break with the baseball establish- 
ment and end the major leagues' long-standing ban on African American play- 
ers. In 1945, Rickey approached Jackie Robinson, a brilliant collegiate athlete, 
to lead the integration of baseball. Over the next two years, the first in the 
minor leagues at Montreal and then in 1947 with the celebrated Brooklyn 
Dodgers, Robinson created one of the most illustrious legends in American his- 
tory, prevailing in his performance on the field and opening the gates for 
Ahcan-American athletes not just in baseball, but across the sporting spec- 
trum. More importantly, Rickey's initiative and Robinson's courage and 
strength, established an important precursor for the national Civil Rights move- 
ment of the 1950s and 1960s. Recall, baseball's integration happened a year 
before the US Army considered African Americans as equal. 
However, the sustained campaign to integrate baseball did not begin with 
Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers organization in 1945, but almost ten 
years earlier. In 1936, when most sportswriters and their papers remained silent 
about baseball's Jim Crow laws, Rodney had launched a campaign under the 
title "The Crime of the Big Leagues," that exposed the injustice and hypocrisy 
of baseball's colour line to American readers. Even more remarkable is that 
these Americans learned of this injustice through Rodney's service as the sports 
editor of the New York Daily Worker, the instnunent of the American 
Communist Party. To Rodney, sport was not just another diversionary tactic of 
the capitalist bosses doping workers to forget the class struggle - "an opiate for 
the masses" - but an important component of people's lives and culture. This 
book assiduously demonstrates that Rodney did not write simple accounts of 
the sporting events he attended: he also emphasized the social issues that sur- 
rounded these games. 
Following the directives of the Communist Third International, in which 
Party members were urged to form a "popular front" with other forces on the 
political left, Rodney could not have identified a better way to court a working- 
166 Reviews 
class readership than to highlight coverage of baseball - including the exploits 
of the then marginalized Negro Leagues. Rather than clubbing the readership 
over the head with dogmatic and propaganda-laden dispatches, Rodney, a 
working journalist and a full-fledged and accepted member of the Baseball and 
Basketball Writers' Association, won acceptance and respect from players and 
fellow sportswriters for his broad knowledge of sports and his skills and hon- 
esty as a reporter. He was thus uniquely positioned to publicize the injustice of 
baseball's racist practices, while simultaneously enhancing the Party's visibili- 
ty in what Party leaders hoped would be the fertile recruiting grounds of 
African-American communities. 
Press Box Red demonstrates that since the Robinson story played itself out 
against the backdrop of the post-World War 11 Red Scare and repression of the 
Communist Party, the suppression of the Party's role in the integration cam- 
paign proved relatively easy for those who wished to portray Robinson's expe- 
riences as a harbinger of improved race relations. However, this book goes a 
long way to correct this omission and shows just how influential the Daily 
Worker was despite its limited circulation. Based in New York City at a time 
when interest in communism was at its peak, other elements of the Party appa- 
ratus picked up on Rodney's campaign and did much to popularize it picketing 
ballparks, organizing petitions, and raising awareness within the trade union 
movement for example. In essence, Rodney was keen enough to understand 
that sport could serve as a sort of cross-racial Esperanto, fostering a working- 
class consciousness that transcended racial divides. This is not to say that 
Rodney dogmatically perceived communism as a panacea for the ills of the 
world. Far before the Khruschev report in 1956, Lester Rodney was critical of 
the Party's unwillingness to confront the darker realities of the Soviet Union. 
Silber shows that Rodney and other Daily Worker employees sided with the 
reformers who sought to wrest control of the Party from traditional hardliners. 
When the Worker was accordingly shut down by the old guard, Rodney, like 
many others, resigned his membership. 
In the end, this book illustrates the stimuli that moved men and women of 
conscience like Rodney to join the Communist Party during the turmoil of the 
Great Depression. It demonstrates their rejection of the racism of the era and 
their commitment to social justice. The transgressions of the American 
Communist Party were profound and numerous, but its heritage was also a 
worthy and honourable one. The story of Lester Rodney personifies the best of 
this tradition. 
Julian Arnmirante 
York University 


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