Transnational American Memories

Transnational American Memories

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Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung Edited by / Herausgegeben von Astrid Erll · Ansgar Nünning

Editorial Board / Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Aleida Assmann · Mieke Bal · Marshall Brown · Vita Fortunati Udo J. Hebel · Claus Leggewie · Gunilla Lindberg-Wada Jürgen Reulecke · Jean Marie Schaeffer · Jürgen Schlaeger Siegfried J. Schmidt · Werner Sollors · Frederik Tygstrup Harald Welzer

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Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Transnational American Memories Edited by Udo J. Hebel

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 1613-8961 ISBN 978-3-11-022420-7 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Laufen Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Contents UDO J. HEBEL Introduction.…………………………………………………........1 JUAN BRUCE-NOVOA Transnational Recastings of Conquest and the Malinche Myth……………………………………………….......11 ASTRID M. FELLNER Performing Cultural Memory: Scenarios of Colonial Encounter in the Writings of John Smith, Cabeza de Vaca, and Jacques Cartier………………………………………………33 CARMEN BIRKLE Saving the Circum-Atlantic World: Transnational (American) Memories in Julia Álvarez’s Disease Narrative……………...……59 ORM ØVERLAND Intruders on Native Ground: Troubling Silences and Memories of the Land-Taking in Norwegian Immigrant Letters ...79 HANS BAK Tribal or Transnational? Memory, History and Identity in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk………….……......105 NICOLE WALLER Arabs Looking Back: William Peter Blatty’s Autobiographical Writing……………………………………….129 MITA BANERJEE Roots Trips and Virtual Ethnicity: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated………..……. ........145

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ALFRED HORNUNG Terrorist Violence and Transnational Memory: Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo………………………....171 VOLKER DEPKAT Remembering War the Transnational Way: The U.S.-American Memory of World War I…………………...185 DAVID WILLIAM SEITZ “Let Him Remain Until the Judgment in France”: Family Letters and the Overseas Burying of U.S. World War I Soldiers...…..………………………………...215 INGRID GESSNER Liberating Dachau: Transnational Discourses of Holocaust Memory................................................................................243 KRISTIN HASS Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’ and Containing the ‘Remembered War:’ Insistent Nationalism and the Transnational Memory of the Korean War……….........................267 BIRGIT DÄWES Celluloid Recoveries: Cinematic Transformations of ‘Ground Zero’……...............................................................................285 ASTRID BÖGER (Re)Visions of Progress: Chicago’s World’s Fairs as Sites of Transnational American Memory………………………………311 KIRK SAVAGE Between Diaspora and Empire: The Shevchenko Monument in Washington, D.C…………………………………………….333 JULIANE SCHWARZ-BIERSCHENK Of Routes and Roots: Topographies of Transnational Memory in the Upper Rio Grande Valley………………………351

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BIRGIT BAURIDL “A Lens Into What It Means to Be an American”: African American Philadelphia Murals as Sites of Memory……..377 MICHAEL KAMMEN Artistic Inspiration and Transnational Memories in the Twentieth Century……………………………………………...405 DAVID W. SAXE Magna Carta 1215 and the Exercise of Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century ..…………………………………..425 EDWARD T. LINENTHAL Commentary Epilogue………………………………………….447 Notes on Contributors.……...………………………………….453

Introduction UDO J. HEBEL

The declaration of the “memory boom” dates back to the 1990s (Huyssen 3) but the productivity and proliferation of memory studies has far from waned and has even been described as “memorial mania” (Doss 227). Introductions to the study of collective memories and cultures of memory (Erll) as well as interdisciplinary handbooks (Erll and Nünning) and anthologies of theoretical texts (Rossington) testify to the conceptual potential and material richness of an academic field that is still rooted in the groundbreaking theoretical studies of Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora but that has long developed into a multifaceted and multivocal paradigm at the crossroads of ever so many disciplines, approaches, and scientific and political interests. The seemingly endless extension of the scope of scholarly explorations of commemorative practices and platforms of memory has prompted an equally remarkable variety of public history projects, conferences, and publications trying to assess the “merits of memory” (Grabbe and Schindler). If it takes a journal and a book series to evidence the academic inscription of a field of scholarly curiosity and interest, the launch of “Media and Cultural Memory” in 2004 and the arrival of Memory Studies in 2008 may be taken as respective gauges in the historical and institutional narrative of memory studies. In the field of American Studies, memory and remembrance have proven to be particularly productive concepts in the wake of the revisionist impulse of the New American Studies since the late 1980s (Fisher). Widely discussed issues of identity politics and nation-building as well as theories of “imagined communities” (Anderson) and “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger) – long-time favorites among (New) Americanists studying the multiethnic history and pluralistic society of the U.S. – reverberate with constructivist notions of memory and link up with political understandings of cultural memories and collective commemorations. Counter-memories and practices of oppositional remembrance have moved to the center of critical attention in, e.g., African American Studies (Kachun) and Native American Studies (“National Museum”; Elliott). The defining interdisciplinarity of American Studies and the discipline’s prominent involvement in recent theoretical turns (Bachmann-Medick),

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from the visual and performative to the spatial, virtual, and transnational, provide Americanists with the wide-ranging scholarly vision suitable – and actually necessary – to account for the diversity of the manifestations and purposes of U.S.-American cultures of memory. The theoretical emphases and reorientations of American Studies (Radway; Pease and Wiegman; Rowe, New American Studies; Rowe, Post-Nationalist American Studies) have also foregrounded the potential of both well-known and recently recovered materials for American memory studies and offered manifold possibilities and perspectives to explore the political, cultural, and economic competition for commemorative participation and authority of memory in the United States (Hebel, “Sites of Memory”; Hebel, “Introduction”). Studies such as Jim Weeks’ Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine focus on the commercialization of famed sites of U.S.-American civil religion and public memory since the nineteenth century. Rob Kroes’s Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History explores the interplay of photographic visualization and memory from the mid-nineteenth century through the years after 9/11. Benjamin Hufbauer’s Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory and Kirk Savage’s Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape can be read as representatives of the spatial turn in American memory studies. Ingrid Gessner’s From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences traces the processes and implications of the virtualization of physical locations and personal experiences of collective commemoration and forgetful erasure in contexts that are both national(ist) and transnational. It is in these larger contexts that the present volume has been conceived as a sequel to the 2003 collection Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (Hebel). It follows the claim formulated elsewhere (Hebel, “In Lieu of an Epilogue”) that the transnational trajectories, implications, and politics of U.S.-American cultures of memories and sites of commemoration deserve more attention by interdisciplinary memory scholars in general and practitioners of American Studies in particular. The premises and purposes of transnational American Studies as advanced in programmatic publications by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Alfred Hornung, Winfried Fluck, and Heinz Ickstadt inform the nineteen original contributions to this collection by leading scholars and newly emerging voices in the field of American memory studies on both sides of the Atlantic. The international background of the contributors reflects the transnational impact and relevance of the theories, issues, and materials engaged in the volume. The recognition of the boundless and creative transnational flow of commemorative energy in and out of the cultures grounded in or associated

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with the space of what today is the United States of America makes for the wide geographical, historical, cultural, and political scope of the individual essays. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as transnational crossroads of remembrance and commemoration manifests their complex role and possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform the ongoing discussions about American Studies and/as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. A major part of the contributions to Transnational American Memories takes (literary) texts from the times of early colonial encounters in the Americas through the immediate present as repositories of and agents for the representation, recovery, and transformation of collective and individual memories over time and space. Juan Bruce-Novoa traces the interweaving of the mythical Mexican figure of Malinche with the Holocaust in contemporary Mexican-American-German poet Rita María Magdaleno’s collection Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother of 2003. Astrid M. Fellner emphasizes the palimpsestic layering and Transamerican framework of the archive of colonial American literature by juxtaposing scenarios of intercultural encounter in Jamestown as displayed in John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624) with depictions of European-Native American encounters in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacíon (1537-55) and Jacques Cartier’s The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (1580). Carmen Birkle approaches the autobiographical novel Saving the World (2006) by contemporary Caribbean American writer Julia Álvarez from Atlantic Studies and Hemispheric Studies points of view and shows how the fictional recollection of an early nineteenthcentury Central and South American expedition and disease narrative merges over time and space with a present-day story of the establishment of an AIDS clinic in the Dominican Republic. Orm Øverland presents immigrant letters as a storehouse of transnational memories and discusses how letters by nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrants to the upper Midwest, and especially the study of silences and the repression of memory in these documents, may help to retrieve immigrants’ attitudes towards the Native Americans they displaced. Hans Bak’s reading of James Welch’s novel The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) investigates what happens to the Oglala Lakota protagonist when he crosses the Atlantic to Europe as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West in the late 1880s, gets lost for several years in the French diaspora, and resorts to his tribal memory as a source of both sustenance and disorientation in this particular transnational context. Nicole Waller’s recovery of William Peter Blatty’s semi-autobiographical novel Which Way to Mecca, Jack? of 1959

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highlights the significance of ethnic life-writing as the commemorative interpretation of personal experiences of marginality, discrimination, hybridity, and mimicry in the case of a Lebanese American narrator and his life in the prejudicial worlds of New York and Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s and his time as U.S. Information Service agent in Lebanon in the 1950s. Mita Banerjee’s discussion of the politics of transnational (American) memories starts from her analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and addresses the convergence of several particular historical and cultural moments of wider international scope: the building of the Jewish Museum in Berlin; the museum’s recent public relations activities; the springing up in Europe, and especially in Eastern Europe, of a heritage industry capitalizing on sites of (lost) Jewishness. Alfred Hornung analyzes the representation of terrorist violence in literature written in the wake of 9/11, focusing on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), to illustrate the replenishment of U.S.-American fiction by way of transnational memories at a historical and cultural moment which seemed to evidence a limit to the literary imagination. Given the absence of similar catastrophic destruction in the history of the continental United States since the Civil War, writers find analogies in the military actions of World War II both in Europe and Asia and use transnational memories of manmade destruction to cope with the impact of international terrorism on U.S.-American soil at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Alfred Hornung’s contribution makes for a transition into a second group of contributions that engages issues, implications, and concretizations of remembering war and its manifold manifestations and consequences in transnational contexts. Volker Depkat problematizes conventional understandings of war memories as inherently national and as a form of collective memory which is best analyzed within national paradigms. Focusing on the cult of memory surrounding World War I in the United States, Depkat not only suggests that the social cleavages and transnational interconnections of this and any other international military conflict translate into memory wars and the fragmentation of national memory but also that despite its strong national focus, U.S.-American memory of World War I had transnational elements to it from early on. David M. Seitz’ records the controversies surrounding the burial in Europe and in the United States of fallen U.S.-American World War I soldiers as preserved in letters housed in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Seitz recovers the testimonies of U.S.-American citizens whose responses to the government’s inquiries recollect their respective attitudes to remembering the nation’s intervention in global affairs at the beginning of the twentieth century. While some family mem-

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bers relinquished the care of corpses to the government, others demanded the return of their loved ones’ remains to the United States Members of the African American community noted that although their men had fought and died for the nation, African Americans were still treated as inferior citizens. Ingrid Gessner adds to the ongoing discussion of Holocaust memories by bringing into the official U.S.-American narrative of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp the narrative of Japanese American soldiers who contributed to that historical liberation but were themselves members of an ethnic group interned for alleged reasons of national security at home in the U.S. Gessner’s essay reads The Gate of Heaven, written collaboratively by playwrights/actors Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge, and Solly Ganor’s survivor memoir Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem (1995) as transnational constructions of memories of the Holocaust and the internment experience of Japanese Americans. Kristin Hass links the national memorials to the Korean War erected in the United States and in Korea in the 1990s and thus opens up a monumental dialog across two nations which, despite the differences of impact that the war had in the two countries, reveals the common impulse in the two memorials to have the Korean War remembered as a singular national triumph. Birgit Däwes’ analysis of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), selected contributions to Alain Brigand’s collection 11’09”11 (2002), and Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty (2005) as filmic memorial trajectories widens the perspective beyond the international wars of the twentieth century and examines the translation of the supposedly unambiguous iconic images of 9/11 into filmic narratives that, in turn, transform, or refuse to transform, the site of the former World Trade Center into the memorial space of Ground Zero. The articles by Kristin Hass and Birgit Däwes foreground the spatial implications of memory studies and illustrate how specific locations of national commemoration in the United States (or any other nation) may become sites and agents of transnational memory. It is this particular space specificity of transnational sites of memory which informs a third set of contributions to Transnational American Memories. Astrid Böger explores the Chicago World’s Fairs of 1893, 1933, and 1992 as vehicles for appropriating world history from a U.S.-American vantage point. Böger’s analysis of the Chicago World’s Fairs reconstructs the interplay of the forces of U.S.-American cultural memory production and the (intended or involuntary) processes of transnational memory formation over the course of one hundred years. Kirk Savage unfolds the multifaceted history of the Washington, D.C. monument to nineteenth-century Ukrainian artist, painter, and writer Taras Shevchenko. Savage situates the monument in the larger contexts of the competing commemorative adoptions

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Shevchenko had to undergo by the Soviet Union and by Ukrainian nationalists in the diaspora abroad and at home and shows the erosion of the monument’s political and cultural clout in changing political environments since the Cold War and in the wake of changing monumental rhetorics. Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk reads the Southwestern borderlands as contested grounds of memory, replete with competing images and conflicting narratives of a multiethnic past. Taking the ancient trade route of the Spanish Camino Real as its focus and the controversial celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the Camino Real in 1998 as its historical and ideological context, Schwarz-Bierschenk’s article argues that the commemorative projects along the Camino Real illustrate a spatialization of memory designed to concretely situate identities and communities in a region intending to recover its transnational history and legacy. Birgit Bauridl turns to African American sites of memory and discusses Philadelphia murals as public possibilities to honor and memorialize leading local figures, commemorate collective African (American) histories, and affirm and perpetuate traditions and values of various cultures and ethnicities. Bauridl shows how the Philadelphia murals store particular African American memories: physically on the very site of their display and virtually on a specifically created web site. The final two articles by Michael Kammen and David W. Saxe relate to several of the aspects discussed in the preceding essays and extend the disciplinary and material scope of the volume at the same time. Evoking Randolph Bourne’s early twentieth-century concept of a ‘trans-national American nation,’ Kammen presents the memories of artists who had come to the United States as immigrants during the early to mid-twentieth century and achieved cosmopolitan fame in the years thereafter, and traces the legacy of their transnational creativity as stored in museums around the world. Saxe’s essay returns to textual documents as points of reference in collective memory and in political processes of commemoration and unravels the history of the commemorative veneration of the Magna Carta with special focus on U.S.-American constitutional and political history. The volume is concluded by a commentary epilog. Edward T. Linenthal complicates theoretical concepts and terminologies guiding some of the contributions, emphasizes the political implications and conflicts at the core of so many acts of remembering, and points ahead to further work in the field of memory and remembrance studies. The broad range of the present collection reflects the diversity and multiperspectivism of the field of transnational American Studies from which it emerges. Following and substantiating Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s projection that “as the transnational increasingly attracts our interest, American stud-

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ies scholars will welcome investigations of public memory and monuments in comparative perspective” (Fishkin 33), the volume focuses American memory studies on issues of transnational flow and intercultural exchange with emphasis on the political relevance and social implications of both the sites of (U.S.-)American memory studied and the American Studies practice of exploring them. I thank all contributors to Transnational American Memories for their support in that endeavor, their willingness to provide original work, and their continued cooperation throughout the editorial process. A special word of gratitude goes to Karin Amann, Augustus Cavanna, Ingrid Gessner, Veronika Hofstätter, and Veronika Jungbauer, (all from the American Studies Department of the University of Regensburg, Germany) for their untiring and competent support in preparing the manuscript for publications. I thank the Series Editors, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, for their immediate openness towards the project and their inclusion of the volume in the series “Media and Cultural Memory.”

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006. Doss, Erika. “War, Memory, and the Public Mediation of Affect: The National World War II Memorial and American Imperialism.” Memory Studies 1.2 (2008): 227-50. Elliott, Michael A. “Indian Patriots on Last Stand Hill.” American Quarterly 58 (2006):987-1015. Erll, Astrid. Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. —, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. Fisher, Philip, ed. New American Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17-57. Fluck, Winfried. “Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need?” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 23-32. — et al., eds. Transnational American Studies. Tübingen: Narr, 2007. Gessner, Ingrid. From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Grabbe, Hans-Jürgen, and Sabine Schindler, eds. The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts, Debates. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008 Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan, 1925. —. La mémoire collective. Paris: PUF, 1950. [Tr. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper, 1980; On Collective Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.]

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Hebel, Udo J. “Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, 2008. 47-60. —. “In Lieu of an Epilogue.” The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts, Debates. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe and Petra Schindler. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 389-95. —, ed. Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. —. “Introduction.” Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. ix-xxxii. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge UP, 1983. Hornung, Alfred. “Transnational American Studies.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 6773. Hufbauer, Benjamin. Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory. Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 2005. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995. Ickstadt, Heinz. “American Studies in an Age of Globalization.” American Quarterly 54 (2002): 543-62. Kachun, Mitch. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003. Kroes, Rob. Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2007. Linenthal, Edward T. The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: OUP, 2001. —. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Viking, 1995. —. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. —, and David Chidester, eds. American Sacred Space. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995. —, and Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: Metropolitan, 1996. “Media and Cultural Memory” (2004–); Series Editors: Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning; Berlin/New York: DeGruyter. Memory Studies 1.1 (2008–); Editor-in-Chief: Andrew Hoskins; London: Sage. “The National Museum of the American Indian.” Special Double Issue American Indian Quarterly 29.3/4 (2005). Nora, Pierre. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992. [Tr. Realms of Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 1996-1998.] —. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26 (1989):7-25. Pease, Donald, and Robyn Wiegman, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. Radway, Janice et al., eds. American Studies. New York: Wiley, 2009. Rossington, Michael et al., eds. Theories of Memory: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Rowe, John Carlos. The New American Studies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. —, ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

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Savage, Kirk. Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Weeks, Jim. Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Transnational Recastings of Conquest and the Malinche Myth JUAN BRUCE-NOVOA

It will be fruitful to investigate in further studies the effect of the Malinche figure on other cultures in order to evaluate how different sociopolitical influences affect the representations of the paradigm. Sandra Messinger Cypress, La Malinche in Mexican Literature

Memory Maps and the Politics of Cartography William Boelhower’s now familiar diagram of ethnic semiosis assigns one of the four corners to memory as the instrument of recall and another to the encyclopedia or storehouse of all possible memories as images and events in history (Through a Glass). Their interaction forges an ethnic identity, with acts of recall offering to readers images to be shared as a common heritage. As I showed in my early work (Chicano Authors), highly diverse and locally focused Chicano authors shared certain readings and attitudes drawn mainly from a mixture of their exposure to the basic building blocks of Mexican popular culture as well as a U.S. education system that included a set of established historical and literary readings. Both sources offered cartographies of a usable past selected by repeated acts of recall filtered through social approval at multiple levels. The travel guides for traversing these spaces and what value was to be attributed to the images encountered can be seen as manuals of public and private political correctness and survival. Like Mexico City’s Avenida Reforma, a street lined with statues commemorating the contribution of each state to the forging of the nation, incarnated historical events and civil virtues deemed worthy of admiration and imitation by citizens, a memorial stroll is a lesson in which many versions of the past are worthy of recall. How the route is designed for individual access is itself a lesson in social behavior and personal survival. Ethnic authors and critics often speak of finding themselves relegated to the peripheral or blank zones of the authorized maps. They also envision their role as rendering these zones visible by, in Boelhower’s terms,

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selecting different items from the encyclopedia. These acts of alternative recall not only opened up more space on the map, they led readers to different monuments and traced different routes for the historical sojourn. New memorial routes expand the active encyclopedia of identity, even when the new items are drawn from sources far afield from previous drafts of the communal map or constitute new inventions produced more by the imagination than historical retrieval. While ethnic criticism, in its attempt to offer a coherent vision of its field, may focus on the most common spaces and images a particular group frequents in its memorial voyages, the process is never complete and often contentious. To the patriarchal route found in much of the literature by Chicano writers, Chicanas have responded by constructing a female if not always feminist rerouting. To claims of centrality by one region, others regions respond with their local difference. A walk down memory lane with any one group should be balanced a return trip down alternate paths. Chicano literature inherently is transnational because Chicano culture brings together elements from the U.S. and Mexican cultures, as well as ingredients from Native American nations. Most attention has gone to tracing lines between and among these obvious national mixtures, less to links beyond. Nash Candelaria’s Memories of the Alhambra (1977) stated that a return to Spain, not Mexico, was necessary. Rolando Hinojosa’s Korean Love Songs (1978) wrote the Chicano GIs experience in the Korean War into the active encyclopedia. Cecil Pineda’s Face (1985) replayed the Mexican Malinche myth into a Brazilian context, forging wider Latin American ties. Ron Arias’ memoir Moving Target (2002) related his father’s military service in both World War II in Europe and later in the Korean conflict. “The Week in the Life of Manuel Hernandez” (1969), an unfortunately forgotten story by Nick C. Vaca, dedicated one day of the week to the protagonist’s readings of key texts from European philosophy while studying in England, while Richard Rodriguez recalled his real student sojourn in London in his first book. My own Only the Good Times (1995) features a Chicano filmmaker forging a career in European cinematic and geographical context. Each text added possibilities of untypical transnational encounters that later Chicano authors can return to as they access the expanded Chicano encyclopedia. Rita María Magdaleno’s poetry collection Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother (2003) constitutes a mature, full-blown addition to this small, but significant venture into that wider transnational field. What foregrounds her work among the others is its interweaving of a major historical/mythical Mexican figure with a universally acknowledged European cultural matrix, the Holocaust, a transna-

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tionalism also incarnate in the author’s German/Mexican American heritage.

Malinche: Evolving Mythic Paradigm Sandra Cypress convincingly demonstrates that the cultural myth of la Malinche, Cortez’ mistress and interpreter, functions as “a paradigm for female images in Mexico, for the ways men and women relate to each other” (7). Using Victor Turner’s concept of a cultural root paradigm as an archetypal pattern that acquires “allusiveness, implications, and metaphor” (Turner 154), she explains how it transcends time by recasting itself in accord with changing times. Cypress dedicates a chapter to Chicana writers for many of whom “their own political and social concerns and their questions regarding ethnicity are derived from La Malinche’s experiences” (142). Their efforts make Chicanas major players in the recasting process of the paradigm. Cypress also sees international potential for Malinche’s paradigm. She compares her to the Celtic Queen Boadicea, another avatar of female resistance to the conquering cultural other. In the epigraph above, she suggests expanding Malinche studies into distant cultural settings. I propose here just such a combination of international perspective and the Chicana-rewriting project. Serious Malinche researchers admit that much claimed about her is utter conjecture. The ‘facts’ about her origins and life were contested from the start. Cypress demonstrates the point in sentences like the following: “We may also assume without knowing for certain that [Malinche] was the first-born daughter of a cacique and so a member of the privileged, educated class” (33). A paragraph that follows strings together semidisclaimers like “Marina must have attended,” “[m]ost historians agree,” “[i]t is possible that […].” The paragraph ends tentatively: “It would be expected, then, that Marina would have been conditioned by her socialization as a slave among the Amerindians to obey the commands of her new masters” (33). Claudia Leitner has shown that visual knowledge of Malinche is equally a product of contentious artistic speculation, including the depictions by Chicanas (see “Cover(t) Girl”). In short, Malinche’s cultural myth refers to a core symbolic representation of a life experiences utilized as a model associated with performing national identity. We can summarize Malinche’s outline as follows: The family of a young woman, native to pre-Colombian Mexico, mistreated her and indentured her to another tribe. When a foreign power invades, she is given to the conquerors. As the leader’s interpreter she plays a key role in his conquest of her people. She also has a sexual relationship with the leader,

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who fathers her child, but eventually abandons her to return to his own family and his home country across the sea. Malinche comes to be seen as the combination of arch traitor to the indigenous people and mother of the Mexican Nation. Chicana writers claim Malinche as the historical figure that most closely represents their essence. Scholars have documented a Chicana obsession with refashioning the myth of origins in the figure of this maligned and silenced mother (see Alarcón, “Feminist Literature;” “Traddutora”; Bandau; Leitner; Pratt; Romero). The act of retracing her story has become a ritual of Chicana identity. Rita María Magdaleno’s poetry collection Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother fits the bill.

Searching for Mother; Discovering Malinche The production details of Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother guide our approach to the text. It appeared in The University of Arizona Press’ “Camino del Sol, A Latina and Latino Literary Series” for “exceptional literary work by Latina and Latino authors” (see University of Arizona Press). The series features recognizable authors like Juan Felipe Herrera, Virgil Suárez, and Demetria Martínez. The prestigious academic press certifies Magdaleno’s identity as a Latina. The book presents Magdaleno’s voyage of reconciliation with her dead mother. Her trip to the mother’s home country – her own country of birth – assumes biographical and psychological dimensions as she visits maternal relatives to learn about her youth and discover what brought her parents together. Predisposed to a Chicano reading, readers are reminded of similar Chicano recuperation voyages. Section I opens with the author traveling along a border that divided a single nation into two countries by a war, another Chicano commonplace. The author seeks something to mend the rift with her mother: […] Here, I can feel an old separation – of heart and land, of mother and daughter. This trip is like going back more than forty years and I’m thinking of my dead mother, of the borders we once constructed between one another. (4)

Family and nation conflate, both having suffered decades of separation; mother and daughter equal the nation’s split territory. The poem states the trip’s and the book’s goal as “journey back / to my Mother” (17). The ideal resolution would be reunification. Significantly, separation is expressed as space between ‘heart and land,’ the human and the nonhuman world separated but related by the conjunction. They should unite in the

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ideal of ‘heartland.’ The following equivalencies arise: heart = mother while land = daughter, implying that a mother/daughter reunion must precede the integration of body/family/land/nation. The poem’s project appears in the simile of mother/border: “[…] wet border. She is wide open like a mother who is ready to give birth.”(4)

The author travels back towards her birth that equates to the rebirth of her original heartland and simultaneously her own rebirth within a reunion with her mother/land: motherland. That product is hybrid in its primary material, language, playing interlingually with its public language, English, and the parents’ two intimate languages. Leaving aside the title for now, the author’s itinerary is predicted by her advertised ethnicity. The author visits the maternal family in its home space and explores her birthplace, replete with ethnic details. Her relatives provide glimpses of the familial past. In the process, she will discover a pattern of patriarchal suppression of women and even unmask the grandfather’s violation of the author’s mother. She will confront racism against her as the illegitimate product of the mother’s liaison with a conqueror perceived as racial other. Finally, not all family members hail the author as prodigal child. All this helps us understand what drove her mother into the conqueror’s arms. The author creates the setting to perform the past anew as the drama of the two young people from different sides of the war. Their relationship – perhaps love – that engendered the author are represented in established Chicano topoi: a conquering soldier and the beautiful native woman of the conquered zone. Later, the abandoned woman is left pregnant with a mestiza child who is the author recalling the story. The mother goes to the U.S. driven by her “immigrant dream” (49). The first poem of the collection’s last section reprises the border/birthing image from Section I, clarifying it as the author’s birth: “a shining moment & you believed America was the pure/ dream – my face, a dark moon surfacing between your / thighs” (79). The author characterizes herself in Chicano terms: “dark daughter, mojada” and “a wetback escaping to an American education” (88). She escapes to her Mexican American father’s native Arizona. When her parents’ marriage fails, the daughter feels divided by a border that continues even after the mother’s death (73). In the end, the text realizes what so much Chicano literature sets out to do: rescue from forgetfulness, suppression and incomprehension historical images and stories that determined the meaning of the past and restore the well-being of the present generation threatened by the loss of its familial and/or cultural axis mundi. The text

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rescues and displays those images for appreciation and analysis, facilitating understanding of the forces that created them while revealing the reader’s place in that tradition (Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry). The rescued past allows Magdaleno to organize her present from which to project herself into a mestizo, hybrid future, anticipated in the interlingualism. Although English predominates, a few Spanish phrases tone the text, such as “alas y restos, / birdwings / & ashes” (15) or “una hija natural, / illegitimate child” (52). The mestizo future assumes an ethnic identity in the author’s characterization of her essence: “my Azteca heart” (28). The Spanish adjectival form ‘Azteca’ lends its English frame an ethnic specificity in the center of her bodily being. This is Chicano interlingualism at its subtle and simple best. These elements locate Magdaleno’s text firmly in line with Chicano literature. However, privileging Chicano discourse ignores other signs and another discourse that occupies more space, while another geography serves as central setting, and another language, German, competes with Spanish for the position of other within the dominant English. The title illustrates this play of German and Spanish within English: Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother, two actresses and an anonymous mother, with nothing seeming to relate the former to the latter. Somehow the stars serve as a starting point for the reading. The nationalities referenced mirror that of the author’s parents: German mother and U.S. father. Yet, nuances expand the contextual intertextuality to reveal that these apparently non-Chicano national references conceal links to Chicano discourse. Arguably Germany’s most famous film star of the World War II period, Dietrich had moved to Hollywood in 1930 and was pro-Allies (see Katz 366). The International Spy Museum lists her among celebrities involved in anti-Nazi espionage. Dietrich assumes Malinche characteristics in siding with the conqueror against her ‘native’ country. Her recording of Allied propaganda in German simulates a type of translating that aided the enemies of her native country. Considering the post-war Americanization of German culture, Dietrich resembles Malinche in her personification of the cultural hybrid formed in the ensuing peace. Rita Hayworth offers similar hidden complexities. Of Spanish and British descent, Hayworth was a mestiza, “born Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino [...]. Her parents were Volga Hayworth, of Irish and English descent, and Eduardo Cansino, who came from Seville, Spain” (Hoz). While some claim Hayworth epitomizes the struggle of a generation of Latinos who changed their names to be accepted by mainstream culture (see Hadley-Garcia), her mother’s name was Hayworth. Yet ethnic critics call using the name ‘Hayworth’ an act of cultural betrayal, called

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malinchismo in Mexico, even though Hayworth was a legitimate ethnic choice. Malinche’s echo filters through it all: “She is known by different names […] La Malinche is called Malinal, Malintzin, Malinche, or Doña Marina. Malintzin is formed from her Náhuatl birth name, Malinal, and Marina was given to her at her Christian baptism; la Malinche is the syncretic, mestizo form” (Cypress 2). No matter what name is used, someone finds it offensive, because Malinche figures occupy an in between position of hybrid identity unacceptable to any one group alone. Hayworth also reflects back onto Dietrich to remind us that Marlene was the professional name for Maria Magdalene Dietrich. Dietrich and Hayworth shared the category of ‘Love Goddess,’ supreme object of masculine desire. Emerging from this context, the nameless Mother, in addition to fusing German and U.S. cultures, incarnates celluloid sexual desire. Her reality as mother is saturated with the mythic allure of stars who were pinups for GIs. Hence, to reach that reality will require demythification and mediation among the possible combinations of elements, with desire and role-playing central to our effort. Magdaleno recontextualizes Chicano literary clichés within her personal situation as a German Chicana born in 1947 in Augsburg, Germany, daughter of a Mexican American soldier from Arizona. She revitalizes Chicano thematics by resituating them out of context within strange associations capable of renewing tired imagery. Freud might say that Magdaleno’s poems produce the Unheimliche, that combination of the familiar and the strange. While translated as the uncanny, the word’s center is Heim (home), the familial abode where one resides comfortably. Yet when something arises within that apparently secure context to produce a sensation of strangeness, the paradox perturbs us. The Unheimliche functions in Magdaleno’s text on several levels: thematic, intertextual, and that of reader reception. Its regenerative power lies in its capacity to disorient readers as if they were crossing, not the familiar bicultural boundaries of Chicano writing, but other cultural borders unfamiliar in Chicano literary production. The first uncanny twist comes in the opening poem of Section I: ‘Grenze’ – the familiar topoi of the border displaced into an unexpected language. The persona finds herself in 1991 Germany aboard a train en route to Berlin. Until shortly before that date the city had been divided by a border dispute among the World War II Allies, a line that not only cut one country in two – the Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the German Democratic Republic under the Soviets in the east – but fractured Berlin itself, first politically and in 1961 with the construction of the Berlin Wall. The author evokes this zone using a linguistic tactic familiar to Chicanos, i.e. bilingualism: “they were split / by the border, die Grenze,

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for more / than forty years” (3). The process deterritorializes a Chicano arch-theme by placing it in a German double, distancing it from U.S.Mexican geography and holding up a mirror to cast reflections in both directions for mutual enlightenment. The border loses uniqueness to become an avatar of political circumstances repeated over time in different locations. Inserted into the uncanny, the border loses its uniqueness in the light of competing formulations of the topoi forcing it to circulate in the random play of mutual reflections. Within this new space there emerges the text’s foundational metaphor of the mother giving birth to the author, the German Chicana Rita María Magdaleno, a new take on the Chicana mestiza. Similarly, the archetypal couple of native mother/Malinche and Hispanic conqueror father undergoes displacement. Their familiar situation happens in another space and time, thus raising the possibility of it happening anywhere and anytime. The conqueror’s attitude and comportment can no longer be classified as European, but global – recurring when and wherever conquering males encounter subjugated females forced to negotiate for survival. Here the invader is Chicano from whom the author derives her ‘Azteca heart.’ The conquest denounced by Chicano literature here facilitates the author’s ethnic affiliation. Conquest facilitates miscegenated identity. If a German mother can incarnate the Malinche experience, it is not specific to one culture or one historical moment but rather ubiquitous and arising from patriarchal politics that exploit women in crisis. The author’s mother, grandmother and aunts suffered male abuse and exploitation, an attitude elevated to a national program under Nazism or Spanish colonialism – and implicitly under both pre-Columbian Mexican cultures and patriarchal Chicanismo. The mother’s fraternization with the foreign conqueror assumes the guise of an escape from abuse the author’s female relatives suffered at the hands of her father and the Fatherland. The author’s discoveries reveal motivation for the mother’s sexual surrender to the GI who impregnates and then abandons her. Magdaleno’s story is yet another Chicana vindication of la Malinche. The past and the present link within repeating archetypal encounters. For example, “High Summer” (21-23) reprises the mother and daughter bargaining for survival on yet a different border. On a trip to Prague, Magdaleno plays western tourist in the eastern third world – a status shared by many former Soviet satellite countries in the 1990s. On the return drive they “stopped near Hlinsko to buy cherries.” This sets the stage for the mother/daughter to be victimized by yet another conquest and invasion.

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I am thinking about that mother, how she stood empty-handed beside her daughter, how they watched our silver bus pulls away, quickly. Now the sun drips orange behind wild hills curving all around us and I wonder what is left for that woman to give her daughter besides a small space at that roadside stand, to sell cherries. And sometimes to get cheated by people like us, tourists who need to take something home, who expect to travel with full pockets across the border. High summer, the moon swelling up fat and yellow over the border. Over each row of naked cherry trees. (22-23)

The two Czech women are victims of delayed repercussions of World War II, playing themselves out amid the newer form of conquest: globalization. The tourist plays the conqueror’s role, enjoying the sights, purchasing consumer goods and returning with her booty of bargains. The culminating image is of cherry trees stripped of the fruit the woman sold to give something to her daughter. The situation resonates with the question – with the cherries gone, what can they offer the next tourists? The only thing left is their bodies, and the colloquial usage of cherry as virginity seals the metonymy between fruit and the young girl, just as the trees’ naked state conveys the womens’ condition. Magdaleno centers this encounter squarely in the female body as focal point of nature, and both are mercilessly exploited by conquerors. The uncanny results both from setting displacement into yet another border zone and another time period and from the Chicana author’s complicity in the exploitation. As powerwielding invader/abuser, the author links with her conqueror father featured in Section II, while simultaneously sympathizing with the desperate women who foreshadow the author’s female relatives in the World War II period. Magdaleno utilizes nature to transcend geographic separation and to provide perspectives capable of illuminating otherwise obscure images. ‘High Summer’ crosses and re-crosses the border by shifting visual direction. She frames the poem with the moon seen first over Germany from the Czech Republic – directionally east to west – and then in reverse, over the Czech cherry trees from Germany – looking west to east. The poem crisscross the border like a colossal inverted V pivoting through itself on its axis with a movement that relegates sociopolitical division to a line

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powerless to limit travel, yet ironically opening the powerless to exploitation. However, while Magdaleno sees nature as a poetic code beyond sociopolitical realities, her female protagonists remain trapped in the realities of scarcity that exposes them to foreign invaders who offer relief in exchange for prized possessions. Magdaleno is preparing readers for Section II. The structure of ‘High Summer’ duplicates Magdaleno’s depiction of her parents’ relationship. A vision of youthful innocence transforms into mediation between the mother’s desire to escape and the invader’s desire to possess her. The ending is suspended in shifting perspectives that can only mark moments and locations in an oscillating relativity. The parents’ relationship is salvaged but not idealized. Negative factors receive their due and failure is the result, despite nature’s positive alternative. Recreation of the parents’ relationship begins in “My Mother’s Hair,” a poem placed on an unnumbered page – technically the roman numbered page ix – separated from Section I. The parents appear in a scene saturated with youthful innocence and replete with lighthearted signs of a spring: When I think of my mother at seventeen, I see her sitting on the floor of the warm kitchen on Brunnenlechgässchen. It is 1946 and the war is over, a bright spring afternoon. […] My mother has gotten a perm, curls shining like copper. “Pretty girl,” my father is singing and dancing around her. “Yes, you are my pretty girl,” smell of bread rising, calendulas on the table. Martha, my mother’s best friend, is riding away on her motorcycle. The war is over. My mother’s hair is shining. (ix)

In the home’s bright, happy heart the couple plays like children on the floor, dancing and singing. The bread is still pure promise and calendulas splash yellow color into the warm kitchen in play with the metallic glimmer of the mother’s hair. The calendulas’ legendary healing properties underscore the promise of a future in which wounds can be healed. Youth takes flight in the friend’s motorcycle. The scene is reminiscent of an impressionist painting of sensual, self-indulgent revelers. This poem springs not from testimony of an eyewitness as in many later poems but rather as an imagined recollection that most satisfies the author. Perhaps for that reason the author foregrounds this image, positioning it not only first, but also outside the text’s Arabic numbered main

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body, a memory separate from, and thus uncontaminated by, what the book will reveal. Section I underscores the first poem’s isolation by relegating the mother to peripheral images in only six of its nineteen poems. She returns to full presence only in Section II. Section I features German relatives encountered while Magdaleno delves into her mother’s youth within the pervasive Nazism of those years. When the text returns to the young lovers, Section I will have stripped away springtime optimism. The familial and societal contexts suffer degradation through reference to Nazi crimes, especially with reference to Dachau which is not far from Augsburg, native city of the author’s maternal family. This context generates phantoms to crush all young life, like the child-abusing, bird-killing grandfather, or the uncle who assisted in the bird-killing and later joined the infamous Schutzstaffel (SS), a man who also would have killed the author “without hesitation” for being of “mixed blood”(28). Youthful joy and innocence disappear amid the accumulated bloodstained images of death, repression and suffering. While the author’s journey leads her from Berlin to Bavaria, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary, it also takes her into history. The Nazi past haunts both time zones, toning everything with gray doom in perpetual struggle with the colors of hope, principally associated with nature. This landscape must be disturbed, probed to uncover buried truths. The poem “Salzbergwerk: The Salt Mines Tour” (17-18) metaphorically summarizes Magdaleno’s project. From charming Salzburg, with its gardens, castles, and “Mozart’s little birth house,” the author’s route leads her by “Hitler’s mountain retreat / his second headquarters.” The journey back to her mother overlays present-day picturesque destinations onto the Nazi past at every turn. When she arrives at Berchtesgaden, pursuing one of the area’s prized tourist excursions, a descent into the ancient salt mines, she depicts the event as a metaphor of her life-writing project. Always, there is water: to draw out the salt, to wash and cleanse. At Berchtesgaden, I will know that salt mining takes time and patience, takes so much tapping, carefully tapping to make sure a new spot is stable and capable of releasing the salt –“White gold”– from that womb of rock and black water. (17-18)

Magdaleno taps dark crystals of familial experience that, like prized salt, might both preserve and flavor her and her mother’s life. Before effecting

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that retrieval, however, the author must plumb the nether regions of communal memory. A key ‘spot’ in Magdaleno’s mine is Nazism. Post-war calendulas transmute into wartime white roses, emblem of the anti-Nazi student organization at Munich University whose members were condemned to death in 1943 (see Scholl). “Sophie and the White Rose” (5-8) is dedicated to Sophie Scholl who speaks from beyond: “Don’t call me an heroine: I’m dead” (5). Like so much encountered in this section, death bespeaks frustrated youth, frustration made more poignant when Sophie asks her mother if the roses will bloom in June, a month she did not live to see. Once again, against despair and separation Magdaleno offers the hope of transcendent memory in a nature image. Matching the white-roses poem, “The Red Door” (11-12) follows. The author hears children going to school and recalls what her mother recounted about her own school “before Hitler sent young girls / to farm camps.” Interned there, she experienced her first menstruation, a lifeblossoming act fused with death in the image of her brother in a “submarine / that never surfaced.” Degraded youth takes voice in a question at the heart of Section I: “What do we call this memory / of death, this grief of children?” Degradation’s effect is summarized verses later: “everything we believe / can begin to fall away.” Yet the poem’s last stanza, like Sophie’s inquiry, turns from death to hope, here in the possibility that somewhere children return in the evening to nurturing homes. The white and red poems mutually reflect, each featuring a sister and brother felled by the Nazi regime, with the sole survivor being the author’s mother. Between the two poems stands “Memorial Walk” (9-10) that initiates the Dachau concentration camp series. The author’s grandmother still insists that people were sent there for “[o]nly an adjustment / of their political attitude.” She still fears truth, so it must be voiced as trees/umbrellas planted “in the heart of Dachau,” like stone words declaring “Never again.” Magdaleno again turns nature into signs of unexpressed truths. Dachau appears as major content in six of the nineteen poems in Section I, the infamous camp arising as a significant stop in the author’s itinerary. From this poem’s title, the walk becomes a leitmotif of walking tours through the same concentration camp, replete with a tour guide, in the poems “little Universe,” “Second Tour,” and “Those Red Tulips.” Through spatial association, “Memorial Walk” places both the Scholls and the mother under Dachau’s extended shadow. This Ur-poem echoes in “Memorial,” in which the family cellar hides a secret torture chamber where the grandfather violated the author’s mother – his own private Dachau.

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While most of the negative imagery is associated with the Nazi regime, one poem accuses the Allies of their share of destruction. “Firestorm” (13-15), set in Hamburg, recalls the saturation bombings carried out by British and U.S. forces that created firestorms much more lethal than simple bombing. Operation Gomorrah, as the British called it, left over one million German civilians homeless and caused 50,000 casualties, 40,000 alone in the firestorms of July 27, 1943 (see Lowe). 1 Magdaleno starts in a mid-“1000 degrees” storm, and true to her wont, the first victims are “trees gliding out of the earth / like kindling” followed by “children / bursting / into bright candles, / Whoosh, the smallest / disappearing / completely.” One child is foregrounded, “captured / most clearly, / the dazzling moment / he was torched, / bone fused / to metal, / a skeleton / pedaling / the charred / bike.” The joyful image of the mother’s brilliant hair transforms here into the child’s blonde hair aflame in “green auras.” The despair of mass death is countervailed by reference to the wizard Gandalf of The Lord of the Rings, who survived a fall into the fiery bit of doom to return, purified by the inferno. The author associates herself with these victims, claiming the devastated Hamburg as her city that rises like a “Phoenix bird, / alas y restos, / birdwings / & ashes / in my heart.” The bilingual play of Spanish and English words functions trilingually by naming a German city. And once again the author taps her code of nature to express survival beyond death and forgetfulness. The nadir of the author’s exploration of this pervasive abuse of youth comes in “Memorial” (29-31) with the unmasking of the grandfather as a racist and incestual child abuser. “You kept / secrets in the cellar, / in the dark, you / entering my mother / at ten.” This denunciation is reconfirmed in Section II where seven lengthy verses detail the forced act of fellatio the grandfather imposed upon the mother, an act compared to near violent death (50). The play between initial presentation and fuller elucidation prepares our move into Section II. The first poem of Section II underscores its shift to focus fully on her mother by doubling the gaze that perceives: by describing a photo of a mother holding a baby – apparently the photo used on the book’s cover – the poet’s present and past perception share the same object of their vision. This “photo you will / mail to an American soldier / you say is my father” (45) simultaneously establishes and undercuts the paternal link by infusing it with doubt with “you say.” The parents’ romantic image suffers further degradation when the relationship is said to have begun when the

_____________ 1

For reasons unknown, Magdaleno dates the firestorm of the title on July 27, 1944, a day on which no mass bombing took place in Hamburg.

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mother’s brother told a soldier, “yes I have a sister” (64). These words are a fragment of a cultural script of procurement: a soldier or tourist looking for sex asks a boy if he has a sister, communicating his desire and intention, and the youth responds affirmatively to confirm the transaction. This reading is reinforced in “Green Morning in the Summer Forest” (62-63) in which the mother receives from a soldier “black / stocking, silk and rare, / a fine black line that ran the back / of each firm calf” (62). The exchange of stockings for sex was common in World War II. Other verses show the mother in another familiar setting from the same code of images. “The smoky nightclub / on Haunstetten Strasse, / exotic, emerald earrings, / the GIs whispering, Come here / & I will tell you how beautiful / you are, gin & tonic, / American martinis” (62). In the context of post-war scarcity, it is legitimate to wonder how she acquired the emerald earrings – for that matter, how did her friend get a motorcycle in the collection’s first poem? The penultimate stanza features the mother’s desire, focused narcissistically on her need to feel herself loved. “My mother’s leaving / & leaving again for those smoky / nightclubs, her need / to be loved & loved / & loved, each night, / her beautiful legs” (63). Framing the poem with nature imagery, Magdaleno uses hummingbirds as metaphor for the mother – it is hardly coincidental that her father and her SS brother killed birds. Emerald-chested birds set against stinging black ants, the latter quickly transforming into “black tickets of love” (63). It is not difficult to visualize the teenage beauty flitting among U.S. soldiers as plentiful as ants ready to crawl all over her and offering merchandize to lure her to a light. The situation is confirmed in a Deutsche Welle study of the post-war period. “US servicemen were an irresistible draw for Germany’s lonely, starving women. The men could get them corned beef and cigarettes – and show them a good time […] chocolate and silk stockings” (“Occupation”). Love is expressed in terms of ration cards exchanged for silk stockings (see 62). In “I Am the Daughter” (70-71) the author directly calls herself, “daughter / of the edelweiss and the whore” (70). Her mother was treated as the latter, denied “analgesics”(52) to deliver her child for having conceived out of wedlock, and an unnamed man – we assume he was her father – “spit on her” (82). In addition to mistreatment by her own people, she would have had to struggle with the U.S. Army that tried to discourage these relationships by reassigning soldiers and refusing their pregnant German lovers information on their whereabouts (see “Occupation”). It is hardly surprising that Magdaleno’s mother left Germany with her infant daughter to follow the GI who wanted to marry her (see 51). They traveled to America following Magdaleno’s mother’s “pure dream” (79) closely linked to the daughter’s birth: “my face, a dark moon surfacing

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between your / thighs” (57). Ideally her dream should be fulfilled by marriage that we see in a second photo poem dated 1948 of the newlyweds posing somewhere “between Tucson & Phoenix” (53). But the poem ends on a negative note when we are told that the wedding vow of permanence “would / be broken” (53). The following poem is titled “Falling in Love with Ludwig” and begins as follows: “You left for love on another continent” (54). But this relationship soon failed as well, “[Ludwig’s] promises already fluttering away” (54). Only in Section III are readers provided a clue into the motivation for the first divorce: “They called / you ‘a spy,’ too beautiful for the barrio of south / Phoenix, ‘Marlene Dietrich girl’”(87). Like Malinche she is rejected by the conqueror’s people because of unacceptable phenotype difference – racism? Deutsche Welle provides collaboration with similar testimony: “Maria M. was 16 when she met her GI husband [...] She immigrated to the US in 1948, but she never felt at home in Ohio [...] ‘They considered me the devil, I was known as the ‘Nazi girl,’’ she said. ‘I was isolated, nobody talked to me. It was like solitary confinement’” (“Occupation”). A third man became Magdaleno’s stepfather, a Jewish concentration camp survivor (see 82-85). Like La Malinche, after being rejected by the conqueror and one of her own people, Ludwig, Magdaleno’s mother ends up in a between position. Her Jewish husband is neither U.S. conqueror nor native Aryan. By marrying a concentration camp survivor, the mother can be seen to have attempted her own reconciliation with those phantoms in her and her nation’s past and to answer the question posed in the sixth poem of Section III: “Where were you before the Holocaust?” (84). By paraphrasing the familiar question, ‘Where were you during the war?,’ Magdaleno shifts the emphasis to what was done to stop the killing before the violence. Magdaleno links her mother, like Malinche, to the question at the heart of the new nation that troubles all proposals of unity: The position one takes concerning the rights and wrongs of that crisis moment of violent foundation. The Holocaust question haunts the last poems of Section II. For the author “[n]othing / has disappeared” (65). The grandfather’s abuse remains unpunished and the supposedly deceased SS uncle is discovered alive, hiding in Budapest. While the journey succeeds in retrieving many images of the deceased mother – like one of mother and daughter in intimate nonverbal communication as they embroider a tablecloth (see 60-61) – the Holocaust remains a palpable wall between them. This motif of Section III links the fall of the border wall and the dream of coming together. Yet “Train, 1941” (91-92), the last poem of Section III, recalls the past again in which the twelve-year-old mother is “shaking rugs / at the upstairs / window” (91) while boxcars pass on route to Dachau. Magdaleno chooses

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to end with two stanzas in which she juxtaposes the trains’ regularity and her mother’s steady work at the window. Magdaleno keeps the horror of that moment from slipping into history by marking these images as temporal and permanent with the word “still” in each side of the image. The falling Berlin wall has not facilitated a coming together with her mother. For Magdaleno the Holocaust remains present, and she rejects the acceptance of its horror implicit in her mother’s having done nothing to stop it: “I would ask her, now; / ask for a ticket out / of that smoke-filled / country” (92). Yet, Magdaleno must be conscious of the irony of her high moral position with respect to the Holocaust. She has already shown that, when she could, her mother competed for her own tickets out, – “black tickets of love” (63) –, and took the first viable one given her to escape to her American Dream. That ticket was the birth of Magdaleno. Had she escaped before, we would have no author and no book.

The Chicano Uncanny Magdaleno’s demythification of her origins dialogues with and within Chicano literature. Abused German women mirror a Malinche abused by her family. The Nazi ideological context comments on the imperial aspirations of the Mexicans [Aztecs], including systematic sacrifice of enemies. This context justifies female fraternization with the conqueror as pragmatic survival plus anti-patriarchal resistance, just as feminists have interpreted Malinche. The nation-founding aspect of Malinche’s myth, with the birth of a mestizo introducing a new entity, can be read into Magdaleno’s person and story with respect to Germany. The miscegenated product of Magdaleno’s tale appears at the start of the end of the national state, just as Malinche’s child coincided with the beginning of its rise. Thus, the new mestiza can be seen as a founding figure of the transnational state and culture which we call the global. Post-World War II Germany is a viable candidate for the model of just such an entity. The Americanization of European culture in the last half of the twentieth century needs no elucidation. Reinhold Wagnleitner summarizes the process well: “It seemed that the United States alone had a corner on the codes of modernity. Especially the fascination that the myth ‘America’ had for young people must not be underestimated in this context” (2). What epitomizes better this new cultural phenomenon than a German born just as Americanization swung into high gear, a German who, as a Chicana, also represents the transformation of that U.S. culture both from the inside and outside through latinization?

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The Chicano reading raises another question: does this demythification affect Chicano discourse as well? Again, Freud’s Unheimliche offers insights. The uncanny “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud 370). Yet it also indicates “something withdrawn from the eyes of others, something concealed, secret [and even] hidden or dangerous” (377). We hide this familiar strangeness because it threatens our comfortable self-image. Everything about Magdaleno’s parents qualifies. The ideal of family, of love, of home security hides yet holds those menacing phantoms. Homi Bhabha interprets the uncanny as collective cultural repression of “the foreign” that actually is native (see “DissemiNation”). The national represses aspects of itself that clash with the desired self-image. Bhabha sees uncanny elements arising from marginalized groups within the national cultural who emit perturbing images of otherness. Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother is the eruption of the uncanny in Chicano discourse – not Chicano culture as the uncanny of U.S. culture, but rather uncanny phenomena within Chicano discourse in the sense that this discourse would prefer not to acknowledge certain elements of its own archive. The initial image of the collection recalls the idealism of the early postulations of Chicanismo with its patriarchal ideal, just as the demythification of that ideal recalls Chicana feminism’s devastating unmasking the misogyny at the core of those postulations. However, in as much as this demythification has already been authorized by academic institutions and to a certain extent incorporated into our public discourse, it is presently neither strange nor threatening to us. As Bhabha explains, the center appropriates certain marginal elements that can lend its nationalist discourse a semblance of heterogeneity without disturbing its unity. No, the truly uncanny in Magdaleno’s book stems from other factors which Chicano discourse, for the most part, continues to ignore and silence. Magdaleno attributes the demise of the family to others’ hatred, especially as practiced by her SS uncle. However, by emphasizing not race or religion, but shade or tone in color, a difference that is always relative within sameness, Magdaleno opens what is usually seen as racism to a fear and loathing of otherness itself. It should be noted that within the hatred of otherness, Magdaleno emphasizes a particular orientation. Her Aztec heart is not the source of her uncle’s hatred, rather she purposely insists on the mestizaje of her essence. The full statement of her essence reads “branch / of the linden tree shining in my Azteca / heart” (28). Here she places the origin of her uncle’s hatred: “mixed blood you would have / spilled without hesitation” (28). Yet rejection of different physical appearance is attributed also to Magdaleno’s father’s Chicano family. The only cause readers are given for the failure of a relationship that was born in

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the most difficult of circumstances and persisted in the face of great political, cultural and geographic opposition was the rejection of the mother for her Germanic looks. How can we refuse to recognize the denunciation of any nationalist discourse that continually vilifies the other under essentializing terms, like ‘Anglo’ or ‘Euro’ American, that betrays a prejudice equivalent to that of the SS uncle? In this way, the Nazi discourse emerges, in effect, as a double of Usonian discourse, but when the perspectives multiply, Chicano discourse surfaces as another double of that same odious national discourse, an involuntary repetition (see Bhaba 390) that filters up from within national discourse like the return of the repressed (see 394) which reveals its fundamental links with the other erased by public discourse. Prejudice against miscegenation is revealed as the repressed familiar of all nationalisms. Bhabha might well see Chicano literature as the double of the authorized literature of the U.S.: “scraps, patches, and rags of daily life [that] must be repeatedly turned into the signs of national culture” (297). Yet when Magdaleno places the Chicano within the center of U.S. power – the Chicano soldier as the “American GI” – she erases difference by demonstrating that Bhabha’s binaries are too simple, too simplistic. When she triangulates the cultural forces with three languages sharing her textual surface, everything multiplies and fragments into extending variables. The repressed within the national field becomes the double that is essential to the One when seen from a multinational perspective. The double that seeks to see itself as the marginalized other comes to represent – we could say double – the central discourse when it moves beyond the national borders, becoming the authorized of its other facing yet another Other. In this manner, absolutes set off down Borges’ bifurcating paths demonstrating that they all share the hidden, the repressed in the global scene. Thus, repugnant Fascism shows itself as a possible variant of any group with nationalist goals, including Chicanos. Magdaleno creates many images to support the proposition: of her persona – she of the shining linden tree within the Azteca heart – as someone capable of behaving like a Gringa tourist, or of her father as the lustful conqueror of mid-century, of her family as long suffering women and brutal men, or of her Chicana family as intolerant Americans who voice anti-German prejudice. Perhaps the discovery of the divisive duplicity of all nationalist rhetoric explains the need for the last poem in the collection. Magdaleno creates a frame to match the first poem, and like that one, the last appears outside Section III and without pagination. Positioned as a paratext outside the numbered collection, the poem occupies a privileged perspective from which it comments on the entire core, and in its pairing with the opening poem forms an arc that passes simultaneously through and over

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the body of the work. “Cordate Envoy” (95) features the author contemplating a leaf. The poems have already established Magdaleno’s penchant for reading nature as a text, hence a leaf calls upon its alternate usage as a page in a book. In this way the author does a final reading in and through nature. The word envoy supports this interpretation, since in addition to its colloquial usage as a messenger or representative, its first denotation is as a message itself, in the sense of an envoi – with which Magdaleno adds French to her polyglot text. Envoi means a final commentary to a text, especially the last stanza of a poem that clarifies the meaning or the moral message of a work and it almost always addresses the person to whom the poem is dedicated. Magdaleno underscores the importance of this last commentary by associating it with the heart: cordate. Thus, readers are offered a final revelation and message from the heart. But this is no longer the Aztec heart that confronted the Nazi uncle. Perhaps the insight into the latent fascism in nationalism or the prejudice discovered in her Chicano family moves her to modify her nationalistic tendencies in favor of a more open perspective. Within Magdaleno’s code as established in the text, nature offers the portal to hidden meanings and transcendent values. It is no surprise, then, that in her final commentary and message Magdaleno would carry out a reading of nature in the form of a leaf. The leaf in question here features a symmetric structure with the organization of its mass along and around a central axis. ‘Regimented lines’ extend from the central vein conveying an order from which emerges the evocation of the mother. Against this backdrop the daughter appears in “[b]rown spots, small imperfections […] like the ones I will carry / on the surface of my own hands” (95). Mother and daughter share the space, related within a code of signs that pertain to a single living natural being, participants in the same ecological system. This mother/daughter union within the heart, which is also the very material of the world, dialogues with and responds to the images of separation of those elements in “Grenze,” the initial poem in Section I. The journey through the text has led to the possibility of reunion that the author sought from the start. Nevertheless, the specifics of the locations where the mother and daughter appear on the leaf should not be overlooked. Each belongs to distinct strata: the mother is related to the orderly central circulatory system, while the daughter appears in the abject of the system as imperfections that threaten its purity. It is no coincidence that the blotches are brown and dark, the color and shade associated with Chicanos or, in the text’s terms, with Germany’s unwanted. Magdaleno creates in this last poem yet another avatar of the play between the authorized dominant and the troublesome subaltern. In the last sentence, spread over five verses, the leaf is viewed profiled against the sun. In the cosmic light the leaf

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ceases to be a play of generations or ethnicities or nations and begs a different reading, one focused now on “pinholes of light,” small spots where the surface was pierced, “those places where wind / or the smallest pebble of grief / broke through” (95). Echoes return of those “spots” in the salt mine that must be carefully tapped to release their treasure from the hidden “womb” (18). And “this grief of children” was the phrase she used to express the “memory of death” (11) caused by the Hitler regime, and she raised the wind to its apocalyptic apotheosis in “Firestorm” in which horrifying images of incinerated children alternated with a literary tale of survival in the form of Tolkien’s Gandalf. In a surface where order and its counter-discourse dialogue, these punctures are the portals where what the author has identified as the essential human experience bleeds through despite efforts to obscure and hide it. Only an illuminated and purposeful reading discovers what are in effect almost invisible ‘imperfections’ on the beautiful surface. Magdaleno suggests that we do so with Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother, reading its many levels, but especially those that venture beyond established modes of representation and old defensive prejudice.

Works Cited Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Latham: Women of Color P, 1983. 182-90. —.“Traddutora, traditora: una figura paradigmática del feminismo de las chicanas.” Debate Feminista 8 (1993): 19-48. Ron Arias. Moving Target. Phoenix: Bilingual Review P, 2002. Bandau, Anja. “Malinche, Malinchismo, Malinchista. Paradigmen für Entwürfe von Chicana-Identität.” La Malinche: Übersetzung, Interkulturalität und Geschlecht. Ed. Barbara Dröscher and Carlos Rincón. Berlin: Tranvía, 2001. 171-200. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990. 291-322. Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly, Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. Venice: Helvetia P, 1984. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: U of Texas P, 1980. —. Chicano Poetry, A Response to Chaos. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. —. Only the Good Times. Houston: Arte Público P, 1995. Candelaria, Nash. Memories of the Alhambra. San José: Cibola P, 1977. Cypress, Sandra Messinger. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” 1919. Papers on Applied Psychoanalysis. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co, 1956. 369-407.

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Hadley-Garcia, George. Hollywood Hispano, Los Latinos in el Mundo del Cine. New York: Carol Publ. Group, 1991. Hinojosa, Rolando. Korean Love Song: From Klail City Death Trip. Berkeley: Editorial Juste, 1978. Hoz, Claudia De La. “The Early Years: Margarita Carmen Cansino.” 1998-2008. 16 Aug. 2008 . Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Leitner, Claudia. “Cover(t) Girl of the Conquest: Chicana Iconography of la Malinche.” Mobile Crossings, Representations of Chicana/o Cultures. Ed. Anja Bandau and Marc Priewe. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2006. 49-61. Lowe, Keith. Infierno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943. New York: Scribners, 2007. Magdaleno, Rita Maria. Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, & My Mother. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003. “Occupation Children Sleeping With the Enemy.” Deutsche Welle. 15 Sept. 2008 . Pineda, Cecile. Face. New York: Viking Adult, 1985. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Yo Soy La Malinche: Chicana Writers and the Poetics of Ethnonationalism.” Callaloo 16.4 (Fall 1993): 859-73. Rodriguez, Richard. The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Boston: Godine, 1981. Romero, Rolando. “Materialismo, feminismo y postestructuralismo en la teoría crítica chicana: Calibán, La Malinche y Cabeza de Vaca.” Actas Irvine 92, Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Irvine: U of California P, 214-22. Scholl, Inge. The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1983. University of Arizona Press. “Camino del Sol Series.” 12 Aug. 2008 . Vaca, Nick C. “The Week in the Life of Manuel Hernandez.” El Espejo – The Mirror. Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1969. 136-43. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.

Performing Cultural Memory: Scenarios of Colonial Encounter in the Writings of John Smith, Cabeza de Vaca, and Jacques Cartier ASTRID M. FELLNER

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery. William Carlos Williams

Prologue: Setting the Scene On September 10, 1570, a small group of Spanish Jesuits landed in Ajacán, site of the future Jamestown in the Chesapeake region of what was later called Virginia by the English. Establishing a mission in the Bahía de Santa María (Chesapeake Bay), the Jesuits intended to convert the Algonquian-speaking inhabitants to Catholicism. They came without soldiers and the only way to communicate with the Natives was through an interpreter, an Indian from the area who had spent some time in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba. Soon, however, the mission was destroyed when the Jesuits were killed by the Natives. The only survivors were a young boy, Alonso de Olmos, and the Indian interpreter, who, as it turned out, had led the attack against the Jesuits. According to the archival records collected in the form of manuscripts, letters, and reports by Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie in 1953, the Spanish had captured this interpreter, who was baptized with the name Don Luis de Velasco when he was a young man, and had brought him to Spain. Don Luis had told the Spaniards that his homeland was called Ajacán and that he was the son of a chief. He traveled with the Spaniards back to the New World, became the godson of the Mexican viceroy and ostensibly convinced the Spaniards to return to Ajacán to convert the Natives, promising to serve as a guide and translator. 1 How_____________ 1

For more detailed summaries of Don Luis, his capture by the Spaniards, see Lewis and Loomie 15-18. Spanish sources do not agree on Don Luis’s age or how he was picked up by the Spanish. See also Gradie’s “The Powhatans and the Spanish Empire,” 165-71.

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ever, when he arrived in the Chesapeake with the Jesuits, he chose to rejoin his people and, in February 1571, turned against them and led a surprise attack that killed the Spaniards. A Spanish relief ship came looking for the missionaries in 1572 and picked up Alonso de Olmos who told them his story of the massacre. The Spanish took revenge by attacking the Indians; yet, they failed to capture Don Luis and decided to leave. The Spanish withdrawal from the Chesapeake subsequently benefited the English, who founded Jamestown colony near the destroyed Jesuit mission. 2 Anna Brickhouse has shown in “Hemispheric Jamestown” that the archival records of the Jesuit mission cast a different light on the very origins of anglophone American literature – an English tradition rooted in a story of Native-European contact that not only had a historical precedent in the precise geographical location as the Jamestown settlement but was already embodied in a series of hispanophone narratives about the same native population and locality. (31)

Jamestown, the nation’s imagined point of origin, has always been a crossroads of different cultures and traditions, and its history can only be fully grasped if viewed in relation to larger imperial histories in the Americas. Colonial American literature is full of depictions of (mostly conflictive) encounters and exchanges with Natives. In fact, the archival memory of the early Americas consists of many ‘polyphonic’ texts that “reverberate with a cacophony of European and native voices attempting to make sense of each other” (Castillo 2). Given the shared colonial histories that shaped the Americas and the multiple transhemispheric cultural flows that embed what is now the United States, it is therefore interesting to take a look at the palimpsestic layering that structures colonial American literature. In the following essay, I will show that in the Americas, cultural memory, “the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imparts its self-image” (Assmann qtd. in Grabes 129), can be seen as acts of imagination that are performed through what I call ‘scenarios of encounter,’ 3 acts of transfer that work through surrogation. Reading key passages on scenarios of encounter in John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624) in light of the chronicles _____________ 2

3

In “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed,” Charlotte Gradie examines the Spanish presence in sixteenth-century Virginia, offering a series of explanations for the failure of the Spanish Virginia enterprise. As she states, the Jesuit’s withdrawal constituted a lost opportunity for the Spanish and signaled a new direction for Virginia history (see 133). I borrow the term ‘scenario’ from Diana Taylor. While Taylor speaks of ‘scenarios of discovery,’ I find the concept of ‘scenario of encounter’ more useful for my analysis of colonial texts.

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of the Jesuit mission in Ajacán, I want to challenge national narratives that present U.S. American literature as emerging from the British settlements in the early seventeenth century. Displaying the Transamerican quality of the archive of colonial American literature, I then want to juxtapose the scenarios of encounter in Jamestown with depictions of European native encounters in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacíon (1537-55) and Jacques Cartier’s The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (1580) in order to highlight the inter-connectedness of cultural evolutions in various places in the Americas.

Performing America In this essay, I will use performance as my methodological lens to look at colonial texts that produce ‘America’ 4 as hemispheric performance. Rather than treat ‘America’ as a place or an object of study, I follow the approach of performance critic Diana Taylor and view ‘America’ as a practice that creates itself through performative acts. 5 It is a highly contested practice, “an act of passion and belief conjured into existence through verbal and visual performatives” (Taylor, “Remapping” 1421). It was “[c]onquered in part through naming and given to be seen through hypervisuality – maps, drawings, and tangible goods such as gold and material specimen (Indians)” (“Remapping” 1421). As Winfried Siemerling has poignantly stated, “[i]naugurated in expectations of replication, the New World was as much ‘discovered’ as it was articulated through colonial projection that sought to decipher and recognize familiar patterns” (4). The texts that emerged in _____________ 4

5

I use the term ‘America’ to refer to the North American continent. Abandoning the rhetorical malpractice of equating ‘America’ with the United States, I want to draw attention to the various circuits of hemispheric relations in the Americas when I take a look at some founding narratives produced by English, Spanish, and French colonizers. As Diana Taylor has stressed, for many Latin and South American scholars the term ‘American’ constitutes “an act of aggression, an appropriation by people in the United States that excludes other inhabitants of the landmass” (“Remapping” 1418). The term ‘American’ in American Studies, “re-enacts the historical and cultural politics of exclusion” (“Remapping” 1426). The term ‘performative’ was coined by John L. Austin to describe cases in which “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (6). America is performative in that it constitutes the identity it is purported to be. America, however, can also be seen as a performance in the sense that it can be analyzed as one. Although not quite the same, I want to use the concepts of performativity and performance interchangeably here, referring both to actual performative practices in the early Americas, as they are described by early writers, as well as to the performative character of the texts themselves. What connects performance and performativity is the focus on iteration. A performance approach allows me to look at cultural texts both as performances that stage cultural encounters as well as performatives that discursively bring ‘America’ into being.

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the years following the initial contact between European explorers and settlers and the native peoples of the Americas are marked by attempts to account for the incommensurability of the ‘new’ with recourse to known conceptualizations of the ‘old.’ Newness, however, enacts a kind of surrogation since the creation of a New England, New Spain, or New France is based on the memories of the old but at the same time supersedes the old, thereby effacing indigenous populations (see Roach 4). Thus, to the extent that European texts produced this New World, these discourses also spoke the language of the old. Repetition and reiteration, the key principles of performance, are therefore foundational practices upon which ‘America’ was created.

Theodor de Bry (1590)

American performatives are coterminous with memory and history. In his Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Roach investigates the performative act of forgetting in relation to the colonial Americas, focusing on the surrogation of colonial history in the present day. As he illustrates, memory is selective, and involves collective enactments of forgetting in order to forge the importance of wide spread cultural memory. As “restored behavior” or “twice-behaved behavior” (see Schechner 36), performance “stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace” (Roach 3). Roach’s focus on performance as surrogation allows him to stress “the three-sided relationship of memory, performance, and substitution” (2), which also depends on the idea of an original. Out of these affinities between performance

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and memory, he states, “blossom florid nostalgias for authenticities and origin” (3-4). Since the meaning of originality is dependent on the copy, it is the copy that renders performance authentic. Acts of origination are ubiquitous in New World histories – one of the first ones was visualized by Theodor de Bry. In his famous sixteenthcentury engraving, the scenario of encounter is clearly theatrical. Carefully choreographed by acts of taking possession, such as planting a cross, his engraving enacts the drama of ‘discovery’ by offering a powerful display of native bodies. Semi-naked, the Amerindians, however, do not assume center stage but are pushed to the margin. Some are shown running away, leaving the scene; others are there as part of a group that is cropped by the end of the engraving. The Natives are acknowledged in this painting only to be disappeared in the act of displaying their presence. If performance is that which disappears, performance studies could, anachronistically speaking, be called “absence studies” in the Americas, “disappearing the very populations it pretends to explain” (Taylor, Archive 34). The absenting of Amerindians and their traditions in European discourses on the Americas must be seen in connection with the important status of writing in Western epistemology. Writing, as Derrida has stressed, “is unthinkable without repression” (Writing 226). The repression in the European writings on the Americas is the “colonial repudiation through documentation that dates back to the sixteenth century Americas” (Taylor, Archive 25). Taylor explains: “What changed with the Conquest was not that writing displaced embodied practices […] but the degree of legitimization of writing over other epistemic and mnemonic systems” (Archive 18). As Michel de Certeau has pointed out, the “discovery” and “conquest” of the “New” World were primarily projects of writing: “the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history […] This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, ‘savage’ page on which Western desire will be written” (xxv, emphasis in the original). In Colonial Encounters in New World Writing 1500-1786, Susan Castillo, in turn, has stressed that the native cultures in the Americas “were anything but a tabula rasa on which Europeans could inscribe their beliefs, traditions and cultural practices” (8, emphasis in the original). To the contrary, there existed a rich and vibrant tradition of diverse forms of performances. These performative practices were, however, often deemed ritualistic and exotic. Because they were not codified in print they were dismissed as not noteworthy and were therefore either destroyed or ignored. As a result, these embodied knowledges did not find their way into the histories of American literature. A shift to a performance studies approach, however, allows critics to identify these practices and analyze them not only as texts or narratives,

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but as “scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description” (Taylor, Archive 16). While I do not analyze early performative practices in North America per se, I am looking at performative texts that are considered foundational texts in North American literary history and that signal ‘beginnings.’ What interests me in these texts is how these narratives engage ‘colonial difference’ and how they enact conflictive encounters in order to produce ‘America.’ 6 Perceptibly, there is a spectral presence of Native American practices in early American literary texts, which, in turn, can be said to haunt the archive of American literature. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor defines the concepts of archive and repertoire as follows: ‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change. […] The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge. (19-21)

The archive is not necessarily opposite to the repertoire but rather a method of transmitting selective histories, as, for example, in the case of colonialism. The embodied knowledge of the repertoire resists the written knowledge of the archive. Thus the repertoire can expand the archive, which then offers a way of rethinking the canon and critical methodologies (see Taylor, Archive 26-27). Taylor also introduces the concept of the scenario which includes features of literary analysis, like narrative and plot, but focuses attention where text and narrative do not: on the physical environment or scene of encounter and the multiple sign systems in play, including nonverbal images, gesture, and visuals (see Archive 28–32). As a meaning-making paradigm, the scenario functions as an act of transfer and participates in the transfer and continuity of knowledge. As knowledge is stored and communicated through embodied practices, performance transmits cultural memory and collective identity from one generation to another through reiterated behavior (see Connerton 38). Significantly, the scenario is a paradigm that is formulaic and repeatable because it leaves out complexity. Reducing conflict to its stock elements, it encourages fantasies of participation: _____________ 6

‘Colonial difference’ is a concept introduced by Walter Mignolo, who defines it as “the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging.” It is “the space where the local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, the space in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored” (Mignolo ix, emphasis in the original). In other words, ‘colonial difference’ is the space where two local histories, “the physical as well as imaginary location,” come together and where “coloniality of power is enacted” (Mignolo ix).

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Its portable framework bears the weight of accumulative repeats. The scenario makes visible, yet again, what is always already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes. The discoverer, conqueror, ‘savage,’ and native princess, for example might be staple characters in many Western scenarios. (Taylor, Archive 28)

This concept not only allows me to analyze ‘America’ as a performative that is discursively brought into existence through narrative strategies, but it also enables me to reveal the historical and cultural politics of exclusion which are part of this reiteration. By focusing on some representative events in the genealogy of what Joseph Roach calls “circum-Atlantic performance,” I want to show that a spectral cultural memory haunts American colonial literary history, which triggers the principle of surrogation, carrying within it the memory of forgotten substitutions. Scenarios of encounter structure our understanding of colonial America, but they constitute a hauntology “that resuscitates and reactivates old dramas” (Taylor, Archive 28). This “hauntology of performance” rests on the notion that performance makes visible “that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life (Taylor, Archive 143). 7 Reminding of the structure and logic of the palimpsest, the archive of American literature consists of texts that, like palimpsests, are “uncanny harbingers to the present of the murdered texts of former ages” (Dillon 13). In colonial texts, ‘America’ only becomes visible and meaningful “within the context of a phantasmagoric repertoire of repeats” (Taylor, Archive 144). Like a palimpsest, ‘America’ is created by a process of performative layering that consists of erasure and superimposition.

Scenario of Encounter I: Don Luis, Opechancanough and John Smith In commemorating Jamestown’s 400th anniversary, a series of performances and celebratory practices intended to raise Jamestown’s importance and status in U.S.-American history. After all, the Puritans did not land on _____________ 7

In Unmarked, Peggy Phelan has stated that the defining feature of performance is the relationship between appearance and disappearance, stressing that performance disappears without a trace. Taylor, however, views the “hauntology of performance” as the flip side of the “ontology of performance” (Archive 142). The concept of hauntology is a Derridian notion that is connected to the return of the revenant. In folklore, a revenant refers to a visible ghost, a specter. In Derrida’s usage, the specter returns even before it has actually come. The specter “comes back, so to speak, for the first time” (Specters 4). Hauntology, then, is the reversal of ontology because it refers to the recording of something that never had material existence. In form of a ghostly echo, the forgotten may come back to haunt cultural memory.

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Cape Cod until thirteen years after the settlement at Jamestown. 8 Celebrating the putative birthplace of ‘America,’ the 2007 Jamestown Quadricentennial not only drew the attention to the performative character of ‘America’ but also conjured up the hauntology of performance, evoking an entire history of surrogation. The idea of dating Jamestown’s ‘origin’ to 1607 not only ignores the diverse groups of Europeans – especially the Spanish and the French – who had been exploring and seeking to settle the Atlantic coast since the 1520s, but, even more importantly, denies the existence of the rich traditions of the powerful Algonquian-speaking Indians of the Tidewater. Their tribes were bound together in a loose association dominated by a leader that the English referred to as Powhatan. For the Powhatans, contact with Europeans had been intermittent before John Smith and his men arrived in the Chesapeake. The intruding Europeans had occasionally appeared on the coast before, had kidnapped young Natives, and had attempted to establish colonies. The English themselves had undertaken an effort in the 1580s to found a community at Roanoke Island. The interpreter upon whom the missionaries relied when they arrived in Ajacán, Don Luis, for instance, was taken back to Spain in 1560. According to some historians, this Indian guide may have been no other than Opechancanough, the brother of the powerful Powhatan, who spared John Smith’s life three weeks before Pocahontas, Opechancanough’s niece, again saved the Englishman. 9 If we are to believe that Don Luis and _____________ 8

9

Apart from the official ceremony, there were a series of other commemorative practices, which involved the creation of the ‘Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail,’ the first national water trail in the United States. In his speech in Anniversary Park in Williamsburg, President Bush talked about the beginnings of democracy in Virginia, humorously invoking the theatricality of encounter: “Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in America; it predated the Mayflower Compact by thirteen years. This is a very proud state, and some people down here like to point out that the pilgrims ended up at Plymouth Rock by mistake. They were looking for Virginia. They just missed the sign.” () The reenactment of the landing of the first English speaking colonists in North America, however, certainly was the most theatrical staging of the meeting of the English and the Amerindians. See also the official site of “America’s 400 Anniversary” at http://www.jamestown2007.org/. This is the view endorsed by the historian Carl Bridenbaugh, who first presented it in his book Jamestown 1544-1699 and then developed it further in Early Americans. Bridenbaugh not only speculates that Don Luis and Opechancanough are the same person, but has devoted entire chapters to the history of these two figures treating them as if they were one (see Jamestown 10-33 and Early Americans 5-49). He argues that after the Jesuits arrived in Virginia, Don Luis went back to live with his own people. As he writes, “symbolic of this determination to drop the dual role he had been playing was his abandoning the name of Don Luis de Velasco and assuming a new one – significant in view of his past adventures and arcane knowledge of the strange white people – OPECHANCANOUGH” (Early Americans 14-16). Bridenbaugh argues that Don Luis took the name Opechancanough,

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Opechancanough are the same person, a completely different view on the encounters between John Smith and the Powhatans as depicted in Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624) emerges. Don Luis/Opechancanough must then have been familiar with European customs, which, if true, will lead to radically different interpretations of his relationship with John Smith. Concomitantly, the complex series of rituals performed by the Natives that brought the English colony into the Powhatan world, which are described in Smith’s account, will take on a different meaning. But even if we dismiss this biographical assumption as wild speculation, the existence alone of the historical documents concerning the early Spanish settlement in Virginia troubles any coherent story of a unitary starting point of American literature and culture. Whether Don Luis was indeed the same person as Opechancanough may be subject to scholarly debate; his specter, however, haunts the official story of Jamestown. The records by the Spanish Jesuits during and after the 1571-72 mission to Ajacán render interesting insights into the Powhatan world. In the only surviving letter written by two of the Ajacán colonists, Father Quirós and Father Segura, the reader learns that the timing of the mission was poor, as the region was enduring a famine: “We find the land of Don Luis in quite another state than expected, not because he was at fault in his account of it, but because our Lord has chastised it with six years of famine and death, which has made it less populated than usual” (Lewis and Loomie 89). Interestingly enough, Father Quirós’s letter introduces an unnamed minor figure into the story of the Jesuits in Ajacán “that nevertheless holds a significance for the future colonization of Virginia by the English” (Brickhouse 21). It mentions a young boy who is sick and whom the Spanish are supposed to heal: The chief has kept a brother of Don Luis, a boy of three years, who lies, ill 6 or 8 leagues from here and now seems certain to die. He has requested that someone go and baptize him, for which reason it seemed good to Father Vice-Provincial to send last night one of Ours to baptize the boy so close to death. (Lewis and Loomie 89-90)

_____________ which allegedly means “He whose soul is white” in Algonquian, in order to show his “hatred of all Spaniards and Christians” and signal his transformation (Jamestown 17). Bridenbaugh refers to the killings of the Spanish missionaries as Opechancanough’s “first massacre” (Early Americans 16, emphasis in the original), which he sees as the first one in a line of other massacres that followed in the Chesapeake area. Opechancanough’s second massacre ostensibly happended when the Powhatans eliminated the English colony in Roanoke (see Early Americans 17). As some other historians have noted, Bridenbaugh’s arguments rest largely upon circumstantial evidence. Most notably, Helen C. Rountree has refuted Bridenbaugh’s theories. For a detailed discussion of her reasons why Bridenbaugh’s assumptions do not hold, see her Pocahontas’s People 18-24.

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If we believe those historians who claim that Don Luis is the same person as Opechancanough, this young boy, who then disappears from the story, assumes special significance: This child would then be Opechancanough’s much younger brother who grew up to become the leader of the Powhatans whom the English referred to as Powhatan. As Brickenhouse concludes: “Through this record of Don Luis’s first act of mediation, then, the major native interlocutor for the English in Jamestown nearly forty years later may have entered the written record in the Spanish Jesuit documents of a pre-English Virginian past” (22). The central figure in the Jesuit reports, however, is Don Luis, who was supposed to fulfill an ambassadorial role for the Spanish. Not surprisingly, this young Indian has become an important figure in the historical reconstruction of why the Spanish failed to colonize the Chesapeake region. In some ways, he has also entered Virginian history in popular imagination. Most famously, James Branch Cabell, a Richmond writer, dubbed Don Luis the “first Virginian,” stating that Don Luis’s treacherous behavior prevented Spanish settlement in the Chesapeake Bay and thereby preserved Virginia for the English. 10 In the field of American literature, however, Don Luis, who can be seen as a hybrid border figure, has been given hardly any attention. Described as the archetypical treacherous Indian in the Jesuit records, Juan Rogel, a Jesuit priest who accompanied the punitive mission and wrote a report based on Alonso’s story, for instance, said that Don Luis “fell into evil ways” once he was back on his native land (Lewis and Loomie 119). After the Jesuits arrived in Ajacán, “Don Luis abandoned them, since he did not sleep in their hut more than two nights nor stay in the village where the Fathers made their settlement for more than five days” (Lewis and Loomie 110). Left behind, the Jesuits were soon in dire straits without an interpreter. In his letter dated August 28, 1572, Rogel tells in detail what happened after the Jesuits put pressure on Don Luis to return: On Sunday after the feast of the Purification, Don Luis came to the three Jesuits who were returning with other Indians. He sent an arrow through the heart of Father Quirós and then murdered the rest who had come to speak with him. […] Don Luis himself was the first to draw blood with one of those hatchets which were brought along for trading with the Indians; then he finished the killing of

_____________ 10

See Cabell’s novel, The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest (1942), which tells the story of a Native American who sailed away with Spanish explorers, later to return, be made chief of his tribe, and kill all the Spaniards in the Virginia settlement. Cabell also produced a more concise, historical treatment of the novel’s events in “The First Virginian,” which is part one of his 1947 work of non-fiction, Let Me Lie, a book on the history of Virginia.

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Father Master Baptista with his axe, and his companions finished off the others. (Lewis and Loomie 110)

Whatever the motive, Don Luis remains an enigmatic figure. The only way the Spanish could make sense of his transformation from Christian convert to murderous savage is through recourse to the Bible. In Rogel’s later letter (written in 1600), Don Luis becomes a “second Judas” (Lewis and Loomis 134). As Brickenhouse has pointed out, a tension between narration and comprehension becomes visible in Rogel’s letters: “As the relations move in time from the event of Alonso’s recovery, the larger narrative repository begins to flatten out and elide the mediations and polyvocality marking its earliest texts by introducing increasingly selfconscious literary qualities and more subtle modes of characterization alongside more allegorical meanings” (25). The Jesuit massacre becomes more and more embellished, as there is a greater focus on the different forms of torture. It is important to keep in mind at this point that the entire story rests on Alonso’s memories, which, as Brickenhouse has shown, adds yet another narrative layer to the events. 11 When Alonso was picked up by the Spanish relief ship, he was unrecognizable to the Spanish. In a scene clearly reminiscent of Cabeza de Vaca’s meeting of the Spanish after he had been lost, Alonso, “naked and tanned by the sun” (Lewis and Loomie 160) could hardly speak Spanish anymore. Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 account is also echoed when Father Rogel reports in 1572 that after the Indians had killed the Jesuits, they plundered their goods, attiring themselves in the cassocks and chasubles of the Jesuits. One of Don Luis’s brothers, for instance, cross-dressed “going around clothed in the Mass vestments and altar cloths” (Lewis and Loomie 111). Don Luis left the vestments together with a crucifix locked up in chests, but the sacramental content of these boxes ostensibly caused great sensation among the Powhatans, which gave rise to miraculous stories. As Rogel reports, “[s]ome Indians who wanted to see what was in it, fell down dead on the spot. So they keep it closed and protected” (Lewis and Loomie 112). As Rogel’s narration proceeds, this story becomes more and more exaggerated when the deaths of the Amerindians are described in detail: _____________ 11

Alonso is another hybrid figure in the text that is worth exploring in greater detail, but this would go beyond the scope of this essay. Brickenhouse has found a note in the margin of the original letter by Rogel that embeds a story of cross-cultural kinship and transculturation. As she states, by the time Rogel writes his second account of what happened in Ajacán, Alonso gets less and less attention as the primary witness to the massacre. Apparently, Rogel thought that he too might have been deceptive, which, in turn, subverts Rogel’s narrative confidence, as the entire narration is based on Alonso’s memories. For Brickenhouse, this untold story forms a counter-narrative to the official colonial story the Jesuits wanted to tell, one of adoption kinship identification with the Natives (see 29-30).

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There was a certain Indian, eager for spoil, who came upon the box where the Fathers kept the sacred vestments for saying Mass, and in it was a crucifix. When he wanted to break and smash the box so as to drag out its contents, he dropped dead on the spot. Then another Indian tried to force it open and had a similar fate. A third Indian, who had no warning from these two unfortunates, sought to break open the chest also, but he was a companion in their death. As a result the rest dare not approach the box any more. (Lewis and Loomie 121)

In his attempt to render the happenings in Ajacán in Christian terms, Father Rogel establishes a connection between the powers attributed to the chest and the Holy Trinity when he introduces the deaths of three Indians to the story. The Jesuit writer struggles to contain the subversive meanings of Don Luis’s failed conversion, which “threatens to undermine the stability of the Christian colonial discourse upon which their New World narrative depends: How does one tell a conversion story in which the central figure of redemption apparently converts back?” (Brickenhouse 26). When the first printed version of Don Luis’s unsuccessful conversion story appeared in Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Life of Father Francis Borgia, which was printed in Madrid in 1592 and 1594, two explanations were given: Don Luis killed the Jesuits either because he “had already apostatized and returned to idolatry and so was embarrassed, or because he had kept secret this wicked plan” (Ribadeneyra 146). In other words, Don Luis was believed to have either been ashamed of his failed conversion or there never had been a conversion in the first place. Both explanations, of course, partake of the rhetorical programs of colonial justification. As Don Luis’s behavior is indecipherable to the Spanish beyond the by then firmly established trope of ‘Native treachery,’ Don Luis’s ritualistic killings and the Powhatans’ reiteration of Christian traditions through sartorial performance introduce a polyphonic quality to the Jesuit writings that testifies to the problems inherent in the staging of colonial difference. 12 Clearly, Don Luis is a hybrid figure. Going against Eurocentric interpretations of scenarios of encounter, Frederic Gleach adopts an approach based on reconstructing aspects of a Powhatan world-view. Stressing the capacity of the Powhatan world for accepting and integrating difference, he focuses on the hybrid nature of the conversion experience. Gleach points out that the acceptance of the English God by Amerindians was usually in addition to but did not replace their traditional beliefs. Hence, rather than read Don Luis’s behaviors within a paradigm of conflicting loyalties to two separate worlds, he places Don Luis “in a liminal position _____________ 12

As Gesa Mackenthun has pointed out, colonial violence in the Americas “can only be imagined as a reaction to the natives’ previous and groundless (i.e. ‘natural’) treachery. It is impossible to admit […] that violence is part and parcel of the European imperial project itself. The story of Indian treachery has indeed developed such a truth value over the centuries that it is usually considered out of bounds for critical reflexion” (Metaphors 229).

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where the two worlds become one, where, for Don Luis, the Spanish Jesuits have been brought into the Powhatan world – and thus there is only one loyalty. Neither world is rejected; rather, they are united” (Gleach 94). The Jesuits’ acts of putting on the robes of the dead Fathers only make sense if the reader assumes that the Indians, informed by Don Luis, “recognized the power of these items and wore them with respect, as a way of maintaining that power” (Gleach 96). What emerges from the descriptions of the Jesuits is that the performative practices in the Americas prior to contact were radically different from those of the European invaders. The early records by the Jesuits thus offer an important insight into the dynamic enactment of New World encounters. Concomitantly, these largely forgotten archives of the sixteenthcentury Spanish presence in Virginia ask that we reconsider the AngloAmerican archive from a hemispheric perspective. As April Lee Hatfield has stressed, the early English promoters of Virginia clearly saw Virginia in relation to Spanish colonial America. They understood Jamestown to be part of a larger English project to challenge Spain in the Americas (see 7). Whereas the English could not find a way to profit from native labor in the way the Spanish had in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and Peru, they nonetheless relied on patterns of settlement and trade that the Spanish used. “Preexisting exchange pattern provided them with one mechanism for moving from a situation in which they struggled to understand Indian modes of reckoning space in the Chesapeake to one in which they commanded part of that space themselves” (Hatfield 9). John Smith, for instance, took it for granted that his readers would know the Spanish texts on the encomienda system, the particular form of tribute system of labor that the Spanish relied on, when he wrote: “The manner how to suppresse them is so often related and approved, I omit it here: And you have twenty examples of the Spaniards how they got the West-Indies, and forced the treacherous and rebellious Infidels to doe all manner of drudgery worke and slavery for them, themselves living like Souldiers upon the fruits of their labours” (Generall Historie 299). Smith was in Virginia from April 1607 until October 1609, when the English colony was getting started. He produced several texts about his two-year sojourn in Jamestown. These texts constitute acts of selfstylization that powerfully brought ‘America’ into being for his contemporary readers. Involved in the major exploring and trading expeditions that took place, Smith was a captive of the Powhatans in the winter of 160708. Smith first tells about his experience of captivity in his A True Relation. Fashioning Smith as a “New World hero à la Cortés” (Mackenthun, Metaphors 207), A True Relation is rather a personal narrative than a historical account. When taken before Opechancanough in December 1607, Smith

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tells that he “presented [Opechancanough] with a compasse diall, describing by my best meanes the use therof, whereat he so amazedly admired, as he suffered me to proceed in a discourse of the roundness of the earth, the course of the sunne, moone, stares and plannets” (True Relation 47). Later retelling the story in The Generall Historie, Smith furnished more details and added a scene in which he was tied to a tree. The scene is worth quoting in detail: Then according to their composition they drew him forth and let him to the fire, where his men were slaine. Diligently they chafed his benumbed limbs. He demanding for their Captaine, they shewed him Opechankanough, King of Pamaunkee, to whom he gave a round Ivory double compass Dyall. Much they marvailed at the playing of the Fly and Needle, which they could see so plainly, and yet not touch it, because of the glasse that covered them. But when he demonstrated by that Globe-like-Jewell, the roundnesse of the earth, and skies, the spheare of the Sunne, Moone, and Starrs, and how the Sunne did chase the night round about the world continually; the greatnesse of the Land and Sea, the diversitie of Nations, varietie of complexions, and how we were to them Antipodes, and many other such like matters, they all stood as amazed with admiration. Notwithstanding, within an houre after they tyed him to a tree, and as many as could stand about him prepared to shoot him, but the King holding up the Compass in his had, they all laid downe their Bowes and Arrowes, and in a triumphant manner let him to Orapaks, where he was after their manner kindly feasted, and well used. (147)

If Opechancanough were identical with Don Luis, then Smith’s compass ruse certainly missed the intended effect, and Opechancanough “may have been one step ahead of Smith all the time” (see Hulme “Polytropic Man” 27). The trick won only an hour’s delay before his life was threatened again. However, for reasons unknown, Opechancanough then ordered that Smith’s life be spared and had him taken before his brother Powhatan, who also spared him, eventually allowing him to return to Jamestown. Most notably though, some years later in 1622, Opechancanough planned an attack on the English colony, which became the turning point for English Indian relationships. In assessing the relationship between Powhatans and Smith, Bridenbaugh has stressed that Smith “failed to gauge the depth of the resentment of the English intrusion on the part of Powhatan, Opechancanough, and their fellow kings” (Jamestown 20). After all, Don Luis – regardless of his precise relation to Opechancanough – had had ample opportunity with the Spanish in Mexico to observe imperialism in action and had surely shared his stories with members of his tribe. If they were not the same persons, they still were contemporaries, so the Powhatans must have had some form of comprehending of Europeans’ intentions when the English arrived in 1607. It would thus be interesting, as Brick-

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enhouse suggests, to re-read Smith’s texts “for signs of an informing Native-European and colonial polyculturalism that the English writers themselves could never discern” (31). Smith, it seems, was unaware of the Jesuit mission at Ajacán and had never heard of Don Luis. To be true, Ajacán is never mentioned in any contemporary English documents. In The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles John Smith changed from a writer of personal adventures to a promoter of colonization and visionary propagandist. This text is a large project divided into six books, complete with an engraved title page, revised versions of Smith’s maps, and expanded versions of his earlier publications. A Map of Virginia, which was published in 1612, was, for instance, reissued in 1624 as part of his Generall Historie. Consisting of a patchwork of texts that are held together by Smith’s narrative voice, this text is theatrical indeed. Narrated in the third person, Smith engages in an act of selfstylization and his meeting with Opechancanough and Powhatan is given a romantic twist. Book 4 gives the story of Smith’s captivity in greater detail, with several additional episodes, the most famous, of course, being the Pocahontas episode, which crucially does not appear in A True Relation. In one rather long and convoluted sentence, Smith describes the situation as follows: The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarious manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could Layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the King’s dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, neads, and coppter; for they though him as well of all occupations as themselves. (Generall Historie 151)

In their interpretation of this scene, historians and literary critics have not come to a satisfying conclusion as to the exact nature of the event; nor have they agreed on whether the episode is even fabricated. Smith has been accused of having embellished if not invented the scene either for reasons of self-glory (see Barbour, “Introduction” xiii-lxiv) or as a form of European appropriation of the other (see Hulme “Polytropic Man” 13673). Frederic Gleach contends that for the Powhatans these events formed part of a protracted ritual which attempted to make a place for the English colony in the Powhatan world, including the recognition of Smith as one of their leaders (see 11). Similarly, Barbour has suggested that Pocahontas’s rescue of Smith may have been an adoption of Smith by the Powhatans (see Pocahontas 23-26). Clara Sue Kidwell and Paula Gunn Al-

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len, in turn, have stressed Pocahontas’s function as a cultural mediator who symbolically saved Smith’s life so that he could be reborn into a new world of cultural relationships. To Smith, the events that happened in the winter of 1607-08 were a series of unconnected events that included “his capture (a military defeat), accusations of murder (adjudication), inclusion in rituals (to determine his reason for being there), rescue (which was inexplicable), and his return to Jamestown (victory – returning to his prior state of freedom)” (Gleach 11). While he could only make sense of these events by translating them into his own belief system, these practices most likely had a completely different meaning for the Powhatans. Helen Rountree, one of the foremost experts on Pocahontas and the Powhatans, has stressed that in the nineteenth century, in an effort to counteract the opinion that ‘American’ history began with the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, Pocahontas was canonized as an ‘Indian princess.’ Southern historians, as Rountree stresses, “used her inflated relationship with John Smith to attract readers’ attention to an American story that took place before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock” (Pocahontas 238). As a result, the Pocahontas episode has come to be seen as the key foundational scenario of encounter in Anglophone North American literary history: here we find the staple cultural myths and assumptions that are associated with colonial encounters in the Americas. Gesa Mackenthun has observed that Smith’s Generall Historie is different from his earlier texts in that it attempts to fashion itself as a “historical narrative of British America” (Metaphors 210). While the True Relation was a “text of action” that told readers what to do in Virginia, the Generall Historie “is concerned with endowing these actions with a coherence that would authorize England’s colonial project” (Mackenthun, Metaphors 211). Like all narratives, the authority of a historical narrative, however, depends on the notion of origin because “successful narratives can only be written backwards” (Hulme Colonial Encounters 23). And, as Mackenthun adds: “From the Aeneid of Virgil onward, intercultural romance was a preferred beginning of colonial narratives” (Metaphors 211). The Pocahontas story as told by Captain John Smith, it seems, offered a coherent beginning for Virginia history and American literature, but “the development of the romantic myth was possible only once the intercultural harmony it expresses had been superseded by the reality of colonial violence” (Mackenthun, Metaphors 211). Crucially though, we will never know what the complex rituals originally meant to the Powhatans. As it turns out, the complex rituals that the English experienced and witnessed present the same problems of interpretation as the events of the early seventeenth century when the Jesuit mission was attacked by the Powhatans. We can only grasp what these actions

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and performative practices have come to mean in the appropriation, the re-presentation, and the continually renewed acts of performance, such as the countless romanticized accounts of the Pocahontas myth culminating in the Disney cartoon of 1995. The elements of this scenario of encounter, the paradigmatic setup of encounter that stars a white male protagonist subject and a brown, discovered “object” (see Taylor, Archive 13) that can be found in Smith’s account are also activated in other key colonial texts. Smith’s encounter with the Powhatans which carries within itself the spectral presence of Don Luis, takes on yet another layer of hemispheric sedimentation when read in conjunction with Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s sixteenth-century narrative of colonial encounters in Florida. 13

Scenario of Encounter II: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and the Natives of Tampa Bay Cabeza de Vaca, a promising young noble, was assigned by Emperor Charles V as the Crown’s treasurer to the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition chartered to explore the Gulf coast. On June 27, 1527, six hundred men thus set out from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain to “conquer and govern” (Vaca 30) Florida. On Cuba, they encountered a hurricane and lost two ships and a great number of men. After crossing to the mainland and landing near Tampa Bay, their explorations were repelled by hostile inhabitants and unconquerable land. The Spaniards hastily constructed rafts but were wrecked in a storm on the Gulf coast. Captured by local Indians, only four survivors – Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, the Moroccan slave Estebanico, and Cabeza de Vaca himself – lived to reach Mexico City after an eight-year-long odyssey that took them all across what is now the Southwest of the United States. Naked and on foot, Cabeza de Vaca wandered through the Southwest, undergoing a series of transformations from conquistador to missionary, and from ‘Indianized Spaniard,’ who performed as a healer of the sick back to a Christian Spaniard when he re-united with the Spanish. Cabeza de Vaca transformed the events of the disastrous expedition into an account, entitled Relación, which was published in Zamora, Spain in 1542. 14 Contrary to the romantic image that Smith’s tale of captivity fos_____________ 13 14

In the sixteenth century, the Spanish province of La Florida extended from present-day Florida to Newfoundland and therefore also included Virginia (the territory that the Jesuits called Ajacán). See Gradie’s “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia” 131 and 134. There is a second edition that was published in Valladolid in 1555. This second edition includes some changes in the text of Cabeza de Vaca’s wanderings. The annotated translation by Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández used here is based on the 1555 edition. As

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ters, Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicle is “anything but triumphant” (Stavans xvi). Writing about a series of obstacles that he had to overcome, Cabeza de Vaca portrays himself as a wanderer “through many very strange lands” (28). Acutely aware of the newness of the land and keenly observant of the environment and its people, Cabeza de Vaca engages the scenario of encounter several times, the first of which appears at the beginning of his narrative. In chapter four, we find the following passage: There we found many merchandise boxes from Castile, each containing the body of a dead man. The bodies were covered with painted deerskins. This seemed to the Commissary to be a type of idolatry, and he burned the boxes with the bodies. We also found pieces of linen and cloth and feather headdresses which seemed to be from New Spain. We also found samples of gold. (35)

Cabeza de Vaca refrains from describing this spectacle in more detail, but it is interesting to take a closer look at what has disappeared at the stroke of the colonizer’s pen. While the ritual of the burning of cases along with the unknown bodies with painted deerskins is only briefly referred to in this narrative, the act of erasure of the system of encoding and transmitting knowledge inherent in this ritual takes on tremendous significance. This burning of evidence initiates the principle of surrogation, a process of forgetting that, however imperfectly, erases its overlaps and alternatives. The question arises who these dead bodies were and why they were put into boxes covered with painted deerskins in boxes. As Diana Taylor puts it: the inaugural moment of colonialism introduces two discursive moves that work to devalue native performance. (1) the dismissal of indigenous performance traditions as episteme; and (2) the dismissal of “content” of Native performances as bad objects, idolatry. These discourses simultaneously contradict and sustain each other. (Archive 33)

In Cabeza de Vaca’s case, the boxes of unknown bodies were destroyed because the Spaniards did not understand the performative practices in the Americas. Clearly, they did not deem non-verbal knowledge relevant and could only decode it as idolatrous. Once burned, these bodies could not serve to create or transmit knowledge any longer. Cabeza de Vaca chooses not to write about the destruction of local knowledge, and instead moves on to talk about samples of gold. This is interesting considering that in the prologue to his narrative, Cabeza de Vaca addresses the King and tells him that instead of bringing back gold, he has knowledge to offer: _____________ Ralph Bauer (77) has pointed out, the earliest English notice of The Account was in 1609 when Richard Hakluyt invoked Cabeza de Vaca’s account as proof for the riches of Florida.

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[S]ince my counsel and my diligence were of little avail in accomplishing the task for which we went in the service of Your Majesty, and since God permitted, because of our sins, that of all the expeditions that ever went to those lands, no other encountered such great dangers or had such a miserable and disastrous outcome, I can render only this service: to bring to Your Majesty an account of what I learned and saw in the ten years that I wandered lost and naked through many and very strange lands. (28)

Cabeza de Vaca, it seems, could not have written about the details of the spectacle of burning the bodies, as he could have faced prosecution in Spain: In the peculiar political/religious milieu of Spanish colonial legalities, which intricately delimited a conquistador’s range of action while exploring foreign territories, the burning of countless bodies could well have struck the inevitable court reviewers as an atrocity worthy of investigation. (Bruce-Novoa)

Cabeza de Vaca’s act of self-fashioning necessitates the leaving out of details concerning the spectacle of the boxed bodies. Understandably, Cabeza de Vaca also needed to justify himself for the failure of his mission. After all Cabeza de Vaca’s official charge in that expedition had been to protect the emperor’s investment and assure compliance with Spanish law. It is only at the end of his narrative that Cabeza de Vaca mentions these dead bodies. He mentions the bodies again probably because he wants to defend himself against the charge of dereliction of duty. He discursively manages to give meaning to this native performance by stating that the bodies “were Christians” (121). In other words, Cabeza de Vaca justifies his act of erasure of pre-existing traditions by saturating the visual domain of the New World with a Western, Catholic iconography and mode of visualizing. Why, however, should those cadavers have been the dead bodies of Christians? This is surprising because Cabeza de Vaca notes that in all his travels he had not seen any pagan sacrifices directed at Christians. Cabeza de Vaca, therefore, “has amassed evidence to refute the Commissary’s judgment of idolatry on which he had based his order to burn the bodies” (Bruce-Novoa). The dead bodies whose provenance remains unclear “silently accuse the true culprits of the voyage’s failure, exonerating Cabeza de Vaca by inference” (Bruce-Novoa). What then can we make of this spectacle of dead bodies in boxes? As Bruce-Novoa has convincingly put it: [T]his hybrid assemblage of European boxes, native deerskins, and male cadavers; these bodies that drift between pagan and Christian, between Native American and Native European, even between inanimate and animate; these body signs created by Native Americans and recreated again by a once Spaniard turned Indiano: Americano. These bodies – which ultimately, in their ambiguous location

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within and among codes of signification, float back and forth across multiple borders of identity demarcations – are America in its premier performance.

Forever shipwrecked and unmoored, ‘America,’ is lost in the act of discovery. But, it will be remembered in cultural texts. The scenario of the first encounter, including the embodied practice of displaying bodies in boxes which forms part of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, will be reiterated and re-enacted, as, for instance, in Nicolás Echevarría’s 1991 film Cabeza de Vaca. ‘America,’ it turns out, is created in the fusion of European and native performative practices. In fact, it is the fusion of different visual systems of representation, the pictorial and the written that lies at the origins of ‘America.’ Just as is the case with the performances conducted by the Powhatans, the meaning of the spectacle of the boxed bodies in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative remains enigmatic and is only available to us in form of re-presentation. However, rather than attempt to explain an irrevocably lost history of performative practices, I briefly want to turn to Jacques Cartier’s account of his expedition the Northern Atlantic coast. Just about the same time as Cabeza de Vaca wandered “lost and naked” (Vaca 28) through North America, Jacques Cartier also explored the continent. His voyage of 1534, which – similar to Cabeza de Vaca’s – ended in failure, constitutes another representative event in the genealogy of hemispheric performance.

Scenario of Encounter III: Jacques Cartier and Donnacona Jacques Cartier’s exploration account is generally seen as signaling the beginning of Canada (see Siemerling 26). As an “interventionist text that would construct the unknown country and its Aboriginal […] peoples for consummation and realization by Cartier’s French audience” (Blodgett 6), Cartier’s text constitutes an act of origination that performatively constructs ‘America’ for the French. My inclusion of Cartier’s depiction of his encounter with Donnacona emphasizes the overlapping and sedimented histories of colonial America. Reverberating with familiar spectral echoes, Cartier’s account is yet another site in which colonial difference is enacted. Jacques Cartier was commissioned by King Francis I of France to set sail for North America on a quest for a route to Asia. On April 20, 1534, Cartier thus left St. Malo on a sure course for Newfoundland. Like Cabeza de Vaca, Cartier was a keen observer and his account reflects his curiosity about unfamiliar surroundings. Jotting down an impressive array of information concerning natural history and the people he came upon during his explorations, he meticulously marked each new bay that he found. Cartier painstakingly attempted to understand the New World by making

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the unfamiliar familiar through acts of naming. In the Bay de Chaleur – so named because the temperature was “more moderate than Spain” (22) – he came across some Natives: “While making our way along the [north] shore, we caught sight of the savages on the side of a lagoon and low beach, who were making many fires that smoked” (22), he wrote, possibly of the Micmac who approached them to trade. “The savages came over in one of their canoes and brought us some strips of cooked seal, which they placed on bits of wood and then withdrew, making signs to us that they were making us a present of them” (22). Of course, the Natives on the Atlantic seaboard had already encountered Europeans before and therefore were familiar with European trade relations. Cartier’s journal furnishes a familiar instance of the European performative act to claiming the land. At the Baie de Gaspé Harbour Cartier erected a thirty-foot cross with a fleur-de-lys shield and a wooden board engraved with the words, ‘Vive le roi de France.’ Indicating that this vast uncharted land was now the property of the King of France, Cartier engaged in a formal act of claiming the land: We erected this cross on the point in their presence and they watched it being put together and set up. And when it had been raised in the air, we all knelt down with our hands joined, worshipping it before them; and made signs to them, looking up and pointing towards the heaven, that by means of this we had our redemption, at which they showed many marks of admiration, at the same time turning and looking at the cross. (26)

Not surprisingly, the staging of this act of taking possession infuriated the Natives. The chief of the Iroquois, Donnacona, probably felt himself to have been wronged. When the French were about to re-embark, Donnacona approached the ship in a canoe. This is how Cartier describes Donnacana’s actions: When we had returned to our ships, the captain, dressed in an old black bearskin, arrived in a canoe with three of his sons and his brother; but they did not come so close to the ships as they had usually done. And pointing to the cross he made us a long harangue, making the sign of the cross with two of his fingers; and then he pointed to the land all around about, as if he wished to say that all this region belonged to him, and that we ought not to have set up this cross without his permission. And when he finished his harangue, we held up an axe to him, pretending we would barter it for his skin. (26)

This drama of taking possession, evocative of the act of origination in Theodor de Bry’s engraving, relied on well-established performative European tradition. But what can we make of the Natives’ protest? As Ramsay Cook speculates, “Cartier’s interpretation of it as a rejection of the French right to act without permission can be seen, at the least, as a sign of his guilty conscience” (xxv). But did Donnacona, “the lord of Canada” (50), as Cartier called him, have the same sense of proprietary rights? Or

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was he claiming the Gaspé harbour area as his people’s fishing and hunting territory? (see Cook xxv). Again, the ‘original’ meaning is lost and we only have access to what this drama has come to mean in Cartier’s representation. During the first voyage, Cartier did not have an interpreter and therefore could not understand the signs made by the Iroquois. He describes native speech as a “harangue” (26), thus suggesting a type of forceful or angry speech. It was not until his second voyage that Cartier had native interpreters. Right after planting a cross, Cartier employed the pretext of pacifying Donnacona by giving him an axe in exchange for his ware. But as soon as Donnacona reached for the axe, the French forced the chief aboard and convinced him to give them two of his sons, Dom Agaya and Taignoagny, whom the French wanted to take back to France. As Cartier writes in his report: “We dressed up his two sons in shirts and ribbons and in red caps, and put a little brass chain around the neck of each, at which they were greatly pleased” (27). As mentioned before, it was customary for explorers to carry off natives and take them home, but Cartier fully intended to return to North America. On the second voyage in 1535, Donnacona himself then was captured along with his sons and seven others. Soon after, the chief died in France before Cartier’s third voyage in 1541. Cartier’s text offers a fairly coherent version of his relationship with Donnacona. This relationship, however, was based on a dialogue of incomprehension. As Stephen Greenblatt has remarked: “The Europeans and the interpreters themselves translated such fragments as they understood or thought they understood into a coherent story, and they came to believe quite easily that the story was what they actually heard. There could be, and apparently were, murderous results” (27). In Cartier’s account, Donnacona’s actions “were made to speak in European words,” which, for Donnacona “ended, if not in murder, then certainly in tragedy” (Cook xxi).

Epilogue: “Memories imperfectly deferred” Seen as performance, ‘America’ has no point of origin, but is constantly produced by what it leaves out. While stories of ‘conquest,’ ‘invasion’ or ‘first encounters’ are often considered stories of origin, they are in fact stories of surrogation. Similar to Columbus’s letter from his first voyage to the New World, which only comes down to us in several editions, that is as copies of a lost copy, the foundational scenario of encounter has no

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original. 15 There also is no original manuscript for Cartier’s descriptions of his ‘discovery’ of the St. Lawrence region, and the depictions of his encounter with Donnacona come down to us in English and Italian translations. 16 Stories of ‘conquest,’ therefore, cannot adequately serve as providential beginnings for national literatures. “History,” as William Carlos Williams famously wrote in his In the American Grain, “begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery” (39). The search for origins of ‘America’ and the beginnings of American literature never is a form of discovery but rather one of erasure. The scenarios of encounter that structure the depictions of Don Luis’s encounter with the Jesuits, Smith’s meeting with Opechancanough, Cabeza de Vaca’s experience with Indians and Cartier’s capture of Donnacona form part of an American hauntology of performance. They have participated in the transfer and continuity of certain forms of knowledge that marginalize and erase other ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding. “Officially forgotten,” the Native American presence, however, can never be successfully repressed but lingers on as “memor[ies] imperfectly deferred” (Roach 4). The model of cultural contact and intercultural encounter presented here is based on performance, which suggests a transnational historical narrative of American literature and culture. Such a model, as Joseph Roach puts it, “requires a performance genealogy in which the borderlands, the perimeters of reciprocity, become the center” (189). The complexity and multivocality of colonial literary history suggests that a paradigm of analysis predicated on the confines of the development of a national tradition is limiting. A shift in methodological approach to per_____________ 15

16

Christopher Columbus’s famous announcement of the success of his voyage in his 1493 letter to the King and Queen of Spain caused so much excitement that it occasioned numerous editions to be issued in the same year all across Western Europe, in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. R. H. Major points to the level of uncertainty and conjecture which surrounds Columbus’s letter: “It is not known whether the original, written by Columbus, in Spanish, be now in existence or not, but it is possible that it may still lie, like a diamond in the mine, in some unexplored Archivo in Spain” (Major ii). We also do not know precisely when Columbus first composed this letter because his personal log, in which he ostensibly recorded his literary efforts, has survived only in the revision by Bartolomé de Las Casas. Cartier’s Voyages present a series of problems concerning authorship and publication history. As Ramsay Cook explains: “The report of the first expedition was initially published in Italian in 1565, in English fifteen years later, and finally in French in 1598. […] To complicate matters, the second Voyage, which was the first to be published and appeared as an anonymous book in French in 1545, differs in some respects from each of the three known manuscript editions. Finally, there is the third Voyage: it exists only in English in a version compiled by the famous English publicist of overseas expansion, Richard Hakluyt, in 1600” (xi). In other words, no original manuscript has been found for the texts of any of the three voyages collected in Ramsay’s edition.

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formance studies brings about a rethinking of literary canons, as it allows other forms of practices to emerge in a text (see Taylor Archive 16-17). This revisionary approach should, however, not only be a project of recovering hitherto lesser known texts that, once restored to recollection, can be added to the canon of U.S. American literature as precursors of later texts. Rather it should also entail a remapping of the U.S. national tradition within a large web of Transamerican perceptions. As Mackenthun has pointed out, “the transnational is […] that which has been left out discursively during the establishment of disciplines” (“Encountering” 26, emphasis in the original). But despite previous attempts to “exclude the multicultural muddle of early American history and writing from the canon” because “it did not offer itself for a national narrative of colonial beginnings” (“Encountering” 8), the specters of the past remain present. Bringing to light lesser known texts from the past and focusing on the various elements that make up scenarios of encounter can change the ways in which we interpret and remember the past. A performance genealogy that locates itself in the borderlands can pay attention to the palimpsestic character of early American literature. In the culturally and socially constructed world of performance, presence always contains traces of the past; and these traces themselves are the specters of presence. This hauntology of performance can, however, inspire a revised approach to colonial American literature. A look at the Transamerican ‘orgins’ of American literature from a performance studies perspective reveals an obscured and repressed historical presence whose ghostly echoes haunt the archive of American literature.

Works Cited Allen, Paula Gunn. Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. San Francisco: Harper, 2003. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975. Barbour Philip. “General Introduction.” The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631). Vol 1. Ed. Philip Barbour. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. xliii-lxxii. —. Pocahontas and Her World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Blodgett, Edward Dickins. “Is a History of the Literatures of Canada Possible?” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (1993): 1-18. Brickhouse, Anna. “Hemispheric Jamestown.” Hemispheric American Studies. Ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2008. 18-35. Bridenbaugh Carl. Early Americans. New York: Oxford UP, 1981 —. Jamestown 1544-1699. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.

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Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Unpacking America’s Boxed Gifts: From Cabeza de Vaca to Donald Duck.” Body Signs: The Body in Latino/a Cultural Production. Ed. Astrid M. Fellner. Wien: LIT, forthcoming. Cabell, James Branch. The First Gentleman of America: A Comedy of Conquest. New York: Farrar, 1942. —. Let Me Lie: Being in the Main an Ethnological Account of the Remarkable Commonwealth of Virginia and the Making of Its History. New York: Farrar, 1947. Cartier, Jacques. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Ed. Ramsay Cook. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Castillo, Susan. Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786: Performing America. London: Routledge, 2006. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Cook, Ramsay. “Donnacona Discovers Europe: Rereading Jacques Cartier’s Voyages.” The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Ed. Ramsay Cook. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. ix-xli. De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum, 2007. Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. Grabes, Herbert. “Constructing a Usable Literary Past: Literary History and Cultural Memory.” Literatur, Literaturgeschichte und kulturelles Gedächtnis/Literature, Literary History and Cultural Memory. REAL 21. Ed. Herbert Grabes. Tübingen: Narr, 2005. 129-43. Gradie, Charlotte M. “The Powhatans and the Spanish Empire.” Powhatan Foreign Relations 1500-1722. Ed. Helen C. Rountree. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 154-72. —. “Spanish Jesuits in Virginia: The Mission That Failed.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 96.2 (April 1988): 131-56. Greenblatt, Stephen J. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Cultures. New York: Routledge, 1990. Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London: Methuen, 1986. —. “Polytropic Man: Tropes of Sexuality and Mobility in Early Colonial Discourse.” Europe and Its Others. Ed. Francis Barker et. al. Colchester: U of Essex P, 1985. Kidwell, Clara Sue. “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators.” Ethnohistory 39.2 (1992): 97-107. Lewis, Clifford M., and Albert J. Loomie, eds. The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570-1572. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1953. Mackenthun, Gesa. “Encountering Colonialism: A Transnational View of ‘Colonial America.’” Colonial Encounters: Essays in Early American History and Culture. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 1-27. —. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997.

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Major, R. H., ed. and trans. Select Letters of Christopher Columbus: With Other Original Documents, Relating to His Four Voyages to the New World. London: Hakluyt Society, 1847. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Ribadeneyra Pedro de. “Life of Father Francis Borgia, Third General of the Society of Jesus. Book III, Chapter 6.” The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia 1570-1572. Ed. Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1953. 145-47. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990. —. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985. Siemerling, Winfried. The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing, and the Politics of Re/Cognition. New York: Routledge, 2005. Smith, Captain John. The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles [1624]. Repr. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631). Vol 2. Ed. Philip Barbour. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. —. A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia [1608]. Repr. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631). Vol 1. Ed. Philip Barbour. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. Stavans, Ilan. Introduction. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition. Trans. Fanny Bandelier. Rev. Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2002. ix–xxxi. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. —. “Remapping Genre through Performance: From ‘American’ to ‘Hemispheric’ Studies.” PMLA 122 (2007): 1416-30. Vaca, Cabeza de and Alvar Núñez. The Account, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación. Trans. Martin A Favata and José B. Fernández. Houston: Arte Público, 1993. Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956.

Saving the Circum-Atlantic World: Transnational (American) Memories in Julia Álvarez’s Disease Narrative CARMEN BIRKLE

Narrating Disease across the Atlantic and into the Past The recent novel, Saving the World (2006), by the Caribbean American writer Julia Álvarez, born in New York City and living in the Dominican Republic until she was ten, engages in both transnational medical as well as mnemonic issues by using a fictionalized autobiographical mode of story-telling. Álvarez’s novel works with the two time frames of the present United States and the early nineteenth-century Spanish past, which come together spatially in the Caribbean and Spanish South America and merge temporally in the protagonist’s reading of the diary invented by Álvarez of the historical figure of the rectoress of an orphanage in La Coruña, Spain, Doña Isabel Sendales y Gómez (a rather fictional as well as variously recorded and misspelled last name in an otherwise historical story). The diary depicts the smallpox vaccination enterprise of the early nineteenth-century Spanish Royal Expedition of the Vaccine (1803) led by the doctors Francisco Xavier de Balmis and José Salvany and taking them mostly to Spanish colonies in Central and South America and the Philippines. This disease narrative of the past is paralleled in the present by the story of the protagonist’s husband engaged in the establishment of an AIDS clinic in the Dominican Republic. Approaching the novel from both an Atlantic Studies and Hemispheric Studies point of view, I will argue that Saving the World engages in memories on three levels: first, on the level of transtextuality through the dialogic reading of a diary and letters, a level which Aleida Assmann has called ars; second, on the level of individual memory by translating both diseases (smallpox, AIDS) into narrative and focusing on the personal memories and reflections of the respective first-person female narrators, which constitutes the vis level according to Aleida Assmann; third, on the level of bodily memory as past and present bodies carry the markers of the respective diseases as visible reminders of having barely survived, a level

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which, in analogy to Assmann’s terminology, I suggest to call corpus. In her novel, Álvarez asks her readers to remember not only the early colonial circum-Atlantic connections that established the world as we know it today but also recovers historical disease narratives that uncannily help balance our understanding of recent developments of AIDS or SARS, which are diseases equally entangled in a web of (post)colonial forces. Thus, we may – perhaps daringly – say that smallpox is to AIDS what Spain is to the United States, and what the diary is to the protagonist’s ‘autobiographical’ writing, namely its respective intertext and thus its memory – bodily, textual, political, and social. Disease narratives are always also studies of societies or individuals under extreme pressures, in which memory is often lost, denied, ignored, or simply in crisis and in need of recovery. In the present case, the act of recovery is effectively processed by women who ultimately create collective memory across time and space through the medium of Álvarez’s novel Saving the World. Álvarez’s transatlantic novel, by focusing on two women writers who in the process of writing find their strength and meaning in life, shows its readers that the simple processes of reading and writing are acts of remembering, making that which is remembered – often by association in her characters and readers – relevant for one’s life. It is literature that – by crossing the Atlantic and moving into the past – can join a woman from Spain, living in the nineteenth century and crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea to Central America, to a woman from the Dominican Republic, living in the United States. Álvarez’s novel forms this alliance, merges the two women and, through them, the Old World and the New, Northern, Central, and Southern America, and evokes hope for a successful battle against HIV by invoking the ultimate eradication of smallpox epidemics. In her novel, Álvarez does what Emory Elliott envisions for the increasingly transnational discipline of American Studies, namely to “form alliances [with scholars from every country], advance knowledge, and accomplish goals together so far unimagined” (19). In short, by “looking beyond the [U.S.] nation’s borders” (Fishkin 20), the medium of the novel produces a global form of transnational or collective memory (see Erll’s concept of “‘fiktionale Gedächtnismedien’” in “Medium” 21) that freely crosses borders of time and space. However, Winfried Fluck critically points out that with “the redefinition of the field of American studies as transnational, transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric, or even global studies” (23), “American studies is running away from the task and interpretive challenge for which it was created. […] at a time in which understanding the United States has become perhaps more important than ever” (30-31). Yet, in response to Fluck’s warning, I would suggest that Álvarez’s novel, by being transna-

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tional, transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric, and even global, gives the author’s alter ego, the protagonist Alma Huebner or Fulana de Tal and a U.S.-American writer of Dominican descent, in her life in Vermont the knowledge of her own rootedness in and entanglement with world history. Alma, in the United States, begins to understand U.S. economic and medical involvement in the Caribbean. Thus, the 1803 Royal Expedition – an idealistic as well as imperial venture – has been replaced by economically motivated imperial business in so-called Third World countries. Ship and plane become moving vehicles of colonial and economic imperialism. Therefore, both Atlantic Studies and Hemispheric Studies suggest important possible approaches to U.S.-American literature and contribute to transnational American Studies, which “is by definition political” (Hornung 68). 1 As early as 1916, the Jewish cultural critic Randolph S. Bourne (1886-1918) feels confident enough to suggest in his essay “Trans-national America” that “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a transnationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (297). By looking at U.S.-American history and literature from transatlantic / transnational and hemispheric points of view, I would suggest that Julia Álvarez’s novel puts “different national and extra-national histories and cultural formations into dialogue,” as the editors of a collection of essays on Hemispheric American Studies suggest (Levander and Levine 2). In a similar vein, in 2004, William Boelhower focuses on the figura of the ship and the text of the map in his essay “‘I’ll Teach You How to Flow’” to demonstrate how the Atlantic engendered a new social order in the mindset of Renaissance Europeans: The ocean-going ship and the modern world map are undoubtedly the two major emblems of the genesis and taking hold of the modern world-system. So much so that they can be considered critical conduits for the flow of peoples, goods, and ideas back and forth between Europe, Africa, and the Americas particularly in the early centuries of the Atlantic world’s formation. (33)

Álvarez’s novel allows us to take an aerial photographic peep at the circum-Atlantic world “as a particular zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission” (Armitage 16). 2 But the next step is to zoom _____________ 1 2

See also the Special Issue Amerikastudien /American Studies titled European American Studies 47.1 (2002); see also Lenz. “It is therefore the history of the ocean as an arena distinct from any of the particular, narrower, oceanic zones that comprise it. It certainly encompasses the shores of the Atlantic but does so only insofar as those shores form part of a larger oceanic history rather than a set of specific national or regional histories abutting onto the Atlantic. It is the history of the people who crossed the Atlantic, who lived on its shores and who participated in the communities it made possible, of their commerce and their ideas, as well as the diseases they carried, the flora they transplanted and the fauna they transported” (Armitage 16).

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in on a more specific phenomenon of this circum-Atlantic world. It is both the Atlantic as well as the Caribbean Sea (and later also the Pacific) that suggest moments of movement and connection or, to put it in the words of travel writing, of departure, journey, and arrival. The journey takes place on the water (ship) or in the air (plane) and constitutes a transitional phase in which transnational memories gradually begin to replace actual experience, location, and people. It is on both levels – the past and the present in the novel – that the transatlantic and hemispheric journeys trigger the need for a more self-conscious, productive, and creative treatment of memories. Like the proponents of an Atlantic Studies approach, scholars interested in Hemispheric Studies recognize “the limits of a hermetically defined nation-based analysis” (Levander and Levine 3). In this context, national identity is always “a relational identity that emerges through constant collaboration, dialogue, and dissension” (Levander and Levine 5). Similarly, individual identity that is in the process of emerging in Álvarez’s novel is relational across space and time. Presenting Spain as the colonial power in the early nineteenth century evokes the U.S.-American Monroe Doctrine proclaimed in 1823, which is generally “taken as a key starting point of U.S. hemispheric expansionism” (Levander and Levine 7), but was created in response to European, particularly Spanish, colonialism in the New World. In addition to Atlantic and Hemispheric Studies approaches, the numerous, substantial, and groundbreaking publications on memory in a cultural and literary studies context by Aleida and Jan Assmann, Astrid Erll, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Ansgar Nünning, and others offer fruitful theories and methods for the analysis of an early twenty-firstcentury novel written by the Dominican American author Julia Álvarez, in which she joins the lives of two women from the nineteenth and twentyfirst centuries. In the re-writing of the nineteenth-century Doña Isabel’s personal memory of the smallpox virus, Álvarez also addresses the collective memory of the people in Spain and the Spanish colonies, where Isabel travels with the Royal Expedition to introduce the necessary vaccine. The possible creation of cultural memory, which is a memory that is no longer based on living people as those who remember (“lebendige[s] Gedächtnis” according to Aleida Assmann 15) but that is supported by media that preserve this memory, may also be the result of Álvarez’s novel. As Aleida Assmann suggests: “Das lebendige Gedächtnis weicht damit einem mediengestützten Gedächtnis, das sich auf materielle Träger wie Denkmäler, Gedenkstätten, Museen und Archive stützt” (15). Figuratively speaking, Álvarez’s novel becomes such an archive with which she wants to counteract the present crisis of memory which Pierre Nora finds in contempo-

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rary society. Álvarez’s literary archive is “a special form of cultural memory in itself: as a complex lieu de mémoire with its very own forms and strategies of observation and writing from older memories and their diverse representations” (Eckstein ix). Álvarez bridges the gap between past and present and makes the present meaningful in its continuation of the past. Furthermore, as Astrid Erll suggests, literature is actively engaged in structuring and re-structuring memory (see “Erinnerungshistorische Literaturwissenschaft” 124). In the following, I will show that Álvarez’s literary archive works on three levels: ars, vis, corpus. Of course, ars, vis, and corpus as three forms of memory, of remembering the past, do not exist independently from each other. Rather, they are intricately interwoven, but for clarity’s sake will be treated separately in the following analysis of Álvarez’s novel.

Writing Selves in(to) History: Transtextual Memory (ars) Álvarez introduces memory on a textual level by creating – on the level of the historical past – the (fictional) letters and diary of Doña Isabel who wants her own story as well as that of the expedition to be remembered. Isabel describes a “primary, immediate experience” so that her text can be considered a (fictional) “testimony” (Eckstein 12). The reader learns about this testimony through the writer in the present – Alma – who creates this past level and thus establishes the necessary archive of remembrance. In other words, by drawing on Isabel’s testimony, Alma’s text can be seen as “palimpsest or second-degree narrative” (Eckstein 12). Alma – and by implication Álvarez – becomes the perpetuator of Isabel’s fame, a position that was traditionally held by the poet. Alma makes sure Isabel’s ‘fame’ is recognized, remembered, and thus eternalized (see A. Assmann 38). Isabel is remembered not (only) because of what she has done but because Alma writes it down (see A. Assmann 45). Alma’s technique of remembering is to alternate Isabel’s narrative with her own life story. As Aleida Assmann explains, while the art of memory (see Yates) originally referred to the craft of memorializing, critics such as Renate Lachmann and Anselm Haverkamp as well as Assmann herself have connected this technique to theories of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and intertextuality. For Assmann, the term ars suggests a form of ‘saving’ data (as in a text). This process of saving could be any mechanical technique which aims at preservation (“Einlagerung”) and recovery (“Rückholung”) (28). Thus, in Saving the World we find a threefold intertextual process of (gendered) preservation and recovery, i.e., of ars, because it is accomplished by Isabel, Alma, and Julia Álvarez, a process that, in a further step

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of archive-building, transtextually leads to collective and, eventually, cultural memory. One of the epigraphs preceding the actual novel is a quotation from a text on Francisco Xavier de Balmis’s nineteenth-century Vaccination Expedition to Puerto Rico and Central and Southern America; more precisely, it is a reference to the child carriers of the expedition that “are all but forgotten” but “deserv[ing] a place in human recollection” (Álvarez n. pag.). This reference establishes memory as oscillating between forgetting and remembering and declares the novel a vehicle of excavation of the child protagonists’ contribution to the saving of the world. Texts, here the novel and its epigraph, serve as archives of memories written down and, therefore, retrievable in the future. Rather than representing the nineteenth-century story of the expedition by relying on historical sources, Julia Álvarez, instead, chooses to juxtapose and interweave the fictitious nineteenth-century diary and letters, written in her novel by the female protagonist Doña Isabel Sendales y Gómez, and the early twenty-firstcentury narrative of Alma’s life as a writer with a writer’s block and a husband engaged in AIDS prevention and dying during an attack on the clinic in the Dominican Republic, where the AIDS vaccine is tested. With the writing of Doña Isabel’s autobiographical text, Álvarez through her character Alma creates such a historical archive, based on her own research, for the present. In contrast to historical recreations, she freely admits to using poetic license to fill in the gaps of the nineteenth-century woman’s life story. Álvarez not only intertextually relates Alma’s story of the present with Doña Isabel’s story of the past, but uses both textual and temporal levels to turn her novel into a transtextual entity with Alma emerging as a new character at the end, inspired by and merging with the woman she is reading and writing about. More than simply identifying with the historical figure of Doña Isabel, Alma begins to explore her own self through the re-creation of Isabel. Julia Kristeva uses the concept of intertextuality to describe the interaction of each new text with its predecessors, which is an idea that certainly applies to Álvarez’s text at first sight, i.e., Alma’s text relates to Isabel’s. However, gradually, this interaction goes beyond intertextuality, beyond the mere co-presence of two or more texts, to a form of transtextuality that merges the two narrating voices. Alma’s life story, represented through flashbacks and present actions and ponderings, and Isabel’s life story, also based on personal memories, merge into Álvarez’s novel. By implication, her novel is not just the recovery or recreation of a voice and story long forgotten, but almost propaganda for the importance of literature in human life. Here, we have Doña Isabel, imagined as a strong woman at the beginning of the nineteenth century, serving as a

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means of reflection on Alma’s life. Both – with their hope, doubts, faith, and love – make Álvarez’s novel such a point of possible reference for readers of the twenty-first century in a transnational as well as circumAtlantic context with the Caribbean (Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) as a focal space of (female) empowerment. Alma’s access to the nineteenth-century story is through an unnamed book she has borrowed from the university library, a book described as “dusty tome” (15), suggesting old age, the past, a textual collection of memories. Furthermore, she corresponds with “the historian in Spain who tends the Web site” (15). The Internet as another textual-virtual space of memory is suggested but not much followed up in the course of the novel. Reading about Balmis and his wife (Josefa Mataseco), who is left behind during the expedition, immediately makes Alma draw parallels to her own and Richard’s life. He, too, will leave her for a medical expedition, not as its doctor but rather as its manager. Alma encounters Doña Isabel’s name on a list figuring “six attendants, twenty-two boys, the ship’s crew, and – unheard of on an expedition of this sort – a woman, Isabel Sendales y Gómez – or López Gandalla or Sendalla y López” (17), whom she calls “the mysterious rectoress about whom nothing is known for certain but her first name” (17). In contrast to official history taught in school, i.e., the grands récits of the world, Alma is drawn to this little history or facet of the past because she begins to ponder over parallels, motives, and the human factor behind the written representation. Furthermore, while she finds access to Isabel’s story via the historical Dr. Balmis, who is exactly Alma’s age, she is more intrigued by the mystery around the rectoress and begins to imagine and render her story in the form of letters and diaries. Gradually, Alma’s and Isabel’s life stories interweave, seem to respond to, and depend on each other. For a while, the story of the Vaccination Expedition remains a world of escape for Alma, away from her loneliness after Richard’s departure, away from her fear of death, particularly of the death of her neighbor and friend Helen dying of cancer, but also away from her writer’s block and sense of emptiness and senselessness in her life and dissatisfaction with what she has become as a writer, “an ethnic performing monkey” (22), as she herself believes. Like Alma, but for different reasons, Isabel is shown as wanting to escape: Being possibly limited to a mere story, Isabel laments: “Who would guess my desperation, my desire to break out of the life I was living?” (27). Shifts from past to present to past tense emphasize these phases’ entanglement and reinforce the sense of immediacy of the narrative, provoked also by Alma’s third-person interior monologues and free indirect speech as well as Isabel’s first-person narrative:

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Maybe that is why Alma is fleeing to the nineteenth century. Why Balmis’s project intrigues her. The man wanted to do something truly good – save the world from a deadly disease, a spreading epidemic. But his means were questionable, using orphans as carriers of his vaccine! Did Balmis feel the least bit troubled? (23)

Intrigued by the man but also by the ethical questions involved in such an expedition that uses children as objects of experimentation, Alma continues her research. Balmis’s website gives Alma the possibility of reading another intertext, namely the doctor’s bust (23) that renders him grim but also human and triggers Alma’s curiosity. In the novel, the textual mediation of the past is set off from the present in alternating chapters, indicated by time references (dates) and, graphically, through the alternation of Arabic and Roman numerals and different fonts. Like her character Alma, Julia Álvarez has done research on Balmis, Doña Isabel, and “La Real Expedición Filantrópica de la Vacuna (REFV)” of 1803 (see Álvarez 365-68). Like Alma, Álvarez has found much information on the Royal Expedition of the Vaccination, on its director Balmis, and on some of the boys functioning as live carriers of the vaccine. However, not much is available on the only female attendant of the expedition, Doña Isabel (see Ramírez Martín and Tuells). While the readers of Álvarez’s novel learn about some historical background in the course of the novel, it is the mystery around Doña Isabel, a woman participating in a man’s world in medicine and at sea, that Álvarez fills with life. She fills in the many gaps through acts of imagination, thus “inventing the truth,” as the title of a collection of essays, edited by William Zinsser, suggests when talking about autobiographical writing. Álvarez gives emotional and professional life and voice to a courageous woman of the early nineteenth century. As historical sources explain, in 1798 Edward Jenner published An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae in London, “describing how injection of fluid from cowpox pustules protected the subject against acquiring smallpox” (Rigau-Pérez 394), a discovery he had made in 1796. Disastrous smallpox epidemics in North America had already destroyed large parts of the native population and continued to threaten human life. When the doctor Benjamin Waterhouse successfully vaccinated his son in Massachusetts, the necessary lymph fluid was sent from England and introduced to the United States in 1801 (to Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York) (see Rigau-Pérez 394). An abstract of Jenner’s work was published in the Semanario de Agricultura y Artes in 1799 and established arm-to-arm vaccination as the most effective form of vaccination against smallpox. Dr. Balmis had just published a translation of the Traité historique et pratique de la vaccine by J. L. Moreau de la Sarthe (1801) in 1803 when Charles IV decided to prevent the spread of vast smallpox

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epidemics in the Spanish colonies. Although saving the lives of thousands of people across the Atlantic, the expedition still has to be seen as an imperial tool instrumentalized for the perpetuation of colonial power. The Royal Expedition of the Vaccine was established through royal order with Balmis as its director, Salvany as its sub-director, and its itinerary from La Coruña via Tenerife (Canary Islands) to Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Venezuela. The expedition eventually divided in Caracas into one branch going to South America (Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru) and the other one going to Mexico, the Philippines, Macao, and Canton (see RigauPérez 414). It left on November 30, 1803, and Balmis returned to Spain in 1806. Both Álvarez and her historical sources inform their readers of the medical, organizational, institutional as well as emotional problems connected with the expedition, some of them directly related to or often caused by the rather difficult and easily enraged director himself. Dr. Balmis serves as a transition between the past and the present. Alma in the present is first intrigued by the face of the commemorative bust of the doctor, which projects sternness but also softness as a human being. It is then the face not of Balmis but of Doña Isabel that attracts attention in the first chapter on the past, which is most probably a part of Isabel’s diary, written in her first-person voice. Isabel desires to escape from the confining world of the orphanage but is restricted by the marks a smallpox epidemic has left on her face, an epidemic that also killed her family. Lacking any addressee, Isabel tells her life story, her first encounter with Balmis, and eventually their departure for Puerto Rico. In her diary, she textually unfolds herself and communicates her memories. Through this act of communication, she takes off the veil, reflects on her present situation, and begins to re-create her memories (see Welzer). Since a “diary records dailiness in accounts and observations of emotional responses” (Smith and Watson 193), Isabel admits to being puzzled by the sudden encounter with Balmis, asks questions which, however, at present she is unable to answer. The diary can only reflect on the here and now and does not know anything yet about the future. Apart from being an account of events that have already happened, the diary allows for introspection, often expresses a desire for communication, resulting in a selfdirected pondering about the self. The immediacy of the narrative voice in the diary attracts Alma both to the genre and to the speaking voice. As readers, we have to assume that Alma creates Isabel’s voice; it is not a literal rendering of what is written elsewhere, but an invention of a (possible) truth as well as a mirroring of herself in Isabel. In the process of narrative creation, Alma projects onto Isabel, as her alter ego and as a version of her own self in the past, her own desires, questions, doubts, anxieties, and sorrows. Instead of writing “a multigenerational saga of a Latino fam-

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ily” (Álvarez 18), commissioned by her publisher, Alma begins selfexploration through Isabel. Thematic moments connect the shifts between past and present. Chapters 1/I are held together (with Arabic numerals for Alma’s story and Roman numerals indicating Isabel’s story) by Balmis’s face in which both Alma and Isabel recognize “the softness around [the] his mouth” (23, 45); in chapters 2/II, Richard wants to convince Alma to accompany him on his mission to the Dominican Republic “‘to start a green center in the mountains’” (49), and Isabel boards the ship María Pita that will take her from the Old World to the New, from East to West, while Richard will go from North to South. In both cases, the mission is to save the world. Isabel leaves Spain, and in chapter 3 Richard has already left for the Dominican Republic. While Alma’s connection to Richard is the occasional phone call and fax, Isabel begins to intersperse her diary with letters to Nati, her former attendant and friend at the orphanage. Both Alma and Isabel experience the need for communication; for Isabel, the letters are an extension of her diary to help her experiences survive beyond her life, without, however, ever receiving answers. The diary entries become pauses in-between her epistolary recording of history but also her confessions of improper behavior on the ship, thus limiting the personal revelations to a minimum. The response in chapter 4 is Richard’s fax to Alma. The reader, like Alma, is on the receiving end of the faxes sent by Richard; Alma’s responses are never reprinted. In a final upsurge, Alma begins to write Isabel’s story, faxes the pages to Richard, and concludes in the accompanying letter: “This is what I’m really working on. Trying to save the world on paper, I guess” (143). What Richard, Balmis, and Isabel do literally and physically, namely saving the world from AIDS and smallpox epidemics respectively, Alma and, by implication, Julia Álvarez try to achieve in writing. To do so, Álvarez inter- and transtextually evokes the collective memories of smallpox epidemics – still virulent until 1980 when the World Health Organization declares this virus eradicated – in order to expose the parallels to the rather recently developed AIDS epidemic. During the actual ocean-crossing from the Canary Islands to Puerto Rico, Doña Isabel goes back to diary writing only – immersing herself into the present, disconnected from her past in La Coruña – and seems to envision her text for a broader public because she begins chapter IV describing the functions of her diary as recollection and remembrance: “I, Isabel Sendales y Gómez, mean to keep this record of our crossing. Perhaps in a future I cannot yet imagine for myself, I will have it to look back upon and recollect these nightmare days at sea in the sunny light of memory” (145), suggesting that a diary that is kept daily will be a truthful recording of events, which memory, however, will view in much more posi-

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tive and perhaps glorifying and thus illusionary ways. With the expressive position of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ juxtaposed to her full name, Isabel writes herself into the history of the expedition, sets herself up as the author of this text and a participant in the events. She is the active autobiographical and thus subjective subject who controls the narrative and attributes relevance and power to language: “If anything will get us across this ocean, it will be the telling of stories” (146). Writing means survival for her: “I will soon have to put book and quill away for the agitation of the ship is making it near impossible for me to proceed. And yet I cling to my quill as a sailor might to a floating beam from a sinking ship” (154). Alma, too, clings to the same quill: “Fulana de Tal. Last seen on the island of Tenerife, headed west, to save the world with a certain Don Francisco” (171); more specifically, Alma takes care of her beloved neighbor Helen, who is dying of cancer. Richard even calls Alma “Florence Nightingale” (184), the nineteenth-century British nurse, nursing the soldiers during the Crimean War and writing pamphlets about nursing and medicine. The book Doña Isabel uses for her diary is given to her by Balmis for her to keep an official record of the expedition, a task which turns her into one of the historians of the enterprise. Chapters 5/V expose her controlling hand in what should become public knowledge and cultural memory: And yet, when I saw him [Balmis] so downcast, I worried not only for him but for the future of our expedition. This worry grew in the ensuing weeks as our director’s conduct began to threaten the very spirit of our mission. That is why I did not continue writing in my book. I did not want there to be a record of our fiasco in Puerto Rico. (198)

Álvarez, or her character Alma, brings together these two versions of the troubles of the expedition that are to some degree caused by its director’s easy and emotional irritability and irrationality; these two versions reveal the personal interest of Doña Isabel in textually preserving the more positive memories of the expedition.

Creating Identities for Survival: Experiential Memory (vis) Isabel’s act of remembering is not only a mechanical technique but is also connected to the creation of identity. Aleida Assmann describes this function of memory as vis (29). The idea of vis, according to Aleida Assmann, includes a psychological discourse that, in Antiquity, is based on fantasy (or imagination), reason, and memory (30). Alma’s creation of Isabel’s life story is not just a mechanical act but a work of her imagination which, via the past, gives her access to her own life and narrative; even more, it

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prompts her to increasingly identify with Isabel. As I will show, in the process of writing, Alma recreates herself anew and develops a new identity that leaves behind her former depression and gives her hope, faith, and love. Isabel herself gains a new identity by overcoming the trauma of her parents’ and sister’s deaths through smallpox and her own disfigurement. Writing allows her a certain control over her past, present, and future. Both Isabel and Alma frequently reflect on their past and its effects on their respective present lives. While Alma’s peaceful life with Richard is threatened by an anonymous female caller who pretends to have AIDS (which turns out not to be true), Isabel remembers how the smallpox epidemic destroys her family and has left her with psychological as well as physical scars. When she is sixteen, her father, mother, and sister die of smallpox, and she herself only barely survives. After her recovery and with her immunity to the epidemic, she becomes a nurse and ultimately the rectoress of an orphanage. To overcome this trauma of the loss of stability, strength, hope, and love, she at times invents alternative life stories for herself. When Dr. Balmis comes to the orphanage, she is struck by the man’s physical appearance and enthusiasm for saving the world from great suffering. The respect for his work and the love for the man in him, developing in part because of her memory of personal suffering, easily convince her to accompany him on his expedition. During the expedition, she is finally able to write: “After years of resignation, I am alive again with passion and intention! His [Balmis’s] heart, I know, belongs to Doña Josefa, but there is still a place for me in this expedition, this child of his – and now my own imagination” (159). In the twenty-first century, Alma is already in love with Richard; she is happily married to him, and, yet, she misses something in her life. She cannot go on unthinkingly writing her novels about people she is not interested in. She misses meaning in her life, which she only gradually finds at first through Richard’s absence, then Doña Isabel’s story, and finally Richard’s death. Alma and Isabel follow the men they love in their missions to Central America and the Caribbean, where they finally find strength through memory even in their losses. Alma is motivated by the memories of her common life with Richard, Isabel by her desire for a life with Balmis. Both women, being deprived of personal happiness and love for most of their lives, do find love for the people around them. After Balmis’s and Richard’s deaths, the vaccinations will continue and the clinic will explore vaccines against AIDS. Their spirits survive even though their bodies do not. Memories are preserved by the women who write, establishing connections across life and death, crisscrossing the oceans, leaving traces of humanitarian aid, and merging Alma and Isabel.

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Alma increasingly identifies with Isabel: “Take a deep breath, she coaches herself. Make believe you’re Isabel. (This is slowly becoming her mantra.)” (225). Their lives merge further when Alma walks up to the kidnappers of her husband in the clinic to negotiate with them and, above all, to be close to her husband: “And all that way, she feels as if another woman inside her is leading her forward, the woman she once saw out of the corner of her eye, whom she has identified as Isabel because sometimes a story can take over your life. If you are desperate enough to let it happen. Which Alma is” (243). When asked for her name, Alma adopts Isabel’s as a final merger of identities (273). This process of becoming one with Isabel continues into Alma’s dreams (297) in which she tells Isabel: “You are not alone. We are here together” (297), phrases that Isabel uses as well (see 315). The “here” is constituted by two separate spatial and temporal locations, the past – on the ship of the María Pita – and the present – in the AIDS clinic in the Dominican Republic. After Richard has died in the American squad’s attempt at rescuing the kidnapped from captivity, Alma remembers scenes from Isabel’s life and her return to Mexico with the boys. Isabel’s story is “a living story inside her, an antibody to the destruction she has seen, an intuition […]” (326). The final chapter VIII jumps ahead in time to the year 1830 when smallpox breaks out again with no vaccine left in Mexico. Doña Isabel, older and physically weak herself, wants to find cowpox to continue the vaccinations and finally is reunited with one of the boys of the expedition who has become a doctor and is ready to continue; almost ironically, his name is Francisco. Doña Isabel finds hope in this continuity and understands that her life story, if remembered and passed on, can continue saving the world: “[…] I realized that I, too, was a carrier [of the vaccine], along with my boys, carrying this story, which would surely die, unless it took hold in a future life” (353), which it does in Alma’s, in Álvarez’s, and in their readers’ lives. The final section of chapter 8 ends with the scattering of Richard’s and Helen’s ashes on Snake Mountain when Alma, almost in a religious apotheosis, replaces grief with hope, faith, and love: “She has to make a bigger leap, into a story that is not just a story, her own and not her own. Richard and Helen, Isabel and Balmis, the black-kerchief poet, Benito – they are inside her now, wanting her faith, needing her hope. So this is how the dead live on. […] The ashes fly out from all their hands – floating on faith, floating on love – blessing the ground” (362-63).

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Inscribing the Trauma of Disease: Bodily Memory (corpus) In the same way that stories can save the world, the body carries a vaccine with the same potential. Researchers have frequently acknowledged a connection between great pain and memory, a connection which we find, for example, in rituals of initiation, bringing together pain and cultural memory. Apart from the mind’s remembrance of the pain, the body as an interface of pain and memory receives its own archives of memory, frequently in the form of scars. These scars guarantee perpetual remembering and make forgetting impossible. This bodily memory, or corpus as I will call it in analogy to Aleida Assmann’s terms ars and vis, in an act of recovery and mental healing frequently turns into language; in Álvarez’s novel, Isabel’s scars as reminders of the smallpox epidemic make her participate in the expedition and write her own life story, i.e., create the archive of her own life. Isabel translates her bodily memory into a textual and, therefore, stable and more permanent memory. Similarly, Isabel is able to translate the trauma of her childhood – in which she feels that she is stuck and which she believes will always determine her life – into language and thus into a form of memory with which she can work, live, and develop. She overcomes the static bodily inscriptions of the trauma, which Aleida Assmann describes as follows: Trauma wird hier als eine körperliche Einschreibung verstanden, die der Überführung in Sprache und Reflexion unzugänglich ist und deshalb nicht den Status von Erinnerungen gewinnen kann. Das für Erinnerungen konstitutive Selbstverhältnis der Distanz, welches Selbstbegegnung, Selbstgespräch, Selbstverdopplung, Selbstbespiegelung, Selbstverstellung, Selbstinszenierung, Selbsterfahrung ermöglicht, kommt beim Trauma nicht zustande, das eine Erfahrung kompakt, unlösbar und unlöschbar mit der Person verbindet. (278)

Doña Isabel is a survivor of a smallpox epidemic that happened at least 18 years before in Spain, which has not only left her an orphan but also a woman with facial scars which she hides beneath a black veil. As a woman she feels that she has been betrayed and deprived of any happiness as wife and mother. At the same time, the scars are constant visible reminders of her past suffering and great pain, which she also tries to cover with the veil. A woman wearing a black veil and black clothes, including gloves, symbolically expresses her mourning for a recent loss of loved ones in her life. As a sign of mourning, black clothes are usually discarded after a certain period of time. In Doña Isabel’s case, however, she not only mourns the loss of her family but also the loss of her former self, which is permanent, as she feels, and constantly recent. Furthermore, the veil exposes her shame at being permanently disfigured. But the scars are also a sign of her immunity to any smallpox outbreak.

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Because of “the rough skin, the misshapen nostrils” (26) as reminders of the disease, Isabel believes that she would never become a wife and mother. She focuses on her body as the only (disfigured) expression of her femininity, as she seems to believe. Even more desperate, she regrets that people will know nothing about her “desires to break out of the life [she] was living” (27). Consequently, at this point in time wifehood, motherhood, but also story-telling are, to her, means of preserving the memories of her own life, of writing herself into history. However, her life story is bound to change with the arrival of Dr. Balmis at the orphanage. Isabel encounters Balmis from behind her veil, at first entering “the room, undetected, a skill [she] had perfected over the years, wishing to be spared the gawking of the curious” (32). She is aware that her veil also allows her face “to reflect feelings openly without fear of discovery” (33). Balmis’s reference to his planned smallpox expedition, however, makes her stagger with her scars – as archives of memory – physically reacting “as if they were opening again” (33) to this reminder of the trauma. The revelation of her face to Balmis, however, does not shock him, as she has expected. His understanding of her suffering but also his urging her to help prevent others from undergoing the same pain, make her gradually accept what he says to her: “You must learn not to cover yourself, Doña Isabel […]. Those scars will fade even further with exposure to the sun and salt air. Though a pocked face would serve our mission better. A convincing warning to those who might resist us.” His words were a needle in my heart. […] We would save the world together, but my role was to serve as a cautionary figure! (44)

Balmis’s gaze at the unveiling of her face thus is not voyeuristic but rather utilitarian, not eroticized and yet powerfully sustaining his position and provoking Isabel’s new agency into being. His reference to the fading scars suggests to her that she will eventually be able to deal with the trauma of her past so that these memories will fade into the background. In the novel, the scars are visible reminders not only of the past suffering but also of a time before this suffering. Whenever Isabel touches her scars, she is shocked because she does not find what she intuitively hopes to find, namely her face before the illness. This shift from health to illness is also a shift in identity, radically changing her outlook on life. Furthermore, the scars are visible markers of interior physical and psychological pain. “Physical pain,” as Elaine Scarry proposes, “has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story […]” (3). The scars in Isabel’s face are vesicles of her own life story, which, however, she is not ready yet to tell. The veil not only covers the scars but also extinguishes the voice that is trying to break through. Balmis’s willingness to take her on the expedition opens the door to her life story. When she begins to tell

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it, Isabel realizes that what she has believed to be unsharable and thus unique to herself because of her “resistance to language” (Scarry 4) becomes the focus of her own and other people’s daily life. The scars are Isabel’s memory, and this revelation introduces the active act of remembering leading into story-telling. Similarly, Alma’s twenty-first-century writer’s block is alleviated when she sheds the veil of the “ethnic performing monkey” (22) and no longer takes for granted the happy life with her husband. With Doña Isabel, she begins to tell her true story, and as readers we become the listeners to and interpreters of their great pain turning into hope, faith, and love. Thus, listening to the language of pain, i.e., for example, by reading about these memories, may already be a first step toward saving the world, if a juxtaposition of Elaine Scarry’s and Julia Álvarez’s words be permitted. Lifting the veil from her scars has turned Isabel into a more outspoken person. While she questions and mourns her fate before Balmis’s arrival and ends many of her sentences with question marks, expressing her doubts but also her passivity, she ends the sentence about her role as a cautionary figure, or, we could say, a memorial to the victims of smallpox, with an exclamation mark which indicates her outrage at seemingly being reduced to such a memorial and warning object. She here begins to assume agency by rejecting an imposed role that would again make her the object of an outside gaze seeing in her not the agent who wants to save the world but the passive carrier of past suffering. Contrary to a traditional romance, Balmis’s provocation of Isabel’s romantic feelings for him rouses her from passivity and eventually makes her the stronghold of the expedition. Isabel accepts but also discards the destructive memories the scars represent, no longer needs the romantic plot as escape fantasies (although, at first, they are perpetuated in her attraction to Balmis), and is able to translate memories of pain, suffering, and trauma into agency for the future. While her body has been immune to further onslaughts of the virus, her mind begins to rise to becoming equal to its physical counterpart. The triumphant virus of the past, memorialized in her scars, has lost its power over her and no longer is exclusively “associated with the vulnerable human body and its immune system, with contamination and dangerous contact zones between bodies” (Sielke and Schäfer-Wünsche 24), but an enemy against whom a new effective antidote or weapon has been found. Through Balmis, her scars turn from vesicles of trauma via individual memory into proponents of a collective memory that situates her within a community. The scars here represent what Jan Assmann has called “die konnektive Struktur eines gemeinsamen Wissens und Selbstbilds, das sich zum einen auf die Bindung an gemeinsame Regeln und Werte, zum anderen auf die Erinnerung an eine gemeinsam bewohnte Vergan-

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genheit stützt” (16-17). Furthermore, he argues: “Das Grundprinzip jeder konnektiven Struktur ist die Wiederholung” (17). He describes cultural memory which is based on actively perpetuated rituals (“rituelle Kohärenz” [17]), which hold a community together. In Isabel’s case, the ritual, we might say, is performed by the smallpox virus, having no borders, binding the world population together in its suffering. Balmis and Isabel’s task will be to disrupt this ritual, to destroy this negative form of collective memory, to prevent repetition, and to substitute it with a more positive form of memory, namely that of healing. Isabel’s scarred body finally turns from its symbolic reference to trauma into personal memory, is then translated into language, and ultimately embedded in a form of collective memory that is preserved in the archive of her own text and becomes accessible for future generations such as Alma, Álvarez, and the novel’s twenty-first-century readers. As Aleida Assmann suggests: “Das Archiv ist ein kollektiver Wissensspeicher, der verschiedene Funktionen erfüllt. Dabei spielen wie bei jedem Speicher drei Merkmale eine besondere Rolle: Konservierung, Auswahl und Zugänglichkeit” (344). In Isabel, bodily inscriptions are connected to a trauma, but in the bodies of the young boys who serve as carriers of the antidote, bodily inscriptions become memories necessary for healing. Dr. Balmis describes the process of vaccination or, in other words, the act of intrusion into the body to artificially instill memory, as follows: “[…] the vaccination procedure is quite simple: a scratch, a drop of the limpid fluid, a vesicle forms, ripens, and by the tenth day is ready to be harvested and used to vaccinate any number of potential victims” (35). The success of this process depends on the bodily memory of each vaccinated body, namely that it has already had contact with the smallpox virus – albeit with a less severe one – and that it has been able to develop an antidote that works as a shield against further attacks of the same virus. Thus, without the capacity for bodily memory, vaccination would be without effect. According to Aleida Assmann’s definition of archive, the twenty-two young boys’ bodies become archives in which the antidote is preserved and made accessible for further creation of archives. It is essential that nothing happens to these life carriers at a time without other conservation possibilities, particularly during such a long ocean crossing. If anything happens to the carriers/archives, the saving memory will die out and will make room again for epidemics. On the level of the present, with the development of an antidote to HIV or cancer, researchers have not yet progressed as far as Dr. Balmis. No remedy is available in the case of cancer either. Alma’s neighbor Helen will die of it in the course of the novel. In the Dominican Republic, the clinic established by Richard’s company works with experimental drugs to

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find a cure. Like smallpox, HIV encounters no barriers, as Alma writes: “[…] AIDS has cut across those first- and third-world borders. These plagues, the great levelers, might end up inadvertently tying the world together” (177). AIDS still is too much of an individual experience in people’s minds and not yet a generally accepted shared experience that calls for expeditions like that in the nineteenth century. The clinic in the Dominican Republic, however, seems to be a first step. Constant infections threaten the level of the present – Alma’s life. Hannah, her neighbor Helen’s daughter-in-law, believes to have been infected with HIV and wants to pass on this infection in order to shock the world into making stronger efforts at finding an antidote. Later again, she pretends that she and her husband let loose a monkey pox virus and again instill fear in everyone, including Alma, of being infected. That none of these pretensions are true does not change the initial fear that rapidly spreads and as such works like an epidemic. Like the vaccine, Alma believes, her body stores “some deadly disease” (296) infecting everyone around her. Unlike the vaccine, this virus would not save but destroy the world. Alma’s trauma then becomes real not because she has a disease but because HIV indirectly kills her husband who is shot in the guardia’s attempt at saving the hostages in the clinic. Via Isabel’s strength, Alma handles this trauma that physically sticks with her. In the end, Alma’s and Isabel’s stories merge. On Snake Mountain, Alma, relatives, and friends scatter Richard’s and Helen’s ashes and thus perform a ritual that could be called “Totenmemoria,” as Aleida Assmann suggests (33-38). Alma feels the dead inside her “wanting her faith, needing her hope,” and she knows: “So this is how the dead live on” (363).

Saving the World across Borders and into the Future Memories – personal and collective – are what the characters – past and present – need for survival. In Álvarez’s novel, memories establish connections across temporal and spatial borders, restore faith, hope, and love in the protagonists, and serve as strongholds in moments of crisis and death. It is Emily Dickinson’s poem “After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes” that helps Alma understand that suffering is not an end but the chance for a new beginning, as Isabel also learns after Balmis’s death and the fact that Lieutenant Pozo never returns to her from the war in Europe. Memories connect the past with the present and the future, but they can only do so if they are contained in an archive that is passed on from generation to generation. Balmis’s conclusion that “[o]ur undertaking shall be remembered by future generations” (Álvarez 43) can only

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come true through the archive of literature. “Literary memory is thus to be read as a complex space in which historical occurrences and their representations are both inscribed and preserved, transformed or dispersed within the dynamic of continually evolving strategies of mnemonic reference” (Eckstein 235). Isabel writes her story which Alma reads and re-creates which Álvarez writes which we, as contemporary readers, read, remember, and disperse in many different ways, for many different purposes, one of which is constituted by this paper. Álvarez shows that literature preserves and disperses memory on (at least) three levels: narrative technique, plot, symbolism. On each level, stories are interwoven, set into dialogue with each other, merge, and transform into something new. The narrative creation of voice, identity, and body – or ars, vis, and corpus – helps to cross temporal, geographical, and cultural borders to connect the living and the dead in the circum-Atlantic world. The productive recovery of memory can point to effective ways of dealing with crises – personal or collective – that threaten human life. Álvarez uses the interface of literature and medicine to show the potential the early nineteenth-century smallpox expedition offers for the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since such epidemics know no national borders, their cures, too, have to be transnational to save the world.

Works Cited Álvarez, Julia. Saving the World: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2006. Armitage, David. “Three Concepts of Atlantic History.” The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 11-27. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck, 2005. Boelhower, William. “‘I’ll Teach You How to Flow’: On Figuring out Atlantic Studies.” Atlantic Studies 1.1 (2004): 28-48. Bourne, Randolph S. “Trans-national America.” 1916. History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays. Ed. Van Wyck Brooks. New York: Biblo, 1969. 266-99. Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Elliott, Emory. “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational?” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007): 1-22. Erll, Astrid. “Erinnerungshistorische Literaturwissenschaft: Was ist…und zu welchem Ende…?” Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer. Tübingen: Narr, 2004. 115-28.

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—.“Medium des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Ein (erinnerungs-)kulturwissenschaftlicher Kompaktbegriff.” Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses: Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. 3-22. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17-57. Fluck, Winfried. “Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need? A Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007): 23-32. Hornung, Alfred, ed. European American Studies. Special Issue Amerikastudien / American Studies 47.1 (2002). Hornung, Alfred. “Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 67-73. Kristeva, Julia. “Baktine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman.” Critique 23 (1967): 438-65. Lenz, Günter H. “Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Borders Discourses, and Public Culture(s).” Amerikastudien / American Studies 44.1 (1999): 5-23. Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine. “Essays beyond the Nation.” Introduction. Hemispheric American Studies. Ed. Levander and Levine. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2008. 1-17. Ramírez Martín, Susana María, and José Tuells. “Doña Isabel, la enfermera de la Real Expedición Filantrópica de la Vacuna.” Vacunas 8.3 (2007): 160-66. Rigau-Pérez, José G. “The Introduction of Smallpox Vaccine in 1803 and the Adoption of Immunization as a Government Function in Puerto Rico.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 69.3 (1989): 393-423. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Sielke, Sabine, and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche. “The Body as Interface: Dialogues between the Disciplines.” Introduction. The Body as Interface: Dialogues between the Disciplines. Ed. Sielke and Schäfer-Wünsche. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. 11-30. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Welzer, Harald. Das kommunikative Gedächtnis: Eine Theorie der Erinnerung. München: Beck, 2002. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Intruders on Native Ground: Troubling Silences and Memories of the Land-Taking in Norwegian Immigrant Letters ORM ØVERLAND 1

Historians of America and American ethnic groups are all too ready to ignore the preexisting cultures and groups as they recount their version of life in the New World. Roger Daniels, Coming to America

One rarely told version of the history of nineteenth-century immigration is the story of how Europeans moved into the homelands of Native populations and replaced them. The 250 year-long struggle between defenders of land and takers of land does not loom large in the memory of the descendents of European immigrants. Immigrant letters are an invaluable store of transnational memories. These memories may be a source of pride in later generations. They may also be troubling. This essay considers what letters by immigrants may reveal of their attitudes and reactions to the people they displaced. It is necessarily also a study of silence and the repression of memory – of the absence as much as the presence of Native Americans in these letters.

Letters from the Upper Midwest to Norway The Norwegian National Archives (Riksarkivet) has a large collection of immigrant letters, mainly by rural settlers, from the 1830s and up to the near present. Since the late 1980s I have been involved in editing a sevenvolume edition of letters – Fra Amerika til Norge (From America to Norway) – based on the collection in the National Archives. The first two volumes were published in 1992. Three followed in 1993, 2002, and 2009, and the sixth and seventh volumes, with 1914 as the cut-off date, are ex_____________ 1

Halvor Kjellberg, Todd Nichol, and Dina Tolfsby have been helpful in providing material from various archives and depositories for this essay.

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pected in 2010 and 2011. 2 With this edition of about 1,650 letters as a main source, my essay explores immigrants’ memories of the people they displaced in the Upper Midwest. The most important point to be made about the attention paid to Native Americans in the letters is that they were rarely paid any attention at all. In the sixth volume of Fra Amerika til Norge – covering the years 18951904 – only one of 283 letters mentions Indians. It is by an immigrant who wrote from Killisnoo, Alaska in 1903 (6: 232). The Indians he mentions worked, as he did, in a cannery. In the fourth and fifth volumes, which cover the years 1875-1894, Indians are only mentioned in 14 of 569 letters. In the third volume (1869-1874) there are five such letters of 246. In volume two (1858-1868) Indians are mentioned in 23 of the 184 letters; ten of these are from the years 1863-1864 and are responses to the Shakopee Sioux rebellion in Minnesota in 1862. Readers of these letters may be left with the impression that the immigrants moved into areas without Native populations or that these populations had been ‘removed’ before the immigrant land-taking. If so, the letters give a false memory of immigrant life in the Upper Midwest. The disparity between the actual experience of meetings between immigrants and Native Americans and the silence about such experience in letters is particularly striking in the earliest letters. Four (of 147) in the first volume (1838-1857) mention Indians. In one from the year 1846, Amund Holthaugen describes his journey from New York to Wisconsin. He is the only early writer who demonstrates curiosity for the Indians as strange and exotic. Going by boat from Buffalo to Milwaukee he had been “very surprised to see a large number of Indians; among them one who had a big silver ring in his nose and one who had 12 or 14 rings in each ear. They wore shoes and stockings up to the groin and either a coat or a blanket thrown over their shoulders, and their hair was so long that I do not believe it had ever been cut” (1: 16). Such wonder at the sheer novelty of the New World is hardly ever expressed in the letters. To a present-day reader, Amund’s greenhorn wonder makes us all the more aware of the general absence of Native Americans in immigrant letters. It is a problematic absence. In reading these letters we must listen as carefully to their silence as we do to their words.

_____________ 2

See the multi-volume edition Fra Americka til Norge (Øverland and Kjærheim). References to letters in these volumes are to volume and number (as 4: 15). Translations are mine.

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A Difficult and Uncomfortable Topic The writers do not explain their silence. I have used a selection of letters to tell the story of four siblings who emigrated in the 1840s to a pioneer settlement in Dodge county, Wisconsin (see Øverland, Det smærter). They never mention Indians even though they must have seen them on a daily basis. Ole Munch Ræder, a lawyer who went to the United States to report on the jury system, visited their settlement at Ashippun in 1847 and wrote about the Indians there in his report (see Ræder). The amateur historian Martin Ulvestad describes this settlement as follows: “There were only wild Indians in the vicinity when the first Norwegians settled there” (3). 3 Another amateur historian, Hjalmar Holand, does not mention Indians in his account of the settlers at Ashippun but gives his view of the original inhabitants in his report of the first settlements in central Wisconsin: Only fifty years ago this was the Indians’ Paradise, untouched by the white man’s foot or his ambition. [...] From the reeds on the shores of the lake to the woods that covered the hills, this was a land of peace and abundance. Manitou had given it all to his red children and life was long. So they lay there smoking their pipes in peace and comfort and told their old tales. Then they would go hunting, pick berries or dance the lively buffalo dance. Life was good. But one day the white man arrives – the energetic Yankee and the strong and stern Norwegian. [...] The desperate struggle of the early settlement days has now almost been forgotten, and where one could once see the Indians’ miserable wigwam there is now a large and prosperous Norwegian settlement. (Holand 199-200)

To Ulvestad the Indians were “wild”; to Holand they were lazy and irresponsible “children” who had to make way for “the strong and stern Norwegian.” These were the two basic attitudes that may have helped European intruders disregard the fact that they expelled people from their homelands: Whether they were wild or lazy, it was a historical necessity that the Indians must yield to a higher civilization. Such views were not original and were most famously expressed in President Jackson’s message to Congress, “On Indian Removal,” in 1830. One instance of how officially sanctioned attitudes were picked up by newcomers is the 1844 guide book Pathfinder for Norwegian Emigrants by the journalist Johan Reiersen who adopted the ideology that was named ‘manifest destiny’ one year later: [The Americans] do not recognize the moral right of any class of persons to monopolize the soil that a benevolent Providence has given them and their offspring, or to stop the advance of industry, civilization, and Christianity. If driving the Indians from their hunting grounds and the graves of their forefathers can be defended, it must be upon the basis of this principle: The red man was a mo-

_____________ 3

My translation.

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nopolist. He took possession of more land than could be reconciled with the welfare of the human race. And he was a barbarian, hostile to the useful occupations and fair arts of a civilized life.

When the liberal and well-read Reiersen embraced such views on his first visit, it is only consequential that most immigrants were convinced that the land was theirs by a right sanctioned not only by their new government but by “a benevolent Providence.” To Reiersen the conclusion to be drawn was unambiguous: “Supported by these rights and attitudes, the Americans are determined to drive through the deserts of the West and on to the shores of the Pacific before they submit to any attack upon popular freedom and popular sovereignty” 4 (Reiersen 183). The silence of the letters is of course no evidence that the immigrants adopted this view of their natural right to inhabit the Indians’ land. How may we better understand the silence of the letters? There is so little to write about that will be of interest to you. Variations on this phrase are often repeated in immigrant letters. “We have nothing of interest to tell you,” Amund Bjorli wrote from North Dakota in 1889 (5: 168). People who are not used to writing may often be hard put to think of something to write about. Consequently, there may be little reason to make much of this but sometimes the writer explains why there is so little to write about: “Well, I don’t think that I can write as much as you did,” Jacob Swanson wrote from Wisconsin in 1890. “There would have been much to write about had you been acquainted [with conditions here], but since you are a stranger to all and everything here, there is little here that will be of interest to you” (5: 194). In other letters there are similar phrases about how the unknown and unfamiliar would have no interest for the recipients. The immigrants’ most alien and alienating experience in their everyday lives could well have been their meetings with Native Americans. How could a writer unable to describe a strange-looking house or an unfamiliar landscape, write about the alien Indians? They hardly ever wrote about their excursions to the nearest town for provisions; why or how should they write about the Indians they passed on the way? Andrew Lee, who wrote to his brother from a lumber camp in Wisconsin in 1891 may serve as a witness to the difficulty of describing the unknown: “You ask me what I do, what work I do, but that is almost more than I can say; the work here in the woods is so different from what it was in Norway. Let it be sufficient that it is tough work and long days” (5: 211). Writing about the foreign, then, could be an insurmountable difficulty. Almost all persons mentioned in the letters are family members, relatives, and _____________ 4

Originally published as Veiviser for Norske Emigranter til De forenede nordamerikanske Stater og Texas (Christiania: G. Reiersens, 1844). In 1844 most of the “shores of the Pacific” did not belong to the U.S.

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neighbors from the home village – all of them well-known to the recipients. 5 So one context for an appreciation of the silence of the letters on Native Americans is the immigrants’ silence on so much else we would like to hear. Barely literate immigrants did not write for pleasure but from their need for contact with the people they had left behind and in order to give them practical information. A better education may give improved writing skills as well as more pleasure in writing. One writer stands out from the majority: Frithjof Meidell, who was born in Trondheim in 1830 and emigrated in 1852. He belonged to a small urban elite, and his humorous sketches of life in a small town in Illinois, published in Aftenbladet in Oslo and in Emigranten in Wisconsin, are evidence of his literary gifts. 6 His favored style, in his sketches as well as in letters to his family, was that of satire. He had a sense of the ludicrous in human life but demonstrated little emotional or intellectual depth. The few times Meidell mentions Indians are in a condescending manner. In early 1859 he went to California via Cape Horn to try his luck prospecting for gold and quickly made the prevalent racist attitudes to the Chinese his own, as is unpleasantly evident in a letter he wrote to his mother in December, telling her that he has now almost become an “able-bodied miner”: The Chinese are a kind of monkey from Eastern Asia with the important distinction that they have their tail in their neck. [...] They are quite similar to people; they unceasingly chat with each other so that one is almost tempted to believe they have a language. They always walk on their hind legs and use their forelegs with as much dexterity as we use our arms. The females, of which there happen to be few, annually give birth to a little monkey. (2: 34) 7

Meidell’s intention was to entertain his mother with some light-hearted banter. He probably succeeded, and when she read the letter to her friends we may assume that they laughed. They were educated, but their education was in a culture where derogatory views of other peoples were common. So it is not so certain that a better education would have given immigrants a better understanding of a different people. While Meidell chatted with far-away family members, most early writers wrote brief letters with information and advice on the all-important question of emigration. In the preface to his Pathfinder Reiersen refers to the rumors abroad of dangerous rattlesnakes and Indians in the New _____________ 5 6 7

In volumes 5 and 6 “English” (English-speaking Americans) are mentioned in three letters, Finns in five, Irish in twelve, Swedes in 29 and Germans in 19 letters. Letters from Meidell are in volumes 1 and 2. His sketches are discussed in Øverland, The Western Home 42-43. This letter is included in Blegen, Land of Their Choice. The quoted passage and other similarly offensive passages, however, are not included.

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World and claims “that it is just as rare to hear of anyone being bitten by a rattlesnake as of his being molested by the completely harmless Indians who still roam the forests of Wisconsin. Thus, with suitable brevity,” he concludes, “let us dispose of these two matters” (Reiersen xiv). A main reason why immigrants wrote so little about Indians may indeed have been that they did not regard them as relevant for their present and future life in America; they were there, but they had no practical importance in their lives. Native Americans were reminders of the past; immigrant Americans looked to the future. There may be other reasons for this silence than little education, poor writing skills, and little relevance. It could be that it was best not to think much about them or even not to notice them in order to live with an untroubled conscience in the land that had been theirs. The Swedish novelist Sven Delblanc was born in an immigrant settlement in northwestern Manitoba in 1931. In his autobiography Livets Ax (1991), he writes about the immigrant community but adds: “The Indians were, it must be admitted, not part of this community. One did not see them; I believe that one repressed their existence. I was surprised when I returned in my fifties and saw them everywhere. In my childhood and youth I had not seen them” (16). 8 It may be that the silence of the letters reflects the invisibility of people who were uncomfortable reminders of the ethical ambiguities of immigrant homemaking. In 1911 Anund Myrben wrote from southwestern North Dakota that his homestead “was what they call wild land that had not been lived on before” (7: 210). He was surely not ignorant of the recent history of this area; but unconsciously or consciously he disregarded it.

The Land-Taking Historians tend to specialize; rarely do the same historians write Native American history and immigration history at the same time. Thus we have two different narratives of the great changes that took place from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century. With great sacrifice and heroic determination immigrant families created homesteads and laid the foundation for the prosperity of following generations. With great sacrifice and heroic determination Native American families tried to hold on to their homes and preserve their way of life for following generations. Historians have tended to focus on one or the other of these _____________ 8

My translation is from the Norwegian edition of Delblanc. As Betty Bergland has reminded me, Delblanc’s return visit was after indigenous peoples – in the U.S. as in Canada – had become publicly visible in ways unimaginable in the 1930s and 1940s. Emphasis mine.

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two narratives. Neither the Rosebud nor Wounded Knee has symbolic resonance in the story of immigration. When Native Americans appear in immigration history, they do so collectively as one of the difficulties immigrants had to face. Immigration historians have described them as barriers and hindrances rather than as protectors of homes. Norwegian immigrants and Indians were neighbors, if not always neighborly, in many areas and over long periods of time ever since the first to arrive began to clear land near Lake Erie in the 1820s. There has been much interaction – some of it peaceful and friendly – between immigrants and Indians. The few records of such interaction in letters often reflect the writers’ prejudice or imagination more than their actual experience. It may therefore be fitting to look at a well-known imagined meeting between immigrants and Native Americans before considering some letters. This meeting took place in 1873, in the northeastern corner of present-day South Dakota, and was imagined by Ole Edvart Rölvaag in the early pages of his novel Giants in the Earth (1927). 9 The novel tells the story of a group of immigrant settlers; at the center of attention are Berit and Per Hansa Holm. The first of the two parts of the novel is called “The Land-Taking.” The ethically ambiguous connotation of this phrase, which in the present context may seem obvious, was not intentional. Rölvaag dedicated his novel “[t]o those of my people who took part in the Great Settling.” In the Oslo 1924 edition, this dedication is to those who took part in the great “landnám,” an Old Norse word meaning the taking of land with allusion to the Norwegian settling of Iceland in the early tenth century. Rölvaag’s account of the immigrants’ meeting with the original inhabitants is in the vein of the late nineteenth-century literary motif of the vanishing Indian. 10 Beret and Per have traveled for days through a seemingly _____________ 9

10

Rölvaag’s I de dage... and Riket grundlægges were published in Oslo in 1924 and 1925. In collaboration with Lincoln Colcord he translated the two volumes as one novel in 1927: Giants in the Earth. Page references are to the 1927 New York edition. Rölvaag peppers his text with the conventional symbol of elision, “....”, so my elisions in Rölvaag quotations are indicated: [...]. For a discussion of this motif see R. Bergland 2000. One Norwegian-American example is in Janson (published in Norwegian in Minneapolis, 1889). The protagonist lies on the beach of Lake Minnetonka: “The lake lay there as if dreaming – just as blue as it was thirty years ago. Gone, however, were the white tents from which the smoke rose like light clouds in the clear air. Gone were the brown faces and the light canoes that shot like arrows over the surface of the water. […] Where are they now? They have all gone. The white man has chased them away from their paradise, for the white man’s God is a mighty God, a terrifying God. The Indian fled, trembling before his face, farther and farther away. At last he could do nothing but lie down like a wounded animal on the narrow strip of land that still was granted him, and slowly bleed to death. The earth had no more use for him” (87).

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empty country when they arrive on the land that some of their group have surveyed in advance. There is an undertone of unease in Per’s question to one who has arrived some days earlier: “You haven’t discovered any signs of life since you came?” His friend assures him that there have been no other land seekers and adds: “I was the first one to find this place, you know” (34). Per evidently does not have competing land seekers in mind and when he sees “a small depression in the ground” (35) he concludes that it is a grave. When he also finds a small stone that has been shaped by human hands, his neighbor exclaims, “It certainly looks as if the Indians had [sic] been here! […] Now isn’t that rotten luck?” (35) But Per’s vision of the future is as strong as ever: “This vast stretch of beautiful land was to be his – yes, his – and no ghost of a dead Indian would drive him away!” (36). It is, of course, he and his fellow immigrants who have driven the Indians away. As Per has suspected, his homestead is on an Indian trail and one afternoon some Indians are seen in the distance. “They have come,” says Beret. Per is convinced that they are “just peaceful people like ourselves” (67) and calms down the others as the Indians make camp for the night. That evening Per takes his oldest son with him to visit the Indians and fetch the cows that have run off to join their caravan. It becomes a very friendly visit and Per is given tobacco for his empty pipe before he leaves for the night. When he bends down by the fire for an ember to light his pipe, however, he becomes aware of a man huddled in a blanket with a badly swollen hand. Per immediately takes charge, sets people to boil water and sends his son off for a bottle of whisky and other things he needs. He is joined by Beret who not only gives away her best apron, but “one of her home-braided garters” (83) to help dress the “festering wound in the palm of the hand” (77). The giving of gifts is reciprocal: It was noon of the third day before they broke camp, to continue the journey northward. The hand of the sick man still looked very bad, but the immediate danger seemed to be over. Per Hansa had made a sling for him, in which he carried his arm. When the long train of queer-looking teams had got well under way, they saw the sick Indian coming down the hill toward the house, leading a fully saddled pony by the bridle; one of the wagons stood waiting for him farther along the hill. (84)

He has come to give the immigrant the gift of a pony in return for his help. In effect, the immigrant is not only accepted but welcomed on the land of these Native Americans, who never return to disturb the peace of the settlers. Rölvaag’s account of the meeting between homesteader and vanishing Indian functions as a solemn rite of possession that somehow legitimizes “The Land-Taking.”

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Personal Courage and Cultural Prejudice There is no respect for the defeated in the most-cited letter about Indian encounters that Guri Endreson wrote to her family in Hardanger in 1866 about her terrifying experience of the Shakopee Sioux Uprising in 1862. There was cruelty and suffering on both sides in this conflict. The rebellion caused the death of almost five hundred settlers and there are no reliable figures for the high number of Dakota who were killed. They included, in the words of historian Betty Bergland, “mixed and full-blood, young and old, farmers and warriors, and those opposing the Rebellion and those supporting it” (Bergland, “Guri Endreson” 344). The story of Guri Endreson’s fortitude in the face of danger had been told several times based on other sources when Theodore Blegen discovered her letter during a research visit to Norway in 1928-29. 11 She wrote to report that all was well and that her trials were in the past: “I do not seem to have been able to do so much as to write to you, because during the time when the savages raged so fearfully here I was not able to think about anything except being murdered, with my whole family.” Hers is a moving tale of loss, suffering and heroism. Two daughters were captured, but were able to escape, one son was wounded and died later and another one was killed, and she “had to look on while they shot my precious husband dead”: For two days and nights I hovered about here with my little daughter, between fear and hope and almost crazy, before I found my wounded son and a couple of other persons, unhurt, who helped us to get away to a place of more security. To be an eyewitness to these things and to see many others wounded and killed was almost too much for a poor woman, but, God be thanked, I kept my life and my sanity, though all my movable property was torn away and stolen. But this would have been nothing if I could only have had my loved husband and children […].

Guri returned to the area of her homestead in 1866. She was optimistic but “the atrocities of the Indians are and will be fresh in memory; they have now been driven beyond the boundaries of the state and we hope that they never will be allowed to come here again.” 12 When she concludes with the additional hope, “may the Lord by his grace bend, direct, and govern our hearts so that we sometime with gladness may assemble _____________ 11 12

The text of the original letter is in 2: 141. Quotations here are from Blegen, “Guri Endreson” 425-30. Guri Endreson was not alone. Gro Svendsen wrote in December 1862, shortly after her arrival in Iowa, “the Indian revolt has been somewhat subdued, so we feel much safer than we did a while ago. It isn’t enough merely to subdue them. I think that not a single one who took part in the revolt should be permitted to live. Unfortunately, I cannot make the decision in the matter. I fear that they will be let off too easily” (Farseth and Blegen 32).

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with God in the eternal mansions,” it is clear that she does not expect to meet savages in Paradise. As her government has removed “these terrible heathen” from Minnesota, she trusts that her God has reserved heaven for her own kind. Guri Endreson may have been special in her fortitude, but there were many meetings such as hers between European Americans and Native Americans and there were atrocities on both sides. Her letter poses a challenge to the historian who wishes to describe the process by which land was wrested from one population group and resettled by another: to Guri the people protecting their homeland were bloodthirsty savages. 13 Is it possible to retell this story with dignity, humanity and courage granted to the characters on both sides? Or must we have two stories told by different historians with different agendas: one of a courageous Indian uprising and one of heroic behavior in a confrontation with cruel savages? Bergland argues “that we need to see simultaneously both the individual courage of Guri while rejecting the ideological formations embedded in the heroic narrative of savagery and conquest” (“Guri Endreson”). The letter writers were as influenced by the ideology of their society as we surely are by the dominant ways of thought in ours: they quickly learned to regard the Indians with the eyes of their new compatriots. There were, however, minority dissenting views among the immigrants as there were in the society they entered, and some reasoned in a less prejudiced manner than was common. When Hellik Lehovd wrote from Minnesota in 1864, he was preoccupied with the Civil War and the draft. His account of the events leading up to the war suggests that he was wellinformed. He also reports on the Indian uprising further west in the state where “the wild Indians” two years ago “murdered about 900 white people in their homes and ravaged and burned wherever they went.” He adds that the Indians had been forced to leave so that “we now don’t have any reason to fear them.” Lehovd, however, offers a rational explanation: “And the reason for their rebellion was the fault of the Government that they didn’t pay them their annual pension since they once have been the owners of the entire country” (2: 116). For Lehovd it was possible to see injustice on both sides. Like Rölvaag’s Per Hansa, he recognizes that the Indians are the onetime “owners of the entire country.” But it may be asking too much of Guri Endreson to expect her to explain the behavior of those who had killed her husband and two sons. Ethical ambiguities make the balanced historical account asked for by Bergland a complex matter. _____________ 13

When Helga Hegtveit wrote in 1863, she knew about Guri Endreson’s experience. To her the Indians were “only wild animals” (2: 97). To Hans Forset, they were “red devils” (2: 102).

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Ambiguities of Bloodthirstiness By 1876 Wisconsin had become the land of European Americans, a majority of whom were German and Scandinavian. Betty Bergland gives a survey of how tribes in Wisconsin responded to the government’s changing policies and concludes: “One of the consequences of this history is that immigrants entering Wisconsin in the mid and late nineteenth century encountered remaining tribes” (B. Bergland, “Norwegian Immigrants” 70). One such immigrant was Ole Sørtømme who came to Eau Claire in 1871 and found work in the sawmills. An undated letter fragment is remarkable in that this urban dweller writes as if Indians were a threat. He must have written after the hotly contested presidential election in November 1876 and before the compromise of March 1877. The preserved fragment begins in the middle of a sentence about how some “timid souls” now fear “a new civil war” because of the “vindictiveness” of the Southerners. He is confident, however, that they are “still far too weak to attack the North and the present government with the sword. But they are brave enough to take on the poor black Negroes, and they kill them in large numbers in the South”. 14 Even though Sørtømme had come to Wisconsin six years after the end of the Civil War, memories of the bloodshed were still very much alive. He has evidently internalized his host society’s prejudices against the former foe and writes about their “hot blood” and “hatred and vindictiveness.” The newspapers he read – in English and Norwegian – supported the Republican Party and were replete with criticism of the Southern Democrats and their treatment of the former slaves. The distance between Sørtømme and the rebellious South facilitated both his contempt for the whites and his sympathy for the blacks. Yet, unrest near at hand caused greater concern, and his letter continues: “Just now the Indians are about to begin warfare again. Yes, even the so-called Chippewa Indians (they live up along the Chippewa River that runs through the city of Eau Claire), who have always been friendly with white people, are arming themselves to murder and to quench their thirst for blood” (121). This may seem quite unreasonable in the peaceful setting of Wisconsin, but the year 1876 had news of disasters as unsettling as the white Southern dissatisfaction with the presidential election. In Montana warriors from several tribes under the leadership of Crazy Horse had defeated the United States Army in the well-publicized battles of the Rosebud and Little Big Horn in June. Sørtømme does not refer to the events in Montana as the reason for his fear of the Chippewa in Wisconsin. Rather, _____________ 14

Letters from Ole Sørtømme can be found in Ree 117-22. Dina Tolfsby made me aware of this publication.

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his fear was triggered by a local event that would have made him an accomplice to murder if the same guilt by association so often applied to Native Americans had been applied to Norwegian Americans: The reason for the hostility demonstrated by this tribe is said to be as follows: Recently the relations between the white population and the Indians along the Chippewa River haven’t been good. Last week there was a conflict between members of both sides a short distance above the town of Menomonie and a young Norwegian man shot and killed an Indian. This is something the tribe will and must revenge so news of killings is expected any day. (121)

The only demonstration of murderous inclinations has been by a Norwegian and yet it is the Chippewa who have a “thirst for blood.” They are the feared Other and have negative characteristics as a group, while the immigrant murderer is an individual whose deed in no way reflects on other members of his tribe. The writer has no fear of trigger-happy Norwegians but of all Chippewa, even though they in his experience “have always been friendly.” Racial stereotyping does not feed on fact. He continues: “People who live near the forest will probably seek refuge in the towns. […] The Indians cannot come to Eau Claire. […] I have never seen an Indian in Eau Claire” (121). Indeed, he may not have seen one anywhere, but he knows they are murderous. His image of the vicious Indian has been fed by sensational accounts of the Rosebud and Little Big Horn battles rather than by real-life encounters in the Chippewa Valley. As most immigrants, Sørtømme sought acceptance in U.S. society and his adoption of the dominantly negative image of the Indian in local lore and newspapers was part of his process of integration.

A Home for White Men This process is confirmed in letters by Jacob Hilton who had emigrated in 1877, lived a few years among relatives in Iowa, and then moved west by stages through Nebraska and Montana, coming to Socorro in the present New Mexico in the spring of 1881. He wrote regularly to his father and in April 1881 wrote a letter that announces his new identity. He is no longer, as in Iowa, a Norwegian immigrant who identifies with other Norwegians but rather one of the white men who belong in the land they have built. He now lived, he wrote, in a new world where white people have just begun to come. Now I am among Indians, Mexicans and Spaniards. All three are alike in appearance and one is as dangerous as the other. [...] [W]hite people are beginning to swarm in the mountains and valleys that used to be populated by these lazy and useless people who live like wild animals. I have never felt better since I left home than after I came to this place. (4: 171)

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In Iowa he had been a Norwegian in the land of the Americans; now he is a white man in the white man’s land. He now belongs here as he had once belonged in Norway: This place shall be my home if all goes well. I came here at the right time to become one of the first settlers in this New World. […] This is not an empty dream or a castle in the air; it has been built by white people all the way from the Atlantic Ocean in the East to the coast of California, from sea to sea. There are still millions of acres of land that haven’t yet been trod on by white people but as immigration grows it will all in time be settled by whites. But this place has become my home. Let others go further. (4: 171)

As a white person – a post-migration identity – Hilton is no longer a foreigner. It is the “lazy and useless people,” who were here before the arrival of the white man who do not belong in a country “built by white people.” Hilton’s new homeland has not been wrested from others; it has been created by his own kind, by white people! But the “lazy and useless” people did not give their country away voluntarily; the situation in Hilton’s new homeland was far from idyllic. Open warfare with the Apaches had begun in 1871, with the massacre at Camp Grant in Arizona, and came to an end with the defeat of Geronimo in 1886. In a letter dated June 26, 1881, however, it is evident that Indians do not represent the only danger: “There is no regular law here yet; everyone carries the law in his belt (two large pistols and a long knife and a rifle). That is still the law we have here” (4: 173). In his letters from Nebraska and Montana he appears timid, and weapons are only in the belts and hands of unruly men who make the streets unsafe. In his letters from his first year in Socorro he not only identifies with but celebrates a culture of violence. 15 However, there is other and unacceptable violence. On August 7, 1881 he began to write to his father but was interrupted and did not take up his pen again until twenty days later: I’ll complete my letter now that I have a quiet evening by myself. The reason I didn’t complete it then was that the Indians had raided in the mountains and reports from all over came to town with survivors, that they had shot, burned and pillaged, and murdered all they came across. […] They slaughtered 7 men who were working in a quarry where they take stone for building. Gus Hilton and another Norwegian were partners in the quarry and had employed several men. Gus was the only survivor. He crawled under some large stones in the mountain so they couldn’t find him and he hid there until an armed posse arrived from town.

_____________ 15

Some months later, March 5, 1882, he wrote to a brother: “I cannot say that we have had a very merry Christmas: it went by us hardly noticed, except that a man was shot dead on the spot and a policeman had his arm shot off. That was on Christmas Day and was all the Christmas joy we had... Hanging and shooting are the order of the day so we do not pay all that much attention to it” (4: 189).

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Seven murdered men were buried in one day in Socorro. […] I closed my shop […] rented a horse and rode off as fast as my horse could manage. I used my spurs till my boots were bloodied in order to get there and bring Gus Hilton back to town. He had already been five or six hours in his cave and could expect death any minute. […] The men killed by the Indians were the worst sight I’ve ever seen and I hope I’ll never see such a butchery of men again. These red devils kill all they come across, sparing none. In three weeks they have put four to five hundred whites and Mexicans in their graves in this state around Socorro. […] It is enough to raise the hair on a man’s head and make him feel as if a lump of ice were drawn down his back from top to toe. The horses and cows they couldn’t take with them they cut up in pieces. These are the “poor Indians” that people in the eastern states have so much sympathy for. My judgment on such people is that they should be in hell with broken backbones – both the Indians and those who feel such concern for them. (4: 175) 16

Jacob Hilton created his new identity and his sense of home by defining himself as a white male westerner who despised not only Indians and others defined as non-white but also the effete liberals of the East. Like Guri Endreson, Jacob Hilton had reason to use harsh words about the Indians. Even before his harrowing experience in the quarry he had learned to regard them as wild creatures, “useless” and less than human. His language was not born of his experience but absorbed from the rhetoric he was surrounded by, from the language of local newspapers as well as of conversations on his westward journey. When Hilton wrote about the “lazy and useless people who live like wild animals” and despised the Indian-loving “people in the eastern states,” this was a rhetoric approved by the arbiters of Western politics and that he had made his own. By the time he settled in Socorro his racism as well as his contempt for eastern liberals had become part of his identity. But the convictions that made him at home in Socorro were unsettling to the recipient of his letters. In a letter dated November 20 he addresses his father’s unease with the language he had used about the Indians: “You would have seen it my way if you had known more about their behavior” (4: 181). Neither Norwegians nor Easterners seemed to be qualified to speak of the Indians; and only the white men of the West were the defenders of civilization. Such views were not personal; they were imbedded in the culture that he entered. Both he and Sørtømme were of course responsible for their attitudes, but they were nevertheless voicing the views of their communities – views adopted as part of the process of making America their home. Native resistance could not stop the invasion of the European Americans. By 1891 serious resistance to the U.S. Army had come to an end. _____________ 16

Emphasis in original. Conrad Hilton, son of Gus Hilton, writes about this event in his autobiography Be My Guest.

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But this does not mean that Native Americans suddenly ceased to resist or that immigrants suddenly ceased to fear them. When Gulbrand Rundhaug wrote from North Dakota on February 10, 1891, it was primarily to report on his situation as a new settler, his sod cabin, his board-built granary and the excellent soil. But all was not as well as we might believe: We now live in constant fear of the Indians since they have begun to kill the whites. They have already killed and scalped many white people. They burn them alive in the most horrible manner. The soldiers are out to stop them and they slaughter many, and all here in Dakota who don’t have rifles are given rifles by the government. They are really awful people. They are red as blood and worse than wild animals. (5: 215)

This was written a few weeks after Wounded Knee, but the immigrant’s horror is reserved for the supposed savagery of the Indians. On the land he has broken he lives in peace; his main concern is with debt. Yet, he also lives with a fear based on what he has heard and read: he reports no negative experience of Native Americans. His self image is not affected by the actions of the white soldiers who “slaughter many,” while all Indians are “worse than wild animals.” Soldiers are soldiers and Rundhaug has no responsibility for their violent behavior. But the Indians are Indians and share a collective guilt. He cannot imagine a shared community with them, not because of his experience but because he does not recognize their humanity: they are not white but “red as blood.”

A Fireplace and a Shared Sense of Home Many immigrants responded to the people they displaced as did Rundhaug and Hilton. A few, however, wrote differently. In 1872, Iver Elsrud wrote to his parents about his journey from Iowa to the present North Dakota: You may imagine that I saw much more on this journey than I can tell you, but I will at least tell you a little about all the Indians that I lived with when I worked on the railroad. You may believe that all Indians are unfriendly with the white man, but this isn’t so. Many tribes are very friendly with the whites and one may live more safely with them than with the Irish or the “shoemakers” as the Norwegians call them. (3: 135)

Iver Elsrud is not without prejudice; he demonstrates his disdain for the Irish while Indians are described as nice people. When Ole Forsetvolden wrote in 1870 he also wished to give a more positive image of the Indians. He was responsible for a saw mill in Portage County, WI and lived with his family about four miles from the mill. “I see Indians and speak with them every day. They aren’t dangerous.” He gives a detailed description of

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their appearance, dress, and way of life and reports that “at night they light their fires and set up their tents wherever they may happen to be.” As this may seem strange (indeed unhomely) to his readers, he adds: “This is their home.” Some degree of empathy is needed to appreciate that the strange can be home for others. He has been the guest of his Indian neighbors at a wedding and the dance he describes is rather different from dancing in his home valley in Norway: “They danced and were merry and glad. They dance separately and they stand on the same spot and stomp as when a shoemaker threads leather and hold their rifle in their hand” (3: 68). Forsetvolden seems to have had an inquiring mind and a sense of cultural differences, and it is evident that he liked being with his Indian neighbors. Some years earlier, in north-eastern Wisconsin, Erik Schjøth lived alone and survived on a little farming and a general store. His name and letters suggest that he had belonged to the social elite in the Norwegian capital. In Wisconsin he lived among Indians and in a letter to two brothers in 1863 he writes: “I’m not afraid (even though fright is quite common). I’m their friend because I trade with them and don’t offend them. […] They call me the good man because I’ve often shared my bread with them and let them stay in my home for the night in bad weather – something that people with a wife and children don’t dare do.” He feels at home with Indians and lets them be at home with him. These Indians are nevertheless foreign to him and he establishes difference when he adds: “Be sure that some of them are not created for the sake of their beauty” (3: T16). In spite of such a remark there is a sharp contrast between Schjødt and Meidell, members of the same social class. Another immigrant who felt at home ― with himself and with the Indians who caused such fear among immigrants in the Dakotas – was Iver Lee. He had settled in Traill County in the present North Dakota in 1882. In 1891, about two months after Wounded Knee, he wrote a letter to his family in Norway, telling them about the death of a friend (“he was such a good person, familiar friend, and a faithful comrade. I miss him a lot.”), his recent marriage (“She is 25 years, short, but quite fat.”), and a five-day journey he had recently made to the northern part of the state to visit friends and buy fish from Native Americans (5: 219). Iver Lee wrote long letters and the following quotation may also be somewhat long, but it deserves our attention – both because it is well written and because it speaks of his generous personality. He writes that the Indians lived by a lake not so far from the friends he visited and that he bought “about 1200 pounds of fish from them at two cents a pound.” On his return home he had sold most of his fish at a good profit and used some of the rest to

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make rakfisk, 17 so that he has food “that I haven’t tasted since I came to America.” The Indians are rather nice people to visit. I had never been near their homes nor seen more than individual Indians before this. They live together in groups or in villages, partly in tents and partly in log houses. In most of their homes they had a stove but in some there were fireplaces. I must say that it was really nice to see a fireplace again, because I haven’t seen one since I left you. The fire burned so brightly in their fireplace that I really felt at home. They had no chairs or anything else to sit on, nor did they use beds; they sat and they slept on the bare floor. There was quite a lot of trouble with the Indians last fall and winter and they’ve rebelled in many places; the government has made regular war against them. There’ve been several battles and several hundreds have fallen on both sides, but mainly Indians. There has been no uprising where I visited, but they are said to have done their so-called war dances some time after I was there and that caused quite a scare. [...] Quite a few exaggerated and some completely false rumors were in circulation and this made the situation look much worse. Many left their cattle and homes behind and fled from the area. But the scare subsided when the exaggerations and falsehoods were revealed. The government is responsible for the unrest among the Indians. They are in a way the wards of the government. They do not farm the land but have fed themselves by fishing and hunting. So as the land has gradually been taken from them, their sources of livelihood have diminished and as compensation the government has agreed to supply them with food and clothes. This is done through government agents but these have been under so little control that they’ve made themselves wealthy at the Indians’ expense. So the Indians have often suffered from hunger and this is what has led them on the warpath. It seems quite reasonable that they would rather fight for survival than die of starvation.

Entering the homes of Indians, Iver Lee was reminded of homes in his old-home valley. He looked for and found not only a shared humanity but a shared sense of a fireplace as the center of a home. It is important to note that his recognition was deliberate. He could have chosen to let the lack of furniture and the use of the floor for sitting and sleeping allow him to dismiss them as primitive. But rather than focus on what felt foreign he chose to focus on what made him feel at home. Iver Lee listened to the Indians’ version of their plight. He traded with them and visited them. He had powerful reminders of his old home both at an Indian fireplace and when eating the rakfisk he made of the fish the Indians had caught. He experienced them as human beings, and he could neither think of them as the vanishing Indian of the literary tradition (as in Rölvaag) or as the primitive savage. He would not accept the rumors of ill-doing or damn a people who were in a desperate situation.

_____________ 17

Rakfisk, usually made of trout, is cured by a process of fermentation.

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Memories of Making America Home The writers of these letters took part in the expansion of the United States and built their homes and plowed their farms on land still not entirely vacated by the Native population. Their letters are a repository of transnational memories of the making of America; some are unpleasant while others may give comfort. Understanding these memories gives a better understanding of the past. The narrative of brave and sturdy immigrants who made themselves new homes in a new and strange land avoids the ethical questions raised by the land-taking. It may be that some letter writers avoided these questions by repressing them. Some letters are extreme in excluding Native Americans from humanity. Most, one way or another avoid the issue. Nevertheless, a few writers speak for a potentially inclusive all-ethnic American home. The cultural context of all writers was much the same. They had attended the same kind of rural elementary schools and were brought up in the same Lutheran religion in Norway, and they had shared the challenges of migration and the making of new homes in the United States. As aspiring members of a new community they were ready to pick up and assimilate what they understood to be the views and visions of this community. Their letters may be read as expressions of American identities in the making. Iver Lee had much the same kind of immigrant experiences as the other writers with the exception of Guri Endreson who had suffered such great personal loss. Most immigrants seem to have easily adopted the racial prejudices developed by European Americans since their first arrivals in the seventeenth century. This was an important way of becoming part of a white America. History may now have moved beyond the concept of a white America, but in 1891 Iver Lee was in a minority among these writers when he felt at home with Indians and when he followed his own heart as well as his own mind and found it “quite reasonable that they would rather fight for survival than die of starvation.” He and the few others who expressed similar views, however, were not as alone as they may seem to be in this selection of letters. Throughout the period of nineteenth-century immigration there were individuals who rose above the dominant negative attitudes to Native Americans in their culture.

An Educated, Christian Voice The letters by Meidell in the 1850s and 1860s demonstrate that education did not necessarily open people to the humanity of strangers. Education

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and an open inquisitive mind, however, characterize the letters that the clergyman Olaus Fredrik Duus wrote home to Norway from Waupaca, Wisconsin in the 1850s (see Blegen, Frontier Parsonage). 18 He returned to Norway with his three small children after the death of his wife in 1859. In Waupaca the world outside the parsonage was in part populated by Native Americans. Writing to his “dear ones” in Christiania (then the name of Norway’s capital) on October 23, 1855, Duus lets the foreign world outside the window of his study enter into his letter: “As I sit here writing, a number of Indians are passing by – men, women, and children. All are on horseback with full packs, and, straggling alongside and among them, are a great many colts. Yesterday and today I have seen between thirty and fifty Indians, although not many have been about here recently” (6). There is no condescension in his brief sketch. Indeed, the Norwegian word fruentimmere, here translated “women,” would have been used informally about married women of his class in Christiania. On his way home from his 1856 New Year’s Day service in one of his distant congregations it was natural for Duus to stop his sled and enter an Indian wigwam to escape from the intense cold: “God alone knows how the poor Indians survive when it is so cold. There was a swarm of halfnaked children outside, and when I lifted the blanket that formed the door I found two squaws and a man and still more children” (11). He concludes his letter with a description of the wigwam. He is evidently interested in learning more about these people. His ability to note and describe the foreign without condescension or disgust is evident when he writes to his “[d]ear ones at home” about the smell of wigwams on October 14, 1857. He asks whether they received the three pairs of moccasins he has sent them with a returning immigrant: They are really made by Indians, for I bought them from one of the handsomest Indians I have seen. They were made by an Indian maid of the Menomonie tribe and I feel quite sure that you will be able to get the scent of wigwam smoke from them. The smell of smoke from the wigwam, and the peculiar odor of the Indians, which comes from their almost constant diet of meat, or – perhaps more likely – the scent which clings to their clothing from their constant trapping and hunting of bears and deer, makes horses get their scent a long way off and shy and jump whenever they meet them. Indians know this, and they always step four to six paces aside when they meet a person with a horse. (85)

He could have used a variety of negatively charged adjectives to describe the “odor” but soberly states that it is “peculiar”; he is primarily interested in what may cause this smell and does not express any sense of distaste. Indeed, he dismisses the popular dietary explanation and thinks it is probably not a body odor but the smell of their clothes caused by their _____________ 18

Page references in parentheses are to this edition.

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occupation as hunters and trappers. In writing, he seems to return the politeness of the Indians who step aside so as not to make his horse shy. His respectful account of this smell is in sharp contrast with his disgust with a nasty habit in his account (December 4, 1856) of a visit in a “Yankee” home where [a]n elegant woman sits in a rocking chair. […] The greetings How do you do, sir and How do you do, Ma’am are exchanged. She remains seated and invites us to have chairs. We sit down and start to chat; in the midst of the conversation the elegant lady belches so loud that the room resounds. Your face shows surprise, but if you had lived here as long as I you would know that this is a common habit. What is more disgusting, it is a daily practice at the table. (46-47)

Duus could certainly freely express his negative views of other people and their ways of life, but he consistently shows his respect for the Native inhabitants of the land. Christmas Day 1855 he held a service in the home of an immigrant. In a letter he describes this event and his own joy of the beauty of the day and the landscape, the celebration of “the birth of our beloved Savior,” the expected birth of a child, and the rejoicing congregation. Then, he turns to a scene outside the window: I noticed someone who did not understand the reason for our rejoicing. There stood a tall, powerful young Indian in his tawny deerskin garb, with a motley headdress in striking contrast to his swarthy skin and long, glistening black hair. He stood leaning his right shoulder against the window frame, his rifle at his side, holding in his left hand the ramrod which an Indian always carries with him. His coal-black glittering eyes peered curiously at us through the window. He listened intently during the singing of these hymns as though wondering what could be the reason for this gathering and this singing. For an hour he stood there, engrossed. After a long time, when my glance fell on the window, I saw him, his rifle on his shoulder, vanishing into the near-by forest. […] It grieved me deeply to see [him] 19 leave without my being able to explain to him the reason for our rejoicing so that he might share in it. God have compassion on the poor Indians and others who stray in darkness. (12-13)

Had it been possible to solicit the stranger’s own story of his experience at the window of the settler’s home, it would probably have been different from what Duus imagined. Duus reveals an open and including attitude to the young man whom he observed. He was indeed foreign but Duus appears sincere in his wish that the Indian could share his joy in the Christmas gospel as well as in the salvation that is the promise of this gospel. _____________ 19

Rather than the neutral “him” the published translation here uses the – to us – loaded word “savage.” Duus, however, wrote “ham,” the object form of the third person personal pronoun – in English: him. The translators’ use of the word “savage” was surely to avoid repetition of the pronoun and reflects a changed sense of an acceptable vocabulary since the 1940s.

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Twice in his preserved letters Duus has a window pane between himself and the observed Indians. The window is emblematic of his role as observer in this relationship. There is no indication that he was ever able to communicate his religion or exchange his thoughts with this foreign people. They remained strangers. After his wife Sophie had given birth to the last child they would have together he wrote with a glint of humor about her “felicitous delivery of a little Indian girl” (74). 20 When Duus lovingly uses a word that for many was associated with savagery for his newborn child, he again demonstrates his open attitude to Native Americans, aware as he must have been of his participation in their displacement. Duus wrote about Indians in the Wisconsin forests with respect. He has a sense of their dignity; and he shows concern for their scant protection against the cold of winter. He would have liked to share his Christian faith with them; and he uses the word “Indian” as a term of endearment for his newborn child. Indians are indeed human like himself. The contrasts between Meidell and Duus and between Lee and Hilton exclude simplistic explanations of immigrant attitudes to Native Americans based on cultural determinism.

Dances with Norwegians This essay has been focused on how letters open up memories of the land-taking. In conclusion I will briefly consider two other textual genres – a travel narrative from 1867 and a memoir from 1985. Johan Schrøder was a Norwegian agronomist who, after a failed attempt to run a model farm near the capital, decided to go to the New World in 1863 with the intention of returning with a book that could serve as a guide to prospective emigrants. He never returned, but his book, Skandinaverne i de Forenede Stater og Canada, was published in La Crosse, Wisconsin and Christiania, Norway in 1867. The first part is a narrative of his journey through Lower and Upper Canada and has been published in translation as Johan Schrøder’s Travels in Canada, 1863. 21 It is this part of his book that is of interest here. _____________ 20

21

I do not follow the published translation. Duus used the female form of Indian – Indianerinde – about his newborn child. This is a form common in most Germanic languages but not in English. The translators misunderstood him and wrote, “Sophie’s good fortune in being attended by an Indian midwife.” His message was not quite as sensational as his translators would have it. The Christiania edition has the same title as the one published in Wisconsin but only includes the first, Canadian part. See Øverland, Johan Schrøder’s Travels. Page references are to this edition.

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After his arrival in Quebec, the first people Schrøder got to know on the steamboat between Quebec and Montreal were a father and son of the Abnaki tribe. On their invitation he left the boat and went with them to their village on the St-François River, where he stayed for several days. He is fascinated by this foreign society, describes their way of life, and gives a brief survey of their history as told to him by one of their leaders, Peter Paul Osunkhirhine. He describes an entertainment by “the young people” of games and sketches, some of which satirized white behavior: “It was all in fun, but these intelligent Indians understand and are sensitive to the attitudes and prejudices of most white people” (76). Schrøder’s distaste of white prejudice is expressed in his account of his friendship with one of the Abnakis: On one of our walks we came to an establishment owned by a Frenchman, and I ordered two glasses of cognac. The servant poured one glass only as he rudely remarked that the “savage” could not be served any liquor. Joseph grew angry immediately, but he quickly gained control of himself and smiled: ‘No, give me a glass of water.’ I was still too young in America to realize the privileges of skin, and it was annoying to witness the haughty manner in which a pompous but insignificant clerk dared to address a man who had been tried in hardship and danger. (76)

His Indian friend is his social equal; the Québécois servant is clearly not. Schrøder compares his experience to the stories of havoc in Minnesota the year before: In Europe the presence of the Indians is used as a scarecrow to stop emigration, and a large number of Americans are also more or less afraid of them. The confrontations I have described here, as well as those I experienced later, have taught me that when the European approaches the Indians openly and deals with them as his equals in all and everything, he will have nothing to fear, at least in a country where neither government nor private corporations have deliberately tried to cheat, subdue, or debase them. (77)

Schrøder’s style can at times be both stilted and pretentious compared to the witty and entertaining Meidell. However, from an ethical point of view we may nevertheless wish to rank the serious and didactic Schrøder above the light-hearted and satirical Meidell in an evaluation of their writing. They belonged to the same social class and had been exposed to similar influences. Some four decades later conditions had changed radically – for Native Americans as well as for immigrants. In most eastern areas of the Midwest, Indians were no longer a significant presence. Further west, however, in western Minnesota and the Dakotas, many Norwegian immigrants had Indian reservations in their neighborhood and there were practical and personal relations between members of the two ethnic groups. By this

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time even the most timid among the immigrants had ceased to see Native Americans as a threat. Prejudice, however, was still rife. The historian Clarence Clausen was born in Norman County in 1896 and grew up in Clearwater County, both in northwestern Minnesota. Øyvind Gulliksen interviewed him several times in Northfield, Minnesota where Clausen was professor of history at St. Olaf College, and he edited Clausen’s memoirs for a local history publication in Norway (see Gulliksen 93-127). 22 The writers presented so far have been nineteenth-century immigrants. It may therefore be fitting to conclude with the twentiethcentury reminiscences of the American-born Clausen. “In the corner of Minnesota where we farmed,” he writes, “there were many Indians,” and he remembers talk “of a good deal of fear among people [in Norman County],” but the Indians never did any harm. One of his childhood memories may illustrate that Norwegian immigrants often had Native Americans as their neighbors and that their attitudes to these neighbors was not always formed by their experience: In Clearwater the Chippewas used a main road through the County. They were entirely peaceful. But as small children we were nevertheless a little afraid of them. Emma, my sister, and I used to walk to the general store that was about three miles from our home. Just before coming to the store we had to enter the main road, and doing so we would sit a while listening in case there were Indians on the road. Some times small groups of Indians had set up camp close to the road, but we would continue on our way. (106)

The children’s anxiety is clearly based on the talk of adults, but it is also evident that there was much of a more positive nature to be heard: I know that my parents and my older brothers said that many of the Chippewa had learned to speak some Norwegian because they worked for and among Norwegians. I can remember that they talked about Chippewas who took part in Norwegian dances and that an Indian whose name was Joe Flama played his fiddle at some of these dances. Perhaps he played Norwegian tunes! (106)

Clausen bears witness to a work fellowship as well as a social fellowship. It is, of course, possible that the aging Clausen idealized his childhood memories of the stories that his parents had told him in the early years of the century and that he was influenced by the attitudes common in the 1980s as well as by his long academic career. However, his memory of social intercourse between Native Americans and immigrant Americans is not so different from that described by Iver Lee in 1882. Both bear witness to a relationship between immigrants and Native Americans based on mutual respect and an interest in each others’ traditions and culture. _____________ 22

Gulliksen’s presentation is partly based on Clausen’s own published texts and partly on several interviews. Page references in parentheses. Translations are mine.

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We should perhaps be wary of reading too much into Clausen’s memories of the older family members’ stories of dances where immigrants and Native Americans mingled on the floor. But there are other witnesses to a close relationship between members of the two groups. 23 The many families parented by Native and immigrant American couples are evidence of a personal and mutual recognition of humanity. One wellknown witness to such relationships is the German and Native American writer Louise Erdrich. A material memorial of Native and immigrant relationships is the Yankton Sioux teepee that is part of an outdoor museum collection of immigrant buildings from the Midwest at the West Norway Emigration Center at Sletta on Radøy north of Bergen. The teepee was given to the Emigration Center on behalf of Sioux Indians of Norwegian descent. 24 Its presence enforces the memories of a shared humanity as expressed in the letters of Iver Lee and Olaus Duus. Speak, Memory is the title the voluble Vladimir Nabokov gave to his memoirs (1951). This essay has addressed the silence of the unspoken memory as well as the memories given voice by immigrants to whom words did not always come easily. It presents a reading that is conscious of the different horizons of twenty-first century academic readers and nineteenth-century largely uneducated immigrants who wrote letters for readers in the country they had left. In spite of such an intentional awareness of difference, it was nevertheless difficult for me to avoid a more sympathetic reading of texts that seem to be more in harmony with present-day sensibilities than of texts that give voice to attitudes that now – one and a half centuries later – seem prejudiced and racist. Discomfort may have been one reason why letters are silent. Discomfort is certainly one reason why memory is selective. This reading of immigrant letters retrieves some transnational memories of the ‘land-taking’ by listening to a troubling silence and by trying to read with respect and appreciation the written words of immigrants whose views and opinions were formed by their experience and by the several voices of their culture in much the same way as our views and opinions have been formed in ways not always obvious to us. As all history writing should be, this article is an attempt to make our memory less selective. _____________ 23

24

As early as in 1851, Lars Larson Kløve wrote matter-of-factly from Milwaukee in Wisconsin about his son Johannes, “Since then he has been here in the settlement sometimes working for Norwegian and sometimes for Indian farmers and he has had the same pay as I” (3: T5). The teepee at the West Norway Emigration Center at Sletta in Radøy, an hour’s drive north of Bergen, was the gift of a visiting Yankton Sioux, Ben Geboe, in 2003. He is of Norwegian descent on his mother’s side and maintains relations with his family in Norway; his identity is both Native American and Norwegian American. See his prospectus for a “Norwegian-Native American Film Project: Family Reunion.”

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Works Cited Bergland, Betty Ann. “Guri Endreson and Gendered Representation of the Landtaking in the Wake of the Lakota Rebellion.” A paper at the Seventh International Interdisciplinary Women’s Congress, Tromsø, Norway. 20-26 June, 1999. 5 Apr. 2009 <www.skk.uit.no/WW99/papers/Bergland_Betty_Ann.pdf >. —. “Norwegian Immigrants and ‘Indianerne’ in the Landtaking, 1838-1862.” Norwegian-American Studies 35 (2000): 319-50. —. “Norwegian Immigrants, Wisconsin Tribes and the Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, 1883-1955.” Norwegian-American Essays 2004. Ed. Orm Øverland. Oslo: NAHA-Norway, 2005. Bergland, Renée. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2000. Blegen, Theodore C., ed. Frontier Parsonage: The Letters of Olaus Fredrik Duus Norwegian Pastor in Wisconsin, 1855-1858. Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1947. —. “Guri Endreson, Frontier Heroine.” Minnesota History: A Quarterly Magazine 10.4 (1929): 425-30. —. Land of Their Choice: Immigrants Write Home. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1955. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2nd ed. New York: Perennial, 2002. Delblanc, Sven. Livets aks. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1991. Farseth, Pauline, and Theodore Blegen, eds. Frontier Mother: The Letters of Gro Svendsen. Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1950. Gulliksen, Øyvind Tveitereid. “Clarence Clausen: Drangedøl og amerikaner.” Det var ein gong – Minner frå Drangedal 8 (1985): 93-127. Hilton, Conrad. Be My Guest. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987. Holand, Hjalmar Rued. De norske settlementers historie. 4th ed. Chicago: Anderson, 1912. Janson, Drude Krog. A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: A Memoir. London: Gollancz, 1951. “Norwegian-Native American Film Project: Family Reunion.” 2008. 5 Apr. 2009 . Øverland, Orm, and Steinar Kjærheim, eds. Fra Amerika til Norge. 7 vols. Oslo: Solum, 1992-2009. Øverland, Orm. Det smærter mig meget at nedskrive disse Linjer til Eder: En utvandrerhistorie i brev. Notodden: Notodden Historielag, Telemark Historielag, 1995. —. The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America. Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1996. —. Johan Schrøder’s Travels in Canada 1863. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1989. Ræder, Ole Munch. America in the Forties: The Letters of Ole Munch Ræder. Trans. and ed. Gunnar J. Malmin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1929. Reisersen, Johan R. Pathfinder for Norwegian Emigrants. Trans. Frank G. Nelson. Northfield, MN: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1981. Ree, Ingvar. “Nye funn av gamle Amerikabrev.” Gauldalsminne: Årbok for bygdehistorie og folkeminne 2001-2002. Melhus: Gauldal historielag, 2002. Rølvaag, Ole Edvart. Giants in the Earth. Trans. Lincoln Colcord and the author. New York: Harper & Row, 1927. Ulvestad, Martin. Nordmændene i Amerika. Minneapolis: Author Publisher, 1907.

Tribal or Transnational? Memory, History and Identity in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk HANS BAK

As Shelley Fisher Fishkin observed in her 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, “Transnational questions and approaches can complicate Native American issues in American studies in fascinating ways. […] [They can] reshape our understanding of Native American history and culture” (Fishkin 29-30) and, by necessary implication, of American history, memory, and identity. Given the special legal and political status of tribal nations within the U.S. federal system, one could argue that ‘tribal cultural memory,’ paradoxically part of yet simultaneously excluded from American memory, always and by definition is ‘transnational American memory.’ In The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), his fifth and last novel before his death at age 62 in August 2003, James Welch shows what happens to ‘tribal memory’ when it crosses the Atlantic and comes under pressure as a constitutive element of personal and cultural identity in a transnational ambience. Concretely, he presents the case of Charging Elk, a full-blood Oglala Lakota, a participant in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show on its 1889 European tour, who inadvertently gets separated from his troupe and finds himself abandoned in a European ambience. Severed from his tribe, and for sixteen years barred from the possibility of return, his tribal cultural and historical memory is all he has to sustain a sense of himself as a Lakota Indian in the French diaspora. In his novel Welch shows how this tribal memory, displaced in a transnational context, functions as a source of sustenance and comfort as well as alienation, doubt and disorientation. We witness how Charging Elk’s personal and cultural identity is subjected to an ongoing process of transformation and reconstitution, as his tribal cultural memory as an American Indian interacts with the ‘new’ cultural ambience of the ‘Old World,’ and Charging Elk finds himself brought up against the legalistic and political implications of a Euro-American narrative of history and citizenship that is in rapid and ruthless process of becoming dominant (see Opitz).

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Performing Euro-American History: Buffalo Bill in Europe The Heartsong of Charging Elk shows how this Euro-American narrative – fostering a national myth of conquest and dispossession in which the Indian, by necessity, is posited as ‘vanishing’ – obfuscates and erases the historical experience of suffering and genocide that is deeply and ineradicably embedded in the personal and collective memory of Charging Elk. It is a narrative of U.S. history constructed, performed, and effectively exported by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which toured in France in 1889 and again in 1905. Presenting itself on its posters and programs as the enactment of a “full and complete history” with “vivid and realistic scenes from the Pioneer History of America,” it effectively promoted (and established in the European mind) a version of the history of the American West as a “clean, dramatic and compelling narrative [that] made the conquest of savages central” (qtd. in Opitz 102-03). As Rob Kroes has pertinently noted, “Buffalo Bill’s show brought more than ethnography as pageantry. It told a story of American Manifest Destiny, of the superiority of the White race, of civilization brought by the bullet” (61). Its 1906 program presented its self-mythologizing hero, Buffalo Bill Cody, as “the intrepid pioneer, who led civilization through barbarian populations and who, thanks to his courage, made the star of the Empire shine on the western trails” (qtd. in Kroes 61-62). Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show thus promoted, in the words of Kroes, a reading of recent American history that well fit the prevailing Social-Darwinist cultural climate in Europe in the late nineteenth century, at the height of its own imperialist expansion. Exotic and intriguing the Indians may have been to Europeans, yet at the same time there was the sense that here, on display, reenacting their historical defeat, were literally the last of the Mohicans, the representatives of a vanishing race. Such, Europeans and American agreed, was the course of history. […] The show was rewritten essentially as a performance dedicated to explaining and justifying the Euro-American conquest of the American West. (6263)

Ironically, as a participant in the show, Charging Elk and his fellow Indians are unwittingly and unwillingly complicit in projecting this ‘white’ narrative. As Welch’s novel underlines, this narrative – with Indians cast as the wild and savage aggressors and white colonists and settlers as triumphant civilizers, and with Indian culture on the brink of vanishing – has thoroughly come to pervade the European perception of American Indians, to the point where cultural representation has replaced historical and personal reality. As one of the French characters, taking the show’s enactment for truth, observes in the novel: “Buffalo Bill says [the Indians] are disappearing – like the bison. He says their culture is dying and soon

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they will be gone too. It is a tragedy that such things happen” (Welch 137). 1 Rather than offering surcease of historical pain by reaffirming the sustaining and consoling force of tribal culture on the reservation, Welch transports his protagonist from the local roots of his tribal culture in the Black Hills of South Dakota to the global metropolitan world of late nineteenth-century century Paris and Marseilles, showing how cultural memory plays a crucial role in the painful reconstitution of personal identity in an amphibious transnational conjunction of tribal America and Old World culture.

Fig. 1. Aerial View of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Paris 1902. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; P.6.479.

Tribal Memory and Transnational Discourse In 1889 Charging Elk finds himself stranded and abandoned in the city of Marseille when as a result of sickness and a painful fall from his horse during performance he ends up in a hospital, only to discover that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show has moved on and that he is left in complete aloneness, dazed with pain and hunger, haunted by memories of tribal life and history. Welch probes deeply into his protagonist’s emotional, psychologi_____________ 1

All subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.

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cal and even existential state of culture shock and estrangement, a ‘heartsong’ of suffering and incurable aloneness, of exile from his tribal past, community and culture, and of enforced endurance of a life of ‘difference’ in diaspora. Fully sensitive to the rich possibilities for transnational comparison and critique embedded in his protagonist’s situation, Welch makes us look at Western culture (late nineteenth-century French civilisation) through the spiritual and cultural lens of a Lakota, and counterpoints the Indian’s tribal perspective with the views of ‘civilized’ (mostly Christian) Frenchmen and Americans living abroad. Welch’s portrayal points up the blatant failure of a European and American culture rampant with racial stereotypes and rife with prejudice against the ‘other.’ He thus allows us to take the measurement of Euro-American civilization (and Christianity) by the degree to which it manages or fails to deal humanely with its ‘lost.’ By mirroring tribal and Western cultures Welch attains a complex cultural relativism which highlights the flaws and vulnerabilities as well as the strengths and nobilities of both. With Charging Elk as the novel’s main focalizer, Welch’s and our sympathies are inevitably with his Indian protagonist. Yet, though we cannot but be horrified by the human, diplomatic and political bungling of French and American bureaucracy and government, Welch’s vision is ultimately wise, generous and tolerant in the way it strives for balance and fairness in his portrayal of a Euro-American culture clearly culpable in its failings. The novel’s prologue presents an image of Indian culture at a poignant historical moment of loss and transition that will be deeply embedded in the tribal memory of Charging Elk: less than one year after the “fight with the longknives on the Greasy Grass” (1) (the defeat of Custer at the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876) Charging Elk, then eleven years old, witnesses the surrender of his tribe, led by Crazy Horse, to the American military at Fort Robinson on May 6, 1877, four months before Crazy Horse’s death. This memory, of a tribe with “no fight left in them” (1) yet singing a “peace song” (4) to fortify themselves for endurance and survival, will echo through his life in Europe. The moment also signals the beginning of the inevitable process of acculturation to which the tribe would be subjected, the forced abandonment of ‘the old ways’ and adaptation to the ‘white man’s ways’ through forced sedentary reservation living, schooling, linguistic dispossession and Christianization. A cameo memory of Charging Elk’s one-year experience at Indian boarding school poignantly prefigures the enforced erasure of memory and the suppression of a historical reality of violence underlying a national discourse of conquest and victimization. When in art class Charging Elk draws a picture of three young Indians “cutting off the finger of the dead soldier at Little Big Horn to get at the agate ring” (56), his white teacher

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tears the picture into pieces and forces him to burn it in the stove. The educational policy of acculturation ruthlessly implemented at boarding school effectively substituted the representational repertoire of what Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., has famously called “the white man’s Indian” for a sense of Indian identity rooted in personal memory and experience. One of Charging Elk’s early memories poignantly evokes how U.S. policy of assimilation forced him at an early age to internalize an image of the ‘Indian’ squarely at odds with his personal experience and reality. He had sat in one of the rows of long tables watching the freckle-faced white woman write her words in white chalk on the black board: Boy. Girl. Cat. Dog. Fish. She showed them colored pictures of these creatures. The humans were pink, the cat yellow, and the dog black-and-white. The fish were orange and fat, unlike any he had ever seen. […] He remembered the word “Indian.” She had pointed directly at him, then at the board, and said “Indian.” She made all the children say “Indian.” Then she showed them a picture of a man they could not recognize. He had sharp toes, big thighs, and narrow shoulders; he wore a crown of blue and green and yellow feathers and an animal skin with dark spots. His eyes were large and round; his lips tiny and pursed. The white woman said “Indian.” (Welch 56)

The scene painfully illustrates how boarding school effectively led to a confusion of representation and reality, an alienating displacement of what Charging Elk knows and remembers to be his Indian identity and the representation or image of ‘Indian’ privileged by the white man’s civilization – in the words of Andrea Opitz, “the racist fantasy that needs to project the ‘Indian’ as artifact, as fetish, and as other” (101), a fantasy likewise implied in the version of history performed and transported to Europe by Buffalo Bill. Not surprisingly, Charging Elk had strongly resisted being schooled away from tribal custom and ceremony and had scorned his parents for settling down to reservation life and accommodating to “the ways of the white god” (Welch 17). Instead, with his friend Strikes Plenty he had chosen to retreat to the Stronghold, home of the “bad Indians” (14) and had lived there fiercely and freely for nine years, “continuing the old ways” (14), and holding out against the compromises and adaptations succumbed to by the reservation Indians. It is there he experiences his vision quest, finds his power animal, receives his badger claws’ necklace and wallows in the proud memories of Oglala bravery at the Little Big Horn, their “last time together as a free people” (11), graced by the help of Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery. When, after nine years, most of the buffalo are gone and a life of starvation looms, Charging Elk decides to accept his selection as a “wild” warrior (one who was “not tamed by the white bosses” [34] and who “never surrendered” [125]) to ride in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show on its 1889 European tour. As Rocky Bear explains,

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Charging Elk was selected over his friend because he perfectly fit the European preconceptions of what an Indian savage from the wilds of America should look like: “He should be tall and lean. He should have nice clothes. He should look only into the distance and act as though his head is in the clouds. Your friend did not fit these white men’s vision” (38). Welch is sharply sensitive to the doubleness of Charging Elk’s participation in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as it unwillingly and unwittingly makes him an accomplice in the erasure of history as embedded in the tribe’s collective memory and the construction of a revised and officially sanctioned historical American memory. At moments Charging Elk seems aware of the discrepancy between the ‘real’ history kept alive in his tribe’s memory and the colonizer’s version constructed, performed and promoted by Buffalo Bill, and ensconced in Euro-American memory under the banner of sanctioned transnational discourse. After the playing of the French and American national anthems, he recalls, the crowds would be “ready for the Wild West show” (70). And the Indians would be ready to accommodate them. Wearing only breechcloths and moccasins and headdresses, they chased the buffalo, then the Deadwood stage, attempted to burn down a settler’s cabin, performed a scalp dance, and charged the 7th Cavalry at the Greasy Grass. Buffalo Bill always rescued the wasichus – the settlers, the women and children, the people who rode in the stagecoach – from the Indians, but he couldn’t rescue the longknives. They died every time before Buffalo Bill got there. And when he came on the scene of the dead bodies, he took off his hat and hung his head and his horse bowed. (70) It had always puzzled Charging Elk that, in the daily reenactment, Buffalo Bill was the first wasichu to find the dead longknives on the Greasy Grass; yet none of the Indian performers, even those who had fought there, could remember any of the Lakotas talking about him then. Surely, such a big man would have been talked about. (126)

Charging Elk is thus forced to internalize and support a version of history which runs counter to his own tribal memory, which simultaneously establishes the Indian as “the original citizen” (114) of the New World and fosters the Euro-American myth of the Indian as a ‘vanishing’ species which must inevitably give way to the progress of civilization: Rocky Bear had once told him, while they were sitting around a fire after the evening show, that these people on this side of the big water called the Indians “the Americans who would vanish,” that they thought the defeated Indians would soon disappear and they were very sad about it and wanted to see the Indians before they went up in thin air – unlike the real Americans, who would be only too happy to help the Indians disappear. (52)

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Fig. 2. Native Americans in Traditional Regalia Stand amid Painted Tipis. France 1889. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; Gift of Peter H. Davidson, P.69.2034.2.

Charging Elk is likewise sensitive to the ironic coincidence of stereotype and reality. Even as he is proud to act out before a European audience the traditional Lakota ways dressed up in full Lakota regalia, he is simultaneously aware that he is catering to stereotype and playing a false role in “the white man’s sham” (52). He tries hard to control his excitement, for he knew the French people wanted the Indians to be dignified. And too, the young Indians wished to be thought of as wichasa yatapik, men whom all praise, men who quietly demonstrate courage, wisdom, and generosity – like the oldtime leaders. […] As Charging Elk rode his painted horse in the procession, he couldn’t help but think how fortunate he was. Instead of passing another cold, lonely winter at the Stronghold, or becoming a passive reservation Indian who planted potatoes and held out his hand for the government commodities, he was dressed in his finest clothes, riding a strong horse, preparing himself to thrill the crowds with a display of the old ways. Of course, he knew that it was all fake and that some of the elders back home disapproved of the young men going off to participate in the white man’s sham, but he no longer felt guilty about singing scalping songs or participating in scalp dances or sneak-up dances. He was proud to display some of the old ways to these French people because they appreciated the Indians and seemed genuinely sympathetic. (51-52)

Fostering a loss of distinction between spectacle and reality, the show thus exemplifies the ironic truth that tribal culture in the Euro-American mind can only exist and survive as what Jean Baudrillard has called “simula-

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crum” culture. The French spectators are unable to distinguish between the performance of Indian history in the show and the scenes of Indian daily life they witness after the show behind the circus tents: [T]hey had wandered among the lodges of the Indian village, watching the women cook or sew or repair beadwork. They stood over the squatting performers and watched them play dominoes or card games. Some even entered family lodges, as though the mother fixing dinner or the sleeping child in its cradleboard were part of the entertainment. (Welch 51)

The seeming sympathy of the French for Indian people is limited to what Kroes, following Baudrillard, has called the “spectacular simulation” (70) of the Wild West show; encountering an actual Indian in the streets of Marseille their gazes are filled with suspicion and a puzzling hostility, much as if they were Americans.

Tribal Survival in Transnational Diaspora: Memory, Identity, and Citizenship Such scenes come to us as part of the manifold tribal memories besieging Charging Elk as he finds himself waking up in Euro-American darkness, confused and disoriented, in a “white man’s healing house” (Welch 7) – an ironic designation, as if the Indian needs to be healed of his indigeneity, but also one prefiguring the redemptive ending to the novel. For most of the novel Welch presents Charging Elk’s memories of tribal culture on the Dakota plains in counterpoint to scenes from urban French life in Marseilles. But as, over the sixteen years he spends in France, Charging Elk finds a way of survival through adaptation and endurance, his tribal memories alternately become a source of sustenance and identity, and a source of religious doubt and existential disorientation. We share Charging Elk’s shocks of strangeness as he seeks to find his bearings in a culture in which he does not speak the language (he has no English or French, only Lakota) and in which nothing fits – literally, he cannot find a coat or shoes that will match his huge physique. He is overwhelmed with a sense of loss and abandonment as he realizes he has lost his “war medicine” (23) (the badger claws’ necklace) and can only sing his “deathsong” (104) and trust to Wakan Tanka to make sure his spirit (nagi) will find its way home. Walking the Marseille streets, he is intensely aware of his difference, as he towers above the tiny French and is perpetually stared at, “dark even for an Oglala” (42) (he was nicknamed the “black Indian” [70]). Zooming in on a poignant moment of transcultural interface – a few days before Christmas, when Charging Elk is confronted in the French shop windows with the enigmatic and unfamiliar symbols and rituals of

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Christianity: decorated Christmas trees, nativity scenes, and processions with huge statues of the Virgin Mary – Welch in ironic reversal makes European culture seem as ‘exotic,’ foreign and absurd when viewed through the perspective of a Lakota as Oglala rituals and ceremonies seem to the French. Welch recurrently counterbalances the religious traditions of Christianity and Lakota spirituality, illuminating how each satisfies identical psychological and emotional needs, without claiming superiority for either one. Thus, the Christmas tree is juxtaposed to the “sacred tree” (67) at the Sun Dance ceremony; Charging Elk is almost like a Puritan in his belief and trust in Wakan Tanka’s ‘plan’ for him; the belief he attaches to the predictive power of dreams (a feature of Native tribal life) is on a par with the value René Soulas attaches to the visitations he receives from the Virgin Mary. And whereas Charging Elk is deeply disturbed that he has lost his tribal talisman (the badger claws’ necklace) he is relieved and grateful when he is given a Christian equivalent (a picture of Jesus, with bleeding heart and crown of thorns, “wakan to the white people” [145]) by a beautiful Française, Sandrine. She is not only the first white person for whom he allows himself to feel human warmth and who makes him think “the unthinkable” (75), he also considers her a “spirit-giver” and cherishes her “good luck charm” – “He didn’t have to worship the man, only the power of the charm” (146). It is one of the countless miniscule steps towards his slow acculturation. Modern European culture is recurrently measured and found wanting by tribal standards. Thus, when the famous Black Elk visits the Wild West show, he comments on white culture and its loss of “the wisdom of the simple life” (60): I have lived in the wasichu world for two years and I do not like what I see. Men do not listen to each other, they fight, their greed prevents them from being generous to the less fortunate, they do not seem to me to be wise enough to embrace each other as brothers. I have learned much from this experience, much that will help me teach our people the right road when I get back to my country. (59)

Charging Elk experiences such cultural deficiencies at first hand, once he has been arrested on Christmas Eve, for vagrancy, thrown into prison, and brought face to face with French and American government authorities, their equally rigid bureaucracies, and their conflicting ways of reading the Indian and his place in history. The American vice-consul, Franklin Bell, tries hard to get Charging Elk transferred to the American authorities, so he can be reconnected to the show or shipped back to the United States, but the French refuse to relinquish him, Christmas Eve or not. The situation is partly of Bell’s own making: had he been more alert in taking on the case of Charging Elk, the Indian would never have escaped out of the hospital without being formally discharged. As it is, Franklin Bell is no

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Benjamin Franklin, not in tact, humor or intelligence, and not in his American attitude towards Indians, which brings all possible stereotypes into play and demonstrates how deeply embedded in his American memory lies the national historical discourse of conquest and progress. As Welch underlines, Bell “had read Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men when he was a kid, just twenty years ago” (82). They were a strange race of people, he thought, still attempting to live in the past with their feathers and beads. But perhaps that was understandable, seeing that they had no future to speak of. He had read an article […] just the other day about ‘the vanishing savages’ and that just about summed it up. They were a pitiful people in their present state and the sooner they vanished or joined America the better off they would be. […] This Indian was thoroughly defeated. (82-83)

In the end, Bell is more concerned with the bleak prospects of his love life and his “spotless, if undistinguished” (122) record in the foreign service: he vainly dreams of replacing the consul in Marseille. The French attitude to American Indians is likewise riveted with the stereotypes drawn from a national discourse equally rooted in cultural supremacy. Martin St-Cyr, a salon socialist and a bourgeois at heart, may seem ‘sincere’ in his concern for Charging Elk, but as a small-time police reporter hunting for a good story his disinterestedness is in doubt. Exceptionally, he is granted permission to visit Charging Elk in the Gothic underworld of the Marseille jails but, much like Bell’s, his image of what an Indian might look like comes from the illustrated adventure books he had read as a boy: feathers, fur, war paint, a fierce scowl, a dangerous “wild savage from the American frontier” (93). When he stands face to face with the human reality beneath the stereotype, St-Cyr is struck by Charging Elk’s vulnerability and silence, by his suffering and hunger. Overcome by a generous impulse, he bribes the guard to give Charging Elk some decent food and leaves him cigarettes and matches. Later Charging Elk convinces himself that the man must be one of the “heyokas, sacred clowns, come to show him the way” (144), and will use the matches in a pathetic attempt at tribal ceremony. St-Cyr’s article on the “lost soul” in the “entrails” of the jail, instead of rousing the intended “monstrous public outcry,” leads to but modest public protest by a small priest-led group pleading the exercise of Christian virtues on behalf of “uncivilized savages the world over, all of whom were God’s simplest creatures” (100). As StCyr dreams of rousing a grand collective fury on behalf of this “pitiful savage,” he is trapped between a selfish desire to launch himself as a “legitimate journalist” and his genuine concern for a fellow human being. Even his “sincerity,” however noble in intent, is flawed by his condescending inability to think of Charging Elk as other than “a somewhat lesser animal”:

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He could not forget the dark, sunken eyes behind the cheekbones. […] They were the eyes of a dying animal, of an animal that had resigned itself to death. […] [He] did not realize that he had come to think of the creature in the cell as an animal that had been cornered. And in a way, he cared more for the animal than the man. (103)

Welch pertinently connects such stereotyping, deeply ingrained in EuroAmerican memory and historical discourse, to French and American legal and governmental policy. Charging Elk becomes a victim of the ambiguous and paradoxical status of Indians under French and American law. Whereas in Buffalo Bill’s show the Indian is culturally constructed as “clearly a citizen of America […] the original citizen” (114), the American authorities do not recognize a tribal person as a U.S. citizen, and as a consequence, since the Indian has no passport, the French regard him as an illegal alien, one of the “undesirable types” (114) to be held in custody. Unwilling to release him, the French authorities will allow him to be placed with the family of a simple, good fishmonger, who feel it is “their duty as Christians” (108) to take him in. René Soulas offers what ‘solace’ Charging Elk can count on; he is a man of a “genuinely pious nature” (108) whose trust in the benevolence of God’s will parallels Charging Elk’s trust in the goodwill of Wakan Tanka’s plan for him. Madame Soulas, feeling that her husband is “the most moral man I know” but that his piety could be “a burden,” is more realistic and skeptical: “Surely God didn’t intend for Christians and savages to live together” (110). For all their noble intentions, even the Soulases cannot free themselves from touches of prejudice: Madame considers savages at least “part beast” and even René, though almost inclined to believe in the “Peau Rouge” (by now dressed up in gentleman’s outfit) as “a normal man,” muses: “It was only when one looked at the dark, almost black face with its high cheekbones and squinty, unseeing eyes, that one realized he was far from being a normal man” (116). Even a good man like René cannot wholly rise above racializing stereotyping – he thinks of Charging Elk as “a magnificent creature” very much like “a prince, a very dark prince,” “almost as dark as a nègre” (134). Tellingly, none of the whites observing Charging Elk can in any way strike through the distance, isolation, and loneliness, and intuit his inner life; all wonder what he is thinking, feeling? Welch recurrently resorts to an almost Levinas-like emphasis on the significance of ‘looking at’ the ‘other.’ René is one of the few whites into whose face Charging Elk does not mind looking; in René’s eyes he recognizes “the kind of sad wisdom that some of the older [tribal] people possessed. Their eyes expressed a kindness, a forgiveness of man’s transgressions, that comes from a hard life, from understanding what human beings go through to become better

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or sometimes, even worse. The eyes of these old people did not condemn” (132). Such human wisdom, tolerance, compassion and generosity are rare in any culture, tribal or transnational, and Welch’s portrait of Soulas is lovingly etched, with only faint touches of irony. As Charging Elk becomes gradually used to a routine of domesticity and hard work as René’s helper at the fish market, he shares the family’s rituals, comes to be on friendly terms with the children (who teach him his first French) and slowly conquers Madame’s mistrust. Gradually, even she is able to look at him “as a human being – someone to be considered – not as some strange object or wild animal to be stared at, perhaps to be feared” (166). As his process of acculturation takes shape, Charging Elk is haunted both by consoling memories of idyllic tribal living and hunting, and by disturbing dreams of the destruction of his tribal culture that will prove to be prophetic. Bird Tail’s dream of the vanishing buffaloes recurs to taunt him with its promise of the broken sacred hoop made whole again (12728), while at other moments he is plagued by a recurrent nightmare of being the sole survivor of his wiped-out Lakota tribe (“You are my only son” [235]) or has prophetic glimpses of what he would later learn was the Ghost Dance 2 : That night Charging Elk dreamed of returning to the Stronghold. He rode High Runner and the tall bay danced through the badlands, in a hurry, as always, to return to the good grasses and the cunning mares. As they ascended the high butte, Charging Elk could see many people, on horses, in wagons, some walking, all going toward the Stronghold. And when he got on top, he saw many lodges and he saw many people dancing in a circle. He didn’t recognize the dance. It was not rhythmic and graceful like the old-time dances; rather, the people hopped and twirled in place, men shouting and wailing, women ululating and crying out. The drum group pushed the people even faster, until some of the dancers fell to the ground, where some lay motionless while others twitched and rolled around as though they were struggling to leave their bodies. (128)

At other times he suffers moments of religious questionings and doubts about the effectiveness of traditional ceremonies (“his song was weak and he was afraid it was losing its power. He no longer felt his nagi lifting inside of him, hovering, waiting to be freed for the long journey” [105]). Yet mostly his tribal faith and memory sustain him: time and again he manages to resign to the will of Wakan Tanka and accept his ways as being “beyond understanding. He could only play out his role and hope and pray that the circle would become wakan again and he would live to be an old man among his people” (129). _____________ 2

The Ghost Dance, reinstated in 1889 by Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka, led to a revival of tribal ceremonial dancing among other tribes, including the Lakota Sioux, and is believed to have instigated the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.

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Only rarely do we see him take stock of the enormous transformation he is slowly undergoing. One day, looking into the mirror, he is shocked at the degree of his domestication and acculturation. Ashamed to see his hair cut short, he fears he has lost his Lakota strength and courage: He had gone from being a wild Indian to this creature in the mirror. He glanced down at his new clothes, his new rough shoes. What had happened to him? Just a few sleeps ago, he had possessed his father’s hairpipe breastplate, his own badger-claw necklace, his skin clothing – above all, the long hair that had never been cut. Even when he put on the wasichu’s blouses and pants, he wore brass armbands, earrings, and the two eagle feathers in his hair. He wore moccasins and wrapped his braids in ermine and red yarn. Now, this creature that looked back at him in the mirror didn’t look like the Oglala from the Stronghold. The face had grown thin, the eyes seemed unsure, and the mouth looked weak. How would Wakan Tanka know that it was Charging Elk? How could Charging Elk again become the man he once was? Would he always look like this – like a weak, frightened coward? (133)

Walking the streets, “a hulk of a man” (146), he cannot but feel uncomfortably and conspicuously different, an exotic ‘other’: “The stature that had once made him so proud in Paris now made him feel as freakish as the man with no legs” (146). Yet he relishes the fact that his new clothes, similar to those of the people around him, can make him feel so much part of the crowd as to become “almost invisible” (147).

Transnational Limbo: From Invisibility to Existential Affirmation The image of invisibility – set persuasively by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and reverberating through multi-ethnic American writing from Toni Morrison to Chang-Rae Lee – is also a recurrent one in Welch’s novel, paradoxically signifying both a longing to belong and merge with the community and a lament at not being truly “seen” as a person by that very community, which regards him mostly with stealthy glances or hostile stares. As Bharati Mukherjee has poignantly commented: “The oldest paradox of prejudice is that it renders its victims simultaneously invisible and over-exposed. […] An Indian slips out of invisibility in this culture at considerable peril to body and soul” (37). The image comes back with particular wryness, when Charging Elk falls victim to a Catch-22-like bureaucratic mix-up (he is mistaken for Featherman, a fellow Indian who died of consumption in the hospital bed next to his) and is officially declared dead. In the eyes of some French and American authorities the only good Indian is indeed a dead one – in despair Franklin Bell even suggests Charging Elk simply assume the identity

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of Featherman who supposedly is still alive, individual Indians apparently being interchangeable as nametags. As it proves impossible to straighten out this “bureaucratic folderol” (Welch 176) without causing a major diplomatic row between the two countries – an “international fuss” (180) neither side is prepared to risk – Charging Elk finds himself caught in a transnational limbo: declared “as dead as yesterday’s news” in U.S. governmental discourse, he is very much alive in personal reality – a wry reflection of the Indian’s place in American cultural memory. When Soulas wonders who then is living with his family, Bell’s answer – “absolutely no one […] he is non-existent, a ghost” (178) – resonates with unintended but macabre truthfulness. Welch places such cultural perceptions emphatically in a context of international political economy. He evokes the city of Marseille with particular vividness as a transnational site of cultural and commercial interaction. One of the late nineteenth-century Europe’s most important and busiest harbors, it is a city open to the world’s international flow of trades and cultures. Significantly, the backdrop of the novel is the transnational realm of Empire, evident in the furnishings in the apartment of vice-consul Franklin Bell (who has had previous positions in Morocco, Panama and Peru) as well as in the growing French resentment of America’s imperialist policies and increasing monopoly of global affairs. Thus St-Cyr, mindful of his father’s words that “the Americans were getting ready to take over the world” (286), ponders: “They are the new Romans […] who came to Marsilia with their big ships and demands for tribute” (294). But Marseille is also a truly multicultural city, with cultural influx from North Africa and the Orient, and a strong allochthonous presence in the ethnic neighborhoods of the Old Port. After leaving the Soulas family, Charging Elk ends up living by himself in Le Panier, “an old working-class section of Marseille that now attracted immigrants from the Barbary States and the Levant, who worked the worst jobs in the soap and hemp factories, the abattoirs and tanneries” (84). Here Charging Elk, his life governed by “a quiet, echoing aloneness” (186), finds a congenial social and ethnic milieu, living on a narrow street which buzzed with many tongues, mostly North African and Levantine. Children played in the street until late at night, sometimes keeping him awake. But more often than not, he found the laughter, the squeals, the cries, the barking dogs, somehow comforting, as though the constant flurry of noise proved that he was not alone. (190)

Indeed, the neighborhood evokes memories of the village at the Stronghold: “These people were closer to his own than any of the others he had come across since he left Pine Ridge” (190).

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A turning point in Charging Elk’s slow process of acculturation comes when one night, as he is seated at a restaurant amid a hum of voices, “dining alone” yet feeling “part of the festive crowd,” he realizes the racial markers of his difference: He had become so used to the people of this town and his own uniqueness that he had not thought of himself in terms of color. He had no one to identify with, no group that he belonged to, and so he thought mostly of himself as one who had no color, was in fact almost a ghost even though his large dark presence always attracted attention from both light and dark people. (198)

At this moment he is crudely provoked and racially taunted by an American sailor (wearing a blurred eagle-tattoo) as a “goddamn bloody Indian” (199). Though he momentarily cherishes the naive hope that the American sailors in the bar might help him return home, he is boggled by the fact that after three years of “making himself invisible” it is his race that makes him conspicuous, visible and hated. The insight rouses him out of his habitual passivity, into anger and fear. In response he can only return to the deepest levels of his Indian memory and identity: He began to sing, first under his breath, then a faint, thin falsetto, then he began to sing as though he were alone, as though he had staked his sash to the ground and meant to make his final stand; as though he were alone on the plains, surrounded by enemies, suddenly calm and determined, as though he meant to take as many as he could before he was killed. Then he stood. (201)

It is a crucial moment of self-reconstitution and existential re-affirmation, as Charging Elk, making his “final stand” on his Lakota identity, finds new strength and energy in his very difference: “Charging Elk was in another country, a quiet country, and he was strong with meat and song. He had remembered that he was a man, and a man who sings his deathsong in a proper way is a man to be reckoned with” (202). Pondering the “magical effect” of the song – it had made his enemies “powerless,” for the brawny sailors had succumbed to silence – Charging Elk also believes for the first time that he has found a way of survival, of making a home, on strange soil: “Perhaps he was meant to live, and to live here, at the edge of the great water that stood between him and his home. Perhaps this had become home” (204). Thinking of the song as a “magical weapon,” he now begins to shake off his “reluctance to be noticed,” walks the streets proudly and erect, and buys a new hat and a walking stick with a silver duck’s head, so that he seems “as dashing as a boulevardier” (204). Welch undercuts his sense of pride with double-edged irony: Thus decked out, he strolled the streets of Marseille in the evening and sat in the cafés at night, doing his best to imitate the slender young men who attracted admiring glances from the young women. And in truth, he did cut an admirable figure, just not the type nice young women would feel comfortable with. They looked at him as a large, possibly dangerous North African or Turk, the kind of

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brute their mothers – just before they crossed themselves and said a fervent prayer to the Virgin – told them to avoid. (204-05)

Predictably, perhaps, the consequences are disastrous. For not only is Marseille the city of the proud and prejudiced haute bourgeoisie, of international diplomats, and of plain good Christian folk like the Soulases, it also harbors an underworld of darkness and danger, of sin, violence, and perversion, the signs of which Charging Elk, in the throes of his cultural dislocation, tragically misreads. As René Soulas had sensed at an early stage, Charging Elk’s ignorance of the surrounding culture makes him vulnerable, “like a puppy. He could be led by anyone with nothing more than the promise of a treat” (143). Left to his own resources, Charging Elk is sucked into the very world of evil and perdition the Christian Soulas had warned him against. It is a world treacherously decked out in the paraphernalia of Christian goodness: the American gay bars and whorehouses out are located on Rue Sainte. Though Charging Elk intuitively senses the evil of the place, in his need for warmth and sexual comfort, a reprieve from devastating loneliness, he finds himself drawn to a young prostitute dressed in a Madonna-like light blue gown and actually named Marie, whom he is the first to bring to orgasmic ecstasy. He is admitted to the luxury brothel by exception, mostly because his exotic, darkly oriental physique is erotically intriguing to the gay bartender. Marie offers an antidote of hope to the apocalyptic nightmares of tribal destruction and lone survival which haunt him: [H]e approached the cliff, too weak to even attempt to jump, he looked down and he saw his people lying in a heap at the bottom. They lay in all positions and directions – men, women, and children, even old ones. They lay like buffaloes that had been driven over the cliff by hunters, and Charging Elk understood why he had been weeping. As he stood and looked down at his people, he heard the wind roar in his ears like a thousand running buffaloes, but in the roar he heard a voice, a familiar voice, a Lakota voice, and it said, “You are my only son.” And when he turned back to his village at the Stronghold, there was nothing there – no people, no horses or lodges, not even the rings of rock that held the lodge covers down – not even one smoldering fire pit. Everything was gone. (235)

His recurrent visions of massive slaughter, of “a catastrophe beyond belief” (252), later turn out to have been predictive images of the Wounded Knee massacre of December 1890, part of a collective tribal unconscious, the “real world” (252) of dreams and cultural memory accessible to Charging Elk even in his transnational diaspora. Such nightmares lead to increasing doubts about Wakan Tanka, and fears that he may have lost his warrior’s courage and the tribal sense of solidarity and sharing, “replaced by an attention only to himself and his own desires” (243). As Charging Elk increasingly seeks out the company and sexual comforts of Marie, receiving signals of soft feelings in return, he actually dares

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entertain hopes of bringing her into his life, even of marriage. But a disastrous turn of events cruelly disrupts his hopes: Marie is terrorized and blackmailed by the homosexual Breteuil, the most famous restaurant chef in Marseille, who is riveted to the soul by Charging Elk’s beauty and who enlists Marie in a plot to drug his prey so he can have oral sex with him. When Charging Elk is roused from unconsciousness in the middle of the sexual assault, he stabs his rapist to death and slits his throat. As he leaves in fear and panic, he finds himself (much like the Indian Killer in Sherman Alexie’s 1996 novel of the same title) singing a song, “and he knew he had become invisible” (278). Praying to Wakan Tanka in Lakota, he feels “renewed as he waited to die” (280). The renewal comes from his return to his tribal unconscious at the moment of crisis, for the act of murder had not been a conscious decision, but an immediate knowledge: “he knew what he must do” (277). The murder thus can be read as his second act of existential re-affirmation of his Indian identity (like Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas he might have said, “what I killed for, I am” [461]). Charging Elk has acted out of a deeply embedded tribal cultural obligation to kill evil when one comes across it – he believes he has killed, not a man, but an evil spirit, a siyoko, which had taken possession of a man’s body. In his tantalized religious and existential anxiety, the specific evil of Breteuil and the general evil of white destruction of tribal life and culture become momentarily indistinguishable: “to kill one was worth a hundred acts of counting coup on the enemies,” he muses, before he surrenders to the “resigned serenity” of knowing he had passed Wakan Tanka’s “final test” and that in his act of killing the siyoko he had “fulfilled his time on earth” (297-98).

Unbridgeable Divide: “Savage Code” versus “The Laws of Civilization” In ironic rehearsal Charging Elk’s fate is once again taken up by wellintentioned but ultimately ineffectual whites like the dandy socialist StCyr, the guilt-ridden American diplomat Franklin Bell, and the naively trustful Christian Soulas. Bell may have been caught between the rigidities of French and American bureaucracies, he has also committed an act of “immense stupidity and incompetence” (as well as fundamental human failure) in dealing with the Indian: “he had simply willed the Indian out of his life” (286-87). Haunted by guilty nightmares of Charging Elk coming to his door swinging a bloody hatchet, he consents to give an interview to St-Cyr that he knows will be “political suicide” but that at least will serve to relieve his conscience. Learning all the sordid and sensational details of

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the case, St-Cyr is sensitive enough to feel ambiguous about who is the villain, who the victim, yet is determined to make the case into a cause celèbre. St-Cyr’s “sincere” attempt to help Charging Elk is not only seriously flawed by self-interest – he hopes to ride to glory as a journalist on the back of Charging Elk – but also caters to and reinforces all the cultural stereotypes: “All of Marseille would come to know the exotic creature from America and his strange habits, his pathetic attempts to become a Frenchman, and the clash between his savage code and the laws of civilization” (295). The ensuing events highlight the un-crossable divide between tribal and western culture. When St-Cyr visits Charging Elk in his cell, for all his good intentions he is simply too deeply entrenched in Euro-American cultural preconceptions to grasp the Indian’s perspective: [N]othing [Charging Elk] said made sense. It was as if the savage’s brain worked differently from ordinary men’s. […] St-Cyr listened to the strange, almost chanting language with fascination. He wished desperately that he could understand what was going on inside the indien’s head. He knew that the real story lay somewhere behind that lean, coppery face, those obsidian eyes, those wide, thin lips that mouthed the incomprehensible words. (303-04)

Welch’s portrait of St-Cyr is riveted with irony, yet his “overheated journalism” – mired in flagrant stereotype: “child of nature, or born killer?” reads one of his headlines – manages to whip up massive public indignation against the French justice system as well as widespread sympathy for the “innocent savage” who many feel was being tried “for a crime that was not rightfully his own.” In the end, however, the scandal is “too exotic to be a part of their lives” (335). St-Cyr’s efforts may help to save Charging Elk from being guillotined, ultimately his triumph is empty and he ends up feeling he has “betrayed” Charging Elk: “I looked into his eyes as he was being led away in chains and I saw a living death. May his God forgive us all” (343). No such sympathy governs the court session, where Charging Elk stands indicted as “not only an illegal immigrant but a savage who could never comprehend the necessary rules and obligations of a civilized society” (315). During the court proceedings charitable Christians like René and Madeleine Soulas may be outraged at the lies and distortions of the charges, but ultimately their good intentions are ineffectual and their testimonies clownish for their naiveté. In addition, Charging Elk has been completely abandoned by the American government – Bell has been shipped back to the U.S. and no American witness testifies at the trial. During the nine days of the trial all Euro-American stereotyped pre- and misconceptions about Indians come to the fore (one doctor claiming that, as savages have smaller brains, Charging Elk did not have “the mental

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capacity to understand the rules of a civilized society” [323]), as Charging Elk stands before a wholly white “God-fearing” French jury (“not a dark face among them”) who easily identify the culprit with the multicultural ‘other’ living in Le Panier, “a hellhole of North Africans and Turks, of thieves and cutthroats” (329). When Charging Elk himself takes the stand to address the court, two world orders clash, completely and irremediably. Not having the language to cross the cultural gap, he lapses into Lakota to explain his tribal obligation to kill evil, but inadvertently reduces himself to an ironic and pathetic spectacle: “Many times in the past four years Wakan Tanka had made him invisible to the people in this land, but now he wanted them to see him, to hear him. And in some way, the Great Mystery had opened their ears to his words. And so he thanked Wakan Tanka for giving him the good words that opened the hearts of these people and allowed them to see into his own” (338). Charging Elk is tragically mistaken: his words are perceived as “gibberish” (341) and only meet with an outburst of laughter. Caught in the interstice between tribal value and French law – from a tribal perspective the question of guilt or innocence as defined by French law or ethics simply does not apply – Charging Elk is inevitably found guilty of murder. As the judge passing the verdict observes: [T]he man who now stands convicted of murder is not of a civilized race of people. It is clear that he does not hold the same beliefs and principles that contribute to an orderly, law-abiding society […] he simply cannot conform to even the most elementary code of conduct – and therefore will always remain a threat to society. (341)

Sentenced to life imprisonment in high-security detention, Charging Elk spends the next ten years in La Tombe, only to meet with another quirk of the French system: after a decade of exemplary behavior, he is inexplicably granted a pardon by the Republic of France, which now admits it had mistakenly tried Charging Elk as a U.S. citizen, whereas in effect, as a member of a tribal nation, he was not subject to the legal agreements between France and the United States. Hence he is now reclassified from common criminal to political prisoner, given full rights as a French citizen (403), and told: “You have been illegally held all these years” (361). His cause is taken up by the Catholic Relief Society of Marseille, which places him with a simple farmer’s family near Bordeaux. There, incredibly, Charging Elk is given a second chance of life, love and happiness: he slowly accommodates to family and farming life, finds a balance between the spiritual comfort to be found in the white man’s church and the legacy of his own tribe (he makes horsehair braided belts with Lakota designs), falls in love with the farmer’s daughter, and manages to persuade the un-

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willing father that a marriage between a white girl and a “savage” may not be such an “ungodly union” after all (400).

Buffalo Bill Redux: “Lakota, wherever you might go” Welch imagines all this with considerably more plausibility than such a mere summary would suggest, as he moves his novel to its conclusion. Reestablished in Marseille, Charging Elk becomes relatively well-assimilated into French domestic and working life. Not only is he to become the father of a mixed-blood child, he habitually attends church and has taken up drawing, producing meritorious sketches of life on the Dakota plains. Working on the docks, loading and unloading ships, for the first time he feels accepted by his fellow workers (he is a member of a labor union) and recovers a lost sense of community and solidarity: “he was part of a group of men who looked out for each other. And he liked it” (416). Welch forces Charging Elk to face the inevitable moment of choice, as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show returns to Marseille on its 1905 tour. Welch underlines how, since the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, Buffalo Bill has recast his “spectacular simulation” of the battle at Little Big Horn, so as to stage it emphatically as a triumphalist narrative of white supremacy and retribution, a “representational construction” (Kroes 7071) of American history sharply at odds with Charging Elk’s personal recollection of the ‘real’ event. Overcome with the familiar scenes of the show’s performance, Charging Elk notes a change in the show’s final act: Only the last act was new to Charging Elk – Pahushka [Buffalo Bill] played a scout for the army and ended up going into a patch of fake trees and brush, where he was ambushed by an Indian. After hand-to-hand combat, Buffalo Bill drew his knife and ran it through the Indian’s heart. Then he knelt over the prone Indian, and after much busywork in the bushes, help up the bloody scalp of the Indian. The announcer said, in French, “The first scalp for Custer!” And the audience cheered and stamped their feet, a rhythmic drumming that shook the stands. Charging Elk remembered the real fight with Custer on the Greasy Grass, the terror that ran through the village as the soldiers attacked. He had been a boy of ten winters then and had hidden with his mother and brother and sister in the cottonwoods along the creek, listening to the popping of the rifles and watching the big cloud of dust kicked up by the hundreds of horses drift over the village. Even now he could see that cloud of dust that blotted out the sun. (426)

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Fig. 3. Cover of Map Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Tour of France. 1905. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming; MS6 6:A 3/12.

Charging Elk is now granted the possibility of return from exile to his ‘home,’ an opportunity that has governed his dreams for the past sixteen years. For all his slow acculturation and his slow process of reinventing himself, he realizes he is still a stranger in a strange country: “Even now he walked on the edge of the crowds, as solitary as he had ever been” (428). Throughout his years in France he had been tantalized by dreams of tribal destruction and an enigmatical voice whispering in his ear: “You are my only son” (434). As he now watches a new generation of Lakotas perform in the show, he realizes the dream of Lakota annihilation must have been wrong and that even all his prayers to Wakan Tanka may have been “futile” (427). Meeting the Lakotas after the show, Charging Elk is now looked at with confusion and suspicion by his own people – “you are still one of us, yet you are different” (431) – and learns to his dismay how thoroughly his people (now carrying Anglicized names) have been subjected to a process of acculturation in the U.S.: forced schooling has wrenched them away

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from their tribal culture, as they have been forbidden to speak Lakota, to pray to Wakan Tanka, to perform their holy ceremonies, and have been massacred in the ways his dreams of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee had prophesied. Yet Charging Elk finds tentative hope in affirming the survival of the Lakota people: “you tell me that we have survived, pitiful and powerless as we are […] we will go on because we are a strong people, we Lakotas” (435). But he also resists returning home to the U.S., as he realizes the depth of his connectedness to his new life and land: “This is my home now,” he says, “[…] I speak the language of these people. My wife is one of them and my heart is her heart. She is my life now and soon we will have another life and the same heart will sing in all of us” (436). Affirming the universality of his “heartsong,” Charging Elk yet remains unmistakably Lakota. As one of the younger Indians at Buffalo Bill’s show tells him: “You are not a stranger. You are Lakota, wherever you might go. You are one of us always.” (435-36) Charging Elk accepts he has found a new home and a new identity in France. But though his new home is very much a home-in-difference, his new identity is ultimately hybrid or amphibian only in a limited sense: underneath the gloss of his assimilation to French and Christian life lies a core of Indian-ness ineradicable, a tribal memory inerasable even by spectacular simulations like Buffalo Bill’s. In a sense, his home is where his heart is, and his Lakota-ness has become a ‘portable’ identity, dissociated from its local roots, transportable across national and cultural boundaries. Paradoxically, his exile has ensured the preservation of his Lakota-ness (unlike that of the reservation Indians who have been subject to a process of cultural erosion), even as it has subjected him to a process of slow, subtle but inevitable adaptation. Yet his very difference has ensured the survival of his Lakota identity. It is precisely the degree to which he has resisted the pressures of assimilation and has remained loyal to the memory of his tribe’s history and spiritual and cultural beliefs which has made possible his endurance: in the sense that he remains ineradicably Lakota, he is indeed his tribe’s lonely survivor, its “only son.” But if his loyalty to tribal memory and beliefs has been his saving grace, permitting him to endure against all odds, still Welch moves to affirmation of a universal heartsong which transcends Indian-ness: ultimately, Charging Elk’s endurance is rooted in his human dignity, humility, and reverence for the gift of life, regardless of whether that gift is bestowed by Wakan Tanka or a Christian God. In the last analysis, it is his unborn child who will have to face the real challenges of intercultural and transnational amphibiousness.

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Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: U of Stanford P, 1988. 166-84. Berkhofer Jr., Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indians from Columbus to the Present. New York: Random, 1978. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17-57. Kroes, Rob. “European Responses to American Mass Culture: The Case of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” First Nations of North America: Politics and Representation. Ed. Hans Bak. Amsterdam: VU UP, 2005. 52-71. Mukherjee, Bharati. “An Invisible Woman.” Saturday Night 96 (1981): 36-40. Opitz, Andrea. “‘The Primitive Has Escaped Control’: Narrating the Nation in The Heartsong of Charging Elk.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 18 (2006): 98-106. Welch, James. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Wright, Richard. Native Son. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

Arabs Looking Back: William Peter Blatty’s Autobiographical Writing NICOLE WALLER

William Peter Blatty as an Arab American Writer In 1959, William Peter Blatty published the semi-autobiographical novel Which Way to Mecca, Jack? Written in a mocking tone and brimming with scenes bordering on slapstick, the book describes the life of the narrator and protagonist William Blatty, who grows up in the United States as the child of Lebanese immigrant parents. Blatty’s experiences as an ethnic outsider in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s result in an ‘Arab complex’ which worsens in Hollywood, where he auditions for movie parts as an all-American hero but is rejected on the grounds that he is not ‘The Type.’ In an allusion to his ethnicity, producers suggest he could play minor roles in Biblical films if it were not for his blue eyes, which stand in the way of a “realistic” performance as an Arab (54). To prove his Americanness, Blatty enlists with the U.S. Information Service (USIS), a government agency responsible for promoting American policies and culture outside the United States. Against his will, Blatty is sent to Lebanon as a press expert. Upon returning from a two-year stay in Beirut, where he has come to terms with his Arab heritage, Blatty takes revenge on Hollywood by masquerading as ‘Prince Xeer’ of Saudi Arabia, playing on America’s worst Orientalist stereotypes and thereby effortlessly gaining access to the insider parties, film studios, and nightclubs which were barred to William Blatty, the blue-eyed Arab American with a talent for acting. Which Way to Mecca has received very little critical attention. In a 2008 collection of essays designed to counteract the scarcity of scholarly work on Blatty’s novels in general, only one article briefly discusses Which Way to Mecca as a portrayal of life “at the intersection of two cultures” (Goodrich 21). Most critics agree that Blatty’s success as a writer is based on his novel The Exorcist (1971), which does not seem to have an Arab American theme. Yet the demon which possesses the American girl Regan in The Exorcist is of Assyrian origin and is associated with the landscape of Iraq. Philip Simpson has argued that The Exorcist

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exploits a paranoid anxiety or fear of cultural assimilation by signifying the agent of possession as foreign, specifically Middle Eastern, in the context of growing tension between East and West. […] The images of contagion and disease and the corrupted body in the novel carry with them an unsettling suggestion – that viral or foreign elements must be exorcized without bargaining, without negotiation. […] Blatty has given the American public an enduring supernatural melodrama of the impossibility of assimilation. (42)

Such a reading suggests Blatty’s own wish to assimilate, his experiences of the impossibility of bridging cultural divides, and an essentially conservative desire to cleanse the American nation from the Arab threat within. Arab American literary critics, who have focused more on Blatty’s autobiographical work, have likewise taken issue with the way Blatty addresses his Lebanese heritage. Evelyn Shakir, who analyzes Blatty’s portrayal of his mother in Which Way to Mecca, has claimed that Blatty’s defense against the pain of being excluded from mainstream U.S.-American society “is to burlesque himself, his Arab background, and the mother who embodies it and is thus the source of his humiliation” (9). Shakir honors Blatty’s exposure of Western stereotypes in his charade as Prince Xeer but aptly comments: “It is not quite clear, however, just whom the joke is on. For, of course, Hollywood has not accepted Blatty, the Arab-American, but Prince Xeer, a personification of its own romantic (and essentially Orientalist) fantasies about the East” (10). She observes that the very stereotypes which Blatty exposes “seem to be virtually the only way he himself can speak of Arabs” (10). Tanyss Ludescher calls Which Way to Mecca “a farce, a self-mocking parody of ethnic life, which uses humor to dispel the angst of being different and foreign. By making himself ridiculous, Blatty can appear less frightening and alien to his all-American audience” (102). While Which Way to Mecca was written in the late 1950s, in the age of racial segregation and the Cold War, Blatty reworks some of his memories in the 1973 autobiography I’ll Tell Them I Remember You. This book creates a fuller and deeper portrait of Blatty’s mother, who had died in 1967, and ends in Exorcist fashion with poltergeist occurrences and Blatty’s final assertion that his mother is communicating with him across the boundary separating the living and the dead. Evelyn Shakir comments on the differences between the two depictions of the Arab mother figure in Blatty’s autobiographical writing: In the first, out of embarrassment, pain, or the desire for a quick buck, he has let outsiders (or the outsider in himself) dictate his mother’s portrait, has in fact claimed to see her as would an amused, detached, but not unkindly Western spectator. In the second, for all its supernatural hocus-pocus and its need to believe in his mother’s superhuman powers, Blatty has given us a more complex and human sketch of his mother, has reduced her – in her earthly life – to more lifelike dimensions. I’ll Tell Them I Remember You really tells us that it is never too late to

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move beyond caricature to begin to see others – specifically women – as more than just the projections of one’s own needs and fantasies. (11)

In calling for an in-depth portrayal of Arab characters and histories, Arab American critics are pointing to the potential of immigrant autobiographies to bridge both the gap between Arab and American heritages and identities and the gap which Pierre Nora has analyzed as the tension between memory and history. I will argue that Blatty addresses this gap in I’ll Tell Them I Remember You but dramatically refuses the creation of a lieu de mémoire for the Arab American community in the earlier Which Way to Mecca. Blatty’s mediative strategies for addressing the immigrant experience and creating an ethnic community in the United States in I’ll Tell Them I Remember You can be seen as crucial precursors for the strategies employed in contemporary ethnic American writing. Nevertheless, I will claim that it is the earlier book, the ‘self-mocking parody,’ which is formally and politically most significant. Contemporary Arab American writing has moved beyond the need for lieux de mémoire which ‘merely’ strengthen Arab ethnic identity in the United States or nostalgically hark back to a better world in the Middle East. Rather, Arab American writers are currently situating themselves and their literature in the uncomfortable force field of international or even global politics. It is exactly this shift to a more political form of writing which Blatty prepares in Which Way to Mecca by ‘looking back’ in two senses. First, Blatty depicts Arab characters returning the Western gaze. Instead of using this constellation to construct a more ‘authentic’ Arab counter narrative, however, he sends both his Arab and his American characters into an endless loop of distorted looks. By refusing to construct characters with depth, Blatty draws attention not to the issue of identity as subjectivity, but to the larger context, the structures, in which his characters are situated. This context, in a second step, is examined by ‘looking back’ in time. Again, Blatty does not use the past in order to create meaningful personal biographies which could stand in for the ethnic group. Instead, he looks back on a past of political struggle between Western and Middle Eastern societies by invoking the crusades as a context for the interpretation of the Suez crisis and the Lebanon crisis of the 1950s. While I’ll Tell Them I Remember You expresses the potential of Arab Americans to serve as cultural mediators, Which Way to Mecca highlights how such mediation opens up the community for potential political exploitation.

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I’ll Tell Them I Remember You as a Lieu de Mémoire The transition from the rural society of his Lebanese immigrant mother to his own urban life in New York places Blatty’s biography not only between two cultures, but between two historical moments: on the one hand, his mother’s Lebanese memories conjure up a life which retains the markings of a social order that is, in Nora’s words, “unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth” (8). This link between present and past is both magical and unquestioned. Although the patterns of this past constantly renew themselves, they do so within a particular frame and meaning, consolidating a group. Blatty’s mother’s mythical Lebanon, evoked as the frame for her family’s life, appears as such a force to her young son. In contrast, the urban squalor of Blatty’s impoverished Brooklyn life creates not only a rupture with his distant homeland, but with his mother’s sense of the past. In Nora’s terminology, this distanced and fragmented view of the past emerges in the form of history, marked by “the loss of a single explanatory principle” (17). Lieux de mémoire, then, are sites created to give us a glimpse of memory’s powers in the face of our loss of memory, bridges to a past that seems to have slipped away from the fragmentation of our daily lives. According to Nora, individual writers can function as such bridges: “when memory is no longer everywhere, it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapture it through individual means. The less memory is experienced collectively, the more it will require individuals to undertake to become themselves memory-individuals” (16). Immigrant writers often face the task of becoming and creating lieux de mémoires for their communities, linking the traditions of home with a new life. Nora characterizes such lieux as “mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Möbius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile” (19). I’ll Tell Them I Remember You becomes exactly such a site in its linkage of Arab and American, mother and son, dead and living. In one instance, Blatty’s mother takes her son to a Brooklyn Heights site overlooking the East River and relates how, at sundown in the village of her birth, the angels would visit the earth with a great peace for twenty minutes each night. On their Brooklyn park bench, Blatty and his mother succeed in feeling the same stillness as the sun sets. It is such a connection across great divides which Blatty achieves when he communicates with his mother after her death, and it is a similar impulse which makes him, as a little boy, attempt to overcome his own aging:

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I would focus on a moment of time in the future, something precise and easy to remember, such as 3 P.M. on January 7, 1950, which projected me well into deep senility but was also my birthday to the minute; and at a moment in the present, one that could also be easily fixed on and remembered years later in 1950, I would concentrate deeply and terrifically in an effort to “beam” a thought to myself in that moment in the future: I would think a message “at” myself. And when that future moment came, my older self would reverse the process, thinking to that moment in the past when I knew that I had been thinking of the moment that was now. I believe that I was harboring the wild hope that the head-on collision of beams of thought might produce an effect like that of crying “Shazam!” and would turn me into Captain Marvel or even Captain Future, if I held down the thoughts to under twenty-five words. I would even have settled for Captain Quince. (Blatty, I’ll Tell Them 68-69)

Blatty’s scheme creates a connection between present and future, past and present, in one individual body, reversing time and magically conflating different periods of human growth and development. Captain Marvel is a popular comic figure, double self to a young boy who can turn himself into an adult superhero through a word spell by invoking the name of the magician who ‘made’ him, Shazam. Captain Future and his universe invoke the desire to project oneself forward and backward through time. But while both superheroes are orphans, Captain Quince is Blatty’s way of invoking his own Lebanese heritage, since his mother is a peddler of Lebanese quince jelly. The wish to travel through time and connect an older and younger version of the self through magical words is thus expanded to include the wish to connect Lebanese and American worlds and transform the immigrant experience into a site of growth and empowerment. In this respect, Blatty is a precursor to contemporary writers such as Junot Díaz, who describes his narrative The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as the attempt to cast a counterspell of words that can transform the pain of colonial Caribbean history, political corruption, and the Dominican immigrant experience in the United States. While Díaz’s book constitutes the narrator’s “very own counterspell” (Díaz, Brief Wondrous Life 7), the “number-one hero” of its immigrant protagonist Oscar Wao is Shazam (14). Díaz comments: I was thinking about how in the world to describe the extreme experience of being an immigrant in the United States, the extreme experience of coming from the Third World and suddenly appearing in New Jersey. […] Every language that I was deploying, every language system, fell apart. […] But science fiction, fantasy, and comic books are meant to do this kind of stupid stuff, they are meant to talk about these extreme, ludicrous transformations. (“In Darkness” 15)

Díaz claims that popular opinion of the normalcy of Third-World suffering figuratively associates the Dominican Republic with the boy Billy Batson and the United States with the superhero Captain Marvel. His own work, then, attempts to deconstruct this contrast by linking the political

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problems of the Dominican Republic with an invasive U.S. foreign policy and showing how the two sites are interlinked both culturally and politically. Thus the immigrant writer embodies not the boy or the superhero, not the country of origin or the United States, but the magical words between them: The joke is you’re neither Billy Batson or Captain Marvel, you’re basically shazam!, you’re the word, you’re that lightning which transforms, that runs back and forth between them and holds them together, and I think part of this narrative was attempting to write the lightning, because I don’t think I could've done anything else […]. I felt what I really was was that thing which holds these two guys together, that makes their transformation possible. (Díaz, “In Darkness” 17)

Despite Blatty’s early exploration of themes urgently relevant for contemporary writers like Díaz, I’ll Tell Them I Remember You veers uneasily back and forth between the early Arab American strategy of total assimilation and the wish to retain the Arab mother’s presence even beyond death. Blatty’s time in Lebanon is described on a few brief pages. The passages foreground the poverty of many Lebanese and honor Blatty’s parents’ courage to seek a better life for their children in the United States. It is in this context that Blatty situates his mother’s naturalization interview, in which she tells the American judge that the replacement for the American President in case of his death is ‘the President’s son’: The judge’s red hair matched the color of his laughter. My mother laughed with him, uncertain as to why, and yet genuinely merry. Then the judge asked, “Why do you want to be a citizen?” And she answered, “For my children.” The judge said, “You pass, Mrs. Blatty.” (125-26)

In The Exorcist, the alien presence becomes a threat to American life and the future of the American nation, embodied in the child Regan. In I’ll Tell Them I Remember You, the U.S. nobly opens itself up to the Arab immigrant despite her ignorance about the American political system and the English language. Both parties, the American judge and the Arab mother, place their hopes in the American-born generation, the children. Which Way to Mecca refuses to resolve the tension between the unassimilable and threatening ‘other’ and the strategy of gradual assimilation/naturalization. Instead, the book creates an endless series of grotesque mirror images between Arabs and Americans. Yet it is precisely this troubling hall of mirrors which allows for new approaches to the past that can serve contemporary Arab American writers’ current agenda, which is marked by an urgent search for a literature which formally and in its contents expresses the community’s situatedness in the force field of international politics.

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From the Crusades to the Suez Crisis: Which Way to Mecca, Jack? and International Politics As a recent special issue of MELUS on Arab American literature demonstrates, both the chronology of Arab immigration to the United States and the development of Arab American writing have, by now, been well established and documented. Scholars conceptualize Arab immigration in terms of waves, beginning in the 1880s with predominantly Christian immigrants, mostly unskilled workers and peddlers from the area of Greater Syria, and picking up speed after the abolition of U.S. immigration quotas in 1967, when large numbers of Arab immigrants, many of them Muslim, educated, and politically aware, came as refugees. Members of the first wave, who came from an area then under Ottoman rule, gradually came to embrace the concept of assimilation and, throughout various court cases, attempted to prove their racial and political acceptability as U.S. citizens in a country tying citizenship to the status of racial ‘whiteness.’ Members of the later waves more often took a political, anticolonial, and nationalist stance (see Suleiman; Samhan; also Ludescher). As Tanyss Ludescher argues, Arab American writing has undergone similar processes of change and adjustment, moving from questions of immigration and assimilation to issues of international politics and the relationship between the United States and the nations of the Middle East. In the early twentieth century, members of the Mahjar movement such as Kahlil Gibran, Mikhail Naimy, and Ameen Rihany merged Arab literary traditions with American transcendentalism and Romanticism, producing works both in Arabic and English which were to serve as a bridge between what the group saw as progressive American political and social values and a vibrant Middle Eastern spirituality (see Ludescher 95). From this time up to the 1950s, Arab American writing frequently took the form of poetry or poetic meditations. In addition, immigrant autobiographies provided insight into the gradual process of assimilation the community was undergoing (see Ludescher 98). Scholars of Arab American literature generally agree that this assimilative process culminated in the works of American-born writers like Vance Bourjaily, Eugene Paul Nassar, and William Peter Blatty, who “saw themselves as mainstream writers and did not identify as Arab Americans” (Ludescher 101). Since the 1980s, Arab American literature has entered a process of consolidation and extension, branching out into fiction, drama, critical essays, and hip hop poetry. Frequently confronted with the impact of political events in the Middle East, Arab American writers have also begun to produce highly political work. In a recent interview, Arab American writer Khaled Mattawa ties together this double impulse towards for-

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mal innovation and political involvement by calling for “substance, not laments, or lyricism” (142). Mattawa envisions alternatives both to the assimilative stance of immigrant autobiographies and to the earlier nostalgic tropes employed by Arab American writers: “The return to the ancestral homeland has been too well documented, and has become unsurprising. Plus, many Arab American writers were exoticizing their kin, and in that sense Orientalist, innocently so, but not less condescending. Though of Arab ancestry, they really did not know what they looked at” (143). As Lisa Suhair Majaj has observed, Arab American writers are now moving from preservation to transformation (qtd. in Ludescher 108). In their introduction to the special edition of MELUS, Salah D. Hassan and Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman assert: “a critical understanding of Arabs in the U.S. must move beyond the unifying story of migration, and the concomitant stories of assimilation and acculturation, which place so much emphasis on cultural particularisms and neglect the political determinations of Arabs both in terms of U.S. domestic racial policies and foreign affairs” (5). Current Arab American writers, who have long called for an inclusion of Arab American voices into the field of postcolonialist theory and literature, are searching for ways in which to respond to both U.S. and Middle Eastern policies in a political vein. Recently, however, Hassan and KnopfNewman have argued that both postcolonialism and ethnic identity politics are based on models of national awakening and have become too limited for describing global political processes (9). In line with this observation, David Williams sees the most recent generation of Arab American writers tracing “global webs of corrosive power” (59). Yet, as Malini Johar Schueller observes, “there is a danger that relatively neutral terms such as transnationalism and cosmopolitanism can displace more politically charged terms such as colonialism and imperialism” (Schueller 488). In light of these developments, Which Way to Mecca seems an oddly contemporary book. It addresses the impasse of contemporary identity politics through the trickster-like figure of William Blatty, a flat character who denies depth and authenticity not only to himself, but to virtually all the characters around him. John Goodrich has remarked that the book “could have easily been categorized as neocolonialist condescension of Arabs and the Middle East generally if Blatty did not skewer virtually everyone that is mentioned in his book. His American controllers and handlers seem as incompetent and strange as the Lebanese that surround him” (20). Blatty’s endless charade of ridiculous identities reverberates mischievously with Hassan and Knopf-Newman’s assessment of identity politics in Arab American literature: “Any effort to challenge a myth by

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asserting a more authentic representation risks the production of a new myth” (5). Instead of risking the production of myths, Blatty begins by deconstructing both the notion of Arab Americans as an alien ‘race’ and the easy solution of a hybrid Arab American cultural identity. Race is addressed in Blatty’s frequent hints at both his mother’s and his own brown skin color. The Arab American desire for whiteness is explored in his mother’s breaking up of the friendship young William forges with the African American girl Frankie (21) and in William’s secret wish of being a pale-faced Irishman. Although it seems that his desire for racial whiteness plays itself out in his marriage to the Irish girl Peggy, Blatty again turns the tables when an Arab ethnics professor asserts the primacy of Arabness by “expounding a rare racial theory, the general drift of which was that the Irish were descendants of the Arabs” (211). While Hollywood’s denial of William the blue-eyed Arab threatens to push Blatty back across the racial divide, his own conviction that his ‘tan’ and his light eyes should pose no contradiction asserts a borderline position. Indeed, Blatty begins his autobiographical first chapter by confusing racial categories of descent and then declaring them beside the point: “My mother is an Arab, which would make me half Arab, except that my father was an Arab too. But already I digress” (13). Throughout the book, the solution of a hybrid Arab American identity is rejected by the Americans around Blatty unless it can be exploited for political purposes. During training at USIS, Blatty regularly has to undergo the “Brainwashing Hour” with an American teacher who would pounce upon us individually with such irrelevant questions as “Why do you Americans hate us Syrians?” […] “When are you going to stop lynching Negroes in Akron?” […] “Why don’t you give Puerto Rico back to the Puerto Ricans?” […] “Who does your laundry, you dirty war-mongering capitalist?” It was supposed to train us to keep cool, keep smiling, and keep marshaling succinct, telling arguments in defense of U.S. policy. Most important of these, though, was the injunction to keep smiling. (67)

These ‘irrelevant’ questions, ostensibly spoken in the voice of the enemy to give the trainees the opportunity to refute them, are never answered or contradicted in the book. The act of assuming an – unrefuted – enemy position creates a space of double meanings which exposes the U.S. officials while it allows for the simultaneous existence of two perfectly opposed political messages. Blatty thus indirectly places Arab/American relations into a wider political context of neo-imperialism and capitalist expansion and creates exactly the doubled space of seemingly contradictory positions which is denied to him as an Arab and an American. Ironically, his teacher’s impersonation of an Arab interlocutor seems to deny

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Blatty the possibility of an Arab American identity from the point of view of an Arab: “Well, now, Mr. Blatty, you’re an American, aren’t you?” “Well, my parents were Arabs and–” “Oh, so you’re an Arab!” “Uh – not exactly. I mean, I’m an Arab-American and–” “What do you mean, you’re an Arab-American? Either you’re an Arab or you’re an American. Now which are you?” “I – I’m not sure.” “You’re not sure? What do you mean you’re not sure? You work for the American Embassy, don’t you?” “Yes, I’m with the U.S. Information Agency.” “I see. So your job is to gather information about us and relay it back to Washington, is it not? And so aren’t you simply a spy?” (67-68)

Throughout his training and his stay in Lebanon, this question, meant to steel Blatty for his role, likewise remains unanswered. In fact, the USIS and the American Embassy place him in an irresolvable bind: Blatty is repeatedly told that second-generation personnel often become a problem for the United States because they tend to either assert their Americanness too harshly or simply “go native” in the country of their ancestors (69-70). Despite the fact that a combined Arab American identity is singled out as a problem in the “Brainwashing Hour,” the Embassy thus wants Blatty to exploit his doubleness by pretending to the position in-between so that he can “scrut” the “brutes” (72). Blatty’s superiors ignore the social intolerance in the United States which fosters second-generation immigrants’ shame of their heritage (69-70). Instead, they seek an instrumentalized doubleness which can be politically exploited. Blatty finds himself back in a theater of stereotyped role-playing: “I had to prove my worthiness as an American by being an Arab. In other words, I had to be Biblical. But if I were Biblical, then how could I be ‘The Type?’” (87). It is another sign of the book’s relevance for current issues that Blatty’s exposure of his superiors’ stance resonates strongly with the debates about the Bush government’s instrumentalization of both Arab American and Muslim American identities in the wake of 9/11. Despite his teacher’s impersonation of aggressive Arabs during the “Brainwashing Hour,” Blatty finds that by and large, the Lebanese he meets are quite fascinated, and often mildly amused, by “the weird spectacle of an Arab who was an American” (222). In Beirut, Blatty plays games with the Lebanese in the same mischievous and often irreverent fashion that he employs vis-à-vis the Americans. Still, he seems to fit in better because his wicked sense of humor appeals to the Arabs around him. Time and again, during crises of diplomacy often created by Blatty himself, he resorts to the humor he shares with many of his fellow Lebanese:

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What had been my greatest crisis in Beirut? […] The Festoon caper. And how did I get out of it? Answer: With the help of Afif, Mahmoud, the Arab time sense and a bizarre sense of humor. Humor. That was Mahmoud. And how like to Mahmoud was – Eli Fazaha! Both intellectuals, both sophisticates – indeed, how very like! Was this the answer? (204)

After a series of endless “capers,” Blatty concludes that “in coming to grips with the Lebanese, I had come to grips with myself. I was Bill Blatty, Citizen of Space, and people were people were people – anywhere. Anywhere? What about back in the States?” (227-28). Despite, or perhaps because of, Blatty’s triumphant return to Hollywood as Prince Xeer, this question, too, is never fully answered. Having deconstructed racial theories and the easy possibility of being an Arab American in the United States, Blatty’s book presents its own ambivalent answer to the central question – “am I an Arab, an American or a frumious bandersnatch?” (13). Blatty points to the constructedness of his ethnicity by quoting from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” a tour de force of words blended in unusual combinations which retain a threatening ambivalence. It seems that in the tension between Arab and American, Blatty opts for being a “frumious bandersnatch.” As such, instead of diplomatically mediating between the two seeming opposites, creating an assertive Arab American identity, or merely playing the Arab to satisfy the Americans, he highlights the way in which he has become a figure on a chessboard, a signifier in a chain of words. The world Blatty creates links agency not with subjectivity, but with positionality. In capitalizing on the fact that his American superiors or his Hollywood associates fail to see him as an individual, Blatty opens the way for an entirely different analysis. If an in-depth analysis of the subject is precluded, if the chess figure and the signifier function only in their context and through their relations, it is the context which becomes significant. In Which Way to Mecca, this context is political. In a first step, Blatty fights back by casting Arab and American images of each other back and forth in an endless array of mirror images. Which Way to Mecca tells a very different story of Blatty’s mother’s citizenship interview, namely that she refuses to become an American citizen and “craftily” gives wrong answers in order to circumvent her brothers’ pressure to become naturalized (17). Thus Mama becomes the living embodiment of an Arab political identification. Nevertheless, in the epilogue, as a newly reconciled William enthuses about the beauty of life in Lebanon, his mother answers: “What the hell I want with Lebanon? […] I’m American!” (256). The book’s Lebanese and American passages are structured along similar doubles: while William often pretends not to speak Arabic in Lebanon, “Prince Xeer” speaks very little English in Hollywood. William

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describes his childhood as “living in America, all right, but on an island Araby – a body of odd customs entirely surrounded by my mother” (13). His stay in Lebanon is described as life “on an island America – a body of odd customs entirely surrounded by my Ambassador” (13). All of this gives us the impression that, as Khaled Mattawa asserts in the above quoted interview, second-generation Arab American authors in truth frequently did not know “what they looked at.” Yet the solution to such a conundrum is not necessarily taking a more ‘authentic’ look. While Blatty’s strategy of returning the gaze can be read as a political stance in the same way that postcolonialist and feminist critics have asserted the strategy of ‘looking back,’ he does not inscribe a clear Arab counternarrative. This becomes obvious in Blatty’s description of a party which he and his wife feel compelled to organize for the American Embassy staff in Beirut. As a good host, Blatty is expected to furnish his guests with binoculars so that they can look into the windows of the Lebanese residents in the buildings around them. This peeking and spying on Arab private lives is a favorite pastime of the Americans in Beirut and is associated by Blatty with the Orientalist fantasy of uncovering the veiled native body. Blatty the entertainer recommends a peek into the window of a Saudi Arabian man who lives with four wives: “By day the girls would sunbathe in Bikinis, and they didn’t give a Continental State Bank who saw it. But at night, when they left the building for none knows whither, they would be heavily robed and veiled in strict Moslem tradition” (213). While Blatty’s guests are told to ignore the more boring views, such as the window of an old Arab man who plays board games with friends, one of the guests claims to have made a troubling discovery in exactly this window: “He handed over the binoculars and I squinted at where he was pointing. I saw nothing but the old Arab in the nightshirt on the sixth floor, which wasn’t too unusual at all, except that he was training a pair of binoculars on us!” (213). The American’s reaction is horror at the switched positions: “See what happens when you educate the beggars?” (213). Meanwhile, the Arab man and his friends are enjoying the uproar which their act of ‘looking back’ has created: “With my naked eye, I could see the old man in the nightshirt jumping up and down on his balcony, and the men who usually played Boardless Monopoly soon joined him and were passing the binoculars back and forth” (213). Refuting his own position as a potential spy, Blatty’s staging of Arabs returning the gaze neither asserts Orientalist stereotypes nor replace them with a more truthful version of Arab private life. Similarly, Prince Xeer’s visits to the houses of Hollywood celebrities fail to give us an insight into the ‘real lives’ of the Americans he encounters. The old Arab man who looks back at the spying Americans creates an endless loop of image and

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counter-image in which each side sees the other in the act of ‘looking back.’ Although this produces a counter-pressure to the American position, it does not resolve the tensions in any meaningful way. What Blatty’s critics have argued is that such literary deconstructions fail to offer alternative versions which could begin to bridge the gap constructed between Arab and American. But Blatty the writer does suggest such an alternative: in the party scene, Blatty the character withdraws form the circuit by laying down his binoculars and looking at both sides with his ‘naked eye.’ Far from advocating a reified, mediating, or authentic look through Arab American eyes, however, Blatty’s narrative redirects our attention to the second sense of ‘looking back’ by invoking the past. Since we are moving in a world of flat characters and stereotyped subjects, the past which slowly begins to dominate the narrative is not a personal past centering on his mother’s recollections of a Lebanese childhood or his own analysis of growing up Arab American. Placed even before the prologue which begins Blatty’s story with the remark about his Arab lineage, we find an author’s note which begins: “On the morning of July 15, 1958, exactly 754 years following the surrender of Richard the Lionhearted to Saladin, the United States Marines landed on the beaches of Lebanon in what wide-eyed Arab bystanders, unbelieving in their swimsuits, must surely have taken for a Crusader attempt to have another go at it” (7). Like the array of Arabs and Americans looking back and forth, the crusades appear repeatedly in Which Way to Mecca, providing a central metaphor for Arab/American and Arab/European relations. But again, the metaphor takes shape by pointing at its own distortedness. The centrality of the crusades in the book makes it even more remarkable that Blatty should begin with two glaring historical inaccuracies, ironically introduced by the modifier “exactly”: Richard the Lionhearted never “surrendered” to Saladin. The third crusade, marked by the death of the emperor Barbarossa and the military and political encounters between the armies and diplomats of Richard and Saladin, ended in a truce between the two parties which ensured the survival of the Franks in the Middle East but left Jerusalem and the largest part of Palestine in Muslim hands (see Mayer 136). In addition to Blatty’s reinterpretation of a basically balanced struggle which, nevertheless, sharply hurt Saladin’s reputation of being invincible, the dubious invocation of a time exactly 754 years before the crisis of 1958 leads us back not to the third crusade, which ended in 1192, but to the year 1204, the sacking of Constantinople. Diverted in Venice from its itinerary towards Egypt, the European army of the fourth crusade became involved in the Byzantine struggles over the succession to the throne. This resulted in the crusaders’ eventual decision to destroy the city of Constantinople and, in its wake, the Byzan-

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tine Empire. After the city fell to the crusaders, three days of brutal murder and plunder ensued. This attack of Roman Catholic Christians on Eastern Orthodox Christians marked the end of the fourth crusade (see Mayer 180-81). Blatty’s allusions to the third and fourth crusades are set in the context of the deployment of American troops to Lebanon in 1958. Lebanon’s Maronite Christian president, Camille Chamoun, had called for American support to put down a rebellion of Lebanese Muslims. U.S. President Eisenhower’s Operation Blue Bat sent American troops to occupy Beirut and helped Chamoun to quell the uprising. The crisis in Lebanon resulted from earlier disputes, most notably the Suez crisis of 1956, during which the armies of England, France, and Israel attacked Egypt in a conflict over the control of the Suez Canal. Despite military victories won by the attacking armies, they had to withdraw under the pressure of U.S. and U.N. opposition, which resulted in part from U.S. fears of a Soviet involvement on the side of Egypt. The position of Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, supporter of a pan-Arabic (and essentially Muslim) identity for Middle Eastern nations, was strengthened by this outcome. England and France, on the other hand, saw their erstwhile imperial power in the Middle East dwindle. The Lebanon crisis of 1958 resulted from the fact that many Lebanese Muslims wanted their country to associate with the antiWestern, pan-Arabic politics of Egypt and Syria while many Christian Lebanese held on to Lebanon’s link with the West. Reading the crises of 1956 and 1958 in conjunction with the third and fourth crusades, Blatty creates an implicit political polemic on several layers. Like the English and French kings who marched toward the Holy Land during the third crusade, England and France had attacked Egypt in 1956. Like Saladin, who had to accept partial military defeat but nevertheless strengthened the Muslim position vis-à-vis the Christians in the Middle East, Nasser’s military losses were transformed into political capital. Like the Christian troops called to tip the scales in the Byzantine struggle for power during the fourth crusade, American Christians occupied Beirut at the call of an Eastern Christian leader. Blatty’s own biography seemingly sets him up as yet another Christian crusader. His religious background is Catholic, and his work for the U.S. government is meant to “transmute [his] Turkish-coffee-stained soul into the spirit of a modern Holy Land Crusader” (62). When he is hired by USIS, he envisions himself as marked with the label “NOVUM CRUSADERUM” (65). On the other hand, his earliest interactions with American boys at toddler age results in his crushing of the Americans’ lead soldiers (20). In a similar vein, Blatty ends up leading a pro-Nasser demonstration in Lebanon, which he seems to turn around to declare to

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the masses that America is their friend (223). Yet when the crowd initially approaches the building which houses the USIS staff and begins to shout, Blatty “began to shout with them.” In typical fashion, he declares: “I don’t remember what I shouted, because I black out at certain parts of this story” (220). The narrative is interspersed with such tidbits, including the observation that most Arabs regard Lawrence of Arabia “as an utter fraud” (208) and the recounting of a visit of Americans to the crusader castle Krak de Chevalier, which is peppered by an Arab student’s quip that the Arabic inscription above the main entrance reads: “Crusader, go home!” (137). Blatty’s time in Lebanon occurred at a historical moment when the British and French were still attempting to retain traces of their colonial power in the Middle East while the U.S. was gaining power in the region but was still not showing a fully coherent, predictable policy. Blatty’s cautiousness about a stronger American involvement, best exemplified in the invocation of the date 1204 in connection with the American involvement in Lebanon, obviously results from his experiences as an Arab American in the United States. In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Arab American writers and critics have repeatedly pointed out that Americans and their government must acknowledge the political dimension of the conflict instead of reducing it solely to religious or ethnic differences or a question of values. The U.S. government’s attempt at creating an American Islam and predictable Arab American identities which could be used as tools to sway opposition in the Middle East exemplifies the difficulties the Arab American community faces in trying to assert an ‘authentic’ and ‘undistorted’ identity. Blatty’s strategy of ‘looking back’ may offer one possible way to handle this impasse: while he returns the gaze and deconstructs the hall of mirrors as a cabinet of distortion, he redirects our attention not simply to the individual story of an Arab American lineage, but to the historical structures of European/Middle Eastern antagonism, contextualizing the political situation in the Middle East in the 1950s through the history of European attacks on Muslim states. Blatty’s fusion of two historical moments, as well as the allusion to Mecca in the title of his book, acknowledges the religious dimensions of the East/West divide but suggests that both the crises in the 1950s and the crusades must equally be seen as political events. Blatty’s mocking tone and ambivalent political association, however, preclude both the functioning and the exploitation of this past as a “single explanatory principle” in Pierre Nora’s sense. In the author’s note, which introduces the crusader theme and is placed even before Blatty’s personal ‘beginning’ as the son of his parents, Blatty lists two reasons for his having spent time in Lebanon as a member

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of USIS: “the Crusades and my mother” (8). While some critics have focused on the latter part, the former likewise has valuable insights to offer.

Works Cited Blatty, William Peter. Which Way to Mecca, Jack? New York: Bernard Geis, 1959. —. I’ll Tell Them I Remember You. New York: Norton, 1973. Díaz, Junot. “In Darkness We Meet: A Conversation with Junot Díaz.” World Literature Today 82.2 (2008): 13-17. —. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Goodrich, John. “Lebanon, the Fightin’ Irish, and Billy Shakespeare: The Comic Novels of William Peter Blatty.” American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty. Ed. Benjamin Szumskyi. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 18-24. Hassan, Salah D., and Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman. Introduction. MELUS 31.4 (2006): 3-13. Ludescher, Tanyss. “From Nostalgia to Critique: An Overview of Arab American Literature.” MELUS 31.4 (2006): 93-114. Mattawa, Khaled. “An Interview with Khaled Mattawa.” MELUS 31.4 (2006): 135-44. Mayer, Hans Eberhard. Geschichte der Kreuzzüge. 7th ed. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1989. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7-24. Samhan, Helen Hatab. “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab-American Experience.” Arabs in America: Building a New Future. Ed. Michael W. Suleiman. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. 209-26. Schueller, Malini Johar. “Orientalizing American Studies.” American Quarterly 60.2 (2008): 481-89. Shakir, Evelyn. “Arab Mothers, American Sons: Women in Arab-American Autobiographies.” MELUS 17.3 (1991-92): 5-15. Simpson, Philip L. “Fear of the Assimilation of the Foreign Other in The Exorcist.” American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty. Ed. Benjamin Szumskyi. Jefferson: McFarland, 2008. 25-44. Suleiman, Michael W. “Introduction: The Arab Immigrant Experience.” Arabs in America: Building a New Future. Ed. Michael W. Suleiman. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. 1-21. Williams, David. “This Hyphen Called My Spinal Cord: Arab-American Literature at the Beginning of the 21st Century.” World Literature Today 81.1 (2007): 55-63.

Roots Trips and Virtual Ethnicity: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated MITA BANERJEE

Writing about Jewishness, it would seem, is inseparable from addressing the very intersection between the virtual and the real, and more so perhaps than in other cultural and historical contexts. Or rather, in order not to begin this essay with what runs the risk of being a deep-set essentialism, looking at Jewishness may engage the idea of virtuality in historically and culturally specific ways. Precisely because the history of Jewishness in Europe, in the twentieth century, is surrounded by aporia, writing about Jewishness must itself carry with it a form of virtuality. Conversely, looking at articulations of Jewishness may add a new layer to the very debate on virtuality as such. 1 This essay hence will look at the idea of commemorating the past, and of institutions of memory among which are, among many others, both the museum and the literary text. Virtualizing memory, in this context, would relate to the ways in which a museum points, through its architecture or through its framing, at the ways in which the past cannot be contained, in which its memory cannot be institutionalized. It is for this reason that I would like to trace in the following the repercussions, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), of particular historical moments, moments which are necessarily transnational in scope (and hence, perhaps, virtual in this sense as well): the building of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the museum’s recent ‘image campaign,’ and the springing up, in Europe and especially in Eastern Europe, of a heritage industry capitalizing on sites of (lost) Jewishness. This essay is hence concerned with ways of institutionalizing Jewish memory, and the ways in which this institutionalization may, in multiple senses of the term, be ‘virtual.’ If the museum and the image campaign are less virtual than the literary text, they _____________ 1

The idea of postmodernism, of course, is what underlies this argument as a whole; even as Foer’s writing style, in Everything Is Illuminated (2002) as much as in his subsequent novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), is emphatically postmodernist, then, I am not addressing this idea in more detail in this article, since the intersection of postmodernism and the writing of history would, of course, merit a detailed analysis in its own right.

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nevertheless seek, as I will try to argue in the following, to virtualize their own presence in the national design they participate in. Conversely, Foer’s literary text, precisely by aligning itself with historically and culturally material developments (the museum, the heritage industry), intervenes in discourse that are extra-literary, ‘real.’ At the same time, this essay will try to inquire into a specific historical moment: a moment in which ‘old’ forms of institutionalizing memory may have become obsolete, in which the very aesthetic of telling the history of Jewishness must be reconsidered. What is crucial is that this ‘virtualizing’ of Jewishness is emphatically transnational in scope: How else would we be able to account for the same aesthetic form surfacing in cultural texts as dissimilar as a German Jewish advertising campaign, a German museum built by a Polish American architect, and a debut novel written by a Jewish American author?

Green Worms on Toothbrushes: “Not what you expected” The Jewish Museum in Berlin invented a new publicity campaign in 2002: a campaign which was meant to radically challenge whatever it is we expect of ‘Jewishness’: This groundbreaking campaign, commissioned by the Jewish Museum and designed by the PR firm Scholz & Friends, was geared toward creating the most unusual of images: On giant posters of ten by twelve meters, the campaign caught the eye of the unsuspecting passer-by with images far out of the ordinary: a green worm being squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste, a prickly chestnut shell falling open to reveal a golf ball, a bike tube which turns out to be a snake, and a landscape whose cliffs are made of multicolored slice of cake. 2 The slogan accompanying this ‘new image’ campaign, also, could not be more apt: “Not what you have expected” (“Nicht das, was Sie erwarten.”). It seems to me that this new image campaign of the Berlin Jewish Museum bespeaks not only of a strikingly new articulation of Jewish history and presence/present, but also of a particular historical moment. For the poster campaign comes at a time when, according to recent and not so recent polls, the German public (and German youth in particular) are fed up with what they see as the everlasting reiterative discourse of Jewish victimhood and German gentile guilt, or more particularly, the ascription of guilt. The number of visitors of traditional, established sites of memory has plummeted, and they have plummeted on account of what is viewed by many _____________ 2

The copyright for the images referred to in this article lies with the Jewish Museum Berlin; the images are used here with permission.

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as mandatory remembrance, the civic duty of commemorating the past that many young Germans no longer feel responsible for. Memory, the new advertising campaign of the Jewish Museum is now suggesting, needs a new image: Jewishness – and not so much the past, and not so much the reduction of Jewishness to its past, to the Shoah – needs to be advertised: this advertising is itself a novelty, and it is a novelty not only in what seem to be the well-worn trenches of German-Jewish relations. As the website of the Jewish museum describes the campaign: [Description of the posters] with the images ‘seashell’ and ‘fancy cake:’ Those who associate museums with boredom and dust and who understand the Jewish Museum mostly as a Holocaust Memorial, will be surprised by a visit to the [Berlin Jewish] museum. The Jewish Museum is “Not what you have expected.” This message is at the center of the image campaign aimed at reaching not only the traditional museum visitor but also those who rarely or never visit a museum. (Emmerich, my translation)

Advertising – and the commissioning of a PR firm for a campaign for the Berlin Jewish Museum – is itself a novelty; and it is through this politics of advertising that the Jewish Museum in Berlin does not only want to increase its number of visitors, but that it can actually be seen to aim at a profoundly different audience, and audience type: the opening of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, it must be remembered along with the Stelenfeld was among the most highly debated events in recent German (and GermanJewish) history: It was a debate which often seemed to be fixed by the mandatory, the historically zealous and hence ultimately, the predetermined or over-determined: in the quagmire of remembering the past, of establishing monuments which made a German dominant culture and an international audience of witnesses (to this German politics and duty of remembering) to be forever on guard against the crimes of the past, there was nothing about Jewishness which could be unexpected: both parties of this discourse (architectural, institutional) had their roles, roles which had already been circumscribed for them. It is these polarized oppositions that the recent image campaign of the Berlin Jewish Museum seems to step into, and step into in a radically different sense. For the poster campaign highlights the voids in the German discourse on memory in the sense that precisely because of the unspeakable horror and traumata of the past, there can be no chronology, no fixed sequence of events to the telling of Jewish history. Rather, the image campaign turns the absences – even as it respects, honors them in the sense of absences being occasioned by historical trauma – into something radically different. Crucially, the poster campaign fills these gaps, these deliberately introduced breaches in the narrative of Jewishness with humor, and with a

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humor that is not particularly Jewish. There is nothing particularly Jewish about a green worm being squeezed onto a toothbrush. These images, moreover, seem to target an audience from all kinds of walks of life: upscale images of golfing, ‘pedestrian’ images of bike tubes, ‘nature’ images mixed with cake. Advertising Jewishness is clearly not a piece of cake in a country – and city – which has often seemed to be stymied in a debate which long seemed to have lost its dynamism and hence, ultimately, its contemporaneity. As Marlies Emmerich has observed, At the intersection of Schönhauser Allee and Metzer Straße in the Prenzlauer Berg district, passers-by can already glimpse an open coconut revealing the pulp of an orange. Within the next few days, there will be three more images: A green worm is crawling out of a tube of toothpaste; the trunk of a cut-down pine tree reveals an Italian salami; and a faucet drips drops of whipped cream. “We expect observers to be slightly upset. But we can live with that,” says Klaus Siebenhaar, the Jewish Museum’s marketing director, adding, “The campaign is meant as a surprise effect.” By the end of November, there will also be radio features. (My translation)

The ultimate aim of the poster campaign, then, is the rousing of curiosity – a curiosity, which has seemed so absent from the entire discourse of German Erinnerungskultur. It is this curiosity which may be the longneeded infusion into a debate which must never become obsolete, and which has been fossilized precisely of this exhortation: Memory is kept alive, not through the invocation of duty, but through the rousing of curiosity. It is in this sense that the recent image campaign of the German Jewish Museum could be said to virtualize memory: It virtualizes memory by rendering Jewishness unexpected, by divorcing it from the very forms and narratives it has hitherto been articulated in and by: you open a chestnut shell and out comes a golf ball, and the golf ball turns out to be Jewish. Virtual Jewishness – and the German culture of memory with it – is synonymous with rendering Jewishness dynamic, unexpected: “Nicht das, was Sie erwarten.” What is more, there is no longer a particular audience targeted by the Jewish museum: rather, the image campaign – or campaign for a new image – is aimed at universalizing this audience. This dynamizing of target groups, too, is at once a step out of the stymied debate around a mandatory culture of memory: Part of the problem of this entrenchedness was that a German dominant culture (and one which had long become weary of being told to remember), saw itself as the sole or at least the main intended audience of the Jewish Museum. If Jewishness, as the image campaign tells us, no longer comes in predictable shapes, neither does its audience. It is no wonder, then, – and it would be less striking if the prior debate on Jewishness and the culture/duty of remembering had not been so entrenched in its ways – that the Jewish Museum should advertise in

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Kreuzberg, and that it should advertise in Turkish: “Beklidiginiz türden degil” – “Nicht das, was Sie erwarten.” As Eva Söderman of the Jewish Museum has noted: Berliners of Turkish ancestry are addressed through the Turkish translation [of the campaign slogan] “Beklidiginiz türden degil.” Other posters, also measuring ten by twelve meters, are issued not only in German, but in Hebrew, Russian, and English. The invitation [to visit the Jewish Museum] is meant for Kreuzberg, the neighbourhood which the museum is located in. “Through this translation campaign, we want to live up to our concern of being a place of encounter for different ethnic and religious communities.” (Emmerich, my translation)

This, too, is not what we would have expected from the German Jewish museum; and this unexpectedness in this particular case and context, is twofold. First, it dynamizes the German-Jewish culture of memory by introducing multiple audiences: German Turks, clearly, will not see themselves as the object of the German discourse of memory, or German historical guilt. It could be argued, moreover, that the Turkish-German community is addressed here in two ways, and in ways whose interconnection seems as groundbreaking as the image campaign itself. They are being addressed as German, for this past, and the memory of the Shoah is part of the country they have come to live in, and they are being addressed, in Turkish, as international audience and witnesses. For the makers of the advertising campaign, Berlin is clearly multiethnic; and it is therefore, also, that the advertising of the Jewish museum cannot be monolingual in German. Bringing memory up to date, this image campaign suggests, is inseparable from acknowledging that the discourse on memory – or the language of its sites – can no longer be simply national. Instead, memory must be creatively unmoored: from both the sites and the sounds of unexpectedness: “Beklidiginiz türden degil.”

Virtually Jewish: Vegetarianism in Eastern Europe It seems to me that Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) is groundbreaking precisely in virtualizing Jewishness, and in virtualizing sites of memory. This virtuality, in turn, is inseperable from a transnationalism deeply ingrained in the narrative structure, and the process of remembering. Foer’s narrative vision, in Everything Is Illuminated, is deeply transnational. Jonathan, an American Jew, goes on a “heritage tour” 3 to the Ukrainian to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is accompanied by Alex, a young Ukrain_____________ 3

It is this phenomenon of “heritage tourism” which Jacobson has addressed (45).

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ian, and his Grandfather, also named Alex. The humor of the story arises partly from constant transnational misunderstandings, and from the young Ukrainian’s stilted English. 4 The roots industry begins with a clash of civilizations. The feat which Foer’s novel accomplishes mirrors the advertising strategy of the Jewish museum: for the protagonist’s vegetarianism is both humorous and much more – or rather, much less, than that: the point is not only that in the Ukraine, vegetarianism is both out of place and out of line, but that in this displacement, it parallels Jewishness itself. The point is not, however, that Jonathan’s vegetarianism has anything to do with his Jewishness. Rather, his Jewishness, from the perspective of gentile Ukrainians, is as out of place as is his vegetarianism: “One thing, though,” the hero said. “What?” “You should know …” “Yes?” “I am a … how to say this…” “What?” “I’m a …” “You are hungry, yes?” “I’m a vegetarian.” “I do not understand.” “I don’t eat meat.” “Why not?” “I just don’t.” “How can you not eat meat?” “I just don’t.” “He does not eat meat,” I told Grandfather. “Yes he does,” he informed me. “Yes you do,” I informed the hero […] “What do you mean he does not eat meat?” the waitress asked, and Grandfather put his head in his hands. “What is wrong with him?” she asked. (Foer 65)

The grandfather’s denial of the ‘hero’s’ vegetarianism, moreover, is only a prelude to his denial of Jewish history in the Ukraine, and his own involvement in this denial. The narrative introduces itself as a story about green worms, or vegetarianism in Eastern Europe; it turns out to be, however, a story about a denial much more fundamental, and as unexpected. The tourist’s vegetarianism is everything but ‘normal.’ Even before he has arrived in the Ukraine, the (Jewish) tourist has upset gentile Ukrainian living patterns; he has become a “troublemaking Jew” (Foer 104): “Oh,” I said, “so he is intelligent?” “No,” Father corrected. “He has low-grade brains. The American office informs me that he telephones them every day and manufactures numerous half-witted queries about finding suitable food.” “There will certainly be sausage,” I said. “Of course,” Father said. […] Grandfather and I viewed television for several hours after Father had reposed. […] The only time that either of us spoke was when he rotated to me during an advertisement for McDonald’s McPorkburgers and said, “I do not want to drive ten hours to an ugly city to attend to a very spoiled Jew.” (6-7)

_____________ 4

This is one element, however, in which Foer’s narrative seems to fall short of the true potential of its own transnationality. Alex, given his convoluted speech, seems an Eastern European caricature at best; in this caricature, Foer’s American narrative seems condescending at best. Yet, Alex’s insights (both moral and historical) could be said to serve as a counterbalance to this linguistic violence done to him by Foer’s narrative. It seems regrettable, however, that Foer’s American humor should capitalize on an Eastern European character’s inadeptness at getting things ‘right.’

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Crucially, the irony of this passage is itself a transnational irony: For what is implied by the image of “McDonald’s McPorkburgers” is that Jewishness is disruptive to two national stories, to the story of both Americanness and Ukrainianism: Not only does the Jew disrupt national narratives by travelling (and by travelling to Eastern Europe), but he disrupts nationness as normality even before he crosses the border. Neither in the United States nor in the Ukraine, this passage suggests, is Jewishness quite kosher. At the same time, however, the tourist’s Americanness supercedes his Jewishness precisely because as an American, he has the currency to make his Ukrainian tour guides conform to his strange eating habits, whether or not they have anything to do with his Jewishness. It is at this point that what Matthew Frye Jacobson has termed the “roots tour phenomenon” (47) becomes crucial. For the roots industry, in Everything Is Illuminated, is both American and Jewish; and it is its Americanness – and the economic disbalance between the United States and Eastern Europe – which make the tour guide conform to weird Jewish demands. As Alex observes, “‘No sausage,’ I told Grandfather. He closed his eyes and tried to put his arms around his stomach, but there was not room because of the wheel. It appeared he was becoming sick because the hero would not eat sausage” (65). The irony at the heart of Foer’s novel lies in the fact that Jonathan, the American tourist, refuses to conform to either (Eastern European) expectations of Americanness or Jewishness: When we found each other, I was very flabbergasted by his appearance. This is an American? I thought. And also, This is a Jew? He was severely short. He wore spectacles and had diminutive hairs which were not split anywhere, but rested on his head like a shapka. […] He did not appear like either the Americans I had witnessed in magazines, with yellow hairs and muscles, or the Jews from history books, with no hairs and prominent bones. He was wearing nor blue jeans nor the uniform. In truth, he did not look like anything special at all. I was underwhelmed to the maximum. (32)

Jewishness, in this passage as much as in the narrative as a whole, is unexpected in multiple senses of the term, and it is unexpected in its disruption of multiple national narratives. Jonathan is both a troublemaking American and a troublemaking Jew; and it remains unclear – this, too, is part of the defining fabric of the narrative –, whether Jewishness supercedes Americanness or vice versa. The hero’s vegetarianism, moreover, may be due to neither his Americanness nor his Jewishness, it may simply be a personal whim. The ‘underwhelming’ quality of the protagonist’s appearance, paradoxically, may be the first step to ‘normality,’ and to the normality of Jewishness (even) in the Ukraine. As Alex writes to the narrator:

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Mother asked about you yesterday. She said, “And what about the troublemaking Jew?” I informed her that you are not troublemaking, but a good person, and that you are not a Jew with a large-size letter J, but a jew, like Albert Einstein or Jerry Seinfeld. (104)

Jerry Seinfeld, ironically, is spelled with a capital J, but it is not his Jewishness – or so Foer’s narrative would imply – that we know him for but his comedy, just as Albert Einstein, by the same token, was a genius who happened to be Jewish. It is this normality of Jewishness that Foer’s narrative capitalizes on, and it does so by refusing to capitalize Jewishness; like vegetarianism, jewishness may be an everyday affair. The scenario which Foer creates, through the unexpected narrative twist of vegetarianism, is an Eastern European landscape in which Jewishness is emphatically out of place, in which Jewishness is the exact opposite of ‘normality.’ It is in this sense that the token (and unexpected token) of vegetarianism is brilliant: For precisely by making us reflect on the parameters of the normal, the impossibility of vegetarianism in Eastern Europe may reflect another, much more fundamental impossibility or absence: the absence of Jewishness from Eastern European life. As Ruth Ellen Gruber has suggested, the absence of normality is itself a marker of the absence of what was once a vibrant Jewish Eastern European culture: “In most European countries today, however, particularly those where most of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were concentrated, it is not at all ‘normal’ to be Jewish. This is the result of the Holocaust and the other legacies of a long and troubled history” (7). Everything Is Illuminated will turn out not to be a story about vegetarianism at all. Opening the pages of Foer’s brilliantly crafted novel, you open a chestnut shell, and out comes a golf ball; and this golf ball will turn out not to be recreational at all. Foer’s narrative, as I will try to point out in the following, takes up a historical development, that of what Matthew Frye Jacobson has called the “roots industry.” As an attempt to recapture their “ethnic” past, Jacobson points out, America’s “new white ethnics” (71) set out to revisit the European sites of their family’s past. This revisiting, moreover, is a recreational endeavor: For as Jacobson points out, it is their whiteness which provides, as it were, the safety net for the journey; precisely because ethnicity is different from race, because these ethnic are considered white in the United States, the journey back to Europe at no point jeopardizes their racial credentials in the United State. Foer’s novel, on the other hand, takes up this very idea of the roots trip and goes on to repoliticize it: Precisely by capitalizing on the ways on which Jewishness is out of place, is abnormal in Eastern Europe, the history which Foer revisits is a racialized one. The roots trip back to the Ukraine, in this sense, is not recreational, but compulsive. Jonathan may recover his ethnicity, but he does not re-

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cover his whiteness. If Jacobson has argued that there is a deeply reactionary twist to the “roots industry” patronized by what he calls “new white ethnics,” Foer’s narrative could be said to salvage the roots trip from its depoliticizing components. Before trying to trace the spatial and aesthetic logic of this repoliticizing of the heritage industry, I would briefly like to explore the reactionary logic of new white ethnicity and the roots trip.

“Kiss Me, I’m Irish” The so-called heritage industry which Matthew Frye Jacobson has described may constitute the latest addition to the institutionalization of the past, or what may in fact be termed a museum culture. Jacobson writes, “New ethnic merchandise and marketing practices appeared, ranging from the kitsch shamrock key chain to the tourism industry’s ‘discover your homeland’ touring packages across Greece, Ireland, Italy, or Lithuania” (5). The past becomes a memento; an addition meant to color the whiteness of American cultural privilege. For as Jacobson emphasizes all of these ethnic groups – the Greek, the Irish, the Italians or the Lithuanians – are considered white by today’s American standards. The roots trip, then, is an attempt to make this very whiteness more interesting. What is at stake, then, is what Jacobson has termed the logic of the “post-Civil Rights era” (97). If, following the Civil Rights Movement, whiteness no longer had a story to tell, the roots trip restores this story: whiteness, too, has a story to tell because it is no longer just white but is in fact ethnic (too). Jacobson observes, this was a post-Civil Rights era “in which the mainstream, however mythic, lost its compelling energy and its magnetic attraction. Schrag called this ‘thinning’ of the mainstream ‘The Decline of the WASP.’ […] It relocated that normative whiteness from what might be called Plymouth Rock Whiteness to Ellis Island Whiteness” (6-7). Ethnicity – and the tracing of white ancestry to Ellis Island, not Plymouth Rock – hence resurfaces to make whiteness newly interesting. Crucially, however, ethnicity does not compromise whiteness. White ethnics, clearly, can have their cake and eat it, too. At the same time, however, ethnicity – the ethnic inflection of whiteness as a racial category – may also serve to alleviate what Jacobson describes as a form of “white guilt.” The term here is my own. It is at this point that the “roots trip”, my term as a paraphrase of Jacobson’s concept is deeply and inextricably connected to the Civil Rights Movement; not incidentally, the idea of “roots,” as Jacobson emphasizes, harks back to Alex Haley’s groundbreaking television saga about the history of a black family. The terminology of the Civil Rights Movement, and the legitimacy,

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indeed, the duty of remembering or revisiting the past is hence at once appropriated by white ethnics and deprived of its anti-racist impetus. As Jacobson observes, The composite ‘white ethnic’ […] replies to the Black Power movement that had so captured public attention between 1965 and the publication of Unmeltable Ethnics in 1971. The salient feature of the white ethnic experience, by this account, is not the ethnics’ share in historic ‘white privilege,’ but, on the contrary, the mistaken attribution of such privilege to peoples who had never fully possessed it. (189)

By a remarkable sleight of hand, racism – or rather, those who might be held responsible for it – has disappeared. As Jacobson goes on to say, The leader of an antiracism workshop in the 1990s once noted a disquieting inclination on the part of the group’s white participants to dissociate themselves from the history and persistent reality of white privilege by emphasizing some purportedly not-quite-white ethnic background. “I’m not white; I’m Italian,” one would say. Another, “I’m Jewish.” After this ripple had made its way across the group, the seminar leader was left wondering, “What happened to all the white people who were here just a minute ago?” (1-2)

From a room full of white people, whiteness has disappeared; and it has disappeared, because a plethora of ethnic narratives have appeared, narratives whose whiteness is no longer at issue. History is replaced by recreation, and it is here that Jacobson’s account of the roots trip undertaken by “new white ethnics” parallels Anthony Appiah’s idea of ‘recreational identity:’ Seeking to de-essentialize “black” identity by divorcing ethnicity from race, Appiah suggests that African Americans, in disregarding race, may well learn from the Irish: “This would not mean that everybody would be the same as everybody else – but it could lead to a more recreational conception of racial identity. It would make African-American identity more like Irish-American identity is for most of those who care to keep the label” (103). The gist of this ‘recreational ethnicity,’ in turn, is precisely that it can be shed: as with the wearing of an Irish pin, ethnicity, for these new white ethnics also described by Jacobson in Roots, Too, can be turned on and off at will. It is for this very reason that Jacobson, like Appiah, speaks of “recreational immigrants” for whom Europe, as Jacobson puts it, has become a “nostalgic theme park” (60). The juncture, the intersection between race and ethnicity is crucial here, of course: For it is only because Irishness, in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ceased being a racial category and became a cultural, an ethnic one, that it can now be recreational: Precisely because the wearer of the Irish pin, without the pin at his lapel, does not look racially different, he is free to express his ethnicity at will. On days he feels particularly Irish, the Irish pin will be part of his outfit; on other

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days, he will be ‘just’ (white) American. Recreation or recreational ethnicity is hence in fact a marker of the privilege of whiteness. The Civil Rights Movement has become a fun, or rather, a love parade; inseparable from commodification and indeed, from leisure, ethnicity has itself become an accessory, like the Irish pin. Through the Irish pin and/or the solace of ethnicity, new white ethnics can have it both ways and they can do so precisely by capitalizing on the juncture between ethnicity and whiteness. The clover inscribed “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” is at once a kitsch trinket and a symptom: Whiteness becomes newly loveable because it is ethnic. (Irish) ethnicity, by the same token, is both recreational and romantic. Foer’s narrative, on the other hand, at once takes up Jacobson’s idea of the roots trip and repoliticizes it. Crucially, Jacobson’s image of the badge closely resembles Appiah’s idea of the Irish pin: in both instances, the roots trip is not so much political as it is personal, recreational. Jacobson writes, “After decades of striving to conform to the Anglo-Saxon standard, descendants of earlier European immigrants quit the melting pot. Italianness, Jewishness, Greekness, and Irishness had become badges of pride, not shame” (2). The instance in which Foer’s narrative can be said to intervene into this story of recreational ethnicity and vocational roots trips is in the very idea of ethnic pride evoked by Jacobson. Jewishness, in Everything Is Illuminated, remains the riddle of a(n Eastern) European past; and it brings with it the burden of telling a story that has not yet been told. As Alex’s father observes, “‘He is looking for the town his grandfather comes from,’ Father said, ‘and someone, Augustine he calls her, who salvaged his grandfather from the war. He desires to write a book about his grandfather’s village’” (6). In this sense, Foer’s (fictional) revision of the historical process of Jacobson’s “roots trip” may well be said to be a two-layered one. As in the poster campaign, humor is certainly present on the surface: The framing of the actual narrative – or the two actual narrative, that of the ancient shtetl and its destruction by anti-Semitic violence – is the playful encounter of the American tourist with his Eastern European tour guides. The journey, however, ends in anything but recreation; it ends in a painful recreation of a troubled Ukrainian – and Ukrainian-Jewish – past. Whereas, to relate this different roots trip back to Jacobson’s historical observations, this particular Jewish roots trip would seem to differ from, say, an Italian American’s visit to Milan would be in the salience of racialization. At the same time, however, it is the European history of this story of white ethnicity which Jacobson’s story about new white ethics could be said to gloss over. 5 For Irish history, or the history of the Irish in Europe, _____________ 5

I am indebted to Glen Lowry for this point.

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too, was a deeply racialized one; the point is not only that, in the course of the twentieth century, as both Jacobson and Noel Ignatieff have noted, the Irish turned white, but that their racialization in the United States mirrored or paralleled their racial history in Europe. The Irish pin would seem to erase this European racialization of Irishness. It is this European racialization, by the same token, which Foer’s novel emphasizes, and has to emphasize, of course, because it is inseparable from the history of pogroms which his narrative unearths. Taking Jacobson’s observation as a point of departure, I would suggest that in Everything Is Illuminated, Jewishness does not disappear into whiteness. In the Ukraine, however, there is no one to kiss the (Jewish) narrator, even if he had had a T-shirt announcing his (recreational) Jewishness. Romance (or the nostalgia for Jewishness) must be absent from Foer’s narrative precisely because the denial of the contemporary Ukraine for its Jewish past seems complete. If the clover pin with the slogan “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” signals the triumph of new white ethnics, there is no one to welcome the narrator of Everything Is Illuminated because he is Jewish. It is in this absence of either romance or nostalgia that (compulsive) Jewishness differs from (recreational) Irishness, that Foer’s roots trip differs from that described by Matthew Frye Jacobson. There are no Jewish paraphernalia, which the Jewish American tourist might be provided with in the Ukraine: and these paraphernalia are absent, above all, because the tour guide – the Ukrainian narrator’s grandfather – has become a tour guide in spite of himself. Foer’s is a roots trip from which the very ingredients of the roots industry are absent. It is a roots trip which will turn out to be not recreational, but traumatic; and which will turn out to be traumatic for both this tourist and his guide.

“Cities without Jews” In Everything Is Illuminated, Jewishness is deeply historicized, a history which is itself inextricable from racialization. In Everything Is Illuminated, the heritage tour is not recreational, but it is compulsive: the unearthing of history, in other words, is not a recreational desire to make American Jewishness (or Jewish whiteness) more interesting, but it is an endeavor that is vital, not recreational. Foer’s sleight of hand is that he portrays this heritage tourism – and Jewish Americans as its prime customers – through the eyes of the tour guide. In the process of the heritage tour, however – and this, too, is a sleight of hand on Foer’s part or on the part of Foer’s narrative – the very distinction between Jew and gentile, between tourist and tour guide, is effaced. As Alex, the tour guide’s grandson, observes,

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Father toils for a travel agency, denominated Heritage Tourism. It is for Jewish people, like the hero, who have cravings to leave that ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine. Father’s agency scores a translator, a guide, and a driver for Jews, who try to unearth places where their families once existed. […] I will be truthful again and mention that before the voyage I had the opinion that Jewish people were having shit between their brains. This is because all I knew of Jewish people was that they paid Father very much currency in order to make vacations from America to Ukraine. (3)

Similarly to the “kitsch shamrock” described by Jacobson, the roots trip paid for by the American tourist at first seems to be a sham. How could a journey taken with a blind driver who does not believe in the unearthing of Jewish Ukrainian history have been otherwise? My grandmother died two years ago of a cancer in her brain, and Grandfather became very melancholy, and also, he says, blind. Father does not believe him, but purchased Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior for him nonetheless, because a Seeing Eye Bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness. (5)

Yet, it is crucial that this blindness can be read on both levels, as taking up the idea of gentile exploitation of the Jewish need for roots trip – an exploitation which turns to roots trip or rather, the roots industry into a sham for unsuspecting American tourists who have “shit between their brains” (3) – and as a willful amnesia on the part of the gentile Ukrainian population. The horror of the heritage tour, for the tour guide, is that he must revisit, with his unsuspecting client, the very scene of a historical crime he once collaborated in bringing about: After telephoning me, Father telephoned Grandfather to inform him that he would be the driver of our journey. […] Grandfather said, “I do not want to do it. I am retarded, and I did not become a retarded person in order to have to perform shit such as this. I am done with it.” […] I thought that would be the end of the conversation. But Father said something queer. “Please.” And then he said something queerer. He said, “Father.” I must confess there is so much I do not understand. Grandfather returned to his chair and said, “This is the final one. I will never do it again.” (6)

It is this reluctance of the tour guide which saves him from the narrative charge of exploitation, of exploiting a horror to which he himself was once the helpmate. The pain, the narrative stresses, is that of the tour guide as much as that of the tourist. As it turns out, Alex’s grandfather will have to be both driver and guide: Father said that a tour guide was not an indispensable thing, because Grandfather knew a beefy amount from all of his years at Heritage Touring. Father dubbed him an expert. (At the time when he said this, it seemed like a very reasonable thing to say. But how does that make you feel, Jonathan, in the luminescence of everything that occurred?) (6)

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Commodification, moreover, is not simply dismissed by the narrative; rather, it is appropriated precisely through the humor which is the signature style of Everything Is Illuminated. Tragically, the tour guide’s knowledge of the past is that of an expert because this past is also his own. The drabness of the present is only partly due to economic disenfranchisement, an enfranchisement alleviated through the dollars of the American tourist on his roots trip. It is a drabness which once again participates in what I have tried to describe as Foer’s layered aesthetics. If vegetarianism is readable both as humorous anecdote and a token of a much more profound denial of the normality of Jewishness in Eastern Europe, then the image of drabness, too, may index a plight more than economic. It is a drabness, rather, that may itself point to the impoverishment by Ukrainians of their own culture, and cultural multiplicity. Foer’s Ukrainian narrative may well parallel Hugo Bettauer’s The City Without Jews (1922). In Bettauer’s narrative, a law expelling all Jews from Vienna leads to a complete emptying out of Viennese cultural life: Vienna becomes a place of drabness, of boredom; this is a boredom so complete, moreover, that the mayor eventually revokes the law, inviting the Jews back with open arms: “Without the Jews, Viennese culture dries up, newspapers become a yawn, coffeehouses empty out, and intellectual life comes to a juddering standstill. […] In short, the city – indeed, the entire country – becomes a drab, bleak, boring wasteland” (3). The drabness of the Ukraine in Foer’s novel mirrors that of Bettauer’s early 1920s narrative, which, of course, turned out to be sadly prophetic 6 as the twentieth century progressed. 7 In Everything Is Illuminated, too, the Ukraine is the site of drabness; it is a space curiously devoid of vitality, a space illuminated only by the flickering light of television. As Alex writes to Jonathan, “I want to inform you about Grandfather, and how he views television for many hours, and how he cannot witness my eyes anymore, but must be attentive to something behind me” (178). This drabness, what is more, is both cultural and moral; the first trauma that the narrative unearths is that of child abuse. As Alex confesses to the narrator: I would never say hello to Grandfather when he was viewing television because I did not want to meddle with him. […] I was already on the fourth stair when I heard something queer. It was not crying, exactly. It was something less than crying. First I witnessed the television. It was exhibiting a football game. […] I wit-

_____________ 6 7

As Gruber notes, “The expulsion order [in Bettauer’s narrative] clears Austria of its Jews in six months and includes elaborate ‘who is a Jew’ classifications that uncannily foreshadow the Nuremberg laws decreed by the Nazi Third Reich” (3). Bettauer himself, as Gruber goes on to say, was murdered in 1925, only three years after the publication of Die Stadt ohne Juden. Gruber writes, “Bettauer himself, however, had little time to enjoy his fame. In March 1925 he was murdered by a proto-Nazi who was determined to save German culture from ‘degeneration’” (4).

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nessed a hand on the chair that Grandfather likes to view television in. But it was not Grandfather’s hand. […] I know that I should have recognized the sound that was a little less than crying. It was Little Igor. (I am such a stupid fool.) (68)

Here, too, guilt is a complex issue; the traumata of the past may be what leads Alex’s grandfather to molest his own grandchildren, but they cannot absolve him from this new, present guilt. Even so, Alex notes, “Everything is the way it is because of the way it was” (145). In Everything Is Illuminated, the Ukraine is a country without Jews, a country whose vitality is clearly past and whose drabness is only accentuated by the industry of heritage tourism. The irony, of course, is that minus Jewish culture, true to Bettauer’s (Viennese) prophecy, the Ukraine, too, has become a cultural “wasteland” (Gruber 3); how ironic, then, that the heritage tour should lead the Jewish tourist not to a culture of plenitude, but of virtual absence, an absence which is itself at the root of the roots trip. It is in the face of such drabness that the epistolary form of the novel may be crucial. For the humor of Everything Is Illuminated may be said to arise precisely from this (epistolary) dialogue between the Jewish narrator and the Ukrainian tour guide, Alex. The drabness of a city or country without Jews (the Ukraine) is hence alleviated precisely through Jewish infusion – it is through Alex that the Ukraine, in Foer’s narrative, welcomes back the Jews, and is relieved, in return, from a little of its drabness. The alleviation, the overcoming of drabness is possible only in transnational terms: If the horror of Ukrainian history lies precisely in the annihilation of Jewishness, the element of Jewishness can be restored only through the roots trip. Ukrainian cultural life can be temporarily resurrected, and saved from the sorry fate of being a country without Jews, through the structure provided by the roots trip. Not only the humor, but that historical revision which underlies it, can be achieved only in transnational terms. What is absent from Foer’s fictional version of the heritage industry, however, is the element of nostalgia which Ruth Ellen Gruber, from a European perspective, has considered crucial for the heritage industry. Gruber’s definition of “virtual Jewishness” describes a Europe where Jewishness is performed, by Jewish and non-Jewish performers alike, for largely non-Jewish audiences: As part of this trend, Jewish culture – or what passes for Jewish culture, or what is perceived or defined as Jewish culture – has become a visible and sometimes highly visible component of the popular culture domain in countries where Jews themselves are now practically invisible. From Milan to Munich, from Krákow to Cluj and well beyond, Jewish exhibitions, festivals and workshops of all types abound. (5)

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Crucially, nostalgia may itself be a marker of Jewish absence. Only once Jewishness is completely and irrevocably absent from Eastern European presence can nostalgia arise. It is this absence, however, which is lacking in Everything Is Illuminated; and it is lacking precisely because the past is not yet over. Because of this lack of closure, there may be no Jewish paraphernalia, no Jewish pin which the tour guide may have given to his American tourist at the outset of the tour.

Fig. 1. Image of the public relations campaign for the Jüdische Museum Berlin, by Scholz & Friends Berlin, (c) Jüdisches Museum Berlin

Gruber’s definition of “virtual Jewishness” is remarkable for another reason, moreover. For it seems striking that her argument about the irony of virtual Jewishness – the resurgence of interest in Jewish culture in countries from which a contemporaneous Jewish presence seems to have disappeared – is so compelling also because it is transnational. What is at stake is not only the specific histories which mark the discrepancy between, say, Italian history and the roots industry in Milan, but also that nostalgia for (lost) Jewishness should emerge simultaneously, as Gruber emphasizes, in Milan and Munich. The ‘trend’ of virtualizing Jewishness is itself a transnational site of memory; it is virtual, however, in the very sense that it simulates Jewish culture where there is none. To this simulated Jewishness, Foer’s narrative contrasts another kind of transnationality: The virtual absence of Jewishness in the Ukraine is broken up by the

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presence of an American Jew; by a Jew whose heritage tour helps reveal the fact that this virtual absence of things Jewish was a fiction to begin with.

Towers of Faces The journey into heritage tourism, for both the Jewish (American) tourist and the (presumably) gentile (Ukrainian) tour guide, turns out to be a journey out of commodification and (back) into history. For the roots industry, it must be remembered, is a highly commodified form; it is this tourist infrastructure, then, which Foer’s novel interrogates about its own roots, its origins in a past which has nothing to do with commodification. The moral dilemma at the heart of the roots industry, however, is that those who destroyed Jewish (Ukrainian) culture in the first place are now making money by helping (Jewish) tourists revisit the sites of the past. The twist through which this salvaging of heritage tourism from commodification occurs in Foer’s narrative is that of virtuality: Foer’s narrative virtualizes memory by virtualizing the site of heritage; the heritage tour, crucially, ends in a void. This void must resist commodification because it is itself necessarily formless, can be inscribed only through the imagination. This may well be where Foer’s narrative meets the architectural design of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum: For Libeskind’s challenge was to create a monument, a site of memory (and of warning), without closure, a site which, in order for this closure to be withheld, had to be both actual and virtual, a site which not only denied, but ultimately defied its own siteness, its own actuality. The fractures in the design, then, are the aporias in the narrative; and it is this aporia, I would like to suggest, which occurs in Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Like Foer’s narrative, Daniel Libeskind’s architectural form is one of unexpectedness. Like Foer’s narrative design, the Berlin Jewish museum, designed by a Polish American architect of Polish descent, suggests that the often deadlocked structures of memory – the drabness of the Ukraine, the narrowly circumscribed parameters of the German Erinnerungskultur – may be broken up only through transnational discourses and forms. As Libeskind recalls in his autobiography, it is his deliberate disregard of specifically national German regulations which ended winning him the contest for being allowed to design the Berlin Jewish museum: The voice was that of Walter Nobel, a nice young man who would soon become well known as an architect in Berlin. “You are new here,” he told me gently. “You don’t know us Germans. You don’t understand how it works. Everything

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must be done meticulously. You must know the following.” He pulled out a pad and began writing down a long series of numbers. “You must know the toilet measurements. Along with the fire regulations, the toilet measurements are the most important things to know.” When he finished, I thanked him and tucked his notes into my coat pocket. That evening in my hotel room, as I got ready for bed, I pulled the notes and tossed them in the garbage. This building would not be about toilets. (5-6)

Both Libeskind and Jonathan Safran Foer have crafted into their respective narratives, fictional and architectural, what I would call a transnational aporia: they highlight the very instances where two national memories (America and the Ukraine, America and Germany) are discontinuous with each other; and the ways in which the overcoming of these aporias – through the fusion of a hybrid, transnational aesthetic form – may be crucial. Both Foer and Libeskind capitalize on highlighting the voids. Libeskind writes, “Running through the form [of the proposed building] was a Void – a kind of cut in which there is nothing. The Void ran, straight but broken, [through the entire building]” (84). The reluctance of the tour guide, his insistence that the history he revisits is not his own, is one such void deliberately crafted into the fabric of Foer’s narrative. Foer’s narrative at the same time describes and disrupts the heritage industry, the seemingly seamless story of the roots trip; just as Libeskind’s architecture disrupts the very story he was commissioned to tell. Crucially, aporia is spacialized in Foer’s narrative, just as the aporia inscribed onto the Berlin Jewish Museum is architectural, not linguistic. Memory becomes aporetic, becomes virtual, because of the fact that the heritage tour ends in a void. The woman whom the tourist has been looking for, Augustine, turns out not to be Augustine; the place which he has hoped to find proves to be a void: “No,” [Augustine] said, “we are here.” “She says we are here,” I told the hero. “What?” “I informed you that there would be nothing,” she said. “It was all destroyed.” “What do you mean we are here?” the hero asked. “Tell him it is because it is so dark,” Grandfather said to me, “and that we could see more if it was not dark.” “It is so dark,” I told him. “No,” she said, “this is all you would see. It is always like this, always dark.” (184)

Trachimbrod is unmappable; it exists only in memory. And yet, there is a curious tension between the absence of Trachimbrod on a map and its presence in, or rather, as, Augustine’s house. Crucially, the house as shtetl where the narrative comes to a real, not a virtual end, resembles exactly the “Tower of Faces” in the United States Washington Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.: These faces, and the photographs in which they have been captured, spell out an overlap between the virtual and the real; virtual because the tower – or the walls of Augustine’s house is not a shtetl and the memory (and the photographs) of the faces is all that is left of what

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was once a vibrant Jewish community; and virtual in the sense of the absence of closure. A face, after all, is only a face; Jewishness, in or through the multitude of faces, becomes ordinary, human. (This, too, is taken up by Foer’s narrative in the idea of the Jewish/human fault line.) 8 Augustine’s house has become a museum in its own right; yet, it is through laundering the clothes belonging to the people in the photographs that she keeps the community alive even as its presence can only be virtual. Doing laundry is a marker of the everyday, and a defiance of the historical, an insistence on the living present or on the life of what is no longer present. As Alex observes, I could not see the wall through all of the photographs. They appeared as if they came from many different families, although I did recognize that a few of the people were in more than one or two. All of the clothing and shoes and pictures made me to reason that there must have been at least one hundred people living in that room. (147, italics mine)

It is in this image – the living memory of the people who are no longer alive –, the absence of closure which bespeaks the normality, the everydayness of Jewish life, that Foer’s narrative seems like a literary echo of an architectural design, of the “Tower of Faces” in the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum. As is noted in the exhibition catalog, This three-story tower displays photographs from the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection. Taken between 1890 and 1941 in Eishishok, a small town in what is now Lithuania, they describe a vibrant Jewish community which existed for 900 years. In 1941, an SS mobile killing squad entered the village and within two days massacred the Jewish population. (133)

In both its architectural and its narrative form, then, the Tower of Faces at the same time institutionalizes memory and points to the impossibility of such institutionalization. Memory is virtual in both cases; even as Augustine (or the woman who is not Augustine) goes through the motions of keeping Jewish memory alive, the faces remain witnesses to the absence of Jewishness, to what Gruber, in her definition of “virtual Jewishness” has called “the continuing physical absence of Jews” (41).

Jewish/Human Fault Lines Foer’s story – and the heritage tour that gave rise to it – ends in a tie, in an ethical dilemma, which spells out the full horror of Nazism. As Alex de_____________ 8

Alex’s grandfather remembers his friendship to Herschel: “He was my best friend. It was different then. Jews, not Jews. We were young, still, and there was very much life in advance of us. Who knew?” (244).

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scribes his grandfather’s reaction to the visit to Augustine’s house: “Do you remember what he did next, Jonathan? He examined the photograph again, and then paced it on the table again, and then said, Herschel was a good person, and so was I, and because of this it is not right what happened, not anything of it” (247). In the end, the Jewish/human fault line which was a fiction to begin with is fully erased, because the tragedy is that of the tourist as much as of the tour guide; it is that of Eli-turnedAlex, Sasha’s grandfather, as much as that of the Jewish friend, Herschel, whom he condemned to his death in a burning synagogue: [The General] went to the next man in line and that was me who is a Jew. He asked and I felt Herschel’s hand again and I know that his hand was saying pleaseplease Eli please I do not want to die. […] I am afraid of dying. […] Who is a Jew the General asked me again and I felt on my other hand the hand of Grandmother and I knew that she was holding your father and that he was holding you and that you were holding your children. […] I said he is a Jew. (250)

The heritage tour has led to the dénouement of the tour guide’s own past. The stories of the American tourist and the Ukrainian tour guide have become inextricably interwoven; Trachimbrod has become a transnational site inscribed by multiple memories. As Foer’s narrative salvages the roots industry from its commodification, transnational tourism has served as a catalyst for Ukrainian memory. If the story, like the advertising campaign of the German Jewish Museum, started with a humorous image – that of vegetarianism in Eastern Europe –, it ended in a reconstruction, in the telling of a traumatic history.

Fig. 2. Image of the public relations campaign for the Jüdische Museum Berlin, by Scholz & Friends Berlin, (c) Jüdisches Museum Berlin

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The advertisement campaign of the Berlin Jewish Museum may be an inquiry into this very idea of the Jewish/human fault line; it intervenes into the fossilized discourse of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung by virtualizing the audience of a Jewish museum, and by virtualizing the content of such a museum. Precisely because Jewish history is both German history and human history, there can be no set pattern or target group for either the audience of a Jewish museum or for those who commission its exhibit. It is these set patterns, by the same token, which the advertisement campaign – through the unexpected juxtaposition of its images – sets out to unsettle. It is in the idea of the Jewish/human fault line that I would like, once more, to return to the Berlin Jewish museum. As Libeskind writes about the beginning of the construction, or rather the designing, of the Berlin Jewish museum, this design – the form of the Jewish Museum he was being commission to design – was flawed from the outset; and it was flawed, Libeskind reminds us in his memoir Momente meines Lebens, by something quite like the human/Jewish fault line described by Foer’s fiction. The very terminology describing the building which was to be constructed, Libeskind remembers, was not only flawed, it seemed inhumane, marked by an amnesia or wilful dis-remembering of history: The Berlin government has always promoted cultural affairs, and now it was inviting me to participate in an architectural competition to create a Jüdische Abteilung – a Jewish Department – for the Berlin Museum. Jüdische Abteilung! The words stabbed me in the heart. […] But to use that phrase! It was the Jüdische Abteilung der Gestapo that had the responsibility for carrying out the ‘Final Solution.’ The competition organizers weren’t thinking much about history, I suppose. […] They were unable to imagine the Jews in any way other than as outsiders. As they saw it, there would be a sculpture department, and a film department, […] and now there would be a Jewish department. But how can you separate the history of non-Jewish Berliners from the history of Jewish Berliners? You can’t, any more than you can separate the molecules in a glass of water. (79-80)

It seems curiously ironic that Libeskind should note in his recollection of the call for designs surrounding the building of the Berlin Jewish Museum, that unlike his own design (which would eventually win the competition), most of the architects would stress the idea of quaintness, a quaintness which seems curiously akin to Anthony Appiah’s idea of “recreational conception of racial identity” (103): In order to qualify as an ‘addition,’ a jüdische Abteilung, in order to seamlessly fit into contemporary Berlin, this architectural narrative of Jewishness would have to be almost recreational. Libeskind writes: “Architects from around the world had entered the competition. Almost all entrants came up with a seminar image: a neutral space, soothing and attractive, where one could visit the remains of a once flourishing culture after viewing other exhibits in the big Baroque build-

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ing” (83). The gist – indeed, the cutting edge – of Libeskind’s design for the Jewish museum is that, like Foer’s narrative, he makes the visitor – through the very form of his design – revisit the very fault line that would forever split Jewish/gentile Berlin history: he writes into his design a crossroads at which history, as it were, had the option of turning differently; at which Berlin could have become something radically different, but chose not to. According to Libeskind, You struggle to find the most immediate way to get at the truth. What was needed, as I saw it, was a building that, using the language of architecture, speaking from its stones, could take us all, Jews and non-Jews alike, to the crossroads of history, and show us that when the Jews were exiled from Berlin, at that moment, Berlin was exiled from its past, its present, and – until this tragic relationship is resolved – its future. (99, italics mine)

It is in this banishment of Jewish culture from Berlin that Libeskind’s observations mirror Hugo Bettauer’s tragically prophetic short story, The City Without Jews, as well as the drabness of Foer’s fictional Ukraine. What is revisited by both Libeskind’s architecture and Foer’s narrative design is not only the site of the present but a crossroads which is both historical and spatial. Both narratives evoke the juncture at which history could have turned out differently, the juncture at which Germany and the Ukraine could have chosen not to ban its Jews but didn’t. In Everything Is Illuminated, the crossroads at which Eli could not have pointed out his friend to the Nazi general ends by dooming all of his future acts: His son having become a violent alcoholic and himself the molester of his own grandchildren, Eli/Alex is forced to acknowledge that there can be no righting of history after this fundamental wrong. Suicide, paradoxically, becomes the only moral act. As he writes in his last letter to the narrator, “I am complete with happiness, and it is what I must do, and I will do it” (276). Like Foer’s literary narrative, Libeskind’s architectural design for the Berlin Jewish Museum revolves around, centers on, the ‘crossroads’ in German history. This crossroads, however, is a juncture at which, in both narratives, we arrive unexpectedly: through the twists in Foer’s humor and through an irony, in Libeskind’s architecture, which is both unexpected and not quite ironic. Like the Jewish Museum’s recent advertising campaign, humor serves both as a catalyst and a door opener: the visitor or reader enters the building or the story out of curiosity, not a sense of duty. Ironically, the irony of Libeskind’s building – and the trauma which underlies this irony – lies in the fact that the Jewish museum has no door. One of the aspects about Libeskind’s original design which seemed outrageous to jurors – and which won him the commission to build the museum precisely because of its outrageousness, its unexpected turn of a

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narrative that had become too familiar – was that the Jewish Museum would have no entrance: [The senator] studied it [the model of the building]. “How do I get into this building?” “There is no door for you, Senator. For you, there is no entrance to this building.” The room froze. “There is no door for you,” I continued, “because there is no way into Jewish history and into Berlin’s history by a traditional door. You have to follow a much more complex route to understand Jewish history in Berlin, and to understand the future of Berlin. You have to go back into the depth of Berlin’s history, into its Baroque period, and therefore into the Baroque building first.” (98)

This outrageousness, the insistence on inserting a fracture into an all too seamless narrative of Jewish life in Berlin, the insistence on not providing a “traditional door,” a normal entranceway, is born of a vision which is itself transnational. For Libeskind’s deliberate maintaining of an external perspective, his refusal to immerse himself too deeply into the German discourse on memory – and on institutionalizing memory –, gave him the courage of insisting on the outrageous. “This building would not be about toilets” (Libeskind 6). I have tried to argue in this essay that three contemporary narratives about the institutionalization – and the virtualizing – of memory – Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything Is Illuminated, the architectural design of the Berlin Jewish Museum, and the museum’s recent image campaign converge precisely in their suspension of Herkömmlichkeit, of expectedness. This suspension of the unexpected, and of the commonplace, may itself be born of a profoundly transnational vision. It is because the Berlin senators ended up commissioning a Polish American architect whose vision deliberately defied the trenches of German Erinnerungskultur that they created, with the Berlin Jewish museum, a site of memory which is both national and transnational. Similarly, precisely by participating, through his literary narrative, in a transnational roots industry, Foer’s narrative insists that any vision which explores only the rationale of the tourist, not the tour guide, must necessarily be one-sided. What the striking parallelism between Foer’s American narrative and the architectural and advertising narratives of the Berlin Jewish Museum seem to imply, moreover, is perhaps that in this day and age, sites of memory can no longer be national, but must and will instead be both national and transnational in scope and outlook. Where both Foer’s and Libeskind’s narratives converge with the advertising campaign of the Berlin Jewish Museum, is in juxtaposing this transnational vision with the humorous twist of the unexpected, and with the unmooring of Jewish stories from both an expected audience and an expected author. What Libeskind’s architecture and Foer’s narrative style add to an entrenched discourse on Jewish/gentile Erinnerungsgeschichte is an

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element of play: Unexpectedness, it would seem, is itself inseparable from improvisation. Libeskind’s architectural vision, as the title of his memoir implies, is ‘breaking ground’ in more senses than one: For the perspective which his aesthetic design, like Foer’s literary narrative, destroys is that of a narrowly national vision. Foer’s protagonist is ‘underwhelming’ both as an American and as a Jew; Libeskind’s design for the Berlin Jewish museum, critics suggested, could not be built because it defied both the architectural, physical logic of statics and the cultural logic of the German discourse on memory. A transnational vision, in both cases, brings with it the power of improvisation. Precisely by taking, by insisting on unexpected turns, including the very suspension of narrativity and, in Libeskind’s architecture, apparently even of the laws of statics, Foer and Libeskind tell a story which it may have seemed impossible to tell anew, because in the rehearsal of its parameters, there has seemed to be no room for improvisation. Libeskind recalls, “I showed my design to two friends, both fine architects, before I submitted it. ‘Daniel,’ they said, ‘you’ll never win! You’ve broken too many rules. They will disqualify you” (82). It is this improvising, which must necessarily be playful, that Foer’s and Libeskind’s fictional/architectural narratives converge, and are mirrored by the green worm on a toothbrush in the Jewish museum’s advertising campaign. It is this improvisation, and the humor and playfulness by which it is defined, which seems to be at complete odds with the story it tells, which seems to link the very lives of Jonathan Safran Foer and Daniel Libeskind. Foer’s debut novel, written at the age of twenty-five, turns out to be a masterpiece. The Berlin Jewish Museum was the first of Libeskind’s architectural designs which was ever realized. Libeskind notes, “I’d never built a building before. [My wife] Nina has always said that I was a late bloomer, which is true: it wasn’t until I was in my fifties that a building I’d designed was built” (98). It is in the idea of the debut, of the first, perhaps, that the gist of their innovation may lie; the chutzpah of defying the trenches of a discourse that has been running the risk of running dry. Precisely by virtualizing memory, by turning Jewish memory into anything at all, Foer and Libeskind unmoor its narrative from expectedness. Whoever thought that a green worm could be Jewish?

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Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Amy Gutman. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Bettauer, Hugo. Die Stadt ohne Juden: Ein Roman von Übermorgen. 1924. Wien: Achilla, 1996. Emmerich, Marlies. “Jüdisches Museum wirbt auch auf Türkisch: Kampagne mit Riesenposter.” Berliner Zeitung 3 May 2009 . Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated. New York: Harper, 2002. Gruber, Ruth Ellen. Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Jüdisches Museum Berlin. 3 May 2009 . Libeskind, Daniel. Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture. New York: Riverhead, 2004. Weinberg, Jeshajahu, and Rina Elieli. The Holocaust Museum in Washington. New York: Rizzoli, 1995.

Terrorist Violence and Transnational Memory: Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo ALFRED HORNUNG

In a special session of the German Bundestag on Wednesday, September 12th, 2001, the party whip of the Social Democratic Party, Peter Struck, stated programmatically: “Heute sind wir alle Amerikaner” (Struck 2001). These words encapsulated the dismay of all members of the German parliament after the events of the previous day and reaffirmed the full solidarity and sympathy of the German people with the people of the United States in shock and mourning over the many victims of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington. Struck’s phrase almost seems to echo John F. Kennedy’s famous speech of 26 June 1963 in Berlin when the President of the United States expressed his commitment to a free Berlin in four memorable German words: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Struck’s memory of Kennedy’s remarkable visit during his days as a student must have inspired his emotional address almost forty years later and invoked the spirit of resistance to hostile forces in a beleaguered city. The captivating phrases of both the American president and the German politician can be read as expressions of a transnational commitment contributing to transnational memory. When two months later, Struck related the military engagement of American troops in Afghanistan to the defense of Germany’s freedom, he took up the idea of a transnational battle against international terrorism as a responsibility of the German army. Consequently in December 2002, as Secretary of Defense, he used the same argument to convince the German public of the transnational dimension of security measures in an age of terrorism: “Die Sicherheit Deutschlands wird auch am Hindukusch verteidigt” (Struck 2002). This changed political situation serves as the background to my analysis of the representation of terrorist violence in literature written in the wake of the events of 9/11. While political and military measures were taken immediately after the attacks to forestall similar acts of terrorism in the future, writers needed some time to find an appropriate form in which to cope with the topic. Theodor W. Adorno’s momentous statement about the production of literature after the extermination of Jews in the

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concentration camps – “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34) – has been used in analogy to the practical absence of spontaneous literary responses to 9/11. It is my assumption that the site/sight of Ground Zero in this double sense acted as a limit to literary imagination. Faced with the double dilemma of broaching an unprecedented topic of immediate American reality and finding an appropriate form in which to represent it, serious novelists found themselves at a loss. The representation of acts of violence and terror, which had been one of the standard topics of postmodern imagination, suddenly found a point of resistance in the actuality of a changed reality. Rather than imagining America as a simulacrum or virtual reality (Baudrillard) writers and artists felt the need to reconceptualize their mimetic principles and to return to a form of literature “grounded in reality” (qtd in DeCurtis 46). In the absence of new ideas for fictional designs many writers turned to earlier literary works and historical events to evoke the scope of the disaster of 9/11. Given the absence of similar major catastrophic destruction in the history of the continental United States since the Civil War, writers found analogies in the military actions of World War II both in Europe and Asia. In my analysis of two key texts by two important contemporary American novelists I will argue that the transnational memories of man-made destruction served as the material to cope with the impact of international terrorism on the American soil at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By now, several years after the collapse of the World Trade Center, the catastrophic events have received a number of literary and artistic treatments, which try to capture and cope with the physical and emotional loss and the incomprehensibility of the event. They range from personal and public reactions in form of poetry, plays, novels, photographic installations, popular arts and crafts, political cartoons, and material documents to ceremonial performances and communitarian reenactments. For the purposes of this article, an interpretation of two novels, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), might serve best to substantiate my thesis about the replenishment of the American craft of fiction by way of transnational memories. This recourse to a transnational bond by American writers seems to be commensurate with a similar move in the global dimension of scholarship and the discovery of transnational American Studies (Fisher-Fishkin). Both of these transnational turns in the United States have also been seen as strong counterpoints to the unilateral politics of nationalism and patriotism of the Bush administration after 9/11 (Hornung 70). The transnational turn of the two writers in question might not be viewed as such a recent event. Certainly, Don DeLillo has incorporated in fictions of his accomplished career international ranges of this topic. The

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evocation of German fascism in the figure of Jack Gladney, the chairman and inventor of Hitler Studies in White Noise (1985), and the correlation of the American World Series with the Soviet nuclear tests of the 1950s in Underworld (1997) for the depiction of a postmodern panorama could be cases in point. Indeed, some of his work has been read as a premonition of the devastation of 9/11, such as the cover design of Underworld which features the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center enshrouded by a cloud (see Boxall 157; Litt; Kraft). Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2001), took its autobiographical protagonist on a field trip to the Ukraine in search of his Jewish past. But these apparent precursors of transnational links were mere literary renditions of historical facts embedded in an overall fictional design. The fictional concepts of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Falling Man are categorically different from the earlier playful engagements with historical events. Here both authors engage for the first time their characters in the living memory of the past within a transnational scheme. In this context the transnational memory of earlier moments of disaster brings comfort and sustenance to the American characters who have directly experienced the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York and suffered the loss of their loved ones. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close presents the story of nine-year old Oskar Schell whose father died on 9/11 in the collapsing World Trade Center. In his effort to cope with the loss he looks for traces in his father’s belongings and accidentally breaks a vase containing “a fat and short key, in a little envelope, in a blue vase, on the highest shelf in his closet” (Foer 37). Later he finds the name “Black” in his father’s handwriting on the back of the envelope. These two items constitute the cues for his search to find the lock for the key and the person in New York to whom it belongs. The tantamount task of this search becomes obvious when his Internet research gives him 475,000 persons of the name Black and more than 160 million potential locks in the five boroughs of New York. He takes on the enormity of the task since it represents a form of mourning for his lost father and a displacement of his bad conscience over not having taken his father’s last phone call when he heard his voice on the answering machine. The alphabetical search by first names leads him to Aaron Black, a 103-year old man and former war correspondent, who has not left his apartment in over 24 years. The encounter with Oskar whom he helps find the lock also breaks his isolation and actually allows him to reconnect with the world by turning on his hearing aids again after all these years. In this new relationship with the boy he becomes a sort of grandfather figure and substitutes for both Oskar’s father and grandfather.

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The topic of a broken or only partial communication is pervasive in the novel and is presented as a consequence of both personal and national traumata, which were caused by major catastrophes. The traumatic experience of 9/11 by Oskar stands paradigmatically for the national trauma for which no solution seems to be available within the national frame. Hence Oskar’s search for a lock to his father’s key in New York City takes him almost inevitably outside his frame of narrative and to extraterritorial sites of memory. The experiences of the grandfather figure Mr. Black as a war correspondent, which apparently had contributed to his voluntary isolation, form the bridge to Oskar’s real grandfather and his experiences of the bombing of Dresden in World War II. It is Thomas Schell, Sr.’s story which establishes the transatlantic link to the European theater of war. In the night from the 13th to the 14th of February 1945, Thomas Schell lost his pregnant girlfriend Anna in the bombed out city and remained emotionally devastated. His physical scars on the palms of his hands, which he burned on a doorknob trying to get to his friend’s house during the bombing, serve as a living memory of this loss which is compounded by his gradual loss of speech. Thus this traumatic event is repeatedly referred to as the moment when he lost everything, his pregnant love, his parents and his past life. Seven years later, he is in New York where he happens to meet his dead girlfriend’s sister who eventually asks him to marry her after posing for him as a model for a sculpture, which she recognizes as an artistic recreation of Anna. Among the many rules which they agree upon for their married life are “Nothing Places” meant for their privacy and Thomas’s demand of childlessness (110, 85). Thus when his wife gets pregnant Thomas decides to return to Dresden out of fear to reexperience his past loss. He thus consciously repeats the course of action forced upon him back in Germany. This physical separation from his first love’s sister and their child named Thomas, Jr., sets off a form of communication which never reaches the intended addressee. Thomas Schell, Sr., who since his first loss in 1945 and the subsequent loss of speech had the words “YES” and “NO” tattooed on either palm of his scarred hand for short messages and had started using a daybook for writing longer phrases, begins a daily correspondence from Dresden with his son in New York. But instead of mailing the daily letters he just sends empty envelopes, which his wife collects in New York, later found by Oskar in the dresser of his Grandma’s apartment. I saw from the postmarks that the envelopes were organized chronologically, which means by date, and mailed from Dresden, Germany, which is where she came from. There was one for every day, from May 31, 1963, to the worst day. Some were addressed “To my unborn child.” Some were addressed “To my child.” (235)

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Since the letters are never sent, they never get read, except for one single letter that Thomas, Jr., according to his mother, “‘was obsessed with […], always reading […]. I don’t know what you wrote, but it made him go and look for you’” (277). As it turns out, this was the letter in which the father related the story of his loss during the bombing of Dresden to his son instilling the wish in him to become a journalist and write a “‘story about the survivors of Dresden”’ (277-78). When the son dies on 9/11 his father’s memory of the terrible disaster is buried under the rubbles of Ground Zero and lost. Thomas Schell, Sr., learns about the terrorist attack of 9/11, as most people did outside of New York and the United States of America by seeing the televised images of planes flying into buildings. “I was in Dresden’s train station when I lost everything for the second time, I was writing you a letter that I knew I would never send […] I didn’t care about anything except for the letter I was writing to you, nothing else existed, it was like when I walked to Anna with my head down, hiding myself from the world, which is why I walked into her.” (272). This American disaster links up with the German disaster of the war in 1945, both connected with the personal loss of a loved one. It is such a drastic event for Thomas Schell that he stops writing letters, decides to return to New York for a second life, a life of mourning. In his suitcases he transports the unsent letters written to his son. Later when he is reunited with his wife, officially living in her apartment as “the renter,” he assists Oskar in opening his father’s grave at night and places the letters in the empty coffin. Instead of the body, lost in the rubbles of the World Trade Center, the letters contain all the knowledge of the past 40 years, only known to their writer. It is significant that this final act of filling the coffin with the story of the father’s life, traumatically shaped by the experience of the destruction of Dresden, restores meaning to the unsolved problems. It coincides with Oskar’s almost miraculous find of William Black, the owner of the key, who had sold the vase to Oskar’s father shortly before 9/11, ignorant of the fact that it contained his diseased father’s key to a safe containing his inheritance. The grandfather’s trauma over the loss of his pregnant girlfriend, redoubled in the loss of his son in 9/11, seems to be resolved as is Oskar’s trauma over the loss of his father and the unacknowledged and uncommunicated messages on the answering machine in a final scene with his mother who seems to have known all along. For the reader of the novel the resolution of the American trauma caused by the terrorist acts of 9/11 is provided by the author’s engagement of transnational memory. Birgit Däwes along with other critics has rightly argued that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close constitutes “a memorial across continents” and a progress “toward a transnational memory”

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(531, 539). Her reading situates this transatlantic memorial on the level of the three narrators, Grandpa, Grandma and Oskar, and applies Daniel Levy’s and Natan Sznaider’s concept of “cosmopolitan memory” to her usage of transnational memory. In her translation of the German original by Levy and Sznaider it refers to “the complex (trans)formation of human experience which allows for cultural difference and contradiction, resisting hierarchical boundaries of nationhood, and encouraging intercultural exchange” (540). In my reading of Foer’s novel, I locate the transnational memory on the level of the author and the reader. Both the American author and his national and international readers are faced with the same dilemma of coming to terms with the traumatizing effects of 9/11. It is Foer’s selection of textual and pictorial material and its arrangement which make for the almost happy ending of the novel by way of a transnational memory. This narrative strategy is behind Oskar’s ignorance of how his father died and his wish to find out: “It makes me incredibly angry that people all over the world can know things that I can’t, because it happened here, and happened to me, so shouldn’t it be mine?” (256). The narrative section, in which Oskar plays his father’s tapes to his as yet unidentified Grandfather and plans the opening of the grave, can be related to the titles which the Grandfather chooses for his letters to his son: “WHY I’M NOT WHERE YOU ARE.” In both instances, the fictional characters deplore the missing link to knowledge, which resides in another place outside of the country of residence. By choosing to insert some of Thomas Schell’s unread letters to his now dead son in his novel he evokes the transnational memory of loss by relating the missing stories. The grandfather’s description of his personal loss in Dresden serves transnationally as visual representation of the destruction of human lives in the World Trade Center: On my way to Anna’s house, the second raid began, I threw myself into the nearest cellar, it was hit, it filled with pink smoke and gold flames, so I fled into the next cellar, it caught fire, I ran from cellar to cellar as each previous cellar was destroyed, burning monkeys screamed from the trees, birds with their wings on fire sang from the telephone wires over which desperate calls traveled, I found another shelter, it was filled to the walls, brown smoke pressed down from the ceiling like a hand, it became more and more difficult to breathe, my lungs were trying to pull the room in through my mouth, there was a silver explosion, all of us tried to leave the cellar at once, dead and dying people were trampled, I walked over an old man, I walked over children, everyone was losing everyone, the bombs were like a waterfall, ran through the streets, from cellar to cellar, and saw terrible things: legs and necks, I saw a woman whose blond hair and green dress were on fire, running with a silent baby in her arms, I saw humans melted into thick pools of liquid, three or four feet deep in places, I saw bodies crackling like embers, laughing, and the remains of masses of people who had tried to escape the firestorm by jumping head first into the lakes and ponds, the parts of their

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bodies that were submerged in the water were still intact, while the parts that protruded above water charred beyond recognition, the bombs kept falling, purple, orange and white, I kept running, my hands kept bleeding, through the sounds of collapsing buildings I heard the roar of that baby’s silence. (211-13)

This description, which must have been the content of the crucial letter, the only one sent to and repeatedly read by Oskar’s father, is unknown to Oskar and his Grandma. Oskar only learns about it in the series of letters, which Grandma writes to him under the title of “My Feelings.” Here the images of the disaster appear first as survivor’s guilt (80-83; 308-09), then as a dream sequence in reverse: “The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of planes whose propellers turned backward, like the second hands of the clocks across Dresden, only faster” (306-07). The scope of transnational memory is widened even more through references to Oskar’s school project on the nuclear destruction of human lives in Hiroshima. Using a recorded interview with a mother who lost her child in the nuclear disaster allows him to present drastic images of the disintegration and incineration of human bodies. By analogy to the transnational memories of Dresden and Hiroshima, Oskar and his grandfather, as well as the readers can fathom the immensity of the effects of international terrorism and can begin to overcome the personal and national trauma. Jonathan Safran Foer’s transnational memory was probably also triggered by the example of Günter Grass’s juvenile protagonist Oskar in Die Blechtrommel (1959; see Däwes 539) and Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, including personal experiences of the air attack in Dresden. In Slaughterhouse 5, the autobiographical alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, stands for Vonnegut’s own memory and coincides with his authorial intentions. While Foer’s and Vonnegut’s narratives differ in terms of their personal backgrounds – Vonnegut living through the Dresden bombing, Foer experiencing 9/11 in New York – they both use the transnational memory of the destruction of Dresden to cope with another event. Vonnegut’s depiction of the chaotic effects of massive air strikes has been seen early on as an analogy to the war in Vietnam, which reached its culminating point at the time of the publication in 1969 (Dickstein, Allen). The repeatedly voiced criticism about the clear rejection of Nazi ideology in both Vonnegut’s (see Freese 346) and Foer’s novel overlooks the implicit working of the transnational memory. Clearly, the Holocaust figures in both novels. Vonnegut uses the discussion of the postwar fight against the Communists to point to the military situation and sets the figure of casualties in Dresden against the number of Jews exterminated in the concentration camps. Foer has Anna’s father hide Simon Goldstein in a shed in his garden and reappear miraculously as a refugee in Manhattan where Thomas Schell recognizes

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him. Prior to their first love making, separated by a wall of books in Simon Goldberg’s hideout, Thomas and Anna had observed “the busy train station” and registered that “the commotion of the war grew nearer and nearer, soldiers went east through our town, and refugees went west, or stayed there, trains arrived and departed, hundreds of them.”(127). In post 9/11 Manhattan Goldberg voices his outrage about the destruction: “We go on killing each other to no purpose! It is war waged by humanity against humanity, and it will only end when there’s no one left to fight!” (128). Finally, Oskar’s correspondence with Stephen Hawkins, whose A Brief History of Time he has read, could serve as a concluding evidence for the importance of transnational memory and its role in coping with personal and national calamities on a transnational level. In his final letter, Hawkins refers to his dismal physical and emotional condition and wishes that he “were a poet” who can offer solutions in a world of universal problems (305). Foer seems to have accepted this role for himself counting on the mediation of transnational memory. In his 9/11 novel Falling Man, Don DeLillo uses transnational memory for his analysis of the universal existence of evil expressed in the symbolism of its title. Like Foer, he evokes the transnational memory of violence and destruction, which in his case is, however, not caused by catastrophic historical events but by contemporary acts of international terrorism. Thus he creates a direct link to the terrorist violence of 9/11 with the intention to show the similarity of terrorist motivations across the globe and to explore personal and national traumata transnationally. The story of the novel focuses on the life of the lawyer Keith Neudecker who narrowly escapes the Twin Towers before they implode. Rather than returning to his own apartment he instinctively makes his way to his family’s place where his wife Lianne and their son Justin live. Yet, the spontaneous reunion of the estranged couple under the impact of 9/11 fails. Keith begins a loose relationship with Florence Givens whose briefcase he had rescued from the collapsing buildings and continues seeing his group of poker players. Lianne intensifies her work with a group of Alzheimer patients who in turn aid her to overcome the emotional pain over her father’s suicide when diagnosed with Alzheimer disease symptoms. Justin denying the reality of Ground Zero searches the sky for planes sent by Bill Lawton (a phonetic equivalent of Osama bin Laden) on their way to destruction. This history of an American family in New York by extension includes Lianne’s mother Nina, a retired professor of art history, and her partner Martin Ridnour, a dubious art investor and former member of the Baader-Meinhof Group. It is interrelated with terrorist groups operating in Germany, the Middle East, and with the stunts of a performance artist, the literal falling man of the title. While the three parts of the novel sug-

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gest a structure according to individual agents: Bill Lawton (or Osama bin Laden), Ernst Hechinger (Martin Ridnour’s German name) and David Janiak (the falling man artist), the narrative interweaves the storylines of family history, terrorist activities, and artistic falls with the reality of private and political figures involved in the catastrophic events of 9/11. In the person of Martin Ridnour with the German name of Ernst Hechinger, DeLillo engages the transnational memory of terrorist activities in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, which had links to training camps in the Middle East, to ideological cadres in the German Democratic Republic and other countries of the Eastern block. Initially named after two of its founding members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the group eventually adopted the name of Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion), was operative from 1968 to 1998 and responsible for 34 violent deaths. Its techniques of operation were similar to the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) working in Italy in the 1970s kidnapping and killing leaders of the system to bring down the allegedly fascist and imperialistic states (see Kaufman). It is interesting that in Falling Man Martin’s terrorist past is not directly related but worked out indirectly in dialogue between Lianne and her mother. The terrorist’s personal memory, the reader learns from Nina, does not yield any concrete information: He said to me once, I’ve done some things. He said, This doesn’t make my life more interesting than yours. It can be made to sound more interesting. But in memory, in those depths, he said, there is not much vivid color or wild excitement. It is all gray and waiting. Sitting, waiting. He said, It is all sort of neutral, you know. (146)

Instead of Martin’s deficient and repressed memory of the past, Nina, urged by her daughter’s hint at her own complicity, provides the missing details by taking recourse to the transnational memory about terrorist activities in Europe: I know one thing. He was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One. Demonstrating against the German state, the fascist state. That’s how they saw it. First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs. After that I’m not sure what he did. I think he was in Italy for a while, in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. (146)

Visible sign of the transnational memory is the wanted poster with nineteen names and faces of German terrorists of the early seventies, “‘wanted for murder, bombings, bank robberies’” (147). It is significant that Martin keeps this poster in his apartment in Berlin where he had shown it to his American friend during one of her previous visits. It forms part of her transnational memory, and she recognizes its content when her partner links the 9/11 terrorists to the European ones:

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He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood. (147)

The transnational dimension of the terrorist acts of 9/11 is the pervasive subject of Falling Man and Don DeLillo’s basis for his evaluation of the global implications of Ground Zero. Each of the three parts ends with a titled chapter in which the course of the 9/11 terrorists, exemplified in the fictional Hammad and his friend Amir, is marked by three concrete locations in Germany, Florida, and New York. This trajectory corresponds to the actual stages of preparation of the real persons, such as Mohamed Atta (see 172). The first of these sections in Part One is located “On Marienstrasse” in Hamburg where the group of Arab students is officially enrolled in architecture and engineering, but secretly planning Islam’s “struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far, Jews first, for all things unjust and hateful, and then the Americans” (80). The section begins with the personal memory of an old man in which he relates to Hammad his revolutionary actions as a soldier in Saddam’s army and as a martyr of the Ayatollah (see 77). All training camps and battle places of jihadists in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Turkey and Bosnia surface in the story and are seen as preparatory stages for the battle against the degenerate West. During the flight training “In Nokomis,” on the Southwest coast of Florida, the terrorists “accept their duty, which was for each of them, in blood trust, to kill Americans” (171). The implementation of terrorist violence occurs “In the Hudson Corridor” with the impact of the plane in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the perspective changes back to Keith Neudecker and the catastrophic situation of the damaged building about to collapse. Don DeLillo’s placement of this terrorist attack in the storehouse of transnational memory allows him to show the like-mindedness of terrorists all over the world. In accordance with his ideological persuasions of the 1970s Martin Ridnour shares the Islamist perception of the Twin Towers “as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction” (116). This ostentatious display of America’s “careless power,” he tells Lianne after her mother’s death, nauseates the rest of the world and renders America irrelevant (191). In this final encounter with her mother’s long-time friend, she recognizes the core of Ernst Hechinger’s duplicitous role: “She could imagine his life, then and now, detect the slurred pulse of an earlier consciousness. Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her – one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white” (195). Her knowledge of the transnational memory of European terrorism, in

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which Hechinger was involved, prevents her from falling into the ideological trap of exonerating him from his deeds and thoughts. Instead, she finds him guilty by association for the terrorist attack (191). The recourse to transnational memory, which dispels binary forms of thinking along ideological divides, also helps Lianne understand the gradual loss of memories among her Alzheimer patients and the role of religion to carry out and to understand terrorist actions. The group of patients consists of men and women, some of them with immigrant backgrounds, one with a criminal record having served a prison term for killing a man. Their writing therapy is supposed to help them cope with the situation which Lianne’s father never wanted to face: “the day when he failed to know who he was” (130). The disorientations experienced in the daily routines of their lives reflect minor gaps in their memories. They are, however, aggravated when they endanger their personal positions. Thus Rosellen S. is lost in New York because she “could not remember where she lived” (93); Carmen G. misses the company of the group in the morning when she wakes up alone and does not want to get up because it feels like passing a frontier: “It’s like I need my documents to get out of bed. Prueba de ingreso. Prueba de dirección. Tarjeta de seguro social. Picture ID” (125); and Omar H. wants to hide his Arab descent after the terrorist attacks. In this post-9/11 situation with the spontaneous revival of American patriotism the question of national allegiance and ethnic background emerges. When the patients write about Rosellen S., who did not return to the group since she could not remember where she lived, Lianne compares them to immigrants on old passport photos from Martin’s collection on the wall of her mother’s apartment. In this stage of disease “Staatsangehörigkeit” is reduced to official stamps and decorative signs, which in turn have become irrelevant (see 141-42). The topic of not knowing one’s place unites the members of the group. When they agree to write about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 none of them mention the terrorists, some blame God instead for letting this happen, others, however, feel reassured in their belief (see 60-65). Thus belief in God, in whose name this terrorism is allegedly carried out, loses its nationalistic ideological dimension. The attitude of the Alzheimer patients reflects a transnational memory of religion. Eventually it also emerges from the heated debates about the role of religion in politics and terrorism between Nina, Lianne and Martin and is symbolized in the novel’s many references to the falling man. Not only does David Janiak, the performer of the falling man, possess a multinational training in his art of falling, but he also seems to have planned his final mortal stunt as a conscious imitation of “the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center,

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headfirst, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower?” making him into a “Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror” (221, 220; see also Raspe; Drew). But Janiak also represents the universal Biblical topic of the fallen man who dies for his sins. In this sense, the North Tower turns into a postmodern equivalent of the Tower of Babel built out of arrogance and in defiance of God, who consequently punished the people by confounding their one language and scattering them abroad upon the face of all the earth (Gen. 11: 1-9). Don DeLillo’s symbolic reference to the common Biblical source of the three Abrahamite religions seems to call on the transnational memory of Christians, Jews and Muslims, often forgotten in our time. Rejecting all kinds of binary thinking and ideological attribution of guilt, he appeals to the common bond of all humankind. While Jonathan Safran Foer offers a transnational solution to personal and national traumata in a quasi happy ending, commensurate with the juvenile mind of nine-year old Oskar, Don DeLillo’s evocation of transnational memory suggests a mode of understanding and acceptance of differences and failure on a global scale. The fictional rendition of transnational memory by both authors can be seen as poetic equivalents of recent theories in the social sciences about transnationalism and a cosmopolitan society. Both novelists and social scientists like Ulrich Beck, Jeffrey Stepnisky, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider share an optimistic belief in the common bond of humankind beyond national borders (see Schindler). Thus they jointly contribute to Jürgen Habermas’s projection of a “cosmopolitan community of world citizens” and “global governance” (109, 111).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1967. 17-34. Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Baudrillard, Jean. America. 1986. London: Verso, 1989. Beck, Ulrich, Natan Sznaider, and Rainer Winter, eds. Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2003. Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006. Däwes, Birgit. “On Contested Ground (Zero): Literature and the Transnational Challenge of Remembering 9/11.” Amerikastudien /American Studies 52.4 (2007): 51734. DeCurtis, Anthony. “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Letricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 43-66. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.

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—. “In the Ruins of the Future.” Harper’s Magazine (Dec. 2001): 33-40. Dickstein, Morris. “Fiction and Society, 1940-1970.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Gen. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Vol. 7. Prose Writing 1900-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 101-310. Drew, Richard. Photograph of “Falling Man.” 11 September 2001. Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. “Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17-57. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. 2005. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Freese, Peter. The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. American Studies – A Monograph Series 174. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. Habermas, Jürgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. Max Pensky. 1998. Cambridge: Polity P, 2001. Hornung, Alfred. “Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 67-73. Kaufman, Linda S. “The Wake of Terror: Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future,’ ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ and Falling Man.” Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (2008): 353-77. Kraft, Johanna. “Die Terroranschläge vom 11. September 2001 und ihre Verarbeitung in der amerikanischen Gegenwartsliteratur.” State Exam Thesis: University of Mainz, 2008. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. Litt, Toby. Rev. of Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The Guardian 26 May 2007: 35. Raspe, Martin. “The Falling Man: Der 11. September in der Momentaufnahme.” Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001. Ed. Ingo Irsliger and Christoph Jürgensen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 369-82. Schindler, Sabine. “National Pasts and the Global Future: Cosmopolitan Visions of Collective Memory at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.” The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts, Debates. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe and Sabine Schindler. American Studies – A Monograph Series 143. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 221-47. Stepnisky, Jeffrey. “Global Memory and the Rhythm of Life.” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2005): 1383-1402. Struck, Peter. “Erklärung des Vorsitzenden der SPD-Fraktion Dr. Peter Struck zu den Anschlägen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (12.09.2001).” 15 Jan. 2009 . —. “Regierungserklärung des Bundesministers der Verteidigung.” 11 March 2004. .

Remembering War the Transnational Way: The U.S.-American Memory of World War I VOLKER DEPKAT

In answer to the question “What is a Nation,” Ernest Renan in 1882 defined a nation as a spiritual community constituted by the memory of the sacrifices made for it in the past and by the willingness to make further sacrifices for it in the future. A heroic past and common suffering were, according to Renan, the social capital upon which the nation as “un principe spirituel” rested (903). Translated into the terms of present-day nationalisms research, Renan defined a nation as an “imagined community” (Anderson) held together by the common memory of past sacrifices made, hardships suffered, and heroic deeds done for it. 1 If we accept Renan’s definition of a nation, then wars figure prominently in the processes of nation-building as they are both times of heroism and sacrifice. Ever since we have come to understand a nation not as a given but as a social construction by those who either consider themselves to be part of it, or who would like to be part of it, the question of exactly how, i.e. through which symbols, practices, institutions and media, nations actually imagine themselves as nations dominates much of the research into the history of nationalisms (Nora; François and Schulze; Berding; Hobsbawm and Ranger; Gillis). In this context, war memories attracted a considerable research interest among the international community of scholars. 2 This rich and multifaceted research, that has greatly expanded our knowledge and deepened our understanding of nationalisms, cannot be discussed in all detail here. Suffice it to say that, as diverse as the subjects investigated into are, as different as the temporal scope of the various studies is, as _____________ 1 2

The current research into the history of nationalisms continues to be informed by the ‘cultural turn’ as it was ushered in by the works of Anderson; Gellner; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism; see also Wehler. General, and focused on the twentieth-century wars: Piehler, Remembering War; Linenthal and Engelhardt; Mosse; Zehfuss; Keren and Herwig. World War I: Fussel; Winter, Sites of Memory; Winter, Remembering War; Snell; Trout, Memorial Fictions; Trout, “Forgotten Reminders”; Vance; Brandt; Korte; Dülffer and Krumeich. World War II: Echternkamp and Martens; Scholz; Gessner; Terkel; Brokaw. Korea: Edwards. Vietnam: Bleakney; Oliver; Hass.

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numerous as the methodological and conceptual approaches are, the lion’s share of the scholarship in the field of war memory studies is united by one shared premise: It is usually taken for granted that war memory is inherently national and can therefore be analyzed adequately within national paradigms. This approach – as plausible as it is – ignores, however, that wars do not only separate nations but connect them as well. Wars let nations interact with each other as enemies or allies, and thereby also intertwine their memories. This holds particularly true for the wars of the twentieth century. They put entire societies in arms, and their regional scope was much greater than that of the wars in earlier centuries. In the case of the U.S., the wars of the twentieth century ended the long tradition of self-satisfied continentalism and involved the country in the political affairs of world regions it had painstakingly steered clear from before. As a result, much of the U.S.-American memory of these wars is connected to sites in Europe, Africa and Asia. At the same time, it is inseparably intertwined with the war memories of the nations the U.S. interacted with during these wars, be that as enemies or allies, as destroyers or builders, as occupiers or liberators. However, the twentieth-century wars of the U.S. did not only take place abroad; they were also motors of political, social, economic and cultural change at home. The inseparable interconnection between ‘over here’ and ‘over there,’ between the home front and the battle front, between the enemies abroad and the supposed enemies within is one of the defining moments of the U.S.’ twentieth-century wars. The mobilization of all social, economic, and cultural resources for the war effort deepened already existing cleavages and triggered new social conflicts in U.S.America’s multiethnic and multiracial society. At the same time, the U.S.’ very multicultural plurality produced multiple transnational interconnections with the countries the U.S. was allied with or – more importantly – fought against. These multiple social cleavages and transnational interconnections translated into memory wars between the various social groups that undercut, pluralized, dissolved, and fragmented the national memory. In the following, I want to elaborate on both aspects of transnationalism in U.S.-American war memory, i.e. the links of U.S.-American memory to sites abroad and the transnational multiplication of war memories in the U.S. itself, by looking at World War I and the problems of commemoration connected to it. 3 _____________ 3

On the U.S. in World War I see Kennedy; Harries and Harries; Chambers II; Keene, World War I; Keene, Doughboys; Keene, The United States and the First World War; Farwell; Hawley. On the American commemoration of World War I see Piehler, Remembering War 92-125;

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World War I has been identified as the “great seminal catastrophe” (Kennan 3) of the twentieth-century ushering in “the Birth of the Modern Age” (Eksteins), and a “Short Twentieth Century” marked by the experience of repeated (total) warfare (Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes 22). It was the first war under the conditions of a fully developed industrial modernity. The experiences of industrial warfare and its unprecedented sacrifice, suffering, and slaughter produced a new cult of memory whose language, images, sites and practices of commemorating and representing war substantially shaped the way in which the subsequent major military conflicts of the twentieth century were remembered. World War I triggered, as Jay Winter argues in Remembering War, the “memory boom” of the twentieth century as a “varied and ubiquitous cultural project” whose “initial impulse” can be traced to the years from 1914 to 1918 (1). This article argues that the cult of memory surrounding World War I, despite its strong national focus, also had clearly visible transnational elements to it from the start, and most of them can in one way or another be traced to the novel kind of industrial warfare that came as a culture shock to all combatant countries involved. To prove this, the essay first investigates the problem of where to bury the fallen U.S. soldiers, then moves on to expose transnational elements in the cult of the Unknown Soldier, and finally examines how notions of U.S.-American national identity were increasingly transnationalized in the process of remembering World War I in the light of experienced disunity at home and abroad.

Burying Fallen Soldiers The question of where to bury the war dead was posed in all combatant countries after 1918. Whether the remains of the fallen soldiers should be gathered in national cemeteries on the battlefields where they had fallen, or whether they should be brought home to local communities and buried where their next of kin wanted them to be buried, was at the heart of controversial discussions in France, Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Germany, and the U.S. 4 The policies pursued by the various national governments differed considerably. Germany, having lost the war, was in no position to return to the areas it had occupied between 1914 and 1918 to repatriate the remains of its soldiers interred in Eastern and Western Europe. The Treaty _____________ 4

Mayo 79-99; Snell; Budreau; Graham; Trout, Memorial Fictions; Trout, “Forgotten Reminders.” Winter, Sites of Memory 15-28; Vance 60-63; Mosse 70-106; Piehler, Remembering War 94-97; Meigs 143-87.

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of Versailles placed the responsibility of caring for the war dead of the enemy buried on its territory into the hands of every combatant country, and Germany was not given control over its military cemeteries in Belgium, France and the other areas it had occupied during the war (Mosse 82). In Great Britain, the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was responsible for settling the problem of the final resting place for the fallen British soldiers, and it rigorously ruled out the option of repatriating them to either the British Isles or the Commonwealth countries (Winter, Sites of Memory 27; Vance 60; Inglis, “Sacred Place”; Inglis, “The Homecoming”). The French government originally intended to regroup isolated burials in designated military cemeteries in the battlefield areas of World War I. Since this policy met with fierce criticism by the families of the fallen who wanted to have the remains of their loved ones back, the French government on 28 September 1920 finally agreed to give the families the right to claim the soldiers’ remains, and to have them transmitted home at state expense. By 1923 about 300,000 of the identified French war dead had been handed over to their next of kin. The remainder of either unknown or unclaimed dead was laid to rest in national war cemeteries scattered over a vast area in north-eastern France and Flanders (Winter, Sites of Memory 26-27). In the U.S., the federal government had originally intended to return all recovered corpses to America. In 1917, upon entering World War I, the War Department declared that the bodies of the fallen soldiers would be buried in the U.S. either at their homes or in national cemeteries. This procedure was in keeping with earlier overseas conflicts. Already the fallen U.S. soldiers of the Spanish-American War and the Philippines Insurrection had been repatriated to find their final resting place in the U.S. (Piehler, Remembering War 94). Altogether 80,178 soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) died in the course of World War I. Of these, 34,063 were listed as killed in action, 14,215 had died of wounds after receiving medical attention, 23,210 had died of disease, and another 4,588 of “other causes.” Finally, 4,102 U.S. soldiers were noted as “missing in action” (Budreau 376). Most of the battlefield dead were initially buried where they fell by their comrades who topped their graves with rough crosses or cairns of rubble which were to attract the attention of the burial parties coming up behind (Harries and Harries 451). The American Graves Registration Service (GRS), created in 1917, was responsible for identifying, exhuming, and registering the U.S.-American war dead. By 1919, it had registered more than 2,400 sites across Europe where U.S.-American dead had been temporarily buried in more than 15,000 isolated graves (Budreau 376).

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After the war, and breaking with the initial pledge to repatriate the U.S.-American war dead, a number of prominent political, military and other leaders in the U.S. began advocating a policy of maintaining permanent overseas cemeteries in Europe. Already during the war former president Theodore Roosevelt had declared that his fallen son Quentin should be buried in France on the spot where he had fallen arguing that the proper resting place for a warrior was on the battlefield (Piehler, Remembering War 96). Politicians such as former President William Howard Taft, Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, clerical authorities like AEF Chief Chaplain Charles H. Brent, and many other internationalists argued that the country’s war dead should remain buried overseas as a symbol of the U.S.’ continued commitment to Europe (95). The advocates of permanent overseas cemeteries claimed that the soldiers’ graves would be enduring monuments to the cause of freedom for which they had died. They furthermore envisioned U.S.-American cemeteries abroad to reflect the power and prestige of the U.S., which had been greatly enhanced during the conflict, and they “emphasized the continued service the war dead could perform for their country and for Western civilization” (96). This policy of nationalizing the war dead did not go undisputed. It rather triggered a bitter fight over the question of where to bury the soldiers. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker insisted in 1919 on his department honoring its original commitment to bringing the remains of the U.S.-American fighters home, and he left the final decision on whether they wanted their fallen loved ones to be repatriated or remain in France to the next of kin (95). The War Department sent questionnaires to the widows, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters of the war dead giving them four primary choices as to what to do with the remains: first, return to the U.S. for burial in Arlington National Cemetery, second, return to the U.S. with shipment to personal home address, third, return to the U.S. for burial in a national cemetery, or, four, remain in Europe for burial in a permanent U.S.-American cemetery (Budreau 377-78). An overwhelming majority of those asked requested the return, and of them again a majority wanted their loved ones to be buried close to home. In the end, an approximate 45,588 bodies were shipped to the U.S. and 764 to European places of birth, which means that roughly 70 percent of those who died overseas in World War I were returned to the U.S. (Budreau 378). Interestingly enough, this also included the bodies of the Canadian volunteers in the AEF. Thus the dead Canadian soldiers who had fought in the ranks of the British army were not allowed to return home, while the ones having fought with the AEF upon request of their families could (Vance 63). By 1921 most of the identifiable U.S. war dead

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had been repatriated entirely at government expense of nearly 30 million U.S. dollars (Budreau 377-78). A vast majority of U.S. citizens, therefore, did not want their sons, husbands and fathers to be used as symbols of the nation. They simply dropped out of the national cult of memory, which, as Lisa M. Budreau argues, contributed to a “massive diffusion of memory” (379). A sizeable minority of altogether more than 30,000 U.S. war dead including those without a known identity remained interred in Europe (372). For them, the federal government established altogether eight permanent military cemeteries, one in Belgium (Flanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial [ACM] at Waregem) and six in northern France (St. Mihiel ACM at Thiaucourt (fig. 1), Meuse-Argonne ACM at Romagne, Somme ACM at Bony, Aisne-Marne ACM at Belleau Wood, Oise-Aisne ACM at Fère-en-Tardenois, and Suresnes ACM near Paris). The eighth ACM is located in England, where a portion of the Brookwood military cemetery is designated as the final resting place for the fallen of the AEF (379).

Fig. 1 St. Mihiel American Cemetery and Memorial, France. Photograph: Courtesy of the American Battle Monuments Commission, Arlington, Virginia, USA.

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The federal government spent millions on creating the eight ACMs in Europe. Initially, the War Department and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) were in charge of designing the overseas cemeteries and monuments. As of 1923, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) – a newly established, presidentially appointed, and independent agency created by Congress at the urging of the War Department and the CFA – was responsible for the construction of all overseas memorials and cemeteries. The creation of the ABMC was a declared attempt to centralize the control over the way in which World War I was commemorated in and by the U.S. The commission worked to have France and Belgium prohibit all U.S.-American war memorials not approved by it, it forbade regimental monuments in Europe, and reviewed all monument projects proposed by state governments and even private groups. All these measures were intended to prevent the profusion of monuments and ensure the primacy of the officially approved sites and forms of commemorating World War I (Piehler, Remembering War 98-100). The ACMs in France and Belgium were supposed to represent a vision of the war society as a rocksolid entity unified by the common dedication to defending freedom and democracy in the world. Yet, despite, or maybe because of this strong determination to nationalize the war dead, the ACMs in Europe became an integral part of the transnational landscape of memory into which the battlefields of World War I were transformed during the 1920s and 1930s (Brandt). The language, symbols, concepts, and forms of the U.S.-American war cemeteries and memorials in Europe converged with those of other nations, as the cult of memory emerging in the interwar period, despite of national variations and differentiations, was essentially the same in all combatant countries. It moved within a complex web of flows and exchanges of commemorative practices that transcended national boundaries (Winter, Sites of Memory 227-28; Winter, Remembering War; Winter, “War, Memory, and Mourning” 104). Thus, in planning the ACMs, the War Department, the CFA and later the ABMC drew on British commemorative practices. Following the British model, officers and enlisted men were buried without distinction next to each other in symmetrically arranged graves of identical size in a park like setting, and they were commemorated with identical headstones that varied slightly only in their descriptions (Piehler, Remembering War 97-98). The Canadians constructed the same kind of cemeteries for their fallen soldiers (Vance 61). The symbolic egalitarianism of the cemeteries was intended to visualize the “submergence of individual identity to the nation’s cause,” and the individual soldier’s “voluntary and willing sacrifice […] to the nation as a whole” (Piehler, Remembering War 97). This was not

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unique to the U.S. since, as George L. Mosse has shown, the post-war cult of the fallen soldier became a “centerpiece of the religion of nationalism” in all combatant countries (7). Yet, this national prism obscures the fact, that in the context of the European battlefield landscape every national cemetery also acquired a transnational meaning. Together, they conveyed the anonymity of slaughter, the equality of all soldiers in death as well as the universality of suffering, grief, and bereavement of the families and next of kin. The mass death that these cemeteries visualized in the context of the memory landscape of the European battlefields precluded any form of national triumphalism (Winter, Sites of Memory 107). The military cemeteries of the various European countries erected on the battlefields of World War I integrated communities of mourning that were transnational in character. In the interwar period, the battlefields of World War I became “foci of the rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of bereavement”, places “where people grieved, both individually and collectively” (78-79). Hundreds of thousands of veterans and mourners, pilgrims and tourists from all combatant nations visited this landscape of memory, consisting of authentic battlefield sites interspersed with military cemeteries and war monuments (Lloyd; Brandt; Vance 57; Winter, Sites of Memory 78-116). As sites of memory and mourning, the military cemeteries and memorials on the battlefields of World War I interconnected the memories of the nations. Thus, to commemorate the battle of Verdun, a huge mausoleum holding the bones of over one million unidentified French and German soldiers killed in the wartime sieges was erected at Douaumont and officially dedicated in 1932 (Ossuaire de Douaumont; Werth; Rohde and Ostrovsky). The Monument to the Missing at Thiepval, also dedicated in 1932 and designed by the British artist Sir Edwin Lutyens to commemorate the approximately 73,000 missing French and British soldiers of the Battle of the Somme, unites the monument with two cemeteries of French and British soldiers (Winter, Sites of Memory 105-08). Käthe Kollwitz’ war memorial Die Eltern has the sculptures of two parents mourning their son at his authentic grave at the Roggevelde German war cemetery, near Vladslo in Flemish Belgium (108-13). Canada built its national war memorial at Vimy Ridge on Hill 145, a bitterly contested spot in the strategically important coalfields of Northern France, which the Canadian Corps took after a fiercely fought battle with over 10,000 Canadian casualties in 1917. When Walter Allward’s memorial was dedicated in 1936, 6,000 Canadians travelled to Artois in the so-called Vimy Pilgrimage (Vance 56-72). Viewed in this context, the U.S. war dead permanently interred in European soil were a concrete link connecting U.S.-American memories to Europe on the collective and official as well as on the individual and

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private plane. The U.S. military cemeteries in Europe were located on battlefields which the memories of other nations were also tied to, and where the war dead of other combatant countries also found their final resting places: the Somme, Meuse-Argonne, Oise-Aisne, Aisne-Marne, and Flanders Field. Two of the U.S. cemeteries, the ones at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, were identified with victories of the AEF, whereas the others lay in regions where AEF divisions fought in joint operations under British and French command (Budreau 379). Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens travelled to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s to visit the graves of their loved ones. The year 1927 saw the trip of some 25,000 AEF veterans and their families to the American Legion convention in Paris which was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the U.S.’ entry into World War I (Kennedy 363-67). The American Legion was the first national veterans organization founded after World War I, and the core element of the 1927 convention’s program were visits to the U.S.-American war cemeteries in France. Upon boarding the ship bound for Europe on 10 September 1927, National Legion Commander Howard P. Savage said that the veterans would visit the battlefields to remember “the sacred bonds of communion we will hold with the dead in the cemeteries of the World War” (qtd. in Kennedy 363). Not only AEF veterans travelled to the U.S. military cemeteries in Europe in the interwar period. Uncounted widows, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters of the fallen soldiers did so as well. As the majority of those who had lost their next of kin in war could not afford a trip to Europe, war-related associations like the American Gold Star Mothers, the American War Mothers, and the American Legion embarked on a campaign to have Congress fund a pilgrimage to Europe for mothers who had allowed their sons to be interred in overseas cemeteries. 5 Insisting that the federal government owed every mother who had sacrificed her son to the nation at least one visit to his grave, these associations lobbied for organized and state-subsidized cemetery visits to Europe. A first bill authorizing “an appropriation to enable Gold Star mothers, fathers or wives to visit the graves of their sons and husbands in France” was introduced by the Democratic representative from New York, Samuel Dickstein, as early as 1923, but it did not pass (Budreau 387). Five years later Thomas S. Butler, a representative from Pennsylvania, reintroduced legislation to fund visits of the next of kin to the graves of their loved ones in France, and this time the measure was successful. In early 1929 Congress passed bill HR _____________ 5

On the Gold Star Mothers’ pilgrimages see Budreau; Graham; Piehler, Remembering War 101-05; Keene, “The Memory of the Great War” 67-68; Kennedy 368-69.

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5494, and on 2 March 1929, just weeks before leaving office, President Calvin Coolidge signed it (393). Ultimately altogether five million dollars were appropriated by Congress to send roughly 6,000 Gold Star Mothers to visit their sons’ graves between 1930 and 1933. 6 Women taking part in the pilgrimages, at least the white ones, travelled cabin class, stayed at first-class hotels and were taken to the graves of their sons and husbands, but they also stayed a week either in Paris or London where they were honored by the French and British governments with receptions.

Commemorating Unknown Soldiers Many of the forms, symbols, and practices of commemorating World War I adapted nineteenth-century traditions to the memory of the first industrial war in history (Winter, Sites of Memory 2-7, 223-29; Trout, “Forgotten Reminders” 203-04; Mosse 103-06). The unprecedented sacrifice, suffering, and killing of World War I provoked, as Jay Winter argues in Sites of Memory, a “search for an appropriate language of loss,” and this search found its target in the “enduring appeal of many traditional motifs – defined as an eclectic set of classical, romantic, or religious images and ideas” of representing and commemorating war (5). According to Winter, the renaissance of the traditional forms of commemorating war has to be related to their power of mediating the “universality of bereavement in the Europe of the Great War and its aftermath” (5). The cult of the Unknown Soldier, however, emerged from World War I as an unprecedented form, symbol, and practice of commemoration. 7 It had inscribed into it the experiences of the novel kind of industrial warfare, under the conditions of which mass-produced machine guns and artillery, trench warfare and the battles of material reduced the individual soldier to the status of a serial number in the anonymous slaughter of what Ernst Jünger described as Stahlgewitter (“Storm of Steel”). In those storms, countless soldiers perished without a trace on the European battlefields, the remains of countless others could no longer be identified. World War I’s army of the dead, therefore, contained hundreds of thousands of unknown soldiers. For them, almost all combatant countries erected tombs of the Unknown Soldier in a national shrine shortly after _____________ 6 7

Just over 6,000 of the more than 30,000 people contacted accepted the government’s invitation to join the Gold Star Pilgrimages to Europe (Budreau 403). For the sums allocated and spent see Budreau 373; Kennedy 367. See Hanson 282-354; Inglis, “Entombing Unknown Soldiers”; Winter, Sites of Memory 10208; Mosse 94-98; Piehler, Remembering War 116-25; Meigs 143-50; Bruns.

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the war. The cult of the Unknown Soldier reflects exactly this “loss of individual identity that soldiers experienced in the armies of the First World War” (Piehler, Remembering War 117). Great Britain and France each independently buried one unidentified soldier with an elaborate state funeral on Armistice Day, 11 November 1920. The tomb of France’s Unknown Soldier was located beneath the Arc de Triomphe, in Great Britain the Unknown Soldier found his final resting place in Westminster Abbey (Hanson 282-354). The U.S. followed suit on Armistice Day one year later, when the remains of America’s Unknown Soldier were laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery in a grandiose ceremony rivaling any state funeral for a president or a general. 8 A blindfolded sergeant had selected the corpse to be entombed at Arlington on 24 October 1921 in the Hôtel de Ville of Châlon-sur-Marne by dropping a white carnation on one of the altogether four caskets containing the remains of unidentified U.S. soldiers from four military cemeteries in France. 9 U.S.-America’s Unknown Soldier crossed the Atlantic aboard the U.S.S. Olympia, Admiral Dewey’s Spanish-American War flagship, was then transported to Washington and placed in the rotunda of the Capitol on 9 November. President Warren G. Harding, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, Speaker of the House Frederick H. Gillett, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Howard Taft, Secretary of War John W. Weeks, Secretary of Navy Edwin Denby, and General Pershing all placed wreaths before the casket resting on the Lincoln catafalque. The following day the diplomatic corps, numerous dignitaries as well as tens of thousands of veterans, representatives of associations and organizations, and private citizens paid tribute to the Unknown Soldier’s casket. On 11 November 1921 the remains of the Unknown Soldier were escorted to Arlington National Cemetery (fig. 2) in a huge and dignified procession. The president, all members of Congress, the Supreme Court, cabinet members, state governors, high-ranking foreign officials joined the veterans, the scores of representatives of service and professional organizations and the crowds of official and unofficial mourners in the streets of Washington and at Arlington National Cemetery. The funeral service was conducted by an interdenominational team of Christian clergymen, a rabbi and Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow nation who offered a prayer to the Great Spirit and placed his war headdress and crop on the casket. The Unknown Soldier was awarded the highest military medals and laid to rest _____________ 8 9

The following account is based on Piehler, Remembering War 116-22. Doughboy Center; Bruns; Kennedy 368-69; Hanson 331-53. Kennedy speaks of six unidentified corpses from which the American Unknown Soldier was chosen (Kennedy 368). Hanson (338) and the entry on the website Doughboy Center know of only four.

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at Arlington Memorial Amphitheater (fig. 3). As this was done, President Harding called the nation to observe two minutes of silence, a call which was heeded by millions all across the U.S. The agents of memory in England, France, the U.S., and other combatant countries intended the Unknown Soldier to be a symbol of national unity. Scholarship has taken this intention at face-value, arguing that “[t]hose who created the idea wanted this figure to commemorate all the soldiers who fought for the nation and to make the enormous loss of life in the war comprehensible” (Piehler, Remembering War 117).

Fig. 2. Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (also Tomb of the Unknowns), Arlington National Cemetery. 1997. Photograph: Ingrid Gessner.

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Fig. 3. Arlington Memorial Amphitheater. 1997. Photograph: Ingrid Gessner.

However, this focus on the national dimension hides from view the strong transnational elements that were present in the cult of the Unknown Soldier and that complemented, expanded but also questioned an exclusively national reading. Jay Winter argues that the “cultural history of the Great War was a common history” essentially structured by “the universality of bereavement in the Europe of the Great War and its aftermath” (Sites of Memory 5, 227). One of the clearest manifestations of the transnational universality of mourning is, as this essay argues, the cult of the Unknown Soldier which presents itself as a very complex web of transnational flows, intertwinements, and cultural transfers. Transnationalism in the cult of the Unknown Soldier can be observed in at least two respects: first, in the relative sameness and convergence of the commemorative ceremonies relating to the anonymous corpse; and second, in the complex mingling of various national actors, symbols, and practices in the cult of the Unknown Soldier that evolved in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. The burial of the Unknown Soldier in the U.S. had many elements in common with the British and French ceremonies. In selecting the remains of the anonymous soldier, the British as well as the French took great care to ensure that the identity and origins of the chosen soldier would remain completely unknowable. Both countries treated the chosen corps with guards, escorts, and the highest military honors which were normally accorded only to admirals and field-marshals. Furthermore, the presence of the highest dignitaries of the state and their laying of wreaths, the processions, the long lines filing past the casket placed in some iconic site of the

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nation, the interdenominational burial services, all these elements were present in the state funerals of the Unknown Soldier in France, Great Britain, and other combatant countries as well (Hanson 282-354; Inglis, “Entombing Unknown Soldiers”; Mosse 94-98). Particularly interesting in this context is the element of the so-called “Great Silence,” the two minutes of silence of which the first was to commemorate those who fought and came home, the second those who fought and did not return. This practice originated in South Africa in the last stages of World War I. From there it spread all over the British Empire and was then integrated into the state funerals for the Unknown Soldier (Hanson 300-01). However, transnationalism in the cult of the Unknown Soldier encompasses more than just the convergence of commemorative practices. Rather, the cult of the Unknown Soldier was a transnational ceremony per se. Thus, the casket bearing the remains of the British Unknown Soldier was placed in Boulogne Castle for a night before it was shipped to England on 9 November 1920. On the day of its departure, the casket was draped in a union flag and placed on a French military wagon drawn by six black horses. A division of French troops escorted it from the Castle to the Quai Carnot from where he was shipped to Dover. The whole route from the Castle to the harbor was lined by French soldiers with rifles reversed and thousands of ordinary French citizens (Hanson 28687). The remains of America’s Unknown Soldier were treated in a very similar way. 10 After it had been chosen, the body lay for several hours in the Hôtel de Ville of Châlon-sur-Marne and was watched over by a guard of honor composed of French and U.S. soldiers. The people of the French city filed passed the guarded casket, paid their respects, and laid wreaths and flowers. After brief official ceremonies by the City of Châlonsur-Marne the remains of U.S.-America’s Unknown Soldier were placed on a flag-draped gun carriage and escorted by U.S.-American and French troops to the railroad station where it was put into the funeral car of a special train bound for Le Havre. When the train arrived in the French port city, it was met by French officials, French troops, and the citizens of Le Havre wanting to pay homage to America’s Unknown Soldier. French and U.S.-American troops escorted the casket through the crowded streets of the city to the pier where the U.S.S. Olympia was waiting to take it aboard. After the casket had been ceremoniously handed over to the United States Navy, the battleship was seen out of the harbor with a salute of seventeen guns from a French destroyer, to which the U.S.-American flagship responded with just as many shots. _____________ 10

The following description is based on Doughboy Center.

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The transnational mingling of commemorative symbols, ceremonies, and rituals in the cult of the Unknown Soldier continued after the dead had found their final resting places. All the Unknown Soldiers of the Entente countries were decorated with the highest medals of the allied nations. In October 1921, the U.S. conferred the Congressional Medal of Honor on the British and the French Unknown Soldiers (Hanson 313-14), and during the amphitheatre ceremonies at Arlington America’s Unknown Soldier was decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Cross, the Victoria Cross, France’s Croix de guerre, Italy’s Gold Medal for Bravery, Poland’s Virtuti Militari, and several other highest-ranking awards from other victor nations (Piehler, Remembering War 121). During the interwar period, the tombs of Unknown Soldiers continued to be the target of transnational commemorative practices. When the American Legion held its convention in Paris in 1927, a mass parade down the Champs Elysées on 19 September was one of the highlights of the program. While the parade of some 20,000 veterans was characterized by a carnival atmosphere that alienated most of the one-million-strong audience of Parisians crowding the streets, each of the AEF veterans dropped a red, white, or blue flower at the tomb of France’s Unknown Soldier interred under the Arc de Triomphe (Kennedy 365). The tribute to the French Unknown Soldier was also an integral part of the pilgrimages of the American Gold Star Mothers in the 1930s (Piehler, Remembering War 104, 106). In the course of the first Gold Star Mothers’ pilgrimage in 1930 another very telling episode happened. On 19 May, six mothers were chosen to lay wreaths at the graves of unidentified U.S.-American soldiers at Suresnes ACM. Among the six was one German American woman accompanied by relatives from Munich, and they all paid tribute to the anonymous U.S.-American war dead interred in France (Kennedy 368). It has been pointed out that the Unknown Soldier “could take on any identity,” and thus function as a “void” that could be filled with all kinds of private and collective memories of the community of the bereaved (Meigs 147). We know that many of the mourners placing flowers and wreaths at the graves of anonymous soldiers assumed their own missing fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers to be interred there (Hanson 31011). On a collective level, the Unknown Soldier symbolized a national community without divisions and social conflict. It expressed the solidarity of service and equality of sacrifice, symbolically raising the “status of the common soldier to that of a general or head of state” (Piehler, Remembering War 117). Shrines of the Unknown Soldier, therefore, became a “perfect symbolic focal point” for all groups and societies “seeking to

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come to terms with the war, but uncertain of its ultimate meaning” (Trout, “Forgotten Reminders” 203). At the same time – and transcending the national community – the Unknown Soldier also stood for all the war dead of World War I. He suggested that all soldiers were equal in suffering and death. He represented the universal ethos of service, duty and sacrifice, which would only be justified if wars would never happen again. Under the conditions of the interwar period, the Unknown Soldiers and the anonymous mass-killing of industrial warfare they stood for were a very powerful argument for peace. This argument ties in with the overall didactic impetus that was a characteristic feature of the way in which most combatant countries remembered World War I. “Many of the commemorative forms created after 1918 were intended to warn” of future wars, argues Jay Winter in Sites of Memory (9). However, this warning could only function if one cultivated a transnational perspective on the war dead in general and the Unknown Soldier in particular.

Transnationalizing the U.S.-American Nation As a war of industrial modernity World War I required the total mobilization of all social, economic and cultural resources for the war effort. 11 The new kind of industrial warfare integrated the battlefront and the home front into one big theater of war, and, therefore, required particular government efforts also in the field of mental mobilization. In the U.S. just as in every other combatant country, World War I was just as much a propaganda war as it was a fighting war. War propaganda was to produce a sustained war consensus at home, and was to talk the individual citizen into contributing to the war effort, a contribution which could potentially go as far as letting oneself be killed for the imagined community of the nation. Fighting for the minds of men and women on all fronts, therefore, was an integral part of the warfare during World War I and beyond. 12 In the U.S., the propaganda war for the minds of the citizen had two sides to it. 13 On the one hand, it aimed at establishing a war consensus by _____________ 11

12 13

For the debate about total war and World War I’s place in it see Förster, An der Schwelle zum totalen Krieg; Chickering and Förster, Anticipating Total War; Chickering and Förster, The Shadows of Total War; Chickering and Förster, A World at Total War; Chickering and Förster, Great War, Total War; Beyrau; Förster and Nagler. On total war and propaganda in general see Karmasin and Faulstich; Morelli; Paddock; Buitenhuis; Welch. On the American war propaganda during World War I: Vaughn; Kennedy 45-92; Buitenhuis. The following summarizes the findings of Vaughn; Kennedy; Ellis, “German-Americans.”

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influencing, manipulating, and directing public opinion through information, facts and education. On the other hand, dissent was suppressed and silenced by the government clamping down directly on dissenting groups, particularly pro-German circles as well as socialists and other radicals for whom the whole war was but a capitalist plot to subjugate the workers and their movement. In 1917/18 Congress passed a series of acts providing the governments with far-reaching instruments to suppress dissent and protest against the war (Espionage Act of June 1917, Trading-with the Enemy Act of October 1917, Sedition Act of May 1918). The major propaganda instrument of the U.S. government was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), founded on 14 April 1917 and headed by the former muckraking journalist George Creel. Originally, the CPI was intended to be a decidedly democratic propaganda agency that was supposed to rely on convincing U.S. citizens through information and facts. In this context, the U.S. propaganda effort pursued two great strategies, the first of which was to promote democracy as ‘American way of life’ that would be a model for the rest of the world after, thanks to U.S. participation in the war, it had been made safe for democracy. The second strategy was to unleash the energies of a war nationalism centering on systematically created enemy images which saw Germany as the epitome of autocracy, militarism and despotism, i.e. the ‘significant other’ upon which notions of U.S. national identity were constructed. The longer the war lasted – and the more numerous casualties became – the CPI developed into a rather crude propaganda mill emotionalizing the war, demonizing the enemy, and preaching hatred and revenge. All in all, the U.S. war propaganda stirred up a new form of hypernationalism that centered on the idea of “100 percent Americanism.” 14 This newly coined phrase demanded an absolute and unqualified loyalty to the U.S. – and suspected all those who had not fully adopted the English language or had not yet fully assimilated to essentially White Anglo-Saxon Protestant customs and values of being disloyal. It was exactly this unqualified WASPish superpatriotism that put an increasingly plural and diverse society to a test. The propaganda vision of the U.S. nation as a monolith united by selfless service and sacrifice on behalf of the ‘American way of life’ stood in sharp contrast to the catalytic effect the exigencies of modern warfare had on already existing social conflicts. German Americans and other so-called ‘enemy aliens,’ i.e. immigrant groups from countries that the U.S. was at war with, were discriminated against. The ‘100 percent Americanizers’ opened a frontal assault on foreign influence _____________ 14

The following summarizes the findings of Higham 195, 198-202, 204-07; Preston; Kennedy 67-68; Ellis “German-Americans” 184-85.

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in U.S.-American life, aimed at stamping out all traces of Old World identity among immigrant groups, and suspected all those who refused to be disloyal, treacherous and obstructive. This produced an atmosphere of hysteria, denunciation and ethnic violence as immigrant groups from either Germany or Austria-Hungary were seen as enemies within. After the war the experience of the discrepancy between the propaganda-vision of society and the realities on the ground triggered the transnationalization of U.S.-American war memory. The specific memory of the various ethnic groups undercut the official national memory by pluralizing, fragmenting and in parts also deconstructing it. To illustrate the argument this chapter focuses on two aspects, first on the emergence of conceptions of America as a transnational nation during and after World War I, and second on the African American war memory. The obvious precariousness of national unity produced intense criticism of the melting pot ideology already during the war. The most telling example in this respect is Randolph Bourne, whose essay “Transnational America,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1916, forcefully encouraged Americans to rethink their self-conceptions and notions of identity. 15 From today’s perspective, Bourne’s text appears as the classic formulation of the multiculturalism paradigm, yet, it is anything but timeless. It is a product of World War I, and particularly the hyper-nationalistic war fever, that was building up in the U.S. well before the country actually entered the war. Bourne reflects the war in many respects as a factor deconstructing prevalent notions of national identity. The war, according to Bourne, had exposed the supposed Anglo-Saxon unity of the U.S.-American nation as an illusion. It had shown that the various non-English ethnic groups from Eastern, Southern, Northern, and Western Europe had refused to be melted down into “some homogeneous Americanism” on Anglo-Saxon terms (253). Rather, Bourne argued, the various ethnic groups had “remained distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native ‘Americanism’ around them” (253). More prominent than the experience of cooperation in times of war was, for Bourne, the experience of cultural and social conflict intensified by the “100 percent Americanism”-nationalism, which for him was but a forceful assimilation of non-English ethnic groups to AngloSaxon standards. “No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the ‘meltingpot,’” he declared and continued: “The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our _____________ 15

On Bourne see Clayton; Vaughan.

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traditional beliefs” (248). The war, therefore, had exposed “just the degree to which that purpose of ‘Americanizing,’ that is, ‘Anglo-Saxonizing,’ the immigrant has failed” (252). Against the backdrop of this diagnosis, he urged his fellowcountrymen to investigate into “what Americanism may rightly mean”, and declared that the time had come to “assert a higher ideal than the ‘melting-pot’” (248-49). Bourne argued that America was a “federation of cultures,” and interpreted the experiences of World War I as having “made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain” (256). In his eyes, the war was a “vivid realization of their [the Americans’] trans-nationality” (264), and building up America as the “first international nation” would be the true beginning of the “great American democratic experiment” (258). Bourne was a radical voice in his time, yet, his vision of the U.S. as a transnational nation began to structure the memory of World War I in the 1920s and 1930s. While the majority of commemorative symbols, rituals, and practices continued to move within the framework of WASPnationalism, there was a substantial minority of individuals, groups, and organizations that were ready to abandon the “100 percent Americanism” of the war years and embrace notions of the U.S. as a multicultural nation in the aftermath of World War I. Some war-related organizations, like e.g. the American War Mothers, founded in 1919, promoted a pluralistic notion of U.S.-American nationhood that stressed the multiplicity of religions and ethnic groups in U.S. society. The American War Mothers believed, as historian G. Kurt Piehler argues in “The War Dead and the Gold Star,” that the “ties of motherhood and the mutual sacrifice of their sons to the war effort would unite native-born Americans and the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe” (176). Furthermore, the pilgrimages of the Gold Star Mothers to their sons’ graves in Europe, also pushed notions of the U.S. as a transnational nation. They united women from all regions, races and ethnicities, native born and foreign born. While the War Department, which was in charge of organizing the pilgrimages, segregated African American women, a fact which will be discussed in the further course of argument, it still was keen on stressing that each woman who participated received the same – lavish – treatment (Piehler, Remembering War 104). The pilgrimages were staged as a great display of diversity in unity. Among the first group of pilgrims consisting of 231 women, 56 were of foreign birth with the majority of them claiming Germany as their former homeland (Budreau 404). Native American Gold Star Mothers travelled with the white pilgrims and paraded in full regalia before cameras on several occasions (399).

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The cult of the Unknown Soldier also had strong elements of multiculturalism to it. As shown above, the burial ceremony was interspersed with elements stressing the ethnic and cultural diversity of the U.S.American nation, and when President Harding addressed the mourners assembled at Arlington National Cemetery, he declared that it mattered little whether the Unknown Soldier was a “native or an adopted son” because both had “sacrificed alike” (qtd. in Piehler, Remembering War 120). The “universal liability to service,” that President Wilson spoke of in his “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany” on 2 April 1917 also included African Americans. 16 On 22 September 1917, the first draft call for blacks was issued, and in the end, 380,000 African Americans served in the wartime Army. Approximately 200,000 of these were sent to Europe (Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance 74100; Mennell). Their experience of World War I was paradoxical at best. The leaders of the NAACP and other African American elites saw African American loyalty to the war effort as a step towards equality. They understood it as a chance to integrate blacks into the national consensus, end racist discrimination, and push for equal rights at home. These expectations did not materialize, however, as racist discrimination continued and even intensified during the war and its aftermath. African Americans thus fought, suffered, and died in a war for a democracy that continued to withhold freedom and equality from them (Schneider 7-35). Racism in the AEF was widespread. 17 African Americans were doing their duty in strictly segregated units commanded by white senior officers. The vast majority of the African American soldiers were not used as combat troops, but as stevedores in French and British harbors, as common laborers or as servants in the rear. More than half of the roughly 200,000 African American soldiers sent to Europe were assigned to labor and stevedore battalions stationed in Great Britain and France. Only approximately 42,000 saw combat, which means that only one of every five black men sent to France saw combat, while in the AEF as a whole two out of three soldiers took part in battle (Kennedy 162). Racism was at work behind these discriminatory practices in at least two respects. On the one hand, widely circulating racist stereotypes suggested that African Americans were cowards and would not make good soldiers. The U.S.-American General Staff report in 1918 stated explicitly that the “mass of the colored _____________ 16 17

The African American experience of World War I is examined in Barbeau and Henri; Bill Harris; Stephen L. Harris; Slotkin; Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance; Kennedy; Whalan; Keene, “The Memory of the Great War.” The following is summarizing the findings of Barbeau and Henri; Kennedy 158-62, 199200; Harries and Harries 106-10, 129-30, 139, 284, 372-74, 439; Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance 80-100.

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drafted men cannot be used for combatant troops,” and it recommended that “these colored drafted men be organized in reserve labor battalions” (qtd. in Kennedy 162). On the other hand, there was the deep-seated fear that blacks indeed could perform courageously on the battlefield and thereby undermine key premises upon which the doctrine of white supremacy rested. Thus, using African Americans as second-class soldiers for the same kind of menial, low prestige occupations they were doing in civilian life was a way of cementing the hierarchy of race. However, some African Americans were put to service in combat regiments in France. The all-black 92nd Division operated under AEFcommand, while four black regiments of the incomplete 93rd Division were brigaded with the French army. The 92nd Division was used in the Argonne offensive in September/October 1918. The division’s units had been trained in various camps dispersed all over the U.S., not in a single location, so that they literally met on the battlefield in France for the first time. The 92nd Division, therefore, was inexperienced, and it was never fully equipped until after the Armistice. It was short of wire-cutting equipment, did not have adequate maps, and the artillery support it received in battle was insufficient. Furthermore, leadership was a major problem in the black regiment. The white senior officers and instructors treating African American officer candidates like the lowliest of enlisted men had failed to create a critical mass of black Non-Commissioned Officers capable of initiative and command. The French military command criticized the 92nd Division for its lack of competent company commanders, arguing that the majority of black NCOs were “very mediocre” (Harries and Harries 373). The white senior officers of the division, however, were not less part of the leadership problem. They were constantly being reassigned, looked down upon their men, and mostly treated them in a harsh and condescending manner. All in all, these problems destroyed effectiveness and morale among both white and black troops. The result was chaos and a poor performance of the 92nd Division’s 368th Regiment on the battlefield, which seemed to prove long standing racial stereotypes that depicted blacks as cowards. The entire 92nd Division was removed in disgrace from the front, and after the war, those black officers of the 92nd Division who had applied to be commissioned in the regular army were rejected. The division’s Chief of Staff publicly declared that he would disapprove all applications, and at Camp Meade, one Captain T. Dent, 368th Infantry, was told that he was unqualified to be an officer in the postwar regular army by reason of “the qualities inherent to the Negro race.” (qtd. in Harries and Harries 440). The four black regiments under French command fared much better. Most famous is the 369th Infantry, the so-called “Harlem Hellfighters,”

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which General John J. Pershing assigned to the 16th Division of the French Army. With the French, the “Harlem Hellfighters” fought at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood helping to repel the German offensive and to launch a counteroffensive. The 369th Infantry and two other African American regiments were decorated with the Croix de Guerre, despite the fact that the French government and military were very keen on not alienating the U.S. and, therefore, were very cautious in not overpraising the performance of black troops. Generally, the French civilians and the French military treated African American soldiers with respect and on terms of relative equality (Barbeau and Henri; Slotkin; B. Harris; S. L. Harris; Keene, “The Memory of the Great War” 61). The African American memory of World War I mirrored these paradoxical experiences, and thereby energized the civil rights struggle at home during the interwar period and beyond (Keene, “The Memory of the Great War”; Schneider 7-19, 55; Berg 10-56). A host of memoirs, histories, and pictorial yearbooks published immediately after the war commemorated the African American war experience. W. E. B. DuBois worked on “Wounded World,” an authoritative multivolume history of the African American soldiers in World War I, which was never finished. 18 Many accounts of the history of particular units were published, however. Furthermore, documentary films like Heroic Negro Soldiers of the World War (March 1919) or The 93rd Division chronicled the experiences and achievements of black regiments and individual soldiers (Keene, “Memory of the Great War” 72-73). Adding to that, memorials, photographs, and paintings commemorated the African American war experience. All in all, therefore, memories of World War I resonated loudly in the African American community in the interwar period. The African American war memory was driven by a tension of achievement and disillusionment, of heroism and tragedy. 19 In the context of the interwar period, the African American community’s commemoration of World War I served two purposes: first, to uphold a sense of pride among blacks; and second, to counter the blatant racism in white America’s war memory, which tended to reinforce the racist prejudices that depicted blacks as childish, incompetent and cowardly fools who did not know how to fight. Numerous episodes and stories featured the loyalty and service, heroism and sacrifice of black units and individual soldiers. Furthermore, black leaders and veterans described the relative equality experienced among the French military and in their interactions with the French population as _____________ 18 19

The draft versions and supporting manuscripts of DuBois’ unpublished manuscript are held by Fisk University, TN. The following summarizes the findings of Keene, “The Memory of the Great War.”

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unheard of and uplifting. In his “An Essay toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War,” an editorial for Crisis published in June 1919, W. E. B. Dubois spoke of a “vision of real democracy dawning” (698) on African Americans in France, which for him was “the only real white Democracy” (732) with a seemingly colorblind society. This depiction of France as a model interracial society stood in sharp contrast to his accounts of the unrelenting racism, the discriminatory practices and the harassment that blacks experienced in the AEF and in the U.S. Thus, the memory of World War I in the African American community was carried by both: the reverence of the performance, service and sacrifice of black soldiers; and a feeling of disgust with white America. The latter has to be measured against the high expectations generated by the African American contribution to a war that was, as President Woodrow Wilson had declared in his “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany” of 2 April 1917, to “make the world safe for democracy.” In his famous editorial for the July 1918 issue of Crisis W. E. B. DuBois had urged African Americans to “Close Ranks” behind the U.S.-American war effort and to “forget” their “special grievances” for the duration of the war. Against this backdrop, the discrepancy between expectations and experiences let, as Jennifer D. Keene argues in “The Memory of the Great War in the African American Community,” the failure of World War I “to deliver its promise of democracy to African Americans” emerge “as a key theme in several postwar civil rights campaigns led by the NAACP“ (65). Things came to a head when the U.S. government decided to segregate the pilgrimages of the Gold Star Mothers. 20 624 of the 17,389 women eligible for the government-sponsored trip were African American. They were accommodated in inferior hotels and served extra meals prepared by African American cooks, they sailed as a separate group upon freighterpassenger vessels, rode separate trains through France, were separately welcomed at the Paris train station by black jazz musicians, and they even had their own medical practitioners dispensing care to them on their trip (Budreau 400). In response to this procedure, the NAACP organized a campaign to convince African American women to stay home, and some of them heeded the call. One hundred African American women were scheduled to travel with the first pilgrimage of the Gold Star Mothers to France in 1930. Fifty-six of them initially refused the invitation at the request of the NAACP signing a petition declaring that “ten years after the Armistice, _____________ 20

For the following see Piehler, Remembering War 104-05; Budreau 400-03; Keene, “The Memory of the Great War” 67-68, 77; Graham.

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the principles of 1918 seem to have been forgotten” (qtd. in Keene, “The Memory of the Great War” 68). Yet, in the following years the War Department sent these women repeated invitations, and in the end all but twenty-three made the trip (77, Fn. 25). These twenty-three women paid a heavy price to retain their honor and self-respect, while the others – just as understandably – accepted the only chance they would likely have in their lifetimes to visit their sons’ graves. They had sacrificed enough for the cause of black emancipation already.

Conclusion The way in which societies have represented and remembered war has been attracting interest among scholars since the beginning of the 1990s. Historians, literary and cultural critics, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and other academics have investigated into various aspects of the subject, examining languages, symbols, forms, and practices of commemoration, identifying the various agents of memory, reconstructing the collective forms of memory and distinguishing them from the private forms of coping with war experiences, bereavement, and loss. As different as these approaches are, they are all carried by the written or unwritten assumption that war memory can only be analyzed in a national frame. Wars are seen as events separating nations, and as times of heroism, suffering, and sacrifice on behalf of the imagined community of the nation. This article has approached the issue from a transnational angle, and has unearthed transnational elements in the U.S.-American commemoration of World War I during the interwar period. In this context, it has pursued an understanding of transnational memory that, on the one hand, looks for interconnections and intertwinements of the U.S.-American memory with that of other nations. On the other hand, the understanding of transnational memory was informed by the idea that transnationalism means undercutting national memory through the multiplication and diversification of individual group memories within a society. Among other things, the transnational turn in memory studies has, as Udo J. Hebel argues, (re-)inscribed “newly-(re-)gained group-specific memories […] into cultural fields that had long been perceived as well-distributed by those exercising authority over defining national, cultural, and collective identities and over allocating the financial means and representational places to do so” (393). It thereby has opened up the view for the “increasingly complex and challenging landscapes, structures, and processes of transnational exchange, competition, and conflict” in national memory (395).

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Against this backdrop, the study of how the wars of the twentieth century are remembered is a very promising field of transnational inquiry. This essay has analyzed the U.S.-American memory of World War I as a case in point. It has shown how the very nature of the war tied memory to sites abroad, how the U.S.-American symbols and forms of commemoration converged with those of other combatant nations, and how the many social conflicts aggravated by the exigencies of industrial warfare translated into fierce memory wars within U.S. society in the interwar period and beyond. It appears that the very determination of the state-agents of memory to remember the U.S.-American nation at war as a unified entity of idealistic individuals dedicated to making the world safe for democracy ironically enough triggered the transnationalization of the country’s war memory in many respects. World War I as the first modern war fought under the conditions of a fully developed industrial modernity produced many symbols, forms, and practices of commemoration that heavily influenced the way in which the subsequent wars of the twentieth century were remembered in the U.S. and in other countries. In contrast to World War I, the U.S.’ engagement in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War lasted much longer, the transnational intertwinements were much more sustained and the social conflicts at home accelerated by the wars much deeper. Therefore, it appears to be a very promising endeavor to look more closely into the transnational dimensions of U.S. war memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation. New York: Random, 1998. Bruns, Roger A. “Known but to God.” American History 31.5 (1996): 38-42, 73. Budreau, Lisa M. “The Politics of Remembrance: The Gold Star Mothers’ Pilgrimage and America’s Fading Memory of the Great War.” Journal of Military History 72.2 (2008): 371-411. Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1987. Chambers II, John Whiteclay. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 18901920. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster, eds. Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2006. —. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2000. —. The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919-1939. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2003. —. A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2005. Clayton, Bruce. Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984. Doughboy Center: The Story of the American Expeditionary Forces: America’s Unknown Soldier. Ed. Mike Hanlon of the Great War Society. 1998-2000. 29 Mar. 2009 . DuBois, W. E. B. “Close Ranks.” W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: H. Holt, 1995. 697. —. “An Essay toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War.” W .E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: H. Holt, 1995. 698-733. Dülffer, Jost, and Gerd Krumeich, eds. Der verlorene Frieden: Politik und Kriegskultur nach 1918. Schriften der Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, N. F. 15. Essen: Klartext, 2002. Echternkamp, Jörg, and Stefan Martens, eds. Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Europa: Erfahrung und Erinnerung. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007. Edwards, Paul M. To Acknowledge a War: The Korean War in American Memory. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2000. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Ellis, Mark. “German Americans in World War I.” Enemy Images in American History. Ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl. Providence: Berghahn, 1997. 183-208. —. Race, War, and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. Farwell, Byron. Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918. New York: Norton, 1999. Förster, Stig, ed. An der Schwelle zum totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte über den Krieg der Zukunft 1919-1939. Krieg in der Geschichte 13. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002. —, and Jörg Nagler, eds. On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1997. François, Etienne, and Hagen Schulze, eds. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 3 vols. München: Beck, 2001.

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Fussel, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983. Gessner, Ingrid. From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)framing Japanese American Experiences. Heidelberg: Winter 2007. Gillis, John R., ed. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. Graham, John W. The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the 1930s: Overseas Grave Visitations by Mothers and Widows of Fallen U.S. World War I Soldiers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. Hanson, Neil. Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War. New York: Knopf, 2006. Harries, Meiron, and Susie Harries. The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 19171918. New York: Vintage, 1997. Harris, Bill. The Hellfighters of Harlem: African-American Soldiers who Fought for the Right to Fight for Their Country. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Harris, Stephen L. Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I. Washington: Brassey’s, 2003. Hass, Kristin Ann. Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Hawley, Ellis. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979. Hebel, Udo J. “In Lieu of an Epilogue: Whereto American(ist) Memory Studies?” The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts, Debates. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe and Sabine Schindler. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 389-95. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 1995. —. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. —, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Inglis, Ken. “Entombing Unknown Soldiers: From London and Paris to Baghdad.” History & Memory 5 (1993): 7-31. —. “The Homecoming: The War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England.” Journal of Contemporary History 27.4 (1992): 583-606. —. “A Sacred Place: The Making of the Australian War Memorial.” War & Society 3.2 (1985): 99-125. Jünger, Ernst. In Stahlgewittern: Aus dem Tagebuch eines Stosstruppführers. Leisnig: Robert Meier, 1920. Karmasin, Matthias, and Werner Faulstich, eds. Krieg – Medien – Kultur: Neue Forschungsansätze. Paderborn: Fink, 2007. Keene, Jennifer D. Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. —. “The Memory of the Great War in the African American Community.” Unknown Soldiers: The American Expeditionary Force in Memory and Remembrance. Ed. Mark A. Snell. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2008. 60-79. —. The United States and the First World War. Harlow: Longman, 2000.

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—. World War I. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006. Kennan, George F. The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979. Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Keren, Michael, and Holger H. Herwig, eds. War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Modes of Remembrance and Commemoration. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Korte, Barbara, ed. Der Erste Weltkrieg in der populären Erinnerungskultur. Schriften der Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, N.F. 22. Essen: Klartext, 2008 Linenthal, Edward T., and Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: H. Holt, 1996. Lloyd, David Wharton. Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919-1939. New York: Berg, 1998. Mayo, James M. War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond. New York: Praeger, 1988. Meigs, Mark. Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War. New York: New York UP, 1997. Mennell, James. “African Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917.” Journal of Negro History 84.3 (1999): 275-87. Morelli, Anne. Die Prinzipien der Kriegspropaganda. Springe: Zu Klampen, 2004. Mosse, George. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de Mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1992. Oliver, Kendrick. The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006. Ossuaire de Douaumont. Official home page. 2004. 29 Mar. 2009 . Paddock, Troy R. E., ed. A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion, and Newspapers in the Great War. Westport: Praeger, 2004. Piehler, G. Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1995. —. “The War Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War.” Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Ed. John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. 168-85. Preston Jr., William. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. Renan, Ernest. “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” Oeuvres Complètes de Ernest Renan. Vol. 1. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947. 887-906. Rohde, Horst, and Robert Ostrovsky. Militärgeschichtlicher Reiseführer Verdun. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Mittler, 1996. Schneider, Mark Robert. “We Return Fighting”: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2002. Scholz, Kristina. The Greatest Story Ever Remembered: Erinnerung an den Zweiten Weltkrieg als sinnstiftendes Element in den USA. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 2008. Slotkin, Richard. Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality. New York: H. Holt, 2005. Snell, Mark A., ed. Unknown Soldiers: The American Expeditionary Force in Memory and Remembrance. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2008.

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Terkel, Studs. “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II. New York: The New Press, 1984. Trout, Steven. “Forgotten Reminders: Kansas World War I Memorials.” Kansas History 29.3 (2006): 200-15. —. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Vance, Jonathan. Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997. Vaughan, Leslie J. Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1997. Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Nationalismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen. München: Beck, 2001. Welch, David. Germany, Propaganda, and Total War, 1914-1918: The Sins of Omission. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. Werth, German. Verdun: Die Schlacht und der Mythos. 2nd ed. Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe, 1982. Whalan, Mark. The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. Wilson, Woodrow. “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War against Germany.” Our Documents. 2 Apr. 1917. 30 Mar. 2009 <www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=61&page=transcript>. Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War and Historical Memory in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006. —. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. —. “War, Memory, and Mourning in the Twentieth Century: Notes on the Memory Boom.” The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts, Debates. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe and Sabine Schindler. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 97-118. Zehfuss, Maja. Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

“Let Him Remain Until the Judgment in France”: Family Letters and the Overseas Burying of U.S. World War I Soldiers DAVID WILLIAM SEITZ *

In November 1920, the U.S. War Department received a note from Emma Cuff, an African-American cook from Eckman, West Virginia, whose son William had died in the so-called Great War: “mY DEAR SIR MY SON HAS NO CHILDREN NOR WIFE I AM HIS MOTHER his father is dead an i have no place that i can call my own and i dont believe that i want my sons body destearbed, if he is in france let him remain until the judgment in france YOURS as ever.” 1 Like tens of thousands of grieving citizens across the nation, Cuff (fig. 1) had received inquiries from the War Department seeking consent to bury her son’s remains in one of the nascent permanent American military cemeteries in Europe. Assuming the subject position of a widowed mother, Cuff spoke plainly, yet eloquently: since she was homeless and William was wifeless, the government could assume responsibility for his dead body and bury it in France. In a few short lines Cuff gave up her son, her most precious treasure, once more to

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1

I express my thanks to Dave Bedford, Mike Conley, Nadia Ezz-Eddine, Walter Franklin, and everyone associated with the American Battle Monuments Commission who has supported my work. I thank the archivists at the United States National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland for their constant help. I extend my gratitude to Kathy M. Newman, Chris Rasmussen, and Eric Sandeen for their comments regarding a related presentation I made at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association. I thank Michael Vicaro for his continued encouragement and insightful suggestions. Finally, I am grateful for the constant guidance of Ronald J. Zboray, my dissertation adviser, and Mary Saracino Zboray, who were instrumental in the formation and writing of this essay. Unless otherwise noted, the personal correspondence discussed and images shown in this essay can be found at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration II, College Park, Maryland, in the Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General (RG 92), under “Burial Case Files.” For specific citations, please contact the author. All grammatical errors and original capitalization in the correspondence have been preserved unless otherwise noted. Misspellings and errors can be attributed to the probability that many letter writers had no formal education or spoke English as a second language.

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the American nation and invoked an unspoken ethical contract that would hold the government accountable for the proper treatment of his body until judgment day. Moreover, her note represented one more crucial ‘vote’ cast in favor of the government’s controversial plan to construct monumental military cemeteries on foreign soil, where public memory of U.S. sacrifice in the war would be kept alive through the permanent display of soldiers’ graves.

Fig. 1. Eunice Cuff. NARA RG 92.

This essay brings forth the voices of ‘ordinary’ U.S. citizens who, following World War I, responded to government inquiries regarding the final disposition of their loved ones’ bodies. It is based upon hundreds of letters housed in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). 2 Although many relatives simply filled out and returned forms issued by the War Department, others crafted messages of varied, and often poetic, rhetorical appeals to express their opinions regarding the

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Within RG 92 there are 5,400 boxes, organized alphabetically, containing burial case files of soldiers killed in World War I. Each box holds roughly twenty individual files. To collect correspondence related to the final disposition of 400 soldiers, I requested every fourteenth box from the 5,400 available. From each of these boxes I collected data from the first file that contained what I call ‘extra communication’ – letters, notes, telegrams that went beyond the filling out of forms.

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plan to bury American war dead in distant lands. These letters serve as what historian Robert S. McElvaine terms “immediate testimony” – personal statements that reveal the contemporary views of people who lived through a particular historical moment (5). While historical letters have limitations as primary sources of evidence, 3 I have done my best to interpret each individual letter within all of its available contextual information. 4 This essay recovers the immediate testimonies of a range of American citizens: from those who relinquished the care of corpses to the government, to those who demanded, sometimes bitterly, the return of loved ones’ remains to the U.S., to members of the African-American community whose men had fought and died for a nation that treated blacks as inferior citizens. The correspondence discussed here offers views into the complexities of the feelings, ideologies, traditions, and rights of U.S. citizens who were prompted by the death of their kin to consider both their own relation to the nation and the human costs that U.S. intervention in global affairs entailed. Beyond capturing the sentiments of a past generation of Americans, this textual corpus may have also served as an inventional resource for officials developing an administrative rhetoric that at once could satisfy the needs of U.S. citizens and advocate for the establishment of symbolic and monumental cemeteries in Europe. I will suggest that through the process of communication it initiated with grieving families, the War Department learned to temper its highly bureaucratic speech with a personal and sentimental vernacular appropriated from the letters of citizens. This vernacular became not only part of the government’s official discourse regarding the final disposition of the dead, but was also instantiated in the visual presentation of America’s eight World War I cemeteries in Europe, still seen by thousands of international visitors each year. 5 Thus, the story of the process of transnational commemoration initiated by these monumental American burial grounds begins with the letters examined here. This essay is divided into eight sections. The first provides a brief genealogy of the plan for American overseas World War I cemeteries. The

_____________ 3 4 5

Such letters often provide only fragments of an ongoing correspondence, and they can tempt one to take the letter writer’s words at face value (Maynes, Pierce and Laslett 82-90). I consider the subject position of each letter writer; the desires expressed by the writer in all accessible letters; the most likely motives of the writer; and how each letter fits within the larger chain of correspondence between the writer and the government. These sites are Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial (ACM), Belleau, France (Fr.); Brookwood ACM, England; Flanders Field ACM, Waregem, Belgium; MeuseArgonne ACM, Romagne, Fr.; Oise-Aisne ACM, Fère-en-Tardenois, Fr.; St. Mihiel ACM, Thiaucourt, Fr.; Somme ACM, Bony, Fr.; and Suresnes ACM, Fr.

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next five uncover the varied sentiments and arguments expressed in families’ letters concerning the final disposition of U.S. war dead. The seventh section analyzes correspondence from African Americans and posits that grieving black families felt less entitled to the same discursive space claimed by whites. Finally, the conclusion suggests that U.S. military and political leaders adopted and deployed the personal vernacular found in letters from grieving families in their efforts to acknowledge the government’s social contract with relatives of the dead and to construct permanent burial grounds throughout Europe. Following the World War I, the task of memorializing fallen soldiers was far more problematic for the United States than for most other combatants. The nation had lost 116,516 soldiers in defense of territory that was not its own. Furthermore, threats to the American homeland and its interests were not as obvious, direct, or imminent as for European belligerents. Following Armistice, public doubts over the costs paid through casualties of conscripted U.S. citizens became common and eventually led to congressional investigations of wartime profiteers – the so-called “merchants of death.” 6 Moreover, wartime rhetoric of preserving Western democracy against the “autocratic Hun” revealed lingering domestic contradictions. For example, African Americans who had bravely served their country returned home to find that any measures of social equality they had attained in Europe meant little in the U.S., with its continuing Jim Crow segregation and increasing racial violence (Keene 187-90; Slotkin 395461). In light of soldiers’ bodies still lying in haphazard, makeshift graves in battle-scarred fields and forests throughout Europe, many citizens rightfully wondered for what, and for whom, had Americans died in what seemed strictly a European affair? By war’s end in November 1918, U.S. Army General John J. Pershing anticipated the postwar requisite of memorializing America’s fallen. Having found that many troop units had already built sporadic battlefield monuments that “bore inexact relation to the scope of the achievements they were commemorating” and “for the most part were poorly designed,” he believed that “the entire story of the American Expeditionary Forces should properly be monumented from the national viewpoint” (North 1). Arguably the most internationally famous military figure at the time, Pershing became the main catalyst behind a federal plan to consolidate 2,400 temporary battlefield cemeteries and isolated graves (fig. 2) into a few carefully designed, monumental cemeteries. Constructed on or near

_____________ 6

See Wiltz for more on postwar attitudes toward and investigations of wartime profiteers.

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the fields and forests where ‘Doughboys’ had fought and perished, these burial grounds – sacralized as American sites – would help link the dead symbolically back to U.S. soil, and the national purpose rooted there. Helping to assuage public concerns over the war, these sites (not coincidentally) would also express the nation’s emerging prominent role on the world’s stage to a transnational audience. 7

Fig. 2. A temporary American cemetery in France. NARA RG 165.

However, unlike its Australian, British, and Canadian counterparts, whose “losses in the Great War were so large as to make the choice of removal impossible,” the U.S. government was not in a position to force families to leave their dead in continental Europe (Graham 35). The precedent for repatriating soldiers killed abroad had been set twenty years earlier when, after the Spanish-American War, the U.S. government returned all war dead to the homeland; thus, most Americans assumed that Great War casualties eventually would be brought back to the U.S. (Piehler, “Commemoration” 94). Furthermore, as early as 1917, the War Department told families that it was “the intention of the Department to have the remains [of the dead] disinterred and shipped to [the legal next of kin] at the expense of the Government” as soon as possible (Hicks).

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The plan for these cemeteries reflected broader memory projects instilled by the federal government during the postwar years (Kammen 444-80; McClymer; Piehler, Remembering War 92-125). Furthermore, Pershing hoped to build burial grounds that could rival the war cemeteries of other nations (American Battle Monuments Commission). For more on official motives behind the sites, see Grossman; Piehler, Remembering War 97-101; and Robin.

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Despite these lingering promises of repatriation, the War Department set out to pursue the burgeoning plan for permanent American military cemeteries in Europe. In early 1919, the Quartermaster Corps (QMC), a branch of the War Department, began a campaign to register the sentiments of families whose loved ones had been identified in improvised graves and cemeteries across the continent. That year 75,000 families were mailed a letter and a small card of inquiry regarding their kin’s final disposition. Each card, inscribed with the respective soldier’s name, Army serial number, and rank and organization, unsympathetically expressed the following: State your relationship to the deceased _______________________ Do you desire the remains brought to the United States? ___________ (yes or no) If remains are brought to the United States, do you wish them interred in a national cemetery? ___________ (yes or no) If you desire the remains interred at the home of the deceased, give full information below as to where they should be sent: ________________________

Approximately 65,000 inquiry cards were returned to the War Department that year. Seventy-one percent of the respondents were in favor of bringing the dead home (United States 6). This percentage irked General John J. Pershing, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, and other military leaders, who publicly campaigned to leave the dead in European soil, where “[t]he graves of our soldiers [would] constitute […] a perpetual reminder to our allies of the liberty and ideals upon which the greatness of America rests” (“Pershing Against”). In October 1919, Congressional leaders who feared that Pershing and other military figures might unduly use propaganda to influence public sentiment over the repatriation of soldier dead attempted to wrest control of the burial policies from the War Department, but to little avail (United States). 8 In 1920, the Graves Registration Service (GRS), a division within the QMC, began issuing GRS Form 120 to relatives of the dead. This form asked next of kin to indicate (again) whether they desired the respective soldier’s body returned to their address, buried in a domestic national cemetery, or left in Europe. 9 Over the next two years those who requested the return of bodily remains through GRS Form 120 were required to jump through one more hoop and send a telegram to the GRS (paid for by the government) to confirm this decision. On March 31, 1922, the War Department stopped accepting requests for the return of bodies except in cases of families whose loved ones had not

_____________ 8 9

Many kin indicated that reports of the plan for overseas cemeteries had persuaded them to leave the dead in Europe – a fact that troubled some members of Congress (Reager). The government claimed that this form allowed families who had changed their minds regarding final burial to issue new instructions (“‘Village’s’”).

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yet been identified; thereafter, all unclaimed bodies would rest in perpetuity in an overseas cemetery (“30,496”). In the following pages, I will bring forth and examine the responses that were elicited by this process of consultation that occurred between 1919 and 1922. For many families the process of extracting accurate information and conveying their wishes to the proper authorities was one of anxiety and uncertainty. A common problem was that newspaper reports of governmental burial policies often countered the information next of kin received from the War Department. In August 1921, Charles Hubert, a salesman from Yonkers, New York, wrote to the War Department: “I read in several papers lately that all the American soldiers that died in Europe are to be sent home! My son Harold W. Hubert was killed and buried over there, and we do not want his body sent here.” The QMC responded: “Newspaper reports to the effect that the remains of all soldier dead are being returned to this country are in error. The remains are being returned only in those cases where the legal next of kin definitely request such action.” Other next of kin were anxious to make sure that their wishes were properly expressed and received. For some this meant writing not only in spaces designated on cards and forms, but in the margins and on the back of government-issued documents as well. For instance, Nora Dooley of New York City indicated on the front of her GRS Form 120 that she wished to leave her son’s remains in Europe. On the back of the form she emphasized this request: “Yes. Leave him rest in peace.” Jennie Peters, a Native American from the Menominee Indian Reservation in Keshena, Wisconsin, indicated on the margins of her War Department inquiry card that she would properly handle her son’s corpse herself: “I will take care of the body when it gets to [me].” Some next of kin betrayed a near paranoia in their attempts to make sure that the authorities had the information necessary to carry out their wishes. In a series of letters, Josie Kneale of Oakland, California, who requested the return of her brother’s body, continually mentioned that she no longer lived at 2412 11th Avenue, but now resided at 2117 11th Avenue – even after the QMC stated that the change had been recorded. Anxiety often spilled over into anger for families who felt that their wishes were not being fulfilled in a timely and proper fashion. Addressing complications concerning the return of his son’s body, Patrick Ayres, a farmer from Heflin, Alabama, complained to the War Department: [I]n Reply to your letter [of recent date], I never have signed for him to Stay in france I signed for his boddy to be braught back home I will send you A letter I received from the War Department that shows that I have ask for him I waunt

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him returned home […] read careful mark your record I dont waunt no more mistakes please write me by return mail dont forget to return his boddy.

Marie Jewell of Mix, Louisiana, expressed similar frustrations. Throughout 1919 and 1920, Jewell sent seven letters to the QMC, each asking for her son’s corpse. On August 8, 1919, she claimed, “There seems to be a growing sentiment in favor of leaving their bodies in France, among those who have never loved and lost like Gen. Pershing; but they can never feel, nor ever know the great yearning desire we mothers, who have given our all, have to get back all that is mortal of our precious sons.” When Jewell received a second GRS Form 120 in June 1920, she pasted a scathing note to the back of the form. Perhaps sensing that her previous, and thoughtfully crafted, correspondence had been ignored, she stated, “My wish has been expressed many times as to the return of my son’s body. Records must not be accurate. […] Ship body to [me].” Likewise, Jacob Hablitzel Sr., a farmer from Eustis, Nebraska, was none too pleased with the War Department’s recordkeeping. On the back of an inquiry card returned to the QMC, he angrily scrawled: “You must have your records in a hell of a shape. Just received word from the Capt. Francis G. Coates, Battery E, 8th F. A. that my Son J. Hablitzel jr. was never a member of his organization. What garantee have I got that his identical bones and not somebody else’s are shipped back to me […] I think it is rotten.” Some next of kin expressed indignation over seeing other families receive remains before them. Frances Schmidt of Urbana, Ohio, grumbled, “Twice I have requested the return of the body of [Cpl.] Ivan F. Schmidt [...] Why do I not get some word? The rest of the boys are being returned. Why not my son?” These letters reveal that the process of communication initiated by the War Department gave voice to grieving families who might otherwise have remained silent on the matter of repatriation. But this process of consultation also raised the expectations of next of kin, who were often disappointed when their expressed wishes were not fulfilled in a flawless manner. As much as the War Department may have wished to ameliorate any anger felt by relatives of the dead, it enacted and enforced a peculiar policy that unnecessarily antagonized mourning families. The final resting place of a soldier’s remains was governed solely by the desires of the “legal next of kin,” which the War Department defined as the soldier’s widow or children. If a dead soldier had been unmarried (as was common), or if his widow had remarried since his death, then the right to dictate disposition

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was given to the soldier’s father. 10 The patriarchal bias of this policy disappointed many women whose claims to bodily remains were denied. Nellie McDonald of Binghamton, New York, requested the body of her nephew, whom she had raised as her own child: “He was as dear to me as any son could be to a mother […] he has a father who never cared for him in years.” The QMC replied: “[I]t is requested that you furnish documentary evidence of your appointment as legal guardian […] or submit affidavits of two responsible citizens who have knowledge of the fact that you were responsible for the care of the late soldier until just prior to his enlistment in the Army.” As McDonald was unable to produce such evidence, the QMC sent the body to the soldier’s father per his request. Sarah Jane Jaires of Quinlan, Texas, whose husband Elmer J. McCann had been killed by bomb shrapnel, wrote: “I see by the paper that all those who lost [their] lives in France were to be brought home. I have re married and living out west and will you please notify me if my [husband’s] body comes back.” In response, the QMC told Jaires that as a result of her remarriage she had lost the preferential right to direct final disposition. Sadly, because the QMC did not receive any requests from McCann’s “legal next of kin,” his remains were ultimately left in Europe. Sometimes the patriarchal bias of the War Department’s policy led to outright conflict between estranged family members, who involved the government in their feuds. For instance, Victor Christensen, a factory worker from Mohawk, New York, mailed this scathing letter to the War Department: You [sent] me sometimes ago a card to fill out concerning bringing the dead soldier back from Europe. I should consider it an outrage to ever do any such thing if you couldn’t bring them back alive it is of no use (there is more dead ones in this country now than there ought to be) but the soil here is good enough for them, but I should think The Government would be satisfied they had done a good job to get rid of these young men, that they could let them alone now and let them rest in peace in the sacred soil where they lie now and not bring them back to this condemned country. If any body have filled out the card to the contrary and signed it with my name it is false.

A few months later, the QMC received a letter from Victor’s estranged wife, Amelia Christensen: “The Father wrote and requested you not to return the body just to be mean to the Boy’s Mother. I am his mother and think I have just as much right to have him returned to this Country.” The QMC responded to Amelia with a less than hopeful letter: “[Y]ou are

_____________ 10

If a dead soldier left no widow, children, or father, the right to dictate final disposition went to the mother, then to the nearest male relative (War Department).

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advised that the action of this office in the disposition of the remains of soldier dead in Europe is governed solely by the desires of the legal next of kin […]. If the father will advise this office concurring with your request that the body of your son be returned to this country for private interment, same can be made a matter of record.” To its credit, the QMC sent a series of letters to Victor asking if he would relinquish the right of determining the disposition of his son’s body to Amelia. Receiving no response, the QMC wrote to the Postmaster of Mohawk: “Please endeavor to locate Mr. Victor Christensen […] [W]ill you kindly secure a signed statement from him as to whether he concurs in the request of Mrs. Amelia Christensen […] to have the remains returned to the United States and shipped to her.” A few weeks later, the QMC received the letter they had sent to the Postmaster. Scrawled at the bottom of the page was the following: “Mr. Christensen refused to answer any question and said that you must take the matter up direct with him. You will find him a hard man to deal with.” The case of the Christensens illustrates the breakdown of communication between the government and private citizens that could (and did) occur now that the military had relinquished some physical control over the bodies of soldiers back to relatives (who often disagreed on the question of burial). 11 But more importantly, it highlights the patriarchal bias of the War Department’s policies – a bias that pushed many grieving women to reconsider the wartime rhetoric of the ‘silent, supportive heroine’ female subject position. Before and during the war, the bulk of government and pro-war propaganda had tied ‘patriotic womanhood’ directly to the success of America’s fighting forces. In light of the crisis of a foreign conflict and the reality of a national draft, women had been called upon to offer up their husbands and sons to service and to fulfill quietly any roles in the domestic front asked of them (Grayzel 2002; Karetzky 1997; Kennedy 1999). Surely many women were stunned to discover that after all of their wartime sacrifices (including the offering up of their men to the fates of war), as well as the political gains they had made through war work, they were being bypassed in the process of determining their son’s or husband’s final resting place. The War Department’s miscalculated assumption that women would passively maintain the accommodating role prescribed to them during war raised bitter feelings among those whose claims to the dead were disregarded.

_____________ 11

Lt. Col. Charles C. Pierce, Chief of the GRS, eventually recommended that in such a case the parent “designated by the deceased soldier in his emergency address” would be “held entitled to direct disposition of his remains” (qtd. in Sledge 141).

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Although the Selective Service Act of 1917 had effectively ‘democratized’ the process of wartime conscription in the U.S. by drawing upon ablebodied males of all economic classes and prohibiting the hiring of substitutes, following the war many next of kin believed that their wealth, or lack thereof, might play a crucial role in the final disposition of the dead. 12 For example, despite public statements by the War Department that American bodies would not begin to return to the U.S. until late 1920, some next of kin attempted to use their wealth to expedite the process. In a March 1919 telegram to the GRS, Fred Keithan of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, stated: “My son Frederick H Keithan died in Coblentz Germany […] can I have his body will send a representative to Washington and post with you any amount of money to defray all expenses of the return please do not deny this request I want my boys remains.” Others referenced their working class status or poverty in emotional appeals. In November 1918, Eugene Head, a dairy farmer from Mahopac Falls, New York, wrote to the War Department: “I want very much to have my boys body returned, but as I am simply a laboring man working by the day, I feel unable to bear the expense myself. Will you kindly advise me on this subject.” In a January 1919 letter to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, William Buente, a machinist from Pittsburgh, whose son Howard was killed in action, argued against the construction of overseas cemeteries that, in his view, could only be visited by the rich: As we are patiently waiting for our dear son’s body to be returned to us, we ask of you as a sec of war, if you will do your utmost in bringing his body back to the good old ‘U’ ‘S’ ‘A’ where he was born and raised […] I think as every mother father brother wife or sweetheart whose a member of the “Bring home the soldier dead” league thinks that as he was a brave American with American blood running through his veins. Why should he be deserted by us and our government and left sleeping on the other side. As the old saying of these fellows (NOT MEN) who did not lose anybody in the war ‘Let them sleep where they fall.’ This saying is not the truth as the majority of the bodies have been removed several times and finally to this large plot where hotels are now being built to accommodate the rich (those who lost NO ONE) but coming for curiosity and also for the French to make a little coin, and the poor (yes the poor) can stay at home look at the picture and never have an opportunity to lay flowers on his grave.

In this letter, Buente makes the powerful suggestion that his son’s bodily remains might become part of a larger spectacle that would make money for the French. We see in Buente’s letter his keen awareness of the charac-

_____________ 12

This belief was wrong, as the financial condition of legal next of kin had no official bearing on the final disposition of soldierly remains. The government returned all bodily remains to any legal next of kin who desired them free of charge. Furthermore, the government gave families up to 100 U.S. dollars to hold private funerals. The government also covered costs for burials at domestic national cemeteries (War Department).

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teristics of twentieth century commercial culture – a culture in which even cemeteries could be marketed for mass consumption – and his consciousness of the dissonance between the personal pain of his family and the notion that the overseas cemeteries might become a curiosity for the wealthy. As one might easily imagine, two distinct collective voices emerged from the correspondence sent to the War Department: one demanded the repatriation of war dead and the other requested foreign burial. 13 Generally, those in favor of returning the bodies of their sons, brothers, and husbands perceived a threat that the government, in its desire to construct symbolic cemeteries abroad, would somehow prevent the removal of American war dead from Europe. Such concerns were not baseless; at the time, newspaper headlines trumpeted Pershing’s desire to leave the bodies in foreign soil, Congressional leaders called for the establishment of overseas cemeteries, and French health policies barred the immediate evacuation of war dead from France. Furthermore, despite the documents sent by the War Department to next of kin, as well as public assurances from Secretary Baker in late 1919 “that no body will remain abroad which is desired in this country” (qtd. in Sledge 136), actual legislation guaranteeing families’ rights to the bodies of soldier dead was not passed until March 4, 1921 – nearly two and a half years after Armistice. Even after the enactment of Public Law No. 389, many next of kin, still waiting for their beloved’s remains, seemed unable to take the government at its word. Thus, between 1919 and 1922, the War Department received countless emotional correspondence from citizens calling for the return of America’s fallen. Those who sought the return of bodily remains offered a range of arguments and pleas. Some relatives, such as Lydia Campbell of Mankato, Minnesota, employed patriotic rhetoric: “Any parents who gave their loved son to the great cause, should have the right to the body of that boy, who was given to his country, returned for interment in the country that he fought for & loved.” Lewis Brown, a teamster from Staten Island, argued for the return of his son’s body by evoking the inherent ‘American-ness’ of the dead: [O]ur boys were good Enough to be taken away over there they should be good enough to Be Brought Back Again though they are Dead he was an american Bred & Born & his Forefathers Befor Dont you think this country of ours should

_____________ 13

This is not to say that all next of kin wholeheartedly supported either repatriation or foreign burial. Some were quite unsure of what they wanted. See Carrie Andrews, letter to War Department (WD), 25 Apr. 1919, Burial Case File (BCF) for Clarence St. John.

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Keep its word – American First Please Record my Application for the Return of my Boy and you will Oblige his Father who wants it.

For Campbell and Brown, then, the only proper place for the interment of American soldiers would be the U. S. – the country for which they fought and died; the land where they were “Bred & Born.” To them, the notion that the government might not honor the minimal commitment of returning America’s sacrificed war dead to the soil of their homeland was too outrageous to believe. Other next of kin eschewed patriotic language and crafted letters that expressed more familial, tender sentiments instead. Such letters often focused on specific funerary practices. Henry Beyer, a coal truck driver from Chicago, wrote of his son’s corpse: “We would like to have his body returned to […] Chicago […] where his body will be taken care of and placed in a vault for a few days.” Martha Swain, a family nurse from Norfolk, Virginia, wrote of her dead son David: “I truly want his body [sent] home so I can look after it as long as I live and to Know that I can be near it.” Addie Blosser of Bryon, Ohio, echoed this sentiment: “Sir i want my Dear boy body if can have it i Be sure it him and Burried it in our home grave yard it will pleas me so for he was so close to me then i Can go to his grave when i want to it seem so hard to have our boys die over there i wil be so thankful to get his body.” Such expressions indicated that many Americans adhered to traditions in which bodily death is not the final moment of life. Indeed, many next of kin believed in the resurrection of an individual’s spirit in the afterlife; this resurrection depended on the proper treatment and burial of the dead. For many grieving relatives, this meant burying loved ones nearby, where they could constantly renew their contact with the spirit of the dead by being within the presence of their beloved’s bodily remains. 14 Sometimes next of kin insisted that they were fulfilling the wishes of the dead. For instance, Leta Matsler of Centralia, Illinois, claimed: “I am writing this as a request for the body of my dear son […] to be returned to me, that his body may rest in his homeland which he loved and to which he longed to return.” Rosie Hajek of Chicago eloquently stated that her son had always been adamant about his final resting place: “His only wish was to be buried next to his father, he begged his Friends when he was in Rockford in Camp that if anything should happen to him in the battle they should tell his mother to fill out his dying wish […]. All I want is to fulfill his dying wish and you could do it with gladness for laying down his young life.” Through romantic depictions of their sons’ longings for the

_____________ 14

For information on late-nineteenth century religious interpretations of the corpse in the U.S., see Laderman 173-74.

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homeland, these women argued for the privileged position of the next of kin as the best representatives and interpreters of the desires of the dead. Other relatives made no such pretenses about fulfilling the wishes of the dead, but rather sought the return of bodily remains through emotional references to their own broken hearts. Carrie Bruce of Lawrence, Massachusetts, confessed: “[O]ur human hearts cry out in grief and loneliness, for the pitiful bit of comfort that can come in feeling sure that their dead bodies are being cared for.” Anna Sullivan of Scranton, Pennsylvania, whose son Richard had been killed during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, sadly stated: “The news of my son being killed in action was indeed a terrible shock to me, but the delay […] in returning his remains to me has affected my heart almost to the breaking point.” And Charles Joyce, a fireman from Pittsburgh, whose sister Katherine had died while serving as a volunteer nurse in France, channeled his physical grief into prose: I send this letter […] to see if My Dear Sister will be sent over her bodie I have so I can lay her where I can see her last resting place How Happy I would feel to have her near me so far she is I am hear Hartbroken as she was all I Had […] but what it would mean to see my Dear Sister once again that sleeps in a lonely Grave among other Mothers Dear loved ones I am chocking must quit writing but please ansir this and I thank the War Dept for all there kindness I got her efects from france and not her O how I felt when they came with out her Dear Deasent Face for she was loved and and is Sadly mised by all whom Knew her Kindly ansir.

For Joyce, just writing about the final disposition of his sister’s remains was nearly too much to bear. He had been separated from his sister twice: once when she left for Europe, and again when she died. A third separation – this time her burial in foreign soil – would be just as wrenching, if not more so, than the previous two. While the large majority of next of kin asked for repatriation, others were content to leave the dead in Europe. Many in this latter group crafted correspondence explaining why, even though simple responses to government-issued inquiry cards and forms would have guaranteed their wishes. It seems that the initial reaction for many next of kin – including those who supported the plan to build overseas cemeteries – to the bureaucratic inquiries was to respond as openly, fully, and personally as possible. John W. Graham, author of The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the 1930s, writes, “The decision […] to leave [a soldier’s body] forever overseas must have been one of the most difficult choices a parent could have faced” (35). Many families made this point clear to the government. It might seem ironic, but in correspondence from kin who wished to leave the dead in Europe, we can find references to the same feelings

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expressed by kin who advocated repatriation. For example, Eggert and Martha Martens of St. Louis used the power of patriotic rhetoric to express themselves: “In regards to the Remains of our Son Charles Martens (Deceased) [we] will say that he Died Like a true American Soldier and done his Duty for his Country and the ones he left behind him and Let him rest in peace with all his Comrades over there who fought Side by Side with him.” Others portrayed themselves as representatives for the dead. Clara Gagnon of Worcester, Massachusetts wrote of her son’s body: “I think that it is better to leave his body there and I also think that were he able to speak it would be his wish.” Still others alluded to their broken hearts. William and Josephine Dugan of Brookline, Massachusetts, pasted a simple, yet touching, message on the back of their GRS Form 120: “[We wish Frank’s] body to lay in the land where it fell though our hearts grieve for our Darling.” Thus, it seems that those in favor of foreign burial and those in favor of repatriation drew upon a familiar, universal discourse about war and sacrifice to mount opposing arguments. Despite these similarities, testimonies from those in favor of foreign burial contained an assortment of separate arguments that supported the War Department’s predisposition to leave the dead in Europe. Of these arguments, the most common centered upon a fear of “disturbing the dead.” James Anderson of Phoenix, Mississippi, wrote of his son William’s body: “I prefer that the body be not disturbed […]. That troubles me more than any thing else about it remaining over there.” Ada Garner of Philadelphia, whose son lied in a temporary cemetery in St. Mihiel, France, stated: “I do not like the idea of him being disturbed and would like to have him remain in a permanent American Cemetery [in France].” And Emily Dixon of Haverford, Pennsylvania, returned her War Department inquiry card with the following message: “I feel very strongly that the body of my husband should not be disturbed at all.” Perhaps by expressing this tender concern for letting the departed rest in peace, these kin were also attempting to reclaim the dead from their service to a government that, at least in these women’s minds, may have been unconcerned with such matters. Others made religious allusions to an afterlife in which they might one day reunite with the dead. Naomi Meily of Kansas City, Missouri, wrote: “[T]his is a hard problem to solve, that of leaving all that remains of the only one that is so near and dear to a Mother so far away from home and friends. But I have the blessed assurance of meeting him in that upper and better land where there will be no parting.” Some expressed gratitude for the government’s promise to tend to the graves of American dead in perpetuity. Anna Fatout of Cumberland, Indiana, stated: “I wish to let [my son’s body] remain in France. It will always be cared for there. Were I to bring it to my home the grave when I am gone will per-

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haps be neglected. If I send it to Arlington Nat. Cem. I will feel it is almost as far away as it now is. So let his body rest in France.” Charles Pancoast of Woodstown, New Jersey, revealed: “[I]t surely is a comfort and satisfaction to know that the government is taking good care of the bodies of soldiers who have given their lives in the cause civilization over in France.” And some kin, still reeling from the initial shock of losing their beloved in the war, stated that the return of bodily remains would reopen wounds that had only started to heal. Mary Markle of Lore City, Ohio wrote: “i once advised the Government that i did not wont my Sons Body Brought to the States he will rest Just as Easy over ther as here and Please dont Bother me any more as it was hard anought to give him up with out having him Bring ofer here for me to See.” Mary Sanders of Indianapolis told the War Department: “I just can not think of bringing him back across that offul water again and while he died and was buried in France we will let him remain there for we could not see him any way.” Sanders, like many in her cohort, projected herself as a mother who simply wished no further suffering for her son or herself. We might question the notion that one more trip across the Atlantic – “that offul water” – could actually bother a corpse. But we can empathize with those who wished to forgo the pain that would come with the return of the dead. In a very real way, the government’s offer to bury American fallen overseas saved many grieving families from experiencing the sorrow that a domestic burial might bring. Instead of seeking closure through familial rituals of death, people like Sanders clung to a hope that the dead could now rest in heavenly peace. At the outbreak of U.S. participation in the Great War, leaders within the African-American community issued general support for the national war effort. Despite some undercurrents of resistance within the community, many blacks accepted W. E. B. Du Bois’ prewar contentions that the conflict in Europe represented an opportunity to show one’s devotion to country and that the black community’s grievances could be put on hold until war’s end (Slotkin 47-51). Unfortunately, any enthusiasm blacks felt for the war effort was coldly met with widespread discrimination from the U.S. military. For example, just before the U.S. declared war, Lt. Col. Charles Young, the highest-ranking black officer in the Army, was found physically unfit for duty and put on the retired list. Many African Americans believed that Young’s forced retirement was meant to prevent the possibility of a black officer commanding drafted white soldiers in battle (Fletcher 2881). During the war, the U.S. military utilized the majority of African-American recruits as laborers far from the battlefronts, labeling 89

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percent of the 370,000 black draftees as too “moronic” to serve under fire. However, two “colored” divisions, the 92nd and 93rd, were formed and fought admirably on the front lines, often under the command of the French. Despite the fact that these divisions earned praise and respect from French soldiers and citizens, black soldiers faced increased segregation and racial violence from white Americans both abroad and, upon return to the U.S., at home (Edgerton 69-99). 15 Ironically, although the U.S. military treated African-American troops as second-class soldiers throughout the war, the bodies of fallen black soldiers became just as symbolically valuable as their white counterparts after Armistice. The War Department had every intention of burying dead African-American soldiers with white soldiers in Europe, for every dead black soldier left overseas represented one more headstone to be seen in a symbolic U.S. cemetery. Relatives of black soldiers received the same inquiry cards, letters, and forms as white families, and were encouraged to express their desires regarding the final disposition of loved ones’ remains. Given the socioeconomic conditions of a large percentage of the AfricanAmerican population at the time (nearly a quarter of the community was completely illiterate), it is likely that many black families were unable to effectively express their personal wishes and feelings (Snyder 21). But despite this probability, the Record Group of the Office of the Quartermaster General does hold the correspondence of many African-American next of kin. While most African Americans requested the return of their loved one’s body, the percentage that did so is on par with the percentage of whites that asked for the return of bodily remains. Most African Americans who wrote back to the government were succinct. For example, Albert Dubose, a farmer from Bolivar, Tennessee, whose son had been killed in action during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, sent a telegram to the GRS stating: “Forward Private Will Dubose body here for burial.” Caesar Bradford, Principal at the Alto Colored Public School in Alto, Texas, wrote to the GRS: “It is my desire that you have the remains of my son Henry Etheridge Bradford returned to the United States and shipped to me, Caesar Bradford Alto, Texas, Cherokee County. Hope this is plainly understood.” But some African Americans crafted messages of longer and deeper expression. For instance, Stella Mitchell of Beaumont, Texas, whose son Leon Gilder had died of heart disease in France, wrote on the back of her GRS Form 120: “I have been thinking the matter over I would rather not to destirve the dead My belove son

_____________ 15

For stark evidence of the U.S. military’s racist views towards black soldiers, one can turn to the memo, “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.” Written in 1918 by a French liaison officer to General Pershing’s staff, this startling document was distributed to French troops as a reminder of American color lines (Slotkin 253-54).

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died over there that is the lords will not mine. Many thanks to you for your kindness and at the last day we will be brought togathere yet I Love him over there.” Other African Americans, perhaps doubting their ability to secure their beloved’s remains from the government, hired lawyers to express their desires forcefully and effectively (“Graves”). Some African Americans who requested burials at national cemeteries in the U.S. indicated that they could not afford to come to the funeral, as if they felt obligated to acknowledge some unspoken guardian role that they could not fulfill. Henry Creed, a laborer at a meat packing company in Chicago, whose son was to be buried in the Arlington National Cemetery, sent a telegram to the GRS, simply stating: “Have Corporal Abraham Creed buried cannot attend funeral.” Mattie Lou Fuston of Topeka, Kansas, sent a similar telegram message: “Bury Elmer Fuston in National Grave Yard I am unable to attend funeral.” A small percentage of African-American next of kin explicitly asked for the dead to remain in Europe. For some members of this group, the return of loved ones’ bodies would take too much of a toll on their health. Willie Mae Bedford of Memphis wrote to the GRS: “I [received] your letter in regards to my husband remains Oscar Bedford Cook, serial no 1401628, Co A 370th Infantry. I do wish for the remains to […] stay in france on the account of my illness.” Others simply refused to play the game of memorialization that returning the dead entailed. Elizabeth Somerville (fig. 3) of Hackensack, New Jersey, whose foster son had died of pneumonia in Europe, responded to the burial inquiry card’s question, “Do you desire the remains brought to the United States?” with the statement: “No. Since it is impossible to see him would rather his remains rest in France.” Correspondence from African Americans regarding the final disposition of war dead was, generally speaking, succinct and void of the rhetorical flair often found in letters from whites. Though some grieving African Americans, like Emma Cuff, made references to both their familial relationships with the dead and the social contract they expected the government to fulfill, most correspondence from black families contained simple, straightforward requests unadorned with sentimentality. Perhaps African Americans felt less comfortable expressing private emotions to a government that had never treated them as full citizens. Maybe they did not feel entitled to, or properly equipped for, the same discursive space so many whites eagerly claimed. In light of the fact that African Americans had had little say in the events that led to the deaths of their beloved, as well as the reality that blacks faced increased disenfranchisement and racial violence in the U.S. during the postwar years, it seems probable that many grieving African Americans simply felt defeated. Instead of engaging the

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government in a personal process of negotiation, most grieving black families simply chose the most straightforward route to securing a peaceful resting place for their fallen men.

Fig. 3. Elizabeth Somerville. NARA RG 92.

Ultimately, the correspondence between the War Department and grieving families centered on the fundamental and sacred obligation of the government to care properly for citizen-soldiers who had willingly died for the nation. Those in favor of repatriation and those in support of foreign burial alike invoked this social contract, sometimes in concrete terms. For instance, John Lingle of Paoli Indiana, whose son had died of pneumonia in England, claimed that the plan to keep American dead in foreign soil constituted “a direct violation of the implied contract to those who went over never here to return as before.” William Roth, a grocer from New York City, wrote: As the father of one of those boys who paid the Supreme Sacrifice in France […] allow me to protest against the cowardly newspaper propaganda which has for its object the influencing of our Government to change its policy in regards to the returning of the bodies of our soldier dead […]. Now that he gave his life for that cause, can I (who gave him wholeheartedly to our government for that cause) […] not have all that remains of him, his earthly clay, to revere and cherish while I live [?]

And Mollie Roycroft (fig. 4) of Coker, Alabama, expressed her expectations to the government: “[Our] request is that Special care be taken of

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[our son’s] Grave. [H]e was our only dear Son. So we gave all we had, and trust that you will take Special care of his Grave for his dear parents.” Families of the dead counted on the government to hold up its end of this tragic bargain.

Fig. 4. Mollie Roycroft. NARA RG 92.

The War Department was slow to account for the prominent place this social contract held in the hearts and minds of soldiers’ relatives. Instead of immediately addressing the pain and expectations of grieving families, the War Department maintained the distant, highly bureaucratic voice it had used in its wartime communication with the bereaved. 16 Throughout 1919, families received an official form letter from the War Department, inscribed by Adjutant General P. C. Harris, which coolly explained in further detail their options for burial of the dead. It read in part:

_____________ 16

In 1917, Mattie Hicks of Caryville, Florida, inquired about the return of her son’s corpse: “Just rec’d a letter […] telling me the Sad news of my Sons death […] I want the body Sent back home to me as he was only a boy not yet 17 years of age […] Let me know at once.” Hicks received a letter from the QMC, which stated: “In reply you are informed that it will not be practicable at this time to transport the remains of your son to the United States but as soon as it can be done it is the intention of the Department to have the remains disinterred and shipped to your address at the expense of the Government.”

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The original plan […] was to deliver the body in every case at the home address of the deceased to the person legally entitled to dispose of the remains. A desire has been expressed, however, in numerous instances to have the body remain abroad, and General Pershing is likely soon to enter into negotiations with the French and Allied Governments with the view of establishing permanent cemeteries for members of the American Expeditionary Forces […]. A bill is now before Congress for the establishment of ‘Fields of Honor’ abroad, which will insure future care by the United States Government as national cemeteries are now cared for […]. The Department is unable to state when it will be possible to begin the removal of the remains of the soldiers, but the information requested is being collected at this time in order that there may be no delay when the times comes for such removal.

While addressing certain questions of burial, this official form letter, like others sent by the War Department after Armistice, lacked the personal touch needed to show appreciation for the wartime sacrifices of citizens, let alone persuade next of kin to bury their beloved in distant lands. The few attempts War Department officials made to speak directly to the suffering of bereaved families 17 were further undermined by highly publicized comments from leaders like Secretary of War Baker, who implored relatives of the dead to “sympathize with the feeling of the department that it is the wiser and better course to leave those bodies in France” (United States 9). Even when Baker, Pershing, and political figures seemingly regurgitated certain arguments put forth by relatives in favor of foreign burial, they seemed unable to convince the public at large of their concern for the average American family’s suffering. 18 By the early 1920s, Pershing and his cohort recognized the necessity of a new rhetorical approach. In April 1923, Pershing issued an order, published in the New York Times, urging the military to adopt a new literary style that contained “the personal touch so often lacking in corre-

_____________ 17

18

During the postwar years, Lt. Col. Charles C. Pierce, Chief of the GRS, stood out for his efforts to comfort next of kin. A strong advocate for the rights of citizens to claim their beloved’s remains (United States 45), Pierce wrote many letters to families in an attempt to put a human face on the military. Although his letters made no guarantee of the return of the dead, they surely brought consolation to countless families (Pierce). As early as 1919, Pershing candidly lifted arguments from the letters of next of kin in his efforts to secure the establishment of overseas American cemeteries. For instance, Pershing claimed that by leaving bodies in Europe, the War Department was fulfilling the wishes of the dead: “Believe that could these soldiers speak for themselves they would wish to be left undisturbed in the place where, with their comrades, they fought the last fight” (“Pershing Against”). Rep. George Huddleston of Alabama argued that repatriation would lead to “the reopening of heartbreaks, a reopening of grief and sorrow in every community when one of these bodies is carried back.” Many next of kin were deeply offended by such statements. As one father said: “Shall anybody criticize me if I care to have my feelings stirred by the bringing back of my boy’s body?” (United States 18-21).

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spondence with the public” (“Pershing Criticises”). He knew that in order to secure the political will and economic resources necessary for the establishment of U.S. cemeteries in Europe, military and political figures needed to express fully, and continually, their deepest appreciation for the losses families had sustained in the war. In light of the growing opposition to the plan for overseas cemeteries, 19 the War Department adopted a discursive style clearly tempered by the sentimental vernacular found in the correspondence of grieving families. As early as November 1919, the War Department began closing its letters to all next of kin with the statement: “It is desired to express to you the deep and sincere sympathy of the Department on account of the loss you have sustained in the death of your” husband, brother, or son (Pitman). Over the next few years, War Department officials honed their literary skills, crafting messages that accounted for a range of emotions grieving families might have felt: “The Department is gratified that you have confided the mortal remains of this soldier to his country’s care. He will rest, forever, in […] France, with his many comrades, under the flag in defense of which he gave his young life and where his grave will be reverently cared for by a grateful nation” (Lowery). In June 1920, Secretary Baker announced a rather progressive policy that would allow a friend or relative to accompany the body of a dead soldier from its port of arrival to the home of the deceased. “This arrangement is made in order that relatives who wish to do so may secure early control of the bodies of their loved ones and bestow upon them that sympathetic care which they so naturally desire to give” (“To Accompany”). In May 1921 President Warren G. Harding issued a proclamation that established Memorial Day, an annual holiday of commemoration for American war dead: “I invite my fellow citizens fittingly to pay homage on this day to a noble dead who sleep in homeland, beneath the sea or on foreign fields, so that we who survive might enjoy the blessings of peace and happiness and to the end that liberty and justice, without which no nation can exist, shall live forever” (“Harding”). At the third “Armistice Day pilgrimage” in Washington, D.C., former President Woodrow Wilson delivered an address to

_____________ 19

Rep. Oscar E. Bland of Indiana opined that “France is and has been throughout all the centuries the great battle ground of the world, and we do not know but what the cannon of future inventors may dig up those very graves in years to come” (United States 6). Some opponents claimed that if “American dead are left in France, the necessity for preserving the inviolability of our burial places will be more likely to involve the United States in future European wars” (qtd. in Robin 56). The plan faced intense opposition from the U.S. funeral industry as well, which stood to gain much from the return of war dead (Graham 40-41; Piehler, Remembering War 96-97). See also Sledge 135-38.

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thousands of World War veterans – some disabled – on the accomplishments of the “most ideal army that was ever thrown together.” Though the speech was highly impersonal and jingoistic, Wilson broke down into tears three times at the sight of the men before him – a performance the veterans found deeply moving (“Wilson”). And in the late-1920s, the War Department sent a form letter and card to each of the 30,000 families that had left their beloved in Europe. The card, which stated the final resting place of the respective dead soldier, was marked with a gold star – a nod to the powerful Gold Star Mother movement that had spread throughout the U.S. 20 The form letter read: “The Quartermaster General desires to invite your attention to the [enclosed] card which gives the permanent cemetery location of the soldier’s grave in which you are interested […]. Please be assured that in effecting removal of the dead, the utmost reverential care was exercised by those who performed this sacred duty. For the future, these graves will be perpetually maintained by the Government in a manner befitting the last resting place of our heroes” (Pope). Thus, appropriating the sentimental vernacular of grieving families, the War Department and politicians increasingly learned how to articulate and acknowledge the government’s social contract with the families of soldierly dead. In June 1923, President Harding appointed Pershing to head the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). Created by act of Congress, this seven-member board of politicians, military figures, and citizens, was given total authority over the planning, constructing, and maintaining of America’s military cemeteries in Europe (Nishiura 3). Over the following decade, Pershing played a dominant role in designing the sites and securing the appropriations necessary for the board’s monumental visions (Robin 58; “Pershing Arranges”; Price). Although the Commission “favored either pseudo-medieval styles or ponderous variations of classical designs” that evoked abstract democratic ideals and romantic notions of the Medieval Crusades (Robin 60), the ABMC also incorporated the sentimental vernacular of grieving families into the final visual presentation of the cemeteries. 21 For instance, eschewing the “tablet grave marker model” found in Arlington National Cemetery, the ABMC opted

_____________ 20

21

Founded in 1918, the Gold Star Mothers was a grassroots organization of mothers and widows of U.S. soldiers killed in the Great War. Dedicated to honoring the sacrifice of American soldiers, the group was a powerful advocate for the rights of veterans and their families (Graham 12-17; L. Meyer 34-37). For a composite description of the visual presentation of these sites, see Grossman; L. Meyer 40-47; R. Meyer 218-27; Nishiura 17-114; Robin 55-65; and Sledge 204-06.

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Fig 5. Somme American Cemetery and Memorial (2006). Photograph by the author.

for white marble headstones in the shape of the Latin cross (fig. 5), which would connote familiar religious allusions of sacrifice, redemption, and rebirth (Grossman 135-36; Robin 63-64; Piehler, Remembering War 10001; Seitz 77-78). 22 At each site, the Commission constructed a ‘non-sectarian’ (though clearly Christian) chapel, where visitors (including, presumably, relatives of the dead) could contemplate the sacrifices of U.S. soldiers and offer prayers in their memory. On the walls of the chapels, the ABMC inscribed statements of a tender and spiritual nature. 23 And, in one exceptional case, the ABMC allowed the mother of Lt. Walker Blaine Beale to erect a statue of her son in the St. Mihiel American Cemetery (Ezz-Eddine). An accompanying engraving, written in French above the soldier’s head, reads: “He

_____________ 22 23

A small percentage of the headstones are in the shape of the Star of David to mark the graves of Jewish soldiers. For instance, an engraving in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery chapel states: “This chapel is erected by the United States of America as a sacred rendezvous of a grateful people with its immortal dead.” The inscription across the face of the altar of the Somme American Cemetery chapel reads: “Thou O Lord has granted them eternal rest..”

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sleeps far from his family in the gentle land of France.” This stirring stone figure still occupies a prominent place in the site’s landscape (fig. 6).

Fig. 6. The Beale Statue at the St. Mihiel American Cemetery and Memorial. Courtesy of the ABMC.

There is little doubt that the process of consultation between the War Department and grieving families had deeply impacted Pershing. As the most instrumental figure in the creation of America’s overseas cemeteries, as well as the catalyst behind the Army’s adoption of a new affective style of communication, Pershing evolved from a warrior who ordered his men to battle (and death) into a symbol for the government’s efforts to address the suffering of private citizens. The New York Times portrayed the general as a keeper of the dead who tenderly watched over Doughboys buried in Europe (“Pershing Seeks”). He became an outspoken advocate for the “Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages” of the 1930s, a federally funded program that enabled mothers and widows of the dead to visit their loved ones’ graves in Europe (L. Meyer 48). And in 1931, he told a party of Gold Star pilgrims visiting France that “mothers would realize […] when they look out over the white crosses of the cemeteries where their sons and husbands lie, that the sacrifice was not in vain, and that their memories would be tenderly cherished down through the years” (qtd. in Graham 142). Influenced by the unprecedented dialogue between the U.S. government and relatives of war dead, Pershing helped usher a new, sentimental dis-

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course on soldierly sacrifice into both American public life and the ongoing project of transnational memory that the U.S. overseas military cemeteries have entailed.

Works Cited American Battle Monuments Commission. Annual Report to the President of the United States for the Fiscal Year 1925. Washington: GPO, 1926. Edgerton, Robert B. Hidden Heroism: Black Soldiers in America’s Wars. Boulder: Westview, 2002. Ezz-Eddine, Nadia. “Re: St. Mihiel Cemetery statue.” E-mail to the author. 11 Dec. 2008. Fletcher, Marvin E. “World War I.” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History. Ed. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West. Vol. 5. New York: Simon, 1996. 2881-83. Graham, John W. The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the 1930s: Overseas Grave Visitations by Mothers and Widows of Fallen U.S. World War I Soldiers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. Grayzel, Susan R. Women and the First World War. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Grossman, Elizabeth G. “Architecture for a Public Client: The Monuments and Chapels of the American Battle Monuments Commission.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43.2 (1984): 119-43. “Harding, in Memorial Day Proclamation, Asks General Homage to War Dead on May 30.” New York Times 4 May 1921: 12. Harris, P. C. Form letter to Anastacco Rodriguez. 9 May 1919. BCF for Juan M. Rodriguez. Hicks, Mattie. Correspondence with QMC. 1917-1920. BCF for Clifton R. Hicks. Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1993. Karetzky, Joanne. The Mustering of Support for World War I by The Ladies’ Home Journal. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997. Keene, Jennifer D. World War I. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2006. Kennedy, Kathleen. Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799-1883. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996. Lowery, J. E. Correspondence with QMC. 1918-1932. BCF for Robert W. Lowery. Maynes, Mary Jo, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008. McClymer, John F. “The Federal Government and the Americanization Movement, 1915-24.” Prologue 10.1 (1978): 22-32. McElvaine, Robert S. Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1983. Meyer, Lotte Larsen. “Mourning in a Distant Land: Gold Star Pilgrimages to American Military Cemeteries in Europe, 1930-33.” Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies 20 (2003): 31-75.

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Meyer, Richard E. “Stylistic Variation in the Western Front Battlefield Cemeteries of World War I Combatant Nations.” Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies 18 (2001): 189-253. Nishiura, Elizabeth, ed. American Battle Monuments: A Guide to Military Cemeteries and Monuments Maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1989. North, Thomas. General North’s Manuscript. 2006. Ts. Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial Superintendent David Bedford. “Pershing Against Removal of Dead.” Washington Post 24 Aug. 1919: E3. “Pershing Arranges for War Memorials.” New York Times 26 June 1927: 16. “Pershing Criticises Army Literary Style; Urges Clarity and the Personal Touch.” New York Times 13 Apr. 1923: 1. “Pershing Seeks A Plan to Preserve Memorials.” New York Times 6 Sept. 1931: 101. Piehler, G. Kurt. “Commemoration and Public Ritual.” Oxford Companion to American Military History. Ed. John Whiteclay Chambers, and Fred Anderson. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 169-71. —. Remembering War the American Way. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1995. Pierce, Charles C. Letter to Robert E. Buglune. Feb. 1919. BCF for Arthur R. Sargent. Pitman, Argyle. Correspondence with War Department. Nov. 1919. BCF for Henry S. Pitman. Pope, F. H. Letter to John MacIntyre. 16 May 1926. BCF for Harold V. MacIntyre. Price, X. H. Letter to John J. Pershing. 12 Feb. 1925. “Correspondence of the ABMC Chairman, Gen. John J. Pershing, 1923-45.” Records of the American Battle Monuments Commission. RG 117, NARA. Reager, Georgie O. Letter to QMC. 20 Sept. 1919. BCF for Wallace C. Reager. Robin, Ron. “‘A Foothold in Europe’: The Aesthetics and Politics of American War Cemeteries in Western Europe.” Journal of American Studies 29.1 (1995): 55-72. Sledge, Michael. Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Seitz, David W. “Silent Thunder: War Memorials and the Break Up of the Collectivistic Motive to Sacrifice.” InterCulture 5.2 (2008): 74-90. Slotkin, Richard. Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Snyder, Thomas D., ed. 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. Washington: U.S. Department of Education, 1993. “30,496 A. E. F. Dead to Be Undisturbed in European Graves.” Washington Post 9 Apr. 1922: 1. “To Accompany War Dead.” New York Times 9 June 1920: 22. United States. Cong. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Hearings on Authorizing the Appointment of a Commission to Remove the Bodies of Deceased Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, from Foreign Countries to the United States, and Defining Its Duties and Powers. 66th Cong., 1st sess. HR Res. 9927. Washington: GPO, 1919. “‘Village’s’ Food Reformer; Soldiers’ Graves.” New York Times 3 July 1921: 64. War Department. “Cemeterial Division Bulletin No. 10-F-W.” BCF for John A. James. 16 May 1919. “Wilson Overcome Greeting Pilgrims; Predicts Triumph.” New York Times 12 Nov. 1923: 1.

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Wiltz, John Edward. “The Nye Munitions Committee, 1934.” Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792-1974. Ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Bruns. Vol. 4. New York: Chelsea House, 1975. 2735-919.

Liberating Dachau: Transnational Discourses of Holocaust Memory INGRID GESSNER *

The Transnationalization and Americanization of Memory Discourse In recent years, the transnational contexts and implications of individual and collective memories have moved to the center of attention. What begun with concepts such as ‘sites of memory’ (Morrison), lieux de mémoire (Nora), and Erinnerungsräume (Assmann) on a national scale in the 1980s and influenced scholarly explorations of commemorative practices in connection with the analysis of social, cultural, and political issues has moved into the global arena. Scholars like Andreas Huyssen have called the inter/national obsession with issues of memory a “memory boom” (Twilight Memories 3; “Monumental Seduction” 191) or spoken of “memorial mania” (Doss 227). Huyssen has also diagnosed a “globalization of traumatic memory discourses in which the tropes and rhetoric of the Holocaust play an increasingly prominent role in different national and political contexts” (“Diaspora” 147). 1 Hannah Möckel-Rieke understands the renewed discourse on memory, among other factors, as being tied to “the vanishing of the Holocaust generation” (5). 2 Alison Landsberg introduced the term “prosthetic memory” for new forms of public cultural memory and mass _____________ * 1

2

I am grateful to Birgit Däwes, Udo Hebel, and Rüdiger Kunow for their kind feedback and insightful comments on previous versions of this article. Since the 1990s a growing number of scholars has examined ways in which memorials and museums contribute to the collective and cultural memory of the Holocaust. See, among others, Linenthal, Preserving Memory; Berenbaum; Cole; Hoskins; Salvo; Weinberg and Elieli. Although, only structurally comparable, it is certainly no coincidence that forty years after World War II – when those who had lived through the times were dying – the so-called German Historians’ Controversy (Historikerstreit) emerged in West Germany. The historians’ debate over the German past and the responsibility for the Holocaust focused on the definition of national identity and self-representation of West Germany. The notion for a more affirmative narrative of German history set forth by neo-conservative historians Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber, among others, ignited the controversy in the summer of 1986.

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technology. Prosthetic memory enables anyone to experience the past, no matter how remote, or distant or traumatic (2). Aleida Assmann has equally diagnosed that the basic rules of collective memory have changed in the past decades. She attributes this to a new consciousness of the long-term effects of past experiences. In the case of the traumatizing memory of Holocaust survivors, the maxim of cathartic power of forgetting has made way to the ethical demand for a collective memory. The standards of commemorating and forgetting are currently undergoing a revision that is reinforced by the fact that we have entered a transnational epoch. The new transcultural point of view does by no means dissolve the specific horizons of collective memory and cultural formation. It rather focuses on them and critically examines their detrimental consequences regarding international and intercultural relations (Assmann, “Gedächtnis” 23-24). 3 While memory discourses have become transnational in this respect, they still remain tied to specific memories of social groups in time and place and thus need to be read within these contexts first. In other words, while this article assumes that a transnational discourse of Holocaust memory exists, it does not fully subscribe to Natan Sznaider and Daniel Levy’s idea of a global or cosmopolitan memory. 4 Tracing memories to their individual origins, I will also analyze their construction into collective and transnational memories. In this context, the question arises how the specific experience of the Holocaust attained the status of an American or possibly universal, transnational memory. Actually, in the years following World War II the war in the Pacific, and thus Hiroshima, not Auschwitz, had a greater impact on American society, as it also seemed to have more profound implications for the future of the United States. In the 1950s the popular association of Jews with Bolshevism culminated in the trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Holocaust was hardly talked about in the decade following World War II. 5 In the 1960s several developments inspired a closer examination of the Holocaust. With the reporting of Adolf Eich_____________ 3

4 5

Assmann writes: “Im Falle einer traumatisierten Erinnerung wie der der Überlebenden des Holocaust ist die Maxime von der heilenden Kraft des Vergessens […] der ethischen Forderung der gemeinsamen Erinnerung gewichen. […] All dies wird durch den Umstand verstärkt, dass wir mit Übergang ins neue Millenium [sic] in eine transnationale Epoche eingetreten sind. […] Die neue transkulturelle Beobachterperspektive löst die spezifischen Horizonte kollektiver Gedächtnisse und kultureller Formationen keineswegs auf, sie hat sie aber im Blickfeld und befragt sie kritisch hinsichtlich ihrer schädlichen Folgen für zwischenstaatliche und interkulturelle Beziehungen” (23-24). See Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (2001). An American edition was published in 2005 by Temple UP. This assumption about American society at large does not contradict the fact that the Jewish community in the United States did memorialize the Holocaust immediately after the war as Hasia R. Diner has rightly shown.

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mann’s capture in 1960 and the subsequent trial in Israel in 1961 the Holocaust was presented to the American public more thoroughly than ever before. Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial for the New Yorker and her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, stirred a debate about the “banality of evil.” In the aftermath of the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) many American Jews came to view Israel’s situation in a Holocaust framework. According to Peter Novick Jewish American organizations conceived “Israel’s difficulties as stemming from the world’s having forgotten the Holocaust.” In turn “[t]he Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that rights and wrongs were more complex” (Novick 155). The Holocaust entered the consciousness of the United States in the early 1970s, with American Jews focusing on the embattled Israel. The rise of identity politics in the 1960s which also affected the Jewish American community likewise contributed to the continued Americanization of the Holocaust. In contemporary America, in face of a relative – and I stress relative – absence of anti-Semitism and also due to a decline of religious doctrine, it appears that memories of the Holocaust have become a major reference point in the assertion of a Jewish American identity. Holocaust commemoration has also found its way into mainstream popular culture. For example, Oprah Winfrey claimed to be a better person after having seen the movie Schindler’s List (1993), and even President Clinton advised his fellow citizens to watch it (see Novick 214). In the mid-1990s the postulation of the Americanization of the Holocaust by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (1995) and Hilene Flanzbaum (1999) was echoed by Peter Novick’s study of The Holocaust in American Life (1999). Novick argues that Americans were spatially too removed from the concentration camps to be traumatized. Embracing Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory, which states that present concerns determine what of the past we remember and how we remember it, Novick contends, “[e]very generation frames the Holocaust, represents the Holocaust, in ways that suit its mood” (120). He believes that Holocaust memory in the United States in the late 1990s is too banal, inconsequential, uncontroversial, and unrelated to real divisions in American society and calls for the Holocaust to enter into “an arena of political contestation in which competing narratives about central symbols in the collective past, and the collectivity’s relationship to that past, are disputed and negotiated in the interest of redefining the collective past” (279). In his study on the Texture of Memory (1993), James E. Young examines exhibitions at Holocaust museums in the United States, Poland, Israel, and Germany as they are juxtaposing, narrating, and remembering events “according to the taste of their curators, the political needs and interests of

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their community, the temper of their time” (viii). Young refers to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site as having “come to serve as a Holocaust icon in the eyes of Western tourists, taking on a life of its own in the culture of travel.” In fact, over a million international visitors tour the site every year. Young adds that “[i]n an ironic twist, its historical significance seems to have grown in direct proportion to the success of the memorial” (70). Beside the memorial grounds and the excellent museum whose structure and display panels were overhauled in 2002-2003, the Dachau camp’s proximity to Munich contributes to its touristic attractiveness. More than 200,000 prisoners from over thirty countries were imprisoned in Dachau between 1933 and 1945. It is well documented that on April 29, 1945 the U.S. Army liberated over 67,000 prisoners, about 30,000 of these in the main camp. In fact, the widespread media coverage of the camp’s liberation in Life magazine and Movietone newsreels of American soldiers at Dachau also contributed to its notoriety. The newsreels, which also became part of educational film material at the Dachau site, shape public imagination and understanding of the event until today (Distel 40). The fact that Japanese American soldiers of the segregated 522nd Field Artillery Battalion played a vital role in the liberation is less well known. 6 Many of the Japanese American soldiers, whose family members were being held in American internment camps, 7 perceived the liberation as members of one persecuted minority helping another. This article takes the Dachau concentration camp as its starting point to perform a comparative, textual and cultural analysis of two literary texts that use the site as place of reference and departure. Cathy Caruth has argued in her interpretation of Freud’s “parable of the wound and the voice” that trauma is unavailable to direct access and will have to find alternative modes of expression (4), and in Trauma Culture, E. Ann Kaplan _____________ 6

7

This may also be due to the fact that the visual documentation of the liberation was limited to the main camp. Emily Colborn claims that “[a]lways publicity-minded, the US military establishment […] restaged the liberation of Dachau with an all-Caucasian cast of soldiers so that the newsreels would not display any incongruous or embarrassing Japanese-looking faces posing as American heroes” (202). Survivors of the death marches, some of which the all Japanese American 522nd battalion came across and assisted, were not part of the worldwide coverage. A number of expressions are used to describe the ten facilities in which Japanese Americans were detained behind barbed wire and under armed guard during World War II. Even the term ‘concentration camp’ was already widely employed at the time the camps were established. However, the term ‘concentration camp’ primarily evokes Nazi Germany’s atrocities and is semantically linked with death or extermination camps (see Schiffrin 514). Furthermore, the singularity of the Holocaust forbids comparison with any other event in history; I will thus speak of ‘internment camps’ and ‘internment experiences’ when refering to the Japanese American experience.

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calls for more attention to “mediatized trauma” (2). In these ‘other’ codes or narratives, literary mediations are particularly productive as “technologies” of cultural memory (Sturken, Tangled Memories 12, 17). Not only do they function as distancing devices, or agents of order, renewal, and healing for the individual survivor, but they also translate the traumatic encounter into political and cultural systems of signification. The Gate of Heaven (1996), written collaboratively by playwrights/actors Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge, tells the story of lifelong friendship between a Japanese American soldier and the near-dead Jew he rescues from Dachau. Their friendship is depicted as a cross-cultural learning experience, interspersed with the sharing of memories too painful to bear alone. Solly Ganor’s survivor memoir entitled Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem (1995) relates the Nisei (second generation Japanese American) 8 participation in the Dachau liberation. The transnational character of Ganor’s experience is furthermore enhanced by the presence of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, also known as the ‘Japanese Schindler’, who issued thousands of visas to Polish Jews. Nishikawa and Talmadge’s play as well as Ganor’s autobiography can be read as transnational constructions of memory of the Holocaust and the internment experience of Japanese Americans. The texts also serve to counter the dominant U.S.-American narrative of liberation.

From Holocaust Memory to Remembering Japanese American Experiences Memory work not only needs to be undertaken in the context of Holocaust commemoration. Marita Sturken has placed the Holocaust in a provocative context with the Japanese American internment experience: What would it mean for Americans to remember the names Manzanar, Poston, Tule Lake, Topaz, Minidoka, Heart Mountain, Jerome, Gila River, Amache, and Rohwer in the way that they know the names Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald? To begin to memorialize the camps would mean to open up the question of what constitutes American nationalism and identity. To properly memorialize the camps and their survivors means to rethink the myth of America’s actions in World War II that remains so resolutely intact. (“Absent Images” 47)

Although Sturken’s question lacks the proper sensitivity, since a clear distinction needs to be made between the two types of camps mentioned _____________ 8

The American-born children of the Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) are referred to as ‘Nisei,’ or second generation. A ‘Sansei’ belongs to the third American-born generation.

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(the internment camps clearly defy any resemblance with Nazi death or extermination camps), her assessment of American remembering of World War II is accurate.

Fig. 1. Exhibition, Tulelake-Butte Valley Fair Museum. 2002. Photo by the author.

An exhibition at the local museum of Tulelake in northern California, close to one of the ten internment camps, shall serve to illustrate American commemorative politics. In the World War II section of the exhibition two posters placed next to each other display the words “Dachau” and “Tule Lake” (fig. 1). Were the curators trying to compare the two camps through the arrangement of their display and were they – by doing so – equating the two camps? Those who only briefly glance over the bright posters might indeed be left with a wrong impression; different to its appearance the two camps are not compared to each other. The Dachau panel describes the experiences of a local World War II veteran who was among the liberators of the respective concentration camp. However, the fact that Japanese American soldiers of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion freed at least one subsidiary camp of Dachau concentration camp is not mentioned in the exhibition. Although a controversy around the participation of Nisei soldiers in the liberation of concentration camps arose around the fiftieth anniversary of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1991, their participation in the liberation effort is by now proven and well documented. 9 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum _____________ 9

Both Ganor (378) and Menton (267) have documented the liberation of an undetermined sub-camp. According to another source, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion liberated Kaufering IV Hurlach, one of 169 subordinate slave labor camps of Dachau housing about 3,000 prisoners on April 29, 1945. On May 2, 1945, soldiers from the 522nd found several hundred Jewish death march survivors outside Waakirchen, Germany, near the Austrian

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(USHMM) also recognizes the role of Japanese American soldiers in the liberation of the Dachau camp(s) (see Colborn 207). The museum owns at least one photograph that documents the Japanese American presence at Dachau in spring 1945 (fig. 2). The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site also confirms the presence of Japanese American soldiers among the U.S.-American liberators in a special area designated as ‘memorial room’ (Gedenkraum) reserved for individual commemoration. 10 George Oiye, a Japanese American veteran of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, has documented the Nisei participation in the liberation with a camera he ‘liberated’ from a dead German soldier. 11 His photographs are part of the “George Oiye Album” which is held by the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. Yet, similar to the memory of the Holocaust, Japanese American experiences were perceived quite differently by society and popular culture between the 1950s and today. Most Japanese Americans suppressed their memories, and public statements as well as published fictional and artistic renditions of the forced removal and incarceration were rare in the period directly following the war. Robert Pirosh’s Hollywood film, Go For Broke! (1951), represents one of the few mass media treatments of the Japanese American experience during World War II, but it not even comes close to conveying the full story or doing justice to the Japanese American soldiers. In his essay on Nisei soldiers and racial discourses, Takashi Fujitani demonstrates how Japanese Americans and their experiences were in fact instrumentalized in Pirosh’s movie in order to stress the rightfulness of the American narrative concerning race, nationalism, and war (242).

_____________

10 11

border (see “Central Europe Campaign”). Some oral history projects, such as the Hawaii Holocaust Project, have been troubled by the question of whether the men of the 522nd should be called ‘liberators’ because they were not at the Dachau main camp with the American troops from the 42nd and 45th Infantry divisions (see Menton 262, 266). Menton describes the anti-Japanese American atmosphere that preceded the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor leading to accusations against Japanese American veterans who had supposedly exaggerated their wartime record by taking credit for accomplishments that were not their own (268). In turn, many Japanese American veterans felt the need to stress that they were not taking credit for ‘liberating Dachau’ (269). See personal e-mail correspondence with Albert Knoll, Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site Archives, 6 Sept. 2006. See Tara Shioya who writes that one “photo shows Dachau subcamp prisoners giving the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute to Nisei soldiers, assuming they belonged to the Japanese Imperial Army” (4/Z1). George Oiye has made the telling of the liberation story his major purpose in life; he expresses a “tremendous feeling of guilt for mankind” (A Tradition of Honor).

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Fig. 2. Two Japanese-American soldiers with the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion stand in front of the crematorium in the Dachau concentration camp soon after the liberation. May 1945. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (45866).

Already during the war, the government used the segregated units to make propagandist statements of its color-blindness, proving that – in Roosevelt’s words – Americanism was no matter of race or ancestry. 12 In this sense, the experiences of the Nisei during World War II echo those of other minorities in the United States since at least the Civil War. Hoping their military service would move them closer toward acceptance into American society, Japanese Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans had served in the military. Yet, when they returned after World War II, the ethnic minorities’ struggle against discriminatory and exclusionary laws was only beginning. Their accomplishments served as inspiration and justification for civil rights efforts of _____________ 12

Upon activating the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team on February 1, 1943, President Roosevelt said: “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry.”

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their respective communities. Members of the segregated Japanese American units achieved an iconic status within their communities during and after the war. The story of the Japanese American military contribution to World War II is, however, not the story of the whole ethnic community. Forced removal, incarceration and especially resistance add more facets to the history that resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s when the Sansei (third generation Japanese Americans) in the wake of the Yellow Power movement questioned the long silence of their Nisei parents as well as their parents’ compliance with unlawful government policies. In the post-Vietnam War era the debate around righting a grave historical error of World War II, the Japanese American internment, also gained momentum. In 1976 President Gerald Ford rescinded President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 (which had sent Japanese Americans into the camps). In 1980 Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), whose recommendations would eventually serve as the basis for the redress bill. Although their loyalty had already been acknowledged by President Ford, Nisei achievements on the battlefield during World War II are often cited as proving their Americanness.

The Gate of Heaven The play The Gate of Heaven acknowledges, in David Henry Hwang’s words “the fluidity of culture itself” by challenging notions of cultural purity and racial isolationism thereby exploding the very myth of an immutable cultural identity (vii-viii). In this way, the play offers itself for a transnational reading, echoing Shelley Fisher Fishkin who believes the study of global flows or the “diffusion of cultural forms” to be at the center of transnational American Studies (24). Hwang furthermore points out “that our identities as Asian/Pacifics cannot be separated from the other cultures which have also become part of our personal histories, whether these be Jewish, gay, or the natural result of a mixed-race heritage” (viii). Within a complex, multiracial landscape Nishikawa and Talmadge “excavate buried histories, as they describe the little-known interrelations, intersections and historical parallels among Japanese Americans and Jews,” particularly the situation of Japanese Americans in the U.S. and Jews in Nazi Germany (Kondo xii). The Gate of Heaven, as a Washington Post reviewer has pointed out, is not a Holocaust drama but a play about “personal and cultural and family identity and connectedness […] and more specifically about the great, conflicted, wonderful cultural mishmash we know as the American Dream” (McCombs D1).

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The play traces the life-long interracial alliance and friendship between a Japanese American veteran, Kiyoshi ‘Sam’ Yamamoto 13 , and the Holocaust survivor, Leon Ehrlich, whom he saves at the gates of Dachau in 1945. Both characters have ethnic accents (Polish and Hawaiian pidgin) that fade in the course of the play as the men become – at least – superficially more assimilated into American culture. Although both Leon and Sam end up in San Francisco after the war – Leon as an Army psychiatrist and Sam as an accountant – their lives and experiences vary to a great extent. While many interethnic narratives are constructed as tales of conflict, The Gate of Heaven takes another approach. Despite their different family and cultural backgrounds, the two protagonists become and stay close friends until Leon’s death in 1996 which also marks the ending of the play. Brian Nelson, who published the play in an anthology of Asian American drama, points out that it “recognizes the importance of ritual to a culture” and – as a play – becomes itself a form of ritual: “the authors offer a new ceremony to honor both the similarities and differences between Jewish and Japanese” (159). For example, Sam instructs Leon in the Japanese art of sumo wrestling. During a mock fight Leon realizes: “What are you doing, Samuel, is binding me to your community. Cultures create rituals in order to keep the community together […]” (175). The two playwrights, who set out to celebrate their family histories, 14 performed their own play on a two-year tour across the United States marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Dachau concentration camp liberation and commemorating the heroism of Japanese American soldiers in World War II. Tracing the U.S. tour of the play in her essay, Emily Colborn shows how different communities with their particular expectations and commemorative practices (from Japanese American 442nd veterans in Hawaii to the audience at the USHMM in Washington, D.C.) transformed the meaning of the play (201). As a realistic play The Gate of Heaven is not based on the naturalistic ‘camp play’ theme that only emphasizes the historical experience of the Japanese American internment between World War II and 1965 (see Kondo x). Mostly following the conventions of realism, only few extraverbal elements are used in the play; exceptions are the use of Japanese traditional music (shakuhachi and taiko drums) and Jewish klezmer music and the introduction of kuroko figures from traditional Japanese theater. _____________ 13 14

It is worthwhile to note that the Japanese American character in The Gate of Heaven bears the name Sam (Samuel), a prophet as well as leader of ancient Israel, a as his ‘Americanized’ first name. Lane Nishikawa is a third-generation Japanese American and Victor Talmadge lost many relatives in the Holocaust.

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Nelson believes that by using these devices “productions of The Gate of Heaven can inspire a different way of recognizing our disparate pasts” (160). Both characters frequently provide memories from their past in order to explain present behavior. In other words, the play centers on the telling and sharing of personal horror stories, emphasizing how painful it is to bear certain memories alone. For example at the beginning of the play, Leon longs to share his memories as well as to (re)construct a collective memory of his liberation. After tracking down his rescuer he begs Sam: “Your memory. […] I want your memory, Samuel” (166). A purely chronological episodic structure and a projection screen, displaying various images or pieces of text, help the audience to orient itself as Nishikawa and Talmadge take their audience through fifty years of U.S. history. For example, the play’s opening stage directions read: It is April 29, 1945. A single slide fades up to reveal a Japanese-American soldier carrying a survivor of Dachau. We are at Dachau, Germany. Sound fades in with large cannon fire in the background. It slowly blends into taiko drums. Lights fade on SAM the soldier and LEON the prisoner in the same position as in the photo. The slide fades out. (161)

This documentary-style opening with a supposedly archival-looking photograph, which actually shows the two actors, lends a historic quality and supposedly proven accuracy to the play from the very beginning. Colborn asserts that “[w]hile itself a fabrication, the Gate of Heaven photograph was based on a genuine archival photograph from a Nisei veteran’s personal album” (208). Although based on an individual’s memento, it remains a fabrication and, as such, represents a construction of memory. Most key events in the play (the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Vietnam War, and the bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 1976) happen without a direct connection to the friendship between the protagonists. Events that involve other people are thus never fully dramatized in this two-character play, they merely serve as backdrop. The two-act structure with seven scenes in each act is rather conventional. Act 1 opens with the traumatic meeting of Leon and Sam at Dachau and ends with the death of Sam’s son in Vietnam in 1973, with Leon reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish. Act 2 covers the time from 1974 until Leon’s death in 1996 including the bicentennial celebration and the appearance of both men in the redress hearings. There is certainly a danger to view the two protagonists solely as noble victims; yet the play touches upon deeper conflicts and reverberates with universal resonance: the longing for a sense of home and family, the need for acceptance of one’s difference and the wish to lead a meaningful life. Leon wants to counter his loss and aloneness in the world by recreating a

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sense of family for himself; Sam is wondering whether his life means anything – he served for his country while his family was interned, but he was forced to give up his Army career due to racial prejudice. Sam also suffers under continuing job discrimination being passed over again and again for promotion. Yet, as these stories are merely related, never experienced or shown by the two characters, the issues of racial prejudice often remain one-dimensional. During the bicentennial celebration we find Sam and Leon bickering about what constitutes authentic American food. As the play mostly features Sam and Leon pitted against the world, this situation of personal conflict seems inevitable to move the play forward. Leon does not want to eat at the restaurant Sam prefers because he deems it to be “too […] American” (186) and suggests sushi instead. Sam is insulted by Leon’s unwitting racist assumption that Sam might prefer sushi to steak (in fact, he longs for prime rib, leg of lamb, or fried chicken). To Sam the bicentennial is “an American celebration,” while Leon points to the melting-pot ideal of America being “made up of different exotic kinds of people” (187). The incident triggers a discussion on cultural difference and rituals of food preparation and eventually leads to a serious debate around questions of identity, belonging, as well as each man’s ethnic status in the United States. The scene – that could possibly be considered the psychological climax of the play – culminates in a quarrel, during which Leon accuses Sam of being a racist by looking for a “scapegoat,” and Sam responds that this is not about what happened to Leon in the war. Rejecting Sam’s charge, Leon replies: “I don’t know what it’s like to be different? My family, my whole world was destroyed because I’m different!” (190). “[G]iven the remarkable sensitivity each [character] has had for the other to this point, the fight seems contrived,” as one critic pointed out (Triplett B2). Yet this is also the only scene in which the protagonists openly display their own prejudices and “the deforming effects – such as rage – that a lifetime exposure to racism or, say, genocide, can produce” (B2). Overall, the play remains on the level of a didactic documentary, rather than offering an artistic or aesthetic rendition based on the lives of the two authors’ fathers and relatives. Many passages of the play are seemingly intended to ‘educate’ the audience about Japanese American internment experiences, the Japanese American participation in the liberation of a concentration camp, or the Japanese American movement for redress. For example, the character of Sam declares: “Take Dachau. Nobody wanted to believe that we had helped to liberate a concentration camp in Germany while our families were being held in camps back home” (170). In Act 2, scene 3, Leon takes on the role of moral authority when he gives his testimony in front of the Redress Committee (192-93). He also reads

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an excerpt, which he introduces as being written by a young boy in the camps during the war. The text could have been one that originated in a Nazi concentration camp, yet the reference to a Japanese American name and the camp’s name “Manzanar, California” at the very end of the letter reveals its true origin (193). This scene conveys the similarities between the two protagonists’ wartime experiences.

Fig. 3 Chiune Sugihara Memorial, Hero of the Holocaust. 2002. Photo by the author.

A reference to the Japanese consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, is inserted into the play by means of a long-lost cousin of Leon’s. 15 The insertion of this episode into the play seems more intentional than believable. Sugihara who gave out exit visas to Polish war refugees to travel from Lithuania to Japan supposedly also gave one to Leon’s cousin Sarah (202). The incident, however, gives Leon the opportunity to call it “beautiful […] to think that both Sarah and I were saved by Japanese.” He then calls Sam his own “Sugihara” (204). The fact that Sugihara serves as an icon of transnational commemorative practice also becomes manifest in several sites of memory dedicated to him around the globe: the Chiune Sugihara Memorial in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles (fig. 3); the Sugihara Memorial in Yaotsu, Japan; the Sugihara house-museum and memorial in Kaunas, Lithuania; the Sugihara Memorial Garden in Newton, MA; and the marker in the Avenue and Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. In the very last scene of The Gate of Heaven, set in a hospital in 1996, Leon shares the memory of the death of his father with Sam (207). Sam promises to share this story with his children and grandchildren; he gives _____________ 15

The Sugihara episode is also fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000).

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his Silver Star to Leon and gently lifts up Leon from the chair, thus mirroring the liberation image at the beginning of the play. The play ends with a color slide showing a moment back in 1945 with Leon reaching out to Sam. The image resembles Nathan Rapoport’s bronze memorial of an American soldier carrying a Holocaust victim; the monument stands in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, within sight of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty (fig. 4) (see Colborn 207). Yet, Nishikawa and Talmadge remind us that not every American liberator had the Caucasian features represented in the New Jersey Liberation monument. The playwrights thus construct a counternarrative to the official national one. In the play, Sam begins to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish (208), which Leon had recited earlier for Sam’s son, who was killed in Vietnam. By sharing their experiences they are constructing what may be termed ‘transnational memories.’

Fig. 4. Nathan Rapoport. Liberation. 1987. Photo wallyg, 2008 .

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Light One Candle Since the 1970s critics, such as James Olney, Philippe Lejeune, and Paul John Eakin have stressed the connections between autobiography and fiction, de-emphasized the issue of an autobiography’s truthfulness, and thus “firmly incorporated first-person narrative into the domain of literature” (Popkin 51). 16 Despite the critical distance or reluctance of many historians towards autobiographies, the fact that first-person testimonies have come to play a major role in constructing Holocaust memory should not be overlooked. Not only in the context of Elie Wiesel’s Night have survivor’s memoirs been sometimes accorded a sacred status. David Patterson has even conferred a sacred function to the reading of such works in his study (12). However, historian Walter Laqueur, himself an author of a Holocaust memoir with Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go (1992), cautions his readers that the value of autobiographies “as a source of historical insight is very limited because they shed more light on the state of mind of the author when he wrote his recollections than on the events when they actually occurred” (4). Solly Ganor’s “survivor’s tale” Light One Candle is very much a product of the cultural climate of the early 1990s. Ganor, who lives both in California and Israel, started writing his first-person narrative after meeting curator and author Eric Saul in 1992. Saul had accompanied a group of Japanese American veterans to Israel. In the prologue to Light One Candle Ganor calls the meeting with Saul and the Japanese American veterans his “second liberation” (xix). He contends that “[t]he irony is not lost on me that even as [Japanese Americans] were fighting and dying for the United States, many of their families were incarcerated in American detention camps” (xii). Like Nishikawa and Talmadge he thus confirms a certain parallelism of the experiences. Among the veterans Ganor meets in 1992 he identifies Clarence Matsumura (fig. 5) 17 as his liberator. Several reunions of the two men follow this first encounter. Admitting that he has learned more about his rescuers at each meeting with Matsumura, Ganor includes Japanese American experiences and memories in his narrative; it is almost as if their experiences become part of his own memories, thus acquiring a collective quality. Jeremy D. Popkin in his article on firstperson narratives and the memory of the Holocaust defines autobiogra_____________ 16 17

See Olney, Memory, and Metaphors; Eakin, Fictions, Making Selves, and Touching the World; Lejeune. For an overview on autobiographical theory also see Marcus. Among the few photographs the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) owns that show Japanese American soldiers, is one of Clarence Matsumura.. Matsumura’s name is spelled with an ‘a’ instead of the first ‘u’ as in Ganor’s memoir.

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phies as “individual stories, not collective enterprises” (50). Light One Candle, however, seems to display the quality of a collective enterprise.

Fig. 5. Clarence Matsamura, a Japanese-American soldier in the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion in Germany, poses next to a 522 EMS club sign. Matsamura was the soldier who liberated Jewish survivor Solly Ganor from a death march in Waakirchen. May 1945. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (45865).

Some passages in Light One Candle do not even detail Ganor’s experiences but that of his Japanese American liberator Matsumura and his people. It seems that only through sharing painful memories they are actually able to resurface for victim as well as rescuer. Ganor writes: “I met Clarence Matsumura on May 2, 1945. Our paths didn’t cross again for thirty-six years. During those years I did not speak of my wartime experience with others. […] I found out later that many of our rescuers could not speak of what they saw either” (xii-xiii). At this point an allegedly reprinted version of Matsumura’s testimony about his experiences in late April and early May 1945 is inserted into Ganor’s narrative. Matsumura, Ganor informs us, has told this story to Eric Saul who worked both for the National Japanese American Historical Society of San Francisco and the San Francisco Oral

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History Project in the 1980s. Although passages detailing Japanese American experiences are italicized, the Jewish and Japanese American memories merge in Ganor’s narrative. For example, a description of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, introduces Ganor’s memories of the harsh winter of 1941 which he spent a world apart in the Kaunas ghetto (190-91). The collective quality of Japanese American/Jewish memories certainly informs Ganor’s narrative. It should, however, be noted that Light One Candle is still primarily a first-person narrative that makes use of Japanese American experiences in order to frame and possibly augment Ganor’s personal story. Light One Candle was first published in the United States in 1995 by Kodansha. 18 Similar to The Gate of Heaven which seemed to emanate a different meaning at the different venues of its U.S. tour, several ways of publication and circulation of Ganor’s book ensured a transmission of his collected memories across national borders, reaching diverse audiences. The Dachauer Hefte, a German-language journal that focuses on documenting the history of Nazi concentration camps and that caters to a mostly academic audience, published a short account of Ganor’s liberation in 1995 (“Todesmarsch”). A German translation of Ganor’s book was subsequently published in a Fischer paperback edition in 1997 (Das andere Leben). Its new subtitle “Kindheit im Holocaust” (Childhood during the Holocaust) primarily promotes the book as a coming-of-age narrative in times of the Holocaust. In the United States, Japanese American poet and activist Lawson Fusao Inada included an excerpt of Ganor’s “Prologue” in his anthology on Japanese American internment experiences: Only What We Could Carry (2000) thus introducing the story to a wider (Asian) American, and high school/college audience. 19 Structurally, Ganor follows the common features of Holocaust memoirs: his life was directly and personally affected by the Nazi persecution of the Jews in his hometown of Kaunas; he is forced to flee his prewar home, first interned in the Kaunas ghetto and then sent to the concentra_____________ 18

19

In 2004, possibly still in the wake of the Wilkomirski affair, the integrity of Ganor’s book came under attack. For analyses of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s inauthentic childhood memoir Fragments (1996) see, for example, Hasian Jr.; Maechler; Suleiman. In Ganor’s case K. K. Brattman, who identifies himself as managing editor of the Holocaust Survivors’ Network web site (http://www.isurvived.org/), published a long text claiming that Ganor has never been to the concentration camps of either Stutthof or Dachau, and that he is a Holocaust impostor who wrote his book in an attempt at self-aggrandizement. The factual allegations were refuted and proven to be false by Barbara Distel, the director of the KZGedenkstätte Dachau (http://www.rongreene.com/solly.html). The book project was funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a program established under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that should educate the public about internment, sponsor research activities and award national fellowships.

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tion camps of Stutthof and later Dachau; he loses his mother and brother during the Holocaust (see Popkin 54). Similar to the arrangement of Nishikawa and Talmadge’s play, Ganor opens and closes his memoir with an account of his liberation from the Dachau concentration camp. Yet while The Gate of Heaven fictionalizes the fifty years following this experience and offers insights into the postwar lives of its protagonists, Ganor – in what he himself calls a “survivor’s tale” – merely covers the seventeen years from his birth in 1928 until his liberation in spring 1945. Only one chapter offers a limited glimpse into Ganor’s future. “The War of Independence,” the first chapter in Light One Candle details Ganor’s participation in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In fact, many authors of Holocaust memoirs leave their post-Holocaust lives as a blank. By cutting their experiences after the Holocaust out of the picture, the classical survivor’s narrative – like Light One Candle – forgoes the possibility to become a ‘real’ autobiography. An autobiography that links postwar events to those during the Holocaust would help readers understand how survivors experienced what happened to them as Popkin argues (59). While in The Gate of Heaven Chiune Sugihara is mentioned in passing as having saved a cousin of the character Leon, Ganor makes Sugihara part of his narrative. Referred to as ‘Sempo’ (“a friendly nickname by which he was known in Lithuania” [xii]), the Japanese consul is depicted as a friend of Ganor’s family, with whom Solly even shares his love for collecting stamps (39, 41). Ganor ‘decorates’ him with metaphors borrowed from his memoir’s title, calling Sugihara “a single light in a sea of darkness” (xii). Unfortunately Ganor’s family is not saved by one of Sugihara’s transit visas because the family had delayed their departure on account of their father’s business (44). Ganor’s liberation is then also related in terms of Sugihara’s transnational iconicity: Sugihara serves as an icon of transnational and commemorative practice (see fig. 3) – the different ethnic and national identities of consul and liberator only playing a minor role: “How strange and wonderful it was to recognize Sugihara’s ethnic features again five years after I last laid eyes on him, and at the very moment of my liberation. His eyes, and even something of his smile were in the kind face of the G.I. who brought me back from the brink of death” (xii). In fact, the details of Ganor’s liberation somewhat differ in the “Prologue” and in the last chapter of his narrative. While almost dead in the “Prologue,” Ganor displays a strong will to survive in the chapter “Liberation.” In the “Prologue” Ganor remembers to have been lifted from a snow bank where German SS guards had left him for dead (xii). In the last chapter Ganor describes how he – after being abandoned by the SS guards – is fixing himself a soup from potato peelings and horse meat

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when a jeep approaches. A soldier with “oriental features” touches him on the shoulder and provides him with a chocolate bar (346). Matsumura’s earlier mentioned transcribed account adds yet another facet to the experience. He relates the liberation of prisoners from an underground aircraft factory (probably Kaufering IV), his arrival at the Dachau main camp, their pursuit of the SS guards and their rescue of many prisoners left almost dead at the roadsides (xiii-xv). Altogether, as contradictory as it may seem, this shows how by remembering we also forget. By presenting a collective version of his liberation that has been nourished by several sources over the years, Ganor presents a transnational construction of memory that also counters the dominant U.S. narrative of liberation. In other words, as far as Ganor is concerned a certain negligence as to the exact location and date, and a diverging description of what he and his rescuer were doing, does not run counter to his intended message to remember victims and liberators alike 20 – in itself a truly transnational call to commemorate.

Conclusion Widely divergent in their literary forms both Nishikawa and Talmadge’s play The Gate of Heaven as well as Ganor’s first-person narrative Light One Candle confront us with a transnational construction of collective memory by combining the experiences of the Holocaust with the internment experiences of Japanese Americans. Both texts also serve to counter the dominant U.S.-American narrative of liberation by introducing the nonwhite faces of Japanese American liberators in their texts. The image that frames both texts is that of one man carrying the other, which is foreshadowing the sharing of the protagonists’ experiences and memories in the course of the play and the narrative respectively. At the beginning and end of The Gate of Heaven the Japanese American soldier carries the Holocaust survivor. Ganor is also lifted up by his rescuer Clarence Matsumura and recollects this experience in the prologue and last chapter of Light One Candle. Nishikawa, Talmadge, and Ganor – with this particular image – construct their own memorials that purposefully do not resemble Nathan Rapoport’s New Jersey Liberation monument. The playwrights as well as the autobiographer refer to Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara in their texts. Although neither the protagonists’ lives in _____________ 20

Ganor dedicates his narrative to “those loved ones who perished at the hands of the Nazis, but equally […] Clarence and all the brave men of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion […] as well as […] Chiune Sugihara” (xxii).

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The Gate of Heaven nor Solly Ganor is directly affected by this man’s noble deeds, both texts use his (absent) presence to combine the memory and experiences of Holocaust survivors and Japanese Americans. The fact that Sugihara was Japanese, and not Japanese American, is glossed over in both texts by a generalizing reference to his oriental features. In both works Sugihara serves as an icon of transnational commemorative practice. While the international appeal of Ganor’s narrative is proven by its various contexts of transmission to an American as well as Japanese American and German audience, the two-year tour of The Gate of Heaven across the United States equally demonstrates its universal appeal. Japanese American World War II veterans or visitors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum brought their particular expectations to the respective venues and transformed the meaning of the play in each case, possibly adapting what they saw to their own commemorative practices. The question that Novick asks in The Holocaust in American Life still needs to be answered: Could the two presented texts offer versions of Holocaust memory which may enter into “an arena of political contestation in which competing narratives […] are disputed and negotiated in the interest of redefining the collective past” (279)? And, are the works presenting transnational discourses of memory? The answer, it seems, can only be an evasive one. Both texts could have answered these calls, as the stories certainly have the potential for contestation and transnationalization due to their general setup. Yet, both texts opt for a generally inclusive approach (conflicts if they occur are quickly resolved) and present their audiences with a consensual and reconciliatory way of writing memory across national borders.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999. —. “Individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis – Formen, Funktionen und Medien.” Das Gedächtnis der Kunst: Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart. Ed. Kurt Wettengl. Frankfurt/M.: Cantz, 2000. 21-27. Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, 1993. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. “Central Europe Campaign (522nd Field Artillery Battalion).” Go For Broke National Education Center. 2009. 16 June 2009 <www.goforbroke.org/history/history_historical_campaigns_central.asp>.

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Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2000. Colborn, Emily. “Japanese Americans at Dachau: Intercultural Exchange in the US Tour of The Gate of Heaven.” Theatre Research International 27.2 (2002): 201-12. Cole, Tim. Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler – How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold. New York: Routledge, 1999. Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962. New York: New York UP, 2009. Distel, Barbara. “Öffentliches Sterben: Vom Umgang der Öffentlichkeit mit den Todesmärschen.” Dachauer Hefte: Studien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager 20.20 (2004): 39-46. Doss, Erika. “War, Memory, and the Public Mediation of Affect: The National World War II Memorial and American Imperialism.” Memory Studies 1.2 (2008): 227-50. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. —. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. —. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004.” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17-57. Flanzbaum, Hilene. The Americanization of the Holocaust. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Fujitani, Takashi. “Go for Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses.” Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Ed. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. 239-66. Ganor, Solly. Das andere Leben: Kindheit im Holocaust. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1997. —. “Der Todesmarsch.” Dachauer Hefte: Studien und Dokumente zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager 11 (1995). —. “Light One Candle.” Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Ed. Lawson Fusao Inada. Berkeley: Heyday, 2000. 377-87. —. Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem. New York: Kodansha International, 1995. Go for Broke! Dir. Robert Pirosh. MGM, 1951. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper, 1980. Hasian Jr., Marouf. “Authenticity, Public Memories, and the Problematics of PostHolocaust Remembrances: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Wilkomirski Affair.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91.3 (2005): 231-63. Hoskins, Andrew. “Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age.” Media, Culture & Society 25.1 (2003): 7-22. Huyssen, Andreas. “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts.” New German Critique 88 (2003): 147-64. —. “Monumental Seduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan V. Crewe and Leo Spitzer. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1999. 191-207. —. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.

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Hwang, David Henry. “Foreword: The Myth of Immutable Cultural Identity.” Asian American Drama: 9 Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape. Ed. Brian Nelson. New York: Applause, 1997. vii-viii. Inada, Lawson Fusao, ed. Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Berkeley: Heyday, 2000. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. Kondo, Dorinne. Asian American Drama: 9 Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape. Ed. Brian Nelson. New York: Applause, 1997. ix-xiv. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Laqueur, Walter. Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go: A Memoir of the Journeying Years. New York: Scribner’s, 1992. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Theory and History of Literature 52. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust. Edition zweite Moderne. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. —. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2005. Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Maechler, Stefan. “Wilkomirski the Victim.” History & Memory 13.2 (2001): 59. Marcus, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. Manchester, NY: Manchester UP, 1994. McCombs, Phil. “A Liberating Friendship: Two Actors’ Links to an Immigrant Past.” Washington Post 24 Oct. 1996: D1. Menton, Linda K. “Research Report: Nisei Soldiers at Dachau, Spring 1945.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8.2 (1994): 258-74. Möckel-Rieke, Hannah. “Media and Cultural Memory.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 43.1 (1998): 5-17. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. 1987. Ed. William Knowlton Zinsser. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 183-200. Nelson, Brian. “Editor’s Notes: The Gate of Heaven.” Asian American Drama: 9 Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape. Ed. Brian Nelson. New York: Applause, 1997. 15960. Nishikawa, Lane, and Victor Talmadge. “The Gate of Heaven.” Asian American Drama: 9 Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape. Ed. Brian Nelson. New York: Applause, 1997. 161-208. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7-25. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Olney, James. Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. —. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Patterson, David. Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir. Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1998. Popkin, Jeremy D. “Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs.” History & Memory 15.1 (2003): 49-84.

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Rosenfeld, Alvin H. The Americanization of the Holocaust. David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs 5. Ann Arbor: Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, U of Michigan, 1995. Salvo, Michael J. “Trauma, Narration, Technology: User-Ordered Representation and the Holocaust.” Computers and Composition 16.2 (1999): 283-301. Schiffrin, Deborah. “Language and Public Memorial: ‘America’s Concentration Camps.’” Discourse & Society 12.4 (2001): 505-34. Shioya, Tara. “The Conflict Behind the Battle Lines: The Japanese Americans Who Fought in World War II Were Engaged in Another, Private Battle, Against Prejudice and Misunderstandings.” San Francisco Chronicle 24 Sept. 1995: 4/Z1. Sturken, Marita. “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment.” Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Ed. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. 33-49. —. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs: Wilkomirski/Wiesel.” Poetics Today 21.3 (2000): 543. A Tradition of Honor. Dir. Craig Yahata. Prod. Craig Yahata and David Yoneshige. Videocassette. Go For Broke Educational Foundation, 2003. Triplett, William. “Down-to-Earth ‘Heaven.’” Washington Post 25 Oct. 1996: B2. Weinberg, Jeshajahu, and Rina Elieli. The Holocaust Museum in Washington. New York: Rizzoli, 1995. Wiesel, Elie. Night. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. New York: Schocken, 1996. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993.

Remembering the ‘Forgotten War’ and Containing the ‘Remembered War:’ Insistent Nationalism and the Transnational Memory of the Korean War KRISTIN HASS

Despite the vastly different impacts of the Korean War in the United States and in South Korea, the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul and the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. have remarkably similar impulses. This does not mean that the war is remembered across national boundaries as a discreet, singular event. The war, in fact, gets remembered as two quite distinct wars in the memorials. What is shared is the impulse to remember the war of the 1950s as an act of national reconstruction in the 1990s. Why? Celebratory remembrance of a Cold War-war in the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, might have made sense as a way to mark a more final kind of victory for both the United States and South Korea. But this reasonable, obvious framework for understanding the war is absent from the memorials. The Korean Wars remembered are remembered as national wars that define the U.S. and South Korea in distinctly domestic, not-international terms. Both memorials disappear their allies in the war and the global context of the war. They also both, despite the facts of the war, tell the story – the fiction – of a singular national triumph. Why?

Insistent Nationalism It would be tempting to begin to try to understand these memorials, completed in 1994 and 1995, by thinking about the story of the end of the Cold War. But because the Cold War is so insistently not what these memorials work to remember, it is more useful to begin with a broader question about the impulse to remember in the early 1990s. These memorials are products of and evidence of a global memory boom. In the last thirty years myriad memorials, museums, historic sites, memoirs, and the like have been produced across the globe. This memory boom has been repeatedly described by scholars but has not yet been fully explained. It is

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also not the first transnational memory boom. The current memory boom is generally dated from the late 1970s into the present. A previous memory boom is dated from the 1890s into the 1920s. Understanding these memory booms seems crucial for understanding transnational memory – for doing the kind of work that comparing a memorial in Seoul to a memorial in Washington D.C. requires. And while coming to a full understanding of these memory booms is beyond the scope of this essay, there are some broad questions about these turns to memory that are worth raising here. The first memory boom seems to have taken place mostly in the U.S. and in Europe. In the U.S. the turn to memory in this earlier period tends to be understood as a response to the Civil War (see Kammen, O’Leary, Winter, Savage). Historians have linked the interest in memory in Europe to the opening up of mass suffrage and to the problem of the memory of World War I (see Winter, Remembering War). Yet, maybe thinking about them together would be useful; it seems unlikely that the fact that they happened at the same time is merely coincidental. Why was there a need for memory in the 1890s? The same question needs to be asked about the current memory boom. Why did memory become important again in the 1970s? The short answer to this question is often – the Holocaust. This important answer is a start, is provisional, and is not entirely right. 1 Certainly, remembering the Holocaust has been a staple of this memory boom but there has been much else to remember. In fact, so many objects of memory have been produced in this period that it is hard to usefully map the terrain of the turn to memory. The question of the kind of cultural work the products of this boom – Roots, The Holocaust, the memorials, the museums, the memoirs, the sites, etc. – have been doing and the question of what they share across national lines still require exploration. To begin to answer any of these questions we need to turn to the category of the nation. ‘Nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are loaded and complicated ideas, and in recent years there has been a great deal of interest among scholars in thinking beyond the national to the transnational, postnational, multinational, and global. This is compelling and vital work – it reflects shifting consolidation of capital and new state formations. The calls from Arjun Appadurai and others to “think beyond the nation” usefully reflect these shifts but have also overstated the collapse of the category of the nation (Appadurai 158). When Donald Pease writes that “[o]nce believed crucial _____________ 1

Scholars that focus on Holocaust memory frequently cite the 1978 PBS television miniseries The Holocaust as a key starting point of the memory boom but they have largely neglected to mention the importance of the mini-series Roots which was made one year earlier by the same director.

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for membership in the world system, the nation-state has been recast as a tolerated anachronism in a global economy requiring a borderless world for its effective operation,” he seems to understand nations – politically and ideologically – as far less powerful social forces than they continue to be (2). 2 Seen from a broad perspective of interest in global systems this position makes sense but the view from inside nations and aspiring nations is very different. The nation as a category around which millions of people continue to imagine, organize, and sacrifice their lives is still very much alive and is essential for understanding the transnational and the global now. Partha Chatterjee has argued that to understand the transformations Appadurai and Pease want to take up we need to “look within the nation rather than beyond it” (Chatterjee 57). In fact, the idea of the nation – on the ground, if you will – seems to be gaining rather than losing significance in the U.S. and around the world at the start of the twenty-first century. As sociologist David Boswell observes: “The nation-state is said to have passed its day but nationalism […] seems particularly vociferous. It is one of the great paradoxes of current affairs” (11). For this reason, both nations and nationalism, as part of the project of understanding the global, require continued exploration. (They are not dead yet.) Holding onto nations as vital objects of study does not require, however, understanding nations outside of a global context. Many scholars have expressed both the desire to avoid “disturbing disavowals of the global reach of U.S. media and military might” and the desire to move thinking about the United States, especially in an American Studies context, beyond the ‘insular,’ ‘parochial’ limitations of the national frame (Curiel et al. 2). 3 In the case of these war memorials, for instance, the global context of the turn to memory is particularly important. Writing about the turn to memory in Britain, cultural geographer Kevin Robins argues that “this prevailing concern with the comforts and continuities of historical tradition and identity reflects an insular and narcissistic response to the breakdown of Britain” (16). He, and others tracking the flourishing heritage industry in Britain, link the rise of ‘insular’ expressions of nationalism to threats to the real and imagined status of Britain in the world (see Lowenthal; Wright). 4 Obviously, the details of the British and American and South Korean situations are quite different, but Robins’ observation is _____________ 2 3 4

It is worth noting that in other contexts, Pease does hold on to a healthy respect for both the utility of and the longing for the national. For these scholars the term postnational connotes a will to move the field in more internationalist and comparative directions. To describe this inward turn Robins also uses the biting phrase, “a retreat into cultural autism” (16).

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salient for thinking about the renewed interest in the past. This interest in the past is linked to anxiety about the status of the nation in the present. Interest in the past is linked to thinking about the nation because invented, and willfully misremembered pasts are essential to the construction and maintenance of nations. This is, perhaps, the most pervasive theme in scholarly thinking about nations and nationalism. 5 Nineteenthand twentieth-century theorists of nations return again and again to the creation of shared pasts. These shared pasts, or memories, are not merely expressions of nationalism – they are constitutive of it. Nations and memories, in fact, exist in a mutual dependence that French historian Pierre Nora and historian of social memory Jeffery Olick have described as the “memory-nation nexus” (Olick 3). In this formulation nation and memory are inextricably bound; memories constitute nations. Or, as Olick writes, memory is “the handmaiden of nationalist zeal” (1). He was not writing about national memories of the Korean War when he wrote this, but he could have been. All of this begs a question about whether the current turn to memory is a response to anxiety about the nation that is shared across national boundaries? A brief look at the Korean War memorials certainly begins to suggest this.

The War In the United States the war that was waged from June of 1950 through July of 1953 on the Korean peninsula has come to be called ‘the forgotten war.’ Forgotten, as it is used here, means not remembered in a domestic context – ‘the war to which people in the U.S. have paid little attention since it ended.’ This is different from forgotten meaning ‘not remembered in terms of why it was fought and what happened in the world as a result.’ Both kinds of forgetting are relevant in the United States, but only the former has been a cause of concern. The term ‘forgotten war’ was everywhere in the discussions about building a Korean War memorial on the National Mall. In these discussions, it was always used with the unselfconscious implication that the sacrifice of U.S. soldiers was what had been forgotten and thus should be remembered. There was a remarkable silence on the question of why the war was waged. Remembering ‘the forgotten war,’ in fact, involved a fairly vigorous forgetting of the details of the war itself. (The conversations in Congress, in the newspapers, in the design _____________ 5

As Goeff Eley and Ronald Suny write, “most fundamentally of all, we may mention the attempt to manufacture and manipulate a particular view of the past, invariably as a myth of origins which is meant to establish and legitimate the claim to cultural autonomy” (8).

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meetings turned instead on the problem of how the sacrificing soldier should be remembered.) For this reason, it is important to begin these explorations of the Korean War memorials with a few of details about the war and a sense of what the war meant in the world. South Koreans often call the war ‘the 6/25 war’ because it started on the 25th of June. This makes sense in the context of Korean history; it marks the war as another event in a long series of struggles against colonial rule. The origins of the 6/25 War lie in the problem posed by former Japanese colonies in the post-World War II period. Korea had been, essentially, under Japanese rule since the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had troops and interests in Korea. Following the surrender Korea was hastily split in two at the 38th parallel. The United States stayed in the south and the Soviet Union stayed in the north. The country was to be run by a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. commission for four years at the end of which Korea was to reunify and govern itself independently. Not surprisingly this plan was not popular with Koreans. There was political agitation in the North and in the South. Eventually the U.S. and the Soviets backed competing reunification efforts. Both countries came to see the 38th parallel as a significant front in the Cold War and in 1950 an odd sort of civil war broke out when the Soviet-supported North Korean Army crossed the 38th parallel into the South. President Truman responded with feverish anti-communism. In a June 27th statement of the U.S. position he claimed that “the attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war” (Truman). 6 It is worth noticing that he conflates ‘Korea’ and ‘South Korea’ and that the enemy is Communism figured as an active agent rather than a political philosophy. Communism is the agent of armed invasion, not North Korea or the Soviet Union. Truman, significantly, did not respond by asking the U.S. Congress for a declaration of war; instead he turned to the United Nations. 7 He continued: “I know that all members of the United Nations will consider carefully the consequences of this latest aggression in Korea in defiance of the Charter of the United Nations. A return to the rule of force in international affairs would have farreaching effects. The United States will continue to uphold the rule of law” (Truman). Truman framed the war as a response to communist aggression and as a UN supported fight for the rule of law rather than the rule of force – a Cold War-war. This framing neglects the colonial origins _____________ 6 7

Harry S. Truman, statement, 27 June 1950, George M. Elsey Papers, Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Independence. The precedent of going to war without Congress has turned out to be a dangerous one.

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of the conflict and therefore oversimplifies the status of South Korea as an independent nation seeking freedom from the rule of force. United Nations Security Council Resolution 82 called for the North to withdraw and supported a UN effort to defend the South. U.S. and South Korean troops did most of the fighting and dying, but they were joined by soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, France, the Philippines, Turkey, the Netherlands, Thailand, Ethiopia, Greece, Colombia, Belgium, South Africa, and Luxembourg. When the U.S. and the South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into the North in October of 1950, the Chinese entered the war to support the North Koreans and their interests in maintaining communism in Korea. The war lasted three years. 273,127 South Korean soldiers were killed. An estimated 520,000 North Korean soldiers were killed. Roughly three million Korean civilians were killed. 54,246 American soldiers were killed. 8 114,000 Chinese soldiers were killed. And the war ended in a stalemate that has lasted fifty-five years. A demilitarized zone was established at the 38th parallel. It is 2.5 miles wide and 155 miles long. It has been uninhabited by humans for so long that it has come to hold interest for wildlife biologists. (Ruddy Kingfishers, Watercocks, and von Shrenck’s Bitterns – species of birds struggling in other parts of Korea – are thriving in the DMZ) (Ruffin). But it is by no means abandoned – the length of the DMZ is vigilantly policed on both sides. This keeps the war very much alive on the Korean peninsula and gives the term ‘the forgotten war’ an awkward resonance. It was the first hot front in the Cold War. It was the first war in which the superpowers used the bodies and territories of others to wage their war against one another. And given that the tensions in Korea have heightened rather than abated in the post-Cold War era, ‘the war that stays alive’ might be a more accurate term for describing the war in Korean from 1950 to 1953. But this is not what gets remembered at either Korean War memorial.

In Seoul In Seoul the nothing-if-not-imposing War Memorial of Korea was opened in 1994. It is a vast complex on the grounds of the former Army Headquarters and is one of very few memorials in South Korea (Grinker 3031). 9 The memorial was initially envisioned in 1989 by then-president Roh _____________ 8 9

This is the number most commonly cited for U.S. deaths in the Korean War but this includes all Korean War era military deaths – 36,576 were killed in Korea and 17,670 were killed in other U.S. military contexts in this period. Grinker notes an absence of memorials in South Korea.

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Tae Woo as a site dedicated entirely to the memory of the Korean War. But popular reaction against such a memorial required him to build a memorial to the long history of all wars in Korea. Despite the resulting shift in name and mission, it is hard to read the memorial as anything but a 6/25 War memorial (Grinker 29). It consists of commanding ceremonial spaces, a museum, and an enormous outdoor display. The outdoor display includes acres of military equipment, a reproduction of a memorial stele to King Kwanggaet’o the Great, and a figural sculpture – the Statue of Brothers. (King Kwanggaet’o the Great is a beloved fourth century king whose conquests are thought to mark a high point in Korean history.) The Memorial building sits on an area of about 20,000 square meters and has six floors of exhibit space. In this space there are seven halls: The Memorial Hall, The War History Room, The Korean War Room, The Expeditionary Forces Room, The Armed Forces Room, The Large Equipment Room, and the Korean Defense Industries Room. The scale of this memorial and all its various elements is massive. The story told in the exhibit halls is the story of the Korean War as the culmination of 5,000 years of a linked national and military history in which the Korean War is the war and certainly not someone else’s war. No other war gets its own hall; no other war frames a glorious Korean national history. As historian Shelia Miyoshi Jager writes, “in South Korea, official memory about the war has always been constituted within a discourse of national self-definition aimed to promote the legitimacy of the State” (118). 10 In the memorial, as Jager sees it, this legitimation of the State is not only decidedly militarist and masculinist, but it is also linked to a physical inheritance. It is a legitimation made in terms of the blood-lines of war centuries of war heroes – and the inheritance of the current generation of this blood and heroism. Her careful, systematic reading of the site finds these linked themes everywhere in the memorial. She finds, in fact, that “the War Memorial not only tells the story of the manly and strong nation against the plight of its war-torn past, it also advocates manliness and brotherly strength as patriotic values against the plight of a divided future” (118). Jager argues that the “first clue of the Memorial’s self-preoccupation with its own ‘blood-line’ legitimacy can be seen at the Central Plaza.” Reliefs carved on either side of the main stairway define this vast ceremonial space. These reliefs begin the narrative Jager follows throughout – on the left the figures in the relief are “common citizens on their way to battle the Japanese colonial oppressors” and on the right, “the Righteous Army itself is depicted in full battle gear” (121). The common citizens and The _____________ 10

This essay is deeply indebted to Shelia Miyoshi Jager’s insightful chapter on the memorial.

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Righteous Army, which in various iterations and with varying degrees of success fought Japanese invaders between 1890 and 1945, are linked to the project of the museum by an inscription that describes the ‘proud armies’ and calls on visitors to “Inherit the anti-Japanese Righteous Soldier’s sacrificial spirit/Devote yourselves to restoring our national pride” (qtd. in Jager 121). As Jager reads it, the language of ‘inheritance’ in the inscription is one of many examples of efforts to place these warriors in a familial continuum. And, this language directs visitors to see themselves as part of this continuum. All of this is what ushers visitors into the museum. Visitors are literally led in by marching armies with raised weapons calling them to duty. The armies sweep the visitors into the museum where they encounter a narrative about the long military history of the inheritance that culminates with the Korean War. Inside, the ordering of the exhibitions in the museum produces a narrative of military triumph out of a long history of subjugation. Visitors start in the War History Room where they get a version of pre-1945 Korean history that emphasizes sixteenth- century victories and tries to link them to the twentieth-century stalemate. Jager writes, that “[i]f Korea’s colonization by Japan was given only passing mention in the early history of Choson Korea, its triumph over Japan four hundred years earlier was celebrated as one of Korea’s greatest achievements.” As Jager understands it, “the possibility of laying claim to Korea’s (anti-Japanese) ‘patriotic’ past could be made only by illuminating the victorious State’s ultimate triumph over its enemies (Japanese imperialism and North Korean communism) through the grandiose display of power and prosperity embodied in the very structure of the memorial itself” (121). Outside the museum, set in a sea of planes and jeeps and weapons, the reproduced stele and the Statue of Brothers re-enforce this narrative by representing an ancient tradition of conquest and by representing the still hot Korean War as having ended with a domesticated reconciliation that has never happened. The stele, like nearly all steles, represents victory in a fairly straightforward manner. The Statue of Brothers is a more complicated proposition. Standing on top of a domed pedestal, two soldiers/brothers embrace. The South Korean brother is significantly larger than his diminutive North Korean brother; he is at least a head taller and bends over to make his embrace. He cradles the lesser brother’s head in the palm of his hand. The figures are, apart from the discrepancies of scale, realistically rendered. Their eyes are locked and they are wrapped in each other’s arms. Their military uniforms are reproduced in enough detail for the fact that they are wearing military uniforms to be clear but not in enough detail to highlight the fact that they are soldiers in different armies. This marks the brothers as brothers because they are both soldiers and diminishes the

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distinctions between them. The South Korean brother carries a giant gun slung across this back. His North Korean brother is unarmed. All of these details emphasize the virility of the South Korean brother and the submission of the North Korean brother. It marks a victory of the manly that was never achieved by South Korea and its allies. As Jager describes it, “the legitimacy of the State, which became inextricably linked with this narrative of triumphant (or failed) manhood, was therefore couched in very familiar terms: one brother was heroic and virtuous, the legitimate ‘heir’ of Korea’s victorious ‘manly’ past […] the other brother was weak, effeminate, and by extension, illegitimate” (136). The need to fictionalize North Korea in this way speaks to a fundamental problem of remembering the war as a glorious victory in a South Korean context. Roh Tae Woo wanted to define the South Korean state with the celebration of a victory in the Korean War that South Korea did not win. He seems to have compensated for this with the scale of the memorial and its emphasis on a manly, military past whatever historical contortionism this came to require. Jager writes: “The Memorial’s monumentality derives from its latent insecurity” (136). She might have written that ‘the State’s drive for memory derives from its latent insecurity.’ The Memorial seems pretty clearly to be a response to anxiety about South Korean nationalism, something like the ‘insular’ expressions of nationalism that Kevin Robbins saw as a response to threats to the real and imagined status of Britain in the world. The response in Seoul to ‘threats to the real and imagined status of South Korea in the world’ take a particular form that is worth noting – as Jager makes clear the military and the masculine are emphasized and, as Jager mentions but does not develop, the multinational aspect of the war nearly disappears. There is some exhibition space in the museum dedicated to contributions of the UN forces to the war. (It is a modest display of uniforms worn by UN soldiers) (130). There is also a map that marks the nations that made up the UN forces in the dome beneath the Statue of Brothers. While it is not surprising, it is worth noting that there is no indication anywhere in the Memorial that the Korean War was a U.S. American war. The story that the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul tells is one of the triumph of a long history of masculinist, military mastery in national – and decidedly not international – terms. This is the same story that the people in the U.S. wanting to build a memorial for the Korean War tell, only with U.S. Americans as the victors of the fifty-year-old stalemate.

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In Washington Great hulking, gun-metal gray figures stand on the National Mall in a place called Ash Woods – at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial and directly across the Reflecting Pool from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. These figures are surrounded by broad expanses of granite carved with aphorisms and images and by a quiet body of still water. The Korean War Veterans Memorial is a tangle of competing design elements and is not easy to describe or easy to decipher as you stand before it. But the marching soldiers and the vaulted militarism they represent are impossible to miss. The memorial has three central design elements each of which has multiple dimensions. The largest and most striking of these is the triangular ‘Field of Service,’ which slopes slightly upward and is populated by nineteen large statues. These are soldiers – nineteen poncho-clad, helmetwearing seven-foot tall soldiers. They are made of stainless steel with a rough, deeply textured unfinished finish and exaggerated, oversized facial features. They have great hollow, empty eyes. They appear to be a battleready combat troop and appear to be marching up a gentle incline on the Mall. They are armed, but their weapons are not raised. Their weapons are, in fact, partially obscured by their bulky ponchos. They seem to be moving forward with steady plodding rather than speed or determination. The field through which they walk is planted with low shrubs and divided by nineteen long, low black granite slabs. (This carves up the field and marks it as off limits to visitors.) And although their attention is scattered – some face forward, some turn to engage another figure, others look wearily over their shoulders – they appear to be marching toward the enormous American flag at the top of the incline. The second major design element is the black granite ‘Mural Wall’ that runs parallel to the ‘Field of Service.’ It is strikingly like the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Both walls are long, black reflective expanses. But the Korean War Veterans Memorial’s wall is different from the Vietnam Wall in several crucial ways. First, it is not carved with the names of those killed in the war. It is etched instead with images of more than twenty-four thousand soldiers and military workers. The white images emerge from the black stone in varying sizes and degrees of clarity. They seem to be placed randomly, crowded together in some places and separated by expanses of black in others. The images are not easy to see and must always be deciphered through the reflection of the nineteen figures, the visitors moving along the pathway between the ‘Field of Service’ and the ‘Mural Wall,’ and the reflection of the person looking into the granite. It is a murky wall.

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The final major design element is the ‘Pool of Remembrance,’ which sits beyond the flagpole at the top of the incline. It is a black granite pool of still water. The pool is penetrated by an extension of the mural wall, after a sizable gap through which visitors can walk. Above the pool the thick granite wall is carved with striking white letters that read: “FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.” There are benches around the pool which are useful for contemplating this claim and its context. The inscription certainly is suggestive. It asserts that the war was fought for freedom. It asserts that a price was paid, and that this is what needs to be remembered. It refers obliquely to what the war was supposed to be about and, in the same breath, it turns that meaning inward. It implies that what the U.S. does in the world is bring freedom, and that the importance of this is not the success of the efforts, the terms of the efforts, the context of the efforts, but the price paid in the name of freedom by the figures marching toward the flag. There are other design elements as well. The path that runs on the north side of the ‘Field of Service’ is marked on its north side by low granite panels carved with the names of the nations that made up the United Nations force in Korea. The base of the flag pole – just in front of the lead soldier – is an eight-ton triangular stone inlaid with the following text: “OUR NATION HONORS HER UNINFORMED SONS AND DAUGHTERS WHO ANSWERED THEIR COUNTRY’S CALL TO DEFEND A COUNTRY THEY DID NOT KNOW AND A PEOPLE THEY HAD NEVER MET.” This odd language also requires puzzling over. The nation is feminized. The soldier is uniformed and the child of the state. Sons and daughters answered the call, but only sons are represented. And, most strikingly, these sons were asked to sacrifice their lives in a situation of which they had no knowledge. The country and the people remain unnamed and therefore unknown. Why use such oblique language? Why not use the word Korea? Communism? Containment? Cold War? Memorial scholar Barry Schwartz maintains that “the Korean War Memorial’s slogan reasserts idealism by leaving vital interests undefined” (Schwartz and Bayma 947). Why leave vital interests undefined? What would be lost by making the vital interests explicit? U.S. vital interests in Korea were complicated at best. Writing about the Cold War, Christina Klein contends that “the political and cultural problem for Americans was, how can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization” (9)? The odd language of these inscriptions is a response to this quandary – the language is stunningly generic and the only substance it offers is the soldiers’ service. Domesticating service in this way, focusing on the soldier rather than what he or she did in the world, avoids the problem Klein’s question poses. It is, however, also the

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answer offered to her question. The nation is defined as a ‘nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization’ with the evasion of the contexts of the war and an emphasis on the soldier. This strategy is used throughout the memorial, and beyond. As if all this were not enough for the memorial, the death tolls – “U.S.A. 54,246 U.N. 628,833” – and numbers of MIAs and POWs are carved into a granite panel at the edge of the Pool of Remembrance. 11 And, at the entrance to the memorial there is a kiosk with an interactive computer that displays photographs and allows visitors to search for names and service records of those who served. The millions of Korean civilians killed are not explicitly remembered here or anywhere else in the memorial. All of this has to be contended with as you move through the memorial. It marks the remembering that the memorial does as both fraught and resolute. It remembers that it was important to make a grand gesture to memory – the memorial occupies a great deal of the most sacred symbolic real estate in the United States. And it occupies that real estate in a manner that seems determined to fill the space as densely as possible. It asserts quite clearly that no single symbolic gesture would do to speak to the needs of those wanting to remember and, most crucially, it insistently foregrounds the service of larger than life soldiers. However, if you are not too distracted by all of the confusing and competing elements of the design, if you stand still before the figures of the soldiers and look at their faces for a while, the celebration of the soldier gets complicated. The faces of the figures are not uniform and they are not generic. They are hollow-eyed and their faces are tense and often contorted. They are, in fact, painful to look at. The rough finish, the blank eyes, the sheer bulk of them, the distracted scatter of their postures all make the figures both powerfully present and hard to read. Their strength is complicated by their ghostly faces. The Korean War Veterans Memorial is one of the many memorials built and debated in the memorial building frenzy of the late twentieth century in the U.S. It is the product of a time in which the desire for memory in a national context was quite intense. The 99th Congress of the United States that approved the Korean War Veterans Memorial in 1985 also approved two other major memorial projects – the Black Revolution_____________ 11

The number of UN dead – 628,833 is baffling. The number of U.S. deaths (54,246) and the number of South Korean deaths (273,127) combined is just over half of the figure for the UN carved into the memorial. I have not been able to figure this out. The Park Service and the American Battle Monuments Commission have not yet been able to help. The significance of these numbers is in their relationship – the number of U.S. deaths is 11% of the total deaths, but this is not the impression the rest of the memorial conveys.

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ary War Patriots Memorial and the Women in Military Service for America Memorial. Before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was approved in 1979, it had been more than forty years since the last major memorial was built on the Mall and no national war memorial had ever been built on the Mall. In the twenty years after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was completed four other major war memorials were built on the Mall and at least nineteen others were vying for space on the Mall (Memorials and Museums Master Plan 3). These memorials are explicitly and determinedly part of a struggle to rebuild U.S. American nationalism in the wake of the Vietnam War. The way that the Vietnam War was waged, the logic that drove the war, and the kind of nation the war imagined were all profoundly disruptive of nationalism in the U.S in this period. The problem was not simply that the war was unpopular or that the draft was unfair or that rebellious youth did not want to serve. The problem was that people in the United States seem to have wanted to see themselves as the people who brought the world freedom in World War II. They seem to want to understand themselves as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization rather than an imperial global power waging the Cold War in newly-claimed former French, British and Japanese colonies. This desire was, as each exploration will reveal, at the heart of the push to build these memorials. The story of the building of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the debates it engendered and the debates it did not engender, and the questions that the memorial process raised about the nation and the figure of the soldier are all linked to the difficulties in reconciling old ideas about the nation and the new kinds of wars it was waging. The looming, pained soldier at the center of this memorial is celebrated and sacrificed. The war in which he (and she) served is obscured in the memorial process. The rough, raw faces of the statues emerged from the battle over the figure of the soldier and embody the struggle to move from the real, complicated experience of soldiers to a positive representation of the willingness to serve that could act as a corrective to the abstraction, the ambiguity and the grief represented at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The Korean War Veterans Memorial is not simple, but it strives to simplify and domesticate war and military service. In 1955 the Washington Post and Times Herald published a short, lonely letter to the editor on the subject of a possible Korean War memorial: Each day I admire the altogether fitting and proper memorial statute honoring the courageous lads of America who planted the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. Now I’m wondering if there is a memorial somewhere for the equally courageous boys of United Nations who fought under many flags, including our own and that of the United Nations, to stop the aggression of the North Korean and Red China communists on the Korean peninsula. That was a notable land-

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mark in world history, when a number of nations joined together to stop an aggression which touched them only indirectly. Men of all races and creeds died for freedom there. Should not there be a monument showing the heterogeneous qualities of those united forces? Would not that serve to remind us and others that even the ‘little wars’ against free people (or even against unfree people) are important today. G. Holcomb Falls Church (14)

Borrowing the language of President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg – “it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this” – G. Holcomb offers a complicated vision of what could be remembered about the Korean War. He foregrounds the “courageous boys” but suggests that what should be marked about the Korean War is that it was waged by the United Nations and that it was fought by men of “all races and creeds.” When he asks, “Should not there be a monument showing the heterogeneous qualities of those united forces?” he asks a powerful question. In 1955 there was no interest in building a memorial, but what he suggests should be remembered – a newly heterogeneous military (or perhaps more accurately: a newly desegregated U.S. military) and a UN fighting force – are worth paying attention to because when the memorial process began in the early 1980s these striking, logical, obvious terms for remembering the Korean War of the 1950s were absent. They were replaced by the memorial needs and desires of the 1980s. Responding to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (and its perceived threats to U.S. nationalism and its perceived belittling of soldiering) was more present in the conversations about the memorial than remembering desegregated forces or remembering a UN-waged war. Of course, remembering either race or a U.S. war fought multilaterally on the National Mall was thorny business, and these challenges did shape the memorial that was built. But in the end, both race and the UN are present only as ‘traces’ in the final design. 12 So if race and the UN are not central to the drive to remember, then what? Remembering the forgotten war had remarkably little to do with the war to be remembered. An open design competition was held in 1988. The competition rules included a statement of purpose and philosophy: “The memorial will express the enduring gratitude of the American people for all who took part in that conflict under our flag. It will honor those who survived no less than those who gave their lives, and will project in a most positive fashion, the spirit of service, the willingness to sacrifice and the dedication to the cause of freedom that characterized all participants.” _____________ 12

Barry Schwartz quotes memorial designer Lecky as praising the statues’ impressionistic style for leaving traces of race and ethnicity in the figures (957).

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Giving lives, serving, willingness to sacrifice, and dedication to freedom – service and sacrifice trump the war itself. The ‘cause of freedom’ is as close as the language gets to specifics about the war. The statement continues: “These patriotic virtues have been common to those who served their country in other times of national crisis – and must not be lacking in the instance of future emergencies. Therefore, the Memorial must radiate a message that is at once inspirational in content and timeless in meaning.” (“Korean War Veteran Memorial”) This memorial was, then, to honor the sacrifices soldiers have made and to ensure the willingness of future soldiers to give their lives. It also needed to exist out of time, to be timeless and therefore not too tightly wedded to historical specificity. The statement reads like the memorial’s advocates had been studying the work of Renan, Hobsbawm, and Anderson on nationalism; it requires the design to use the memory of lost soldiers to maintain the nation in particular terms. The details of figuring these soldiers turned out to be important to the memorial’s advocates. A memo from November 15, 1994 conveys a sense of the level of involvement with the details of the design: The ad hoc design committee has always described these statues as young gallant warriors having embarked on a successful mission. Emphasis on young, gallant, and successful. Generally speaking the committee felt that the faces were older than our directions. If mention is made in the remarks below, about mouth adjustments, it means that the mouth should be either, a) closed, or b) open, but doing something – talking, breathing heavily, in any case determined and focused, as opposed to being open and unfocused. (Ad hoc committee memo; italics in original)

This statement is followed by a list of changes for the statues. The first change for the lead statue, #1, reads: “bridge of nose too broad.” Sculptor Frank Gaylord stills reacts strongly to this, calling #1 the “runt of the litter.” 13 But this was not the only concern about #1. Architect and memorial designer Kent Cooper wrote: “It was agreed to modify the facial expression to be less soulful and ‘more intensely searching.’” Less soulful? Why would the lead solider need to be less soulful? Another item on the list reads: “left arm and hand too limp.” Cooper’s partner William Lecky wrote: “The bent wrist holding the rifle on many figures seems contrived and more appropriate to a ballet than a military situation” (Cooper memo). Ballet? Since when are bent wrists part of the line of a dancer? Gaylord called this concern ridiculous and added that he did not do limp wrists. The comments on figure #3 include “face looks too sweet, adjust mouth/lips.” #5 is “too tired, dead in the water, totally panicked, ok to be stressed out but show more determination.” #6 is “not acceptable, looks _____________ 13

Frank Gaylord, personal interview, 10 April 2007.

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like he is sleeping, also looks like has he has a disdainful expression.” #12 is “too pregnant.” Too pregnant? Noses too broad? Lips too fat? Wrists too limp? It seems impossible not to conclude that standards of masculinity, heroism, and whiteness were being articulated – mandated (Cooper memo). All of these elements in the battle to figure the soldier in this war memorial make two aspects painfully clear: the importance of representing the soldier in particular terms – heroic, manly, gallant, not-too-not-white, virile, successful – and the difficulties in the construction of memory in these terms. In the end, Cooper says of the memorial: “We have tried to give the veterans here what we could not give them with the Vietnam memorial” (qtd. in Reston). “We are not glorifying war,” he continues, “but esteeming the honor of service to country. That is what the vets cried out for […] the Korean War Veterans Memorial is in some way a tribute to simpler times. This is a monument to blind devotion.” What this misses is that ‘simpler times’ would not have required ‘blind devotion.’ ‘Simpler times’ would have made for an easier memorial. But the problem of how to remember ultimately cannot be disconnected from the war itself. The problem of understanding the “nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization” did not disappear in the memorial process, it drove the memorial process (Klein 9).

Shared Anxiety The nation is, indeed, not dead yet. But these two memorials demonstrate a good deal of anxiety about its possible demise. As nationalist projects these memorials produce similar responses to similar kinds of anxiety in different contexts. And while both memorials work hard to deny that the war was a shared war – this would disrupt their narratives of national triumph – the war was, in fact, a shared war. U.S. Americans and the South Koreans shared the war because they shared interests (conflicting interests) in a post-Japanese Korea. For the U.S. these interests have raised questions about what it means to be a global power and how this might disrupt U.S. Americans’ understanding of themselves as not-imperial. For South Koreans the long stalemate continues to raise questions about the legitimacy (and authority) of the South Korean state. These questions have stirred deep anxiety about the national in both cases. The memorials are responses to these anxieties, but this is not all that they share. In both cases the national is expressed not only in emphatically military terms (these are war memorials after all), but in insistently masculinist terms. As historian Anne McClintock has written, “all nationalisms are gendered”

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(89). But while this gendering has always been linked to political power and to threats of physical violence, it has sometimes been expressed with a more subtly – it has not always been the hyper-gendering that remembering ‘the forgotten war’ and containing ‘the remembered war’ seemed to have required. These are nations that shared not only the need for the national but that responded to anxiety about the national in strikingly masculinist terms at the end of the twentieth century.

Works Cited Ad hoc committee memo. 15 Nov. 1994. Commission of Fine Arts Files. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Boswell, David. “Nation and Representaion.” Ed. David Boswell and Jessica Evans. Representing the Nation: Histories, Heritage, and Museums. New York: Routledge, 1999. 1-8. Chatterjee, Partha. “Beyond the Nation? Or Within.” Social Text 16.3 (1998): 57-69. Cooper memo. 27 July 1994. Commission of Fine Arts Files. Curiel, Barbara Brinson et al. Introduction. Post-National American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 1-21. Eley, Geoff, and Ronald Suny, eds. “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Production.” Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 3-38. Grinker, Roy Richard. Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Holcomb, G. Letter. The Washington Post and Times Herald 15 June 1955: 14. Jager, Shelia Miyoshi. Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2003. Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia and the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Korean War Veteran Memorial Design Competition.” 1988. Commission of Fine Arts files. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. McClintock, Anne. “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism (1995).” Dangerous Lisaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 89-112. Memorials and Museums Master Plan. National Capital Planning Commission, 2001. National Capital Planning Commission Files. O’Leary, Cecelia. To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Olick, Jeffrey. States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

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Pease, Donald. “National Narratives, Postnational Narration.” Modern Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997): 1-23. Reston, James. “The Monument Glut.” New York Times 10 Sept. 1995. 7 June 2009 . Robins, Kevin. “Tradition and Cultural Translation.” Ed. David Boswell and Jessica Evans. Representing the Nation: Histories, Heritage, and Museums. London: Routledge, 1999. 15-32. Ruffin, Rick. “Keep DMZ a Place of Peace.” The Korea Times 18 Oct. 2007. 3 June 2009 <www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2007/10/137_12129.html>. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in NineteenthCentury America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997. Schwartz, Barry, and Todd Bayma. “Commemoration and the Politics of Recognition: The Korean War Veterans Memorial.” American Behavioral Scientist 42.6 (1999): 946-967. Truman, Harry S. Statement. 27 June 1950. George M. Elsey Papers. Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, Independence. The War Memorial of Korea website. 2004. 6 May 2009 . Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. —. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006. —. Visions and Violence: Imagining the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Wright, Patrick. “Trafficking in History.” On Living in an Old Country. London: Verso, 1985. 33-92.

Celluloid Recoveries: Cinematic Transformations of Ground Zero BIRGIT DÄWES “Some things you forget. Other things you never do. [...]. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” Toni Morrison, Beloved “What is the half-life of memory? […] If it wasn’t for a tremulous inner voice, singing off-key along with ‘my’ government’s self-serving reminders to Stay Afraid, I might be able to reduce my memory of the vaporized towers down to size, to little more than last season’s most compelling media event.” Art Spiegelman, “Re: Covers”

Unearthing Ground Zero About halfway into Spike Lee’s 2002 film, The 25th Hour, the protagonist’s two best friends, Frank (a confident investment banker played by Barry Pepper) and Jacob (a slightly naive college teacher played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), look over Ground Zero’s expansive construction site from the window of an apartment in Lower Manhattan. As the remains of the World Trade Center loom in the background’s frosty blue, they talk about the protagonist, Montgomery – a drug dealer played by Edward Norton – and his imminent jail sentence after having been “turned in” (25th Hour). While Jacob is upset about the impending absence, Frank thinks that Monty “deserves it” because his wealth was “paid for by the misery of other people.” They realize that their lives will be irreversibly changed by Monty’s punishment, and even though Jacob still believes in the reconstruction of their friendship, Frank strikes a terminal chord: “It’s over after tonight, Jake. Wake the fuck up” (25th Hour). Their conversation is dramatically followed by the camera’s movement: it zooms in on the site of terror, and a montage sequence 1 of nine long shots of machines _____________ 1

For the terminology of film analysis, I am relying on Bernard F. Dick and James Monaco.

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and people cleaning up the rubble provides a visual echo to Frank’s critical statements. Even without much sensitivity to nuance, audiences will hardly miss this scene’s political overtones. While, from one perspective, 2 Monty is seen as a victim, caught unawares by the sudden impact of betrayal, the ‘frank’ angle exposes his past, showing him as unrightfully rich and responsible for his own punishment. Even though we sympathize with Monty throughout the movie, the question of a general ethics comes to the foreground. This scene merges the local with the universal, and audiences are – literally in light of Ground Zero – led to wonder about the consequences of excessive materialism and the blindness to the suffering of others. Probably no other building signified the economic side of globalization as much as the World Trade Center. Erected in 1973, attacked in 1993, and destroyed in the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001, it has become the foremost cultural icon of both the United States and the international flows of capital and brands that Benjamin Barber has termed the “McWorld” (4). From the symbolism of postmodern urbanization and oversized public architecture, via positive connotations of free and peaceful trade; as a tourist attraction optimistically representing the multiculturalism of New York City, all the way to the “temple of Empire” (Spivak 83) and the “monoliths no longer opening on to the outside world” (Baudrillard 43), the twin towers have been among the most dramatically recoded public objects of the past three decades – especially after they were gone. As a focal point of these different symbolisms, ‘Ground Zero’ has become much more than the topographical abbreviation of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The place where the World Trade Center used to stand has emerged as a graveyard, as a haunted place of mourning and tourism, as a construction site or “the pile” (Langewiesche 18), as memorial “footprints” (see “Building a National Tribute”; Sturken 203), and as a sacred field of patriotism; in short, as a place deeply infused with both national and transnational discourses. The name given to the place itself – originally the site of a nuclear detonation, and especially signifying the ruins and losses that the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left behind – reveals that the memory of 9/11 is as marked by a need for repetition and analogy as it is haunted by history. ‘Ground Zero’ is, after all, the reappropriation of a much more devastating act of violence; 3 it _____________ 2 3

Through his name, Jacob (who represents this stance) points to the Biblical story of twins and betrayal, which adds another layer of meaning to the scene where the Trade Center’s twin towers once stood. As Gene Ray argues from a psychological perspective, “the genealogy of the term makes clear that the civilian victims and spectacular destruction of 9/11 triggered an unconscious

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reinscribes the notion of innocence into the United States’ territorial space, and it replaces a differentiated historical consciousness with what Donald E. Pease has identified as “the signifier of the homeland” (75) – the powerful cipher of a new nationalist logic: The homeland did not name a place within the social order so much as the condition produced through the violent desymbolization of the order of things. The Homeland named the shifting imposition of placement without a place and therefore never succeeded in taking up a place. Indeed, it was the efficacy of its absence from any locatable place within the symbolic order that enabled the homeland to determine the entire structure of assigned places. The placeholder for a place that was produced out of violent subtraction from all locatable places, the homeland exercised a structural causality for all of the other terms within the newly symbolized order. (Pease 76, emphasis original)

Precisely through its “absence from any locatable place,” the “homeland” is a universally valid claim which disguises its ideological telos by an emotionally charged signifier. The similarly camouflaged cipher of ‘Ground Zero,’ I would argue, has served not only as a legitimizing trigger for this new nationalist narrative, but as a concrete place for its inauguration and ceremonial empowerment. Since Ground Zero is also the twenty-first century’s most contested site of cultural memory so far, the ways in which we remember the events of September 11, 2001 at and through this site have undeniably far-reaching political consequences. Marita Sturken strikes a similar chord in her most recent study, Tourists of History. She argues that the concepts of innocence, healing, heroism and kitsch, which have dominated memorial practices in the wake of 9/11, generate a new kind of nationalist discourse in which “the world and its ills are somehow elsewhere” (293) 4 : “This sense of historical exceptionalism hovers behind the nomenclature of lower Manhattan as Ground Zero – not only in disavowal of the original meaning of the term but also in the belief, widely circulated and deployed politically, that history itself was transformed on 9/11” (167). The memorialization of what we call “Ground Zero” is thus heavily charged, and it resonates in multiple directions: for one, its reconfiguration into a national memorial site draws on a number of international contributions. For another, this reconfiguration requires a closer inspection of its historical origins and semiotic traces, as well as its global, or transnational, impact. _____________

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discursive reenactment of the problem of American guilt for the 300,000 mostly noncombatant victims of the first use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.” As for her title, she is “defining a particular mode through which the American public is encouraged to experience itself as the subject of history through consumerism, media images, souvenirs, popular culture, and museum and architectural reenactments, a form of tourism that has as its goal a cathartic ‘experience’ of history” (Sturken 9).

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Whereas the images of the terrorist attacks have themselves been widely described as “cinematic” (see Dixon 5; Simpson 5; Baudrillard 7), this study will investigate the literally cinematic reactions: the contributions of international film to the memorialization of Ground Zero. Fiction (and fictional film in particular) is a powerful agent in the construction of cultural memory because, as Winfried Fluck reminds us, it is the source of fiction’s ability to violate existing conventions [...]; it can defamiliarize convention in order to make us see reality anew; it permits the articulation of utopian ideas that cannot yet be expressed in any other way. And, most important for this discussion: it can also be the source of an individual or collective counter-memory which is not yet accepted as valid description of the past by the dominant social consensus. (217)

Especially in a context in which highly iconic television images, or imagines agentes, 5 have been disseminated around the world to shape a dominant (visual) memory, tying specific discourses to the force of an overwhelming spectacle, I am interested in the visual and narrative translations of this spectacle into the fictional sphere. How do Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), selected contributions to Alain Brigand’s collection 11’09”11 (2002), and Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty (2005) incorporate, confirm, or alter, the visual access to a place whose current meaning seems so unambiguous? The following analysis will demonstrate the specific ways in which these filmic narratives underscore or challenge the discourses of the “homeland” and the “tourism of history,” and how they transform, or refuse to transform, the site of the former World Trade Center into ‘Ground Zero.’ What role does religion play in this transformation? And finally, departing from Russell Duncan’s and Clara Juncker’s definition of the transnational as “a loosening of boundaries, a deterritorialization of the nation-state, and higher degrees of interconnectedness among cultures and peoples across the globe” (8), I will show whether the memorial trajectories that these films design are merely based on the same transnationally shared imagines agentes, or whether they contribute to a “transnational memory” – a memory that relies on the transgression of boundaries in both a thematic and a structural sense. _____________ 5

Aleida Assmann describes the classic mnemonic tradition of using imagines agentes: highly suggestive images which serve as anchors for other, less spectacular, concepts by association. “[D]as sind wirkmächtige Bilder, die durch ihre Eindruckskraft unvergeßlich sind und deshalb als Gedächtnisstützen für blassere Begriffe verwendet werden können” (222). Assmann emphasizes that the agency is not intrinsic in the images, but it emerges from their connection to other concepts and/or images: “Die Bilder ‘handeln’ nicht aufgrund ihrer explosiven Suggestivkraft, sondern allein im Rahmen ihrer verknüpfenden, gedächtnisstützenden Funktion” (223). It is therefore always crucial to examine which specific associations, concepts, and discourses are tied to the images and are thus privileged.

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Sacred Ground of Heroes: Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center When World Trade Center was released in the fall of 2006, it was received in a surprisingly favorable manner almost all across the United States. David Denby of the New Yorker writes that “Stone bulls his way into our emotions with his usual force but with greater clarity, sanity, and measure than in the past, and he is better at violent spectacle and at capturing the stages of dying than any other director.” Likewise, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe summarizes that “Oliver Stone has made an honorable film, in other words, and almost the best thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t feel like an Oliver Stone movie;” and Lisa Kennedy praises the film for the Denver Post, since she finds “in the story of two individuals and their families uncommon valor and common ground at ground zero.” Oliver Stone’s nineteenth feature film tells the story of two real Port Authority Police officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who were trapped underneath the World Trade Center’s collapsing South Tower and survived. Three parallel plotlines reconstruct the events of September 11, 2001: (1) the initial rescue operation which almost cost the police officers’ lives, as well as their following fifteen to twenty-two hours of being pinned down in the rubble; (2) their wives’ and families’ situation of uncertainty about their fate, and (3) the story of former U.S. Marine staff sergeant Dave Karnes (played by Michael Shannon in a way that “feels too stiff” to Denby), who decided to leave his job as an accountant in Connecticut to join the rescue team at Ground Zero. The first scenes show New York in the early morning, waking up as a peaceful community: John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno leave their houses in the suburbs to go to work, commuters exchange friendly remarks about sports events on the subway, office workers come into Manhattan on ferries and in cars, and all of them share the sight of the Trade Center as their common visual reference point. The twin towers are still intact against a beautiful blue sky, just as New York – the opening scene suggests – is still an unwounded and innocent city beginning its day. This “narrative of innocence” has been expertly described by Marita Sturken, who reads it as part of the process which transformed the World Trade Center into “sacred ground” (165). She finds it remarkable “how quickly the site became Christianized, not only through the presence of priests who performed services for those working in the recovery operation, many of whom are Catholic, but also through the preservation of a

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cross constructed of two steel beams found in the rubble” (199). 6 Thus, Ground Zero provided both the setting and the projection screen for the spiritual rearrangement of victims’ accounts into “narratives of redemption that participate in the production of innocence and the political acquiescence of the tourism of history” (169). World Trade Center is a prime example of these sanctifying narratives, and Oliver Stone filters both the inside and outside perspectives of the fallen towers through a religious lens. In their time of endurance underneath the rubble, in what Oliver Stone calls “The Hole,” 7 both of the trapped policemen have metaphysical experiences. As the third part of the building collapses, they pray separately, representing different degrees of traditionalism: while John says the Lord’s prayer, Will freely formulates a text about his wife and unborn child. Only a little later, just as it rather symbolically gets dark outside and “Will begins to die” (Stone), he has a vision: the black screen is gradually lit from behind and the figure of Christ emerges with a burning heart on his chest, holding out a bottle of water. In his audio commentary on the DVD version, the director explains this scene: It was at this point, Will says, that he had a vision of Jesus. In this kind of style. Not exactly this vision, no, but I’d say from the Hispanic, colorful. Colorful Jesus, but no face, with a bottle of water. And it was this vision that re-inspired Will, gave him that third wind that he needed and brought him back, according to what he told me. (Stone)

While this visual translation of the survivor’s religious experience is in line with the actual testimony, 8 its structural embedding inflates the scene with additional meaning. Christ’s light dissolves into the light of a family memory: McLoughlin’s wife Donna exchanges a smile with her husband (who apparently just sustained a minor injury while fixing the roof) through a sunlit bedroom window. Then the scene is intercut with the bleak, dark reality of the desperate families, before the theme of light is reintroduced. As a flashlight attached to Dave Karnes’ hat shines into the rubble, this illumination is merged again with the light of Christ. Jimeno’s vision comes full circle and he opens his eyes to tell John – much in the Puritan tradition of the publicly shared conversion experience – about what he saw. Not only does this series of images join all the characters in a com_____________ 6 7 8

What also contributed to this sanctification was a ritual during which the dust was filled into urns and recoded as “sacramental and ceremonial” (Sturken 165); as well as the worshiping of the firefighters (see 192). The DVD edition features an audio commentary by the director, who provides information on the film’s creation process and technical details. The version that Stone shows on screen is confirmed by Will Jimeno, who also comments on the film in a special feature: When “I was done – emotionally spiritually, physically,” he explains, “I did see Jesus.” Right when we see the images, his audio commentary legitimizes Stone’s visual creation: “And this vision that I had actually happened” (Jimeno).

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mon numinous moment, literally generated de profundis and keeping the entrapped officers awake and alive, but it also establishes a direct link between three overlapping spheres of redemption at Ground Zero: the transcendent encounter with Christ as the believer’s Savior, the salvational power of the American core family, and a U.S. soldier lighting the way. Most prominently, it is the latter, this figure of the Marine who turns the site into sacred ground. While the real Dave Karnes did say, in fact, that “I just had a sense, an overwhelming sense come over me that we were walking on hallowed ground, that tens of thousands of people could be trapped and dead beneath us” (qtd. in Liss, “Unlikely Hero,” emphasis mine), Stone’s film places considerable emphasis on his motivation, again supplementing original testimonies with visual force and creative license. According to the film, Karnes is not simply called to duty, but he feels a sudden vocation to sacrifice his career in order to help. Right after the fictionalized Karnes watches the news from his accountancy office, he is seen in church, telling his pastor that “I’ve spent my best years with the Marines. God gave me a gift to be able to help people, to defend our country. And I feel him calling on me now for this mission” (World Trade Center). The scene is visually underscored by the establishing shot of the church’s outside, the close-up shot of a Bible page – tellingly opened to the apocalyptic Revelation of John – and by a dialogue-like sequence of objective and subjective shots, alternating between Karnes and the wooden cross he sees, as if the latter affirmed his plan. When he arrives in New York, he interprets the phenomena he sees – again, much in the tradition of typological Puritan hermeneutics – by transcendental logic: “It’s like God made a curtain with the smoke,” he tells a fellow rescue worker, “shielding us from what we’re not yet ready to see” (World Trade Center). 9 As the representation of Dave Karnes shows most clearly in Stone’s film, the 9/11 imagery of sanctification is inextricably connected to discourses of patriotic heroism and innocence. After this “mission” Dave Karnes changes his life and returns to the military: “They’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this,” his character says; and Rebecca Liss reports that the actual Karnes indeed “re-enlisted in the Marines at age 45 ‘to go after the people who did this so it never happens again,’ as _____________ 9

Whereas reviewers found Karnes’ zeal overdone (see Travers) or at least ambiguous (see Kennedy), and one dialogue almost ridicules his sense of duty (when Scott Strauss from the NYPD Emergency Service Unit asks him for his name, Karnes responds, “Staff Sergeant Karnes.” – Strauss: “I mean, something a little shorter.” – Karnes: “Staff Sergeant”), this scene actually took place, as Rebecca Liss informs us (“Unlikely Hero”): “You’d have to be slightly abnormal,” Liss reasons, “– abnormally selfless, abnormally patriotic – to do what he did.”

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he told me. (When his first tour of duty didn’t take him to Iraq, he reupped for a second tour and made it to the combat zone, serving 17 months there)” (Liss, “Oliver Stone”). This individual’s logic of retribution in the service of the nation is echoed on every level of Stone’s film: every call to communal or religious duty is eagerly followed; 10 and a strong sense of family and matrimonial loyalty is both the key to survival and the backbone of the nation. Furthermore, other narratives of heroism (such as Ridley Scott’s 1997 movie G.I. Jane) provide a network of intertextual references to sustain this patriotic logic, and the ending authorizes and validates the film as a memorial, as an ‘authentic’ interpretation of September 11. Before policemen, firefighters, and rescuers are celebrated as heroes in the closing caption (“For the fallen men and women of the Port Authority Police Department [...] And for all those who fought, died, and were wounded that day” [World Trade Center]), Nicolas Cage’s voice-over narration establishes a universal morality, which justifies the patriotic sentiment and anchors it within the dichotomy of good and evil: “9/11 showed us what human beings are capable of. The evil – yeah, sure. But it also brought out the goodness we forgot could exist. People taking care of each other for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. It’s important for us to talk about that good, to remember” (World Trade Center). According to Ingo Irsigler and Christoph Jürgensen, the category of authenticity, which has traditionally marked the boundary between documentary and fictional genres, has changed its role in the filmic representation of 9/11. While documentaries (such as Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s 911 and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11) increasingly use dramatic techniques of selection and combination, alienation effects, and music, feature films increasingly incorporate documentary techniques: “Behaupten und inszenieren die Spielfilme United 93 und World Trade Center eine scheinbar detailgenaue Rekonstruktion eines Ereignisausschnitts, in dem sie sich grundsätzlich an die Fakten der Katastrophe halten, so narrativieren die Dokumentarfilme ihre ‘authentischen Bilder’ in ähnlicher Weise wie der Spielfilm” (Irsigler and Jürgensen 275). Indeed, World Trade Center uses extradiegetic comments and informational captions, such as time-place designations and disclaimers, as well as original footage from news reports. Even before the film, most audiences will know that – as the end titles later inform us – this story is “based on the true life events of John and Donna McLoughlin and William and Allison Jimeno.” Both families assisted screenwriter Andrea Berloff and producers Michael Shamberga, Stacy Sher, and Debra Hill in drafting the storyline and making the film _____________ 10

At the beginning, when John McLoughlin calls for volunteers to accompany him inside the North Tower, Will Jimeno is first to respond.

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‘authentic’ – which is additionally reinforced by some of the actual participants’ inclusion in the movie. In an audio commentary on the DVD version, Scott Strauss (the NYPD Emergency Service Unit worker who rescued the two officers) and Will Jimeno share their stories by voice-over narration, frequently praising Stone’s directing, the special effects, or the cinematography. Furthermore, the film ends with a restaging of the Thank-You-Barbecue that Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin actually organized for the rescue workers and doctors two years after the attacks. At the film’s barbecue, actors Nicholas Cage and Michael Peña (in their roles as John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno) shake hands with the actual PAPD officers they represent, smoothly merging the levels of fiction and reality, while validating the former, in a scene of celebration. In one sense, therefore, the film could be described as what Bernard Dick terms a “semi-documentary:” a “fiction film based on fact, photographed and acted in such a way that it resembles both a fiction film and a documentary” (367). Yet it is precisely this apparent authenticity that should caution viewers against World Trade Center’s ideological message and invite further scrutiny. For instance, quite contrary to expectation, only the few scenes shown on television screens within the movie consist of original footage. All the other images of the Trade Center – such as the scene when the policemen arrive at the burning North Tower, which is first seen as a reflection on their bus’s windshield – are created digitally; the set of ‘the Hole’ was reconstructed in a flight hangar in California, and most street scenes were shot in Los Angeles. And while the representation of Dave Karnes seems, at first glance, to be supported by eyewitness reports and interviews, there are also a number of inaccuracies in his story – probably because he was not involved in the making of the film. Rebecca Liss notes that [i]n reality Karnes wanted to dress the part of a Marine for access to an all-butsealed Lower Manhattan. In the movie, many of Karnes’ lines are cryptic religious references that make him seem like a robotic soldier of Christ – a little wacky and simplistic. This may be why test audiences didn’t believe he existed, according to a report in Newsweek. The man I interviewed, while he embodied extraordinary inner conviction, was a real human being who took risks that most of us didn’t. (Liss, “Oliver Stone”)

Furthermore, Jason Thomas – another Marine who helped Karnes discover the victims – is grossly misrepresented: he is played by Caucasian actor William Mapother in Stone’s movie (and referred to as “Mike Thomas” in the director’s commentary), while he was in fact an African

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American – a misrepresentation that strongly resounds with political subtexts. 11 Especially in light of these more liberally constructed elements, the film’s claim as an authentic memorial becomes precariously unbalanced. Whereas World Trade Center passes itself – not least through its title – as the attacks’ ‘true’ story, it also skillfully disguises its fictionality and displaces other narratives from the ‘sacred’ ground it paves. More generally speaking, Judith Butler has underlined the silencing effect that the element of authenticity in survivors’ narratives may have on other, less popular, discourses. Grieving is always political, Butler argues; and it is not so much the fact “that [these authentic narratives] humanize the lives that were lost along with those that narrowly escaped” which deserves critical attention, but rather “that they stage the scene and provide the narrative means by which ‘the human’ in its grievability is established. We cannot find in the public media [...] the narratives of Arab lives killed elsewhere by brutal means” (Butler 38). For this reason, we should question our intuitive subscription to collective grief and see its ethical consequences: The victim’s “story takes me home and tempts me to stay there. But at what cost do I establish the familiar as the criterion by which a human life is grievable?” (38). As a semi-documentary memorial, which transforms Ground Zero into a sacred site and lastingly reinstalls the category of an innocent, invaded “homeland,” World Trade Center provokes a similar question. 12 Considering its effectively disguised contribution to the patriotic discourses of heroism, Stone’s film is far from having a transnational trajectory. While the film does touch upon the international perspective of the September 11 attacks (emphasizing in its closing credits that “2,749 people died at the World Trade Center, including citizens from 87 countries;” and showing as people watch the news coverage in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East with a shared expression of shock on their face), 13 its return to the Christian faith, the American core family, and the soldier as savior feeds into the same patriotic discourse that was exploited to justify _____________ 11 12 13

USA Today cites an AP report according to which Thomas, being confronted with the movie’s representation, “laughed and gently chided the filmmakers, then politely declined to discuss it further” (“Once a Mystery”). This powerful effect of the movie is also reflected in its reviews: David Denby concludes in telling words that “[t]he world may not make sense anymore, but Oliver Stone, a warrior still, celebrating courage and endurance, has, in his own way, come home” [emphasis mine]. Furthermore, one could read the scene into which the plane intrudes as an internationalist statement: just when an Asian tourist asks Will Jimeno for directions in Lower Manhattan, the first plane’s contour is seen on a building across the street, literally overshadowing a microcosmic multicultural exchange.

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the United States’ unilateral position and nationalism which have emerged from the new ‘Ground Zero.’

Translating Time Zones: Alain Brigand’s 11’09”01 Even four years before Oliver Stone’s approach, French producer Alain Brigand had already felt the need for providing alternative images to the media’s dominant visual discourse, or to what Jean Baudrillard has termed the “terrorism of spectacle” (30). According to Baudrillard, the images of the Trade Center’s destruction – transmitted across the globe – were the terrorists’ most efficient weapon, because “at the same time as [the images] exalt the event, they also take it hostage. They serve to multiply it to infinity and, at the same time, they are a diversion and a neutralization” (Baudrillard 27). Against this monotonous multiplication, Brigand wanted to create a collective film, as Jean-Michel Frodon explains: “Like everyone else, Alain Brigand was dumbfounded as he followed the destruction of the twin towers on his TV screen. As a television producer, he could sense, better than most people, how much the audiovisual media ran the risk of freeze-drying the event, portraying it in a simplistic manner, and ultimately distorting it.” For this reason, Brigand contacted eleven directors from eleven different countries, commissioning them for his project 11’09”01 to create a short film that would reflect each director’s reaction from his/her own national, cultural, and historical perspective, including their own memory and language (see “11’09”01: Presseheft” 2). Each film was to comprise exactly eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame in order to memorialize, in both title and format, the date of the terrorist attacks. This collection of short films by directors Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Claude Lelouch (France), Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Danis Tanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), Ken Loach (United Kingdom), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Mexico), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Mira Nair (India), Sean Penn (United States of America), and Shohei Imamura (Japan) thus seems, at first glance, like a truly transnational effort – contributing to both the cultural memory of 9/11 and to the exploration of its global aftermath. While some of the contributions explore how people of different nationalities experienced the attacks (such as a fighting French couple in Manhattan reunited by the trauma, a Pakistani-American firefighter’s struggle for recognition, or the reactions of children in an Afghan refugee camp in Iran), others share more openly political agendas. Two films deal explicitly with the conflict over Palestine: Youssef Chahine’s contribution accuses the United States of supporting Israel against Palestinian families;

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and Amos Gitaï’s Israeli perspective shows how the New York events globally displaced other conflicts, such as a bombing in Tel Aviv, from the media. In Idrissa Ouedraogo’s more subtly didactic story, African children dream of escaping from their abject poverty by capturing Osama bin Laden, and Shohei Imamura’s film entirely leaves out 9/11 but draws instead a highly charged parallel by presenting a Japanese soldier traumatized by the bombing of Hiroshima. These larger international and historical connections of the terrorist attacks are also emphasized by contributions from Europe. Danis Tanovic draws a direct line to another traumatic event: the massacre of Srebrenica of July 1995, during which 8,000 Bosnians were murdered literally under the surveillance of the United Nations. Similarly, British director Ken Loach addresses another 9/11: On September 11, 1973, Chile’s elected government of President Salvador Allende was violently overthrown in a coup d’état initiated, supported and sponsored by the United States. “Mothers, fathers, and loved ones of those who died in New York,” a Chilean man writes to the victims’ families from his London exile, reminding them of a crime committed by their own government: “our pain – and your pain – was legalized” (11’09”01). Through these multilateral contextualizations, 9/11 is detached from the discourse of an innocent “homeland” (Pease 75). Whereas World Trade Center establishes Ground Zero as the sacred site of American nationalism, the pluralism of perspectives in 11’09”01 resituates the events globally; drawing attention to other sites of trauma which are connected to the place where the World Trade Center used to stand. The site now known as ‘Ground Zero’ is addressed directly in two films from the Americas: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s and Sean Penn’s contributions try in very different ways to liberate the images of the site from the “hijacked imagination” (Baer 7). Iñárritu shows us a black screen, or “visual silence” (Riding), for most of his film, interrupted only by short, repeated flashes in which audiences gradually recognize human bodies falling from the Trade Center Towers. Listening to a collage of sounds (mixed from a traditional Chamula mourning chant by indigenous people from Mexico, original news coverage of September 11 in different languages, the noise of the planes, the exclamations of eye-witnesses, victims’ last phone calls recorded on answering machines, and the sound of human beings hitting the floor), we are forced to watch the dark screen, experiencing a moment of shock each time the images of the falling people return in irregular intervals. At the film’s turning point, the towers collapse in silence, before the Chamula chant resumes, leading into an orchestra’s theme to which the screen almost imperceptibly lightens. After another minute, an Arabic sura from the Qur’an appears on the gray background, followed by an English translation: “Does God’s light guide us or blind us?” In addition

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to creating associations with Icarus and the Tower of Babel (see “11’09”01: Presseheft” 22), Iñárritu generally questions, by this bilingual ending, the consequences of religious fervor or fundamentalism, regardless of which culture or confession they come from. Through the defamiliarization of the well-known images – a strategy adopted later by Michael Moore in his opening to Fahrenheit 9/11 14 – the director disrupts the numbing effect that these images have achieved through endless repetitions, forcing audiences into a fresh perspective on apparently welldigested events. In this gesture of multi-layered disruption, he also transforms the “terrorism of spectacle” (Baudrillard 30) structurally, into a fragmented audiovisual memorial of 9/11 which draws multiple connections (between American and Mexican, indigenous and colonial cultures) and raises questions rather than providing closure. Following the same idea of refusing to repeat well-known images, albeit much less experimentally, Sean Penn memorializes the terrorist attacks through reflection only. His short film symbolically begins with a close-up shot of withered flowers. An old widower and war veteran (as we can gather from pictures on his wall) is shown in a dark, small Manhattan condo as he performs the chores and routines of everyday life: shopping, vacuuming the floor, having dinner, shining his shoes, and watching daytime television. In his evident loneliness, he does not seem to notice his wife’s absence, as he talks to her incessantly and lays out a new dress for her on her bed every day. He deplores the lack of light in his life: “It’s getting too dark. There’s not enough light. That’s why your flowers are not doing well. They’re like me, you know. They need light to wake up. Right?” (11’09”01) One morning, at 9:16 a.m., the camera pans along his sleeping body to the window, right next to which the mute television set shows the burning towers of the World Trade Center. As the South Tower collapses on TV three quarters of an hour later, light comes into the room, and as we see the tower’s actual shadow reflected on the window and bedroom wall, we realize that the old man’s apartment is right across the street. The man finally wakes up in the sunlight that now reaches him, noticing that his flowers – blurry and surreal in the foreground – raise their heads and start blooming in fresh colors. Just as he turns around to share his happiness about the sudden light with his wife, he realizes that her bed is empty in the bright sunshine and starts crying. The camera withdraws, zooming out of the window to show the dirty wall of his building, on which another collapsing tower is reflected. In the _____________ 14

At the beginning of Moore’s film, the screen remains black, and we only hear the familiar sounds of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the shocked reactions of eyewitnesses in the streets of Manhattan.

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literal shadow of the World Trade Center, this short film suggests, an allegorical patriotic America is confined to an illusion after having suffered the personal losses that come with age. In denial of reality, it talks only to itself; imitating the same routines and words every day. Whereas the light of life eventually returns, it also enforces a confrontation with reality, demanding the sacrifice of giving up deceptive ideas. Severely criticized by Dave Kehr as “Mr. Penn’s perverse way of suggesting that every cloud has a silver lining”, and seen as a “pointless” case of “poetry of the ordinary” by Ty Burr (“Eye-opening”), this film actually casts a subtle but critical glance at both the visual memory of 9/11 and the United States’ unilateral policies. Shown only in reflection – as a shadow-play – the attack on the Trade Center becomes an echoed signifier, located at the unstable borderline between reality and fiction, while again – like Iñárritu’s strobe-light collage – refusing to admit closure. While Sean Penn’s contribution focuses on an American veteran’s life in Manhattan, lacking any obvious inter- or transnational references, its symbolic impact indeed provides an alternative approach to the sanctification of Ground Zero. The different perspectives in Brigand’s 11’09”01 thus clearly create a kaleidoscope of artistic approaches to 9/11 – not as a national tragedy, but as an event of worldwide impact. As the producer emphasizes, “[t]o evoke the planetary echo of this event, other than through these terrible images, it quickly became apparent to me that we had a duty of reflection” (“Artistic Producer’s Statement”). The filmic elements that attempt to bridge the gaps between these rather different approaches also focus on this ‘planetary echo,’ especially in the contexts of time and memory: before the opening credits we see a black map of the world, as on a radar screen, with partial clock faces ticking against a starry sky. All clocks are set to 48 minutes of different hours (which is not entirely accurate, since American Airlines flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46), when a flash appears in the topographic area of New York and the clocks melt, Dalílike, into the film’s title. Between the individual contributions, this map reappears, with each director’s country of origin lighting up, and with concentric circles emanating from this light. Of course, as much as the contributions suggest a universal community that shares an alternative memory of the attacks, this coherence is also ambiguous. First of all, a collage of short films has to follow different conventions of genre than a feature film by one director, naturally allowing for much more diversity in both form and content; and any comparison has to take these technical conditions into account. In addition, much of the coherence is created by the stylized world map (which, as Andreas Jahn-Sudmann critically notes,

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is redolent with military connotations 15 ), and thus by the producers rather than by the contributions themselves. Second, while Alain Brigand notes that “[t]he directors were given total freedom to respond. The only constraints were time, a maximum budget of $400,000 each and a commitment not to promote hate or violence or to attack peoples, religions or cultures” (qtd. in Riding), Jahn-Sudmann points out that the guideline – to draw connections to each director’s cultural background – provided a rather narrow framework: “Die ‘Vorgabe’ Brigands […], mit dem Film einen Bezug zu der eigenen Kultur herzustellen, ist derart invasiv, dass bestimmte Formen der kulturellen Reflexion und Narration von vornherein ausgeschlossen sind” (Jahn-Sudmann 128). In light of this criticism, one could wonder what perspectives would have been possible without the limits of an ‘invasive’ instruction. Yet even with these critical points in mind, the collection presents a pluralism of perspectives. Instead of celebrating discourses of national heroism, 11’09”01 involves precisely the “interconnections of identity, movement and change over and across th[e] narrow confines” of “territorial entity or a set of culturally held ideas” (7) that Russell Duncan and Clara Juncker see at the heart of transnationalism. Especially in the contributions by Sean Penn and Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ground Zero is de-territorialized and resituated beyond any national memory of 9/11.

“My home is not a place, it is people”: Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty Another quite different view on the patriotic aftermath of September 11, 2001 is expressed by Wim Wenders’ thirty-first feature film, Land of Plenty (2005). Condemned by critics for its too obvious message, its dogmatic approach to American politics, and its “groggy, music-infused aesthetic” (Gonzalez), this is a widely controversial film. “Wim Wenders has become no one’s idea of a frontline commentator on American social tectonics,” Michael Atkinson chides him in Village Voice, “but he keeps stepping up to bat, swinging with head full of jukebox noise, and whiffing. […] With [Land of Plenty’s] coda set at ground zero, Wenders has never seemed more of a tourist.” Quite on the contrary, I would argue that Wenders’ film, _____________ 15

“Damit nicht genug, dient als Rahmen der einzelnen Beiträge eine Weltkarte, auf der jeweils das Land und der Name des Filmemachers/der Filmemacherin, deren Beitrag folgen wird, erscheint, wobei die geographische Position wie ein Angriffsziel oder ein Katastrophenort (was natürlich ein kleiner Unterschied ist) visuell markiert scheint, wie überhaupt die ganze Landkarte so aussieht, als wäre sie das riesige Display des Militärs oder der NASA oder irgendeines Katastrophen-Hauptquartiers” (Jahn-Sudmann 121).

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despite a few weaknesses, does not, in fact, confirm America’s post-9/11 “tourism of history” (Sturken 9). It provides a transnational approach that dissevers the discourse of the sacred from the patriotic sphere and turns out to be less obvious in its messages than it may seem at first glance. Set in Los Angeles, the “hunger capital of the world” (Land of Plenty), the film tells the story of a rather unorthodox family reunion: Lana Swenson, a twenty-year-old Ohio-born girl who grew up in Africa with her missionary family, returns to the States from Tel Aviv to deliver a letter from her late mother to an uncle she has never met. This uncle, Paul Jeffries, is a deeply traumatized Vietnam veteran who spends his days in a low-tech surveillance van on the self-assigned lookout for terrorists. Through an alertness bordering on paranoia, he seems to be hot on the trail of a dangerous conspiracy: one of his suspects, a man wearing a turban, is frequently seen carrying large boxes of Borax, a cleaning detergent. While Paul tries to track down the potential terrorist cell, Lana tries to get in touch with him. A deeply religious girl, she stays at the Bread of Life mission in Los Angeles and works at the shelter’s food bank for the homeless. When Paul’s suspect, Hassan, visits the mission for a meal, he becomes the link between them, and a symbol of the film’s transnational ethics: when asked where he is from, he responds: “My home is not a place, it is people” – a sentence that Paul tellingly cannot make sense of. 16 At the climax of two separately woven tales of quest, Lana and Paul witness as Hassan is shot in the street. Following their different agendas of humanitarian and detective work, respectively (Lana believing that Hassan deserves a decent funeral, and Paul believing that he was executed by Al Qaida for failure in a larger scheme), they embark on a road trip together. As they return the man’s body to his brother Yusuf in Trona, CA, 17 the plot culminates in a series of revelations: Lana understands that Paul was deeply traumatized in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, and Paul’s conspiracy turns out to have been a sequence of harmless coincidences, as he realizes in a highly ironic scene. Entering a suspicious house in full combat gear (complete with night-vision goggles), he finds himself in an old lady’s bedroom, discovering that the Borax boxes – just like all the signifiers of a terrorist threat that seemed so unambiguous in their meaning – are empty, _____________ 16

17

When Lana repeats her conversation with Hassan to Paul, he wonders: “What the hell does that mean?” and provides a humorous illustration that his epistemological processes are not marked by excessive complexity: he says into his recorder, “My home is not a place, it is people. That means: his home… is people. Something like that.” Although at first glance but a small town in the desert, Trona is a highly symbolic place: a historical mining town bordering on Death Valley, it used to house one of the largest chemical plants of the area until it closed down in the 1990s, leaving thousands of people unemployed. It is a deserted and impoverished town today, mostly famous for its illegal production of synthetic drugs (see Rückerl).

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used for the general storage of the lady’s possessions. “You dress funny,” she tells him as she wakes up, “but I guess you could say the same thing about me” (Land of Plenty). The television plays George W. Bush’s May 2003 speech on the end of combat operations in Iraq (“Terrorists and their supporters have declared war on the United States of America. And war is what they got.”), causing her to complain that “For two months, no one has been able to fix this thing. I’ve been stuck on the same channel. I can only control the volume.” Hitting the TV set with but one blow of his hand, Paul changes the channel for her (and, figuratively, for himself and the nation) in the insight that things are not always what they seem. It appears, at first, that the allegorical meanings in Land of Plenty are indeed less than subtle: in Lana’s trusting, innocent, even naive character, we find Henry James’ ‘international theme’ reversed, while Paul evidently personifies what sociologist Barry Glassner has termed the “Culture of Fear.” 18 A devoted patriot, Paul has programmed his cell phone to play the national anthem, but he cautiously returns all calls from public pay phones. Like the protagonist of Sean Penn’s short film, he is a personification of a unilateral United States talking mostly to itself, monologically recording his observations with a tape recorder. When a police patrol stops him during an observation, the relativity of ‘suspicious activity’ becomes obvious: sleeping in his van, operating his own little chemical lab, and trusting only his assistant Jimmy, Paul could easily be a subversive cell himself. The current paranoid fear of others, Wenders’ film tells us, not only marks the return of the repressed (since it can be traced to the cycle of violence and counter-violence, as exemplified by the war in Vietnam), but it also leads the United States up the garden path, corrupting its original values of enlightenment, democracy, and cultural pluralism. In the twentieth century, industrialization and scientific progress have reduced the risks to U.S. American lives to a minimum, and yet the number of people suffering from anxiety and phobic neuroses has skyrocketed. Fear has become pathological, as Marc Siegel writes in False Alarm: “The natural dangers are no longer there, but the response mechanisms are still in place, and now they are turned on much of the time. We implode, turning our adaptive fear mechanism into a maladaptive panicked response” (16). The attacks of 9/11 played a decisive role in this development, and Ground Zero has become the launch pad for this new fear of the Other, both within the U.S. and beyond. After Hassan’s funeral in Land of Plenty, Lana and Paul illustrate this by bringing together their different percep_____________ 18

Diagnosing, even before 9/11, a widespread wave of unrealistic fears in the United States, Glassner notes that “[p]seudodangers represent further opportunities to avoid problems we do not want to confront, such as overcrowded roads and the superabundance of guns, as well as those we have grown tired of confronting” (7).

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tions of the World Trade Center’s destruction. Paul tells his niece that he emerged from Vietnam as the sole survivor of his unit when his helicopter was shot down. The nightmares had disappeared for a long time, he says, until 9/11: And then when that plane hit the tower, and the second one … but they were still there. And I was watching that shot of the New York skyline with these beautiful towers. They were burning inside, but they just kept holding on. Right there. I knew it was bad. Over 2,000 gallons of fuel, two 767s, but I thought they could handle it. They took the blow, they were standing strong. I thought: They’re refusing to fall. They’re too proud. But then … that dream just started coming back. (Land of Plenty)

Recounting his experience of the terrorist attacks, Paul summarizes his own trauma of war, allegorized in the towers. Although at first glance his reaction seems to confirm the notion of the innocent “homeland” being ambushed, it also contextualizes Ground Zero within a larger cycle of historical traumata, drawing international connections of violence and counter-violence from Vietnam to Manhattan. Likewise, Lana tells Paul about her own experience of the attacks, as she had to listen to people cheering in the streets of the West Bank. Paul is dismayed by this information, emphasizing that “[o]ver 3,000 civilians were killed on that day. They were innocent people,” to which Lana responds: “Yeah, and it’s their voices that I need to hear. Because I really don’t think that they’d want any more people killed in their name.” The letter from Lana’s mother – read by Paul in voice-over narration – microcosmically adds to this plea with the healing of the family, asking for forgiveness, solidarity and love across any “petty differences” (Land of Plenty). Following this twofold ethical appeal, uncle and niece eventually decide to travel on to New York and visit Ground Zero, passing – in the traditional iconography of the road movie – Las Vegas, Monument Valley, Truth or Consequences, the Midwest, and Washington, D.C. As David Laderman notes, the road movie’s journey is “coded as defamiliarization” and thus “suggests a mobile refuge from social circumstances felt to be lacking or oppressive in some way” (2), while it also traditionally affirms a “conservative subtext” (20). While the motif of social criticism is also taken up in Land of Plenty, the inversion of the genre’s traditional trajectory (from east to west) and temporal pattern (with the physical journey filling the entire movie instead of only the last four minutes) points to a significant modification of the genre. Instead of affirming the frontier myth of a classic American genre, these protagonists merge national and transnational experiences into a new understanding of human suffering, recoding the landscape through their microcosmic overcoming of familial differences and their focus on dialogue and understanding. Symbolically adding

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to this message, the flag that Paul has fastened to his van in Los Angeles is gradually dissolved by the wind, literally dismantling the patriotic points of departure. In the final scene, Paul and Lana stand at Ground Zero, substituting all former nationalist monologues (as symbolized by Paul’s recordings of his investigation) with a policy of listening to the Other: Lana: Paul: Lana: Paul: Lana:

You seem disappointed. I thought it’d be different. Like what? Something more. Not just a construction site. Let’s just be quiet. Let’s just try and listen.

The camera tilts up to the sky, and the scene is completed by Leonard Cohen’s title song, in which the lyrics emphasize once more the film’s overlap of the political and the transcendent: “For the innermost decision that we cannot but obey, for what’s left of our religion I lift my voice and pray: May the lights in the land of plenty shine on the truth some day” (Land of Plenty). Despite its open didacticism (for which the film was heavily criticized), this ending goes beyond a mere reiteration of the Trade Center Site as sacred ground. The aspects of healing – often infused in American memorial culture with patriotic and capitalist ideologies 19 – are clearly part of an alternative agenda here. While Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, for instance, warn against the tourist exploitation of what they call “Groundzeroland” (16-17), Wenders dissociates the process of healing from both the national and the heroic. “If George Bush is right that we should show patriotism by going on vacation and spending money,” Lentricchia and McAuliffe write, then visiting Groundzeroland is a patriotic act. The sublime power of American consumer culture to absorb and commodify even such a devastating blow as this transgressive act of destruction and murder is final proof of that culture’s fundamental indestructibility. […] Pose for a picture: mix disaster and death with stardom and beauty. Feel the scale. Absorb it. Go down in history. Move on. Understand it all. Find closure. (16-17)

In Land of Plenty, the final scene not only withholds the closure that Groundzeroland may promise, 20 but instead of proving “that culture’s _____________ 19

20

Marita Sturken has pointed out the ideological implications that accompany the ‘culture of healing’ in American cultural memory: the “culture of mourning and memory has converged with the concepts of healing and closure that are central to American national identity. American mythology clings tenaciously to the belief that one can always heal, move on, and place the past in its proper context, and do so quickly” (14). Moreover, “[t]his belief in the concept of healing is related to the dominance of U.S. consumer practices, in which consumerism is understood to be a kind of therapy” (14). Instead of the affirmative heroism that is celebrated in Stone’s World Trade Center, Paul’s uncertainty at Ground Zero is foregrounded here; and his feelings of unrest or disap-

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fundamental indestructibility,” it draws attention to the deep racial and economic rifts in American society – discourses often displaced from the memory of 9/11. While the film’s Christian values and particularly the final words and music first seem to suggest another version of the site’s sanctification, Wenders’ Ground Zero is actually far removed from Will Jimeno’s and Dave Karnes’ homogeneous visions of Christ in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. “As a Christian,” Wenders says in an interview, “I know no other option except to be against war and to have solidarity with the poor” (DW Staff). In his approach, religion is not a vehicle for nostalgia and patriotism, but a transnationally uniting force of political ethics. In Lana’s appeal to “listen,” Muslims like Yusuf and Hassan – falsely suspected of fundamentalism by fervent prosecutors, and subject to extreme forms of violence – are included in the memorial process. Just as Gayatri Spivak noted that in 2002, when “New York presented a memorial, European and military in the spectacularity or visuality of its culture of mourning, it could not not welcome the seven hijackers who lie in that ground into the economy of Nature” (90); Wenders reminds us of the universality of human suffering. “There is,” to quote Spivak again, “no apartheid in the transcendental” (90). Along these lines, this film not only criticizes the appalling poverty in one of the world’s richest countries, but it also questions, through Paul’s misguided patriotism, the policies of unilateralism, military hierarchies, and the “culture of fear” (Glassner). In addition to the variation of the road movie genre and the film’s intertextuality, 21 the film’s didacticism is balanced by many instances of subtle humor. In one scene, for example, when Paul’s van does not start, the camera zooms in on his bumper sticker, “United We Stand,” which takes on a situational double meaning (since Paul would certainly prefer “driving” to “standing”). 22 Unlike World Trade Center, which translates the healing of the core family into a patriotic quest for ‘truth,’ Lana’s and Paul’s reunion in Wenders’ film serves the idea of a larger, more inclusive family. The political ethics of Land of Plenty _____________ 21

22

pointment, caused by the “construction site,” are not simply glossed over by claims of authenticity. Wenders refers to a number of his own movies: in one scene, when Lana dances on the roof of the Bread of Life mission, we see a sign in the background explicitly referring to The Million Dollar Hotel – another Los-Angeles-based film of his from 2000. Likewise, the quest across the nation reminds us of previous road movies such as Paris, Texas or Until the End of the World; and the theme of transcendental dialogues is taken from Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close. Such multilateral visual connections abound: In another scene, the test tubes in the foreground of Paul’s “anti-terrorist” lab are humorously set off against Paul and Jimmy clinking beer bottles together in the background.

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is both transnational and pluralistic, and – again unlike in World Trade Center – entering quietly through the back door; through an email from Lana’s friend Yael, for instance, in which demonstrations against the Israeli wall being built on the border to Palestine are mentioned – and we learn that as many Israelis as Palestinians are protesting.

Visualizing Absence: Ground Zero Tomorrow “Remembering makes sense,” Udo Hebel writes in the prequel to this volume, “recollection entails interpretation, memory generates (re)constructive semiotic energy” (x). In these three films from the United States, France, and Germany, we find a wide and various range of possibilities for these processes of semiotic reconstruction. Especially through their translations of the imagines agentes of the World Trade Center’s destruction, recent films, as I have argued, are a crucial constituent in the memorialization of 9/11. They contribute remarkably different visual codes to the ideologically charged discourse of ‘Ground Zero’: While Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center confirms the construction of a new “homeland” – marked by historical innocence, heroic patriotism, and the healing of the nation – Alain Brigand’s and Wim Wenders’ approaches question this innocence and reject the transformation of the Lower Manhattan site into an ahistorical shrine. Spike Lee’s, Sean Penn’s and Wim Wenders’ allegorical approaches to the United States resituate the trauma of 9/11 within larger historical contexts, refusing to allow for Ground Zero to erase its semantic origins at Hiroshima and other sites of violence, and to displace the suffering of others. In this agenda their films conform to Gene Ray’s argument that [t]he return of Hiroshima from within this regressive moment of American patriotic excess at least helps us to see that the construction of a robust and durable ‘post-traditional’ cosmopolitanism will not be able to leap beyond national constraints, in some fantasy of a brave, wired world of open borders and free markets, but will first have to work through, slowly and painfully, the traumas inscribed in the very structures of national identity. (n. pag.)

Berndt Ostendorf, who looks critically at the concept of transnationalism, wondering whether “all this verbiage [is] merely window dressing and a reshuffling of signifiers, an ideological smoke screen, that calls for a rigorous political critique” (2), notes that “[t]ransnationalism presupposes antiessentialism, favors plurality, mobility, hybridity and favors margins or spaces in between” (19). Judged even by more skeptical standards, both Alain Brigand’s collection and Wim Wenders’ feature film are indeed transnational contributions to the memory of 9/11 – less by their obvi-

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ously international origins than by their multilateral structures and plots, their focus on dialogue, and their resistance to closure. Both Alejandro González Iñárritu’s bilingual warning against religious fervor and Wim Wenders’ return to the basic Christian ethics of compassion and caritas resituate the discourse of the ‘sacred ground’ within a universal framework and recover the spiritual – exploited for politicized narratives of redemption – from nationalist discourse. Furthermore, Iñárritu’s audiovisual montage and Sean Penn’s reflection of the attacks through shadows also disrupt the powerful “terrorism of spectacle” (Baudrillard 30) visually. On December 12, 2008, a decisive step was taken at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum’s construction site: the Vesey Street Stair Remnant, known as the ‘Survivors’ Stairs,’ has been moved into the museum as its first historic artifact. So far, as Marita Sturken notes, “[t]he narratives that have been layered on Ground Zero reveal the complex convergence of political agendas and grief in this space, as if, somehow, the production of new spatial meanings will provide a means to contain the past, deal with the grief, and make sense of the violent events that took place there” (168). The memorial of which this museum will be part, designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, will provide material complements to these layered narratives. Aptly titled ‘Reflecting Absence,’ it will center around two pools – the ‘footprints’ of the twin towers – featuring the largest human-built waterfalls in the United States, and a ribbon of names. “The enormity of this space,” the architects write in their statement, “and the multitude of names that form this endless ribbon underscore the vast scope of the destruction. Standing there at the water’s edge, looking at a pool of water that is flowing away into an abyss, a visitor to the site can sense that what is beyond this curtain of water and ribbon of names is inaccessible” (Arad and Walker). Through the design of the footprints, the memorial will engage with the past, inscribing the events into the space of Lower Manhattan, but without allowing either for an exclusively national framework, nor for processes of sanctification. In a time when this material site of commemoration in New York City is still under construction, all of the films addressed above – together with the plethora of photographs, obituaries, novels, plays, poems, and works of art – serve as significant temporary memorials, which re-envision the attacks and their aftermath. The World Trade Center site, as all these films illustrate, is clearly a “glocal” space in Roland Robertson’s sense (see 28) – a place in which the specific and the universal overlap. As most of these filmic memorials demonstrate, the cultural memory of the ‘glocal’ site requires transnational interpretations and angles, to come to terms with an event that reverberated around the world, and the far-reaching consequences of which have necessitated more, not less, inter- and transnational

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dialogue. As all of the celluloid recoveries of the ruins suggest, it might be wiser to start out from the ‘zero’ in Ground Zero than to perpetuate the illusion of historical closure.

Works Cited Arad, Michael, and Peter Walker. “Reflecting Absence.” World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. N.d. 30 Nov. 2008 . “Artistic Producer’s Statement.” 11’09”01: September 11. Dir. Sean Penn, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ken Loach, et al. Prod. Alain Brigand. World Cinema, 2002. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999. Atkinson, Michael. “The End of Relevance: Wenders Whiffs at Social Commentary.” The Village Voice 4 Oct. 2005. 20 Nov. 2008 . Baer, Ulrich. Introduction. 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. New York: New York UP, 2002. Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. New York: Times Books, 1995. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2002. “Building a National Tribute.” National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. 4 Oct. 2008 <www.national911memorial.org/site/PageServer?pagename=building_home>. Burr, Ty. “Eye-opening, if Inconsistent, Views of Sept. 11.” The Boston Globe 2 Sept. 2003. 8 Dec. 2008 . —. Rev. of World Trade Center. The Boston Globe 9 Aug. 2006. 3 Oct. 2008 . Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. Denby, David. “On Duty: Rev. of World Trade Center.” The New Yorker 21 Aug. 2006. 3 Oct. 2008 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/21/060821crci_cinema>. Dick, Bernard F. Anatomy of Film. 4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Introduction: Something Lost – Film after 9/11.” Film and Television after 9-11. Ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. 1-28. Duncan, Russell, and Clara Juncker. Introduction. Transnational America: Contours of Modern US Culture. Ed. Russell Duncan and Clara Juncker. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2004. 7-10. DW Staff. “Attacking the ‘Land of Plenty.’” Deutsche Welle Online. 12 Oct. 2004. 17 May 2009 . 11’09”01: September 11. Dir. Sean Penn, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ken Loach, et al. Prod. Alain Brigand. World Cinema, 2002.

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“11’09”01: Presseheft.” Movienet Film GmbH 2002. 15 Dec. 2008 . Fluck, Winfried. “Film and Memory.” Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. American Studies: A Monograph Series 101. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 213-29. Frodon, Jean-Michel. “Eleven Filmmakers Deal with 9/11 Shockwaves.” World Press Review 49.11 (November 2002). WorldPress.Org. 15 Oct. 2008 . Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Gonzalez, Ed. Rev. of Land of Plenty. Slant Magazine 8 Oct. 2005. 2 Nov. 2008 . Hebel, Udo J. “Introduction.” Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. American Studies: A Monograph Series 101. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. ix-xxi. Irsigler, Ingo, and Christoph Jürgensen. “For Whom the Bell Tolls: Nine Eleven im amerikanischen Dokumentar- und Spielfilm.” Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001. Ed. Ingo Irsigler and Christoph Jürgensen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 251-75. Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas. “9/11 im fiktionalen Film: 11’09”01 und September.” Narrative des Entsetzens: Künstlerische, mediale und intellektuelle Deutungen des 11. September 2001. Ed. Matthias N. Lorenz. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. 117-36. Jimeno, Will. “Audio Commentary.” World Trade Center. Dir. Oliver Stone. Perf. Nicholas Cage, Michael Peña, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Paramount, 2006. Kehr, Dave. Rev. of 11’09”01. The New York Times 18 July 2003. 8 Dec. 2008. . Kennedy, Lisa. “Finding Common Ground in Rubble at Ground Zero.” The Denver Post 8 Aug. 2006. 3 Oct. 2008. . Knörer, Ekkehard. “Alle Wörter sind schon da.” TAZ 7 Oct. 2004. 15 Feb. 2006. . Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: U of Texas P, 2002. Land of Plenty. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Michelle Williams and John Diehl. Kinowelt, 2004. Langewiesche, William. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. New York: North Point P, 2002. Lentricchia, Frank, and Jody McAuliffe. Crimes of Art and Terror. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Liss, Rebecca. “Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center Fiction: How the Rescue Really Happened.” Slate 9 Aug. 2006. 17 May 2009 <www.slate.com/id/2147350/>. —. “An Unlikely Hero.” Slate Magazine 10 Sept. 2002. 4 Oct. 2008 . Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond. 30th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Nicodemus, Katja. “Der europäische Freund.” Die Zeit 7 Oct. 2004. 15 Feb. 2006 . “Once a Mystery, 9/11 Rescuer Unmasks Self amid Publicity for New Film.” USA Today 15 Aug. 2006. 3 Oct. 2008

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. Ostendorf, Berndt. “Transnationalism or the Fading of Borders?” Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere. Ed. Berndt Ostendorf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2002. 1-21. Pease, Donald E. “9/11: When Was ‘American Studies after the New Americanists’?” Boundary 2 33.3 (Fall 2006): 73-101. Ray, Gene. “Ground Zero: Hiroshima Haunts 9/11.” Alternative Press Review 18 May 2003. 29 Mar. 2008 . Riding, Alan. “An American Tragedy Viewed Through 11 Foreign Prisms.” The New York Times 9 Sept. 2002. 16 Oct. 2008 . Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” Global Modernities. Ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson. London: Sage, 1995. 25-44. Rückerl, Yoko. “Die Stadt, die sich fallen lässt.” Der Tagesspiegel 8 Sept. 2008. 2 Dec. 2008 <www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/ausstellungen/Tobias-Zielony-DrogenTrona; art2652,2610003>. Schwab, Jan Tilman. “Amid the Chaos Extraordinary Choices: Zum Selbstmordmotiv in Filmen und Diskursen über den 11. September 2001.” Nine Eleven: Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001. Ed. Ingo Irsigler and Christoph Jürgensen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 277-312. Scott, A. O. “A Desire to Heal the Rifts in a Troubled Landscape.” The New York Times 12 Oct. 2005. 15 Oct. 2008 . Siegel, Marc. False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005. Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri. “Terror: A Speech after 9-11.” Boundary 2 31.1 (Summer 2004): 81111. Spiegelman, Art. “Re: Covers.” 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11. Ed. Ulrich Baer. New York: New York UP, 2002. 284-86. Stone, Oliver. “Director’s Commentary.” World Trade Center. Dir. Oliver Stone. Perf. Nicholas Cage, Michael Peña, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Paramount, 2006. Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. The 25th Hour. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Barry Pepper. Buena Vista, 2002. Travers, Peter. Rev. of World Trade Center. The Rolling Stone. 3 Aug. 2006. 3 Oct. 2008 . World Trade Center. Dir. Oliver Stone. Perf. Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Paramount, 2006.

(Re)Visions of Progress: Chicago’s World’s Fairs as Sites of Transnational American Memory ASTRID BÖGER

Chicago has been the site of three world’s fairs in the course of its relatively brief history, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, and finally the 1992 Age of Discovery Fair. Whereas the former two rank among the most successful as well as best remembered events in the history of world’s fairs, the latter fell apart during its advanced planning stages and is all but forgotten today. This essay will outline the significance of these fairs in their local, national, and transnational contexts. Generally speaking, all three events were intended as ‘Time-Keepers of Progress,’ to invoke President McKinley’s famous dictum. But beyond merely gauging the state of technological development, progress as performed at these fairs was also intended to stake the United States’ emerging claim to power vis-à-vis the rest of the world. By projecting the ‘timely’ advancement toward world leadership even as they commemorated the past, the world’s fairs under discussion here were moreover vehicles for appropriating world history from a U.S. American vantage point, and thereby constitute important sites of transnational memory formation. At the same time, they were invariably conceived as idealized representations of national memory, as well. Chicago’s three world’s fairs thus show how American cultural memory has been conceived, performed and revised – or elided, as it were, in the case of the 1992 fair – within the context of transnational memory formation over the course of one hundred years.

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as a Site of Transnational American Memory In terms of its immediate as well as long-term impact on North American culture, Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition has been acknowledged by critics as “the most elaborate and extensive public exhibition produced by the United States in the nineteenth century. It was also, unquestionably,

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one of the greatest world’s fairs of all time” (Badger, “Chicago 1893” 116). Even though it is still revered as one of the city’s greatest achievements, the fair had originally been conceived against considerable odds. Not only was the city still recovering from the devastating fire of 1871 when the initial planning began; moreover, America was hard-hit by a severe economic depression during the years leading up to it, which made funds acquisition an even much greater challenge than usual. Still, Chicago was chosen over its main competitor New York City as the site of a world’s fair that would celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing on American soil and simultaneously outdo – or at least match – the grand Exposition Universelle which had captivated Europe in 1889, and whose most visible remnant, the Eiffel Tower, is still one of the most iconic structures in Paris even today (see Findling, Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs 13). In order to create what would be recognized as one of the most memorable spectacles of the late nineteenth century, whose legacy would reach far into the twentieth if not the present, its chief of construction, Daniel Hudson Burnham, favored a particularly impressive building scheme consisting of an idealized, quasi-urban Beaux Arts environment also known as the ‘Court of Honor’ (fig. 1). A magical City upon a Hill, the site became more popularly known as ‘White City’ for its striking appearance strongly suggestive of architectural as well as moral purity – especially when compared to the real urban environment neighboring the site frequently experienced as chaotic and even dangerous. And indeed, for six months in 1893 the eyes of many people around the world were upon U.S. America nominally commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landfall – one year later than originally planned, to allow for more publicity and funding efforts – but in fact celebrating the present, pristine incarnation of Winthrop’s vision scenically located on Lake Michigan some seven miles south of the hustle and bustle of downtown Chicago and seemingly representing the pinnacle of human achievement. Importantly, however, unlike the previous U.S. American world’s fairs (i.e. the 1853 Exhibition of the Industries of all Nations in New York also known as the New York Crystal Palace and the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia), the vision of the World’s Columbian Exposition did not limit itself to America; instead, as its official name suggests, it strove to include if not unite the whole world, though from a U.S. American vantage point and as part of its increasingly ambitious, transnational enterprise.

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Fig. 1. Charles D. Arnold, Grand Basin and Court of Honor looking west from the Peristyle, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library.

No other structure at the fair lived up to this aim more effectively than the imposing Beaux Arts ensemble of the Court of Honor, where awe-struck visitors entered the fair site. As Findling explains: Five massive neo-classical buildings, with cornices at a uniform height, painted a dazzling white, and supremely ornamented, surrounded the formal Basin. At the east end of the waterway stood Daniel Chester French’s 65-foot tall, gilded Statue of the Republic, and at the west end was Frederick MacMonnies’ Columbian Fountain, an allegorical representation of the discovery that the fair was celebrating. (Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs 18)

Thus framed by imposing allegorical statuary, the Court of Honor provided numerous grand vistas from various heights and vantage points. From wherever they looked, however, visitors were presented with uncannily familiar sights, as several structures in the ensemble recalled wellknown national memory sites including the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. and the Statue of Liberty in New York City (see Miller 491). These structures, however, were placed side by side with buildings reminiscent of European architecture of ancient times (e.g. the Peristyle or

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open colonnade surrounding the interior court on its eastern end) and the Renaissance, resulting in what Edward Wolner has termed an illusionary “architecture of pathos.” Denounced by only a few critics as fake or even dangerous (most notably by architect Louis Sullivan, who vehemently criticized it as hopelessly backward and possibly damaging to the urban modernism Chicago was becoming known for at the time), the Court of Honor ensemble was on the whole exuberantly received by citizens of the United States (see Badger, Great American Fair; Burg). While one can only surmise why U.S. Americans – unlike many European visitors, interestingly enough (see Lewis 179-81) – were so enamored with long outdated European building styles, one should not make the mistake of merely focusing on the imitative aspect of the White City architecture. As Donald Miller argues: These buildings might have been imitations of the ancients […] but many people reported feeling a surge of “Americanism” on entering the Court of Honor and gazing upon architectural symbols of the country’s greatness. They saw the architecture as a return not to the Rome of the Caesars but to the chaste classicism of Thomas Jefferson, “a return to our better selves.” (Miller 491)

The formal architecture of the Court of Honor was readily embraced by most – perhaps primarily on an affective level – as an expression of U.S. American national culture, not least because of certain individual structures that recalled existing monuments to the celebrated national experience. At the same time, the entire ensemble – via its use of Columbian symbolism, as represented by the central Columbian Fountain, for example – gestured beyond the national experience toward transnational memory formation. Through its calculated pastiche of different layers of cultural history, including ancient Greece and Rome, the (Italian) Renaissance as well as the late 19th century when the World’s Columbian Exposition was staged, the Court of Honor exuded a sense of pathos which was by and large decoded in national and patriotic terms. The memorialization of the Columbian voyage and its meaning for both the Old and New World was thus recast in transnational terms and Americanized as a result, which was simultaneously the greatest accomplishment and arguably the most important legacy of the exposition. Given its Columbian theme of transcultural encounters, it is not surprising that great efforts were made when it came to representing racial and ethnic otherness at the exposition, in turn indicative of prevailing racial attitudes as well as a predominance of hegemonic values based on Anglo-Saxon culture. In particular, the Columbian Exposition pioneered in its use of anthropological and ethnographic exhibits, and helped establish academic approaches to studying ancient and foreign cultures in North America, among other things, by strengthening the role of the

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Smithsonian Institution at the fair as the central site of U.S. American memory formation. “So pervasive was the opportunity to study anthropology at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” writes Robert Rydell, that Otis T. Mason, curator of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology since 1884, exclaimed: “Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the World’s Columbian Exposition was one vast anthropological revelation. Not all mankind were there, but either in persons or pictures their representatives were.” (Rydell, All the World’s a Fair 55)

Fig. 2. The Werner Company, Indian Chief and Squaw, Dept. of Prehistoric Anthropology, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893.

Among the most interesting exhibits in this regard was the Smithsonian Institution’s display in the U.S. Government Building, put together under the directorship of Frederic W. Putnam, head of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, and with assistance from Franz Boas, among others. The guiding idea behind the exhibit was to “reflect life in America at the time Columbus landed,” according to Rydell. This was achieved through the use of life-size mannequins of Native Americans dressed in traditional costumes and shown “working at typical tasks in their natural environments” (Rydell, All the World’s a Fair 58). Not only were the resulting displays often indicative of an underlying racial hierarchy according to which ‘races’ deemed inferior were destined to become extinct because they did not fit into the social Darwinist scheme of racial progress then en vogue; moreover, they also served the larger aim of memorializing culture, in this case, by relegating the ethnic other to some prehistoric past. This is poignantly illustrated by the photograph of a glass case from an exhibit in the U.S. Government Building displaying an “Indian Chief and Squaw” according to its caption

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(fig. 2). On the far right, one can recognize a label identifying this case as belonging to the “Department of Prehistoric Anthropology,” which creates a striking contrast with the following text accompanying the image originally reproduced in the official Portfolio of Photographs of the World’s Fair in 1894: These figures are picturesque types of the valiant Sioux nation, the most important branch of the great Indian family of Dakotas. The warrior is the indomitable chief “Red Cloud,” erewhile the ally of Sitting Bull and other stubborn foes of this Government in the Northwest. There is some pathos in the fact that his effigy here serves to illustrate a lesson in ethnography. The Sioux are now settled mostly in South Dakota and Nebraska. Forced by the Chippewas south and west, they made cession to the United States, in 1837, of all their lands east of the Mississippi, and in 1851 those in Minnesota. For all these lands annuities were promised them, but were generally long in arrears, while the Indians became demoralized by the introduction of whisky and the crookedness of Government agents. In 1862 a fierce war was the result, which cost the American people 1,000 lives and $40,000,000 to bring to a settlement. A portion of the tribe settled down near Yankton and developed into industrious and peaceful farmers. A less tractable element returned to Northern Dakota, where, under Sitting Bull, they again broke out in war during 1876, the conflict being chiefly memorable for the disaster on the Little Big Horn in which Custer and his command were annihilated. The war was over in a few months, but Sitting Bull had taken refuge in Canada. (n.p.)

Regarding this explanatory note, it is surprising how admiringly the “valiant Sioux nation” is described considering that according to the text the represented “picturesque types” had been allies of Sitting Bull, one of the fiercest enemies of the U.S. Government during the Indian Wars, and who famously defeated Colonel Custer and his army at Little Big Horn in 1876. Furthermore, when keeping in mind the then-recent date of that conflict, its (especially to U.S. Americans) traumatic outcome and also the fact that the Indian Wars were not yet over in 1893, it is curious to say the least that representations of native life such as this one were put in the department of prehistory. Apparently this kind of display of racial otherness served not only to preserve native ways for anthropological purposes, but was also a form of memorialization which finally surrendered the natives (or more precisely, those unwilling to be absorbed into the cultural mainstream, as “industrious and peaceful farmers”) to ‘prehistory’ where, by implication, they were turned into lifeless specimens of a bygone culture attracting the curious gaze of mostly amateur anthropologists (in this context it seems significant that this particular style of displaying natives with mannequins became the preferred mode adopted by most natural history museum in North America around this time, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the latter being a direct outcome of the 1893 world’s fair as well as a continuation of its exhibitionary practices).

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Although the presentation itself and also its intended effect is obviously rather different from the “architecture of pathos” reflected by the Court of Honor ensemble, one can still recognize a related attempt at creating a transnational American memory site likely to evoke in contemporary audiences feelings of Americanism. In the case of the anthropology exhibit, such an affective response was created in the face of the racial other formerly perceived as a threatening presence, but now safely relegated to prehistoric memory via equally life-like and life-less displays of ‘Indianness,’ which were becoming a primary projection field for collective fantasies of cross-racial nostalgia at the time (see Hollweg 79-82; Fluck 76) and were appropriately housed by the largest and most important repository of national U.S. American memory, the Smithsonian Institution. By thus memorializing and thereby containing native cultures, any painful residual memories of shameful defeat and national trauma were equally shifted to a remote past, in turn facilitating untrammeled national identity formation from the perspective of the late nineteenth century observer constructed as the victor of a certain chapter of United States history. Such a privileged position vis-à-vis history cast as triumphant progress toward national unity, however, was unavailable to members of the largest minority population at the time, namely African Americans. A well-known fact is the near-exclusion of black leadership in the fair, as are the differences between Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, both famous civil rights advocates avant la lettre, when it came to responding to this problem. Douglass, in brief, was in favor of black representation at a special ‘Colored People’s Day’ offered by the fair management to accommodate black demands for representation at the fair, whereas Wells was vehemently opposed to such a plan as she felt it was condescending and possibly even harmful to blacks. In the end, the spectacle which became known as ‘Jubilee Day’ took place on August 25 and did, in fact, divide the black population. Douglass, however, made use of the opportunity to address white America with the following remarks: “Men talk of the Negro Problem. There is no Negro Problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.” By referring to a highly popular exhibit of a Dahomeyan (West African) village nearby (see fig. 3), he continued: “We have come out of Dahomey into this. Measure the Negro, but not by the standard of the splendid civilization of the Caucasian. Bend down and measure him – from the depths out of which he has risen.” (Rydell 53)

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Fig. 3. Charles D. Arnold, A Group of Dahomeyans, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library.

The depicted Dahomey or Fon people were considered to be representative of the lowest level of civilization, according to the evolutionary scale at work throughout the fair, which was emphasized by their partial nudity and also the ritualistic performance of a war dance suggesting cannibalism to fascinated contemporary audiences (Böger, “Envisioning the Nation” 126). Given its perceived primitivism and also the fact that this live display ranged among the few representations of blackness at the fair, it is not surprising that it was highly controversial, particularly in the eyes of African Americans including Douglass’. Against this background, it is all the more remarkable that Douglass insisted in his speech on comparing African American accomplishments to the “depths out of which he has risen” (Rydell 53), which he located in a West African past constructed as savage. By appropriating transnational memory-turned-spectacle of racial otherness and favorably comparing African Americans to that spectacle Douglass, while shying away from invoking notions of racial equality, which would not have been acceptable to most members of the ‘splendid civilization’ at the time, nonetheless aims to raise Americans’ awareness of the impressive cultural trajectory of African Americans. Significantly, he does so by purposefully contrasting African American culture, at a time when it became possible for some African Americans like Douglass to move up

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the social scale, with a group of Africans perceived not just as other, but as totally alien to mainstream America. Faced with the near-absence of actual representations of African American achievements at the fair, Douglass thus opted for using a particular representation of supposedly primitive black culture – and one he himself detested at that – as a standard to gauge African American progress in order to give it visibility after all, albeit indirectly and under adverse circumstances, in an act that could perhaps be described as ersatz memory formation from the marginalized perspective of African Americans. When re-evaluating the cultural achievement of the World’s Columbian Exposition over a century later, it is easy to dismiss its implicit racial, ethnic, class and gender biases and concomitant marginalization of voices belonging to the respective minorities. In defense of its intellectual legacy, though, it is worth noting that the exposition pioneered with the addition of a series of about twenty conferences called the World’s Congress Auxiliary, whose motto was “Not Matter, But Mind: Not Things, But Men” and which offered a transnational space for scholars and activists from around the world to debate such diverse subjects as African liberation, temperance, bookbinding and photography, among many others. The two best known congresses by far were the World’s Parliament of Religions and the meeting of the American Historical Association. Especially regarding the latter, however, one should not miss the specifically U.S. American concerns negotiated, such as the question of expansion and its geographical, historical, and ideological bounds as delineated by Frederick Jackson Turner in his well-known speech presented at the congress titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” A seminal moment in transnational American memory formation, Turner’s text famously argues that the Western frontier has shaped U.S. American culture and mentality and that new frontiers would have to be found after the ‘closure’ of the old one. The Columbian Exposition can in fact be regarded as an idealized vision of such a new frontier, as its subtext was the justification of overseas expansion preferably via transnational trade. Once unified behind the common cause of overseas expansion, and with an eye toward the exigencies of the United States’ trajectory as outlined by Turner, U.S. America entered into what is arguably still its most imperial phase in history (see Kaplan and Pease), culminating in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and leading to the annexation of the Philippines and other territories in the Pacific region. A century later and seeing straight through its white veneer of neo-classical refinement, novelist Richard Powers exposes the expansionist phase the exposition inaugurated and symbolized:

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Clear to everyone, this spectacular assemblage of fake Beaux Arts buildings formed a great world capital calling out for an empire. America had her eye on economies of scale. Fruit, minerals, spices, tea, rubber, guano: a growing appetite for raw goods had left her chafing at her borders, snatching up those islands that the Wilkes expedition had charted for this very reason, a half century before. And even sooner than Imperial Chicago would have predicted, Illinois boys found themselves fighting Filipino guerillas and opening China’s commercial door by force of arms. (249)

To conclude, the World’s Columbian Exposition indeed symbolized a “great world capital” representing a simulated version of world history remembered from the U.S. American vantage point, as well as an emerging transnational mission vis-à-vis the future. As Henry Adams famously remarked in his Education, “Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there” (287-88).

The 1933 Century of Progress Exposition and the Incorporation of Transnational American Memory In his seminal book The Incorporation of America Alan Trachtenberg discusses the White City in terms of the emerging corporate culture it symbolized, but it took another forty years before the Century of Progress Exposition achieved the full-fledged incorporation of U.S. American culture in the modernist shape of Chicago’s second world’s fair spectacle. Inadvertently situated in the middle of another ‘great’ depression, the Century of Progress Exposition had a twofold aim: One, it was intended as a centennial celebration of the founding of Chicago and devoted many exhibits to the history of the “city of the century” (Miller) on Lake Michigan, which had turned into the most important urban area in the Midwest in the course of only one hundred years. Moreover, the fair was also a welcome occasion to more generally celebrate scientific and technological progress made within the same time span. Like the World’s Columbian Exposition before, the Century of Progress Exposition thereby intertwined the local with the national and, indeed, international level into one commemorative event organized, in this case, around the upbeat theme of scientific and industrial progress. From the start, more so than any previous U.S. American fair, the planning of the Century of Progress Exposition was based on a close collaboration of industry, science and the state. This was even reflected by the board of directors itself with oilman Rufus G. Dawes as chairperson and Lenox R. Lohr, a former military officer, as general manager of the fair (Findling, “Chicago” 268). The National Research council also con-

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tributed in an advisory role in order to insure that the exhibits reflect the state of the art of pure and applied sciences and generally cast a positive light on the future of the United States hinging on technological progress. The fair’s motto: “Science Finds; Industry Applies; Man Conforms,” (Rydell et al. 136) further testifies to the technological utopia propagated at the Century of Progress fair while also uncomfortably registering the rise of totalitarian rhetoric elsewhere – a clear indication that transnational mega events such as world’s fairs are always competitions between nations but also ideological systems, which can only be properly understood when seen in dialogue with each other (see Schivelbusch 129-68). In its attempt to find sufficient funds to stage the fair, the exposition board was forced to adopt a new scheme in order to cut costs and shift responsibilities to the private sector instead of relying on government subsidies. Hence, unlike at previous fairs, where exhibits were organized thematically and assembled in large groups according to certain, closely supervised selection criteria, for the 1933 fair, industrial corporations were invited to create their own, separate pavilions for independent exhibits. Born out of necessity, this scheme proved very successful and was adopted at later world expositions as well and is still in place today. Among other things, it naturally favors large corporations able and willing to afford the expense. As Findling explains, “industrial giants such as General Motors and Sears, Roebuck and Company were willing to pay to have their own pavilions because of the highly favorable publicity that would be generated” (“Chicago” 269). And whereas only nine industrial companies had set up individual exhibits at the 1893 exposition, in 1933 twenty corporations were represented with their own pavilions (Rydell, World of Fairs 122). As a result, industrial and technological progress appeared more desirable than ever – as did its material analogues, the concrete products displayed at the fair. As Rydell argues, “the Chicago fair and each of its successors became theaters of operation for massive public relations campaigns to make the future seem unimaginable apart from the modernizing influence of American corporations” (World of Fairs 122). Not surprisingly, the resulting pavilions were in essence built advertisements for the companies behind them, as in the example of the Chrysler Pavilion below:

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Fig. 4. Hedrich Blessing, The Chrysler Building, Century of Progress Exposition, 1933.

When designing the fair, overwhelmingly positive memories of the 1893 events were still present, and a conscious decision was made to use a different site and architectural scheme in order to preclude grounds for unfavorable comparison. Therefore, but also quite simply to develop the area in question, a site just south of Chicago’s downtown ‘Loop’ was chosen, or more precisely “a 427-acre strip of land, seldom wider than a quarter of a mile, that stretched 3 miles from Twelfth Street down to Thirty-Ninth Street,” as Findling explains (“Chicago” 270). Given space restrictions, it was not possible or even desirable to create a unified layout as in 1893. Instead, pavilions were placed irregularly, and set designer Joseph Urban was hired to develop a color scheme that would provide a sense of order and orientation to visitors (see Findling, “Chicago” 271). Toward this end, Urban devised an elaborate decorative scheme of bright colors and special light effects, making great use of indirect lighting as was customary in Hollywood studios at the time; the image of the dramatically lit Chrysler pavilion above being a good example of the resulting, rather spectacular aesthetic effect. Apart from the innovative decorative scheme, the fair also introduced a new architectural style, which marked the forceful emergence of modernism in the United States, thereby purposefully obliterating what was considered all too traditional or simply old. As Rydell notes, exposition trustee Dr. Allen Diehl Albert insisted that

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the exposition’s architecture break with neoclassicism and offer ‘proof of courage and the spirit of progress.’ What that meant […] was that buildings would be ‘designed to create an effect based primarily on usefulness. New elements of construction, the products of science and industry, would be the vehicles of achievement.’ The structures, in other words, would reflect what historian David Nye has aptly termed the spirit of corporate modernism. (World of Fairs 123)

In more concrete terms, the new brand of corporate modernism consisted of streamlined structures influenced by art deco and Bauhaus principles then becoming tantamount to urban modernism in America. Importantly, the Century of Progress fair was thus not primarily a public works effort for the city of Chicago hard-hit by the depression. Rather, it served as an experimental laboratory for architecture and industrial design – all the more so as the site was very much an integral part of the city’s downtown area, where modernist sky-scrapers and other innovative building projects were being envisioned and constructed at the same time (in this regard, it seems noteworthy that several architects worked on projects at the fair as well as outside of it, including Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, who would later found the influential, Chicago-based architectural firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (see Findling, “Chicago” 270). One has to remember, however, that the urban visions proffered at the Century of Progress Exposition were directly connected to big corporations and their market-driven profit motive. The implications of this change of direction inaugurated in 1933, which has greatly influenced every world’s fair since, cannot be overestimated. Put simply, whereas the world expositions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries functioned primarily as educational sites commemorating the national experience within a transnational setting, the later fairs – even the term ‘exposition’ became unfashionable in America after 1933 – served primarily as advertisements for large corporations aiming for a global market and, moreover, as tourist attractions. For even though it was so squarely oriented toward the future, the Century of Progress Exposition was also an important site of memory formation, where history was preferably rendered as entertaining spectacle targeting tourists both from America and abroad. It thus commemorated seminal events in the foundational history of Chicago, for example, with a “reconstruction of Fort Dearborn and the cabin of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first person to settle in the Chicago area, whose black ancestry provided a focal point for some mild protest against racial discrimination,” as Findling notes (“Chicago” 272). Another special ‘commemorative’ event was the end of Prohibition, which was celebrated with free beer and sandwiches on November 8 and ingeniously dubbed Personal Responsibility Day (Findling, “Chicago”274-75), and which obviously had nearuniversal popular appeal and furthermore added a corporeal dimension to U.S. American memory formation.

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However, among the fair’s biggest crowd-pleasers was an exhibit titled “The World a Million Years Ago,” which featured mechanized, moving dioramas, among others, of “lifelike dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals” (Findling, “Chicago” 272) and which provided the sort of state of the art visual entertainment that visitors had come to expect at U.S. American world’s fairs and beyond, mainly via Hollywood’s fabrications of visual spectacle as popular entertainment very much in its heyday at the time. Thanks to such new visual technologies and their successful exploitation in the United States as well as abroad, world history was beginning to acquire a distinctly American look and, conversely, cultural memory became truly transnational as a result. A particularly good example of the successful merging of U.S. American memory with corporate and increasingly global interests represented at the fair was the use of a “mechanical Indian named Pontiac [at the General Motors Building], who answered visitor’s questions about automobile production” (Rydell et al. 82). By the 1930s, representation of native Americans had become a marketing gimmick exploiting (not only) U.S. Americans’ infatuation with all things native so long as they were removed from reality and safely contained in the realm of popular entertainment. In general, popular rather than more rarefied branches of culture moved into the limelight in Chicago in 1933, though this was clearly not to everyone’s liking. Europeans were especially piqued at the board’s suggestion “that foreign exhibits be designed to attract American tourists rather than display scientific progress or industrial products,” which was considered the domain of U.S. American corporations. Only when the Belgian Village became a huge success did “other nations […] construct their own model villages, featuring typical food, drink, and entertainment” (Findling, “Chicago” 272, 275). In other words, The Century of Progress Exposition paved the way – and created considerable popular demand – for environments such as Disney World’s Epcot Center (though the latter was not actually built until the early 1980s) introducing tourists to a particular U.S. American version of world cultures, thereby creating another important site of transnational American memory formation. The combination of tourist spectacle and the performance of global culture was also the success formula of many of the live entertainment shows staged at the fair, a case in point being Howard Tooley’s World’s Fair Follies, a popular show that featured a Miss Louise Litten, “The World’s Fair Miss America” (fig. 5) according to a promotional announcement (see Lytton Study Group website).

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Fig. 5. World’s Fair Follies with Miss America, Direct from her own Theater on the Midway at a Century of Progress, Chicago, 1933.

The accompanying advertisement emphasizes the universal appeal of the show as follows: Everybody will want to see MISS AMERICA, and her World’s Fair Revue – to get a glimpse of A Century of Progress scenically as well as entertainingly expressed. You see pictured acts that played in Old Mexico, the Streets of Paris, the Blue Ribbon Casino, Hollywood at the Fair, and the open air circus – the scenes will take you right on the Midway and other places made famous at a Century of Progress. Don’t Wait – Act Now (Lytton Study Group website, emphasis original)

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Throughout the text, there is an interesting slippage between such visual and, more often than not, voyeuristic terms as “see,” “glimpse,” “pictured acts,” and “scenes,” which are adroitly attached to the Miss America pageant prominently featured at Chicago’s world’s fair and produce the overall suggestion of American popular culture as an open invitation to “everybody” i.e. the world to enjoy, notwithstanding the rather obvious national and gender bias of the event. Regarding the promotional poster above, it is especially noteworthy that the central female figure – most likely Miss Litten herself, also referred to as the “ideal American girl” in the show’s promotional announcements – is clothed in fake Native American costume and accompanied by a group of smiling, bow-equipped chorus girls, which gives her a faux savage appeal or else feminizes native culture or both. Among other things, this indicates the ideological underpinnings of this particular pop cultural pastiche of desirable otherness squarely based on hollowed-out markers of gender and race. When taking into account the huge popular appeal of such live entertainment aggressively marketed at the Century of Progress Exposition, one cannot fail to notice the dynamic of transnational American memory formation at the time, which was forcefully turning in the direction of popular culture.

The 1992 Age of Discovery Fair and the Failure of Transnational American Memory As early as 1977, the idea came up to host a third world’s fair in Chicago (Rydell et al. 128), whose aim would, again, be twofold: To celebrate, first, the quincentennial of Columbus’s landfall in America and, second, the centennial of the greatest event in the history of the city, the World’s Columbian Exposition (albeit one year early this time!). To rejuvenate the format, the 1992 fair was envisioned as a joint venture with Seville, Spain, in the spirit of the transnational endeavor the fair was to commemorate. To set the planning machine in motion, a private organization was founded in 1981 under the directorship of utility company executive Thomas Ayers, the so-called Chicago World’s Fair 1992 Corporation, which worked very efficiently from the outset. As Rydell notes: Within a year that group had planned a theme, set dates for the fair, located a site along Lake Michigan just north of the Century of Progress site, and applied to the BIE [for Bureau International des Expositions, the Paris-based organization overseeing world’s fairs] for sanction. (Rydell et al. 128)

Arguably, however, it was precisely this swift behind-the-scenes approach to planning in the hands of a certain power elite which brought down the fair in the end (see Findling, Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs 151). For the 1992

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Chicago world’s fair never actually happened; instead, plans collapsed in late 1985, and the project was abandoned. Largely forgotten today, its records are kept at the Chicago History Museum and at the Art Institute. What brought down a world’s fair that started with such great promise and momentum? Its eventual folding is all the more astonishing considering that the plan was strongly supported by individuals in the highest places, including President Ronald Reagan, who authored an official document in June, 1984, in which he endorsed the fair as follows: Chicago is an excellent site for this historic exposition. A global crossroads, Chicago already has hosted two successful world’s fairs […] The choice of Seville as a site is especially appropriate, for without the foresight and adventurous spirit of the King and Queen of Spain, Columbus would never have had the opportunity to undertake his catalytic voyage which changed the course of history. […] The unique relationship between this great American city and Seville underlines the continuity of history in a new age of communications and transportation. By bridging the seas in 1992, Chicago and Seville once again will link the New World with the Old in the dawning of a truly new “Age of Discovery.” The 1992 Chicago-Seville International Exposition […] promises to become a symbol of international peace and process, illuminating our past and our future. With its many splendid opportunities for the stimulation of trade and for cultural and technological exchange, the exposition has the enthusiastic support of the United States Government.

The emphasis on a global perspective and the “adventurous spirit” was entirely in keeping with Reagan’s (and also the organizers’) publicly displayed attitude toward the planned event. And yet, they mainly saw it as a vehicle to showcase new U.S. American communications technologies including satellite transmission and more specifically Reagan’s favorite then-recent invention (which former President Bush, Jr. would attempt to revive many years later), the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative intended to enable high-tech surveillance if not control of space and whose origins have to be seen in the cold war period that gave rise to a felt need for such a ‘protective shield.’ The fair’s theme, ‘Age of Discovery,’ therefore marked a ‘global crossroad’ indeed, albeit of another order than all the official slogans and ceremonial proclamations in unison suggested: The world’s future was foremost cast as a domain of the United States, and the fair was embraced, as the Century of Progress fair fifty years earlier, as a site of transnational U.S. American memory affirming such a claim. It would be wrong to assume, however, that the fair was brought down by its problematical techno-military subtext. Rather, tension soon arose much closer to home, and more specifically over questions surrounding the site where the fair should be located. In brief, once it became apparent around 1981 that the fair was going to greatly impact the mostly ethnic neighborhoods of Pilsen (home of Chicago’s Chicano

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community as well as many blacks and Italians) and Chinatown without giving the inhabitants and their local representatives any real say in the matter despite all official assurances to the contrary, resistance built fast (see Dorfman 4). To counter what was perceived as the secretive maneuvering of the World’s Fair 1992 Corporation, an independent, grassrootsstyle organization was formed which gave itself the name Chicago 1992 Committee and soon became an effective pressure group uniting the fair’s opponents. The communities’ struggle, first, to be heard, and then to bring down the fair is well documented in a publication by one of the movement’s proponents, Illinois representative Robert McClory, which bears the telling title The Fall of the Fair: Communities Struggle for Fairness and gives a detailed account of the developments leading to the fair’s eventual folding in 1986. Another reason for the failure of the fair was the 1983 election of Mayor Harold Washington, the first African American to win this office in Chicago. Unlike his predecessor Jane Byrne, Washington was at best lukewarm about the planned event, in part due to its uncertain financial scheme and potentially ensuing fiscal perils at a time when Chicago’s economy was already under great pressure. Moreover, questions of representation or, rather, the lack thereof loomed large once again, as African American and minority input in general was practically non-existing. Fair officials tried to counter this by proposing an elaborate affirmative action scheme which ensured that a significant portion of on-site jobs would have gone to minorities, but of no avail: Public sentiment fed by certain memories, in particular, of exclusionary and other racially demeaning practices at the previous world expositions had already forcefully turned against the 1992 fair. As a matter of fact, most public spectacles surrounding the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in America were met with similarly ambivalent responses, in large part due to a tidal wave of minority consciousness raising in combination with counter-hegemonic attempts at remembering history from a more pluralistic and multicultural perspective. Udo Hebel contextualizes the ensuing critical momentum as follows: U.S.-American festive culture was to remain politically and culturally powerful, if not dominant, well into the second half of the twentieth century. In the context of more recent debates over multiculturalism, ethnic empowerment, political correctness, and identity politics, time-honored celebrations of Columbus Day or the arrival of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock became the very epitome of repressive Eurocentric conceptualizations of the U.S. to advocates of a more pluralistic understanding of American histories, cultures, and identities. (54)

In the end, however, it remains unclear who rang the fair’s final death knell, the community activists or the politicians who became involved in 1985 after Michael Madigan, the speaker of the Illinois House of Repre-

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sentatives, commissioned a feasibility study that would decide whether or not to go through with the event. Not only was it then revealed that the fair would in all likelihood produce a huge financial loss; it also weighed heavily against it that, according to the study, “the Fair [had shifted] from an exhibit-based fair to an entertainment-based fair.” This critique rather adequately reflects the course of U.S. American fairs since 1933, as argued above. The report’s final verdict was consequently unambivalent: “The Fair, as planned, is fatally flawed in its treatment of theme, the environment and site configuration, and is not financially sound” (Stevenson). As a result, Madigan pulled the breaks in the form of state funds, and without such funds, the Bureau International des Expositions “withdrew its sanction for the Chicago fair,” in 1987 (Findling, Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs 152). As a postscript to the world’s fair that never was and whose public memory has long since evaporated, so that we might speak of transnational oblivion in the case of the last world’s fair attempted in the United States to date, it should be noted that the Seville expo did take place in 1992, with a slight adjustment of its theme which, ironically enough, was changed to the more pluralistic-sounding “The Age of Discoveries” after the United States had dropped out of the venture.

Conclusion Over the course of one hundred years, Chicago became the site of several important events commemorating the national experience within the context of transnational memory formation. While the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition focused on the celebration of Columbianism albeit recast from the U.S. American point of view, the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition turned toward the world’s future and, more precisely, America’s central role in it. The 1992 Age of Discovery Fair, finally, while continuing the theme of technological progress already established at the previous fairs, emphasized popular entertainment rather than enlightenment of the masses. Considering the global attraction and concomitant economic power U.S. American popular culture has achieved over the course of the twentieth century, it could be argued that precisely its focus on mass entertainment would have been the 1992 world’s fair’s equivalent to the World’s Columbian Exposition’s focus on cultural and science exhibits, as both are valid expressions of public culture in its respective social and historical context. By the mid-1980s, however, (not only) U.S. American society had undergone significant changes, and mass events such as world’s fairs that

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would celebrate the national experience were at best considered an unnecessary expense and, at worst, an unacceptable display of power in the hands of a few. Also, their usefulness as sites of transnational memory formation had become questionable considering that other pop cultural institutions including permanent theme parks or, for that matter, Hollywood movies were becoming much more suitable to the task of remembering world history from the U.S. American perspective. However, even though it appears at present as though there will not be another world’s fair in the United States, it would be wrong to assume that Americans might have to do without transnational mega events as key sites of global culture formation. Chicago, in fact, became one of four finalists for the 2016 Summer Olympics on June 4, 2008, and if it wins the bid over its rivals Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, we are in for another installment of what Maurice Roche has aptly termed an “Olympic global media event” (Roche 147) recalling the world’s fairs of previous centuries. And thus the story of transnational American memory continues into the twenty-first century; to be continued.

Works Cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Badger, R. Reid. The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition & American Culture. Chicago: Hall, 1979. —. “Chicago 1893.” Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions. Ed. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. 116-25. Böger, Astrid. “Envisioning Progress at Chicago’s White City.” Space in America. Theory – History – Culture. Ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Architecture – Technology – Culture 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 265-84. —. Envisioning the Nation: The Early American World’s Fairs and the Formation of Culture. Unpubl. book ms., 2007. Burg, David F. Chicago’s White City of 1893. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1976. Bureau International des Expositions. 13. Dec. 2008 . Dorfman, Ron. “Chicago Politics and the World’s Fair of 1992: The Old Establishment Meets the New.” World’s Fair 1 (1984): 1-4. Findling, John E. Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994. —. “Chicago 1933-1934.” Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions. Ed. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. 268-77. Fluck, Winfried. “Playing Indian. Media Reception as Transfer.” figurationen gender literatur kultur: Intermedialität/Transmedialität. Ed. Gundolf S. Freymuth. Köln: Böhlau 2007. 67-86.

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Hebel, Udo J.. “Sites of Memory in U.S.-American Histories and Cultures.” Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. 47-60. Hollweg, Brenda. Ausgestellte Welt. Formationsprozesse kultureller Identität in den Texten zur Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Lewis, Arnold. An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1997. Lytton Study Group – Louise Litten, 1933 World’s Fair Miss America. 12. Dec.2008 . McClory, Robert. The Fall of the Fair: Communities Struggle for Fairness, Commissioned by the Chicago 1992 Committee. Chicago 1986. Miller, Donald L. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. New York: Simon, 1996. Nye, David. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of New Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1990. Portfolio of Photographs of the World’s Fair. Published Weekly by the Werner Company. Chicago, 1894. Powers, Richard. Gain: A Novel. New York: Picador, 1998. Reagan, Ronald. “Proclamation 5215 – 1992 Chicago-Seville International Exposition, By the President of the United States of America. June 27, 1984.” 8 June 2009 Reed, Christopher Robert. ‘All the World Is Here!’ The Black Presence at White City. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. —. World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions. Chicago: U of Chicago P 1993. — et al. Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 2000. Roche, Maurice. Mega-Events & Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Entfernte Verwandtschaft: Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal 1933-1939. München: Hanser, 2005. Stevenson, Adlai. Final Report of the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on the 1992 Chicago World’s Fair. Chicago, 11 June 1985. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill, 1982. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Hold, 1921. Wolner, Edward. “The Court of Honor at the 1893 World’s Fair: An Architecture of Pathos.” Central: Papers on Architecture (Winter 1987): 49-64.

Between Diaspora and Empire: The Shevchenko Monument in Washington, D.C. KIRK SAVAGE

Fig. Leo Mol, sculptor, and Radoscav Zuk, architect. Taras Shevchenko Memorial. 1964. Washington, D.C, 2003. Photograph by the author.

June 27, 1964, in the words of one commentator, stands as “the zenith of Ukrainian-American history” (Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel 454). On that day nearly 100,000 self-identified Ukrainians from the U.S. and Canada gathered in Washington, D.C. to unveil a monument to Taras Shevchenko, the so-called ‘bard of Ukraine.’ Unlike the U.S. military heroes whose statues surrounded his monument in the traffic circles of northwest Washington, Shevchenko was an artist, a painter and a writer,

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who lived his whole life in the Russian empire (see Antokhii et al.). Born a serf in 1814 in what is now eastern Ukraine, Shevchenko rose to become the most celebrated poet in the Ukrainian vernacular, while his anti-Tsarist writings and political activities, which led to his banishment to the outer regions of the Russian empire, would eventually make him a cult hero adopted both by Soviet communists and by their Ukrainian nationalist antagonists in the diaspora abroad. At the unveiling ceremony, UkrainianAmericans carried anti-communist banners and listened to ex-President Eisenhower decry Soviet “tyranny and oppression.” Eisenhower went on to express his hope that the event would “kindle a new world movement […] dedicated to the independence and freedom of all captive nations” (“Eisenhower Calls”). While Eisenhower gave the monument a transnational significance far beyond the memory of its esoteric hero, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson officially ignored it and sent no representatives to its dedication. On the other side of the globe, the Soviets had unveiled their own monument to Shevchenko in Moscow on June 10. Premier Nikita Khrushchev, fresh from winning the Shevchenko Prize for his “contribution in developing and strengthening Ukrainian Socialist culture,” declared that “socialism is the true heir to the cultural treasures of the people’s genius” (“Khrushchev Wins”; “Eisenhower Calls”). (Khrushchev had been the Soviet boss in Ukraine under Stalin and still had a political base among the communist party organization there, although his support was weakening fast and he would be deposed from power later that summer.) In Soviet hands Shevchenko could stand as a model of solidarity between the peoples of Ukraine and Russia: he wrote in both languages, received his artistic training in St. Petersburg, and maintained close ties to both cultural worlds. The Moscow monument culminated months of official activities celebrating Shevchenko’s 150th birthday, particularly in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. At one such event, a huge meeting of writers from around the Soviet Union in the Ukrainian parliament, a Soviet Ukrainian official blamed “transoceanic falsifiers” for using Shevchenko as a propaganda tool in the Cold War (Shabad). This came on the heels of a rebuff from the Ukrainian-Americans in charge of the Washington project, who had refused a request from a delegation of Soviet Ukrainians to attend the monument unveiling in the U.S. and to bring “sacred soil” from Shevchenko’s hilltop grave (“Dwight D. Eisenhower”). Evidently Washington’s Shevchenko memorial was no ordinary ‘ethnic’ monument. Immigrant groups in the U.S. had a long tradition of erecting monuments in public space. The Washington Star tried to put the Ukrainian project in this context: “We are Irish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Scandinavian. We are Swiss and Netherlanders and African.

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We are also Ukrainian. This happy variety in our composition is expressed, among other ways, in many of the monuments in the Nation’s Capital” (“Association Again”). But despite these reassurances, the Shevchenko monument was fundamentally different from the many Italian-American monuments to Columbus throughout the U.S. or the monuments in Washington, D.C. to foreign-born Revolutionary War heroes sponsored by Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans, and other groups. In those cases the ethnic group in question staked a claim to ‘Americanness’ by linking itself to the common stuff of ‘American’ memory – the ‘discovery’ of the New World or the war for independence. Sometimes the group remained discreetly in the background, but other times it trumpeted its rightful place in public space: on the monument to Revolutionary War engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko in Washington, the inscription declares, “Erected by the Polish National Alliance of America and presented to the United States on behalf of the Polish American citizens May 11, 1910.” In no uncertain terms the monument proclaimed that Poles had been fighting for America ever since its founding, and that they had a right to make that heritage known and recognized – even if staunch assimilationists like Henry Ford or Woodrow Wilson objected to “hyphenated Americans,” or any coupling of national identity with transnational ethnicity (Sollors 91; “Wilson Condemns”). The Shevchenko monument was another matter. Shevchenko himself had no connection to mainstream U.S. history. To the vast majority of U.S. citizens he was totally unknown. He was not so much a ‘hyphenated’ figure as an alien one. No true precedent for this monument existed in the nation’s capital (see Goode; “Inventory”). A few statues of foreign heroes arrived in Washington as donations by their home countries (Artigas, from Uruguay; Bolivar, from Venezuela; Joan of Arc, from France); these are better understood as part of an international system of tribute or gift exchange. There was an even smaller handful of monuments to European inventors or scientists, but these were erected by professional associations in the U.S. eager to link their own nascent professional identity to a prestigious European forefather (Daguerre, the French inventor of photography, sponsored by the Photographer’s Association of America; Hahnemann, the German founder of homeopathy, sponsored by the American Institute of Homeopathy). The Shevchenko monument was a transnational project of a different order, the homegrown product of a relatively obscure immigrant group seeking to wrest the memory of their own nationalist hero from the clutches of foreign imperialists and align that memory instead with Cold War U.S. ideology. While the typical ethnic monument was geared to a popular audience, the Ukrainians in the American diaspora aimed their monument rather at the foreign-policy establishment

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of the U.S., which they saw as weak, and at the Soviet bosses of their faraway homeland, which they saw as vulnerable. The monument’s major goal, as Eisenhower suggested in his dedication speech, was to show the world that Ukrainian nationalists and their U.S. supporters would not rest until they had overturned Soviet rule and enabled a unified, independent Ukrainian nation-state to emerge for the first time in history. This is not to suggest that the Shevchenko monument’s supporters had any illusions about imminent ‘regime change.’ The sponsors of the monument were not in fact recent émigrés hoping to return to their homeland, but were members of the older, established organizations of the diaspora community, fully integrated into U.S. society (Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel 449). Yet their self-identification as Ukrainians depended on active solidarity with a historical chimera, a variously imagined and contested nationality thousands of miles distant. The Ukraine was a nation that had never existed, except in the compromised form of a Soviet national republic. This was the paradox condensed into a few square meters of ground at 22nd and P streets in Washington, D.C., where the monument was erected. It was here that the colossal statue of Shevchenko strode forward into an uncertain future, premised on a transnational aspiration linking the fortunes of an imaginary Ukrainian nationality with an actual American superpower: both would fulfill their historical destiny only as implacable opponents of the Soviet world order.

Shevchenko and the Problem of Transnational Memory The country of Ukraine has long been a liminal zone between Europe and Russia; its very name derives from the word for “borderland” (Yekelchyk 4). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the territory that encompasses today’s Ukraine had many shifting internal and external borders: the incipient nation was in reality a patchwork of disparate regions ruled at one time or another by Austria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and, of course, Russia. The first wave of ‘Ukrainian’ immigrants to North America were Galician peasants, from western Ukraine, who came in the 1890s to escape agricultural poverty in their homeland. As scholars of the diaspora have emphasized, these immigrants were more inclined to identify themselves along local or regional lines than national ones, and, before 1914, few called themselves ‘Ukrainian’ or even knew the word (see Satzewich 41; Kuropas, Ukrainian Americans xx). Clerical leaders and immigrant organizations worked hard to instill a Ukrainian consciousness in the new immigrants, and by World War I their efforts had begun to reap fruit.

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Following the dissolution of the old Hapsburg and Tsarist empires during World War I, Ukrainian nationalists made the first attempts to create an independent Ukrainian state. Despite being rebuffed by the United States and the other great powers in the Treaty of Versailles, Ukrainian governments were assembled separately in western and eastern Ukraine. However, they had little authority and were soon dislodged by the Poles in the west and the Bolsheviks in the east. To some extent this reproduced an age-old feudal pattern: for centuries Polish nobility had ruled the peasants in Galicia while the Russian Tsars had ruled those in the more russified eastern regions of Ukraine. One key difference in the interwar period was that Soviet leaders, to help gain the support of the local population, promoted an official policy of Ukrainian nationality; Soviet Ukraine had its own nominal government and, off and on, official support for indigenous Ukrainian language and culture (see Martin). Ukrainians in the North American diaspora were divided over the issue of Soviet Ukraine, with socialists supporting it as an exemplary revolutionary nation, and nationalists bitterly opposing it as little more than a tool of Soviet tyranny. Events such as the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, where Soviet officials forcibly took grain from an already starving peasantry and left some three to four million dead, only hardened the divide (see Yekelchyk 112; Kuropas, Ukrainian Americans 251). But the political dynamic changed fundamentally after World War II with the advent of the Cold War. In the great reorganization of Eastern Europe, the Soviet republic of Ukraine took over the western territory that had been part of Poland; the land of Ukraine, which had always been divided under multiple oppressors in various regions, was now for the first time unified, but unified under the iron fist of a single imperial master, the Soviet Union. With a new influx of refugees from war-torn Ukraine, the socialist wing of the diaspora waned while the nationalist wing, which had been preoccupied with Poland and Russia in the interwar period, now focused entirely on the Soviet enemy. Nationalists could not expect to free Ukraine from Soviet domination without the sponsorship of a great power, which is why some among them had earlier looked to Nazi Germany to play that role (before Hitler showed his hand and brutalized Ukraine). But in the aftermath of World War II, Ukrainian nationalist aspirations came more closely into alignment with U.S. national interests in the Cold War, even if the diaspora community continually complained about Washington’s tendency to appease the Soviets (see Kuropas, Ukrainian Americans 298-302; Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel 406-26). As the world map changed so too did Shevchenko’s significance. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he had been resurrected as a prophet of Ukrainian nationhood. His poetry, protesting Polish as

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well as Russian oppression of his homeland, could be marshaled against the imperial powers encroaching on Ukraine from both the west and the east. The Soviets under Lenin and Stalin at times allowed Shevchenko to continue functioning as an authentic Ukrainian symbol in order to advance their nationalities policy, but they also promoted him as a Soviet symbol of opposition to Tsarism and bourgeois capitalism. He became, in effect, the paradox of Soviet Ukraine itself, a national figure who was at the same time an exemplary Soviet socialist. With the advent of the Cold War Shevchenko was drafted into a more drastic binary conflict between West and East, which culminated in the 1964 monuments erected in the world’s two opposing capitals, Moscow and Washington. The complicated multi-polar world that the historical Shevchenko had inhabited and written about, disappeared, replaced by a radically simplified ideological divide. In the Soviet Union he had to become more Soviet than ever, a proto-revolutionary facing the capitalist West; and in the U.S. he had to become more American than ever, a “freedom fighter” facing the Soviet East. His statue in Washington, the sponsors proclaimed, was “the second statue of liberty,” not an entirely inapt analogy since the first Statue of Liberty, in New York, had originated among French republicans with their own internal political motivations (Dobriansky, Vulnerable Russians 373). “The poet reaches beyond his own nation, crosses the frontiers to other oppressed peoples” (Malyshko 12). Here was a transnational claim that would make an ideal caption for the monument the UkrainianAmericans erected, except that in this case the quotation was a Soviet one, from an English language periodical published by the Soviet embassy in Washington. Both sides in the Soviet-American Cold War wanted to position Shevchenko as a transnational figure of liberation, but to control his meaning each side had somehow to center him in its own world. In this hall of mirrors the rival Shevchenkos struggled to achieve a distinct identity.

Shevchenko as Victim and Hero The U.S. Congressional authorization for the Shevchenko monument in September 1960 came a little more than a year after the same Congress had approved a tough anti-Soviet resolution also initiated by UkrainianAmericans. This earlier resolution established, in July 1959, “Captive Nations Week,” which assailed “the imperialistic policies of Communist Russia” and declared that Soviet satellites “look to the United States, as the citadel of human freedom, for leadership in bringing about their liberation and independence” (Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel 438). Both Con-

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gressional resolutions were in large part the work of Lev Dobriansky, a professor of economics at Georgetown University, the president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), and a formidable ‘one-man lobby’ in Washington. Dobriansky was a second-generation immigrant, born in New York in 1918 to Ukrainian parents. He did not speak fluent Ukrainian, a problem for some in the diaspora community (Kuropas, “One-Man Lobby”). But he was a passionate spokesman for Ukrainian independence and knew how to work the halls of power in Washington as well as anyone. A lifelong Republican, like many of his compatriots, he was an unabashed hawk on all matters Soviet. He and the UCCA had been on record since 1951 against the “passive policy of containment” of the Soviet Union, declaring instead that “victory over Soviet Russian imperialism” required “the potent and fearless idea of psychological warfare aimed especially at the intrinsic weakness of the pseudomonolithic Soviet State” (Dobriansky, Political Policy 8-9). In Dobriansky’s view, the Russian empire’s satellite nations were the “new frontier” in this “psycho-political struggle” because there nationalist resentments seethed just below the surface, waiting to be tapped by the psychological warrior. The memory of Shevchenko was a key battleground, and his monument in Washington was to be Dobriansky’s most conspicuous instrument (Dobriansky, Vulnerable Russians 201, 348; Dushnyck). From the start the monument faced in two directions at once. It was a weapon directed outward at the Soviet Union in a global propaganda war, but it also turned inward, to claim something essential about ‘America.’ Dobriansky liked to argue that the U.S. had to master the Soviets’ psychological tactics, but that in the contest the U.S. had an advantage: truth and freedom were on its side (see Dobriansky, Vulnerable Russians 223-24). So if the monument project seemed to be a foreign affair, a psycho-political struggle to claim the memory of an eastern European hero, it was meant equally to get U.S. citizens in touch with their own inner Americanness, their identity as the world’s prophets of national self-determination. Only by hewing fiercely to that inner identity, the whole project seemed to say, would the U.S. ultimately prevail in the outer conflict. The most immediate problem for Dobriansky and his allies was the American side of the equation – how to make the monument a legitimately national enterprise, rather than a mere tactic in a struggle over foreign territory thousands of miles away. Two lines from a single poem of Shevchenko’s provided the starting point: “When shall we get ourselves a Washington/To promulgate his new and righteous law?” (Shevchenko 501). This plea for a Ukrainian George Washington was hardly remarkable, given the man’s international reputation in the nineteenth century as the republican hero par excellence. Nevertheless the monument sponsors

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relentlessly repeated the passage and ultimately incorporated it into the monument itself. It had just enough rhetorical substance to justify the even bolder claim, incorporated into the Congressional authorization of the monument, that Shevchenko’s writing revealed the ‘inseparable spiritual ties’ linking the U.S. and the Ukrainian nation. Even if Shevchenko’s reference to Washington might easily be dismissed as pro forma, there is ample irony here in a former serf calling upon the example of a slave owner in the pursuit of ‘a new and righteous law.’ The slave system to which Washington owed his livelihood remained in full force throughout Shevchenko’s lifetime. The poet himself drew an analogy between Russian serfs and black slaves in his poem “The Caucasus” (1845), and later he would get a glimpse of the social impacts of the U.S. racial system through his friendship with the African American actor Ira Aldridge. Aldridge, from a free black family in New York, had fled professional discrimination there to become an international sensation in Europe and Russia (see Marshall and Stock). Shevchenko drew a beautifully sensitive portrait of the actor in Moscow in 1858, at a time when the crisis over slavery in the U.S. was coming to the boiling point. If he understood anything about Aldridge’s life story in the context of U.S. race relations, Shevchenko must have been just as aware of the limits of Washington’s ‘righteous law’ as of its promise. The Shevchenko-Aldridge connection cut both ways in the ‘psychopolitical struggle’ of the Cold War. On the one hand, for UkrainianAmericans, it was one more piece of historical evidence linking the poet to the rights of man expressed in the U.S. national project, as the chief of Ukrainian services for Voice of America made clear (Corbett). On the other hand, it complicated the U.S. claim to champion captive peoples, just as Washington’s involvement in slavery complicated his nation’s founding identity. The Soviets could use Shevchenko to draw attention to U.S. hypocrisy on the issue of civil rights. Most of the literature on the Shevchenko-Aldridge friendship came out of Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine, at the same time that the Soviets relentlessly hammered the U.S. record on racial discrimination. Referring to the Shevchenko monument and its appeal for a new “righteous law,” the newspaper Komunist Ukrainy declared, “Today all the righteous laws in the United States have been buried; there exists a reign of the most highhanded reactionary social forces, a ruthless enslavement of the workers, and racial and national discrimination” (2 Feb. 1961, qtd. in Shevchenko 6). If Ukrainians in the diaspora saw the U.S. as their “citadel of freedom,” Soviet propagandists would respond that the citadel had always been closed to many of its own people. How could the U.S. talk about freeing Ukrainians from Soviet domination when it still deprived its own citizens of basic political rights? With the

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civil rights movement drawing ever greater attention to these contradictions, the struggle over Shevchenko’s memory turned on the question of how to divide the world into free and captive peoples. It was against this backdrop that the Shevchenko Memorial Committee of America chose a design that included an explicit image of enslavement, only the second such image to appear in a public monument in Washington (the first was in a monument to Lincoln erected in 1876). The monument committee held a design competition in 1962, and at least three of the sixteen entries included a relief sculpture of Prometheus chained to a rock, inspired by Shevchenko’s celebrated poem “The Caucasus” (Projects). In the poem Shevchenko folded the ancient myth of Prometheus into an extended meditation on Russian imperialism (see Grabowicz 87-88, 98; Shkandrij 138). According to the myth, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains, where his organs were pecked out by a vulture during the day, only to be made intact again at night so that the cycle of punishment could repeat endlessly. Shevchenko transformed Prometheus’s ordeal into a metaphor of indomitable resistance against oppression: Torn [the heart] may be, but never shall its blood Be wholly drained away in fatal flood. For, ever and anon, it stirs again And feels new gladness in its mortal pain. So likewise shall our spirit never die Nor our freedom wholly vanquished lie. (Shevchenko 244)

In the winning design, sculptor Leo Mol included a tall white granite stele with a relief showing Prometheus’s body bent into a tight semicircle, broken only by an arched foot and a clenched fist both shackled to the sharp geometric planes of the rock behind. Though the iconography of chains and shackles could not fail to recall U.S. slavery, it is unlikely that the Prometheus motif was supposed to carry any direct association with the subject. Nor was it likely that the motif referred to a former political movement in Eastern Europe known as Prometheism, a Polish-led effort to build a federation of non-Russian peoples allied against the Soviet Union (see Woytak). Under Polish sponsorship Prometheism had little appeal in the diaspora community (which remained outraged at Polish atrocities in the Ukraine in the 1920s and ‘30s), and by World War II it had become essentially defunct in Eastern Europe as well. The Prometheus relief was probably meant to be seen more simply as an allegory of the plight of ‘captive nations’ in the Soviet empire, especially since the inscription on the finished monument dedicated it to “the liberation, freedom and independence of all captive nations.” Prometheus thus appeared as an inspirational figure, unbowed by perpetual oppression. Though he was stripped

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and fastened cruelly to the sharp edges of a bare rock, the curving dynamism of his unbroken body and the clenched fist at the top of the composition suggested a capacity for endurance that might one day overcome his prolonged ordeal. Given the symbolic charge of the Promethean image, the Soviets would never have included it in their own monuments to Shevchenko. Even though Soviet anthologies included “The Caucasus,” and extracts from it even appeared in the ‘cultural’ magazine USSR, their literary authorities claimed it as a ‘revolutionary’ work, aimed at the oppression of Tsar Nicholas, not at Russia itself (Rylski and Deitch). In the medium of literary interpretation, Shevchenko’s Promethean image could be historicized and controlled, but in the monumental medium of stone a figure chained to a rock was a provocation virtually impossible to confine to any one historical context or interpretation. Out in public space this image of enslavement launched the myth into a contemporary context, effectively inviting viewers to connect the ancient narrative of captivity in the Caucasus to the modern-day oppression of peoples in the Soviet world. Leo Mol’s winning design paired this Promethean image of resolute victimhood with the colossal figure of Shevchenko, who was the very opposite of a victim, standing erect and twisting forward on his left leg. We know little about what the monument committee members wanted, except that they specified a larger than life size “full figure of Shevchenko as a young man” (Padoch). A typical monumental image for a writer or creative genius would have him seated in thought, with pen in hand. The committee eschewed this formula and opted instead for an image of a man of action. There were already many standing figures of Shevchenko around the world; the Moscow monument of 1964 would add another (see “Monuments to Shevchenko”). But while the Moscow statue has Shevchenko looking down pensively, with his arms behind his back, the statue by Mol is a dashing figure, with his chest swelling forward, his coat rippling behind him, and his whole body in dynamic torsion. One hand closes on his coat lapel, the other opens with fingers spread in a fan; the torso twists in one direction, while the hips and legs twist in the opposite. Shevchenko’s body is a coil of forces barely in equilibrium, yet evidently ready to burst into action. We can speculate why the monument committee liked Mol’s figure. Given that Shevchenko was for them the personification of Ukrainian nationalism, no doubt they wanted to avoid any appearance of passivity, which would have suggested instead the stance of Soviet Ukraine within the U.S.S.R. Hence the more contemplative poses, such as the one chosen for the monument in Moscow, were inappropriate. Better to show Shevchenko youthful with a fierce inner vitality, suggested in the statue by

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the extreme torsion of the body. He was not precisely in action, but itching to be: aggressively expectant, like the diaspora nationalists themselves, who, along with Shevchenko, would wage a war of words and images against the Russians until the oppressed peoples on the edges of the empire rose up and the system collapsed.

Americanizing Shevchenko To wage this cold war of words, images, and monuments, the UkrainianAmerican diaspora needed the patronage of the U.S. government. The Eisenhower administration in its final years seemed happy to oblige, readily approving both the Captive Nations resolution and the Congressional authorization for the Shevchenko memorial. The continuity between the two initiatives was obvious, and U.S. newspapers were quick to represent the monument project as a salvo in the Cold War (see Wingenbach). Nevertheless, the Ukrainian nationalist community was not entirely in synch with U.S. foreign policy. Even a Republican hawk and veteran anticommunist like Vice-President Nixon tried to explain away the Captive Nations resolution when Khrushchev berated him about it on Nixon’s visit to Moscow. Ukrainian nationalists saw the U.S. foreign policy establishment as far too appeasing; they were fiercely opposed to any moves that smacked of détente or cooperation (see Dobriansky, Vulnerable Russians 29-31; Kuropas, Ukrainian-American Citadel 409-11, 439-41). Once the Kennedy administration took over, the monument project clearly made them uneasy. Kennedy had generally good relations with the Ukrainian-American community and was responsive to the captive nations movement, but now that he was governing, the Manichean view of the Soviet Union had to be tempered by the pragmatics of coexistence in a nuclear age. The problem was that in a cold war it was impossible to separate the cultural domain from the political; in fact the war was largely waged on the cultural front. Early in 1961 National Park Service officials reportedly were worried that the project “might intensify international stresses with the Soviet Union” (Eisen). And indeed the Soviet press went on the attack, accusing the Ukrainian nationalists behind the monument of being “docile servants” of “American imperialists,” intent on “slandering the homeland of Shevchenko, Soviet Ukraine” and presenting the poet as “some kind of advocate of the modern ‘American way of life’” (Shevchenko 6). Dobriansky and his allies were “cowards” and “criminal renegades” (Dobriansky, Vulnerable Russians 356; “Reds Decry”). Soviet Ukrainian poet Mykola Bazhan concluded in 1963 that the fight over Shevchenko’s memory “exposes the deceit and falsehood of all talk of

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peaceful coexistence of two ideologies,” a position that his antagonists in the Ukrainian diaspora could not have agreed with more (qtd. in Shevchenko 6). Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall did give an address at the groundbreaking ceremony for the monument on September 21, 1963, but the position of the administration toward the project seems to have been ambivalent. Shortly after the groundbreaking ceremony, the Washington Post launched a prolonged editorial campaign against the monument, arguing that it was the work of a “tiny group” of UkrainianAmericans “who managed to convert an errant private passion into a public cause”; “they are using it to advance their own peculiar notion of how to fight communism and their own implausible goal of Ukrainian nationhood” (“Shevchenko Affair”). The Post completely rejected the Americanization of Shevchenko and argued that the “dispute [with the Soviets] over the soul of a Ukrainian poet is a quarrel within the ranks of Ukrainian nationalists in which Americans in general and Washingtonians in particular have no proper interest” (“Shevchenko Again”). In the wake of the Post’s campaign, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which had already approved the site and design of the monument, decided to reconsider its decision. Udall’s role in this is unclear but he did publicly support the reconsideration as part of a larger effort to rationalize the selection of subjects and sites for monuments in the capital (see Shevchenko 95). Ultimately the NCPC decided that it did not have authority to revoke its earlier decision, and the monument went ahead as planned. There is no direct evidence of the Kennedy administration’s involvement in the controversy. The Ukrainian-American press reported rumors that the Soviet embassy had sent letters to the administration protesting the monument, but these were never confirmed (see “Dwight D. Eisenhower”). One can only speculate whether the administration, at a time when it was negotiating grain deals and other cooperative measures with the Soviets, wanted to distance itself from such an openly adversarial project. The controversy stoked by the Post did have the effect of confusing public opinion on the project and giving the impression of national division over its appropriateness, and this may well have been useful to U.S. authorities. Meanwhile the Soviet authorities reversed course and decided to embrace the monument project. In January 1964 the Soviet embassy in Washington publicly released a letter from several dozen Soviet Ukrainians offering to attend the monument dedication ceremony and to bring some soil from the hill where Shevchenko was buried (see “Red Embassy Joins Row”). The monument committee promptly rejected the offer. Ordinary Ukrainians from the Soviet Union had privately sent letters of support to the monument committee, sometimes even enclosing donations in

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rubles, but the committee would have nothing to do with an official delegation (see “Dwight D. Eisenhower”). Prof. Roman Smal-Stocki, chairman of the monument committee, explained that “this whole soil plan as well as the proposed delegation is nothing more than the usual Russian Communist trick […]. By accepting this soil and delegation, behind which is contemporary Russian imperialism and colonialism […] we would propagate a monstrous lie to the free world, a crime against truth, freedom, justice, and against the very memory of Shevchenko and Washington” (Shevchenko 84). Indeed it was imperative to reject any signs of a joint, transnational memory shared by official Soviet Ukraine and the UkrainianAmerican diaspora. On one side was authentic memory, on the other was trickery, and nothing could possibly reconcile the two. The monument committee carefully planned the dedication ceremony to be a transnational coalition, but only of “free” peoples: thus the parade did include delegations of Ukrainians from abroad but these were “Members of former Ukrainian Free Governments and Parliaments” and other delegations from Canada and Europe (“Unveiling”). Conspicuously absent from the ceremonies on June 27, 1964 were representatives of the United States’ own administration. In addition to ex-President Eisenhower, four U.S. Congressmen gave speeches and the chaplain of the Senate appeared on the monument platform, but the Johnson White House sent no one and clearly wanted nothing to do with the project. Later, when the monument committee invited Johnson to a subsequent ceremony, the President through an assistant sent his regrets. Actively engaged in détente with the Soviets, LBJ steered clear of the monument’s “psycho-political” stance. The regret letter studiously avoided any recognition of the monument’s ideological role, and represented the project instead as a typical ethnic monument: “Primarily, the recognition being accorded Taras Shevchenko in Washington is testimony to his contribution to the world’s cultural heritage. It is also testimony to the important contribution which Americans of Ukrainian ancestry made to our own rich and varied national life” (Valenti). Masked in polite language, Johnson’s refusal was a stunning repudiation of the fundamental premises of the memorial project. The transnational claims of the monument disappeared, its significance reduced to ‘cultural heritage.’ The diaspora’s whole effort to link U.S. nationalism and Ukrainian nationalism, to make Shevchenko’s memory relevant not only to Ukrainian aspirations for independence but to America’s own ideological identity, here fell on deaf ears. In Johnson’s formulation, the Ukrainian diaspora became just another constituency in the patchwork quilt that was America.

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The Post’s editorial campaign and the studied indifference of LBJ’s administration did not halt the project but did help to marginalize it. As Myron Kuropas declared, the dedication of the monument in 1964 was the high point of the project and of Ukrainian-American influence in national affairs. But that moment was brief, and the monument soon enough lapsed into obscurity, except within the diaspora community, which has continued to use the site periodically for celebrations of Shevchenko’s cultural significance, along the lines of the ‘heritage’ model suggested by Johnson.

The Lapse of Memory Dobriansky was right, of course, that the Soviet Union was less monolithic and more vulnerable than it appeared. He was not so prescient, though, about strategy. He argued that time favored the Soviet side; if the U.S. did not stop appeasing the Russians and start pressing more effectively for the independence of their captive peoples, the Russians would soon enough make us all captive (see Dobriansky, Vulnerable Russians 37576, 400). But time proved to be the undoing of the Soviet Union. In 1991, with the Soviet state in a freefall, Ukraine finally achieved independence, ironically with the very national borders created by the Soviets for their own Ukraine. The Shevchenko monument became an occasional stopping point for officials from the newly independent nation. In April 2005, for example, leader of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, President Viktor Yushchenko, laid a wreath at the monument on a state visit to Washington (see “Ukrainian President”). Having played his supporting role in the Ukrainian independence movement, Dobriansky went on to help erect another monument in Washington, a relatively small bronze figure of liberty, modeled on the “Goddess of Democracy” erected by Chinese students in Beijing in 1989, and dedicated in 2007 to the “more than one hundred million victims of Communism” (Miller; “Inventory”). While the new monument still used the old rhetoric of “captive nations and peoples,” it belonged to a much newer politics of victimization that had emerged in the U.S. in Holocaust remembrance, slavery reparation debates, and multicultural struggles. No matter how modest in scale, the ‘Victims of Communism Memorial’ sought to remind everyone that the real mother of all victimizers was America’s old Cold War foe, outdoing fascism and racism and any other contender by several orders of magnitude. The resolute, forward-looking heroism of the Shevchenko memorial here gave way to a backwardlooking victimology.

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Meanwhile the complicated saga of Ukraine and Russia continues. But even if the ‘Russian bear’ tries to reassert its dominion over eastern Europe, as some fear, the Shevchenko monument will never have the significance its sponsors once thought it would at the height of the Cold War. The U.S. will never see its identity so closely tied to the fate of a Ukraine. The monument, too, has effectively lost its transnational charge. While it has lapsed into the realm of ethnic heritage, it has also become a local gathering point for the gay community that lives in the neighborhood. On a typical sunny day in 2003, a crowd of men in tanktops and tshirts leaned against the monument’s pedestal and relaxed on its steps, a fitting addition to the muscular images of Prometheus and Shevchenko above them. Once a ‘captive people’ in their own right, they sunned themselves publicly in the company of the Ukrainian bard, no doubt unaware of the peculiar aptness of a former serf and foe of tyranny bearing witness to their ongoing movement toward liberation.

Works Cited Antokhii, M. et al. “Shevchenko, Taras.” Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. 2001. 30 Mar. 2009 . “Association Again.” Washington Star 4 Dec. 1963. Clipping in Records of the Commission of Fine Arts, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 66, entry 17 – Project Files – Shevchenko Memorial. Corbett, Demetrius M. “Taras Shevchenko and Ira Aldridge: (The Story of Friendship between the Great Ukrainian Poet and the Great Negro Tragedian).” The Journal of Negro Education 33.2 (1964): 143-50. Dobriansky, Lev E. The Political Policy of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. New York: n.p., 1951. —. The Vulnerable Russians. New York: Pageant P, 1967. Dushnyck, Walter. Memorandum to Members of Executive Board, Shevchenko Memorial Committee, New York. 30 July 1963. Shevchenko Monument Committee Records. Shevchenko Scientific Society. “Dwight D. Eisenhower Unveils Memorial to Taras Shevchenko in the Nation’s Capital.” Svoboda 27 June 1964. Rpt. in Ukrainian Weekly 27 June 2004: 11. Eisen, Jack. “Memorials in Washington Pose Monumental Task.” Washington Post 19 Feb. 1961: A7. “Eisenhower Calls for War Against Tyranny.” Los Angeles Times 28 June 1964: B1. Goode, James M. Outdoor Sculpture of Washington, D.C.: A Comprehensive Historical Guide. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1974. Grabowicz, George G. The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Shevchenko. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1982.

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“Inventory of American Sculpture.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. 2001-2004. 8 June 2009 . “Khrushchev Wins a Prize.” New York Times 11 Mar. 1964: 8. Kuropas, Myron B. “One-Man Lobby.” Ukrainian Weekly 17 Feb. 2008: 17. —. Ukrainian-American Citadel: The First One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1996. —. Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations 1884-1954. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Malyshko, Andrei. “Taras Shevchenko.” USSR 73.10 (1962): 12-13. Marshall, Herbert, and Mildred Stock. Ira Aldridge, the Negro Tragedian. London: Rockliff, 1958. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. Miller, John J. “A Goddess for Victims – The Victims of Communism Memorial Comes to Fruition.” National Review. 28 May 2007. 30 Mar. 2009 . “Monuments to Shevchenko around the World.” Taras Shevchenko Museum. 2007. 10 Oct. 2008 . Padoch, Jaroslaw. Letter to T. Sutton Jett, Superintendent of the National Park Service. 18 Apr. 1961. Shevchenko Monument Committee Records. Shevchenko Scientific Society, New York. Projects of the T. Shevchenko Memorial in Washington, D.C. New York: Taras Shevchenko Memorial Committee, 1962. “Reds Decry Ukrainian’s Statue Here.” Washington Post 7 Mar. 1961: A5. “Red Embassy Joins Row on Shevchenko.” Washington Post 7 Jan. 1964: A6. Rylski, Maxim, and Alexander Deitch. “The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko.” USSR 91.4 (1964): 54-55. Satzewich, Vic. The Ukrainian Diaspora. London: Routledge, 2002. Shabad, Theodore. “Kiev Honor Poet Who Fought Czar.” New York Times 31 May 1964: 10. Shevchenko: A Monument to the Liberation, Freedom, and Independence of All Captive Nations. Washington: GPO, 1964. “Shevchenko Again.” Washington Post 12 Nov. 1963: A20. Shevchenko, Taras. The Poetical Works of Taras Shevchenko. Trans. C. H. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1964. Shkandrij, Myroslav. Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. “The Shevchenko Affair.” Washington Post 18 Oct. 1963: A20. “Ukrainian President to Address Joint Meeting of U.S. Congress.” Ukrainian Weekly 3 Apr. 2005: 1, 13. “Unveiling of the Shevchenko Monument.” 26-27 June 1964. Washington, D.C.: Shevchenko Memorial Committee of America, 1964. Valenti, Jack.. Letter to Roman Smal-Stocki. 1 Apr. 1965. Shevchenko Monument Committee Records. Shevchenko Scientific Society, New York.

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“Wilson Condemns Foreign Alliances.” New York Times 17 May 1914: 11. Wingenbach, Charles E. “A New Twist in the Cold War.” New York Herald-Tribune 15 Oct. 1960. Clipping in Shevchenko Monument Committee Records. Shevchenko Scientific Society, New York. Woytak, Richard. “The Promethean Movement in Interwar Poland.” East European Quarterly 18.3 (1984): 273-78. Yekelchyk, Serhy. Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Of Routes and Roots: Topographies of Transnational Memory in the Upper Rio Grande Valley* JULIANE SCHWARZ-BIERSCHENK

When New Mexico celebrated its four-hundredth anniversary in 1998, the Cuartocentenario was widely advertised as a commemoration of four hundred years of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro forged by don Juan de Oñate, the ‘Last Conquistador’ (Simmons 1991). The ancient trade route running north from Mexico City to the provincial capital of Nueva México served as a convenient organizing principle to coordinate anniversary celebrations throughout the state. Outside the major centers such as Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and even El Paso, TX, smaller New Mexican communities took the opportunity of community celebrations to leave their imprint on the commemorative map of the state and to recommend themselves to heritage tourists travelling the region (see “Oñate Cuartocentenario”; “Oñate’s Entrada”). Yet the landscapes of memory that constitute the Southwestern borderlands present themselves as contested ground, harboring conflicting images and competing interpretations of a multi-ethnic past: On a winter night in early 1998, two quadricentennial narratives crosscut at the site of Oñate’s final destination in northern New Mexico – one celebrating heroic conquest and glorifying colonial beginnings in New Spain, the other recalling resistance to the displacement and subjection that followed the Spanish entrada. In a belated retribution for atrocities committed during conquest, a “group of unknown vandals” sawed one foot off a bronze statue dedicated to Oñate in Alcalde, NM (Diaz). The trenchant criticism highlighted the contentious privileging of the Hispanic past at the expense of other ethnic groups in the tri-ethnic state. The northernmost point on the Camino Real thus entered collective American memory as a site of _____________ *

The contribution builds on my dissertation which investigated the significance of recent Oñate monument projects for Hispanic memory and identity in New Mexico, an outline of which was published in Grabbe and Schindler. The present study of the Camino Real expands the topical and theoretical scope of studying memory in the borderlands from personalized and localized memories to the complex topographies of transnational memory. It was made possible by a conference and travel grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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memorable divisiveness and Oñate’s foot became a symbol of the contestations over memory unfolding along the path he had forged towards a new world. While the memories that inform identity and community in the Southwestern borderlands are primarily local and regional in focus, remembering Southwestern pasts must transcend national frames of reference if it is to account for the diversity of borderlands experiences. The dramatic political and social realignments and the radical economic transformation of the region are attributable to pervasive processes of economic and cultural globalization already prefigured by Oñate’s conquest; they intricately entangle Southwestern history with the global predicaments of colonialism and imperial expansion. Consequently, narrating the regional past has been concerned not only with creating a national legacy out of a local experience, but has always commented on the meaning and significance of ‘America’ and, more recently, aspired to integrating a particular experience within the universal heritage of mankind. From Oñate’s foot to reenactments of the Spanish entrada to the tourist-friendly designation of the real-and-imagined trail, memory along the Camino Real speaks to the involvement of the local in more expansive frames of reference that constitutes a precondition of transnational integration. I will investigate the cultural meanings of establishing the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro as a National Historic Trail (2000) and of inaugurating the Camino Real International Heritage Center as its interpretive centerpiece (2005) as deriving from this nexus of place-and-world contexts. I contend that the commemorative projects implicate the history of a long-established trade route in the ideology of current trans-border labor recruitment and economic exchange, thus establishing the site – and by inference the state of New Mexico and the borderlands – simultaneously in the material contexts of a globalizing economy and in the cultural discourses of world heritage. Given the processes of national, hemispheric, and global integration, the Camino Real represents a spatialization of memory designed to concretely situate identities and communities in a region that is about to recover its transnational legacy.

Roots and Routes: From Memory in the Landscape to Topographies of Memory Scholarship on memory and nationalism attributes the ideological foundation for (national) communities and identities to memory and related cultural practices. Shared pasts serve to explain the present, they allow communities to articulate and legitimize feelings of group coherence and to

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symbolize and communicate the particularities of a socio-cultural group to wider society, thus naturalizing social, cultural, and national differences. Concrete and metaphoric sites – canonized texts, images, or symbols as well as commemorative celebrations, historic markers, or museum projects – give permanent significance to evanescent events and assemble historical moments into memory complexes. Places and spaces have mostly been regarded as containing visions of the past rather than constituting memory in their own terms. Yet in (re)designing space with a memorial purpose in mind, as for example through the designation of historic sites, people cast partial discourses about the past in tangible, material form. Through anniversary celebrations and reenactments, communities anchor their narratives about the past in everyday spaces, justifying their emotional bonds to place as well as their claims to commemorative terrain which may transcend national affiliations. Localized memories can be discursively connected within regional, national, or global networks of commemorative sites to constitute landscapes of memory that assemble even physically discontinuous spaces within a meaningful whole. They reflect J. B. Jackson’s idea of the cultural landscape as “an archive of ideas and meaning” (qtd. in Starrs 492) and serve to retrospectively explain diverse human experiences. The construction of temporal continuities through memory thus finds its counterpart in the spatial contiguities construed by sites. Through their double grounding of group coherence in the archives of time and space, landscapes of memory stabilize collective identities. Tracing the Spanish presence in the Rio Grande valley through the centuries, the Camino Real outlines a cultural landscape which retrospectively legitimizes a distinctly Hispanic experience of the borderlands and communicates it to contemporary U.S. society. The desire for continuity, however, originates in and collides with the pervasiveness of cultural change which challenges established order with regard to its temporal, spatial, and social constitution. In order to counter the alienating forces of change, sites of memory are also invested with a normative function which provides the retrospective search for the roots of the present with an explorative motive, seeking to map avenues into a future for the collective. When they cast evanescent narratives about the past in permanent form, sites respond to or even anticipate the destabilizing effects of change in narratives that historicize and thus naturalize processes of change, and in this manner subject them to control by the present. Thus, when sites are imaginatively interconnected in the name of group-specific narratives about the past, individual sites of memory do not merely archive memories, they actively reorganize the cultural landscape as a signifying system. Building a spatial web of cultural meanings in which sites function as discursive nodes, they modify the semantics of space.

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Joining temporal and spatial as well as social and emotive processes with textual and visual representations, the semantics of space contribute to making place synonymous with culture, constructing a closed and exclusionary system of signs, practices and images mapped onto historically charged environments. Naming and ‘imaging’ places as well as performing memory and identity in public space are highly indicative of the semantic organization of space. Yet when the fundamental assumptions undergo change, the semantics of space must change accordingly in a process of semiotic representation of dominant ideology which Maoz Azaryahu summarized as “renaming the past” (16). While naming allows to identify a place and identify with a place, the apparently innocent act at the same time (re)orders the spaces of everyday social and cultural practice semantically in response to the political constructions and social formations dominant at a given moment in time. (Re)Naming represents a process of (re)imagining which is already informed by contending visions of the past and which aims at grounding changed values within the shared (or claimed or appropriated) spaces of a community in order to legitimize new visions for its future. Therefore, rather than tracing the reflection of memory in the landscape, I suggest to explore the topographies that localized memories unfold. Topographies of memory go beyond spatial representations of the past that aim to retrospectively legitimize a lived reality. Rather, as the captivating image of the ‘road map’ suggests, they project and forge avenues into the future of a community. The commemorative remapping that transformed the Camino Real into a National Historic Trail and the interpretation of this process which is presented to the public in the exhibits of the Camino Real International Heritage Center suggest to investigate this (expansive) site as integral to a new topography of Southwestern memory, a road map towards a transnational American borderlands.

Roots: Oñate’s Foot or the First Thanksgiving? In the Southwestern borderlands, memories are informed by longstanding residence and by recent, short-term migration. Sites and practices reflect the ambivalent experience of uprooting, migration, and community building as well as the conflictive and (at least) bi-lateral experience of interethnic encounter. Migration to the borderlands necessitated the semantic adaptation of unfamiliar parts of the continent to the migrants’ paradigms of New World history and geography, imbuing space with images and imaginations of ‘America’ that implied exceptionalist promises and expectations.

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Since the Columbus Quincentenary, the Spanish colonial past of the Rio Grande valley has gained heightened public attention in commemorative sculpture, narrative, and performance. Clearly dominated by the perspective of Hispanic New Mexicans, 1 the Cuartocentenario of 1998 elevated Juan de Oñate to founding father and celebrated the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro as a symbolic route into a future when the so-called Hispanic contributions to United States history would be acknowledged and honored. 2 Consequently, the Camino Real is built on the memory complex around Oñate’s founding acts and serves as the backbone of a Hispanic New Mexico. It integrates sites along its course irrespective of their authenticity as historical way-stations. The topography of memory constructed around the historic route inscribes a glorious past into the physical space of the borderlands in order to obliterate the overt and subtle forms of discrimination which the declared descendants of the first colonists have faced ever since annexation by the United States in 1848. During the Cuartocentenario, New Mexico presented its new topography of memory to national and international audiences in community celebrations and official ceremonies which established the central instances of Oñate commemoration as way-stations along the Camino Real: Oñate’s famous paso por aqui was engraved in collective New Mexican memory through period-style reenactments of his entrada performed by a special operations group of the Spanish military who marched the trail in historical uniforms as well as through relay runs that restaged the pre-Columbian system of communication between Pueblos. Official guests of state were invited to retrace the entrada – albeit by car or helicopter – moving through the commemorative terrain along the Rio Grande from ‘First Thanksgiving’ celebrations in El Paso to the ground breaking and dedica_____________ 1

2

The style and content of the anniversary catered to the sensibilities of a segment of oldstock New Mexicans who consider themselves descendants of the conquistadors. Although they refer to themselves interchangeably as ‘Spanish,’ ‘Hispano,’ or ‘Nuevomexicano’ in contradistinction to ‘Mexican American,’ ‘Chicano,’ or ‘Latino,’ I use the terminology of the U.S. Census as the least incorrect outside designation. Commemoration of Oñate in New Mexico revolves around two complex events: The ‘Last Conquistador’ is celebrated for the expedition of 1598 that extended the Camino Real more than 1,000 miles north from Santa Barbara and laid the foundations for a new province. Yet he is also indicted for the atrocities concomitant to the battle of Acoma Pueblo in early 1599. Interpretation of the historical moments pitted different interest groups against each other in a controversy that reflects local and global concerns: While proponents defend the lasting significance of Oñate’s founding acts for American history and insist on the social and cultural benefits of Spanish colonization to present-day New Mexico, opponents point to the large-scale transformations of Native American societies. They emphasize the cruelty of colonial subjugation but also oppose Oñate commemoration because it legitimizes the displacement and annihilation of indigenous cultures and peoples concomitant to all forms of colonization.

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tion of cultural institutions to a ceremonial re-encounter between Pueblo representatives and an official Spanish delegation at San Juan that was designed to “redefine the relationship between the Indian people and the Spanish in order to lay aside some of the grievances of the past” (Rolwing). The central Cuartocentenario event on the Santa Fe Plaza highlighted the military, political, and religious aspects of conquest when the Spanish delegation presented the state of New Mexico with a replica of Oñate’s banner (see Ortiz; Soto). Both the banner ceremony and the reenacted march represented the spiritual and political protectors of colonization, depicting the ‘Virgin of Remedies’ and the coat of arms for King Philip II of Spain, and they euphemistically framed the colonial appropriations of space in terminology that replaced ‘conquest’ with ‘pacification.’ Not part of the New Mexico celebrations but still a widely noted event in 1998, the annual pageant at El Paso recast Oñate’s administrative act of taking possession of Nueva México for the Spanish Crown in the form of a ‘First Thanksgiving,’ thus tying together the ideologically and historically disparate scenes of Spanish and English arrival in the New World and emphasizing Hispanic precedence (see Simpson; Duin; Figueroa). 3 The sensational “foot-chopping incident” (Brooke) at Alcalde decreased the singularity of Oñate’s achievement and foregrounded its implication in colonial and imperial designs by resurrecting the specter of violent conflict that had been screened out in the official anniversary. It reminded the public that while the expedition had forged new routes and established novel political relations, it had by no means traversed terra incognita nor chanced upon unoccupied territory. In fact, the colonization effort had firmly relied on indigenous topographical knowledge of passable valleys, freshwater sources, mountain passes, and river fords in forging the route north (USDI, “El Camino Real” 72) and it had realized predesigned strategies of colonization developed on the basis of earlier explorations. Routes, resources, and resident populations to be expected in Nueva México were already part of colonial topography and geographical imagination when Oñate headed for the Tierra Adentro in 1598 (see Weber, Spanish Frontier; Simmons; USDI, “El Camino Real” 58-60, 71). _____________ 3

In the late 1980s, local historian Sheldon Hall, himself hailing from New England, translated La Toma de Posesion that preceded the crossing of the river into the idiom of pageantry. The ‘First Thanksgiving’ reenacts the military and spiritual ceremonies and secular entertainment that framed the symbolic act. Historically, La Toma affirmed the administrative designs for colonization. It projected the cultivation of an antagonistic natural space and anticipated beneficial changes of the man-made landscape, envisioning a remaking of the people and the land extending through past, present and into the future. It thus not only factually expanded the legal reach of Spanish domination over Pueblo country, but discursively reworked the colonists’ geographical imaginary.

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En route to the final destination in what is today northern New Mexico, Oñate repeated the ceremonious readings of colonial documents at different Pueblo settlements in order to establish legal dominance over both the land and its inhabitants. Beyond the economic motivation of physical occupation, the colonizers epistemologically appropriated and reorganized a land(scape) that had been Native American before their incursion: In the apparently simple foundational act of renaming places and landmarks, e.g. in accordance with the calendar of saints or in analogy to well-known landscapes of Spain (see Simmons), the colonists at a first glance tied the unfamiliar securely to the times and spaces of home. Thus explaining their experiences of novelty with recourse to the past, they transformed the land into a landscape of memory. Upon closer inspection, however, the primeros pobladores were also and simultaneously building a legacy in visual and textual representations that celebrated the successes and naturalized the violence integral to colonial domination. They projected their experiences into the future in a newly designed topography of memory, Nueva México, which semantically realigned the existing landscapes of the different Native American groups, including the established trade network that linked Rio Grande communities to northern Mexico. Furthermore, they fixed the transformation irreversibly in their mapping, chronicling, and (re)naming the land before them. Four hundred years later, Hispanic New Mexicans aimed at central tenets of national recollection when they organized their anniversary around Juan de Oñate as a founding figure, credited with the stature and significance of a George Washington (see Rivera; Flynn). They juxtaposed the sites of crossing the river and of the first Hispanic colony with the iconic sites of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown in order to situate their experience within the spatial imaginary of the United States and to point to the differences of the respective histories of European- Indian relations. Through the Camino Real and its central position within the Oñate memory complex, Hispanic New Mexicans found a way, literally, to affirm regional particularity and to claim national and, most recently, transnational significance in the guise of a glorious past. Celebration of the historic trail translates a specific geopolitical advancement across space – northbound Spanish exploration and colonization – into the commemorative discourse about Anglo-American arrival – the ‘First Thanksgiving’ – and, to an extent, reclaims the logic of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. It also weaves the disparate experiences of communities along the Rio Grande into a comprehensive narrative about the New Mexican past, declaring all of them significant as symbolic sites for Hispanic achievement in the state. Memory of the historic trail during the Cuartocentenario ignored that the superimposition of spatial semantics entailed the

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forceful appropriation of previous spatial, economic, social, and cultural knowledge systems. 4 It took Oñate’s foot to remind New Mexicans that the memory of Oñate tells the story of the conquerors rather than that of the conquered and that the Camino Real both constitutes and traverses a highly contested terrain of memory.

Routes I: The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail On October 13, 2000, following the annual observation of Columbus Day, Congress passed the act which officially added El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro to the list of National Scenic and National Historic Trails. As decreed by the National Trails System Act (Sec.5(b).11.A), the trail opens archaeologically and historically significant segments of the Camino Real to the public for educational and recreational purposes. 5 The full route connects historic sites in large and small communities in New Mexico, Texas, and in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosi, Guanajuato, Querétaro, all the way to Mexico City (see USDI, “El Camino Real” 56; Sletto; fig. 1). In its U.S. section, the National Historic Trail follows the Upper Rio Grande from the international border near El Paso, TX, to San Juan Pueblo in what is today northern New Mexico. Public Law 106-307 put 404 miles of the historical link between the colonial center of New Spain and the capital of one of its remotest provinces under the special stewardship of the U.S. government, to be jointly managed by the National Park Service (NPS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The mission of the explicitly international trail project is summarized in the programmatic statement formulated in the opening passages to the final Comprehensive Management Plan: El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro is recognized throughout the United States of America and Los Estados Unidos de México as a timeless route of trade and cultural exchange and interaction among Spaniards, other Europeans, American Indians, Mexicans, and Americans, that shaped individual lives and communities

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5

Commemoration of the trail is rendered problematic because Oñate’s expedition not only contributed to technological change in the Americas, but because his colonists also came epistemologically equipped for conquest. Royal instructions and legislation and collective belief systems and attitudes with regard to the unknown may have left an ideological legacy to outlast the material transformations of the cultural landscape. Public Law 106-307 “An Act to Amend the National Trails Systems Act to designate El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro as a National Historic Trail”; appended in USDI, “El Camino Real” 37. National Trails System Act (Sec. 5(b).11.A) appended in “Eligibility, Feasibility” 16-32.

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and affected settlement and development in the greater Southwest. Recognition of this route as an international historic trail will commemorate a shared cultural heritage and contribute in a meaningful way to eliminating cultural barriers and enriching the lives of people along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. (USDI, “El Camino Real” 5, emphases mine)

Various planning documents strongly endorse a binational heritage program which asks NPS, BLM, and their Mexican partners to open up avenues for bilateral administration of the trail (USDI, “El Camino Real” 12). The cooperation involves the Mexican government institution responsible for preservation issues, i.e. the Instituto Nacional de Anthropologia y Historia (INAH), sister city and similar civic partnership projects as well as cooperation among educational institutions on both sides of the international border (see USDI, “El Camino Real” 12; “Eligibility, Feasibility”; Sletto 10-12). Sections of the trail, individual sites, and colonial Mexican cities are already designated historic sites and the project has applied for UNESCO World Heritage status (see USDI, “FY07 Trail”; INAH), thus contextualizing the Camino Real in a global discourse of commemoration.

Fig. 1. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail courtesy of National Park Service National Trails Intermountain Region and Bureau of Land Management

Designation and implementation of the National Historic Trail are based on preliminary research into trail development from precolonial to United States territorial times presented in a NPS feasibility study (1997) as well

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as in the Comprehensive Management Plan (USDI, “El Camino Real”). 6 The NPS studies emphasize the enduring significance of the Camino Real as a historic, cultural, and economic link between New Mexico and ‘Old’ Mexico and as “ a symbol of the cultural interaction between nations and ethnic groups and of the commercial exchange that made possible the development and growth of the borderlands” (“Eligibility, Feasibility” 10). 7 As New Mexico’s third contribution to the system of national trails, the Camino Real complements the Santa Fe National Historic Trail and the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. It thus qualifies regional imaginations founded on scenic splendor (as in the Continental Divide Trail) or westward expansion (as in the Santa Fe Trail). The designation of a National Historic Trail that transcends the time frames of national U.S. American and Mexican eras and that highlights colonial and precolonial spatial connectedness indicates that another semantic reorganization of the region is in progress: Invoking sub-national foundations and international affiliations, the designation redefines the borderlands based upon cultural links rather than political boundaries and unfolds a transnational topography of memory which recognizes the multicultural roots of ‘America’ in the hemispheric implications of the colonial route. 8 _____________ 6

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True to the mission of interagency and international cooperation, the feasibility study integrates research done at the Center for Spanish Colonial Research, a joint venture of NPS and the University of New Mexico, the work of archaeologist Michael P. Marshall for BLM and the non-profit Camino Real Project, Inc., and the results presented during the first International Camino Real Colloquium in Valle de Allende, Chihuahua (1995), a cooperation of INAH, the NPS, BLM, and Ciudad Juarez Universidad; see “Feasibility, Eligibility” 5-10. The study traces development of the Camino Real from a pre-Columbian trade corridor that connected routes bound north from the central valley of Mexico with southbound routes originating in the Rio Grande Pueblos through early colonial expansion in the northern frontier zone of New Spain, motivated by the discovery of silver and aided by the trail system. Transitioning between the phases of exploration and colonization, Oñate’s expedition of 1598 extended the trail north and furnished an access route for the Franciscan missionaries until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 when military confrontation between colonists and the indigenous population effectively stalled colonization. Diego de Vargas’s reconquest in 1692 shifted the Spanish military north from the previous war zone of the Gran Chichimeca. It reaffirmed Spanish domination in the subsequent founding of villas like Albuquerque (1706) or Chihuahua (1709) and inaugurated a century of commercial and civic consolidation. Mexican Independence in 1821 eventually opened the region to international trade, the Camino Real or Chihuahua Trail connecting the westbound U.S.-American Santa Fe Trail with the southbound route into Mexico. Despite the Mexican-American War, the Camino Real retained its importance as a route of economic and cultural interaction well beyond 1848 and only declined in significance after the Civil War and eventually after the coming of the railroads in 1882. Emerging centers like Taos or Pecos relied on the Camino Real to establish economic relations between Native American, American, and European traders, gradually extending the scope of an increasingly attractive market from northern and central New Spain across the continent and even the Atlantic. Both the dynamic economic exchange and the re-

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The official documents explicitly invite Mexico’s and Spain’s perspectives on the project and seek to incorporate issues of international concern in the trail (USDI, “El Camino Real” 10), yet the Act establishing the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro as a National Historic Trail nationally sanctions Hispanic history. While the “Findings” acknowledge precolonial use of the trade route in the statement that “American Indian groups, especially the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande, developed trails for trade long before Europeans arrived” (Sent. 4), the Act still privileges the colonial Spanish heritage in the geographical definition and national specification of the trail (Sent. 1 and 2) and in the historical frame (1598 to 1882; Sent. 1, 5, 7). Indications of conflict, violence, or warfare are absent from the Findings. Instead, they attribute a central function to the Spanish in ‘civilizing’ the borderlands (Sent. 7, 9). Slighting the precolonial achievement of hemispheric communication in the absence of beasts of burden, the Findings dwell extensively on the range of non-native actors in the processes of migration to and socio-cultural transformation of the region during the Spanish colonial, Mexican, and U.S.-American territorial periods (Sent. 7, 8, 9). Rather than to the different boundaries established in the region, the official interpretation attributes the development and growth of the borderlands to the route and institution of the Camino Real (Sent. 7), declaring it “a symbol of cultural interaction […] and of the commercial exchange” (Sent. 3) and implying a trajectory that leads directly and inevitably to the present state of global interconnectedness (Sent. 8). Yet the idea of interaction and exchange in the borderlands is countered both by Sent. 6, which emphasizes unidirectional northbound emigration throughout the nineteenth century and by Sent. 8, which refers to demographic shifts as ‘travel’ rather than migration. Also, the historical parameters stop short of the massive displacement and spiritual and intellectual appropriation of the region that began with tourism in the late 1880s. The “Findings” suggest a historical basis that turns the Camino Real into a spatial symbol for Southwestern exceptionalism and supports a reading of the region first established by Anglo-American cultural brokers around 1900. The transnational potential of the historic trail project is somewhat offset by the simultaneous instrumentalization of the Camino Real in constructions of a decidedly Hispanic heritage which also affirm a particular ethnicity of New Mexican Hispanics as distinct from other Mexican American and Latino groups in U.S. society. _____________ newed military confrontation with advancing Native American groups towards the end of the eighteenth century affirmed the position of the border province at the intersection of the hemispheric interest spheres of Spain, France, and the United States. An elaborate system of communication, credit, and transportation prefigured the ambivalent transnational relations which characterize the Southwestern borderlands today.

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Greeted as a long overdue recognition of Hispanic history on a national level, the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail eventually interprets the landscapes of Hispanic memory for a national audience. But given almost a decade of memorial controversy in the state of New Mexico, have differing interpretations of the colonial roots altered the topography of memory represented at the Camino Real International Heritage Center?

Fig. 2. Fortress of Hispanic Memories? The Camino Real International Heritage Center as seen from the desert ampitheater behind the exhibition building. © JSB

Routes II: El Camino Real International Heritage Center The Camino Real International Heritage Center inhabits a plot of windswept desert land several miles off Interstate 25 between Socorro and Las Cruces, NM. Placed at the northern edge of La Jornada del Muerto it conveys a fair impression of the desolation of this notorious portion of the historic trail. On two levels, the Heritage Center aligns administrative and educational facilities and a round, two-story exhibition building. The major axis of the building complex roughly runs north-south and points to the Rio Grande, suggesting in its linearity the two-dimensional mapping of the historic trail as well as the spatial concepts upon which imperial expansion and colonial administration were built. The exhibition building is

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clad in a box-like structure that from the outside is reminiscent of a presidio (fig. 2). Especially the center’s outside appearance suggests reading the building plan as an architectonic statement on the collision of circular Native American and linear European cosmologies: Despite the emphasis on exchange and interaction that characterized the planning and research documentation, the building complex conveys a defensiveness that evokes the collision of traditions. Rather than present an architectonic interpretation of the permeability of cultures in encounter or of the malleability of memory resulting from processes of exchange and mestizaje, the building implies a fortification of memories. Visitors access the building from the top floor. Before they enter the exhibition proper, they descend a flight of stairs to a glass-fronted, airy entrance hall that establishes the historical theme in factual and entertaining variations obviously geared to different implied audiences. 9 The entrance to the exhibition is framed by a large illustrated panel topped by an ox cart that interweaves central issues of trail development in a fence-like structure (fig. 3). Visitors slip through an opening in the ‘fence’ into a tunnel where maps, further wall-mounted text, and sound and light effects establish a sense of place. Furthermore, the recreated settings of a colonial Mexican town or a trading station as well as (interactive) maps which balance the text- and image-based presentation of history appear indicative of ‘sense of place’ as a guiding principle throughout the exhibition.. The exhibition texts at the Heritage Center are consistently bilingual and reproduce the information presented in government documentation. They emphasize the trail’s potential to reaffirm economic ties across international boundaries and to rejuvenate the long established avenues of cultural and social exchange, thus contextualizing the narrative of the regional past both in a national and a transnational imaginary. Yet much like the establishing documents for the National Historic Trail, the transborder narrative presented at the Heritage Center rather points to the “romance of the intercultural space” (Fluck 26) than to the realities of the borderlands. Reading the exhibition texts closely and against the grain generates an array of recurring themes that establish a web of “transitional, multinational, and international linkages” (28) at the same time that they replay established topoi of American self-description. _____________ 9

The exhibits in the hall address children, passers-through, heritage tourists, and local audiences. In late October 2008, for example, the hall held a table-sized Camino Real game, a meditation in objects on the theme of travel, a summary of trail history mounted on a free-standing carreta (ox cart), a wall panel listing the primeros pobladores, and a video installation occasioned by Dia de los Muertos. My interpretation of the narrative presented by the Heritage Center focuses on the introductory summary (“Intro”) because owing to its placement in the entrance area it is likely to reach a larger proportion of visitors. Additional citations from exhibition panels are abbreviated as “Exh.”

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Fig. 3. Downstairs entrance to the Exhibition, Camino Real International Heritage Center © JSB

Consequently, even the first panels of the introductory display foreground the timelessness and boundlessness of the phenomenon symbolized by the Camino Real: While José Cisneros’s rich illustrations concretely visualize the narrated past, the textual explanation immediately expands the limits of national history into precolonial times and establishes a discursive space of hemispheric communication and exchange. Declaring the Camino Real one of the longest and “oldest continuously used roads in North America” (Exh. 2) reintroduces not only the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterized Oñate commemoration but also implies an almost typological notion of continuity in the face of change: El Camino Real began as faint foot paths carved by native traders as they exchanged goods between north and south. Spanish explorers etched it deeper during their expeditions northward to claim land and riches for the King of Spain. Thousands of migrants, miners, missionaries, and merchants followed over the next 500 years. The trail that began as a scratch in the earth is now a bustling highway with cars zipping by and planes flying overhead. (Exh. 1)

Offering trail history in a nutshell and retrospectively constructing the trajectory of trail development, the text contends that even considering changing circumstances and actors, the meaning and substance of the

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historical experience remain stable and eventually fulfill the promise inherent in the foundational act: “Just as El Camino Real was a path to new opportunities for those who explored, settled, and supplied the interior provinces in centuries past, it is now an avenue for immigrants seeking new lives and work in the United States” (Exh., antepenultimate panel). Listing the impressive numbers of Oñate’s colonizing expedition, the introductory display credits Spain with the honor of first exploration and settlement and only insinuates the aggressiveness of conquest (Intro 3). Instead, the panels that explain the Spanish entrada legitimize Spain’s and later the United States’ military presence in terms of protection and selfdefense. Thus, the text naturalizes the increasing militarization of the border(lands) in a rhetoric of protection where, initially, Spanish presidios and later American forts secured commerce and troops guaranteed the physical integrity of “resident Hispanic families and the new settlers from the East” against the threat posed by “Native American and European raiders […] along this burgeoning commercial route” (Intro 4). Furthermore, the exhibition text elaborates on the bi-directionality of exchange and emphasizes that both material goods, ideas, and cultures ‘traveled’ the trail. It presents mobility as the creative source for the trail and as an inherently American impulse that inevitably results in social encounter and cultural change. The text constructs a trajectory that leads from initial difference to eventual fusion, as if the notion of mestizaje could be emptied of its relational and processual character and fixed as a stage of cultural development. As from the “Findings” in the Act, indications of unequal power relations, violent conflict, resistance, or hybridity are conspicuously absent from the narrative. Through a rhetoric that inextricably ties demographic shifts and economic exchange in the consistent pairing of “product and traveler” (Intro 5) or “commerce and people seeking their fortune” (Exh. Rio Grande), the exhibition develops its statement on mobility into a notion of adventuresome travel. As in the Act, the exhibition text casts the people who presumably trekked alongside goods and ideas mainly as ‘travelers’ rather than (im)migrants, and it invites visitors to “Travel the trail from Zacatecas where soldiers, artisans, and families gathered in 1598 for the colonization of New Mexico. Discover the Old and New World goods and ideas that flowed freely along El Camino Real […]. Shop at a trade fair along the way. Witness the battles lost and won as nations struggled for land and independence” (Exh. 1, emphases mine). The suggestion of adventuresome travel culminates in the claim that automobilists in the twentieth century were, “as those before them, on an adventure of cultural and environmental diversity” (Intro 5). The exhibition thus continues that brand of commodified adventure first established by the

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Harvey tours through the Southwest at the beginning of the twentieth century, extending adventurous consumerism beyond national space. The three concluding panels of the exhibition unfold a landscape of memory that transcends national times and spaces and evoke a history of good neighborly relations between two countries that share a culturally coherent region of the Americas: Just as El Camino Real was a path to new opportunities for those who explored, settled, and supplied the interior provinces in centuries past, it is now an avenue for immigrants seeking new lives and work in the United States. […] People are still on the move along El Camino Real, traveling faster than ever before. The spirit of cooperation and communication between the nations is now written into the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Its goals include: duty free trade across borders and between nations, promotion of fair competition, increased investment opportunities, and protection of intellectual property rights. The effects of NAFTA have multiplied the flow of manufactured goods between Mexico and the United States. Cultural tourism is also growing on both sides of the border.

Furthermore, the exhibition reorganizes and re-imagines the Southwestern borderlands as a Hispanic topography which overwrites the divisiveness of the international border. It implies the contingency of national territories in view of trends towards hemispheric economic integration, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Taking the economic integration of the borderlands as its cue, the rhetoric employed by NPS and BLM in their textual representations of the Camino Real is indebted to the consensual logic of nation-building history and makes concessions to the location and purpose of the sites along the historic trail. The narratives presented at both the Heritage Center and along the Historic Trail contribute to constructing a marketable image for the state and to turning regional history into a commodity for tourist consumption. But because they capitalize on the regional past and forget about the debt accumulated over the centuries by the enforced shift of spatial semantics, they spatially manifest a geographical imaginary that Winfried Fluck critically apostrophized as the “romance of the intercultural space beyond the borders of the nation-state” (26). The Camino Real as a spatial symbol thus feeds into the exceptionalist notion of the Southwestern United States as a ‘Land of Enchantment’, a master trope of cultural hegemony against which Hispanic New Mexicans, Chicanos, and Pueblo groups have tried to formulate alternative regional images.

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Beyond the Land of Enchantment: Globalizing the Heritage of the Borderlands Since the late 1800s, the various forms that memory took in New Mexico have served to explain regional particularities to the nation at the same time that they legitimized local contributions to a (U.S.) American past. In order to symbolically integrate the appropriated territory into their emerging societies, the different waves of immigrant populations constructed narratives that sought to comprehend the nature and significance of ‘the American experience,’ i.e. the creation of novel societies in a new world, and they conceived of topographies of memory in order to produce common ground for identification to which the paradoxical impulse to both claim difference from and belonging to a larger political, social, or cultural entity could be anchored (see Campbell 1; Weber 342). Spatializations of the regional past are captured in a series of suggestive images that oscillate between sub-national and transnational dimensions: the Land of Enchantment, the Hispano homeland, Aztlán. However, while memory revolving around the Camino Real builds on established imaginations of New Mexico it remains open to debate whether the resignification of space intended by trail designation succeeds at realizing the transnational potential inherent in the borderlands past or whether the semantics of space remain indebted to a nationalist paradigm. The invention and image of the Land of Enchantment established the borderlands as the ‘American Southwest.’ It remains the most pervasive and powerful abstraction of the multicultural realities that constitute topographies of memory in the border region. Ever since Charles Lummis exhorted his fellow citizens to “See America First!” travelers have reveled in the region’s sublime natural beauty, the exoticism of its cultures, and the authenticity of its traditions. In the decades around 1900, artists, intellectuals, and other cultural brokers sojourned in the Southwestern deserts, seeking an ultimate ground for a genuinely American model of an integrated multicultural society and culture based on (im)migration. The proposed harmonious coexistence of authentic traditions in New Mexico promised to realize the nation’s motto e pluribus unum and to offer utopian relief from the disenchantment of an industrializing, urbanizing America. Prerequisite to such an exceptionalist imagination of the region was, however, a willingness to abandon the richness of cultural expression still to be found in territorial New Mexico for the reductive concept of triethnicity (see Bodine). Proclaiming ethnicity as the unifying and motivating force behind social and cultural practices, the so-called tri-ethnic myth homogenized diverse historical experiences into a hierarchy of ethnic traditions with “Indians at the bottom, Mexicanos in the middle, and An-

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glos at the top” (Rodriguez, “Taos Pueblo Matachines” 254n19). The triethnic myth discursively embraced diversity and historical complexity, yet in practice it allowed to contain the ambivalence resulting from the various intersections of regional traditions in a pluralist vision of distinct and definite ethnicities. In a variation on the game of renaming the past, processes of internal differentiation and acculturation were downplayed (Wilson 29) to the benefit of a commodifiable packaging of the Southwestern borderlands as a destination with exotic cultures, foreign customs and ancient histories (Rodriguez 1987, 1989, 1998, 2002 passim ). 10 The images conjured up by the discourse of tri-ethnicity in the Land of Enchantment have served to draw and maintain imaginary boundaries between groups which have stood in the way of achieving economic and civic equality for Native Americans, Hispanos, Mexican Americans, and Hispanics. The social and cultural concerns of minority groups that originate in the colonial and imperial realities of hemispheric history are subordinated to a static cliché of tri-ethnic harmony at the expense of processes of mutual transformation of traditions entailed in the notion of mestizaje. In response to the master tropes of tri-ethnicity and the Land of Enchantment, various minority groups in New Mexico have attempted to derail the Anglo-dominated topography of memory and recast it in a new regional image. Both Oñate memory in 1998 and the commemorative projects of the Camino Real and the International Heritage Center can be read as such attempts at redefining the region. Already in this vein, albeit with different political repercussions, both the idea of the Southwest as Aztlán, the mythic land of origin of the Chicanos, and the idea of a ‘Hispano homeland,’ an isolated haven of endogenic culture change producing a particular, clearly classifiable subculture in northern New Mexico, emerged during the late 1960s as alternative conceptions of a region negotiating the demands and challenges of a shared past and a common future. The reconfiguration of the Southwestern borderlands as ethnic nationalist homelands spatially underscored the demands for political, social, and cultural emancipation circulating in the civic and academic debates of the civil rights era. The notion of a homeland that is as much imagined as geographically concrete, rooted in the past but dedicated to the future of a community, became paradigmatic for topographies of memory dedicated to providing an ‘alter-native’ frame of reference for collective identification not necessarily congruent with the paradigms of nation and national identity. 11 The homeland concept helps _____________ 10 11

On the tri-ethnic myth see also Rodriguez, “Land, Water”; Montgomery, “Trap of Race,” and Spanish Redemption. While Nostrand and Estaville maintain that ‘homeland’ allows to tie a particular group identity to a clearly definable geographical place (xv), historical geographer Michael Conzen

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to analyze the role and politics of space in the competition over cultural, historical, and political resources within multicultural societies (Conzen 270) and allows to identify legitimizing discourses circulating within and between socio-cultural groups. Yet while homelands function as both the motor and the outcome of processes by which groups seek to articulate community and affirm identity, the concept remains entangled with constructions of cultural difference and with mechanisms of social and spatial in- and exclusion. This limitation of the concept becomes especially evident in explanations of the regional subculture that evolved in northern New Mexico. The so-called Rio Arriba is a complex cultural landscape which serves as the spatial and symbolic frame of reference for different Pueblo groups as well as for Hispanic villagers, for an international crowd of ‘art-colonists’ drawn to Taos and Santa Fe, and for the personnel of the laboratories at Los Alamos. The heterogeneous assembly of cultural heritages produced a multiply symbolized space which first inspired the idea of the Land of Enchantment at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, there have been attempts at redefining the region as Hispano or “SpanishAmerican homeland” (see Carlson) based on the autochthonous Hispanic presence. 12 Cultural historian Enrique Lamadrid reads the designation of El Camino Real as a National Historic Trail as a reinvention of the borderlands which extends the notion of the Hispano homeland from the Rio Arriba to New Mexico and beyond. He claims that the trail provides the foundations for a genuinely Hispanic sense of place, la querencia, and signifies one of the “deep cultural homelands of the United States” (Lamadrid qtd. in Brown). Officially affirmed in the National Trails System Act and its Findings, the Hispanic geographical imaginary represents a current attempt at restructuring the social hierarchies that informed the Anglodominated idea of the Land of Enchantment. In the context of quadricentennial controversy, however, despite the acknowledgment of bilinguality and long-ranging processes of mestizaje and despite the evidence of sociocultural mixing in rituals and folk celebrations (see Nostrand, “HispanicAmerican Borderland” 641-44; Gandert), the concept of Hispano home_____________

12

cautions that such places presuppose a socio-cultural group and that reconnecting memory to territory primarily reinforces the cohesion within a community. The unity of “a people, a place, and identity with place” which Nostrand proposes (Hispano Homeland 214) must be qualified in the context of inter-group competition for political and cultural dominance within actual spaces as a symbolic claim to a “territory that one indigenous group controls to advance its own cultural goals” to the exclusion of others (Conzen 266). Geographers propose a culture area for an old-stock minority rooted in traditions of agrarianism and folk Catholicism, traceable in the distribution of family and place names, settlement and land use patterns, and linguistically in the local dialect characterized by old Castilian survivals (see Nostrand “Hispanic-American Borderland” 652-55).

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land has mostly rejected non-Hispanic cultural traditions and failed to explain recent cultural change, instead approaching it in terms of decadence and loss of authenticity. While the notion of the Hispano homeland that explained an empirically evident folk culture in the Rio Arriba represented a rather isolationist response to multiculturalism, protagonists of the civil rights movement sought a spatial imaginary that would support their political and social critique and offer a ground for resistance against and interventions in the spatio-ethnic hierarchies inherent in pluralist models of society such as those established in the Land of Enchantment (Weber 356). Consequently, they promoted the idea and image of a mythic homeland of Chicanos, Aztlán, in order to account for the diversity of their historical experience and to unlock the paradox resulting from the legacies of conquest and subordination. In the Chicano imaginary, Aztlán figured as a hemispheric topography of memory that integrated the precolonial traditions and postcolonial struggles of Native Americans on both sides of the international border into the contemporary movement of resistance and liberation and thus aimed to ground the realities of mestizaje in a transnational Southwest. Aztlán rallied civil rights activists during the 1960s and 1970s, thus underlining the “political dimension of cultural identity” articulated in space (Conzen 255), and in the programmatic statements of “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” Chicanos also pointed to the actual material and legal inequities and conflicts of interest within a multicultural U.S.A. that had been glossed over in pluralist models of society: In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that […] Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. […] [W]e declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán (Alurista, emphases mine)

The spatio-cultural vision of a mythic Aztlán encompassed the whole continent and aspired to a mestizo society and historiography anteceding colonial beginnings. Yet in order to assert an alternative identity, the concept of Aztlán erected new boundaries of difference and thus like the Hispano homeland remained entangled in cultural essentialism and ethnic nationalism (see Bus 118). Since the 1990s, as evident in the protests revolving around the memory of colonial beginnings along the Rio Grande, the two ethnic nationalist visions of a sub-national Hispano enclave that owed its existence to Spanish conquest on the one hand and a transna-

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tional, mestizo Aztlán that claimed hemispheric significance and precolonial roots on the other had lost their attraction. How could a regional identification be articulated that responded to the concerns articulated in critique of the Land of Enchantment yet realized the aspirations of the civil rights movement without a renewal of parochialisms and narrow essentializing? Confronted with interpretations of U.S. history that originate in the east of the nation, borderlands communities are retelling and reenacting the story of national beginnings from a Southwestern angle: They claim precedence over those who landed at Plymouth Rock, they provide their own founding figures, they cite regional gateways to the United States as indications of the diversity and complexity of immigration histories – in short, they insist on presenting their past as integral, not marginal, to the national historical narrative. Their narratives accommodate the contrary experiences of conquest and reconquest, annexation and migration, political integration and social resistance. In commemorative projects like the Camino Real or the International Heritage Center, New Mexicans are challenging unified models of regional identification in their search for a topography of memory that better reflects their negotiating the dichotomies that derived from the confrontation of old world selves and new world others and that have shaped the perceptions of the Americas to this day. The palimpsestic and openly contradictory borderlands emerge from the interaction of variously located political and economic players: Colonial empires, emerging nation states, national institutions, global corporations and local interest groups have engaged in (re)appropriating and (re)defining the Rio Grande region. Memory of the Camino Real develops a trajectory of trans-border integration in its recourse to a pre-national stage of intraregional exchange and in its projection of future international cooperation on the civic, institutional, and government levels. There is a perceptible shift from notions of homeland toward a merging of cultural forms and practices resulting from these transnationalizations of the borderlands. As presented at the Heritage Center, the historic trail unfolds a space of pre- and sub-national mechanisms of cultural and economic exchange that predates and anticipates the present globalizing order. It has been read as a positive symbol of economic integration and technical innovation, visually and physically inscribing progress in the cultural landscape. As perceptions of the region shift to an internal perspective, memory of the Camino Real also conceptually shifts towards transnational approaches by situating the historic epoch commemorated through Oñate in 1998 in the real-and-imagined geographies of the ‘Greater Southwest.’ 13 Designation and reinterpretation of the _____________ 13

Precolonial cultural connections over an enormous geographical area and a perceptible

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trail indicate a remarkable transition between parallel academic traditions as the ethnic nationalist imaginations used to describe the Southwestern borderlands and presented above are giving way to transnational concepts that have heretofore informed archaeological, historical, and anthropological scholarship. A first recognition of the transnational scope of borderlands history was proposed by H. E. Bolton in his notion of the ‘Epic of Greater America.’ With regard to the Camino Real, further conceptual evidence for such a transnational notion of region born of mestizaje is to be found in Americo Paredes’s notion of ‘Greater Mexico’ for whom the cultural ties between Mexico and the previously Mexican portions of the Southwest still exert a cohesive power expressed in the geographical imaginary of the borderlands (see Saldivar, Borderlands of Culture 37). ‘Greater Mexico’ is constructed by lines of mutual exchange rather than by frontiers of advancing acculturation. Yet the Camino Real also remains a highly ambivalent borderlands symbol which points to the interdependence and inextricable entanglement of Anglo and Latin American imperial policies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the borderlands between Mexico and the United States that stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast is one of the arenas experiencing the “accelerated transnational ‘flows’ of capital and information” caused by trade agreements like NAFTA one the one hand, and the humanitarian crisis of ‘illegal immigration’ along a severely guarded political boundary line on the other (Wood 252). In political and economic terms, the boundary still separates an “advanced industrial country from an underdeveloped one” (Fernandez-Kelly 250), thus perpetuating the frontier imaginary of the confrontation of civilization and savagery under late-capitalist terms and conditions (see Weber 71). Traversing an “area of considerable cultural diversity, where problems of international dependency, domination, and development may be appreciated with piercing clarity” (Fernandez-Kelly 250), the Camino Real is still situated in a multiply fragmented space. An optimistic reading might emphasize the potential of memory in culturally unifying and spatially organizing the region along the transnational route. The trail designation might establish a topography of memory _____________ social and cultural impact of the colonial powers on indigenous society and space inform the archaeological perception of the ‘Greater Southwest’ as a region that necessarily encompasses the northern Mexican states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango – condensed in the rule of thumb ‘from Las Vegas (NV) to Las Vegas (NM), and from Durango (Mexico) to Durango (CO)’ (J. Reid). Mutual (yet uneven) transformations and adaptations of native as well as Spanish and Mexican cultural landscapes are evident in settlement patterns, architecture, social systems, and cultural traditions. I owe my perception of the borderlands as a transnational entity, prehistorically and presently, to University of Arizona archaeologist Jefferson Reid who strongly advocated the comprehensive perspective.

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that newly legitimizes the borderlands in global contexts, providing extant economic relations with a cultural dimension that is affirmed by the nomination of the Camino Real for the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. Furthermore, seeing the region through the lenses of the archaeologists’ notion of the Greater Southwest and Paredes’s Greater Mexico might effect a change of perspectives from the inside out that allows to reconceive of the borderlands not as marginal but as a transitional space pulling the Americas closer together. However, a more skeptical reading of the projects uncovers numerous ties to nationalist frames of identification which, again, fail to account for the situatedness of borderlands experience between the mutually exclusive linguistic, religious, or national descriptors of Spanish or English, Catholic or Protestant, Mexican or U.S.-American identifications. The textual representations of Camino Real memory suggest to read the trail as an attempt at naturalizing the Hispanic presence in the borderlands and at expanding the ethnic nationalist notion of the Hispano homeland beyond nationally demarcated space, pushing culturally constructed border lines just further south instead of opening a space in-between, a twenty-first century Nepantla. With Fluck’s critique of intercultural utopianism in mind, one must ask whether the official interpretations of the trail do not rather support newly emerging forms of international dominance which are attributable to an ongoing re-formation of American power under the parameters of globalizing economies and governance resting on unequal relations and exploitative economic, social and cultural dynamics. Despite their inherent transnationalism, memories of the Camino Real have not achieved a clear trajectory yet. It remains to be seen whether they contribute to a topography of memory in the tradition of minority resistance and in-betweenness or to topographies that resurrect and extend the homeland concept and ennoble exploitative economic relations by awarding them the cultural distinction of national and world heritage.

Works Cited Alurista. “El Plan Spiritual de Aztlán.” 1969. 5 May 2007 . Azaryahu, Maoz. “Die Umbenennung der Vergangenheit, oder: Die Politik der symbolischen Architextur der Stadt Ost-Berlin, 1990-1991.” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 88 (1992): 16-30. Bodine, John J. “A Tri-Ethnic Trap: The Spanish-Americans in Taos.” SpanishSpeaking People in the United States: Proceedings of the 1968 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Ed. June Helm. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968. 145-53.

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Brooke, James. “Conquistador Statue Stirs Hispanic Pride and Indian Rage.” New York Times 9 Feb. 1998, late ed.: A10. Brown, Patricia Leigh. “Remote Majesty of the Camino Real.” International Herald Tribune 3 Oct. 2003: 5. Bureau of Land Management and NM State Monuments Division. “El Camino Real International Heritage Center: Resource Management Plan Amendment and Environmental Assessment.” EA-NM-050-00-62. 30 Mar. 2001. 1 Jan. 2008 . Bus, Heiner. “‘Keep this Chicano/a Running’: Geography and the Dynamics of Spatial Movement and Stasis in Chicano Literature.” U.S. Latino Literatures and Cultures: Transnational Perspectives. Ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Karin Ikas. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. 115-30. Campbell, Neil. The Cultures of the New American West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland: Four Centuries in New Mexico’s Rio Arriba. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Conzen, Michael P. “American Homelands: A Dissenting View.” Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place Across America. Ed. Richard L. Nostrand and Lawrence E. Estaville. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. 238-71. Diaz, Elvia. “Foot Cut Off of Oñate ’s Statue: Celebration May Have Sparked Vandalism.” Albuquerque Journal 8 Jan. 1998, north ed.: D1, D3. Duin, Julia. “Southwest Marking 400th Anniversary of 1st Thanksgiving: Towns to Honor Conquistadores’ Visit.” Washington Times 26 Nov. 1997. 22 May 2005. . “Eligibility, Feasibility, History, and Significance.” c. 1997. 24 Oct. 2003 . Fernandez-Kelly, Maria Patricia. “The U.S.-Mexico Border: Recent Publications and the State of Current Research.” Latin American Research Review 16.3 (1981): 250-67. Figueroa, Ivonne. “America’s First Thanksgiving: 400th Anniversary.” Hispano America USA, Inc. c. 1998. 5 May 2007 . Fluck, Winfried. “Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need? A Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly 59.1 (2007): 23-32. Flynn, Ken. “Views Differ on Statue’s Renaming.” El Paso Times 10 Nov. 2003: 1A, 2A. Gandert, Miguel. Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico P, 2000. Giles, Paul. “Transnationalism in Practice.” Dislocations: Transatlantic Perspectives on Postnational American Studies. Spec. issue of 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies 8 (2001). 3 Nov. 2008 . Grabbe, Hans-Jürgen, and Sabine Schindler, eds. The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts, Debates. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. Gutiérrez, David G., and Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo. “Introduction: Nation and Migration.” American Quarterly 60.3 (2008): 503-21. INAH. “Camino Real de Tierra Adentro Postulada para UNESCO.” Artes e Historia México. 3 Nov. 2008 . Korff, Gottfried. “Mentalität und Monumentalität im politischen Wandel: Zur öffentlichen Namensgebung in Wolfsburg und Eisenhüttenstadt.” Aufbau West, Aufbau Ost: Die Planstädte Wolfsburg und Eisenhüttenstadt in der Nachkriegszeit. Ed.

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Rosmarie Beier. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1997. 3 Nov. 2008 . Montgomery, Charles. The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power and Loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. —. “The Trap of Race and Memory: The Language of Spanish Civility on the Upper Rio Grande.” American Quarterly 52.3 (2000): 478-513. Noble, Allen G., ed. To Build in a New Land: Ethnic Landscapes in North America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Nostrand, Richard L. “The Hispanic-American Borderland: Delimitation of an American Culture Region.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60.4 (1970): 638-61. —. The Hispano Homeland. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. —, and Lawrence E. Estaville, eds. Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place Across America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. “Oñate Cuartocentenario Statewide Schedule of Events.” NM Office of Cultural Affairs. n.d. n. pag. “Oñate’s Entrada Tranquila.” Community of Socorro, NM. n.d. n. pag. Organization of American States. “Bi-National Cultural Heritage Program Mexico – United States of America: The Tierra Adentro Royal Path / Programa Binacional del Patrimonio Cultural Mexico – Estados Unidos de America: El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro.” n.d. 3 Nov. 2008 . Ortiz, Frank. “Santa Fe Celebrates Cuartocentenario.” Santa Fe New Mexican 24 Apr. 1998. 24 Oct. 2003 . Rivera, Ray. “Hero or Villain: How Should We Remember Don Juan de Oñate?” Santa Fe New Mexican 11 Jan. 1998. 24 Oct. 2003 . Rodriguez, Sylvia. “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos: Toward A Sociology of the Art Colony.” Journal of Anthropological Research 45.1 (1989): 77-99. —. “Fiesta Time and Plaza Space: Resistance and Accommodation in a Tourist Town.” Journal of American Folklore 111.493 (1998): 39-56. —. “Land, Water, and Ethnic Identity in Taos.” Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants. Ed. Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1987. 313-403. —. “The Taos Fiesta: Invented Tradition and the Infrapolitics of Symbolic Reclamation.” Nuevomexicano Cultural Legacy. Ed. Francisco Lomeli, Victor Sorell, and Genaro Padilla. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2002. 185-202. —. “The Taos Pueblo Matachines: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations.” American Ethnologist 18.2 (1991): 234-56. Rolwing, Rebecca. “Spanish Reach Out to Indians: Group Hopes to Calm Anger in New Mexico.” Denver Rocky Mountain News 14 Feb. 1998. 2 June 2005 . Saldívar, José David. “Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste: Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Martinez’s Parrot in the Oven, and Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 339-67. Saldivar, Ramon. The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.

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Simmons, Marc. The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1991. Simpson, Shannon. “Rio Grande Thanksgiving.” Borderlands: An El Paso Community College Oral History Project 9.5 (1991). 5 May 2007 Sletto, Bjorn. “Two-Way Corridor through History.” Américas 48.3 (1996): 8-17. Soto, Monica. “Banners, Statues Greet Spanish Dignitaries.” Santa Fe New Mexican 28 Apr. 1998. 24 Oct. 2003 . Starrs, Paul F. “Brinck Jackson in the Realm of the Everyday.” Geographical Review 88.4 (1998): 1492-1506. United States. Department of the Interior. National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management. “El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail: Comprehensive Management Plan and Final Environmental Impact Statement.” Long Distance Trails Group. Santa Fe. Apr. 2004. 1 Jan. 2008 . —. “FY07 Trail Accomplishments and FY08 and Out-Year Priorities.” 1 Jan. 2008 <www.nps.gov>. Walsh, Lawrence B. “Spanish Road, American Destinies, ‘Voyages to the Interior.’” Encounters 5-6 (1990): 56-61. 9 Mar. 2005 . Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992. —. “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands.” American Historical Review 91.1 (1986): 66-81. Wilson, Chris. “Monuments to a Selective History.” Designer/Builder 11.3 (1997): 2831. Wood, Andrew Grant. “Writing Transnationalism: Recent Publications on the U.S.Mexico Borderlands.” Latin American Research Review 35.3 (2000): 251-65.

“A Lens into What It Means to Be an American”: African American Philadelphia Murals as Sites of Memory BIRGIT BAURIDL

Introduction 1 “The National Museum of African American History and Culture [NMAAHC] was established on December 19, 2003, when President Bush signed into law legislation establishing the Museum as part of the Smithsonian Institution. It is the first national museum to be devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life” – thus reads the opening of the “Building Design Update” section of the NMAAHC’s web site (Smithsonian Institution). What at a first glance triggers a positive reaction develops into astonishment when the message begins to sink in. The statement suggests that after the Emancipation Proclamation it took 150 years to establish a national African American museum, with a museum being nothing less than a public site of memory which recognizes the African American experience as both nationally defining and inclusive. While the building is scheduled to be finished in 2015, the online museum meanwhile constitutes the main feature, bringing “the stories of African American History to a global audience” (Bunch) and at the same time enabling public participation in an interactive memory book. Despite its link to a transnational public, the NMAAHC nevertheless operates on a national level: it “will use African American history and culture as a lens into what it means to be an American” (Bunch). The launch of the NMAAHC can without doubt be interpreted as a positive event. However, its long absence parallels the many years of neglect and ignorance of the impact of the African American experience on American history (see Berlin et al.) – of the African American experience being American history. It demonstrates the necessity of public sites of _____________ 1

I would like to thank Amy Johnston and Lindsey Rosenberg from the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and Charles Flowe for their support and Carolin Folsom, Ingrid Gessner, and Veronika Jungbauer for their time and diligent reading of this article.

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memory in the most geographic and physical meaning of the term to (further) inscribe the African American experience into collective memory and consciousness. Philadelphia murals provide these public and easily accessible possibilities of encounter, engagement, and recollection both in their physical presence as well as in their global and interactive transmission on a specifically created web site. 2 In general, Philadelphia murals memorialize and honor heroes, oftentimes leading local figures; commemorate history and histories; affirm and perpetuate traditions and values of various cultures and ethnicities; and at times prove “to be a healing and cathartic experience for the communities [and ethnicities] involved […] and restore […] a semblance of pride and ownership to citizens in crumbling neighborhoods” (Fleming 108). African American Philadelphia murals, 3 more specifically, store particular African American memory and cultural values and recognize the specific importance of memory and places that trigger recollection in the African American experience. Due to the historic experience of forceful dislocation and family separation, traditional sites of memory have been lost and communicative memory within families has been made impossible. In addition, temporal control, by depriving African Americans from temporal knowledge concerning the self (e.g. the recurring motif of not knowing one’s own birthday or age) and by excluding them from written forms of history, was reduced to a minimum in slavery and has thus led to what W. J. T. Mitchell terms “prevention of memory” (Picture Theory 194) and to what made the slave “a prisoner of his or her own power of recall” (Gates 100-01; Basseler 33; see Mitchell, Picture Theory 186, 194). David Blight’s definition of memory is especially valid in the African American context: “Memories are not merely reproduced; they are constructed […] Hence we create and ‘recreate’ narratives in response to ever-changing political and social circumstances” (52). Murals revise and recreate narratives. As sites of memory they “produc[e] inclusion” in the face of exclusion (Hebel, Introduction x) and attempt to diminish the gap in national collective memory. In an environment of “cultural conflict over memory,” they give evidence and engrave “the tragic ‘other side’ of American experience” into collective memory (Blight 51, 50). Calling African American memory the “other side,” Blight stresses that African American memory is a counter-narrative, but not in the sense of being a binary opposition or addendum to national collective memory. On the contrary, African American (collective) memory needs to be included, yet not assimilated, as an equal and defining part in the larger national narrative. _____________ 2 3

See Prigoff and Dunitz for a survey of African American muralism. With ‘African American mural(s),’ I refer to murals with a predominantly African American theme; i.e. not necessarily to murals designed by African American artists.

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It is crucial that African American Philadelphia murals as sites of memory not only visually stage counter-narratives but also participate in the processes and functions of culture. They are not only “purposeful representations of historical events, individual lives […] [and] produce contextualized narratives and inscribe them into the collective memory”; they also engage in “the construction, tradition, and contestation of cultural values, symbols, ideologies, and identities” (Hebel and Moreth-Hebel 188) and constitute a “productive influence in the formation, preservation, and problematization of group coherence” (Hebel, Introduction x). While murals can be characterized as relatively static and immobile in their material reality, African American Philadelphia murals nevertheless oscillate between, combine, and join different discourses. Although or because, as Mitchell explains in Picture Theory, African American memory was deprived of “temporal consciousness” and had to heavily rely on “spatial consciousness” (186), these murals literally claim space (and time) on a local, national, and transethnic/transnational level. They perpetuate African American memory and culture and at the same time promote and take possession of national ideologies. These murals provide, to repeat Bunch’s description of the NMAAHC, “a lens into what it means to be an American” and affirm Heinz Ickstadt’s thesis that, in the face of transnational American Studies, “between the local and the global there is still the ‘national’ as a category requiring continuous analysis” (551). While functioning as African American images, African American Philadelphia murals are woven into a web of more than 3,000 murals citywide (more than in any other U.S. city) (Dribben A1; Lowe) and thus participate in a network of visual representations of various groups, ethnicities, and nations. It is the struggling and often silenced ones that gain a visual voice by claiming their position within and their space throughout the city. All their (counter-)narratives become visually and spatially a part of public consciousness. Art develops into “a medium not of individual self-affirmation but of integration of selves and their common empowerment” (Hein 88). The memory of these multiple experiences turns Philadelphia murals into centers from or to which connecting lines to various ethnicities, cultures, and nations radiate. Murals are themselves linked and, at the same time, link all the other murals, the city, and the nation to many points of origin, e.g. the native countries of past and present immigrants and dislocated groups and individuals, and expand the visual network of Philadelphia murals into a transnational web that recollects histories and cultures beyond the local and the national. The transnational potential of Philadelphia murals is further increased by their presence on the Internet and their attractiveness to tourists. Not only does Center City Philadelphia brim with international tourists who flock the historic landmarks, but the

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City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program furthermore offers guided mural tours and an online tool for those who want to organize self-guided tours. Hence, the murals become a transnational object of multiple ethnic and cultural interpretations and appropriations. African American murals are only one ethnic detail within the larger picture and cannot be read in neglect of their context and the multiple histories and memories surrounding them. Hence this article will first discuss the specificities of Philadelphia murals and the multiethnic and multicultural mosaic they visualize, using the example of Common Threads, a mural that has frequently been described as a mural about (Philadelphia) murals. It will then proceed to an analysis of two African American murals which are embedded in this transcultural context, yet located in two very different and distinct Philadelphia neighborhoods. It will become transparent that these murals remember, participate, and claim space in different narratives between the local and the global. The meaning of murals, due to their characteristics as public art, cannot be reduced to the artist’s intention but is constructed in multiple viewing processes and consequently depends on the eyes of the beholder. Since the audience is a heterogeneous group of transnational composition, it can certainly not be regarded as an ‘interpretive community’ (Stanley Fish), but as a public that creates multiple meanings for one mural. As this “possibility of multiple meanings” in public art “validates pluralism in judgment and therefore the democratization of art” (Kammen xxi), the multiple semantic layers of the murals elucidate a potential of interpretation(s) rather than claiming essentialist truth and result in ‘collected memory’ (James Young). 4 In order to grasp the impact of a mural, it is crucial to discuss the full scope of its potential.

_____________ 4

Krause Knight explains Young’s concept of ‘collected memory’ as follows: “[A]ggregate in construction, plural in meanings […] comprised of diverse and competing responses […] which shift with time, circumstance, and ideology as they converge at each site […] memorial spaces are not permanent ‘witness-relics,’ but ‘forever incomplete’ and ‘fundamentally interactive’ […]” (23-24).

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Fig. 1. Meg Saligman. Common Threads. City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 1998. Photo by the author.

Mapping the City with Common Threads: A Mural on Murals The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program developed in the 1980s out of the previous Anti-Graffiti Network. The program, run by muralist Jane Golden, functions as an affiliate department to the City of Philadelphia and has an annual budget of over five million U.S. dollars. The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program employs professional artists and mural-

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ists who design and “execute the final artworks” (Fleming 108). Yet, since the Mural Arts Program decidedly defines itself as a community outreach program and a “public art initiative,” local residents, “struggl[ing] against blight and economic underdevelopment,” from (“at-risk”) youth to prisoners, are in “a collaborative grassroots process” engaged in the production of the murals (Mural Arts Program). Although the design is left to the professional artists, the basic ideas for the images usually stem from the very neighborhoods in which the murals are located. Themes are gathered in community meetings or door-to-door conversations; drafts are presented to the neighborhood; finally, the murals are dedicated to the community in a festive act. 5 Thus, the creation of a mural is from the very beginning based on a dialogic pattern; dialogue, of course, continues during and after the creative process – between artists and the audience during the production and, later on, between mural and its audience. Due to its focus on the community context – on “serv[ing] the needs of neighborhoods” and on “empower[ing] neighborhood residents to tell their individual and collective stories, [to] pass on culture and tradition” (Mural Arts Program) – a Philadelphia mural cannot be viewed outside of this social context. “The site is the content,” as Harriet F. Senie argues (“Responsible Criticism”). In the same way as Erika Fischer-Lichte calls for a recognition of the environment of a performance as part of the performance, the spatial surroundings and the audience need to be viewed as a crucial aspect and an extension of the mural. Or vice versa: the mural itself is only a detail of the urban space and of the complete web of murals that literally map the city. Before zooming in and taking a closer look at Message to the Child…the Hero Can Be Found and Lincoln Legacy, two murals based on the African American experience, the visual and larger spatial context of these two murals needs to be explored. 6 Despite their celebration of difference, Philadelphia murals emphasize tolerance and unity among the various groups, which is expressed by the network of murals as well as in single murals. 7 The basic contours of _____________ 5

6 7

For the Mural Arts Prorgram’s most recent project, the “first City-Wide Mural Project that invites residents from all over the city to come together to plan and paint a new mural that encompasses the entire city” (33), see Russ. For the story of Janice Jackson-Burke, who together with the Mural Arts Program created a mural on ‘forgiveness’ after her son was shot, see Pompilio. Fleming argues that many American urban murals are influenced by Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, or José Clemente Orozco (97). See, for example, The Peace Wall (depicting hands of different ethnicities united); History of Immigration (immigrants of various nations and cultures gather around the Statue of Liberty, including a critical view on the past); Coming to America and Making It Stronger (immigration); History of Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican cultural heritage); Procession of St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi; Black American Gothic (all in Golden, Rice, and Kinney; Golden, Rice, and Pompilio).

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Philadelphia muralism can be illustrated by viewing Common Threads, which incorporates major aspects of Philadelphia muralism in general and which can thus be regarded as representative. Common Threads by Meg Saligman (1998, Broad and Spring Garden) is eight stories high and was, at the time it was created, Philadelphia’s tallest mural (Golden, Rice, and Yant Kinney 116). 8 It serves as a symbol of “a body of work that documents different urban communities during different decades […] [and is] a record [i.e. a site of memory] of people – their time, styles, attitudes, and hopes” (Saligman qtd. in Golden, Rice, and Yant Kinney 116). The contemporary teenagers in the image exemplify the thematic and representational relevance of Philadelphia murals for their communities. They all attended either nearby Benjamin Franklin high school or the School for Creative and Performing Arts, and they were all involved in the mural-making process. As their photographs became figures in the mural, the community is directly represented in the image. The gaze of the girl who visually presides over the mural, Tameka Jones in real life, reflects the reciprocal relationship of murals and the surrounding community. It seems to transcend the physical border of the architectural space and to be directed into the community. In consequence, the community, its members, and its specific cultural dynamics are observed in the mural. Both the photographic, realistic basis of the image and the gaze of Tameka make clear that Philadelphia murals communicate with their audience (see Senie, Baboons 237) and take a deep interest in the needs of the communities. 9 Tameka’s gaze is not only directed at the community around her but also at any audience that might encounter the mural. “On a typical weekday, 5,800 people pass through the SEPTA stop at Broad and Spring Garden streets,” use the nearby parking lots or shopping facilities (Golden, Rice, and Yant Kinney 121). The fact that a local and, due to its attractiveness for tourism, an international audience enters into a dialogue with Philadelphia murals becomes nevertheless obvious – although not every mural receives that much attention. Since the audience is certainly not always familiar with the local or the national meaning of the respective mural, “meaning now is pluralized by contextualization, and by a diversified public” (Hein 90). It would be essentialist to claim that Philadelphia murals inevitably receive a transnational meaning; however, they do com_____________ 8 9

For general information on Common Threads, see Golden, Rice, and Yant Kinney 116-19. Grandmother’s Quilt, for example, has led to changes within the community. The idea “was to show a traditional craft of the black community being passed down through the generations, and to strengthen a sense of community by portraying real people from the neighborhood.” Now, community members report that after the completion of the mural, “drug dealers have disappeared, graffiti has ceased, and, due to the now calmer environment, a local developer is planning 52 new homes right across the street from the mural” (Hurdle).

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municate with an audience that is not limited to the American nation or a single culture and that creates semantic and commemorative meaning according to their presuppositions and cadres sociaux (Maurice Halbwachs). Hilde Hein furthermore argues: If MacLuhan’s “global village” is not quite a reality, our ability to “reach out and touch someone” is virtually worldwide, and fellow members of any public can now be continents apart. […] [P]ublic art […] sets out intentionally to construct a public, but members of such publics may be widely dispersed. (93)

Following Hein, it can be concluded that the composition of the audience – or at least of the potential audience – becomes increasingly transnational. This claim holds especially true for Philadelphia murals since the Mural Arts Program has recently launched an interactive web site. The web site’s main feature is a search engine that allows its audience to find murals in relation to their location or theme. The web site’s name, Mural Farm, plays with the notion of community and nurturing as well as with national ideologies and values from the agrarian ideal to the common man. A Google Street View feature allows the visitor to combine the virtual reality of the mural farm with the mediated view of the physical environment of the murals, to actually operate the camera and take different perspectives, to explore the urban neighborhood of the mural and thus to include the surroundings into the interpretation of the mural through active participation. Common Threads comprises not only a reflection of the audience’s varied composition but also a reflection of the ethnic and cultural diversity of Philadelphia and its neighborhoods. 10 The mural depicts contemporary teenagers as well as various historic role models. Both represent various ethnic and religious groups; especially the ancient figures evoke the picture of different nations, including “non-Western prototypes,” to which the present-day youth seems inextricably connected through common behavior and action (Golden, Rice, and Yant Kinney 117). The imitation of ancient models through contemporary youth stresses the importance of the past and its recollection for the future. Since the figures of the past transcend national American borders, memory itself transgresses national limitations and binds together different nations, cultures, and ethnicities, different histories and pasts in a common present. Immigration and other forms of relocation bring the contemporary teenagers into a shared spatial environment, but, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin insists, “the endless process of comings and goings […] creates familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across national borders” (24). What happens here on the microcosmic _____________ 10

The U.S. Census Bureau reports for Philadelphia in 2000: 42.7 percent white; 43.8 percent Black or African American; 5.4 percent Asian; 6.2 percent “other”; 1,6 percent “two or more races”; 10,3 percent Hispanic or Latino.

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level of the single image – the free movement in time and geographical and cultural space, the commemoration of and emphasis on the past – serves as an example for the network of murals which is spread over the city. By representing various ethnicities and cultures together with their values and narratives, Philadelphia murals mirror what Udo Hebel terms “the pluralization of history/ies and memory/ies in increasingly multicultural and multiethnic societies” (Introduction ix). The single mural with its specific image and cultural representation functions only as a piece in the mosaic of cultures and memories, which, just like Common Threads, then turns into a “a broad commentary about the things that connect us across generations and across cultures” (Golden, Rice, and Yant Kinney 116). Patricia Phillips relates the spatial and cultural as well as the individual and urban relevance of public art: [I]f we take that step beyond conceiving of the new urban landscape as a geographic grid of buildings, spaces, and art, to view it instead as an ever-mutating organism sustained by multiple, interrelated vortices and networks and the private trajectories that complicate them, then the horizon line of public art expands to include the ‘invisible’ operations of huge systems and the intimate stories of individual lives. (96)

Not only the people who frequent the site, but also the various groups who reside there contribute to the fact that “meaning […] is pluralized by contextualization, and by a diversified public” (Hein 90). Despite the transnational connotations, the Philadelphia mural network is – especially because of its commitment to the communities – an expression of the city’s diversity. The single murals in the respective communities stand first and foremost for these communities; together they form the city in spatial and representational terms. The central position of Common Threads, the mural on murals, in Philadelphia speaks for the aim to represent the city as defined by various cultural and ethnic groups and, of course, by multiple histories of “comings and goings.” Common Threads is located at Spring Garden and Broad Streets, which connect other points of interest and historically meaningful landmarks within the city. If you travel on Broad Street from City Hall in the south to the struggling neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, you pass Common Threads, which consequently establishes a clear link between Center City and more invisible neighborhoods and thus propagates their inclusion into our notion of the City of Philadelphia. This confirms not only the importance of the spatial context for readings of public art but also repeats the aim of murals to mirror and strengthen various communities on a larger spatial level. Spring Garden Street directly links Columbus Blvd. in the east – Columbus Blvd. borders Penn’s Landing and is not far from Independence National Park – to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the west.

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Here, Spring Garden Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway merge into the square that includes Washington Monument. Whether intended or not, the mural links several sites that are designed for the purpose of memory. Moreover, with Columbus and Penn, different landings and a not-yet national but more transnational phase in American history are commemorated, while in the other landmarks, memory becomes more national. The effect is twofold: firstly, the “proximity to City Hall” and to other landmarks that commemorate nationally defining events “gives it the appearance of a civic emblem” (Senie, “Reframing Public Art” 189). 11 Common Threads is literally located between the national and transnational or pre-national. Secondly, seen within a national context, its own affirmation of cultural diversity and unity becomes a statement about the nation itself. The nation is portrayed as a union based on multiculturalism and pluralities, on a history of immigration and historic ties to other nations – yet another master narrative of American self-identification. The image of ethnically and culturally diverse teenagers sharing one building and remembering their common past supports this interpretation. Despite its affirmation of American master narratives and ideologies, Common Threads nevertheless directs our gaze towards a different facet. The fact that it is Tameka, a black girl, who seemingly presides over this multicultural mosaic 12 and the city’s historic sites, gives the image a twist and challenges dominant white narratives, promoting the existence of counter-narratives and postulating their inclusion in collective memory. The national becomes desired as the common spatial and historical denominator for these ethnicities. The single murals might provide counter-narratives and counter-memories, which only together form a full-fledged national narrative. The example of Common Threads as a mural on Philadelphia murals shows that their function as sites of memory and as circulators of values and ideologies on various levels from community to ethnicity, from the local to the transnational, nevertheless also emphasize the national.

African American Sites of Memory and Counter-Narratives Part I: Message to the Child … the Hero Can Be Found Zooming in from the larger ethnic and cultural mosaic, the audience encounters representations of various ethnicities, cultures, and nations – e.g. _____________ 11 12

The quote refers to the Philly Clothespin, a piece of public art near City Hall. Although the mural was completed ten years before the 2008 presidential elections, this aspect of the mural will certainly be related to Barack Obama’s victory by the mural’s audience.

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in murals on Mexican Americans, Vietnamese immigration, or the design of an Arab American mosque. 13 Many of the murals are situated in African American communities and present aspects of African American life. Ronald Lee Fleming explains that many Philadelphia murals illustrate […] local heroes […] celebrate local and African American histories through such depictions as a former mural portraying Harriet Tubman and scenes from the Underground Railroad […], show anonymous children bearing their dreams and aspirations [… and] restore […] a semblance of pride and ownership […] (108)

While all murals celebrate the African American history of overcoming, some stay entirely within African American narratives and gain their national relevance only through their participation in the larger mosaic of murals and in the architectural and historic space of the city as well as through the mere fact of visibly inscribing themselves into (national) collective memory and history. Other Philadelphia African American murals, however, incorporate memories, ideologies, and narratives of American self-identification on a thematic, visual level. Two examples that, also because of their different location within the city, do so with more or less direct reference to African American history are Message to the Child…the Hero Can Be Found and Lincoln Legacy. Message to the Child is located on 17th and Ontario Street in North Philadelphia and was created in 2004 by John Lewis with the Big Picture Program. The purpose of the Big Picture Program reflects the Mural Arts Program’s self-definition of being “a broad mission of youth development and neighborhood revitalization through the arts” (Golden, Ricen, and Pompilio 12) and decidedly sets Message to the Child into a community context. Since Message to the Child is situated outside Center City in a North Philadelphia area, it is less the architectural space and the historic landmarks that define Center City which are important in terms of ‘the site as content,’ but rather the social and cultural space of the specific neighborhood. The 2000 U.S. Census states that this zip code area is mainly populated by African Americans – 60.7 percent of the residents are African American, 34.5 percent Hispanic/Latino, and 13 percent white. Moreover, 39.4 percent of the individuals live below the poverty line, as compared to an average of 12.4 percent nationwide. Since “[t]he general condition of the site,” and I would argue this includes its social condition, “affects perception of the art” (Senie, “Reframing Public Art” 186), the image can be perceived as directed towards and as an object of interpretation and appropriation for a predominantly African American community living in _____________ 13

For examples, see O’Connell 21-23.

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a struggling neighborhood. Describing the development of African American muralism, Floyd Coleman writes: Expressing solidarity and unity through visual and formal means, the artists were creating community. They explored culture and history, affirming ties to Africa and the Caribbean. By claiming space, the artists demonstrated self-worth and demanded respect, calling for resistance to oppression and recognition of the redemptive nature of struggle and resistance. (10)

Fig. 2: John Lewis. A Message to the Child … the Hero Can Be Found. City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2004. Photo by Charles Flowe.

Similarly, Message to the Child commemorates and transmits historic aspects and cultural and ideological values that are supposed to affirm the community’s ethnic and national identity. The, in large parts at least, realistic rendition is dominated by two figures, man and boy, to the left, who are, through the common theme of construction, semantically linked to African American children building a house on the right-hand side of the mural. The image is first and foremost a symbol of uplift, overcoming, and unity. At first sight, no traces of any traumatic experience can be detected. The community, in joint effort, successfully creates its own home and identity. The upward movement of the children in the construction, the symbolism of the (social) ladder, and the gesture of the boy, who raises his hand in victory and celebration, express hope and a positive future. Since Philadelphia murals are created in dialogue with the respective neighborhoods, Message to the Child can be considered an affirmation of strength and survival of this very African American neighborhood struggling with urban blight.

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A dominant feature of the mural, which supports its function as a symbol of uplift, are its spiritual aspects. The ladder used by the African American children to access the construction site points to Jacob’s Ladder, which, in The Book of Genesis, symbolizes a promising outlook into the future, granted by God. The children in the mural remind one of the angels on Jacob’s Ladder (OT, Gen. 28:10-19); they, the chosen ones, are meant to reach heaven – spiritually and socially/politically; their construction becomes Bethel, the house of God. The black man and boy, depicted with carpenter’s tools, explicitly refer to Joseph and Jesus. Similarly, with his head in the clouds and the golden light surrounding him, the man guiding the boy is religiously transfigured and turns into a religious icon supporting not only the boy but the whole community, thus promising guidance and verifying the power of hope. The image of the man ‘carrying’ a child is reminiscent of St. Christopher carrying Jesus. Consequently, the African American child is equated with Jesus in a similar fashion as the teenager Tameka receives divine characteristics when presiding over the city in Common Threads. The black youth is elevated; they themselves become the “heroes” from the mural’s title and can instigate their own uplift. Both religious references also reveal very secular meanings. In almost deist fashion, the ladder in the mural leads into the construction site, not into heaven. It is the children themselves who ‘build’ the house and their future – and they can succeed. The scene assures the African American children of their own strength rather than promising elevation through God. The biblical story that precedes the episode of Jacob’s Ladder – Esau and Jacob’s struggle (OT, Gen. 27: 1-45) – unmasks the inequities and atrocities in black and white relations as questions of power, profit, and racism. The fact that St. Christopher carried Jesus over the water and that he has consequently become the patron of travelers also uncovers a more traumatic dimension of the image. Memories of the Middle Passage and the many forceful dis- and relocations, accompanied by destruction of family and community ties, are evoked. At a second glance, more of the mural’s features reveal a re-collective meaning. The ropes which the children use as a means of mutual support, may once have been the ropes used to tie the slaves’ feet and hands. The term ‘construction’ itself is linguistically repeated in the Period of Reconstruction and is thus temporally and historically linked to the history of slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. The environment of the workers in the mural is characterized by nature, i.e. not a Philadelphian urban environment, therewith implying a Southern setting. While the South is often connected with a feeling of nostalgia, it nevertheless bears the connotation of slavery and of toiling on the plantation. Yet, despite the notion of slavery, the shackles have be-

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come untied and hard work has turned into the construction of one’s own future. The memory of a history of overcoming receives more emphasis than the past itself and thus endows the image with an affirmative message, which is further strengthened by the indirect presence of great black leaders. While both the boy and the man evoke the image of the hero in a more general way, being not clearly connected to one specific ‘hero,’ the depiction of a bucket in an African American context can only be related to Booker T. Washington’s historic demand to “cast down your bucket where you are” (“Atlanta Exposition Address”). In the mural, however, the bucket is not cast down, but carried up the (social) ladder; it is thus reminiscent of opponents of Washington’s assimilationist and accommodationist policy such as W. E. B. DuBois, who not only openly criticized Washington but insisted on “work, culture, and liberty” in his Souls of Black Folk. While ‘work’ is obvious and ‘liberty’ is transported through the memory of slavery and overcoming, ‘culture,’ and, to be more precise, the importance of cultural roots, is conveyed predominantly through the color of the building and the elderly woman sitting in front of it. The reddish brownish color, which merges from the ground into the building, resembles the color of earth and carries a symbolic meaning in terms of belonging and home. It establishes a connection to Africa in terms of space (the earth is literally the ground on which the house is built), time (Africa as the past homeland, as the point of departure, and as the place where slavery began), and culture (as the place where the cultural roots lie). The present and the future are based on the past; the erection of the house visually renders the cultural goal of ‘building on the past instead of over it.’ The elderly woman and the tree underneath which she sits, are included in the image in an almost ‘magic-realist’ way. 14 Despite the realistic rendering of the figure and the tree, the spatial connection between them and the house becomes unrealistic; both the tree and the elderly woman seem to be hovering above the ground, i.e. both are not to be taken as physically present elements, but as embodiments of memory spiritually present in African American culture and community. Belonging to the generation of elders, the woman, like the tree, symbolizes cultural roots and ties. Moreover, both woman and tree intertextually link the mural to written African American expression and therefore participate themselves in an African American cultural discourse and function as transmitters of memory. Alice Walker and Paule Marshall, for example, have elaborated _____________ 14

The goal of building on the past is expressed in many African American literary works; most prominently in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which stresses the necessity of memory for overcoming. In African American narratives, magic realism often conveys both historical truths and (imaginative) memory; e.g. Beloved or Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.

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on the importance of women as ‘storages’ and perpetuators of cultural knowledge and memory in essays such as “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” and “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Here, younger women find their identity by listening to the older female generation’s stories and by engaging in the processes of communicative memory and ‘re-membering’ cultural and collective African American memory. The ‘tree’ / ‘root’ appears in texts such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (where the ‘cultural’ root physically and psychologically strengthens Frederick in his fight against his master and his own enslavement); Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” (where the tree turns into Delia’s connection to her cultural roots and represents her victory in her struggle for self-respect and independence); or in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (where the tree appears as a scar on Sethe’s back, a physical reminder of abuse during slavery). The image cluster ‘tree’ / ‘root’ becomes symbolic of culture, memory, and the empowerment which comes along with it. Message to the Child participates in the circulation of images and ideas central to African American artistic expression, culture, and memory. The memory of slavery is inseparable from a memory of the Middle Passage and of Africa. Yet these facets of a transnational history and a past that connects the two sides of the Atlantic remain only faint echoes in Message to the Child. What is more obvious beyond the local features and the spirit of community uplift, is a decided participation in and a promotion of national American narratives. While the mural demands visual space for African American culture and (counter-)history within the larger urban and national space and within the ‘collected’ memory consistent of all histories of the multi-ethnic mosaic, it also appropriates national narratives and merges them with African American values and ideologies. Message to the Child thus claims a voice and visibility as well as it states African American equality. Construction exceeds the borders of a creative and self-affirmative process within the community; the house becomes the house of the nation, which itself depends on the past and present contribution of African Americans. They join the process of nation building in joining the efforts of the ‘common’ and ‘self-made man’ and his ‘work ethic.’ The spiritual aspects are not ascribed to a specific religion. On the contrary, the children and St. Christopher, who is turned into a carpenter, play a crucial role in the construction of the community and the ‘house’ of the nation. The saint becomes a quasi-political leader. And this equation of nation and religion leads to a reading of St. Christopher as a depiction of Civil Religion rather than of Catholicism. The ‘social ladder,’ assuring social and economic achievements, is deeply rooted in American national iconography and alludes to, e.g., The Ladder of Fortune by Currier & Ives (1875), which promises riches, influence, and happiness, among other

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things, if one sticks to values such as morality, honesty, industry, courage, and perseverance. 15 Liberty and freedom are not only self-defining ideas in the African American context but also in a national American one. This assumption is clearly supported by the historic Philadelphia landmarks including Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the place where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and which is often referred to as the ‘birthplace of the nation.’ It was in Carpenter’s Hall, which is thematically mirrored in the carpenter’s tools in the mural, where the First Continental Congress took place in 1774. The most prominent element of national iconography in this mural is its play with ‘heroism.’ Not only African American culture abounds with heroes from tricksters to self-defined heroes within the braggadocio and word play of oral culture to runaway slaves to great black leaders; American culture as well thrives on the image of the hero, which can be seen in the way (some) presidents (from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to, most recently, Barack Obama) or the firemen of 9/11 are elevated into national iconography. Indeed, with his hard hat and the expressed upward movement, the man in the image is related to the images of the firemen of 9/11 and the soldiers of Iwo Jima and consequently inscribed into national iconography. 16 With the memory of 9/11, a globally reverberating event, the transnational argument is certainly strengthened. Nevertheless, the mural’s dominant expression is that of a celebration and memory of African American culture, roots, and community spirit, that of pride and self-reliance in Alain Locke’s sense of the “New Negro,” and, still in Locke’s sense, that of active participation in the nation, its definition, and its narratives. What is not intended is an expression of American exceptionalism. Instead, we observe a visual claiming of space for African American culture as one of many narratives and cultures within the world and, more specifically within, the nation.

_____________ 15 16

For the visual and a close-up, see, for example, the Museum of the City of New York at www. mcny.org.; also Hebel, Einführung 327. For a discussion of interpictorial links between 9/11 and Iwo Jima, see Hebel, “Interpikturale Dialoge.” The notion of firemen evoked by the mural also vaguely links it to Ben Franklin, who founded the first Philadelphia fire department. With Ben Franklin, another national icon and national idea(l)s such as freedom, independence, from rags to riches/ self-made man are furthermore stressed.

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African American Sites of Memory and Counter-Narratives Part II: Lincoln Legacy Lincoln Legacy, designed and executed by Josh Sarantitis in 2006, is the “largest Venetian glass tile mural in the world” (Golden, Ricen, and Pompilio 73). It is located in Center City Philadelphia and adjacent to the Old City area; its neighborhood is frequented by international tourists. For this zip code area in Center City, the 2000 U.S. Census reports 87.7 percent white and 6.3 percent African American population. Only 7.6 percent of the individuals live below poverty level; and the per capita income is 6.4 times as high as in Message to the Child’s North Philadelphia neighborhood. Despite and because of its clear dedication to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Legacy is a mural of African American expression. The left-hand part of the image depicts elements of Africa that merge towards the right-hand part of the mural, into the American flag, which serves as the background for an African American girl. In her hand she holds an object in the shape of flames, which contains the image of an African American woman rising out of an African medallion.

Fig. 3: Josh Sarantitis. Lincoln Legacy. City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2006. Photo by the author.

Obviously, Lincoln Legacy is the visual representation of a temporal and spatial story – a story that needs to be read from left to right, from Africa

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to America, from slavery to hope and uplift and that has as its plot the African American experience. The image substitutes the African American griot, who relates memory and cultural values through stories rather than explicit didactic statements. The African medallion and the woman in the flame, who can be read as an ancestor whose spirit is present in the girl’s life, are in the girl’s possession, i.e. in possession of contemporary African American culture that is based on and embraces its African roots. Similar to Message to the Child, which alludes to written African American texts, Lincoln Legacy is set into a cultural context of African American expression with its usage of lines and shapes. Especially the lines created by the planks of slave ships and the American flag and the circles indicated by the shape of the flame bear resemblance to Aaron Douglas’s series of African American murals, Aspects of Negro Life. Coleman explains its function as follows: This mural is an icon in the history of African American modernist art […]. Douglas […] was the first to create works that were expressions of an African American sensibility and ethos. […] Aaron Douglas is important to the history of African American murals because he took the image of the lived experience of blacks and created powerful works that combined the ‘felt’ and the ‘imagined’ experience of black people. (15)

Lincoln Legacy is thus set in the tradition of Douglas: it also reflects a continuation from an African to an American urban setting; in the act of imagination it visualizes both history and feelings, in this case hope and pride. Although and because Lincoln Legacy has less details and specific renderings than Aspects of Negro Life, it becomes iconic in its expression of these very feelings. Lincoln Legacy’s symbolism in terms of slavery cannot be overlooked. Slave ship planks; an African mask that resembles a skull; and the grayish coloring that lies over the left-hand part of the mural and thus over history and reminds one of the veil in the DuBoisian sense recollect the traumatic experience of slavery. Water, slave-ship imagery, shackles, and the implied movement from Africa to America clearly induce memories of the Middle Passage. As a result, the mural makes a threefold statement about African American memory: on the one hand, traditional African sites of memory have been lost; on the other hand, traumatic sites of memory such as the Middle Passage have been created (see Basseler 32). Now, positive sites of memory such as the mural itself need to be constructed in order to commemorate the history of overcoming: the planks are broken; the shackles have been opened and cast away; the mask, as in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” or in the traditional Caribbean carnival, mocks the enslavers; the girl raises her hand in a ges-

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ture of empowerment similar to the Black Power Movement. Three pendants lend her the appearance of an Olympic medalist. As in Message to the Child, in Lincoln Legacy a positive future, expressed in the bright colors on the right-hand side, seems impossible without the memory of the past. One of the pendants is an 1838 abolitionist token. The token portrays a kneeling woman in chains, who constitutes a stark contrast to the uplifted, empowered figure of the black girl. Two lines of development are thus established and recollected in the mural: from left to right, past to present; and from bottom to top. The latter represents both, social position and aspirations for the future. This thesis becomes emphasized when reading the woman in the flame not only as an ancestral figure but as a prediction for the future of the girl as a representative of African Americans. The abolitionist token functions as a symbol of liberation, of a history to build on, and of empowerment. The girl and the African American community have risen from their kneeling position. With the flame and its content – medallion and empowered women, past and future – the girl is given possession of spatial and (!) temporal memory (i.e. the very facet of memory African Americans were deprived of). Memory itself becomes a crucial element of African American identity and the key factor for a positive present and future. Around the arm of the girl winds a part of the flame which contains the inscription: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will forever continue to struggle.” This statement, made by Lincoln during his last joint debate with Stephen Douglas at Alton on October 15, 1858, conveys manifold messages. Firstly, besides being immediately related to and stressing Lincoln’s viewpoint on slavery, the fact that it regards the struggle as eternal exposes continued forms of oppression. Although it does not make a clear statement, problems such as racism, discrimination, violence, and poverty are alluded to, especially in the face of the urban environment and with Philadelphia being a city that struggles with a high crime rate. 17 The inscription lessens the overall positive statement of the mural, but at the same time it explains the necessity of an expression of hope and strength. Secondly, with its evocation of binary oppositions, the writing hints at the phenotypical contrast between black and white, which _____________ 17

The Philadelphia Police Dpt., for example, reports 406 murders, 960 rapes, 10,971 robberies, and 10,546 aggravated assaults for 2006. For 2007, the Dpt. of Justice / FBI reports a violent crime rate (per 100,000) of 466.9 for the U.S., while the Uniform Crime Reporting Program counts 21,180 violent crimes in Philadelphia (i.e. a rate of 1475.4 with a population of 1,435,533) or 50,453 in New York City (i.e. a rate of 613.8 with 8,220,196) .

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was used as one of the justifications of slavery. Thirdly, since whiteness was historically equated with Americanness and blackness with noncitizenship, one almost unavoidably is reminded of the African American double consciousness (DuBois) and, accordingly, of the struggle for identity as being black and American. Fourthly, the phrasing “black and white” instead of African and American together with the extension “throughout the world” expands the semantic range of the mural into the space of the “Black Atlantic” (Paul Gilroy) and the transnational realm. Moreover, in his speech, Lincoln himself recognizes “the same tyrannical principle” not only between black and white but also between kings and their subjects and thus expresses a universal truth about the relationship between oppressors and victims (431). The transnational – or at least culturally and nationally connecting – dimension of the mural is further supported by the implied movement from Africa to America and, consequently, by the inscription of Africa into African American collective memory and, moreover, into American collective memory. Africa and America become linked not only spatially through history but also in African American identity and culture. Joanne M. Braxton and Maria Diedrich express the same transnational relationship: “[Slaves] in Paul Gilroy’s words were ‘the living means by which the points in the Atlantic world were connected’” (1). In the mural, the map of Africa functions in a similar way. The plaque whose inscription, if completed, obviously reads “Africae Tabula Nova,” closely resembles that of Abraham Ortelius’ 1570 map of Africa. Abraham Ortelius is credited for being the first to establish a continental drift thesis, i.e., he believed that originally the continents were joined together. Despite all transnational connotations, Lincoln Legacy, just as Message to the Child, emphasizes national emblems and narratives of self-definition. The mural’s setting within the multi-cultural network of Philadelphia murals, together with its thematic focus on liberation, allows for its reading as both a call for participation and an ironic comment on America as the nation of immigrants and liberation. The broken shackles are comparable to the ones nestled at the feet of the Statue of Liberty; 18 the woman in the flame seems to imitate the Statue of Liberty in her gesture. While clearly being appropriated for African American culture, these idea(l)s stand in stark contrast to slavery. Thus the mural ironically comments on the historic exclusion of African Americans from liberation and calls for their inclusion into national narratives and memory. Lincoln Legacy also toys with ‘heroism’ and nationally iconic figures – the girl as the Olympic medalist and the reference to Lincoln. The title of the mural arouses expectations _____________ 18

For a picture of the shackles at the Statue of Liberty, see Sollors 95.

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of a Lincoln memorial resembling those that the American public is familiar with and that portray Lincoln himself in a pose of grandeur and great leadership. Yet, conversely, the mural only reflects on Lincoln as the emancipator by quoting from his speeches and the only way it renders Lincoln as a person is in form of a commemorative coin, i.e. one of the pendants the girl wears. Lincoln’s physical absence in the mural is yet another comment on memory and on how the nation or the government deals with it. “[E]ven as blacks have been excluded from most written accounts of history […] they nonetheless have been indispensable makers and shapers of the American cultural and sociopolitical legacy. Though often invisible to history, they have played roles in it that have proved crucial” (O’Meally and Fabre 4). The same is happening here: Lincoln commemorative coins 19 and most of the memorials stress and celebrate the man, and, if at all, portray slaves only as victims and as those ultimately depending on the white politician. While certainly acknowledging Lincoln’s politics and celebrating him as a national hero – the title of the mural is dedicated to him and the quote can be seen as a foundation of the girl’s raised hand and thus her empowerment –, Lincoln Legacy nevertheless “mediate[s] power relations” (Mirzoeff 25) and partially reverses them. The ‘dominant’ hero is no longer the person who issues the Emancipation Proclamation, but the ethnic and cultural group who endured, survived, and overcame the institution of slavery. The mural thus functions as counter-memory and shifts the focus of the so-far dominant narrative. In a similar fashion, the Stephen Douglas coin turns into a sidenote and furthermore weakens the impact of Lincoln. A comment on democracy and its dialogic structure between Republicans and Democrats, the Douglas coin stresses political development and the process of decision-making over the heroic achievement of the single person. 20 With Douglas being a controversial figure regarding the history of slavery, national politics itself becomes the aim of criticism. Thus both politics in general as well as politics of national commemoration become issues of debate. What Werner Sollors explains for African American literary expression can also be applied to Lincoln Legacy’s play with national symbolism and icons: African-American writers have, for a long time, taken on the special responsibility of questioning American national symbols by confronting them with the history

_____________ 19 20

The United States Mint has just launched the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial One Cent Program; none of the four coins shows renditions of slavery or emancipation; see <www.usmint.gov>. The employment of the Lincoln and Douglas coins seems to hint at the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858.

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of slavery and segregation. […] William Wells Brown’s Clotel […] dedicated a whole page to the contrast between the two American beginnings of the “Mayflower” and of Jamestown, of freedom and of slavery. (111)

Sollors’s statement not only summarizes Lincoln Legacy’s comment on politics of memory and the figure of Lincoln, but it simultaneously hints at another aspect that seems of interest in an analysis of the mural: the Mayflower and Jamestown. The connection of the mural to the idea of landings becomes transparent when taking a closer look at its geographic location within the City of Philadelphia. It is situated within an area that is frequented by both tourists and locals, on the busy and commercial Chestnut Street, only two blocks from Liberty Bell. Chestnut Street leads, within approximately two blocks, directly into Independence National Historical Park, which includes Independence Hall, and from there, again directly and within approximately three blocks, into Penn’s Landing. Thus, “in public art, the site is the content. […] All sites have local, if not national, content established well before they are transformed by public art” (Senie, “Responsible Criticism”). Both Liberty Bell and Independence Hall are historic landmarks, commemorating and promoting nationally defining narratives. Lincoln Legacy enters into a conversation with these landmarks through its own proximity, again questioning the reliability of national and dominant versions of memory and at the same time claiming its own space in American narratives 21 – again, as has been explained before, without assimilating or fusing itself into the dominant narrative but, since the memory of one’s own cultural roots is upheld, by transmitting a narrative of equal importance. Penn’s Landing becomes involved in the same process of appropriation and counter-memory. It commemorates the arrival of a dominant white group, similar to memories of the Mayflower or Jamestown. Yet, as Sollors further claims, “[f]or black writers [and the black community] ‘Jamestown’ memorializes not 1607 and John Smith with or without Pocahontas but 1619, the first arrival of Africans in the English colonies that were to become the United States. This is, incidentally, an event not remembered much even in Jamestown itself” (112). Lincoln Legacy, however, decidedly recalls the arrival of Africans on board of the slave ships. The abolitionist token reveals a similar comment. An “authentic reproduction” of this very token is sold at the nearby Liberty Bell Museum Gift Shop. Without any doubt, many of the tourists will encounter both, the mural and the gift shop. The repetition will trigger communication (communicative memory) as well as historic discussion. Simultaneously, the mural participates in the circulation of certain images within visual _____________ 21

Also see Young and his idea of ‘counter-monuments.’

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culture, knowing that it is exactly the circulation and repetition that strengthens their cultural message within national collective memory. The mural not only provokes response but enters into a dialogue with the nearby historic sites in best call-and-response manner, therewith both embedding the historic sites into its own meaning and at the same time countering them. America as a nation is discussed even more ironically; at the same time, it is depicted as an entity one wishes to participate in, when we flip the coin: “The reverse of the token bears the legend, ‘United States of America – Liberty – 1838’” (Liberty Bell Museum). Had the muralist selected the coin’s counterpart for his image, the message would have been slightly different: this one, from 1792, portraying a kneeling man, reads on the reverse side: “May Slavery and Oppression Cease Throughout the World.” Hence the artist has not only chosen to stress the impact of slavery on women but has also preferred the national connotation over the transnational one. Mitchell’s idea of art as being both “utopian and critical” helps to summarize the process in which the mural claims space, voice, and memory in the picture-perfect context of Independence National Historic Park and the other nearby landmarks: in the environment of historic sites of memory and “art that attempts to raise up an ideal public space,” Lincoln Legacy functions as “art that disrupts the image of a pacified, utopian public sphere, that exposes contradictions and adopts an ironic, subversive relation to the public it addresses, and the public space where it appears” (Hebel, Introduction 3). Returning to the initial comments about the neighborhood in which Lincoln Legacy is set, it needs to be added that the community in this area is predominantly white.

Conclusion Lincoln Legacy and Message to the Child adhere to Coleman’s description of contemporary African American murals: Urban murals [are] vehicles of empowerment for African Americans. They signify a resistance to victimization and a refusal to act the part. They articulate hope, celebrate history and achievement, and show off the creativity of artists. […] Many of them emblematize the donations and potential of African Americans. They visually insist that people on the margins of society have a presence and a say in the central dialogues. […] The audience was and is a primary concern […] the response is immediate and instructive. (42)

Both African American murals affirm blackness and African American culture and express the spirit of hope and uplift, celebrating a history of overcoming. A similar notion of affirmation cannot only be detected in Common Threads but in most of the Philadelphia murals.

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In the same way in which Common Threads states the interest of Philadelphia murals in memory, Lincoln Legacy and Message to the Child store and transmit African American memory and culture and provide it with a visibility that it lacks in dominant and older versions of history. “‘For this reason,’ maintains Sollors, ‘what is called ‘memory’ (and Nora’s lieux de mémoire) may become a form of counter history that challenges the false generalizations in exclusionary ‘History’” (O’Mealley and Fabre 8). With the African American experience being just one facet, in Common Threads and the complete network of Philadelphia murals the focus rests on giving ethnic, pluralistic, and marginalized voices a stage to tell their counternarratives (see Assmann 16; Basseler 45). They oppose “the idea of a total history” and support the concept of “decentered microhistories and […] a multiplicity of memories” in “pluralistic societies” (O’Meally and Fabre 7). While Lincoln Legacy explicitly conveys memories of slavery, Message to the Child does so in a more implicit way without directly depicting the traumatic experience. Yet both, like Common Threads, remain affirmative in their overall design. The characteristic of murals as being “site specific,” i.e. as being closely linked to the surrounding communities and their social dispositions (Kammen 120), accounts for this difference. On the local geographic and social level, there is a crucial difference that explains the lack of direct reference to slavery in Message to the Child: it is set in a struggling, predominantly black community, so – considering the dedication of the Mural Arts Program to the needs of the respective communities and their stress of community participation in the creation of the mural – affirmation, strength and unity are more called for here and necessary than in another social setting. Lincoln Legacy, however, is situated in a touristic, historic, and predominantly white environment; thus it is symbolically surrounded by a dominant ‘white’ narrative and more explicitly wishes to remind of the history of slavery. The immediate proximity of the historic sites calls for a stronger inscription of African American history into their narrative. Common Threads functions as an image of all Philadelphia communities; it becomes an exemplary representation of all the murals and their function within and dedication to the needs of the communities, which Kammen explains as follows: “artists involve themselves deeply with the communities for which they have been commissioned – exploring in depth the history and ethnic diversity of the locale” (147). They communicate with the local residents in “call-and-response” manner (Coleman 27), and, together with the murals themselves, become “enablers of others” (Hein 99). Since, to cite Sollors again, “[e]thnic and national identities are interrelated in ways that are important for an analysis of ‘minority’ as well as ‘Majority’ cultures,” (92), it is no surprise that Philadelphia murals – and,

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exemplary, Message to the Child, Lincoln Legacy, and Common Threads – move beyond the realm of the local or single ethnicity and play with the concept of the nation. Still, what explains the more direct employment of images of slavery in Lincoln Legacy – its neighborhood – also accounts for its more explicit employment of national imagery and commentary on the national. The direct neighboring of historic monuments inscribes them deeper into the visual content of the mural and desires a stronger discussion of them. The opposition between African American versions of history and the national version of historic sites, being exemplary for white master narratives and versions of memory, becomes more obvious here, and needs a clearer counter-statement and unveiling of their flaws. Yet, the two African American murals discussed here appropriate national master narratives, especially when it comes to the expression of ideologies – not versions of history/ies – and depict them as similar compared to African American ideologies. Although exclusion from a white and dominant version of history is countered, ideologies and values such as multiethnicity, work ethic, or liberty are celebrated and participated in. Hence, African Americans claim their space within the nation; not because of nationalistic endeavors but because of the aim of constructing a home, as expressed in Message to the Child, and of finally claiming the enforced identity as American. What is expressed then is not American exceptionalism and nationalistic rhetoric but rather equality, participation, and a quest and affirmation of one’s own identity. In the same way, Common Threads, and with it the network of Philadelphia murals, reflects the cultural and ethnic mosaic of the city, and consequently of the nation, the ideology of immigration, freedom, and multiculturalism – yet without confusing “multiculturalism,” which may have emerged as a “quintessential American value” (Sánchez 41), with exceptionalism and without “collaps[ing] difference into some new nationalist paradigm” (Sánchez 56). Moreover, all three murals share a transnational connotation. First of all, they provide the possibility of dialogue with any audience, with international tourists as well as with any user on the World Wide Web. Secondly, while African American culture can be considered transnational per definition (see Basseler 36), the two African American murals (Lincoln Legacy more explicitly) furthermore include Africa and the Black Atlantic in their imagery. The transnational becomes even more obvious when viewing Common Threads and the complete mosaic of murals. Then the ties are not only established to Africa but within the history of immigration to manifold nations and countries, historically, culturally, and for recentgeneration immigrants, personally. Message to the Child, Lincoln Legacy, and Common Threads, the latter a mural on Philadelphia murals, commemorate and celebrate the respective

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ethnic histories and cultures, mirroring “the pluralization of history/ies and memory/ies in increasingly multicultural and multiethnic societies (Hebel, “Introduction” ix) and claiming their (visual) space and voice within national and dominant history and ideologies. These murals give us a glimpse into the local neighborhoods; they, to repeat Bunch’s description of the NMAAHC, offer “a lens into what it means to be an American” and are endowed with a transnational connotation. They support the thesis by Ickstadt, that “between the local and the global there is still the ‘national’ as a category requiring continuous analysis” (551). Or, to conclude in a more poetic way, borrowing Sonia Sanchez’s illustration of Philadelphia murals at the beginning of Golden, Rice, and Pompilio’s second edition on Philadelphia murals: In this City where history stretches in aristocratic silence. In this City where hope continues to bloom like flowers in a procession of waves, there are the murals, celebrating neighborhoods and people. They say our names out loud. They say you can find us without maps […] with a sound that has been handed down from generation to generation. A sound of immaculate voices. A sound of ancestral blood. A sound of eyes, uncrucified. Insistent with beauty. […] These murals are everywhere. We know many by heart. Black. Brown. Yellow. White. Gay. Lesbian. Peaceful saints, pure as ivory. (5)

Works Cited Basseler, Michael. Kulturelle Erinnerung und Trauma im zeitgenössischen afroamerikanischen Roman: Theoretische Gundlegung, Ausprägungsformen, Entwicklungstendenzen. Trier: EVT, 2008. Berlin, Ira, et al. “Introduction: Slavery as Memory and History.” Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. Ed. Ira Berlin et al. New York: New P, 1996. xv-liv. Blight, David W. “W. E. B. DuBois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory.” History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 54-71. Braxton, Joanne M, and Maria I. Diedrich. “Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Introductory Remarks.” Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery and Memory. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Maria I. Diedrich. Münster: LIT, 2004. 1-7. Bunch, Lonnie. “A Vision for the National American Museum of African American History and Culture.” NMAAHC, Smithsonian Institution. 21 Feb. 2009 . City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Muralfarm. 20 Feb. 2009 <www.muralfarm.org>. Coleman, Floyd “Keeping Hope Alive: The Story of African American Murals.” Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals. Ed. James Prigoff and Robin J. Dunitz. San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate, 2000. 10-23.

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Cullen, Jim. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Dribben, Melissa. “Gracing the City.” The Philadelphia Inquirer 27 July 2008: A1, A1617. Fabre, Geneviève, and Robert O’Meally, eds. History and Memory in African-American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008. Fisher-Fishkin, Shelley. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies.” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 17-57. Fleming, Ronald Lee. The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community through Public Art and Urban Design. New York: Merrell, 2007. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial Self.” New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Golden, Jane, Robin Rice, and Monica Yant Kinney. Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. Golden, Jane, Robin Rice, and Natalie Pompilio. More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell. Philadelphia: Temple, UP, 2006. Hebel, Udo J. Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. —.“Interpikturale Dialoge in der amerikanischen Malerei und Fotografie.” Bilder Sehen. Ed. Christoph Wagner et al. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009. —. “Introduction.” Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Ed. Udo Hebel. American Studies – A Monograph Series 101. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. ix-xxxii. —, and Christine Moreth-Hebel. “The Pictorial Turn and the Teaching of American Cultural Studies: Repositioning the Visual Narrative of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want (1943).” Text, Kontext und Fremdsprachenunterricht. Ed. Dagmar Abendroth-Timmer, Britta Viebrock, and Michael Wendt. Frankfurt: Lang, 2003. 187-201. Hein, Hilde. Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently. Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2006. Hurdle, John. “A City Uses Murals to Bridge Differences.” The New York Times 7 Oct. 2008. 31 Jan. 2009 . Ickstadt, Heinz. “American Studies in an Age of Globalization.” American Quarterly 54 (2002): 543-62. Kammen, Michael. Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 2007. Krause Knight, Cher. Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Liberty Bell Museum. Liberty Museum Gift Shop. 20 Feb. 2009 <www.libertybellshop.com>. Lincoln, Abraham. Political Debates between Lincoln and Douglas. Cleveland: Burrows, 1897. Bartleby.com. 2001. 15 Mar. 2009 <www.bartleby.com/251/>. Lowe, Brendan. “Postcard: Philadelphia.” Time/CNN 23 Aug. 2007. 31 Jan. 2009 . Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. Mitchell, W. J. T, ed. Art and the Public Sphere. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. —. “Introduction: Utopia and Critique.” Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Art and the Public Sphere. 1-5. —. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

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Mural Arts Program. Program Brochure. Philadelphia, 2009. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 284-300. O’Connell, Maureen H. “Painting Hope: The Murals of Inner-City Philadelphia.” Commonweal: A Review of Religion, Politics & Culture 18 Jan. 2008: 19-23. O’Meally, Robert, and Geneviève Fabre. Introduction. History and Memory in AfricanAmerican Culture. Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 3-17. Phillips, Patricia. “Out of Order: The Public Art Machine.” Artforum 27.4 (1988): 9297. Prigoff, James, and Robin J. Dunitz, eds. Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals. San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate, 2000. Pompilio, Natalie. “A Son’s Legacy of Forgiveness.” The Philadelphia Inquirer 21 Oct. 2007: B1, B6. Russ, Valerie. “Hitting a Wall: Mural Arts Is Out to Capture the Essence of Philly.” Philadelphia Daily News 17 Feb. 2009: 27, 33. Sánchez, George J. “Creating the Multicultural Nation: Adventures in Post-Nationalist American Studies in the 1990s.” Post-Nationalist American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 40-62. Senie, Harriet F. “Baboons, Pet Rocks, and Bomb Threats.” Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. Ed. Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. 237-46. —. “Reframing Public Art: Audience Use, Interpretation, and Appreciation.” Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium. Ed. Andrew McClellan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 185-200. —. “Responsible Criticism: Evaluating Public Art.” Sculpture 22.10 (2003). 21 Feb. 2009 <www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag03/dec03/senie/senie.shtml>. Smithsonian Institution. “Building Design Update.” National Museum of African American History and Culture. 17 June 2009 . Sollors, Werner. “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity: ‘Of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown Island’; or, Ethnic Literature and Some Redefinitions of America.” History and Memory in African-American Culture. Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 92-121. U.S. Census Bureau. “Philadelphia, PA,” “Zip Code Tabulation Area 19140, PA,” and “Zip Code Tabulation Area 19106, PA.” American Fact Finder. 20 Feb. 2009 . Young, James E. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Art and the Public Sphere. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 49-78.

Artistic Inspiration and Transnational Memories in the Twentieth Century MICHAEL KAMMEN The cultural heritage of the American artist today has its roots and is fed by the cultures of all times and races. Stuart Davis, “Is There a Revolution in the Arts?” (1940)

Because the United States has been called (countless times) a nation of immigrants, there surely must be as many transnational memories about coming here as there are snowflakes in a blizzard. And like certain blizzards that occur under special climatic conditions, some of the memories stick and accumulate while others simply melt away, leaving just a temporary touch of wetness, like a melancholy tear. Whether they stick or melt depends upon the surface where they land. I have chosen to concentrate upon the memories of ten highly successful artists, most of whom came to the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century, though there are two, painter/photographer Man Ray and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who were actually born here but early on chose to spend their lives shuttling back and forth between continents and cultures. (I shall mention half a dozen others in passing, but the ten I have highlighted left an especially rich trove of recorded memories and represent a diverse array of experiences.) All of my dramatis personae were creative cosmopolitans and highly influential. For each of them, forced as well as voluntary exile served as a stimulus to memory, but also as a source of suppressed recall. New beginnings begat innovative art even as they blotted out or caused the repression of remembrance. 1 Six of my ten fled fascism during the 1930s and early forties. The remainder were restless souls either drawn to the U.S. to fulfill their talents or, in two cases (Marcel Duchamp and Ananda Coomaraswamy) they came because their fame actually preceded them. (Duchamp arrived in New York as a kind of celebrity in 1915.) The New World provided them a promise of fresh achievements with no loss of _____________ 1

For their impact on American artists and émigré artists who arrived a generation earlier, see Stevens and Swan 169, 172, and index under “Noguchi.”

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regard or honor ‘at home.’ Cultural memories constituted a significant segment of the baggage they brought – sometimes subconsciously, but more often overtly and with eyes wide open. Take Saul Steinberg, the brilliant ‘cartoonist’ born in Romania in 1914, who trained in architecture in Italy and worked in Milan during the 1930s. He fled in 1941 and entered the U.S. (after a year in Santo Domingo) when The New Yorker offered employment and provided what became permanent access to new experiences because his unique style of line drawing delighted the literati and upper-middlebrows alike. During the course of an interview in the mid-1970s, recalling the smell of kerosene sold by vendors on the streets of Bucharest during his childhood prompted these ruminations, which can serve as an epigram for all that follows in this essay: It sometimes happens that all of a sudden, for some mysterious reason, the memory of that smell comes back to me. Nothing that has been deposited in the memory is lost. Memory is a computer that all one’s life goes on accumulating data which are not always used, since man is often like an ocean liner that sets sail with only a single cabin occupied. We ought to be able to use this huge accumulation of data continually, keep it functioning, combine and multiply its elements and reintroduce them into the circuit of our thoughts. So it happens with the return of these smells, deposited many years ago in the memory and now revived. Maybe I’ll have the good fortune to find again other things that now seem forgotten. I’d like to be able to go back and see all the things that at the time I stored away without perceiving them, follow myself at the age of ten and judge, with the mind of today, the conditions under which I lived, thus discovering what, at that time, had been deposited in the computer without my knowing it. (Steinberg 5-6)

I suppose that this group of artists is unrepresentative in the sense that they were all intellectuals and high achievers. In many cases they wrote memoirs or autobiographies, and gave revealing interviews. Most of them brought particular aspects of European cultural innovation, such as Josef Albers who came from teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, or Jacques Lipchitz, the pre-eminent sculptor affected by cubism who fled France in 1941. Others, like Piet Mondrian and Fernand Léger quite deliberately sought to create transnational art by looking and listening carefully in their new environments.

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Fig. 1. Emery Muscetra. Mondrian in his New York studio with (clockwise from top right) New York City and Boogie Woogie. 1941. Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International, Warrenton, VA.

Hence we get from Mondrian’s fondness for jazz and his adopted home his well-known paintings, New York City (1941), Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43) and finally the diamond-shaped Victory Boogie-Woogie (1944). In Mondrian’s case we know that he liked New York (even its traffic) very much, and that he intensively and invasively reworked paintings that he had begun in Paris and London. Prior to his death in 1944 he had several major exhibitions in Manhattan and told an interviewer in 1943: “I’d always had the idea I would like America. I especially like the metropolitan life of New York. I feel here is the place to be, and I am becoming an American citizen.” 2 An earlier, quite different example that comes to mind, of course, is Antonín Dvorák because of his ninth symphony, “From the New World” (1893), linked to his experience during the summer of 1893 with the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa. Almost all of these artists became the beneficiaries of American opportunities and hospitality, even though some, like Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and Marc Chagall, chose to leave soon after the war. The majority, however, remained and received shelter as well as support from American _____________ 2

See the invaluable and remarkable work by Cooper and Spronk 51, 56, 61, 67; the quotation at 33.

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institutions, ranging from colleges and universities to art museums and newly created organizations, such as the Société Anonyme that Katherine Dreier formed in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. A remarkable number of them even opted for American citizenship, including Mark Rothko (1937), Josef Albers (1939), Yves Tanguy (1948), and Duchamp (1955). Some, like Willem de Kooning, struggled for several decades before achieving recognition and financial success, though his experience was unlike those who arrived with reputations already established in Europe. The sentiments and poignant memories that moved these figures ranged from bittersweet nostalgia for men like Mondrian, Léger, and the German Expressionist Max Ernst to cheerful acceptance of fresh challenges in the opportunistic situations facing Josef Albers at Black Mountain College and later as the profoundly influential head of Design at Yale; Steinberg’s immensely upbeat career as the whimsical satirist of American visions and fashions; and Walter Gropius’s deeply respected teaching at Harvard. The latter group made the most of their reputations and opportunities. I cannot say that they ‘never looked back,’ but they assuredly made highly successful new lives that enhanced their reputations internationally. 3 What might be termed an ‘intermediate group’ would continue to lead truly transnational lives, most notably Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Lipchitz (who eventually spent his last years in Italy rather than Paris or New York), and Isamu Noguchi. For several of them, intensely sentimental memories prompted the desire to be buried where their lives had begun. In the case of Tanguy, who married an American woman and lived happily with her in Woodbury, Connecticut until he died in 1955, he preferred to be cremated and have his ashes scattered on the beach at Douamenez in his beloved Brittany. Salvador Dalí came to the U.S. with his wife Gala in 1940 and remained for eight years, including time spent collaborating on films in Hollywood; yet in 1949 they returned to Catalonia for his remaining four decades because their native region exerted an intensely magnetic, memoryfilled appeal. As soon as Dalí fled to New York, his work became grimly pessimistic about the dire situation in Europe and remained so for the duration of the war, culminating in horror at the American devastation of Japanese civilians. A spectacular Dalí exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art during the summer of 2008 supplied arresting and little known examples from the start – Book Transforming Itself into a Nude Woman _____________ 3

For a useful though cursory series of profiles, see Sweeney, “Eleven Europeans” 1-38.

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[aided by a knife] (1940) – and from the finish, Melancholy Atomic Uranic Idyll (1945). 4

Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray It seems sensible to begin with two other Surrealists who became life-long friends because the Surrealist “moment” (1920s-1930s) happened to coincide with the rise of fascism that caused so many enthusiasts of what Hitler called “degenerate art” to seek asylum in the United States. Shortly before Marcel Duchamp died in 1968, he gave an extended series of revealing interviews that provide useful memories of how he was invited to send works for inclusion in the notoriously provocative New York Armory Show of 1913. All four of the paintings that he sent were purchased, including the scandalous Nude Descending a Staircase, which prompted his interviewer to remark that “you were a man predestined for America,” to which the artist responded: “So to speak, yes.” When asked about his innovations promptly following his arrival – when he began using massproduced objects as works of art – he responded with candor: Please note that I didn’t want to make a work of art out of it. The word ‘readymade’ did not appear until 1915, when I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a ‘readymade,’ or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn’t have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or describing anything. (qtd. in Cabanne 43-47)

Well, perhaps. We have learned not to take most artists too literally, and especially dissident ones like Duchamp. From 1925 onward he traveled to and from France with remarkable frequency, more so than any of the others we are considering, though in 1942 he made what he considered his permanent home in Greenwich Village. He anticipated many others in viewing America as the future center for art, surpassing even Paris. The capitals of the Old World labored for hundreds of years to find that which constitutes good taste and one may say that they have found a zenith thereof. But why do people not understand what a bore that is? […] If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished – dead – and that America is the country of the art of the future. […] Look at the skyscrapers! Has Europe anything to show more beautiful than these? (qtd. in Tomkins 152)

Duchamp recalled feeling that in the U.S. the past had ceased to be a burden because it barely existed in American consciousness. “In Paris, in _____________ 4

The first is in a private collection in the U.S., and the second in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

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Europe,” he remarked, “the young men of any generation always act as the grandsons of some great man […]. They can’t help it. Even if they don’t believe it, it goes into their system, and so, when they come to produce something of their own, there is a sort of traditionalism that is indestructible. This does not exist here […] So it is a perfect terrain for new developments.” New York meant liberation from cultural tyranny. Duchamp differentiated between two types of artists: those who are integrated and “deal” with society, and the other kind, his kind, “the completely freelance artist, who has nothing to do with it – no bonds.” (qtd. in Tomkins 153) Appearing on NBC television in a thirty-minute interview in 1955 (Tomkins 393), Duchamp observed that “the danger for me is to please an immediate public – the immediate public that comes around you, and takes you in, and accepts you, and gives you success, and everything. Instead of that, I would rather wait for the public that will come fifty years – or a hundred years – after my death.” It may or not be ironic, then, that in 1967 three young painters made a series of collaborative images titled “The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp.” The last one, depicting his burial, Duchamp regarded as “very pretty.” The pallbearers were Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Restany, and other prominent Pop artists. Always enthusiastic, Duchamp observed: “Dressed as American Marines! I swear it was amusing to look at. It was awful as painting, but that doesn’t matter; it had to be that way for them to want to prove something; it was horribly painted, but it was very clear. It was a hell of a job” (Tomkins 393; Cabanne 103). Because Pop Art had inherited Surrealism, its devotees needed to bury it (see Bourdon 258). Although Man Ray was born in Philadelphia in 1890 (as Emmanuel Radnitzky, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants), he eventually crisscrossed the Atlantic almost as often as his friend Duchamp, but having contrary inclinations lived more of his life in Paris than anywhere else. In 1963 he wrote a highly detailed memoir – one wonders how he could recall so many specific events and episodes without having kept a journal – and at the end acknowledged that he did so in order to free himself from the past “and the risk of boring my hearers if I should forget that I had already told the same story” (Ray 310-11). Living in France (with an array of lovely women) from 1920 until 1940, he recalled his initial optimism on the eve of the German invasion. “We in Paris settled down impassively to face the future. There was every confidence in the army’s ability to stave off the invader: the First World

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War slogan was taken up again: they shall not pass.” 5 Reality soon set in and along with his wife Adrienne, Man Ray joined the stream of refugees swiftly fleeing south. Intercepted by the Germans, he was ordered back to Paris and he sought shelter there at the American Embassy where he requested repatriation. Despite being an expatriate for two decades, he had remained an American citizen. Eventually he and his wife made their way circuitously to Lisbon where they got a boat to New York, all the while fending off appeals from Salvador Dalí to serve as his interpreter. Ray begged off, “saying simply that I did not want to attract attention to myself. He managed pretty well with the press anyway,” a wonderful piece of sardonic understatement about the self-promoting Dalí (Ray 242-59). Because he had been equally successful as a photographer and painter, Man Ray quickly moved to Hollywood, joined by his new love, Juliet. His first thought was somehow to recover a package of photographs he had left behind in Paris, hoping to “reconstruct some of them while the memory of their colors was still fresh in my mind.” Because California remained “a wilderness for me,” he wanted to return to Paris soon after the war, but a variety of commitments – such as painting Ava Gardner and other gorgeous movie stars – and exhibitions kept him in Los Angeles. In 1945 he gave a public lecture there describing some of his pre-war activities among the Surrealists, illustrating its “tendencies” and its “influence on contemporary thought,” and concluded by saying that “brevity was one of its virtues, whatever other reservations one might have on the subject.” Man Ray became a kind of informal oral historian of the Surrealist movement. In 1951 he finally relocated to his beloved Montparnasse, though with several more trans-Atlantic trips still ahead in his remaining twentyfive years (Ray 263, 278-81, 284, 290-91). Being present-minded and future-oriented, however, Man Ray’s Self Portrait, written in 1961, had more to do with putting the past behind him than with explaining his memories or reflecting critically upon them. As he observed of his mind-set while writing at the home of a stranger outside Paris, “forgetting where I am, [but] rather imagining myself back in Hollywood, fifteen years ago. […] [I felt] inarticulate in certain respects but without the usual expression of one determined to make a respected position for himself in the world” (Ray 279). Having been a cultural pilgrim for so long, is it any wonder that Man Ray’s mind could so readily wander from place to place, and momentarily lose track of where he actually was? The peripatetic life is not notably conducive to reliable memories, never mind a secure sense of place. _____________ 5

The Romanian-born historian Eugen Weber was in Paris at just the same time and much later recalled feeling the very same sense of unrealistic optimism, all too soon dashed.

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Josef Albers, Fernand Léger, and Jacques Lipchitz Josef Albers (1888-1976) came to the U.S. in 1933 when Hitler’s regime closed the modernist Bauhaus school at Dessau. We know that he found Americans surprisingly friendly and that he made a swift and successful transition. In certain key respects, his philosophy of art appears to have been uncongenial to retrospection. One of his favorite aphorisms declared that “Tradition in art is to create. If we were to revive we would still be in caves” (Rosenthal 16, 18). Often called a Constructivist, he is best known for the many precise and colorful variations he made of his signature motif, Homage to the Square. During the course of instructive interviews that he gave to Margit Rowell in 1970-71, he resurrected memories of his varied experiences in the art world as a young man prior to joining the Bauhaus, and those revelations go a long way toward explaining his immense impact as a teacher of very diverse students at Black Mountain and Yale. By the age of twenty-five, he recalled, he had been attracted to the avant-garde work of Munch, Van Gogh, German Expressionism, Delaunay, and especially Cézanne. What he took away from that exposure was not just his well-known interest in color, but excitement over the interaction of color and light. 6 He discovered Munch in Berlin at the 1913 Herbstausstellung. As he recalled seventy-three years later: “At the exhibition, there was a painting by Munch, The Rising of the Sun. It was a huge painting. It overwhelmed me. There was such a terrific glow that you couldn’t look into that sun. It was so overwhelming that it put me on my knees. That is one of the greatest experiences I have ever had in modern painting” (Rowell 27). He had similarly vivid memories of being influenced by the Die Brücke group, active in Dresden until 1913, and being inspired (1913-15) by photographs of works in charcoal by Van Gogh that moved him so powerfully he felt the need to touch the images. Albers discovered Cézanne at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen as early as 1908, though “it was not until Essen (191619) that Cézanne got into my bones” (Rowell 30). Digging deeply into his past, Albers found in his encounter with Cézanne’s work one of the most crucial elements contributing to his stylistic evolution. “I was fascinated by Cézanne’s organization of the color field,” he recalled, “how planes – areas of light and dark – touched or did not touch, had dissolved or abutted edges, and I was impressed by the independent articulation of the planes in reference to the image thus pro_____________ 6

See Davis in Kelder: “An artist who has used telegraph, telephone and radio doesn’t feel the same way about time and space as one who has not. And an artist who lives in a world of the motion picture, electricity, and synthetic chemistry doesn’t feel the same way about light and color as one who has not.” (122)

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duced” (Rowell 30). Because of Rowell’s probing and prompting, our understanding of the apparent simplicity of Albers’s mature work (and teaching) has been greatly enhanced. It is now easier to understand why he became the first living artist to receive a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1971). With Fernand Léger (1881-1955), a gifted colorist with a distinctive volumetric style, the nature and influence of his transnational experiences is more ambiguous. Having sought refuge in the U.S. in 1940, he returned to France as swiftly as he could in 1945 where he joined the Communist Party, considering himself a passionate humanist. When interviewed after the war by James Sweeney, Léger declared that “it is difficult to point to any major change in my painting during the war.” When he first visited the U.S. in 1931, he felt overwhelmed by its vastness. “It’s not a country – it’s a world,” he remarked. “It’s impossible to see the limits. In Europe each nation is aware of its boundaries, whether it is France, Italy, England, Scandinavia.” In America, “all is without limit.” Still, when he returned to New York in 1935 to attend an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, he gave one journalist a tart response: “A painter of my generation should not have to learn English […] America is a poor place for a painter” (Sweeney, “Eleven Europeans” 13; Wilmoth 43). Léger’s French chauvinism seems to have been somewhat modified, however, by his engagement with the novel sight of industrial refuse and the American landscape. He had, after all, been the first artist to take as his idiom the imagery of the machine age, and his visits to this country during the 1930s provided opportunities to paint large murals. In any event, he acknowledged in 1946 that “[n]owhere else have I found such an energetic and dynamic atmosphere. The French public will be amazed when it compares my American painting with my pre-American output.” He enjoyed very extensive travels in 1941 and they clearly affected him. We do not know his emotions when he painted Adieu New York at the end of his stay; but when interviewed by a French journalist in 1945, his comments were two-fold. First, he said “I tell you it’s an amazing country.” But then, “One always returns to Paris – it is a sentimental matter. For a Frenchman or somebody who has lived here, France exercises an irresistible attraction” 7 (Wilmoth 44, 53-54). Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), a Lithuanian born in Tsarist Russia, emigrated to Paris in 1909 at the age of eighteen and flourished there under the compelling influence of cubism, which he appropriated with a bold, muscular style. In 1941 he left his adopted country via Toulouse and _____________ 7

Adieu New York is reproduced as plate 56 in this volume. Robert Colescott, the distinguished African American artist, studied with Léger.

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Marseilles and came to the U.S. reluctantly, acknowledging in his autobiography that he felt very apprehensive about beginning anew. Although he adapted swiftly, memories of his life and work in Paris lingered powerfully, just as they had for Léger. As he recalled in his autobiography: “In 1942 I was working with the Spring bronze foundry and suddenly I developed a nostalgia to do transparents such as I had done in France in 1925. These were different from the earlier ones in the sense that I had now solved all the technical problems so I could work in an extremely free, lyrical manner” (Lipchitz and Arnason 144, 159). In 1942-43 Lipchitz made a drawing titled “Road of Exile,” highly symptomatic of his early feelings in his new and still strange environment. Like Léger, he returned to France in 1946. A Spanish friend had declared that the next great art center would be the New World, but as the sculptor explained in a 1945 interview: “For me the centre is still France and I believe it will remain France for some time to come. […] And what is most striking is that so many of the greatest leaders of the French school have been foreigners, from Pol de Limbourg, down to Jongkind, Sisley, Pisarro and Van Gogh,” in itself an interesting transnational perspective. Certainly it was trans-European. In that same interview he also acknowledged that his greatest heroes were Rodin and Cézanne, both indisputably French, of course (Patai 344-45; Sweeney, “An Interview” 86, 88). Nevertheless, within three years Lipchitz became so eager to return to the New World that he left his wife behind (actually, Berthe so loved her house and garden that she refused to leave France again) and brought his new love, Yulla, to eventually settle in Hastings-on-Hudson. By 1953, as he recalled almost two decades later while working on a commissioned piece concerning American enterprise, “I now felt myself so completely an American that I was fascinated by [this] American theme.” The United States, and especially his place on the Hudson, had come to mean serenity and freedom from the mundane bustle of Paris and New York City. Even so, the lure of Italy would captivate him early in the 1960s and he would relocate yet again. When the time came for a major exhibition in New York in 1957, he wrote a statement for the show looking back on many years of creating art: During the almost half-century I have been a sculptor, I remark that after periods of tense and controlled work I feel a strong urge for a kind of free lyrical expansion that cannot be stopped. So came my “transparents” in 1925 after a long period of hard fight for a new [visual] language. So came in 1942 my “transparents” here in this country after the tense years of war and my flight from Paris. So came my “variations on a chisel” after the fire in my [Manhattan] studio in 1952. And now after a few years of working on my “Virgin” [a Roman Catholic commission] and the sculpture for the Fairmount Park [American Enterprise], I literally exploded into these “semi-automatics. (Patai 412)

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During the war, when Lipchitz attempted to buy a home in New Jersey, he encountered anti-Semitism in the form of a restricted neighborhood not open to Jews. That and a few other experiences left bitter feelings that helped push him back to France soon after peace was achieved. Ultimately, however, his very positive memories of America as a stable and appreciative place to work – and Lipchitz surely was a workaholic – pulled him back for a more enduring stay that he never regretted, even though many more retrospective exhibitions and commissions from international sources caused him to become even more of a world citizen than ever before. After he died in Capri, his body was flown to Jerusalem for burial. His autobiography makes it very clear that his memories had supplied an enduring source of satisfaction (see Hammacher 70-75).

Fig. 2. Artists in Exile at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. New York. 1942. Empreintes, 2008. Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris.

Saul Steinberg Saul Steinberg (1914-99), who left Milan for the U.S. in 1941, swiftly took citizenship, served overseas with the Office of Special Services (OSS), and settled into a charmed American career as an illustrator and cartoonist. He

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rarely looked back, but when he did, as we have already seen, he did so with clarity and little ambivalence. As he remarked in his last years, “I don’t want to go back to Romania: they are places that don’t belong to geography but to time. And the memory of these places and of sadness, of suffering, but above all of great emotions, is spoiled by seeing them again. It’s better to leave certain things in peace, just the way they are in memory: with the passage of time they become the mythology of our lives” (Steinberg and Buzzi 41). An Ex Voto (crude pencil drawing) that he created in the 1980s showed his parents after he brought them to America “in a state of bewilderment and shock – until they saw Gary Cooper in a movie, and breathed easy. Him they knew from Romania, an old friend.” Even the aged, resituated into a strange and incomprehensible culture, could cling to visual memories that had been exported to a distant land while living under a repressive political regime (Gopnik 147). The art critic Harold Rosenberg believed that Steinberg kept his keen eye on universal transformations. “Becoming someone else,” he wrote, “is a crisis situation. Steinberg’s drawings are full of figures on the edges of precipices, statues falling from their pedestals, solitary individuals staring into voids.” True enough, but that may not sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which the cartoonist conceived of art as autobiography. Rosenberg also declared that “Steinberg’s art lacks a centrifugal location. His nostalgia, fabricated of yesterdays, is skin deep” (Rosenberg 11, 17). Perhaps, but based upon her 1970 in-depth interview, critic Grace Glueck concluded that Steinberg’s work was always autobiographical: “From way back, it reads like a diary,” he told her. “It reflects what I’ve read, my entanglements with people, places, moods.” Writing warmly of his colleague and friend a year following Steinberg’s death, Adam Gopnik observed that “he was sincerely ironic, ironically sincere. Romania, he once said, was ‘an Art Deco world peopled by Byzantium man.’ (The idea of Byzantium, of a lost, layered, glittering corrupt civilization, haunted him)” (Glueck 110; Gopnik 142). All three writers, however, knowing Steinberg personally, recognized the extent to which he became such an acutely sardonic observer of his adopted country. And he did so in such a persistently on-going manner that he became a kind of canine for the visually impaired, enabling Americans to see what was becoming of their culture. As Gopnik wrote, “more than any other artist, high or low, he recorded the great change that overcame New York between 1950 and 1975. He saw a culture of inhibition become a culture of sensation,” all the while recognizing the inherent conservatism of American society. During the 1960s Steinberg could perceive that post-war prosperity and stability in the U.S. were notable not because of “its abundance, its washing machines and its advertisements,

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but because of its solemn attachment to the American past” (Gopnik 141, 146). When Grace Glueck observed in her interview that a foreigner had come to her country and became “a really American artist,” Steinberg responded by asking “Who is American? It’s a foreigner who came here and said, tiens! What a country. Let’s go West. That is the tradition of the American. As a matter of fact, that is the tradition of the artist – to become someone else.” He also indicated (more than once) his bemusement at what he called bondieuserie (good Lord stuff), the notable prominence of religious kitsch in America. Worth noting from that same interview are his fascination with Van Gogh and his strong identification with James Joyce and Tolstoi (Glueck 112-13, 117). When Glueck asked about the widely shared assumption that he had been influenced by the work of Paul Klee, Steinberg denied it although he characteristically acknowledged that “we are both ex-children who never stopped drawing.” As an alternative to Klee he (perhaps whimsically?) designated as a significant inspiration the cakes that his mother had decorated: “the main thing was her spirit of observation. She had a way of describing something verbally [visually?] which was the essential thing” (Glueck 114). I find one other item symptomatic of the way his transnational history and identity endured. Quite late in his life Steinberg made a crude pencil drawing intended to invoke his vision of the American scene. The street sign indicates that his focal point is the corner of Lexington Avenue and 62nd Street in Manhattan. The caption beneath the drawing is lengthy: “In front of Bloomingdale’s young elegant brunette distributes leaflets. She looks familiar. She looks at me. Do I look familiar to her too? I ask for a leaflet: Madame Rosa, Clairvoyant. Of course, a gypsy from Romania.” As late as 1994, at the age of eighty, his roots continued to provide grounding for his present. Although Steinberg had come a very long way, his Bucharest boyhood remained vivid via cakes, gypsies, and the rubber stamps that his father had made. Adam Gopnik has sagely called him a “surreptitious Surrealist.” That’s exactly right. 8

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The image is reproduced in Gopnik 147. See pages 143, 146 for the Surrealist influence. For Steinberg’s love of rubber stamps, passports and related documents, see the exhibition souvenir booklet, Saul Steinberg: Documents (1979).

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Ananda Coomaraswamy and Isamu Noguchi We can usefully expand our focus by briefly considering the career of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), who served from 1917 until 1947 as Keeper of Indian and Muhammadan Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Because his duties there were not onerous, he not only had time to create a great body of scholarship on South Asian art but also build the pre-eminent collection of such art in the U.S. and encouraged its acquisition by museums in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, and Kansas City. He became the founder and first president of the Indian Cultural Centre in New York. For the India Society founded in 1924 he made lecture tours and encouraged the formation of various organizations to promote knowledge of India and Indian philosophy. He passionately believed that the West sorely needed an infusion of soul from the East. As one observer has written, “he referred to the scholars and teachers from abroad who took up residence in the United States as men who helped to add to American ‘virility’ the quality of ‘serenity’” (Singam 11). Coomaraswamy was born in Colombo, Ceylon to an English mother and an Indian father. After receiving his PhD in London in 1904, he steeped himself in ancient languages (East and West), philology, science, above all Indian art, and in the process acquired a vast knowledge of many cultures. Like Steinberg he admired Tolstoi, especially because of his emphasis upon spirituality. The most persistent theme in Coomaraswamy’s writing is his insistence upon the inseparability of religion from art. As he wrote, “it is not only in Philosophy and Religion-Truth and Love but also in Art that Europe and Asia are united and from this triple likeness we may well infer that all men are alike in their divinity.” Whereas many have called him conservative, he preferred to regard himself as reactionary. He urged others to look to the past for inspiration and guidance. His lament about modern conceptions of art in the West was the dichotomy that he believed others created and assumed between art and life (Singam 6-7). He obviously held strong views about many key matters. Although glad to live and work in the U.S., Coomaraswamy became very aware that economic and social problems were difficult to solve within the framework of capitalist industrialism – a perspective that he clearly shared with Fernand Léger. He also held a very Jeffersonian view of government, though he arrived at it quite independently. “The least amount of government it is possible to live with, is the best,” he wrote, “and the less we are mixed up with it, the better for us; or rather, the better we are, the less we shall wish to be involved in it” (Singam 9). In 1923 he had this to say in an essay titled “America and India.”

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The state of modern India, typical of modern Asia, is doubly perilous, because the same development is taking place more suddenly, and here the past is still existing and powerful side by side with the present, in a total opposition more intense than any to be observed in Europe. It is true that the Asiatic past is older in experience and wisdom than any existing culture – the very children of the East are spiritually older than the thinkers of the West: but the ancient East is already senescent, and if modern Europe is adolescent, modern India is infantile. (Singam 10)

Some of Coomaraswamy’s most important analyses of Indian art preceded his arrival in Boston in 1917; but the three decades that he spent at the Museum of Fine Arts greatly expanded his comparative perspective and deepened his appreciation of ways in which modern art history and criticism might benefit from knowledge of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures and their memories as transmitted through oral tradition. Hence his inquiries into Native American and African American culture as well as his interest in Pacific islanders. The man was a genuine omnivore and polymath. His legacy has been called a philosophy of “visual theology” based upon his insistence that all art is ultimately religious (Singam 6, 8). Although Coomaraswamy is not well remembered by historians of Western art, he is revered as an intellectual sage in South Asia where the career that he made in contemplating transnational comparisons has enjoyed considerable influence. I have saved Isamu Noguchi for last (1904-88), partially because he, too, linked East and West, and because many of his astonishing sculptures are among my favorites (most notably the marble “doughnut” and the cube en pointe in the sunken garden at Yale’s Beinecke Library), but mostly because in several respects his rich lifetime of experiences provides the most transnational case of all – the ne plus ultra. In addition to being Japanese American and spending many years in both countries, he also devoted time to absorbing the cultures of China, India, Nepal, Hawaii, Jerusalem, Mexico, and Europe (Greece and Rome in particular). The word peripatetic is barely adequate to describe Noguchi’s impulses. Although his father, an aspiring Japanese poet, rejected him, his American mother took him to Japan quite early so that he would grow up in what she believed to be his ‘native culture.’ Because of his negative interactions with a hostile father, he would prefer the U.S. as home base for much of his earlier training and initial career, yet beginning in the 1960s would spend increasing amounts of time in Japan, acquired a rustic farm and retreated to the serenity he found there to execute large commissions destined for placement in the United States. Logistical complications rarely seemed to daunt him (Ashton 22-44, 201). In 1927 young Noguchi received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel to the Far East. He began, however, by going to Paris where he served as

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Constantin Brancusi’s studio assistant for several months, a formative apprenticeship. When it came time to write about that experience in 1976, what Noguchi had to say clearly had himself in mind as much as his recollection of Brancusi coming to Paris from Romania in order to practice his craft, yet bringing something with him beyond his initial training in art at home. The memory of childhood, of things observed not taught, of closeness to the earth, of wet stones and grass, of stone buildings and wood churches, hand-hewn logs and tools, stone markers, walls and gravestones. This is the inheritance he was able to call upon when the notion came to him that his art, his sculpture, could not go forward to be born without first going back to beginnings. (Ashton 169)

A decade earlier, when Noguchi had become world famous, he wanted to begin his autobiography with the poignant story of his mother, a powerful influence in his life. “It should be more than just a biography,” he explained. I think it should be a history of our times with […] my mother coming to Japan and trying to make a go of it […]. I believe she was involved with my father because he needed some kind of help with his English. As a result of all this I was the product. What to do with me was her problem. Merely bringing me up in America as another kid was not her idea of progress. So in a way [going to Japan] was my mother’s decision what would be best for me. (qtd. in Duus 11)

Noguchi actually found it very difficult to make headway on his autobiographical project, despite strong encouragement and help from his then girlfriend, Priscilla Morgan. Seated at a typewriter he would lose concentration. “I wasn’t born to write things,” he told her in frustration. “I was born to do sculpture” (qtd. in Duus 289). From the very outset, however, Noguchi knew that he wanted his narrative to explain his unique situation as an artist straddling two cultures. When it eventually appeared in 1968 as A Sculptor’s World, it contained only thirty pages of text and 259 pages devoted to photographs of his work. In 1967 Priscilla had asked the artist’s friend Buckminster Fuller (the geodesic dome designer) to write a foreword, and he agreed. “Isamu and the airplane were both born in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century,” Fuller began. At two years of age Isamu ‘took off’ or was taken off by his Japan-bound mother in what has since proved to be a half century of continuous world peregrinations. […] As the unselfconscious prototype of the new cosmos, Isamu has always been inherently at home – everywhere. […] In my estimation the evoluting array and extraordinary breadth of his conceptioning realizations [truly] document a comprehensive artist without peer in our time. (Duus 288-89, 307)

In terms of inspirational texts and patterns of creativity, Noguchi found special stimuli in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the art of Wil-

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liam Blake, in the choreography of Martha Graham (with whom he worked) and dancer Erick Hawkins, and in the minimalist collaboration of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The classic dry garden, manifest at so many different venues in Japan, became his metaphorical signature. In 1961 he purchased a factory in Queens, New York, that became his permanent workshop and residence. Today it is home to the Noguchi Museum (see Duus 289; Asthon 155, 229). In 1968 his first museum retrospective took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He told John Gordon, who curated the exhibition, that he felt caught between the two poles of Greece and Japan, explaining that the United States “is the arena where the battle is being waged.” As Dore Ashton has explained, the show enjoyed great success and persuaded earlier critics of his eclecticism, decorativeness, and Japonaiserie that they were viewing the work of a mature master. The exhibition was an inspirational triumph (Ashton 172-73).

Transnational Memories and National Identity In 1916 Randolph Bourne, the radical young cultural critic, published a manifesto essay titled “Trans-national America” in which he pleaded for a fresh sense of national identity rooted in the acceptance of pluralism and multiculturalism. 9 The immigration restrictions authorized by Congress in 1921 and 1924 did much to defer that ideal, but the opening up of immigration in 1965 has brought the U.S. much closer to achieving it. In between, the welcoming acceptance of Old World artists in flight from fascism during the later 1930s and early years of World War II also did much to foster a permanent legacy of transnational creativity that can be enjoyed in museums and other institutions around the world, but especially in America. 10 So many others hover in the wings, just waiting to come on stage. One thinks of Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) who emigrated to the U.S. in 1923, took citizenship, and in 1933 designed the Ukrainian Pavilion for the great exposition in Chicago. One thinks of Roberto Matta (1911-2002), the Chilean surrealist whose biomorphic oil paintings flourished and enjoyed considerable impact during his decade in the U.S. (1939-48), after which he divided his life between Europe and South America. Among those who resisted not merely repatriation, but even _____________ 9 10

Reprinted in Bourne 260-84. For context see Horowitz, which deals mainly with musicians, dancers, filmmakers and movie stars, rather than fine artists.

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revisitation, one remembers Mark Rothko (1903-1970), born in Latvia but reaching Ellis Island with his family in 1913. Early in 1950 Rothko traveled in Europe for five months, eyeing Old Masters in all of the major museums, yet resolutely refusing to visit Soviet Russia and repeating the snub on his two subsequent trips abroad. When Edith Halpert, the influential dealer in American art, returned to her native Odessa in 1958, she felt deeply disillusioned by the shabbiness she encountered while seeking out her natal neighborhood and original home. She had become an American chauvinist and regretted the visit (see Breslin 283-87; Pollock 348). One also thinks of László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), the Hungarian painter and photographer who moved to Chicago in 1937 at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, became the first director of the New Bauhaus and subsequently opened his own Institute of Design. There is also Marc Chagall (1887-1985) who came to this country (notably Chicago where he made many friends) in 1941, returned to France in 1946, but later designed mosaic murals at Lincoln Center in New York (1966) as well as a stained glass wall at the headquarters of the United Nations and many other transcendent projects. Chagall’s most cherished motifs and symbols represent freedom, love, man’s creativity (exemplified by the circus), time and the modest life (signified by the pendulum clock). These are the kinds of universals that one constantly encounters in the works of all our cast. There is also a generation of displaced artists too young to have genuine memories of a time or place of origin. So they create what have been called “appropriated memories.” A prime example would be Alberto Rey, born in Havana in 1960, who left Castro’s Cuba in 1963 and came to the U.S. two years later. Until he finally returned to the island of his birth in 1998, his memories were inevitably vicarious. But his 1996 visit to the Cuban Refugee Center in Key West inspired a series of mimetic representations of familiar landscapes that conflated real memories with imagined ones. Hence we have such works as Niagara Falls/Isla de Pinos, an arresting variation on a motif of dual memories that we can find in so many works by the artists who have been the principal focus of our attention (see Herrera 299-306). 11 Having their feet situated on several shores, their hearts and minds intermittently filled with memories, they found fertile ground for their noble and notable skills.

_____________ 11

See fig. 14 for Niagara Falls in Herrera.

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Works Cited Ashton, Dore. Noguchi East and West. New York: Knopf, 1992. Bourdon, David. Warhol. New York: Abrams, 1989. Bourne, Randolph. The History of a Literary Radical & Other Papers. New York: S. A. Russell, 1956. Breslin, James E. B. Mark Rothko: A Biography. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking, 1971. Cooper, Harry, and Ron Spronk. Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Davis, Stuart. “Is There a Revolution in the Arts?” Stuart Davis. Ed. Diane Kelder. New York: Praeger, 1971. 121-23. Duus, Masayo. The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Dvorák, Antonín. Symphony no. 9 in E minor, From the New World, op. 95. 1893. Glueck, Grace. “The Artist Speaks: Saul Steinberg.” Art in America 58 (6 Nov. 1970): 110-17. Gopnik, Adam. “What Steinberg Saw: The Cartoonist and His America.” The New Yorker 13 Nov. 2000: 140-47. Hammacher, A. M. Jacques Lipchitz: His Sculpture. New York: Abrams, 1961. Harold Rosenberg. Saul Steinberg. New York: Knopf / Whitney Museum, 1978. Herrera, Andrea. Remembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora. Austin: Texas UP, 2001. Horowitz, Joseph. Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Lipchitz, Jacques, and H. H. Arnason. My Life in Sculpture. New York: Viking, 1972. Noguchi, Isamu. A Sculptor’s World. New York: Harper, 1968. Patai, Irene. Encounters: The Life of Jacques Lipchitz. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1961. Pollock, Lindsay. The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Ray, Man. Self Portrait. Boston: Little, 1963. 310-11. Rosenberg, Harold. Saul Steinberg. New York: Knopf / Whitney Museum, 1978. Rosenthal, T. G. Josef Albers: Formulation: Articulation. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Rowell, Margit. “On Albers’ Colors.” Artforum 10 (1972): 26-37. Saul Steinberg: Documents. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979. Singam, S. Durai Raja. “The Boston Years, 1917-1947.” Ananda Coomaraswamy – The Bridge Builder: A Study of a Scholar Colossus. Ed. S. Durai Raja Singam. Malaysia: Petaling Jaya, 1977. Steinberg, Saul, and Aldo Buzzi. Reflections and Shadows. New York: Random, 2002. Stevens, Mark, and Annalyn Swan. De Kooning: An American Master. New York: Knopf, 2004. Sweeney, James Johnson. “An Interview with Jacques Lipchitz.” Partisan Review 12 (1944): 83-89. —. “Eleven Europeans in America.” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 13 (1946): 1-38. Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Wilmoth, Simon. “Léger and America.” Fernand Léger: The Later Years. Ed. Nicholas Serota. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1987. 43-54.

Magna Carta 1215 and the Exercise of Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century DAVID W. SAXE

The Power of Memory and Traditions King George III supposed his American colonists to be so consumed with colonial matters such as exploring, settling, building, manufacturing, trading, and dealing with Native Americans that ancient-medieval traditions would have no place in this New World. He was wrong. From the first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607 to the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, American colonists played the part of largely dutiful and obedient subjects. However, when King George sought to tax his colonial subjects, he unleashed a storm of dissent that led to a revolution and independence. It seemed that ancient-medieval traditions that forbade kings to tax subject without consent mattered. The voices of protest were clear. Beginning in 1763, James Otis of Massachusetts reminded his fellow colonists that natural rights trump a king’s prerogative. Invoking the authority of the 550 year-old Magna Carta as guardian of liberty, Otis declared that No legislative, supreme or subordinate, has a right to make itself arbitrary […] [they are bound] by God and nature […] (1) to govern by stated laws; (2) those laws should have no other end ultimately, but the good of the people; (3) taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent in person; and (4) [the peoples] whole power is not transferable. (Otis, “Rights” 121)

Here, thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence was the essence of the revolution; the points on which the ‘rebellious’ colonials were to make their claim for independence. From Otis forward, like-minded colonists cleared a path to rebellion, war, and declarations of independence. Following his mentor, John Adams authored a resolution on Parliament’s usurping of rights with the hated Stamp Act of 1765: “The act will make an essential change in the constitution of juries, and it is directly repugnant to the Great Charter [Magna Carta] […].” (Adams, “Instructions” 57). Another New England lawyer advanced the building argument that Britain’s government was

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tracking toward the oppression of liberty in America. Writing in 1768, Silas Downer noted: It is the very essence of the British constitution, that the people shall not be governed by laws, in the making of which they had no hand, or have their monies taken away without their own consent. This privilege is inherent, and cannot be granted by any but the Almighty. It is a natural right which no creature can give, or hath a right to take away. The great charter of liberties, commonly called Magna Carta, doth not give the privileges therein mentioned, nor doth our Charters, but must be considered as only declaratory of our rights, and in affirmance of them. [… ] I cannot be persuaded that the parliament of Great Britain have any lawful right to make any laws whatsoever to bind us, because there can be no fountain from whence such a right can flow. It is universally agreed amongst us that they cannot tax us, because we are not represented there. (141)

The stage was set for change. Although the temper and consequence of national memory had rested for 156 years, even at the temporal distance of nearly six centuries and geographically 3,000 miles from its origins, America’s founding generation did not ignore the actions of the medieval King John and his barons as they wrought out a Magna Carta. Thus, the persistence of ideas cut through the centuries like a sharp knife: government must have limits, liberty was a right, written charters yield the stability of rule of law, consent was not an aspiration of free people, but an expectation. While matters of time and space may be of less concern in a world engineered by mobile phones, supercomputers, and laser guided missiles, it seemed unlikely that the intrigues of medieval English kings and noblemen would escape the confines of their times, unleashing the transformative powers of ideas that moved subsequent generations to act. And yet, Magna Carta was just that. The Great Charter of English liberties proved the power of memory and political traditions.

Remembering Magna Carta As we approach the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015, it is appropriate to pause and reflect on this event from a distant world largely unknown and at times poorly understood by moderns; not for its historical-cultural value to invested nation-states, but for its political-social applications (Sotheby 9). The established history of Magna Carta has been ably recorded and its historiography is not disputed here (Alderman). This article also raises no controversy or objection over wordsmithing literal translations from Medieval Latin into English (or other languages) and makes no claims of contrary revelations. Instead, although lightly tracing the history of Magna Carta 1215 to orient the reader, this article focuses

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on Magna Carta’s legacy as an application of ideas, illustrating the power of ideas to stimulate action. The prime exemplar of Magna Carta’s success as an inspiration to action is found in the founding of the United States of America (see Wright; Churchill; Swindler). The supposition presented here is that as colonial Americans made the transition from subjects of the British Crown to citizens of a free and independent nation, Magna Carta was their guide. If Magna Carta legitimized the colonists’ appeal to justice, it confirmed British actions as violating the essential principles of English liberty. Although the Crown vigorously disputed its colonists’ invocation of Magna Carta as a talisman to check British policies, even to wage war against its own American empire, it is instructive to revel what colonial Americans believed about Magna Carta (however misinformed or misguided), to explore what it represented, and to examine what actions England’s blood cousins took to justify its cause. The history of the Magna Carta of 1215 can be summed up simply: forced upon King John by his barons’ swords at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, Magna Carta was a document stipulating that the English King respect the ancestral rights of his nobles. England of 1215 was a violent world inhabited by petty rulers in which the rule of law was arbitrarily applied, a world in which subject citizens possessed little control over their lives. That history, however integral to nation building in England, is not our primary interest. Rather, it is what people in later generations pulled from this era to create the legacy of Magna Carta that resonates. In the blossoming British Empire of the 1680s, within five hundred years of John’s humiliation, memories of Magna Carta invoked a revolution that subdued a king’s penchant for absolute rule in favor of the legislative proxy of a parliament. One hundred years later, in 1776, across an ocean of conflicted traditions and dim memories, Magna Carta fostered another revolution that subdued the legislative rule of Parliament in deference to a people’s government where individuals might exercise their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness against government usurpations. Although the historical record of Magna Carta has remained stable, the memory of its intended or reasoned meanings have transformed a once distant medieval document that pressed a king to acknowledge the feudal rights of his lords to a symbol for British constitutionalism for elite interests to the virtual foundation of an American government devoted to guarding the sovereignty of individual rights (Swindler 207-08). Retracing the historiography of its interpretation and application, this article explores Magna Carta as a transformative document from its inception as a medieval limit on the English King’s prerogative for absolute rule to the Parliamentary benchmark of modern government in the 1680s to

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justification for revolution and the formation of the United States of America. While Magna Carta was claimed as the foundational precursor of the Parliamentary revolutions in seventeenth-century England and was named holy grail of liberty by American patriots of 1776 and shortly thereafter proclaimed the inspiration of good government by authors of the Constitution of 1787 and the consequential Bill of Rights of 1791, as we move into the second decade of the twentieth century, three related questions surrounding Magna Carta’s currency for America, Europe, and the rest of the world are begged: - Has the intellectual synergy of Magna Carta been spent? - What does the transformative nature of Magna Carta (applied decisively in the seventeenth century in England and later by upstart ‘English’ cousins in the American colonies in the eighteenth century) mean for our contemporary world? - Do the evolved principles that invoked the primacy of limited rule, the authority of written constitutions, and specific absolutes of inviolable rights (applied so successfully by jurists and nation makers of England and America) still matter? The track from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the United States Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791 can be captured by six phases: (1) various confirmations of Magna Carta by the crowns of England from 1215 to 1460; (2) guarantee of rights seated in the 1606 Virginia Charter (prepared by Sir Edward Coke) and re-assertions of Magna Carta’s ancient rights and the supremacy of common law by Coke in England; (3) applications of Coke’s Magna Carta in the American colonies by William Penn, William Fitzhugh, and Henry Care; (4) alerts and alarms warning the Crown and Parliament of usurpations by James Otis, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and John Dickinson; (5) declaration of rights and the necessity of independence and its martial defense by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington; (6) re-establishment of the supremacy of common law and securing rights by James Madison and George Mason. In the track from Magna Carta to the U.S. Bill of Rights, we must also account for the profound effect of the universal natural law theory of the Enlightenment writers, particularly that espoused by John Locke in his Two Treatises on Government. In addition, attention must be placed on the role that William Blackstone and his Commentaries on the Laws of England played in setting forth the basic rules and underlying principles of English law as it related to natural law (Turner 169-70). In eighteenth-century contexts, Magna Carta and its derived documents and charters were contract law between two parties: the government and the governed, the crown and his subjects. Natural rights theory was not viewed in contrac-

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tual terms but simply as something that existed independently of government; that individuals held rights that no government might take or control at any time under any circumstance; that all rights belonged to the people and that government was merely an instrument of obligations; that the purpose of government was to secure and protect these rights in trust. As long as government maintained the rights of the people all was well. However, natural rights theory also contained the right of rebellion; that should the government usurp or otherwise destroy the rights of the people, the people have the right to challenge the government, to rebel against it, or even destroy it in order to create a new government of rights. Swirling between the Magna Carta’s implied contract between king and subjects and Locke’s natural theory, American colonists selected those aspects and features of these thoughts in order to craft a revolution.

The Medieval Magna Carta The Magna Carta was a document forced into the hands of a very reluctant King John, who, we understand, had no intention of honoring his barons’ and some Church officials’ bold attempt to limit his authority. There had been other ‘charters of liberties,’ Henry I’s charter being among the most notable, but Magna Carta was the first imposed by vassals upon a king. Perhaps even the supposed ‘signing’ where John was thought to have placed his seal on the document was more symbolic of his barons making the point that John’s rule as king was numbered, not that a king’s rule should be subject to oversight and correction by a third-party body such as a collection of barons or, more directly, what was later construed as the beginnings of a Parliament. Simply put, to the barons of Magna Carta meeting on June 15, 1215, the document was intended as a timely expedient political action, not a momentous nation-building event. On close inspection, Magna Carta was not a diplomatic negotiation between territorial rivals or the result of politically disparate parties petitioning their sovereign for redress of grievances. In context, it was little more than a surrender demand. As proof of this martial nature, shortly after the barons retired from what was in effect a field of battle, King John’s promises were laid aside – not at first by King John, however, but by the barons themselves. The Church was not untouched by these disputes and, together with John, several bishops appealed to Rome to quash Magna Carta. In review, Pope Innocent III determined that Magna Carta violated the feudal dynamics between sovereign lords and vassals and issued a bull nullifying Magna Carta. Under Church law, recently and reluctantly affirmed by John

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himself, the Pope considered the sovereign lord (king) to be subservient to the Holy See. The fact that John’s barons sought to hold authority over the Pope’s vassal in the presence of King John violated the primacy of the Pope’s authority over kings. Therefore, to Pope and King, Magna Carta was obnoxious and its applications ‘null and void.’ Moreover, those who violated the Pope’s injunction against Magna Carta by pressing its requirements were subject to excommunication. Reflecting the fate of other medieval events to our modern sensibilities, the Magna Carta that was to become a legacy of liberty for eight centuries was at first disposed of within two months of its start. By the following spring, in battle with his rebellious barons, John had restored most of his lands. With victory secured, the authority of his crown. The barons’ cause was lost and with it Magna Carta should have faded into history. But Magna Carta was not to die. Cooler heads, calculating the value of a ‘magna carta’ to subdue the perpetually rebellious barons, revived Magna Carta by turning it on its head. The Pope rejected Magna Carta as infringing upon ancient prerogatives with his vassals (in this case, King John). However, as revised, Magna Carta was reissued in the name of and on the free-authority of a king as sovereign lord to vassals. Under this configuration, while the King may rule his vassals, the King remained a vassal to the Pope. The revision worked. With the new pope’s confirmation, careful thinkers (as advocates to the tradition of royal prerogatives and surrogates to the minor King) adjusted Magna Carta to favor the king as the people’s champion and protector of rule by law. Ironically, in time, the Magna Carta to which the barons of Runnymede meant to subdue a king was applied to consolidate the power of kings at their expense. Although the history of Magna Carta 1215 dimmed (and the original copies sent throughout the realm were lost or disappeared into archives, not to be seen for nearly five hundred years), the spirit of Magna Carta as reflecting the prevailing rule of law was fit into contemporary contexts and applied. Interestingly, in later centuries, it was Henry III’s 1225 version that was often referenced (and revised). In addition, still later, others imagined Magna Carta 1225 as the baseline, when they were actually working with versions of Magna Carta 1297. Despite these archival (and perhaps technical) errors, the flexibility of fitting whatever version of Magna Carta into contemporary contexts was a characteristic that defined Magna Carta as a living constitution. From its first version in 1215 to its last in 1416, Magna Carta was confirmed, revised, reissued, and reconfirmed at least fifty-five times. While the original Magna Carta 1215 with its archaic tenets and stipulations suited for a medieval world faded into time, Magna Carta’s seminal constitutional principles continued to spin the legacy of Magna Carta.

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Parliament’s Magna Carta in the Seventeenth Century Most of its specific provisions came and went, as was characteristic of its living constitutional elasticity, but Magna Carta’s fundamental intent as a charter of liberty remained intact. Enmeshed with the ebb and flow of Magna Carta as ‘guiding’ law, the nature of English common law emerged and flowered. Until the early seventeenth century, Magna Carta was more a dynamic among the ruling elites than a sentinel of liberty for the common subject. This relationship may have remained so if not for the work of Sir Edward Coke. Until Coke there was no greater voice for English common law and liberty for common citizens. It was Coke who fostered the notion that law was not made by legislatures or judges, but discovered (or ‘declared’ as Coke claimed) by jurists (Coke 163-64). That is, the correct and right decision had already been established at some earlier time, and it was the task of the learned and skilled jurist to scan and scour legal archives and resources to find precedence, to rediscover the correct decision. Thus, Coke meant to establish the integrity and authority of a legal profession centered on scholarship in which the disposition and dispensation of law was given over to learned jurists poring over case law immemorial. Coke, of course, was drawing a line between the ancient arbitrary nature of royal prerogative in which the Crown determined the outcome of cases on whims and without benefit of law in favor of a modern approach that brought stability and assurance of the rule of law. At a time when kings ruled under the authority of ‘the Devine Right of Kings,’ Coke’s reasoning in favor of common law over arbitrary royal prerogative proved a formidable obstacle to the rule of King James I and later Charles I. Prerogatives were ‘rights’ that exist outside or above ordinary law. Depending upon the interpretation, Magna Carta either confirmed or established the precedence of royal prerogatives as well as legislative/parliamentary prerogatives. Depending upon the need or circumstance, the crown and/or Parliament could legally invoke their prerogative to deny absolute rights. In practice, this ‘reserved’ or arbitrary power essentially limited the peoples’ so-called inalienable rights, rendering them, in effect, non-existent. As U.S. founding fathers embraced the various strains of their traditions, the supremacy of natural rights eventually prevailed, turning prerogatives its head by putting the peoples rights first. Coke’s reasoning also signaled the primacy of natural law; that laws exist to which all rulers must submit, and that natural laws protect individual citizens from government. It was Coke who may be credited with adding a third dimension to the power struggle between king and Parliament with the notion that the people (under the protection of common

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law) were entitled to certain rights, rights to which kings and parliaments were bound. To establish this new dimension in the dynamic between rulers and ruled, Coke’s reasoning engaged and enlarged the playing field for individual rights. His seminal Petition of Right of 1628 (the precursor of the English Bill of Rights of 1687 and the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights of 1791) worked to settle the law’s position on individual rights. The Petition of Right outlined specific limits on the royal prerogative: - Taxation cannot be required without Parliament’s consent. - The Crown is forbidden to force loans on subjects. - Arbitrary arrest is forbidden. - Habeas corpus must be respected. - Troops may not be quartered in private homes without permission and compensation. - Restrictions were imposed on martial law in times of peace. - Arbitrary imprisonment was banned. - Property rights were to be respected. Coke’s Petition of Right provoked a showdown between Parliament and the English crown eventually leading to the beheading of Charles I that ushered in the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. Coke’s invoked interpretations of the Magna Carta also influenced the rise and establishment of Parliament as a power government institution and, together with the work of John Locke, inspired England’s vaunted Bill of Rights of 1689. Issued on the resolution of the Glorious Revolution, that effectively subdued and dismantled the royal prerogative seated in the ‘divine rights of kings,’ the Bill of Rights continued to echo the evolution of rights as was thought to be in the tradition of the Magna Carta. The central features of the Bill of Rights delineated that the Crown was not allowed to - interfere with the administration of the law, - interfere with Parliamentary elections, - tax by royal prerogative, - keep a standing army in time of peace, - deny hearing or punish anyone bringing a petition or grievance. In addition, the Bill of Rights - provided freedom of speech for members of Parliament while in house, - banned cruel and unusual punishments, - guaranteed rights for the accused, for juries, and for fines. While the fruit of Coke’s accomplishments were profound, it was Coke’s work with common law as the institution of a legal mechanism to cham-

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pion basic human rights that proved to spark a revolution. For that application, we next turn toward England’s eighteenth century American colonists, who, inspired by Coke’s work, read Magna Carta as a rock of liberty.

America’s Magna Carta in the Eighteenth Century To the American colonists, the Magna Carta was what they held it to be: the first written, authoritative, and binding law of English rights upon whose essential principles no ruler, Parliament, or court may trespass. To American colonists, regardless of how ignorant or sketchy on the details of its history, Magna Carta embodied England’s settled legal principles; declaring what laws existed, indentifying what rights that had been won. In this context, to the American colonists, Magna Carta was not creative or inventive of legal principles, nor did it grant new law. Americans were so firm in their conviction of the efficacy of Magna Carta as the foundation of liberty, they were prepared to wage revolution, to place their ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ to protect their rights as free-born Englishmen. To come to an understanding of the American Revolution, the track toward the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, and all that the rule of law came to be in America, one need not look further than to William Fitzhugh, a ‘self-made’ man of eighteenth-century Virginia (see Davis). Coming to the New World from Bedford, England in 1670 at the age of nineteen, this ‘second son’ embodied the proto-typical American success story. A commoner with perhaps some family connections in America, he quickly took up the law as a practicing attorney. Settling up the Potomac River near present-day Washington, DC and Alexandria, Virginia, Fitzhugh came to own 54,000 acres of land, heavily invested in tobacco. He was one of the first land-speculators of Virginia and an accomplished entrepreneur. With his wealth, interests, and marriage, Fitzhugh became well connected socially to the elite of Virginia and also served as a member of Virginia’s General Assembly. What connects Fitzhugh to the Magna Carta and to the establishment of Magna Carta as the foundational law of the British colonies and later United States can be found in how he practiced law. As Fitzhugh commented to his fellow Virginian Richard Lee in 1679 and also demonstrated as member to the House of Burgesses, Fitzhugh asserted the supremacy of common law over statue law; the authority of ancient rights and precedent over the expedient of legislatures. His point was that one could not properly interpret law without first processing a knowledge of common law; for the law “is only to be learned out of ancient authors (for out of

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old fields must come new corn) contrary to opinion of the generality of our judges and practicers of the law here” (Fitzhugh 66). But that was not really just Fitzhugh’s point; here we discover Coke’s directive (Coke’s argument with James I and Charles II); that the Crown, his judges or agents through courts, and other appointments cannot be the final author of justice; that only the law and those independent from royal prerogative and trained to research and practice it can administer justice. For American colonists, Fitzhugh (through Coke) was establishing the imperative of rule of law over rule by men. Belief and conviction of this imperative explained the American Revolution. Through his work as an attorney, on what authority did Fitzhugh argue that ancient rights derived from such sources as the Magna Carta belonged to him and his new countrymen in America? Again, we turn to Sir Edward Coke. Long before the American Revolution, before the French and Indian War, before the establishment of William Penn’s vast landholdings in America, before any Pilgrim landed at Plymouth or even before the founding of Jamestown and the first permanent English foothold in North America there was Virginia’s original charter, most-likely authored by no other than Coke. Before there was even one subject of King James in America, it was Coke who insisted that every English colonist to Britain’s American colonies would bring with him/her the exact same rights held by any Englishman in Britain. Virginia’s 1606 Charter, granted by King James, was the first of its kind: [W]e do, for Us, our Heirs, and Successors, DECLARE, by these Presents, that all and every the Persons being our Subjects, which shall dwell and inhabit within every or any of the said several Colonies and Plantations, and every of their children, which shall happen to be born within any of the Limits and Precincts of the said several Colonies and Plantations, shall HAVE and enjoy all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities, within any of our other Dominions, to all Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born, within this our Realm of England, or any other of our said Dominions. (“First Charter of Virginia” 17)

Fitzhugh and his fellow colonists understood the importance of this charter (written well in advance of the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights); that every colonist held certain ancient and inviolable rights, rights that stemmed from, according to Coke, the Magna Carta and earlier. As understood by men like Fitzhugh, Coke’s case for Magna Carta as foundation law in the American colonies is now set for exemplification. To make the case, after Fitzhugh, we may trace the Magna Carta as the inspiration for essential law from 1683 to 1791 (covering the transition from colonial America to the Confederation period to the establishment of the United States) through the works of selected colonial leaders. It is important to note that although the thirteen American colonies (Canada excepted) came into being as separate political units, the principle of

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‘transferred rights’ was firmly embedded into not only colonial minds, but also into colonial law. There were also other generalizations that applied. Colonial America spawned no cultures of ‘royals,’ no aristocracy, no medieval land traditions. There was the man, the individual making his own (and her own) way. This notion developed into a feeling of ‘exceptionalism’ where colonial Americans created a duel identity: to be EnglishEuropean like, but not of England and its European neighbors. However, when it came to law, colonists viewed themselves as freeborn Englishmen entitled to all the rights and privileges which the title implies. As Fitzhugh and his contemporary William Penn argued, although colonists may have held the rights of Englishmen, for practical purposes, without access to trained lawyers equipped with ample books and documentary materials, colonists were, more often than not, placed under the mercy of courts run by the Crown (or authorized by same). To thwart would-be usurpers of ancient rights, Fitzhugh, Penn, and others invoked the Magna Carta as trump card.

William Penn Perhaps more than any other visionary, William Penn understood the importance of establishing law as a barrier between royals and the people. A persecuted Quaker, imprisoned several times for writing and speaking out against oppression, Penn understood the mischief of kings. When granted an American ‘kingdom’ that was to become Pennsylvania, Penn envisioned a country set by the best of English law, embellished with rights and freedom, and guarded by a wise and active people, educated in and ready to vigorously defend their rights. Making the most of a growing literacy (and somewhat relaxed royal standards of publishing in Colonial America), Penn prepared two important works for his American audience: The Excellent Priviledge of English Liberty published in Philadelphia and English Liberties published in Boston. The latter work, although ‘compiled’ by the journalist Henry Care, was most likely authored (or heavily influenced) by William Penn himself (Hudson 579). Initially published in England in 1680, five editions later, the enduring English Liberties was first published in colonial America by Benjamin Franklin in 1721 in Boston. If Penn was not the author of both works, he lifted the first forty pages of English Liberties without citation from Care as the lead copy of The Excellent Priviledge of English Liberty. Penn reasoned effective colonization was predicated on established rights and freedoms; that would-be travelers would be guaranteed the promise of the Magna Carta in advance of their journeys to the British

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colonies. To Penn, a free people cannot be too often reminded of their rights and the collateral that even a ‘good’ government can quickly devolve into the enemy of freedom. In the front matter of The Excellent Priviledge of English Liberty, Penn writes: It may reasonably be supposed that we shall find in this part of the world, many men, both old and young, that are strangers, in a great measure, to the true understanding of that inestimable inheritance that every Free-born Subject of England is heir unto by Birth-right, I mean that unparalleled privilege of Liberty and Property, beyond all the Nations in the world beside; and it is to be wished that all men did rightly understand their own happiness therein; in pursuance of which I do here present thee with that ancient Garland, the Fundamental Laws of England, bedecked with many precious privileges of Liberty and Property, by which every man that is a Subject to the Crown of England, may understand what is his right, and how to preserve it from unjust and unreasonable men: whereby appears the eminent care, wisdom and industry of our progenitors in providing for themselves and posterity so good a fortress that is able to repel the lust, pride and power of the Noble, as well as ignorance of the Ignoble; it being that excellent and discreet balance that gives every man his even proportion, which cannot be taken from him, nor be dispossessed of his life, liberty or estate, but by the trial and judgment of twelve of his equals, or Law of the Land, upon the penalty of the bitter curses of the whole people; so great was the zeal of our predecessors for the preservation of these Fundamental Liberties (contained in these Charters) from encroachment, that they employed all their policy and religious obligations to secure them entire and inviolable, albeit the contrary hath often been endeavoured, yet Providence hitherto hath preserved them as a blessing to the English Subjects. (1-2)

Penn’s inspiration was, of course, the Magna Carta as interpreted by Edward Coke. Since the original 1215 Magna Carta was unknown to Penn (and his contemporaries), Penn began both The Excellent Priviledge of English Liberty and English Liberties relying upon versions of the Magna Carta as confirmed by Henry III in 1225 and Edward I in 1297. While The Excellent Priviledge of English Liberty disappeared into archives, English Liberties became the standard work on English law for the American colonists (Hudson 580). Published in a compact form, English Liberties provided its colonial American users with a handy and reliable standard on English laws and the rights of Englishmen. In time, such diverse readers as Benjamin Franklin (who published the first American edition), James Otis, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, all applied its fundamental lesson: no king or government held court over an Englishman’s ancient rights and/or freedom.

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James Otis Among the first to challenge Crown and Parliament was Massachusetts’s James Otis. Serving as the Crown’s Advocate-General in the Vice Admiralty Court in Massachusetts, Otis was obligated to defend the legality of the Writs of Assistance. Outraged at the affront to civil rights and violation of Magna Carta, Otis quit his work for the Crown and opposed the Writs in court. Arguing that the law was unconstitutional, Otis asserted that “[it] appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law that ever was found in an English law-book” (“Against the Writs” 74). In his statement, Otis went on to cite one of Coke’s most famous defense of personal liberty: One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. (“Against the Writs” 75)

Future founding father, John Adams, was in the audience the day Otis delivered his stirring five-hour attack on what many others in Boston thought a grave oppression of English rights. Adams was amazed at the power and force of Otis the man, but also of Otis’s uncompromising argument for protecting the ancient rights of Englishmen in America. Adams later said: “Then and there, was the first scene of the first opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. […] Then and there, the child Independence was born” (qtd. in McCullough 62). Continuing with his declarations on English liberty, in 1763, Otis mixed and matched interpretations of Coke’s Magna Carta with evolving natural rights theories to attack the hated Stamp Act. The British government authorized the Stamp Act in order to raise money to pay for expenses incurred during the French and Indian War and also to pay for the defense of American colonies. However, in British America, the Stamp Act crystallized how and on what basis Americans might resist British colonial policies. First, for example, while an agent of Pennsylvania in London, Benjamin Franklin was called to Parliament to explain his fellow colonists’ ‘opposition’ to taxing policies related to the French and Indian War. Franklin clarified that the war did not involve colonial interests since American colonial products were for export to Britain exclusively. Rather, the war was centered on the interests of British merchants selling or trading with Indians. Thus, to colonial Americans, the French and Indian War was a British war, not a colonial war and, consequently, any efforts to raise taxes to support that war would be questioned as outside American interests. Second, as was argued by Patrick Henry in Virginia and John and

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Samuel Adams in Massachusetts, the raising of taxes without the consent of the people was invalid according to Coke’s reading of Magna Carta because it violated the rights of the people to be represented and the right of the people to consent to taxes. Despite some temporary peaceful moments, from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765/66 to 1776, the colonists sharpened their rhetoric on Britain’s perceived mounting oppressions. Following the Townshend Acts (1766), the Boston Massacre (1770), the Almanac Creek Uprising (1771), the Gaspée Affair (1772), the Boston Tea Party (1773), and the Intolerable Acts (1774), perhaps the best contemporary assessment of how far American protest on British policies had grown was found in Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (1774). As he would later say of his Declaration of Independence, there was not anything in this document that had not already been said or implied elsewhere in the colonies. Yet, Jefferson in his creative style captured the essence of growing colonial defiance. Jefferson wrote to [r]emind [His Majesty] that our ancestors, before their emigration to America were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right, which nature had given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them. […] That their Saxon ancestors had under this universal law, in like manner, left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had possessed themselves of the island of Britain. (“Summary Rights” 4)

While Jefferson returns to the violation and usurpation of native rights in the Declaration of Independence, here he advanced the argument for rebellion by undercutting the ancient prerogative of kings as overlord of the lands of his subjects. Jefferson’s point was that universal laws govern the actions of men, not royal (or legislative) prerogatives. On technical and universal principles, the king did not ‘own’ any colonial lands. Moreover, Jefferson called this ancient prerogative a “fictitious principle […] that [His Majesty] had no right to grant lands to himself” (“Summary Rights” 18) To Jefferson, the exploration and claims of the British colonies were bought and paid by private concerns, not royal concerns; that the land itself was won by the settlers, paid-in-full by their sweat and blood, not the King or his soldiers. The argument between the protesting colonists and the Crown and Parliament had reached its limits; both the King and Parliament must relent to secure colonial American liberties and confirm the supremacy of its colonial subject’s natural rights, or the King and Parliament must enforce its ancient prerogatives. Either way, appeals to the Magna Carta would factor into the mix. Britain’s answer was to bring its American colonist terriers to heel; natural rights be damned, the ancient prerogatives confirmed by Magna Carta remained in force. In America, neither King nor Parliament could

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throttle the ancient rights of a free people also confirmed by Magna Carta. At loggerheads over principles and actions based on principles claimed to be embodied in a mythical Magna Carta, a common stock of people went to war against itself. The die was cast, north to south in Britain’s American colonies. With the resounding words of Patrick Henry – “Give me liberty or give me death” – American patriots took up arms to defend their rights, ushering in the martial aspects of the fifth phase. Other colonists, loyal to the Crown, either left their homes to friendlier British shores or held out in hope of British relief. The time for independence had not yet come, but the shooting war began in earnest. Conjuring up all the past sins of Britain upon themselves and their ancestors, the first articles of war were drawn up by the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts on April 5, 1775, a scant fourteen days before the “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired at Lexington Green on April 19: Whereas the lust of power, which of old oppressed, persecuted, and exiled our pious and virtuous ancestors from their fair possessions in Britain, now pursues with tenfold severity us, their guiltless children, who are unjustly and wickedly charged with licentiousness, sedition, treason, and rebellion, and being deeply impressed with a sense of the almost incredible fatigues and hardships our venerable progenitors encountered who fled for the sake of civil and religious liberty for themselves and their offspring, and began a settlement here on bare creation, at their own expense […] do think it our indispensible duty, by all lawful ways and means in our power, to recover, maintain, defend, and preserve the free exercise of all those civil and religious rights and liberties for which so many of our forefathers fought, bled, and died,, and to hand them down entire for the free enjoyment of the latest posterity. (“Massachusetts” 323-24)

Britain had crossed the threshold. The people of Massachusetts no longer believed that their government’s obligation to secure and defend their rights would be honored. Invoking the right to revolution, implied by Magna Carta via Coke and declared by natural rights theory, the next step was not reconciliation with Britain, but to declare independence from Britain in order to secure their ancient rights. The American Revolution was not a modern war guided by a liberal-progressive theory, but a new sort of war imbued by an incredible urge to restore traditions, to secure rights and rule by law, and to preserve the legacy of the Magna Carta as derived from inventive mixtures of Coke, Locke, and Blackstone. As the colony of Massachusetts led its sister colonies into the Revolutionary War, it adopted as its seal its Minuteman soldier holding a drawn sword in one hand with the Magna Carta in the other (fig. 1). With blood spilt, it was the duty of newly appointed General George Washington to win the war. But what did winning the war mean? Even if it could be accomplished, was the objective merely to drive the British from North

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America? Even after Lexington Green and the start of the shooting war, there was no end in sight for either the British or Americans. The intellectuals in America were uncomfortable with American patriots being described as ‘rebels.’ In answer, Jefferson and Dickinson provided a rational explanation for war in their Necessity for Taking Up Arms of July 1775: Our cause is just. Our union perfect […] we have not raised our armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain and establishing independent states. We fight not for glory or for conquest. […] In our own native land, in defense of the freedom that is our birthright and which we ever enjoyed till the late violation of it, for the protection of our property acquired solely by the honest industry of our forefathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. (95)

Fig 1: Massachusetts Seal during Revolutionary War

Yet, as the fighting of 1775 spilled into the dark days of 1776, few dared to speak the inevitable; war would not lead to reconciliation with Britain, independence must be declared. In January 1776 one of the most widely read works of late eighteenth century America was published, Common Sense. Authored by Thomas Paine, the case for independence was made abundantly plain: Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voices of nature cries, ‘tis time to part..’ […] The authority of Great Britain over this continent is a form of government which sooner or later must have an end […] the conferring members [of the Continental Congress] being met, [must make their] business to frame a continental charter, or charter of the united colonies answering to what is called the Magna Carta of England […] a government of our own is our natural right. (278-82)

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Thomas Jefferson The step from Paine’s plea in Common Sense for Congress to strike for independence and to establish a new country to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was a natural one. But there was much that went on in advance. First, the various colonies declared their own de-facto independence by transitioning their colonial governments into independent state governments before the Declaration was passed. Secondly, George Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights, that arguably became the theoretical model for all state governments, was adopted some two weeks before Jefferson’s Declaration was begun. The Declaration of Independence instantly turned an army of rebels into an army of patriot-citizens and converted thirteen awkwardly aligned British colonies into a proud union of thirteen independent sovereign states. True, the war was yet to be fought, finished, and won, but the philosophical underpinnings of the revolution and its aftermath were set – and they rested upon the authority gleaned from the Magna Carta. While the Declaration contains eight fundamental ideas derived from Coke’s and Blackstone’s interpretation of the Magna Carta, from Locke’s (and others) work on universal rights, from the events and consequences of British America’s settlement and colonization, from the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and its traditions, and from the founding fathers’ own experiences with Great Britain dating back to the end of the French and Indian War, Jefferson still managed to draft something that no other political leader had achieved: the creation of a government based solely upon the consent of the governed, a government in which the people alone held rights and liberty, a government whose first and primary obligation was to secure and protect the rights of the people. In order to separate America’s Revolutionary War from a rabble-mob of disaffected outlaw-subjects fighting a shooting war with it own government, Jefferson’s first task was to establish two ‘legal’ principles supposedly in seriatim: (1) the right of rebellion, and (2) the right of declaring independence. Addressing the object of the work, Jefferson, however, does not begin with the right of rebellion; he starts with the right to declare independence: When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation. (317)

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To advance the progressive-liberal principles of universal rights, Jefferson had to first remove the medieval connections of kings to subjects. To accomplish that task, it was necessary to undercut and dissolve the King’s ancient prerogative to rule. In medieval terms, the opening section of the Declaration was patently offensive to the Crown (as was the balance); under established law, these words were treasonous as no rebellion could ever be reasoned as legal. In a legal world fixated on precedence, Jefferson was careful to maintain that legal structure, but Jefferson’s argument was an appeal to ‘law’ that existed prior to the Magna Carta, to law that trumped Magna Carta’s dynamic between king and subject: – the law of ‘Nature and Nature’s God.’ The Declaration’s second paragraph contains the famous “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”-phrase that is more closely aligned to Enlightenment than to the Magna Carta. Although important as the U.S. foundation of liberty, the philosophical underpinning of the nation’s independence was more a rhetorical moral inspiration. In fact, although its principles were applied in the writing of U.S. law, the Declaration itself was not law. The work of moving the evolved legacy of the Magna Carta into U.S. law would have to wait for the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the subsequent demands for a Bill of Rights.

George Mason and the Colonial Barons of Runnymede The Mason family’s first immigrant was loyal to James I and Charles I. His son, however, supported Nathanial Bacon’s revolt against Virginia’s governor. By the time of the Revolution, the fourth George Mason was considered one of the most effective political minds in the colonies and new nation. More than any other, Mason took the spirit of the Magna Carta’s legacy of rights as gospel. It was Mason, not Jefferson who first advanced the notion of moving unalienable rights from theory into law. The idea that the Constitution as the supreme law of the land did not include a bill of rights was deeply troubling to Mason. With the support of James Madison and others, a Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. What surely would have come as a surprise to King John and his world of 1215, the work of the barons of Runnymede had come full circle. Regardless of the true accounting of the Magna Carta of 1215, America’s ‘barons’ of Runnymede established as fundamental law, the basic rights and liberties of citizens against the potential abuses of government. The first five lines of the Bill of Rights reflected the medieval world of 1215; the dictum “Congress shall make no law […]” was as much an absolute as any of the original Magna Carta’s sixty-three clauses.

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While the Bill of Rights secured freedoms not specific to the Magna Carta of 1215, the principle that a solemn document secured rights made the Magna Carta antecedent to the U.S. experiment. Where Jefferson led colonial Americans into the ethereal world of universal rights at a time when it was sorely needed, in a new nation that rejected standing armies, if a skiff of paper would be all that stood between stability and anarchy, Mason returned the U.S. to the practical world. Flowery principles detached from written law would not be enough to thwart the would-be tyrants. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights would serve as unalterable guarantees that no government would be permitted to trample the basic rights and liberties of its citizens.

Summary While the Magna Carta survived into England’s seventeenth century and blossomed in British America during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it is no longer invoked in the U.S. as a means to thwart the intrusions of tyrants, even symbolically. The world has not been rid of tyrants, but the notion that an inviolable armor of citizen rights exists (anchored by written law that may be exercised among citizens at will to arrest the acts of government) has been somewhat diffused by modern injunctions centered on appeals for social justice. Modern advocates of social justice often reject or dismiss the preeminence of individual rights to the imperative of a government’s interpretation of the common good. Drifting far afield from a Magna Carta meant to throttle government, prevailing social justice theorists appear more aligned to a government system that requires a state apparatus wherein individual rights are converted into human or group rights. It is not that the world cannot thrive in such a context of social justice, but applications of the Magna Carta in seventeenth-century Britain and eighteenth-century British America augers against governments that seek to subdue individual rights. Is there a future for the Magna Carta, a place for medieval traditions in our modern world? On the one hand, it would seem that Magna Carta’s nearly eight centuries of influence ought to disappear into the dustbins of history. On the other, as many explore the possibilities of transnationalism that features working alliances of diverse and borderless peoples perhaps it is not yet time to forget older applications of internationalism centered on alliances among the sovereign states. If true, traditions of the Magna Carta found in the writings of such men as Edward Coke, William Penn, James Otis, John Adams, Patrick Henry, and George Mason offer remind-

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ers of two of Magna Carta’s ancient axioms: individual rights are not easily secured and once lost are nearly impossible to recover.

Works Cited Adams, John. “Instructions of the Town of Braintree Massachusetts on the Stamp Act, 1765.” Documents of American History. Ed. Henry Steele Commager. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963. 56-58. —. “Letter to Price, 1779.” The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. Ed. Charles Francis Adams. Vol. 4. N.p., 1851. —. “The Meaning of the American Revolution, 1818.” The Annals of America. Vol. 4. New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976. 465-69. Alderman, Clifford Lindsay. That Men Shall Be Free, The Story of the Magna Carta. New York: Pocket Books, 1964. Ayars, James. We Hold These Truths: From Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights. New York: Viking, 1977. Blackstone, William. Commentaries of the Laws of England. N.p., 1765, 1769. Brooks, David L., ed. From Magna Carta to the Constitution: Documents in the Struggle for Liberty. San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1993. Care, Henry. English Liberties. Boston: Benjamin Franklin, 1721. Churchill, Sir Winston. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Vol. 2. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956. Coke, Sir Edward. “Reports Defense of the Common Law, 1607.” Documents in English History. Ed. Brian L. Blakely and Jacquelin Collins. New York: John Wiley, 1975. 162-64. Danziger, Danny, and John Gillingham. 1215: The Year of Magna Carta. New York: Touchstone, 2005. Davis, Richard Beale. “Chesapeake Pattern and Pole-Star: William Fitzhugh in His Plantation World, 1676-1701.” American Philosophical Society 105.6 (1961): 525-29. Downer, Silas. “A Discourse at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty, 1768.” The American Republic. Ed. Bruce Frohnen. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002. 140-45. “First Charter of Virginia, 1606.” The Annals of America. Vol. 1. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976. 15-17. Fitzhugh, William. “Letter to Richard Lee May 15, 1679.” William Fitzhugh and His Cheapeake World. Ed. Richard Beale Davis. Chapel Hill: The Virginia Historical Society, 1963. 65-67. Franklin, Benjamin. “The Examination of Benjamin Franklin, 1766.” The American Revolution through British Eyes. Ed. Martin Kallich and Andrew MacLeish. Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1962. 3-21. Holt, James Clarke. Magna Carta. London: Longman, 1961. Howard, A. E. Dick, Magna Carta: Text and Commentary. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998. Hudson, Winthrop. “William Penn’s English Liberties.” The William and Mary Quarterly 26.4 (1969): 578-79.

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Jefferson, Thomas. “The Declaration of Independence.” The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution. Ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris. New York: Da Capo, 1995. 317-20. —. “A Summary View of the Rights of British Americans.” The Portable Thomas Jefferson. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Viking, 1975. 4. —, and John Dickinson. “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, July 5, 1775.” Documents of American History. Ed. Henry Steele Commager. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963. 92-95. Levy, Leonard W. Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History: Legacy of Suppression. New York: Harper Touchstone, 1963. Lincoln, Abraham. Sanitary Fair Speech. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Baltimore: Da Capo, 1864. Locke, John. Two Treatisies of Government. London: Cambridge UP, 1988. Mason, George. “The Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776.” Documents of American History. Ed. Henry Steele Commager. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963. 103-04. Massachusetts, Journals of the Congress. “Preamble to the Massachusetts Articles of War.” The Annals of America. Vol. 2 Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976. 32324. McCullough, David. John Adams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Otis, James. “Against the Writs of Assistance, 1761.” The Annals of America. Vol. 2. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976. 74-77. —. “The Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved, 1763.” The American Republic. Ed. Bruce Frohnen. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002. Paine, Thomas. “Common Sense, 1776.” Colonies to Nation 1763-1789. Ed. Jack Greene. New York: W.W. Norton 1967. 270-83. Penn, William. The Excellent Priviledge of English Liberty. N.p., 1687. Saxe, David Warren. Land and Liberty II: The Basics of Traditional American History. Boca Raton: BrownWalker, 2006. Sotheby. Sotheby’s Magna Carta Catalogue. Hong Kong: Sotheby’s, 2007. Stoel, Caroline P., and Ann B Clarke. From Magna Carta to the Constitution. Portland: Magna Carta in America and Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1986. Story, Joseph. The Story of the Constitution. New York : Harper Brothers, 1872. Swindler, William F. Magna Carta: Legend and Legacy. Indianapolis: Bobb-Merrill, 1965. Thorne, Samuel, et al. The Great Charta. New York: Mentor, 1965. Turner, Ralph V. Magna Carta Through the Ages. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2003. Wright, Louis B. Magna Carta and the Tradition of Liberty. Washington: United States Capitol Society and the Supreme Court Historical Society, 1976.

Commentary Epilogue EDWARD T. LINENTHAL

I thank Udo J. Hebel for the opportunity to read and reflect on this collection of case studies detailing the workings of transnational labors of memory. In this brief epilogue, I raise questions about terms, processes, and boundaries. I grow more and more dissatisfied with the term “memory” to characterize so much of our work – even though I have used the term in the titles of two books. Are all these essays really about “memory”? I wonder, for example, if it makes sense to speak of “public memory.” Is there a “public” that shares a single memory? Memorial biographer James Young raises a similar objection to the term “collective memory”: “I prefer to examine ‘collected memory,’ the many discrete memories that are gathered into common memorial spaces and assigned common meaning. A society’s memory, in this context, might be regarded as an aggregate collection of its members’ many, often competing memories.” An individual, Young smartly observes, “cannot share another’s memory any more than [one person] can share another’s cortex” (Young xi). Perhaps, however, even recourse to the plural “memories” does not always suffice. If we take seriously the people who, in Hebel’s words, provide the impetus for the “boundless and creative transnational flow of commemorative energy,” then neither “memory” nor “memories” seems to capture this dynamism. I share the historian Jay Winter’s preference for the term “remembrance.” “To privilege the term ‘remembrance,’” he writes, “is to insist on specifying agency, on answering the question, who remembers, when, where, and how?” (Winter 3). These essays show people laboring to construct the past in the present, hard at the work of remembrance. Yet another set of terms that I have often used but have become increasingly uncomfortable with are taken from the regime of the therapeutic. Is a group, a community, a nation, “traumatized” as an individual is? What does it mean to say that the United States was “traumatized” by the Vietnam War? Certainly the legacies of the war were – and are – many and substantial, but to argue for a single strain of trauma that “the nation” experienced does not, in my opinion, help us understand many legacies. Even in the aftermath of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal

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Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, there was no single “trauma.” Victims of sexual abuse in the city worried that the violence perpetrated against them would pale in significance compared to the public spectacle of rubble and mass death. Muslim residents shared the sense of horror with others but also worried that they would be viewed – as they were by some – as likely perpetrators. Do nations “repress” memories? That term certainly makes sense in describing the work of a totalitarian regime that controls official channels of communication. It makes much less sense if we use it to mean that a nation is either consciously or unconsciously repressing indigestible memories in order to create a usable past. Laborers of remembrance may spend their energies trying to erase uncomfortable understandings of the past. Whether or not they succeed, there is human agency involved, not a nation somehow repressing the past through invisible means. I worry that the language of therapy too often hides human agency in the labor of remembrance. Instead, I think it better to focus on the laborers and labor of remembrance: in Winter’s words, the “who, when, where, and how.” These essays are a treasure trove of processes of remembrance. Hebel observes that sites of memory serve as “platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiations across spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories.” The terms “exchange” and “negotiation” work well for those who think about the labors of remembrance. Both are action words signifying kinds of conversation. There is a danger, however, if those terms imply that the work of remembrance is always civil, that such exchange and negotiation by definition bring individuals and groups together, for processes of remembrance can be destructive as well as constructive. Further, there is always something at stake in processes of remembrance. How could they not be controversial? Controversy reveals that what is at stake – be it the portrayal of someone or some event in a novel, the aesthetics of a monument, the contents of a commemorative ritual or museum exhibition, the treatment of a body – matters, and matters greatly, to any number of stakeholders. Let’s imagine that readers were to join me on a committee to design a memorial to something none of us much cared about. There would be little or no controversy: Where should it be located, how should the inscription read, who should design it, what should the design be – heroic, cautionary, aesthetically soothing or challenging – or who should speak at the dedication? None of those issues would matter. But if we were all deeply invested in the memorial but had differing and strong convictions that only this design, only this speaker, or only this inscription pays an appropriate debt to the dead or delivers an appropriate message to the living, then controversy would become an expected component of the labors of remembrance.

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These exchanges and negotiations are also about positioning: Who or what is worthy of commemorative labor, where are expressions of remembrance to take place, when, and for what purpose? (Think, for example, of the placement of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum adjacent to the Washington Mall, the nation’s central commemorative space, as opposed to, say, next to a strip mall in Virginia.) Physical location offers a powerful message about the significance of the Holocaust as a central, rather than peripheral, American story. Memorial hierarchies are expressions of positioning. The relationship between Jews and so-called other victims of the Holocaust remained a source of tension throughout the museum project. The definition of “survivor” in Oklahoma City became a volatile issue because the physical memorial contains a memorial wall with survivors’ names. Hierarchies of space reveal who or what is at the center, who or what is at the periphery. Does a plantation tour, for example, take visitors to the site of former slave quarters? Are slave stories integrated into the tour, or does the ideology of space segregate or erase the memory of slave experience? Transnational labors of remembrance by definition challenge boundaries. While it seems logical to think about such work as by definition expanding boundaries – for example by including “others” in commemorative practice, or by including previously ignored ethnic stories on a tourist route – the expansion of traditional boundaries can seem an act of defilement to those who regard the traditional ritual or tour route not as a particular interpretation grown inadequate with time and shifts in awareness, but as a sacred rite or route. Change, for such believers, represents not an expansion that evidences the integrity of remembrance, but an attack on “the truth.” Boundaries are also challenged by media. An event, particularly a spectacle event, immediately enfranchises people around the world to become part of a kind of imagined community. During my many trips to Oklahoma City, I was struck by how many people beyond the boundaries of the United States sent drawings of memorial ideas, expressed their sympathies, and in some cases their identification, with the family members of those murdered. Many of the spontaneous memorial suggestions from within and beyond U.S. borders recalled memorials in many countries as appropriate models for the one in Oklahoma City. It is too easy to dismiss such an imagined community as only voyeuristic, though it certainly may be that. Does a transnational imagined community of bereavement signify a desire to join anonymous others in a gesture that trumps the many things that divide people? And can it be anything more than a passing gesture?

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Yet another set of boundaries is evident in Michael Kammen’s essay, which quotes the cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s comment about the power of the smell of kerosene to transport him to another time, his childhood, and another place, the streets of Bucharest: “It sometimes happens that all of a sudden, for some mysterious reason, the memory of that smell comes back to me.” All the senses play a crucial role in the labors of remembrance, and yet, as the late George H. Roeder Jr. observed of his fellow historians, “ours is a nearly sense-less profession” (Roeder 1112). Introducing a round table in the Journal of American History, “The Senses in American History,” the historian Mark M. Smith argued that “sensory history offers a framework for understanding historical behavior. It begins by adding texture to the past and, at its most powerful, helps explains trends, decisions, and experiences that would otherwise not be understood fully, if at all.” Smith asks questions that are certainly relevant to the study of transnational remembrance: “How might historians best excavate evidence for the sensory experience of the past from written texts? What role does material culture play in sensory history? Can the sensory past be ‘recreated’ or is its experience anchored in the time and place of its production? Does it matter? If so, what does a desire to reexperience what others encountered through their senses tell us about ‘our’ present conceits, themselves inevitably contingent on many factors and hardly universal?” (Smith 379-80). The work of sensory history challenges what we too often take for granted, the privileged status of sight. Remembrance takes place through all the senses, and as Steinberg reported, the power of the senses can transport someone to a past in the absence, it seems, of a conscious decision to remember. Let me conclude with a hope: that transnational remembrance can contribute to the expansion of the boundaries of our moral imaginations. Several of these essays focus on the challenge of remembrance in an age of mass death. Beyond the simplistic formulas “never again,” and “we shall never forget,” how can transnational remembrance help us face constructively the challenge of what the sociologist Kai Erikson calls “a new species of trouble”? Do the terror and the burden of the history of the present render transnational memory impotent? Here is one challenge, brought to us by the journalist Svetlana Alexievich in her book, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. A midwife remembers: “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a happy pregnant woman. A happy mother.” She tells of a woman who, after giving birth, was terrified because she had visited her mother in Chernobyl during her pregnancy and “got caught under that black rain.” The midwife tells Alexievich that the mother “tells us her dreams: that she’s given birth to a calf with eight legs, or a puppy with the head of a hedgehog. Such strange dreams. Women

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didn’t use to have such dreams. Or I never heard them. And I’ve been a midwife for thirty years” (Alexievich 139). Perhaps the end to such nightmares rests in part with the mobilization of transnational remembrance: of the dangerous allure of ancient apocalyptic visions now become scientific possibility; of the constant reminder of the horrors of genocidal weapons to generations increasingly removed from their use; of the evidence that inconceivable worlds (without slavery, for example) can become conceivable and real.

Works Cited Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. New York: Picador, 1997. Erikson, Kai. A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters. New York: Norton, 1994. Roeder, George H., Jr. “Coming to Our Senses.” Journal of American History 81.3 (1994): 1112-22. Smith, Mark M. “Still Coming to ‘Our’ Senses: An Introduction.” Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 378-80. Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Young, James. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.

Notes on Contributors HANS BAK is Professor of American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author of Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (1993) and is currently preparing an edition of Malcolm Cowley’s letters. His edited and co-edited volumes include Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Culture (1993), ‘Nature’s Nation’ Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis (2003), Uneasy Alliance: TwentiethCentury American Literature, Culture and Biography (2004), First Nations of North America: Politics and Representation (2005). His articles focus on twentiethcentury American and Canadian fiction, drama, and biography. Current research interests include American and Canadian multiculturalism, American periodicals, American “middlemen” of letters, the reception of American literature and culture in Europe. He was President of the Netherlands American Studies Association and of the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, as well as Treasurer of the European Association for American Studies. MITA BANERJEE is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her book publications include The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukerjee and the Postcolonial Debate (2002), Race-ing the Century (2005), and Ethnic Ventriloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2008). Her research is focused on postcolonial literature, ethnic American literature, and the American Renaissance. She is currently working on a project which explores the intersection between naturalism and naturalization in nineteenth-century American fiction. BIRGIT BAURIDL teaches American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She studied at Wesleyan University, CT, and the University of Regensburg, where she is currently completing her dissertation on African American performance poetry. She received a Ph.D. scholarship from the state of Bavaria and serves as assistant editor of Amerikastudien/American Studies and co-editor of the online journal COPAS (Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies). Her research interests include African American literature and culture, ethnicity studies, cultures of memory, transnational American Studies, and performance studies.

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CARMEN BIRKLE is Professor of American Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. She taught at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, the University of Vienna, and Columbia University, New York City. She is the author of Women’s Stories of the Looking Glass (1996) and Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation: Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century (2004) as well as the co-editor of (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World (1998), Frauen auf der Spur: Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA (2001), Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas (2004), and Asian American Studies in Europe (2006). Her research and teaching focus on American travel writing, ethnic and gender studies, inter- and transculturality, literature and medicine, postcolonialism, popular culture, detective fiction. Her recent book project focuses on North American travel writing, with particular emphasis on the connection between literature and medicine. She currently serves as Executive Director of the German Association for American Studies. ASTRID BÖGER is Professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She previously taught at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Her published books include Documenting Lives: James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ (1994) and People’s Lives, Public Images: The New Deal Documentary Aesthetic (2001); her monograph on early U.S.-American world’s fairs will be published in 2009. In addition to co-edited volumes on gender and cultural studies, transnational dialogues in philosophy, literature, and art as well as transatlantic perspectives on American visual culture, she has published articles on Hollywood film, short stories after 9/11, and portrait photography. She is a member of the interdisciplinary research initiative on ‘Performances of Memory in the Arts’ located at Radboud University Nijmegen and participates in a research group on American visual culture with special emphasis on contemporary American photography. JUAN BRUCE-NOVOA is Professor of Latin American and U.S. Chicano Literatures and Cultures at the University of California, Irvine, CA. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Mainz-Germersheim, Erlangen, Berlin, and Düsseldorf. His book publications include Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (1980), Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (1982), Restrospace: Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory and History (1990). He was on the editorial board of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. His articles focus on Chicano literature, from foundational texts like Cabeza de Vaca

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to recent writings by, e.g., Rita Maria Magdaleno, and on the Ruptura generation of artists, architects, and writers in Mexico. He is the cofounder of UC-Mexicanists, an international association for the study of Mexican literature and culture based in the University of California system. He is currently editing a volume of essays on Mexican Jewish writers. BIRGIT DÄWES teaches American literature and culture at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Her publications focus on Native American and First Nations literatures, transnational American Studies, issues of cultural memory, and aesthetic responses to 9/11. Her monograph study on Native North American Theater in a Global Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference (2007) won the Bavarian American Academy Book Award in 2007. She has received grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German-American Fulbright Commission, and the German Research Foundation (DFG). She won the Best Article Award of the German Association for American Studies for her article “On Contested Ground (Zero): Literature and the Transnational Challenge of Remembering 9/11” (2007). She has co-edited a volume on Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English (2003) and is currently working on a study of Ground Zero literature. VOLKER DEPKAT is a historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His fields of interest are German and North American history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the theory of history, and the methodology of historiography. He has published on Atlantic history and the history of European-American relations from the eighteenth century to the present, the history of North America from a continental perspective, autobiographies of twentieth-century German politicians. His monographs include Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen: Deutsche Zeitschriften 1789-1830 (1998), Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden: Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (2007), Geschichte Nordamerikas: Eine Einführung (2008). He is currently working on a project on the German Reich as a point of reference for American debates about federalism between 1750 and 1788. ASTRID M. FELLNER is Associate Professor of American Studies in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. She is also Adjunct Professor of English at Bradley University, Peoria, IL. Currently she is the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair and Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Her publications include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana

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Self-Representation (2002), Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-EighteenthCentury American Culture (forthcoming), and articles in the fields of U.S. Latino/a literature, colonial American literatures, post-revolutionary literature, Canadian literature, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies. She is the co-editor of (Anti-)Americanisms (2005) and Making National Bodies: Cultural Identity and the Politics of the Body in (Post-)Revolutionary America (forthcoming) as well as the editor of Body Signs: The Body in Latino/a Cultural Production (forthcoming). INGRID GESSNER is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She has also taught at the University of Mainz, Germany and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. She is the author of Kollektive Erinnerung als Katharsis? Das Vietnam Veterans Memorial in der öffentlichen Kontroverse (2000) and of the award-winning From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences (2007). Further publications include articles on cultural memory and the teaching American Studies. Her major interests in research and teaching include American literature, memory studies, visual culture studies, diseases in American history and culture, and the digital and transnational turns in American Studies. She is assistant editor of Amerikastudien/American Studies and an editor of the e-journal COPAS (Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies). KRISTIN HASS is Assistant Professor in the Program of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and has worked in a number of historical museums, including the National Museum of American History and The Henry Ford Museum. Her monograph Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was published in 1998. She is currently at work on Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall about militarism, memory, and U.S. nationalism of the last thirty years. She lectures, teaches, and writes about nationalism, memory, public history, and memorialization. UDO J. HEBEL is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He taught at the universities of Mainz, Potsdam, and Freiburg, and was a Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO. He was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI and at Harvard University. He published Romaninterpretation als Textarchäologie (1989), Intertextuality, Allusion, Quotation (1989), Transatlantic Encounters (co-ed., 1995), “Those Images of Jealousie”: Identitäten und Alteritäten im puritanischen Neuengland

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(1997), The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period (ed., 1999), Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (ed., 2003), Visual Culture in the American Studies Classroom (coed., 2005), Twentieth-Century American One-Act Plays (2006), and Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies (2008). His articles focus on U.S.American cultures of memory, colonial New England, twentieth-century American fiction and drama, German-American relations, visual cultures, American suburbia, theories of American Studies. He served as Vice President of the German Association for American Studies and as Deputy Director of the Bavarian American Academy; he is a member of the Board of the German Association for American Studies and a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA). He is the General Editor of the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies, an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, and the Founding Director of the Regensburg European American Forum. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Literatures and as Vice President of the University of Regensburg. ALFRED HORNUNG is Professor and Chair of English and American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He held guest professorships at various European, American, Canadian, and Chinese universities. He was a fellow at Harvard University, Yale University, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and he is a member of the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at Peking University, Beijing, China. His publications include Narrative Struktur und Textsortendifferenzierung: Die Texte des Muckraking Movement 1902-1912 (1978), Kulturkrise und ihre literarische Bewältigung: Die Funktion der autobiographischen Struktur in Amerika vom Puritanismus zur Postmoderne (1985), Lexikon Amerikanische Literatur (1991) as well as of twelve edited volumes on modernism, postmodernism, autobiography, postcolonialism, and intercultural studies. He was the General Editor of the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies (1991– 2002) and is the Editor of American Studies: A Monograph Series and of American Studies Journal; he also serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Atlantic Studies and the electronic Journal of Transnational American Studies. He was President of MESEA (The Society for MultiEthnic Studies: Europe and the Americas), President of the German Association for American Studies, Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at the University of Mainz, Dean of Philosophy and Philology at the University of Mainz, and a member of the Senate of the University of Mainz.

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MICHAEL KAMMEN is the Newton C. Farr Professor (emeritus) of American History and Culture at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He held a Visiting Professorship in American History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris and taught at Yale University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as President of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). His books include People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1972; Pulitzer Prize for History in 1973), A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986; Francis Parkman Prize and Henry Adams Prize), Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), and Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (2006). His abridged edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America appeared in 2008. EDWARD T. LINENTHAL is Professor of History and Editor of the Journal of American History at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. He was a Sloan Research Fellow in the Arms Control and Defense Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, where he did the research for his first book, Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative (1989). His other books include Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991), Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (1995), and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (2001). His co-edited books include History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1996). He has been a long-time consultant for the National Park Service and serves on the Federal Advisory Commission for the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA. ORM ØVERLAND is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. His published books include the translation of Johannes B. Wist’s trilogy The Rise of Jonas Olsen: A Norwegian Immigrant’s Saga (2005) and an edition of Drude Krog Janson’s A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter (2002) as well as the following authored or edited volumes: Not English Only: Redefining “American” in American Studies (2001); Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870-1930 (2000), The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America (1996), In the European Grain: American Studies from Central and Eastern Europe (1990), Johan Schrøder's Travels in Canada 1863 (1989), The Making and Meaning of an American Classic: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1973), and Fra Amerika til Norge (7 vols., 1992-2009; 2 vols. forthcoming). His articles on immigration and ethnic history have been published in, e.g., Comparative American

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Studies, American Studies in Scandinavia, Journal of American Ethnic History, American Literary Realism, Modern Drama. KIRK SAVAGE is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, PA. He has published widely on public monuments and collective memory in the U.S., including Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) and Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009). DAVID W. SAXE is Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University, PA. He has published on heritage education and historical interpretation, is a national expert on history standards, and serves as the Director of the American History Project at the Pennsylvania State University. He has appeared on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, PBS’ Frontline and ABC’s Sam Donaldson Show and has written for, among others, The New York Times and Washington Times. He worked for the Clinton and Bush administrations on the new immigration-citizenship test. His books include Social Studies in Schools (1991), State History Standards (1998), and Land and Liberty (2 vols, 2006). Among his ongoing projects is work on German heritage museums and the French and Indian War at the Arboretum at the Pennsylvania State University. JULIANE SCHWARZ-BIERSCHENK has taught American Studies at the universities of Regensburg and Erlangen, Germany. Her dissertation “Monumental Discourses: Sculpting Juan de Oñate from the Collected Memories of the American Southwest" (2007) investigates issues of Hispanic memory in contemporary public sculpture projects in New Mexico. Her approach to memory studies is informed by a background in anthropology and cultural geography, and focused by a concern with the interconnection of place making and identity building. Her theoretical interests in the borderlands of memory are based in her professional experience in the fields of museum anthropology and historic preservation. DAVID WILLIAM SEITZ is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, PA and currently a Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in the Humanities. His fields of interest include public memory, visual culture, and the rhetoric of war. His dissertation examines the processes of cultural negotiation that led to the establishment of U.S.-American overseas military cemeteries following the First World War and the subsequent impact these sites have had on transna-

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tional memories of the war. His published work explores how Western narratives of soldierly sacrifice, traditionally substantiated in U.S. American war memorials, have been rendered dysfunctional by the Iraq War. NICOLE WALLER is Junior Professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. She has worked and taught at Bowling Green State University, Columbia University, The City University of New York, and Louisiana State University. She is the author of Contradictory Violence: Revolution and Subversion in the Caribbean (2005) and is currently working on a book entitled American Encounters with Islam in the Atlantic World. Her areas of research and publication include Atlantic studies, Caribbean studies, colonial North American literature, Arab American literature, postcolonialism, and literary theory.