New Approaches to Enclosures

Review

Radical History

Issue

109

New Approaches to Enclosures Editors’ Introduction Amy Chazkel and David Serlin

1

FEATURES

Enclosing the Sea: Remaking Work and Leisure Spaces on the Naples Waterfront, 1870–1900 Marco Armiero Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production Dara Orenstein “We Must Destroy You to Save You”: Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons Robert Gioielli Energy Security: The Planetary Fulfillment of the Enclosure Movement Robert P. Marzec

13

36

62

83

Reflec tions

The Future of the Commons David Harvey Enclosures of Land and Sovereignty: The Allotment of American Indian Lands David A. Chang

101

108

Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being: UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium John F. Collins

121

Interventions

Confronting the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley Amy Chazkel

137

Curated Spaces

Authorized Disruption: John Hawke and Orange Work, 2005–2010 John Hawke

153

NSK: The Improbable State of History and the History of an Improbable State Alexei Monroe

162

Notes on Contributors

172

Issue Editors Amy Chazkel and David Serlin Radical History Review Collective Robyn Autry, Erica Ball, Dan Bender, Lisa Brock, Amy Chazkel, Duane Corpis, Van Gosse, David Kinkela, Thomas Miller Klubock, Alex Lichtenstein, Conor McGrady, Teresa Meade, Kevin Murphy, Jim O’Brien, Enrique Ochoa, Melina Pappademos, Eliza Reilly, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Jayeeta Sharma, Sandhya Shukla, Andor Skotnes, Karen Sotiropoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Daniel Walkowitz, Barbara Weinstein, Rhonda Y. Williams Editorial Associates Jean-Christophe Agnew, Pennee Bender, Mansour Bonakdarian, Steve Brier, Josh Brown, Peter Dimock, Ellen DuBois, Bob Edelman, Jeffrey Escoffier, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Pamela Haag, Yukiko Hanawa, Douglas Haynes, Amber Hollibaugh, Martha Howell, Robin D. G. Kelley, Regina Kunzel, Dewar MacLeod, Molly McGarry, Priscilla Murolo, David Nasaw, Ellen Noonan, Karin Shapiro, Barbara Clark Smith, Mike Wallace, Jon Wiener Managing Editor Daniel Rodriguez Associate Editor Thomas Harbison Book Review Editor Duane Corpis Curated Spaces Editor Conor McGrady

Radical History Review is published three times a year by Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701. The journal gratefully acknowledges the continuing support of New York University and Tamiment Library. The editorial and book review offices of Radical History Review are located at Tamiment Library, New York University, 70 Washington Square South, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10012; 212-998-2632; contactrhr@ gmail.com. See the inside back cover for guidelines for contributors. Visit the editorial office at chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/ rhr.htm and Duke University Press Journals at www.dukeupress.edu/journals. Direct all orders to Duke University Press, Journals Customer Service, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701. The 2011 volume of Radical History Review corresponds to issues 109–111. Annual

subscription rates: print-plus-electronic institutions, $162; print-only institutions, $157; e-only institutions, $138; individuals, $35; students, $22. For information on subscriptions to the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collections through HighWire Press, see www.dukeupress .edu/library/eDuke. Print subscriptions: add $11 postage and 5% GST for Canada; add $14 postage outside the U.S. and Canada. Back volumes (institutions): $157. Single issues: institutions, $52; individuals, $14. For more information, contact Duke University Press Journals at 888-651-0122 (toll-free in the U.S. and Canada) or 919-688-5134; [email protected]. Photocopies for course or research use that are supplied to the end user at no cost may be made without explicit permission or fee. Photocopies that are provided to the end user for a fee may not be made without payment of permission fees to Duke University Press. Address requests for permission to republish copyrighted material to Rights and Permissions Manager, permissions @dukeupress.edu. Direct inquiries about advertising to Journals Advertising Coordinator, [email protected]. Radical History Review is distributed by Ubiquity Distributors, 607 DeGraw St., Brooklyn, NY 11217; phone: 718-875-5491; fax: 718-875-8047. Radical History Review is indexed in Academic Search Elite, Academic Search Premier, Alternative Press Index, America: History and Life, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Current Abstracts, Current Contents/Arts and Humanities, Film Literature Index, Historical Abstracts, Humanities Abstracts, Humanities Full Text, Humanities Index, Humanities International Complete, Humanities International Index, OmniFile Full Text, Mega Edition, Periodicals Index Online, Research Library, Scopus, and SocINDEX. © 2010 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. ISSN 0163-6545

Editors’ Introduction

This issue of Radical History Review, comprising research articles, reflections,

artistic works, and an interview, continues a dialogue begun with RHR 108. In that issue, we initiated an open-­ended conversation about the historical processes by which resources, especially common lands, that had long been controlled and shared by local communities become cordoned off, either literally or figuratively, for the exclusive use of property owners, states, and corporate entities. RHR 108 focused on the enclosures of physical commons: the open range in the U.S. South, for example, as well as spaces in colonial New Delhi, Durban, South Africa, and the iconic fencing in of open lands in the English countryside, which separated landless people from the flora and fauna on which their subsistence depended. This issue, titled “New Approaches to Enclosures,” allows us to consider in greater depth where our historical inquiries into enclosure had previously taken us. In this issue we probe more deeply the possible historical connections between, on the one hand, the transformation of commonly owned and managed lands into individual property and, on the other, more seemingly abstract forms of privatization. These “new” forms, we argue, manifest the principal problems encountered in the enclosure of the commons, yet in significantly different ways that warrant our attention and scrutiny. In 1989 the British musician Gary Clail released a song titled “Privatise the Air!,” the very title of which leveraged patent absurdity to make a point. Even given the disappearance under Thatcherism of many forms of collective ownership, was it really possible that one could privatize and own the air? Today, just over two decades later, Clail’s prescient, postpunk, contrarian battle cry is likely to be heard differently; its message about the privatization of apparently uncontainable resources necessary for human life sounds more like an indictment of our political-­economic reality than a voyage into the absurd. Carbon-­trading schemes that authorize corRadical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-012 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

1

2 

 

Radical History Review

porations to transform pollution into units of international trade, for instance, have become orthodoxy, even among many environmentalist organizations. Collective resources, like drinking water, have been transformed into commodities, while the plastic bottles that contain them have created a toxic spectacle of unprecedented proportions. And legal instruments like copyright and patents lock up intangible entities, like scientific knowledge and creative expression, under private ownership, purportedly in the public interest. Few can see solutions to the problem of public goods that are scarce or at risk that do not involve more, rather than less, privatization. As the filmmaker Nina Paley asserts in her interview in this issue, the idea that few would be motivated to carry out creative activity unless a monopoly system existed has become so commonplace as to be utterly unremarkable. The topic of enclosure, then, might seem to be a closed case — ­certainly after centuries of privatizing public utilities and lands, regulating public space, creating public-­private partnerships necessary to operate such ostensibly public institutions as libraries, parks, and museums, and criminalizing the gleaning of wild fruit. Yet while it seems difficult to deny that public life has become exponentially privatized, many unanswered questions remain. The essays in this issue illustrate that the study of enclosure remains strikingly relevant. Recent scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences, for instance, continues to problematize the concept of space and its enclosure in theoretically complicated ways. Are the various instances of privatization taking place across the world connected; and, if so, how are they connected? How might we draw a genealogical thread from the enclosure controversies in the eighteenth-­century British midlands to those in nineteenth-­century Naples, late twentieth-­century Baltimore, or even twenty-­first-­century Athens? The authors and artists in this issue take up such questions and rephrase them, both implicitly and explicitly, in a myriad of settings both new and familiar. They do not, in any case, draw definitive conclusions or present definitive answers. Of course, neither this nor the previous issue of RHR are unique in their efforts to reassess contemporary forms of privatization by using historical forms of enclosure as a conceptual paradigm. The antiwar, anticapitalist Midnight Notes Collective (MNC), for example, argued emphatically during the 1970s that the modern political economy under global capitalism sustained the class struggle by transforming everything, including immaterial intangibles such as air and water, into commodities thought to be beyond enclosure.1 They discovered that, in seeking out ways “to express this deeper structure of struggle,” they could appropriate and redeploy the language of the enclosure of the commons: “For ‘The New Enclosures,’ we found the vocabulary of commons and enclosure most evocative and historically rich, since it speaks of a place where Marxism, ecology, indigenous, and antislavery struggles meet. We wanted to explore the ways in which the struggle for a commons defines modern capitalist reality and the efforts — ­which we continue to see as essentially the class struggle — ­to supersede it.”2

Chazkel and Serlin | Editors’ Introduction 

 

3

The Midnight Notes Collective issued a stern warning about what they called the “corrosive secret” that lay hidden behind the “gleaming idols of globalism, the end of the blocs, the Gaian ecological consciousness, Glasnost, the end of the cold war, a united Europe, We Are the World, Save the Amazon Rain Forest . . . these are the phases of the day.”3 In the midst of what seemed like a global movement toward political conscientiousness and openness and careful stewardship of the world’s resources, the MNC pointed to an era of “New Enclosures.” They also noted an important countervailing trend: the emergence of forms of shared subsistence, often deployed to mitigate the consequences of austerity policies and structural adjustment programs fomented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The MNC took a special interest in Zapatismo, for instance, the political struggle in Mexico in the 1990s that invoked the name of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and his fight to restore traditional communally owned lands (ejidos) almost eight decades earlier.4 The collective took inspiration from the Zapatistas’ battle cry, “This world is not for sale,” and sustained support for the armed struggle that began in the tropical southern lowlands of Mexico in the 1990s and fought for socioeconomic justice and indigenous rights. In much the same way, this issue of RHR follows the MNC’s lead by not only offering critical accounts of enclosure and privatization outside of their more familiar historical iterations but also by offering critical accounts of forms of political and cultural activism that have adapted the language of privatization to challenge, often to parody, and ultimately to resist the pathological impulse to enclosure that characterizes the present phase of late capitalist development. One need only consider the catastrophe unleashed by BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 to see how bungled public-­private attempts to contain environmental disaster brought about in the first place by the forces of enclosure have helped galvanize national and international resistance to the rhetoric of commodification (epitomized by the refrain “drill, baby, drill”), as well as to the future exploitation of finite resources. All the monographic articles in our “Features” section engage with new forms of privatization and the commodification of shared resources and physical spaces that the legal and economic forces of enclosure often have engendered in modern and contemporary contexts. Marco Armiero’s essay, for example, describes the capitalist forces that hastened enclosure of the waterfront in late nineteenth-­ century Naples. For centuries the Naples waterfront had enabled a robust fishing economy that understood local waters as a commonly held source of economic and nutritional sustenance for the region’s population. Beginning in the 1870s, evidence of cholera, which afflicted many European cities in the late nineteenth century, forced the hand of sanitary engineers and public health officials in Naples, who cordoned off and enclosed portions of the waterfront to contain the epidemic. Armiero argues that such efforts conducted in the name of public health provided an

4 

 

Radical History Review

ideal opportunity for the city’s elites, especially its regional planners and real estate developers, to exploit the cholera epidemic and transform the edges of the maritime community into gated enclaves of expensive waterfront property. Rather than merely trace this story as a local variation on the historical forces of gentrification, however, Armiero pays attention to the degree to which the livelihoods of fishers, their families, and their culture were affected by the enclosure of the sea, a dramatic and unprecedented paradigm shift in how public access to natural resources held in common were erased seemingly overnight. Armiero also pays close attention to the forms of resistance that the enclosure of the waterfront generated by members of the maritime community, local artists, and public intellectuals, providing a key moment in a genealogy of activism against the privatization and commodification of natural resources that predate many more familiar twentieth-­century social and environmental movements. Similarly, Dara Orenstein reconstructs a crucial, but largely forgotten, step in the twentieth-­century formation of the global assembly line that is a keynote in the literature on the new enclosures. Her article concerns foreign trade zones (FTZs), not to be confused with the more commonly known free trade zones. The hundreds of FTZs that dot the U.S. landscape constitute legal fictions that allow commerce to proceed on U.S. shores but, technically, on foreign soil. They are, in Orenstein’s words “partially denationalized U.S. territory.” Although largely unremarked both today and when they were instituted in the mid-­1930s, FTZs have left behind a vast visual and textual record that Orenstein utilizes to return to the origins of the world’s archipelago of designated spaces in which the market has effectively replaced the state as the governing force. Orenstein looks both to the official, textual record of the political economy of the early twentieth century and the decision-­making process through which the U.S. government created the first of these FTZs in the 1930s and to the “visual artifacts” that these supposedly “invisible” pieces of denationalized territory left behind. How does this story intersect with the erosion of subsistence rights and the conditions of the contemporary world’s poor and working classes — ­in other words, the “New Enclosures”? Orenstein explains that when the architects of this system of foreign trade zones described its aims using the term frictionless production, they referred not just to a reduction in bureaucratic inefficiency but also to the drag effect that workers had on the production process — ­“the fewer, the better, suggested FTZ engineers.” In foreign trade zones, commodities could legally undergo — ­tariff-­free — ­a ny part of the process between making and selling, but not the making and selling itself. It was labor politics that drove the planners of the original FTZs to ban manufacturing; policy makers feared that allowing the actual fabrication of goods, rather than just their assembly and warehousing, would hurt U.S. manufacturing. Blue-­collar workers remained completely absent from the literature and iconography of FTZs. The focus of Orenstein’s narrative, the first

Chazkel and Serlin | Editors’ Introduction 

 

5

FTZ established in Staten Island, was demolished in the 1980s after containerization altered the geography of commerce in the United States. Yet it introduced a template of “frictionless production” which came “to pervade the United States.” Labor-­intensive manufacturing occurs elsewhere, but the work of assembly takes place, duty-­free, in these foreign trade zones. Robert Gioielli’s contribution to this issue implicitly questions whether the urban commons is even characterized by property ownership at all. Gioielli studies a several-­year-­long urban planning conflict that began in 1968 during a period of urban renewal in metropolitan Baltimore. On the surface, the construction of a highway would appear to be the opposite of enclosure. It was open to an undifferentiated public and built with public money as a matter of public policy, not a stretch of land brought under private ownership, and was intended to celebrate postwar motion and freedom, not boundedness. Gioielli demonstrates, however, that for Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods about to be demolished to make way for the new throughway that would service the city’s exurban, mostly white middle classes, the construction of a highway had the same effect as enclosure. The Movement against Destruction (MAD) and Baltimore’s other antihighway activist groups adopted positions that would be familiar to observers of defenders of the rights to the commons in other settings. Gioielli argues that protesters saw the construction of the highway as a direct “threat to their subsistence.” They contrasted the wasteland of urban decay with the vibrant urban ecology that communities hoped to construct on those sites slated for demolition; the protesters blamed their neighborhoods’ lamentable conditions on the municipal leadership’s ham-­fisted urban planning, not inherent urban blight. There was an added dimension to this familiar story: Baltimore’s history of racial segregation and economic inequality. For African American Baltimoreans just following the immediate civil rights era, property ownership — ­and their fight for both “individual rights to homeownership” and compensation — ­bore special significance. Listening attentively to Baltimore’s African American community activists’ own expressions of their aspirations and priorities preserved in the meeting minutes, press releases, and other artifacts of this surge of community activism, Gioielli shows that neighborhood activists decided against forcing racial integration on a “recalcitrant white majority.” Instead, they fought for de facto dominion over the territory that they had already effectively claimed as their own. Although just a series of privately owned homes and the churches, streets, and shops where they went about their daily lives, this was, in effect, their commons. To these members of the African American neighborhoods of Baltimore’s inner city and their mostly poor and working-­class white allies, the highway — ­a space for the exclusive use of automobiles speeding toward the wealthy suburbs — ­would have been private, for all intents and purposes, irrespective of who held title to it. Against this backdrop, then, urban protesters fought against something that

6 

 

Radical History Review

was — ­ostensibly at least — ­public in favor of privately owned, residential homes. Does Gioielli’s analysis function primarily as a cautionary tale about the distortions that come with the blanket application of the idea of enclosure? Or does it show how flexible and valid the metaphor of the enclosed common is, even when its spatial meaning is completely reversed? The reader must decide. Gioielli offers us a close reading of the grassroots experience of urban renewal and invites us to ponder these questions. Ultimately, his emphasis on the possibility of anti-­enclosure activism in favor of private, over public, property leads us to one of the most urgent urban planning issues of our time: Gioielli suggestively connects the political fight over the construction of this urban highway in the 1960s and 1970s to the controversies in cities throughout the United States over eminent domain abuse in the early twenty­first century. Finally, in the last essay in this section, Robert P. Marzec examines the contemporary phenomenon of “energy security,” which he characterizes as a decidedly neoliberal phase (or, as he argues, a fulfillment) of enclosure that began in earnest centuries ago in early modern Europe. Beginning in the 1990s, but consolidated after the attacks of 9/11, numerous U.S. defense analysts and agencies recognized that access to energy resources, especially oil and natural gas reserves, was essential to national security. Marzec decribes how policy analysts, emboldened by George W. Bush’s vision of empire for a new Gilded Age, recommended that the United States exploit the legacy of its “good neighbor” and protectorate policies and strategically position itself to take control of the energy reserves in many Latin American nations, especially those that do not have nationalized energy industries like that of Venezuela. Of course, the U.S. departments of Defense, Energy, and State are not entirely alone in such decision making; neoconservative think tanks, financial institutions, and organizations devoted to free enterprise and free trade all play significant roles in recommending that the tools of foreign policy and the rhetoric of national defense be deployed to enclose energy resources and to contain any comprise to the “American way of life” in the event of future terrorist attacks. For Marzec, the hysteria that instigated the invasion of Iraq, combined with the institutionalized hysteria surrounding national defense since the Cold War, provides an endless Möbius strip of rhetorical and material justification for neocolonial occupation and the seizure of national and indigenous resources. In our “Reflections” section, scholars representing multiple and overlapping disciplines — ­anthropology, geography, and history — ­offer informed commentary on how to make sense of new iterations of ownership and new practices of commodification, both in historical perspective and in the contemporary moment. David Harvey, for instance, makes an important intervention into how we might think about resistance movements to historical forms of enclosure, as well as into how we might think about the political and intellectual legacy of the commons in productive

Chazkel and Serlin | Editors’ Introduction 

 

7

ways. Harvey warns against the temptation to understand enclosure in facile terms that pit privatization against collective ownership; as he argues, “the whole issue has been clouded over by a gut reaction either for or against enclosure, typically laced with hefty doses of nostalgia for a once-­upon-­a-­time, supposedly moral economy of common action.” Through a close reading of often-­ignored passages of Karl Marx, as well as insights gleaned from contemporary thinkers like Elinor Ostrom, Harvey emphasizes the solution offered by collective forms of labor, not collective forms of ownership, to the political and moral problem of enclosure. In this phase of late capitalist development, conceiving of collective ownership without also thinking about how collective labor practices can help reconceive notions of the common good — ­a good that includes everyone, not just those who maintain or have access to commonly held lands — ­and avoid reproducing many of the hierarchies in more pernicious forms of private accumulation. Reconceptualizing organized forms of collective labor, in other words, will go much farther toward redistributing wealth and alleviating human misery than merely seizing privately held lands. Thus, Harvey argues, a new approach to enclosure, one that oscillates between “collective and associational, nested hierarchical and horizontal, exclusionary and open” will play a role in “finding ways to organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption in order to meet human needs.” In much the same way that Harvey recommends that we rethink the often bifurcated nature of ownership as an either/or scenario of either commonly held property or privatization, David Chang, a specialist in Native American history, asks us to reflect on enclosure as not just a transfer of property or a process of legal change but as a “political project,” wherein the transition from collectively owned to private property simultaneously effects a parallel transfer of sovereignty. Through a policy called allotment instituted by an 1887 act of U.S. Congress, commonly owned Native American lands were divided into parcels to be distributed to certain tribal members. Similar to the argument that Ben Maddison makes in RHR 108 in his study of nineteenth-­century Australia, Chang points out the likeness of the impact of allotment on Native American lands to the enclosure of the English commons but warns us against overstating this similarity or allowing it to obscure the particular reality of a settler colony. The subdivision of indigenous lands through allotment infringed directly on not just Native populations’ subsistence but also on their sovereignty. Tribal authorities lost their main source of power: the management of collectively owned tribal lands. Through the sale of these allotments, many indigenous lands ended up in non-­Native hands. Compounding its erosion of indigenous political power, allotment also “reinforced a tendency in the United States to think that it is race, rather than political difference, that defines Indian people and Indian nations.” Blood quantum came to play an important part in determining membership in a given tribe, and therefore in deciding who would be entitled to an allot-

8 

 

Radical History Review

ment of land. The “colonial imposition of allotment” came to be intertwined with the racial politics of blood quantum. This “colonial form of enclosure” affords us another opportunity to consider a case that calls into question the characterization of enclosure as the assertion of private over public power. Privatization indeed generally occurs at the expense of the state’s governing or regulatory power. However, in the colonial scenario that Chang considers, the opposite held true. In creating parcels of private property out of collectively held Native lands, allotment “simultaneously extended and masked the reach of state power.” His work thus helps us connect visible forms of expropriation involving tangible things like land with those that are far less tangible. Picking up many of the themes of control and dispossession examined by both Harvey and Chang, John F. Collins looks at the concept of cultural patrimony as enacted in contemporary Brazil. Patrimonialization, the process by which international agencies such as UNESCO have identified certain material and virtual expressions of cultural heritage for legal protection and copyright control, began in developing nations as a way to resist privatization and instantiate an ethos that respectfully upholds the collective and often antimaterialist histories associated with indigineity and vernacular culture. For Collins, however, patrimonialization in modern Brazil has enabled new iterations of older forms of enclosure that have been guided less by heritage protection and more by the impulses of neoliberalism and the authenticity-­obsessed expropriations of the tourist industries. Collins, an anthropologist, examines in detail the commodification of Afro-­Brazilian practices at the center of Brazil’s restoration of the Pelourinho Historical Center. He is thus able to document local attitudes toward patrimonialization, especially among those who serve as objects of cultural heritage even as they are subjects excluded from its care and the substantial profits to be gained from its exploitation. In our “Interview” section, Amy Chazkel, one of the editors of this issue, interviews the cartoonist, filmmaker, and activist Nina Paley, whose work brings the discussion of the enclosure of the commons squarely into the realm of the intangible. In the course of making and preparing to release her award-­w inning animated feature film, Sita Sings the Blues (2009), Paley drew on cultural artifacts: the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu text, and jazz recordings from the 1920s. She was thus forced to “trespass,” in her words, on cultural terrain to which two groups felt that they held monopoly proprietary rights: Hindu fundamentalists and “IP maximalists,” very different groups of people that passionately believe that enclosing the cultural commons protects culture. 5 Paley’s frustrating experiences in contending with the U.S. copyright system, which ostensibly protects cultural goods like songs, images, and stories by bringing them under proprietary control, radicalized her. In her recent series of video shorts and her activism, Paley counters the widely held notion that enclosing artistic works — ­or anything cultural or “imaginary” — ­behind

Chazkel and Serlin | Editors’ Introduction 

 

9

a purportedly protective fence of copyright law benefits visual artists, writers, musicians, and other producers of culture. Paley herself does not use the word enclosure to describe what she calls the lamentable state of the cultural commons, but, in this interview, she participates enthusiastically in a conversation about it. Importantly, she is careful to distinguish between the “grassy field,” an exhaustible resource, and ideas and culture, an inexhaustible resource. The artistic common, she reminds us, can never be used up. She does, however, leave room for the possibility of a historical connection between the enclosure of the commons in early modern England and the new enclosures in our own time. The “Curated Spaces” section features two sets of contemporary works engaged with questions of enclosure: a series of public installations in New York City and Oslo by John Hawke, and the participatory, multimedia performance art of the eastern European artists’ collective known as Neue Slowenische Kunst, or NSK. Both Hawke and NSK use everyday life as a canvas on which they render provocative, lifelike scenarios that both question the constraints of physical boundaries and play with the balance of public and private power. These works join the other contributions to this issue in demonstrating the immensely complicated nature of what may appear to be the stark division between private and public realms.6 The artworks presented in this section implicitly ask: who is authorized to dictate the uses of and access to public life? Moreover, into what kinds of collectives do people coalesce when given the experimental — ­a lbeit somewhat artificial — ­freedom to choose? John Hawke’s meticulously created installations reiterate the mundane features of the urban landscape, including bus shelters, park benches, construction sites, and signage. Like Nina Paley, Hawke intends his art to be freely shared, altered, and repurposed by self-­selecting and random members of the public. Urban residents adopt and absorb these structures into their daily routines. In Oslo, for instance, they begin to sleep in the lounge areas set up in a contested area of a municipal park. In Brooklyn, even bus drivers come to accept the de facto reality of Hawke’s handmade bus shelter, ignoring the threats implied by the “nonsense legalese” on the signage that Hawke places parodically on its outer wall. These works are intended to be ephemeral, and in all cases Hawke and his collaborators disassembled them within a few weeks of their installation. Their fleeting presence in often-­contested urban spaces, however, demonstrates both the possibility for people to make alternative uses of the familiar and how public facilities like parks and bus shelters can be political theaters that illuminate the disparity between social control and lived experience. Like Hawke’s “stealth” art, the unauthorized nature of the NSK collective and its fascinating entanglement with real-­l ife legalities have conditioned public responses to them. In contrast with Hawke’s reclamation of public space as a

10 

 

Radical History Review

medium for producing art, however, NSK makes art in the purposeful absence of space. NSK produced its own fictitious state, in a kind of fulfillment of Walter Benjamin’s dictum about mechanical reproduction, by treating the state itself as a work of art. As Alexei Monroe explains in his introductory essay, the NSK “virtual state” grew out of a 1980s artistic movement in what was then Yugoslavia, drawing heavily on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century nationalist iconographies at precisely the moment when the fate of the nation-state was being debated — ­and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, materialized across Eastern Europe and the (soon-­to-­be-­former) Soviet Union. The physical items produced as evidence of NSK’s fictitious state — ­the design, creation, and distribution of passports, ID badges, flags, maps, constitutional and genealogical documents, and so forth — ­actually brought this fictitious state into existence in a real sense. As Monroe explains, the NSK consulates and embassies, and especially its passports, came into actual diplomatic use in the early and mid­1990s, enabling NSK “citizens” to take advantage of the general confusion following the fall of the Soviet Union and the conflict-­ridden breakup of the south Slav nations into a multiplicity of states. In 1995, for instance, some people successfully used their NSK diplomatic passports to flee violence in Bosnia. More recently, applications for NSK passports have begun to pour in from Nigeria. As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, RHR 109 is the final installment of a two-­issue exploration of enclosure. In issue 108, we featured photographic essays engaged with histories of fences and walls in the Palestinian West Bank and Northern Ireland and even with materials like barbed wire. One wonders, then, if the particularly visual nature of the present issue of RHR is not a mere coincidence, considering not only the photographs documenting John Hawke’s dynamic, interactive installations and the powerful and well-­utilized national iconographies of the fictitious NSK nation but the plethora of rich images that appear throughout this issue. Are the artifacts of visual culture especially useful for representing the “new enclosures,” demonstrating resistance to and compliance with them, raising debate about their nature, and preserving their historical memory? If so, there is a certain irony to all of this, especially since the property that is being dispossessed, broken up into pieces, and distributed to private owners is, in the end, so utterly intangible. The editors thank Tom Harbison, Atiba Pertilla, Conor McGrady, and Daniel Rodriguez, our fellow members of the RHR editorial collective, our many anonymous reviewers, and the staff of the Journal division at Duke University Press, especially Jocelyn Dawson and Sue Hall, all of whom gave so generously of their time to make this issue possible. — Amy Chazkel and David Serlin

Chazkel and Serlin | Editors’ Introduction 

 

11

Notes 1. Midnight Notes Collective, “The New Enclosures: Planetary Class Struggle,” in Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, ed. David Solnit (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003), 61 – 72. 2. Midnight Notes Collective, “The New Enclosures,” 64. 3. Midnight Notes Collective, “The New Enclosures,” 64. 4. Midnight Notes Collective, Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War, 2nd ed. (Jamaica Plain, MA: Automedia, 2001); Samuel Brunk, “Remembering Emiliano Zapata: Three Moments in the Posthumous Career of the Martyr of the Chinameca,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (1998): 457 – 90. 5. Nina Paley, interview with author, April 19, 2010. 6. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005), 203 – 204.

Figure 1. “Pianta che indica le opere fatte, le opere in corso e le opere da fare”, trasmessa dall’ing. Lorenzo Allievi, amministratore delegato della Società pel Risanamento di Napoli, 1899 (“Maps of Works to Be Done, Already Done, and in the Making,” furnished by the engineer Lorenzo Allievi, CEO of the Naples Risanamento Society, 1899), in Archivio Banca d’Italia (Italian National Bank Archive), Liquidazione della Società del Risanamento (Settlement of the Risanamento Company). Courtesy of the Banca d’Italia Archive

Enclosing the Sea Remaking Work and Leisure Spaces on the Naples Waterfront, 1870 – 1900 Marco Armiero Even when it seems as if a charismatic and all-powerful person — a Haussmann, a Robert Moses, or an Oscar Niemeyer — builds a world with the aim of shaping others to conform to their particular and personal visions and desires, there turns out to be much more to it than just the vision of the person. Class interests, political powers, the mobilization of forces of violence, the orchestration of discourses and public opinion, and the like, are all involved. — David Harvey, Spaces of Hope

In 1998, when the city of Naples had not yet been submerged — literally or

journalistically — by a dramatic tide of garbage, a portion of a massive wall that divided the city from its harbor was demolished. At that time, the city was living what had been pompously called its Neapolitan Renaissance (Rinascimento Napoletano), an expression indicating the local government’s extensive restyling of the urban environment and, above all, of its representations.1 The demolition of that wall thus formed part of a general embellishment of central Naples and of the narrative of this transformation. “The city is regaining its relationship with the sea,” politicians, intellectuals, and commentators recited in the pages of the main local newspapers. No person more august than Naples’s mayor could have expressed this vision better: “Our Berlin Wall, which used to divide the city from the sea, is Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-013 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

13

14

Radical History Review

coming down. I am sure that the Neapolitans will know how to appropriate this regained maritime area.”2 For those who know Naples and the area in question, and probably for anyone who knows the Berlin Wall, the rhetoric employed would seem pompous indeed. Nevertheless, it was instrumental to an entire narrative about this Mediterranean city’s identity, memory, and urban restoration. During the late 1990s, politicians and intellectuals in Naples started to speak about recovering and preserving the memory of the sea and about planning new museums dedicated to the history of maritime activities and emigration.3 Meanwhile, in the Bagnoli area on the western side of the city’s bay, the definitive closure of a gigantic steel plant opened up encouraging prospects for the tourist redevelopment of the seashore to what it had been before the plant had been built.4 Again, after a long oblivion, the sea and its memories would return to Neapolitan shores.5 Yet after more than ten years with no new maritime or migration museum, Bagnoli is still waiting for its messianic regeneration; one suspects that Neapolitans have been unable to appropriate either the virtual or the real maritime spaces that the narrative promised. In this essay, my goal is not to discuss why so many projects intended to recover the maritime character of the city — whatever that might be — have come to naught. Rather, my goal is to understand the origins and implications of these narratives about reappropriating maritime spaces as strategies of urban regeneration and beautification. Such narratives are not recent inventions; they are the result of a long-standing cultural process that has involved reshaping both nature/work and nature/property relations. When city elites and opinion makers talk about regaining the sea, they usually mean that it is no longer part of the urban living experience and that its relationship with the city needs rescuing. But one might wonder, from what or whom? Moreover, is it correct to speak of a generic relationship, without making any reference to the quality of this connection? The bond between urban economic life and the sea is not just a matter relegated to the past. It is no accident, for instance, that Roberto Saviano’s shocking accusation leveled at the Neapolitan Mafia started precisely in the city harbor, the hub of wild globalization controlled by the criminal network.6 Historically, the steel plant in Bagnoli had very close ties to the sea, having even shaped the coastline. Anything but separation would describe the sea and the people of many of the historical districts. Among the maritime neighborhoods, fishers, sailors, porters, fishmongers, smugglers, and many other laborers relied on their daily connections to the sea. Work lies at the very core of this relationship. Yet this was not what the narrative on regaining the sea sought. Reappropriating natural spaces has always been embedded in a dichotomist discourse on nature versus work. As Richard White has shown, the dichotomy between nature and work has historically been popular in Western culture; work clearly exploits and transforms nature, but according to this vision, this transforma-

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

15

tion constitutes a sacrilege rather than a way to be connected to nature. At least since the Industrial Revolution, work and living spaces, unhealthy and hideous, have been segregated from spaces of nature, healthy and splendid. The zoning that organized cities and regions into industrial areas, natural parks, and upper-, middle-, and working-class neighborhoods reinforced this vision of work-nature relationships. According to White, environmentalist cultures have often reinforced this dichotomy, mythologizing nature without work and, conversely, demonizing work itself, especially the hard, physical work involved in transforming resources.7 To be worthy of protection and admiration, nature must be set free from work, which needs to be concealed from view and erased from even the memory of the landscape. As Raymond Williams puts it, “Some forms of this popular modern idea of nature seem to me to depend on the suppression of the history of human labor, and the fact that they are often in conflict with what is seen as the exploitation or destruction of nature may in the end be less important than the no less certain fact they often confuse us about what nature and the natural are and might be.”8 This process of suppression and exclusion does not concern just ideas and concepts but also flesh-and-blood people, since erasing work from the landscape has meant concretely expelling them from such places. In the Neapolitan case, the removal of workers and their practices of using and knowing nature did not stop the exploitation of nature, which occurred in other forms. Theodore Steinberg has stressed the need for environmental historians to scrutinize the deep-rooted connection between nature and property.9 Following Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx, Steinberg focuses on the transformation of nature into commodities that can be owned or sold.10 In his opinion, this was “the driving force behind the significant shifts in species diversity, soil fertility, and atmospheric conditions,” that is, behind the socio-ecological transformation of the environment.11 Thus nature has been incorporated into the socioeconomic system through work in its social forms of organization, which include property rights over both human and nonhuman nature. Hence this essay explores how, in the case of the Neapolitan waterfront, the dichotomist discourse on work versus nature affected property regimes and ways of using spaces and resources while relying on the rhetoric of nature’s purity/beauty and the expulsion of workers through the privatization of spaces. The remaking of the Neapolitan maritime neighborhoods in the late nineteenth century offers an excellent case study through which to understand the connections among narratives on sanitization, beauty, work, and the enclosure of the sea. Generally, the debate on common property has focused on land or on rural environments; the sea and the city have never seemed places for either common property or enclosures. Yet several studies on maritime communities around the world have revealed that even a natural space so seemingly hostile to any kind of boundary has forms of common access, a concept that implies a perception of the coastal sea as a commons.12 This held true not only for members of traditional fish-

16

Radical History Review

ing communities. Even in the city, fishers reclaimed their rights to manage the seashore and to gain access to the waterfront. Once again it was Steinberg who called attention to the urban commons, observing its correlation with the processes of sanitization that have occurred in most Western cities in the past two centuries.13 This correlation between urban commons and sanitization was extremely evident in nineteenth-century Naples when, during a series of cholera epidemics, the city council and the national government decided to sanitize the maritime districts. The by-products of this massive urban transformation were the removal of fishers and the conversion of poor neighborhoods into residential and leisure areas for the middle and upper classes. The seashore shifted from a place of work, deeply connected to a special mode of production and living, to a place of leisure. Here the removal of any trace of human labor was a precondition for restoring beauty and hygiene. While the sanitization discourse aimed to divide these two realms, the narrative of the picturesque proposed an alternative vision that attempted to reconcile work and nature. In this essay I envision the picturesque as the Mediterranean version of the “machine in the garden” rhetoric, but with a stronger link to people, since it was human work rather than technology that the discourse emphasized.14 Yet the supporters of the picturesque ultimately lost their battle, since sanitization affirmed a strict segregation between the space of work and the space of living well. Of course, this good life would have been for just a few people. Since sanitization implied the expulsion of poor people, it also entailed the end of the common regime of access to the sea. Adopting a political ecology approach, this essay will consider these unequal social effects of sanitization as coherent results of a strategy targeting the lower classes and their shared commons rather than as side effects of a strong treatment aiming to sanitize the city. Enclosure, privatization, and the expulsion of the poor were the goals of sanitation discourse, and in the case of fishers, the mission was largely accomplished. The Beautiful, the Dirty, and the Picturesque: Imagining an Urban Sea According to legend, Naples was founded in the spot where the siren Parthenope died, in the waters of the city harbor. Apart from the dark symbolism of a dead body serving as a city’s foundation, the legend links the city to its sea, transposing onto a mythical level what was indeed the historical root of settlement, the arrival of colonists from the eastern Mediterranean. Since then, the sea has played a considerable role in Neapolitan urban identity and, above all, in its narration. It is no accident that the stereotypical image of the city, produced and reproduced by travelers and artists, includes a vision of the bay: the sun, the sea, and Vesuvius remain essential ingredients in the city’s canonical iconography. In the mid – nineteenth century a foreigner traveling in Naples wrote: “The coastal strip from Capo Miseno to Salerno,

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

17

that is, the bay of Naples and half the Bay of Salerno, is indisputably the most beautiful part of Italy, and one of the most beautiful in the world.”15 However, the sea was not just the gate to the “paradise of devils” — this was the common definition for Naples — or the frame for a typical postcard.16 The sea did not stay out of the city, but entered its streets, squares, and buildings and created hybrid neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the maritime districts — namely Chiaia, Porto, Mercato, Pendino, Santa Lucia, and Posillipo — had rather different characters, and the dominating presence of the sea did not level out the variety of social relationships with it, nor did the sea homogenize the narratives about these areas and their inhabitants. The dichotomous distinction between work spaces and leisure spaces was crucial in this diversification among maritime districts; in some areas the sea was simply part of the scenery of a beautiful promenade for tourists and uppermiddle-class residents, as in Chiaia, with its city park built on the old beach, and on the Posillipo Hills. Yet elsewhere the sea was still part of lower- class social and economic life, as in Santa Lucia and Porto. Although the segregation between those spaces and those visions of urban nature could seem severe, matters were actually very confused until the midnineteenth century. Indeed, Santa Lucia was a major destination for Grand Tour travelers during their visits to Naples, despite the district’s filth and chaos. As the Italian anthropologist Alessandra Broccolini puts it, Santa Lucia became a mirror in which the ancient Greek roots of the city were reflected in the very faces of fishers and their families.17 Stratified in the urban soil and in the genes of the fishers, the noble Greek origins of the city found their home in Santa Lucia or, rather, in the narratives about that area and its inhabitants. Among its narrow alleys and in the sunbaked faces of its fishers, northern European travelers thought they recognized the primitive design of both the city and its first inhabitants. If Santa Lucia was the city’s cradle, it was a chaotic one, the stage for a folk comedy rather than a Greek tragedy. It was even possible to rent chairs in the street to comfortably admire the spectacle of folk life, framed in a historical and natural landscape made by the sea, the medieval castle dominating the area, and the view of the entire bay. The picturesque was the key to appreciating Santa Lucia and its combination of natural beauty and human activities, an appreciation that, instead of segregating work and nature, sought to blend them.18 At the end of the nineteenth century, Matilde Serao, a well-known Neapolitan writer and journalist,19 offered a description of Santa Lucia based on this picturesque canon: “Nothing [is] more picturesque than Santa Lucia, the exclusive property of the signori fishers and sailors, weavers of fish-traps and sellers of oysters.”20 Santa Lucia was the very essence of the picturesque. In eighteenth- and nineteenth- century iconography, the image of Naples was inextricably linked to this ancient fishers’ village,21 where everything — folk traditions and jobs, religion

18

Radical History Review

and dialect, and even political allegiance — was deeply marked by the presence of the sea.22 Most descriptions of nineteenth- century Santa Lucia stressed the picturesque character of this neighborhood;23 in the 1880s the Illustrazione italiana (Italian Illustration), a popular magazine of the time,24 published a series of articles on Santa Lucia. Here a description from one: “There is no other street which can be considered more Neapolitan in character than Santa Lucia. . . . A carriage is stopped in front of the Albergo Roma . . . a group of kids is playing in the street; a sailor is sleeping on the bastion . . . ; two English ladies are running away from a child who wants them to buy an enormous bouquet; an acquafrescaio invites clients.”25 To represent Santa Lucia, the magazine published an illustration depicting a women’s brawl, with chairs raining from the windows; maybe the place was picturesque, but in the 1880s the pendulum of cultural sensitivity was shifting toward other visions, leaving very little room for the fashion of dirt and chaos. 26 In fact, despite the celebrations of the picturesque, the Illustrazione italiana had started its series of articles dedicated to Santa Lucia with the unequivocal lines: “Delenda Carthago [Carthage must be destroyed]! Naples will never be civilized, tamed, or great with these filthy areas in which . . . the germs of crime, social plague, and ignorance have their hideouts.”27 The time had come to sanitize old Naples. Infection and Sanitization Although it was fishers, peddlers, fishmongers, acquafrescai, oyster-sellers, brawling women, and dirty kids that allegedly gave special color to Santa Lucia, at the end of the nineteenth century it was a singular microscopic inhabitant of these maritime districts that became the most significant agent of identity and transformation: Cholera vibrio. Though the unhealthiness of Naples became notorious with the 1884 epidemic, there had been twelve others — eight of cholera and four of typhoid — during the preceding fifty years. Until 1885, Naples did not seem to be a very healthy city.28 While these numbers cannot tell the whole story of the epidemics, the death rate in each neighborhood shows the impact of cholera on the urban population more clearly.

Table 1. Number of deaths in the nineteenth- century Neapolitan cholera epidemics

1836 – 37 1855 1866 1873 1874 1884

23,472 1296 2389 1312 7018 7143

Source: Giuseppe Russo, Napoli come città (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1966), 265.

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

19

Table 2. Mortality rates according to neighborhood

Neighborhoods San Ferdinando* Chiaia* San Giuseppe Montecalvario Avvocata Stella San Carlo all’Arena Vicaria San Lorenzo Pendino* Mercato* Porto*

1836 8.30 15 10.80 6.90 4.30 5.40 11.70 9.70 9.40 17.70 18.90 38.60

Deaths per 1,000 inhabitants 1873 0.62 1.53 1.27 1.31 0.88 1.81 1.23 2.37 1.30 4.01 5.14 4.96

1884 3.75 4.42 9.56 4.09 2.46 4.40 6.02 16.71 5.47 24.96 30.86 22.70

* Maritime neighborhoods Sources: Russo, Napoli come città, 280; Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera 1884 – 1911 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 107.

Some parts of the city — namely, Pendino, Mercato, and Porto — were more exposed to epidemics than others, even if more detailed data might show the existence of poor and highly infected enclaves also in other neighborhoods such as the Santa Lucia area in San Ferdinando District. Many sources confirmed this impression; two medical reports, one written in the 1830s, the other in the 1860s, depicted the same districts — plus the subareas of Mergellina and Santa Lucia — as the dirtiest in the city and, consequently, as the most unhealthy and receptive to any kind of disease.29 Hence, the nineteenth-century cholera epidemics in Naples followed a regular routine, always infecting certain parts of the urban body more than others. As a matter of fact, throughout the century, mortality rates correlated with poverty in Naples. Geographically, the areas most affected by cholera were those along the coast, where most of the fishers and the other social groups dependent on the sea for their livelihood were concentrated, and where urban infrastructure, especially sewers and fresh drinking water, were scarce or nonexistent. The high concentration of people living in those maritime areas was another significant factor behind the spread of epidemics. In her study of the 1836 cholera outbreak, the Italian historian Annalucia Forti Messina remarks that the Porto, Pendino, and Mercato quarters, practically built on the ancient beach,30 were the most populous in the city, with a density of 120,000 inhabitants per kilometer.31 The situation did not change in the second half of the nineteenth century; according to Frank Snowden’s data, in 1884 the 64,000 people who lived in a Naples square kilometer became 130,000 in those boroughs around the sea, in the lower city.32

20

Radical History Review

Table 3. The population of Naples in maritime districts throughout the nineteenth century

Districts Chiaia Porto Mercato Pendino San Ferdinando City

1829 27,284 36,569 52,352 30,923 N/A 357,237

1880 36,611 38,487 55,538 34,895 36,985 535,206 *

* Data from the 1880 general census Sources: Giuseppe Talamo, “Napoli da Giuseppe Bonaparte a Ferdinando II” (“Naples from Joseph Bonaparte to King Ferdinand II”), in Storia di Napoli: Storia politica ed economica, (History of Naples: Political and Economic History) vol. 5 (Bari: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1976), 173; Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884 – 1911, 107.

If we superimpose the map of the areas most affected by the nineteenthcentury cholera epidemics onto the areas with the highest density of sailors and fishers, we find that they coincide almost perfectly.33 Thus it is hardly surprising that these recurrent outbreaks and the resulting quest for urban and social sanitization strategies radically changed the perception of these coastal spaces and the human universe revolving around them. As Martin Melosi has explained, reformers tended to associate environmental chaos with social pathologies. Therefore, to restore the city, one needed to take action not only with regard to reforming its infrastructures (sewers, aqueducts, and buildings) but also with regard to reforming or eliminating its inhabitants, often described as members of uncivilized “tribes” living in primitive enclaves in the urban fabric.34

Table 4. Percentage of sailors and fishers in local demographic samples

Year 1831 1851 1871 1891 1911

Chiaia 7.9 7.6 7.4 5 1.9

S. Ferdinando 5.5 3.4 1.8 2.8 0.8

Pendino 1.3 1 0.3 1 0.7

Porto 3.3 1.9 0.3 0.4 1

Mercato 3.64 4.6 4.4 6 4.7

Average 4.328 3.7 2.84 3.04 1.82

Source: Alida Clemente, “Il mare e la città. Comunità pescherecce e trasformazione urbana nella Napoli contemporanea”(“The Sea and the City. Fishing Communities and Urban Transformation in Contemporary Naples”), Società e storia 97 (2002): 557.

Although the sea clearly shaped people’s professions, lifestyle, culture, and language, we still do not know much about these city fishers.35 Research has usually focused on easily identifiable fishing communities, but rarely on those settled

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

21

in urban environments. So what explains this crusade against the lazzari del mare (plebeians of the sea)? As we have seen, in the late nineteenth century, an idyllic picturesque vision of maritime life, full of barefoot lazzari and expert fishers, gave way to the denouncement of the dreadful conditions of life in those areas of the city. Naples had started to become an open-air laboratory for a new season of sociological inquiries: intellectuals, journalists, and philanthropists roamed the city’s narrow alleys, painting harsh pictures of the urban misery they found. Even before materializing in the Haussmann method of massive urban renewal projects, the dissection of what was seen as the sick urban body started with these inquiries as liberal governmentality arrived in the Neapolitan streets to gather and deploy statistical and social knowledge.36 The cholera epidemic of 1884 accelerated the political effects of these discourses on social and urban sanitization, culminating in a special law for the city’s regeneration, the Risanamento. 37 Yet the process had started long before that; indeed, since the 1870s, policy makers, engineers, intellectuals, and physicians had been speaking about replanning the lower city and renegotiating the relationship between the city and its sea. In one of the most influential reports on Naples published in the late 1870s, for example, the Tuscan intellectual Renato Fucini described the caves of Santa Lucia as dens from which ghosts, not people, emerged from the darkness. One appalling scene of “a little girl sleeping in the darkness on a pile of garbage, with insects on her cheeks,” was meant to inflame the reader’s imagination.38 In 1877, the English writer and philanthropist Jessie White Mario described the poor areas using the same horrified tone: “This fondaco had a hole in the wall in every room. And all these holes drain into the black well, which is a close friend to the water well. . . . In one of the attics I saw a heap of straw moving around; I thought it was due to the ants, but they were other kind of vermin indeed.39 In all these narratives, Naples epitomizes of the whole south of the country — socially and biologically sick, with the only possible cure being the reformation of both people and the environment. Both were framed as porous entities, seeping into one another, so as to affect individual and social bodies, landscapes, and behavior. As the Neapolitan city councilor Teodosio de Bonis put it in an 1884 report on postcholera sanitization, “Too often experts and decision makers looked for the causes of urban illness in the wrong places, failing to see them in the everyday living environment.”40 Toward a Political Ecology of Sanitization Visiting the poor neighborhoods infected by cholera, the Italian prime minister Agostino Depretis pronounced a phrase soon to become the motto of Neapolitan sanitization: “Naples must be gutted.” Not satisfied with this already quite aggressive expression, the king of Italy added: “Gutting will not be enough; in many places, Naples must be razed to the ground.”41 Some considered the king’s attitude to be

22

Radical History Review

both kindhearted and martial.42 While the former quality is rather hard to discern, the warlike character of the latter is indisputable. Sanitizing Naples would indeed be a war. However, the enemies were not just Cholera vibrio, ruined buildings, narrow alleys, and dirt. Following Erik Swyngedouw’s and Nikolas C. Heynen’s arguments, we can envision the sanitization of the Naples waterfront as a struggle in which politics rather than technology shaped the face of urban environments, thus challenging the presumption that the process of transforming the waterfront was simply a series of political or technological solutions to a sanitary problem.43 Analyzing power and class relationships does not suggest that sanitization processes were ill conceived or ineffective in improving health conditions. Rather, it simply suggests that sanitation strategies were not socially neutral; not everybody gained from them. As Matthew Klingle has written with regard to such practices in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Seattle, “Targeting a ‘natural’ problem often involves targeting a specific group and a particular place.”44 In the Neapolitan context, the focus on the waterfront meant that sanitization targeted urban spaces and social groups deeply implicated in the concept of the “natural.” And in the middle of a nineteenth-century city crowded with half a million inhabitants, nothing appeared so natural or so wild as the sea and the fishers. While the narrative of social inquiry represented Neapolitan fishers as being morally and bodily infected and contagious, another kind of narrative portrayed them as unable to use maritime resources wisely. For some, they were “vandals of the sea,” thieves of its resources. Writing in 1870, for example, Achille Costa, a professor of zoology at the University of Naples, blamed local fishers for the shortage of marine produce in the bay since they aimed solely at an immediate profit, using tools and techniques harmful to the fish stock.45 Another scholar followed the same idea by defining Neapolitan fishers as “barbarians.”46 In 1904, David Levi Morenos, a professor and expert on fishery, offered an excellent summary of this rhetoric on fishers’ shortcomings: “Imagine an earthly paradise in which at every season of the year the corn, the grapes, fruits of all sorts are ripe and ready. And around those fields, with no walls or hedges to protect them, . . . imagine a hungry crowd of workers who rush to complete the only job required of this magic land, which needs no sowing or digging, but needs only to be harvested.”47 Here Morenos offers a prescient image of enclosure that foreshadows the ideas of Garrett Hardin sixty years later, choosing to hide the stratification of common rules and practices employed by groups of fishers to regulate their access to particular maritime spaces and the associated biological resources. Yet even in urban environments, maritime neighborhoods preserved sets of rules and practices that can be considered typical of commons.48 Joan Martinez Alier emphasizes that fisheries are a perfect example of the contradictions between open access and common management, regulated by groups of fishers.49 This thesis is confirmed by the extensive empirical research conducted by scholars such as Rob Van Ginkel, Alvaro Díaz de la Paz, and Jesús Giráldez Rivero. 50 In nineteenth-

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

23

century Naples, groups of fishers, organized on the basis of locality and church associations, the common use of tools, and biological target zones, envisioned the sea and the waterfront as common property; therefore they controlled — or at least tried to control — access to the commons and the introduction of new tools, challenging fishers from other areas who sought to enter “their” maritime spaces. A good example is the case of the Confraternity Santa Caterina dell’Arte, a religious association of fishers from the Porto District, one of the areas most affected by cholera and hence by sanitization. 51 The group established the size and shape of tools, fishing seasons, the size and weight requirements of the catch, and, finally, imposed fines for infringements. When those from other districts sought to break those rules, reactions were quite severe, including the burning of boats or even shootings.52 Even more than the sea itself, it was the waterfront that was needed and used as a commons. Fishers generally stayed close to the coast, employing boats and tools that required land, good beaches for storage, and maintenance. It was precisely a long, sandy shore, covered with boats and nets, that was lodged in the memory of Benedetto Croce, the famous Italian historian and philosopher, when he sought to recall the image of the Neapolitan waterfront before the huge nineteenth-century transformation.53 For Croce, the waterfront was the prototype of an unusual hybrid scenery, mixing bucolic and maritime topoi, a landscape simply erased by modernity. Nevertheless, what Croce did not see, nor was interested in seeing, were the material relationships connecting people with their environment. Nets and boats on the seashore were not just part of a picturesque postcard scene; they were occupants of a hybrid urban-natural space that followed local rules, turns, and hierarchies, reinforcing the idea of the waterfront as a common space for work. The fishers’ very existence as a group of allied workers relied on the existence of those common spaces and their free access. Hence sanitization initiated a veritable war between conserving the right to common spaces and resources and “freeing” them from work and workers, which actually meant both privatizing and gentrifying them. As a war, sanitization did not happen without resistance or confrontation. The staunchest opponents of urban renovation were the fishers themselves. For them, the sanitizing of the city would mean not only expulsion from their homes but also the breaking of their bonds with the sea and, most important, the loss of their main source of subsistence. A few sensational episodes of rebellion, probably a small sample of these communities’ widespread aversion to the new shape the city was assuming in spite of them, document their resistance. As stated by Swyngedouw and Heynen, “the material production of environments is necessarily impregnated by the mobilization of particular discourses and understandings (if not ideologies) of and about nature and the environment.”54 This was what happened in nineteenthcentury Naples, where the remaking of the waterfront became the opportunity for a wider debate about nature and beauty. The city council was the arena for this discussion where those who defended the beauty of the seaside neighborhoods were often the same who took the side of fishers and of their common access to the sea. One

24

Radical History Review

example is Councillor Enrico Cenni’s protest against the construction of the new Via Caracciolo, the seafront boulevard running alongside the Villa Comunale, the city park, in the 1870s: “[That plan] despoils this area of a special beauty admired by citizens and foreigners alike. A gently curving sandy beach lapped by the waves of the sea is replaced by a straight-running street of Vesuvian stone. And we know that straight-running streets are never recommended for their beauty.”55 The plan in question was in fact part of a long process of transformation of the Chiaia seafront, begun in 1778 when King Ferdinand IV ordered the construction of the Villa Comunale.56 This feature of urban decoration had already penalized local communities making a living from the sea. Although the passeggio reale (the royal stroll), as the promenade built along the shore was called, had spared a portion of the beach for the use of fishers, there had been uprisings against construction work that threatened the traditional activities of both men and women (especially fishers and washers).57 In Cenni’s speech a century later, the preservation of the landscape’s beauty was commensurate with his staunch defense of the fishers’ rights to continue to use the sea as their source of subsistence. According to Cenni, the city council had no right “to deprive the fishers of their right to exercise their profession on those beaches because rights of commons are, by their very nature, irrevocable.”58 For Cenni, the possibility of both enjoying the landscape and harnessing the sea as a biological resource was complementary through the concept of the picturesque, connecting two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Of course, the sentimental image of the urban picturesque has long been one associated with the problem of Otherness; as Carrie Tirado Bramen has argued in her discussion of U.S. cities, the picturesque transforms diversity into “an aesthetic spectacle.”59 Nevertheless, the politics of the picturesque in the double narrative about sanitization and the commons has a peculiar specificity in the Neapolitan case, since the term referred to the general vision of Italian nature and its relationship to national memory. No traveler would have come to Italy looking for “pure” nature, such as wilderness. Rather, a landscape with ruins had become the canonical representation of Italian nature. In the case of the Neapolitan waterfront, those ruins “lived”; they were people embodying the memory of the past through their ways of working and living. The picturesque was the Mediterranean version of the pastoral narrative aiming to reconcile the garden and the machine in industrial countries. In rural Italy, where machinery was not invasive, the picturesque intended to reconnect work and beauty, the human and the natural landscape. Indeed, one could not conceive of the seafront without boats pulled ashore, nets spread out to dry, and half-naked boys gathering mollusks.60 In these contexts, work formed part and parcel of the landscape and was central to what made it beautiful. This logical-aesthetic line of reasoning, a certain image of the sea and, especially, of the city’s seacoast, competed with another one based on different needs and perspectives (see table 1).

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

25

Table 5. Remaking the waterfront through two opposite logical-aesthetic lines of reasoning

I) Beauty The picturesque Communal use Letting the fishers stay “Private use”  II) Modernity Filth/hygiene Beauty  “Expelling the fishers”

In the logical line of reasoning leading from beauty to communal use (I), beauty is a natural feature. In part II of the table, however, beauty is transformed from a preexisting natural category into a product, the result of the management of urban spaces and of social stratification. In such a formulation, only modernity and hygiene, along with an accentuated class-based zoning of the city, can produce beauty. As one of the city councilors put it, “Should we refrain from giving another shape to that beach just because centuries ago it was beautiful?”61 Two other councilors added that neither “rags and nets” nor “barefoot and half-naked people” should be included any longer in what was the most beautiful landscape of the city.62 Thus, if modernity is the key to understanding the second approach, the concept of the picturesque played a decisive role in the first vision, which considered beauty a gift of nature, rather than as a by-product of modernization. The idea that beauty could manifest itself even in disorder restored dignity to the chaotic life of the alleys of Santa Lucia and of the Chiaia beach. In other words, these places were not beautiful in spite of humans and their work, but because of the blending of culture with nature, of work with the landscape. The merging of work and natural beauty in the picturesque narrative implied the reevaluation of the waterfront as a commons and the option to protect common uses rather than implement privatization and gentrification. In a parliamentary inquiry promoted to investigate the Risanamento project and the local government,63 for instance, one researcher observed that “during the Risanamento, no study was carried out on the poor who were forced to leave their demolished homes. Hence there were no provisions that would have given them the opportunity to move to better areas and apartments.”64 But the absence of both a comprehensive understanding of the poor situation and of specific measures to help them was speculation, not a mistake. The contractors were supposed to build twenty thousand square meters of affordable housing for the “refugees” expelled from the sanitized neighborhoods, but they simply did not. Instead, they preferred to build many more houses for middle-class citizens, thereby doubling the square footage originally allocated to that group.65 Yet the city government did not hold them accountable for this; as the Italian historian Marcella Marmo pointed out, giving a free hand to the entrepreneurs was the city’s way to avoid making contributions to the cost of

26

Radical History Review

construction and at the same time sustaining the value of urban property for the elite.66 Indeed, local government did more than just this; it extended the privileges for sanitization and public works (expropriation and tax exemption) to all kinds of construction projects, thereby canceling out the clauses on the percentage of land reserved for new buildings, as well as those on the percentage of buildings reserved for the lower classes. The extension of special benefits and the neglect of any political supervision over the implementation of the plan were the incentives the local government offered to private investors, with the assumption that private profits would lead to the common good. It is not surprising, then, that affordable houses soon disappeared. Furthermore, even reserving houses for the poor did not necessarily mean that the poor actually benefited. According to one survey, false claimants occupied over one-third of the 1,060 houses built for the poor.67 As a result of sanitization poor areas thus became even more crowded than before; those unable to afford the new, modern, hygienic houses were forced to share the old buildings excluded from urban renovation. According to the Neapolitan playwright Salvatore Di Giacomo, who wrote a guide to the city in 1913, immediately after the Risanamento, the economic subsidies for the poor expelled by sanitization were simply used for short-term survival, while members of the middle class received the new affordable apartments on the basis of political allegiance rather than income.68 With more than thirty-five thousand destitute inhabitants moved from the sanitized districts, the Risanamento meant deportation on a massive scale. That the Risanamento left several secondary alleys overcrowded while gentrifying the sanitized spaces appears clear even in some celebrative descriptions, such as one from an 1892 issue of the Illustrazione italiana: “From Amedeo District to the Chiaia Waterfront — apart from a few alleys where people from the maritime area of Chiaia have found their hideout — we can find a cleanliness that makes us happy. . . . Here are new elegant buildings and rich villas; there, other buildings have been tidied up; many of them have been embellished; others were just rebuilt.”69 If the economic activities of the lower classes have always been deeply rooted in the spaces of daily life, this has held especially true for professions dependent on fixed resources such as those connected to the sea. Pasquale Villari, the most perceptive observer of Naples as a national social issue, wrote in 1884: “A multitude of fishers is crammed into Santa Lucia, because they can just cross the road and get to the sea. Hence it is not only a matter of bad habits; rather there are good reasons linking those people to the places where they live. Anyone can understand that it will not be possible to take them away from those areas.”70 But Villari was, in fact, wrong: the sanitization of the waterfront did not stop at the fishers’ boats or nets. Although the projects included both affordable houses and infrastructure for fishers, in point of fact sanitization simply transformed those areas into tourist and upperclass districts that did not leave any spaces for people or for common uses. In the

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

27

case of the remaking of the Chiaia waterfront in the 1870s, for example, not only did housing become too expensive but all fishing infrastructure was dismantled. While fishers had always used the beach as a storage space for their boats and tackle, the new project transformed the beach into a large promenade with an inadequate fishing harbor, which was later destroyed by a storm in 1879. In Santa Lucia, where renovation included the construction of a small fishing harbor, the city council gave the beach to a private concession that established a seaside resort, Eldorado. And like every version of Eldorado around the world, this one was also immediately enclosed by a concrete wall to keep out nonmembers.71 Few contemporary observers were able to envision the long-term effects of urban regeneration on the special relationship between fishers and nature, above all in terms of the privatization of the commons. Rather, they preferred either to celebrate the virtues of sanitization or to lament the end of the picturesque. It was no accident, for instance, that among the few opponents of the Risanamento were several painters, such as Vincenzo Migliaro, Eduardo Dalbono, Antonio Mancini, and Giuseppe Casciaro, who hastened to capture picturesque glimpses of the old city before they disappeared.72 Dalbono’s reaction to the transformation of the seaside can be considered emblematic of the whole group’s attitude: “Rascals! That avenue was a masterpiece . . . a masterpiece made by Nature. And now look what they are doing. . . . Here, in Naples we have the sky, sun, and sea from paradise. Foreigners have always envied us these things. But no, we must change everything. They say: it is for hygiene. So, we have transformed Santa Lucia into a bike path and the Villa Comunale into an enclosure for the illustrious dead.73 Similarly, the Neapolitan playwright Raffaele Viviani made this point in his work “Pescatori” (“Fishers”): the signori, the rich, were appropriating the whole waterfront for their houses, destroying fishers’ poor shacks and expelling them from the areas.74 And the poet Ferdinando Russo, who dedicated several of his works to Santa Lucia and its people, wrote a poem titled “O’sventramento” (“Gutting”): Just three days sick with some fever! . . . And immediately they come and boss you around! First, the engineer comes and he measures everything, After that he takes your stuff out of your home and sends the workers to demolish it! And now where can we go, my friend? Here they are building houses for rich people! I wish all of you will be sick soon! I wish all of you will die under these new buildings!75

The battle of these artists in some ways resembles the battle conducted by the group of intellectuals who rallied around Croce’s journal Napoli nobilissima (Noblest Naples), fighting in those years to preserve special pieces of art from the

28

Radical History Review

purifying destruction of the Risanamento. As the historian of architecture Cesare De Seta has asserted, many of these intellectuals, while lamenting the end of a world, were also inclined to accept the ideology of the Risanamento and fell into line. They were convinced that the victory of the “comfortable life” over nature was unavoidable; they simply needed to salvage a few fragments of a defeated world.76 The strategies of sanitization were not just threatening the portals and churches defended by the journal; rather, an entire lifestyle was disappearing, and a unique mode of production that enabled interactions between marine and urban ecosystems was coming to an end. Although discussions appear to have focused particularly on the aesthetic aspects of these transformations, the rights of a commons over the environmental resources of the city were at stake. Steinberg, for instance, has recently called attention to the existence of a commons regime even in urban realities, referring to the role of horses and pigs in waste recycling and in the diet of the lower classes.77 Joanna Dyl has adopted the same approach in studying the suppression of chicken coops in San Francisco as a sanitization policy following the plague of 1907.78 Thus the sanitizing of cities, notably the crusade against herding in the city’s streets, has had repercussions not just for the city’s organic cycle but also for working-class means of subsistence. The case of the sea is interpretable along similar lines. Fishers had free access to the biological resources of the city’s sea, but the condition for this access was the occupation and full availability of the spaces bordering the sea. Without a beach on which to land and mend nets, without the proximity of living and working spaces, this freedom became purely theoretical. The urban renovation plans conceived in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the idea of the city’s sea as having multiple uses and meanings. To turn the seafront into a pleasure resort not only meant the end of the local fishing economy but also that the sea and the seafront, no longer understood as a commons, were opened to private use, even give the formal guarantee of free access. The new buildings and streets materially obliterated communal working and living spaces. Illegal construction invaded the seafront, causing prices to soar. Moreover, the idea of a bourgeois sea to be used for leisure and diversion was based on a rigid separation of nature and work and, as a consequence, the banishment of the lower classes. Nevertheless, the sanitization of the lower city did not always cause the complete disappearance of preexisting realities. For example, the Pallonetto — a narrow alley on the slope of Monte Echia (San Ferdinando District) on which the majority of the luciani, those expelled from Santa Lucia, converged — was spared, which in turn permitted some residents to negotiate a different relationship to nature and the rest of the city and its economy. That many of these residents became successful smugglers, using old skills for new purposes, enabled them to remain profoundly connected with the sea.79

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

29

Conclusion The outcome of the aforementioned struggles is well known. The seafront was eventually sanitized, creating an impact on the urban character as well as on the economy of the city. Fishers were driven out of both Chiaia and Santa Lucia. Housing became too expensive, and no infrastructures for fishing survived. It was not possible for the fishers to remain in the new sanitized neighborhoods. However, transformation of the whole coastal area was neither painless nor peaceful; the records of the local administrations report uprisings and riots in Santa Lucia and Marinella.80 An anonymous article published in 1884 in Il Roma, the local newspaper, offers an idea of the kind of social opposition that accompanied the sanitization of the waterfront: “When demolition begins to make way for new buildings, people have to be expelled without violence or tumult. The people must be driven away not by the tormentor’s whip, but by the masons’ pickax. Seeing themselves surrounded by all this dismantling, they go away of their own accord. . . . To beautify the Chiaia seafront, the fishers were driven out in this way, and they found somewhere to go. Can we not do the same now?81 In this case, as in others, we must investigate the modes of conflict and resistance to the general privatization of environmental resources in Naples. 82 As Andrew Hurley has written, the struggle for power and the physical landscape perpetually demonstrates that “the domination of natures involves and necessitates the control of human beings.”83 Notes This article was written while I was a visiting scholar at the Centro for Estudios Sociais (CES) at the University of Coimbra. I wish to thank the CES faculty for their kind support during my stay there. I discussed a previous version of this essay at Nancy Peluso’s LandLab at the University of California, Berkeley. Many thanks to all LandLab friends including Stefania Barca, Catherine Corson, Gail Hollander, Rod Nuemann, and Nancy Peluso. Special thanks to Johannes Stahl; without his help, I would never have found many of the sources I used here. Last, but not least, I thank Mark Walters and Veronika Fukson for improving and editing my English. Of course, I take sole responsibility for any mistakes. 1. After a long period during which the city suffered an appalling reputation, the city council invested extensively in building a positive new image of Naples. The restyling of the Piazza Plebiscito, opening in front of the old Royal Palace, became the symbol of the new city. Regarding mayor Antonio Bassolino and his local government, see in English: Felia Allum and Percy Allum, “Revisiting Naples: Clientelism and Organized Crime,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13 (2008): 340 – 65; Felia Allum and Marco Cilento, “Parties and Personalities: The Case of Antonio Bassolino, Former Mayor of Naples,” Regional and Federal Studies 11 (2001): 1 – 26; in Italian, among many others, see Paolo Macry, “Bassolino, per esempio: I piccoli passi di Napoli” (“Mr. Bassolino, for Instance: Naples’ Small Steps”), Il Mulino 2 (1998): 341 – 52. Specifically on the new urban renovation initiated by Bassolino, see Nicholas Dines, “Urban Renewal, Immigration, and Contested Claims to Public Space: The Case of Piazza Garibaldi in Naples,” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 177 – 88.

30

2.

Radical History Review

“Porto di Napoli, operazione restyling” (“The Restyling of the Naples Harbor”), Repubblica, April 28, 1998. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3. “Il museo del mare nell’isola di Arturo” (“The Sea Museum on Arturo’s Island”), Repubblica, May 7, 2000; Patrizia Capua, “Napoli apre al mare” (“Naples Opens Itself to the Sea”), Repubblica, May 12, 2000; Ferruccio Fabrizio, “L’emigrazione in quaranta foto per raccontare un sogno” (“Emigration, Telling a Dream through Forty Pictures”), Repubblica, January 22, 2000; Francesco Vastarella, “Un museo per emigranti” (“A Museum for Emigrants”), Il Mattino, October 10, 2002; Girolamo Imbruglia, “Città di mare senza storia la rivincita della casa-museo” (Sea Cities without History: The Revenge of the House Museum”), Repubblica, August 13, 2004; Salvo Iavarone, “Al porto il museo dell’emigrazione” (“An Emigration Museum at the Harbor”), Il Roma, August 17, 2005; Salvo Iavarone, “Il museo dell’emigrazione: Rilanciare il progetto” (“Reviving Emigration Museum Project”), Corriere del Mezzogiorno, April 29, 2005. 4. On the conflicting relationships between tourism and the steel plant in Bagnoli, see Salvo Ascione and Gabriella Corona, “Activités humaines et ressources naturelles à Naples au XXe siècle: L’exemple du complexe industriel de Bagnoli,” in The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies, ed. Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviéve Massard-Guilbaud (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002), 351 – 76. For an overview on the urban regeneration of Bagnoli area, see Lucio Iaccarino, La rigenerazione. Bagnoli: politiche pubbliche e società civile nella Napoli post-industriale (Regeneration. Bagnoli: Public Policies and Civil Society in Postindustrial Naples) (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2005). 5. Here I am referring to a famous novel by the Neapolitan writer Annamaria Ortese, entitled Il mare non bagna Napoli (1953; Turin: Einaudi, 1967). Although the literal English translation is The Sea Does Not Touch Naples, the book was published in English as The Bay Is Not Naples, trans. Frances Frenaye (London: Collins, 1955). 6. Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 3 – 16. 7. Richard White, “ ‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 171 – 85. 8. Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 78. 9. This is the main subject in Theodore Steinberg’s Slide Mountain; or, The Folly of Owning Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 10. Theodore Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), xii. 11. Steinberg, Down to Earth, xi. 12. Among others: Rob Van Ginkel, “The Abundant Sea and Her Fates: Texelia Oystermen and the Marine Commons, 1700 to 1932,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 218 – 42; Alvaro Díaz de la Paz, “Ecologia y pesca en Canarias: Una aproximación historica a la relacion hombre-recurso” (“Ecology and Fishery in the Canary Islands: A Historical Approach to the Relationships between Humans and Natural Resources”), Ayer 11 (1993): 207 – 32; Jesús Giráldez-Rivero, “El conflicto por los nuevos artes: Conservacionismo o conservadurismo en la pesca gallega de comienzos del sieglo XX,” (“Conflict over the New Arts: Conservationism and Conservatism in the Fishery in the Galicia Region at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”), Ayer 11 (1993): 233 – 51; James M. Acheson, “Anthropology of Fishing,” Annual Review of Anthropology 10 (1981): 275 – 316.

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

31

13. Theodore Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002), quoted from www.historycooperative.org, section 40 (last accessed May 18, 2010). See also Steinberg, Down to Earth, 157 – 61. 14. Two classics on this rhetoric are Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 15. Karl A. Mayer, Vita popolare a Napoli nell’età romantica (Folklife in Naples during the Romantic Age) (Bari: Gius. Laterza e Figli, 1948), 6. 16. Nelson Moe has analyzed the construction and use of the expression paradise of devils in The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 46 – 59. 17. Alessandra Broccolini, “Scene da un ‘patrimonio’: Identità urbane in un quartiere della ‘vecchia Napoli’ ” (“Pictures from a ‘Heritage’: Urban Identities in an Old Neapolitan Neighborhood”), www.storiaurbana.it/biennale/Relazioni/B22BROCC.doc (last accessed May 18, 2010). 18. About the picturesque and southern Italy, see Moe, View from Vesuvius, 2. 19. On Matilde Serao, in English, see Anthony M. Gisolfi, The Essential Matilde Serao (New York: Las Americas, 1968); Ursula Fanning, Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). 20. Matilde Serao, Il ventre di Napoli (Milan: Treves, 1884), 54. 21. See, for instance, descriptions of the traveler and German literary critic Fernand Gregorovius, Napoli (Rome: U. Carboni, 1909), or the sea stories of the naval official and writer Carlo Bruno published as Storie marinare di Napoli (Maritime Stories from Naples) (Naples: Tip. La Vittoria, 1928). 22. Santa Lucia fishers were traditionally devoted to the Bourbon dynasty that ruled southern Italy until the unification of the country in 1860. According to popular tales, several kings of Naples used to mix with the crowd in Santa Lucia, selling the fish they had caught and discussing fishing with local fishers. Another story claims that King Ferdinando II asked to be nursed only by sailors from Santa Lucia when he became deathly ill during a sea trip. See Vittorio Palliotti, Santa Lucia (Naples: Azienda di Soggiorno e Turismo, 1979), 61 – 69. 23. This image has been handed down in many testimonies, such as Luigi Coppola, “Santa Lucia,” and Carlo T. Dalbono, “Marinai, navigatori, pescatori, rematori e pescivendoli” (“Sailors, Fishers, Rowers, and Fishmongers”), in Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni (Uses and Costumes of Naples), ed. Francesco De Bourcard (Milan: Longanesi e C., 1955), 1 – 13, 23 – 38; Renato Fucini, Napoli a occhio nudo (Naples through the Naked Eye) (1878; Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 51; Giovanni E. Bideri, Passeggiata per Napoli e contorni: Usi e costumi (Walking through Naples and its Surroundings) (Naples: Giuseppe Cattaneo, 1857), 130 – 31. 24. On the Illustrazione italiana, see Moe, View from Vesuvius, 198. 25. Carlo del Balzo, “Santa Lucia,” Illustrazione italiana, May 14, 1882, 20. The acquafrescaio — literally “cold water seller” — was quite a popular occupation in Naples until recently; Santa Lucia (the name of a street that gives name to an area) was the homeland of this activity because it was the source of this mineral water. Actually, this mineral water should be studied as a commons for the people of Santa Lucia, who had informal, exclusive access to it. With the sanitization of the 1880s and the opening of a private thermal resort in 1890, this commons suffered the first blow. With the last cholera epidemic occurring in Naples in 1973, the sale of this mineral water was prohibited.

32

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

Radical History Review

See Palliotti, Santa Lucia, 55 – 59. For an inventory of sources on mineral water in the Neapolitan area, see Stefania Barca, “Per una storia delle risorse termominerali in Campania” (“Contribute to the History of Thermal and Mineral Waters of Campania Region”), Istituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo — Working Papers 20 (2003). Just a few years earlier, in the 1870s, the same magazine had published an article, “The Fishmonger of Mergellina,” lamenting the imminent loss of both fishmongers and their environment: “Next year there will be no more beach, no more fishmonger!” Quoted in Moe, View from Vesuvius, 350. Carlo del Balzo, “Napoli i quartieri bassi” (“Naples’ Lowest Districts”), Illustrazione italiana, May 30, 1880, 22. Frank M. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera 1884 – 1911 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15. The two medical reports are Salvatore de Renzi, Sul colera morbus (On Cholera) (Naples: n.p., 1836); and Marino Turchi, Sull’igiene pubblica della città di Napoli (On Public Hygiene in Naples) (Naples: Fratelli Morano, 1861). Giancarlo Alisio, Napoli nell’Ottocento (Naples during the Nineteenth Century) (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1992), 100. Annalucia Forti Messina, Società ed epidemia. Il colera a Napoli nel 1836 (Society and Epidemics: Cholera in 1836 Naples) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1979), 23. Snowden, Naples in the Time of Cholera, 18. Porto, Mercato, and Pendino were only three of the five maritime boroughs of the city; of the others, Chiaia had a much stronger upperclass identity and a lower population density, while San Ferdinando had a very diverse population, with members of the aristocracy and poor people living in the same buildings on different floors. In all, according to Snowden, about three hundred thousand people lived in lower Naples, in an area of 511,873 square meters. On this point, we should consider two things. First, there were also other districts affected by the epidemics, but here I want to stress the fact that the maritime neighborhoods have always been among the most infected in the city. Second, since the statistics were collected by district, we do not have the data concerning some fisher enclaves in the districts of Chiaia and San Ferdinando. However, during the nineteenth century, the debate on the hygienic and social conditions of the city and the subsequent sanitization plans greatly affected those areas. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 107. On fishers and the urban environment in Italy, see Marco Armiero, “La risorsa contesa: Norme, conflitti, tecnologie tra i pescatori meridionali” (“The Contested Resource: Rules, Conflicts, and Technology among the Southern Italian Fishers”), Meridiana 31 (1998): 179 – 206; Marco Armiero and Stefania Barca, “Nature without Capitalism: The Commons in Modern Italy, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries,” paper presented at the Second International Conference of the European Society for Environmental History, Prague, September 6, 2003. Patrick Joyce, “Maps, Blood, and the City: The Governance of the Social in NineteenthCentury Britain,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002), 99, 106. The expression Haussmann method is from Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), here quoted from the online version edited by David J. Romagnolo, 68 – 69. The Risanamento (Law No. 2892, January 15, 1885) was the name given to the plan of the city’s sanitization. Briefly, the main aim of the Risanamento was to widen the narrow streets

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

33

of the lower city by demolishing old buildings and creating large boulevards. According to Giuseppe Russo, the Risanamento planned to sanitize about 980,000 square meters, amounting to 25 percent of the entire urban space. See Russo, Napoli come città, 309. Renato Fucini, Taccuino di viaggio a Napoli e dintorni nel 1877 (Naples and Its Surroundings in 1877: A Travel Notebook), ed. Toni Iermano (Cava de’ Tirreni: Mephite, 2003), 57 – 58. Jessie White Mario, La miseria di Napoli (The Misery in Naples) (Florence: Le Monnier, 1877), 13, quoted here from the electronic version at www.liberliber.it (last accessed May 18, 2010). Historically a fondaco was a place for storing large amounts of wares; in nineteenthcentury Naples, those cellars and grottoes, symbolic of city decay, became the homes of poor people. Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Napoli (Proceedings of Naples City Council), Relazione de Bonis sul bonificamento (de Bonis’s Report on Sanitization), October 3 (F. Giannini, 1884), 700. Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Napoli, Councilor Arlotta’s Report, October 3 (F. Giannini, 1884), 679. Ibid. Erik Swyngedouw and Nikolas C. Heynen, “Urban Political Ecology, Justice, and the Politics of Scale,” Antipode 35 (2003): 901. Matthew Klingle, “Changing Spaces: Nature, Property, and Power in Seattle, 1880 – 1945,” Journal of Urban History 32 (2006): 199. Achille Costa, La pesca nel golfo di Napoli: Lavoro presentato al Reale Istituto di Incoraggiamento in Giugno 1870 (Fishery in the Bay of Naples: Paper Presented to the Royal Institute for Encouragement in June 1870) (Naples: Tip. G. Nobile, 1871), 2. Leonardo Dorotea, Sommario storico dell’alieutica che si esercita nelle provincie meridionali e della legislazione correlativa alla stessa (Historical Overview on Fishery Activities and Legislation in Southern Italy) (Naples: F. Vitale, 1863), 65. David Levi Morenos, Il “proletariato peschereccio” nel problema adriatico (“Proletarian Fishers” in the Context of the Adriatic Issue) (Rome: Tip. Industria e Lavoro 1904), 9. Armiero, “La risorsa contesa” and “Nature without Capitalism.” Joan Martinez Alier, “Temas de historia económico-ecológica” (“Topics in Economic and Environmental History”), Ayer 11 (1993): 39. Van Ginkel, “Abundant Sea and Her Fates”; Díaz de la Paz, “Ecologia y pesca en Canarias”; and Giráldez-Rivero, “El conflicto por los nuevos artes.” The documentation on this confraternity is found in the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio (National Archives in Naples, Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce Papers), folder 289. Some violent episodes were reported in Gesualdo Police, “Sulla questione odierna della pesca con le sorgenti luminose nel golfo di Napoli,” (“The Current Issue of Fishing with Artificial Lights in the Bay of Naples”) Neptunia: Rivista della marina peschereccia nazionale 28 (1911): 2. Benedetto Croce, Storie e leggende napoletane (Neapolitan Stories and Legends) (1919; Milan: Adelphi, 1990), 258. Swyngedouw and Heynen, “Urban Political Ecology,” 903. Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Napoli (Proceedings of Naples City Council), 1873, Sessione di primavera (spring session), May 10, 1873, Discorso del consigliere Cenni (Councillor Cenni’s Speech) (Naples: F. Giannini, 1874), 211. On the urban transformation of the Chiaia seafront and, in general, of the coastline,

34

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

Radical History Review

see Giancarlo Alisio, Il lungomare (The Waterfront) (Naples: Electa, 1989); Benedetto Gravagnuolo and Giuseppe Gravagnuolo, Chiaia (Naples: Electa, 1990); Monica Michelino, “Il borgo di Chiaia e la sua villa: Evoluzione storica” (“Chiaia and Its Villa: The Historical Evolution”), in La villa reale di Chiaja: Storia e futuro (Chiaia’s Royal Villa: History and Future), ed. Ferdinando Jannuzzi (Naples: Giannini e Figli, 1997); Ferdinando Jannuzzi, “La villa di Chiaia, il mare e la città” (“Chiaia’s Villa, the Sea and the City”) in Jannuzzi, La villa reale di Chiaja, 89 – 107. Benedetto Croce, “La villa di Chiaia,” Napoli mobilissima 3 (1893): 36. Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Napoli, Discorso del consigliere Cenni, 212. On property rights over Naples’ lido, see F. Ruggiero, Secondo discorso intorno alla questione di proprietà del lido del mare che confina con la città di Napoli disputata tra il demanio e il municipio napoletano (Discourse on the Property Rights over the Neapolitan Waterfront) (Naples: Stabilimento Tipografico dell’Ancora, 1869). Carrie Tirado Bramen, “The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization,” American Quarterly 52 (2000): 447. In the 1950s, fishing boats were still mentioned alongside bathing houses in Touring Club guides; Touring Club International, Marine d’Italia (Italian Seascapes) (Verona: A. Mondatori, 1950), 142 – 57. Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Napoli (Proceedings of Naples City Council), 1873, Sessione di primavera (spring session), May 10, 1873, Discorso del consigliere Cellammare (Councillor Cellammare’s Speech) (Naples: F. Giannini, 1874), 214. Ibid., 217; Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Napoli (Proceedings of Naples City Council), 1875, Sessione straordinaria (extraordinary session), July, 10, 1879, Discorso del consigliere Florenzano (Councilor Florenzano’s Speech) (Naples: F. Giannini, 1879), 542. Following a series of scandals involving the local government, an Inquiry Commission was established in November 1900. It was called the Saredo Committee, named after its chair, Senator Giuseppe Saredo. Regia commissione d’inchiesta per Napoli presieduta da Giuseppe Saredo: Relazione sulla amministrazione comunale (Royal Commitee of Inquiry on Naples Chaired by Giuseppe Saredo: Report on the Municipal Government), ed. Sergio Marotta (Naples: Vivarium, n.d.), 437 – 38. Ibid., 723. Marcella Marmo, “Speculazione edilizia e credito mobiliare a Napoli nella congiuntura degli anni ottanta,” (“Real Estate Speculation and Credit in 1880s Naples”) Quaderni storici 32 (1976): 678. In this article Marmo offered some ideas about the origins of the financial backing of the Risanamento plan; in 1888 a group of banks and societies from northern Italy (Banca Generale, Credito Mobiliare, Societá Generale Immobilare, Banca Subalpina, Banca di Torino, ditta Marsiglia) constituted the Risanamento Society with 30 million lire (659). This survey is quoted in Regia commissione, 725. Salvatore Di Giacomo, Nuova guida di Napoli, Pompei, Ercolano, Stabia, Campi Flegrei, Caserta (New Travel Guide to Naples, Pompei, Ercolano, Stabia, Campi Flegrei, and Caserta) (Naples: A. Morano, 1913), 379. “Passeggiate napoletane” (“Walking in Naples”), in Illustrazione italiana, October 16, 1892, 42. Pasquale Villari, “La questione di Napoli” (“The Problem of Naples”), La nuova antologia 24 (1884): 690. Regia commissione, 790. Russo, Napoli come città, 393 – 94. Migliaro went to live in Santa Lucia to paint a series of

Armiero | Enclosing the Sea

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

81. 82.

83.

35

landscapes for the San Martino Museum; see Federica Coscino, “La festa della Nzegna,” (“The Nzegna Carnival”) (Degree thesis, Istituto Universitario Suor Orsola Benincasa, 2002). This phrase is quoted by Giuseppe Russo in his Napoli come città, 393. Raffaele Viviani, “I pescatori” (“The Fishers”) in I capolavori (Masterpieces) (Naples: Guida 1992), 402. “Tre gghiuorne ‘e freva! . . . Bella guapparia! / Vene ‘o ngigniere, te tira ‘e mmesure, / te caccia ‘e scartapelle mmiez’ ‘a via / e manna ‘e pressa p’ ‘e fravecature! / E addò jarrammo cummarella mia? / Ccà fanno tutte case p’ ‘e signure! / Che ve pozza venì na malatia! / Nce puzzate murì, sott’a stì.” Quoted here from Guido Donatone, “Il Risanamento: Lo sventramento del quartiere angioino di Napoli alla fine dell’ottocento” (“The Risanamento: The Gutting of the Neapolitan Angioini Neighborhoods at the End of Nineteenth Century”), in Appello all’UNESCO per la salvezza del centro storico di Napoli patrimonio dell’Umanità, (Appeal to UNESCO to Protect Downtown Naples), ed. Francesco Iannello and Raffaele Rusciano (Naples: Assise di Palazzo Marigliano, 2006), 51. Cesare De Seta, Napoli (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1981), 265. Steinberg, “Down to Earth,” 810 – 14. Joanna L. Dyl, “The War on Rats versus the Right to Keep Chickens: Plague and the Paving of San Francisco, 1907 – 1908,” in The Nature of Cities, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 38 – 61. Only after World War II, and especially in the 1970s, did most of the luciani of the Pallonetto turn from fishing to smuggling. See Alessandra Broccolini, “Da pescatori a scafisti: Trasformazioni di una economia tradizionale” (“From Fishers to Smugglers: Changes in a Traditional Economy”), in Il borgo di Santa Lucia: Trasformazione urbana e tradizioni (Santa Lucia District: Urban Transformation and Tradition), ed. Broccolini (Bracigliano, Salerno: CECOM, 1999), 39 – 40. Alida Clemente, “La città e il mare: Comunità pescherecce e trasformazione urbana nella Napoli contemporanea” (“The City and the Sea: Fishing Communities and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Naples”), Società e storia 97 (2002): 20, 24. Il Roma, 26 October 1884. Gabriella Corona, “La sostenibilità urbana a Napoli: Caratteri strutturali e dinamiche storiche,” (“Urban Sustainability in Naples: Structural Characters and Historical Dynamics”) Meridiana 42 (2001): 39. Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945 – 1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 182.

Foreign-­Trade­Zones­and­the­Cultural­Logic­ of­Frictionless­Production Dara Orenstein

Prologue:­Frictionless­Handling

When a T-shirt is “made in Indonesia,” or in another factory of the Global South,

chances are it is sewn in a free trade zone.1 Most readers of Radical History Review likely know of free trade zones, if vaguely, and even hold bird’s-eye mental images of their interiors: Young women lean over electrical boards or microscopes or piles of fabric. Bodies, chairs, tables, and fluorescent lights form perspectival lines that seem to extend for miles and to convey the architectural and economic scale of exploitation. Free trade zones decorate the world as icons of late capitalist enclosure, their gated, windowless sheds and stores of migrant workers not only physically resembling places of enclosure, of control and captivity, but also functionally requiring processes of enclosure, of privatization and dispossession. In fact, they are spotlighted in two of the three quotations featured in a seminal indictment of the “new enclosures,” linked to sweatshops in China and to land clearance in the Philippines.2 Free trade zones make for bold copy. The U.S. government hosts its own version of free trade zones, which it calls foreign-trade zones, or FTZs. When a car is “made in the U.S.A,” whether by Ford in Ohio or Toyota in Alabama, chances are it is assembled in a plant located in an FTZ, outside U.S. customs territory. Translation: If Ford or Toyota imports a car radio from Germany, or, more probably, from a free trade zone in Brazil, the tariff

Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-014 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

36

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

37

that normally applies is suspended; if the radio leaves the zone as a radio, the tariff is charged, but if the radio exits the zone in a new form, as part of a car, voilà! The tariff vanishes. A deceptively simple legal fiction, the FTZ and its attendant perks allow state and municipal agencies in places like Ohio and Alabama to attract corporate investment by promising “the benefits of offshore, onshore.”3 Authorizing this “trade program” for cities is the federal FTZ Board, which is housed in the Commerce Department and has gifted FTZ status to over 750 sites from Anchorage to Miami.4 The FTZ Board administers the FTZs as “public utilities,” as nodes of an infrastructure for commodity flows, although, in keeping with the spirit of the new enclosures, increasingly it grants them to private corporations rather than public agencies. If the means are Barnumesque, the ends are real: in 2008, shipments into FTZs totaled $692 billion, or roughly 40 percent of the nation’s manufacturing GDP.5 While free trade zones outside the United States are familiar archetypes, foreign-trade zones are more foreign territory. FTZs earn a huge number of pixels and column inches in business and legal journals, and sporadically in local media, but rarely do they arouse enough debate to become headline news; as is often said of units of infrastructure, they attract notice just in those rare moments when they break.6 Nor are FTZs the topics of books or articles by historians or historical geographers, radical or otherwise.7 Indeed, they are almost entirely untouched by scholars in the humanities, not even earning an entry in Kenneth Jackson’s definitive Encyclopedia of New York City on the much-heralded debut of Staten Island’s Zone 1 during the Great Depression. No less than the Library of Congress slights them, cataloguing them under the general subject category of “free ports and zones,” a category it introduced in 1959 to encompass both “free ports” and “free trade zones,” but not to reference FTZs, the U.S. variety, specifically.8 This void is both capacious and curious, not only because FTZs are far older than other free trade zones but also because in the United States they are without precedent. When Congress passed the Foreign-Trade Zones Act of 1934, at the dawn of the New Deal, it inaugurated a profoundly new spatial practice.9 Never before had the U.S. government partially denationalized U.S. soil. Now, in the age of the new enclosures, of “failed states” resurrected by “structural adjustment programs,” the partial denationalization of sovereign territory is the default mode of economic development in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) playbook, and thus a catchphrase of scholarship on globalization.10 In 1934, though, the birth of this practice in the United States went unremarked, aside from the occasional quip by a bemused journalist. Why did politicians remain mum about it? Seemingly because they could talk of nothing other than the type of property they hoped it would license: a “halfway house of commerce,” a refuge of “frictionless handling.”11 Officially, “friction” referred to paperwork and storage fees, or to what a continental observer once dubbed the “ faux frais of production,” the incidental but unavoidable costs of moving cotton from Texas to Indonesia and T-shirts from

38

Radical History Review

Figure­1.­FTZ­Engineers,­­ “Centralization­of­Movement,”­­ November­1,­1935.­The­FTZ­­ engineers­worked­for­the­WPA.

Indonesia to Texas.12 Meanwhile, unofficially and often unconsciously, “friction” also referred to workers. The fewer, the better, suggested FTZ engineers. Their initial diagram of how the FTZ promised to choreograph the scientific management of commodity circulation referenced no workers whatsoever (figure 1). How might this old, overlooked blueprint of a hands-free depot relate to the modern, generic image of a massive shed crowded with rows of “nimble fingers”?13 Tracing how the history of FTZs in the United States connects to the present reality of free trade zones across the globe, and thereby to the new enclosures, involves looking at three discrete aspects of the invention of the FTZ: first, when and why it was proposed; second, how it was constructed, both on Staten Island and in the national imagination; and third, what exactly, legally and economically speaking, it was designed to promote. While fragmentary answers to these questions are to be found in the fine print of the Congressional Record, a comprehensive understanding of the FTZ also requires the decoding of a variety of visual artifacts. Despite its apparent invisibility, the FTZ does claim its own distinct iconography, but of the sort that is so ordinary as to be hidden in plain view.

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

39

The­Warehouse­of­the­World It is widely accepted that the FTZ grew out of an older spatial form, the free port. But precisely how so is far from established, because the free port’s lineage is shrouded in myth. FTZ boosters, for their part, have long proclaimed the free port to be purebred European. Citing a direct line of descent to a legendary network of merchant enclaves, the Hanseatic League of the late Middle Ages, politicians and business leaders have successfully peddled this fable to popular media.14 As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal vouched in a profile of FTZs in 1945, “The free port is a thousand years old. It found its most romantic expression in the Hanseatic League, which reached the zenith of its power in the fourteenth century, when its membership extended from towns in Italy through central Europe to Scandinavia and beyond to the ancient Russian principality of Novgorod.”15 Other scattered sources, however, reveal a more splintered family tree, riven by the so-called colonial free ports that later fueled the circuits of slavery and imperialism. Typified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British outposts in China and the Caribbean such as Guangzhou and Kingston, sites of sizeable free trade zones today, these ports served as laboratories for the practice of extraterritoriality, and arguably it is they, not the cities of the Hanseatic League, that made free ports modern.16 Nevertheless, the role of colonial free ports has remained uninterrogated in FTZ circles because FTZ boosters have all along presented the fable of the Hanseatic League mainly for spin control, to naturalize free ports as ancient relics of Western civilization. Whether as wholesalers of the 1930s or manufacturers of the 1980s, FTZ boosters have shown little interest in parsing the FTZ’s actual historical nuances, focusing instead on selling its unmistakable commercial virtues. “Free ports go naturally with high tariffs like those of the United States,” the Wall Street Journal reporter thus framed his article, after his requisite nod to the Hanseatic League. “Low-duty nations like Holland and pre-1918 England don’t need them.”17 And no one has challenged this Ricardian accounting of free port economics. If the free port’s origin story has been Eurocentric, and too tangled to unravel here, its perceived value has been universal. On the Baltic Sea and on the Pearl River Delta, in the thirteenth century and in the nineteenth century, respectively, free ports have been said to hold the same basic appeal: to enhance the allure and hence the wealth of the nations hosting them. So to understand why in 1934 the foreign-trade zone was embraced as a remedy for friction, it helps to consider how ports worked before the age of the container ship and the general shift from the free port to the free trade zone. The thought of old ports conjures up bustling harbors crowded with clipper ships and schooners. But the true anchor of mercantilism was fixed firmly on land. From metropolitan Hamburg to colonial Hong Kong, ports revolved around waterfront warehouses, in which commodities were temporarily stored and often sampled or repackaged prior to purchase or reshipment — and from which national coffers

40

Radical History Review

were replenished. The problem was that these multistory brick warehouses were nearly as costly to use as to build, thanks to the customhouse clerks who administered them. “All morning at the custom-house, plagued with red tape,” a Boston poet grumbled in his diary in 1869, expressing the displeasure of merchants the world around. “If I went in a Protectionist, I came out a Free-trader.”18 Yet, logistically, there was no escaping these warehouses and their overseers. After all, merchants needed to house their wares to move them; as a contemporary of the Boston poet observed, “without the commodity stock, no circulation.”19 Under merchants’ control was one significant variable: the choice of which particular seaports to patronize. So fortunes rose and fell on ports’ strengths and weaknesses, on their perceived openings and barriers. At stake were the fortunes of many types of workers — bankers and lawyers as much as seamen and stevedores — and of entire cities and empires. Eighteenth-century New York trumped Philadelphia with the might of its port, just as seventeenth-century Amsterdam catapulted the Dutch over the Spanish. For port cities, many believed, power lay in becoming not the “workshop of the world” but, like London, the “warehouse of the world.”20 Free ports thus enhanced this competition among port cities by cutting red tape and well-nigh erasing customhouse fees from merchants’ ledgers. In areas designated as free ports, commodities could sit in warehouses indefinitely and unceremoniously, beyond the scrutiny of this or that Bureau of Animal Industry or Division of Seed Inspection, demanding neither the payment of tariffs nor the employment of guards and clerks. Off the grid, so to speak, merchants could likewise enjoy the luxury of time to coordinate shipments and to await optimal market conditions; free ports inoculated merchants from risk. But still, why cabin off and partially denationalize whole parcels of territory? Why not simply designate discrete warehouses as customhouse havens? In the wake of the financial crisis of the late 1830s, this very question inspired U.S. merchants to push successfully for “bonded warehouses” akin to those found in Great Britain, wherein goods could be temporarily stored duty free.21 Authorized in the Warehousing Act of 1846, bonded warehouses soon became familiar fixtures of seaports such as New York and Charleston, as well as essential components of the distribution of domestic goods subject to excise taxes such as liquor and tobacco. But bonded warehouses failed to eliminate bureaucratic oversight, presenting merchants with numerous constraints: they required strict protection by customs guards, at merchants’ expense; they accepted deposits for finite periods, typically of no more than three years; and they prescribed inflexible procedures for the handling of merchandise.22 These rules highlighted a distinction between free ports and bonded warehouses that was of both practical and symbolic import: unlike free ports, bonded warehouses sat squarely on U.S. customs territory, shielding commodities from tariffs by administrative fiat, not by jurisdiction. Thus, although in the early 1920s Congress finally relaxed many of the regulations governing their use, most

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

41

members of merchants’ associations still chafed at their restrictiveness — because most had caught the free port bug. Although free ports dotted all of Europe by the beginning of World War I, merchants in the United States admired them as “a peculiarly German institution.”23 Hamburg’s was deemed the ur – free port or free trade zone, a model of efficiency wherein cargo moved “with as great freedom as though customs officials were an unknown species to commerce.”24 Talk of Hamburg’s free port first made headlines in 1894, when a railroad magnate initiated hearings in Congress to create a free port at Montauk, the eastern tip of Long Island.25 In 1909, Hamburg was once again invoked when a prominent grocer organized a group of Brooklyn politicians to crusade for a free port at Jamaica Bay, the future site of New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport and FTZ No. 111.26 Although neither proposal came to pass, by 1918 the idea that the East Coast needed a free port to propel the United States into the twentieth century was axiomatic among merchants, particularly amid the ruins — and opportunities — of war. The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce expressed this sentiment bluntly when it passed a resolution calling for Congress to allow free ports: “In our opinion it is prudent in time of war to prepare for peace conditions after war.”27 Both the House and the Senate held hearings in 1919, but postwar retooling was not sufficient enticement. Numerous bills for “free ports or foreign-trade zones” drifted through Congress after World War I, none surviving the constant onslaught of social and economic nativism that yielded the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Then, in May of 1934, during the first phase of the New Deal, the prospects for a little Germany in Jamaica Bay or a Hamburg on the Hudson suddenly brightened. Brushing aside knee-jerk protests from protectionists who feared a beachhead for foreign commodities made possible by lower wages abroad, and disregarding scholars who cautioned that the United States was too isolated on international shipping lanes to facilitate transshipment and re-export, free port advocates hammered away at the premise that the United States should depose Britain and position itself as the world’s marketplace, no matter who was doing the producing or consuming. On the House floor, a representative from Brooklyn put the matter as a question of simple math. “Half of the goods bought by the United States from England are not produced there at all,” he railed. “Cotton from Egypt we buy in London. Tin from Bolivia we buy in London. Wool from Australia and hemp from the Philippines we buy in London. We buy East Indian spirits in English ports. This should all be reversed.”28 Or, as a city councilman quipped indignantly in a speech five years later, “We buy and use all these commodities while other people make profits on us by trading in them.”29 The Foreign-Trade Zones Act became law on June 18, 1934, six days after the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. 30 Three years later, artists employed by the New York City poster division of the Works Project Administration

42

Radical History Review

Figure­2.­Jack­Rivolta,­“United­­ States’­First­Foreign­Trade­Zone,”­­ December­8,­1937.­Rivolta­worked­­ for­the­WPA.

(WPA) crafted the first of three different silk screens for the FTZ Board to mail around the world to promote the new FTZ (figure 2).31 The poster’s aesthetic encapsulated the commercial cosmopolitanism that imbued the FTZ, as it deliberately quoted the style of recently released ads for French ocean liners by a pioneer of modernist poster art, who happened to design ads that same year for the Container Corporation of America.32 Combining art moderne simplicity and cubist flare, its typography was contemporary and bold, with a perfectly round O and an R angled confidently forward like the bow of a ship. Its message was clear: geared-up and stripped of red tape, the United States was open for business. An­Isolated,­Enclosed,­and­Policed­Area The ships in the WPA poster were styled so starkly that they barely registered as ships, let alone as geographically embedded. Aesthetically, the poster lacked any connotation of place, much like the FTZ itself. While Zone 1 was located in the Stapleton section of Staten Island, having landed there in early 1936 after years of campaigning from local politicians and merchants, nothing about it was unique to the area. To the contrary, in legal terms, each zone was a portable fiction, a space mapped and moved at will: during World War II, the federal government designated the Stapleton piers the U.S. army port of embarkation and temporarily shifted most

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

43

FTZ business to the west side of Manhattan.33 FTZs were designed to be serialized, constructed as spatial products suitable for any U.S. seaport.34 This article excavates the visual record from Zone 1 in Staten Island, but it could just as well mine Zone 2 in New Orleans or Zone 3 in San Francisco. That said, on the ground, of course, each zone was very much a physical place, an expanse of dirt in a specific seaport where a legal fiction was materialized into brick and mortar. Zone 1 sat opposite the Red Hook section of Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Wall Street, on the Staten Island waterfront next to the city’s quarantine station. Officially described as spanning ninety-two acres, it was equal in size to about forty-six soccer fields.35 It contained five finger piers, four of them covered so as to double as warehouses. Planning for it, the New York Times reported, yielded “forty-five pounds of maps and detailed drawings and documents.”36 Much of this ink was spent on the zone’s most politically prominent, and perplexing, feature: its fence. By law, the FTZ was “an isolated, enclosed, and policed area,” and its boundary was to be built to exact specifications. FTZ regulations required a fence of “not less than no. 6 gage wire, with a mesh not exceeding 2 inches, and an overall height of at least 10 feet above the concrete base in which the posts are set,” “topped by at least three strands of galvanized barbed wire, four-point type, each stand consisting of two strands of no. 12.5 gauge wire,” and so on. No stone was to be left unturned for “the proper protection of the revenue.”37 As the New York Times underscored, “The enclosed area will be about as closely regulated and guarded as though it were a prison.”38 Such conspicuous security distinguished the standard image of the FTZ from that of its distant cousins.39 Typically, images of Hamburg and other European free ports echoed the romanticist tradition of maritime painting, whether by a gesture of respectful mimicry, as in most publicity photographs, or of inventive revision, as in expressionist landscapes (figures 3 and 4). These various portrayals always evoked the depth of the water and the sky through elegant, layered compositions of ships, cranes, and warehouses. Showing a throng of diverse vessels and commodities, they conveyed an ideology of openness, of the sea as a commons, of free trade: their harbors were liminal spaces, thresholds of exchange.40 Similarly, the FTZ’s precursor, the bonded warehouse, was customarily presented as a quotidian site of urban commerce. Although the bonded warehouse claimed its own set of security protocols, it was still figured as integrated into the marketplace, appearing almost as a storefront (figure 5). Even if its windows were barred and boarded, per legal mandates, its facade was accessible and inviting. This was not foreign land. The FTZ, on the other hand, was very much regarded as foreign land, albeit “foreign in a domestic sense,” like Puerto Rico and other literal and figurative islands in U.S. law.41 The FTZ’s strange spatiality provoked a set of maritime tropes opposite those of Hamburg: not water and ships, but fencing and signage.42 To document

44

Radical History Review

Figure­3.­Free­port­of­Hamburg.­Reprinted­from­U.S.­Army­Corps­of­Engineers­and­U.S.­Shipping­Board,­ Foreign Trade Zones (or Free Ports)­(Washington,­DC:­U.S.­Government­Printing­Office,­1929)

Figure­4.­Emile­Nolde,­Hamburg Free Port,­1910

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

45

Figure­5.­Bonded­warehouse­in­Rochester,­New­York,­ca.­1920.­From­the­Albert­R.­Stone­Negative­ Collection,­Rochester­Museum­and­Science­Center,­Rochester

the exterior terrain of Zone 1, photographers for the Staten Island Advance always stood outside the zone looking in, foregrounding the fence (figure 6). Yet the image of the fence alone did not suffice to define the zone; it needed a label, as it were, a sign to denote it an FTZ. At first, Zone 1 contained only one sign, which was erected in the back of the zone near the water, parallel to the front of the piers. To include this sign in the frame and to juxtapose it with the fence and gate and guards, Advance photographers always positioned themselves close to the right side of the main gate and gazed in to the left (figure 7). Then, in 1940, a second sign was erected, crowning the main gate and naming the site more visibly for passersby.43 Now the Advance photographers always jogged back into the street and to the left to capture the gate (figure 8). The sign was crucial; without it, this fenced property was any bunch of buildings, an unexceptional part of an unexceptional port. The Staten Island Advance commissioned most published photographs of Zone 1 and frequently permitted reprints in other newspapers. As a result, the syntax of this particular set of images acquired a quasi-official status: the FTZ became synonymous with the fence and the sign. Captioning varied from one context to the next, however. The Advance tended to phrase its captions in a plain, factual tone, whereas other newspapers presented FTZ photographs more editorially, and

Figure­6.­“Trench­diggers­at­free­port,­awaiting­shipment­for­European­battlefields,”­Staten Island Advance,­February­21,­1940.­All­rights­reserved.­Reprinted­with­permission

Figure­7.­“U.S.­Customs­agents­police­the­‘frontier,’­”­Washington Post,­January 28,­1940. All­rights­reserved.­Reprinted­with­permission

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

47

Figure­8.­“Field­hospital­units­rolling­into­the­free­port,”­Staten Island Advance,­December­15,­1940. All­rights­reserved.­Reprinted­with­permission

dramatically. Consider the image of guards stopping a car at the gate (figure 7). Released by the Acme photo service, it appeared in the Washington Post in a fullpage spread about Zone 1, its caption announcing, half- coyly and half-seriously, “U.S. customs agents police the ‘frontier.’ ”44 If it walked like a frontier, and it quacked like a frontier, was it then a frontier? While not legally classified as such, the FTZ had all the trappings of a militarized national border: guards, customs agents, barbed wire. Certainly this was how the WPA engineers seemed to map the zone in their minds. Outside the landed boundary of the fence was the United States, and outside the water boundary was “the rest of the world,” as they wrote on a preliminary diagram of Zone 1.45 The status of what lay in between did not especially matter from a legal standpoint, despite the opacity of what FTZ leaders unceremoniously called its “exterritoriality” (a now-antiquated spelling of a now-revitalized term).46 Those ninety-two acres simply mediated the relationship between one national customs regime and another, between flags, as in the second WPA poster of Zone 1, which featured a cargo ship set against a background mosaic of national flags. Zone 1 was “the United States’s first foreign-trade zone,” as the first WPA poster announced, not “Staten Island’s” or “New York City’s.” And this was true across the world: modern free ports and zones were emphatically national, not local, regimes. When Mexico authorized free ports in 1924, ten years

48

Radical History Review

Figure­9.­Map­reprinted­from­Puertos-Libres Mexicanos (Mexico­City:­Imprenta­Nuevo­Mundo,­1947)

before the United States, for instance, it issued a map that resembled a dartboard on which its puertos libres formed the bull’s eye of world trade (figure 9).47 Nations were not designated on this map, but only because their presence was assumed; the local was global, in the sense that the free ports of Salina Cruz and Topolobampo connected Mexico directly to Shanghai and Lagos. Yet if these zones bespoke national frontiers, they did so not by contrasting civilization with savagery, as in earlier conceptions of frontiers, but by characterizing one acre of U.S. soil as foreign to the next. FTZ frontiers deterritorialized rather than delineated the nation, creating archipelagos of murky sovereignty and unsettling what it meant to be or buy “American.” Ninety-two acres of Staten Island were “virtually internationalized,” proclaimed the New York Post — and that was precisely what some rightfully feared, barbed wire or no barbed wire.48 A Massachusetts congressman had vigorously fought the FTZ Act in 1934 on the grounds that “a natural barrier against foreign imports” in the form of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would be “obliterated” if the bill were passed.49 In reply, proponents of the bill had scrambled to reassure him and others by naming the new territory a foreign-trade zone rather than a free port. As an FTZ leader later clarified, “We call it a ForeignTrade Zone to take the curse off the word ‘free’ in free port.”50 But not everyone got the memo, and oftentimes the hyphen fell away, leaving the foreign to dangle dangerously — did it modify trade, or zone? Journalists found the concept confusing. They even stumbled over how to articulate why the zone needed an elaborate barbed wire fence — was this paraphernalia meant to prevent smuggling “out” of the zone, or “into” it?51

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

49

Live­Storage Journalists frequently botched the name because they failed to understand the kind of trade it described. Foreign-trade zone. Foreign trade zone. Free trade zone. Even the initial director of the FTZ Board called the legislation “puzzling.”52 At the heart of the confusion was the secret of the zone’s magic: how exactly did an FTZ make a tariff vanish? The answer to that riddle was not to be found in the fine print of the FTZ Board’s stipulations regarding measurements for galvanized wire. The fence was merely a high-profile container for the funny business that happened inside. FTZ regulations allowed commodities to be “stored, broken up, repacked, assembled, distributed, sorted, graded, cleaned, mixed with foreign or domestic merchandise, or otherwise manipulated, but not manufactured or exhibited.”53 This subtle but critical distinction between manipulating and manufacturing prompted many people to wonder where one ended and the other began. Dictionaries were of no use. The answer depended on the commodity, and it rested with officials at the Treasury Department; they reigned in this domain because the distinction first arose in tariff disputes.54 Their guiding principle was — and still is — a 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision that defined manufacturing as “something more”: “Manufacture implies a change, but every change is not manufacture,” the court reasoned. “There must be transformation; a new and different article must emerge.”55 Tungsten refining illustrated this principle in action. Exceptionally hard and heat-resistant, tungsten ore figured in an array of commodities, from radios and lightbulbs to tanks and missiles; it was a twentieth- century marvel, according to the Tungsten Institute, “invaluable in war, important in peace, and extremely difficult to wrest from nature.”56 By 1939, tungsten was an object of much desire, and a Chinese man who claimed to be the first to discover deposits of it in China, site of the richest ore, won a contract to supply it to the U.S. government. His first shipment barely arrived in June of 1940: “patriot Chinese” had sunk boxes of tungsten in the rivers of North China “when the Japs first poured into China,” the New York Herald Tribune excitedly reported, and the boxes eventually reached Staten Island “still mud-encrusted from the river bottoms.”57 But the “Tungsten King,” as he was later known, already had a strategy to maintain supply, with or without China. He had designed a refinery that was capable of processing tungsten from all over the world, tungsten of different grades at different stages of concentration. He named this refinery the National Reconditioning Company, and he erected it in Zone 1 on Staten Island — allowing him to pay tariff duties only when he “imported” the refined tungsten from the zone into the United States after losing some amount of dutiable ore during production.58 While refining required a sizeable staff of skilled technicians and a labyrinth of massive machines, it did not constitute manufacturing as defined in tariff law. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “tungsten remained tungsten, whether refined or not.”59 Despite how frequently this vignette was repeated, a labor-intensive opera-

50

Radical History Review

Figure­10.­Photograph­reprinted­from­Carter­R.­Bryan,­“Like­the­Pea­in­the­Shell­Game,”­­ Foreign Commerce Weekly,­February­21,­1942

tion like the tungsten refinery was unusual for Zone 1. More common was an enterprise that seemed to require no labor at all, like the curing of the incredible shrinking nuts from Brazil, another oft- cited example of what transpired in the FTZ. Normally a pile of nuts deposited in a warehouse would be considered “dead stock,” in the sense that the nuts would not yet have realized their value on the market. This term originated as the opposite of “live stock,” referring to the plows and hoes and assorted inanimate instruments of labor — ”dead labor” in another register — that facilitated the cultivation of animals on English farms.60 What could be more “dead” than a pile of nuts lying on a dirty floor? Certainly they looked inert — that is, to readers of Foreign Commerce Weekly who glanced perfunctorily at photographs and skipped accompanying captions and text (figure 10). As FTZ publicity brochures explained, in word if not in image, the Brazilian nuts were by no means lost to “dead storage” on Zone 1’s covered piers. Rather, the nuts were “actively making money for investors” — not dead stock, but “live storage.”61 The nuts increased their value simply by sitting still. Taking the cure in the salubrious salty air, they shed a few

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

51

pounds, their water metabolized by the zone. After they were finally dressed and imported into the United States, they weighed less on customs scales and thus cost less than before. And the buck did not stop there. During the period at which time and space were suspended and the nuts were stateless (no longer in Brazil, but technically not in the United States either), they were able to levitate and circulate in a different form — as collateral. Local banks agreed to loan money against the nuts, suggesting a spatial fix for at least one early-1930s monetary crisis, that of the $100 million in U.S. capital that was frozen in foreign banks due to exchange controls. In 1934, any U.S. merchant with money in a Brazilian bank was unable to convert his milreis to dollars. But if he used his Brazilian currency to buy a load of Brazilian nuts, which he then shipped to Zone 1 to be stored indefinitely, duty free, he could use his nuts as coin. Bankers applauded this prospect. “Such a plan would be virtually impossible without the free port,” one commented to the New York Times, noting that merchants never bothered to move commodities in such a manner due to the hassle and expense of importing through conventional ports. “It goes without saying that no bank here would loan a nickel on products stored abroad, but would be perfectly willing to extend credits on the same goods at this port.”62 In a nutshell, this was a win-win proposition for two neighbors, according to the Department of Commerce. Brazil made money for the nuts, and the United States made money with the nuts. The nuts were “ambassadors of good will”!63 The affable anthropomorphism of this caption, the fetishistic animating of nuts in the absence of actual workers, masked the reason that Congress banned manufacturing from FTZs in the first place: labor politics. Congressmen fond of tariffs had insisted that the zones would harm “the shoe workers of Lynn, or the textile workers of Lawrence, or other men who toil with their hands.”64 They worried that the zones would encourage foreign companies to dump foreign products. To duck this accusation, sponsors of the Foreign-Trade Zones Act had emphasized that the zones would support strictly foreign trade, primarily in the guise of transshipment and re-export, and that insofar as commodities would be imported from the zones, they would be imported regardless, except that now the FTZ program would guarantee their processing offshore- onshore, employing workers offshoreonshore rather than plain offshore. These were warehousing jobs, the argument went, not manufacturing jobs; the FTZ was a site of circulation, not production. The problem with this pitch, however, was that circulation often blurred into production. When the work involved unloading ships, or shoveling nuts, the divide between circulation and production seemed self-evident. But when the work also involved, say, mixing chemicals into perfumes, or assembling watch parts into watches, the specter of manufacturing reappeared. Often what was raw to Staten Island looked cooked to Chicago.65

52

Radical History Review

Figure­11.­Harry­Herzog,­“The­ United­States’­First­Foreign­Trade­ Zone,”­January­6,­1938.­Herzog­ worked­for­the­WPA.

What enabled the discourse of the FTZ to separate circulation from production was the way in which it visually and rhetorically separated commodities from workers. In the cosmology of the FTZ, commodities replaced workers. The zone was rendered as a warehouse with special powers in which commodities moved in abstract flows through abstract space in a symphony of frictionless handling (figure 1). Save for an offhand reference to longshoremen and guards, FTZ literature assessed only the labor value of the engineers and clerks who staffed the front office; the docks and storage rooms came across as virtually devoid of human activity. Even the one WPA poster that depicted waterfront work omitted waterfront workers (figure 11). If WPA artists usually chronicled the laboring of U.S. culture, whether in the romantic curves of social realist murals or in the clean lines of modernist posters, this was the de-laboring, the antithesis of Popular Front iconography.66 Men who toiled with their hands were photographed in the tungsten mines of the West, not on Staten Island (figure 12). On Staten Island, to quote an August 1934 memorandum on the law of the FTZ, men performed the un-transformative, un-photographic, unheroic work of “mere assembling.”67 As the occasional FTZ publicity stunt attested, assembly work barely required living labor. Even a movie star in a suit and tie could do it (figure 13).

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

53

Figure­12.­A­tungsten­mine­in­Kern­ County,­California.­Russell­Lee,­­ May­1942

Figure­13.­“Douglas­Fairbanks,­Jr.­moves­burlap­bags­containing­clothes­donated­for­Korean­War­victims,­ 1951.”­Staten Island Advance.­All­rights­reserved.­Reprinted­with­permission

54

Radical History Review

Epilogue:­Little­Hong­Kongs If Congress prohibited manufacturing in FTZs, how is it that Ford and Toyota currently occupy FTZs? Are auto manufacturers actually auto warehousers? Setting aside the latter question momentarily, answering the former question is simple: in 1950, Congress amended the Foreign-Trade Zones Act to allow manufacturing and to invent a new entity called a “subzone,” a zone encompassing a discrete production or distribution facility, like a Ford plant or a Walmart warehouse.68 Now hundreds of FTZ subzones and so-called general purpose zones pockmark the United States, also thanks to a redefinition of the rule that an FTZ be located “in or adjacent to a port of entry” (“ports” now include airports, and “adjacent” now means sixty miles or less).69 To the bewilderment of an economic geographer who studied FTZs in the early 1950s, and who discussed them recently during an interview, no site lies beyond reach of the modern, or postmodern, FTZ juggernaut, not even a defunct limestone cave.70 FTZs started to explode in number in the late 1970s, when corporations began to export jobs to free trade zones in Asia and Mexico.71 To convey the deep history of FTZs, this article has emphasized the commonalities among free trade zones, whether inside or outside the United States. Here, to survey the present, it is useful to stress the dissimilarities, and to do so by highlighting the EPZ, or export-processing zone, the latest incarnation of free trade zones outside the United States. “A cocktail of exemptions,” in the words of one commentator, the EPZ is an enclave wherein nearly all of a nation’s laws and regulations are suspended to attract foreign-owned export-oriented manufacturing: not just customs laws, as in the FTZ, but labor and environmental laws too.72 If the FTZ is a Shirley Temple, relatively speaking, the EPZ is a double Margarita. And it is the cocktail of the moment, after a half century of gradually rising popularity. The EPZ was first quietly concocted in small part on Staten Island in the 1940s, when officials from nations that would later mass-market it visited Zone 1 with notebooks in hand: officials from Panama in 1944, from China in 1946, and from Egypt in 1948.73 But it was not routinely served to U.S. corporations until the end of the “American Century,” in the mid-1970s, by which point seventy-nine nations had adopted at least one, or one of its variants, and policy analysts had begun to take notice. As a prominent economist told Business Week at the time, he and his peers in the Ivy League and at the World Bank were coming to realize that the EPZ was an excellent antidote for the headache of protectionism in a “developing” nation like India. “Trade zones are the one way we can smuggle in free trade,” he remarked. “In a sense, you design six areas, six little Hong Kongs, and you hope that eventually they will dominate all of India.”74 Four decades later, at the dawn of the new millennium, the EPZ is a fact of everyday life, and the number of such zones around the world has topped thirty-five hundred, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).75 A fantasy of the FTZ’s early proponents has become

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

55

Figure­14.­Map­reprinted­ from­Report on Proposal to Create a Foreign-Trade Zone (or Free Port) in the Republic of Panama­(Washington,­DC:­ Department­of­Commerce,­ 1946)

reality, and what a San Francisco merchant envisioned in 1919 as “a chain of free zones” has come to encircle — and, as in a June 1946 map of an FTZ Board junket to South America, symbolically enclose — the globe (figure 14).76 In this new world order, Zone 1 turned out to be a residual form. In the 1960s, as tungsten and nuts began moving in steel containers rather than wooden crates, Staten Island’s piers became archaic, dwarfed by the global factory’s new megaships, and in 1972 the warehouses finally closed, just as the twin towers looming north of them finally opened.77 The occasion was commemorated by a bonfire. To empty the wharves without paying tariff duties, the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Ports and Trade gathered the merchandise that FTZ tenants had abandoned — ”very old dolls’ clothing, some old rifles and some 20 – year-old gin,” noted the Staten Island Advance — and carted it outdoors to burn it in front of officers from the U.S. Customs Service.78 Twelve years later, wrecking crews demolished the piers themselves, and now not a brick remains of the nation’s first venture into extraterritorial economic development (figure 15). If Zone 1 is history, the template it introduced is thriving. Frictionless production has come to pervade the United States, transforming a nation of shopkeepers into an empire of warehousers. While FTZ shipments constitute a whopping 40 percent of manufacturing GDP, FTZ labor rolls amount to a paltry 2.5 percent of

56

Radical History Review

Figure­15.­“Pier­supports­piled­on­a­barge­wait­for­transport,”­Staten Island Advance,­January­31,­1989.­ All­rights­reserved.­Reprinted­with­permission

manufacturing employment. To put this ratio in terms of a global metric, in 2008, a total of 330,000 people worked in all FTZs, plural, compared to 3 million in just the Shenzhen EPZ, singular.79 And these numbers directly relate. Generally speaking, the labor-intensive manufacturing of parts and inputs is performed in EPZs, and then their frictionless assembly is completed in FTZs. Such is the flow of the global assembly line. The career of an old neighbor of Zone 1 from across the harbor and upriver in Manhattan typifies how the FTZ-EPZ equation has shaped the industrial and commercial topography of the United States. In 1983, a year before Zone 1’s piers vanished, bulldozers began work in exurban New Jersey to prepare the grounds for Zone 44, an industrial park slated for a mixture of distribution and light assembly tenants.80 Crowned the “International Trade Center,” the facility was reportedly the second largest holding of none other than the Rockefeller Group, whose first largest holding was Rockefeller Center — the underground chambers of which happened to house a bonded warehouse known colloquially as a “free port” beginning in the early 1930s.81 Now, a generation after its New Jersey debut, the Rockefeller Group is establishing FTZs in pastures and deserts on both coasts, concrete conurbations such as the Tejon Ranch Tejon Industrial Complex just south of Bakersfield, California. Buildings advertised on the group’s Web site are likely familiar to denizens

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

57

Figure­16.­“Completed­warehouse­ interior,”­Rockefeller­Group­ Development­Corporation,­www­ .rockgroupdevelopment.com/ca/ tejon.html

of U.S. highways. Stretching five hundred acres or more, they assert an imperial horizontality when photographed indoors that inadvertently but eerily demonstrates how these places of enclosure benefit from distant processes of enclosure. Pristine and pristinely empty, the buildings are haunted by the absent presence of the multitudes in Shenzhen and elsewhere who furnish the boxes soon to fill them: if laborintensive production has been outsourced from the United States, so too has its image (figure 16).82 Notes For crucial and much-appreciated assistance in the researching and writing of this article, I thank Jean- Christophe Agnew, Amy Chazkel, Irene Cheng, Jennifer Ching, Carlotta DeFillo, Michael Denning, Tisha Hooks, Sophia Z. Lee, Rebecca Tinio McKenna, Natalie Orenstein, Ginny Orenstein, Robert Orenstein, Dina Pollack, Ron Resetarits, Steve Zaffarano, and RHR’s three anonymous reviewers. I dedicate this article to the memory of David Banigan-White. 1. For evocative, ground-level tours of free trade zones outside the United States, see Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000), 195 – 229; and Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 98 – 121. For taxonomies of their many modalities, see Xiangming Chen, “The Evolution of Free Economic Zones and the Recent Development of Cross-National Growth Zones,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19 (1995): 593 – 621; and Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). On the law of free trade zones, see Michael B. Likosky, The Silicon Empire: Law, Culture, and Commerce (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 2. Midnight Notes Collective, “Introduction to the New Enclosures,” Midnight Notes 10 (1990): 2 – 3. 3. I borrow this slogan from a Web site that catalogs domestic and international tax-haven schemes. See Lowtax Network Ltd., “Offshore Onshore,” www.lowtax.net/lowtax/html/ offon/offonhom.html (accessed June 12, 2009). 4. Greg Jones, interview by the author, Mobile, Alabama, October 22, 2007. Jones is an FTZ consultant and a past president of the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones.

58

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

Radical History Review

See FTZ Board, ia.ita.doc.gov/FTZPAGE/annualreport/ar-2008.pdf (accessed January 12, 2010). The figure of 40 percent is mine, based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. See www.bea.gov/industry/index.htm (accessed January 12, 2010). On the cultural latency of infrastructure, see Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture, and Society 24 (2007): 1 – 25. The only two monographs on the FTZ — in any discipline — are both technical studies by economic geographers, and they are so old as to serve more as primary than secondary sources. See William A. Dymsza, Foreign-Trade Zones and International Business (Washington, DC: Small Business Administration, 1964); and Richard S. Thoman, Free Ports and Foreign-Trade Zones (Cambridge, MD: Cornell Maritime Press, 1956). Tom Yee, telephone interview by the author, June 26, 2009. Yee is the deputy director of the Library of Congress’s Policy and Standards Division. Notably, the FTZ Act was sponsored by Emanuel Celler, a liberal congressman from Brooklyn and a great foe of tariff and immigration quotas alike. I omit his name and that of all other individuals in the text of this brief article because here I aim to focus readers on the FTZ as a cultural object. For more on the social and political lives of the FTZ, see Dara Orenstein, “Offshore Onshore: Foreign-Trade Zones on U.S. Soil, 1846 – 1989” (PhD diss., Yale University, in progress). See especially Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Saskia Sassen, Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). “Address of Congressman Emanuel Celler over Station WYNC,” Box 5, Folder 2, FTZ Records, Staten Island Historical Society (Staten Island, NY). United States Tariff Commission, Information Concerning Free Zones in Ports of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 42. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, [1885] 1992), 214. On representations of women on the global assembly line, see Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 237 – 82; and Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006). See, for instance, U.S. Shipping Board, Foreign Trade Zones (or Free Ports) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), 3 – 5. Paul Goetz, “N. Y. Foreign Trade Zone Seeks Bigger Role in Post-War Commerce,” Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1945. For the only extended treatment of colonial free ports, see Frances Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766 – 1822 (London: Longmans, Green, 1953). On the origins of the U.S. doctrine of extraterritoriality in Chinese treaty ports, see Teemu Ruskola, “Canton Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 859 – 84. For a full genealogy of the FTZ’s antecedents, see Orenstein, “Offshore Onshore.” Goetz, “N. Y. Foreign Trade Zone Seeks Bigger Role in Post-War Commerce.” Samuel Longfellow, ed., Final Memories of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Ticknor, 1887), 127. Marx, Capital, 2:223. See also David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, new ed. (New York: Verso , 2006), esp. chap. 12.

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

59

20. For an example of this widespread perspective, see F. A. McKenzie, “The World Metropolis: New York or London?” New York Times, August 3, 1919. 21. For a recent — and groundbreaking — historical analysis of bonded warehouses, see Gautham Rao, “Cities of Ports: The Warehousing Act of 1846 and the Centralization of American Commerce,” Thresholds 34 (2007): 34 – 37. See also Orenstein, “Offshore Onshore.” 22. For a quick comparison of free ports and bonded warehouses, see Roy S. MacElwee, Port Development (New York: McGraw Hill, 1925), 394 – 98. 23. Edwin J. Clapp, “The Free Port as an Instrument of World Trade,” in American Problems of Reconstruction, ed., Elisha M. Freidman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918), 248. 24. Philip B. Kennedy, A Comparative Study of the Economic, Industrial, and Commercial Conditions in the Free Ports of Europe and the Port of New York (New York: Merchants’ Association of New York, 1914) 8, 10. 25. The magnate was Austin Corbin, the president of the Long Island Railroad. See “An American Free Port,” Washington Post, May 14, 1894. 26. The grocer was Henry A. Meyer. See Meyer, Looking through Life’s Windows (New York: Coward-McCann, 1930), 147 – 236. 27. United States Tariff Commission, Information Concerning Free Zones, 31. See also Harvey, Limits to Capital, 424 – 45. 28. Congress, House, Congressman Emanuel Celler of New York, H. R. 9322, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 78, pt. 9, May 29, 1934, 9852. 29. Newbold Morris, [Speech], October 23, 1939, 4, Box 5, Folder 2, FTZ Records. 30. Foreign-Trade Zones Board, Regulations: Governing the Establishment, Operation, Maintenance, and Administration in the United States of Foreign-Trade Zones (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), 1. 31. LaGuardia to Kolff, November 4, 1937, Box 28, Folder 8, Cornelius Kolff Papers, Staten Island Historical Society. Eventually the poster was deemed so uniquely striking and resonant that it was chosen as the cover image for the first book-length study of the WPA poster program. Christopher DeNoon, telephone interview by the author, June 18, 2009. See DeNoon, Posters of the WPA (Los Angeles: Wheatley Press, 1987). 32. The artist was A. M. Cassandre. For a glimpse of his iconic poster, “L’Atlantique,” see the book jacket of Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 33. Due to length constraints, in this article I focus on Zone 1’s physical and legal architecture and not on its relationship to Staten Island or New York City. 34. Keller Easterling coins and elaborates the concept of a “spatial product” in Enduring Innocence, 1 – 3. 35. Thomas E. Lyons, General Description of Foreign-Trade Zone 1, pamphlet, April 1, 1938, 1, Box 2, Folder 14, FTZ Records. 36. “Mayor Asks Roper for Free Port Here,” New York Times, July 9, 1935. 37. Foreign-Trade Zones Board, Regulations, 5. 38. R. L. Duffus, “Free Port Offers Boon to Trade,” New York Times, February 2, 1936. 39. My reading of the FTZ’s visual archive is indebted to the work of Allan Sekula, particularly Fish Story (Düsseldorf, Germany: Richter Verlag, 1995) and Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 40. See Jean- Christophe Agnew, “The Threshold of Exchange: Speculations on the Market,” Radical History Review, no. 21 (1979): 99 – 118.

60

Radical History Review

41. See Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). This infamous interstitial category dates back to the Insular Cases, the original cluster of which, from 1901, centered not on the citizenship status of colonial subjects but on the tariff status of colonial commodities — agricultural products like sugar and oranges shipped from Puerto Rico to New York. 42. Both sets are old tropes. On the forerunners of the FTZ fence and sign, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2003), 371 – 401. 43. “Report for the Year of 1940,” July 1, 1941, 10, Box 3, Folder 13, FTZ Records. 44. “Where War Goods Wait,” Washington Post, January 28, 1940. 45. [Diagram], Box 3, Folder 16, FTZ Records. 46. Thomas E. Lyons, “Dedicating the New Orleans Foreign-Trade Zone,” speech, November 16, 1946, 2, Box 8, Folder 6, FTZ Records. 47. Puertos-Libres Mexicanos: Salina-Cruz, Puerto-Mexico, Matias-Romero, Topolobampo (Mexican Free Ports: Salina-Cruz, Puerto-Mexico, Matias-Romero, Topolobampo )(Mexico City: Imprenta Nuevo Mundo, 1947). 48. Leon M. Siler, “ ‘Hylan’s Folly’ May Be Boon, After All,” New York Post, February 4, 1936. 49. Congress, House, Congressman Allen T. Treadway of Massachusetts, H. R. 9322, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 78, pt. 9, May 28, 1934, 9779. 50. Morris, [Speech], 4. 51. For an “into” example, see “Where War Goods Wait.” 52. Claudius T. Murchison, “Creation of Free Ports Holds a Serious Problem,” New York Times, July 22, 1934. 53. Foreign-Trade Zones Board, Regulations, 10 – 11. 54. See Bureau of Customs, “General Authorities Bearing on the Question of What Constitutes Manufacturing in Connection with Operations Which May Be Carried on within a ForeignTrade Zone,” memo, August 6, 1934, Box 10, Folder 2, FTZ Records. 55. Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association v. the United States, 207 U.S. 556 (1908), 562. 56. Mildred Gwin Andrews, Tungsten: The Story of an Indispensable Metal (Washington, DC: Tungsten Institute, 1955), 3. 57. Woodrow Wirsig, “The Port within a Port,” New York Herald Tribune, January 13, 1946. 58. The man was K. C. Li. See K. C. Li, Tungsten: Its History, Geology, Ore-Dressing, Metallurgy, Chemistry, Analysis, Applications, and Economics (New York: Reinhold, 1947). 59. Goetz, “N. Y. Foreign Trade Zone Seeks Bigger Role in Post-War Commerce.” 60. Marshall D. Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 104; Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1 (New York: Vintage, [1867] 1977), 302, 342. 61. Catherine L. Nevins, Foreign Trade Zone 1 (New York: FTZ Operators Inc., 1943), 18. 62. “Free Port Will Aid Exchange Release,” New York Times, February 2, 1936. 63. Carter R. Bryan, “Like the Pea in the Shell Game,” Foreign Commerce Weekly, February 21, 1942, 3. 64. Congress, House, Congressman William Patrick Connery, Jr. of Massachusetts, H. R. 9322, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 78, pt. 9, May 28, 1934, 9769. 65. Benjamin M. Altschuler, “Recent Administrative Rulings on Foreign Trade Zones,” October 17, 1947, Box 5, Folder 3, FTZ Records. 66. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (New York: Verso, 1997).

Orenstein | Foreign-Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production

61

67. Bureau of Customs, “General Authorities Bearing on the Question of What Constitutes Manufacturing,” 4. 68. See Dymsza, Foreign Trade Zones and International Business, 33 – 36, 143 – 92. 69. See Douglas W. Cray, “Trade Zones Spread Inland,” New York Times, October 8, 1972. 70. Richard S. Thoman, interview by the author, Hayward, California, June 13, 2006. Zone 15 in Kansas City — one of the first “inland” zones — opened in 1972 boasting storage rooms in “underground caverns left by limestone miners.” Cray, “Trade Zones Spread Inland.” 71. For a case study of this moment, see Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 2001). 72. Easterling, Enduring Innocence, 115. 73. See, respectively, “Report for the Year of 1944,” May 31, 1945, 11, Box 3, Folder 13, FTZ Records; “Free Zones Expected to Spur Trade,” China Weekly Review, October 12, 1946, 177; Thomas E. Lyons, “Foreign Trade Zones and Air Commerce,” May 20, 1948, 4, Box 5, Folder 2, FTZ Records. For an in-depth examination of the linkages between FTZs and EPZs, see Orenstein, “Offshore Onshore.” 74. Jagdish Bhagwati, quoted in “The U.S. Lags in Trade Zones,” Business Week, November 17, 1980, 82 – 87. 75. Jean-Pierre Singa Boyenge, “ILO Database on Export Processing Zones,” April 2007, 1, www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/sector/themes/epz/epz-db.pdf. 76. William Harris Douglas, quoted in United States Tariff Commission, Information Concerning Free Zones, 52. 77. While Staten Island was the first to decline, by the mid-1970s the piers of Brooklyn and Manhattan had also lost ground to the new container terminals at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. See Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 92 – 97. 78. R. F. Miller, “Foreign Trade Zone in Stapleton to Close Monday,” Staten Island Advance, January 27, 1972. 79. See FTZ Board, ia.ita.doc.gov/FTZPAGE/annualreport/ar-2008.pdf (accessed January 12, 2010). On Shenzhen, see Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 80. Anthony DePalma, “Earth Movers Carving Free Trade Zone,” New York Times, April 3, 1983. 81. “Rockefeller Center Becomes ‘Free Port,’ ” New York Times, July 21, 1932. This event required a special act of Congress, which is detailed in The Rockefeller Center Warehouse and Exhibition Act (1935), booklet, Box 2212, Folder 2, 1939 World’s Fair Records, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division. 82. Distribution centers such as the Tejon Industrial Complex are examined in Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). In a preface, Bonacich draws attention to the motorscape of the supply chain, noting that she first became fascinated by distribution centers as she contemplated a particular complex along the Pomona Freeway during her regular commute to the University of California, Riverside.

“We Must Destroy You to Save You” Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons Robert Gioielli

I

n August 1969, hearings on a proposed highway bypass gathered people from all over metropolitan Baltimore. For three nights, black and white, urban and suburban, working and middle class all voiced their opposition to the city’s highway system. “The threat of the road was acting like a zipper, pulling white and Black together,” one witness said. Another angry woman told state officials, “You did one good thing. You brought black and white together, and this is a beautiful thing.” That Baltimore’s white, black, urban, and suburban communities, riven by protests, riots, and racial clashes, could agree on anything, much less cheer each other on, was a surprise to some observers, including the Baltimore Sun reporter Janelee Keidel, who noted that “witnesses described the hearings as the greatest boon to race relations here in years.”1 But the Rosemont Hearings, as they were known, were not an anomaly. In 1968, white and African American communities formed a citywide, interracial organization, known as the Movement against Destruction (MAD), to oppose the construction of the city’s planned highway network. For much of the 1960s city officials had been pitting one neighborhood against another, moving the highway a few blocks here or there to help save a church or important business, only to have it plow through another block of homes. By the end of the decade, Baltimoreans realized that this zero-sum game only benefited those who would use the highway Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-015 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

62

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

63

and would harm all the city’s central neighborhoods. By educating minority and working-class city residents about highway politics, MAD and other groups helped them articulate a view of urban space that stood in contrast to efforts to modernize the city’s physical infrastructure by municipal officials, highway engineers, and local business leaders. Because the highway destroyed community resources, such as schools and parks, and open spaces, and severely limited housing choices, especially for African Americans, many Baltimore residents saw the road as a form of enclosure — the taking of commonly available resources and redistributing them to a privileged few. To these residents the city’s neighborhoods were a commons for African Americans and working-class whites. “The city condemns the land, holds it until construction (perhaps five years) and is responsible for its interim maintenance and use. Why waste this valuable land and resource? Instead, return services to the neighborhoods and help bridge this No-Man’s land of battle scars. . . . We need play areas, shopping, cultural and community center facilities,” one community group wrote in a 1968 press release.2 In one sense, this is an inversion of the traditional understanding of the enclosure of the commons, in which private interests appropriate formerly public, or unclaimed, property for their own use, usually in an agrarian setting. By stark contrast, in the case of mid-twentieth- century Baltimore, the state appropriated private space for ostensibly public use. But although the goal of the highway was to create a roadway for the benefit of the entire city, residents who lived in the path of the road saw it as enclosure because it would only help certain groups, primarily white suburbanites. “This system . . . is being built for the convenience and exclusive use of white suburbanites to gain easy access to or from the downtown districts,” the community activist Joseph Wiles wrote in a 1968 letter to city officials.3 In addition to exploring how traditional definitions of enclosure are insufficient for understanding conceptions of public versus private space in the modern city, the story of Baltimore’s highway fight helps refocus the narrative of U.S. urban renewal on how city residents experienced attempts to reconstruct urban space. This essay sees urban renewal not as one policy, but as a “host of programs and policies that wrought a series of radical interventions on the urban built environment,” including highway construction, slum clearance, and downtown office and stadium projects.4 Despite the abundance of recent work on the spectrum of problems that U.S. cities faced in the postwar period, we know little about the relationship between the experience of physical destruction and redevelopment and local activism, especially by minority and working-class groups. Accounts of urban renewal and highway fights tend to fall into two broad categories. The first examine these controversies as part of broader case studies of individual cities in the postwar period. Highway fights become simply one in a series of problems that led to political and social clashes during the 1950s and 1960s. 5 The second group looks specifically at road wars but tends to address political or policy questions, or focus on the activism of

64

Radical History Review

middle-class residents and political decision makers. The connections between the experience of urban renewal by its primary victims — urban racial minorities and working-class groups — and their activism need to be more fully explored.6 This inverted reimagining of the concept of a commons, as revealed in the wake of its enclosure, helps us understand the grassroots experiences of urban renewal from the perspective of those that it deeply affected. Local political and business leaders believed that the way to keep Baltimore competitive in a decentralizing industrial and commercial economy was to remake the physical landscape of the central city. Because they could simultaneously erase slums and provide transportation connections, city leaders considered highways a key part of this process. In response, neighborhood and community groups pointed not only to the symbolic meaning of the highway — how it represented their lack of power, the misplaced priorities of city leaders, and the subsidy of private automobiles over public transportation — but also to the material problems it caused. They based their disapproval of the highway construction project not on their conjecture of what the highway was going to do but on what it had already done. Decades of planning, condemnation, and land clearance had taken a real, physical toll on many central city neighborhoods. When African American and working-class white groups spoke in opposition to the highway, they spoke with the knowledge of experience. This experience was especially important for African Americans. The highway planners targeted their communities first, and the black experience helped shape the eventual citywide movement into a type of anti-enclosure activism. On one level, the highway project was about the taking of private space, including individually owned homes, businesses, and apartments, and creating a new, public highway that all could use. But from the black perspective, the public space of the highway was exclusive, not inclusive. The physical nature of highways themselves — limited access, constant speed — made them unavailable to anyone other than motorists. In addition, many central city residents did not own cars and were dependent on public transportation, which was being starved of funds. Inner-city African Americans thus did not see the construction of highways as the taking of their private land for a public good. They saw it as the expropriation of territory used by the black community for the benefit of certain publics: in particular, affluent white suburbanites. Although the community they spoke in defense of contained private spaces — homes and businesses — they considered it a commons. Baltimore’s history of residential segregation had limited black housing choices for decades. Although ending this discrimination was one of the major goals of local civil rights activists in the postwar era, others focused on defending and protecting those areas that had long been part of the black community. Thus when they spoke of the destruction caused by the highway, they argued in defense of individual rights to homeownership and compensation, as well as the right of the black community to have access to and benefit from territory already recognized as part of black neighborhoods. The highway represented the

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

65

creation of new space not accessible to African Americans, and it destroyed individual and community housing options as well as community facilities. Because this activism in some ways defended Baltimore’s racial geography, African Americans were able to establish an effective coalition with working-class whites from other parts of the city through MAD. By the end of the 1960s some white neighborhoods were beginning to see how the drawn-out nature of highway planning and condemnation shaped their communities, and conversations with black groups helped them understand how much worse the situation could become. They were able to work with African Americans because their common enemy, the highway, and not their activism, threatened the racial status quo.7 Like many U.S. cities, Baltimore was riven by racial strife in the late 1960s, including a destructive riot in April of 1968. Thus an interracial movement to prevent the highway was unique, but activists were driven more by the fractured and segregated realities of an industrial city than by a liberal integrationist or radical utopian ideology. What brought whites and blacks together was a mutual belief that the highway would harm the central city. Municipal leaders promised that the road would help urban neighborhoods. But highway opponents saw the road as a project that actively destroyed their communities and only helped suburbanites. “Sacrifice in the Name of Progress” By 1960, the consensus among Baltimore’s civic, economic, and political leaders was not that the city should have a highway system, but that it desperately needed one. The original plans for a cross-town expressway had been drawn up in the mid1940s. This first road, dubbed the “East-West Expressway,” was to help move traffic from one side of the city to the other. By the postwar period, connecting downtown businesses to the suburbs, moving traffic along the booming mid-Atlantic corridor, and connecting Baltimore’s ports to larger markets via motor freight were added to these intracity needs. In addition to these practical concerns, most leaders believed that if Baltimore was going to compete in the increasingly cutthroat postwar market for jobs, capital, and prestige, a highway was the primary transportation priority. Perhaps most important, the provisions of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act made highway construction affordable. All the city had to do was follow federal guidelines, and the federal government would pay for its new roads (fig. 1).8 Despite this apparent consensus over the need for a citywide highway network, infighting among planners, engineers, politicians, and business leaders had hamstrung Baltimore’s attempts to build an urban highway system for much of the early 1960s. By the middle of the decade, politically connected preservationists and architects began to cry foul, arguing that the highway would rip away at the city’s historic fabric. Fed up with delays, local and state leaders agreed in 1966 to an innovative proposal to hire a team of architects, planners, and engineers to redesign all of the city’s planned highways.9 The Urban Design Concept Team (UDCT) was the

66

Radical History Review

Figure 1. This map shows planned highway and urban renewal projects, in white, outlined over an aerial picture of central Baltimore. Downtown is in the center. Circled on the left is the Franklin-Mulberry Corridor, on the predominantly African American west side. Circled on the right is Fells Point, part of the working- class white southeast side. From Urban Design Concept Associations, “Final Joint Development Report,” Movement against Destruction Collection, Special Collections Department, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore. Used with permission. Courtesy of the University of Baltimore

brainchild of a Baltimore-based architect, Archibald Rogers, who recognized that urban highways were not simply traffic conduits but major pieces of urban architecture that could prove tremendously disruptive. Rogers and the team’s members understood that highways fundamentally expropriated and reordered urban space and, by burying the process under layers of bureaucracy, did so in an undemocratic manner. Hoping that it would be a pilot project for a new, less controversial method of highway planning, the federal Department of Transportation paid the team’s $1.4 million consulting fee. But from local officials’ point of view, the plan backfired. The planners and architects who made up the core of the UDCT did more than simply pay lip service to the idea of citizen planning. Through informational meetings, a newsletter, and scores of after-hours meetings with local groups, the UDCT educated people about highway design and traffic engineering, giving skeptical residents concrete arguments against the road.10 The first explicitly antihighway groups came from African American neighborhoods on the city’s west side. These activists would prove extremely important

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

67

not only in fighting city and state officials on highway issues but also in educating residents of other neighborhoods about the destructive power of the road. This was based on their experience with condemnation for the road and on the fact that since the early 1940s, their communities had been the target of many of the city’s ambitious and destructive urban renewal schemes. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Baltimore’s political and business leaders, as well as liberal housing and planning advocates, saw the predominantly black neighborhoods that surrounded downtown as the biggest threat to both the economic and the physical health of the city. Overcrowding and poor code enforcement had led to abysmal housing conditions, reformers argued, with extremely high incidents of communicable diseases like syphilis and tuberculosis. Business and property owners believed that the physically degraded neighborhoods surrounding downtown Baltimore attracted poor and working-class residents seeking low rents, especially African Americans. This would encourage more disinvestment, both business leaders and planners argued, spreading the area’s negative physical characteristics to the rest of the central city. Because the perceived source of these problems was physical — a dilapidated and degraded housing stock, which attracted vermin and encouraged disease — reformers and city leaders recommended physical solutions, including urban renewal, redevelopment, and highway construction.11 Although some aspects of urban renewal emphasized renovation, most municipal officials and private-housing advocates considered many areas beyond repair, requiring demolition and reconstruction, and almost all of these were predominantly African American communities. According to one report, from 1951 to 1964, 89 percent of the families displaced by urban renewal and highway construction in Baltimore were black, with 60 percent of future relocations coming from African American neighborhoods. Renewal officials argued that this disparity was simple economics. Because most blacks were poor, they could only afford the worst housing. “Almost all of the areas were selected for clearance because they contained the worst housing in the community,” a renewal authority brochure said. “Consequently, they were occupied by the lowest income groups — predominantly Negro.”12 Both in their planning and execution, Baltimore’s urban renewal programs failed to take into account the segregated nature of the city’s housing market. In the 1910s, Baltimore had been a pioneer in attempting to enforce residential segregation through city ordinances. Although the courts overturned these laws relatively quickly, during the middle decades of the twentieth century Baltimore followed a pattern of more informal segregation that was nevertheless remarkably effective. African Americans of every socioeconomic level could only purchase and rent homes in a narrow band of communities surrounding downtown. Blockbusting and white flight helped expand these areas in the postwar years, but Baltimore retained a dual housing market: one white and one black. In forcing poor people out of substandard

68

Radical History Review

Figure 2. A row of houses that have been condemned for Baltimore’s highway. Note the sign on the left. From Urban Design Concept Associations, “Final Joint Development Report,” Movement against Destruction Collection, Special Collections Department, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore. Used with permission. Courtesy of the University of Baltimore

housing, urban renewal put constant pressure on the black community to reabsorb displaced residents.13 Civic leaders rationalized the destruction of black neighborhoods by defining them as slums, neighborhoods that had no value and that could only be saved with destruction. But to black Baltimoreans, it was the messy, haphazard process of urban renewal and highway construction that destabilized and destroyed their communities. Plans developed in the early 1950s took almost two decades to implement. The purchase and clearing of the land occurred well before engineers finalized construction plans. This left blocks and blocks of boarded-up and bulldozed wastelands that helped drag down property values, and thus the stability, of surrounding communities (fig. 2). Furthermore, many areas had existed in a form of unofficial condemnation for even longer. The Franklin-Mulberry Corridor, the area between Franklin and Mulberry Streets on the west side of the city, was in the heart of Baltimore’s primary black ghetto and had been designated as a highway route since the first plan for the East-West Expressway in 1944. It remained a part of every highway plan for the following thirty years. This discouraged investment and

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

69

encouraged physical decline, making it that much easier for officials to continue to include it in highway plans.14 Combined with Baltimore’s long-standing practices of housing segregation and discrimination toward African Americans, this experience is key to understanding the particular way in which black Baltimoreans understood the highway process as one of enclosure. City leaders saw entire black communities on the west side as a threat to the overall health of the city. By removing them from private hands and making them into public space — through eminent domain and highway construction — they believed they could repurpose these districts for the greater good. In response, African Americans spoke as a community. Because they lacked access to other parts of the city, the west side was their commons. The city’s poor, mostly black residents of the west side viewed official efforts to expropriate this territory, even for what was meant to be a public works project for the benefit of all, as a threat to their subsistence, similar to the way that landless farmers would have viewed large landowners who put up fences to keep them from gleaning kindling and wild fruit. For example, in 1968, residents of Harlem Park, a community next to the planned highway corridor, released a position paper in which they described the reasons for their opposition to the road: “This road . . . will destroy a black middle-income community and bisect other communities. It will destroy historic sites; remove schools; greatly reduce community and commercial facilities; and has and will have a degrading affect [on] neighborhoods adjacent to the highway. The highway will . . . cause the relocation of thousands of people who cannot find decent, safe and healthy houses in which to live.”15 To these residents, the highway was not just an inconvenience that forced some of them to move, or a symbol of an abusive and discriminatory city government. By destroying community facilities and depriving many of them of safe domiciles, it was taking away what they needed to subsist. To understand the issue this way, as a type of enclosure, was not unique among west Baltimore’s African American residents. In 1967, representatives of various community groups formed the Relocation Action Movement (RAM), an organization that focused specifically on antihighway activism.16 Much like the residents of Harlem Park, when the members of RAM described the destruction caused by the condemnation and land clearance process, they focused on damage caused to common spaces and the community at large, not on private property. The Franklin-Mulberry Corridor in particular had become, according to one RAM activist, an “environmental waste land” and an “open invitation (for) disease, accidents, and general filth.”17 Many condemned buildings still sat empty and were dragging the surrounding neighborhoods down with them. “People live in jungles of boarded up houses, rats, and fire department sirens . . . we demand constructive action immediately to save our dying neighborhoods,” one RAM position statement declared.18 Because they were subject to vandalism and crime, condemned areas needed more city services, not the reduced amount they

70

Radical History Review

were getting, RAM members argued. In a 1967 petition to Mayor Theodore McKeldin, residents demanded that the city increase police and sanitation services “to correct the negligent method of condemnation which often left one or two families stranded in a block of vacated, boarded-up, garbage infested, city owned housing causing increased problems of vandalism, rats, and an unreasonably large amount of additional upkeep on their own homes.”19 Describing the destruction caused by the highway builders was the first important step for Baltimore’s highway opponents. By establishing the UDCT, city and state officials had hoped to insulate themselves from resident discontent. When citizens complained about projected problems, officials could simply point to the UDCT and argue that their concerns would be ameliorated through a variety of “tweaks” in the design. But immediate issues could not be shunted away so easily. Once they established that their communities had been harmed, residents moved on to more substantive criticisms: Rivers of concrete are being pushed through parks, areas of historical significance and most importantly serve as a source of destruction for many residential areas. It is no coincidence that most of the neighborhoods slated for construction are Black. For too long the history of Urban Renewal and Highway Clearance has been marked by the repeated removal of Black citizens. We have been asked to make sacrifice after sacrifice in the name of progress, and when that progress has been achieved we find it marked “white only.” The members of RAM are residents and homeowners who live in the Expressway path and adjacent areas. We have united not to stymie progress but to demand justice; we do not ask for patronization but an end to victimization. We [hope] that the city will wake up to its responsibility and avoid the damaging effects thoughtless renewal projects can have.20

This quotation reveals how, despite apparent contradictions, activism was a form of anti-enclosure protest. As “rivers of concrete,” highways were destroying common resources, such as parks and historic landmarks. This was a common complaint of both RAM members and other activists and residents. By 1968, two schools, a post office, and Echo House, a social service and community center, had already been destroyed or relocated. “Coupling this with the loss of the many commercial establishments in the area, it is safe to say that the State of Maryland is in the business of community destruction,” RAM said in a position statement.21 Despite this devastation, parts of the Franklin-Mulberry Corridor still sat empty while the city finalized construction plans. RAM member Esther Redd argued that communities should be allowed to use these spaces, in the interim, as parks and ball fields. “We feel that interim use is the answer that provides hope for fighting this blight,” she said in a letter to a state official. “This community needs playgrounds and parks. Yet for some reason, the city has stated that it will not fund interim use projects.”22

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

71

In response to citizen protest over the loss of community resources, the UDCT proposed a plan for “joint-development” with the highway. Schools, parks, and community centers would be constructed along with the road on already condemned land. The team’s ideas were pioneering and futuristic, with facilities planned, as one journalist put it, “on the land beside, below or even under a freeway.” Officials eventually scrapped the plans due to lack of funds and concerns about noise and air pollution in buildings so close to a freeway. But because residents were opposed to the loss of community facilities, joint development was a major part of the freeway project for almost five years (figs. 3 and 4).23 Although this emphasis on the loss of community space may seem to place highway activism within a more traditional definition of anti- enclosure, looking more deeply into activists’ public statements shows the impossibility of dividing the public good from private ownership as these activists confronted the political reality of the postwar, urban United States. Here and in their other correspondence, RAM members identify themselves not only as community members but also as homeowners. It would be inaccurate, however, to dismiss their activism as simply a case of agitating for homeowner’s rights. This assertion was embedded in their broader efforts to protect the African American neighborhoods on the west side, and the commons they were looking to defend cannot be strictly divided into public and private spaces. It was a hybrid landscape, with public spaces such as streets, vacant lots, sidewalks, parks, and schools interspersed with private homes and apartment buildings. Moreover, homeownership had multiple meanings for different groups, and property accumulation did not necessarily exclude a black Baltimorean from making claims for public space. Anti-enclosure activism thus must be understood within the racialization of space and property in Baltimore and other postwar U.S. cities. Although they owned homes, these black Baltimoreans lacked full access to property and credit markets, placing them in a lesser position vis-à-vis similar white residents. Because their socioeconomic status had been mapped onto their race, they spoke as both African Americans and homeowners.24 From a broader perspective, this defense of west Baltimore seems contradictory. The neighborhood had been produced by discrimination and segregation. Baltimore’s segregated housing market, and not the highway, was by far the biggest obstacle to black housing opportunities. Thus protest should have focused on integrating the majority of city neighborhoods and suburban areas that were closed off to both black home buyers and renters. But although black activists always acknowledged the problems caused by housing discrimination, RAM’s position fell firmly within the strain of postwar black activism that focused on improving the African American condition, rather than on forcing desegregation on a recalcitrant white majority. By the end of the 1960s, many within the black community felt that they had pushed up against the limits of postwar liberalism and its promises of providing social and economic justice. This frustration would manifest itself in a variety

72

Radical History Review

Figures 3 and 4. At the top is the Franklin-Mulberry Corridor before planned highway construction. Below is an architectural rendering of the highway along with a “joint- development” project composed of a school, community center, and commercial buildings that would be placed above the road. This project was proposed in response to resident concerns about the loss of community resources. From Urban Design Concept Associates, “Baltimore Interstate Highway System 3 – A: Segments; 10 and 11,” Movement against Destruction Collection, Special Collections Department, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore. Used with permission. Courtesy of the University of Baltimore

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

73

of ways, including the emergence of various forms of Black Power. For activists and residents of Baltimore’s west side ghettos, it meant preserving the common spaces of the city that were open and available to African Americans.25 “Human Needs of the Majority” Opposition to the highway in west Baltimore was a response to the destruction caused by the highway condemnation and construction process, which was layered on the decades of experience African Americans had with urban renewal and redevelopment programs. This understanding of the capricious and undemocratic nature of highway building would constitute the foundation for interracial, citywide opposition to the road. As late as 1967, many working-class whites saw the highway as salutary and were contemptuous of those who tried to stop it. City officials told them they would get good payments for their homes and that nearby factories needed the access the road would provide. Then the city started purchasing homes in the condemnation zone in Canton and Fells Point, two working-class communities on the southeast side of downtown. These homes sat empty and became targets for vandals and squatters. A wave of blight began to come through the community. As the planning process dragged on, residents began to see that the road would prove even more destructive to the community, tearing apart institutions, including important churches, and cutting off neighbors from each other. In response, they formed the Southeast Council against the Road, or SCAR, in 1969.26 Along with RAM, SCAR was an important part of MAD. The latter was formed in 1968, and its original members included RAM, other west side African American groups, and white civil rights activists, many of them from the Congress of Racial Equality. It was created as a citywide coalition and welcomed antihighway groups from all over Baltimore, including SCAR. MAD’s history is short; it was only active for about seven years. During much of this time, it had a core active membership of only a few dozen members, but they represented about a score of antihighway and community groups. The real successes in stopping the road came from MAD’s member groups, which filed lawsuits to delay or prevent highway construction. MAD served mainly as a citywide forum and clearinghouse, giving its members and constituent groups access to knowledge about the highway construction process. Armed with expertise first gleaned from planners, architects, and engineers associated with the UDCT, but later from their own research, MAD members were able to express how the highway would wreak destruction on their homes, streets, neighborhoods, and communities. To understand how MAD brought residents together from different parts of the city and crystallized their antihighway arguments, it is instructive to examine a series of public hearings held in August 1969. Organized by Maryland’s Department of Transportation, these hearings were supposed to be about moving the road out of Rosemont, a middle-class black neighborhood. However, during the previous year,

74

Radical History Review

as residents had become angry and anxious over ever-changing road plans, neither the state nor the city had provided any opportunities for public comment. This made the Rosemont Hearings a focal point for activists from all over Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun reporter James Dilts best expressed their value in a 1971 article about the highway: “While printed road hearings do not yet approach congressional hearings as a literary art form, they have a vitality all their own. The hearings on Rosemont were held ostensibly to examine four alternate routes around the community. The anti-expressway forces turned the hearings into a forum on the road itself.”27 Black west side residents set the tone for the hearings, discussing how their communities had been the casualties of urban renewal and highway construction for years. Charles Curtis, the president of the neighborhood council for Harlem Park, said that many black homeowners had been enthusiastic about some aspects of urban renewal because they believed it would improve their communities. But then the highway destroyed any possibility that urban reform would benefit them: Here in Harlem Park since 1956 these people have been under the gun. We spent over four and a half million dollars improving our homes. We are supposed to be an example for the whole country, urban renewal has. Then they come along, tear down all these houses. Now we are overcrowded, the rats are running us out because of this highway, because of this proposed highway. . . . There are 18,000 of us who are getting pretty sick from all this devastation, which is one block from us. Nobody except the people in Rosemont perhaps are more directly affected by this devastation than we are. You can’t even keep your street clean any more.28

Like other black critics of the road, Curtis describes the impact on both private and public space, but he does not draw a firm distinction between the two. He points out how condemnation has destroyed private residences, but he does not specifically talk about injuries to his own property. The tragedy of the destruction was that it affected the community as a whole, “18,000 of us,” not just individual property owners. Hezekiah Morris, the president of the Western Community Improvement Association, made a similar condemnation and pointed out that not only were common spaces devastated and did people feel overcrowded, but many, especially senior, citizens found it increasingly tough to survive. We believe that a road is an anathema, an eating disease penetrating through the city, taking neighborhood properties, graveyards, anything else in its way, and they always have a set pattern; first the Black neighborhood, then the poor people, and now they are going as low as digging the graves. Now, you know, that is going too far. And what happens after they go through; what do they leave behind? People without property, old folks that have homes and are too old to get no more because they ain’t going to give you no more homes after you

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

75

get so old, so what do you have left? They are on the Welfare, or out begging. It leaves behind destruction, rats and everything, and the world is turned upside down, people fighting against each other, separate.29

To Morris, this urban road produced an effect akin to the enclosure of a rural commons, because its construction forcibly removed both people and publicly available resources. The destruction of people and place was intricately intertwined. According to him, many, especially the elderly, had few resources outside neighborhoods now being condemned. With the coming of the road, they would have no choice but to go “on the Welfare, or out begging.” The SCAR member (and future U.S. Senator) Barbara Mikulski made a similar argument. “Roads destroy neighborhoods, they force people to move but never allow them to relocate justly. Ordinarily they have no place to go, and there are lots of hidden costs in relocating.” The road was not really for the public, Mikulski said. “You may try to take possession of our houses, but you can’t take possession of us and that is why you are never going to win, because we are human, and at this time human needs of the majority are going to have to try to supersede the economic needs of the few.”30 Morris, Mikulski, and others spoke in response to a process of the declaration of eminent domain, condemnation, and land clearance that saw their communities as space ripe for a form of privatization. According to legal precedent and highway practice, as long as the state provided adequate compensation, it had the right to take land and construct the road because it was considered a public good. Highway opponents challenged this logic, arguing that the road was actually removing urban space from public use and benefit. At the Rosemont Hearings, numerous people testified that city neighborhoods and city spaces were of real value, but that the road was destroying them. To make an argument against the road, they had to make an argument for the city and the strength and value of its neighborhoods, the best of which came from the SCAR chairperson Gloria Aull: I don’t want the road. Quite frankly I do not want the road because I am a city girl. I don’t like June bugs, I don’t like the songs of birds in the trees. I have never had them, so how can I miss what I have never had. But I do know concrete city streets and human life in the city, and I don’t believe the concrete roadway is conducive to human life in this city. I don’t think we are compatible.31

Aull resented the perceived superiority of the suburbs to the city and said she did not miss the amenities of suburban living because she “had never had them.” Other speakers made this comparison much more directly, arguing that the road was meant for the benefit of those who lived in the suburbs, to the detriment of those who lived in the city. “So our former neighbors who live in the county, who don’t pay any taxes, by the way, in the city, can just drive through and say, well, we drove

76

Radical History Review

through and we saw them cats down there smoking pot or something, you know, getting high, and go back home to have something to talk about, while we have to crowd up on top of one another,” Curtis said.32 Dallas Bartlett, another Rosemont area activist, likewise argued that city residents would have to bear the costs of the highway: “[The highway] will only serve a segment of the population, suburbia, and the people passing through the city. Its major cost and upkeep will be borne by the very people most affected by it, the city dwellers. They have to give up homes, park lands, community services and many other things if this road becomes a reality.”33 This argument — that the road was being built for the benefit of the suburbs — was important in bringing black and white Baltimoreans together. The MAD coalition was built on the realization that highway construction was a zero-sum game. By the late 1960s, neighborhood groups began to understand that moving the road from their community just pushed the problems of the highway around, so an argument in defense of the city helped people find common ground. The city-versus-the-suburbs argument is also key for understanding Baltimore’s antihighway agitation as a type of anti- enclosure activism. Local leaders argued that the highway was necessary for the overall economic health of both the city and the region. An explicit part of this argument was connecting Baltimore’s booming suburbs to downtown. To do this, certain inner-ring neighborhoods would have to be sacrificed. But central city residents saw the highway as destroying space that benefited their communities, metaphorically fencing it off for the benefit of a few. Even though the property relationships were reversed — the state was technically taking private land for public benefit — this is a type of anti-enclosure activism if we define the commons as land to which the public has access and from which the public can benefit, rather than defining it strictly on the basis of who owns the title to that land. As a single-use roadway, the highway eliminated all other uses of that land, privileging those who owned cars and needed to travel quickly from the suburbs to downtown. From the point of view of city residents, the state unjustly used its power to take land that benefited the many and put it to use for the few (fig. 5). This defense of the city was more pragmatic than utopian. Whites and blacks were able to speak for each other during the Rosemont Hearings and work together in MAD because they did not see the other groups as a threat. The threat came from officials, engineers, and suburban areas that were siphoning off resources from the city. But the commons they were defending was fraught with conflicts and contradictions. Whites and blacks lived in homogeneous neighborhoods, with African Americans in particular facing limited housing choices outside community boundaries. This meant that as much as the highway “acted like a zipper” to pull people together, it could only go so far.34 Not only did Baltimore face the threats of the suburbs, the highway, and other destructive urban renewal programs but it was also hamstrung by its own history of segregation and discrimination.

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

77

Figure 5. Images of the Fremont neighborhood on the west side of Baltimore, bordering the FranklinMulberry Corridor. Many city leaders argued that the highway should be built because of the community’s physical decay, whereas residents argued that the highway construction process caused the physical problems. From Urban Design Concept Associates, “Baltimore Interstate Highway System 3 – A: Segments; 10 and 11,” Movement against Destruction Collection, Special Collections Department, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore. Used with permission. Courtesy of the University of Baltimore

78

Radical History Review

Despite these contradictions, understanding highway activism as antienclosure activism puts the spatial and physical experience of the road front and center. On one level, it is possible to see the fight over Baltimore’s highway as a fight about civic participation. Layers of bureaucracy and the privileging of technical expertise had given residents little voice in Baltimore’s postwar urban planning, especially in the construction of its highway system. But for the members of RAM, SCAR, and MAD, the primary spark for their activism was not a real or perceived lack of involvement in the planning process. This lack of participation would become part of their arguments against the road, but their original motivation was the actual material experience of road construction: the way it tore up their neighborhoods, destroyed businesses, displaced schools, and, especially for black Baltimoreans, limited the places in which they could live. Highways did not just appear in U.S. cities. Their construction was part of a wrenching process of physical destruction and reconstruction, and enclosure helps us understand how residents tried to live through this process. Epilogue: Enclosure and the Modern City The summer of 1969 was in many ways the high point of Baltimore’s freeway revolt. Although it would continue until the mid-1970s, the highway fight would never again arouse the sort of passion among, and connections between, Baltimoreans that it did at the end of the 1960s. The primary reason was the success of the highway opposition, not only in Baltimore but also around the country. Urban highway controversies led to major revisions in federal construction laws, requiring environmental impact statements and other studies that considered factors beyond real estate costs and engineering necessities. These new laws gave citizens a major voice in urban planning, but they also institutionalized highway opposition, moving the debate from the public realm to the legal one, with the focus on motions, hearings, trials, and the endless minutiae of the environmental-regulatory state. This shifted the focus of groups like MAD from education, awareness raising, and protests to fund-raising and legal procedures. Lawsuits made highway planning more democratic than it had been in the early 1960s, but they lacked the grassroots orientation of the UDCT, which gave Baltimoreans a voice in shaping their local communities and sought to educate them in the technical intricacies of highway planning. Nevertheless, legal recourse proved extraordinarily effective in preventing the construction of much of Baltimore’s highway system during the 1970s. In the end, only one of the contested sections was built: the Franklin-Mulberry Corridor, a two-mile ditch in west Baltimore, unconnected to any other major highway, a “road to nowhere” in the middle of the city’s poorest African American ghetto. This eventuality — that the only major section of the highway would be built in a black neighborhood and prove essentially useless — makes it easy to see the

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

79

road as a grim reminder of the failure both of Baltimore’s highway dreams and of the general belief that the postwar city in the United States could be saved through physical reconstruction. This narrative of the folly of attempts to remake urban space has become entrenched both in academic literature and in popular media. As powerful as this story is, it reads back onto many U.S. industrial cities a teleological narrative of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and decline, leaving out the many contests and conflicts, especially over urban space, in the postwar era. During the quarter century after World War II, few of Baltimore’s residents saw their city descending into dysfunction and malignancy. Baltimore’s growth coalition felt that the city needed a new highway system to remain competitive, while the city’s residents articulated a different vision, one focused on the value of their neighborhoods to the life of the city. In addition to offering an alternative narrative to postwar urban decline, highway protest in Baltimore also offers a glimpse of the changing relationship between state power and the control of public space during the late twentieth century. In recent years, local governments have used expansive definitions of blight to condemn and reappropriate urban land, often explicitly for commercial development. Although this bears a greater resemblance to more traditional definitions of enclosure, it is easy to see Baltimore’s highway system as a step in this direction. Metropolitan leaders today make the same arguments that Baltimore’s did in the 1960s: for the health of city, we need to sacrifice certain places. From their perspective in Baltimore’s neighborhoods, residents saw the arguments about the public benefit of the highway as a fiction. It would only serve a certain, privileged sector of the city, they believed, destroying valuable space for their community in the process. Notes Special thanks to two anonymous reviewers from the Radical History Review and to Amy Chazkel. Their honest and insightful critiques were invaluable in crafting this essay. The first part of the title of this article borrows from James Dilts, “Changing City: We Must Destroy You To . . . ,” Baltimore Sun, August 4, 1968. 1. Janelee Keidel, “An Expressway Bridges a Gulf between People,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1969. Available in Box VIII-1, Folder Rosemont, Movement against Destruction Records, Special Collections, Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore (hereafter referred to as MAD Papers). 2. Expressway Coalition, “Policy Statement on Expressway Priorities,” May 23, 1968. Available in Box 546, Folder 676, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III Papers, Baltimore City Archives (hereafter D’Alesandro III Papers). 3. Joseph Wiles, Rosemont Neighborhood Improvement Association Press Release, undated, Box 543, Folder 663, D’Alesandro III Papers. 4. Eric Avila and Mark H. Rose, “Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal: An Introduction,” Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 335.

80

5.

Radical History Review

See, for example, Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 6. For a good overview of highway fights, see Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30 (2004), 674 – 706. On specific cities, see William Issel, “Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City’s Treasured Appearance: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,” Pacific Historical Review 68 (1999): 611 – 46; Zachary M. Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations,” Journal of Urban History 30 (2004): 611 – 46. Suleiman Osman argues that for critics such as Jane Jacobs, the urban highway became symbolic of all the problems and mistakes of urban renewal. See Suleiman Osman, “The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Postindustrialization, and Race in South Brooklyn, 1950 – 1980” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006), chap. 5. Two works that deal with city residents’ efforts to shape the physical reconstruction of urban space are Eric Avila, “Turning Structure into Culture: Reclaiming the Freeway in San Diego’s Chicano Park,” in The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O’Malley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 267 – 84; and Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 7. The literature on the postwar city emphasizes whites defending their neighborhoods from black incursion, or Blacks defending their communities from white oppression, but never the two working together. On white defense, see Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 – 1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). On African Americans, see especially Robert O. Self, “ ‘To Plan Our Liberation’: Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965 – 1977,” Journal of Urban History 26 (2000): 759 – 92. 8. Greater Baltimore Committee, “Highways Sub-committee Report,” Box IV-K-1, Folder 1956, Greater Baltimore Committee Papers, Special Collections, University of Baltimore (hereafter GBC Papers); Greater Baltimore Committee, “Report of the Highways Subcommittee,” Box IV-K-1, Folder 1958, GBC Papers; Robert Moses and W. Earle Andrews, Baltimore Arterial Report (New York City: Robert Moses, 1944). 9. A good overview of the bureaucratic battles is available in Michael P. McCarthy, “Baltimore’s Highway Wars Revisited,” Maryland Historical Magazine 93 (1998): 137 – 57. 10. Archibald Rogers, “Outline of Recommendations for Revising Federal Highway Legislation” to Sen. Joseph Tydings, May 20, 1968, Box IV-K-1, Folder Jan. – Oct. 1968, GBC Papers; Congress, Senate, Committee on Public Works, and Subcommittee on Roads, Urban Highways, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Roads, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1968. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968). On federal responses to local protest, see Raymond A. Mohl, “The Interstates and the Cities: The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Freeway Revolt, 1966 – 1973,” Journal of Policy History 20 (2008): 193 – 226; David Allison, “The Battle Lines of Baltimore,” Innovation, July 1969, 9 – 21. 11. The literature on urban renewal is vast. For a good summary, see Avila and Rose, “Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal”; and John Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940 – 1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). On Baltimore, see Martin Millspaugh and Vivian Gurney Breckenfeld, The Human

Gioielli | Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

81

Side of Urban Renewal: A Study of the Attitude Changes, Produced by Neighborhood Rehabilitation (Baltimore: Fight-Blight, 1958); Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency, Outline of Urban Renewal (Baltimore: BURHA, 1965). For a reformer’s perspective, see Frances B. Morton, Across the Fallsway: A Synopsis of “A Social Study of Wards 5 and 10” (Baltimore: Baltimore Council of Social Agencies, 1937). The Greater Baltimore Committee, a group of downtown property owners and corporate leaders, would prove a major force behind urban renewal and highways. See Greater Baltimore Committee, “Statement by the Greater Baltimore Committee on the Expressway Consultants’ Report,” Box IV-K-1, Folder 1961, GBC Papers; GBC, “Statement by the Subcommittee on Mass Transportation and Highways,” Box II-B, Folder 1960, GBC Papers. Samuel Roberts argues that the unhealthy conditions of these neighborhoods were a result of segregationist policies and practices. See Samuel Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). James Dilts, “Spreading or Ending Slums? Poor Shoved out to Make Room for Rich, Foes Charge,” Baltimore Sun, April 24, 1966; Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency, Outline of Urban Renewal. Gretchen Boger, “The Meaning of Neighborhood in the Modern City: Baltimore’s Residential Segregation Ordinances, 1910 – 1913,” Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 236 – 58; W. Edward Orser, Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Garrett Power, “Apartheid Baltimore Style: The Residential Segregation Ordinances of 1910 – 1913,” Maryland Law Review 42 (1983): 289 – 323. Moses and Andrews, Baltimore Arterial Report; Dilts, “Spreading or Ending Slums?” Harlem Park Neighborhood Council, “Position Paper on the Rosemont Expressway,” October 4, 1968, Box VIIA-1, Folder Harlem Park Neighborhood Council, MAD Papers. RAM, “Relocation Action Movement,” June 19, 1968, Box VII-1, Folder Relocation Action Movement, MAD Papers. Esther Redd to Fritz Linaweaver, September 16, 1969, Box 543, Folder 659, D’Alesandro III Papers. RAM, “Relocation Action Movement.” RAM, “A History of the Relocation Action Movement,” Box VII-1, Folder Relocation Action Movement, MAD Papers. RAM, “Position Statement,” January 16, 1968, Box VII-1, Folder Relocation Action Movement, MAD Papers. Ibid. Esther Redd to Fritz Linaweaver, September 16, 1969. George Favre, “Baltimore Urban Design Team Wins,” Christian Science Monitor, 6 February 1970, available in Box VIII-1, Folder UDCT, MAD Papers; Janelee Keidel, “Design Concept Team Aid Resigns over Restrictions,” Baltimore Sun, August 26, 1969. On the racialization of property and credit markets, see David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See, for example, K. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). Rhonda Williams examines how black women fought to improve conditions in public housing projects in postwar Baltimore. See Rhonda

82

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Radical History Review

Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). James Dilts, “Fells Point — Goodby [sic] to All That?” Baltimore Sun, February 16, 1969; Lin Butler, “MAD Minutes,” February 15, 1969, Box I-2, Folder Minutes, MAD Papers; Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working- Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940 – 1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 156 – 65. James Dilts, “Who Wants the Expressway?” Baltimore Sun, June 6, 1971. Hearings on the Rosemont Bypass, August 9, 1969, Maryland Room, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland, 68 – 69. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 55 – 56. Ibid., 58 – 59. Ibid., 70 – 71. The city of Baltimore is surrounded by Baltimore County, thus the county became a colloquial term for the suburbs in the postwar era. Ibid., 77. Keidel, “An Expressway Bridges a Gulf between People.”

Energy Security The Planetary Fulfillment of the Enclosure Movement Robert P. Marzec The advantages resulting from enclosures are not to be looked upon as merely beneficial to the individual, they are of the most extensive national advantage. The improvements in agriculture, that source of all our power, must be trifling without them. — ­Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England (1770) The founders of our country did not believe that the purpose of government is to serve Allah or the environment, but ensure liberty. We need an energy policy that will do so. — ­Robert Zubrin, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil Collective energy security in the twenty-­first century, like collective military security in the twentieth century, can transform competitors into partners and allies. — ­Jan H. Kalicki and David L. Goldwyn, Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy

Official historical memory places the last British parliamentary act of enclosure in

1914.1 As late as 1967, however, a Greater London Council (General Powers) bill in Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-016 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

83

84   Radical History Review

Parliament contained a clause that gave Metropolitan Water the right to enclose and extinguish common rights in an area in Epping Forest, and the lingering mandates of a two-­centuries-­old enclosure from 1795 brought about the eviction of a Somersetshire cottager in 1962, on the grounds that he was squatting without any legal rights.2 Such supposedly minor events of the mid-­twentieth century, if acknowledged at all by enclosure historians, are taken as signs that enclosures are a phenomenon of the past. Yet enclosures began, contrary to the received record, before the development of capitalism during the transformation from the Saxon system to the more militarized manorial system, made into law in 1237 by the Statute of Merton.3 The great manorial lords were the first enclosers, and the rise of capitalism that followed feudalism erased the communal essence of freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders, and so forth by creating two categories of individuals: those who had the power to enclose, and those who were dispossessed by acts of enclosures. The movement was hailed by the growing entrepreneurial class as one of the greatest advances in land development, increasing the production of grain yields on the farms of some of England’s counties from ratios of 3:1 to 20:1.4 Furthermore, the movement developed into a widespread discourse and a new ontological ground plan for human existence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The land was re-­presented as a raw material in need of “improvement” and “cultivation,” and no longer as an entity that gave life to “inhabitants,” a key term used by those who resisted enclosures. At the same time, however, an ontological anxiety about the land began to develop. Land — ­and nature in general — ­came to be reimagined in the sociopolitical consciousness as an enemy in need of domestication, and the people working the land, especially those rioting against enclosures and the inequalities they produced, as recalcitrant vagabonds in need of discipline and incarceration. As England began to develop its empire abroad, a national agenda (“Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure”) further solidified the idea that land needed to be “secured.” This long history of the land’s privatization, of course, amounts to no more than a preamble to the kind of massive, planetary-­w ide enclosures we are seeing today. The current discourse around energy security, for instance, has become perhaps the most important global phenomenon of the twenty-­first century, especially as it signals the ultimate fulfillment of the enclosure movement. The concept of energy security arises out of the knowledge that the era of oil is coming to an end. It targets developing countries, specifically those that can provide the raw materials for supporting an alcohol-­based fuel system (ethanol and methanol), and pushes for the privatization and enclosure of the land in these countries. Energy security thus touches directly on environmental and human rights issues. Energy security developed into a widespread neoconservative discourse in the years following the attacks of 9/11, and it has now become a part of neoliberal politico­economic agendas. Its advocates include diverse figures such as R. James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA; Frank J. Gaffney, the founder and current president

Marzec | Energy Security   85

of the Center for Security Policy; Anne Korin, the codirector of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS) and the cochair of the Set America Free Coalition; Caroline Blick, a senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington; Timothy Connors, the director of Manhattan Institute’s Center for Policing Terrorism (CPT); Cliff Kincaid, the president of America’s Survival, Inc.; and Robert Zubrin, a former senior engineer with Martin Marietta Astronautic; as well as global organizations such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and think tanks like the Woodrow Wilson Center. Until recently, the environment was an area of concern belittled in conservative circles as a liberal cause not worthy of attention. This is no longer the case. Today the environment is a hot topic for neocons. The year 2005, for example, marked the beginning of “green patriotism” and the open development of close ties between the military and environmental activism, or what I have termed elsewhere “environmentality” following Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality.5 The ecosystem is now visible in the neoconservative imaginary on the basis of its problematization as a potential target of terrorism.6 The fate of the environment and the struggles of the world’s poorest communities working in cash-­crop regions are being overwritten and erased by the single military allotrope “U.S. Energy Security.” Organizations such as the Green Patriots and the Set America Free Coalition hold out the carrot stick of hybrid, flex-­fuel vehicles, arguing that this transition will free the U.S. public from its dependence on foreign oil. This maneuver serves as an attractive alternative among many liberals as well, concealing a growing shift in the neoconservative military agenda. Some Green Patriot organizations, for example, have been encouraging the use of ethanol as an alternative source of fuel by reorienting their focus to Latin America rather than the Middle East. “In Brazil,” one supporter wrote in 2006, “at least 25 percent of the fuel sold in gas stations is sugar-­based ethanol . . . Latin American and Caribbean countries like Guatemala, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Jamaica are all low-­cost sugar cane producers. These nations could become key to U.S. energy security if large numbers of American vehicles [made the transition to ethanol].”7 The subtext of such a statement should be made as transparent as possible, especially for environmentalists looking to find ways to develop alternatives to oil. The environment is made visible in terms of its ability to yield energy, and this energy must be guarded as a matter of national security. Through its reconfiguration in this new order, environmental activism becomes a government-­administered environmentality that has very little to do with any kind of familiar ecological ethic. The new move to secure the environment for energy security appears to be a two-­stage process. First, advocates of energy security argue for the emancipation of all land resources in developing countries. The WTO perceives agricultural protectionism — ­an essential aspect of communal land organizations such as Brazil’s

86   Radical History Review

Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) — ­as the biggest obstruction to development. The Doha Ministerial Declaration, adopted on November 14, 2001, lays the groundwork for the destruction of alternative land movements struggling to maintain a political presence in agricultural communities around the world. As Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton have argued, “We’ve settled on a program that lays out ambitious objectives for future negotiations on the liberalization of the agricultural market. These objectives . . . will help the United States and others to advance a fundamental agricultural reform agenda.”8 The World Bank lead economists Kym Anderson and Will Martin claim that developing countries will “enjoy 45 percent of the global gain from completely freeing all merchandise trade.”9 In addition, developing countries are encouraged to expand their infrastructure to prepare for the oncoming demand of high yields from developed countries.10 The History of the Present How is such a contemporary phenomenon related to canonical definitions of the enclosure movement? Historically, enclosure movements were designed to erase the communally organized social system of agricultural production. Common rights — ­the right of access to land considered “open” to everyone for grazing, gathering fuel and supplies, erecting cottages, and so forth — ­stem from a system of collective cultivation of the land (e.g., the Saxon system) that is now known to be much older than the feudal system by at least a few centuries. Land tenure was an inherent part of the Saxon system. As this system began to erode slowly during the feudal era, tenure began to disappear, and two social groups of farmers began to form: the “villeins” of the manor, who held certain rights to the land and to their cottages but who could be evicted by the lord, and the “serfs,” who had no land holdings and worked as “bondsmen” of the lord, but who still had access to common rights.11 In subsequent centuries, this feudal system gradually began to disappear as the system of enclosing came to dominate. In response to these transformations, numerous “enclosure riots” broke out, during which groups of anywhere from a dozen to several hundred formed to tear down the hedges and stone walls of newly ­enclosed spaces. Among the most famous of these was Ket’s rebellion of 1549.12 Parliament’s reaction to these enclosure riots was to pass a series of legislative acts designed to prevent villagers and farmers from forming groups of more than three.13 By 1590 popular protests of enclosures in the form of hedge leveling had created such widespread fear that the charge of “revolt” was raised to the level of “treason against the King.”14 The post-­Restoration government began to openly sanction acts of enclosure, envisioning them as a way to cultivate the land more productively.15 In the mid-­seventeenth century, the last anti-­enclosure bill was presented in the House of Commons and rejected.16 By the eighteenth century enclosures were regarded

Marzec | Energy Security   87

increasingly as a revolutionary scientific development, generally thought to be more efficient and cost-­productive. Enclosure allowed for many “improvements” to occur, such as fertilizing, draining, and regulated rotation.17 An efficiency-­driven relationship to the land began to hold sway. An act of enclosing a portion of the land guaranteed that formerly unconnected communities would thereafter be tied to a growing grid work of commercial enterprise. The formerly isolated, nucleated local village became part of an emerging international market.18 This international market also became a military concern: the eradication of the lowland “wastelands” occurred during the wars with France, and the conquest of these wastes became synonymous with the conquest of France itself. In 1803, for instance, Sir John Sinclair wrote that we have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country. . . . Why would we not attempt a campaign against our domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the Kingdom? . . . Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.19

The control of “waste” at home reflected the desire for national domination of land abroad.20 The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also witnessed the large-­scale dissemination of agricultural “general views” that reflected the installment of a general economy and the policing of land administered by a centralizing agricultural and political authority. We might call this panoptic land — ­a phrase deliberately intended to invoke Jeremy Bentham’s architectural designs, which Foucault famously adapted to describe the creation of disciplined and docile bodies in the eighteenth century — ­since such agricultural views helped produce a land broken down and rearranged so that it become more obedient and useful. The age of parliamentary enclosure also enabled the rediscovery of the land as an object and target of power in which it became subject to an overseeing panoptic principle of efficiency. At the same time, this disciplinarity implements heavy restraints on the land by diminishing “errant” forces — ­such as the supposedly wasteful itinerant movement between fields under the former strip farming methodology — ­to maintain political obedience. Panoptic land also couples an increase in production (the new push for “higher yields”) with an “increased domination.”21 In the eighteenth century, England led the world in grain yields, being 50 percent above any other European country.22 The 1797 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica boasted that “Britain alone exceeds all modern nations in husbandry.”23 The scientific justification of increased yields, buttressed by the encyclopedic confirmation and dissemination of the knowledge of this increase, empirically established

88   Radical History Review

land as the panoptic measure of Western husbandry, which involved the amalgamation of small peasant holdings into large farms (referred to legally as “engrossment”). Meanwhile, the transformation of small farmers into wage laborers created a landless class that became increasingly vulnerable to greater forms of insecurity. Wage laborers, unlike their village laborer predecessors, became subject to market fluctuations — ­experiencing a drop of 50 percent in real wages between 1500 and 1640. And unlike village laborers, wage laborers could not rely on the produce from common land as an alternative means of support.24 Panoptic land thus has less to do with the search for methods of “scientific advancement” and “historical progression” — ­ even though these are the phrases that are ceaselessly invoked in historical analyses of the enclosure movement — ­than with the installment of a new oligarchic strategy of social control and political domination. This phenomenon, which was also commonly referred to as the “disappearance of the small farmer,” was at its most concentrated at the height of England’s imperial order in the Victorian era.25 Throughout the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth, these meticulous strategies of control and mastery of land at home were transplanted abroad, thus enabling the discourse of enclosure to expand to its global and colonial dimensions. Panoptic Land and the Seedy Underside of Energy Security One could argue that the constitution of panoptic land is now in the early stages of planet-­w ide development. This is reflected mostly in the United States, where the logics of enclosure have been adopted ontologically despite significant differences between the United States and England in how historical deployments of enclosure manifested locally.26 Scholars at the Woodrow Wilson Center such as Jan Kalicki and David Goldwyn, for instance, view the relation between foreign capital and the struggle to protect the environment as a roadblock that “stalls” economic development “in much of Latin America.”27 But economic development, they argue, cannot occur without first being firmly coupled with a panoptic armature of security that touches on geopolitical regions in need of policing by the United States and its allies. “The US,” they argue, “needs to build coalitions among nations in both the industrial and developing worlds to support a wider shared security agenda, including such issues as systemic reform in the Middle East, transparency in Africa, and the rule of law in Russia and Central Asia.”28 At the forefront of the push to enclose are people like Zubrin, whose book, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil, essentially makes the case for a total enclosure of all third world agricultural communities. He espouses the logic of “improvement” pushing for higher yields that exemplified the writings of pro-­enclosure advocates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: The United States imports 12 million barrels of oil per day, more than a third of the OPEC total. In 2006 this oil cost us about $260 billion. If we were to spend this on alcohol fuels instead, we could increase the total US farm income of

Marzec | Energy Security   89

$127 billion by 50 percent — ­and still have around $200 billion left over to pay for alcohol fuel imports derived from third world agriculture. For comparison, US agricultural imports in 2005 totaled $56 billion. Thus, by switching to alcohol we could quadruple our purchases of third world agricultural goods, while giving US farmers substantially more business, not less. . . . If the pattern described above were followed by other oil importers as well, the net effect would be to multiply total third world agricultural foreign exchange earnings fourfold, yielding earnings that would dwarf all current worldwide foreign aid expenditures by a factor of ten. . . . A huge engine for world development would thus be created.29

Zubrin’s book makes England’s development of panoptic land look like child’s play. His argument for developing the potential of methanol is based on the fact that the crop base for producing methanol includes “all plants, without exception”: “Not only the edible and inedible parts of commercial crops, but weeds, wild jungle underbrush, trees, grasses, fallen leaves and branches, water lilies, swamp and river plants, seaweed, and algae, can all be used to produce methanol.”30 He essentially views the world’s many “developing” countries — ­especially those in Latin America — ­as farmland for the United States: “It would behoove us to create jobs south of the border by buying much of our methanol and ethanol abroad.”31 His argument for the foreign development of ethanol and methanol precisely replicates England’s industrial and economic relationships to its former colonies by maintaining colonized spaces as sites of raw materials and ensuring that the host country controls the means of production. As Zubrin writes, such relationships will “put money in [workers’] hands that they can use to buy our manufactured goods, such as tractors and harvesters to grow the fuel crops, trucks to transport them, and equipment to process the biomass into liquid fuel.”32 Indeed, Zubrin even devotes a chapter of Energy Victory to the rise of the alcohol fuel industry in Brazil and presents the country’s military dictatorship as its savior. “When the newly inaugurated General Ernesto Geisel found his nation confronted with economic devastation from the Arab oil shock,” Zubrin writes, “he acted forcefully to seize his moment for greatness. Even though Brazil imported 80 percent of its oil, the enlightened military autocrat decreed that it could and would become energy independent. His answer was ethanol.”33 Geisal’s institution of low­interest loan programs fronted the construction of hundreds of new ethanol distilleries. He then mandated that the alcohol ratio in flex cars be at least 24 percent. Consequently, “ethanol production soared 500 percent in four years.”34 Geisal’s program was not the miracle that Zubrin paints it to be. During this period, Brazil remained financially insecure because of accelerating international interest rates and a slow growth in world exports.35 Nonetheless, the important point here is that Zubrin’s plan seeks to improve the efficiency and high yield of all agricultural regions while at the same time firmly connecting that improvement to the United States and its corporate allies. Despite the direct relationship between etha-

90   Radical History Review

nol production and the growth of devastating poverty, Zubrin presents the Brazilian experience as a triumph of humans over nature that, on principle, “should be copied” by “many in the developing world.”36 In fact, Zubrin sees this transformation as a military necessity. He argues that the entire region of Latin America should be transformed into an ethanol farmscape, so that it can ward off the spread of “Islamist ideology.” “While America sleeps, Islamists are using their alliance with Latin American drug lords to establish bases in the Western Hemisphere.”37 Crucial to an understanding of Zubrin’s espousal of a panoptic enclosure of land for purposes of inaugurating a great new age of alcohol-­based fuel is his reference to the “correct” way to govern economically and politically. It is not by accident that his point of reference is early modern England. “In European history,” Zubin writes, “the acquisition of vast unearned New World treasures by Spain led to the degradation of the enterprising classes and caused the abortion of the development of representative institutions in that country. In contrast, the need of England to develop its sources of revenue through commerce and manufacturing forced the British monarchy to consult with Parliament and enact measures suitable for growing the productive powers of the nation.”38 But neither the environment, nor the land, nor the people who work the land are ultimately important to Zubrin and his energy-­security compatriots. His supposed concern for the environment becomes clear when he belittles Al Gore’s assertion that “we must make the rescue of the environment our central organizing principle” and characterizes Gore’s environmental agenda as a stance that comes “dangerously close to proclaiming [its] loyalty” to “fascism,” “totalitarian communism,” and “Islamism.”39 Zubrin’s simultaneous espousal of parliamentary “productivity” and his condemnation of Gore’s centralizing of the environment are symptomatic of the influence of the discourse of enclosure, which foregrounds the land as an entity in need of constant supervision and control. The inhabitants who work the land are necessary but secondary to this productivity, and in many cases they are constituted as a subaltern class. An ontology of enclosure thus becomes the perfect structural fantasy for obtaining an attainable level of planetary power as the waning of oil supplies looms on the horizon.40 As with all attempts to enclose land, the impulse for high productivity and toward mastery that imagines the land as an enemy in need of disciplining ultimately leads to the destruction of that land and of the lives of inhabitants attempting to carve out a meager existence in the face of overwhelming global mechanizations. What no advocate of the “Brazilian miracle” discusses, for example, is the astonishing abuse of the people who do the bulk of the labor required to produce the yields demanded for the international market. Brazil has one of the world’s most highly concentrated landholding structures, “with a Gini-­coefficient near 0.9 . . . [a] nearly total concentration of ownership in few hands.” This situation has resulted from its colonial history, a latifundia-­style agriculture and land tenure system.41 More than 50 percent of land is controlled by 4 percent of landowners.42 Nearly one-­t hird of

Marzec | Energy Security   91

Brazilians, about 55 million people, live on less than two dollars a day, while another third live in absolute poverty: “By most measures, Brazil has the largest gap between rich and poor of any sizable nation on Earth”;43 “Experts frequently classify the poor of Brazil’s northeast as the largest group of severely malnourished and disease­r idden people in the Western Hemisphere.”44 More than three hundred thousand farmworkers are seasonal cane cutters in this “Saudi Arabia of biofuels,” according to Patrick McDonnell. And, as he has argued, “by most accounts, the work and living conditions [of these farmworkers] range from basic to deplorable to outright servitude.”45 In a 2008 report, Amnesty International detailed the grim situation of Brazil’s biofuel workers, more than “1,000 of whom were rescued in June 2007 after allegedly being held in slave‑like conditions at a plantation owned by a major ethanol producer, Pagrisa, in the Amazonian state of Para.”46 In stark contrast, Brazilian corporate executives rank among the highest paid in the world.47 This is due primarily to Brazil’s history as a colony of Portugal and to its production of sugarcane. Sugarcane has been the dominant crop in Brazil since 1537 — ­a time in colonial history when sugar was worth almost as much per pound as gold. Between 1580 and 1680, Brazil was “the world’s largest producer and exporter of sugar.”48 The period was known as Brazil’s golden century of sugar. The production of sugarcane began in the northeast of Brazil, the area that contains more than half of the country’s poor and two-­thirds of the rural poor. “The production of sugar cane in northeastern Brazil marked the creation of a very powerful class that controlled large landholdings and exercised almost total power over both the land and the people who worked it.”49 Yet global organizations such as the World Bank, neglecting these local and global histories, are now utilizing the full potential of the discourse of enclosure. In the case of Brazil, the government’s agrarian policy more often than not follows the World Bank’s recipe for economic development. Ostensibly concerned about Brazil’s landless and the country’s poverty, the World Bank makes gestures toward alleviating the latter. However, to make such a scenario even possible, it must erase the inhabitants of the land as political actors and turn them into tenants ultimately controlled by a manorial landlord. Rather than maintain its commitment to economic structures designed to help the poor, the World Bank instead inaugurated the Cédula project, which is designed to remove any form of confrontation that would prevent securing land for a neoliberal international market. Part of this mechanism is to offer cash to small farmers and settlers for unproductive land. The project offers low-­interest loans to the landless, who can then buy what is considered unproductive land from the latifundia owners. However, families can be expelled from the land they buy if they cannot pay off the loan, and it forces them to “purchase cheaper farms that are far from markets and have poor soil.”50 All of this makes it harder for the farmers to produce enough to pay for the loan and, according to Sérgio Sauer, “very few families covered by the Cédula de Terra earn enough to eat and survive.”51 This market-­based land-­reform

92   Radical History Review

policy is an effective fetter for undermining grassroots organizations fighting for land, for it gives the low-­income families the sinecure of “owning” land, thus making it unnecessary to become part of a powerful political organization like the MST that struggles against the state to secure land without loans. It is important to recognize, too, that the idea of national security is not offered to the spaces that the United States and the World Bank wish to control. Luis Téllez Kuenzler, for instance, argues that Latin American countries continue to founder in an outdated notion of “sovereignty,” whereas the United States has achieved a “modern” notion of sovereignty, which he loosely defines as “the ability of people to self-­determine their future.” Kuenzler claims that “the implication of this ‘national sovereignty’ as a political actor represents clear evidence of the limitations of the Latin American political system to assimilate, improve, and modernize those new institutions that could maximize the natural resources to the benefit of its people and establish the necessary viability of their economy in the context of globalization and the integration of new geopolitical arenas.”52 If Latin American countries “are not capable of understanding that being the monopolistic providers of energy does not intrinsically lead to the maximization of natural resources wealth, and if they do not integrate a ‘modern’ concept of sovereignty to their basic institutions, they are running the risk of letting opportunities pass, having done nothing but leaving their ‘sovereignty’ — ­whatever that means — ­intact.”53 A thesis like that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — ­t hat national empires are on the wane in favor of the supranational corporate empire — ­would need to be rethought in light of these early twenty-­first century national and global economic agendas. For the laborer in the fields of Brazil, the colonial order has not changed but has simply acquired a new set of clothes. Kuenzler employs the term security favorably to buttress his desire to increase the state power of developed nations, but he deploys the term sovereignty negatively to criticize the attempt on the part of developing nations to constitute strong states able to control the production of their natural resources. “Resource sovereignty” — ­a name for the resistance to privatization — ­is another stumbling block to the control of neocolonial resources. The energy-­security agenda thus seeks to increase the national power of developed nations, such as the United States, while decreasing these same powers in former colonial spaces, such as Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere.54 Retrieving Inhabitancy: The Example of the Landless Workers’ Movement Roughly sixty years before Parliament ratified enclosures as a national agenda, a man by the name of Stephen Gateward was brought before the county court on a charge of vagrancy in Stixwould, Lincolnshire. Gateward worked with farmers who had lost their land through acts of enclosure. Dispossessed farmers argued, “We are inhabitants. We have inhabited this land since time immemorial,” and they were

Marzec | Energy Security   93

frequently rewarded with the reopening of enclosed land. Little is known about Gateward’s case, but what is known is that the court ruled against him, and against the use of the term inhabitant. The concept of the human as an inhabitant was struck from the judicial record — ­and eventually from the historical record and from social consciousness.55 Inhabitancy is an idea of human subjectivity directly opposed to the current constitution of humanity in the great age of economic liberalization, agricultural development, technological efficiency, and energy security. It refers to the conception of the individual from the standpoint of her or his co-­relation to a people and a place. It does not imagine the human subject as an instrument for the production of high yields, nor as a subject directing its existence toward national sovereignty (modern or otherwise). It is a conception of the human that predates the discourse of enclosure, and it speaks to a different understanding of economics and justice. The idea is based first and foremost on a cohabitation with the land, not on the desire to transform the land into a profit machine. In opposition to international actions like the Doha agenda, privatization, and the general militarization of the environment, inhabitancy is based on what we might call “food sovereignty” and “habitation sovereignty.” It names an indissoluble connection between the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. This was precisely the kind of formulation of human existence on which organizations such as the MST were founded. In contrast to the official state memory of Brazil and other cash-­crop geographical regions, the countermemory of organizations like the MST bases the struggle for survival on the idea of inhabitancy. The MST is the largest social agricultural organization in a transnational network of landless workers and activists.56 Founded in 1984 by a small group of squatters, its practice of occupying latifundia jumped from 119 occupations in 1990 to 505 in 1999, with a total of 2,210 occupations in ten years.57 Today, the movement is said to have over 500,000 (comprising ca. 2 million people) in some three thousand legally owned settlements.58 Its farm co-­ops number five hundred and support production marketing, credit, and technical assistance. The organization has redirected government funds to “support its administration of 1,800 elementary schools with more than 160,000 students, teaching basic literacy to 30,000 teenagers and adults.”59 A brief examination of the MST’s organizational structure illuminates an ontological understanding of existence based on a complex, singular connection to the land that stands against the distanced, panoptic perspective that abuses the land and its people for the gain of other nations and private corporations. The idea of collective leadership is of paramount importance to the MST, and experienced spokespersons for the organization offer their knowledge of past confrontations and negotiations with corporations and the government but refuse to take over the leadership of other camps. They believe that only those living in a camp can speak for it.60 The movement thus wards off the panoptic figure of the transnational individual

94   Radical History Review

who, under typical circumstances, would assume a role as a primary spokesperson for the movement. This prevention mechanism internal to the organization’s structure carries great importance. From its origins, the movement has internalized in its structural apparatus the critique of the professional speaker-­actor. As one commentator has observed, “The people camped at Encruzilhada Natalino — ­and eventually the whole landless movement — ­came to agree that attacking authoritarianism by creating a new group of professional spokespersons to challenge existing authority would be unsuccessful, for they would themselves become authoritarian and paternalistic in the process of representing the group.”61 This critical awareness prevents the rise of a special intellectual class that stands in opposition to the working class and enables farmers, workers, and peasant families to be valued on the same level as priests, agronomists, teachers, lawyers, and doctors. The mechanism thus works along the lines of a true mass-­movement model, rather than along those on a vanguard or trade union model.62 It also speaks to the chronic problem within labor movements of unequal gender relations by teaching that the empowerment of women as active participants in the private world of the home is as important as their empowerment in the political arena. As Mônica Dias Martins has written, the MST has found that “most of its efforts are aimed at nothing less than creating a ‘new man and a new woman for a new society.’ ”63 This multidimensional democratic ethos also wards off the development of the panoptic model in terms of monocropping — ­one of the chief reasons for starvation among poor farming communities in Brazil and elsewhere. In monocropping, farmers are pushed to work solely on the cash crop and told not to plant crops for food. When a downward fluctuation occurs in the market, they lose all ability to purchase food, which can only be obtained with cash. The MST work with agronomists to develop practical alternatives to monocropping, specifically the on-­farm production of the food the family needs. Such a method is “far more reliable and less speculative than [becoming part of] the vast international soy and grain markets, controlled by a handful of largely U.S.-­based firms.”64 Large farming is by definition a product of the engrossing component of the enclosure movement. As a phenomenon it exists because of the desire to make a killing on a particular crop that is deemed important to the international market: corn or sugarcane production for the alcohol fuel market. The knowledge of diversifying crops wards off the destruction of lives that inevitably occurs with monocropping. This diversity also wards off the destruction of the environment. Sugarcane and corn production are chemically dependent and destructive of the conservation of soils and wildlife.65 The MST thus promotes an agro-­ecological understanding of what it means to be an inhabitant of an environment, which also means living ethically in an environment so as to preserve the balance of life and “eliminating dangerous pesticides from the farm and building soils with organic fertilizers, rather than purchased

Marzec | Energy Security   95

synthetic chemicals.”66 Enclosure also threatens the balance of life in habitations in the form of transgenic seed production. Transgenic seeds are made to be more tolerant to herbicides (meaning that more can be dumped into the soil), and some are engineered with toxins derived from a bacterium that kills pests like caterpillars. However, herbicide-­tolerant seeds only promote the use of more herbicides, which destroy the soil. Building in toxic bacteria “means the almost certain development of resistance in caterpillars to the bacterium, eventually destroying the effectiveness of the bacterial toxin as a pest-­control tool.”67 In addition, the corporations that have patents in the transgenic seeds control yet another portion of the value of the farmers’ crops. The Twenty-­First Century: The True Age of Enclosure The emergence of counterhegemonic groups like the MST reveals the continuing (and growing) presence of the discourse of enclosure and the monomaniacal drive to control production on a macroplanetary and a microbiological scale. One might even characterize the present age as the age of the global war against inhabitancy and the fulfillment of the enclosure movement that began almost a millennium ago. This war bypasses the needs of the environment, and the very presence of nature itself, in favor of the technological “advancements” of speed, efficiency, and high production. As with the eighteenth-­century enclosure movement, the twenty-­first century’s enclosure movement related to energy security rewrites nature as a recalcitrant force that must be ruled at all costs. The labor and peasant movements not associated with a privatized international mechanism pose a threat to these feudalistic lords of the land. Struggles like those engaged in by organizations like the MST also reveal the power of the resistant force of inhabitancy, a conception of the human subject fundamentally different from constitutions of subjectivity offered by globalization, nationality, and even individuality. National and international law, because of its foundation in discourses of enclosure, cannot provide a resistant politics for the global poor. Moreover, the ideas of national sovereignty, as we have seen, will remain in the hands of the primary global national actors, particularly nations in the Global North and the West. Individual sovereignty destroys chances for the global poor to organize against large corporate and state landholders. What is needed, ultimately, is a new judicial conception and deployment of food sovereignty and habitation sovereignty. Food sovereignty names immediately the pressing issue of planetary starvation. Habitation sovereignty names the indissoluble connection between the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. And the idea of inhabitancy speaks to both of these. However, before these transformations can occur, we will continue to encounter brutal forms of corporate and militarized feudalism. Early feudal enclosures and later parliamentary enclosures have returned in the guise of a corporate

96   Radical History Review

and national war on the supposed security of the planet, especially energy security, as both neoconservatives and neoliberals prepare to enclose the land on a planetary scale. In the political push for energy security in the consumer world and in the struggle for basic existence in the developing world, we can observe the evolution of two kinds of human subjects: those that seek to control the environment and those that are connected to (and brutally disconnected from) their environments. If ideas of energy security continue down the path of history’s enclosures, environments and their inhabitants will be too compromised to save. The poorest communities on the planet already live with tenuous connections to their habitations. The transformation of corn and other edible crops into fuel for developed countries will inevitably cause prices in staple foods to fluctuate at rates heretofore unknown. Even the World Bank acknowledges that large increases in food prizes will “raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially.”68 Human subjects without a right to inhabitancy will quickly become citizens of the shadow kingdom of the twenty­first century. They will take on the mantle of history’s dispossessed, the farmers, laborers, villagers, and tenants who lost their rights to inhabitancy during the great waves of enclosure acts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The questions that global players should be asking themselves, then, are: Should we be annexing half the planet’s population to the status of a life without the means to live so that consumer society’s high yields can be maintained? Or should we be rethinking the status of all from the standpoint of the right to inhabitancy? Notes I wish to thank the editors of RHR and the anonymous readers for their invaluable comments and suggestions on this article. 1. “Managing and Owning the Landscape,” www.parliament.uk/about/livingheritage/ transformingsociety/landscape/overview/enclosingland.cfm (accessed May 15, 2010). 2. W. E. Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967), 140. 3. The statute was passed by Parliament (made up at this time of lords that were barons) and enabled the lords to enclose without permission or appeal to the freeholders and villiens. 4. Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure (Kent, UK: William Dawson and Sons, 1980), 54. Mark Overton offers a more conservative estimate, namely, that the increase was only one-­third in yield. See his Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500 – 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 165 – 66. However, the point is that enclosure advocates justified their position by emphasizing the substantial increase in yields. The self-­evident value of greater production — ­” improvement” — ­was an essential part of the discourse of enclosure and reflected a new orientation of land management. It was thought that pre-­enclosure strip farming, in which farmers worked side by side and moved repeatedly between three fields or more, was a wasteful use of time and space. Staying on one area of land was considered more efficient because the farmer could devote his entire time to planting, maintaining, and harvesting his crops. 5. See my essay “Environmentality,” Global South 3 (Spring 2009): 139 – 49.

Marzec | Energy Security   97

6. Amanda Griscom Little, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Woolsey?” Grist, June 7, 2005, www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/06/07/little-­woolsey. 7. Frank J. Gaffney, War Footing: Ten Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 2006), 53. 8. Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, Fair Trade for All (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57. 9. Kym Anderson and Will Martin, “Agriculture, Trade Reform, and the Doha Agenda,” in Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda, ed. Anderson and Martin (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 11. 10. Chad E. Hart and John C. Beghin, “Rethinking Agricultural Domestic Support under the World Trade Organization,” in Anderson and Martin, Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda, 239. 11. For the specifics of feudal social hierarchy, see Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, 1536 – 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 12. Joan Thirsk, “Agricultural Policy: Public Debate and Legislation,” in 1640 – 1750, vol. 5, pt. 2 of The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 224. 13. For a fascinating and extensive account of enclosure riots and social protest, see Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509 – 1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). 14. Ibid., 228. 15. Thirsk, “Agricultural Policy,” 318­ – 19, 372. 16. Joan Thirsk, Tudor Enclosures (London: Historical Association, 1958), 21n1. 17. G. E. Mingay, “Farming Techniques,” Agrarian History 6 (1989): 277. 18. Michael Turner, Enclosures in Britain: 1750 – 1830 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 23. 19. From Sinclair’s memoirs, quoted in Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Kent, UK: William Dawson and Sons, 1980), 88. 20. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 23. 21. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 138. 22. Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and th e Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 1. 23. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 18 vols., (1797 edition), 1:249. 24. See John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London: Longman, 1971). “Between one-­quarter and one-­third of the population were considered to be too poverty­stricken to be assessed for taxation purposes in the period 1523­ – 1527. . . . The wage­earner’s position was a tenuous one. Any one who was maintaining himself at one moment might find himself without visible means of support at the next. The rural labourer was better off than his urban counterpart in this respect, for whereas a town-­dweller seldom had any alternative means of support, a countryman could often supplement his earnings from the produce of such land as he possessed” (79). “During the period 1500 to 1640, despite a threefold increase in monetary terms, real wages dropped by as much as 50 percent. Those that had to rely on wages alone, and their number increased as the century progressed, invariably found themselves in real difficulties, and their plight was made worse by the fact that there was no guarantee of regular employment” (80). 25. Allen, Enclosures and the Yeoman, 1. 26. The enclosure movement is not as foregrounded in U.S. history as it is in English history.

98   Radical History Review

Nevertheless, enclosure was transplanted to the United States from England, in both theory and practice. 27. Jan H. Kalicki and David L. Goldwyn, “Introduction: The Need to Integrate Energy and Foreign Policy,” in Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy, ed. Kalicki and Goldwyn (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005), 5. Kalicki is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a counselor for international strategy at Chevron Corporation. Goldwyn is the president of Goldwyn International Strategies and was U.S. assistant secretary of energy for international affairs from 2000 to 2001, as well as national security deputy to the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson. 28. Ibid., 2. 29. Robert Zubrin, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007). 30. Ibid., 152. 31. Ibid., 155. 32. Ibid., 156. 33. Ibid., 162. 34. Ibid., 163. 35. Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, Brazil since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 49. 36. Zubrin, Energy Victory, 170. 37. Ibid., 175. 38. Ibid., 251. 39. Ibid., 259. 40. These policies of energy security differ from former Cold War policies of communist containment, which operated through the establishment of state-­to-­state power relations (politico-­economic agreements between the United States and other state authorities). Whereas power relations in the discourse of energy security function by anchoring control directly on the land, that is, on the correct use of the land, and the most efficient means to reap the total benefits the land has to offer. 41. Sérgio Sauer, “The World Bank’s Market-­Based Land Reform in Brazil,” in Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform, ed. Peter Rosset, Raj Patel, and Michael Courville (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2006), 178. 42. Angus Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2003), xv. 43. Ibid., xvi. 44. Ibid., xix. 45. Patrick J. McDonnell, “Human Cost of Brazil’s Biofuels Boom,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2008. 46. Amnesty International, “Annual Report 2008,” www.amnesty.org/en/region/brazil (accessed May 18, 2010). 47. Huw Beynon and José R. Ramalho, “Democracy and the Organization of Class Struggle in Brazil,” in Working Class Global Realities: Socialist Register 2001, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin, 2000), 217. 48. Wright and Wolford, To Inherit the Earth, 114. 49. Ibid., 107 – 8. 50. Sauer, “The World Bank’s Market-­Based Land Reform in Brazil,” 185. 51. Ibid., 189. 52. Luis Téllez Kuenzler, “Latin America,” in Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign

Marzec | Energy Security   99

Policy Strategy, eds. Jan H. Kalicki and David L. Goldwyn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 387. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 388­ – 89. 55. See Coke, Court of Common Pleas, folio 6, n59. 56. Brenda Baletti, Tamara M. Johnson, and Wendy Wolford, “Late Mobilization: Transnational Peasant Networks and Grassroots Organizing in Brazil and South Africa,” Journal of Agrarian Change 8 (2008): 290 – 314. 57. Mônica Dias Martins, “Learning to Participate: The MST Experience in Brazil,” in Rosset, Patel, and Courville, Promised Land, 269. See also in the same volume Beatriz Heredia et al., “Regional Impacts of Land Reform in Brazil,” 277 – 300. 58. Cliff Welch, “Movement Histories: A Preliminary Historiography of the Brazil’s Landless Laborers’ Movement (MST),” Latin American Research Review 41 (2006): 198 – 210. These are 2006 figures. Wright and Wolford report 2002 figures as “approximately 350,000 families in three thousand settlements” (To Inherit the Earth, 75). 59. Wright and Wolford, To Inherit the Earth, 75. 60. Ibid., 60. 61. Ibid., 66. 62. Ibid., 75. 63. Martins, “Learning to Participate,” 273. 64. Wright and Wolford, To Inherit the Earth, 93. 65. Ibid., 94. 66. Ibid., 95. 67. Ibid., 96. 68. Maros Ivanic Will Martin, “Implications of Higher Global Food Prices for Poverty in Low‑Income Countries,” Policy Research Working Paper No. 4594, World Bank Development Research Group Trade Team, April 2008, econ.worldbank.org/external/ default/main?ImgPagePK=64202990&entityID=000158349_20080416103709&menuPK =64210521&pagePK=64210502&theSitePK=544849&piPK=64210520.

Reflec tions

The Future of the Commons David Harvey

I

have lost count of the number of times I have seen Garrett Hardin’s classic article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”1 cited as an irrefutable argument for the superior efficiency of private property rights with respect to land and resource uses and, therefore, as an irrefutable justification for privatization. This mistaken reading in part derives from Hardin’s appeal to the metaphor of cattle, under the private ownership of several individuals concerned with maximizing their individual utility, pastured on a piece of common land. If the cattle were held in common, of course, the metaphor would not work. It would then be clear that it was private property in cattle and individual utility-­maximizing behavior that lay at the heart of the problem. But none of this was Hardin’s fundamental concern. His preoccupation was population growth. The personal decision to have children would, he feared, lead eventually to the destruction of the global commons (a point that Thomas Malthus also argued). The private, familial nature of the decision was the crucial problem. The only solution, in his view, was authoritarian regulatory population control. I cite Hardin’s logic here to highlight the way that thinking about the commons itself has been enclosed all too often in a far too narrow set of presumptions, largely driven by the example of the land enclosures that occurred in Britain from the sixteenth century onward. As a result, thinking has often polarized between private-­property solutions or authoritarian state intervention. From a political perspective, the whole issue has been clouded over by a gut reaction either for or against enclosure, typically laced with hefty doses of nostalgia for a once-­upon-­a-­time, supposedly moral economy of common action.

Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-017 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

101

102 

 

Radical History Review

Elinor Ostrom seeks to disrupt some of the presumptions in her book, Governing the Commons,2 in which she systematizes the anthropological, sociological, and historical evidence. Ostrom shows that individuals can and often do devise ingenious and eminently sensible ways to manage common property resources (CPR) for individual and collective benefit. These case studies “shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve CPR problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation” and, as Ostrom argues, demonstrate “rich mixtures of public and private instrumentalities.”3 Most of her examples, however, involve as few as a hundred or so appropriators. Anything much larger (her largest case involved fifteen thousand users) required a “nested hierarchical” structure of decision making, rather than direct negotiations between individuals. There is, clearly, an unanalyzed “scale problem” at work here. The possibilities for sensible management of common-­property resources that exist on one scale, such as shared water rights between one hundred farmers in a small river basin, do not and cannot carry over to problems such as global warming or even to the regional diffusion of acid deposition from power stations. As we “jump scales” (as geographers like to put it), the whole nature of the common-­property problem and the prospects of finding a solution change dramatically. What looks like a good way to resolve problems at one scale does not hold at another scale. Even worse, good solutions at one scale (say, the local) do not necessarily aggregate up, or cascade down, to make for good solutions at another scale (say, the global). This is why Hardin’s metaphor is so misleading: he uses a small-­scale example to explicate a global problem. This, incidentally, is also why the lessons gained from the collective organization of small-­scale solidarity economies along common-­property lines cannot translate into global solutions without resort to nested hierarchical forms of decision making. Unfortunately, hierarchy is anathema to many segments of the oppositional left these days. In the grander scheme of things, and particularly at the global level, some sort of enclosure is often the best way to preserve valued commons. It will take a draconian act of enclosure in Amazonia, for example, to protect both biodiversity and the cultures of indigenous populations as part of our global natural and cultural commons. It will almost certainly require state authority to do so against the philistine democracy of short-­term moneyed interests ravaging the land with soybean plantings and cattle ranching. But in this instance there may be another problem: expelling indigenous populations from their forestlands may be deemed necessary to preserve biodiversity. One commons, in other words, may need to be protected at the expense of another. Questions of the commons are contradictory and therefore always contested. Behind these contestations lie conflicting social interests. Indeed, “politics,” as Jacques Rancière has remarked, “is the sphere of activity of a common that can only

Harvey | The Future of the Commons 

 

103

ever be contentious.”4 At the end of it all, the analyst is often left with a simple decision: whose side are you on, and which and whose interests do you seek to protect? The rich these days have the habit of sealing themselves off in gated communities within which an exclusionary commons gets defined. Radical groups can also procure spaces, sometimes through the exercise of private property rights (such as when activists buy a community-­action center for some progressive purpose), from which they can reach out to further a politics of common interests. Or they can establish a commune or a soviet within some protected space. Not all forms of the commons are open access. Some, like the air we breathe, are open, while others, like the streets of our cities, are open in principle but regulated, policed, and even privately managed in the form of business-­improvement districts. And some, like a common water resource controlled by fifty farmers, are from the very start exclusive to a particular social group. Most of Ostrom’s examples are of the last variety. Furthermore, she limits her inquiry to so-­called natural resources such as land, forests, water, fisheries, and the like. (I say “so-­called natural” because all resources are technological, economic, and cultural appraisals and therefore socially defined.) Ostrom expresses no interest in other forms of common property, such as genetic materials, knowledge, and cultural assets, which are very much under assault these days through commodification and enclosure. Note, for example, how cultural commons get commodified (and often bowdlerized) by the heritage industries. Intellectual property and patenting rights over genetic materials and scientific knowledge more generally constitute one of the hottest topics of our times. When publishing companies charge readers for access to articles in the scientific and technical journals they publish, the problem of access to what should be common knowledge and open to all is plain to see. Cultural and intellectual commons are often not subject to the logic of scarcity and exclusionary uses of the sort that apply to most natural resources, a point emphasized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth. We can all listen to the same radio broadcast or television program at the same time. The cultural common, Hardt and Negri write, “is dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future production. This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth.” It is built up over time and, in principle, open to all. In this way it is possible even to view “the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common.”5 The human qualities of the city emerge from our practices in the diverse spaces of the city, even as those spaces are subject to enclosure both by private and public state ownership, as well as by social control, appropriation, and countermoves to assert what Henri Lefebvre called “the right to the city” on the part of the inhabitants.6 Through their daily activities and struggles, individuals and social groups create the social world of the city and, in doing so, cre-

104 

 

Radical History Review

ate something common as a framework within which we all can dwell. While this culturally creative common cannot be destroyed through use, it can be degraded and banalized through excessive abuse. The real problem here, it seems to me, is not the commons per se. It is the failure of individualized private property rights to fulfill our common interests in the way they are supposed to do. Why, for instance, do we not focus in Hardin’s metaphor on the individual ownership of the cattle rather than on the pasture as a common? The justification for private property rights in liberal theory, after all, is that rights should serve to maximize the common good when socially integrated through the institutions of fair and free market exchange. As Hobbes argued, a commonwealth gets produced through privatizing competitive interests within a framework of strong state power. This opinion, articulated by liberal theorists such as John Locke and Adam Smith, continues to be preached, though usually while downplaying the need for strong state power. The solution to the problems of global poverty, the World Bank continues to assure us while heavily leaning on the theories of Hernando de Soto, is private property rights for all slum dwellers and access to micro-­finance (especially ones that just happen to yield the world’s financiers hefty rates of return). Once the inherent entrepreneurial instincts of the poor are liberated in this way, it is said, then all will be well, and the problem of chronic poverty will be broken. For Locke, individual property is a natural right that arises when individuals create value by mixing their labor with the land: the fruits of their labor belong to them and to them alone. This was the essence of Locke’s version of the labor theory of value. Market exchange socializes that right when each individual gets back the value he or she has created by exchanging it against an equivalent value created by another. In effect, individuals maintain, extend, and socialize their private property right through value creation and supposedly free and fair market exchange. This is how the wealth of nations is most easily created and the common good best served. The presumption is, of course, that markets can be fair and free, and in classical political economy it was assumed that the state would intervene to make them so — ­at least, that is what Smith advised state leaders to do. But there is an ugly corollary to Locke’s theory: individuals who fail to produce value have no claim to property. The dispossession of indigenous populations in North America by “productive” colonists, for instance, was justified because indigenous populations did not produce value. So how does Karl Marx deal with all of this? Marx accepts the Lockean fiction in the opening chapters of Capital — ­though the argument is certainly larded with plenty of irony when, for example, he takes up the strange role of the Robinson Crusoe myth in political-­economic thinking, in which someone thrown into a state of nature acts like a true-­born Briton. But when Marx takes up how labor power becomes an individualized commodity that is bought and sold in fair and free mar-

Harvey | The Future of the Commons 

 

105

kets, we see the Lockean fiction unmasked for what it really is: a system founded on equality in value exchange produces surplus value for the capitalist owner of the means of production through the exploitation of living labor in production. The Lockean formulation is even more dramatically undermined when Marx takes up the question of collective labor. In a world in which individual artisan producers controlling their own means of production could engage in free exchange in relatively free markets, the Lockean fiction might have some purchase. But the rise of the factory system from the late eighteenth century onward, Marx argues, rendered Locke’s theoretical formulations redundant. In the factory, labor is collectively organized. If there were any property right to be derived from this form of laboring, then surely it would have to be a collective or associated rather than individual one. The definition of value-­producing labor, which grounds Locke’s theory of private property, no longer holds for the individual but is shifted to the collective laborer. Communism should then arise on the basis of “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor-­power in full self-­awareness as one single labor force.”7 Marx does not advocate state ownership but some form of ownership vested in the collective laborer producing for the common good. How that form of ownership might come into being is established by turning Locke’s argument on the production of value against itself. Suppose, says Marx, a capitalist begins production with $1,000 in capital and in the first year manages to gain $200 surplus value from laborers mixing their labor with the land, and the capitalist then uses that surplus in personal consumption. Then, after five years, the $1,000 should belong to the collective laborers, since they are the ones who have mixed their labor with the land. The capitalist has consumed away all of his or her original capital. Like the indigenous populations of North America, the capitalists deserve to lose their rights, since they themselves have produced no value. While this logic might sound outrageous, it lay behind the Swedish Meidner plan proposed in the late 1960s. A tax on corporate profits, in return for wage restraint on the part of unions, was to be placed in a worker-­controlled fund that would invest in and eventually buy out the corporation, thus bringing it under the common control of the associated laborers. Capital resisted this idea with all its might, and it was never implemented. But the idea ought to be reconsidered. The central conclusion is that the collective laboring that is now productive of value must ground collective, not individual, property rights. Value, socially necessary labor time, is the capitalist common, and it is represented by money, the universal equivalency by which common wealth is measured. The common is not, therefore, something extant once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that, like the urban commons, is continuously being produced. The problem is that it is just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetary form. A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its

106 

 

Radical History Review

neighborhood and to protect against gentrification, for example, may suddenly find its property prices rising as real estate agents market the “character” of the neighborhood as multicultural and diverse as an attraction for gentrifiers. The outcome, writes Marx, is that capital, impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition to maximize (as do the cattle owners in Hardin’s tale) utility (profitability), produces progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-­lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-­scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — ­the soil and the worker.8

This “tragedy” is similar to that which Hardin depicts, but the logic from which it arises is entirely different. The problem of the commons is redefined here along with a range of possible solutions. Left unregulated, individualized capital accumulation perpetually threatens to destroy the two basic common property resources that undergird all forms of production: the laborer and the land. And with capital accumulation occurring at a compound rate of growth (usually at the minimum satisfactory level of 3 percent), these dual threats to land and labor escalate in scale and intensity over time. The violent neoliberal attacks on the rights and power of organized labor that, from Chile to Britain, began in the 1970s are now being augmented by a draconian global austerity plan that, from California to Greece, entails losses in asset values, rights, and entitlements for the mass of the population, coupled with the predatory absorption of hitherto marginalized populations into capitalism’s dynamics. Living on less than $2 a day, this population of more than 2 billion or so is now being taken in by microfinance as the “subprime of all subprime forms of lending,” so as to extract wealth from them — ­as happened in U.S. housing markets through subprime predatory lending, which was then followed by foreclosures — ­to gild the McMansions of the rich. The environmental commons are no less threatened, while the proposed answers such as carbon trading and new environmental technologies merely propose that we seek to exit the impasse using the same tools of capital accumulation and speculative market exchange that got us into the difficulties in the first place. Unfortunately, this is an old, old story: every major initiative to solve the problem of global poverty since 1945 has insisted on exclusive use of the means — ­capital accumulation and market exchange — ­that produce relative and sometimes absolute poverty. It is unsurprising that the poor are still with us and that their numbers are growing rather than diminishing over time.

Harvey | The Future of the Commons 

 

107

The dismantling of the regulatory frameworks and controls that sought to curb, however inadequately, the penchant for predatory practices of accumulation has unleashed the après moi, le déluge logic of unbridled accumulation and financial speculation that has now turned into a veritable flood. The consequent damage can only be contained by the socialization of surplus production and distribution and the establishment of a new common of wealth open to all. What matters here is not the particular mix of institutional arrangements — ­ enclosures here, extensions of a variety of collective and common-­property arrangements there — ­but that the unified effect address the spiraling degradation of common labor and common land resources (including the resources embedded in the “second nature” of the built environment) at the hands of capital. In this effort, the “rich mix of instrumentalities” that Ostrom begins to identify — ­not only public and private but also collective and associational, nested hierarchical and horizontal, exclusionary and open — ­w ill all have a key role to play in finding ways to organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption to meet human needs. The point is not to fulfill the requirements of accumulation for accumulation’s sake on the part of the class that appropriates the common wealth from the class that produces it. The point, rather, is to change all that and to find creative ways to use the powers of collective labor for the common good. Notes 1. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968), 1243 – 8. 2. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3. Ibid., 182. 4. Jacques Rancière, cited in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 350. 5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, 350. 6. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005), 150. 7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1977), 169 – 71. 8. Ibid., 638.

reflec tions

Enclosures of Land and Sovereignty The Allotment of American Indian Lands David A. Chang

I

n 1887, when Congress passed the General Allotment Act, it authorized the president of the United States to divide the common lands of American Indian tribal nations into private parcels and apportion them to tribal members — ­a process known as allotment. The law, usually referred to as the Dawes Act, opened a devastating chapter in the history of federal policy toward Native people. The federal government first established allotment agreements with tribes under the provisions of the act, and then it began amending the general policy. The outcome was a calamity. Non-­Indians had already seized the bulk of the lands of the continent, but under allotment Native landholdings declined precipitously: from 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million acres in 1934. Prior to undergoing allotment, each tribal nation determined landholding among members as it saw fit, and tribal members held collective title to their national lands as a whole. This acted as a brake on the sale of tribal lands. By making the remaining tribal lands into private property, allotment made it possible for Native individuals to lose them through direct sales, defaulted mortgages, tax forfeiture sales, and other means. Initially, trust provisions safeguarded allotments from alienation, but soon Congress began to chip away at these protections. Allotment combined the making of land into private property and the taking of that private property from Indians. The resonances with enclosure in early modern England are strong, because both processes involved the breaking up of common lands and their dispossession.1 Merely applying this European notion in the North American context would Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-018 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

108

Chang | The Allotment of American Indian Lands   109

risk obscuring a crucial factor in U.S. history: the fact that the United States is a settler colony, something reflected in its land policy. This essay explores what it means to take allotment seriously as a colonial land policy. It does this by scrutinizing two interrelated effects of the process by which the U.S. government implemented the allotment of American Indian lands: first, this policy infringed on the sovereignty of Native nations; and second, it reinforced a tendency in the United States to think that it is race, rather than political difference, that defines Indian people and Indian nations. Throughout, this reflection on allotment as a colonial form of enclosure suggests that bringing tribal common property into private title also brought new fields of power under the authority of the U.S. state. The creation of private property simultaneously extended and masked the reach of state power. This insight suggests it might be wise to consider the possibility that state power is similarly growing under the new types of enclosure of resources (other than land) considered by studies in this issue of Radical History Review. The 1887 Dawes Act initially excluded Indian Territory (present-­day eastern Oklahoma) from its provisions. After Congress extended allotment to Indian Territory in 1898, the division of lands became the policy of the federal government toward Indian lands nationwide. White U.S. citizens who wished to obtain Indian lands for their use or speculation voiced support for allotment, but the immediate impetus for the program came from Anglo-­A merican reformers dedicated to liberalism and to a colonial mission to “civilize” Indians. These reformers believed that tribal land title reinforced the identification of Indian people with their tribal nations. Because they thought that tribal identification and solidarity impeded the “civilization” of Native people — ­by which they meant their embrace of Anglo­American culture, family structures, and individualist commercial orientation — ­the reformers called for abolishing tribal collective title. By breaking up tribal lands, they hoped to weaken tribal bonds. By nurturing individual landownership, they hoped to cultivate economic individualism. These reformers believed so strongly that private landownership would transform Indian people that they wrote paternalist trust provisions into allotment law in an attempt to keep the newly private lands in the hands of allottees. The Dawes Act provided for a twenty-­five year trust period over allotment lands; the allotment agreements of the Indian Territory tribes exempted from the Dawes Act mostly provided for shorter periods of restrictions on the sale, mortgage, and encumbrance of lands.2 Some tribal nations, from the Navajo in the west to the Red Lake band of Anishinaabe in the north, escaped allotment. Reasons for such exceptions ranged from tribes’ opposition to allotment to the fact that their lands were not suitable for the kind of small-­scale agriculture that policy makers intended allotment to facilitate — ­reasons that could equally well have applied in most of the cases where federal officials implemented allotment. Despite the exceptions and the trust provisions on lands, allotment did result in massive dispossession. By 1934, when the disaster had become so apparent that

110   Radical History Review

New Deal – era legislation called a halt to allotment, tens of thousands of allottees and their heirs had sold their parcels. Over ninety thousand Indians nationwide were reduced to landlessness. Reservations became “checkerboarded” as lands that non-­Indians had bought came to surround the dwindling plots that remained in private, individual Indian ownership. Among the Odawa and Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region, for example, almost 90 percent of allotted lands came into non­Native possession.3 Would-­be land buyers found it easy to evade trust provisions and restrictions. Large-­scale speculators, complicit local, state, and federal officials, and bureaucrats in the Office of Indian Affairs abetted the sale of allotments. Problems plagued even allotment lands that remained in their owner’s possession until death, as the law recognized all heirs as owning an undivided interest in the land as tenants in common. By the late twentieth century, multiple generations of inheritance had compounded the problem of “fractionated ownership”; some parcels had hundreds of owners, none of which could effectively use the land.4 The unallotted tribal lands fared no better. Tribes had ceded tens of millions of acres of such so-­called surplus lands to the federal government, which then sold them to non-­Indians. The Dawes Act required the federal government to manage in trust the proceeds of sales of surplus and some individual lands, a responsibility Washington failed utterly to fulfill.5 Allotment was a catastrophe for Native people and Native nations. Given that the scale of this disaster has made allotment a major topic in historical writing on American Indians, the number of histories of allotment per se remains surprisingly small.6 Certainly, more close studies are needed. Some studies follow the model that Angie Debo established in 1940, documenting the ways in which federal authorities first coerced Native nations to accept allotment and then either failed to intervene in or actively abetted land alienation.7 More recent literature, such as Melissa Meyer’s work on the White Earth Anishinaabe, remains attentive to the machinations of officials and speculators but dedicates particular care to how the policy exacerbated political, economic, and ethnic divisions among Indian people.8 In the past decade, allotment has become a central site in the study of the fraught place of people of African descent in Native nations of the old Indian Territory, particularly the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, (Muscogee) Creek, and Seminole Nations. Early twentieth-­century allotment commissions assigned parcels only to people they deemed to be tribal citizens, a process that this essay discusses below. In the process of making determinations of tribal membership, the commissions generated tribal rolls, affidavits, and other documents that in many cases remain key to deciding whether people today are or are not tribal citizens. Thus allotment remains at the center of present-­day political and legal struggles over the question of the citizenship of people of African descent in Indian nations.9 In all three of these ways of discussing allotment, sovereignty is an implicit issue, yet sovereignty deserves much more sustained attention in studies of the sec-

Chang | The Allotment of American Indian Lands   111

tionalization of Indian land. Sovereignty, along with indigeneity, distinguishes Native nations from all other political entities in the United States. These nations are the political heirs of the sovereign nations with which the United States and its antecedent colonial governments made treaties. Treaties themselves indicate the sovereign national status of tribal governments, as treaties are made between nations and assume the sovereignty of each party. This is not to deny that American colonialism has profoundly limited the effective range of the sovereignty of Native nations. Indeed, in his famous decision in the 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia case, John Marshall declared them to be “domestic and dependent nations” in regards to the United States — ­but he concluded that they were nations nonetheless. The following year, Marshall went on the clarify this position in the Worcester v. Georgia decision, affirming that in U.S. law “Indian nations” constitute “distinct political communities, having territorial boundaries, within which their authority is exclusive, and having a right to all the lands within those boundaries.” In this formulation, national sovereignty appears as jurisdiction over a bounded territory by a “distinct political community.” Given that the denial of this sovereignty can serve to define colonialism, attention to sovereignty as it pertains to allotment makes the land policy’s colonial nature clearer. The imposition of allotment formed part of a series of congressional acts and decisions of the Supreme Court in the period stretching from the 1880s to the first decade of the twentieth century in which the federal government asserted its power over Indian nations and individuals in ways that contradicted the notion of nationhood that Marshall had elucidated.10 Allotment legislation never directly addressed the political absorption of Indian nations, but its very operation expanded the scope of federal authority at the expense of tribal sovereignty. Nancy Shoemaker has recently considered allotment through the perspective of enclosure, all the while making note of a crucial distinction between the two. She argues that whereas “England’s enclosed ‘common’ lands made the transition to private landownership without leaving the sovereign territory of England,” the U.S. federal government “swallowed up” tribal sovereignty along with tribal lands: Washington brought Native lands out of the territory of Indian nations and under its own sovereign rule.11 It was, therefore, not just non-­Indian would-­be landowners that stood to benefit from allotment but the federal government itself as the colonial power in Indian Country. Although she does not expand upon the point, Shoemaker indicates the way that, under allotment, the sphere of federal authority grew in proportion to its infringement on the sovereignty of Native nations. Allotment aimed to foster Indian economic individual initiative, but it gave federal authorities new power over the lives of Native people. Whereas tribal authorities had always stood between their tribal citizens and the colonial state in most matters, allotment largely removed that layer in the crucial area of land management. The federal government oversaw the trust provisions and restrictions on allottees’

112   Radical History Review

land. Thus when allottees wished to rent, lease, mortgage, or sell their land, they were required to do so under the oversight of the U.S. secretary of the interior. In actual practice, this meant that for decades following allotment, local agents of the Office of Indian Affairs, later reorganized as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, exercised control over allottees’ lands. They used it as leverage in their efforts to shape allottees’ working lives, marriages, residential choices, and kinship practices. Examples from the Creek Nation vividly illustrate how they wielded this power to encourage proletarianization and Anglo-­American kinship norms among Native people. When Adolphus Tiger, a man of twenty-­three, asked for permission to sell forty acres of his land, the local agent denied him that privilege. Because he was “strong and capable of doing a full day’s manual labor,” labor should sustain him. Moreover, Office of Indian Affairs directives warned local agents in the Creek Nation and elsewhere against permitting land sales. Indians might use the proceeds to support the broad networks of kin many Native people recognized, rather than the handful of relatives the “Indian agent” recognized as legitimate. Federal agents manipulated the paternalist restrictions on allotment lands to encroach on the cultural and economic sovereignty of Native people.12 Allotment imposed on Indians and their nations, but it failed to make Indians indistinguishable from other Americans or to obliterate the sovereignty of Native nations. Unsurprisingly, tribal bonds have changed in the century since the height of allotment, but allotment did not sever them. For their part, tribal nations retain their sovereignty in large part because they have refused to allow Washington or the states to take it from them. Tribal nations have never ceased asserting their sovereignty, taking a wide variety of actions such as making land claims, enforcing their treaty-­assured hunting, fishing, and gathering rights, exercising jurisdictional authority within reservation boundaries and over tribal members, making gaming compacts with states, maintaining their exemption from state taxes, and in a myriad of other ways both dramatic and mundane. Yet allotment sharply reduced the sphere in which tribal nations might exert their sovereign authority, and it expanded the sphere of the colonial power, the federal government. Moreover, allotment ushered in a rigid metrics of blood through blood­quantum registration. The first step toward allotment was enrollment, meaning the drawing up of rolls of tribal citizens who were entitled to a portion of the tribal lands. Enrollment criteria were not uniform. Each tribal nation had the power to determine who counted as a citizen and would therefore be entitled to an allotment.13 By and large, these formal criteria had nothing to do with measures of blood quantum; yet enrollment ultimately favored the emergence of blood quantum as a primary criterion of citizenship. To demonstrate that blood quantum was a novel measure of tribal membership that allotment favored, it is helpful to return to the eighteenth century and the

Chang | The Allotment of American Indian Lands   113

early nineteenth. Tribal membership across Native America had allowed for the entry of new members into the community through ways not figured by genetic descent though often understood in terms of kinship. In the chaos that colonialism unleashed, Native polities absorbed new members, new bands, and new villages. They sometimes went so far as to merge into new polities as warfare, disease, and dispossession reconfigured the locations of individuals and communities. To cite only a few representative examples of the fluidity that was the norm in Native America before the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, residents of the Puget Sound region moved freely and apparently felt membership in all manner of overlapping and cross-­cutting political, kinship, and linguistic communities; the Esaw, Sugaree, Shutaree, and other small nations northwest of Charleston coalesced into a new people, the Catawba, in the first half of the eighteenth century; and whites became members of tribal communities from north to south though captivity or intermarriage.14 Static blood quantum held almost no meaning in this world in motion. Perhaps even more than notions of blood quantum, the term tribe expresses commonsense, non-­Indian misunderstandings of Native societies. The word has fallen out of favor among anthropologists, but it retains its currency in Indian Country and elsewhere. The political, geographical, linguistic, and cultural entities that Americans have long called “tribes” rarely, and perhaps never, truly fit the classical anthropological definition of that term: a social and political body bound by common descent. This is not to deny that members of such societies understood themselves to share common ancestors. This was sometimes the case for tribes, and it is very much the norm in the many societies that divide themselves into clans. But such lines are socially constructed and mutable. Thus when individuals joined the Creek confederacy in the eighteenth century, adoption into one of the existing, supposedly descent-­based, clans served to enmesh them in the web of political responsibilities and loyalties that knit the Creek together.15 Descent did determine kinship and thus group membership, but Native people’s understandings of kinship and descent were not limited to Western and biologically based notions. Allotment, and especially its ancillary practices of enrolling tribal citizens and regulating allotment lands, imposed a different understanding of descent: an unchangeable and mathematically precise abstraction made manifest in blood. Ironically, this is true although the Dawes Act itself imposed no blood-­quantum requirement for allotment. Nonetheless, in a number of cases such as those of large tribes in Indian Territory, federal agents annotated enrollment records with individuals’ “degree of Indian blood.” For example, there was no blood-­quantum requirement in the allotment agreements between the Creek or the Cherokee and the federal government. People who sought enrollment needed only to demonstrate (by means of documentary evidence or affidavit) descent from some individual who appeared on

114   Radical History Review

a given, earlier tribal roll or set of rolls. But although blood quantum was never mentioned in the allotment agreement, federal officials calculated and recorded blood quanta in the process of making allotments.16 Even in tribes for which blood was not part of the process of enrollment or of the division of lands, it gained a powerful role in the regulation, taxation, and sale of allotment lands. It is challenging to track processes of bureaucratic colonialism, and the ones examined here prove no exception. Actors as varied as congressional representatives, local agents of the Office of Indian Affairs, and county tax assessors each played a role; they implemented laws and rules in a piecemeal fashion; and laws and administrative practices differed in Indian Territory from the rest of the United States, and from tribe to tribe in Indian Territory. An important step in the institutionalization of blood discourse came in 1906, when the Burke Act empowered the secretary of the interior to issue a patent in fee simple to any allottee he determined to be “competent and capable of managing his or her affairs.” The act spelled out the ramifications of a patent in fee: “Thereafter all restrictions as to sale, encumbrance, or taxation of said land shall be removed.” In effect, the federal government issued a deed to allottees that replaced the trust oversight of their parcels with the sort of “fee simple” ownership that passes for the norm in the U.S. land property system. In theory, this was not a racially specific act. In practice, though, officials frequently determined competency in reference to blood quantum, deeming people with white ancestry to be prepared for market relations and thus not to need trust provisions. In 1917, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells’s “Declaration of Policy” made it the practice of the Office of Indian Affairs to remove trust restrictions on as many allottees as possible by deliberately seeking out those whose degree of Indian blood or level of schooling could permit a declaration of competency. As a result land sales accelerated dramatically.17 At the local level, the Burke Act facilitated land sales much earlier. Meyer’s examination of allotment at the White Earth reservation in Minnesota reveals how this functioned. Only six days after the passage of the Burke Act, Congress removed all restrictions on the “sale, encumbrance, or taxation of allotted land” of “adult mixed bloods” on that reservation. Buyers, especially lumber companies that were eager for pine lands, secured affidavits affirming that allottees were “mixed bloods,” then snapped up mortgages. The local Office of Indian Affairs agent voiced his support for the policy and its outcomes. The unsure legal definition of “mixed blood” worried pine companies, however, as it made the legality of land sales insecure. In 1913, Congress called (as part of the Indian Appropriations Act) for the formation of a committee to make up a White Earth tribal roll marked for blood. Debate over what “mixed blood” meant ensued — ­was it one-­half blood, a common measure suggesting a tipping point toward whiteness? Some lesser figure, perhaps one-­eighth? The lower the better, from the point of view of the lumber companies that sought secure title to as much reservation land as possible. Ultimately, a U.S. circuit court ruled (and the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in 1914) that any

Chang | The Allotment of American Indian Lands   115

amount of “white blood” made an Indian a “mixed blood.” Soon, as David Beaulieu has recounted, physical anthropologists were poring over the bodies of White Earth allottees — ­their hair texture, their feet, their distribution of body hair — ­to determine if they were in fact “full blood” or “mixed blood.”18 They gave their imprimatur to the 1920 Blood Roll, which found more than nine out of ten allottees to be “mixed bloods.” Counties could therefore tax most allotments and even seize them when taxes went unpaid; corporations and individuals could buy them; and all actors could all but ignore the trust provisions of allotment, because Congress had vitiated them.19 The experience of allottees at White Earth demonstrates that understanding allotment means taking into account enrollment and the regulation of lands and levels of authority ranging from local officials to the Supreme Court. Through their actions, blood placed race at the center of a policy that was not, at first glance, about race. Blood became a central part of the experience and effects of allotment despite its absence from the Dawes Act. Why, and to what effect, did blood become so powerful in this story? At the most general level, of course, historians have documented that the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century marked a high point in the prestige of the science of race in the United States. American scientists presumed to gauge racial superiority and inferiority in the sizes of skulls, intelligence quotients, and moral character.20 In this context, it would appear that blood quantum served as a metaphoric measure of the relative power of different racial characteristics in an individual. Other reasons more specific to Indian history, however, reveal the more immediately colonial orientation of blood-­quantum measurement under allotment. Blood-­quantum differences functioned as an argument for allotment for white Americans. By the middle of the nineteenth century, “the full blood” was a stock figure that had come to represent to Americans the authentic Indian that U.S. expansion was tragically but inevitably sweeping off the stage. By the 1880s, advocates of allotment, such as federal allotment commissioners who traveled to Indian Territory to implement the policy, portrayed it as a means to protect “full bloods” from “mixed bloods.” The former were racially incapable of competing with the latter, which the commissioners believed inherited economic sophistication from their white ancestors.21 In a complex and circuitous way, the trope of the tragic “full blood” served to legitimate the colonial imposition of allotment. The noting of blood quantum on allotment rolls is in part an artifact of this argument for allotment. Finally, blood and race had already become important to Native subjectivities in some nations, but their use as measurements of Native identity was contentious. Allotment policy took this contentious tendency and made it law. Witness the case of the previously mentioned Creek, where allotment was imposed in the years leading up to Oklahoma statehood in 1907. This nation had a significant minority of citizens of African ancestry. They descended largely from blacks who had been enslaved by Creeks and had gained freedom and citizenship in the nation after the Civil War.

116   Radical History Review

Some nonblack Creeks denied that blacks had citizenship rights, while black Creeks and their nonblack allies asserted their rights. Blood and race were already under contention in the nation, but under allotment, the agents of the federal government who executed allotment policy permanently registered blood as a measure of Indian­ness. Those agents recorded blacks on “Creek Freedmen” rolls and nonblacks on “Creeks by blood” rolls, and then recorded fractions of Indian blood for all individuals on “by blood” rolls.22 Given that the removal of restrictions on sale, mortgaging, and taxation depended on one’s blood status on these rolls, blood categorization had real power over individuals’ economic fates. Allotment took something that, in some places, had become a point of debate among Native people — ­blood and race — ­and fixed it as a fact of policy for the federal government. Allotment and the laws passed to regulate them marked a watershed in the tendency to treat Native polities as racial rather than national Others. David E. Wilkins, a Lumbee scholar of Native law and politics, makes the essential point that “Indian peoples are nations, not minorities.”23 His argument is rendered both necessary and difficult to make because race, in the guise of blood quantum, has become a commonplace way to understand Indians. There is a pernicious belief among many Americans that being Indian, or Miwok or Suquamish or Choctaw and so on, means having some amount of Indian “blood.” In fact, being Indian or a member of a tribe means being a recognized member of a tribal community — ­w ith the added complication that, as in debates over U.S. citizenship, there is debate in many Native nations over who counts as a member. Allotment land law, however, treated people as quanta — ­a s one-­half Oneida, or full-­blood Ojibwe, or one-­sixteenth Cherokee — ­and this implied that it was race, rather than membership in a sovereign nation, that determined if one was Oneida or Ojibwe or Cherokee. Misunderstanding Indians as minorities entails placing them within a race-­relations model of U.S. society, rather than recognizing them as the indigenous inhabitants of a settler colony, the United States. The misperception that Native nations are racially defined tribes has generated the misconception that they are interest groups in a multiracial America, rather than sovereign nations confronting colonialism. Allotment was not the only act that made these multiple, mutually reinforcing misunderstandings so powerful in U.S. politics and life, but it was a crucial step in making them seem natural to Americans — ­as allegedly natural as race itself. In brief, allotment was a colonial land policy that seized sovereignty from tribal nations and naturalized that seizure by acting as if race, rather than political difference, were what set Native people and nations apart. Of course, land was not a mere pretext for the extension of federal power over Native nations and individuals. American settlers wanted tribal lands to farm on, speculate in, and otherwise profit from. Yet creating private property in land, and alienating that property from Indians, also brought about a transfer of political power. Land is a nation’s most visible resource, but sovereignty is a nation’s invisible and intangible property, prop-

Chang | The Allotment of American Indian Lands   117

erty both in the sense of a defining characteristic and in the sense of an exclusive right. Creating and dispossessing visible private property, in this case land, served to expropriate intangible political sovereignty. Visibly, the federal government took millions of acres of land from Native nations, called it the private property of Indian people, and then permitted the capitalist market (like race, allegedly a natural force) to transform them into non-­Indians’ farms, ranches, homes, and summer cabins. Less visibly, the federal state used this process to limit the effective range of tribal nations’ sovereignty and to seize that authority for itself. Taking allotment seriously as a colonial process reveals that this enclosure of Native land also eroded Native sovereign power. Understanding allotment as a colonial political and economic project can serve two political and theoretical purposes. The first and fundamental one is to name and locate U.S. colonialism in particular policies like allotment that created and still support the U.S. regime of property and power. Naming that colonialism in all its specificity can be, one hopes, a modest step toward countering it. The second is to suggest a way of theorizing enclosure as a political project in which the creation of individual property serves to consolidate state power more broadly. Allotment in the United States bears resemblances to a series of late nineteenth-­century policy initiatives in nations across the hemisphere, from Mexico to Ecuador to Argentina, that favored private property rights in the name of liberalism. One might ask if they followed the pattern of allotment — ­very publicly handing the gift of economic sovereignty to the individual while quietly handing new powers to the state. Given that all the countries mentioned were also settler nation-­states occupying the lands they claimed to privatize, did race similarly act as a screen that obscured the colonial nature of this process? Finally, the other essays in this collection usefully extend the concept of enclosure beyond property in land. Thinking of enclosure as a colonial political project may help reveal how these acts of making private property serve to extend state power while making it less visible. Notes I am grateful to the editors and to Jean O’Brien, David Wilkins, and Tracey Deutsch, whose comments and suggestions have been invaluable to me in revising this essay. 1. Only a handful of scholars have explored allotment as a species of enclosure or an inheritor of English enclosure. For a recent example, see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Lands: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005), 37 – 39. Nancy Shoemaker examines the relationship and the distinction between enclosure and allotment, as this article discusses below. Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-­Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 20. Without specifically invoking English enclosure, the literary scholar Melissa Ryan portrays the reservation system and allotment as two in “an ongoing series of enclosures and spatial reductions” in American Indian history. Melissa Ryan, “The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!” American Literature 75 (2003): 293. William Cronon’s work on colonial New England does not use the term

118   Radical History Review

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

enclosure, but it suggests other ways that the notion of land enclosure can usefully be applied to American Indian history. See his Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 127. Overviews of allotment legislation and the movement in favor of allotment can be found in D. S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973); and Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Lands, 275 – 78. Nicholas C. Peroff, Menominee Drums: Tribal Termination and Restoration, 1954 – 1974 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 12; Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Lands, 257; Edmund Jefferson Danziger Jr., Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance during the Early Reservation Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 118. One of the most complete histories of allotment on one reservation is Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889 – 1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 169. In 2008, Indian plaintiffs won a class-­action suit in federal court over the federal mismanagement of individual trust moneys. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this victory the following year in the Cobell v. Salazar decision. This decision also established measures to try to address the problems of fractionated ownership. “Cobell Lawsuit on Indian Trust Management Settled,” Circle, January 2010, 2. Some monographs include Otis, The Dawes Act; Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887 (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1975); Meyer, White Earth Tragedy; Kent Carter, The Dawes Commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1893 – 1917 (Orem, UT: Ancestry.com, 1999); Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land; and Laurence M. Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester III, eds., The Oneida Indians in the Age of Allotment, 1860 – 1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940); James W. Oberly, “The Dawes Act and the Oneida Indian Reservation of Wisconsin,” in Hauptman and McLester, Oneida Indians, 184 – 99. Meyer, White Earth Tragedy; Laurence M. Hauptman, “The Wisconsin Oneidas and the Federal Competency Commission of 1917,” in Hauptman and McLester, Oneida Indians, 200 – 225. The surge of recent literature that is concerned at least in part with Indian citizens of African descent and with the effects of allotment and enrollment on their status includes Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-­Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Country (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 140 – 77; David Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832 – 1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Landmarks in this series of encroachments on Native sovereignty include the 1885 Major Crimes Act, which extended federal jurisdiction over certain crimes between Indian

Chang | The Allotment of American Indian Lands   119

individuals on reservation lands; the 1886 Kagama decision, in which the Supreme Court deemed the Major Crimes Act to be constitutional; the ruling of the court in Matter of Heff (1905) that receipt of an allotment conferred American citizenship and thus made legislation such as the prohibition of liquor sales to Indians inapplicable; the Burke Act (1906), which provided for the removal of trust restrictions on allotment lands; and the United States v. Nice decision (1916), which declared that the federal government could treat Indians as wards, whether or not they were citizens. See Vine Deloria Jr. and David E. Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999), 147; David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 118; David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 58 – 59. 11. Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, 20. 12. Thomas J. Farrar to Dana H. Kelsey, August 27, 1908, Box 4409, File Creek 306, Entry 121, Central Classified File, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives Building, Washington, DC. See also Chang, Color of the Land, 123 – 24. 13. Excellent recent works on the politics of blood in U.S. colonial contexts include Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and J. Ke¯haulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Against those who presume that federal agents effectively imposed blood or other criteria for enrollment, Alexandra Harmon argues that in the case of the Colville Reservation, “federal agents did not brainwash or impose their will on Indians.” The roll “embodied Indians’ thinking about tribal relations, including their diverse and changing reactions to the government’s legal guidelines.” Alexandra Harmon, “Tribal Enrollment Councils: Lessons on Law and Identity,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001): 179. 14. Alexandra Harmon, “Lines in Sand: Shifting Boundaries between Indians and Non-­Indians in the Puget Sound Region,” Western Historical Quarterly 26 (1995): 429 – 53; James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1989), 92 – 133; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 32 (1975): 55 – 88; Chang, Color of the Land, 32. 15. Chang, Color of the Land, 21. 16. United States, Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, Final Rolls of the Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 2003). 17. Frances Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of an Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 365. 18. David L. Beaulieu, “Curly Hair and Big Feet: Physical Anthropology and the Implementation of Land Allotment on the White Earth Chippewa Reservation,” American Indian Quarterly 8 (1984): 281 – 314. 19. Meyer, White Earth Tragedy, 153, 163, 165 – 70. 20. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996). 21. Alexandra Harmon, “American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (2003): 114 – 15; Chang, Color of the Land, 79 – 80. 22. United States, Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, Final Rolls, 502 – 74. 23. David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics, 45.

Figure 1. Early morning in the Pelourinho Square: State-­sponsored display of the Portuguese “discovery” of Brazil alongside indigenous women, Carnival, 1999.

reflec tions

Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium John F. Collins We might even say that emergent forms of property signify new possibilities for corporeality or bodily integration in lives that observers constantly tell themselves are dispersed. — ­Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect

In late April 2000, on one of those rainy yet sunny “winter” mornings common

in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, I drove my friend Indio from the colonial-­era city center known as the Pelourinho (Pillory) to the peripheral neighborhood of Fazenda Grande do Retiro so that he could visit his brother, Gaginho. Indio needed the ride because a knife wound had left this twenty-­six-­year-­old former street child a quadriplegic. His limited mobility and Gaginho’s HIV-­related ailments and paltry income meant that the brothers faced difficulties in seeing one another or in visiting the Pelourinho, a UNESCO World Heritage Center and former red-­light district where both had contracted AIDS.1 Indio thus brightened notably when neighbors shouted greetings as we approached Gaginho’s home. He exclaimed in response, as beer began to circulate, “Here I am, patrimonialized in this passenger seat. Looking good, ain’t I? That’s why the gringo takes such good care of me.” Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-019 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

121

122   Radical History Review

Indio’s commentary on his relatively immobile yet carefully transported persona took form around what might appear a surprising invocation of patrimonialization, the term used in his city to describe UNESCO-­overseen attempts to preserve colonial architecture and vernacular culture. Nonetheless, Indio’s words were part of an increasingly common way of speaking about personhood and property in the face of the urban reform and the commodification of Afro-­Brazilian practices at the center of his government’s restoration of the Pelourinho Historical Center. Since 1992, this $100 million urban reform has given rise to the displacement of over four thousand residents and the state’s appropriation of six hundred colonial edifices. The project rests on a restoration of crumbling buildings and the reeducation of their overwhelmingly Afro-­Bahian residents in what the state presents as “proper” forms of Bahian behavior.2 This burnishing of people and buildings, begun in the late 1970s, presents a particularly Bahian reworking of policies fomented by the World Bank and the Inter-­A merican Development Bank (IDB) in the 1990s — ­a blending of biopolitical concerns with minority selves and the state-­directed care of traditional practices — ­as central to the harnessing of popular culture as a tool for development.3 The Pelourinho restoration, initiated in 1967 with the founding of the Bahian Institute of Artistic and Cultural Patrimony (IPAC), stands as a special form of heritage management that first took form well ahead of the worldwide curve.4 While UNESCO landmarking has long supported boundaries between nature and culture and monuments and folkloric creativity — ­for most of the second half of the twentieth century the organization divided its patrimonializing registers between “natural” and “cultural” heritage — ­during the past three decades Bahian planners have interpreted these categories through Brazilian intellectual paradigms that have encouraged engagement with everyday practices rather than an emphasis on monuments. At the same time, Bahian planners have often approached relations between race and history and culture and biology in manners distinct from their European and North American peers.5 The Pelourinho’s management thus seems an example avant la lettre of efforts to produce “intangible heritage,” UNESCO’s newest heritage registry and one usually described as arising in Asia. UNESCO locates this intangible heritage in “the human mind, the human body being the main instrument for its enactment, or — ­literally — ­embodiment. The knowledge and skills are often shared within a community, and manifestations of ICH [Immaterial Cultural Heritage] often are performed collectively.”6 Indio’s conceptualization of his wounded body and its importance to forms of expert care sutures concerns with health and morality to cultural practices that make his personhood valuable and attractive to the world’s most powerful. This highlights not simply some fetishization of identity or a misidentification of the real sources of value by Pelourinho residents whose everyday practices are becoming possessions of the nation, and of humankind, but the importance of analyzing enclosure’s leap

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   123

from land and expressive culture to the historical terrain of human being. One could argue that Indio’s creative deformation of cultural heritage restoration, a transnational form of property making within which most everything may be construed as a community possession, suggests that certain of the Pelourinho’s current and former residents have come to blur the boundaries between land and people and colonial ruins and their residents, configuring themselves in the process as a species of living human heritage.7 This bundling of heritage, hygiene, and personhood — ­Indio is HIV-­positive and thus capable of attracting the attention of the social scientists and public health authorities essential to his state’s attempt to sanitize and objectify his habits as culture — ­recalls John Locke’s claim that “man” is the owner of his self. Yet Indio does not argue that he has mixed his labor with land or objects beyond his body. Instead, he suggests that his status as something consecrated as cultural heritage places his body in some sort of sympathy with other objects.8 This entanglement of politics, subjectivity, and property motivates my attempt to understand how heritage, or what is usually called “patrimony” in Latin America, may function in remarkably iconoclastic ways in relation to forms of enclosure that are so much a part of development programs and conceptions of community belonging today. Heritage does not usually involve the legal privatization of public or fallow lands used by the community, but rather a nationalization of once privately held properties, ostensibly for the benefit of all. In this way states employ UNESCO guidelines to transform private properties into publicly held and managed goods understood as representations of national origins and motors for economic advances available, at least in theory, to all citizens. 9 Yet attempts to make history and culture into resources must confront multiple existing property regimes. In the Pelourinho, these include a de facto urban commons formed at the end of the nineteenth century when elites departed for the suburbs after abandoning their mansions to impoverished relatives and domestic servants. In the case of people like Indio, who exercised customary rights to such neglected spaces until their dispossession during the neighborhood’s still unfinished, post-­1992 restoration, such “public” appropriations of formerly private property in the name of capitalist development and democratic polity have generated not only political economic concerns with what Michel Foucault called the “care of the self,” but a social transformation in which particular forms of enclosure have left residents poorer. Such land grabs, promulgated in the name of increased access, are central to understanding enclosure’s relationship to everyday life, as well as the ways the marketing of culture and history may impact the horizons of political possibility today. The use of “cultural heritage,” a designation of common property that in Salvador involves the effective privatization of collective properties, codifies once unmarked habits as cultural goods and allocates shared resources to specific, privileged classes. In other words, this heritage involves not simply the fomenting of community memories or, perhaps more cynically, the retaking of colonial buildings

124   Radical History Review

by the descendents of their former owners. Rather, it functions as a hybrid form of public enclosure of everyday, popular habits as human “properties” overseen administratively by UNESCO and IPAC and facilitated financially by institutions like the World Bank and IDB. Understanding the expansion of patrimony through the logic of property’s extension from the land on which monuments lie into the inner states and private habits of an Afro-­descendent population goes beyond claims about class-­specific interests or statist interventions. Rather, in light of UNESCO’s recent elaboration of “intangible patrimony,” a powerful category within heritage management that props up recent World Bank and IDB-­inspired attempts to treat “culture as development,” the transformations in property regimes currently taking place in heritage sites signal a change in which everyday life is enclosed as (and performed in the name of) a putatively common good.10 Statements like Indio’s claim to patrimonialization should not, then, be treated merely as instrumental reactions to displacement. Instead they index a spiraling commodification of essences that were once, and are often still, understood as inalienable human properties. Yet in a multicultural marketplace for human difference, practices typically coded in social theory as intimate or beyond the state’s purview may become quasi-­natural resources open to alienation and exploitation. Nonetheless, as Indio demonstrates in mobilizing them so as to gain a ride to his brother’s house, such forms of property making may also generate room for maneuver for subaltern and civil society actors. This essay resituates and expands recent anthropological examinations of cultural patrimony through attention to the habits and knowledge practices that in 2003 UNESCO grouped as “intangible heritage.” It seeks to relate them to the dispossessions, territorial demarcations, possessive logics, and possibilities for popular struggle that have surrounded processes of enclosure by focusing on the ways these have been put into play when governments reclassify privately owned or incompletely registered lands and certain human practices as cultural possessions of a collectivity. The essay’s goal is to establish new perspectives for analyzing the effects of UNESCO’s patrimony programs by suggesting vectors for ethnographic and archival work that document the shifts in political consciousness emanating from and informing those reconfigurations of property and community taking place in the name of cultural preservation today. The concept of enclosure thus may prove a useful means of describing the powerful forces that have conspired to congeal “culture” into a composite, alienable good and a tool of late capitalist development. Patrimonializing the Past: Property, Power, and Histories of Heritage Cultural heritage may be understood as a new type of property created by cataloguing in state archives that which supposedly lies within the social forms configured as essential to community identity. Heritage, in such a definition, is both a technology for instantiating state power and a category of property that permits a

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   125

myriad of practices, some of which supposedly index commensurable humankind, to be turned into possessions of that nation-­state. Such transformations involve the surveillance and re-­presentation of everyday life, including material objects of folk culture, by legal, educational, hygienic, and archival institutions. In today’s climate of multiculturalism, in which so-­called non-­Western knowledge practices are often treated as exotic specimens, this heritage planning reflects specific Western epistemologies regarding surfaces and depths, illusion and truth, origins and end points, and subjectivities formed in tension with individual and collective stewardship, or ownership, of resources.11 This is why battles over what gets defined as patrimony, a form of property typically coded as an inheritance belonging to a collectivity that gains legitimacy through the state-­directed care of its traditions, are thus disputes over ethics, or what requires care and attention at a specific historical juncture. Such disputes give form to arguments about what is special or intrinsic to the polity and the practices that symbolically define it. This is a basic part of nationalist imaginaries. But even more importantly, it suggests that patrimony works to produce a delineatory substance conjured up by means of epistemological and legal frameworks for specifying social relations as content-­filled objects in themselves. This is one reason the modern heritage movement has taken shape, and why its histories are told, in dialogue with notions of individual and collective property that are now being stretched and altered in relation to capital’s novel colonization of everyday life through cultural heritage management. The anthropologist Richard Handler has emphasized that in much heritage legislation, the term culture refers to something that communities possess, rather than being a contextual, process-­based, and symbolic idiom that describes human interactions. From this perspective, culture is not something enacted or remade among specific interlocutors but is something open to public-­sphere appropriation and for-­profit alienation.12 Handler’s insights not only set the tone for many ensuing critiques of UNESCO’s apparent misappropriation of the culture concept but also confirm the role that cultural property plays in UNESCO’s late-­t wentieth-­century policies and its current autobiographies. According to UNESCO, a concern with heritage emerged after World War I but took shape only after 1959, when Egypt called for help in saving archaeological sites threatened by the building of the Aswan Dam.13 This is symbolic of many of heritage’s entanglements in the world today, as water and cultural treasures are now lightning rods for debates over scarcity and disputes over the merits of individual versus common property regimes. UNESCO’s mobilization around Egyptian treasures, which came on the heels of the 1954 Hague Convention’s argument that “damage to cultural property belonging to any people . . . means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind,” pushed global property law beyond immediate concerns with who physically possessed an object and on to the issue of who had access to it. The attempt to preserve “man’s threatened heritage” might thus be understood

126   Radical History Review

as a precursor, or a correlate, to discussions related to UN debates in the 1970s and 1980s over intellectual property, especially in the areas of pharmaceutical development and informatics. In the pharmaceutical example, arguments have turned on health as a human right and thus an ethical imperative to provide increased access to medicines whose high costs continue to mean that a majority must limit their right to health. Similarly, UNESCO sought in the second half of the twentieth century to define culture as a right and, like salient conceptions of health in Western social thought, as something imagined in terms of a subject with depth and internal coherence that construe that human vessel as possessing qualities as interiorized, palpable things. Nonetheless, and like contests over patents and rights to health, this involved UNESCO’s deflecting of questions of ownership away from the physical possessor and toward access for an international public. The initiative relied on guidelines for defining the ostensibly special, or extraordinary, value of cultural goods, entities that are not necessarily portable and hence quite different from the artworks whose seizure or destruction had dominated earlier debates. Thus in the second half of the twentieth century heritage came to turn on arguments about human interiority, exceptionality, and access within a universe of shared rights and responsibilities secured in part through rethinkings of property. From UNESCO’s perspective, physical spaces and cultural objects that warrant the suspension of individual property rights in favor of a concern with a generalized humanity must conform to particular technical criteria that can be evaluated and, when they conform to expert-­sanctioned distinctions, can be protected.14 This preservation, which takes place through the extraction of objects and practices from commodity flows and individual ownership, depends on expertise that justifies their removal from the everyday. The 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage allowed nation-­states to stipulate those natural or artificial “wonders” encountered in their territories in UNESCO’s World Heritage List and to spell out the criteria for recognizing what gave these “wonders” such exceptional qualities. The convention made clear that UNESCO simply recommended, but never required, that states seek recognition for practices and objects they claimed to own, while at the same time it promulgated standards to gird international property regimes that might protect such resources. In doing so, the 1972 convention defined “outstanding universal value” around the separation of “natural” and “cultural” patrimony, a move congruent with post-­Enlightenment distinctions between nature and society that have done much to animate modern knowledge claims.15 A separation of nature and culture, and a reliance on labor as an explanation for humans’ ability to transform the former into the latter, is a staple of often otherwise contradictory government policies and traditions in social theory inspired by thinkers as diverse as Locke and Karl Marx. Yet UNESCO and national-­level heritage professionals have since recognized the arbitrariness of nature-­culture dis-

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   127

tinctions and the specificity, or the inapplicability, of European-­derived concepts of property to cultural preservation. Among planners’ quandaries is the realization that nature is eminently social and that, even in the so-­called cultural realm, a cathedral and a dance represent quite dissimilar cultural forms that may require distinct preservation mechanisms. Attempts to reconcile such contradictions have led to modifications and additions to the convention. Among the most significant was the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which emerged from debates in the 1990s surrounding concerns with immaterial labor and practices that were difficult to codify on the basis of the convention’s previous iterations. UNESCO’s attempt to subdivide the category of culture, for instance, meant that it defined intangible heritage as “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills — ­as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith — ­t hat communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage . . . transmitted from generation to generation, [it] is constantly recreated by communities . . . and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity.”16 Intangible heritage, as a slot for valuing humanity and its expressions, defines cultures around an “open character . . . [and their status as] dominant or non dominant . . . not necessarily linked to specific territories and [characterized by the knowledge] that one person can . . . belong to different communities and switch communities.”17 This updates UNESCO’s culture concept to make it less about static qualities and more accepting of a holistic approach to “knowledge, skills [and] . . . cultural spaces associated therewith,” even as the emphasis on protecting intangibility has the contradictory effect of using people’s practices to entwine citizens and landscapes while turning those practices into properties of the collectivity. Cultural Property, Ambivalence, and Ownership: U.S. Anthropology and Heritage Studies States have long faced critical contradictions related to their stewardship of collective property. Since heritage must be produced, circulated, and interpreted, it is open to elaboration throughout its formation and reception, something central to Lisa Breglia’s study of people’s and institutions’ orientations toward heritage sites distilled from Mayan cities. In Monumental Ambivalence, Breglia focuses on contradictions inherent in “logically or discursively opposed projects of protection or preservation on the one hand and promotion or development [often in tandem with privatization] of national or global heritage on the other.”18 Concentrating not on material culture but on uses of heritage, Breglia explores popular resignifications of official representations. To do so, she separates heritage from material culture and argues that, at a neoliberal moment, the Mexican state finds itself torn between privatization and preservation. There is little doubt that a naive empiricism focused on a material culture conceived of as a collection of objects fails to recognize the

128   Radical History Review

diversity of ways that people employ objects in social action. Additionally, states today face critical contradictions related to their stewardship of collective property. Thus Breglia’s separation of the discursive and the material, and of past and present, helps describe an early twenty-­first-­century moment. Nonetheless, it may also follow too closely those logics it seeks to reveal. Property is a social relation that organizes seemingly disparate arenas of individual existence and collective belonging. Among those spheres of social and philosophical life it has tended to support over the second half of the twentieth century, and which my analysis treats as historically specific rather than given, are the world’s partition into the natural and the cultural, facts and interpretations, nonhuman objects and human subjects, and the material and the immaterial. Yet the assumption at the root of heritage and much social theory, namely, that labor mediates nature and culture by translating the former into the latter, relies in turn on the very distinction between nature and culture that such mediation purportedly overcomes. With the rise of culture as a product, this tautology based on human labor thought to produce social products as distinct from natural backdrops has become apparent in a way that generates an intense questioning. This does not mean that the rise of immaterial heritage presages a definitive refutation of the labor theory of value. Instead, it suggests that culture, whether approached as a particular, dialogical relation between specific interlocutors or a product for the masses, has become an integral part of the production of value in ways that highlight the importance of following further the implications of its ambivalent separation from nature or biology. And the effects of a growing recognition by both subalterns and more privileged actors of the role of an objectified culture in producing the bases for community belonging is critical to how enclosure, territory, and humanity are implicated in today’s heritage projects. Cultural heritage-­based manipulations of what might be called “cultural essences” link citizens to territory as quasi-­natural features of a landscape that is not just a place tied together around the elaboration of patriotic narratives but, like a nation’s collective possessions construed as its patrimony, is a material property of such accounts. Heritage and its objects are thus at the center of contemporary forms of enclosure promulgated in places like the Pelourinho that fuse peoples, in the form of symbolic yet living human ancestors, and restored landscapes as one tightly packaged resource. As my invocation of Locke should suggest, this essay is thus an account of human subjectivity, and being, as a property open to enclosure under capitalism. Yet this argument is not directly epochal, or one based on a neat distinction between liberal and neoliberal economies. It is more of a claim about how a shifting, contemporary situation lends perspective to ongoing processes that can now be made out in new ways. A key task is not to identify some rupture whereby heritage is now a resolutely alienable commodity, but rather to understand a shifting

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   129

set of practices that makes “common” sense of popular culture — ­mainly through its commodification, it would seem today — ­at a particular historical juncture. And this is one reason this essay begins with Indio’s narrative of his arrival in Fazenda Grande do Retiro. The circulation of foodstuffs, and especially libations, is a long-­standing means of producing solidarity through the exchange and consumption of symbolic products that materialize human connections.19 Similarly, heritage is an idiom, and a good, whose celebration as a seemingly enduring resource produces feelings of community, a process that Breglia’s work questions by attending to discordances within such a shared medium. Yet even as heritage is not consumed in precisely the same sense as is beer in Salvador, or circulated like a yam or shell necklace in classical anthropological accounts from the Pacific, it is frequently approached as part of a network of gifts, or of reciprocal exchanges, that function quite differently from a marketplace based on the exchange of cash for commodities. In UNESCO’s June 2008 World Heritage Information Kit, one finds a chapter called, “Heritage: A Gift from the Past to the Future.” The title suggests that heritage is inalienable and enduring due to its role in reciprocal exchanges, an economic system long understood in anthropology as a means of maintaining collective control of resources on the basis of their passage between kin or individuals transformed into members of the same community through this intercourse.20 In this context, we can see how Indio’s invocation of patrimony took shape as result of the iconoclastic forms of self­objectification developed in the 1990s by Pelourinho residents subject to the state­d irected disciplining and codification of their culture as a good that might attract outside funding and tourist dollars. Patrimony functions for Indio as part of a gift economy and of a commodity-­based system. And both serve as practical resources for his knowledge of self.21 Conclusion: An Issue of Substance Cultural heritage is an elastic medium that allows people to shift between property regimes at a moment at which privatization is supposedly the name of the game. Heritage plays this role in part because it may involve hybrid forms of communal property in which objects are preserved as well as alienated. But such ambivalence is not just an issue of straddling property regimes or providing alternative histories within established regimes of property. It is also about providing glimpses of these regimes’ limits, their distinct features, and human beings’ construction of alternatives to reigning notions of property. These enable us to observe that, as a social relation, property is a symbolic representation of persons and personhood as defined at a particular geohistorical moment.22 Modern archaeologists have demonstrated an abiding interest in cultural properties’ production, circulation, consumption, and thus their return and safe-

130   Radical History Review

guarding. The resulting literature typically emphasizes redress and prevention as directed at civilizations’ treasures. This often involves losing sight of the extent to which properties are relations that reflect and condense existing political economic systems in ways that undercut attempts at the policing of the objects themselves.23 Such difficulties in delimiting circulation and use arise from factors ranging from the density of networks available under capitalism for the transfer of artworks to the difficulty of establishing the legal boundaries of a cultural manifestation. In Who Owns Native Culture?, Michael Brown wades into debates around cultural properties and calls for a more pragmatic and shifting treatment of culture by actors in the public sphere since existing “law strives for uniformity and precision” rather than the “ambiguity required to foster social peace.”24 Such support for public sphere mediation, in what seems a just and apparently rational manner, ties into a longer history of the coproduction of property and ideals of justice and progress in a variety of ways only touched on in this essay.25 And it highlights some of the reasons why one might want to avoid prescribing how culture can be construed as a more equitable property so as to foster justice. Culture, from the perspective developed in this essay and in relation to the contests going on over survival in Salvador’s Pelourinho today, is not a panacea that masquerades as a form of property; rather, it is a reflection and a constitutive element of capitalism. As such, the task at hand for a critical social science is not to correct how culture takes form but, rather, to understand how practices come to be called culture in ways that have powerful effects on political subjectivities, oppositional movements, and the cosmologies within which they form. In her approach to the ways that cultural property in Mexico supports the mutating forms and subjects of enclosure so constitutive of capitalism, Elizabeth Ferry avoids a focus on patrimonial objects as objects and instead looks at how silver, “the quintessential patrimonial substance . . . is distributed, consumed, and valued in markedly different ways.”26 The most salient issue, for Ferry, is not the attenuation or improvement of dominant means of using silver per se. Instead, she investigates how silver is configured as a particular type of substance in relation to specific human practices. Silver gains value from contexts and uses, as do the practices configured as culture that constitute those attempts to enclose human being as a commodity produced in precisely the sites, like a Mexican mine or the Brazilian center of the Atlantic slave trade, that gave rise to a capitalism too often seen as originating in Europe. This is where culture, or at least the argument about the reification of people’s practices as human “essence,” becomes good to think alongside precious metal. Yet what seems most important for this essay is not culture’s or silver’s statuses as valued goods, or as even capitalism’s origins, but rather the political effects of the practices that confirm that either silver or what passes for culture is a substance in

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   131

itself.27 And as Indio’s commentary on heritage, his disability, and his relationship to social science and scientists indicates, the idioms through which human beings imagine the content of humanity have come to configure culture as a valuable substance. Thus while there is little doubt that social roles such as serf, landlord, and peasant have taken shape around the management and enclosure of landed property in nations ranging from England to Mexico, Indio’s intervention, like UNESCO’s intangible heritage programs, raises the possibility that property and personhood may be co-constructed in new ways today. As citizens’ everyday practices come into being as the core of a citizenship construed along market-­influenced models, culture becomes a quasi-­natural thing likely vulnerable to enclosure. Of course, to argue that culture is construed through objectification is not new. What does appear new — ­or, more precisely, what comes into clearer view in relation to shifting political economic processes — ­is the extent to which an unstable entity called culture becomes an object of state attention that resembles earlier concerns with the privatization of land as a productive resource. In places like the Pelourinho, attempts at accumulation focus not on abstracting labor situated on a shop floor, a field, or even a peasant’s household. Rather, everyday habits of the type long used to individuate modern nations and argue sovereignty around ethnic or cultural particularity now appear as a field of common, human property liable to alienation.28 In the hands of idealistic UNESCO planners, such content is proof of a shared humanity, general in its reach and particular in its manifestations.29 Reworked by the government of Bahia, the IDB, and the World Bank, however, it appears to be a substance, akin to land, that must be enclosed to be mobilized for development. This is important not in terms of mourning an earlier era, but to understand more clearly shifting modalities of capital accumulation, related forms of political subjectivity, and the array of stratagems available to those who might seek to carve out alternative relationships not to culture, but to the broader field of objectifications that have turned practices often thought to index the deepest recesses of human being into touchstones for political economic exploitation. Notes 1. The city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, is typically celebrated as the mythic site of Brazil’s African soul. It thus appears in nationalist thought as the proper place for defining tradition and locating blackness in “racial democracy,” or the purportedly redemptive claim to Portuguese, African, and Native American hybridity essential to Brazilian modernity. The state government of Bahia has sought to reinforce this contested narrative through a reconstruction of the Pelourinho, Salvador’s colonial-­era downtown, which served as the capital of its Brazilian territories and was the South Atlantic’s most important port until 1763. 2. See John Collins, “ ‘But What If I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?’ Empire, Redemption and the ‘Tradition of the Oppressed’ in a Brazilian Historical Center,” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 279 – 328.

132   Radical History Review

3. The role of citizens’ everyday habits in capitalist development has given rise to insightful studies, including Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Michael Herzfeld, Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For development agencies’ policy suggestions regarding cultural practices in the 1990s, see Eduardo Rojas, Old Cities, New Assets: Preserving Latin America’s Urban Heritage (Washington, DC: Inter-­American Development Bank, 1999); and Ismail Serageldin, Culture and Development at the World Bank (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998). Nonetheless, the analysis put forth in this essay departs from such treatments of the roles of artisanal and culture-­based labor due to its contention that cultural heritage functions as a biopolitical idiom, or a means of moralizing, state-­directed care for the biological life of a population. On biopower, see especially Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1978 – 86); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 4. In arguing that the Pelourinho cultural development scheme rests on an explicitly hygienicist approach to an Afro-­Brazilian population I am not simply invoking Foucault but linking this biopolitical management of culture to slum clearance, the treatment of minority and working-­class populations, and thus to aspirations to a European-­style modernity in Latin American urban planning. Among the most helpful, albeit in quite different ways, discussions of this attempt to reconcile an ostensible barbarism associated with Latin American nature with urban civilization in Brazil are Teresa Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889 – 1930 (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); and James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). These works emphasize the extent to which the manipulation of an environment might alter the character of citizens during their own lifetimes, as opposed to future generations alone, and thus serve to counter a Latin American nature or racial condition often portrayed in Brazil as a source of national backwardness. 5. On Lamarckian evolutionary influences on Latin American concepts of cultural evolution and degeneracy, and their relationship to land and landscape, see Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and John Collins, The Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian ‘Racial Democracy’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). Put simply, the influence of Lamarckian concepts of evolution and degeneracy in Latin America, especially prior to World War II, mean that a variety of Brazilian thinkers have argued influentially that people’s contact with their environment and cultural contexts alter their own biological states, or essences. In other words, and contrary to Darwinian models of evolution that emphasize natural selection, the social or geographic milieu in which people take form is understood not simply as a force in their cultural construction but as a means of shaping their biological status in a particular present. In Revolt of the Saints I argue that the restoration of the Pelourinho at the end of the twentieth century partakes of enduringly similar logics, whereby Bahian heritage planners conceive of the restoration of buildings as a means of altering the ontological statuses of their residents. 6. UNESCO, “What Is Intangible Cultural Heritage?,” www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index .php?pg=00002 (accessed April 11, 2010).

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   133

7. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), on the overlaps between architecture, and especially domestic architecture, and conceptions of personhood and political subjectivity in post­Enlightenment thought. 8. For a discussion of the complex calculations that go into people with AIDS’ approaches to personhood and care, see João Biehl, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 9. One especially troubling aspect of this tendency involves the delineation of parks or nature reserves in the name of a “common good,” and often with IDB or World Bank sponsorship, by means of the appropriation of untitled land that under international human rights law belongs instead to indigenous peoples or Maroons. Richard Price’s Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), is a complex ethnographic account of these troubling contradictions. See also Jake Kosek’s Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), which argues against a dichotomous conception of nature and culture while following racially marked local residents’ contested uses of and claims to common lands now administered as a possession of a U.S. national state. 10. The World Bank’s Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Web page illustrates culture’s configuration as an economic resource. See World Bank, “Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism,” web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/ EXTURBANDEVELOPMENT/EXTCHD/0,,contentMDK:20204614~menuPK:430438 ~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:430430,00.html (accessed April 11, 2010). 11. In “Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights, and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (2002): 34 – 61, Charles Hale argues that a fetishization of cultural diversity helps veil more basic exclusions fomented, at least in part, through such celebrations. For a discussion of how the plays of interiority and exteriority I attach here to neoliberal multiculturalism function in terms of race, see John Collins, “Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007): 997 – 1009. 12. Richard Handler, “Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism,” in The Politics of Culture, ed. Brett Williams (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 63 – 74 ; and Richard Handler, “On Having a Culture: Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine,” in Objects and Others: Essays in Museums and Material Culture, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 192 – 217. Rosemary Coombe provides an influential theorization of legal struggles around cultural property in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 13. UNESCO, World Heritage Information Kit (Paris: UNESCO, 2008), 7. 14. Ana Lucia Meira deploys Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of distinction in relation to cultural heritage in O passado no futuro da cidade: Políticas públicas e participaçâo dos cidadâos na preservaçâo do patrimonio cultural de Porto Alegre (The Past in the Future of the City: Public Policies and Citizens’ Participation in the Preservation of the Cultural Patrimony of Porto Alegre) (Porto Alegre, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, 2004). 15. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

134   Radical History Review

16. UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), 2. 17. UNESCO, “What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” 18. Lisa Breglia, Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 6. 19. See, for example, Thomas Abercrombie’s Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), which explores the alignment of past and present through ritual libation. 20. Classical analyses of gift economies and their roles in establishing social solidarity around forms of reciprocity in relation to inalienable goods include Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), originally published as “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” (“The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies”) Année sociologique (1923 – 24); and Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge, 1922). 21. This insight into patrimony’s ability to straddle gift-­and commodity-­based economic systems, and thus its role in revealing their imbrication as opposed to some essential separation, is developed by Elizabeth Ferry in Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). In response to the ways in which workers render cooperative property both alienable and inalienable, thus making it a commodity and an enduring resource, Ferry argues that heritage permits people to boomerang between a marketplace and the preservation of collective property and associated identities. See also Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-­While-­Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 22. Property’s and subjectivity’s mutual influence is emphasized in this essay’s epigraph from Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), 199. 23. Alexander Bauer, “New Ways of Thinking about Cultural Property: A Critical Appraisal of the Antiquities Trade Debates,” Fordham International Law Journal 31 (2008): 689 – 724. 24. Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 242. 25. Rosa Congost’s “Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? What History?” Past and Present 183 (2004): 73 – 106, is an overview of approaches to property in European historical traditions that pushes beyond a view of ownership as possession and takes into account the multiplicity of possible relations contained within, and hence rights to, property. 26. Ferry, Not Ours Alone, 20. 27. Such an illusion of content or intrinsic value is related to the market and its abstractions. Therefore, like commodity fetishism in general, it plays a basic role in ideology. 28. This is not to argue that attention to the ways that labor girds value in the packaging of entities dubbed culture or nature is not critical to understanding the manners in which states oversee everyday life. On the contrary, my analysis rests on the suspicion that the bureaucratic management of the quotidian is itself a form of labor. However, in this short work, rather than exploring how the management of culture is a form of work or, conversely, working to unseat a labor theory of value, I seek to begin to conceptualize space for subsequent, more detailed analyses of the entanglements of nature, culture, labor, and

Collins | UNESCO’s “Intangible” Heritage in the New Millennium   135

land. I do this by concentrating on the specific techniques employed by states that direct bureaucratic labor at the alienation of aspects of everyday life not typically construed as work but as “natural” backdrops to the social. For valuable insights into this process, see especially Genese Sodikoff, “The Low-Wage Conservationist: Biodiversity and the Perversities of Value in Madagascar,” American Anthropologist 111 (2009): 443 – 55; and Fernando Coronil, “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 351 – 74. 29. Jacques Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, trans. Peter Trifonas (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

interventions

Confronting the Enclosure of the Cultural Commons An Interview with Nina Paley Amy Chazkel

The framers of copyright law in the United States aimed to promote the “public

good.” Building on nearly a century of British legal history that sought both to protect the nascent publishing industry and control sedition, the country’s founding document established explicitly brief terms during which no one but a work’s creator may share in the profits it generated — ­alongside unequivocal rights to free expression that would counter copyright’s roots as a form a censorship. Article I, Section VIII of the U.S. Constitution reads: “The Congress shall have power . . . to provide for the . . . general welfare of the United States. . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .” (emphasis added). In 1976, U.S. Congress passed a law that eliminated fixed-­term copyright protection, which before then had been limited to twenty-­eight years. Copyright holders, which have shifted increasingly from individuals to corporate partnerships, control and draw profits from cultural works for increasingly lengthy terms. What has developed over the course of recent decades is a system in which people who do creative work cannot, themselves, own the products of their labor; to distribute a film, a painting, or a song, the artist is structurally forced to hand off copyright to a corporation to disseminate his or her work.

Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011)  doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-020 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

137

138   Radical History Review

The cartoonist and filmmaker Nina Paley was guided at first, she said, only by her “muse”; she set out to make art, not to question the law. Living and traveling in India exposed her to the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. The dissolution of her marriage gave the Ramayana’s story of the vicissitudes of the couple Rama and Sita’s relationship special resonance. Meanwhile, Paley discovered that the recordings of Annette Hanshaw, a now obscure, popular American jazz singer of the 1920s and 1930s, created a sound track for the eclectic, multimillennial drama that was unfolding in her imagination. With little more than a home PC and a budget of $200,000, Paley set out to parlay these influences and experiences into a film that she wrote, directed, and produced herself. The resulting animated feature, Sita Sings the Blues, interspersed scenes from the artist’s own life with parts of the Ramayana, featuring musical numbers in which Sita is shown singing Hanshaw’s recordings. Since its 2009 release, Sita Sings the Blues has received both critical and popular acclaim and a growing list of international awards. Yet the legalities involved in producing a film that draws on previous creative work drew Paley into frustrating and expensive conflicts with groups that claimed proprietorship of the component parts of her film: Hindu religious fundamentalists that sought to ban the distribution of the film in India because they believed that it defiled a sacred text; and corporate entities that demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars from Paley to use the Hanshaw songs to which they held copyright. Paley, who has since become a vociferous critic of copyright law, currently works to promote the free sharing of creative work of all kinds in response to her mounting concern about the corporate ownership of and monopoly power over the

Figure 1. Still from the feature film Sita Sings the Blues, written, animated, directed, and produced by Nina Paley (2009). CC-­by-­SA

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   139

means of cultural production. In 2009, for instance, Paley launched a series of animated video shorts called Minute Memes. In both form and content, in this work Paley speaks out against the aggressive disinformation campaign through which the “content industry” strives to equate copying with theft. She released the first in this series, “Copying Is Not Theft,” in 2009 with a “scratch” track, a draft sound track that marks the lyrics and rhythm but permits, indeed invites, the public to use the Internet to contribute their own sound track. The public has responded with enthusiasm. Paley composed these lyrics for “Copying Is Not Theft”: Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that’s what copying’s for. Copying is not theft. If I copy yours you have it too One for me and one for you That’s what copies can do If I steal your bicycle you have to take the bus, but if I just copy it there’s one for each of us! Making more of a thing, that is what we call “copying” Sharing ideas with everyone That’s why copying is FUN!

Figures 2 and 3. Stills from short video, “Copying Is Not Theft (Minute Meme #1)” by Nina Paley (2009). CC-­by-­SA

140   Radical History Review

In April 2010, Amy Chazkel spoke with Paley about her films and activism, doing creative work under our current copyright regime, and the enclosure of the cultural commons.

Amy Chazkel:  How did you first become interested in the issue of the cultural commons and copyleft? Nina Paley:  After I made Sita Sings the Blues, I discovered that both of the film’s parents — ­t he many-­t housands-­of-­years-­old Indian epic, the Ramayana, and the songs of Annette Hanshaw — ­are considered property by different groups. From the beginning, making the film was going to be very risky, because the Ramayana is considered the property of religious fundamentalists, and the music of Annette Hanshaw, and in fact all of American music, is considered the cultural property of the corporations that own it. In both cases, these cultural works are considered owned. So, I was running the risk of trespassing. For years, I had this inherent sense that copyright does expire and things enter the public domain. I had used public domain artworks when I was younger, like those Dover books of clip art and etchings. At the time when these songs by Hanshaw were written and recorded, they were supposed to enter the public domain after twenty-­eight years. That was the law at the time. And it was renewable for another twenty-­eight years, so that by the 1980s they were supposed to have become part of the public domain. So it’s not as if you set out to be iconoclastic and to break with copyright conventions. You had done your due diligence. Well, I hadn’t really done due diligence, because I knew copyright laws had changed. But why would I do something that might be illegal, or that might upset people? The reason was that I was profoundly inspired, and I felt like I had to do it. My muse kept telling me to do it. So, I went ahead and did it. It wasn’t as if I was being paid to do it. I didn’t have any money. But I just felt that I really had to make this film. According to Western laws, something like the Ramayana that’s two thousand years old is of course in the public domain. What a lot of Westerners don’t seem to realize is that other cultures have their own ideas about intellectual property or cultural property, and copyright isn’t the only way that people claim that they own culture. A tiny group of very angry fundamentalists considers the Ramayana property — ­a nd considers it their property. And I think they are just as deluded as Western copyright lawyers are. I think, in fact, that the rhetoric of people who are outraged by the idea of copyright violation is very similar to that of fundamentalists.

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   141

How do religious fundamentalists enforce their regime, and what are its limits? Free speech is not guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. In India, offending people is basically against the law. Various groups in India compete over which one will be the most offended. And they seek legal recourse? Yes, and the Indian Constitution doesn’t protect artists or authors at all. I think India was the first place on earth to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, because people were offended. Indian law protects property in that particular way, while American law protects property by giving you the opportunity to sue someone. You just say, “I own this, and I can sue you.” In many cases, you win because lawsuits are so expensive that to defend yourself against them is going to cost you a lot of money. Famously, corporations sue or threaten to sue and almost always win because they can afford to just throw their money into bullying people with the law. In the case of both India and the United States, even if the state is not censoring directly, then it’s supporting those who do censor. In the U.S., censorship is outsourced, and in India the state effectively censors things. So the state of India could ban Sita; fundamentalists are trying to ban it from the Internet. But one great benefit of something that’s released under a copyleft license is that it’s hard to censor it. It’s much easier to censor stuff that’s centrally controlled. If Sita had a conventional release in India, it would be easy to censor it. But Sita is completely decentralized, unhindered by piracy laws, and anybody can share it legally with anybody else. In order to censor the film, they would have to censor absolutely everybody, and that’s pretty much impossible. At what point in the making of the film did you decide that opposing the copyright system was going to be your guiding mission? It wasn’t until I finished the film and was trying to release it that I had my conversion experience. I thought that copyright terms were too long, and I didn’t believe that Congress should retroactively extend copyright terms. It just seemed wrong. Early on, I contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation and asked them for help. They put me in touch with the student attorneys at American University’s Glushko­Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, where they did research on the recordings so that at least I could know what I was getting into. This was three years before the film was done. They found out that while the copyrights on Hanshaw’s recordings had never been renewed, the copyright on the compositions had been, which meant that I would have to clear the publishing rights, but not the recording rights, for the film. What I didn’t realize — ­although it doesn’t even matter if I had realized — ­was how much money those corporations would want for a no-­budget independent film to legally use these compositions.

142   Radical History Review

And who exactly was the rights holder of these compositions? Most of the songs have multiple owners: For example, 50 percent might be owned by Warner Chapel, 33 percent might be owned by EMI, and 12 percent by Sony. Publishers cut songs up into little bits. They’re just like baseball cards. How do completely separate corporations end up owning the rights to old songs? When companies buy and sell pieces of each other, they also buy and sell the rights to all of these songs as part of the wheeling and dealing process. What ends up happening is that these cultural works don’t just get locked up by one corporation; they get locked up by a bunch of them. People advise me, “Why don’t you just ask the companies for permission?” But the cost of asking for permission is extremely high. All of the artists are dead, so I can’t ask their permission. And all of the works belong to these corporations, and the corporations won’t talk to normal people. If they don’t know who you are, they don’t return your calls or they just give you the runaround. They will only talk to lawyers and music supervisors, people who are paid intermediaries. We tried for months to contact the copyright holders directly, and they wouldn’t give us any information or respond to us, so I had to hire a lawyer to talk to them. Before I even got an estimate of what it would cost to license this music, I had to pay $15,000 to an intermediary. When I specified that the entire budget for the film was less than $200,000, they came back with the bargain-­basement amount of $220,000 to use Hanshaw’s music in my film. And before they would even talk to me about anything, I had to pay them $500 per song and sign a piece of paper promising not to make any money from it at film festivals, and that after one year, I wouldn’t even be able to show it anymore. You wouldn’t be able to show your own film? No, because it wouldn’t be my film, right? I would be stealing. Do you think that they were being that intransigent because of how prominent Annette Hanshaw’s songs were in the film? Not at all. This is just how they do business. I’m sure the corporation overall spends more money enforcing this stuff than they get from licensing fees. None of it has anything to do with creating anything. The $500 a song they want to charge me doesn’t even pay for the bureaucracy needed for them to figure out that the song is in their vaults. It was only through the pro bono work of the student attorneys at American University that they even found out that it was in their vaults. They don’t have to have responsibility to know that they own something. Speaking of enclosure and fences: these fences are invisible. Unlike real property that you have to register

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   143

and pay taxes and know where the fences are, with intellectual property there’s no copyright registry. There’s nothing. What do you think is the likelihood that they would have tracked you down if you had not contacted them first? Very small. They don’t need to track you down, because the problem arises when you actually want to release the film. No theater will show it without documentation, and no distributor will pick it up. You can’t get DVDs made, and you certainly can’t broadcast it unless you have evidence of copyright permissions. In fact, many of the broadcast channels are owned by the same corporations that own the rights to songs. They own the rights to our cultural history, they own the studios that produce existing culture, they own all the distribution channels, they own the networks, and they own the theaters. So the head branch doesn’t need to find out about your film and sue you if you try to get your film into the machinery of these channels. There always will be some other gatekeeper who will ask, “Where’s the documentation? Where are all the signed clearances?” I’m wondering if artists are trained to navigate these copyright minefields. Is indoctrination about copyright, or criticism of it, or just the logistics of it, part of what contemporary artists know or talk about? Artists who go to art school are told that copyright is their precious right, that their art is intellectual property. Most art schools include some sort of copyright class that tells them, “Don’t copy anything” and “Make sure everything you do is original.” But they never discuss the fact that these goals are impossible to sustain and do not reflect what is actually happening right now. But is there a subculture within the art community that criticizes our copyright regime? There’s not much of a subculture. Most artists, especially commercial artists, really buy into this. But I think it’s more than buying into it. They feel so passionately about it, it’s got to be more than someone just telling them that this is important. There’s something really profound and emotional going on. Do you see any tension at all, though, between an artist’s need to make money from her work and an open-­access regime? Of course not. There are so many artists that are getting acclaim and making so much more money by freeing their work than they would through the regular channels. Like Cory Doctorow says, people can share my book, and I sell more books. Over and over again, people say to me, “Well, that might work for you, but it won’t

144   Radical History Review

work for anyone else.” The denial is profound. I think it was Tim O’Reilly who originally said that the biggest danger facing authors isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. And it’s true. I was obscure until I freed my work. I’d like to muse a little bit about the connection between the phenomenon of the intellectual commons and the physical commons — ­the grassy field with the fence around it. Calling both a grassy field and ideas a “commons” is interesting, because one of them, the grassy field, is tangible and scarce, whereas the other one is not actually limited. A lot of the conversation that happens around imaginary property is that people think that it’s real. The “enclosure of the commons” metaphor definitely works for both, but a grassy field is very different from culture in that there’s only so much grassy field. A grassy field is actually real; if, for example, you take a bulldozer to your grassy field, then the grassy field is ruined. But if you take your bulldozer to a copy of your work, then there are all these other copies. It doesn’t affect the idea. It only affects one copy. So the concept of the “tragedy of the commons” doesn’t really apply to intellectual/cultural works at all. Real things are limited. If you don’t take care of the field, or if you overgraze it, then there’s not enough grass for the other sheep. With cultural works, it’s the exact opposite. The more they’re shared, the more valuable they become. People apply these ideas about scarcity to culture, and culture is not scarce. People are thinking of the “problem of abundance”: the idea that people don’t know what to do with abundance. But there is no tragedy of the cultural commons. I’ve read justifications of copyright where people say that if culture is shared too much the value of the work is diluted. Who came up with that idea? The opposite is true: works do not become less valuable the more they’re shared; they become more valuable the more they’re shared. What on earth are they talking about when they say that sharing dilutes the value of the work? When you consider that visceral reaction against what people consider to be the infringement on their sacred property, do you think they’re somehow carrying over the idea of things that can get used up into the idea that the cultural commons needs to be protected? They confuse symbols with things. And actually that goes back to the Hindu fundamentalists. The Hindu fundamentalists, or any religious fundamentalists, talk about denigrating “our” gods or denigrating “our” god. You’re talking about a symbol; you’re not talking about anything real. All those gods are still there — ­not that I’m denigrating them to begin with. All those other versions of the Ramayana are still there. The only thing that would actually harm any cultural work is to suppress it and censor it and lock it up, which is what they’re doing.

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   145

It’s not just the fundamentalists. When I released “Copying Is Not Theft,” all these people said, “copying is theft, what are you talking about? Copying is theft.” I love to see things from all points of view, but I just can’t get over what appears to me to be the truth. I think maybe because people think they’re taking food out of the mouths of starving artists, the general perception is, “I want to support the arts, so I’m not going to copy.” It’s been framed that way. Karl Fogel did a video documentary called Public Perceptions of Copyright. They went around Chicago and asked people what they knew about copyright and what they thought about it, and a lot of people feel really conflicted. On the one hand, they think this stuff is silly, but on the other hand they do feel like they’re doing something wrong if they’re copying. Also, I think people are confused about abundance: How can I get something without paying for it? If I’m not paying for something, I’m doing something wrong, because it’s something I’ve always paid for. I would really love people to find more ways to support artists, because everybody agrees that the artist should be supported. In fact, that’s, ironically, most people’s reason for supporting copyright: they believe it’s a way for artists to be supported. Of course, it doesn’t work at all, and it actually harms artists. I love that the Internet now does provide a way for audiences to support artists directly, through the donate button, which really works. It’s actually a very simple and excellent model for supporting artists. My favorite way of being paid for Sita Sings the Blues is: download the movie for free and, if you like it, send me a donation. That’s perfect. There’s no middleman, and I get more money, and they pay less money, and everybody’s happy. When you were making your film, did you ever try to claim “ fair use” — ­the doctrine that supports legal copying under certain limited circumstances — ­to help your case? There’s definitely a fair use argument to be made for the use of those songs. I was advised to pay money to clear the rights, because if I did decide to make a fair use defense, it would have taken years and more money to defend it. There are precedents with fair use, but they’ve all involved documentaries. With fiction films, not so much. Also, I used the Hanshaw songs in their entirety rather than using only clips from them. So making a fair use argument really would have been pushing it, and it would have been a really, really expensive thing to push. Copyright law wasn’t created for artists in the first place; it was for publishers. The whole concept of copyright was originally introduced by the British crown to censor works, not to protect them. The fear was that printing presses would pro-

146   Radical History Review

duce seditious pamphlets, which they were in fact doing, so the crown had to control that somehow. They could not let people just print whatever they wanted willy-­nilly, because they might — ­and probably would — ­print antigovernment stuff. So they created the Board of Stationers. Printers had to be licensed and the stationers had to register everything they printed. That was fine. Censorship was controlled. But then printers in Ireland started using printing presses, and these Irish presses were competing with the British presses and undercutting them, and that’s when copyright was created with the invention of the Statute of Anne in 1709. It’s definitely not a coincidence that this was the same time when the Enclosure Acts were about to be passed in England; it was part of the same political moment, when ideas about private property were solidifying. It was also the time of European colonization, and the breaking up of corporately owned indigenous lands in the New World. I would think that the process of eighteenth-­century colonization would have had a lot to do with this. There are all of these myths about the Native Americans saying, “You can’t own stuff!” and colonists coming and saying, “Sure we can. We own everything. You sold it to us for a string of beads.” When I think about those myths, I don’t even realize that there was this concept of commons in Europe at the time. We usually think that Europeans had no concept of the commons and came to the New World and just thought they owned all the land. But actually, for many Europeans, common ownership of land was real. And they fought for it fiercely. Well into the modern era, people in England were still pitching military battles and violent uprisings to fight for the commons. Talking about bloody battles, I sometimes wonder if this is what it’s coming to: the IP (Intellectual Property) Wars. Recently I published an essay, “Redefining Property: Lessons from American History,” where I compared pro-­copyright rhetoric with pro-­slavery rhetoric. That comparison makes perfect sense. It’s in the early nineteenth century when battles were being pitched between abolitionists, on one hand, and pro-­slavery advocates who wanted to assert the sanctity of property over any other kind of rights. By the 1850s, many were asking: do my property rights supersede the rights of this person to not be owned? Of course, it first had to be established that these people were “human.” Right. It’s like establishing that culture is alive. Culture is obviously not human, but it’s a living thing, and we’re killing it by owning it. I have this sort of spiritual theory that only dead things can be owned, and when you own something you make

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   147

it dead. So, when you own a person, you make him or her dead, and when you own culture, you make culture dead as well. Sita Sings the Blues has been “ free licensed.” What exactly does that mean? The license I chose is called Creative Commons Attribution-­Share Alike, and it is the best one that I could find, given our unfortunate copyright regime. We don’t have a copyright registry; everything is automatically copyrighted. If I blow my nose, it’s copyrighted. It doesn’t even matter if I register it or sign my name to it or anything. I own that expression. The current default is total restriction. So Creative Commons makes these fairly standardized licenses that are designed to lift some of these restrictions. Some of the licenses are actually very restrictive, and in fundamental ways they are as problematic as standard copyright. The most popular Creative Commons licenses are noncommercial, which means that there is still a commercial monopoly on the work. Another popular restriction is the “no derivatives” option, which means that no one can build on the work without your permission. Sita uses Attribution-­Share Alike, which means that you can sell it, you can build on it, you can do absolutely anything you want to do with it. There’s only one restriction, however, which is that you have to release it under the same license under which the original film was created. So you can make derivative works, but you cannot put a monopoly around the derivative work, and that’s different than public domain. I don’t want there ever to be a monopoly around the work at all. The problem is that everything is copyrighted by default, and what I really would like is for my work to exist in a world where it couldn’t be monopolized. The “attribution” part of it is interesting. Technically, copies and derivatives have to credit me as the source. I do want my work to be credited to me, but I don’t think it’s important or necessary to have that legal component of it, because I really believe that a community enforces that much better than the law does. No one would be sued for plagiarizing Shakespeare. If I publish “Hamlet by Nina Paley,” no one is going to sue me. The freer my work is, the less plagiarized it will be, because the more people know what it is. I think what’s really cool about free culture is that it actually protects work much better from plagiarism. In a prior interview, you raised the issue of the crucial difference between plagiarism and copying — ­one obviously is theft, and one isn’t. Are you saying that the difference is attribution? Yes, plagiarism is just copying without citing your sources. But most copyright infringement is not plagiarism. In fact, almost no copyright infringement is plagiarism. Until I paid through the nose to clear the songs I used in Sita, I was infringing copyright, but I always attributed the sources. They were in the credits. When

148   Radical History Review

people share files, they don’t put their name on every single file they share. When they share a Madonna song, they’re not claiming that they’re Madonna. It may be copyright infringement, but it is not plagiarism. So if you dispense with monopoly rights as part of the way you have chosen to put your work in the public domain, then there’s absolutely nothing that I couldn’t do with it except try to establish some kind of copyright claim over it? Right. Although technically, even in our regime, you are forced by our laws to do that; you’re automatically given a copyright claim over it. It’s just that the license that they release it under says that you are then compelled to release it under the same license. Otherwise, yes, you can do anything. When you first described the theme of this issue [of RHR] to me, you reminded me that property itself is a weird concept for many people. It’s not necessarily the natural thing that we all take it to be. I grew up in a property-­based society. But it’s very easy to forget that at one time, it was a really foreign concept that you could own land. And now, it’s sacred. It’s the sacred fundament of capitalism. Do you think that activism that pushes at the limits of what makes sense to us as property could be a way into a much broader social critique of property in general? Do you see it inevitably leading there? No, definitely not. In fact, there are these libertarians; they are really anti –  intellectual property, because they are so pro-­real property. For them, real property and intellectual property can’t coexist, because if you enforce intellectual property, then you can’t own a copy of anything. If you pay money for a book, you never really own that book if it’s someone else’s “intellectual property.” Somebody who believes in property would believe that if you bought that book, you should be able to do anything you want with it. I differ from these libertarians in that they seem to have a really passionate feeling towards physical property, which I don’t. But that said, I do actually think that if I buy something, I should be able to do what I want with it as long as I’m not hurting someone. I’m relieved that I don’t even have to talk about real property, and, in fact, I can be a staunch defender of real property and a staunch critic of imaginary property at the same time. I’m sorry, I have to call it imaginary property. Calling it intellectual property just reinforces this idea that such a thing exists, and that’s just a ridiculous concept. Even the term intellectual property is a very recent one. It’s only in the last few decades that it even started popping up in course syllabi in law schools. And once you start calling it property, you start believing it’s property. My latest video, for instance, “Copying Is Not Theft,” is being shared by more and more

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   149

people. And some are saying, “But it is theft! It is theft!” The point of the video, though, is to say, “Look, it might be copyright infringement, but that’s not the same as theft.” To me, calling culture “property” seems like a really dangerous thing, to begin with. In some cases, culture has been called property to protect it. But things go extinct all the time. I would love it if copyright went extinct. The idea of copyright is culture, too. We’ll always have history. But things change. Things turn into other things. Part of evolution is extinction. I know that sounds horrible on the surface, but I really believe that the biggest danger to culture is censorship. The trend towards a monoculture is occurring because we have so much censorship in the form of copyright. Any sort of building on existing culture is considered infringement, which is all done in the name of protecting that culture. The assumption is that if you build on it, then you’re demolishing it. But it’s quite the opposite. I know you encountered attempts to censor Sita Sings the Blues, but did you encounter any problems in trying to circulate or distribute it? The laws in France protect French cinema culture by forbidding films from being freely shared. Sita was released in cinemas right before they changed the law. They have this law called HADOPI, which is a “three-­strikes-­you’re-­out” copyright infringement law. Meaning you could be banned? Meaning you could lose your Internet access. According to the French distributor of Sita, this is somehow related to the cinema release. There are laws in France that say that if a film’s going to appear in cinemas, it can’t be on DVD or accessible in any other way. Only after a certain number of months, it can be released on DVD, and then on the Internet. So, the fact that Sita was already available on the Internet means that it wasn’t supposed to be in the cinemas. Apparently, the distributor was really concerned that if it didn’t release the film quickly, it would not be able to release the film at all. Something like this is the case at the Academy Awards, too; supposedly, for a film to qualify for an Oscar, it needs at least a weeklong commercial run in cinemas before it’s available in any other format. And of course, Sita was shared on the Internet first. In France, you’re not supposed to share culture freely because they believe that if cinemas don’t have a monopoly on films for a certain amount of times, then nobody will go to the cinema.

150   Radical History Review

Isn’t this attitude similar to when, in the 1970s, a cabal of film studios tried to suppress video cassette recorders because they claimed that the new technology would kill the cinema? No one seems to have learned a lesson from that! Because attendance at French cinema also keeps declining, corporations think that the answer to this is to reinforce the monopolies and to make the laws even more draconian. But I think that’s precisely why attendance is declining. Like with Sita, the more people share a film, the more people want to see it in cinemas. Because the film now has cultural relevance, and the film has been shared among many different viewers, people want to have a shared experience with other people in the cinema. But the more that they clamp down and the more they try to enforce a monopoly, the fewer people will go to the cinemas. How would you characterize your post-­Sita work — ­in particular, the film shorts called Minute Memes? They’re shorts, each one addressing a different concept related to copyright reform and intellectual freedom — ­really intellectual freedom more than anything. We’re trying to just tackle one little concept at a time. The first one is called “Copying Is Not Theft,” and we originally released it with a scratch track of my voice and invited everybody or anybody to record new sound tracks for it. A lot of people did, and they’re really cool. Ultimately, we ended up hiring Nick Phelps, a musician that I collaborated with in San Francisco and now lives in Belgium, and he did a very digestible version. But all the versions are in circulation. I hope people keep recording more sound tracks, and I hope someone comes up with an even better sound track. There have been some really great ones. The reason we made “Copying Is Not Theft” first is because the big media companies keep telling us copying is theft over and over again, to the point where people actually believe that copying is theft. So we just wanted to show that copying is not theft. Much to my amazement, it’s been really controversial. I’m just so puzzled. How can you argue with this? It’s not theft! Do you see this as a form of collaborative art, kind of crowd sourcing? There’s a lot of talk about collaborative art. But collaboration is different from crowd sourcing. I’m really sort of a hard-­core individualist when it comes to making art. I am beholden to my vision, and my vision is really personal. I spend a lot of time alone, just me and my vision, and I like it that way. I don’t really want anybody else’s opinion or ideas intruding on that when I’m working. But when I’m done, it’s like: have at it.

Chazkel | Cultural Commons: An Interview with Nina Paley   151

Figure 4. Still from short video, “Copying Is Not Theft (Minute Meme #1),” by Nina Paley (2009). CC-­by-­SA

And do you no longer have any legal responsibility to it if, say, someone adds something to it that is libelous? They can do whatever they want. They can change all the words. They can change it to “Copying Is Theft” and “Nina Paley’s an Asshole.” They can truly do whatever they want. But I don’t feel remotely threatened by that, because my versions are still there. Go ahead and demolish your copy and distribute demolished copies. You can’t demolish my copy, and you just can’t harm it. Have you gotten your short films into animation festivals? I haven’t been submitting them to animation festivals, actually, and that’s an interesting question. It costs money and time to send to animation festivals. In fact, one of the upcoming Minute Memes is going to be about attention and the cost of attention because, like I say, attention is scarce and information is not. When you pay to enter a film festival, you are basically paying for attention. I do want my shorts to get more attention, but for the average film festival, you have to take into account the fee, the postage, and the making of your disc, because you have to send it on a disc and not just a link online, plus the time it takes to fill out the form. Do you see copyleft and the question of free sharing of culture and art coming to dominate your work completely? Well, I don’t know about “dominate completely.” There are other things I grapple with, but freeing my work has changed my life. It has brought up issues of control

152   Radical History Review

and faith. So many artists would never trust their audience. It took a lot for me to take this particular leap, and the consequences have been so positive to me, positive beyond my wildest dreams. You are an activist in that you are making sure that your works stay in the public domain in perpetuity. Do you think of yourself as an activist beyond that? I do think of myself as an activist. But I don’t think I change people’s minds by arguing with them, and I argue with them a lot. It’s a habit, but it doesn’t do much good. I really think that the greatest impact I can have is the fact that I’m freeing my works, that I’m transparent about where my money’s coming from, and that I’m just trying to tell the truth. Daily I need to remind myself that I’m not going to be able to convince the people whom I really want to convince. All I can do is put one foot ahead of the other. I freed the film, and nothing terrible has happened. In fact, only good things have happened, and anyone who’s paying attention will see that. Under the structural regime that we have, does choosing copyleft because of political commitment actually limit the distribution of your art? Is the ideal scenario that you’re talking about — ­the scenario in which not claiming monopoly rights actually increases your income and the dissemination of your work — ­only true in an ideal world? It’s proven true for me. What I love about copyleft in my work is that I win no matter what other people do. If other people don’t free their works, that means that there’s less attention being taken up by other works, and more attention is available for my work, so free works have a competitive advantage right now for attention. Of course, if everybody frees their work, then that’s great, too, because then we would live in a free society. I would lose that competitive advantage that I have because my work is free. But I think that it would be good for my free works to compete with everyone else’s free works; competition’s good and the best stuff gets passed around the most, and I think that’s an effective filtering mechanism. So, it totally works for me now. Free works incredibly well in an unfree society.

curated spaces

Authorized Disruption John Hawke and Orange Work, 2005 – 2010 John Hawke

Questions that currently motivate my thoughts . . . . What kind of public spaces

may exist in the public imaginary? How can these spaces be at least partially realized? Could one paint a typology of disciplinary spaces of our present built environment? Ranging from studio work to architectural urban interventions, my work creates urban spaces, with paintings that practice models of relations, and interventions that push and provoke in concrete space — as experimental counterresponses to prevailing logics. Beginning with the collaborative platform “Orange Work” (OW) in 2004, projects recode street spaces and remind of utopian possibilities of communality. In both painting and projects, the primary organizing conceit has been to adopt the role of construction worker and employ the florescent color orange that signals: AUTHORIZED DISRUPTION. This color (a painterly concern) orders “look here,” “stand back,” or “keep out.” So to appropriate it is a form of spatial jamming. Street projects have blurred categories of public and private, sculpture and building site, stealth art and public works. They necessitate a renegotiation of expectations by all parties — pedestrians, landowners, and police — while also suggesting an alternative arrangement with the opportunity for a public occupation of a site made manifold.

Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-021 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

153

154

Radical History Review

The latest projects have extended the working method from architectural constructions to include signage that encodes and inscribes our street-level behavior and experience. Bus Stop (Brooklyn, NY) John Hawke and Sancho Silva Duration: 56 days (April-May 2005)

Intention: to build at gathering point (bus line), to refigure normative city structure for greater social and practical value Action: design of shelter with facing benches; OW portfolio posted on inner wall, nonsense legalese text affixed to outer wall; maintenance regime, eventual removal of structure by artists Reaction: immediate, constant use; acceptance by bus drivers; graffiti tagging; anonymous maintenance person

Hawke | authorized disruption: John Hawke and Orange Work, 2005–2010

155

156

Radical History Review

Rest Area — Open House (Brooklyn, NY) John Hawke and Sancho Silva, “Mind the Gap” exhibition curated by Eva Diaz and Beth Stryker, Smack Mellon. Duration: 5 weeks (March 15 – April 22, 2006)

Intention: to work at border area where gentrification meets public housing Action: two-week on-site construction of public lounge wearing vests, helmets; employment of commercial signs and icons; discussion, video interview with local residents Reaction: enthusiastic reception and use by residents of adjacent public housing — differing by time of day — old men, children, teens, respectively; maintenance regime adopted by local persons

Hawke | authorized disruption: John Hawke and Orange Work, 2005–2010

157

158

Radical History Review

Solarium Complex (Oslo, Norway) John Hawke and Sancho Silva, exhibition curated by Suzanne Jaschko, Atelier Nord. Duration: 21 days (September – October 2007)

Intention: to posit foreign structure in contested park area enabling normally private behavior (sleeping, lounging) in public space; disturbing the spatial status quo and enabling new encounters and spatial negotiations Action: creation of solarium structure (with bed, large lounge chair, storage spaces, ashtray) with two movable wall sections attached to enable reconfigurations of space, picnic table, and fixed walls to designate the area as a complex and to provide privacy Reaction: immediate usage for overnight sleeping; movement of the hinged walls to close the structure (space claimed by an individual); usage by drug users and dealers who are eventually displaced by a permanent encampment by homeless individuals; eventual police investigation and complaint, leading to removal by artist team with help of above users

Hawke | authorized disruption: John Hawke and Orange Work, 2005–2010

159

Benchmark (Brooklyn, NY) John Hawke, exhibition curated by Sarah Lookofsky and Lillian Fellman, Apex Art. Duration: 107 days (November 2007 – February 2008) for Apex Art, “Land Grab,” 2008

Intention: to rethink street furniture; expand disciplinary parameters to allow for ease of use Action: creation of bus stop shelter with reclining bench, coffee table, variable-height benches, coat hooks, standing bar with cup holder, wind break; sign manufactured by artist in style of parasitic advertising posted on adjacent fence; maintenance of structure over time (removing accumulated trash) Reaction: usage by people waiting for bus, questioning of artist by adjacent landowners, removal of one of three signs by unknown persons, eventual removal by builder

160

Radical History Review

Hawke | authorized disruption: John Hawke and Orange Work, 2005–2010

161

7 Sign Revisions (Lafayette/ Walker Streets, NY) John Hawke Duration: ongoing (March 2009 – ) for Art in General, “Actions for Urban Spaces,” 2009

Intention: to reimagine the disciplinary parameters and point of view of parking and historic preservation signage Action: creation of professionally fabricated aluminum street signage and installation on NYC signposts Reaction (ongoing): tacit acceptance as legitimate signage; consternation on reading by members of public in adjacent lot

curated spaces

NSK the Improbable state of History and the History of an Improbable state Alexei Monroe

NSK is a so-called micronation or virtual state that grew out of the Neue Slowe-

nische Kunst arts movement in 1980s Slovenia, which at that time was still a Yugoslav republic. It comprised various artistic groups working within and across various media united by a “retrograde” approach to history and art. NSK (re)generated their “New Slovene Art” from history and ideology as much as from the numerous artistic, literary, musical, and dramatic sources they sampled. Unlike the avant-garde pioneers whose works they reprocessed, the retrogardists renounced any idea of surpassing history and deliberately, even compulsively, sought out and attempted to work through some of the most traumatic moments of their local historical and cultural contexts. This included the suppression of the avant-garde under Stalinism, the historical suppression of Slovene culture by other cultures (above all by Germanic culture), and the slow, ongoing death of Yugoslav socialist idealism. NSK explicitly announced that it believed in a return to such repressed moments and in effecting what I term “cultural reprocessing.” This amounted to an attempt to recover something of value in historical defeats and traumas, not by negating or denying them, but through a process described by the NSK founding group Laibach as “demasking and recapitulation.” In describing the effect of its controversial interventions, Laibach appropriated Joseph Beuys’s term social

Radical History Review Issue 109 (Winter 2011) doi 10.1215/01636545-2010-022 © 2011 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

162

Monroe | NsK: the History of an Improbable state

163

sculpture — a concept particularly useful for understanding the spontaneous social formation that has grown up around NSK. One of the most productive (but also volatile) elements they subjected to this process was the state, not just the local Yugoslav state or the totalitarian states of the twentieth century but the notion of the state. State-related concepts and motifs were integral to the construction of NSK as one of the most developed contemporary examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art). In 1992, in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia and Slovene independence, NSK announced itself as a state in time, symbolically seceding from a newly seceded state in the name of what it also termed “the first global State of the Universe.” As a follow-up, the state gradually began to issue passports and to promote itself, setting in motion a sequence of events that continues to unfold. In May 1992 NSK publicly announced the formation of the state and opened its first embassy in Moscow.1 This action initiated a series of spatial appropriations during which the nonterritorial state would temporarily materialize, accepting new citizens and exposing audiences to NSK aesthetics (and to the questions that these raise). Perhaps the most monumental of these appropriations took place in Berlin in 1993, but embassies and consulates have opened and NSK state events have taken place in various locations including Ghent, Florence, Umag (which hosted a “kitchen consulate”), Glasgow, and Dublin. Producing realistic passports for its citizens was a natural extension of NSK’s statist aesthetics and a clear conceptual statement. Yet once they were issued to specific individuals in specific political contexts, they began to generate improbability. In 1995 NSK held an event in Sarajevo. As usual they issued NSK passports to those seeking them; however, this was the end of the war in Bosnia, when people were desperate to escape. As well as standard passports, NSK also sometimes issue “diplomatic” versions. In Sarajevo the result was that some people bearing these passports managed to escape the city. They took advantage of their self-assigned diplomatic status and the unwillingness of officials to challenge them at the risk of creating a diplomatic incident, even with an obscure central or east European state. With the spread of these stories, the perceived usefulness of the passports has increased. What began as a conceptual artifact sought mainly by followers of NSK and then by artists and others who encountered them, began to be sought by people who understood them and their imagined possibilities absolutely literally. In the past few years NSK has experienced a massive surge in citizenship applications from Nigeria, where, despite efforts to explain the virtual character of the NSK state, the idea that citizenship represents a direct route to life in Europe has taken hold. Like certain European and U.S. citizens, Nigerians have taken the state more seriously than its creators, investing in it either transnational/utopian ideals or an understandable desire to escape oppressive poverty and corruption. NSK’s practice has been based on an awareness that unprocessed history will

164

Radical History Review

always force itself through cracks in the structure of ideological, cultural, historical, and political regimes and through reality itself, yet its creators have frequently been surprised at how their state has interacted with reality. Alongside “official” NSK events, citizens have created their own initiatives, which have materialized in unforeseeable ways and locations. In 2007 Icelandic citizens held an NSK embassy event in Reykjavik, displaying NSK artifacts alongside local reinterpretations of NSK aesthetics. The “NSK Reading Room,” created by Christian Matzke in the United States, is another example of an unauthorized project that has gained acceptance by NSK itself. Looking back over the period since the creation of the NSK State, we see a sequence of compounded improbabilities. NSK acted out a totalitarian belief in the “iron laws of history,” but they and their creation have actually been subject to and exploited what could be termed an “iron law of improbability.” The NSK groups created the system of aesthetics that led to the NSK State from the unpredictable, ungraspable outbreak of forces that structured and mutated the late modernist Yugoslav cultural-political matrix and the dynamic, fissile energy associated with this phenomenon continues to shape events. So although NSK has attempted to assume state(ist) historiographic functions and define itself, it has constantly been subject to the actions, interpretations, and projections of its citizens. The culmination of this phase of the state’s development was what is perhaps the most improbable (and certainly the most unpredictable) NSK-related event to date: the holding of a first NSK Citizens’ Congress in Berlin.2 This event assembled citizens and some of those involved in the creation of the state to discuss, interpret, and develop this improbable and still-evolving formation. Time will show whether the concrete but unpredictable events and associations that this virtual state has generated can be shaped by its diverse citizens into a sustainable modus vivendi, either literal or symbolic.

Monroe | NsK: the History of an Improbable state

Figure 1. IRWIN, NSK Embassy Moscow, 1992. Image courtesy of IRWIN. Photo by Jozˇe Suhadolnik

165

166

Radical History Review

Figure 2. NSK, NSK State Berlin, Volksbühne Berlin, 1993. Image used by permission of IRWIN/New Collectivism

Monroe | NsK: the History of an Improbable state

Figure 3. IRWIN, NSK Embassy Ghent, 1993. Image used by permission of IRWIN/New Collectivism

167

168

Radical History Review

Figure 4. NSK, NSK State Passport. Image used by permission of IRWIN/New Collectivism

Monroe | NsK: the History of an Improbable state

169

Figure 5. NSK, NSK State Sarajevo, National Theatre Sarajevo, 1995. Image used by permission of IRWIN/New Collectivism

Figure 6. The Retrogarde Reading Room houses one of the largest collections of reference material on the NSK art collective in the United States. Photo by Christian Matzke

170

Radical History Review

Figure 7. In autumn 2010 citizens gathered in Berlin to discuss the future of the NSK state. Image used by permission of Haris Hararis

Monroe | NsK: the History of an Improbable state

171

CURATED SPACES provides a focus on contemporary artists whose work addresses social, historical, or political subject matter.

Notes 1.

2.

For further details, see Neue Slowenische Kunst, NSK Embassy Moscow: How the East Sees the East (Irwin, in collaboration with Apt-Art International and Ridzina Gallery, Moscow, May 10 – June 10, 1992), eds. Obalne Galerije Piran / Loza Gallery Koper, Koper [1992]. For further information on the NSK State and the congress, see www.congress.nskstate .com.

notes on contributors

Marco Armiero is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He holds a tenured position as a senior researcher at the National Research Council in Italy. He has studied environmental conflicts, nature and national identity, and migration and the environment. He is the coeditor, with Marcus Hall, of Nature and History in Modern Italy (2010). David A. Chang is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832 – 1929 (2010). He is currently researching a book on indigenous Hawaiian global geography in the long nineteenth century. Amy Chazkel is an associate professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York, and is a member of the editorial collective for Radical History Review. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life (forthcoming), as well as of articles on petty gambling and the social history of incarceration in urban Brazil. John F. Collins is an associate professor of anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian “Racial Democracy,” a study of the making of a UNESCO Historical Center in Salvador, Brazil, is forthcoming. He is currently conducting fieldwork for a new project on hunters of white-­tailed deer in central New Jersey. Robert Gioielli is currently a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is completing a manuscript that explores the relationship between urban decline and environmental politics in the postwar United States. David Harvey is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Director of CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and the author of numerous books, articles, and lectures. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly forty years. John Hawke received his MFA in painting and MS in art history from the Pratt Institute in 2002, where he initiated Orange Work, an ongoing project with Pratt alumnus Sancho Silva. Hawke has been a Kress Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and a participant in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. His studio work is represented by Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Pace Editions in New York.

172

Notes on Contributors   173

Robert P. Marzec is an associate professor of English literature, critical theory, and post­ colonial studies at Purdue University and the associate editor of Modern Fiction Studies. The author of An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature (2007) and the editor of Postcolonialism: The First Thirty Years (2010), he is currently at work on a second book project entitled “Blood and Soil: The Struggle for Inhabitancy in a Postcolonial World.” He has published in such journals as boundary 2, Rhizomes, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and Global South. Alexei Monroe is a London-­based independent cultural theorist. He holds a PhD in communication and image studies from the University of Kent. He is the author of Pluralni monolit (2003) and Interrogation Machine (2005), on the Slovene group Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) arts movement. He also writes on the aesthetics and politics of electronic music and wider cultural issues, including an ongoing project on the cultural history of the Stag. His work has been published in Contemporary Music Review, Central Europe Review, Kinoeye, New Moment, and other publications in various countries. He is a founder of the Industrialised Culture Research Network and is also active as a DJ. For more information see pluralmachine.blogspot.com Dara Orenstein is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation examines the history and geography of foreign-­trade zones. David Serlin is an associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and is a member of the editorial collective for Radical History Review. He served most recently as the editor of Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (2010).

Guidelines for Contributors

Radical History Review seeks to further political debate among historians, to explore radical interpretations of the past, and to stimulate cooperation and interaction among all progressive academics and activists. Radical History Review is organized exclusively around theme-specific issues (i.e., world history, the Americas, empire, transnational labor movements, and so forth). The journal welcomes submissions of articles and essays that correspond with the issues being planned and with currently posted calls for papers. Submissions that are unrelated to these themes will not be considered. We urge readers to check the RHR Web site regularly for updates on future issues. Submit all manuscripts in the format of 8.5 3 11 inch or A4 pages with 1.5 inch left and right margins; all material—extracts, notes, and so on—should be double-spaced. Contributions should not exceed 35–40 pages. Send each manuscript electronically as an e-mail attachment to the Managing Editor at [email protected]. The author’s name, affiliation, mailing address, e-mail address, and telephone number should appear on a separate cover page. Radical History Review reserves the right to copyedit manuscripts to conform to the journal’s style, which follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. Spelling will be edited to conform to American English. Pieces that are substantially edited will be sent to the authors for review before publication. Submission of an article implies that it has not been simultaneously submitted or previously published elsewhere. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish any material under copyright. Contributors will be asked to assign their copyright, under certain conditions, to MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.