Politics – Page 11 – Ariel Sheen

Review of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression”

Several years ago I’d heard on NPR an insightful interview of Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. My interest in the work piqued, the book sat with the myriad others on my Amazon Wish List until I started creating a Long Civil Rights course track for the IB History classes I’m teaching and from my experience in the classroom I highly recommend it as a companion book/follow up reading to Reconstruction.

Kelley opens by describing the feudal milieu that Communist Party activists sought to change through the Share Croppers Union. Housing settlements are widely disbursed and are not owned by the farmers that occupy them; there are no social centers besides churches that have their preachers vetted by plantation owners; the caloric options from company provision outlets was poor and yet high-priced. Pay rates were also so poor that farmers relied upon home gardens and “odd jobs” to get by. During periods when they were not harvesting or planting, because their housing wasn’t owned, they had to rely upon company welfare – which was often required to be paid back – or government welfare that is cut as soon as planters needs workers. Any attempts at organizing against such living conditions would often mean forced eviction and beatings.

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If living in this sort of economic deprivation wasn’t discouraging enough, there is then the environment of virulent racism that workers and organizers had to live in. The attempt by black share croppers to demand a more just price for their work based upon the actual commodity prices could lead to murder predicated on the defense of Southern Femininity as it was the planter’s wives that often kept the books for the business. Kelley’s narrative abounds with poor black farmers or political organizers that are kidnapped, beaten, shot or hanged by police. The police also give these people over to vigilante squads and fail to prosecute white people for crimes against blacks.

The Communist Party and it’s associate organization the International Labor Defense rouse sentiments and are able to mobilize against such a socially unequal legal order which made no real effort to prosecute lynchings. This activity was all the more heroic as it accomplished with pushback both from white supremacist organizations such as the KKK as well as the “respectable” NAACP. Representing the aspirations of the burgeoning black middle class that saw many poor blacks denial of enfranchisement as just and the confrontational street-politics of the CPUSA as antagonistic to the white allies they hoped to impress, the NAACP red-baited and sought to undermine the organization’s philosophy while the latter group beat and assassinated it’s members. Based upon their defense of the Scottsboro Boys and their role in winning some strikes for better wages and working conditions, however, they managed to seed themselves in the hearts of many Alabamians before and after the Popular Front Period.

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The radical economic changes brought about by New Deal Policies changes everything. Government subsidies are granted to the owners of large agricultural holdings to industrially mechanize. While there was a small amount of resettlement funds itemized allotted to tenant farmers leaving the plantation, they often did not receive it. This army of unemployed mostly made their way into the mining industry next. There they faced racist, dual unions, similar housing arrangements as before and, following the passage of more repressive legislation, a host of pretexts for police to prevent their freedom of speech and organization. Those that were not able to obtain employment, or those that were fired from the mines, had to deal with a patronizing and intrusive system of welfare distribution.

A slew of Communist party organizers and their sympathizers are assassinated while those that live are socially ostracized by the black middle class and white liberals. Kelley breaks down a number of the considerations of the Popular Front and contextualizes the shift to embedding in the CIO as it rises to prominence and additionally gives a number of biographical sketches that gives compelling background to the CPUSA membership. By bringing in their private lives in addition to the struggles faced as a result of political activity that did not always follow CP directives, Kelley humanizes a group that we learn is more maligned because it represented an alternate ideology of modernism and the eradication of racial privilege rather than it’s slavishness as a fifth column for an “evil” foreign power.

This type of first hand account of developing activity on the ground that is constantly adapting to deal with new and often profound exigencies is quite simply an excellent case-study based way for a modern organizer to understand how to obtain true political allegiances and traction within a community by responding to and anticipating it’s needs. The variety of practical considerations makes it an excellent resource for those interested in political organizing. hammerandhoe

Interview with Adam Sheetz

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I’ve been acquainted with South Florida based artist Adam Sheetz for almost a decade now. I met him first at FAU, watching him perform in an anti-war folk duo he lead. After being taken in by the combination of high talent and humility I was further impressed as we spoke on current political issues. Since then I’ve seen his talents contribute to other worthy musical endeavors in numerous local spaces and also seen his graphic art work at a number of venues. While a fan from the beginning, I’ve also noticed that at each new encounter with his work that his artistry has improved – something noticed not just by me but also by those that voted for him and got him the award of New Times Best Visual Artist of 2015.

I met with Adam Sheetz at his house in West Palm Beach. After he showed me around his house filled with unique, carnivalesque art and guitars I chatted with his wife Lindsey for a bit we made our way to his studio. After I looked over the canvases that were in the room and perused some of the books in his library, many of which I also had in mine, we had a shot of whiskey in homage to our shared appreciation of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson then cracked open beers and started talking about a number of things. As the interview was three hours and forty-five minutes, or 38 pages transcribed, it had been edited for readability and concision. Enjoy!

Ariel: So what are you setting up on the easel right now?

Adam: I thought of a Trump piece last night. I’m going to do Trump now in a big diaper crashing through D.C.

Ariel: One of the things that I’ve noticed in the content of you work is a negation of the dominant tropes and narrative of American society – be they politicians, police or religious figures. A negation of that negation, as it were.

Adam: Well I try and leap for the most exaggerated, most grotesque forms of what is actually out there. I really want to be objective for this show. I don’t really want to be supporting any particular candidate. I just want to put the shit out there. I’m not in the business to make people look pretty, I’m in the business to expose people for what they are. If I can elevate the negative to a level that is so farfetched from what it actually is, but within that there are still tenants of a deeper truth, well than that is exactly the kind of attention that they deserve and need. I’m not saying exaggeration is the only way to arrive at a real truth, if you are just telling it like it is, few people are going to pay attention. If you throw in some tits or a politician jacking off or something, people are more likely to look. I mean, why shouldn’t artists use the same methods of big business advertising and culture. Sex sells.

Ariel: That’s precisely why my second book has so much sex in it.

Adam: There you go.

Ariel: So I really like your Animal Farm series. I’m curious to see what thoughts you have that words and qualities associated with being an animal, apart from being a tiger in bed and or hung like an elephant, are typically negative. Do you think that this type of objectification influences the way that people treat the environment?

Adam: I actually wasn’t even going for it in that sense, but I like the connection.

Ariel: You can use that if you like.

Adam: [Laughs] Yeah, I will. With that piece, you know one thing that I have been struggling with in my art, especially taking as a subject something so explicitly that is thematically socio-political, you know the easy way out would be to do each politician as they are. You know do their portrait in some way, but you know that’s only going to last for 2-4 years before it is irrelevant. But the problems are always the same.

Ariel: That’s a really good formulation.

Adam: So my struggle is you know, how do I attack these people by attacking the problems that they are creating? I’ve found very often that the best way to do that is through animals. There are so many parallels to different personality types in the animal world. Not just that, but the symbolism that animals hold in the Bible. I feel that I do a better service to the issues by not putting the people in there. I think if you put people and faces that are recognisable, it gives them more credit than they deserve. It then makes the piece about them, and I think if you make it about them you ultimately miss the bigger structural issues at hand. It makes my art more universal.

I don’t want to be thought of as a cartoonist. I want my low-brow shit to be infiltrating the high-brow world. I want to just flip it on its ass. I think animals are just the best way to represent people at the end of the day [laughs]. With that series, you know each animal represents a different aspect of society

Ariel: Walk me through it?

Adam: Sure. Rather than an eagle, my take on the national bird is the vultures – that’s why it’s displayed with the flag in the background. It’s the first piece in the series and it’s meant to orient people so they know the theme is America politics. Then there’s the saturated pink and green pig. The green background because money and the pig is the businessman. Then there’s the yellow cowardly sheep, which is basically the general population being shepherded around. Then there is the peacock, which is your glitz and glam reality TV culture. The peacock and the sheep go hand in hand because you get to the point of being a peacock and only concern yourself with exterior appearance and keeping up with the Joneses and the status quo. I think ultimately it evolves you to being rolled in with the sheep.

Ariel: Interesting. I took it to represent bourgeois intellectuals.

PH44art800 Adam: The peacock?

Ariel: Yeah.

Adam: That wasn’t my intention. The peacock is the animal representing one of the seven deadly sins, so that was my thought behind it. But I always enjoy hearing what people take away from it, especially if it is not what I intended because now I could have a whole new narrative. Tell me more what you mean.

Ariel: So for me it’s the smile that makes it what I said. Peacocks represent the regal, the rich, but they are not it. To mix bird metaphors here, they parrot the rhetorical positions of “jobs creators”, and get well kept for it, like birds in a menagerie. I don’t know, maybe it’s just something about that smile that makes me think of William Buckley.

Adam: The thing I love about art is when I do a piece, by the time I am done the narrative has changed and I find things that I draw that I wouldn’t call forced symbolism but triggers “that means that” even though at the time it wasn’t what I intended. See

Ariel: Counter to what we have been talking about, I have a question about The Death of Marat. This piece, is there at particular face that was supposed to be on there?

Adam: No. There was no particular face. I was reinterpreting the well know piece by David. That is actually one of my favorite pieces of David’s. I wrote one of my finals in college on him, basically paralleling him to Fox News and other major news networks because at the end of the day they only report what they are paid to report. If whoever owns the company, like Murdoch, doesn’t like something they are not going to report on it. David was a patron of whoever was in power at the time. Whatever direction the revolution was going and whoever paid him the most, that was who he painted for. So I kind of equated him to a news network of that time. The French revolutionary epoch is so fascinating. It paved the way for so many things, politically, socially and artistically. I’m glad you asked about that piece.

Ariel: Well, I wanted to bring it up as even though your style has changed since then I see within it, almost all of your work really, the same radical, emancipatory spirit that inspired the art of that period.

Adam: Thank you! I’m getting goosebumps. That is a very kind compliment.

Ariel: Yeah, it’s why I like you work so much – it speaks to my head and to my gut.

Adam: Good! I want my work to cause a visceral reaction like that. I want people to walk out of my show feeling unsettled. I don’t claim to have all the solutions to addressing the social grotesqueries that have become banal and commonplace and thus accepted. I want my art to put a question mark in my audience’s head that encourages them to seek some sort of answer. I don’t expect that my work will change the world, but god damn it if it isn’t my hope.

Ariel: Well, if it’s any consolation I can’t stand most of the art that I consume at galleries or museums and yet yours speaks to me.

Adam: Thank you. I mean yeah, as it is conceived today, I am a shitty contemporary artist because I don’t pay attention to what is happening in the world. I mean it’s the commercialised world in this day and age. For the most part, that or you’re a “crafter”. You know? For as pompous as I sounded saying that, I don’t mean to. I’m probably one of the most humble guys. You know?

Ariel: Yeah, I mean, I’ve known you for a long time and you definitely are.

Ariel: Yeah, I get it. I’ve been trying to get into contemporary writers. I mean, it’s hard. They write about bullshit I don’t care about. I mean you can only read so many “troubled home” stories before it’s like… okay. I get it. You had a shitty home life. Now find something other to talk about that’s bigger than you.

Adam: Exactly! All art is really just regurgitation at this point. A lot of what I have seen in contemporary art basically just tries to match the formula of what sold last year. There are handfuls of artists that are doing something real, though fuck if I know who they are. I know they are out there, they have to be, I’m also not going to wade through a bunch of mire just to fin them. I mean, that’s part of the reason I try not to pay attention to “what’s hot”. I don’t want to be inadvertently influenced by anything like that, for better or worse. If I want to be influenced I go back to my heroes like Goya, Basquiat, Deschamps and of course Stedman and Picasso. And speaking of Picasso, actually, his work has a style I’ve been trying to figure out lately how to do. I’ve been trying to do a 2D painting of 3D, by mixing and matching the planes. I always thought that was such an interesting concept – but I want to take it a step further, like paint something illustrating the detritus of our current socio-political climate. You know, where there’s not just one problem but all these different angles. I think a cubist representation of that would be a very honest.

Ariel: But what would that look like? I mean, the way you describe it makes me think of Balzac’s the Unknown Masterpiece, which ends with a brief description of this painting that’s clearly aligned with the Zeitgeist and yet nearly indescribable as a language has yet to come together to structure it’s meaning.

Adam: Honestly, I have no idea yet. I couldn’t even say what the subject would be at the moment but I’ll get there. I use liberty a lot as my subject. So just thinking off the top of my head I imagine it might relate to her. But if I were to do a cubist piece I think it would be, maybe something along the lines of the three bathers painting. Something like I did with the “Now and Then” series with Liberty, Justice and Nature. I would probably do those three women in a cubist style and try and fit as many planes of conflict as I could in there. That may be my project for next year, though I’m not sure.

Ariel: I like the concept and am glad you brought up your “Now and Then” series depicting Nature, Justice and Liberty. I thought was great visually, but I’m honestly a bit wary of the politics of nostalgia. Could you speak on your intentions with it, as the implies something that, say, “Ideal and Actual” does not.

Adam: It never existed fully, no, though at the same time you could say that the pre-Colombian people’s here had something closer. I mean, if you look at all of the social injustices from the start of our country, we’ve never been a fully equal society and a fully just society. With the exception of nature, I don’t think there was ever a truly ideal “Then” for any of the subjects that was fully representative of what we all would love them to be.

As far as liberty goes, I’d also say that was significantly more prevalent prior to the kind of techno-surveillance culture we have not. Not for everybody, slavery, obviously, but I feel that liberty has taken a turn for the worse and I guess that was really the turning point between the then and now.

Ariel: So I’m glad to hear that you feel the “Then” never existed, and is just a rhetorical trope as I was going to get on your case about that. After all, it’s a variant of Donald’s “Make America Great Again”.

Adam: [Laughs] Glad you were ready to call me out. I don’t make art for people to tell me it’s good. I expect to be challenged. I’m actually glad you brought that up because you’re absolutely right and I agree with you 100%. But for the sake of the piece it’s the starting point of a narrative. One that starts out as a fairy tale – this utopia that never existed – and we arrive at this gross truth of what it actually is. I think with this view the “then” is exists as hope as something that we can return to, rather something that we can arrive at for the first time.

Ariel: I like that. It evokes the idea of a return to paradise almost, even thought the then is something that we would be arriving at for the first time. Which all makes me think of a desire armed to return there. Considering that Lake Worth is the home of the Earth First Journal and your works contains a number of radical political themes I was wondering if there has been any sort of exchange between you and them.

Adam: Actually, yes. Earth First has contacted me a few times. Unfortunately we have never really lined up on some of the stuff I have versus what they needed. That’s actually a good reminder for me to reach back out them because now I have a few pieces that might be interesting for them. I love Earth First. I love everything they are doing. Somebody needs to do it.

You know and early on at FAU, like ’07-08, right before I met Cecil and you, I played in an anti-war folk band. I had a percussionist and me on acoustic guitar. I used to play at protests against the Iraq war. I was a member of A.N.S.W.R. Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. I went to Washington DC with them in September when Petraeus was coming out with his new budget report and asking for more money for Iraq. There was big protests going on – not on the news, of course – and we took a van to D.C. We marched to the capital, some friends got arrested. One of the organizers was one of the first men on the ground. His name was Mike and he had a video which went viral. Although there is not much time for it now. I still feel like I am doing my part with painting, because somebody has to.

[We break to have a cigarette outside]

Ariel: Now that I see it in your garage, in front of me, one of the questions I had for you was for you to walk me through The Persistence of Reality. The picture on your website is small, but it is such a huge piece.

Adam: It is so far my best attempt at paying homage to Hieronymus Bosch. This piece basically maps the terrain a barren kind of cultural landscape. The only thing that looks lush and fertile is the facade. This quest for visibility and 15 minutes of fame – reality TV culture – I think is dragging us through the mud as a culture.

So you have here these people lining up to go down to watch framed in a manner that alludes to Bosch’s work, “The Cure of Folly”. Back in the day people used to think that people who did bad things had something in their brain and called the Folly Stone. Because of this belief they, logicially, originated the practice of lobotomies originated. They would take out a piece of the brain thinking that would cure them of evil, which is why there are medieval tools in the picture. Up here you have the US Capital Building, the Whitehouse and the flames with this big monster. You have the Hollywood spotlights going. Nobody is paying attention. These are two of my favorite figures that I have come up with. You basically notice that the eyeball around it looks a lot like a vagina. The tear duct is like a clit. So I kind of flipped around, stuck an eyeball in there and created this kind of Uncle Sam foyer figures. You know, kind of representative of the NSA.

Adam: The lush fertile area is just a backdrop. The stiletto wearing vultures. It’s the transformation of what was once the sacred feminine, into this profane “women are bitches and whores”. It’s just a fuckfest down here.

Ariel: Considering that we’ve been talking about animal’s relationship to your work, I like the animal masks that you have them wearing.

Adam: You could chalk it up to the laziness of not wanting to paint a bunch of faces.

[laughter]

Ariel: Did you go to school for art? Or are you self-taught?

Adam: A little bit of both. I went to school for studio arts/graphic design but I still haven’t technically graduated FAU. I learned a lot, but basically I kept going to get access to materials. There’s a number of professors there who have helped shape the seriousness with which I do my work. Of all my art training, what I took the most from was my art history classes, more than the practical application and the studio classes. The studio classes were a chance for me to exercise what I had already been doing, but with new tools.

Ariel: So how do you think your art has changed over time?

Adam: One of the things that I struggled with earlier on in my career was arriving at my own style that was separate from my influences. That was the struggle. I think where I am now compared to where I was 10 years ago and it’s a whole different world. To go deeper, there was a point where I had to break down what I was doing and rebuild it. This is no small task, you know, a whole new world had to be built upon the old. I adhere to that concept in a lot of aspects in life. I think that it’s the most productive way to go about anything at the end of the day – something’s not working, you tear it down and build upon it. Now, for me to pick up the pen and the brush and have it be fulfilling, I really have to be saying something. If I’m not saying anything, it’s a waste of my time… unless I’m getting paid [laughs]. I’ve got a little one to feed. I’m not going to be the one to paint a still-life with a bowl of fruit in it.

Ariel: Or like just a nude.

Adam: Right. I mean it’s not saying anything.

Ariel: Right?! I mean love women. I will ogle and appreciate and blah, blah, blah. But when it comes to my taste in art, however, I need to have some kind of more redeeming, edifying element. I want my naked women to be leading the people.

Adam: Exactly, like Lady Liberty Leading the People. That’s one of my favorites. I actually got to see that one in person at the Louvre.

Ariel: Oh. So on the about you section on your website, you say that you frame your work as portraits of beauty by means of crude exaggeration. Do you think that the anti-septic nature of current socio-political discourse is detrimental.

Adam: Yeah, everything today has got to be so prim and proper and clean and the choice of what people emphasize as being important is just so askew. A lot of times nobody can tell it like it is because so many people have become over-sensitive cry-babies. I mean we live in a culture where you get a trophy just for fucking showing up. That’s what it’s become.

I don’t know when it happened, but I think my generation was when that shift happened. I’m 27 and I can remember my senior class was the first class ever at Cardinal Newman where no one that graduated received senior superlatives in the yearbooks. Too many mothers complained that their son or daughter wasn’t picked for something, so they stopped doing it. I don’t know why this generation has stopped knowing what it was to earn something. I also went to a private Catholic school so a lot of the children were privileged too.

Ariel: I knew a few girls there from when I was in high school, so I know what you mean.

Adam: Haha, yeah… So I was the bottom bracket of the kids at that school. Which I enjoyed because you know, I could be my own person. But I think that the societal discourse of giving trophies just for showing up-

Ariel: We are going to talk about some adult things, “trigger warning”.

Adam: Yeah, and I don’t see how sugar-coating everything and being so politically correct that there is not an ounce of truth in what you are saying, none of that s anything that can help bring us forward. Nobody wants to hear the truth, nobody wants to hear the bad stuff. I’m not saying that foul language etc should be a part… that’s not what we are talking about. Being PC all the time doesn’t get us anywhere though. You can’t have a positive and a positive and expect a reaction at the end of the day. If you break it down to physics.

Ariel: Well I mean, I think at least from the developmental sense. Everybody fails at some point.

Adam: You have to fail and you need to learn how to deal with it. It’s a given that I want the best for my son, that I want him to succeed. But I don’t want him to succeed without failing first on his own. I don’t want him to be destitute, living in a gutter. Failure is a part of life, it is how you grow. Sometimes you run into those walls in your life where you just have to make a decision and hope it pans out. Hopefully you come out smelling like a rose. It’s a practice of to keeping your wits about you, you know?

Relating this to my art, I think about when I stopped drawing with a pencil and started drawing with a pen. I was forced not to throw the piece away, and make something out of the mistake. That’s been something that I live my life by. I think everybody is expecting to go through life with their own personal filter when what they really need is to grow a thicker skin. Nothing is the end of the world.

Ariel: Except global climactic change.

Adam: This is true [laughs]. But even that, I think the anti-septic nature with which that political message is delivered may be doing a social disservice. Treat the public like they can handle how many billions invested in housing and infrastructure will be lost due to catastrophe and maybe something more substantive can be done about it. Instead of the honesty we have fucking Rick Scott preventing state workers from even using the phrase “climate change”. What a sad joke! It’s reasons like that which is why you can’t have an honest debate. It’s just arguing feelings.

Ariel: Yeah, totally! Like I was saying outside, I’m increasingly tired of trying to have real discussions with people online. I don’t talk about things I don’t know about but nobody else seems to think that this matters. They want what that guy [I point to the illustrations of Donald Trump] gives them, they want feelings rather than a complex, nuanced historically based perspective.

Adam: Or they want a sound board where they can bounce their shit off and hear themselves talk, or hear it regurgitated back to them in an agreeable manner. It’s all bullshit and just adds to the veil that is clouding our perception of what reality is. Not everybody is going to get along. That’s just a fucking fact. Find out your differences. Agree to disagree and if it don’t really matter then move the fuck on. Don’t get so butt-hurt if shit doesn’t go your way. If shit doesn’t go your way, maybe you should figure out a way to make it so that shit does go your way. Not in a negative sense though.

Ariel: You frame it in a way that I am wholly in accord with. One some of these important issues lets relate to each other on the actions that need be taken together as a community and through that we’ll heal some of our own issues.

Adam: Exactly.

Ariel: I love how you are all about doing something creatively, that I do as well in my writing, which is openly assimilating forms and styles from other places. A couple of other artists I know are so caught up in trying to be completely original that I think it hinders their ability to compose something great.

Adam: You can’t be original now. We’re just reshaping the past in a way so that the present can understand it. If I was so focused on creating something new, I would be wasting so much energy that I would end up with nothing. What I am creating is original enough, but it’s also an amalgamation of many things past – as all art is. History isn’t some thing, it’s what is happening now. And there are always smart, talented people who have said and done better than we can currently dream of creating.

Ariel: Heroes.

Adam: Exactly, and my heroes have always been those people who said it better. So I think by thinking that you can do it better in your own way is awfully arrogant.

Ariel: And neurotic.

Adam: Yeah. That’s the thing as well, seeking that kind of false comforting thought means that there is no drive to better oneself. Why try any harder in a format that other people have already mastered? Because there is the easy way and the hard way and it’s only in the latter time you really learn who you are.

If I can be vulnerable right now, that is one of the reasons I try to be so serious about the outside things that I tap into for my work. Whether that is historical subjects or different artists. I research because I enjoy and love learning and research. I write different notes and ideas down. I have a little pad that I sketch the ideas and inspirations for my bigger pieces. It’s a juvenile approach.

Kind of like throwing a bunch of shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. It often starts when I am trying to fall asleep. In order to do that I try to use ideating sleep rituals, it helps create a pattern of creative thought. Hopefully I remember it when I wake up. Some I do, some I don’t. I feel like the ones I don’t remember weren’t meant to be created. And anyway I don’t have the time to do every idea. The ones I do remember end up being fairly successful and what I want them to be. So I basically start with a general idea that begins with me trying to fall asleep and then when Thursday-Friday comes around I get the opportunity to put pen to paper. For pieces there is a lot of research involved whether it is researching history or artists or different composition styles, or researching different design clips that I can use. More often than not it is body parts or mechanical things. I’ll print them out and see what kinds of shapes I can make and how it can work. Sometimes I scrap it, but a lot of times I’ll just lay the stuff out, stick it on the paper and force it to dictate the piece to me, based on what sticks out to me at the time. It’s a push and pull. A lot of times, what I find out during the process will tell me something different to what I started with and I’ll end up meeting in the middle. Then all of the vibrancy, perversity, saturation – everything in my work – has to speak to something. Nothing is arbitrary. If it’s a line somewhere, it’s for a reason.

The way I see it’s like, good art is a psychic weapon that attacks things. This is my spell casting book.

Ariel: Then you must be like Hermoine, I see that you’re constantly making new works and it’s all so great. You are much more disciplined than I am as well. It looks great though.

Adam: I try to maintain discipline. Gonzo style. With everything around the house, being a new dad, I put in at least 10-15 hours a week on my own work. It’s a habit. Heh. The things around the house I need to write down, keep a schedule for work. Not for my own stuff though, I don’t want it to feel like work but second nature. It took discipline to get to this point, but I knew if it didn’t I wouldn’t get to this point. If I have a goal, I will work non-stop. If I don’t have some big project at the end of the line, it’s harder. So thankfully, I’ve got this show coming up. It will definitely be something they have never seen before.

Did I tell you one of my marketing tactics I’m going to do is campaign signs and the name of the show is going to be called “Nobody is safe” and it’s going to be put all throughout Cleveland. Super bright posters. Red, white and blue. It’s where we are right now.

Ariel: After this series, do you have anything you were thinking about next.

Adam: I was thinking of doing a show out west in California next summer. The Dead Kennedy’s are a huge influence on me and what I say and do in my work. They are the first band that I feel has the same velocity and crassness but still poignant at the same time. I feel like it is what a want to achieve with my work. A juvenile yet sensitive rejection of authority.

So my idea of a follow up show would be doing a series on Dead Kennedy’s and hopefully getting Jello, if not the whole band involved somehow.

Ariel: Who knows, maybe he’ll end up reading this and be as taken in with your art as I have been so he’ll reach out to you.

If you’re in the area, make sure to check out Adam’s upcoming showing, information below.

Also visit his website to purchase prints and follow him on Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date with what he’s working on!

The Hipster Demagogue, The Leftist Professor & The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The post-conference party’s second wave had arrived and soon
I notice familiar sly hand gestures, so tag on to the end
Of the exodus from the Christmas light lit living room to
The dilapidated upstate New York porch packed with old couches.

My mouth is soon on the blunt after a friendly inquiry
And we get to talking about the sessions we’d seen,
And what it will mean for the Social Justice Movement in America
To have a Black President as The Man in power for the first time ever.

The mixed race political theorist that the other students
Call Heideggerian-Anarchist behind his back, or so my friend
Tells me, performs a longwinded paean to Possibilities
That I, a historian, counter with a less sanguine assessment.

Having been pulled under the wing of someone that’s
Made a career of saying such things in glossy magazines
He counters my empiricism with arrogant idealism –
I almost respond with blows, but think “decorum”, hit it again then go.

I float past those spastically dancing to the irregular beats
And lyrics with love-lost themes on the uneven living room
Back to the seat that I had just occupied only to find that
It’s now been taken by the event’s keynote speaker.

His scarf brushes again and again against the band
On his ring finger as he gesticulates high to low
In and out to emphasize whatever he’s explaining
To the manic pixie dream girl sitting next to him.

There’s a red string braided into her unkempt bleached
Orange hair, she wears a chain necklace with boho baubles,
Has a glass of five-dollar-a-bottle champagne in her hand
And a neighbor looking up at me with a fuck off stare.

I lie through my teeth and give compliment to his speech
That claimed an understanding of Ancient Greek Tragedy
Should inform how we frame resistance to contemporary policies
And that seizing the state is no way to stop neoliberalism.

Given this gem of status in front of his hopeful conquest
He repeats in his West Herts accent the same jest he opened with
About how glad he was that while the TSA did cause delay,
X-rays can’t yet reveal worldviews and so he was able to make it.

Turning to assess her reception he smiles seeing her do the same,
Unaware that she came from VT to see me and is mine, for now;
His face again frowns as I bend down and say just loud enough for
The three of us: I’ve grown tired of this, let’s go back to the hotel

Let’s forget all the things we think we know and just go
At each other like the animals we are for as long as
Our bodies will last and she says: Yes, let’s.
And this is why I love her, in my own way.

Review of “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida”

When it comes to understanding the physical formation of greater Miami A World More Concrete by N. D. B. Connolly was incredibly insightful. The Magic City, so called because of its transformation from frontier town to urban region was by far the fastest of its time. Marketers of the Magic City sought to advertise it, justifiably so, as a Caribbean city for elites to leisure upon. However at variance from the other islands within the temperate climate band – such as Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba – it didn’t have the preponderance of poor blacks that this class found unsettling. Not that they weren’t present, just that they were visible only as help. White terrorism, apartheid passes and Jim Crow police enforcement kept blacks from coming onto the beaches so favored by economic elites. Contestation of such treatment was limited by this as well as conflict between Caribbean and American-born blacks while cultural expressions of resistance to this – as well as the colonial and slave history, such as the Junkanoo parades in the area that would come to be known as Overtown – were geographically distanced far from major tourist areas.

Connolly examines the economics of segregation and the various forms of legal frameworks used to perpetuate racial segregation. Constitutional language – specifically property rights – was the primary means of perpetuating and expanding Jim Crow and New South government policies. While real estate was also a means of creating a Civil Rights political discourse, for taxpayers ought to have the same access to goods (like beaches) and services (like schools), it was not an inherently progressive framework.
Describing in fascinating detail the rhetorical tropes used to perpetuate Jim Crow, Connolly rejects the simplistic narrative that pits the black struggle for civil rights against a white defense of property rights. He limns why and the manner in which class caused propertied and property managing African Americans to embrace the logic and laws of real estate for their own ends. Connolly’s interpretation specifies the creation of class alliances between ruthless white exploitation and the black middle-class. To varying degrees, entrepreneurs, landlords, elected officials, and self-styled urban reformers all participated in eminent domain and land control schemes through mechanisms such as housing associations that helped to take advantage of the black poor. To what extent were poor blacks ruthlessly exploited? As an investment, from the 1930s to the early 1960s, black housing was the most profitable real estate investment that one could make. While rental housing for white Americans would fetch an average rate of return around 6%, for blacks it was an astonishing 27%! Blacks would often pay per week what whites paid per month for rent and it would be significantly lacking the amenities and quality of construction of the types of homes that whites lived in.

Landlords preyed on the fact that blacks had limited capital available to defend their cases in a court system that had not yet taken much account of renters rights, that tenant organizing could be meet with counter-resistance from better financed, organized and politically connected landlords, that a politics of respectability and conference decision making with community leaders determined policy rather than recourse to democratic procedures and that all class conflict would be framed as racial and thus would perpetuate racial sentiments. Landlords as a category was not limited to native-born whites. Blacks, Cubans, Seminoles, Haitians, and other Caribbean groups all invested in segregation to the point at which home ownership within communities vacillated from 10% to 20%. Whites were clearly the predominant holders of capital investment in real estate, while “credit’s to their race” that engaged in similar investments like M. Athalie Range and Luther Brooks gave a gloss of legitimacy to it.

Historiography on urban racial segregation must be embedded within the larger framework of the history of capitalism. Connolly’s close analysis of primary sources allows the reader to expand their understanding of the close and mutually constitutive relationships among liberalism, capitalism, and racism by placing real estate at the center of all. Conflicts over the value of land shaped Miami, indeed all American cities, in ways that social movements, local policy reforms, and legal arguments could not undo. There is almost a perverse creativity to the opportunistic alliances and deceptive actions that informed the geospatial and georacial composition of modern Miami. Eminent domain could be used to dispossess poor blacks of real estate at a lower than market price desired by whites, to force the government to purchase real estate for a higher than market price for housing no longer seen as a desirable investment and to condemn housing that was seen by white homeowners as existing too close to their neighborhoods.

Connolly’s focus on the enduring power of the racist social order and property rights at the heart of Jim Crow sheds new light on the limits a civil rights movement could have when predicated on property-rights. Unfulfilled economic promises and public-private chicanery was not the outliers but the norm. Capitalism and the profit motive thus not only underwrote urban governance and preserved Jim Crow, but also put real estate at the center of Miami’s race relations. The neighborhood case studies of Overtown, Liberty City, Good Bread Alley, Allapatah, Nazarene, Liberty Square, Railroad Shop, and Para Village show how local entrepreneurs were able to exploit the racism underlying the practices of the Federal Housing Authority, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal National Mortgage Association for self-enrichment.

Unpacking Happy's Chapter

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved gangsta movies. I’d set up fake Colombia House accounts in order to get free VHS tapes of films like Menace II Society, Boyz ‘n the Hood, New Jack City, Juice, Paid In Full, and Deep Cover and watch them over and over again.
Whereas Jesse’s chapter is stylized after Spanish picaresque and German Bildungsroman literature, Happy’s is based on these films as well as a number of original documents and documentaries. _{1, 2, 3}

Rather than merely replicate these narratives, however, I wanted to inverse a number of the tropes that are found in these gangster films/reality to depict a gang that is crypto-socialist, truly consensual work relations rather than that which is strictly primitive-capitalist and based on force.
Now presuming that you’re familiar with the above listed movies, so I don’t have to cite each, here are some of those narrative tropes that I mentioned/inverted.
1. The leader of a group got due to his ruthless violence or a chance encounter with a plug rather than his intellect.
2. The leader of the group stays in power based upon loyalty out of fear and not of love (unless relations are also familial).
3. The capture of power foreshadows similar machinations on the part of someone else within the organization that similarly wants to take over.
4. Wealth created from the criminal venture predominantly accumulates in the hands of those at the top.
5. This wealth created goes primarily towards the administrator’s consumption, which leads to organizational degeneration in some fashion.
6. Money spent is primarily upon luxury goods that are flaunted.
7. This leads to general envy/viewing the criminal enterprise as the best provider for income and entices those willing to do whatever to get it, but this makes community relations poor.
Making an analogy to larger institutions of political economy, as I would like my readers to so, I can say in short hand that the typically depicted criminal association is more akin to an absolute monarchy.
This passage shows Happy’s organization is significantly different and touches upon a number of the problems that will be delved into later in the chapter. Specifically what is the Project; the impact that the investigation into Officer Daniels illegal dealings; who the other person is that Happy is getting information from in the police department; their relationship to the Zoe Pounds; the possibility that some conflict might transpire should a power vacuum be created from several Zoe Pounds members finding themselves arraigned; who are these important people in Atlanta that requires Happy to have to meet them in person, etc.
I’ve still got a lot to write about for this chapter to near completion – but I hope this explanation of a portion of my project and the small section of the chapter convinces you that my serial novel project is worth getting into and you buy Book 1 of Unraveling!

On The Historical Echoes of Kanye West’s Notion of Freedom

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My DP1 – History of the Americas students are now reading Reconstruction by Eric Foner and one of them pointed out the above tweet to me by Kanye West. What’s the connection between the two? Well, let me juxtapose it with this quote by Thaddeus Stevens, bold section added by me:

We especially insist that the property of the chief rebels should be seized and [used for] the payment of the national debt, caused by the unjust and wicked war they instigated…

The whole fabric of southern society must be changed and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it has never been, a true republic…

Nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen as to make him a freeholder [landowner]. Nothing will so multiply the production of the South as to divide it into small farms. Nothing will make men so industrious and moral as to let them feel that they are above want and are the owners of the soil which they till… No people will ever be republican in spirit and practice where a few own immense manors and the masses are landless. Small and independent landholders are the support and guardians of republican liberty.

To give the above quote by Stevens context. It’s also worth noting that in class we’ve been discussing different conceptions of law – whether it be the preservation of private property or that of justice (however so conceived) and how political expediency plays a major role in the determination of which is used.

Given the discourse that #blacklivesmatters and public intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates have brought up surrounding reparations and the context of the Thaddeus Stevens quote, I thought the connection between the two though rather apt. How so? Well, freed slaves unable to get access to good or significant amounts of land because private property – even if garnered by hook and crook – is considered inviolable means that while they may be legally free (though the Black Codes of the time made this not so) they still exist at the economic whim of their masters and are thus only slightly raised in stature. Having been dispossessed and exploited without recompense, this group was unable to accumulate the capital for communal development in a similar manner to the way that yeoman, plantation, merchant and financier cultures were. Worth mentioning is that this population was also at the mercy of myriad actions subsequent to this particular epoch that had a similar thrust. Kanye here seems to be pointing out that the economic liberty and freedom as propagandized today via capitalism or yesteryear via the Free Labor ideology, is something murkier than such ideologues would suggest. Freedom requires a greater degree of an even economic playing field lest aspirations of Republican liberty turn into the reality of plutocratic tyranny.

From this perspective, the above Kanye quote is spot on and furthermore the Tidal music streaming service that ‘Ye is a founding investor in is not merely a selfish means for obtaining a larger share of profits for his product – though this is true – but also reflects the greater relations of labor in the music industry. Specifically the manner in which large companies like Apple, via iTunes, and Spotify, Pandora, etc. society that capitalizes on the products of black artists/entrepreneurs. They are, in a significantly different way but still comparable nonetheless, the manors of today. Towards this end the demographics of the majority composition of “founding” artists – Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys, Chris Brown, J. Cole – is significant. Are there some white artists that have joined, yes, but the underlying truth remains the same – music producers are incredibly dependent on the owners of content/distribution and will not get a “fair share” unless they have greater access and strength in the market.

An even deeper reading could suggest that those which have manipulated government policy by forcing them into a formal of capitalist exchange that they are severely disadvantaged in for their personal financial well being are deserving of expropriation. I’m not suggesting that Kanye has become someone who advocates for massive redistribution of wealth, but considering the level of Roaring Twenties level of income disparity in this country wherein 1.5 million households (over 3 million children) live in extreme poverty and the U.S. Debt is as of writing this 16.3 trillion dollars, one can see the argument underlying Kanye’s short tweet.

Source

Thaddeus Stevens, “Thaddeus Stevens Calls for Redistribution of Confederate Land,” HERB: Resources for Teachers, accessed March 2, 2016, http://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1533.

Picchi, Aimee, “The surging ranks of America’s ultrapoor,” accessed March 2, 2016,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-surging-ranks-of-americas-ultrapoor/

Review of The Half Has Never Been Told

Shortly after reading The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist a friend that knew I was reading it sent me a link to a Huffington Post article stating that Ta-Nehisi Coates had suggested it as one of the critical books for understanding the early experiences of Africans and their masters in America. I was pleased to learn that something that I’d chosen to read was part of the critical zeitgeist that had more American’s interrogating the relationship between white and black American life, though found myself at times writhing in my reading chair due to the depredations that enslavers enacted upon their “investments”. This is because while Baptist illustrates the multi-faceted and evolving qualities of American slavery in a aesthetically and rhetorically compellingly manner, there is a discomfort emerges from the experiences of individual slaves that demonstrate a morally corrupt political regime that transformed lives into mere economic calculations on a bottom line. Such discomforting emotions are not, however, to be avoided but are to be confronted if one is to gain a greater appreciation of the realities that informed our contemporary society.

The book opens with vivid descriptions of the coffles driven by the “Georgia men” from the Chesapeake area to the South and West of the U.S. states as well as the territories not yet officially integrated into the federal system. By limning the relationship between center and periphery, a foundational concept within dependency theory, Baptist shows how the slave-owners were able to pressure and persuade their northern political counterparts through a number of means in order to get a power disproportionate to their population size within the Federal government. Key to understanding this is the legal designation of black both as 3/5 of a person and also a property that is wholly subject to the desired of the owners.

This quantification of laborers into abstractions of works had a number of intentions. It sought to erase not only the familial connections by separating family members but also the skills that those slaves in the Chesapeake region had accumulated. In the some of the northern regions those slaves that were skilled in the trades were able to make a more bearable life for themselves, however once in the south and west they became radically alienated. One’s skill as a carpenter, after all, has little use for picking the tiny white pieces of cotton. Incentives for working were almost wholly absent and instead corporeal discipline of a different sort from the North was the norm. Such abstraction was not merely for the purposes of work in the fields but also work in the bedroom. Female slaves increasingly came to be prized for their physical attractiveness and the degree of resistance they put towards males sexual advances.

Illustrated on a bar graph, one can see the productivity rates per slave rising over time as a result of the increasingly violent “whipping machine” at a rate equal to our higher than workers in the industrial north. Increasingly larger capital slave-holders displaced smaller ones. A bubble in the slave market as well as problems selling cotton goods due to the Boxer rebellion caused massive economic disruption and depression. Seeking to flee their creditors, a large number of those that once had “Alabama fever” took their capital investments with them to Texas. While the fact that Atlantic slave trade and dispossession of native lands was the primary impetus for the rise of industrial capitalism is something that has been long established by historians and political economists, this fact is often ignored or unknown amongst the general population. Though Baptist is primarily concerned with the slavery experience, his sections of comparative analysis as to the purported efficiencies of it compared to the inchoate northern industries is useful in explaining how the Southern slave-owning elite were able to become so rich and influential despite their being almost unanimously condemned as cruel and awful people within polite society outside of the South.

The chapter on the transformation of slavery from simple single ownership to financial instruments I found to be exceptionally fascinating. Requiring credit to obtain lands and slaves, intermediary firms would create bonds that were based on slave’s future labors and sell them on the international market. Thus while slavery was illegal in Europe, the capital of Capital, financial firms still implicated the purchasers of them into the nexus of Atlantic slavery. Such individuals weren’t the only ones that facilitated the slave trade and the trade in slave extracted goods. A number of states, specifically Louisiana was influenced by the slave-owning elite to sell bonds for the creation of cotton transportation infrastructure that would be paid for if need be by all and not just the slave-owning citizens.

These items are mentioned as it is meant to present a counter-narrative to the largely Southern antebellum historiography that presented slavery as paternalistic and the northern historiography that presented it as ineffective and irrational. There are many more aspects of Southern slavery and it’s relationship to the industrializing North – be it ideological, financial, etc. – that Baptist goes into that are worth touching upon. I would, however, simply suggest that those interested read the book as it is excellent. And with that said, I’m interested in any books or articles that deal with the manner in which these experiences had on the epigenetic effects of the African-American traumatic experiences. If you know of something please email me. Also, for those interested in reading Eric Foner, one of my favorite American historians, review of the book should read this article on New York Times website.

Review of The Ghost Map

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson fell into my lap unexpectedly. While reviewing the syllabus for the 9th grade East-West History class I was contracted to teach I saw the book listed as a required on the syllabus for the prior year and so purchased it. I later found out that it was a optional reading item for extra credit, but I’m so glad that I read it and have since used it as a component of the class dealing with the International Baccalaureate’s emphasis towards understanding the manner in which technology effects human society.

Ghost Map is one of the best works of popular history that I have ever read. I loved it without qualifications and have already recommended it to several people. The style, the pacing, the everything is a homerun and my students that have read it have all found it enjoyable if at times a little difficult.

As the book states in the opening, it is largely the tale of four protagonists: John Snow – a pioneering surgeon and medical researcher; Henry Whitehead – a priest; the city of London itself and the cholera bacterium. Spoiler alert: the story is easily summed up in a few sentences. A cholera outbreak occurs in London at a time when people believe that such illnesses are passed around by bad smells and there is no real infrastructure to removed human and animal waste products from cities. A talented and ambitious but humble medical researcher named John Snow starts to investigate and with the help of a local priest familiar with those affected and armed with information garnished from new practices of governmental record keeping is able to determine from when the cholera outbreak came and to provide a thorough but at the time unrecognized refutation of the miasma theory of cholera dissemination. It’s the attention to detail that he gives these characters, the depth he goes to explain the rationale for functioning of practices and creatures that doesn’t seem overwhelm the reader, the contextualization of the various obstacles faced and the underlying exegesis of some of the concepts of historical materialism that made it such an engaging read. I knew that this would be somewhat the case as the book opens with a quote by Walter Benjamin from the Theses on the Philosophy of History regarding Klee’s Angelus Novus. However I was presently surprised by how much of this was described in relationship to these four protagonists.

Johnson carefully documents how the class system existent at the time and the low level of scientific knowledge played a huge role in the perpetuation of a false medical paradigms that contributed to both degrading attitudes and the delay of infrastructural development needed to address the preconditions for cholera and other diseases spread. There is an irony that hints at comedy in such disdain, for despite the bourgeoisie hatred for the “lower classes” whose labor created the capital that they enjoyed such feelings of superiority for some in the nicer communities are leveled when they too contract it. Related to this is the miasma theory of disease. Johnson cleverly shows all the holes in the theory and shows how this relates to the elite classes own prejudices much as scientific racism was an outgrowth of the conditions of American slavery.

The sections on cholera were insightful without getting too deep within scientific jargon while those on Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead were both compelling. In the YouTube videos that I perused for use in the classroom unrelated to the author the former is highlighted while the latter largely goes unreported. Even then Snow is depicted as an abstraction rather than a person whose motives and actions were far outside the norm of his epoch. John Snow’s devotion to finding this at no profit to him self and how in fact it causes him to face ridicule from a large number of medical professionals at his time, shows how heroic he was. Such circumstances make for good reflections on the nature of the modern hero.

Despite the book being so good, I found that some of my students whose first language isn’t English had major difficulties with the text. Understandable as while “big” concepts were well described in simple language, they had to spend a lot of time looking up words. I think it’s a good practice for students to keep a running list of the words that they use and think that this would be a great interdisciplinary text to use with science lessons.

Review of Counter-Revolution of 1776

The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne presents the argument that the predominant rationale for the Founding Father’s mobilization for a war of independence was because it allowed what would become the United States to maintain slavery. While this sort of historical reading flies in the face of a number of inherited and taught assumptions on the fight for Colonial self-governance, Horne present a rather compelling case for the American Revolution being a “counter-revolution” or the armed mobilization of a dominant class that feel threatened.

The threats from within and without the slowly expanding colonial borders made the elites and settlers constantly fear a wide variety of political actors. There were the nearly ever-present concerns of Native Americas attacking over the dispossession they were facing. There were also the Latin countries, France and Spain, which laid claim to large and desirable swathes of land and would harass people in or near it. There were the slaves as well, who would sometimes escape. However as more time passed the American elite increasingly viewed the U.K. as both a hamper to their development and an unjust master. In regards to the former, England sought to maintain their agreements with indigenous tribes and forego Western expansion. Regarding the latter, England felt compelled to tax the colonies after having just exhausted it’s treasury fighting the Seven Years War to maintain hegemony, obtain concessions and protect it’s colonies.

While the closing off of westward expansion – a notion antithetical to a slave economy – and the increased taxation to pay for defensive wars that maintain territorial sovereignty – necessary to trade’s continuation may seem like small, bitter pills to swallow. These conditions helped the slave-owning elite increasingly see themselves in terms of the master/slave dialectic with themselves on the less unattractive side. Those owners of chattel slaves came to view Britain not as the country’s progenitor, protector, and benevolent master – not to mention a cultural aspiration – but a hurdle to the type of creative destruction that would rapidly accelerate the accumulation of domestic capital.

Compounding these problems were the spread of rebellious slaves. Following numerous uprisings in the Caribbean due to the unforgiving ratios of slaves to masters on the islands, slaves with a knowledge of poisons and rebellion were offloaded into the continent. Pacifying the Caribbean became so difficult that her Majesty’s forces had to entered into agreement with the Maroon leadership in Jamaica in order to maintain a modicum of peace. Such practices smelled of weakness and, to the slave-owners, offered a dangerous precedent.

As Colonials increasing felt that dictates given them were onerous they broke them, trading with whomever and resisting taxes. All this happened while British troops increasingly faced Africans armed by the Spanish and French. This created a problem for the British – how to successfully defend their claims without recourse to doing the same, i.e. arming Africans while at the same time preventing their colonialists from revolting?

The fear that the capital abducted from Africa in the form of slaves would not just be negated by even turned against them became an increasingly real threat.
While this began from just the enemy nations, it soon became a possibility from Britain. Faced with a legal ruling in England that made slavery illegal within her shores was frightening enough. The sudden emancipation of slaves would not only mean the dissolution of the single-most heavily invested commodity in the Colonies but would also mean generalized economic downturn due to secondary industries becoming effected.

Compounding this concern were several pronouncements by representatives of the Crown, such as Lord Dunmore, that suggested they would arm Africans in order to wage a war against the unruly “americans” if they continued to be unruly towards their duty to return the funds spent by London to ensure the Catholic/Native/Negro alliance did not disrupt resource extraction to serve the Manchester looms.

It’s this conflation of interests and contradictions that would lead to the Counter-Revolution of 1776. While the rhetoric of the revolution was universal, it was clear that the continuation of slavery and the up to 1600% profits of it was one of the driving forces of the Declaration. While I found the book to be at times a little redundant – the short closing argument of the book I think presents a correct appraisal of the works context for leftist political activists in that it calls into question the heritage – legal and economic – of the U.S. in such a way as to bring suspicion to it’s emancipatory character. This book, in fact, shows that while there were some greater benefits to this type of society than others formed long ago in Europe, it is hardly the model for the world that ought to be admired and that there is still much work to be done.

If you’d like to hear a variation of the above description of his work from the man himself I’d suggest watching this interview with Amy Goodman. The thrust of the back and forth addresses many of the points that I raise above.

Review of Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence

In considering survey texts for a DP1 History of the Americas class I’d not at first considered Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence. At first I reviewed those texts that I’d read for my Global Histories Class with Dr. Maia Ramnath at NYU.The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic or The Americas in the Age of Revolution: 1750-1850 both seemed sensible. I knew full well that The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 would be too difficult for students so I didn’t even consider that. Looking through the class notes I read that the book was already assigned over the summer by the previous teacher and had an assignment with is already so I decided to forego such deliberations and read it to see how best to use it.

Americanos focuses solely on Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, unlike the other books I was considering that also include descriptions of developments in North America, I found it’s tight treatment of the various developments in the inchoate Latin American nations and their relationships to events in Europe more reading level appropriate to my students than the others. I wouldn’t say that it’s a simpler book, but that those not somewhat versed in political economy might miss the nuances described therein.
Following the American and French Revolutions criollos, who would later become americanos, began to feel that they had the tide of historical development on their side and thus a greater opportunity to greater press their claims for greater participation within the colonial governments and to liberalize trade relationship for greater personal profit.

Organized political action against the monarchy, however, was very limited due to the might of Spanish force and as there was little consensus as to how exactly this would occur. Following the invasion of Spain by France during the Peninsular War, the capture of the Spanish king Carlos IV, the ascension of Joseph Bonaparte to the throne, the formation of the Cadiz Cortes and Britain’s increased desire to establish enduring trading relationships with Latin America negated the traditional glues holding the colonies in thrall to Spain. Whereas previously those that had advocated for home rule were considered seditious, now one could make the same argument under what Chasteen calls the “Mask of Fernando” and attract supporters. After all, the self-elected bureaucratic body that was claiming to be the inheritor to the Spanish monarchy didn’t have the military personnel to protect themselves much less assert themselves across the ocean. While it was still dangerous to propagandize for a Republican model of government, a political orientation that was seen as French and thus unpalatable, those behind this mask were increasingly whipping up a nativist sentiment against “foreign” rule that though primarily elitist in its goals was populist in rhetoric.

Chasteen excels here at illustrating the cultural realities and historical situatedness and contradictions that the criollos and europeos faced and how circumstances across the ocean could rapidly change things in Latin America. National and regional developments were causing alliances to harden, split, pivot and reformulate with new political actors. Chasteen describes these shifts from the standpoint of the various Viceroyalties with great attention to the experiences of those leading them. Hidalgo, Morelos, San Martin, Simon Bolivar failures and success all lead to new conditions in a landscape of accelerating conflict and desire to eject the penninsulares/europes from power. Chasteen goes into extensive detail about Simon Rodriguez and his relationship to Simon Bolivar. From this vantage point the French inspiration for these conflicts comes to greater light.

While there are recurrent descriptions of the various forces and rhetorical tropes guiding the interests and actions of those seeking to overthrow the colonial yoke (and replace it with a neo-colonial one based upon raw goods exportation) I liked that Chasteen waited until the last chapter to have a thorough multi-page analysis of all of these social upheavals. Merely hinting at it in the prologue, here he goes into greater detail about the problems with importing the “Western” political values in Latin America. The previously only lightly touched upon nature of the state formation in these places is expounded upon (even deeper analysis can be found here) as well as the problematics of founding nations that are imagined predominantly by the elites and not the masses of workers.

Another aspect I liked about the book was how helpful it is to assisting students unfamiliar with the historical terms of political economy and those that have difficulty visualizing people. There is a directory of the people at the beginning that also contains pictures of those that are available in the front. My students expressed to me that this helped them picture the personages acting on the world historical stage with greater clarity. There is also a glossary in the back that contains definitions of the various racial caste terms and socio-economic terms used by the Spanish in the new world, i.e. encomienda, pardo, cabildo, etc. Also worth noting is that the book is well suited for viewing with the filmThe Liberator.