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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.

HL reading list for IB History Classes

Supplementary readings for my HL level classes

MYP4

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

DP1

1st Quarter

The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne

2nd Quarter

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist

3rd Quarter

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner

4th Quarter

A World More Concrete by N. D. B. Connolly

DP2

1st Quarter

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward

2nd Quarter

Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency by Doug McAdam

3rd Quarter

The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and it’s Youthful Opposition by Theodore Roszak

4th Quarter

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 by Juan Williams

Review of The Cold War: A New History

While I normally avoid mass-market history books, as it’d been assigned to one of the IB classes I was assigned to teach the year before I read The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. What can I say about it that wasn’t already written in this eight pageNew York Review of Books article that gives it the proper criticism that it deserves? Not much, really. As Tony Judt notes, it’s aligned with the type of liberal triumphalism that Francis Fukuyama and others used to crow about prior to the numerous crises which liberal capitalist societies have experienced since 2008. It’s not just that the subsequent crises make the tone of capitalist banner-waving seem quaint but that the tone and outlines of historical development is idealistic to a fault, disturbingly uneven in it’s treatment of events and naïve.

How so naïve? Well, for one there are now a number of research articles (1, 2, 3) that attest to the fact that it was only a result of the Soviet state’s existence that workers in the West were able to obtain the gains that they did and that as soon as Socialism/Communism was no longer an ideological threat the attacks against workers rights and wages were accelerated. Additionally element of naivety is the fact that a number of major social repressions that occurred in the U.S.A. and other countries for ideological purposes is not, seemingly, worthy of mention. The numerous domestic Red Scares with the help of the FBI and the liquidations of Communist Party members abroad that were accomplished with the help of the CIA do not even get a footnote in Gaddis’ book. While the overthrow of Guatemala, Iran and Chile are mentioned the first two are glossed over as excesses excused by zealousness to protect those regions from Soviet influence while the last one is justified.

Additionally naïve is the manner in which, as Judt points out, Gaddis depicts the manner with which power operates in the United States. On page 168 he states, “The idea that their leaders might lie was new to the American people.” as if prior to the Cold War was a halcyon age wherein American politicians always kept their word. Not only that Gaddis frames such a claim such that it was the fault of the Soviets to cause such dissimulation. If only those people over there weren’t so evil and untrustworthy, he seems to state, then American politicians would never stoop to such behavior.

The lack of political economy in explaining material conditions of the combatant nations is also disturbing. It’s absence means that instead of macroeconomic issues creating social pressures and changes it is simply the whims of major actors that determined the direction and pace of historical development. The Soviet Union’s demise is due to moral failings of godless Communists rather than other historical, secular circumstances. This is not to say that Gaddis ignores political economy completely – but he does not do so in a way that is genuinely comparative. What this means is that while he will mention the large number of Russians killed fighting the Nazi’s during World War Two, the effects of this and the destruction of a large number of factories in Nazi Occupied countries that would soon fall under the influence of Stalin have almost no effect on the country’s ability to manufacture goods for the international marketplace. Because of this and a number of other omissions the criticism he makes – that the Soviet’s simply produced poor quality goods – lose some of the bite. While such a criticism is deserving – it is unfortunately lacking a full depiction in a political-economy constellation and thus the moralistic imprecations that follow which laud liberal capitalism.

In the end Gaddis’s view of the Cold War does not include the perspective of any people of any country affected by police or military conflict with the exception of those regions that sought to rebuff encroaching or existent Soviet influence. It is thus the perfect book for Americans looking to legitimize the notion that they won a moralistic war and that they can kick up their feet knowing that America is the epitome of ethical goodness.

The real brothers who inspired the Sucrarios in Unraveling

Two of the antagonists in Unraveling are a pair of brothers whose last name is Sucrario. Sucrario is not a “real” Spanish last name or even a real Spanish word but a portmanteau term combining the Spanish word for sugar, “sucre” with the Spanish word for assassin “sicario”. While the characters and their history are fictional, they are largely based upon two real people: Alfonso and Jose “Pepe” Fanjul.

Documentation that the Gomez-Mena’s were the largest sugar owners in Cuba before the revolution

Despite Alonso Fanjul’s claim otherwise, his grandfather Jose Gomez-Mena was intimately involved with the functioning of the Batista government. He was Batista’s Minister of Agriculture, which in a country that had since it’s colonization been recognized as one giant sugar plantation is a big deal. He was also involved in banking and using capital to consolidate sugar holdings and upgrade their productive facilities. He was an important person and his friends and associates included a number of American politicians, important to keeping sugar tariffs low, as well as the former president of Cuba, Mario Menocal. Prior to this post and private sugar and banking enterprises the Gomez-Mena family were involved in the Cuban sugar trade at a time when the slave trade was legal. Even after it was officially abolished, the conditions of the Africans remained largely the same as it was before. To circumvent the ban of chattel slavery over 100,000 Chinese workers were imported. Though the white, landowning Cubans considered “the Celestials” less barbaric than the blacks, their work and living conditions were much the same.

The Fanjul family, which had long ties to Spainish nobility, escaped Cuba following the seizure of governmental authority by the Communist Party of Cuba headed by Fidel Castro. Castro even used one of the mansions built by Jose Gomez-Mena as his private residence and is even said to have met with him to point at a map of his holdings and tell him face to face that all of that land now belonged to the government’s collective farms. The mansion as well as his extensive private art collection remains intact and is now called the Museum of Decorative Arts and can be viewed by the public.

After arriving in the United States with all of the cash, capital goods and deeds that they could carry and ship without getting caught, the Gomez-Mena/Fanjul family were able to obtain a number of large farming subsidies with the help of the numerous American politicians whose favor they had curried over the year and were able to obtain large parcels of land for sugar production, and help halt the flow of Cuban sugar. Raising sugar cane in the Everglades was long a desire for many American farmers. Given the costs of land reclamation, dike projects, and other issues this was considered impossible without significant government assistance. While Florida and the Federal government wouldn’t seriously consider such a project prior to the Cuban Revolution due the huge amount of capital investment and political risk that it talked, after the revolution they did. Those that had cultivated the relationships with the right politicians – like the Fanjul’s had – were able to rapidly build back up their wealth.

According to the Land Report, the Fanjul brothers now collectively own 160,000 acres of land, or 250 square miles, in Florida and according to the New York Times they own 240,000 acres, or 275 square miles, in the Dominican Republic. Based on too many reports to cite here, they are not merely the farmers, land conservationists and philanthropists that they promote themselves as, but are sugar barons in the most original sense of the word. The co-existence of feudal labor relations within a mixed-capitalist economy isn’t itself surprising. What is perhaps more so is the wide reporting of it that doesn’t seem to gather any traction in the public imagination. Articles regularly point out how their meagre investments of, say, two million dollars, into the American political machinery will bring a return of sixty-five million dollars.

The Fanjul brothers are notoriously shy of the public spotlight, one of the reasons that I wanted to fictionalize them, yet still make it into the press occasionally. Most recently they’ve been receiving press over their actions taken to prevent action being taken on Florida’s 2014 Amendment 1, which passed with 78% of the vote. Their goal? Prevent the purchase of land that would be used to increase the quality of South Florida’s water supply. Their money not only buys the political machinery of south Florida but a number of estates in the Domincan Republic, Florida and a lavish lifestyle.

References

International Migration in Cuba: Accumulation, Imperial Designs, and Transnational Social Fields

The Castro Collection

2014 Land Report

Land Report on the Fanjuls

Everglades to be Killed this October

In the Kingdom of Big Sugar

Wikileaks: Fanjuls among ‘sugar barons’ who ‘muscled’ lawmakers to kill free trade deal

Interview with Paul Kwiatkowski

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So after reading (and loving) Paul Kwiatowski’s book And Every Day Was Overcast and then confirming that one of the people that I thought I knew from the pictures in it was in fact who I thought it was, I decided to email Paul Kwiatkowski to request an interview. I wanted to talk to him about growing up in South Florida, his creative process as well as his early literary and musical influences. He agreed to speak with me and on July 23rd we spoke over the phone.

Ariel Sheen

So, have you had any contact with people whose pictures you took in the book and if so what have been some of their responses to it?

Paul Kwiatkowski

Yeah some of the people I’m still in contact with. Most of the people I’ve talked to have dug it. As for those that I haven’t spoken with, well, I hope they like the project and know where I was coming from with it.

Ariel Sheen

Keeping in mind that I love the lyrical nature of the book, I’m wondering what your decision making process was in deciding to forego a traditional narrative arc.

Paul Kwiatkowski

A narrative arc would be disingenuous to the material considering it’s the past and memory doesn’t work narratively that way. You can’t really remember it anything other than as bemusings and flavors. To create something that would make an arc would have been too clear.

Ariel Sheen

Do you find yourself more or less alienated living in New York than you were in South Florida?

Paul Kwiatkowski

OVERCAST_7 I mean, I think a lot of the alienation that I wrote about had to do with just being a teenager. Plus Florida is kind of an isolated place to grow up. Not living in close proximity to people, I never felt like there was a community there. When I read your review of my book, like, I also remember wanting to go downtown, which was really just a movie theatre, and it being like a 40 minute ride just for that. As a teenage I hated that but I feel at this point in my life you can use that to your advantage creatively and just call it solitude.

Living in New York, well, I feel that your experience of the city largely depends on what you make of it. One thing I think is funny is that so many people come here with purpose and certain expectation of what will happen with it. Once that goes away, I think it becomes less exciting. Didn’t you use to live here? What did you think?

Ariel Sheen

Yeah, I did. My experience was largely the same. But I was in grad school so there was a large number of people to socialize with had the same purpose as me. The school encouraged meetings through a number of free food/drink events. But even then there was always this temporary element to any connection we had in the back of our minds. Or at least in the back of my mind. Something like we can be friendly now, but in a year or so we’ll be in totally different places of the country doing totally different things and so will lose track of each other. When I lived in Bushwick it wasn’t like that so much.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Oh nice, I like Bushwick. I saw Genesis P-Orridge play there last week.

Ariel Sheen

Awesome. I’m a little jealous. And a lot surprised! I don’t encounter a lot of people that know who that is. When I was about 16-17 I got really into industrial music. Through my investigations into the genre I came across him and a number of other… unusual musicians via V. Vale Re/Search Publications like Industrial Culture Handbook and his book on William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle. I wasn’t always appreciative of the music, thought I did send Vale a demo I’d made, but I liked the innovative qualities of it. I mean a lot of it, like, sounds really weird.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Yeah I remember hearing them around the same time. Right about the same time I got into writing. I was mostly into Throbbing Gristle. I think it just really changed the way I go about making art. I think that’s what I got the most out of it. You know, Industrial or whatever electronic music name you want to call it just totally blew my imagination away. It definitely was inspiring and I definitely didn’t like every song to just get into the vibe of it. It was kind of a big influence. That stuff was just really. Man. Just finding out about it as a kid was inspiring. Maybe even more so than the products that the artists made. It definitely got me in tune with process and experimentation.

Ariel Sheen

So say 30-40 years from now, when there is no South Florida; How do you think you’ll respond to that?

Paul Kwiatkowski

d5551cf814407980-OVERCAST_0198 It’ll be bitter sweet. There’s a lot of things that I love about Florida that I credit with my imagination. It seems inevitable though… Right? You should check out this book called Finding Florida. It’s just about this history of Florida and how it’s this state that’s never been able to be tamed. From the early Conquistadors that went there thinking they’d find gold. It goes from how thy not only didn’t finding gold but it was the only state that doesn’t have any rocks in the ground. Then tells about how later settlers tried to damn the waters but that storms kept flooding and destroying them. Then the elections and Bush. It’s this like, comprehensive history that this state has manipulated the people that have tried to harness it. Thus if Florida went up it’d just be fitting. It just has this entire history of kicking people back and that’d be just one more instance of it.

Ariel Sheen

I think you’re really on point about the land we call Florida not wanting the practices of white settlers. I’ve actually studied a lot Florida history and am also writing a book myself set there/here right now. Besides the North, prior to the Civil War, it was the Glades that had the largest population of runaway slaves. These were those that escaped and then acculturated themselves to the indigenous people in this land that at the time just could not be brought under the till.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Yeah, the Seminoles, right? The mix of races: free slaves and indigenous.

Ariel Sheen

Yeah, exactly! So from your 2011 Street Carnage interview I saw that you were reading a lot of literature that dealt with… unusual and extreme topics and themes. Because you and I are the same age I had this feeling that, well, in high school the setting of EDWO, at the time my group of friends was reading a lot of Poppy Z. Brite. She wrote Lost Souls and was wondering if you’d ever read it…

Paul Kwiatkowski

Haha. You know it’s funny I too was reading Poppy Z. Brite. I was a huge fan of Exquisite Corpse, which was one of my favorites.

Ariel Sheen

 Yes! That book was so great!

Paul Kwiatkowski
You know it’s funny, I picked up the book again a year ago and it’s still really good. She’s kind of a kick as writer. So transgressive as well. It’s so impressive. Other than her, at the time I was also getting into Dennis Cooper and he definitely had a big influence on my approach to writing. Oh, and I started to discover Bret Easton Elis. There’s a book called Jesus Saves by Darcey Steinke.
It had a goth feel to it. I was just a voracious reader and was just really discovering literature at that time. I also remember reading In the Belly of the Beast and being really impressed by that. I worked at Borders so I had a lot of access to books. And a lot of the French Surrealists like Bataille and the Marquis se Sade. I’m glad I got that stuff out of my system as a teenager and not as an adult.

Ariel Sheen

That’s so funny. I also worked at Borders, briefly, and when I was there Mike [the guy I know in one of the photos] was one of the floor managers.

Paul Kwiatkowski

That’s really wild.

Ariel Sheen

Going back to the Street Carnage interview, you’d mentioned then that you were working on a project from your trip to the Caribbean and Mexico, are you still working on that project? Or something else?

Paul Kwiatkowski

Haha! I don’t even remember what that project was, but at the moment I am working on a new book about Minnesota. Which is a large departure from those project. I’m working with a photographer who’s from Minnesota that’s now based in Medellin in Colombia. The book is about an airplane accident that claimed his cousin and photography’s relationship to technology. So it’s kind of like a mix between an Adam Curtis documentary with… I don’t even know what you’d say it’s mixed with…

Ariel Sheen

Cool. Interesting that you say that. I showed The Power of Nightmares in my Debate Classes to help students better contextualize the rhetoric their subjected to in the news.

Anyway, last question. So I bought the paperback edition of the And Everyday was Overcast for $30 and then learned that there’s an audio component that came for free with the $6 digital edition. Think you can send me that?

Paul Kwiatkowski

Oh, I can send it to you! I think it’s on my site. The soundtrack is part of the digital edition that I had done for my published that I did with Ryan DeShawn. It was actually heavily inspired by Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle. I wanted to illustrate that Retard Radio storyline that runs through the book and, you know, in addition to going back to Florida and collecting pictures I’d go back and collect sounds. Something that always really stuck out in my memory of Florida was the sounds. It’s such an alive state. It’s constantly buzzing and grinding. It’s something that always fascinated me so I wanted to put something together as a companion piece to the book. But yeah, I’ll send you a zip file of it in a little bit.

Ariel Sheen

Cool, I’d like that.

Paul Kwiatkowski

No problem, I like that you’re interested in it. It was a cool experiment.

Ariel Sheen

Yeah. It sounds like it. And hearing you talk about it, it sounds like a friend of mine’s music production process that I just heard about on NPR that also left Florida for New York. Hopefully I can make it back there in two or three years.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Well it seems like you’re doing well over there, teaching and writing.

Ariel Sheen

That’s true, but that’s only after a long period of some personal hardships. No need to get into that, though. Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me.

Paul Kwiatkowski

My pleasure, it was good talking to you!

You can purchase And Every Day Was Overcast by clicking the title and learn more about Paul Kwiatkoski’s current projects by clicking here.

You can also read more interviews with the author that may or may not deal with topics of greater substance here.

Featureshoot Interview

Air Ship Daily

Street Carnage Interview

Miami's Economic and Racial Segregation in Unraveling

One of the themes within my book is race’s role in economic and political power. Each part of the series is a first person perspective with worldview that differs dramatically based upon their historical consciousness and the desires they wish to fulfill.

In Book 1, Jesses displays what I and other philosophers of race would call racial ignorance. What does this mean? Pulling from concepts explicated by Frantz Fanon’s in his book Black Skin, White Masks, we learn that whites often lack the experience of systematic prejudice and thus there is a knowing and unknowing of race. Whites can conceptualize race, but have only the experience of the privileged “norm” rather than the racialized Other and thus are unable (or unwilling) to perceive, understand, acknowledge, or relate to the general condition and experiences of non-whites.

Given the widely-touted multi-racial nature of Miami this seems to not fit with normal expectations. However the below maps and history are an attempt to give greater contextualization to how Jesse came to this worldview and also gives background to other characters perspectives on the role of race to their worldview.

Unfortunately this ethnic map of Miami doesn’t also show the history of legislation and settlement to the many cities and townships that make up Miami, Miami Beach and it’s surrounding areas. Including this sort of data we would begin to get a larger understanding of why the composition of the region is that way that it is.

Where people are living in overcrowded units.

As you can see here, in areas that are the poorest people are living in the densest arrangements. While there is little statistical breakdown by the City of Miami of what the percentages relate to in material conditions, from this data and that elsewhere we can see that two bedrooms apartments housing five or more people is normal. If this were the case we would find many of the circumstances described by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Case for Reparations. From the founding of the City of Miami and Miami Beach the patterns of habitations were guided by racial segregationist legislation that was enforced through a combination of policing and intermittent mob actions.

White politicians consistently sought to and successfully deprived black entrepreneurs from accumulating capital in white areas as well as their enterprises in black towns, rabidly fought unionization and collective bargaining campaigns and targeted social justice activists for harassment and assassination. While expanding along the beachfront to the east, whites captured formerly black areas through eminent domain and corrupt housing practices that pushed black west into higher density housing areas.

medhhincbgtemp — Miami’s Median Household Incomes.

This and the patterns of public transportation directly informed the type of labor available to black-American and Caribbean populations (and later Latin American groups) as well as their ability to demand political change, their ability to use public goods and services as well as their housing options.

Justifications for an inflated police state and greater surveillance of the population at first stemmed from the second World War and the fear of destabilizing acts by foreigners. The work pass system, started in the 1930s, mandated that black and white workers in the tourist sector wear passes, for instance.

This theme would pop up again in various forms in order to legitimize greater oversight of black bodies and delegitimize political opposition to such acts by the government. Jim Crow, in a word, formed thoroughly enmeshed the patterns of habitation, political power and labor in the nascent Miami, which as late as 1953 was, according to Robe Carson, was a “Tropical Frontier” that had not yet been fully conquered by the white race. How so? Well even after 1943, when this threat was no longer credible, and into the 1960’s these passes served to reinforce an apartheid style urban geography.

Various counties created and enforced curfews to keep blacks out of white areas both through their police departments and white vigilantes. Later political upheavals were blamed by foreign agitators from northern Florida and New York to prevent the granting of political demands. The worldview promulgated by local papers was that local blacks were happy with their conditions and it was only because of outside influence that civic unrest occasionally erupted. Racism in the police forces in these and other areas continues to this day.

povbg — Where the Pockets of Poverty Are in Miami.

As the shows, the high rate of poverty in Miami communities of color was not caused by cultural character flaws but by a sustained and systematic assault by the local white and even Federal government policies towards maintaining segregation, preventing communities of color from having access to beachfront property on the larger scale keeping trade going with Caribbean dictatorships that were able to extract higher rates of surplus capital from their investments due to authoritarian practices.

The later success of Cuban communities is often cited as a reason as to why it is a cultural character flaw, however this belies the capital and advanced educational degrees that many first wave migrants were able to bring with, the federal assistance that they were given, the longer history of successful political mobilization they’d experienced and accrued as sociopolitical capital as well as the notion of the first wave as “white people”.

Miamians continues to suffer as a result of it’s past. It’s continuously named as one of the worst places to live, it lacks a comprehensive plan to combat global climatic change due to the interests of land developers – the most powerful political lobby in Florida – it’s politicians and police are recurrently in the press for corruption and illegal acts and as anyone who’s familiar with it knows it’s vast area could be greatly reorganized for more rational and equitable land usage. This is all intimately tied to municipal government development and the influence of predominantly white capital on the areas political economy.

Jesse, however, isn’t aware of any of this. He hasn’t learned this data in his history class. His parents are, like many others living in South Florida, are not natives nor are they aware of it’s history so cannot pass this information along. The private high school he previously attended was predominantly white, as is par for South Florida Private Schools, so he’s not interacted with many black people until last year when he entered a public school. As a result of his growing recognition of the nature of political power and through the course of his increased interaction with black people, however, Jesse comes to have greater awareness of the racial environment of Miami and, in his later book, the surrounding regions. Jesse’s epistemological development is thus not aptly described by calling his views in the beginning racist but ignorant. Furthermore this is not an active ignorance that seeks to maintain privilege but one that seeks ruthlessness to understand and critique how power operates. At each step of his epistemological development Jesse comes to a state of greater empathy, understanding and recognizes a greater duty towards, to bring it back to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

References

A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly

Miami Beach police shared hundreds of racist and pornographic emails

Fort Lauderdale Cops Fired for Sharing Racist Text Messages and Videos

Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement by Irvin D. S. Winsboro

Take Back the Land by Max Rameau

America’s Most Miserable Cities

100 YEARS: The Dark And Dirty History Of Miami Beach

On Choosing a Proper Cover for Unraveling: Book 1

I thought that coming up with a book cover for Unraveling would be easy, but it’s turned into a project. My first idea was to look for a stock photo that captured enough of the elements of one of the scenes in the chapter and then to slap some text over it with the title and my name. I searched through ShutterStock for a good several hours using terms that were appropriate for Jesse’s chapter. Teenagers. Drug Abuse. Gangs. Addiction. Recovery. Secrets. Espionage. Isolation. etc. The amount of images that I went through was, well, staggering. Finally, I alighted upon this image!

I liked it immediately and purchased it. My thought process in doing so was that though the image doesn’t depict Jesse Oberman, a bright and driven 16 year old boy trying to deal with a number of major changes in his life that he doesn’t fully understand or know how to deal with, the image is a pretty damn good physical approximation of Josselyn, a character that Jesse meets in Book 1. The items around her, the gun, mask and money, are also components of their relations so it seems appropriate. Lastly, who wouldn’t be intrigued enough into making a small purchase of a serial novel by a pretty woman with these items around them.

From here I then decided to use the Cracked font for the author attribution and title, then Age of Unraveling. I chose the Cracked font as a means of highlighting the social/political/economic disintegration prevalent within the plot. I’d previously chosen Unraveling as a title, again referring to the themes of the book, but had added Age of to it as a nod to British Historian Eric Hobsbawm. Whereas Hobsbawm wrote with insightful and compelling mastery about the upheavals over 202 years at a high level of abstraction, Unraveling is set over a two year period at a very low level of abstraction wherein characters deal with this historical inheritance. To make the name stand out I made the text black with a red drop shadow. Happy that the picture related if not to Jesse than at least a character he meets in Book 1 and confident that the text alluded to a breaking down of social order I shared this on my Facebook and asked for input.

The response that I got from my friends upon sharing my work was unanimous and disheartening. Time and money spent on that cover were, in their view, a waste. The image was “cheesy” and the text looked awful. Trusting of my friends input I decided to scrap it for a new one. I would not have to do so alone, however, as my brother Jaz said he would help me. He forwarded me a couple of test images, shown below, so that I could help guide him as to what I want.

One of the concept designs for the cover.

I like both of these a lot. Here’s why:

I like the one on the right as it shows a youth, presumably Jesse, in an out of focus manner, hinting at the internal conflict he is going through while interacting with an external world that he wants to mold to his will. The one on the right, however, I can’t use (or can I?) as it is the same stock photo used by the musician James Blake on his album James Blake.

A more appropriate textual rendition of the title.

I like the one on the left as it hints at the accelerating chaos from the unexpected confluence of a number of people/events. Because of this I feel that the lack of a human beings on it not to be so big an issue.

Given that one of the uncommented-upon-by-the-characters conflicts within the book is between Hegelian and Nietzschean conceptions of time, history, law and agency I find myself drawn to a typography that looks like this True Detective poster from season 1.

After I informed Jaz of the the right cover imaged was used by James Blake, he produced the one below as a well as another one with the title text more distorted which I prefer but don’t have a copy of. In this cover iteration we also decided to include a one line thematic description of Book 1: “His life is falling apart and he’s taking everyone with him.”

Like the text and the short description, but not the background image. — Another concept for the cover based on the above right one being used on James Blake’s self-titled album.

He also encouraged me to look over other covers at Designspiration, which is a great resource for ideation of covers. There were many that I liked there as well as on the website for Face Out Books. I was especially drawn to the aesthetics relying upon the placement of multiple covers as there will be several more books in the series. There were so many choices that I felt overwhelmed.

Lastly I decided to do a little digging onto cover ideas on my own. I’m not extensively well read when it comes to pulp/noir novels, but as I’ve always found myself intrigued by the aesthetics of pulp covers and as it was in part a response to my enjoyment of reading the major works of novelists Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler which made me include elements of classic noir fiction (though with a much more progressive worldview) into Unraveling – I also decided to look through Pulp Curry. Some of the pulp covers that I liked are below, though given the number of modern stylistic and narrative elements in it as well as the expenses in producing these original drawings this seems to be a dead end.

mcginnis — Book cover of a book of book covers. How meta!

2014-09-23-pulp-covers-maguire-04 — Not sure if this was a book cover, but I like the image.

7775165196_133d5a5e7c_h — Male gaze in full effect here and in every other pulp novel.

noir-art-ernest-chiriaka-jealous-paul-daniels-via-pulpart-tumblr — Irony: In Unraveling the women trap the men.

I think that the pulp covers would work for some of the female characters books, but not for Jesse. I think it’d be double interesting as most of the females break from being the typical passive object that they are in these types of works and are heroes fighting a toxic form of masculinity and making up for the failings of their male comrades. I don’t want to go to much into this so that you’ll want to see what I mean by reading subsequent books, but did want to point out the irony that would occur if such a détournement was ever made.

All this said, as of now I’ve decided on the following post. I like the oldness of the map – which relates to the repetition of patterns in this area of the world. I’d like to change the font to something more stylized – but I plan on doing this after the publication of the third part of the book as then I plan on getting physical copies published and making them available for sale.

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Protected: Summary for Unraveling: Book 1

Review of The Lathe of Heaven

George Orr is having trouble sleeping properly and Dr. Haber helps him. This is, in a sentence, the distilled story of The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. The plot and story, however, are much more complex and send the reader on a strange journey that comments on the power of dreams, the nature of the human unconscious, whether or not human society is perfectible and the at times ethical ambiguity of action and inaction. While I found the book somewhat slow at times, a product of Le Guin’s clear love for ornate descriptions, I was able to read the book over two nights before bed.

I found myself rather amused by much of the purportedly dystopia future that I’d expected Le Guin to describe. I use the word purportedly as I’d noticed the term “dystopia” in a number of reviews of the book and disagree with its use to describe the conditions of the book. While there are clearly problems in this future that read very much like our own – environmental degradation, disease, financial insecurity – they are fleeting and serve more as a counterpoint from which to act upon rather than circumstances that cause reaction. To deny the importance of these social issues in the book, or indeed life itself, is not possible but they are presented in a very different manner than 1984 or Brave New World. They are a motivating force for Dr. Haber only upon the realization the George Orr’s dreams have ethe power to retroactively change time without the present being aware of such a change. I use the word amused as much of the descriptions of the “dystopian” future are, 45 years after it’s publication, holding true. Environmental degradation, racial strife, nationalist wars, gross economic disparity – these issues are as topical now as she’d predicted.

In a Daoist fashion, George Orr accepts this world as it is. The sleep therapist that he sees, however, does not and seeks to use his Augmentor, a machine with several important functions, to first direct George’s power and later transmit it to himself. Concerned by his use and unable to stop treatment, George began as part of a court ordered program for drug users as the Judge believed him that he was taking others people’s pharma quotas. Dr. Haber’s attempts at fixing the world’s ills through the power of the Augmentor, hypnotherapy and George Orr’s dreams leads to a number of somewhat humorous changes to world history. After Dr. Haber suggests that George make the world free of racism all people are on a grey scale. After Dr. Haber suggest that nationalist wars no longer continue, the world unites to fight off an invasion by aliens that look like sea-turtles and are later revealed to be peaceful and somewhat stupid.

One of the aspects of the book that I liked very much in the first half was the hypnotic inductions and patter of Dr. Haber. It was aligned with the training that I’ve received in hypnosis through FICAM. The research that Le Guin spent on this is clear and allows even the laymen reader to be immersed in the Dr. Haber’s perspective and practice.
In some of the reviews on Amazon I noticed that a number of readers connected this book to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. I don’t think that it’s unfounded. There are signs that hint at criticism of crypt-socialist views. A name like Dr. Haber can be associated with Ashkenazic Jewry, those that were often drawn to the socialist credo in Europe in the early 20th century, and has a clear resonance with Sigmund Freud. I believe such a reading, while interesting and valuable for some of the connections it is able to uncover, misses some of the nuances of the book. The somewhat stupid but benevolent aliens, a key component in Orr’s coming to understand his powers, after all have no equivalent in an simple analogy between the two books. Most tellingly, there is no amount of honest exegesis that one can do to the text to create a corollary connecting the wishes of a single, well-intentioned psychiatrist to a socialist party. Hayek and the scientific socialists he seeks to warn others about both state that comprehensive social changes is a collective effort. Secondarily the rational notions that Dr. Haber seeks to enact always have, as mentioned above, wholly unpredictable effects. While one could easily say that George, representative of the working class, is exploited by the Dr. Haber – beyond the ill fit of the latter as the party there is also the mystical and irrational nature of these changes that are contrary to the rationalism of socialist doctrines. In my reading of the text Le Guin seems more interested in displaying the mystery of the mind and the difficulty that we can have, even with the best of intentions, in manifesting those desires. Her book The Dispossessed offers a less ambiguous view of her socio-political beliefs. This novel, in the end left me in a state of wonder than feeling as if I’d concluded a journey. While yes, the action ends for all the characters in resolutions that seems fitting considering their trajectory – the journey’s that they took to get there are, at least to me, somewhat confounding and so, ironically enough, in a good way.