Category: decolonial

The Jew and the Nationalists

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date December 12, 2019

Mira Schor, "Untitled (part of an ongoing series of corrective interventions into The New York Times shared on social media since 2017)" 2019.

My body has just become a battleground for the rise of the nationalist right. The Anglo-American governing strategy is to consolidate nationalists and split the left around the figure of the “Jew.” I’m of Jewish descent and I have family in Israel. According to the Trump administration that now means being Jewish is my national origin “on the basis of actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” Really? Which ancestry? The Bukharans who became Jews to get into Russia in the 1860s? Or the unknown Eastern Europeans or Russians who fetched up in London’s East End in the 1890s? Which ethnic characteristics? My nose? My tendency to be sarcastic?

It’s easy to make fun but this is serious business. The Brexit-Trump wave of 2016 has doubled down on white nationalism. This nationalism has updated the neoliberal tactic of attacking your opponent’s strength. It now accuses its opponents of being racist. Not the old racism that it so gleefully parades but a newly invented tradition: anti-Israel racism.

To cover the newness, they call it “antisemitism.” In this worldview, Brexit-Trump nationalists are not racists, they defend the Jewish nation against antisemitism. Meanwhile critics of Israel are racists, so Brexit-Trump nationalists are antiracist. They could care less about actual Jews. They want to split any possible antiracist coalition to govern by executive orders and majorities won with 42% of the vote.

Can you be racist against a country? One you don’t even live in? Brexit-Trump nationalism gets around such objections by drawing up a list of rules, not legislation as such, but a “quasi-law.” So to win acceptance, call them by an imposing name. And then claim that everyone already agrees to these rules.

Enter the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its definition of antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is so vague that it can only be specified by examples. Example number one: “targeting the state of Israel.”

IRHA say you can, in theory, criticize Israel in terms “similar to that leveled against any other country.” Only in practice the new antisemitism police always find any criticism of Israel to be exceptional. Above all, don’t mention the occupation.

The IHRA definition was a key source of controversy in the Labour Party, where it was seen as preventing criticism of Israel. And now it’s been introduced as a benchmark by Trump’s executive order.

A marginal issue? Not if this quasi-law is being used to reconfigure “race” as “nation,” a position very congenial to the right. And not when the UK election will turn on 150,000 votes in marginal constituencies–it’s all margin. The 2016 US presidential election was decided by 100,000 votes across three states, a rounding error.

The small number of Jews that may change votes based on “antisemitism,” actual or invented, is almost irrelevant. Far more significant are those liberals who can be made comfortable with not voting or even voting conservative as an expression of their anti-antisemitism. To say nothing of those whites who can find this supposed antiracist nationalism to be a moral force.

First came the furore in the UK. Boris Johnson, author of casually racist and antisemitic fiction and journalism turned prime minister in the UK has been “shocked, shocked” to find purported antisemitism in the Labour Party. He has hardly had to make the point. A toxic alliance of print and broadcast media with anti-Corbyn Labour MPS has done it for him (see appendix below).

Yes, there are instances of antisemitism in Labour but not because Labour is an antisemitic party. Rather, Britain–especially England–is an antisemitic country.

Now comes Trump’s order to amend the Civil Rights Act with regard to antisemitism. Many Brexit-Trump mouthpieces call now criticism of Israel “anti-Jewish racism.” In this view, they are nationalists, not racists. The Left are racists. This has the further advantage of subdividing the racial category “semite” that includes Arabs and Jews to just focus on Jews. Brexit-Trump nationalism is all about Islamophobia, that’s “priced in,” as they say.

Many assume the goal of Trump’s order is to make support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel illegal. While it certainly does, that’s just a benchmark. The long-term goal is to consolidate an explicitly hierarchical white nationalism, hinging around the pivot of the “Jew,” and frame the “left” as anti-Jewish racists.

Here “Jew” means Israel, where Israel is both a totem for the religious right and the exemplary “racial settler colony” (Ronit Lentin). The goal is to pivot from the long-standing collective position that (to adapt Foucault) “Israel must be defended” to its updated form: “racial purity must be defended.” In both cases, what’s at stake is the racialized nation-state. Today Jared Kushner uses the liberal New York Times as his platform to declare “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” (his capitals) under the headline “Trump’s Order Protects Jews.” As if this invented tradition were accepted fact.

This shift has been happening for some time. The attack on the Democratic Representatives known as the Squad was the start. Ron Dermer Israel’s ambassador to the US already went so far as to cite Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a cause of the Pittsburgh massacre. In this way, the use of imputed antisemitism against those critiquing settler colonialism produces actual antisemitic violence. The push-back against Bernie Sanders by association with the Squad has already started in the Jewish press.

From here, expect that BDS and declarations of loyalty to all that Israel does will become wedge issues first in the Democratic primary and then in the general election. Learn from the UK–facts don’t matter in this debate, endless repetition creates moral panic: over 5400 media articles about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party. It doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to split votes enough to let the nationalists win.

Let’s look at how this is already playing out. The Middle East Studies Association Board of Directors issued a statement at the start of its 2019 annual meeting condemning

“the conflation of criticism of Israeli actions and policies, and of Zionism as a political ideology, with anti-Semitism.”

On the same day, yet more children were buried in Gaza after the latest Israeli bombing. The usual statement “Israel has a right to defend itself” came from Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as if to speak for the triangulating tendency of neoliberalism. But, as part of the new nationalism, Israel has stopped playing by triangulation rules. A few days after Buttigieg and Biden defended the Gaza bombing, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz revealed the whole incident was a sham:

The target had not been re-examined for at least one year prior to the strike, the individual who was supposedly its target never existed and the intelligence was based on rumors.

No one in the “Israel must be defended” lobby, inside or outside Israel, cared. But they know enough to want to prevent others from talking about it.

So is it now “antisemitic,” under the terms of Trump’s order, for me to discuss what has been reported in Israel on my university campus? Can I ask how the right of nations to self-defense has been distorted to justify attacks on occupied territory in conditions of mass incarceration?

When NYU’s spokesperson claims it is “highly supportive [and] deeply concerned about its Jewish community,” does that mean me and others of Jewish descent who are appalled by what is being done in our name? What’s a Jew to do?

This is just beginning.

Appendix: Why the Labour Party Is Not Antisemitic

So many pay credence to these allegations that it’s worth re-enumerating why the idea that Labour is an antisemitic party is wrong and how it was formed:

The number of members alleged to have been antisemitic and subject to a Labour Party investigation represented about 0.1% of the membership.
Between June 2015 and March 2019, eight national newspapers carried a total of 5497 stories about Labour and antisemitism. It’s what Stuart Hall called a “moral panic.”
The great majority of people reported for antisemitic remarks or behavior were not Labour Party members.
For example, of the 200 cases cited by Labour MP Margaret Hodge in May 2019, only 20 related to Labour Party members. This discrepancy was not acknowledged by Hodge, who has continued to give interviews referring to ‘countless’ or ‘thousands’ of cases.
Labour party internal discipline over these cases has been hindered by party officials politically opposed to Corbyn. (Full details of these points and more can be downloaded from Jewish Voice for Labour here

decolonial Monuments museums racial capitalism

Face Forward

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date November 9, 2018

Kwame Nrumah in "Transfigured Night" by John Akomfrah.

In transfigured night, hear the poet Milton sing “Hail, horrors, hail.” In this disjuncture, in the break and in the wake, the voice of Kwame Nkrumah comes: “We face neither East nor West, we face forward.” We, the would-be decolonized, was his formula in that betrayed beginning of Bandung, whose spirit continues to inspire. His phrase was as resonant for feminists in Iran as African American activists. To face forward is a positioning against racial capitalism, a setting of direction toward the dismantling of its infrastructures. Toward imagining decoloniality.

This place will document my efforts to face forward in order to engage with race as infrastructure, looking at monuments, museums and other display as constitutive of urban form under racial capital. By the same token, the segregated and unequal distribution of services and infrastructure within cities also requires what Shane Brennan has called “visionary infrastructure,” on the model of Grace Lee Bogg’s visionary organizing.

And Nkrumah’s voice comes again in Transfigured Night, reminding his listeners that they are free. But they’re not and he knows it and so do they. He’s asking them to remember the future. That time when there will have been what he called the “total liberation of Africa,” when the infrastructures of racial capitalism have been erased.

Forward is, then, at once a direction towards possession of the self, which is what freedom has meant in the Atlantic world; the formation of a communal sense of being decolonized; and a relation to time that is neither the progress touted by white liberalism nor the revanchism of reaction but a cosmology that relates human and non-human over the span of many lives. That’s not yet. Decoloniality is the future to be remembered.

Then Fanon’s words appear: “O my body, make me a person who asks questions.” What questions does the body ask? In Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2015) at the New Museum last summer, where I was thinking all this, it is asked: how did this narcoleptic state happen? How would the disalienation, Fanon’s term, of the body, yours or mine, happen?

Here are some of my questions, now. Has there not been a certain narcolepsy since 11/9, a certain sheltering in place, a certain discombobulation under the constant stream of tweets, executive orders and deregulation that has made it hard to know which way I have been facing? Against, yes. Forward, not always. Is it not now past question that no single moment, whether of voting or direct action, is likely to shift the global direction to authoritarian white nationalism? The city feels restive. Movement in the shadows. An awakening, or better, re-awakening is at hand.

Still showing the Lincoln and Washington Memorials from rom the video installation by John Akomfrah, "Transfigured Night" (2018) — Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”

On the screens now, monuments. Lincoln. Washington. Visited by the heads of decolonized states in Technicolor archive footage, the remembered brightness of past possibility. Transfigured into the blue-steeled glass of the corporate present. Figures still face forward but Washington’s “liberty” and Lincoln’s “emancipation” are no more present than Nkrumah’s “decolonization,” specters all. But specters return, they are the future, they remember it.

What, then, of the Indigenous whose land was taken for these monuments, whose loss is the infrastructure across the Americas? The territorial acknowledgement has become widespread, as it is in Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. As those countries’ histories suggest, it is not enough. Land redistribution in South Africa was one of Trump’s racist panics in the past election. White nationalists cheered, globally. What, too, of those Cheyenne-Arapaho writer Tommy Orange calls “urban Indians,” seven out of ten of the Indigenous population?

Modern glass and steel skyscrapers in rom the video installation by John Akomfrah, "Transfigured Night" (2018) — Still: John Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”

Akomfrah ends his installation at what he calls “beginning”. His figure, an African elder, faces forward to the emptiness of gentrified Seattle. The material infrastructure of white supremacy. Race as infrastructure is a set of assemblages that articulate colonial race theory, history as colonial destiny, and the exploitation of labor, made “normal” by what Fanon understood as “the aesthetic of respect for the established order.” The museums. The monuments. The new housing developments with their token “public art” and “parks.” It needs to be articulated as an assemblage, together.

At the foot of the towers, from Luanda to London, Cape Town to Charlottesville, global cities are still networked by what Fanon saw to be “a compartmentalized, manichean, immobile world: the world of statues.” Stone colonialism looks down on people and claims dominance, hierarchy, history, via white supremacy, whether from its towers or from a pedestal. They look down. We look forward. The statues are a weakness, too obvious, too contemptuous. When they fall, it is just the beginning.

Their strategy is still to compartmentalize, to contextualize and to prevaricate. They say: Let’s think about adding a sign? Maybe another monument? A conference? Doesn’t this statue have “artistic merit”? Forward gets past the statues to the world they immobilize.

The opposite of stone colonialism is what the 19^thcentury revolutionaries in England called “the mobility.” Counter to the world of statues, Fanon dreamed of running. Get Out wanted to escape the Sunken Place. It’s Fallism, but it’s more than falling, it’s movement. Forward movement.

[i] Kwame Nkrumah, “From now on we are no longer a colonial but free and independent people,” (March 6, 1957), quoted in John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2015). Full text at https://www.myjoyonline.com/news/2017/March-6th/full-text-first-independence-speech-by-kwame-nkrumah.php

[ii]Fanon , Wretched of the Earth, 15,translation modified.

Tags cities, decolonial, infrastructure, monuments, museums, race, racial capital

aesthetic decolonial Monuments race

For Anti-Racism: Against NYC’s Monuments Commission

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date January 15, 2018

Third International Eugenics Conference exhibit on Roosevelt

The NYC Monument Commission was a failure. It delivered a hot mess of recommendations for more: more bureaucracy, more signs and “>more monuments. This is called an “additive” policy. Without a commitment to anti-racism and decolonial practice, none of it makes sense. The missed opportunity is that a good faith anti-racist, decolonial project could show people of all backgrounds, including Italian-Americans, why the monuments must fall.

This is not trivial. While liberals want to make the racist president fall, they can’t even agree to take down statues of racist presidents. That’s why the monuments matter, as the white supremacists have long known. White racism remains “deniable,” even when said out loud, as the latest Trump scandal shows. It works as a particular structure of feeling, invisible to those on the “inside” (known as white) but all too real to those excluded. The monuments are palpable, immensely material nodes in the network of white supremacy.

What I’m arguing for is precisely an “art”–including museum practice, education at all levels, and activism–that takes decolonizing and anti-racism as its first principles.

In what follows, I examine

how the report comes to decide to do nothing in the case of the President Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
how the Memorial visibly incarnates concepts of racial hierarchy and was designed to be part of the Museum’s advocacy for eugenics
how that agenda is an active part of the anti-immigration movement today
how an anti-racist approach might offer a positive means to make the monuments fall.
TL; DR? Skip to the action section at the end!

Before beginning, I want to note that the Commission was often divided and many members would probably agree with much of what I’m going to write. Somehow, the status quo always prevails, even when there is an exact divide as in the case of Roosevelt. Mayor de Blasio opted for no change in all cases, except for the statue of Marion J. Sims–a decision that now has to be reviewed by the community board and then the Public Design Commission, so don’t expect to see a removal any time soon.

1. Complexity

How did the decision to keep the Roosevelt Memorial, protested by the American Indian Movement as long ago as 1971, get taken? The key principle for the commission in relation to evaluating monuments is “complexity,” which receives an unlikely definition:

acknowledging layered and evolving narratives represented in New York City’s public spaces, with preference for additive, relational, and intersectional approaches over subtractive ones. Monuments and markers have multiple meanings that are difficult to unravel, and it is often impossible to agree on a single meaning.

This watered down version of the deconstructive principle of undecidability makes little sense. Complexity is the interpretation of how complexes work: a situation with multiple, intersecting elements but not a synonym for unintelligibility. Nor is it endlessly relative: in given situations, one vector is often determining. If monuments were really so unintelligible, it’s hard to imagine why so many of them have been built, let alone why people are so keen to defend them and why the Commission wants more to be built.

2. Making Race Visible

Here’s how this works in practice. While half the group clearly saw the Memorial as depicting racial hierarchy, “complexity” resulted because:

Some Commission members pointed to art-historical interpretations of the two standing figures as allegorical, representing the continents of the Americas and Africa, emphasized by the animals in relief on the parapet wall behind them. This analysis included evidence that the sculpture was meant to represent Roosevelt’s belief in the unity of the races. In this interpretation, the figures are in no way abject.

This statement is remarkably tendentious. Roosevelt’s 1905 speech on race made it clear that he believed in a limited equality of opportunity for both the “forward” (meaning white) and “backward” (meaning Black) “races.” But as the terms indicate, he did not for a minute think the “races” were equal. Historian Theodore Dyer noted in his 1980 book on Roosevelt and race that the president believed in “Anglo-Saxon racial superiority to American Indians and American blacks.”

Now, it is enough for someone to have an alternative point of view for there to be deadlock. Note that we are not discussing Fox News here but a sophisticated and widely-recognized group of art world luminaries and other professionals. But critiques of “race” or colonialism were not the priority of the majority who declared their

paramount values [to be] art, public space, and civic discourse

Paramount for whom? To what end?

Let’s look at the Memorial itself. In the two splendid photos by An Rong Xu above, it’s clear that the animals on the wall–we are, after all, at the Museum of Natural History–have no visible connection to the Memorial. The strikingly disproportionate scale of the figures discredits any idea that these figures are equal or unified. That’s even before the racialized stereotyping of the Indigenous and African figures are considered. And note the absurdly over-muscular and newly hirsute body of the Emperor-President as well. The contrast is unmistakeable and intentional.

The Commission’s claim that sculptor James Earle Fraser meant for the figures to represent the continents of Africa and America is advanced only in a Metropolitan Museum catalog entry to another sculpture without reference or documentary support. It is unconvincing. While there are well-known precedents for the Four Continents, like Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s 1872 group sculpture, The Four Parts of the World Holding the Celestial Sphere, I know of no precedent for a two continent sculpture before 1939.

On the other hand, New York City knew well Daniel Chester French’s famed sculptures of the four Continents on the Custom House downtown (1903-07). His America was a group in which an allegorical female figure actively dominates Indigenous figures: by that analogy, Roosevelt would be America and the two figures his dominated subjects. And that surely is the right way to see the sculpture. The group depicts Roosevelt dominating an African and American Indian as representatives, not of continents, but of “races.”

This analysis suggests why the Commission is so reluctant to act: if Roosevelt must fall, what is the case for French? Perhaps it’s a better sculpture in formal terms. But does it make sense that this vision of America trampling Quetzlcoatl underfoot is outside the New York Museum of the American Indian? And if so to whom?

3. Eugenics and Immigration

Display of eugenic sterilization at AMNH (1932)

Why did the AMNH want a statue of Roosevelt at all? Because Roosevelt epitomized the eugenic, imperial racism the Museum wanted to promote. The Report suggests:

Approximately half of the Commission: believe that additional historical research is necessary before recommendations can be offered.

Direct information linking Roosevelt, the AMNH, the Memorial and eugenics is, in fact, widely available: here is a summary.

The AMNH was a bastion of eugenics under the long directorship (1908-33) of Henry Fairfield Osborn. In 1916, Osborn wrote the preface to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (later much admired by Hitler):

Race implies heredity, and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government. Conservation of that race, which has given us the true spirit of Americanism, is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country

Environmental conservation was not, then, the “good” side of the AMNH in contrast to its “bad” racism: they were part and parcel of the same race politics. Roosevelt supported eugenic principles, saying in 1914

I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done.

Osborn unsurprisingly campaigned for a Roosevelt Memorial at the AMNH as soon as the president died in 1919. He gained his greatest success in helping pass the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely limited immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. This Act inspires the current administration’s opposition to immigration, leading to Osborn’s race theory being quoted on the front page of the New York Times this weekend. In other words: this is not over.

In the context of rising fascism and support for race science and eugenics, the Third International Eugenics conference was held at the AMNH in 1932. Osborn’s keynote was a jeremiad against birth control and for what he called “birth selection.” He repeated that environmental conservation was a key part of “improving the race,” meaning white people. His address noted six “overs” in the then-present:

Over-destruction of natural resources….Over-population…with consequent permanent unemployment of the least fitted. I have reached the conclusion that overpopulation and underemployment may be regarded as twin sisters

In short, his proposed solution for the mass unemployment caused by the Depression was eugenic birth selection, including forced sterilization, as the exhibit made clear (see image above), noting that over 15,000 enforced eugenic sterilizations had been performed by 1932 in the United States, including a small number in New York State. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927 in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, there would ultimately be over 70,000 such sterilizations in the US.

Good examples of birth selection were on display at the Eugenics Conference as well, such as the all-white membership of Congress. Notably, there was a display of the eugenically desirable “pedigree” of Theodore Roosevelt.

In case there is any doubt as to the connection of the Memorial under construction at the AMNH to this chart at the time of its display, a sculpted bust of Roosevelt is placed at the top left.

And the AMNH Trustees said as much when the Memorial was opened in 1936, just after Osborn had died:

For more than sixteen years the late Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn had given his time, energy and thought to produce a structure, which he felt would best memorialize Theodore Roosevelt. …The trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, who will later control the operation and maintenance of the memorial, have pledged themselves, …, to carry out the educational purposes laid down by their late President Osborn for their guidance.

Central to Osborn’s life work was the racist hierarchy of eugenics, the control of immigration, the deportation of unwelcome migrants, and the enforced control of human reproduction. It is impossible that the Trustees meant anything else.

4. Eugenics Now

Nor are these eugenics solely a thing of the past. This week it emerged that University College London has been holding a series of eugenics conferences, calling for the “phasing out” of “populations of incompetent cultures.” These events are funded by an unpleasant US-based outfit called The Pioneer Fund. This group was founded by Wycliffe Draper, a collaborator of Osborne’s. His nephew Fairfield Osborn was a founding director and continued to work with Draper until they split in the late 1950s.

Today, the Fund supports white supremacist Richard Spencer, who was active at Charlottesville, and it continues to promote old-fashioned Jew hatred.

But it’s not just the lunatic fringe. The continuance of eugenic ideas occurs every time someone calls someone else a “moron” or an “imbecile,” which were categories of eugenic deficiency. Or when Donald Trump says “laziness is a trait in blacks.”

Trump is adept at the art of racialized provocation. The day after his “shithole” remarks, he appeared to the press in front of a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.

There is no danger that Roosevelt will be forgotten or erased from history if his statue is removed. The point is rather that his statue is part of an active network of racialized signification. Which is to say: how does race have meaning? It connects. It links Trump to Roosevelt via the idea of the dominant Hero, whiteness, and white supremacy.

5. Why Everyone Should Want the Monuments to Fall

In the Commission Report on the Columbus Monument, the 1891 lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans is cited to explain why the Monument was needed. Indeed, this period saw the notorious “one drop” rule in Louisiana, meaning that a person with any non-“white” descent at all was considered “colored,” to use the terminology of the time. In 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a segregated railway train in New Orleans, leading to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld “separate but equal.”

It was in this intensely racialized context that the Columbus Monument was erected in New York. The claim Italian-Americans were making was to be “white.” And it’s not hard to understand why, given the then-ongoing violence of white supremacy. But that is no reason to sustain the argument today. Without even considering Columbus’ devastating impact for Indigenous peoples–though of course in a wider frame we should– present-day Italian-Americans and other “whites” should not want to be white in the manner of 1892. And that’s what this Monument means. But it didn’t work.

The 1924 Immigration Act set the annual quota of any nationality at 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States in 1890. According to eugenic theory, there is not a single “white” European “race” but rather three. The eugenically preferred “Nordic” race is truly “white.” Distinct were Southern Europeans–mostly Italians for practical purposes–and Eastern Europeans, meaning Jews. The 1924 Act intended to promote Nordic immigration and limit that of Southern and Eastern Europeans.

The results of the Act were dramatic. From 1901-1914, 2.9 million Italians immigrated, an average of 210,000 per year. Under the 1924 Act, only 4,000 per year were admitted–a 98% decrease. These restrictions did not end until 1965 and Attorney General Sessions has cited the 1924 Act as an inspiration for current attempts to limit immigration.

In short, while Italians in 1892 certainly had a case that they had been violently subjected to white supremacy, their perhaps understandable attempt to join its ranks by means of the Columbus Monument did not succeed. Today, no one questions the “whiteness” of Italians and all Europeans are considered “white.” But this is not a club that anyone should want to belong to.

Just as several Italian-Americans advocated at the NYC Commission hearings, anti-racist Italians should support removal of the Columbus Monument. An anti-racist campaign would connect Italian-Americans to a different history, the long arc of justice. But prominent New York leaders like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have made it clear they want no part of this anti-racist rethinking of whiteness. The majority of the Commission followed this lead.

6. Action

All the monuments are connected. The Columbus Monument made the claim that Italians were white in the moment of legalized segregation. Roosevelt’s support for eugenics was why Osborn and the American Museum of Natural History wanted a memorial. The same people supported the 1924 Immigration Act that cut Italian immigration by 98%. In short, the “whiteness” these monuments embody excludes almost everyone and perpetuates systemic and hierarchical racism.
The monuments must fall not because people were bad then and we are good today but because the racism they embody is still active and growing.
Building more monuments or putting up signs is not a substitute for the long and difficult work of anti-racism. Anyone can say “I am not a racist.” The question is “what are you doing to end racism?
The Commission thinks that action should be taken in regard to monuments if there is: “Sustained adverse public reaction (two years of more); and/or Instantaneous large-scale community opposition.” So let’s give it to them.

decolonial Monuments race

Monumental Questions

Today hearings were held in Manhattan for the Mayor’s Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. It was a real New York occasion, with dashes of radical politics, establishment equivocation, blunt force and moments of pure eccentricity. Anyone who wanted could speak for three minutes in randomly assigned slots. Despite being called for the day before the holiday at 10am, about 100 people attended with a good sprinkling of local media.

As luck would have it Decolonize This Place organizer Conor Tomàs Reed went first and called on the commission to remove the Columbus monument at Columbus Circle, the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the American Museum of Natural History and the Marion J. Sims memorial at 103rd St. As Reed said

These three monuments serve as a daily reminder of colonialism, indigenous genocide, and white supremacist eugenics. That they are familiar landmarks in this city shows just how much we have inured ourselves to the horrors that they celebrate.

This bracing challenge was soon countered by a succession of “proud Italian Americans” declaring undying love for Columbus and that any attempt to remove the monument was an outrage. One speaker from the Knights of Columbus claimed opponents were like the KKK because the Klan were (he claimed) against Columbus in the 1930s. These statements were undercut by a young Italian-American activist from SURJ who pointed out that Columbus lived about 350 years before Italy was a nation; spoke only Catalan; and served the Spanish monarchy. But no politician could have missed the vehemence and belligerence of the opposition to any change whatever, even adding a sign.

If most of the discussion was about Columbus, in nearly four hours of testimony, very few Indigenous voices were heard. One exception was Robert Borrero of the International Indian Treaty Council, who spoke with dignified restraint about Columbus’s brutality to his own Taino people.

Several African Americans testified to the scandal of Marion J. Sims, who did medical experiments on African American women without anesthetic, having a memorial. One flamboyant Jewish lady got the only laugh of the day when she concluded emotional testimony saying

Keep all the monument–except that Sims, I never heard about that, he’s awful

So if I had to bet, I’d guess Sims will be the token withdrawal. The co-commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, NYC’s cultural director, opened with a slightly lame PowerPoint suggesting alternatives to removal, like adding signs; commissioning art projects; or augmented reality apps. This seemed to be a clear signal of the Commission’s thinking, although radical academics like Audra Simpson and Jack Tchen are members and might be able to push for a little more. Perhaps the markers to Marshall Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, who directed the genocidal Vichy regime in Second World War France, might be quietly uprooted.

There are two more opportunities to intervene:

Monday, Nov. 27 at 10 a.m. — Bronx Borough Hall, Rotunda, 851 Grand Concourse, the Bronx
Tuesday, Nov. 28 at 10 a.m. — Staten Island Borough Hall, Room 125, 10 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island

Even so nothing will happen fast this being New York. The report will come out in December. The Mayor will then decide which of their recommendations to adopt. And then it all goes back to the beginning with the community boards and a multi-step process back to the usual parks and culture review board. So here we are, giving reform a chance. Expect to hear about a return to revolutionary tactics soon!

Roosevelt Must Fall

As for me, I spoke about the Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Monument at the American Museum of Natural History. For the record, this is what I said:

“I would like to suggest to you that the Equestrian Monument that is part of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History should be removed because it visualizes systems of racialized hierarchy, which, while discredited, continue to do harm in the present. Additional signs or information cannot replace the visceral impact of visual materials, as advertisers and artists alike know very well. Certainly, that removal would need to be the start of an extensive repurposing of the Museum, which is long overdue. But given that the Natural History Museum is the most visited in New York, with over 6.5 million visitors, it cannot be right to leave a symbol of racial hierarchy in place.

Roosevelt died in 1919 and the New York memorial was at once proposed by Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. That same year, the Museum Journal claimed to demonstrate a “relationship between [skin] color and achievement.” Osborn was a believer in Nordic supremacy, a theory which also entailed the decline of white dominance unless immigration was controlled. These theories unfortunately continue to have purchase today. In 1921, the AMNH hosted the International Congress of Eugenics under Osborn’s organization. It opened a Hall of Public Health to promote eugenics (the attempt to breed out “impurities” from humans, also involving forced sterilization) and the effort to control immigration that resulted in the 1924 Immigration Act.

The Equestrian monument was sculpted by James Earle Fraser, who had earlier made a piece called The End of the Trail, illustrating the eugenicist belief in the period that Indians would “die out.” The monument visualizes belief in racial superiority through the now discredited so-called science of craniometry—measuring skulls. The idea was that the perfect skull had a vertical forehead, which is hard to find in an actual human being, so the example given was usually a Greek statue. In the US this idea was widely disseminated in Josiah Nott’s 1857 Indigenous Races of the Earth. This work claimed that there are several distinct human races, visible in their different skull shapes more than superficial details like skin color. In this framework, a statue is not a depiction of a racist idea, it is a racist idea.

If you examine the Equestrian Monument, you can see that Roosevelt’s skull is close to vertical, while the African figure has a noticeably sloped forehead and the Indian has the most sloped of all. In short, the Monument visibly incarnates Osborne’s system of racial hierarchy, as the Trustees acknowledged at the dedication ceremony in 1936 (the sculpture was completed in 1939). Of course, Roosevelt’s towering position over the half-dressed African and Indian reinforces that meaning, derived as it was from Roman Imperial sculpture.

It’s true that most people have now forgotten the specifics of craniometry. But the racist term “slopehead” indicates that the false claim of cranial angle still influences present-day racist caricature, usually applied to people of Asian descent—it’s in the cult film Pulp Fiction for example, a Harvey Weinstein production, I might add.

So it’s not a question that people at that time had bad ideas and we censor the monument for that but that it actively visualizes and perpetuaties racial stereotypes today.

I’m second from the right, speaking. Photo: MTL+

Sources

Anon, “The New York Theodore Roosevelt Memorial.” Science 83, no. 2143 (1936): 75-76.

David Bindman, Ape to Apollo : aesthetics and the idea of race in the 18th century (London: Reaktion, 2002)

Michael Barker, “The Life and Controversies of Henry Fairfield Osborn,” http://www.swans.com/library/art18/barker99.html

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton 1996)

Havig, Alan. “Presidential Images, History, and Homage: Memorializing Theodore Roosevelt, 1919-1967.” American Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1978): 514-32. doi:10.2307/2712298.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).

George N. Pindar, “The New York State Roosevelt Memorial,” The Scientific Monthly Vol. 42, No. 3 (Mar., 1936), pp. 280-284

abolition decolonial gender lynching race visual organizing

Monuments, Looking, Lynching and Gender

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date August 22, 2017

Caddo Parish Confederate Monument, where three people were lynched in 1903

In the past week, the ubiquitous Confederate monuments have suddenly become visible (to non-Confederate sympathizing white people) as monuments to genocide and white supremacy. It’s important to continue to show their systemic role in making and sustaining white supremacy. In particular, the monuments form a network that connects seeing, unseeing, lynching and gender in ways that I for one had not previously fully understood.

seeing and unseeing

The sheer numbers are astonishing. Over 13,000 Civil War memorials. 700 Confederate monuments on public land, including Arlington National Cemetery and the US Capitol. Statues of Robert E. Lee at universities like City College, New York, and Duke. That’s a system, an infrastructure of white supremacy that has been hiding in plain sight across the US. Now begins the process of learning to unsee the unseeing of them.

But the statues were always watching. In the Vice documentary on Charlottesville, one African American woman comments that the statue of Robert E. Lee seemed to watch her wherever she went. The monuments are racialized CCTV, placing those designated “not white” on notice that white supremacy is watching. They materialize the mystical power of “oversight,” once embodied in the plantation overseer, and now part of segregated public space.

material mourning

Ad for the McNeel Marble Company in 1913, peak of the monument boom

The monuments convey that power not by artistic skill or visual creativity but by sheer mass. These were mass-produced objects, made by companies like McNeel Marble. They had massive height and weight. When Louisville, Kentucky, decided to take down its monument, nearby Brandenburg put it back up. It’s 70 feet tall, 100 tons of granite and now re-mounted on 80 tons of concrete. In and of itself, this materiality dominates. By its simple presence it makes a statement as to who “counts” in America, who is grievable, and who is not.

Via the monument, the materialized power of (over)sight forms specific sites within the matrix of white supremacy. Take the thirty-four foot high monument in Pensacola, Florida, paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1891. At the time, the city was majority African American. It had been been captured from Native Americans and free Africans by Andrew Jackson in 1817.

The monument dominated the local landscape when first installed (as in the 1907 postcard above). A year later, Leander Shaw, an African American man accused of assaulting a white woman, was lynched nearby. Over 2000 bullets riddled his corpse, after he was hanged from an electric pole (yes, there’s a picture; no, I’m not posting it). When the local high school was “integrated” in 1975, a race riot ensued and attracted a major KKK rally to the monument.

In the past week, the mayor has called for it to come down, only to meet determined opposition from the local Republican congressman and a 5000-signature petition. Which in turn generated 2300 signatures supporting removal (possibly to a nearby cemetery). Now a weekend rally has been called in support of the monument.

Here, then, is a metonymy of what these monuments stand for: the conquest of Indigenous populations; the subjugation of African Americans; white supremacy and the myth of white womanhood; the former Republican “Southern strategy” of electoral domination; and now the metonymic conflict over the monument.

the site and sight of lynching

In other cases, as in Brooksville, Florida, and Hot Springs, Arkansas , lynchings actually took place at the site of the Confederate monument. Take the case of Caddo Parish, Louisiana. It was the second largest site of lynchings nationwide. In 1903, the UDC put up a Confederate monument. Six months later, three people were lynched at the site on November 30, 1903, from the tree visible in the photograph below.

Caddo Parish Confederate Monument. Three men were lynched here in 1903 from the tree.

A typical “Silent Sentinel” monument, the Caddo Parish example is thirty feet tall, dominating its locale. The woman in front represents Clio, the muse of history and the inscription reads “Lest We Forget.” The site could better serve as a memorial to Phil Davis, Walter Carter, and Clint Thomas, the lynched men.

In general, it’s noticeable that there is a rough correlation in the incidence of lynchings and the numbers of Confederate monuments.

Tuskegee Institute table of lynchings per year.

SPLC chart of Confederate monuments per year

Both “peak” in the decade after 1890, as Jim Crow became fully established in the South, with an upturn again in the 1920s with the revival of the KKK. I do not think that the monuments “caused” lynchings or vice-versa. Rather, both were interactive instruments of violence in instituting and sustaining white supremacy.

This interaction can be called the “sight of lynching.” As in the case of Leander Shaw, many lynchings resulted from the testimony of white women, often without other evidence. In the common instance of “reckless eyeballing,” (which I’ve written about here) the accusation was that an African American person had looked at a white woman with sexual intent, as in the case of Emmett Till.

There is, then, a relay to be explored between the oversight materialized in the Confederate monument; and lynchings based on embodied perceptions of being looked at. The white gaze was at once surrogated through the monument and expressed as the power to remain unseen (in the case of the monument) and unseeable (in that of white women).

What was both seen and unseen was the spectacular and appalling violence of lynching. In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative will open the Memorial to Peace and Justice, the first prominent memorial to the 4000 victims of lynching. Yet as many exhibitions and publications have shown since the groundbreaking Without Sanctuary exhibit (2001) [caution: very distressing images], lynching itself was intensely mediated. There were postcards, photographs, newspaper stories and public events. Nonetheless, only one white man was convicted of lynching in its eighty-year heyday.

white mythology

Further, the Confederate monuments were, as has been widely noted, often paid for by the UDC or other Confederate women’s organizations. Fundraising for the Pensacola monument was failing until the UDC became involved. Perhaps unexpectedly, white women’s activism made the network of monuments possible. Women are even active in today’s white supremacy movement, despite its visible misogyny.

In her 1952 memoir, UDC leader, Dolly Blount Lamar claimed that the monuments expressed:

in permanent physical form the historical truth and spiritual and political ideals that we would perpetuate.

This “truth” was very specific. When a historian at the University of Florida expressed the view in 1911 that

the North was relatively in the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong

members of the UDC drove him out of his job. When we hear the call to respect “history” on all sides, it is such falsified and white supremacist history that is at stake.

segregation forever

These monuments remain active today. One instance of the work they do for white supremacy is to act as “border” markers in segregated cities. It’s not just in the former Confederacy that this happens. The statue of the appalling J. Marion Sims, who performed medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthetic, does this work in New York City today.

To the North of Sims is so-called “Spanish” Harlem, a diverse area of Black and brown people, dotted with housing projects and schools offering free meals to anyone under 18. South is Central Park and Museum Mile, where white people play whiffle ball and look at the monuments of white “civilization.”

anti-antiblackness

I have not been to the mountain top. I do not know what comes after white supremacy. I continue to be engaged in the work of anti-antiblackness which means negating the regime of white supremacy by making the monuments and the work that they do visible: and thereby removable.

abolition Black Lives Matter decolonial race

All The Monuments Must Fall #Charlottesville

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date August 14, 2017

Durham NC August 8, 2017. Photo: Derrick Lewis

In the aftermath of the white supremacist terrorism at Charlottesville, all the monuments must fall. The murder of Heather Heyer was prompted by the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. These statues are material nodes in the network of white supremacy. They are the visible form of the established order of racial hierarchy. No longer “unseen,” they are active and violent in and of themselves. The work of decolonizing has been by-passed and now it has returned with a vengeance. Taking our cue from South Africa, they must now fall. When I first wrote this post on Sunday August 13, it was in hope. That Monday, August 14, people in Durham, North Carolina, came to the same conclusions (entirely separately, as far as I know) and pulled down the Confederate memorial in their town. It’s on.

seeing the unseen monument

The Charlottesville statue in question is a 1924 equestrian monument to Robert E. Lee designed by Henry Merwin Shrady and finished by Leo Lentelli. Shrady, a New Yorker, had designed the Washington DC memorial for Ulysses Grant. His statue of George Washington is in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. In the 1996 application to place the statue on the National Register of Historic Places, no historical claim relating to the Civil War was made. Rather, the work was held to be an

important art object that exhibits the figurative style of outdoor sculpture produced by members of the National Sculpture Society

Which is to say, it’s not that important, really, as a sculpture. It has no historical value because it was not made in the period in which its subject was alive and the artists had never met Lee. As a work of art, it is derivative, and in poor condition. Other, better works by Shrady remain in place.

Shrady & Lentelli, “Robert E. Lee” (1924)

The statue was dedicated in 1924 after three years of organizing by the KKK in the area. The ceremony was organized by “the Confederate Veterans, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.” Lee’s great-granddaughter pulled away a Confederate flag to reveal the sculpture. And then the sculpture began its work as part of the unseen operations of enforcing consent, what Frantz Fanon called “the aesthetics of respect for the established order.” Military ceremony is key to these aesthetics, as are these usually “unseen” monuments, testifying here to the naturalizing of white supremacy.

the whiteness of statues

Consider the statue in itself. Formally, the sculpture evokes that of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations were one of the books Lee took with him to war. The 1895 US edition was dedicated to Lee by the English translator. Trump’s defense secretary Mattis also carries the book with him. White nationalism sees itself as embodying the legacy of Rome. The violent polemicist Richard Spencer has even imagined Trump’s regime as a new Roman Empire.

As so often, there is also a racist dog-whistle here, made visible in the film Django Unchained–the purported unlikeliness of an African American riding a horse. The statue is intended as a portrait of Lee’s horse Traveler. It marks the dominion of whiteness over both inferior races and non-human “brutes.”

Other than Lee’s name, the statue has no contextualizing or historical information. The content of the statue as an art work is thereby expressed through its form. It is, to use the American semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, only loosely indexical because it was made from illustrations and photographs. While Lee may be a key figure in the Confederate imaginary, the sculpture is not iconic in the strict sense that it shares qualities with Lee. It is strongly symbolic, not of Lee as a person, but of white supremacy.

That whiteness is both overwhelmingly visible and not present. Statues have been used in polygenic natural history for two centuries. In this now-discredited view, there are multiple species of humans, who exist alongside each other in a ranked hierarchy. At the top, as illustrated Julien-Joseph Virey’s Natural History of Man (1801) were Greek sculptures, representing whiteness.

This idea was widely circulated in the United States and was used extensively in pro-slavery positions.

In the past, I’ve made fun of this, pointing out that no actually existing whiteness can be found, only statues. But now I see it differently. Classically-influenced statues can be found across the Atlantic world. They form a material network of whiteness, one of its fundamental infrastructures. Whiteness does not adhere to any particular aspect of these sculptures but rather to the entire monument.

In the case of Lee, there was a debate as to whether the base of the sculpture was sufficiently large. At the unveiling, a speaker agreed but said:

Let it stay that way. The planet as a pedestal would be too small for Robert Edward Lee.

“Whiteness,” said Du Bois two years later in 1926, “is ownership of the earth for ever and ever, amen.”

***

It was only after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 that local people began to ask questions, leading to the base of the statue being tagged “Black Lives Matter” in 2015 (still visible in the photo). Earlier this year, young African American Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy led a movement to remove the statue, despite a persistent campaign of harassment led by Justin Kessler, who also organized Unite The Right.

The resistance has been persistent, first legal and now violent. For the statue is doing new work. The Trump administration is dominated by white nationalists (Bannon, Miller, Sessions) and generals (Kelly, Mattis, McMaster). Monuments like Lee’s naturalize the connection between the extreme right between white supremacy and war. This articulation has reached a new degree of tension in the unlikely conjuncture of North Korea and the murder of Heather Heyer. At all costs, it must not become naturalized.

Replace us

So far more is at stake here than the classification of a second-rate sculpture.

On my first visit to Berlin some years ago, I went to the Reichstag. I’m of Jewish descent and so I was startled to see the racialized inscription Dem Deutschen Volke (The German Race) still in place. It gave me some sense of what a person of color might feel when confronted with a statue like that of Lee. At that time, I thought to myself: “We’re still here, you lost.” On Friday, white supremacists at the University of Virginia chanted, as if in response: “Jew Will Not Replace Us.”

The slogan was coined by the fascist website The Daily Stormer, which translates the title of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer. In the chants, “you” and “Jew” were interchangeable, just as “us” also stands for US. The replacement of the statue by “you” (the racially inferior from African Americans to Jews and more) was understood as a challenge to be resisted by force.

#AllTheMonumentsMustFall

What, though, if anti-fascists took “replace us” as a challenge? Not “replace white people,” because many of us are white. But the statues. It’s time to say “all the monuments must fall.” Because it’s the form that sustains white supremacy, not just the individual objects.

While some people are not able to engage in the street contestations, many academics, artists and activists–the kind of people I imagine might be reading this–know of such monuments in their cities and campuses. It’s time to take action against them not as individual “works” but as a class–these are violent and dangerous objects.

Putting them in museums is not in and of itself a solution. The Elgin Marbles are the epitome of classical whiteness and colonial power. No British government has imagined returning them to the empty museum that awaits them in Athens. To do so would be to finally end the colonial imaginary in the UK. Or at least admit that it was time to do so.

There would have to be a new way of displaying these immense objects in the circuits of power, knowledge and aesthetics that sustained the established order of white supremacy, without accidentally allowing the statues to continue to do that work.

In Germany, I do not remember seeing any statues of Nazi-era generals or politicians. There was a minor rehabilitation of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker in the 2000s and now US neo-Nazi websites have posted extensive galleries (caution: highly offensive website) of his work, including a portrait-bust of Hitler. In other words, these things are hard to contain.

Any such action would be an expansion and extension of the #Fall movement in South Africa that began with the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town and expanded to defeat the government over proposed tuition increases in #FeesMustFall. Now the agenda is to decolonize the curriculum.

In following the South African lead, those of us who are identified as white and/or as intellectuals need to heed a warning. At the end of the challenging 2016 film Metalepsis in Black about #FeesMustFall, a Black South African student speaker (above) castigates those academics and intellectuals who write about the movement but do not participate. She says:

It’s no longer good enough to write…It’s time to take bolder action…We do not need your sympathy, we need action, real action.

statues are falling

The Durham activists heeded that call. They did not hear it directly. When there are social movements, they create a counter-power that has its own “common sense.” In Durham, that lead to direct action. So far, no one locally appears inclined to criminalize it. In Lexington KY, the mayor has directed that Confederate memorials be moved to a site where they can be repurposed. Let there be diversity of tactics. But recognize that it was direct action that created the possibility of that diversity.

The statue brought down in Durham was also dedicated in 1924, at a time of “unprecedented growth” for the Ku Klux Klan in the state. I suspect the national Klan resurgence in the 1920s sparked a wave of such memorials. Whereas the Charlottesville statue had some B-list claim to artistic merit, the Durham one is far more interesting fallen than it ever was on its pedestal.

Yet no sooner had the statue fallen, than certain elements on the white left began decrying the action. So once again: the Fall movement does not erase history, it reveals it. In this case, we are learning that Ku Klux Klan activism created and engaged with the 1920s Confederate memorials, which I at least did not know before. If these statues are not “just” in defense of white supremacy but in active support of the Klan, is there still a case that they should stand? Really?

The work ahead is not limited to the former Confederacy by any means.

Here’s a memorial to Lee on General Lee Avenue in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, NY. The Army has consistently refused to change the name, and did so as recently as last week. It might be time to ask again in whatever way necessary.

There will be retaliations, as there were in South Africa, by white nationalists, like the attack on Boston’s Holocaust memorial yesterday. Already we’re seeing the so-called “respectable” Republican right trying to cauterize its connection to white nationalism. Partly they want to isolate and undermine Trump and partly they know that being on the side of Nazis and Holocaust memorial vandals is not acceptable, even to whites that go along with dog-whistle anti-blackness. So this assault raises issues for those identified as white.

When statues fall, it opens the way to re-thinking the infrastructures of racial hierarchy, as we saw in South Africa. Rhodes Must Fall became Fees Must Fall became Decolonize. Here the intersectional issues of reparations, the abolition of mass incarceration, respecting the treaties with Indigenous nations are both clear and seemingly far from being attainable. When I look at the three young African Americans in Durham raising Black Power salutes next the fallen Confederate statue, they suddenly seem a little closer.

{R}evolution decolonial eating Hunger strike Palestine

The Long Hunger Strike (Against Slavery)

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date May 21, 2017

These posts are difficult to write and I’m sure they are difficult to read. By measuring the time taken to write–or to read–it is possible enter the symbolic world created by the hunger strike, a world in which existence matters. It is the force of the statement made by the strike that enables this fragmentary sliver of participation. It is their gift to those in solidarity, the hospitality of those utterly without resource. Like all gifts, it invokes a response, the taking of the time to feel for an instant the stakes of their action.

For a hunger strike both compresses and expands time. Every moment without sustenance is freighted with meaning and, after the first days, haunted with danger. And yet it also makes things visible. It opens the understanding of the long hunger strike from Atlantic slavery, to British imperialism, women’s suffrage and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The long hunger strike is interwoven with British coloniality, from slavery to Ireland, the women’s suffrage struggle, India and the former British mandate of Palestine. This pattern stems from the British practice of using regulated hunger as a weapon, which was then turned against them by the enslaved and colonized.

the long hunger strike

The long hunger strike turns the state weapon of hunger against itself. It changes the terms of the encounter between the state regime and the body of those Fanon called les damnés, the damned–those who have no voice that the state can hear. By risking life, the damned reclaim dignity and in so doing make themselves heard. This is not a statement in the manner of a politician proposing a settlement, or a philosopher formulating a maxim. It is one that is felt within the body, at a molecular level. It is nonetheless articulate. It enacts the right to exist through the self-willed challenge to life.

The power to keep people in hunger of all kinds is a tool of coloniality, the transhistorical expansion of colonial domination and its continued effects. Whereas, according to Nelson Maldonando Torres,

decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world

Humans have the right to exist, so they share food and offer hospitality to each other. They know that living together is the only way that humans may live and the only way to avoid ge(n)ocide. Dignity is the right to exist. If it is refused, people strike.

Slavery and the hunger strike

For Marcus Rediker, the historian of slavery,

The Atlantic slave trade was, in many senses, a four-hundred-year hunger strike.

In Central and West Africa, a politics of “eating” was central to social ordering. As Africanist Wyatt McGaffey has summarized it

An ordered society is one in which ‘eating,’ both literal and metaphorical is properly distributed

Eating is both supplying food and creating conditions in which people, animals and spirits alike can thrive. A slave ship was very obviously not such a place. Many captive Africans refused to eat. In 1727 a man refused to eat on board the Loyal George, causing its captain to torture and kill him, whereupon all the Africans rose in revolt. Similar violence on the ship City of London caused all the 377 Africans on board to go on hunger strike in 1730. A Fante man (name unknown) undertook a fatal hunger strike on board the Brooks, the ship famously drawn by abolitionists. The little Black stick figures were people, who had a politics and acted on it.

As a result, the slavers resorted to force feeding, using a metal device called the speculum oris to force open African hunger strikers’ mouths. As the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson reported in 1808:

the slaves were frequently so sulky, as to shut their mouths against all sustenance, and this with a determination to die; and that it was necessary their mouths should be forced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased them might incur no loss by their death.

Speculum oris to open the mouth of a hunger striker, c.1850

It rarely worked (if by that we mean “kept the captive alive”) but it perhaps deterred others. Many more “returned to Africa” by means of their hunger strikes.

the suffragettes

The same tool was used against the Suffragettes, when they undertook hunger strikes in British prisons. In July 1909, the artist Marion Wallace-Dunlop was imprisoned for stamping a slogan on the walls of Parliament. She refused to eat, declaring

I claim the right recognized by all civilized nations that a person imprisoned for a political offence should have first-division treatment; and as a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me, I am now refusing all food until this matter is settled

She was, in short, on dignity strike. “First division” treatment was a provision of the 1898 Prison Act, whereby the prisoner would not be subjected to a month of solitary confinement, or have to wear prison dress. They were allowed visits and reading materials. “Second” and “Third” division prisoners were allowed none of these things and had to maintain silence at all times, or else be placed on bread-and-water diet.

As the writer Oscar Wilde, sentenced to two years hard labour, put it in a letter to the Daily Chronicle in 1898, there were “three permanent punishments authorised by law in English prisons”: hunger, insomnia, and disease. The hunger striker in British prisons, like those in the slave ships before them, turned the state’s weapons against itself.

For this presumption, they paid a terrible price. Using the speculum oris, prison administrators force fed the Suffragettes, especially those from the working class. Sylvia Pankhurst, arrested in 1913 for breaking a window as part of the Suffragette escalation of the period, described how she was force fed after a hunger strike of only three days:

I felt a steel instrument pressing against my gums, cutting into the flesh, forcing its way in. Then it gradually prised my jaws apart as they turned a screw. It felt like having my teeth drawn; but I resisted—I resisted. I held my poor bleeding gums down on the steel with all my strength. Soon they were trying to force the india-rubber tube down my throat. I was struggling wildly, trying to tighten the muscles and to keep my throat closed up. They got the tube down, I suppose, though I was unconscious of anything but a mad revolt of struggling, for at last I heard them say, “That’s all”; and I vomited as the tube came up. ….But infinitely worse than any pain was the sense of degradation, the sense that the very fight that one made against the repeated outrage was shattering one’s nerves and breaking down one’s self-control.

Force feeding was also rape. Sometimes the prison authorities tried to make this anatomically specific, by inserting food into women’s vaginas and rectums. The women called it “violation.”

the palestinian dignity strike day 35

The logic of colonial domination continues in the former British mandate of Palestine today. 33% of the Palestinian population are what the UN call “food insecure,” meaning threatened by hunger. This hunger is unevenly experienced: 57% of those living in Gaza suffer it, as do 19% of those living in the West Bank. An outside visitor to Palestine, like myself, would be hard put to document this suffering because Palestinians are so committed to hospitality. We visited a village demolished over 100 times by Israeli police, reduced to only two tents, where our hosts produced a delicious and generous lunch, quite unasked and utterly not to be refused.

Within the Israeli prison system, food supply is a consistent problem. Families are not allowed to bring in food and, according to a 2016 report by Addameer, “the quality of the food and the quantity has decreased dramatically” since 2011. Not least, the fall in quality is due to the fact that Israeli convicts prepare the food for Palestinian prisoners. As a result, prisoners rely on a privatized and expensive canteen, forcing them to participate in the prison labor system. Prisoners spend an average $111 on food per month, which is “shopped” and cooked collectively at a mark up of over 20% from outside shops. The Israeli Prison Service makes over $30 million a year from this system.

Like the enslaved and the disenfranchised women before them, the Palestinians are turning the system’s withholding of food into a means to reclaim dignity. So it is denied to them in other ways. Far-right activists held a barbecue outside a prison, taunting the prisoners with the smell of food, just as British prison authorities left eggs, bread, milk and chops in the cells of Suffragettes. The prison service released a video purporting to show Marwan Barghouti eating a candy bar after more than two weeks of hunger strike. If he had done, he would have vomited it immediately. No media bothered to mention that.

in solidarity#dignitystrike #day35

decolonial Palestine

Dying for Dignity

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date May 19, 2017

This is a project about time, mutant capitalism and life. Its tempo has changed from the epoch to the day. For the remainder of the dignity strike, there will be daily posts.

It is now a month since Palestinians in Israeli regime incarceration began. On #day31 of his hunger strike, Bobby Sands was nominated as Sinn Fein candidate for MP in the by-election for Fermanagh and South Tyrone that he would go on to win. Having started his strike two weeks ahead of his fellow strikers, Sands was already half way to death. I don’t think there was anyone in the UK or Ireland that did not know his name. On #day66 he died and 100,000 people attended his funeral.

Today is also #day31 of the hunger strike of over 1000 Palestinian prisoners, a hunger strike for political status, known as the Dignity Strike. Over 100 men are in hospital and they are refusing water. This will become critical imminently. The Guardian has no mention. Nor does the New York Times or Washington Post. All the attention goes to the circus in Washington.

The Bobby Sands Trust has two articles on its front page about Palestine. 400 immigrants are being arrested every day. Dozens if not hundreds of strikers are at risk of starving themselves to death.

A year ago today I was about to go to Palestine, totally unprepared, despite my own sense of knowing, for what I would see and learn there. A year later, it will be the Trump circus that arrives, leading Abbas to make nice in the delusion of preference or perhaps just to further feather his nest.

Often people cite Judith Butler’s work about grievable lives to understand such situations. Recently, she has put it like this:

we are compelled to find the specific forms in which grievability is asserted. Indeed, one question I hope to pose is: what counts as a militant assertion of grievability?

I understand and appreciate Butler’s position, which is brilliant as ever. And yet.

Biologist Michelle Callard-Stone has summarized the effects of hunger:

Roughly speaking, at the end of thirty days without food, the body is dying. Humans are not meant to starve for prolonged periods, hungry cavemen ate bushes and roots instead of going without food. The body is well-into starvation mode, which means that your body has depleted its glycogen stores in the liver and muscle, and has also reduced its use of ketones, which are the body’s short term solution for lack of food. At this point the body is surviving primarily by degrading muscles and bones, even in the presence of adipose (fat) tissue.

Damage to the immune system is permanent, even if food is restored. Sight and hearing may be affected forever.

In his book Hunger: An Unnatural History, Sharman Apt Russell sees forty days as the key turning point for hunger strikes, depending on the condition of the striker at the beginning of the protest. At this point, the body loses the ability to function at a cellular level, unable to form new cells or transfer across cellular membranes. Sight and hearing fail. At some point, the person cannot fully recover even if the strike is abandoned. The Yad Vashem museum documents that “tens of thousands” of Holocaust survivors died from the effects of returning to eating and overeating.

To read such paragraphs takes us to a place beyond even grief and grieving to question how life is lived and how there are ways to protest–how small that word feels here–even when every option has been foreclosed. It makes us feel the force of words like “dignity” that seem so old-fashioned in our worlds of precarity, state-enforced self-reliance and permanent attrition of social welfare. Dignity was what Frantz Fanon saw as the goal of decolonizing.

In Washington, Tel Aviv and official Ramallah, dignity has been so lost, it no longer has any meaning. Try and imagine denying yourself all food and water for over thirty days in pursuit of dignity. What would I do for my dignity, I ask myself? Do I have a claim to dignity, when the elected leader of my country is visiting the regime that perpetrates the occupation that has removed all dignity for an entire people? What is the psychic damage to me and to all of us to live without dignity? Is that a hunger so deep-rooted and so systemic that, like the long-term hunger striker, we no longer feel it?

decolonial Palestine politics race

Salt and Baseline Communism #dignitystrike

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date May 3, 2017

Salt has often been a catalyst by which the interaction of life, colonialism and apartheid can be made visible and subject to change. From India to South Africa and today’s ongoing Palestinian hunger strike, salt is the means by which the inhuman form of colonial oppression can be tasted. To deny access to salt by taxation, price or the regulations of mass incarceration is to colonize human life itself. It is to assert that only certain types of human life are beyond price and have inherent dignity.

In his book Debt, activist anthropologist David Graeber calls gestures like passing the salt “baseline communism.” If you sit at a table with someone, whether in your own home or a dining place elsewhere, and they ask you to pass the salt, you simply do it. You don’t try and monetize the transaction. You don’t demand some kind of reciprocal gesture, like passing the pepper, just because you passed the salt. It is the simple recognition that the request comes from a human being like yourself.

This common interaction suggests that, as Graeber puts it, “communism is the foundation of all human sociability,” not to be confused with the formerly existing state Communism of the Soviet period. Nor is it about the exchange of goods. It’s the basic generosity and hospitality that makes human social life possible. It was this impetus, for example, that led the Native peoples of the Americas to give food to white settlers to their long-term detriment.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi protested against the British imposition of a tax on salt in colonial India by walking to the sea in his now-famous Salt March. Arrived at the coast, he picked up a handful of dried salt, deliberately breaking the colonial law. The absurdity of the colonizer prohibiting the colonized from using a natural product epitomized the baseline stupidity of colonialism. It was perhaps his most effective act of non-violent resistance, or satyagraha, and some 60,000 Indians were arrested for contravening the salt laws in similar fashion.

A few years ago, I visited the University of Pretoria in South Africa. I used the example of salt as baseline communism in a seminar. Later, students told me that the university had recently introduced a charge for salt in its cafeteria. It was just a couple of cents, irrelevant to those like myself with means, so I had not noticed. For those without resources, always the Black South African students, such small charges are exactly what prevent them from being able to study.

Shackville at University of Cape Town, 2015

Just as utility debt, rent arrears or a traffic ticket can disrupt African-American social life, as Ferguson has taught us, so could this little salt tax end the possibility of a Black South African student making ends meet. In 2012, Black South Africans earned an average 3000 rand ($224) per month. Assuming that a student might not make that average, it’s easy to see how even small extra charges add up. At Wits University, one of the most expensive, student fees range between 30,000 and 60,000 rand. As a result, only 53% of Black South African students graduate six years after beginning their degree. As many as a third drop out after only a year.

The students did not accept their endless immiseration. When the Zuma government attempted to raise tuition fees by 8%, they rose up, created #FeesMustFall and defeated the increase. The student movement has now turned to decolonizing education, using the slogan “Decolonize the Curriculum.” For Dr Shoshe Kessi of the Black Academic Caucus, “we can’t have a dialogue about Black people’s dignity. That is a given.” And yet it is not. That is why the Palestinian hunger strike is a dignity strike and why the hunger strike is a decolonial action.

In the Palestinian hunger strike in Israeli prisons, the regime has taken to denying the strikers salt. They had been consuming only water mixed with salt, a basic and fundamental nutrient without which life is endangered. Denying salt is denying life. More exactly, it denies social life, which is to say, human life. Graeber describes how communities like those of the Iroquois are divided into halves. The two sides interact in specific ways. You can marry only people from the other side, while you are obligated to bury their dead, just as they bury yours. “Society will always exist,” says Graeber. “Therefore there will always be a north side and a south side of the village.”

The regime wants to deny that possibility. It refuses the principle of hospitality, which capital has mutated into “the hospitality industry,” a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. According to Graeber, there is an Arab story that a burglar accidentally tasted the salt in a house he was robbing. Realizing that he had partaken of their salt, he replaced their property because now he was bound to them. Israel wants to be bound to no one and to deny the possibility of there being common life between peoples of different religions or ethnic backgrounds.

Aarab Barghouti, Marwan Barghouti’s son, launched the “saltwater challenge.” He drank a glass of salt water, like that then being consumed by the strikers, and challenged others to do the same. Thousands have done so, including Yacoub Shaheen, the winner of Arab Idol 2017. In a striking understanding of what is at stake, hospitality industry businesses like the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah have posted videos of their staff taking the challenge.

What is the meaning of this challenge? It does not raise money like the ALS Ice Water challenge. It recognizes that the “village” of the social world exists, even and especially in prisons. By performing the action of those imprisoned, the challenged do not pretend that their conditions are the same. Rather they recognize that there is a duty of care toward the incarcerated. It is to enact the conditions of baseline communism in the only way possible.

Tags decolonial