Imperial Debris

IMPERIAL DEBRIS
IMPERIAL DEBRIS
EDITED BY
On Ruins and Ruination
A N N L A U R A S TO L E R
Duke University PressDurham and London2013
2013 Duke University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
All rights reserved
Imperial debris : on ruins and ruination / edited by
Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper
Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng
Information Systems, Inc.
Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 9 are
reproduced by permission of
the American Anthropological
Association from Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008). Not for
sale or further reproduction.
Frontispiece:
photo by John Collins.
Ann Laura Stoler.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 8223-5348-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978- 0- 8223-5361-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Postcolonialism.2. PostcolonialismSocial
aspects.I. Stoler, Ann Laura.
JV 152.I 4742013
325.3dc23
2012044772
This volume is dedicated to

IMOGEN BUNTING,
who died suddenly of heart failure

at the age of twenty-five, in
the midst of work on this project.
A brilliant graduate student in
anthropology at the New School
for Social Research, Imogen was
a fearlessly ethical being, an
incandescent soul, and a political
activist who infused us all with
the vital demands she made on our
intellectual and quotidian lives.
CONTENTS
Prefaceix
IntroductionThe Rot Remains: From Ruins to Ruination
A N N L AU R A S TO L E R1
PA RT I . D E C O M P O S I T I O N S O F M AT T E R A N D M I N D
1.
An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in Congo

N A N C Y RO S E H U N T39
2. The Coolie: An Unfinished Epic

E . VA L E N T I N E DA N I E L67
3. Empires Ruins: Detroit to the Amazon
G R E G G R A N D I N115
PA RT I I . L I V I N G I N RU I N S : D E G R A DAT I O N S
A N D R E G E N E R AT I O N S
4. Detritus in Durban: Polluted Environs and

the Biopolitics of Refusal
S H A R A D C H A R I131
5. Ruins, Redemption, and Brazils Imperial Exception

J O H N C O L L I N S162
6. When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square
A R I E L L A A ZO U L AY194
PA RT I I I . A N T I C I PAT I N G T H E I M P E R I A L F U T U R E
7. The Void: Invisible Ruins on the Edges of Empire

G A S T N G O R D I L LO227
8. Engineering the Future as Nuclear Ruin
J O S E P H M A S C O252
9. The Future in Ruins
V Y J AYA N T H I R AO287
Bibliography323
Contributors355
Index357
PREFACE
It would be hard to write about ruins today without acknowledging Walter Benjamins imprint on the politicized readings we bring to them. When
this volume was still in early formation in 2005, his writings on ruins had
long made them a productive and privileged site of critical historical inquiry.
Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morsss enabling reading of his Arcades project in
The Dialectics of Seeing, fifteen years earlier, had helped turn many of us away
from the nostalgic European gaze upon ruins, to treat them as symptom
and substance of historys destructive force, to take the measure of the fragility of capitalist culture from the decaying structures left scattered across
our urban and rural geographies, to attend to the force of these fragments
and the traces of violence left in its wake. He would seem to be an obvious
reference for what follows, and in sundry ways contributions to this volume
build on his reflections.
But, strangely perhaps, because of the nature of the conversations that
elicited this project (and the convergence of persons and concerns it joined),
it was not Benjamins treatment of ruins that served as this volumes inspiration. It is around processes of ruination as much as imperial ruins that
this volume turns. Ruination was neither Benjamins focus nor the process
he sought to explicitly name. Our centering on ruination shifts the emphasis
from the optics of ruins to the ongoing nature of imperial process. The latter
joins psychological disablements to the imperial genealogies of dislocation
and dispossession.
Our sights from the beginning were set on the search for a vocabulary and
analytics that might speak to the stark and occluded durabilities of imperial
effects, to their tangible and intangible effects. At a moment when ruins
theory had not yet been named, Adriana Petryna, Vyjayanthi Rao, and I
from the varied places and problematics with which we each workedset
our sights on something more than ruins per se. We sought to identify
neither the political aesthetics of ruins nor the aftermaths of catastrophic
destruction, but rather the deeply saturated, less spectacular forms in which
colonialisms leave their mark. Our attention has been on the lives of those
whose sensibilities have been marked by the ruins in which they live, and on
the possibilities foreclosed by how they have had to live in them.
In the process of conceptualizing our project, language choice has been
key. Nietzsche may have been right that concepts are dead metaphors, but
they can also be generative sites for concept formation. Or in the absence of
concepts, metaphors speak to the nonspoken, to the nonconceptual sensibilities that escape consolidated conceptualized forms. As Hans Blumberger
suggests, metaphors are anything but seamless similarity. They are disturbances. They can be disruptive, suggest new analytic space and new associations, even as they seem smoothly to line up with that to which they refer.
Metaphors can be political actors when they stretch our visions to new domains. Metaphors are never precise, as Blumberger reminds us. This gap is
where their traction lies.
In the initial conference for this volume, in 2006, scarred landscapes
shared a place with imperial debris in our conversations. But it was Derek
Walcotts figurative language that seemed to offer the analytic capacity to
join the waste of bodies, the degradation of environment, and the psychic
weight of colonial processes that entangle people, soil, and things. Rot,
debris, and detritus held us fast. In identifying colonialism as the rot
that remains, Walcotts metaphors take on a living valence. Rot opens
to the psychic and material eating away of bodies, environment, and possibilities. Rot contains an active substance. It is hard to wipe out. Like debris, it is not where one always expects it to be. Nor is it always immediately
visible. Such references have more than poetic purchase; they hold tight to
the ongoing work of debris-making that we have sought to retain.
Like ruins, debris is constructed, ruination is made. Debris speaks to
something else. Leftovers are assigned as detritus because they are rendered into neglect or valorized for insistent remembrance. The effort to
make visible colonial processes that escape that naming has been enhanced
by many who helped us think this project as it was forming. At the initial
xP R E FAC E
conference on Scarred Landscapes and Imperial Debris, Claudia Baracchi,

Jacqueline Brown, Faisal Devji, Diane Fox, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Hugh Raffles,
Claudio Lomnitz, Karolina Szmagalska-Follis, Jonathan Veitch, Hylton
White, and Gary Wilder each pushed the conversations in new directions.
The anthropology graduate students David Bond, Imogen Bunting, and Joe
Stefano intellectually fueled our deliberations. Julia Hell and George Steinmetz were valued interlocutors early on. Anonymous readers for the special
issue that appeared in Cultural Anthropology were as well. Readers from Duke
University Press offered enabling challenges to our formulations. I thank
Kim and Mike Fortun for their incisive work as editors of Cultural Anthropology, and Ken Wissoker for encouraging us from start to end.
Graduate students at the New School for Social Research were extraordinary contributors to this venture. Vasiliki Touhoulitis brought the volume together for its initial submission to Duke University Press. Charles
McDonald copyedited the revised contributions, offered substantially important revisions, submitted the final manuscript, and crafted the index.
Katie Detwiler offered her insights throughout to its formulation. Students
in my seminar The Colonial and Postcolonial Order of Things offered acute
assessments of what worked and what did not. Most important, they kept
me alert to what I remind them of all the time: namely, that books should
be read not as new truths but as interventions in an ongoing conversation
often animated and redirected by the assumptions those students challenge
and the questions they think to ask.
P R E FAC E xi
INTRODUCTION
ANN LAURA STOLER
The Rot Remains

From Ruins to Ruination
A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone,

Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next
Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake,
Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed
In memory now by every ulcerous crime.
The worlds green age then was a rotting lime
Whose stench became the charnel galleons text.
The rot remains with us, the men are gone.
But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind
That fans the blackening ember of the mind,
My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.
D E R E K WA LC OT T, Ruins of a Great House,
Collected Poems 19481984
Derek Walcotts searing eulogy to empire and its aftermath as an ulcerous crime captures something that seems to elude colonial histories of the
present again and again. His verbs shift between multiple tenses. If the insistence is on a set of brutal finite acts in the distant slave-trading past, the
process of decay is ongoing, acts of the past blacken the senses, their effects
without clear termination. These crimes have been named and indicted
across the globe, but the eating away of less visible elements of soil and soul
more often has not. Walcotts caustic metaphors slip and mix, juxtaposing
the corrosive degrading of matter and mind. Most critically, Walcott sounds
a warning to the distracted reader too easily lost in a receding past: proceed
with caution, stay alert, for the rot remains long after murderous men like
Drake have perished, rapacious planters have turned to ash, colonial officials
have returned home, and anxious white settlers have relinquished hold on
what was never theirsand are gone. His cadence joins the acidic stench of
rotting lime with an ulcerous crime, a sensory regime embodied, gouged
deep in sensibilities of the present.
One could read Walcotts fierce phrasing as the hyperbolic, enraged words
of a gifted poet in a quarrel with history, whose metaphoric might weighs
heavily against the sixteenth- century slave trade, its lucrative spoils and
ruinous effects.1 One could lament the verbosity of scholarly depictions, pale
and placid next to Walcotts spare and piercing prose. But in first reading his
poem several years ago, I approached his choice of language as something
more, as a harsh clarion call and a provocative challenge to name the toxic
corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, the durable forms in
which they bear on the material environment and on peoples minds. Riveted on the rot that remains, Walcott refuses a timeframe bounded by the
formal legalities of imperial sovereignty over persons, places, and things.
His positioning struck me as a summons and an invitation to pursue that
which poems ordinarily cannot. E. Valentine Daniels Epic in Verse, on the
destruction of Sri Lanka, included here, is one notable exception. It, too, disrupts facile distinction between political history and poetic form, urging us
to think differently about both the language we use to capture the tenacious
hold of imperial effects and their tangible if elusive forms. In this volume
we attempt to track the uneven temporal sedimentations in which imperial formations leave their marks. Most important, we seek to ask how empires ruins
contour and carve through the psychic and material space in which people
live and what compounded layers of imperial debris do to them.
There is nothing uniform in how the volumes contributors broach the relationship between ruin and ruinationeither the opacities in which these
histories reside or the visceral reckoning with landscapes and lives in which
they may be traced. Gastn Gordillo, for example, takes as his very subject
the uncertain political imaginaries that underwrote the disappearance and
reemergence of Spanish ruins in the Chaco region of Argentina, which obscure the parallel ruination of indigenous people and the history of their
refusals to succumb to colonial conquest. John F. Collins explores how a
Brazilian World Heritage program confuses colonial buildings and their occupants, and thus the redemption of people and the restoration of things,
2A N N
L A U R A S TO L E R
in ways that spur those who inhabit the ruins of Portugals South Atlantic
empire to tie together seemingly disparate strands of contemporary imperial
formations and the improvement of ostensibly problematic populations.
Nancy Rose Hunt rejects mutilation photographs to mark the durabilities of the Belgian Congo rubber regime. She explicitly turns away from the
visual field toward those of hearing and sound. Ariella Azoulay, on the other
hand, fiercely embraces the visual as she attends to the concerted work of the
Israeli state to create invisibilities in the visual field of Palestinian dispossession. Her analysis wrestles with the task of seeing, with acts of violation for
which there are no photographs able to document bodily exposures and intrusions of space. Here, debris is the built environment of Palestinian habitation, shorn of the private, as Azoulay argues, unprotected by the boundaries of what the privileged get to call home. What joins these efforts are
tactical methodologies keenly attentive to the occluded, unexpected sites in
which earlier imperial formations have left their bold-faced or subtle traces
and in which contemporary inequities work their way through them.
A Counterpoint to Emergency
Scholarship is produced in uneven waves of reaction and anticipation, sometimes prescient about that which has not yet entered the public domain,
at other times struggling to keep up with seismic shifts and unanticipated
events that render our observations belabored and late. Studies of empire
share something of both. In the United States, reactions to 9/11, to the invasion of Iraq, and to public revelations about the treatment of detainees at
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib have moved students of colonial and imperial
history to counter with unusual urgency the resurgent assertions of imperial
priorities expressed through both familiar and new rationales of rule that
such terms as benevolent empire, humanitarian imperialism, and the
new liberal empire were coined to convey. In response, scholars have marshaled their expertise to argue that targeted humiliations of subject populations, humanitarian intervention as offensive strategy, prolonged states of
emergency, and preemptive military assault in the name of peace are neither
aberrant nor exceptional tactics of imperial regimes, but fundamental to
their governing grammar.
Empires past have long served arguments about how Euro-American geopolities could and should comport themselves in contemporary political predicaments.2 But recent writing on empire does more than treat colonial history as a lesson plan in an analogic mode. What is striking about the current
I N T RO D U C T I O N 3
turn is how swiftly it has produced provocative and deep imperial genealogies of the present, pointed assaults on the common keywords and political
concepts so often called on today: torture in the name of truth, displacement
of targeted populations in the name of security, states of emergency to sanction violent intervention, and states of exception that justify the suspension
of legal constraints and the expansion of new imperial sovereignties.
Such counterhistories have withered the conceit that the politics of compassion and humanitarianism make for empire-lite: they have tracked the
emergence of the U.S. surveillance state as one forged on the experimental
terrain of counterinsurgency projects in the early-twentieth- century colonial Philippines; they have demonstrated that empires of intelligence have
provided the architecture of British imperial pursuits throughout the Middle
East and French empires structural imperative for militarized terror in
North Africa.3 These revisions have been predicated in part on reassessing
what constitutes contemporary colonial relations, what counts as an imperial pursuit, and which geopolities rest on residual or reactivated imperial
practicesor have abandoned their imperious ambitions all together. Seasoned students of colonial history have been joined by a new cohort of commentators and scholars from a range of disciplines who ask about the lessons of empire and what should be garnered from them.4
Not all colonial and postcolonial scholarship works in such a pressing
mode, of course. If some have turned to the current immediacies of empire,
there are as many that labor to revise what constitutes the archives of imperial pursuit, to reanimate arrested histories, to rethink the domains of
imperial governance and the forms of knowledge that evaded and refused
colonial mandates to succumb, civilize, and serve.5
Still, academic debates about the lessons of empirewhich first crescendoed and then diminished as the war on Iraq receded into the publics
everydayhave taken a very particular direction. In the rush to account for
the nature of imperial practices today and their similarities or differences
from earlier European and U.S. imperial interventions, a restrictive conceptual apparatus has come to occupy dominant analytic space. Its vocabulary
is aptly sharp and critical, bound by the keywords of our moment and the
urgent themes to which they speak: security, disaster, defense, preparedness, states of emergency and exception.
This volume does not so much turn away from these concerns as it seeks
to work through the less perceptible effects of imperial interventions and
their settling into the social and material ecologies in which people live and
survive. This is rarely, as Achille Mbembe insists, a matter of wholesale adap4A N N
tations of colonial technologies. It is instead about reformulations and deformations of the crafts of governance in the management of peoples lives.6
We thus start from the observation that the less dramatic durabilities of
duress that imperial formations produce as ongoing, persistent features of
their ontologies have been set aside as if less at hand, less pressing, and
less relevant to current global priorities and political situations than their
more attention-grabbing counterparts. We attempt to broach, albeit indirectly, a set of questions not often addressed: What conditions the possibilities by which some features of colonial relations remain more resilient,
persistent, and visible than others? If violent environments are made so
not by a scarcity of resources but by grossly uneven reallocation of access to
them, the dispossessions and dislocations that accompany those violences
do not always take place in obvious and abrupt acts of assault and seizure,
but in more drawn out, less eventful, identifiable ways.7 Our focus is on the
more protracted imperial processes that saturate the subsoil of peoples lives
and persist, sometimes subjacently, over a longer dure.
But the challenge is directed more broadly at a deeper set of assumptions about the relationship between colonial pasts and colonial presents,
the residues that abide and are revitalizedif in different working order
today. In question is whether postcolonial studies has too readily assumed
knowledge of the multiple forms in which colonial pasts bear on the present,
and has been too quick to assert what is actually postcolonial in current
situations. We take the opportunity to consider more carefully the physical
structures, objects, and dispositions in which those histories are carried and
conveyed, and not least to attend, as Daniel Miller more generally advocates,
to the unexpected capacity of objects to fade out of focus as they remain
peripheral to our vision and yet potent in marking partitioned lives.8 Rethinking and expanding how to approach the tangible effects of ruination
is key. If the tangible most commonly refers to that which is capable of
being touched, it equally refers to that which is substantial and capable of
being perceived. One way to parse what motivates this venture might be its
effort to identify new ways to discern and define what constitutes the tangibilities of colonial pasts and imperial presence.
Imperial Tangibilities
At issue is more than that long- contested term postcolonialism, which may be
thinly employed to mark a sequential moment, or the fact that people and
places that have been colonized are no longer, or thickly applied to reflect
critically on when a present political reality, a set of social representations, a

physical or psychological environment is considered to be shaped directly by
a prior set of colonial relations. How those relations do so is sometimes precisely specified, though critics contend that they are often notthat the age
of empire is over, that imperial regimes are defunct, that colonialisms have
been long abandoned, and that political analysis and scholarship should
move on as well. Some argue that an analytics committed to searching for
colonial effects has dulled what once appeared as postcolonial studies critical edge, that its accounts of the present are inadequate and partial, that its
agents and subjects are long dead, and that its political charge is increasingly irrelevant.9 Others argue that postcolonialisms consolidation as an
academic specialization concertedly removed from the analysis of imperialism ensured that it had always-already lost the plot.10 Meanwhile, conservative constituencies in Canada, France, Australia, and the United States
often take that argument elsewhere, insisting that colonial histories matter
far less than they are contrived to do, that they are called on strategically
by specific disenfranchised populations to register (unreasonable) political
demands. In this view, an insistent return to colonialisms effects is seen to
foster unfounded claims for redemption, apology, and retribution.11
The essays collected here defy these distorted assessments. Far more has
emerged in the call to rewrite colonial histories, in the debates over old and
new forms of imperial venture, and in the acrimonious exchanges over what
counts as a colonial legacy and what does not. The fact that imperial forms
have changed should provide a challenge, not render study of their obscured
entailments obsolete. On the contrary, we take these obscured entailments
and subjacent durabilities as objects of inquiry, not as given or fully understood facts. Their examination provides opportunities to unsettle well-worn
formulations of imperial attributes, to consider an alternative vocabulary,
and in so doing to redirect our questions. Why, for example, are PalestinianIsraeli relations, so long marginal to the dominant postcolonial scholarship, now so explicitly articulated in these terms? Why is it only now that
students of Korean history are rewriting colonial accounts of the Japanese
imperium and Koreas subjugation to it? Why has the domestic history of
the United States, so long sequestered as that of a nation without empire,
been exploded over the last decade by a new generation tracing policies of
containment, enclosure, and segregation that inextricably link the internal and external techniques of colonial rule to imperial patterns across the
globe? And why have these all occurred when in some quarters something
6A N N
called postcolonial studies is deemed so poorly equipped to speak to the

present?
Given these discrepancies, it may be more productive to embrace the uncomfortable tenor of a contemporary malaise. One might think of mal-aise
here in its multiple senses of embodied disquiet, a lethargy borne of vague
ill- ease. To posit that colonial situations bear on the present is not to suggest that the contemporary world can be accounted for by colonial histories alone. It is rather to understand how those histories, despite having
been so concertedly effaced, yield new damages and renewed disparities.
While sources of this malaise may be overdetermined, some of them impinge on the very issues we seek to examine here: for one, as I have argued
for some time, the quintessential Victorian Indian model of empire may offer
a distracting and constricted guide to imperial sovereignties of differential
breadth and historical depth. Two, we might note an overly expansive sense
of what we imagine to know about the tenacious qualities of empire, and
what new forms of authority they tether to and inhabit. If at times colonial
studies has taken the relationship between colonial pasts and postcolonial
presents as self-evident, this volume does not. Finally, we question whether
a skewed attentiveness to colonial memorials and recognized ruins may offer
less purchase on where these histories lodge and what they eat through than
does the cumulative debris which is so often less available to scrutiny and
less accessible to chart. What joins colonial pasts and imperial presence
seems to escape some of the bald-faced rubrics on which students of the
colonial have come to rely. Our focus is less on the noun ruin than on ruination as an active, ongoing process that allocates imperial debris differentially and ruin as a violent verb that unites apparently disparate moments,
places, and objects.
Postcolonial scholarship has sometimes embraced a smug sense that the
nature of colonial governance is a given and that we can now effortlessly move
on to the more subtle complexities of the postcolonial present.12 The literary critic Terry Eagleton concurs, suggesting that postcolonial studies suffers from an increasingly blunted historical sense.13 Frederick Cooper, too,
points to a flattening of time, to analyses unmoored from specific relations
between colonial policy and postcolonial political structures.14 What precipitates and sustains such historical blunting is worth pursuing further. Here
we take the charge to be a vital one: to refocus on the connective tissue that continues to bind human potentials to degraded environments, and degraded
personhoods to the material refuse of imperial projectsto the spaces re-
defined, to the soils turned toxic, to the relations severed between people and
people, and between people and things. At issue are the political lives of imperial debris and the uneven pace with which people can extricate themselves
from the structures and signs by which remains take hold. Rubrics such as
colonial legacy offer little help. They fail to capture the evasive space of imperial formations past and present as well as the perceptions and practices
by which people are forced to reckon with features of those formations in
which they remain vividly and imperceptibly bound. They also gloss over the
creative, critical, and sometimes costly measures people take to become less
entangledor to make something new of those entanglements.
Ruinous Processes in Imperial Formations

To look at imperial formations rather than at empire per se is to register
the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation. Imperial formations are relations of force. They harbor those mutant,
rather than simply hybrid, political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities,
and equal rights. Working with the concept of imperial formation rather
than empire per se shifts emphasis from fixed forms of sovereignty and its
denials to gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rulesliding and contested scales of differential access and rights.15 Imperial formations are defined by racialized relations of
allocations and appropriations. Unlike empires, they are processes of becoming, not fixed things. Not least, they are states of deferral that mete out
promissory notes that are not exceptions to their operation, but constitutive
of them: imperial guardianship, trusteeships, delayed autonomy, temporary
intervention, conditional tutelage, military takeover in the name of humanitarian works, violent intervention in the name of human rights, and security
measures in the name of peace.
Raymond Williamss notion of a formation calls attention to those
tendencies, with variable and often oblique relations to formal institutions.16 Our interest, too, is in those oblique relations, in dissociated and
dislocated histories of the present, in those sites and circumstances of dispossession that imperial architects disavow as not of their making, in violences of disenfranchisement that are shorn of their status as imperial entailments and that go by other names. As Edouard Glissant once noted, a
population whose domination by an Other is concealed . . . must search
elsewhere for the principle of domination . . . because the system of domina8A N N
tion . . . is not directly tangible.17 Our concern is with the opacities that imperial formations produce between the elusive vectors of accountability and
the lasting tangibilities in which ruination operatesand on which such
formations thrive. A richer sense of the nature of tangibility is critical to
this venture.
To Ruin: A Virulent Verb

In its common usage, ruins indicates privileged sites of reflectionof pensive rumination. Portrayed as enchanted, desolate spaces, large-scale monumental structures abandoned and grown over, ruins provide a favored image
of a vanished past, what is beyond repair and in decay, thrown into aesthetic
relief by natures tangled growth. Such sites come easily to mind: Cambodias Angkor Wat, the Acropolis, the Roman Colosseum, icons of romantic
loss and longing that inspired the melancholic prose of generations of European poets and historians who devotedly chronicled pilgrimages to them.18
Perhaps this is one reason why transnational institutions like UNESCO work
so hard at preservation of such sites. But in thinking about ruins of empire, this volume works explicitly against the melancholic gaze to reposition
the present in the wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and refusal that
imperial formations sustain. Nor is it the wistful gaze of imperial nostalgia
to which we turn. Walter Benjamin provides the canonical text for thinking
about ruins as petrified life, as traces that mark the fragility of power and
the force of destruction. But we are as taken with ruins as sites that condense
alternative senses of history, and with ruination as a ongoing corrosive process that weighs on the future. Unlike Benjamins focus, a focus on imperial
debris seeks to mark the trail of the psychea venture he rejectedas
much as it seeks to follow his acute alertness to the track of things.19
To ruin, according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, is to inflict or bring
great and irretrievable disaster upon, to destroy agency, to reduce to a state
of poverty, to demoralize completely.20 Attention here is on to ruin as an
active process and a vibrantly violent verb. In this forum, we turn with intention not to the immediate violence of Iraq and recognized zones of active
war, but to the enduring quality of imperial remains, what they impinge on,
and their uneven distribution of impaired states. This is not a turn to ruins as
memorialized monumental leftovers or relicsalthough these come into
our purview as wellbut rather to what people are left with: to what remains
blocking livelihoods and health, to the aftershocks of imperial assault, to the
social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things. Such effects reside in
the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind. The focus,
then, is not on inert remains, but on their vital refiguration. The question
is pointed: how do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in
ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of peoples lives?21
Imperial effects occupy multiple historical tenses. They are at once products of the past imperfect that selectively permeate the present as they shape
both the conditional subjunctive and uncertain futures. Such effects are
never done with, as Derek Walcott reminds us, in the definitely closed off
pass compos. Frantz Fanon identified the extensive mental disorders that
followed French rule in Algeria as the tinge of decaythe indelible smack
of degraded personhoods, occupied spaces, and limited possibilitiesthat
were (and remain) hardest to erase.22 They are also the hardest to critically
locate.
Fanon worked between two poles of decay: at one pole was an evocative
figurative sense that situated the breakdown of persons, their pathologies,
and mental disabilities as imperial effects. Here the future of such patients
was already mortgaged by the malignancy of their psychological states.
Subject to what Fanon called a generalized homicide, a whole generation
of Algerians would be the human legacy of France in Algeria.23 Aim Csaire in 1955 called that affliction a gangrene . . . distilled into the veins of
Europe, in the racialized rule of domestic France.24
Such images could be construed as mere metaphor, but the ruinous tinge
of decay for Fanon was never figurative alone. At the other pole lay the material, tangible, and physical destruction of Algerian landscapes, drained
swamps, charred homes, and gutted infrastructures of over a century of
French rule and nearly a decade of colonial war. To work between these is to
acknowledge both the potential and the problems in sustaining a balance
between the analytic power that to ruin carries as an evocative metaphor and
the critical purchase it offers for grounding processes of actual decomposition, recomposition, and renewed neglect. These latter processes are of our
time as they build on and reactivate the traces of another. Such remainders
impinge on the allocation of space and resources and on what is available
for material life. The analytic challenge is to work productively, if uneasily,
with and across this tension. In so doing, our project here is not to fashion
a genealogy of catastrophe or redemption. Making connections where they
are hard to trace is designed neither to settle scores nor, as Wendy Brown
warns, to nurture undurable ressentiments and wounded attachments.25
10A N N
It is rather to recognize that these are unfinished histories, not of a victimized past but of consequential histories of differential futures.
Ruin is both the claim about the state of a thing and a process affecting
it. It serves as both noun and verb. To turn to its verbal, active sense is to
begin from a location that the noun too easily freezes into stasis, into inert
object, passive form. Imperial projects are themselves processes of ongoing
ruination, processes that bring ruin upon, exerting material and social
force in the present. By definition, ruination is an ambiguous term, being an
act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it. Ruination is an
act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss. These
three senses may overlap in effect, but they are not the same. Each has its
own temporality. Each identifies different durations and moments of exposure to a range of violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subcutaneous or visible, prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct.
By the dictionary again, ruination is a process that brings about severe
impairment, as of ones health, fortune, honor, or hopes. Conceptually,
ruination may condense those impairments or sunder them apart. To speak
of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance of signs,
the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated
and remain. But ruination is more than a process that sloughs off debris as
a by-product. It is also a political project that lays waste to certain peoples, relations, and things that accumulate in specific places. To think with ruins of
empire is to emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations, neglect,
and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present.
To focus on ruins is to broach the protracted quality of decimation in
peoples lives, to track the production of new exposures and enduring damage.26 Elements of this concern have been the subject of critical geography
and environmental historians for some time.27 Campaigns against what is
now commonly referred to as environmental racism have been instrumental and effective in the public domain in documenting the grossly uneven
distribution of pollution, waste disposal, and biowaste among impoverished
populations in the United States and worldwide.28 Much of this critical work
targets the long-term practices of multinationals, mining conglomerates,
and successive U.S. administrations and Departments of Defense, Agriculture, and more recently Homeland Security that have laid to waste and continue to destroy microecologies and the livelihoods of populations that live
off and in them.29 If critical geographers, environmental historians, and his-
torically inclined anthropologists have taken the relationship between colonial rule and degraded environments as their subject, it is striking how little
of this work has made its way back to the analytic center of postcolonial
scholarship or is even considered in the archive of postcolonial situations.30
The American studies scholar Valerie Kuletz has considered it apt to identify
the abuse of the land of indigenous peoples in the United States, Micronesia, and Polynesia as nuclear colonialism and as acts of social ruin, a fact
which people in those places, as she notes, recognized early on, but such
work still rests on the margins of the conceptual reformulations in colonial
studies itself.31
If the multiple legacies of empire are what postcolonial scholarship has
long imagined itself to arise from and account for, if not explain, one crucial task is to bring these fields of inquiry into more organic conversation.
Disciplinary protocols of presentation, venues of publication, and concepts
that translate poorly can impede the task. The essays gathered here traverse
a heteroclite set of fields: imperialism is as much part of these accounts as
imperial logics and colonial cultures. Cultural analysis is grounded in the
political differentials through which the latter works. Here we envision colonial histories of the present that grapple with the psychological weight of
remnants, the generative power of metaphor, and the materiality of debris
to rethink the scope of damage and how people live with it.
We take it as a starting premise that what is most significantly left may not
be blatantly evident, easy to document, or to see.32 The concepts and notions
conventionally used to make reference to colonial histories are symptomatic
of the lack of clarity. Pervasive ones like colonial legacy and colonial vestige are deceptive terms that deflect analysis more than they clear the way.
As Foucault charged, such ready-made syntheses are placeholders for processes that unite disparate forces under one term and gloss too easily over
dispersed effects.33 In the case of imperial formations, a legacy makes no
distinctions between what holds and what lies dormant, between residue
and recomposition, between what is a holdover and what is reinvested, between a weak and a tenacious trace. Such rubrics instill overconfidence in
the knowledge that colonial histories matterfar more than they animate
an analytic vocabulary for deciphering how they do so. Such terms do little to
account for the contemporary force of imperial remains, what people themselves count as colonial effects, and, as important, what they do about what
they are left with.
With this in mind, a focus on ruins of empire is not about a gaze, but
about a critical vantage point on one. Asking how people live with and in
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ruins redirects the engagement elsewhere, to the politics animated, to the

common sense such habitations disturb, to the critiques condensed or disallowed, and to the social relations avidly coalesced or shattered around
them. What material form do ruins of empire take when we turn to shattered peoples and polluted places rather than to the leisure of evocations?
Situations of disparate time and place come into renewed view. Sequestered
and displaced histories do as well. Imperial ruins, as treated here, are racialized markers on a global scale, the Agent Orangeinfested landscapes of Vietnam, the hazardous wastes in former nuclear test sites of the Bikini Atoll,
the continually battered, makeshift compounds of dispossessed and exiled
Palestiniansflooded with raw sewage from adjacent Israeli settlements
in which they have to dwell.34 Imperial ruins may include the defunct sugar
mills of Central Java as well as the decrepit barracks of Indias railway communities, in which many Anglo-Indians still uneasily live, while others
refuse to recognize that these are feasible places to inhabit.35 These processes of ruination bear on material and social microecologies in different
ways. Under what conditions are those sites left to decompose, remanded,
reconsigned, or disregarded? Some remains are ignored as innocuous leftovers, others petrify, some hold and spread their toxicities and become poisonous debris. Others are stubbornly inhabited by those displaced to make
a political point, or requisitioned for a newly refurbished commodity-life for
tourist consumption, or occupied by those left with nowhere else to turn.
What of those sites of decomposition that fall outside historical interest and preservation, places not honored as ruins of empire proper and that
go by other names? Some remains are rejected as ruins all together. Much
depends, as Derek Walcott again reminds us, on who is doing the labeling. As he noted in his Nobel lecture, in 1992, the tristes tropiques, which
Claude Lvi-Strauss so lamented in elegy to the already decrepit suburbs
of Lahore, may have been a pathos of empire felt more by nineteenth-century
European transientsanthropologists and the likethan those who actually dwelled there. Walcott observes that the sigh of History rises over ruins,
not landscapes, but in the Antilles the only ruins were those of sugar estates and abandoned forts and there the sigh of history dissolves.36
But the sigh of history can manifest in different registers. Nature rots
quickly in the colonial tropics. In the Netherlands Indies, railway tracks for
hauling rubber were rapidly overgrown; tobacco sheds made of plaited bamboo and wood were eaten through by termites, leaving no structural fragments of iron or stone. But more than a mere trace remains of how the land
was used. What connects colonial rubber production in Sumatra to IndoI N T RO D U C T I O N 13
nesias Reebok and Adidas factories, what land has been made available and
converted for new kinds of export production, and who profits from them
is easy to document, even if not recognizable in the forms that we can easily
see. That colonial imprint is deep in Indonesia and elsewhere. Much depends
on where we look for detritus, what we expect it to look like, and what we
expect to see. That the absence of ruins in the Caribbean equals an absence
of living history is not an assessment with which all agree. Richard Price instructs us to seek those traces elsewhere, in the semi-parodic artworks
of the iconic Martiniquan figure of Mdard, a man who in the 1950s and
1960s made from the detritus of industrial society (cellophane from cigarette packages, silver paper from gum wrappers, bentwood from boxes of
Camembert) objects that retold stories of colonial violence as he rewrote
their plots.37
Walcott, too, was impatient with the consoling pity of travelers who
carried with them the infection of their own malaise, those consumed with
sadness because they misunderstood the light and the people on whom
the light falls.38 Rejecting the pathos of ruins, he opted for a celebration of
survival. But his vision was hardly romantic. It was full of rage. His descriptions of the sewers that spew into white sand beaches and polluted marinas call attention to ruined ecologies as the profit of some and the ruination
of others. Proceed with caution, Doris Sommer warns. Better to resist the
the rush of sentimental identification that lasts barely as long as the read
or the mournful regard.39 Melancholy, compassion, and pity nourish imperial sensibilities of destruction and the redemptive satisfaction of chronicling loss. We are schooled to be alert to the fact that ruins hold histories,
that ruins are the ground on which histories are contested and remade.40
Still, the nominative form of a ruin does less work than to ruin as an ongoing process. Ruins can represent both something more and less than the
sum of the sensibilities of people who live in them. Instead we might turn
to ruins as epicenters of renewed collective claims, as history in a spirited
voice, as sites that animate both despair and new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected collaborative political projects.
Some kinds of imperial ruin are easier to identify than others. Projects
of cultural salvagewhether of monuments, artifacts, customs, and
peoplesare available for scrutiny in the ways others are not. There are resurrected ruins, like those studied by John Collins, part of the World Bank
and UNESCO cultural heritage projects designed to harvest the economic
value and capitalize on the allure of partially restored people, things, and
their ostensibly uniting essences. Yet such restorations disperse and redis14A N N
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tribute people, making their ways of being vital to national development

and productive of new inequalities.41 Then there are those ruins that stirred
Jamaica Kincaids derisive and angry view of Antigua, marked with buildings whose faded placards note repairs pending for decades, while damaged but splendid old buildings from colonial times are well maintained
in carefully tended disrepair.42
Some imperial ruins can be distinguished by where they are locatedin
metropole or colonyor on faded imperial maps. Others cannot. Strewn
throughout the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia are the enticements of enjoying ruins by day, luxury by night, as eager travelers balance the indolence
of a colonial- era luxury hotel with the more demanding task of exploring
centuries- old Khmer ruins from dawn til dusk.43 These are more than leisurely distractions for the history-minded, knowledge-seeking traveler. Edification here, like the Grand Tour of the European bourgeoisie in earlier centuries, not only distinguishes Culture from cultures. It replays the salvage
rescue operation that European empires claimed as their expert knowledge
and benevolent task. Napoleon took with him to Egypt more archaeologists
and rubble seekers than surgeons and surveyors. Nineteenth-century colonials in the Netherlands Indies participated in Europes obsession with visiting Hindu ruins, in pursuit of cultural capital on their days off.
Colonialisms have been predicated on guarding natural and cultural
patrimonies for populations assumed to need guidance in how to value and
preserve them.44 This sort of attention to ruins chronicles a present landscape and people already found wanting. But this heartfelt gaze on the ruin,
so much a part of the contemporary analysis of the ruins of modernity, a gaze
that echoed Diderots sense that he felt freer in the presence of ruins, is
not our interest in this volume.45 Rather than the introspective gaze of Europeans on ruins, we look to the lives of those living in them. That shift is key
to trace the dried-up veins of Anacondas copper mines that joined Butte,
Montana, and Chuquicamata, Chile, and wreaked privation on the lives and
bodies of their sequestered laboring populations.46
Imperial nostalgia plays through and sells sojourns among colonial ruins
in other, predictable ways. There is the find of worthy voyagers, the ruins
of Popokvil atop Bokor Mountain in Cambodia. . . . There, youll find the
remains of a French colonial- era towna crumbling post office, an empty
Catholic church.47 At the Mbweni Ruins Hotel in Zanzibar guests can sleep
in what was once a school for freed slave girls, the first Anglican Christian
missionary settlement in East Africa, made into a domesticated colony.
Arranged in 1871 in clusters of small neat houses and garden plots, this was
precisely the bucolic vision that imperial architects harbored to domesticate

their recalcitrant, racially ambiguous, and destitute populations throughout
the colonial world.48 Guests can learn the history of philanthropic imperial
projects and can take solace in the multiple times that the buildings were
abandoned and restored with the intervention of European good works, at
the height of imperial expansion and after.49 We are reminded of Renato
Rosaldos astute observation that imperialist nostalgia is not a postcolonial
pleasure but a concerted colonial one, a mourning contingent and concomitant with what colonialisms destroy.50 Such ruins might be read as vestige
and remnant, but they are neither historys refuse nor unclaimed debris.51
Imperial ruins can also mark the contest for originary racialist claims.
Zanzibars tourists may be unknowing participants in the celebration of empire in the Mbweni Ruins Hotel, but often the political life of ruins are more
explicit for all to contest and see. In Zimbabwe, it was from the sixty acres
of stone ruins, the Great Zimbabwe, that Cecil Rhodes pilfered the prized
soapstone bird with which he adorned his Cape Town house in 1889, the
year before he established a Royal Charter for the British South Africa Company. The stone birds and the ruins that housed them were confiscated by
Rhodes, but it was successive states controlled by white settlers and later
by African nationalists who each made the ruins their own. White racial supremacy and refusal of it, as Henrietta Kuklick so eloquently writes, were
fought on the terrain of these ruins. The Great Zimbabwe was requisitioned as proof of racialized progenitors in the nineteenth century and
reemerged at the center of heated political contest a century later.52 Clearly,
these are not all imperial ruins of common vintage, nor are their political entailments the same. What they might share is what the Afghanistani
photographer and performance artist Lida Abdul has called sites and structures around which stories are wrapped to hide the sounds and images that
roam through them.53
If imperial debris deposits in the disabled, racialized spaces of colonial
histories past and present, it is gendered as wellin how it is embodied,
where it is lodged, and how it is expressed. In Sharad Charis, John Collinss,
and Vyjayanthi Raos essays, both women and men sustain these injuries,
but it is women who voice the injuries to which this debris gives rise. We
see it in Collinss turn to the critical repartee of Topa, a woman whose body
was as marked as her bearing and her history by her precarious poverty and
the assumptions of those who would claim to alleviate it.54 It is in the demand of Jane Glover for her own piece of oxygen, a woman to whom Chari
turns to describe the atmospheric pressure in which people live close to oil
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refineries of post-apartheid Durban, and it is in the songs of lament that

women farmers chant in their displaced fields and about their submerged
village in southern India, described by Rao.55 Over and again, it is women
who seem to loudly attest. Gender may inflect how ruination is embodied
and who bears the debris. Nancy Rose Hunts essay rivets on the sound of
twisted laughter collected, convulsed, and retracted around forms of sexual
violence basic to, indeed constitutive of, the reproductive ruination of Leopolds Congo.56
Still, none of the above seize on gender distinctions to frame their arguments (though all are keenly attuned to the gender dispositions that mark
recollection, as in Charis attention to the photographs taken by and of
groups of young men on the neighborhood lanes where recently dispossessed people made a new Coloured township their home).57 Ariella Azoulay, who otherwise speaks so directly to how gender inequalities are lauded
and glorified in the history of the visual fields in which she has long worked,
chooses here not to do so.58 The sleeping figures of Israeli soldiers wrapped
in colorful blankets in what we quickly learn is a Palestinian home are positions staked out by male soldiers. But Azoulay does not argue that such assertions are made by them alone. On the contrary, Israeli women and men
stand together on a hilltop from which they can show their children both
the symmetry that justifies Israels devastation of Gaza, and Israels spectacular show of force.59 Her point is mute but explicit: it is not that imperial debris does not accumulate with different gendered effects, but this
is not where she chooses to pull our attention. When she describes the applause at the sight of the smoking ruins of Palestinian homes, the exuberant shouts, Weve done it!, these are raised voices of both Israeli women
and men. Hunts treatment of the rapes committed under King Leopolds
Congo is not immune to what was done to young women in particular; she
is direct in arguing that cannibalism and mutilation were able to enter Roger
Casements humanitarian narrative in ways that rape could not. Still, how
gendered dispositions matter to living in imperial debris is less obvious. The
acoustic registers of response are shared by women and men far more than
the skewed photographic archives of bodily exposures.
Imperial Debris by Other Names

Perhaps the most critical task is to address, if not answer, the question
prompted by Walcott in Ruins of a Great House: What is the rot that remains when the men are gone? What forms does rot take? What does it corI N T RO D U C T I O N 17
rode, what interior spaces does it touch, and where is it that it remains? Walcotts language is poetic, but the dispersed ruination he looks to is not. There
may be remnants that slip from immediate vision, detritus that is harder
to graspintimate injuries that appear as only faint traces, or deep deformations and differentiations of social geography which go by other names.
There are social dislocations whose etiologies are found in labels that lead
away from empire and push analysis far from colonial histories, severing
those connections; the terms substituted point to urban decay, to the
perils of progress, to environmental degradation, industrial pollution,
or racialized unemploymentto analyses of those places swept up by
modernization and to those swept aside as the refuse of a capitalist market
that has since moved on.
What work does it do to identify these as ruins of empire? What insights
does it offer to recast these generic labels and processes as patterned imperial effects that produce subjects with more limited possibilities and who
are hampered differently by those effects? One argument might be that such
a critical move makes connections that are not otherwise readily visible.
Such renaming relocates processes dislodged from their specific histories,
disjointed from the connections that made some people and places susceptible to ruin or abandonment. These are not ruins of empire in any figurative
sense. Sharad Charis work with those who live on the toxic edges of oil refineries and in the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa, makes this
clear.60 These are zones of vulnerability which the living inhabit and to which
we should attend.
Greg Grandins riveting account of Fordlandia, Henry Fords vision of a
bucolic American settlement and way of life in the Amazonian jungle at the
beginning of the twentieth century does more than remind us that Fords
success was contingent on the production of rubber in colonial possessions
through Southeast Asia.61 He underscores that Detroit not only supplied
a continual stream of symbols of Americas cultural power but offered the
organizational know-how necessary to run a vast industrial enterprise like
a car companyor an empire.62 Treating Detroit as an imperial nexus imbricated in and dependent on colonial labor regimes throughout the world
rejects the American exception, changes the fulcrum of Detroits demise.
By placing it in the balance of a broader sweep of imperial debris, Detroit
is repositioned, not on the outer fringes of the rust belt but as one of the
corrosive centers of one disabled form of U.S. empire.63 The current cachet
of what some critics call ruin porn with respect to the guided tours of
Detroits splendid ruins pushes those connections even further away.64
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One impulse in addressing the admittedly broad sense of imperial ruin

embraced here might be to distinguish between those processes played out
in imperial centers versus those situations and sites that appear in formerly
colonized regions. But there is perhaps more to gain by suspending that impulse and not making such distinctions too readily. The interior and exterior spaces of imperial formations may not correspond to the common
geographical designations that imperial architects scripted themselves.
Terms like metropole and colony, core and periphery presume to make clear what
is not. We might rather think of other criteria to distinguish the contemporary zones of imperial duress that are more mutable and as mutable as imperial formations themselves: the breadth of corridors in which people can
move, the virtual barriers by which they are cordoned off, the kinds of infrastructure to which they have access, the selective dumping of waste, the preemptive racialized exclusions and exemptions in which they live.
In an article for an American audience, the Israeli novelist David Grossman describes the apathy and studied indifference that ongoing political,
military, and religious conflict imposes on those living in Israel, Palestine,
Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war-torn places of the world. The image he conjures is of people whose moral compasses are narrowed, whose feelings are
numbed, whose language is rendered shallower, thinned by the onslaught
on their everyday. As he puts it, there is a shrinking of the surface area of the soul
that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there.65 Destruction for Grossman is inside people and outcoating their micro- and
material environments.66 The resonanceand sharp contrastwith Walcotts rot that remains and Fanons tinge of decay is striking. In the
non-immediate, extended conditions of the latter, numbness can give way
to critique, language can become sharpened and thickenedrather than
thinnedwith double entendres that mock the security measures that terrorize and destroy rather than protect.
Stories congeal around imperial debris, as do critiques. So do disqualified knowledge and subjugated histories decoupled from the processes of
which they were a part. The overgrown ruins of the palace of Sans Souci in
Haitis northern mountains, which Michel-Rolph Trouillot has so powerfully described (built by its first black king after the defeat of the French in
1804), harbors a suspended, (dis)quieted history of the Haitian Revolution
and the differential histories of colonial relations wedged between mortar
and crumbling stone.67 Michelle Cliff frames her novel of Jamaica, No Telephone to Heaven, around the Jamaican term ruinate, which as a noun subsumes
within it the verb to ruin. She describes it as at once cultivated land that has
been left to lapse into overgrown vegetation. Ruinate in its use is steeped in
colonial history and marks its durability, but seems to be as mobile as the
people who attempt to escape it, as they move to and return from the New
York City boroughs of the Bronx and Queens. It carries both the palpable
colonial history of abandoned European plantations, living waste, and as yet
unreclaimed futures.68
Ruins, as Kuklick found in Zimbabwe, can take on a political life of their
own. As Nadia Abu El-Haj writes, in Jerusalem partly destroyed buildings
were partially restored and reconstructed as ruins in order to memorialize
more recent histories of destruction, and older stones were integrated into
modern architectural forms in order to embody temporal depth.69 Her
point is now commonly shared: ruins are not just found, they are made. They
become repositories of public knowledge and new concentrations of public
declaration.
We need little more evidence that the public or state recognition of something as a ruin, as well as the claims made for it, is in itself a political act.
Such recognized ruins are politicized, but the most enduring ruins in Israel
are neither recognized as ruins nor as ruination wrought by colonial policies.
These ruins are not acknowledged to be there at all. These are the literal ruins
of Palestinian villages razed, bulldozed, and buried by the Israeli military
and the state- endorsed Israeli Afforestation Project. This intensive planting campaign (for which Hebrew school children in Europe and the United
States have been avidly encouraged to contribute their pennies to plant a
tree for Israel) has literally obliterated the very presence of Palestinian villages and farmsteads on Jerusalems periphery for more than fifty years.70 If
planting is a key technology in Israeli politics, here ruination has a perverse,
protracted, and violent colonial history. Security groves have replaced Palestinian olive orchards with cypress and pines; recreational parks dense with
eucalyptus trees smooth over Palestinian cemeteries. Not least, remains of
Arab villages have been effacedas are the claims of their former inhabitants that these were never abandoned fields, but ones they owned, lived
off, and had long cultivated.
In Bethlehems Aida Refugee Camp such fields abandoned to Israeli
occupation are called by other names: there, children are armed at the Lajee
Childrens Center with computers and cameras, and taught how to collect
the stories of their grandparents whose land was seized, to locate the trees
they harvested, to smell the herbs their grandparents remember, to scavenge
the hilltops where their houses were destroyed to make way for Israeli settlements. Sometimes there are no ruins at all: when asked by their elders to col20A N N
lect thyme and sage from the fields, the children often brought back stones
and soil instead.71 Some found old olive trees among the new pines. In Beit
Jibreen, twelve-yearold Suhaib photographed the ruins of an old house on
the hill, imagining that it might have been his grandmothers.72
Ruins are made, but not just by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Large-scale
ruin-making takes resources and planning that may involve forced removal
of populations and new zones of uninhabitable space, reassigning inhabitable space and dictating how people are supposed to live in them. As such,
these ruin-making endeavors are typically state projects, ones that are
often strategic, nation building, and politically charged.73 The fabrication
of nuclear ruins, for instance, was critical in the construction of Cold War
national defense policies and in shaping a U.S. public prompted to be fascinated and traumatized by the specter of nuclear war.74 Nuclear ruins remain
central to the political imaginary of the U.S. security state today. Joe Masco
argues that Cold War planners saw their task to be one of molding and emotionally managing an American public. They did so with simulated bomb
threats and theatrical evacuations in cities and towns across the country.
Strategic public operations imagined ruins, televised ruins, and simulated
ruins, all with attention to particular domestic objects, pointedly anticipating the decimation of what touched Americans most closely, the hard-won
household technology and material comforts of postwar quotidian life.
Ruins draw on residual pasts to make claims on futures. But they can also
create a sense of irretrievability or of futures lost. The Ochagavia Hospital in
Santiagos suburbs, intended to be a spectacular showcase for Pinochets
vision of Chiles modernity and progressivism, in fact showcases something
else: with what Jon Beasley describes as the beached whale of a monument
whose presence has been repressed and ignored, the half-built hospital recollects what could have been rather than what was.75 How such modernist
ruins differ from imperial ones would be suggested not only by the different
histories they unsettle and differently call on, but also by the specific people
dispossessed or otherwise laid to waste by them.
The sense of arrested rather than possible futures and the ruins they produce is one way to convey the problematic processes of development policies. As Vyjayanthi Rao shows in her essay here, the building of the Srisailam megadam in southern Indiawhich began in 1981, displaced more than
150,000 people, and submerged over one hundred villagesmakes real a
failed future and the forceful presence of imperial debris in visceral ways.
During the dry season every year, the submerged villages reappear to haunt
those who once lived there and then disappear, as both sign and substance
for those who once lived there of their precarious futures and of national developments unfulfilled promise. The village ruins contrast the archaeological salvage project of valued Hindu temples enacted in the same space. Here
the critique of development is laid bare in a landscape scarred with ruined
villages that have been laid to waste alongside the transplanted temple ruins,
preened for historical tourism, and preserved as part of Indias national heritage.76
Looking to imperial ruins not necessarily as monuments but as ecologies
of remains opens to wider social topographies. The ruins of Native American
burial sites mark only one site in a broader contested ground of new land
claims and entitlements.77 But we might also think of what I elsewhere call
the carceral archipelago of empire, which has distributed convict islands,
detention centers, pauper and childrens and penal colonies throughout
the globegradated zones of containment that have mixed and matched
security and defense with confinement, abuse, education, and abandonment.78 Such infrastructures of large and small scale bear what captivated Walter Benjamin, the marks and wounds of the history of human
violence.79 It is these spatially assigned traces of violence, more than the
deadening of affects to which we turn.80
Focusing on the materiality of debris, we seek to stay in the logic of the
concrete as Nancy Hunt urges in A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo when she redirects us back to Lvi-Strausss
term.81 Ruins can be marginalized structures that continue to inform social
modes of organization but that cease to function in ways they once did.
What happens at the threshold of transformation when unfinished development projects are put to other use, when test sites are grown over, when
Soviet military camps are abandoned and remade as in the Ukrainian-Polish
borderlands?82 What happens when island enclaves, no longer a declared
nuclear zone, as in the Bikini Atoll, become repositories of vulnerabilities
that are likely to last longer than the political structures that produced them?
Each of these points not to ruins set off from peoples lives but what it might
mean to live through, with, and as bricoleurs around them.
In thinking about imperial debris and ruin one is struck by how intuitively
evocative and elusive such effects are, how easy it is to slip between metaphor and material object, between infrastructure and imagery, between remnants of matter and mind. The point of critical analysis is not to look underneath or beyond that slippage but to understand the work that slippage
does and the political traffic it harbors. Reading W. G. Sebalds On the Natural History of Destruction, a meditation on Germany during and just after the
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Second World War, the numbness of living in the still-smoldering ruins, the
sheer mass of debris, the (deceptive) silence above the ruins, both contrasts and converges with the sorts of remains we write of herein and out
of focus, in and out of speakable bounds.83
While sites of colonial occupation are not outside our purview, our collective focus is more on what Rob Nixon calls the slow violence and long
dyings that mark zones of abandonment.84 If Giorgio Agamben developed
the concept of social abandonment, it is Joo Biehls extraordinary ethnography Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment where it is given flesh. For Biehl,
that zone produces persons who become a human ruin, leftover in their
unexceptional, patterned subjection to the typically uncertain and dangerous mental health treatment reserved for the urban working poor in Brazil.85 The social abandonments under scrutiny in these pages are ruinations
of a different sort: sites of risk proportioned by imperial effects. We track
the concrete trajectory of colonial exclusions and derailments that carve
out the structures of privilege, profit, and destruction today. Naomi Kleins
The Shock Doctrine could help lead back in that direction. There are no index
entries for empire or imperialism in her scathing account of what she
calls the disaster capitalism complex, but the psychic and material connections are threaded through every chapterfrom the current $200 billion
homeland security industry back to U.S. support for military governments
that eviscerated the subsistence of peoples in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and
Brazil.86
This is not to suggest that complex histories of capitalism and empire
should all be folded into an imperial genealogy. It is, however, to attend to
the evasive history of empire that disappears so easily into other appellations
and other, more available, contemporary terms. It is to recognize that the bio
in biopolitical degradations is not haphazardly joined with histories of empire. The social terrain on which colonial processes of ruination leave their
material and mental marks are patterned by the social kinds those political
systems produced, by the racial ontologies they called into being, and by the
cumulative historical deficiencies certain populations are seen to embody
and the ongoing threats to the body politic associated with them. Expulsion,
as in the case of Palestinians, is posited as the defense of society against its
internal enemies, partition and arbitrary violence the results. As David Lloyd
argues for the history of British state policies in Northern Ireland, Partition,
which is the foundation of the state, is also its ruination.87
Zygmunt Bauman identifies the production of waste and wasted lives
as the required, intended, and inevitable debris of the modern.88 Bauman
may be partially right, but such a frame can only account for the fact of
accumulated leftovers, of superfluous, obsolete, and bypassed people and
things. It cannot, however, account for their densities and distribution. Modernity
and capitalism can account only partly for the left aside, but not for where
people are left, what they are left with, and what means they have to deal
with what remains. Globalization may account for the dumping of toxic
waste on the Ivory Coast but not for the trajectory of its movement and the
history that made West Africa a suitable and available site. Capitalism can
account for the BP oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and for Chevrons
three decades of toxic contamination and decimation of the livelihoods of
rainforest inhabitants of the Amazon, but not for the worldwide coverage
of, and outrage over, the former and the sparse note of the latter.89 Again,
there are ruins of empire that are called ruins as well as those that are not.
The political economy of nuclear testing can account for the proliferation
of waste dumps, but not for the campaign in 1996 to locate the Ward Valley nuclear waste dump in the heart of the Mojave Desert National Preserve
and on land that Native American nations held sacred. After thirty years
of uranium mining, carried out during the late 1940s through the 1960s,
across Navajo lands in Arizona and New Mexico, native populations still
refer to their late- onset cancers as a legacy of tears.90 The social and physical effects of uranium mining on aboriginal populations in Australia for the
last three decades is a colonial storyof state commissions mounted and
ignored, of spillages and silences, of massively increasing cancer rates
among aboriginal populations near these sites, of regard and dis-regard
of its own.91 At issue is whether recognition produces more effective histories, what Fernando Coronil calls relational histories, that connect fragments to wholes of the imperial present.92 Rethinking imperial formations
as polities of dislocation and deferral which cut through the nation-state by
delimiting interior frontiers as well as exterior ones is one step in reordering
our attention.93
Race and Imperial Debris

Might we turn back to James Agees Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, not to mark
the universal dignity and damages that dire poverty bestows, but as marking specific places and specific sorts of people abandoned by specific state
policies and historical acts, as the embodied ruins of a racialized American
empire?94 And why does it seem so counterintuitive and forced to do so?
Kathleen Stewart makes it seem less so in her ethnography of those
24A N N
people who live among the detritus of West Virginias coal-mining industry today. She excavates the ruined and trashed economy of the American
South, whose historical veins are coursed through with U.S. Coal and Oil
Company land buyouts at the turn of the century, with hills that became a
wasteland of the unemployed during the 1930s depression, and with over
100,000 dead in the mines since 1906.95 She might tell that story, as she
insists, in the conditional tense, but says she will not reproduce a seamless
narrative. Instead, she takes the trash that collects around peoples places,
like the ruins that collect in the hills to track the composition and decomposition of peoples lives, their movement between decay, melancholy, and
agentive engagement.96 As she writes, Things do not simply fall into ruin or
dissipate. . . . [They] fashion themselves into powerful effects that remember things in such a way that history digs itself into the present and people
caint [sic] help but recall it.97
Agees story might be rewritten in a similar vein, not as the iconic story
of the dignity that emerges from the indignities of being poor whites in the
rural South, nor only as a national, domestic racial story of industrializing
America. One could imagine a reframing of this form of ruination as one
moment in a broader history of U.S. empire, a history that would track cotton production and the creation of expert knowledge of eugenics that authorized institutionalized neglect both of newly freed blacks and poor whites.
These are not untold stories. They have been told as racialized histories, but
not as racialized histories of U.S. empire.
Moving between ruins and ruination, between material objects and processes is sometimes easier said than done. Sometimes the ruins are claimed
to retain ghosts in vivid form: some such phantoms haunt central Javas
sugar factories, described by John Pemberton as forces moving on their
own, operating by uncertain contracts and demanding untoward sacrificial exchange.98 But in fact, in much of the colonial tropics, one is struck
by the absence of colonial ruins, as in vast tracts of Vietnam once overrun
by a multinational plantation industry. In some places, as Walcott claims,
there is hardly a trace of a colonial ruin at all. There are no petrified dwellings partially burned to the ground as in Dresden, no open sewers clogging the senses, no rampage of rats claiming new quarters, no zoo full of
mangled animals as Sebald so horrifically described, no debris of watches
that stopped ticking, no dolls with severed heads. Here we are not talking
about an event of bombardment and the fast-acting decomposition that follows. The ruins of empire may have none of that sort of immediacy.
But they can be as close at hand with an immediacy of another kind. The
coolie, in Val Daniels poem on Sri Lankas tortured colonial history, provides a counterpoint to the masters ruinous tale.99 As he writes in an earlier
fragment of this poem,
. . . The sole witness
to blood shed? The land, of course, with its wounds unfurled:
gouged here, leveled there, with rivers dry-bedded
run, flooding pits, filling dams, in this redeemed world100
Colonialism may have been like a rash spread on the skin of the landscape
for cash. But ruination can incite vibrant refusal to accept its terms and recast the story. As Nancy Rose Hunt argues, hunting down the rusted guns in
the Congo is really not the point of getting at the remains of the violence of
rubber extraction under King Leopoldnor is it really what is left.101
But sometimes, as in Vietnam today, live ammunition is the political point.
These are not ruins per se, though of the over eight million tons of bombs
dropped in Vietnam thirty years ago, there remain over 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance that includes what the Vietnamese government estimates
are 800,000 cluster bombs, M 79 grenade bombs, and flechette bombs still
in the soil.102 Limbs and lives are still being lost. Agent Orange, the military
colloquialism for the twenty million gallons of deadly herbicides sprayed by
U.S. forces across Vietnam for ten years, between 1961 and 1971, also has
potent presence still. Its purpose was described as twofold: to lay bare the
jungles and the cover under which Vietcong soldiers could potentially hide,
and to destroy their food supplies. It defoliated more than five million acres
of land.103 Five hundred thousand acres of crops were destroyed. Toxic residues remain in soils, riverbeds, and the food chain. But the witnesses were
also bodies themselves. Ten diseases are presently linked to Agent Orange
exposure at the lethal levels used in Vietnam: these include cancers, respiratory disorders, severe mental retardation, and musculoskeletal, organic,
and developmental birth defects.104
There is nothing over about this form of ruination: it remains in bodies,
in the poisoned soil, in water on a massive and enduring scale. In 1984 U.S.
veterans of the Vietnam War filed a class-action lawsuit against Dow Chemicals, Monsanto, and five other companies. They were accorded an out- ofcourt settlement of $180 million. No compensation has ever been made to
Vietnamese civilians.105 Their appeals over the last decade have been repeatedly dismissed on the grounds that although dioxin is a poison, it was never
intended to be used on humans and therefore constitutes neither a chemi-
26A N N
cal weapon nor a violation of international law. This particular imperial debris rests in the deformed bodies of children whose grandparents were exposed. New development projects come with new risks: as new land is being
cultivated, bombs buried for decades are now exploding.106 But bed and table
legs are also being made of the steel from recycled unexploded bombs. As
the journalists Aaron Glantz and Ngoc Nguyen note, industrialists are not
worried about their supplies running out.107
Groaning among the ShadowsOr Resentment in Them

In 1964 Derek Walcott wrote, Decadence begins when a civilization falls
in love with its ruins.108 By Walcotts account, England is doomed, as are
those transposed former colonial subjects like V. S. Naipaul who pined for
the grandeur of empire (as much as, or more than, some British nostalgics themselves). Some ruins are loved more than others. One set of nobly
built but crumbling spaces in the English cult of ruin enjoy particular and
current favor. Ian Baucom refers to these as part of country-house England: This ordered and disciplinary England that at once is financed by
the economics of empire and marks, in dazzling expanses of Italian marble
and filigreed iron, the dominion of the metropolis over domestic and colonial countrysidesfor which a current generation of English nostalgics
yearn.109 Nostalgia is often about that which one has never known or never
seen. It also carries a sense that one is already always too late. As Naipaul lamented in the Enigma of Arrival, I had come to England at the wrong time. . . .
I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which (like a
provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy.110
Lvi-Strauss shared the same sense of missing out, of belatedness in his
first ethnographic travels. Disappointed by the already decrepit suburbia
of Lahore, annoyed by the
huge avenues sketched out among the ruins (due, these, to the riots of
the recent years) of houses five hundred years old. . . . [W]hen was the
right moment to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savage have yielded the purest satisfaction, the savage himself been
at his peak? . . . Either I am a traveler of ancient times . . . or I am a traveler of our own day. . . . In either case I am the loser . . . for today, as I
go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is
now taking shape. . . . What I see is an affliction to me; and what I do not
see, a reproach.111
Lvi-Strauss cringes with self-mockery at his disdain for the now. Naipaul
doesnt bother. If both are only too aware that they have been duped by an
imaginary of the ruin, they still crave the Real. Naipaul wants more than
the ruins of empire. Like Lvi-Strausss, his nostalgia is for what he can
never know and has never seen. For the latter, it is a primitive in his prime;
for the former, the evidence that empire was in opulent and working order.
Both desire a state before the fall. Ian Baucom pinpoints when things went
wrong for Naipauljust when his England was sullied by large-scale migration of former colonial subjects.112 But maybe things went really wrong
when those subjects more loudly refused colonialisms terms of privilege,
voided the imperial contract, and had no regard for Naipauls ruins at all.
Imperial ruins, as we locate them here, are sites less of love and lament
for the bygone than of implacable resentment, disregard, and abandonment. Faisal Devji aptly refers to them as the scene of a crime, but also as
an ungraspable moment, a vanishing point that can never come into clear
view.113 As documents to damage, they can never be used to condemn the
colonial alone. Nor should this be the point.114 To call the low-income highrises that hover on the periphery of Paris, where most of the riots took place
in fall 2005, ruins of French empire is a metaphoric, political, and material
claim. It makes pointed material and affective connections that public commentators have made only as a generic indictment of a colonial history that
is now of the past. It reconnects the timing of their construction (beginning
in 1950) with the material cement blocks that were used, with the former
colonial North African people housed in them (who replaced the immigrants
working for Peugeot and living in segregated shantytowns), with the political and economic barriers erected to keep them in place.115 It connects state
racism with its colonial coordinates and with the 40 percent unemployment
of those who live on the outskirts of Frances political and economic life and
in barracks-like tenements.
The geographies of the revolts are colonial through and through.116 More
important, understanding these sites as the ruins of empire registers the
claims that young people in Clichy-Sous-Bois and elsewhere in France were
making when they proclaimed themselves indignes de la rpublique and demanded, as Hannah Arendt so succinctly put it, the right to have rights.
As reported in the press, Clichy-Sous-Bois has no local police station, no
movie theater, no swimming pool, no unemployment office, no child welfare
agency, no subway or interurban train into the city. Cordoned off and excised
from the polity, young people have sought to make claims that refuse those
conditions and terms. As Fanon predicted, French rule would not only wreak
28A N N
havoc on the futures of the colonized. Those relations would haunt French
believers in democracy.117 And it does. It took fifty years for the French government to officially acknowledge the use of the term Algerian Warthe
same amount of time it took some French scholars to acknowledge that the
French Republic was from its start a racialized colonial one.118
Sebald remarks that Jean Amery saw resentment as essential to a critical
view of the past. As Amery put it, Resentment nails every one of us onto
the cross of this ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be
turned around, that the event be undone.119 I would disagree. Resentment
is an active, critical force in the present. It does not demand that the event
be undone. It is about the possibility of naming injuries for what they are,
a demand that the conditions of constraint and injury be reckoned with and
acknowledged. The state of emergency that the French state imposed across
over a quarter of its national territory in 2005 was in part a response to the
riots but also in part to decades of a systematic project to disregard and destroy the agency, health, and livelihood of a very particular population. This
form of ruination defines both a process and sustained political project on
which imperial states did and continue to deeply depend. It does not produce passive or docile subjects but political and affective states of sustained
resentment that redirect what will be in ruins and who will be living in them.
For students of colonial studies, the protracted weight of ruination
should sound an alarm. The point would not be, as some French scholars
have recently done, to mount a charge that every injustice of the contemporary world has imperial roots, but rather to delineate the specific ways in
which peoples and places are laid to waste, where debris falls, around whose
lives it accumulates, and what constitutes the rot that remains. One task of
a renewed colonial studies would be to sharpen our senses and sense of how
to track the tangibilities of empire as effective histories of the present. This
would not be to settle scores of the past, to dredge up what is long gone, but
to focus a finer historical lens on distinctions between what is residual and
tenacious, what is dominant but hard to see, and not least what is emergent
in todays imperial formations and critically resurgent in responses to them.
At least one challenge is not to imagine either the postcolony or the postcolonial imperium as replicas of earlier degradations or as the inadvertent,
inactive leftovers of more violent colonial relations. It is rather to track how
new de-formations and new forms of debris work on matter and mind to eat
through peoples resources and resiliencies as they embolden new political
actors with indignant refusal, forging unanticipated, entangled, and empowered alliances.
Notes
1. Ismond, Abandoning Dead Metaphors, 40. As the book title implies, Ismond takes
Walcotts use of metaphor to be at the center of his political, anticolonial project, with
metaphor as a major term of reference (23). The relationship between metaphor
in language and metamorphosis of life runs throughout commentaries on Walcotts
corpus.
2. Edward Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written in six
volumes between 1776 and 1788, was among the earliest and most well-regarded of this
genre. For recent analogies, see Murphy, Are We Rome?; Isaacson, The Empire in the
Mirror, a scathing review of Murphys simplistic historical analogies in the New York
Times Sunday Book Review, 13 May 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com; Heather, Empires and
Barbarians. Also see Chalmers Johnsons biting critique of contemporary U.S. foreign
policy analysts who call on parallels with the Roman empire, in The Sorrows of Empire.
3. Among them are Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire; Eagleton, Holy Terror; Paul W.
Kahn, Sacred Violence; Le Cour Grandmaison, La Rpublique impriale; Lazreg, Twilight of
Empire; McCoy, Policing Americas Empire; Thomas, Empires of Intelligence.
4. Calhoun, Cooper, and Moore, Lessons of Empire.
5. See, for example, Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza; McGranahan, Arrested Histories;
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity; Dubois, A Colony of
Citizens.
6. See Mbembe, On the Postcolony, one effort to address how colonial logics, imaginaries, and violences are reworked and mutate in Africas postcolonial present.
7. See Peluso and Watts, Violent Environments.
8. Daniel Miller, Introduction, 5.
9. See, for example, Historical Colonialism in Contemporary Perspective, by Arif
Dirlik, who argues that it is no longer very plausible to offer colonialism as an explanation of [the] condition in which the vast majority of the populations of formerly
colonized society live in conditions of despair (611).
10. Lazarus, Postcolonial Studies after the Invasion of Iraq, 16.
11. In France, this debate has taken on a polemical and sometimes vicious tone, detracting from the possibility of a productive and generative debate. See, for example,
Bruckner, La tyrannie de la penitence; Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance colonial; Bayart,
Les tudes postcoloniales, and most recently the latters response to his critics in Les trs
fach(e)s des tudes postcoloniales. Also see Stoler, Colonial Aphasia.
12. See Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty; and Stoler with Bond, Refractions Off Empire.
13. Eagleton, After Theory, 7.
14. Cooper, Decolonizing Situations.
15. For a fuller discussion of this issue see Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty; and Stoler and McGranahan, Introduction.
16. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 117.
30A N N
17. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 20.

18. For one good example of the continuing pleasures yielded by this laconic mood,
see Woodward, In Ruins.
19. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 212.
20. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, fifth edition, 1095.
21. In my seminar on colonial and postcolonial disorders, Charles McDonald
offered a provocative treatment of the sorts of debris that imperial formations cultivate and disavow in the unincorporated territory of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he
argues for understanding debris as more than what is ruined or left behind: Debris
does not materialize out of thin air; it must already be present. It is not a kind of thing,
but rather a state of being into whichand less commonlyout of which things may
pass (The Eye of the Storm, 4).
22. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 249. The full quote, opening the chapter Colonial War and Mental Disorder, reads: That imperialism which today is fighting
against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.
23. Ibid., 25152.
24. Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 3536.
25. Brown, Wounded Attachments.
26. Not all ruins located in empire are imperial ones. See, for example, Lambek,
The Weight of the Past, for a nuanced study of Malagasy relics.
27. For foundational works that do this work on different spatial and temporal
scales, see Watts, Silent Violence; Cosby, Ecological Imperialism; Grove, Green Imperialism;
and Peluso and Watts, Violent Environments, which focuses pointedly on how environmental degradation has been made into a political issue, posed as a threat to national
security. On state violence, nature preservation, and forced relocation in Tanzania, see
Neumann, Imposing Wilderness.
28. See, for example, Kosek, Understories; Carruthers, Environmental Justice in Latin
America; Grinde and Johansen, Ecocide of Native America; Brook, Environmental Genocide; and Hooks and Smith, The Treadmill of Destruction, which argues that capitalism alone does not explain the distribution of toxic waste on Native American reservations. Also see McGovern, The Capo Indian Landfill War. On biowaste, see, in particular,
Hodges, Chennais Biotrash Chronicles.
29. See, for example, McCaffrey, The Struggle for Environmental Justice in
Vieques, Puerto Rico; and Simon, Bouville, Land, and Beck, Radiation Doses and
Cancer Risks in the Marshall Islands Associated with Exposure to Radioactive Fallout
from Bikini and Enewetak Nuclear Weapons Tests.
30. See, for example, Showers, Imperial Gullies; and Beinart and Hughes, Environment
and Empire, which seeks to compare the impact of different commodity frontiers on
colonized people (vi). A strong tradition of such work has developed for Madagascar. See, for example, Jarosz, Defining and Explaining Tropical Deforestation; Kull,
Isle of Fire; and Sodikoff, Forced and Forest Labor in Colonial Madagascar.
31. See Kuletz, The Tainted Desert; and Kuletz, Cold War Nuclear and Militarized
Landscapes. Also see Vine, Island of Shame.
32. In this, we appreciate and share the dilemma of the ambitious volume Postcolonial Disorders, edited by Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and
Bryon Good, whose contributors skillfully and with subtlety tack between the unspoken and the everyday, between the unspeakable and the hidden, and place both the political and the psychological at the center of what constitutes postcolonial disorders.
33. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 22.
34. Mel Frykberg, Villages Contaminated by Settlement Sewage, Electronic Intifada, 29 April 2010, http://electronicintifada.net.
35. On the Indian railway communities, see Bear, Ruins and Ghosts.
36. Walcott, The Antilles.
37. Price, The Convict and the Colonel, 165.
38. Walcott, The Antilles.
39. Sommer, Proceed with Caution, 15.
40. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground lucidly makes this point as do Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, and many of the contributions to Lazzara and Unruh, Telling Ruins in
Latin America.
41. See John Collinss contribution to this volume; and Collins, The Revolt of the
Saints.
42. Kincaid, A Small Place, 9.
43. Landler, Ruins by Day, Luxury by Night, New York Times, 26 November 2000,
10.
44. See, for example, Beinart and Hughess discussion of colonial conservatism
and national parks, in Environment and Empire.
45. See Hell and Schnle, Ruins of Modernity, for a pointed critique of the imperial
ruin gazer and the new ruins which have become part of it.
46. On the industrial ruins of U.S. empire, see Finn, Tracing the Veins.
47. The Follow-Your-Bliss List, New York Magazine, 16 October 2005, http://nymag
.com. But also see Meixner, Cambodia.
48. On the scale and scope of this imperial vision, see Stoler, Along the Archival Grain,
10539 (Developing Historical Negatives).
49. See http://www.mbweni.com/mbweniruins.htm and numerous other sites
with visitor comments. Also see Bruner, Culture on Tour, one of many studies that refers
to African American heritage tours to the dungeons from which slaves were sent from
West Africa to the Americas.
50. Rosaldo, Imperialist Nostalgia, 6887.
51. In Industrial Ruins Tom Edensor conceives of exploring a ruin as a kind of antitourism because movement is rough, disrupted and potentially perilous, replete
with sensations other than the distanced gaze (95). But this is precisely the allure of
the ruins of Detroit and the ones mentioned here, suggesting not an antitourism, but a
tourist delight, orchestrated participation in the adventure of imagining another time
without having to imagine what political processes displaced those who lived in them.
32A N N
L AU R A S TO L E R
52. Kuklick, Contested Monuments. Also see Fontein, The Silence of Great Zimbabwe. On another sort of contested colonial monument, the war memorial, see Mann,
Locating Colonial Histories.
53. This quote appears on a postcard in a photography series titled A History of
the World through Ruins, 20052007, by Lida Abdul (given to me by Hugh Raffles,
whom I thank for them) as part of the Memorial to the Iraq War exhibit, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 23 May27 June 2007.
54. See Collinss essay in this volume.
55. See Raos essays in this volume.
56. See Hunts essay in this volume.
57. See Charis essay in this volume.
58. See Azoulay, Has Anyone Ever Seen a Photograph of a Rape?
59. See Azoulays essay in this volume.
60. See Charis essay in this volume.
61. Grandin, Fordlandia.
62. Grandin, Touring Empires Ruin. See his essay in this volume.
63. This is not a focus of the current fascination with The Fabulous Ruins of
Detroit (DetroitYES!, http://www.detroityes.com/home.htm) or with Exploring Detroits Beautiful Ruins (Rybczynski, Incredible Hulks, http://www.slate.com/arti
cles/arts/architecture/2009/03/incredible_hulks.html).
64. See Michael Hodges, Detroits Ruins Bring Visitors, but Rankle Critics within
the City, Detroit News, 1 July 2010.
65. David Grossman, Writing in the Dark, New York Times, 13 May 2007, emphasis
added.
66. On the relationship between people and debris and on the affective space produced by living in piles of rubbish and ruined environments, see Navaro-Yashins
analysis of Lefkosha/Lefkosa, a city divided since the Turkish invasion of Northern
Cyprus in 1974, in Abjected Spaces.
67. Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
68. Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, 1. I thank Meredith Edwards of Furman University
for alerting me to Cliff s use of ruinate when I delivered a version of this essay in February 2011.
69. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 164.
70. See Cohen, The Politics of Planting; and Walid Khalidi, All That Remains.
I thank Jennifer Lynn Kelly for the references cited here, for pointing me to the Afforestation Project, and for sharing her research with me.
71. Dreams of Home, a brochure and photo collection created by the children of
Lajee Center with Rich Wiles.
72. I thank those at the Lajee Center for sharing with me their publications, the
photographs that the children took, and the stories they collected when I visited in 2008.
73. Abu El-Haj illustrates this point in detail, in Facts on the Ground. Joseph Masco,
John Collins, and Vyjayanthi Rao each look to different features of state-managed
ruins in their essays in this volume.
74. See Joseph Mascos essay in this volume.

75. Beasley-Murray, Vilcashuamn. Also see Jaguaribe, Modernist Ruins; and
Bissell, Engaging Colonial Nostalgia, which looks at the critical purchase that colonial nostalgia can afford in the face of devastated landscapes and dimming memories of modernity (Rachel Swarms, quoted in Bissell, Engaging Colonial Nostalgia,
217).
76. See Raos essay in this volume.
77. On the history and contemporary battles over the theft, protection, and repatriation of American Indian remains and objects, see Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice.
78. Stoler, The Carceral Archipelago of Empire.
79. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 163.
80. Ibid., 182, 170.
81. Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo.
82. See Szmagalska-Follis, Repossession.
83. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 67.
84. Nixon, Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor;
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 2728; Biehl, Vita.
85. Biehl, Vita, 18.
86. Klein, The Shock Doctrine.
87. Lloyd, Ruination, 487.
88. Bauman, Wasted Lives.
89. On oil spills that have mattered less, see John Vidal, Nigerias Agony Dwarfs
the Gulf Oil Spill: The US and Europe Ignore It, Guardian, 30 May 2010, http://www
.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger- delta-shell.
90. See Tatz, Cass, Condon, and Tippet, Aborigines and Uranium, 3.
91. See ibid.
92. Coronil, Editors Column, 645.
93. See Stoler, Haunted by Empire. Also see de Genova, The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States.
94. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
95. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road, 90112.
96. Ibid., 96.
97. Ibid., 111.
98. Pemberton, The Ghost in the Machine, 36.
99. See Daniels essay in this volume.
100. Daniel, The Coolie, 267.
101. See Hunts essay in this volume.
102. It is estimated that eighty-two million bomblets were dropped in Vietnam
between 1961 and 1973. Duds from those continue to be found in forty-three of the
sixty-five provinces in Vietnam, thirty years later. Similar cluster bombs were used by
the United States in Kuwait in 1991 and in Afghanistan in 2001. See Ellen Massey, Disarmament: Will the U.S. Finally End Cluster Bomb Imports?, Inter Press Service, Latin
America, 23 July 2007, http://www.antiwar.com/ips/massey.php?articleid=11328. The
34A N N
estimates of unexploded ordnance range from 300,000 tons to as much as 800,000

tons. I have taken the more conservative estimate.
103. Fox, Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Warfare. Also see Fox,
One Significant Ghost; Weisberg, Ecocide in Indochina; Browning and Forman, The
Wasted Nation; Whiteside, The Withering Rain; Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial.
104. In a recent study of dioxin use by U.S. troops in Vietnam, the epidemiologist
Jeanne Stellman at Columbia University estimates, on the basis of detailed lists of over
nine thousand herbicide spray missions, that far more dioxin was sprayed than any
government study has ever acknowledged. See her The Extent and Patterns of Usage
of Agent Orange and Other Herbicides in Vietnam. Also see the searing photographs
by the Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange.
105. In May 2005 a lawsuit filed by Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange against the
chemical companies was dismissed. In July 2005 a program to investigate the health
and environmental damage caused by the defoliant was canceled before it began. See
Butler, U.S. Abandon Health Study on Agent Orange. The case was appealed and
heard by Manhattans Second Circuit Court of Appeals in June 2007, when the court
ruled again that the chemical companies were acting as contractors for the U.S. government and therefore shared its immunity. In the most recent round, in March 2009,
the Supreme Court refused to reconsider the ruling of the lower court.
106. Aaron Glantz and Ngoc Nguyen, Villagers Build Lives Out of Unexploded
Bombs, Inter Press Service, 26 November 2003, http://www.ipsnews.net/2003/11
/vietnam-villagers-build-lives- out-of-unexploded-bombs/.
107. Ibid.
108. Quoted in Walcott, A Dilemma Faces WI Artists.
109. Baucom, Out of Place, 172.
110. Quoted in ibid., 199.
111. Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1964). I thank Trisha Gupta for pointing me to
the passage on Lahore.
112. Baucom, Out of Place, 18687.
113. Faisal Devjis comments at the Scarred Landscapes/Imperial Debris conference, October 2006.
114. See Burbank and Coopers Review of Marc Ferros Le livre noir du colonialisme,
where they make the important point that the prosecutorial stance and the currency
of indicting the colonial in France today and equating it with totalitarianism miss the
limits of power as actually exercised, the constraints on colonial regimes ability to
transform or to exploit, . . . their frequent dependence on indigenous economic and
political actors whom they could not fully control (46061).
115. On the history of immigrant housing in France, see Bernardot, Loger les immigrs.
116. The point has made been with force by Balibar, Uprisings in the Banlieues,
and by others, but with strikingly little historical analysis.
117. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
118. Stora, Le transfert dune mmoire.
119. Amery, quoted in Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 156.
PA RT I
%Decompositions of Matter and Mind
NANCY ROSE HUNT
An Acoustic Register
Rape and Repetition in Congo
A 2006 documentary on sexual violence and war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC ) includes words and images of raped women. Some
are bent over in pain, some speak, while others harvest new fields together.
Graphic photographs show torn body parts, vulvas mutilated by guns, Coke
bottles, and sticks. The film is set largely in eastern Congo at hospitals where
doctors have been treating many of the thousands raped in recent years.
Produced by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA ), the film also
contains scenes in quateur about soldiers raping women and girls. In 2003
former rebel soldiers (of Jean-Pierre Bembas movement), at a time when
they had only recently been mixed into the national army, turned on some
two hundred girls and women in Nsongo Mboyo in a storm of angry mass
rape. In an unprecedented action three years later, Joseph Kabilas state
charged some of the soldiers, found them guilty, and sent them to jailjust
three months before presidential elections kept Kabila in power.1
Nsongo Mboyo is located where the notorious rubber concession company, Abir, was sited when Congo was King Leopold IIs scandalous Congo
Free State (18851908). The 2006 documentary does not evoke this iconic
imperial violence. Its quateur section locates history weakly, with a once
colonial geographic marker. The filmmaker was Senegalese; history was not
his purpose; and this take on a monument commemorating colonial science
is a mere placeholder. Still, it is significant that none of the humanitarian
actors making efforts to help thousands of Congolese rape victims seems to
know that this rape site, Nsongo Mboyo, was once in the Abir concession, a
terrain of death, starvation, wife abduction, mutilation, and sexual violence
from 1892, when the violent rush for raw rubber began.2 (The Abir zone also
became epicenter of the humanitarian campaign led by the British publicist
E. D. Morel and his Congo Reform Association in the 1890s and 1900s.)3 The
absence of historicization within todays humanitarianism suggests something important about ruination and forgetting, about missed opportunities
to work with toxic imperial debris in producing effective, urgent histories.4
The film does mark as historical the moment in 2006 when the soldiers
who raped at Nsongo Mboyo were condemned to prison for life, ritually
stripped of their uniforms before a crowd at the military trial. Using archival footage from the United Nations Mission to the Congo (MONUC ), the
editors used a long still, showing uniforms spread on the ground as detritus, symbolic evidence of guilt, but also of the firm stand of Kabilas regime.
I viewed the film in Kinshasa with an educated, worldly Congolese woman,
the widow of a former university professor, in 2007. As we watched this segment, she cried out that the soldiers who had raped should all be killed. Then
she suddenly changed her mind: instead, she declared, they should cut off
their hands.
Boali and Visual Debris

This suggestion of a fitting punishment, unwittingly pulling a tenacious
image from the past, resonates with Ann Laura Stolers challenge, in this
volume, to think with ruins of empire so as to attend to their reappropriations . . . within the politics of the present. Mama Paulines recuperation
of severed hands from the psychic and visual ruins of Leopolds Congo may
disturb, yet this reappropriation problematizes the key issues of this essay:
duration, reproduction, and repetition in history and historical writing.
Mama Pauline and I watched the film in a context in which secure possibilities for dealing with the ubiquity of sexual violence as war seemed few.
We watched knowing that Kabilas regime had since failed on its promises
of impunity: ten of the eleven soldiers had escaped from Mbandakas prison
walls earlier that year. Mama Pauline Betus suggestion of amputation implied a claim. At the same time, it recuperated images left behind from Free
State times and still circulating globally: mutilation photographs have become iconic of atrocities in Leopolds Congo and all racialized violence, too.
In this essay I turn to visual detritus from Congo not as concrete de40N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
bris that wedges open ethnographic history, nor to understand how the
phantasmagoric use of atrocity photographs produced anti-Leopoldian
humanitarian spectators in the West.5 I take up shock-photos as refractory evidence whose selective circulation then and since is worthy of canny
attention.6 Some images from Leopolds Congo traveled: they were recycled,
repackaged, and reframed, over and over again. Some did not. We can still
find some photographic debris in recent and not-so-recent histories on red
rubber and its ruinous violence.7 Open Adam Hochschilds King Leopolds
Ghost to its insert of archival photographs, for instance, and you will find
such heavily recycled visual remains therefrom the image of a father looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-yearold daughter, to a photograph of two youths with handless black stumps for arms displayed against
white sheets of cloth.8 Each image was in the standard magic-lantern show
that circulated in Britain and the United States at the height of the antiLeopoldian campaign. Most were taken by Alice Harris of the Congo Balolo
Mission station of Baringa, also the site of an Abir post. As Kevin Grant has
shown, Harriss photographs enabled Morels relentless humanitarian propaganda machine to gather force and to move an ever larger British and U.S.
public.9 By 1907, the London Auxiliary of the CRA had sold ten thousand
copies of a brochure called Camera and Congo Crime, which contained twentyfour photographs by Harris. The standard show of the period, marketed by
Riley Brothers Ltd. as Lantern Lecture on the Congo Atrocities, included
sixty lantern slides. A savage Abir sentry appeared quickly, followed by a
Congolese being whipped. One slide showed a group of chained women:
The treatment of women hostages. Six slides were mutilation photographs, picturing Congolese with missing hands or feet; most of those pictured were young men and boys. An advertisement listed the sixty slides in
four sections that suggested a trajectory from rubber system and mutilation
toward the civilizing potential of missionary work.10
Alice Harriss mutilation photographs were powerful, overwhelming.
Ultimately their autonomous force as shock-photos produced an effective
public revulsion in Britain, the United States, and Europe that changed
the course of history.11 Cathy Caruth suggests that traumatic form combines repetitive reappearance with repression, the insistent grammar of
sight with some kind of effacement of the event.12 The continued use and
reuse of the Harris images reify a maimed, disfigured, individualized body.
In the process, they distort and erase a complexity of forms of ruination and
refusal far wider, more spatial, and more enduring.13
The visual nature of the evidencewhat foreign observers wrote about
A N AC O U S T I C R E G I S T E R 41
seeing, what Congolese explained they had seen, and the photographs that
circulated and shockedhas oriented humanitarian, scholarly, and popular
attention toward severed hands. The mutilation shots, in particular, have directed interest away from the more hidden, tactile, and out of sight, away
from another modality of violence, the sexual. And this modality of violence
was intrinsically more reproductive and transgressive in its nature.
Enter Boali. She resisted the sexual advances of an Abir sentry. The armed
man hired to supervise rubber collection shot her in the belly, took her body
for dead, and then cut off her foot in order to run off with the brass ring
of sure wealth fastened tight just above her ankle. Boali was one of Alice
Harriss subjects. The photograph shows her almost naked, wearing a mere
apron around the waist, holding on to a long pole to stay erect. Her belly is
traced with marks of scarification, recently misshapen from the gunshot
wound. That her foot is missing is just visible at the bottom edge of the
frame. This image of Boali traveled far in Britain and North America as part
of the standard magic lantern show, while her name became deformed as
Boaji. Slide no. 34 carried the caption Boaji, Mutilated for her constancy.14
Appending these redemptive, evangelical words to her ambiguous image reflects an effort to turn her into a model, faithful wife.
Since then, Boalis image has tended to disappear. Morel did not include
the Boali photograph in his books, although it did appear in one CRA pamphlet.15 In contrast, the photographs of young men with missing hands
their black stumps posed in high contrast against white clothwere
cropped and reduplicated repeatedly, even brought together into an assemblage of repetition, with several photographs being cropped and shown at
once within a unified frame, as in Mark Twains King Leopolds Soliloquy. Often,
individuals were not named in captions, and their stories disappeared. It
was as if humanitarian spectators already knew the cast of figures, while the
quantity and simultaneity of the images summarized all: horror.
Fields of Sound
To argue for rewriting the standard Congo atrocity narrative in relation to
urgent politics of the present, I reinsert Boali back into the complexity of
evidence about ruination in the Congo, then and now (since 1996). The conventional story has tended to get caught, often obsessively, on the malevolent, selfish, naughty King Leopold, who never set foot in the place, and
how he should now be put on trial amid a mute row of atrocity victims with
stumps for arms.16 These histories tend to end not long after British Consul
42N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
Roger Casements incriminating report to the British Parliament and Morels

extraordinarily energetic and effective propaganda campaign; they tend to
end with the Belgian parliament being forced to intervene, requiring King
Leopold to turn over his private colony to Belgian administration in 1908.17
I also seek to problematize and disaggregate the visual. The idea is to
move beyond seeing as the primary mode of perceiving the past, by being
wakeful to other senses and capacities, especially the field of hearing, producing, and muffling sound. Such attentiveness makes the following comment, from Adam Hochschilds moving yet ever redemptive and epic history
about violence and humanitarianism in the Congo Free State, both stand
out and smart: One problem, of course, is that nearly all of this vast river
of words is by Europeans or Americans. . . . Instead of African voices from
this time there is largely silence.18 Hochschilds words echo an idea found
in his humanitarian sources. Consider these words, from a CRA pamphlet
of 1904: It is from others, mostly, that we know what there is to know of
his sad story . . . of women toiling in chains . . . the severed hands. . . . But
in all of this we have not heard the voice of the native himself. At most we
have seen him in photographs, stretching mute, mutilated and uncomprehending.19 Congolese voices, however mediated, may have been difficult
to hear in 1904, but the historian today can still find them in a rich range of
sources.20
Enter Boali, once again. Boali spoke, and her voice can be located in
the African Archives in Brussels, alongside the mediated, translated (into
French), transcribed words of the 258 Congolese persons who made depositions before King Leopolds Commission of Inquiry in 19056.21 Boali was
from Ekolongo in the Abir concession, and she testified at Baringa: One day
when my husband went into the forest to gather rubber, the sentry Ikelonda
came, finding me in my hut where I stayed, and asked me to give myself to
him. I rejected his proposition. Furious, Ikelonda fired a gun shot at me,
which gave me the wound whose trace you can still see. I fell on my back; Ikelonda thought I was dead, and to get hold of the brass bracelet that I wore at
the base of my right leg, he cut off my right foot.22 Boali was one of thirteen
Congolese women to speak out and make a claim before the Commission of
Inquiry. Together, the depositions provide complex evidence about sexual
capital and sexual abuse: some women managed to use the first to find protection, while others became reduced to objects of torture and violence.23 It
is not clear precisely when Alice Harris photographed Boali, only that the
picture traveled far at the time along with the caption about marital constancy. Boalis claim was about her wound as a trace, her missing foot, the
stolen brass anklet, her refusal to be raped. Her words were about the sentry. She knew his name. After Ikelondas fury and gun blasted through Boali
with decisive, life-altering noise, she managed to remain quiet as death,
while he used a sharp blade to separate the object of wealth from her body.24
This capacity for lying silent and giving no sign of life even while a body
part was hacked off intrigued Casement when he investigated Free State
conditions in 1903.25 But other aspects of violence during war and raiding he
found unfit for repetition.26
Reproductive Ruination
In my history of colonial things in the Belgian Congo, A Colonial Lexicon, debris was the material and concrete.27 Debris consisted of those once colonial thingssoap, baby clothes, and birth certificatesthat remained as
twisted objects in a postcolonial field, Mobutus Zaire, mired but ever alive,
exerting power over decisions, purchases, gifts, and secrets. The method
used for tracking debris began not with words or sounds, but with observing practice and use in a postcolonial present. Debris as method cannot work
for an anthropological history focused on the violence of Congo Free States
red rubber period and its aftermath.28 A period in the field, trying to find
remnants of concessionary posts or mutilation sites, might be evocative. But
as I learned during a few trips into the region, the Albini rifles and cap guns
are long gone, the hostage structures and rubber baskets, too, even if there
is a a ruined wall about a meter high of an Arab house at the former Abir
post of Mpusu.29 Most memories of imperial violence are jumbled. More recent kinds of ruinationthe structural violence of the Mobutu years, the
bombardments and penury of recent war in the Basankusu areadisplaced
the tangible and accessible memories of 1954, when a Flemish missionary
mounted an essay-writing contest to collect Congolese memories of rubber
violence in the Free State period.30
I therefore take up the immediacy of ruination caused by the rubber system,
providing a fresh reading through the senses, through fields of hearing and
sound. These directions take us to fright, shame, and the unsayable, and the
way anguish produced silence or, perhaps oddly, a brief eruption of laughter.
The duration of duress in the quateur region into the Belgian Congo years
(190860) is significant to overlapping modalities of violencestructural,
corporeal, symbolic, psychic, and sexualand their reproduction and somatization over time.
The bodily effects of spectacular, transgressive, sexualized violence are
44N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
of particular interest. Roger Casement found people frightened and frail

in 1903, when he investigated, traveling from Lac Leopold II up the Congo,
Lulonga, and Lopori Rivers into the Abir concession. He noted the visceral
effects of terror and trauma: suspicious looks, evasive eyes, and flutterings.31 His investigative report included the words of Rev. J. Clark of Ikoko:
Again a lower percentage of births lessen the population. Weakened bodies
is one cause of this. Another reason is that women refuse to bear children,
and take means to save themselves from motherhood. They give as the reason that if war should come to a woman big with child, or with a baby to
carry, she cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers.32 Many spoke
of hunger and starvation. A missionary near Lukolela spoke of a disappearing and dying people, suggesting fear and punishment were producing
loss of appetite and amenorrhea in women.33
A less sensitive observer, more aligned with King Leopold, too, the British
journalist Viscount Mountmorres, found much to admire in the Free State,
while arguing that problems were confined to the quateur concession
areas.34 He witnessed the violent squeeze of the Abir system when the rubber supply was almost exhausted.35 This squeeze produced uprisings. Rubber
villages were making war on food villages, while many simply fled the Abir
zone. Mountmorres imagined the Mongo of this terrorized area as indolent, timid, and sulky, desiring only to be left alone to lead a slug-like existence. He did not recognize how war, forced labor, and starvation were producing the frailty and brokenness before his eyes.
The villages are smaller and not so well kept. . . . One scarcely sees a village worthy of the name. . . . Occasionally one or two huts . . . will still be
occupied by a surly, silent, depressed people, who neither greet one nor
flee before one, but accept ones presence with a dull indifference. . . .
Physically the race is degenerate, being extremely small of stature and
meager of build. . . . The rapidity with which these people fall ill and die
is almost incredible. . . . They . . . accept death with a fatalism which goes
far to encourage it.36
Mountmorress idea of a degenerate Mongo race became repeated in
Belgian colonial words and practice, as quateur became neglected in decades to come, as finance capital turned to mining and its industrialization
in other regions. By the 1920s30s, when attention turned to worker shortages and the impact of labor recruitment on social reproduction, the sight
of overworked, exhausted people in quateur became frequent again. Worries about a low birth rate and infertility became commonplace. Continuing
forced labor, while less murderous, remained a form of structural violence

that shaped social geography and demography. Many robust Congolese
simply moved away, out of the customary realm and its legislated, regulated work obligations (porterage, road building, agriculture) into extracustomary wage labor on plantations or in colonial towns. The women who
stayed behind in quateur had to carry heavy loads of requisitioned food into
the 1930s; from the 1940s, they had to build roads.37
Colonial language about subfertility and sterility in the Mongo and
Nkundo regions of quateur spoke of degeneration, race suicide, extinction,
a customary world unable to reproduce itself, and widespread childlessness.
Shock became an everyday colonial word, as a string of doctors began to report on sexually transmitted diseases (STD s) and to think about infertility
in a psychic lexicon from the interwar period on. The best demographic age
pyramids (from Befale territory) indicate a significant reproductive downturn in 188590 and again in 190510, thus corresponding, respectively, to
when Abir first arrived and again when Abir abuses reached their height,
with a general regression in the birth rate between 190530.38 Up to 40
percent of women were childless in the Tshuapa region of quateur in the
1950s.39 Much degenerationist language was figurative; but we are no longer
in the realm of metaphor when we see the list of women patients names
treated by Dr. Magis in 1958 in his sterility clinic at Boende.40
Reproductive disruption in quateur contradicted the Belgian colonial high-modern aesthetic of the 1950s, focused on reproductive modernity, maternity wards, and happy, helpful husbands.41 There were few rural
mothers beaming with babies in their arms in maternity beds in quateur in
the 1950s. Instead, women unable to become pregnant or give birth to live
babies attended the first infertility cliniclikely in all sub-Saharan Africa
to open its doors at Befale, in 1953.42 The contrast in birth rates and maternity services between quateur and other parts of the colony suggests an
unevenness to temporalities, modernity, and ruination within one and the
same Belgian African empire.43 Not all Congolese received welfare capitalism, maternity wards, and babies in equal measure. Ruinous resource extraction in early colonial quateur had enduring effectson Congolese memory,
reproductive bodies, and European attitudes, and in the penury of investments made in this relatively empty region with a haunting past of widespread death and injury.
46N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
A Callous Eye and Acoustic Debris

Debris takes on a different meaning here, one more sensory and mnemonic
in a history that contains violence, death, and mutilation, where ruination
was bodily and psychic, and where war and sexual violence have resurged
over the last decade. Rather than debris first sighted in a postcolonial field
and tracked historically through archives, I use sensory traces parsed from a
refractory colonial archive to anchor a reading of the immediacy of anguish
and ruination and the sounds and images people were left with some fifty
years later.44
Any archive may be likened to an ethnographic field, if techniques of observing, listening, wondering, and parsing are privileged. Still, we need to be
careful before imagining every scrap of paper, photograph, and object in archives and museums as the debrisor ruinsof empire. Doing so would be
facile, and embrace too much. Neither would it push a vocabulary of ruination to press forward questions about claims and consequences, memory
and the senses, immediacy and duration, reproduction and repetition. While
reading canonical, new, and underused sources, my thinking has turned to
perception and an acoustic presence: hearing, sounds, noises, hushed
stillness, and silence.45 I seek out a soundtrack and words spoken to ground
a new reading of Free State ruination, the anguish and fright of the moment,
forms of remembering and muteness that followed, and claims made and
their potential reappropriationsrepetitionsin the present.
My archive here consists of four sources. Rather than gathering inspiration from Conrads hallucinatory prose, indeed avoiding the spectral
frame it might reintroduce, I return to the investigative report of Casement,
then British consul to the Free State.46 Optics and acoustics operated with
studied restraint in this circumspectly composed indictment of Leopolds
Congo.47 Second, I parse the daily journal of the Free State officer turned
heroic veteran Baron Francis Dhanis (1904), who Abir hired to go in and
investigate just as its regime spun into chaos from rubber exhaustion, increased atrocity, and scandal.48 Baron Dhanis was neither neutral nor a
humanitarian witness. Hired as special adviser, he was allied with Abir and
the king. He was already a major colonial hero, in Belgian circles almost as
famous as Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who helped win key battles of conquest
in the so- called Arab War in Congos Zanzibari- dominated east in the early
1890s. Dhanis was not backed into a defensive mode either, and this makes
his unstudied, spontaneous, and often pained personal jottings about the
visible and the heardnone intended for publicationa precious counterpoint to the studied realism of Roger Casement.49
Dhanis entered into the Abir landscape of ruination in early June 1904
and left by mid-September. Embedded in his diary are notations on encounters with Congolese; most were akin to appeals for help. These suggest a
range of kinds of duress, some visible, though many from the realm of the
tactile and the unseen.50 Also present are claims, occasions when peoplenatives, chiefs with names, one European agents boycame to
complain, protest, or ask for intervention. These claims are an interesting
counterpoint to the testimony of thirteen Congolese who testified before the
Kings Commission of Inquiry in 19056.
Congolese did not speak at the time of rubber abuses only to Dhanis,
Casement, appalled missionaries, and the Kings Commission, but also
among themselves. And fifty years later, when the Flemish missionary
Edmond Boelaert organized a Lomongo-language essay contest in a mission
newspaper, 170 teachers, students, clerks, and chiefs wrote about the violence, death, cruelties, and hardships of the Free State years.51 I use all four
sources to sense violence and ruinationin their immediacy and in forms
of remembering.
Stoler suggests discerning tenacious and weak traces. As I parse this
diverse archive, I attend to weaker, aural traces to complement and complicate the overpowering tenacity of the visual. Even within the visual, I distinguish among images of a basket of human hands in someones immediate field
of vision; of severed, counted hands in memorys eye; and of a mutilated young
man in a photograph that circulated then, as it still does in histories and documentary films today, influencing memorys eye wherever it alights.
The idea is to push beyond the shock of the photographic, which tends
to blot out all else, and seek more fragile memory pictures and acoustic
traces that tell something new and more complicated about the immediacy
of violence and its duration in memory. Silence and the unsayable are significant. Casements report spoke of the quiet of death, and, indeed, muffling
sound saved lives.
Some sounds were words voiced out loud. Sometimes a girls fear meant
her voice was very small.52 Some sound was visceral and eruptive. A chief
broke down and wept, saying that their lives were useless to them.53 A
crowd roared with laughter when a sentry claimed he did not know a
fifteen-yearold maimed boy whose hand the throng knew well he alone
had hacked off.54 Some sounds were technological, emitted by new objects
that moved, killed, and made troops march to time: steamboats, rifles, cap
48N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
guns, bugles, and military brass bands. To the young ears of the village girl
Bonsondo, the sound of a bugle suggested a white officer had been present
when soldiers attacked her village.
Not all objects that made sound were new. The noise of brass anklets
put a girl on the run at risk of being sighted and caught.55 Death produced
sounds of weeping and lamentation. Fright led to the loss of voice. Bikela
remembered after a massacre that friends who were left buried the bodies
and there was very much weeping.56 When soldiers killed her mother with
a gun, she cried very much. Afterward, Bikela was too frightened and
would not answer.57
Elimas visuality extended to dreaming: Bula Matadi was coming to fight
them, but her mother told her she was trying to tell stories, but a little while
later she heard the firing of guns.58 Guns, human hands, and baskets of
severed handssevered so they could be acknowledged and tallied by white
agentswere among the objects that were part of this world of violence and
rubber. The Congolese memories of 1954 emphasize that protective medicines were, too. These charms enabled a special visibility. Looking into the
ikakota pot, Jean-Ambroise Yolo explained, one could see rows of troops at
war.59
Memory smells and shudders. People recalled the stench of rotting
corpses in 1954. These essays, written mostly by second-generation children
of victims and survivors, are rich with sound, of the first boat that arrived
like the noise of large wind that precedes rain, of an old man with inebriated song about war confronting some and sparing others, of mocking
insults hurled at white men with unkempt hair, the bang of guns as rain
drizzled, and children crying from hunger.60 Images are omnipresent: trees
used for hangings, baskets, blood running like a stream or up the thighs.61
Casement was hyperattentive to visibility and audibility, in keeping with
the charged atmosphere of accusations, investigations, and denials. When
one commissioner told English-speaking missionaries their ears [were] too
long, Rev. Clark replied: Their eyes were sharp. . . . We see and know.62
Casement observedand people offered him visible evidencebroad
weals across their buttocks, while a lad of 15 or so, removing his cloth,
showed several scars across his thighs.63 There is no lack of toxic images of
cruelty in Casements report. Ncongo saw a basket with two hundred hands
counted out.64 Casement saw fifteen women . . . tied together, either neck
to neck or ankle to ankle, to secure them for the night.65 When writing that
people were not happy under this system, Casement commented that it
was apparent to a callous eye that in this they spoke the strict truth.66 He was
aware that what he reported as seen or observed became fact, while reporting
on things heard from their lips would double the truth effect.67 And he made
readers aware of the scopic economy at work: eyes watching and guarding
all around, the filling of sacks taking place under the eyes of . . . a State sentry.68 Casement used eyes and ears to argue that there was a very real fear
of reporting among Congolese. Even though people spoke to him, their
previous silence said more than their present speech.69
Seeing took precedence over hearing in the Casement report. And these
were the only two senses at work. This is quite different when one turns to
the 1954 memory accounts or the stories of five Ikoko mission women who
had been rescued as girls around 1893; in these, sound and hearing were as
important as sight. Casement took pains to collect and translate the girls
firsthand accounts. The girls had run for their lives and quickly sensed sound
as risk. A misguided or inadvertent sound could cost a life, Bikela learned
after running far into the bush with her mother. Soldiers followed and
when they came near us they were calling my mother by name, and I was
going to answer, but my mother put her hand to my mouth to stop me. . . .
If she had not . . . we would all have been killed.70 The sound of gunfire produced flight. Crying was dangerous: We heard children crying, and a soldier
went quickly over to the place and killed a mother and four children.71 This
sense of danger also comes through in the memories documented in 1954.
Antoine-Marcus Boyoto recalled, When they perceived a noise or the rattling of shots, they went further into the forest. Mothers buried alive their
small children because of their crying.72 The sound of nervous laughter
could produce a more violent, punitive death, as Ncongo explained: The
soldiers saw a little child and when they went to kill it, the child laughed so
the soldier took the butt of the gun and struck the child with it, and then cut
off its head.73
Sentries, Laughter, the Unsayable

People referred to the armed rubber- company men by the instruments they
carried. Imome, for example, called sentries guns.74 And when Franois
Bombute wrote of sentries, he penned, The guns spoke.75 Dhanis concentrated on Congolese sentries as the gangrene of the Abir system, noting
theft, murder, and stolen wives. There is an arc to his observations about
women, as he tried to zero in on the abduction of wives and daughters by
sentries and their overseers, capitas. He seized on the gifting of women to
sentries by chiefs, thereby seeking exemptions on the quantity of rubber
50N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
to be collected. When one sentry came with a complaint, Dhanis asked him
to declare how many wives he had; soon his wives gestured toward other
uncounted wives with pointing fingers, turning their sentry husband into
a liar. When Dhanis discussed a complex murder case, he made lists of the
cast involved, naming each sentry and his servant or boy, while working
out clashes and murders among the factions.
Of twenty-five episodes of mistreatment, protest, and conversation that
involved a claim made before Dhanis, ten were made by chiefs, five involved
natives, and four came from individuals. Two were by sentries: six from
Besongo asked for caps for their muskets, while saying they needed Albini
rifles. Only a few claims involved a soundtrack beyond the suggestion of
words. Dhanis used the word supplications for the entreaties made by women
doing basketry work in rubber- drying sites as he approached a prison. He
asked a skeleton of an old man in the prison how long he had been there.
The mans wry retortJudge for yourself. I no longer know.stirred Dhanis, who sent the frail man home with an unprecedented intercession, a generous gift of cloth.
The acoustic register of Dhaniss journey also embraced the sound of
laughter. A Boande native asked the Belgian baron how to get back his
wife, who had been abducted by a sentry some time ago. Noting that the
husband had never complained before, Dhanis asked him why. He entered
the reply in his journal: He laughs. The response is sufficient.76 Dhanis also
noted the sentry had been laid off on April 1 of this year, perhaps losing
access to a gun in the process.
Bakhtin on laughter is not so useful here; the husbands laugh was not
a cackling, carnivalesque laughter. Nor was it a laughter that mocked. It
seems closer to the nervous, agonized shaking suggested by Baudelaires
trembling laughter.77 Batailles ideas about the unknowability and anguish of laughter are helpful: That which is laughable may simply be the
unknowable . . . the unknown makes us laugh.78 Laughter, a moment of release,
involves the violence of an excitement which can no longer be stopped.
Bataille added: Anguish is not the cause of the laugh . . . but anguish is in
some form necessary: when anguish arises, then laughter begins.79
This husbands laughter seems to have come from the realm of the immediate and the visceral, the instant and the direct. The erupting sound suggests something important about the duration of duress. The evidence suggests a delayed laughter, coming from a delayed claim, an uncomprehending
white mans question, and a prolonged and diffuse suffering.80
When Casement traveled in 1903, he also heard laughter. In Nganda a
state soldier in his third term from the faraway Upper Bussira spoke fully
of the condition of the people. Casement asked why he had stayed so long
with the work: His own village and country were subject to much trouble
in connection with the rubber tax, he could not live in his own home, and
preferred, he said, laughing, to be with the hunters rather than with the
hunted.81 Perhaps the soldiers laughter revealed uneasiness, nervousness,
and suppressed anguish due to relative safety and the obligation to hunt
others. Bataille reminds: The nature of laughter . . . lies in its link to a position of dominance. . . . We laugh on condition that our position of dominance not be at the mercy of laughter.82 In King Leopolds Ghost Hochschild
uses the word frenzy to comprehend what happens when killing becomes a
kind of sport, like hunting.83 He gives examples of European sadists, torturing Congolese with castor oil, faces rubbed in excrement, and holes shot
through earlobes.84 The complex relationships among laughter, domination,
pleasure, anguish, and frenzy are worthy of further exploration, especially as
they relate to fields of vision and sound in situations of sadism and torture.
Congolese memory accounts give examples of European and Congolese
sadism, of transgressive, gratuitous, grotesque violence, sometimes in a repetitive, almost fanciful mode of remembering.85
The one inflicted with the chicotte who defecated right afterward, they
obliged eating this excrement. If you refuse to eat it, they kill you. . . . A
woman is pregnant, they order: Eviscerate her so that we see how the
baby is inside. The death of the woman follows. They cut one ear from
someone and left him another. They forced a woman to have sexual relations with her son. If she refuses, they kill her. . . . They had a breast cut
off a woman and left her another. . . . They obliged a boy to have sex with
his mother, if not they kill him.86
The way sadistic pleasure combined with sexual torture came through clearly
in Mingos testimony before the Kings Commission in 1906. While I was
working in brick-making at Mampoko, at two different occasions in order to
punish me, the sentries, Nkusu, Lomboto, et Itokwa, made me take off my
cloth and put clay in my sexual parts which made me suffer a lot. The white
man saw me with clay in my sexual parts. He limited himself to saying: If
you die in my work, they can throw you in the water. The white man Longwango also saw the clay in my sexual parts, and he had the same attitude as
Likwama.87
There is no way to know who dreamt up this idea of filling a womans
private parts with clay, of using the material of the work under question to
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threaten, humiliate, and abuse her. Vigdis Broch-Due reminds us that violence can lead to a macabre form of creativity.88 Mingos words suggest that
voyeurism accompanied this spectacle of punishment, torture, and looking.
She spoke about suffering and visibility: the sentry made me take off my
cloth, he made me suffer a lot, the white man saw me. We hear about a
division of labor: there were the black men who put clay in my sexual parts
and white men who watched at a remove. This situation involved racial layers
of authority and the capacity for observation: a white man could sit as if apart
and look, and if he did not quite approve of what he saw, he also did not stop
the situation. Another white man was also there with his eyes, looking.
The optics are clear; but the acoustics require a hermeneutic, sensory
leap. It is as if through an ellipsis of sound in Mingos deposition that we
begin to hear the twisted pleasureand tittering laughterthat accompanied the sexual torturing of a woman through hardening clay. These fragments bring near a human scale and a sensory awareness to the immediacy
of ruination. The sound of twisted laughter collected, convulsed, and retracted around forms of sexual violence basic to, indeed constitutive of, the
reproductive ruination of Leopolds Congo. The acts involved hunting people
as animals, commandeering girls, stealing wives, and raping and sexually
tormenting others. Listening for twisted sounds maintains a technique of
nearness.89 It allows concentrating on nonnarrativity and sound, the convulsive quality of sadistic violence, and the hidden, shameful, and unfit for
repetition.
Abjection and anguish were immediate. Uncanniness and the eerie came
after the fact, for some, in remembering, hearing about, and seeing again
and again in a photographic image. There is not a hint of evidence that the
atrocity photographs ever circulated in the colony; there were no shocking
magic lantern phantasmagoria in the Congo. Perhaps this helps us understand the absence of a spectral mode of narration in the 1954 Congolese
memories (quite unlike the ubiquity of this mode in the West since Morel
first began miming Joseph Conrads prose).
Some intimate injuries . . . appear as only faint traces, notes Stoler.
Dhanis jotted down a chief s swollen finger in his journal. It does important work to identify detached body fragmentshands, feet, or headsas
instant debris of empire in the Congo. A corrosive violence emerged from
having access to the barrel of a gun, by which one could enlarge petty power
and accumulate wealth in women in a situation of hunger, chaos, and devastation. Dhanis worried about the sentries as thieves, stealing until people
had nothing left, robbing them of wives, too. Four Bongulu sentries in charge
of sixty-five rubber gatherers wanted to take their women, but killed their
dogs instead. We can keep nothing was the lament. Similarly, in the 1954
memories, Franois Bombute wrote: If there were bananas in the banana
patch, it is only he who cut them. If he discovered you ate these bananas,
he killed you right away.90 Even more vivid were sexual violence and transgressive excesssentries who made mothers have sex with sons, fathers
with daughters, kin with kin. Of particular note is the mention of sentries
amusing themselves while pounding the insides of womens vaginas with
sticks.91 Such a strong, graphic image suggests acute pain, writhing bodies,
damaged reproductive tracts and desire, damage caused to women in an era
long before there were gynecologists around to speak about psychosocial
trauma or proceed with fistula repair.
Repetition and Difference

It is time to return to Nsongo Mboyo and the rape of women and girls there
in 2003 by Bembas former troops. The UNFPA film Les mes brises, by Khalil
Gueye, includes the words of one Nsongo Mboyo woman raped on that
December night, speaking months afterward: I do not deserve to live any
longer. Several soldiers tied my feet and legs and raped me one after the
other. Then they forced my own father, threatening him with their weapons
to make love with me. After that, they inserted pieces of wood and their gun
barrels into my vagina. They hurt me so much morally and physically.92 In
2007 the DVD of Les mes brises was readily available at a convention gathering together African gynecologists and obstetricians in Kinshasa. The Congolese minister of health spoke about new specialized training programs to
prepare gynecologists to deal with the psychosocial and fistula repair needs
of Congos thousands of rape victims.93 The film mentions 24,520 rapes recorded in Kindu between March 2003 and August 2005; 6,000 of these involved traumatic fistula needing surgical intervention.94 Some tears cannot
be repaired; 260 women in Bukavu in December 2007 had received surgical
attention, but would live with urine- collecting pouches appended to their
bodies for the rest of their days.95
The repetitions are multiple. At the same time, much is new. The differences between humanitarian intervention into human wreckage in the
Congo Free State and again since 1996 are enormous. In each, shocking
numbers and shock-photos produce revulsion and pity among spectators, and also produce humanitarian funds.96 Today, however, humanitarian
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intervention is highly medicalized and bureaucratized. In Congo it involves

all kinds of nationalnot just foreignhumanitarian workers, negotiating the readings of their ethnic identities at roadblocks and clinics.97 In the
case of rape, these humanitarian workers are applying, adjusting, and revising imported gynecological, trauma, and gender sciencesin ways not
yet studied. Other post-1989 contexts of peacekeeping operations and rape,
like Bosnia, suggest that complex assumptions about speech, shame, posttraumatic stress disorder, and psychopharmaceuticals are having material
effects within this UN -administered global reservation.98
The exceedingly medicalized nature of humanitarian attention to rape
in the DRC includes constructing a novel gynecological category, the traumatic fistula.99 And this injury forces a reflective return to the epidemiological theorizing of the demographic historian David Voas, who came close to
wondering around twenty-five years ago if rape in hostage houses was not
the major factor in spreading STD s and producing a low birth rate in Congos
quateur.100 Voas assumed a causal logic that had STD ssterilizing gonorrhea or chlamydia, miscarriage-producing syphilisas the mechanism linking rape and infertility. Similarly, rape in the DRC has attention focused on
AIDS today. Pounding the inside of a vagina violently with sticks in an era
before Coke bottles suggests tearing, blood, and infection, while unmended
fistulae in the Free State years would have produced incontinence, stigmatization, and untold humiliation.
It will never be possible to quantify the number of rapes in Leopolds
Congo. But the evidence on Nsongo Mboyo in May 1904 suggests that residents did not provide rubber as taxed, many women became hostages, at
least eighty-three persons were killed, forms of cannibalism ensued, while
in neighboring villages guards amused themselves in forcing villagers to
commit incestuous sexual acts.101 The same kind of grotesque excess
was present within the imaginary of memory in 1954.102 The Nsongo Mboyo
events of 1904 produced the father Nsala, who wrapped up body parts of his
devoured daughter and took them to Baringa to protest before Abir agents;
he ended up on Alice Harriss verandah, and one result was an iconic magic
lantern photograph of this father in grief next to a small hand and foot. Cannibalism and mutilation were more sayableand more photographable
than either rape or forced incest, which seem to have remained unfit for
repetition among humanitarians like Roger Casement.
Afterlives
Dhanis also took refuge in his journal by trying to imagine a future, an exit
from the ruination he was witnessing. He was seeking a way for the Abir
company to overcome its current disaster and achieve a viable future through
plantations and well-organized markets. This fantasy embraced a way to create a middle rank of industrious, partly civilized Congolese. It included
numerical and bodily control, through counting and inscribing names in
registers and identity books. Dhanis was planning a future through civilizing the perpetrators, the sentries, not the savage victims, lowly slavelike
persons huddled in mere huts or prisons. Sentries wives would be paid to
clean posts and harvest fields. Rubber plantations would develop.
Dhaniss fantasy in the midst of ruination was not impossible. As memories and the archival record suggest, from about 1910 on a new kind of state,
the Belgian Congo, emerged. State agents began collecting names, distributing identity books, and insisting on taxation in money and less murderous
forced labor, glossed as customary and educative. What social roles did
former sentries play once Abir dissolved? Much red rubber violence was
among familiars, and the Abir evidence suggests that whether sentries were
familiars or strangers made a difference in the degree of violence and in how
the sentry category was remembered. (Abir introduced outsider sentries into
Nsongo Mboyo in May 1904 because harsher, more terrifying punishments
were needed.)103 The question of what became of the Free State sentries finds
a parallel in the nagging question asked in the DRC these days: will military
amalgamation or brassage (brewing) work? Can all the men and boys from
various rebel armies be integrated into one national army as part of security
sector reform?
The UNFPA film Les mes brises speaks to another afterlife, the subject
positions of raped women and the difficulties of moving on and remaking
lives. It contains an awkward, disturbing scene of a rape victim, whose face
is blurred while her husband tries to overcome his impulse to abandon her.
His smile is forced, too forced. His effort to give affection seems contrived;
visibly, his gesture does not comfort his wife, who appears more strained
and withdrawn as a result. The filmmaker tried; perhaps, too, did some
UNFPA assistants who wished for such a scene as didactic model. However
flawed, it evokes the emotional toxicity of sexualized violence within persons
and relationships, within the everyday work of repair.104
Compelling, too, are scenes of rape victims planting new gardens, working together in safety, and making new lives. Images of girls and women
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gathered in a Catholic Caritas project are disconcerting. They are learning

to sew. At first, a few sewing machines suggest capital, a chance to learn an
important money-making skill with a technology that costs dear. But the
machines disappear quickly, and the dominant image becomes rows of girls
learning to embroider with needle, thread, and circular frames. This unsettling flashback to colonial domesticity reinforces an image of the Congolese
woman as homemaker, helpmeet, dependent, and needy, obedient wife.105
This aspect of Belgian colonial ruination should not be forgotten if we
are to understand the dire state of gender relations in Congo today. A domesticizing humanitarianism came into play for girls and women across
Belgian colonial terrain in the wake of the human rights disaster that was
Leopolds Congo. It is still present, from sewing classes in Catholic mission
stations to the fact that in 2007 only 10 of around 550 professors at the University of Kinshasa are women. Girls, even those from intellectual, middleclass families, learn quickly that their role is to be minor and obedient, to
serve men (even their university fathers), to find and mind husbands, and to
have children. Gender relations are reportedly changing most rapidly in the
east, where women have suffered most, where the global word genre (gender)
has appeared along with peacekeeping operations and trauma science, and
where the epidemic in rape has politicized many.106
Consider again Boali and the magic lantern show of the 1900s. Unlike
Mingo, Boali could be photographed and turned into a pat story. But this
almost naked woman was nevertheless difficult to fit into missionary narratives. The lantern show sought to offer an image of the uplift that evangelical missionaries could provide, if allowed to work without the constant
turmoil attendant on the rubber regime. One photograph showed mission
girls at school, dressed in long, tailored dresses. Missionaries tried to underline Boali as a faithful wife, mutilated for constancy, but turning this unclothed woman with one foot who had refused rape into a domesticated mission wife was challenging. Boalis photographan ambiguous, troubling
imagewas difficult to control and even dangerous to show repeatedly.
It is important to stay alert to the redemptive projects dreamed up for victims of sexual violence today. More domesticity training will only reinforce
the minimization of women. The 2006 UNFPA film may have had multiple
audiences in mind, but it remains primarily a promotional piece for Joseph
Kabila and his presidency. It does not let resound the strong voices of women
who came through war and rape, formed NGO s, and as activist mothers are
remaking the home-based gender training of daughters and sons. Surely
some are refusing embroidery for daughters and doilies for homes, as they
remake lives, seek peace, and say no to rape.107 But how to catch this, acoustically and visually, is not obvious. Linking the shame and the refusals of
raped women today with the sayable and unsayable of Boalis time is one
way to begin. Regardless, the point is to listen to distress and refusal as immediacy and as duration.
Conclusion
In this essay I have urged for two kinds of reflection, reading and attentiveness. One has been about remembering and sound. The other has been about
duration, reproduction, and repetition.
In demonstrating a sensory, acoustic mode of reading the archive, I have
insisted that the debris to be signaled and reappropriated should not be
photographic. We should avoid repeating the tenacity of the visual and the
sense of shock that it reproduces. Rather, parsing the archive means listening for images and sounds in the eye of memory. It calls for hearing a nonspectral acoustic register, the sounds of people scattering in flight, speaking
in hushed voices, testifying bravely, remembering through stories marked
by song, nicknames, poisonous images, and weeping. This reading has included hearing the sound of tittering, as a man pounds the inside of a woman
with a stick as if she was a mortar and his instrument the pestle, crushing
systematically, rhythmically.
It is no longer tenable to imagine one can write an urgent, effective history about violence in Leopolds Congo without tethering it to the present,
to the last decades of postcolonial war, death (of at least four million persons, according to estimates), and sexual violence. Supposing that one could
reach back in time and put King Leopold on trial, as the make-believe narrative structure of one historical documentary pretended to do, does little to
interrogate the modalities of spectacular violence among Congolese people
living then, or how they moved on and remade lives and relationships.108
Tethering to the present need not be about continuity or causality; one
context did not necessarily produce another. Nor is the point to forge historical links between two situations of militias and sexual violence, as if
each were part of a single historicist stream of history that began long ago in
primitive Africa. It may be appealing to look at the history of Congo as one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage before us,
yet the pile of debris still needs sorting.109 And then it needs form. (One
continuous narrative would distort much, and be impossible.)
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Rather, tethering to the present should be about locating repetitions and

producing history in a mode of repetition. The first has an analytic purchase, suggesting how to read the archive, how to sort the debris. The second is about strategicthus, for the academic historian, largely formal
reappropriations of some bits for the present producing or telling of history.
Form matters: it constitutes the refining of theory and politics in historical
writing and analysis. In this essay, an analytic grounded in revealing acoustics has shaped selection and form at every turn.
Boalis lost foot, stolen anklet, and verbal claim became a storied fragment, a moment of difference from the past used to produce an effect of
difference.110 Repetition in a strategic mode could mean importing Boali
into radio discussions and hip-hop songs about rape and war in todays
Congo. Doing so might produce debate about war crimes and commissions of inquiry. That such a commission existed within the Free State remains understated, when a historian like Hochschild places too strong of a
heroic spin on the pressures that Morel exerted from Britain and beyond.111
We need to remember that this same pressure produced the kings historic
Commission of Inquiry. Congolese in the hundreds spoke before it and with
intimate detail about injury. Despite Leopolds success in suppressing the
testimony and abridging the commissioners report, this public forum of
testifying about violence, injury, and atrocity changed the course of history.
King Leopold lost his colony. He also did not manage to control or destroy
all the evidence; much documentation still awaits further parsing by historians.
Seizing hold of repetitions produces questions about what has not been
reproducedabout what is novel and different in todays present. A key
parallel lies in complexly layered war economies, with globally sought raw
products (rubber then, coltan and other minerals now) fueling violence and
battles that become localized in dimension, meaning, and escalation.112 Another parallel is spectacular, telescoped, and devastating violence. But the
signature has shifted.113 Images of mutilated hands have not been repeated
in Congo, despite their ubiquity in media representations of other 1990s
wars in Africa. The sentry may have become a child soldier, a genocidaire, or
a Mai-Mai, but the signature of horror serving as humanitarian fuel lies in
the much less photographable figure of a raped girl or woman. Three repetitions should make us pause: the armed militia (sentry) figure, the sexually transgressed girl or woman, and the partially redeemed female victim
figure. Each opens issues of social roles and subject positions and their repe-
titions over time. It is important to keep tracking how each becomes symbolic within humanitarian phantasmagoria and within the new Congolese
national imaginary still in formation.114
Notes
This essay is reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association.
It originally appeared in Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 22053, and cannot be
used for sale or further reproduction.
I am grateful to Patricia Hayes, Julie Livingston, Farina Mir, Kim Fortun, Hugh
Raffles, and Gary Wilder for comments on drafts of this article, and especially to Ann
Stoler for her comments, suggestions, and generous encouragement and support during the many lives and ruins of this essay.
1. Gueye, Les mes brises; Integrated Regional Information Networks, Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC ); Kambale, La condamnation des soldats violeurs redonne
lespoir dautres femmes victimes, Inter Press Service, Kinshasa, 23 April 2007,
http://www.ipsnews.net; United Nations Mission to the Congo (MONUC ), MONUC
Expresses Its Satisfaction about the Verdict of the Songo Mboyo Case. The multiple
wars in the DRC since 1996, which have cost around four million lives, are complex
(see Coghlan et al., Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo). They date back
to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and cannot be understood without attention to the
extractive economics and shadow networks involved (Jackson, Making a Killing;
United Nations Panel of Inquiry, Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal
Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
2. Abir was founded as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Exploration (ABIR )
company in 1892. In 1898, at which time all British capital had been withdrawn, ABIR
became Abir (Harms, The End of Red Rubber). In 189192 King Leopold issued a
set of secret decrees that reversed the Free States previous free-trade policy, made it
resemble a state monopoly, and enabled the rubber regime and its brutalities. One decree gave all vacant lands to the Free State. At the same time, Leopold gave tens of
thousands of acres to concessionary companies in which he held major investments.
Thus, when Abir was founded, in 1892, the Free State gave it the exclusive right to exploit all forest products for a thirty-year period; people living in Abir territory were to
collect wild rubber for the company in lieu of paying taxes to the state. Abir received
rights of police and powers of bodily detention, enabling the system of companyrecruited and armed militia, the notorious forest guards or sentries (see Harms, The
End of Red Rubber). Also key to the systematicity of rubber violence was payment
of bonuses or commissions to functionaries for the amount of produce collected,
thus providing incentives for maximal exploitation (Sochin and Sullivan, The Eyes
of Another Race, 6). On humanitarian efforts, see Initiative Conjointe de Lutte contres
les Violences Sexuelles Faites aux Femmes et aux Enfants en RDC , Rapport de mis-
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sion Mbandaka, Kisangani, Kindu, Kalemie, Bukavu, Goma, Kinshasa, du 4 au 21

aout 2003; Lussy and Matemo, La violence sexuelle des jeunes filles Goma; Senga
Kossy, Kinshasa abrite le 9me Congrs de la Socit Africaine Gyncologie Obsttrique; compare with Csete and Kippenberg, The War within the War.
3. Congo Reform Association, Treatment of Women and Children in the Congo
State, 18951904; Morel, King Leopolds Rule in Africa; Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost;
Grant, A Civilised Savagery. The British consul Roger Casement mentioned at Bongandanga that 242 men of the district named Nsungamboyo, twenty miles away, had
marched in a long file, guarded by sentries, bringing rubber to the factory grounds.
According to Harms, Sungamboyo was an Abir post, where people rebelled in late
1905 (Harms, The End of Red Rubber, 8586).
4. See Stolers essay in this volume.
5. Sliwinski, The Childhood of Human Rights, 355. Also see Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo.
6. Barthes, Shock-Photos.
7. E. D. Morel coined the expression red rubber with his book of this name, suggesting that the rubber became bloody, hands were cut off, and so forth (Morel, Red
Rubber). Historians of Africa since the 1970s have referred to this period in Congolese
history (ca. 18921908) as the red rubber period.
8. Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, 11617.
9. Grant, A Civilised Savagery.
10. Morel, Red Rubber, verso.
11. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 353, 202; compare with Grant, A Civilised Savagery; Sliwinski, The Childhood of Human Rights; and Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
12. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3.
13. The longer duration in the Abir region embraces preceding slave raiding, from
at least the 1870s through the early Free State years. This aspect tends to be missed in
a historiography that seeks to find a villain in King Leopold and a hero in E. D. Morel
(Bate, Congo; Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost).
14. Morel, Red Rubber, verso.
15. Morel, King Leopolds Rule in Africa; Morel, Red Rubber. Boali appears in Morels
pamphlet, The Indictment against the Congo Government, E. D. Morel Papers,
F 13/3/2, London School of Economics Archives.
16. Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost; Bate, Congo.
17. At the same time, the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo.
19. Congo Reform Association, Treatment of Women and Children in the Congo
State, 18951904, 2223.
20. Hochschild works to use Congolese voices and mediations as his book progresses. His suggestion about a lack of African voices has been repeated inaccurately
by a visual studies scholar who claims that aside from Roger Casements attempt
to record the testimony of those maimed individuals he encountered directly, there
are simply no accounts (oral or written) from any Congolese person during the Free
States regime (Sliwinski, The Childhood of Human Rights, 35758n2). Sliwinski

misreads Casement and also misses Hochschilds argument about finding the voices
of the Congolese themselves in a searing collection of firsthand African testimony,
the Commission of Inquiry depositions (Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost, 255). The
Lomongo-language essays did not become available in print in a French translation
until 199596.
21. Few historians have used these depositions; for exceptions, see Marchal, E. D.
Morel contre Lopold II; Delathuy, De Geheime Documentatie van de Onderzoekcommissie in de
Kongostaat; and, in a minor way, Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost.
22. Boali of Ekolongo, Deposition no. 172, 12 December 1905, testimony at
Baringa, AE 528 (349), Campagne anti- congolaise, Commission denqute, liasse 1,
African Archives, Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels.
23. Hunt, A Nervous State.
24. Sochin and Sullivan, The Eyes of Another Race, 126.
25. Ibid., 163.
26. Ibid., 140.
28. Numerous name and boundary changes make the term quateur a shifting referent over time. I use the term to refer to the southern quateur region, thus south of the
Congo, Lulonga, and Lopori Rivers, embracing the former Abir zone as well as much
Crown domain and SAB territory in the Ruki, Tshuapa, and Lake Leopold II districts.
29. Chambers, Lomako, 327.
30. Van Herp, Parqu, Rackley, and Ford, Mortality, Violence and Lack of Access
to Health-Care in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Boelaert, Vinck, and Lonkama, Arrive des Blancs sur les bords des rivires quatoriales.
32. Ibid., 144.
33. Ibid., 132.
34. Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost.
35. Harms, The End of Red Rubber.
36. Mountmorres, The Congo Independent State, 4547.
37. Hunt, A Nervous State.
38. Van Riel and Allard, Contribution ltude de la dnatalit dans lethnie mongo.
39. Romaniuk, The Demography of the Democratic Republic of Congo; Romaniuk, Infertility in Tropical Africa; Voas, Subfertility and Disruption in the
Congo Basin; compare with Hunt, Colonial Medical Anthropology and the Making
of the Central African Infertility Belt.
40. Magis, Consultations de strilit lhopital de Boende.
42. Allard, Contribution gyncologique ltude de la strilit.
43. Hunt, Le bb en brousse; Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo; Harootunian, Some Thoughts on Comparability and the
Space-Time Problem.
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45. Warner, Phantasmagoria, 273.
46. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, 10.
47. It is now available in a superbly edited edition: Sochin and Sullivan, The Eyes
of Another Race.
48. Harms, The End of Red Rubber; Baron Francis Dhanis, Large Abir Journal,
21 April11 September 1904, Historical Section, Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. The only historian to use Dhaniss journal is Vangroenweghe, Du sang
sur les lianes.
49. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, 10.
50. Stoler, Intimidations of Empire.
51. Boelaert, Vinck, and Lonkama, Arrive des Blancs sur les bords des rivires
quatoriales.
53. Ibid., 84.
54. Ibid., 170.
55. Ibid., 15556.
56. Ibid., 149.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 152.
quatoriales, 10810.
60. Ibid., 4749, 6271, 16566.
61. Ibid., 3639.
63. Ibid., 69.
64. Ibid., 158.
65. Ibid., 95.
66. Ibid., 98, emphasis added.
70. Ibid., 149.
71. Ibid., 151.
quatoriales, 14345.
quatoriales, 5152.
75. Ibid., 5458. More research is needed within these memories on how Congolese read the ethnic identities of soldiers and sentries, and how Abir used readings
to control and punish labor. How a company like Abir recruited sentries is not well
documented (Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes).
76. Baron Francis Dhanis, Large Abir Journal, 21 April11 September 1904, 211,
Historical Section, Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium.
77. Baudelaire, Lessence du rire et gnralement du comique dans les arts plastiques.
78. Bataille, Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, 90.
79. Ibid., 70.
80. My reading of laughter through Bataille may suggest that I think laughter can
be read in a universal way. Rather, not unlike Mbembe in On the Postcolony, I find Bataille and Sony Labou Tansi useful for thinking about death, excess, and laughter in
central African cultures. More ethnographic work on laughter within Africas current
zones of war and suffering would be instructive.
82. Bataille, Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, 97.
84. Ibid., 166.
85. This is not to suggest that these acts of violence were fantastic, in the sense of
implausible or untrue. Drawing attention to the poetic, tale-telling quality of repetition here suggests the phantastic, thus the psychic at work within this secondhand
memory account fifty years removed.
quatoriales, 24042.
87. Mingo of Ilua, Deposition no. 267, 2 January 1906, testimony at Bonginda, AE
528 (349), Campagne anti- congolaise, Commission denqute, liasse 1, African Archives, Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels; Hochschild also uses Mingos
testimony (King Leopolds Ghost, 25455).
88. Broch-Due, Violence and Belonging, 25. I am grateful to Julie Livingston for
first suggesting that I reckon with the creativity of the violence.
89. Benjamin, The Arcades Project.
quatoriales, 5458.
91. Ibid., 211. See Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes, 134, for a similar instance
near Boende. Casement never used the word rape (although there is a mention of removing the organs of the mean slain by the sentries (Sochin and Sullivan, The Eyes
of Another Race, 125). Nor did he use the more ambiguous word ravish. Historians have
become less shy on a topic for which evidence is rarely explicit. Institutionalized rape
was not uncommon, and such sentries often lived en pacha, state Sochin and Sullivan (The Eyes of Another Race, 321n43), speaking about rubber districts near quateurs
Irebu, but they do not say how they reached this conclusion. Hochschild speaks of
raped hostages in passing (King Leopolds Ghost, 175), and quotes from a Force Publique officers 1895 diary in Uele, far northeast of quateur: The women taken during the last raid at Engwettra are causing me no end of trouble. All the soldiers want
one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape
64N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
them (King Leopolds Ghost, 162). Tswambe, one of Boelaerts sources, speakswithin
Hochschilds book too (King Leopolds Ghost, 166)of the way armed men forced people
to commit transgressive sexual violence against their own kin: Soldiers made young
men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.
92. Gueye, Les mes brises.
93. Senga Kossy, Kinshasa abrite le 9me congrs de la Socit Africaine Gyncologie Obsttrique.
94. Gueye, Les mes brises; compare with United Nations Mission to the Congo,
South Kivu.
95. Personal communication, Madame Maria Mukaya of UNICEF , following
UNICEF -Centre Culturel Amricain Workshop on Gender Violence for Hip-Hop Musicians, Kinshasa, 26 November 2006.
96. Sliwinski, The Childhood of Human Rights; Redfield, Doctors, Borders and
Life in Crisis; Malkki, Speechless Emissaries.
97. Pottier, Roadblock Ethnography.
98. Harrington, Governing Peacekeeping; Amitav Ghosh, The Global Reservation. The UN Security Council set up MONUC in 1999; the council expanded its
peacekeeping mandate and size in 2000.
99. Western mainstream media attention to rape in the Congofrom Glamour to
the New York Timessuggests the rape card is effective in producing humanitarian
funds; it distracts the media from asking about Laurent Nkundas funding or the extractive economics of the ongoing war (Snow, Three Cheers for Eve Ensler?). Keith
Harmon Snows conspiracy-like reporting is problematic, but he points to who is
benefiting from war in Congo and how, and provides information about specific persons, corporations, embassies, and organizations that rarely appear in mainstream or
humanitarian media. See his website, All Things Pass, http://www.allthingspass.com.
For news and articles on sexual violence in Congo, provided by Eve Enslers Congorelated website, see http://drc.vday.org/news.
100. Voas, Subfertility and Disruption in the Congo Basin.
101. Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes, 125. The village, known alternately as
Nsongo Mboyo and as Wala, was located in the Nsongo Mboyo district.
102. Broch-Due, Violence and Belonging, 25.
103. Vangroenweghe, Du sang sur les lianes.
104. Das, Life and Words, 62.
105. Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo;
Hunt, Hommes et femmes, sujets du Congo colonial.
106. Harrington, Governing Peacekeeping.
107. Puechguirbal, Women and War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
108. Bate, Congo.
109. Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 392.
110. Harootunian, The Benjamin Effect, 75.
111. Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost.
112. Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers, The Politics of Rebellion and Intervention in

Ituri.
113. Das, Life and Words.
114. Lvi-Strauss noted this, long ago, in his discussion of history in The Savage
Mind.
66N A N C Y
RO S E H U N T
E . VA L E N T I N E D A N I E L
The Coolie
An Unfinished Epic
The following is a selection from a forthcoming book which I have, provisionally, if immodestly, called an epic in verse. This selection consists of
nine chapters and synopses of the two opening chapters out of a complement of fifteen chapters. My debt to the great Derek Walcott should be obvious to all. I hope I am forgiven for, among other things, flattering myself by
the best form of imitation that my talents allow.
For some of my readers this poem may bring to mind the call for experimental ethnography broadcast by George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer
more than two decades ago, and they may therefore read this as a somewhat
late response to that call.1 If it happens to serve such a purpose, it is so by
default, and I am willing to either apologize or accept accolades, as the case
may be. The real reason for my launching this ethnohistorical poem is a
much more down-to-earth and practical one, a piece of serendipity. The recent history of the island that was once upon a time known as Serendib has
not itself been that serendipitous, especially for its Tamil minorities. My own
work is based on one moiety of the Tamil-speaking peoples of this island,
whose last name was Ceylon and which has been known as Sri Lanka since
1972.
The half that I have worked on consists of Tamils of South Indian origin,
who labor on Sri Lankan plantations or estates as they are locally called,
for periods ranging from several months to a year, at irregular intervals,
over the last twenty-five years. These Tamils are distinguished from the in-
digenous, Sri Lankan Tamils by dialect and habitation. My father worked

on one of these estates during the first twenty years of my life. Except for
two periodswhen I was between ages four and ten, we lived in the town
of Kandy in order to be within walking distance (six miles round-trip) of a
good school; when I was between ages fifteen and eighteen, I spent nine
out of twelve months each year in boarding school in JaffnaI grew up on a
tea plantation. The first time that I did ethnographic research as such among
tea plantation workers, called coolies, who worked with their hands in the
fields and factories, however, was in 1973, for three months, prior to beginning my predoctoral field research in a village in South India.2
Since then, my interest in the lives of estate workers has led me to two
sources of information: oral history and ethnography; and written records
about coffee, rubber, and tea plantations that were made available to me in
far-flung private and public archives in Sri Lanka, India, and Britain and in
the writings of a few pioneering historians who had researched and written on these Tamils. Apart from the latter and a handful of anthropological
studies, the written record consists of very little that was about the actual
lives (especially the unquantifiable aspects of the lives) of the so- called
coolies.3 In the archives was plenty of informationwith dates, if not always
with nameson matters that had an immediate bearing on colonial and
postcolonial politics and economics. Oral history and ethnography, on the
other hand, provided me with gems of information polished by tongue and
time, but with very few reliable dates and names concerning the persons,
places, and events that were recorded, repeated, or recalled in them. Each
of these two sources was rich in one and destitute in the other, forming an
irreconcilable complementarity, a challenging symmetry. After almost three
decades of intermittent struggles with this duality and failed attempts at
writing a documental and chronologized history, a year or so ago, in a state
of pure musement,4 as I was attempting to construct a clear sentence with
substantiatable content, I found that the sentence took on a life of its own
and settled into three tercets of iambic hexametrical, twelve-syllabic lines
in terza rima (aba, bcd, cda, and so on). I was writing in verse! A bonus to
this pleasant surprise came in the form of a discovery: a truth in verse that
could not be conveyed in prose, a truth that was present at hand in oral history and ethnography but made distant or secondary in prose. I believe that
most prose in the social sciences in particular does not merely overshadow
or repress this affective truth in its secondary status but may even kill it.
In the form of verse that I have chosen to narrate the ethnohistory of the
Tamil coolie, the certainties of prose are neither absent nor neutralized but
68E .
VA L E N T I N E DA N I E L
are given a supportive and constraining role. Whereas poiesis is responsible

for the truth I speak of, prose keeps this truth honest. An analogue to the
pairing of poetry and prose and prose in poetry may be found in the way ancient Tamil grammar conceptualizes vowels and consonants: one was seen
as force and the other as form, as the breath and the body, as goddess and
god, as female principle and male principle, as the flowing and the standing, as propelling and fixing. But even a narrative poem that could be told as
a prose tale is not just another way of telling the tale. The coordinates of the
aesthetic faculty employed in a poemeven in a prose poemdemand of
sense and sound an economy that is so exacting that it is achieved through
compression of language into an image that is neither more nor less, but just
right, for conveying the essence of an event such that the desired feelings and
meanings made possible by that event are made available to the reader or the
listener by the singer-poet.5 Far be it from me to claim that I have succeeded
at this challenge in this poem. This is only an attempt, and for that matter,
only a selection from such an attempt. Valry once wrote what became for
him a lifelong writing belief: we do not finish writing a poem, only abandon
it in despair. In the case of this poem, it is too early even for that.
I have taken many liberties with the reader, some because I must, others
because I may. Some names have been changed, not only because of the interpretive and composite nature of the poem, but also in deference to the
expressed requests of the trustees of the letters and private journals from
which I have drawn in writing this poem. I have changed the names of men
and women whose lives, or excerpts thereof, figure in the poem, mostly
in deference to the requests of their grandchildren, great-grandchildren,
nieces, and nephews who held these letters in trust. I have tried my best to
honor these requests by protecting the identities of the trustees ancestors.
A few trustees had no objections to my providing any and all details of identity of the authors. In one instance, I was told that I was free to reveal the
identity of an ancestor in question without reservation, provided I secured
the permission of the surviving progeny, which was too formidable a task
to fulfill. In a third instance, a trustee insisted that I provide any necessary
details of the authors of the journals and letters entrusted to her care. But
having looked at all the permissions and requests collectively, and for the
sake of uniformity, I have chosen to avoid naming anyone whose trustees
placed conditions that I could not meet. Furthermore, because of my ignorance of some of these planter-patriarchs fuller liveslacking sufficiently
comprehensive biographies on any of themand because such details that
I did gather were from (mostly) plantation workers accounts, the accounts
T H E C O O L I E 69
are likely to be partial and selective at best, decontextualized snippets of

their lives and persons. Under these circumstances if I were to explicitly link
event to name, I would run the risk of bringing dishonor to the dead and
embarrassment to the living in their recontextualized uses. Therefore, in all
but a few obvious cases, which are noted, I have taken the liberty to change
and omit names. There are characters who appear in this long poem who are
semblances or composites of others or of one another. Some I have, from
events and facts, realized and written into being. I have also overlaid places
and collapsed times in order to protect their identities.
The following individuals gave me free access to their ancestors letters,
from which I have freely drawn and adapted to the purpose at hand. These
individuals, to whom I owe special thanks, are Ms. Connie Langdon, grandniece of Mr. A. T. Sydney Smith; Mr. Robert Hatkins, grandson of Mr. John
Hatkins; Ms. Myrtle Grey, grandniece of Mr. Terryl W. N. Gascoygne;
Ms. Georgiana Boyd, descendant of Ms. James Taylor; Mr. Robert Hollingsworth, descendant of Mr. H. R. Trafford; and Mr. Arunachalam Somasunderam, trustee of the letters and diaries of Byde Martin.
I have tapped a host of memories, mostly those of plantation workers. The
singers, balladeers, storytellers, and raconteurs from whose talents, knowledge, wisdom, and recollections I draw are too many to list. I shall mention
but nineteen individuals without whose help this project would not have
been possible: the singers Sowpakkiam, Marimutthu, Sathasivam, Manonmani, and Sankili; and the storytellers and raconteurs Sowpakkiam, Kutti
Letchumi, Parameswari, Aravandi, Bhuma, Sellasamy, Kitnan, Dhamayanthi, Poochiyayi, Sombu, Muruhupathy, Sokkuppulavar, Arunachalam Pillai,
and Kuppusamy Thevar. In this list I must reserve a special place for the late
C. V. Veluppillai, who was a rich source of the folklore of plantation Tamils,
and for Mr. Murugesu Pushparajah, who has rescued me out of my ignorance
on more than a few occasions. Last but mostly, I am also deeply indebted to
my brother, George Daniel, who was a clerk and a field officer on a tea plantation for thirty years, and taught me a great deal about the workings of a tea
plantation and the lives of people who worked on them.
What nineteenth- century colonialism did to more than thirty million
human beings by turning them into coolies, the massive contribution of
labor to colonial capitalism that was made possible by this transmogrification, and the positive role colonialism and the plantation economy played
in the making of a modern nation-state amounts to but half of the story.
The other half lies in the violence wreaked on the land and the people by the
political economy of colonialism in general and, in particular, by the planta70E .
tion economyone of colonial capitalisms most productive enterprises of

the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Unlike the urban
ruins observed and written about by Walter Benjamin or W. G. Sebald, plantations are ruins that both fit more snugly and give a new twist to Georg
Simmels description of our fascination with a physical ruin as the fascination of a ruin, that . . . a work of man appears to us entirely as a product
of nature.6 Tea estates are deceptively called tea gardens in tourist brochures. But looking at them as imperial debris gives tea gardens a whole
new meaning, turning them into Benjamins angels of history.7
A peculiar feature of this poem pertains to voice. Typical of an oral epic,
the poem features multiple voices telling narratives within narratives, including the authors own voice and perspective, which pops up unannounced. In
the song-poems, inscapes become landscapes and landscapes inscapes. This
is in keeping with a Tamil poetic tradition that goes back to the sangam age
of early Tamil literature, even though the landscapes invoked are not neatly
and necessarily the five landscapes of the classical Tamil poetry of that age
(ca. 100 BC AD 250).8
Three last details. The first concerns the use of French, German, and
Latin in this poem. This usage is merely intended to convey, by analogy, the
fact that the Tamils I worked among and whom I represent in this poem
also sprinkle their speech with words and expressions drawn from two foreign languages: English and Sinhala. In fact, Tamils in general are far more
learned in one or more languages other than their native tongue than is the
average English speaker. The utterances in English or Sinhala that have been
diagrammatically represented in the poem in Latin or French also indicate
that they are explicitly performative, with accompanying illocutionary and
perlocutionary force.
Second, occasionally in this poem, the reader will recognize a line or
phrase or an echo from a renowned English poet, such as Shakespeares to
be or not to be? Such phrases are diagrammatic of great Tamil poets and
aphorists of yore whom Tamil speakers of all classes and levels of education
know by heart and take special pride in quoting.
The last detail concerns the use of quotation marks. Only the words,
phrases, and sentences that are not within quotation marks are to be read
as purely the authors own. Words, phrases, sentences, images, and figures
of speech that are within quotation marks may not be verbatim quotes drawn
from what the many friends, acquaintances, and strangers told me during
my many years of research among them. However, these poetic forms are
culled from the essential substance of actual interviews and archival sources.
The chunks of narrated and observed predicaments, and of expressions of

emotional, sensory, and cognitive memories that have been worked on have
been approached with great attention and care to cut along the grain of
specific details embedded in these chunks, and thus to be faithful to the
ethnographic context and archived material. Even though most of the verbal
treasures I have made use of in the writing of this poem are not literal translations, all of them have been translated with a concern for faithfulness of
idiom, sense, and contextand only then, for sound. Along this same vein,
I have made no attempt to directly translate or transliterate, word for word,
the folksongs I collected in the field; but, again, the ethnographic narratives
in this poem are based on the content and meanings of these folksongs and
the affect they were intended to convey by those who sang and understood
them. For these reasons, the narrative herein I hold to be neither more nor
less factitious than any ethnography in prose. It is just that the facts are realized in a different register, with painstaking attention for economy and accuracy of detail, especially aesthetic detail.
C H A R AC T E R S
(In order of appearance)
Adhipathy or (Adhi for short): The name of the blacksmith and singer of
tales of times past, present, and future.
Rukku or Rukkumani: The blacksmiths daughter, who doubles as the
medium who receives the tales from Rmu and whispers them into her
fathers ear.
Adhipathys wife.
Rmu: The composite ghost-spirit of many Rmus (pl.) who lived on earth
in the flesh in times past.
Gaapathy or Gapathy (also called Gaesh, Vignvar, or Vinyak, and
Ekadanta, among others) is the elephant-headed deity, son of Prvathi
and Siv.
Hanuman: The monkey-god, Lord Ramas henchman in the great Indian
epic Ramayana.
Rmar: A form of the name that is reserved in this poem to refer to Lord
Rama.
72E .
Appu: The multiskilled servant of an Englishman named Mr. Chauncey.

Makalam: Appus mongrel daughter.
Kau: Makalams husband.
Ratnam: Makalams brother and son of Appu.
Dorai: The title by which men in power, in general, are referred; and by
which all white gentlemen, especially ones master, are referred.
Kaki: The title and form of address used for the leader of a gang of
workers.
Marvel Stark: An English dorai who is the supervisor of a gang of workers
(coolies).
Paar: A coolie who belongs to a caste of untouchables called Chakkii.
Thappu: Paars sisters son. It is also the name of a drum played by Parayar.
Paayan (pl. Parayar): One who belongs to a Dalit caste who were once
called untouchables. Among other services provided to a village community, Parayar also served as drummers at funerals. The drums they
played were generically called parai.
Chakkiian (or Chakkili): One who belongs to a Dalit caste, which was
considered to be the lowest in the caste hierarchy among the Tamilspeaking community of Indian descent in Sri Lanka.
Uppu: A worker in Marvels gang. It is also the word for salt.
Padmini: A young woman who died in childbirth and whose ghost haunts
the jungle.
Thpori: A young female worker, daughter of Sthupathy, a member of a
higher caste. Also means spark.
Vekash: The name of a kai working under Marvel.
Vman: A kaki who works under Marvels successor, a Scotsman
named Jon De Witt.
John De Witt: One of Marvels successors.
THE KLI
(A Selection)
I
Preamble
(A synopsis)
This chapter introduces a blacksmith named Adhipathy and his young

daughter, Rukku.9 Even though Adhipathy is by now an old and decrepit
alcoholic whose memory is fast fading, he still has the most beautiful voice
in a wretched hill town surrounded by tea estates. In a shrine on one of
the plantations there has arrived an important visitor: Gaapathy,10 the
elephant-headed god and scribe, who once upon a time put the great Indian
epic the Mahabharata into writing as the sage Vyasa recited it to him. A band
of workers from the tea plantation arrive at Adhipathys forge to coax him
into coming with them and to sing before Lord Gaapathy, so that he may
write down their history and heritage, the stories of their long walk and the
travails of their ancestors, who began migrating from South India to Sri
Lanka in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.11 After much protesting
and persuading, Adhipathy comes up with a suggestion: since his daughter
knows all the songs about this disenfranchised and stateless migrant community, from having listened to him sing of them from when she was a baby,
and given that she is still young and has a good memory, she could sing of
the history and heritage of her people. Initially, the workers reject the idea
as untenable because Gaapathy would not be dictated to by womankind. A
bright idea dawns on one of the men. He proposes that Rukku could whisper the stories she has stored in her memory into Adhipathys ear and that
he could weave her words into the tunes he knows so well and sing them
aloud in his clear-as-a-bell voice so that Gaapathy could write them down.
II
Supplication to Vinyak
(A synopsis)
In this chapter, the workers fear that Lord Gaapathy might object even
to the whispering of womankind are allayed. So Adhipathy begins with a
lengthy recitation of obeisance to Gaapathy, who, impatient with the ritual
pro forma, commands him to get on with the telling of the tale. But before
Adhipathy can proceed, Gaapathy warns the bard of one condition: Once
74E .
begun, if you should cease your telling, . . . I shall leave in the blink of an elephants eye. Adhipathy responds with his own stipulation: On one condition my vermillion adorned Lord and Scribe, that you write not a word more
if my drift you should lose as a lutanist a quaver might. Begin anew when
you find it. And the anthropologist adds, Tis the law of hermeneutic, the
detail to recover. And so, Rukku, Adhipathys daughter, begins.
III
Generations and Time
When I leave this island,12 said Rukku, a single

witness will still remain to tell of the observed
and the absorbed of the shedders of blood mingled
with blood shed. Mother earth here has been quite reserved,
abashed to confess that she, soaked in venal crude,
puddles her own clay to create out of this sludge,
coolies as us, over and over again. Lewd
our senses, our ways rude, so deemed by all who judge
and miss our dialects pulchritude. Eternal
returnees,13 requisite detritus. Judge not lest
you too be judged for having seen but not witnessed
harm infernal, unlike Rmu, who has lived our every test.
Hey, say! Must I tune my ear to a new bards throat?
Ignore a girls intermittent whisperers rustle
and hearken to a mans pitched braying off note,
I am told. I agree. Now this: a new hustle
in the mix called Rmu. Smithy, do we need him?
Is he . . . Vishnus avatar? The seventh, perhaps?14
Not to change the subject, said Adhipathy, whimsically, as he changed the subject, devising
distractions deliberately. Please lend no more
than a moment at most, the gift your father gave
you so bounteously your loss to you to restore:
those lavish ears with a most capacious head. Brave!
For want of a stylus, a tusk to break you chose.

Ekadanta15 winced and with new resolve returned
to press the lost subject: Rmu. Must I suppose,
that spurning my question you may rest unconcerned?
Answer! Does Rmu belong to the other sect?
Is he one or many? Far, far be it from me
to show you the tiniest glint of disrespect.
Rmu is recurrent indeed, but more easypeasy than Rmar the vegetarian, who
sent General Hanuman to this imperfect
island16 his abducted virgin bride to rescue.
He was on his seventh birth, this Ram you suspect.
Rmu, our Rmu, is non-sectarian,17
strictly non-vg, on his sixthif not on this earth
in our imagination; the custodian
of our sensory memory of untold worth.
App!18 interjected Rukku. Incorrect count!
youve missed three generations, each one a life.
Yours takes us back only towhat is tantamount
to blasphemy1870! Girl-to-wifeto-mother, takes thirteen. Do watch your mouth and tone!
Men became fathers only at twenty and four.
Cept his father! Was fourteen, to her grinding-stone,
his wife mumbled. He, to her indirections score,
in indirection swore: Gossips cognoscenti!
Stop quarreling. Find the difference, and Ill be judge,
the Lord said. App knew hed said more than plenty.
This was no time to generosity begrudge.
To halve or not to halve was no burning question.
We shall split the difference, and dissolve the dispute.
So, may we with no further adjudication,
in concord with language and truth resolute,
re- commence our tale, which takes us, we concluded,
76E .
back to 1829,19 to Rmu of fame,

perennial witness of all lives included
since then, in the agentive line that bears his name,
and bares the biography of an idea.
An Idea? What ever could that be? Coolies
for work, work for coolies, promised panacea
for all our ills, in this tear- drop island of trees.20
Ganesh declared Rmu in with a whatever.
A crow21 with the wind appeared and puffed clouds bestirred
in an otherwise calm sky. Trees set aquiver
as Rmus geist upon them alit. Word on word
fell like hushed petals in Rukkus bejeweled ears.
All prattle ceased. Her whispers, transformed into song
pierced the rising mist as light would a veil of tears.
Place held time still. Time, sang Adhi is neither long
nor short. Length, could not its unchanging measure be.
Some times are gaugeable, as a repasts vaunted
flavors22 are, in x lumens of intensity.
To tack twixt is, will and might be and the taunted
weres is to sample this, that, and the other at
a meal of cooked rice, smbr,23 rasam,24 curds, pickle,
andif luckysome meat; savor the sharp, the flat,
contiguities and affinities, the trickle
of ghee; checking feelings assent with smell and taste.
Does the green of beans befit its crunch? Is just right
a compliment? Is the sugared pysam25 chaste?
Chronicles keep now and then apart and airtight;
they declare time long or short. In heritage,
now becomes then and then becomes now.26 Five, eight or ten27
hereafters reporting to this blend, may somehow
incinder the sum, causing the now into then
to collapse and effervesce, celebrate or mourn
and thereby times space-analog vitiate. But
never always, nor forever. Its gift to burn

makes time a tree. For in the rings of its clean- cut
wound reposes the pasts presence in synchrony.
Lightning splits longitudinally its column
of history. Vignvar, blessed the journey
with raised trunk. Silence settled on all like a hum.
IV
Labor and Empire
In ancient cities turned tourist sites boys scour

the earth to disinter coins dispersed in commerce,
impressed with Arabic, Greek and Roman sourfaced heads of men, Indian gods and beasts. These terse
co-bearers of value, the Tamils called ksu.
The Sinhalese re-pitched it to acute ksi.
Grave28 caixa was a Portuguese amendment. To
haleHail Britannia!fell the honor of recashing it with a phonemic hush. Its timbre,
though, resounded the world over. Victoria
dispensed with justice, trees to fell without number
to redeem unassisted nature.29 Gloria!
Where sandalwood, clad cinnamon and breadfruit once
flourished in equipoise of give and take with jack,
ebony and Ceylons rosewood, there in prudence
slithered in Lockes Law of Nature,30 propertys lack,
to ask for, seek, find and amend. What paved the way
was The Law of Conquest.31 A retinue of terms,
attendant concepts, like obliging mantissae,
marched in concert: barracks, caserns, and subalterns;
calls to muster, roll calls, check-rolls, acre and mile;
lunch-time, tea time, quitting time, overtimeall clocktime; ounces, pounds, kilos; rupees and cents; docile
bodies, lost souls, racial types and such poppycock
78E .
as in Notes & Queries ignorance could make ones blood so hot,

so cold. Contracts, fingerprints, promissory notes;
Companies LTD and Company Stores; lots
of debt and more interest; coolies with no votes.
A s/trapping discourse. Due process pursued with Right
and Rule, with well-tempered faith, hope and Christian
Charity. On the heathen recondite go light
unlike the Batavian or Liberian.
Honor the Trinity of Holy Cs: Conquer,
ye called and chosen; with capital Colonize,
the burden make light; Convert with love the sinner,
by sin be Appalled. The damned corral, tame the wise
as you would the wild. Straighten the crookedin root,
branch or man non- compliant. Horseless equites,
natives all, gave cause and moral purpose to boot
to mark trees, including some ghostly favorites
descendants of legends, storied centurions
for their appointed death by means pre- determined.
In dying thus, from vagrant and Cimmerian
spirits redeemed, forest from village did exscind,
creating space to sack in from black coffee, tea
and rubber, Rukku whispered, and Adhi sang. Tamed
they stood, in ordered rows, in far-flung swaths made free;
owned by the likes of Smith, Gascoyne, Cameron, named
Ravens Craig, Denmark Hill, Concordia. Prefixed
hills and dales, numbered in the thousands. Cash crops
for cash spread like a green rash on this land suffixed,
Estates, for more cash crops, for more cash. Case? Dunlops.
A gash in the trunk of an un-lyrical, grey,
seborrheic, lichen- cloaked, foreign and vulgar
tree.32 Its buff-flesh pearled an ooze, the color of whey,
that dripped into coconut half-shells. Lest rigormortis set, a drop of pungent ammonia
its liquidity assured, then spun to repeal

till no more than a lump in myotonia,
more rubber less latex, lay; in trays to congeal.
These fat slabs reeked of a vinegar-butter blend;
hand-fed between steel rollers made in Manchester,
to mats compressed. Civilization to extend,
Great Regina or Rex, upon these did confer
the approbation of their persons so Highnessed
bless them!in escutcheons, which Royal Right affirmed.
When wood oven baked caramel tone sufficed,
an expert hand their elasticity confirmed.
Trained eyes pronounced them ready for the seal to fix.
For this was sacrificed, one black fulminant night,
by the laws of imperial agronomics,
one-hundred-and-one thousand acres of daylight
eclipsing green canopy of old growth forest.33
After-thought coppices of albizia34 trees
were nurtured to serve, at the managements behest
as swift-burning wood for the punctual coolies.
Colonizers and their fair consorts with much lust
and more leisure to spare, shunned its wily brilliant
but hurried flame that would slyly lick like mistrust.
The embers dimmed their eyes even before gallant
Scots their clothes doffed. Lovers could but leer at them shrink
to ash with a mocking hiss, as ecstasy passed.
The likes of Mark and Anne of the well-informed Inc.,
their friends, Clarisse Louder and Cudsworth Melrose Nast,
Sir Cockshut and Lady Gwen, Nigel and Nancy
and Mark Fells ivorine wife, had naught to forego.
They sojourned in a misnomer owned by Chauncey
that Appu built, a villa called a bungalow,
with sporting fireplaces tucked in all rooms.
Jack, rosewood, satinwood and gleam-lashed ebony.
80E .
Just because it was good to thinkthe question looms

was it good to ignite this slow burning, heavy,
smoke-free hard wood? Ah! Such a Lvi-Straussian
question you say? Quite right. Once while on grubs choking
he split nature from culture, but an avian
thought from power could not tell.35 A bell for stoking!
Boy! Ratnam, age thirty, would rush to the noblesse.
His fair half-sister, Makalam, Appus ecrudermal daughterunmarried, mongrel, motherless
had her own story to tell. Not now, said Rukku.
Today there burns in her a different worry;
less, of the well-lit deeds of lovemaking, Scottishstyle, which discomposed her brothers gift at parry;
than with albizia, short-lived, yellow, corkish,
measured by the foot, rationed and booked, the steadfast
flames of her households hunger to douse with red rice,36
if lucky; mostly kurakkan-gruel,37 ballast
to sate their abdominal languor, or else, price
her husbands wrath. Appu watered his dorais38 bed
of roses with a thin golden stream. Looked further
than he saw. Spat. Shook. Too late to say the unsaid,
too old to care, except for Makalams brother
and his three boys. The youngest on disappearance
paused; wondered if the disappeared could disappear;
his fathers sisters unruly husband perchance?
Boys will be boys, well beyond eighty and one year.
Not those boys-will-be-boys doraisnis39 endure,
but only what coolies can become by the rule
of race, logic of empire and indenture,
endless youth cumbering life on a squirrels spool.
Makal40 yearned for some time her own life to fathom.
But whod protect Kau41 from himself ? Palmyrah
toddys namesake, ersatz renouncer, wastrel, bum.
2.1 Line rooms for workers; one 10 10 room was allotted per family. From
S. Muthiah, The Indo-Lankans: Their 200-Year Saga (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Indian
Heritage Foundation, 2003). Source: S. Muthiah, Indian Heritage Foundation.
sits on the bench at the shack until dawn. Harah!

Hari, hell sing some noon. Come home to try to do
his woman, eat, filch trifles, threaten violence,
and sell or trade his way back to the shack to construe
want. Want-annoyed one noon- day, in the mens absence
he came, kicked up curls of dust, with intent on harm
he entered his line-room.42 The air was motionless.
A diurnal ghoul had birthed an uncanny calm.
Makal sensed the presence of inauspiciousness.
He came, shaft-straight rod in hand, thin as a viper,
drawn from a bundle of like bamboo canes, exportbound for English Public Schools. A moment riper
there wasnt, he thought, to thrash his wife for high sport,
He rushed at her from behind, arm raised over head.
When she spun around, a scalding oil-filled frying
82E .
pan in hand. Flipped it on her husbands face, then fled

west, ahead of the police chase, still un- crying
until she met the tracks of steel reposed on ties
laid by her ancestors, with help from denizens
of local villages. Disobliged by their spiesdeposed king, these peasants re- obliged new reasons
to bend to the new realms coin.43 Lest peasants at six
were to coolies become, they returned home each night,
the siege to keep over this rule of thumb and fix
thereby Tamil-Sinhala difference as black and white.44
Village from sleepy village hid as Makalam each bend
took through the arcade of trees, their arches of thin
arms swayed pensively, to caress or comprehend,
or perhaps to smite. Fear as intimate as skin
embalmed her. She beseeched Amman45 to draw nearer.
Soothed by the early- dawns dew- covered-night- cooled steel,
a far-away trains well-kept beat reached beneath her
feet when she heard the sea roar and temple bells peal.
V
The Clearing
The ocean, her destination, shed never seen

but had heard Appu speak of aplenty: restless
sparkle of salty blue, at dusk a jungle green;
the ship of fools in alimentary distress;
the white mans burden of rules that for themselves stood;
the Big kaki46 in blinding white vi47 dressed,
giving and taking tin tokens48 of cooliehood.
Makalam had hoped to soon reach that mountain crest
where her grandfather at sunset scanned an event:
A trembling cauldron of color, that distant sea
was, hed said. Unscrolled tales unrolled of their descent
into the grasslands and jungle-laboratory.49
2.2 Building the railways upcountry, ca. 1925. From S. Muthiah, The Indo-Lankans:
Their 200-Year Saga (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Indian Heritage Foundation, 2003).
Source: S. Muthiah, Indian Heritage Foundation.
There, suspended in mid-air, stooping to espy

two rivulets of shimmering brown trickle through
a field of buttercups under a sun-reigned sky
heading towards the forest where giant trees grew,
a surveiling kite saw two obtusely angled
streams meeting, pausing, pooling, into a circle,
settling, uncertain as mercury bespangled
ablaze, the trick the noon- day sun in its cycle
played on their sweat- drenched brownalmost maroonbodies.
Circle into crescent concaved. Its horns tapered
to tips as of scorpionoid congruities,
poised equidistant from a lone prey co-pincered
to arrest by pre-hending its ruddy victim
in its hooped claws; but alas, with no arcing tail
to sting with. The quarry, an Englishman in prim
uniform and topee, grave in every detail,
stood with the right to come on, command and commend.
We called him Dorai the source of all injunctions,
captain at muster, who may summon, choose and send
whomever. Rock blasters left first. Strict instructions
re: avoiding sudden death; tree-fellersalso
menwhom chiselers and stone- crushers followed. Steadfast
diggers with strong backs left next. Weeders,50 with bones oh
so supple or embrittled by age, were the last
dispatched. The crescent crumbled like sand and scattered.
The sacred bird of Vishnu,51 god most orthodox,52
soon lost interest in what for humans mattered,
soared up and away, cued by booms of blasting rocks.
With each downward thrust of its white-rimmed chestnut wings,
it rose high above trees to pan the multitude
of forest greens and blood reds, to spot rent partings
that may reveal dead flesh to that thin altitude.
Herds of elephants set in and out from under
arboreal shades, their own lithe shadows like blue

clouds at play. A calf, just acquainted with thunder,
would soon know dynamite, gunpowder and a zoo.53
VI
Death in the Jungle
Was that the conch or was it old Paar blowing

his nose? A joke that had its day, a man offered
that morning to buffer the rude awakening.
It was untimely. Paar was dead. Had suffered
they said. Arise! Swing your scythes, the dorai bellows,
the collective unease was chastened and consoled.
In this well-timed new world beset by strange billows,
surely, labor from loss, the bold future will hold,
will as love from mere labor, be partitioned of.
Guards, gods, wild hogs and rabid dogs, fear! Death, accept!
Paars end, the nest that coiled Russels vipers wove,
dread! Now, Dorais orders obey, Dorai respect!
In this speechlet, Kaki54 a precept concealed:
Acknowledge! Forget! Move! It had served him quite well.
Our people acknowledged Paars death as revealed
by his still warm corpse. We could have moved on, not dwell
in place or in thought. But could we forsake custom,
bury in haste and the loss of loss then to forget?
Of course there is caste (a thoroughly unwholesome
subject where anthropos and hierarchy met).55
Kaki, his kin, and few others exempted,
most in his death-reduced gang of forty were ranked
untouchables: Paayar, Pallar,56 most shunted
Chakkiliyar.57 From the last, all but two were yanked
out of life at Mannar pier by a noxious
fever, which with it brought boils plumped out and charry,
on the same bright sunny day we thought propitious,
86E .
soon after the monsoon rains in a blustery

distemper came and went. Then Paar and nephew
were the lucky two; now halved by one. Eight years old,
the boy, dubbed Thappu.58 Quite gifted, by all review.
He never missed, held back or sped a beat. All told,
a prodigy; could make taut funeral drums speak.
Rmu in the flesh said, His mother bedded down
with a Paayan. A potion of Fenugreek,
neem,59 limejuice, and salt, by a Vauvan60 renown
made, combined with his own cryptic61 ingredient,
was fed to drummer Thappu, which transformed him from
Chakkili into Paayan adolescent.
Captain and kaki deployed a conundrum.
Not soon, but now is when we must move, both announced
in stern consonance. Now to the hills! Not later.
The groups hesitation to obey was pronounced.
Their response was as agile as stagnant water.
The kakis eyes moved like two unstable pans
of a balance-scale: sign of deliberation.
Dorai dipped his chin. Kaki seemed to gain spans
as he stood on toe-tips with no hesitation
to whisper man to man: Here is the little catch.
One whose breath is still in his nostrils must abide
by the dead one, until his body we dispatch
with proper rite. To say otherwise Id have lied.
A quiet moment. Then both heads like echoes turned
and together said, One among you may stay!
Kuppu voiced a thought, which in others bosoms burned.
How may a good Paayan keep vigil? How may
he by a dead Chakkiiyan tarry? A pall
of silence eclipsed all but the sun. A pugil
of snuff which Kaki inhaled rent the thrall. All
turned to face Thappu. It was bell- clear who will vigil
keep. The boy can stay, said Kaki. In saying

so, spoke for all but one: the goatherd.62 To propose
he stood: He could bury the body while waiting
and set his uncles soul free. Forthwith, to oppose,
this mans own mother her voice raised: Consider age,
you knave, she said. Could he dig a grave or carry
a corpse beyond the threshold to cremate? A sage,
your father was. You? A disgrace. Your brain airy.
Well go, said conflict-averse Uppu, to the blue
hills, beyond those hills you see, Thappu. We shall slash
ten acres of Mn63 grass and fell twenty-two
tall trees. We shall fetch from the falls where lightnings flash
the water to bathe your mothers dear brother with.
Shoe-flowers, marigolds, fragrant frangipani,
three baskets filled with flowers of birth, death and myth,
respectively, blooms from flamboyants,64 if any,
even rare flowers from the jungles limits you
will see us bring just before the Sun his self hides.
His co-workers impatience did not let Uppu
say more. Their concerns had shifted course like the tides.
Thappu noted, people and conflicts had limits.
The limitless jungle had one dimension. Depth.
Its sides were all insideswherein the kite transits
and from whence it reappeared, and appeared its breath
to hold when in mid-air it paused till the shriven
line of humans grew short, shorter, then like applause
crumbled and disappeared. Kites a coward, even
for a bird, splashing black against the sky, in caws
crows taunted, then stumbling, a sprawling lichen-flecked
bough arrogated, switched on silence uncanny
to watch an old leopard aprowl most circumspect,
come to inaugurate the carnal ceremony.
The boy glimpsed the birds furtive descent with affect
88E .
2.3 Montage scenery of railways construction operation, ca. 1860. Engraving.

From S. Muthiah, The Indo-Lankans: Their 200-Year Saga (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Indian
Heritage Foundation, 2003). Source: S. Muthiah, Indian Heritage Foundation.
infelicitous. He knew it. But with his dear

mothers brother, life-long protector and prefect,
by his side, from habit Thappu could not feel fear.
With their throats dry as thistles and knives coarse as throats,
our weeders slashed a vast field of Occams razors,
Mn grass-blades sharp as two- edged swords. Clothed in coats
caked by sweat, pollen covered faces like guisers,
the taste of blood filled our nostrils and the sweet scent
of death seeped into our souls. Thirteen days ago,
although alone and empty-handed, Uppu went
back to Thappu, to help dig a grave, as he swore
he would, only to find a lone, accomplished kite
keeping watch over a mans ravished rack of bones.
He looked up at a crow caw an omen in flight.
And down. The kite was gone, morphed into twilight tones.
The thought of Thappu seized Makalams breath

until she inhaled her circumstances profound.
Dead stars blanketed the sky. Fireflies flickered death
in Morse, casting neither shadow nor light. Just sound.
No full moon nor Venus for her grace to pronounce
as she balanced on dew-wet steel. The black woods were
still black. The bells silent. The train her feet announced
yet to come. The sea-smell had been sheer willpower
Attention to the present can be ecstasy.
Not tonight. She fled from the smell of brooding clouds,
gravid with shape, moisture and electricity.
Retreating to thought she saw Thappu in a shroud
of Mn. Thought to thought led. Mn, in stealth came
to cattle, when they could not to Mn go; brought
slow death, expressed through mouth and nostril, as a flamecolored froth with unspeakable agony fraught.
No infernal fire could kill this grass, or blade
its will subdue. When its scythe-shorn stubble malign
you tug and pull to track and uproot, a charade
it will make of you. Its will to power, align
it will, with subterranean forces,65 and grip
like grapnel with doubled stubborn scorn, or transmit
your vitality to its well-spaced scalpel-tippedbuds-bearing parallel roots, so when you draw it
in and up, breaking open the earths crust with ease
an endless spine to reveal. The yellow spell, its
sole threat, cast oer Mns mantis-green by trees,
sun-proof; long gone, hewn to whet capitals greed. Mitts
of rags made, these grass-blades made ribbons of. Gruesome
yet, to behold the hands that to ribbons they cut.
(What would Deleuze have made of this bloody rhizome?)66
Womens palms healed to the touch of husked coconut.
(What mtaphore might its morphology let spin?)
90E .
Thirty eight of forty had re-entered the zone

of trees when the ventriloquy of Rmu in
the flesh was ushered in unmolested. Prepone
your skills. Yield rock and yield tree! The kings here to loot!
The morning star is his faithful spy. His ready
witness, the evening star. Mns defiant root?
Far out! Out of sight. (Idioms in parody.)
Ceylons future? Mn. It will lead men astray,
over- and out-run them, outlive rivers that flow,
carrying hewn timber to ships that sail away
to dock in Britains frigid coast, dipping below
the plimsoll line, till garlands of foam in motion
lace them. Makalam recalled what Appu had said,
Theres no need to ship wood to that livid nation
Britain is where we stand, this soil, rich, black and red.
VII
Marvel and the Ghost
The mighty tamarind tree displayed an ovate

slit on one side of its trunk, tall enough from ground
to tip for a man or woman, with unbent gait,
to step from sun or rain into its womb profound,
hollowed by nature, hallowed by echo, to curse
or bless with spells when Marvels not around. Fruit-batlicks at sundown clipping like messages in Morse,
persisting through noise to make sense of this and that
out of redundant sound. When night thickens and lends
suspense to sound, Padminis ghost will start her rounds
retracing her path to this cave-site of legends
wicked, night after night to this blood sullied ground
where a Burgher, white but not quite, had unraveled
her innocence, re-wrapped her in shame and skipped town
with levity as his name. Her kin left; traveled
lighter by one; refused their caste-name to let down.

She roamed the woods with a plan keen as embodied
pain until it was ripe to return to this altar
of disgrace. Two lives slaughtered to live undecreed;
one unborn, one unwedded. Where oh where could her
despoiler be? His foul breath her spoor. Tamarind
keeps her secrets. Satinwood, its boughs abrangle,
golden and glabrescent standing appressed, chagrinned,
bone- dry ebony and sandalwood, the jungles
sweetest scent, witnessed that grave event. Even though
those who heard the tale knew Marvel was innocent,
Marvel was quite uncertain if the ghost would know
Burgher67 from Englishman. His own fierce thoughts torment
he could not bear, even though he knew that he would
not act on them, cos he was Presbyterian
sworn to resist, lusts sultry rapaciousness. Should
he repent in his tent as a good Christian?
Ought he for dreaming the delights of the blitheless
bloke for whom the ghost with child haunted habitat
camp-fruit-bat? Salubricious musings with mirthless
guilt his soul churned to a woodpeckers rat-a-tat
on a distant tree at sundown. A teal blue-green
multitude of hanging parrots, with blue brocade
undertails, heads and bills dripping red, like pristine
ornaments lit up the banyan tree. Their upgrade
of colors, its said, Gran Primus lacked. Her hatchlings
these received from a tree, a grateful coeval.
Ma Loriculus b the 1st, on a dribbling
Ficus fruit divine feasted in time primeval.
Once of flesh relieved, the seeds she deposited
in palmyrahs68 puberulent crown. By fibers,
twigs and toddy nourished, the bliss-trapped seeds sprouted
epiphytes that sipped the dew like sly imbibers,
92E .
slinked down, goaded by g or hit ground by habit,

then grew there like giant weight-lifters trapezii
thick, strongto buttress the hostess, embracing bit
by bit, walled her in, grew tall, spread such boughs the sky
from earth split. From these, more epiphytes descended
testing the air, like aerial serpents, heads first,
until they touched the skin Mother Earth extended,
pierced it, pausing when their tips struck the end of thirst,
an aqueduct. Their aerial past redounded
in girth with nourishment from their roots they sucked up,
became pillars, gave the arms that spawned them needed
rest. Called the Banyan69 tree of whose own ghostly run-up
of tales Marvel knew not, but took its spread and shade
to be a likeness to his nation: a shelter
and veil from the burning sun. Others in the trade
of overseers came and went. In that welter
Marvel was the sole constant. At night in his tent
he dreamt he turned blue-black like a coolie knight,
mingled unnoticed and shared a black covenant,
to lie in weight with pitchfork and shovel, to smite
the men who came and went just because their thin skin
was white. This dream recurrent brought him peaceful sleep
which at daybreak made him fit, his job to begin
as white overseer with a dark secret to keep.
VIII
Mastering Coolies
Look down! Dig deep. Deeper! A drain, not a furrow!

double the effort, triple your strength! Hear him bark.
Coolie girl, Thpoi! Stop scraping and burrow!
She flicked her head, her eyes to fix on Marvel Stark.
Pitched, her coil of oiled hair inhaled and unraveled,
black silk. She unsnapped her waist straight up to re- coil
her sprung hair that flashed on Marvel as unrivaled

by the crashing granite falls at sunset. To foil
her spell he kept commanding: Trail the root so forked.
Move with gravity. Forget your tresses. Your woes
begin when I catch you upright. Her back she arced
back, a lunar bow, breasts perkedox heart tomatoes,
ripe to the touch. Thus her stresses she stretched into
relief and to Marvel spite. Confused rectitude
he maintained, and did what he knew best: command. Do
what you must. Plant that foot and press with fortitude
and with mavei,70 heave the load, and cast away.
Unlike the other whites he was a man of words,
captain of his charges. Rmu, his tongue his stay
against the breakers of thoughts that pierced like swords,
was the silent one. With pickaxe he shattered rock
and broke clay. With the mavei she cleaved the lumps
and kept with Rmus rhythm, foot and rhyme. The shock
to bone they thus absorbed and dissed the bounce from stumps
The trench around the tree to ring. You be worthy
of your king. Mortal Rmu felt the cracks impact!
Fetch the long saw, you daughter of Sethupathy,
the non-untouchable.71 (How to tell fact from act?)
Draw the saw, both of you; up and down; youll see red
rings concentric, five times five times five. A paisa72
here, a paisa there, yet profits roll a hundredfold for king and country. Forgot the old geezer,
that greedy kaki. Coolie-pride hell put on,
and get some coins, naturally. For you, kanji,73
and for your cooliey74 coolie!75slave on gibbon
until you die or your passage re-paid! Scungyman, slave on! Her Majestys subjects, one single
tree, we all are. We, the branches spread in sunlight,
to rule you, the roots, who with the earth must mingle.
94E .
Striking contrast. Earth and sky. Civil servants! White!

Paisas must capillary up to that fine class.
Blacks get some too. Proportionate disproportion.
Such uncalibrated talk. A snake in the grass
He fancies you with your flowing hair, so, caution.
He wants our labor but in labor he wants you.
Hes distracted showing off; now re- coil your hair.
Thpoi, now! . . . Some day . . . Pay no mind, good Rmu.
Mind? My advice to him is this: Dorai take care!
Just bad blood twixt them. (Each thought the other evil.
In school he took his mothers name, Stark, Esquire.
His dad called him Marvel, before Captain Marvel.)
But Rmus secret lover, her name was Fire.
Hey you! Your name? asked Marvel, sensing disrespect.
Rmu sensed contempt. Kaki saw deep trouble.
From six fathoms away, calling out, I inspect
him Sir. He good man. I coming on the double,
he ran with his long, leaping shadow, to broker
peace. In an intercepted dark revelation
Stark saw himself as torturer and strap buckler
gagging Rmus flesh, his epiphanic vision
of serum seep over iron from gouged black flesh.
Marvels all bark, the kaki assured, his bite
though, is light. Here is one, Kaki Venkatesh,
for you to divine. Three moons ago at midnight
I lay down to sleep, but fearing for the twinkling
stars I set my sight upon the grifting moon when
in its saffron glow the shadow of a grinning
hound appeared. I held my eyes still, and still again.
The beast began to bleed and turned the moon red. How
to tell how much the threat of a mans eyes is worth?
Thpoi forgot the field unbroken by plough;
who lived and who ended in that blood befouled earth.
IX
Disease and Death: The Price of Roads
My people they dug trenches, my people felled trees,

named and misnamed; our bodies and our hearts bled, said
Rukku. Some brought their women, some fled to be free.
Steep trenches were re-filled with gravel and the dead
upon whom they built and tarred the long Kandy road,
pleasures76 fled. In the jungle, Kaki was king.
Peerless. None quite like him to cherish and to hoard.
With proceeds from ear-studs, and newcomers gold rings,
they fired him up on a sandalwood pyre.
When alive he was astute, watchful and skimpy.
but left plump with plenty off Marvel Starks Shire.
So many trees hed ordered hewn. The canopy
undone. One tenth of the isles green sea turned dusty
and brown. The sun beat hard on the well; the ill weaved,
coughing beads of blood, the color of black coffee.
By heaves-propelled, they stumbled beneath fickle-leaved
wind-shaken shade that splattered sun-scattered small change
on the ground, which the dying for wages mistook.
Rmus gang was cut by half, most by blood exchange
with mosquitoes: agents of choleratic puke,
blood-streaked dysentery, typhoid fever, the quaint
ague, smallpox, chicken pox, measles, flea BB ,77
ring, tape, thread, pin, round, all castes of bloody worms, Saint
(unholy) Vitus Dance, unromantic TB ,
despite Jays fluid showers that killed a kiddy
at Maapam.78 The stricken died, as expected
when monsoons lashed. As for the other moiety:
they died from a civet cats bite, became leopards
lean lunch, or by a sloth bear conned, collared and mauled.
The big gun with a big gun, deemed the true hunter
96E .
2.4 Girls taking a break from wage labor (n.d.). From S. Muthiah, The Indo-Lankans:
Their 200-Year Saga (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Indian Heritage Foundation, 2003).
Source: S. Muthiah, Indian Heritage Foundation.
and collector of heads; the brown tracker who hauled

and doubled as guide was often the confronter
with bare hands or knife, in a pinch, choice sacrifice.
The division thorough, Euro- efficiency.
The proof in bungalows; contra line-rooms with lice,
major history versus minor sangathi79
forgettable tales of bare-handed kills, listless
memories of victims, and one remarkable
bull elephant which, with unhurried grace, flawless,
impressed its measured weight, with calm unflappable,

on Kians torso, until blood oozed from every
pore, gushed from each orifice. Close parenthesis.
By blood they lived, and by blood they died; from merry
cyclones and flash floods, by accident or remiss;
lay afloat, belly-up, limbs outspread, puffed up frogs.
The loss of life was barely felt, for there was more
from whence they came, servants, saints, ruffians and rogues,
whose will to power had met becoming80 before.
X
Mr. Spicn Span Real Army Man
When Marvels successor came, he came with rumor,

tore open the earth to rummage in its bowels
for precious ores, pagan gods concealed to humor
future Euros, until some women heard such howls
of pain that sounded English, by echo doubled,
and amplified by the silenced shocks post-thunder,
that dumped floods over floods all night. The drubbed, troubled
low clouds, fissured by lightning that ripped asunder
dark forests and trees, had been wrung dry to nothing
but blue skies, clearing the mountain-scape to echo
the retched and vomited howls that signaled something
amiss in the pit of Eve81 where emeralds glow,
where, it was rumored, she buried rubies Adam
gave her and blue sapphires gifted by the snake.
Blue he was, when the seven women found I am
that I am, in fellowship with four kraits, his rake,
six black scorpions, a puddle of toads aghast,
all held at bay by the braying blue Englishman.
A strange tribe, the English, said one prone to typecast.
When one is naked, hes quite a phenomenon,
I swear-to-God. His heart, a sour-sop sized beet,
98E .
claimed another. I saw one in a flayed- open

dorai. Mookkan was hanged for that. A piece of meat.
It pumped, as if self- copulating. Yes, Watson
was his name! Mookkans wife? No, it was his daughter?
To remember is to know that you can forget.
This one here, he has his good points. The Snuff-snorter!
The sun will soon make the darkness rise . . . . . . and regret.
Forsake him now; lets forgive ourselves later. Flood
loves the pit, the pit the flood. What if he had seen
us? What if he escapes? If! If! If! He drew blood.
Look at these stripes. The whipper, snapper. An obscene
brute. Let him drown. Look! Hawk in pursuit. An omen!
His omen. These trees conspire to conceal us,
said the spunky one with her calves exposed. Our men!
Fetch them. Let them decide. Yes! they said in chorus.
He might be dead by then. God is my testator.
He drew blood. Come off it! We all have stripes. We all
bled. So did Jesus H. Christ. He evoked laughter.
Not Christ; the Padre. Good man, though white as a caul.
His only issue was his erectile tissue.
The only pit he feared was the pit of hell. Pit!
The pit! Think its full? The howls no longer pursue.
Is he dead? Help me! Someone help me! I know it.
You are there. Kooni! Kunthi! Please dont let me sink.
Kamalam! Poochi, my dear Arumpon, Paechi,
Your reward will be great. Think Ruby. At the brink
he must now be. Quick! If he dies, said Kamatchi,
someone will talk, someone will. Not I. Nor I. Who?
me? In spliced declarations they all replied, Aye.
To tell, or not to tellthat is the question. Shoo!
to camp! En route we shall decide. A dragonfly
whisked by in fits and starts, towards the blood-red butte.
Beyond, treeless, ghosted rain taunted, southern hills,
empurpled. Recalled images swam, of now mute

Spicn Span, army man, the cause of many ills.
The living dead, their creaturely lives82 to conquer
this proud man of his word, when rifled, guiltless shed
much guileless blood; termed it collateral error.
Such were their dark musings, as the sky turned to lead.
In the thrall of fear and thrill of agroupment,
their men forgot, the last mile they walked for coolies
for all thirty millionin silent consent.
Blood-gift to world capital.83 Histry of follies,
foul and fair. Who shall write or scrape clean its great price?
Who will be witness to blood shed? Hear the land cry,
its wounds unfurled: gouged here, dressed there, sealed elsewhere. Rice
paddies smothered by earth-slips, rivers running dry,
rains filling pits and breaching dams. Monks preaching fear
and statesmen, hate, in this once green unredeemed world.
The conquerors their old wounds lick with each new year;
the freed re-bind themselves, the coolies lie recurled.
XI
Lost
(From Upcountry)
[H]eres a story. It took him five miles north of camp.

Rmus son lost himself further among sloth bears
that ravished the lotus in the land of marsh-lamps.
A male bear stalked him like a true believers prayer
all night, four nights, man and beast, hider and seeker,
in deadly play unflinching, luck- dared, fearing outdaring luck, till the wispy mist growing meeker
exposed the reedy marsh, and soon the last white cloud
was spun away by clear sky-blue. If faith is inescapable endurance, then, chameleoned
Melursus ursinus, by dawn, lost his faith in
fasting. Bored by his disingenuous prey, yawned,
100E .
hit the woods loping in search of familiar conspecious companionship, and for a healthy breakfast, some cinnamon tree bark to get his claws on.
Four score and seven hours earlier, for the sake,
of a rhizome, a root, our lost man had exchanged
the fiddling faith he did possess for fathomless
fear, a trait of his species, that keeps men estranged
from ghosts, heights, open-spaces, leopards, wasps, harmless
snakes, wild elephants, and successors of Marvel.
Not to forget molesting bears of course. Compact
fear too shatters exhausted, with its coeval,
the vessel that bore it all night. Like a contract
switched on at daybreak, bear and man caught up with sleep.
On the fourth morning, expectant and still, brooding
black clouds that had lain in wait all night over steep
escarps while mountains kept watch for the colluding
spark to strike the cast-iron skies, dropped on the green
plains their charge where bacchanal winds with every tree
consorted. Land, innocent of mill and machine
as late as yesteryear, let a river run free,
deepnot too deepyet quiet, with such clarity
so that every grain of sand reposed untroubled,
magnified under an undimpled, ungritty
flow. Coconut palms that drank at it were doubled
in a flawless mirror. Daybreak! A stunning change!
The river turned black, engorged. Strange swells gained
under the currents surface. Behold, within range,
his four nights companion stood up as it rained:
a lotus-stem, a pink bloom on its tip, he held
between his teeth, a poster-bears conceit; just like
John De Witt, whod suddenly appear among felled
trees with his brown, resin pipe, trying his best to strike
an Edwardian pose, to impress imagined
ladies. Vman opined, To find Dwitt thus disposed

was to know that he was distracted as the wind.
What Vman supposed Rmus son readily chose
and so dove head first from his arboreal bed
into the surging River Soot. He clung onto
a charred log that came his way, revealing some red
in places underneath. It did provide a clue
and distraction too. This feller of trees divines,
while adrift, its age and species: a young, tender,
rosewood. In the tumbling, eddying swirls, more signs
of devastation were everywhere to render
the cost of Englands ruckling Kings burnt sacrifice.
The reduced raft had spun him around, and mistook
him full circle, rolling him like a well-worn dice
around mountains he recognized. His grim soul shook
like a raven in a storm. The mountains he saw
were friends betrayed, whose ancient trees his father brought
down for big Marvel, who (despite it all) in awe
had held, their age, girth, height, grain, strength and worth. He fought
his compatriots greed and his own need his king
to please, ceteris paribus; thus the young ones
he had spared to live a hundred, when his kidlings,
all knighted colonialings, with kings big guns,
would return and harvest their birthright, from estates
that would bear his nameno longer off alignment
with Albions bloody elevated agnates
pageanted, convibrant with sentiments volent,
wanting nothing but want itselfnever lacking
ever desiringEmpires seed and secret
of greatness. Gone to black those dreams of moss-packing
tree-toads. The velvet mosss desire most sacred,
just to be left to be, had been consumed by whumps
of fire that leapt among trees Marvel had spared
102E .
by selective plunder. Flabby thighs and fat rumpsof indigo-blue clouds that the flames reach had dared
for days, at last, heeding gravitys call, had brought
down their heavy load of despair. Liquefied soot
wrought by runnels with cat-speed, fingers of death-fraught
soup, ran downhill to transfuse every rills offshoot,
stream and brook, turning this river black (which seven
score years hence will run with translucent crimson blood
with majestic lethargy).84 His young heart riven,
eyes fixed upon the crime, Rmus son let the flood
take him wherever it listed. He found solace
in a solemn fact. He was no longer fleeing
his own shadow nor a real sloth bear with malice.
His gasping lungs no longer muffled his beating
heart, which skipped with a touch of respect, for the Late
Stark, whom his aging father took for a brother,
co-weeder in a nook of the kings vast estate.
He did well by king and country; as for lucre,
a tad he euchred for himself. As a foreman,
he did not know the grand plan, nor what would follow
him or who. This one who came after, a Scotsman,
was a ruddy stoker by trade. But this fellow
had no patience to pick and choose; a certified
pyrosophist, his will to power was the will
to burn and so was his calling. With sanctified
passion-filled, and sanctioned by the kings man85 to thrill
investors in waiting and planting pioneers,
he poured it on virgin forests that Vmans men
had picked, and matched it with command. The auctioneer
could sell it then, these Sterling purchased pictured glens
for young blooters, to plant their seed. The indigene
of two thousand years would see slash and burn surpassed
by the birth of scorched earth and earth-slips never seen.
Cryptid, Devil Bird86 will soon scream its plaintive last,

as the boy who had cried his last harmless wolf. Queer,
how its flight down-river, stitched shore to shore, to join
where shorelines horizons meet, and there disappear,
boding bow and arrows end and the birth of mines,
tanks, guns, missiles and devil-birds of steel to come.
But before then came Scots like Farmer Ferguson,
mates Sydney Smith, English Hatkins, Watkins, green-thumb
Larkins, all Wunderkinds, descending in season.
After hours of meander, the charred rosewood
raft brought itself, its passenger and his languid
thoughts to rest. A mango tree weighted down with fruit
by the shore stood, its arced bough sipping the torpid
drift, and then as a magic line would, with one hook
it snagged all three. His raftits skin, a crocodiles
he let go to where river the sunset met; took
his thoughts with him up the steep riverbank; fragile,
and fear- drenched though they were, like sparrows, flew away
He ate as many of the ripe fruit as he could,
in haste, and plucked how many more one could not say,
to take with him by bundling them up, as he should.
What in? No clothes. No cloth. Not even a turban.
Black-assed and naked he was. But in what cockaigne
was he? Gone were the hills dressed in black. Once Kamban87
had in verse opined that green thickens when it rains.
The green of leaves was so thick, the son of Rmu
could hardly breathe. He longed for a vista and wind
to clear his head, help find his coordinates. Through
brush and up a muddy slope, passing tamarind
groves, he came upon a plateau. Yet another
hill appeared, steeper still, which he slithered up, found
himself atop a sun-blazed rain-scarp. No greener
bounty had mother earth rolled out horizon bound,
104E .
a vista of infinite but composed green hues

lambently lit upon by feathered clouds. Les rites
de passage through fire and soot will soon subdue
this too, for a dark brew that mill-minions will sweet88
with sugar and lighten with tinned condensed milk, fend,
hunger, between wails of fog horns, their faint spirit,
to lift up to a new work ethic and prehend
the state of statelessness condemned to inherit.
Future past flashed off the hideous lions sword.89
Three mottled aircrafts flew up high in wide-troughed Us,
stooped like birds that had espied carrion ignored
by other carnivores lying under chartreuse
jungles by the silvry emerald river limned;
missed, forked, flew up towards the sky trailing a discrete
misty trident. Repeat. Failed. Again repeat. Skimmed
eight furlongs of treesa spiteful cloud to excrete.
A murmurous wind grieved the forest. Emerald,
jade, teal, sea-green, chartreuse, in that order, the leaves,
grew plump, then shone their last glow in pain unequaled
expressed, choked, shriveled, faded, expired. To breve
the lion,90 the devil birds headed south aslant,
rumpling a well-made sky, left the deformed jungle
the Scots phosphorus spared. A baby elephant
barged in, saw a leopard cub testing a wrangle
of singed trees, then blustered to rejoin unworded
the herd. Tattered smatters of boys with devices
of war strutted while girls tailed in silence enworded
expectance for the command to self-sacrifice
for language, country and rebel leader; while boy
soldiers waited to kill and be killed for the sons
and daughters of privilege, and their precious toys
of Ferraris, Mercedes and Humvees with guns.
Each reincarnate Rmu, will be struck by how
transience outlasts all: Queens, Kings, Imperial might,

Governors, Prime Ministers and their sacred cows,
memsahibs who can afford to be always right;
(Speech-impedimented presidents, demented
sergeants, poets with lisps, mayors of cities, towns,
plangent politicians, professors contented
with precisely adjusted anxieties; Clowns,
genrals, manic depressives [parenthetical].)
(Hello, rationalized Past-Futures, please, Reasoned
Future-Pasts meet. Thats wholly hic et nuncical.
It wont last.) Smoke blew by Rmus sons unseasoned
eyes from not quite dead fires that the shores limned.
The river was reeled in by the meat- colored sun.
But even before it was done, his body dimmed.
For the light from the rain-washed stars the night had won.
Notes
Part of this essay is revised and reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 25478, and cannot be
1. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique.
2. The word coolie is Tamil for wages. In Tamil, this word by itself cannot be used
to refer to a person, even if she or he is a wage earner, unless a morpheme or word for
personcommonly, the suffix or its equivalentis tagged onto it; hence, coolie
+ - = kliy, which literally means coolie person. To refer to someone as coolie
without such a complement amounts to calling someone wage. Although ungrammatical in Tamil, it is commonplace usage in English, the language that has adopted
the word into the English lexicon. The misappropriation of this word into English in
the colonial context has essentially reduced the personhood of the earner to the wage
he earns. See Daniel and Breman, The Making of a Coolie.
3. Hollup, Bonded Labour.
4. Peirce defines musement as Pure Play: There is a certain agreeable occupation
of mind which, from its having no distinctive name, I infer is not as commonly practiced as it deserves to be; for indulged in moderatelysay through some five to six
per cent of ones waking time, perhaps during a strollit is refreshing enough more
than to repay the expenditure. Because it involves no purpose save that of casting aside
all serious purpose, I have sometimes been half-inclined to call it reverie with some
106E .
qualification; but for a frame of mind so antipodal to vacancy and dreaminess such a
designation would be too excruciating a misfit. Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of
ones powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it
listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation. The particular occupation I meana petite
bouche with the Universesmay take either the form of aesthetic contemplation, or
that of distant castle-building . . . , or that of considering some wonder in one of the
Universes. . . . It is this last kindI will call it musement (CP 6.458). (The designation
CP abbreviates The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the volume and paragraph
numbers with a period in between follow the standard reference form.)
5. Traditionally, poems (kavi) are always sung (pu).
6. Simmel, The Ruin. Also see Sebald, The Rings of Saturn; Benjamin, The Arcades
Project.
7. Benjamin, Illuminations.
8. Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War, ix.
9. Rukku is a contraction of Rukkumai.
10. In addition to the name Gapathi, Gaesh, or Gaesha (which means Lord of
a Multitude), this elephant-headed god has many other names, some of which we will
encounter in this poem: Vignshwara, Vinyak, Gaurisudha, Ekadanta, and Nanda.
11. See Vanden Driessen, The Long Walk, for an excellent account of this long walk
that covers the nineteenth century.
12. Soon after Ceylons independence from the British, in 1948, the new government passed three citizenship and franchise acts that rendered most Tamil plantation
workers of Indian descent stateless and voteless. The threat of repatriation to India
hung over the heads of half a million of these Tamils. Many of these disenfranchised
and stateless residents and one or both their parents were born in Ceylon, but spent
years trying to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. Some succeeded and stayed;
of the others, some were deported by force, and others, to use a more recent coinage,
self- deported. In 1972 the country was named Sri Lanka. Following the anti-Tamil
riots of 1983, many Tamils voluntarily left the island for India. The main speakersinger of this poem is a young woman named Rukkkumani, who is at the brink of
either being deported or voluntarily leaving following the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983,
which initiated twenty-six years of civil war in this island nation.
13. Eternal return is the heart of Nietzsches teaching, because it accords the highest honor to the evanescent beings of which the whole consists. Guided neither by ancestral gods nor by philosophical idols nor by some lodestar of future paradise, guided
rather by its own insight into the whole of beings, and granted responsibility by this
insight to maintain those beings, Nietzsches teaching shows the way to the highest
affirmation of natural beings, the new justice that shouts insatiably Once More! to
the whole marvelous spectacle of which the grateful celebrant is a momentary witnes
(Lampert, Nietzsches Teaching, 286).
14. Rama, the hero in the epic the Ramayana, is said to be one of the ten avatars of
Vishnu. He is also widely held to be a vegetarian, even though he is also, arguably, held
to belong to the kshtraya (warrior) varna, who are by tradition nonvegetarians. Rmu,
the perennial witness of the events in the life of the Tamil laborers, is incontestably
nonvegetarian, as are most of the Indian Tamil immigrant workers.
15. Ekadanta means the one-toothed.
16. In the Ramayana, Sita, the wife of Rama, is abducted from a forest in India by
the king of Lanka, Ravana, and held captive on the island of Lanka. The Rama who
appears in the several South Indian versions of the epic, especially in Kambars Tamil
Rmyaam, is presented in a more human and fallible form than the Rama of the Sanskrit version written by Valmiki or of the Hindi version authored by Tulsidas; and so is
Rva. See Richman, Many Ramayanas.
17. The allusion here is to the two major Hindu sects: Shaivism and Vaishnavism.
Vignvar, being the son of Shiva is, naturally, a Shaivite. Ram or Rama, the mythic
figure in the Ramayana, is an incarnation of Vishnu and is therefore seen as a Vaishnavite.
18. App means father.
19. The earliest date on record of South Indian coolies coming to work in British
colonial Ceylon is 1829.
20. In the early years laborers from South India found their own way to Sri Lanka.
The methods of recruitment of labor and the recruiters themselves changed over time:
from freelancing contractorsEuropean and Indianwho recruited laborers at street
junctions in the small towns and cities of the Madras Presidency to the recruitment of
villagers by powerful individuals from the same or neighboring villages, who came to
be known as kakis. The second method was used over a much longer period than
the first. There were three factors that facilitated the recruitment of laborers. First,
there was an increased frequency of famines in South India in the nineteenth century
and in the first half of the twentieth under British rule, which served as the major
push factor. Second, the pull factor was the enticing tales told by the recruiters of the
far better life that awaited the recruits in Ceylon relative to their lot in the towns and
villages of South India. The third factor was the issuance of a piece of paper, tin, or
copper, called a thuu, which gave the recruited individual the privilege of charging
for essential expenses against his or her future wages. These expenses ranged from
advances for travel to subsequent loans for medicines, and ritual functions such as
wedding and funerals. The arrangement almost always placed such individuals in a
state of permanent indebtedness, a virtual state of bonded labor, first to the recruiter
and subsequently to the recruiter-kaki. The rate of interest charged was as high as
120 percent a year. See Bandarage, Colonialism in Sri Lanka; Peebles, The Plantation Tamils
of Ceylon.
21. On special occasions, it is believed, ancestors visit the living in the form of a
crow.
22. In South Asian medical and culinary systems, five tastes or flavors are recognized: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and astringent.
23. Smbr is a stew made of vegetables, dahl, and spices.
24. Rasam, a flavor-packed, watery soup, is prepared in several ways. The recipe
108E .
favored by Tamil plantation workers consists of tamarind, tomato, curry leaves, garlic,
onion, cumin, coriander, black pepper, ginger root, and dried red chili.
25. Pysam is a sweet dish with the texture of thin porridge.
26. On the differences and similarities between heritage and history, see
Daniel, Charred Lullabies, chap. 1.
27. Here we see the rule of approximations in play in this tendency to provide a
range rather than a definite number. See Daniel, Charred Lullabies, 7779; and Daniel,
Fluid Signs, 134.
28. The binary distinction refers to a distinction that Jakobson creatively adopted
and adapted to the study of tonality in phonetics. In technical terms, the distinction
refers to the relative concentration of energy in the lower (grave) or upper (acute) frequencies of the spectrum of sounds. In the fourth lecture of his Six Lectures on Sound and
Meaning, Jakobson writes, The opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the
capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and
thick, of light and heavy, etc. (120).
29. Even though a rudimentary understanding of property ownership with respect
to land may have existed in precolonial South Asia, it would be more correct to say
that the people belonged to the land or place (Ur) in question, rather than that the land
belonged to people. The insensitivity to this distinction is most starkly brought out
in the European encounter with Amerindians. As James Tully puts it in his discussion
on the Inuit: Property rights and duties inhere in the clans and apply to activities and
to the geographical location in which the activities take place, not, in the first instance,
to the products of the activities (An Approach to Political Philosophy, 154). Furthermore,
we find that even in the liberal-minded Lockes view of conquest, if there was more
land than the inhabitants could possess and make use of, the conqueror was at liberty to
make use of the waste, which, in Lockes yeomanesque understanding, referred to
any uncultivated land (The Second Treatise of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration,
85).
30. Theories of natural law are as old as the early Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin texts
on the subject. However, they are not all the same. Lockes notion of natural law is
based on the belief that all human beings yearn for libertynot liberty as freedom
from the constraints of natural desires (as it was for Hobbes, among others), but as
freedom to perfect our nature in rational duties to god and self-preservation, extended to humanitys preservation. The rub and the danger comes with the doctrine
of universal reason that Locke subscribes to, and with that reason being viewed as the
foundation for what is moral and good for all human beings. In this respect, Locke
anticipates Kant almost more than do any of the early moderns. Nature uncultivated
is nature unowned. The natural law of self-preservation depends on the cultivation of
nature. Human labor is required for cultivating nature. Labor expended in the cultivation of unowned nature transforms it into private property. Hence, the law of nature
sanctions private property. So the argument goes.
31. The law of conquest originates in European antiquity. However, its wide appli-
cation, rightly or wrongly, became common in the early modern period of European
colonization of other parts of the world. See Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal, for the
vexed history of this law as applied to Bengal in particular, but by extension to South
Asia as a whole.
32. The rubber tree is native to the Amazon rainforest. It was imported from Brazil
into India and Ceylon in 1875.
33. See Webb, Tropical Pioneers, 2024; and Baker, The Sinharaja Rain-Forest Ceylon.
34. The reference here is to Albizia lebbeck (sirisah in Tamil), a deciduous tree with
a rounded, spreading crown and pale bark. Its flowers, which are showy and grow in
clusters close to the tips of stems, produce flat and long pods that contain numerous
seeds.
35. See Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1981), 160. I thank Greg Urban for this reference.
36. Unpolished rice.
37. Kurakkan is finger millet, which is resistant to insects and fungi.
38. Dorai is an honorific title given to a superior. In the political economy of plantations, this term of address was reserved mostly for the white man.
39. Doraisni refers to the dorais female counterpart; it is an honorific reserved for
European ladies.
40. Makalam means auspiciousness. When one contracts her name to Makal,
it changes its meaning to loss of shine, dull, or dim.
41. Kallu means palm toddy. Kitul is a palm tree commonly found in the south
of Sri Lanka. Its botanical name is Caryota urens, and the tree belongs to the family of
Arecaceae.
42. Lines is the name for a barracks-style row of houses. Each living unit or line
room, as they were called, had a half-walled verandah, a 10 10 bedroom, and a
4 4 kitchen.
43. The last king of Kandy was deposed in 1815 by the British. However, the institution of Rajakriya (obligatory labor to the king and state) was continued under British
rule, with mixed results at best, until 1832. The Sinhala peasants were averse to the
idea of working for a wage and being obligated thereby. They were even more loathe
to meet their obligation to the state by paying taxes in cash or kind from their land.
The Tamil coolies initially filled that lacuna in the consistency of labor and eventually
took over the work on roads and railways almost completely. See de Silva, Beginnings
of Commercial Road-Passenger Transportation in Sri Lanka.
44. Sinhalese and Tamil laborers worked together in building the railways, under
the supervision of British overseers and engineers. However, the Sinhalese workers
in general worked on the railways only as long as their working area was within walking distance back to their villages. Indian Tamil coolies constituted the constant work
force. See ibid.; and Newell, What a Field Is Here for Missionary Exertions.
45. Mariyamman, the mother goddess widely worshiped. She is the deity to whom
Tamil workers turn to when in distress.
110E .
46. A kaki is a labor gang leader, a supervisor, a patron, a father figure all rolled
into one, and is sometimes, as well, a relative and a moneylender.
47. A vi is the lower garment Tamil men wear.
48. These tokens served as tickets for the journey to Ceylon and back, with added
value for initial expenses. Responsibility for the latter was assumed by the kaki
when the tickets were returned to him as collateral. The initial needs unfailingly
exceeded the added value of the ticket, which could then be redeemed only on the
repayment of the accrued debt, a debt (with interest) which the workers could rarely
repay, regardless of how long or how much they labored.
49. See Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, for a discussion of the colony serving as
a laboratory in which European colonizers can educate themselves to the finer points
of race.
50. Children and women worked as they weeded the undergrowth.
51. Vishnus mount or vehicle is Garuda, which is believed to be a Brahmini kite.
52. Those who hold Vishnu to be their foremost deity are called Vaishnavites, and
they tend to be given to more exacting orthopraxy than the worshipers of Shiva or
Shaivites.
53. The elephant population in Sri Lanka at the end of the nineteenth century was
estimated at 140,000. Today the Sri Lankan elephant is endangered, its population not
more than 2,500. The elephants were lost mainly to ivory poachers, especially in the
nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.
54. See Peebles, The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon.
55. In textbooks in general anthropology, if India gets but one mention it most
likely pertains to a discussion of the Indian caste system in the context of studying
the concept of hierarchy. Also see Appadurai, Putting Hierarchy in Its Place, 3649.
56. Parai refers to a drum that is played during funerals. The drummers who play
these drums are called Paayar and belong to a caste by the same name. Paar, like the
Paayar, are classified as scheduled castes in the Constitution of India, as they are
considered to belong to an economically and socially disadvantaged part of the population. The greater part of both these castes are landless agricultural laborers, and
they make up a very high percentage of those who migrated from South India to Sri
Lanka for work on plantations in that country. They have also, for the greater part of
their recent histories, been rivals for rank, recognition, and privileges. Once classified
as untouchables, their self- chosen appellation at present is Dalits, which includes a
range of castes, distributed throughout India, whose human rights are routinely violated even though such treatment is forbidden by the constitution and several other
statutes of India. Dalits struggle for equal rights continues to this day.
57. Chakkiiyar are the most disadvantaged and the most backward in all walks of
life of the castes in South India. Their traditional occupation has been the removal of
night soil, or human waste.
58. The name Thappu refers to a drum, specifically a tom-tom.
59. Neems botanical name is Azadirachta indica. Many parts of this tree, especially
its leaves, are used for its medicinal properties throughout South Asia.
60. A Vauvan is a priest of the Paayar caste and is, as a rule, a literate individual
who is also a poet or singer.
61. The traditional system of medicine practiced in South India is called Siddha,
the other Indian systems of medicine being Ayurveda and Unani. Siddha medical texts
were written in cryptic Tamil verse inaccessible to the untrained literates.
62. A member of the goat-herding caste.
63. The botanical name for this species of grass is Cymbopogon confertiflorus and it
belongs to family Gramineae. It grows to a height of a meter or more, and its edges
have microscopic, but sharp, saw-teeth.
64. Flamboyant trees belong to the species Delonix regia.
65. See Nietzsche, The Will to Power; and Grosz, The Nick of Time, 12539, for an interesting reading of Nietzsches notion of will to power as force.
66. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
67. In Sri Lanka Burgher refers to a descendant of a mixed marriage between
the pre-British, Portuguese, and Dutch colonizers and Sinhala and Tamil natives.
Burghers were favored over the Sinhalese and Tamils because they retained vestiges
of European ways, spoke English, and were lighter skinned.
68. The palmyrah, a palm tree that grows in northern Sri Lanka and South India,
is considered to be the official tree of the Tamil people.
69. Banian- or banyan-tree, now often simply banyan: the Indian Fig Tree (Ficus
religiosa or indica) a remarkable East Indian tree, the branches of which drop shoots to
the ground, that take root and support their parent branches; extending in this way,
one tree will often cover a large expanse of ground.
Banian Tree, Banians Tree, Tree of the Banians, was originally a local appellation given
by Europeans to an individual tree of this species growing near Gombroon on the Persian Gulf, under which the Banians, or Hindu traders settled in that port, had built a
little pagoda; thence it was extended to others, and finally taken as the English name
of the species. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., June 2012 (Oxford University Press),
edn., s.v. Banyan.
70. A kind of hoe, used in South Asia.
71. Marvel appears to be quite adept at caste politics. He puts the girl in her place
by intimating that her fathers claim to belong to a higher caste is dubious; this indicates an intimate knowledge of the culture.
72. A coin of meager value, worth one sixty-fourth of a rupee.
73. Kanji is starchy water, drained from cooked rice. Kriyvin Takla Tami Akarti:
Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil (Chennai, India: Cre-A, 1992).
74. Dy is an attention-getting substitute for the second-person pronoun in slang,
comparable to Oy!
75. Coolie in this instance is employed as a reference to wages, but coolie in
the immediately prior instance refers (ungrammatically) to the person who earns a
wage, thereby reducing the person to a wage.
76. Pleasure was a synonym of car in South Asia, a contraction of pleasure-car.
77. Filariasis is a mosquito- or flea-borne disease that, among other things, causes
112E .
a mans testicles to swell to the size of a grapefruit or bigger and hence was called Big
Balls or BB, colloquially.
78. Maapam served as a transit camp where Tamil workers leaving India for Sri
Lanka were quarantined and disinfected with chemical showers. Today it serves as a
camp for refugees fleeing the civil war in Sri Lanka.
79. These are some of the connotations of the noun sangathi: secret, event, happening, affair, piece of news, a matter or thing (as in, a thing about him), gossip,
enigma, mystery, Arcanum, confidence, and so on.
80. In Nietzsches concept of will to power, force is always described as engaged
in becoming. Instead of identity, [Nietzsche] seeks out forces or wills, instead of
the dialectic, continuous self-modification, he favors the dramatic and untimely leap
into futurity, instead of the becoming of being, he seeks the being of becoming, instead of identity, he seeks a model of action and activity (Grosz, The Nick of Time, 466).
Nietzsche, however, does not consistently distinguish force from power. Thus, by and
large, Nietzsches understanding of power in his will to power is of power as force.
I, following Arendt (On Violence) and in a Peircean vein, distinguish power from force,
where power is legitimized force, whereas force by definition is prelegitimized or unlegitimized. In terms of Peirces phenomenological categories, power is a Third and
Force is a Second (CP 1.32268).
81. Many medieval travelers, Arab and European, held the belief that Ceylon was
the erstwhile Garden of Eden.
82. Creaturely Life alludes to the animal side of the human condition. See Santner, On Creaturely Life.
83. Thirty million is the estimated number of coolies who contributed to plantationbased world capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
84. The reference here is primarily to the killing of Sinhala youths belonging to the
leftist Leninist party called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP ), whose attempt to
overthrow the government through random acts of violence and assassinations were
met with overwhelming force by the government. Estimates of the number of Sinhala
youth belonging to the JVP , associated with JVP , or accused of belonging to the JVP
who were massacred by the Sri Lankan armed forces range from twenty thousand to
sixty thousand. Over the two years between 1988 and 1990, several Sri Lankan rivers
turned blood red from these killings, and body parts were found in the bellies of sea
fish. See Gunasekara, Sri Lanka in Crisis; Hoole, Sri Lanka, 24659.
85. The highest kings office in Ceylon was the governor general.
86. The devil bird has yet to be definitively identified by birders or ornithologists.
In Sinhala, the devil bird is called ulena or ulama. It has been reported that this bird
emits a cry from the depth of the jungle in the form of shrieks that are eerie and
bloodcurdlingly human in sound. Older villagers in the north- central province of the
country who reported hearing and described such cries to me in the late 1950s and the
1960s have more recently informed me that because of the heavy deforestation over
the last few decades, resulting from the expansion of human habitation and from the
use of defoliants during the civil war, they have not heard the devil bird cry in years.
87. Kamban, a medieval Tamil poet, author of the Tamil Rmyaam epic.
88. See Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
89. The lion holding a sword is the central symbol on the Sri Lankan national flag.
90. The lion represents the power of the islands Sinhala people, its majoritarian power, and its rulers, several of whom identify their prowess with that of their
totem, the lion.
114E .
GREG GRANDIN
Empires Ruins
Detroit to the Amazon
In surveying the United Statess last two major wars in light of this edited
volume, it is apparent that the epic corruption and incompetence that has
accompanied Washingtons mostly privatized efforts to rebuild Iraq and
Afghanistan has resulted in a landscape of half-finished, malfunctioning,
or abandoned projects, including schools, roads, hospitals, power plants,
and sewage treatment plants. Its as if the United States, by banking the
projection of its influence predominantly on military power, contracted
mercenaries, and deregulated finance, has opted to skip the creative construction phase of capitalism and jump to something that might be called
permanent creative destruction, where the wreckage doesnt pave the way
for future accumulation but is itself, through a form of military corporatism,
the main profit-generating sector, at least for the Halliburton and Blackwater wing of the U.S. economy.1 In other words, the United States now
starts with the ruins.
One doesnt have to travel to Iraq to contemplate todays relationship between capitalism and ruin. John Patrick Leary has written about the culture
boom currently under way in Detroit, a fascination with the citys wasted
industrial landscape.2 Other places, like Youngstown, Ohio, and Bucharest,
Romania, have attracted photographers documenting First World urban decline, but Detroit, Leary writes, the storied birthplace of the United Statess
hi-tech, labor intensive, middleclass- creating industrial capitalism, remains the Mecca of urban ruins, its blighted baroque and modernist archi-
tecture captured in glossy coffee-table books and New York Times essays, or as
backdrops for postapocalyptic Hollywood movies, like the remake, which
cost a reported $75 million, of Red Dawn.3 Leary points out the pornographic sensationalism of much of Detroits ruin photography, which
aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces
but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just
stubborn survival, of the city.4
Even the best intentioned of this genre, which tries to document the particularity of Detroit, can only convey a vague sense of historical pathos,
serving as tributes of past industrial grandeur or warnings of the rusted
future that awaits us all. The past is achingly present in Detroit, and the
way its citizens interact with the hulking, physical remnants of yesterday
is striking, wrote Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady in the New York Times, in
an essay featuring their new documentary, Detropia. Their film focuses on
scavengerscapitalisms left-behindswho are dismantling Detroit and
selling its scrap metal on the global market, mostly to China. The city literally disappeared before the filmmakers eyes. After filming one salvage crew
taking apart a former Cadillac repair shop, the crew returned the next day to
find that the entire building was gone. They were, Ewing and Grady said
of the scavengers, the cleanup crew in a shaky empire.5
But atmospheric visuals and invocations of Detroit as a metonym for generalized declineWe chose to focus our cameras on Detroit out of a gut
feeling that this city, Ewing and Grady say, may well be a harbinger of
things to come for the rest of the countrycant convey the fact that degeneration was always already built into the opulence. We need no raging hurricane, we need no bolt from the blue, Bertolt Brecht wrote in his play Rise
and Fall of the City of Mahagonny about boom-and-bust capitalism: Theres no
havoc which they might have done that we cannot better do.6 And so Ford,
General Motors (GM ), and Chrysler began to move more and more of their
operations out of the downtown area to the suburbs, rural areas, and then
overseas, not because, as the historian Thomas Sugrue writes, of economic
competition from abroad but because they wanted to weaken union power
and municipal oversight.7 Ewing and Grady, in discussing their film, say that
Detroit lost 25 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010, relating
population decline to globalization. But the evacuation of the Motor City
got under way much earlier, when U.S. corporations were able to set wage
and price standards free from any pressure abroad. Even as the economy
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boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, fifty Detroit residents were already packing
up and leaving their city every day. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989,
Detroit could count tens of thousands of empty lots and more than fifteen
thousand abandoned homes. Stunning Beaux Arts and modernist buildings were deserted, left to return to nature, their floors and roofs covered by
switchgrass. They now serve as little more than ornate birdhouses.8
There have been dissections aplenty about what went wrong with the
U.S. auto industry, as well as fond reminiscences about Detroits salad days,
about outsized tailfins and double-barrel carburetors. In 2008 the iconic
Clint Eastwood even put the iconic white autoworker to rest in his movie
Gran Torino (though Eastwoods sacrificial suicide, which in the film suggested a coming to terms with the rest of the world, now seems premature
considering the subsequent rise of the racially aggrieved Tea Party). Few of
these postmortems have conveyed, however, just how crucial Detroit was to
U.S. foreign policy (although Eastwood, by linking Detroits demise to the
blowback from President Nixons illegal war in Laos, at least came closer
than most).
In mythological terms, however, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace
of storied American capitalism. And as we look back in the years to come,
we may see the decline of the auto industry as a blow to American power
comparable to the end of the Raj, Britains loss of India. Detroit supplied
a continual stream of symbols of Americas cultural power; a marker of a
world power as much as was the possession of a colony or the bomb, in the
second half of the twentieth century, was the ability to make a precision V8
engine. But Detroit also offered the organizational know-how necessary to
run a vast industrial enterprise like a car companyor an empire. Pundits
love to quote GM President Engine Charlie Wilson, who once famously
said that he thought that what was good for America was good for General
Motors, and vice versa. Its rarely noted, however, that Wilson made his remark at his Senate confirmation hearings to become Eisenhowers secretary
of Defense. At the Pentagon, Wilson would impose GM s corporate bureaucratic model on the armed forces, modernizing them to fight the Cold War.
After GM , Ford took the reins, with John F. Kennedy tapping CEO Robert
McNamara and his whiz kids to ready American troops for a long twilight
struggle, year in and year out, as Kennedy put it in his inaugural address.
McNamara used Fords integrated systems management approach to wage
mechanized, dehumanizing slaughter from the skies over Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia, as the historian Gabriel Kolko once wrote.9
Among the most imposing of Detroits relics is Henry Fords Highland
E M P I R E S RU I N S 117
Park factory, shuttered since the late 1950s. Dubbed the Crystal Palace for
its floor-to- ceiling glass walls, it was here that Ford perfected assemblyline production, building up to nine thousand Model Ts a daya million
by 1915and catapulting the United States ahead of industrial Europe. It
was also here that Ford first paid his workers five dollars a day, creating one
of the fastest-growing and most prosperous working- class neighborhoods
in all of America, filled with fine arts-and- crafts-style homes. Today, Highland Park looks like a war zone, its streets covered with shattered glass and
lined with burned-out houses. More than 30 percent of its population lives
in poverty, with higher than 20 percent unemployment and a median yearly
income of less than $20,000. There is one reminder that it wasnt always so, a
small historical register plaque outside the Ford factory, which reads: Mass
production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set
the pattern of abundance for 20th Century living.
America in the Amazon

To truly appreciate the relationship between capitalism, empire, and decay,
one could tour another set of ruins far from the Midwest rustbelt; they lie, in
fact, deep in, of all places, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. There, overrun
by tropical vines, sits Henry Fords testament to the belief that the American Way of Life could easily be exported, even to one of the wildest places
on the planet.
Ford owned forests in Michigan as well as mines in Kentucky and West
Virginia, which gave him control over every natural resource needed to make
a carsave rubber. So in 1927 he obtained an Amazonian land grant the size
of a small American state. Ford could have simply set up a purchasing office
there and bought rubber from local producers, leaving them to live their
lives as they saw fit. Thats what other rubber exporters did. Ford, however,
had more ambitious ideas. He felt compelled to cultivate not only rubber
but the rubber gatherers as well.10 He thus set out to overlay Americana on
Amazonia. He tasked his managers with building Cape Codstyle shingled
houses for the Brazilian workforce he hired. He urged the workers to tend
flower and vegetable gardens, and to eat whole wheat bread, unpolished rice,
canned Michigan peaches, and oatmeal. He named his jungle town, with
suitable pride, Fordlandia.
It was the 1920s, of course, and his managers enforced, or tried to enforce, U.S. rules on alcohol, though Prohibition wasnt in effect in Brazil, as
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it was in the United States at the time. On weekends, the company organized
square dances and recitations of the poetry of Henry Longfellow. The hospital Ford had built in the town offered free health care for workers and visitors
alike; it was designed by Albert Kahn, the renowned architect who built several of Detroits most famous buildings, including the Crystal Palace. Fordlandia had a central square, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, manicured lawns, a
movie theater, shoe stores, ice cream and perfume shops, swimming pools,
tennis courts, a golf course, and Model Ts rolling down its paved streets.
The clash between Henry Fordthe man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions in order to produce an infinite series of identical
products, the first indistinguishable from the millionthand the Amazon,
the worlds most complex and diverse ecosystem, was Chaplinesque in its
absurdity, producing a parade of mishaps straight out of a Hollywood movie.
Think Modern Times meets Fitzcarraldo. Brazilian workers rebelled against
Fords puritanism, and nature rebelled against his industrial regimentation.
Run by incompetent managers who knew little about rubber planting, much
less about social engineering, Fordlandia in its early years was plagued by
vice, knife fights, and riots. The place seemed less Our Town than Deadwood,
as brothels and bars sprawled around its edges.
Ford did eventually manage to gain control over his namesake fiefdom, but because he insisted that his managers plant rubber trees in tight
rowsback in his Detroit factories, Ford famously crowded machines close
together to minimize movementhe actually created the conditions for the
explosive growth of the bugs and blight that feed off rubber, and these eventually laid waste to the plantation. Over the course of nearly two decades,
Ford sank millions upon millions of dollars into trying to make his jungle
utopia work the American way, yet not one drop of Fordlandia latex ever
made its way into a Ford car.
Today in the Amazon, Albert Kahns hospital has collapsed, the jungle
has reclaimed the golf course and tennis courts, and bats have taken up
residence in houses where American managers once lived, covering their
plaster walls with a glaze of guano. The ruins of Fordlandia, in fact, look
a lot like those in Highland Park, as well as in other rustbelt towns where
neighborhoods that once hummed with life centered on a factory have now
returned to weed. There is an uncanny resemblance between Fordlandias
rusting water tower, broken-glassed sawmill, and empty power plant and
the husks of the same structures in Iron Mountain, a depressed industrial
city on Michigans Upper Peninsula that also used to be a Ford town. These
similarities are fitting, for one could read in the rise and fall of Fordlandia
the history of twentieth- century industrial capitalismor better, of Fordism, the foundation of the United States unique empire.
Fordism in the Jungle

No commemorative plaque marks its place in history, but Fordlandia, no less
than the wreck of Detroit, is a monument to the titans of American capital
none more titanic than Fordwho believed that the United States offered
a universal, and universally acknowledged, model for the rest of humanity.
Ford preached with a pastors confidence his one true idea: ever-increasing
productivity combined with ever-increasing pay would both relieve human
drudgery and create prosperous working- class communities, with corporate profits dependent on the continual expansion of consumer demand.
High wages, as Ford put it, to create large markets.11 By the late 1920s,
Fordismas this idea came to be calledwas synonymous with Americanism, envied the world over for having apparently humanized industrial capitalism.
The term Fordism has evolved since the Washington Post, condemning
Ford for briefly shutting down his factory rather than pay high coal prices,
first defined it as Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford
limitations.12 Around this time, it was often interchangeable with Taylorism, after Fredrick Taylor, the pioneer of motion analysis, who aimed to
extract ever-greater productivity out of workers through the isolation of the
individual tasks needed to make a product. It also denoted standardization,
efficiency, and mass production. By the late 1920s, Fordism began to take
on its more comprehensive meaning, whereby it signifies a modernization
of economic thought that appreciated the value of high wages as a motor of
industrial growth. Sociologists and intellectuals, particularly those in industrialized European countries, started using Fordism in tandem with
Americanism. In 1927, for instance, an article in Londons New Statesman
identified Americanism/Fordism as an industrial system in which the pace
of the factory determined productivity (as opposed to the pace being set
by a wage system which rewarded output): The worker under Fordism is
speeded up, whether he likes it or not, by the pace at which the factory runs,
by the endless stream of articles ceaselessly propelled toward him by the
remorseless chain of machines. He must work at the factorys pace, or go;
and go he will, unless he is offered a special inducement to remain.13 But
the article also acknowledged that high wages, in addition to serving as an
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inducement to remain on the line, actually created large markets, which allowed industrialists to increase their takings even as profit margins are reduced: It was found, not merely that high wages were fully compatible with
low costs of production, but that the offer of higher wages still might be so
used to stimulate a further fall in cost. High wages therefore became, with
some employers, not merely a necessity that had to be faced, but a positive
policy.14 By the 1950s, the phrase Fordism had worked its way into socialscience terminology, as scholars began to consider the foundations and implications of the United Statess unprecedented postwar economic expansion.
Fordism, it is now known, contained within itself the seeds of its own
unraveling: the breaking down of the assembly process into smaller and
smaller tasks, combined with rapid advances in transportation and communication, made it easier for manufacturers to break out of the dependent relationship established by Ford between high wages and large markets. Goods could be made in one place and sold somewhere else, removing
the incentive employers had to pay workers enough to buy the products they
made.
That unraveling is most visible in the Amazon city of Manaus, about three
hundred miles west of Fordlandia. Once the gilded epitome of rubber-boom
excess in the nineteenth century, Manaus in the early twentieth century became a city of the past, as the Washington Post observed, with a drop in
global latex process acting more slowly but as surely as the ashes of Vesuvius in Pompeii.15 The city revived only in the late 1960s, when Brazils military regime decreed it a free-trade zone. (There is little free trade about it,
however, at least in the way that term implies minimal government intervention in the market. With its remote jungle location, deep in the continents
heartland, the city as a manufacturing center could not survive without significant government subsidies, needed to offset the high costs of transportation.) Exempt from import tariffs, Manaus became Brazils national
emporium. Cargo ships arrived at its deepwater port from the United States,
Europe, and Asia to unload consumer goods. In 1969 the New York Times reported that a feverish prosperity had returned, as Brazilians from Rio, So
Paulo, and other points south took advantage of improved, subsidized air
flight, flying into the city to purchase duty-free toys, fans, radios, air conditioners, and television sets.16 At the same time, the military government provided subsidies and reduced export taxes to stimulate industry, turning the
city into one of the worlds first brand-name assembly zonessimilar to the
Mexican maquilas that were then beginning to push against the southern borE M P I R E S RU I N S 121
der of the United States. Today, Manauss industrial parks are home to about
a hundred corporate plants, including those of Honda, Yamaha, Sony, Nokia,
Phillips, Kodak, Samsung, and Sanyo. In 1999 Harley-Davidson opened its
first offshore factory there. Gillette has its largest South American facility
in the city. When someone in Latin America buys a DVD player, cell phone,
TV , bicycle, or motorcycle, there is a good chance it was assembled in the
middle of the worlds largest tropical forest.
With the highest population growth rate in Brazil, Manaus has gone from
fewer than 200,000 people in the mid-1960s to nearly three million residents
today. The city bursts out of the Amazon like a perverse Oz, steadily eating
away the surrounding emerald foliage. Like many other Third World cities,
Manaus is plagued by rising poverty and crime, child prostitution, gridlocked traffic, pollution, and poor health care. There is no sewage plant in
the city, and its waste flows untreated into the Rio Negro. Manaus accounts
for 6 percent of Brazils total manufacturing and provides about a hundred
thousand jobs. Yet no matter how dynamic its export sector, the city cant
possibly give employment to all the migrants who travel from the rural Amazon and beyond, desperate for work. On flights in, visitors can see the luxury condominiums that rise high along the rivers sandy banks and, pressed
up against them, low-lying slums built on wobbly stilts to protect against
river floodinga dramatic landscape of inequality in one of the most unequal countries in the world. It makes the distance that separated the homes
of American managers from those of Brazilians in Fordlandia negligible in
comparison.
Cities like Manaus, which are based on the assembly of corporate brandname products, are the true heirs of Fords legacy. Their economies are made
possible by a process if not started then at least perfected by Fords factory
lines, that is, by the fragmentation of industrial production into a series of
reducible, routinized, and reproducible parts. Ford imagined his industrial
method as leading to greater social cohesion, through paternalism. In his
more utopian moments, he envisioned a world in which industry and agriculture could exist in harmony, with factories providing seasonal labor for
farmers and technology making life easier for the masses. Its an easy vision
to mock, especially considering the brutality and dehumanizing discipline
that reigned at his Detroit and Dearborn factories.
Yet actually existing Fordism at its most vigorous albeit short-lived stage
did result in a kind of holism, where the extraction and processing of raw
materials, integrated assembly lines, working- class populations, and consumer markets created vibrant economies and robust middle classesat
122G R E G
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least in the circumscribed U.S. industrial belt. Anchoring it all was a belief
that decent pay would lead to increased sales. Yet even as Ford was preaching
his gospel of high wages to create large markets, Fordism as an industrial
method was making the balanced, whole world that Ford longed for impossible to achieve.
Today, the link between production and consumption, and between good
pay and big markets, has been broken, invalidated by the global extension of
the logic of the assembly line. Harley-Davidson, for instance, does not make
motorcycles from start to finish in Manaus, but rather assembles bikes from
parts manufactured elsewhere, which it then sells in the Brazilian market.
Sony likewise uses free-trade zonesnot just Manaus, but Coln in Panama,
Ushuaia in southern Argentina, and Iquique in northern Chileas low-tax
entrepts into national markets. The final convection of the product in these
cities is a formality, done to exempt the product from import tax.
In other words, there is no relationship between the wages HarleyDavidson pays to make its product and the profits it receives from selling
them. Instead of Fords virtuous circuit of high wages and decent benefits
generating expanding markets, a vicious one now rules: profits are derived
not from well-paid workers affluent enough to buy what they have made,
but from driving prices as low as they can go; this in turn renders good pay
and humane benefits not only unnecessary for sustaining the economy, but
impossible to maintain, since the best, and at times the only, place to cut
production costs is labor. The result is a race to the bottom, a system of
perpetual deindustrialization whereby corporationsincluding, most dramatically, the Ford Motor Companybow before a global economy that they
once mastered, moving manufacturing abroad in order to reduce labor costs
just to survive.
In the lower Amazon, then, along about a three-hundred-mile axis, runs
the history of modern capitalism. On one end is Fordlandia, a monument to
the promise that was early-twentieth- century industrialization. Ford built
us a hospital; he paid his workers well and gave them good houses, a Fordlandia resident told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1993, and I often heard,
during my visits to the town, the following sentiment: It would be nice if
the company would come back.17 On the other is Manaus, a city plagued
by the kind of urban problems Ford thought he could transcend, but whose
very existence owes much to the system he pioneered. Trying to reproduce
America in the Amazon has yielded to outsourcing America to the Amazon.
Neoliberalism in the Americas, however, did not emerge simply from
the economic and technological logic of Fordism. Much like the deliberE M P I R E S RU I N S 123
ate and self-aware efforts of Detroits Big Three to lessen municipal oversight and union strength by moving operations out of the citywell before
international competition justified such a move as unavoidableU.S. corporations, among them the Ford Motor Company, organized themselves to
confront increasing labor power and demands for reform in Latin America.
In the mid-1960s, executives from over thirty U.S. firms founded the Business Group for Latin America, which included participation by Ford, U.S.
Steel, DuPont, Standard Oil, Anaconda Copper, ITT , United Fruit, Chase,
and other blue- chip industrial and financial companies. David Rockefeller,
whose family had extensive holdings in Latin America, served as its liaison
with the White House. The idea was both to influence Washingtons hemispheric policy and to apply direct pressure at the source, funding the campaigns of friendly politicians, helping allies hold down prices, and providing
financial guidance to cooperative regimes. When lobbying proved insufficient, members of the group, either individually or in concert, worked with
the CIA to foment coups, as they did in Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973.18
Some went further: a number of multinational corporations, including
Ford, Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Chrysler, Mercedes Benz, Firestone, Volkswagen, and others, have been accused in recent years of working closely
with Latin American death squadsresponsible for hundreds of thousands of killings throughout the hemisphere from the 1960s through the
1980s. In Brazil the daily O Globo reports that Volkswagen, Phillips, Firestone,
and Chrysler organized a working group to coordinate with the military
regime to identify militant workers.19 Where in the 1960s, the former Ford
CEO McNamara applied industrial systems management to reorganize the
Pentagon to wage large-scale bombing missions in Southeast Asia, a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company in Argentina worked on a smaller scale.
As the historian Karen Robert has documented, with the help of Buenos
Aires unionists, Ford provided Argentine death squads key support during
the late 1970s and early 1980s. The company, for instance, established a detention center on the premises of its manufacturing plant outside Buenos
Aires, where union activists were held. Ford also provided the death squads
with a fleet of greenish gray Falcons.20 The locally built Falcon had served
as a symbol of Argentine modernity, a true badge of the promise of Fordism: the factory workers who built it were some of the highest paid in Latin
America, making enough to purchase the product themselves. Now it became an emblem of terror, used to kidnap many of those same workers,
many of whom were tortured, some disappeared. Fords exclusive contracts
with the Argentine security forces throughout the dictatorship eventually
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GRANDIN
made the Falcon the single most recognizable icon of repression, Robert
writes, one that clearly still resonates today. She quotes Eduardo Pavlovsky,
a well-known argentine psychologist and playwright: Whenever a Falcon
drove by or slowed down, we all knew that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder. . . . It was the symbolic expression of terror.
A death-mobile.21
Robert notes that the Argentine auto industry had exploded in the late
1960s, with strong unions winning high wages and even challenging managements control of the factories. After a U.S.-backed 1976 coup, however,
Ford managers anxious to regain control over their factory found natural
allies in the military faction that planned the coup. The wave of disappearances from Ford began the day of the coup and wrapped up within a few
weeks. And they worked. All union activity ceased at Ford until the early
1980s.22 By placing this assault in an inter-American context, we can escape the allure of ruin porn, as Leary writes, and chart the linkages connecting deindustrialization in Detroit and neoliberalism in Latin America;
it was a precursor, in extreme form, of the assault on unionism that began
in the United States under Ronald Reagan, itself part of the larger project of
shifting the United Statess economic center of gravity from the industrial
Northeast and Midwest to the sunbelt South and Southwest, and hastening
the transition to financial capitalism.
Errand into the Wilderness

It would be easy to read the story of Fordlandia as a parable of arrogance.
With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seem all too
familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination. The more the project failed on its
own termsthat is, to grow rubberthe more Ford company officials defended it as a civilizational mission; think of it as a kind of distant preview
of the ever-expanding set of justifications for why the United States invaded
Iraq in 2003. Yet Fordlandia cuts deeper into the marrow of the American
experience than that.
Over fifty years ago, the Harvard historian Perry Miller gave a famous lecture which he titled Errand into the Wilderness. In it, he tried to explain
why English Puritans lit out for the New World to begin with, as opposed
to, say, going to Holland. They went, Miller suggested, not just to escape the
corruptions of the Church of England but to complete the Protestant reformation of Christendom that had stalled in Europe.
The Puritans did not flee to the New World, Miller said, but rather sought
to give the faithful back in England a working model of a purer community.23 Put another way, central from the beginning to American expansion was deep disquietude, a feeling that something had gone wrong at
home.24 With the Massachusetts Bay Colony just a few decades old, a dissatisfied Cotton Mather began to learn Spanish, thinking that a better New
Jerusalem could be raised in Mexico.
The founding of Fordlandia was driven by a similar restlessness, a chafing
sense, even in the good times, that something had gone wrong in America.
When Ford embarked on his Amazon adventure, he had already spent the
greater part of two decades, and a large part of his enormous fortune, trying
to reform American society. His frustrations and discontents with domestic
politics and culture were legion. War, unions, Wall Street, energy monopolies, Jews, modern dance, cows milk, both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, cigarettes, and alcohol were among his many targets and complaints.
Yet churning beneath all these imagined annoyances was the fact that the
force of industrial capitalism he had helped unleash was undermining the
world he hoped to restore.
In Rome, the ruins came after the empire fell. In the United States, the destruction of Detroit happened even as the country was rising to new heights
as a superpower.
Ford sensed this unraveling early on and responded to it, trying at least
to slow it, in ever more eccentric ways. He established throughout Michigan
a series of decentralized village-industries designed to balance farm and
factory work and rescue small-town America. Yet his pastoral communes
were no match for the raw power of the changes he had played such a large
part in engendering. So he turned to the Amazon to raise his City on a Hill,
or in this case a city in a tropical river valley, pulling together all the many
strains of his utopianism in one last, desperate bid for success.
Ironies abound: in the Amazon, soybeans, which Ford promoted as a wonder crop that could sustain farming communities by creating an industrial
market for agricultural products (soy plastic, soy oil, soy food), are today the
most socially violent agent of deforestation, far surpassing the havoc caused
by logging and ranching. Large-scale, low-labor, highly mechanizedthat
is, Fordistsoy plantations are pushing deeper into the jungle with new soy
hybrids able to sustain more and more humidityhybridization is in effect
the logic of Fordism pushed into the cellular structuredisplacing whole
communities, generating urban sprawl in Amazon cities like Manaus and
elsewhere, and disrupting local food markets. In fact, one major area where
126G R E G
GRANDIN
Ford planted rubber is now given over completely to soybeans. And while
no Fordlandia rubber ever made it into a Ford car, today plastic made from
Amazon soy can be found in some Ford models. In Detroit, Fords pastoral of
worker-farmers never took hold. But today local community activists, with
help from desperate municipal officials, are promoting urban gardening,
hoping to return large, abandoned areas of the city to seed as a solution to
its food crisis.
Nearly a century ago, the journalist Walter Lippmann remarked that
Henry Fords drive to make the world anew represented a common strain
of primitive Americanism, reinforced by a confidence born of unparalleled achievement. He then followed with a question meant to be sarcastic
but which was, in fact, all too prophetic: Why shouldnt success in Detroit
assure success in front of Baghdad?25 We know the ruination that befell
Detroit. Whither Baghdad? Whither America?
Notes
1. The term creative destruction comes from Shumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and
Democracy, 83.
2. Leary, Detroitism.
3. See, for example, Marchand and Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit. As to Red Dawn, John
Patrick Leary writes in Detroitism that a long- abandoned modernist skyscraper
coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between
American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese
propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half- destroyed office building,
whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. A
pedestrian routinely bumped into Asian-American extras with Michigan accents and
fake Kalashnikovs, while a parking garage played the role of a Communist police station. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor Citys industrial
economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial Americas paranoid fantasies of national victimization. What made it even weirder was the fact that the films
producers just left the posters hanging when they packed up. A red-and-yellow poster
on that same parking garage assured us for weeks afterward that our new rulers were
here to help. After the film was shot, the producers decided to make North Korea
the main occupying country, so as not to offend the Chinese. The Chinese invasion is
coming in another form: the New York Times reported that in 2011, Chinese-made cars
have quietly arrived in North America for the first time (Nick Bunkley and Ian Austen,
In Canada, a Car Built in China, New York Times, 20 December 2011).
4. Leary, Detroitism.
5. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Dismantling Detroit, New York Times, 18 January
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/opinion/dismantling- detroit.html.
6. Willett and Manheim, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 27.
7. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
8. In the summer of 2010, about twenty thousand grassroots activists arrived in
Detroit to hold a Social Forum, affiliated with the World Social Forum, highlighting that it is in the U.S. neglected urban wastelands where some of the most creative
efforts to build a humane, sustainable life in the midst of what for many is a permanent crisis are being worked out. For a more detailed discussion of Detroits devastation, particularly as it relates to the distribution of food, along with efforts by local
community organizers to turn the city into a showcase for social movements, see Ben
Ehrenreich, Detroits Social Forum: Hope in a Crisis, Nation, 24 June 2010. See also
Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell; and Klein, The Shock Doctrine.
9. Falk, Kolko, and Lifton, Crimes of War, 15.
10. Fordlandia, Brazil, Washington Post, 12 August 1931.
11. Nevins and Hill, Ford, 604.
12. The Ford Shutdown, Washington Post, 18 September 1922.
13. Reprinted in the Living Age, 15 May 1927.
14. Ibid.
15. Brazils Famous City of Folly, Washington Post, 15 February 1914.
16. Boom, Bust, and Now Boom Again in Amazon Town, New York Times, 1 July
1969.
17. Fords Dream Lies in Decay, Los Angeles Times, 9 March 1993.
18. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, 104, 123. See the discussion in Grandin, Empires Workshop, 1415.
19. Jos Casado, Como as empresas ajudaram a ditadura no Brasil, O Globo, 15
May 2005.
20. Robert, The Falcon Remembered; Robert, The Case against Ford. See also
Basualdo, Complicidad patronal-militar en la ltima dictadura argentina.
21. Robert, The Falcon Remembered, 12.
22. Robert, The Case against Ford, 4.
23. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 11.
24. Ibid., 2.
25. Quoted in Brinkley, Wheels for the World, 232.
128G R E G
GRANDIN
PA RT I I %Living in Ruins: Degradations and Regenerations
SHARAD CHARI
Detritus in Durban
Polluted Environs and the Biopolitics of Refusal
Im not worried about the environment. All I want is my piece of oxygen!

J A N E G LOV E R , interview by Sharad Chari, Durban, South Africa, 23 August 2003
Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness. It bears its end within itself, and reveals itas Hegel already recognizedby
a ruse. With the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to realize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
WA LT E R B E N J A M I N , Paris
Jane Glover and I sat at the doorstep of the flat she had recently occupied in
the section of the Woodville Road Flats that she calls the ghetto within the
ghetto. From our vantage, we could not see the oil refinery at the center of
the former Coloured township of Wentworth in Durban, South Africa.1 I had
been coming to Wentworth and neighboring Merebank to research changing forms of state racism and struggle in these areas, which are cheek-byjowl with oil refineries (Engen, owned by Malaysian Petronas, and SAPREF ,
a joint venture of Shell South Africa and British Petroleum South Africa),
a pulp and paper mill (Mondi Paper, formerly of the Anglo-American conglomerate), a former airport, and the industrial areas of Jacobs and Mobeni.2 Located in a valley that traps pollution, South Durban has witnessed
the rise of one of Southern Africas most important community-based and
internationally networked environmental justice movements. Residents in
these areas have been engaged in struggles over housing, services, contract
labor, and health care, as they refuse to be forgotten in the toxic valley of
South Durban.
Jane and I sat facing engineering workshops as she spoke of insecure
work and familial violence, homeless children living like a band of Artful
Dodgers in an abandoned warehouse, rampant theft and resale of stolen
objects which makes suspects of friends and lovers, drug and sex trades,
and gangsters in and out of prison. Against this freighted narrative backdrop, Jane Glover praised God for her survival and looked out wistfully at the
neighborhood she calls home. When I suggested a shift of registers to the
effects of living next to oil refineries, the focus of media coverage on Wentworth, she laughed and exclaimed, Im not worried about the environment.
All I want is my piece of oxygen!
Jane had recently been part of a group of women who occupied flats left
vacant by the Provincial Housing Department. This group had challenged
the authority of the main community organization, the Wentworth Development Forum (WDF ), which they saw as dragging its feet in negotiations
over construction tenders, which would not have been much benefit to them.
When they could wait no longer, the women held hands and prayed to the
Holy Spirit for the strength to act. By the next morning, they had taken over
the flats and could not be dislodged. The WDF called a meeting with prominent Durban activists at the Austerville Community Centre, above the public
library, and the women of Woodville Road were publicly censured for defying
their purported leaders. In an impromptu response, Jane invoked feelings
of stigma and frustration widespread in Wentworth: I woke up one morning and I said to myself, What is it that depresses me so much about living
here? And when I looked around, I looked at the flat and I said, My god! It
looks like the walls are closing in on me! So, if we failed somewhere along
the way, we are so sorry. You know, when we needed some men around, there
were no men available. So we took it upon ourselves to get in there and take
on the task. Through well-worn themes like the difficulties of sexual intimacy in overcrowded flats that had become claustrophobic, Jane performed
the betrayal of a proper sexuality.3 Her appeals to God, population pressure,
and family values may have been strategic, but they provided an opportunity
for a sharp lambaste against the political inactivity of the men around her,
as well as against the idioms of struggle through which politics had been
conventionally construed. Ideas of purity and pollution pervade her comments, despite a lack of reference to oil refineries. Pentecostalism, pervasive
in Wentworths backyard churches, adds emotional intensity to her fight for
the fruit of this world.
132S H A R A D
CHARI
I have revisited this vignette before; it continues to challenge the research

I have been engaged in through multiple revisits since 2002.4 As I replay her
public speech, I imagine Jane Glover amassing all forms of ruination, heaping them in a pile in middle of the Austerville Community Centre. I have
puzzled over her rejection of an environmental idiom that would seem to
explain the most obvious and politically expedient form of degradation next
to an oil refinery. While thinking through popular refusal to become detritus, or political evidence forged in relation to changing forms of racialization, or the remains of a long and discontinuous history of state racism and
opposition, I have experimented with concepts that in different ways attend
to how people refuse to be ruined, while surrounded by processes of ruination.5 I have come to see Janes demand for a piece of oxygen as a ruse in
Walter Benjamins sense, in that it does not just refuse environmentalism,
but also points in its tone and texture to simmering, emergent critique in the
imaginations of people living with chronic exposure to toxic pollution.
I went to Wentworth in 2002 to understand how people living in a place
saturated by industrial pollution contend with and refuse a variety of forms
of detritus, remains, and waste foisted on their corner of South Africas turbulent present. I soon found that my key concept, detritus, ran the risk of
conflating quite different processes.6 I was not the only one who ran this risk.
In the face of corporate and governmental dissimulation about the health
effects of air pollution, the most obvious kind of detritus in South Durban,
Wentworths residents reflect on other markers of degraded life and landscape, as in the range of horror stories about sex, drugs, and crime that Jane
Glover and several other residents have regaled me with. When the former
president Thabo Mbeki visited Wentworth before the elections of 2005, he
was met with a similar litany of tales of moral and social decay. Debates circulate in Wentworth about whether environmental critique ought to be primary vis--vis multiple forms of suffering and deprivation, and whether to
accept social responsibility funds from industry or whether this was pollution of another kind.
In contrast to this differentiated and fragmented contagion talk, South
Durban had gained a certain kind of visibility on the Left after a highly visible
strike in Wentworth opened the possibility of a conjoining of labor and environmental militancy. A primer on post-apartheid activism uses this event
to argue for a brewing movement linking struggles across South Africas
townships.7 However, this work only begins to ask how, between peaks of
protest, people actively engage problems and revise their conception of politics.8 I sought to intervene in these debates by turning precisely to what they
D E T R I T U S I N D U R B A N 133
evade: how people live with and refuse the detritus of industrial capital and
state-sanctioned racism through critical sensitivities that are contradictory,
uncertain, and not (yet) counter-partisan.9 Ann Laura Stoler frames the
problem as what people are left with . . . in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind.10
In unpacking multiple senses of detritus, remain, ruin, ruination, and debris, I draw on several areas of scholarship. The first concerns the transition
from apartheid, whether conceived through the lens of capital, livelihoods
and social transformation, changing forms of activism, or changing modes
of racism.11 The materiality of racial infrastructure is relatively neglected in
this scholarship, despite pioneering work on geographies of segregation,
instabilities of labor control, and emergent forms of urban life during and
after apartheid.12
In asking what does not transform, what is striking is that the industries
that surround Wentworth and Merebank have retained the state-sanctioned
right to pollute. Seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the effects of atmospheric pollution on childrens health has been flouted by an alliance of local
government and corporate power. Moreover, the technocratic approach of
city management, which claims to incorporate civic interests as stakeholders, denigrates popular determination of urban form and process, or
what Henri Lefebvre called the right to the city.13 This demand, I argue,
was one aspect of anti-apartheid critique from the recent past of the 1970s
and 1980s which has returned with a vengeance in post-apartheid times.
To think of built environments, statecapital alliances, and limits to
popular struggle in relation to the material infrastructure of racism extends
a line of thinking from Walter Benjamins classic essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History. In his oft- cited parable of the Angel of History, faced
backward against the gale of progress, Benjamin writes, Where we see a
chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.14 Scholars have followed this
cue to interrogate the modernity of ruins, from the collection of things in
the lives of the Appalachian poor, to the ruins of Fordist industry in the U.S.
Midwest, to the ruins of colonialism in Namibia, to legendary ships stranded
by a shifting river in Argentinas Gran Chaco.15 Stolers intervention in this
body of work has been to insist on the differential and active nature of imperial debris in peoples lives, and the varied forms of refusal immanent in
situations of ruination.16
Photography and film have been potent in attempts at arresting narratives
of progress, in documenting debris and refusal.17 Postindustrial dereliction
134S H A R A D
CHARI
is such a widely accepted form of debris that, as George Steinmetz wryly

observes, the city of Detroit markets its ruination to Hollywood as a backdrop for dystopian science fiction fantasies and gritty crime films.18 What
remains less explored is Benjamins call to see the monuments of capitalist
production and consumption also as piles of waste, productive of profit and
of suffering. In this light, the thriving industrial geography of South Durban
is also a festering site of pollution and injustice.
If focus on ruination tells us how people live with ruins in dialectical
geographies of destructive creation, this lens also points to the evidentiary
means through which people critically interrogate their ruination. This takes
me to a second key area of debate in South Africa, concerning archives,
memory, and testimony after apartheid. Several scholars have approached
the profusion of memoir, oral history, museum studies, and forms of narrative that question the awkward temporality of post-apartheid; the truthtelling imperative unleashed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission;
and memoir writing that variously confronts the intimate erasures of antiapartheid narration.19
When popular testimony is invoked as counterpoint to statist or nationalist narratives, however, it often reproduces elite fantasies of subaltern autonomy and representation that Gayatri Spivak famously cautioned against.20
To think with ruins and remains provides a different view of popular critique
than that expressed by subalternity as the aporetic moment in representation. Indeed, if subalternity is conceived of in relation to imperial crisis and
ruination, the problem of the subaltern is not a choice between redeeming
a repressed authentic past or fashioning a different present.21 To think of
subalternity relationally in this way shifts focus from the problem of the
subaltern as agentive subject to the differentially ordered material terrain
in which past and present are unequally lived.22 If subalternity and material
ruination are seen relationally, the latter is less about restoring the truth
about the past or present, than about tracking discontinuities between critique that is recognized and that which is disqualified or deemed inappropriate.23
In this light, Janes statements can be seen as an argument in ruin in two
senses: as speaking from a space saturated by despoliation, and as a compromised articulation that mocks the power to transform reality. Unlike the
subaltern presumed by much of postcolonial studies as a site of withholding
of otherness, Jane and others in Wentworth speak precisely in the ruinous
terms of elite discourse in ways that Stoler argues of subalterns in the Deli
plantation belt of Sumatra, who tapped into the uncertainties, fears, and
fantasies of European hidden scripts by playing them back to planters and

officials for their own political purposes.24
While Jane appears contemptuous of environmentalism as a way to resolve the many forms of inequality and suffering she has experienced and
witnessed, she also affirms a god-given right to the natural means of life.
With the simple demand for a piece of oxygen, Jane pulls the emergency
break on the notion of inevitable democratization in post-apartheid South
Africa, where not even clean air can be assumed to be an inalienable right.
Her demand is absolute and visceral, a call to consign inequalities to an
actual past.25
From exploring the evidentiary means with which residents like Jane formulate critiques of the racialized present, my research began to shift back
to the discontinuous and struggled history of racial infrastructure and opposition, to layers of authorized and disqualified critique.26 Following a materialist interpretation of biopolitics in an imperial frame, I suggest that
this momentary mobilization of poor women as an instance of what Jean
Comaroff reservedly calls a reimagining of (bio)politics in contemporary
South Africa, most vividly through the politics of HIV/AIDS .27 Widespread
protests over housing, services, land, health care, and the means of livability
and livelihood, deepening under the presidencies of Thabo Mbeki and Jacob
Zuma, attest to something deeper than the critique of neoliberal economic
policy and of the technocratic language of service delivery; rather, they express a critiques of politics itself.28 (Bio)politics is a rhetorically apt term,
as South African realities push Foucaults concept beyond its Euro-American
comfort zones, specifically in the tendency to think in epochal and Manichean ways about the fate of biopolitical tools, for instance in the notion of
the proliferation of the camp.29
Drawing on Foucaults insight that biopolitical techniques have been contingently instrumental to varied forms of state racism, some scholars turn to
the ways in which biopolitical tools have been deployed in struggles over unequal means of life, in producing what Didier Fassin calls bio-inequalities,
and in calling them into question.30 Fassin argues that concrete attention to
the lived experience of inequalities in the means of life elaborates Foucaults
commitments. The same could be said for historical and ethnographic research on struggles over biopolitical expertise in contexts ranging from the
compromised biological citizenship of Chernobyl survivors, to the suppression of health risks associated with asbestos mining in apartheid South
Africa, to various strategies employed in breast cancer activism in the United
States.31 Rather than the proliferation of a genocidal imperative assumed by
136S H A R A D
CHARI
some readings of Agamben, these studies prompt questions about how degraded or dishonored subjects seek to critique expert knowledge in the ruins
of biopolitical sovereignty. In the latent space of knowledge that is disqualified but never destroyed, and in the face of censure from community activist
leadership, Jane questions the efficacy of environmentalism as a liberatory
discourse, marking in angry words the bio-inequalities that she refuses.
The following section turns to the broader forces that shape specific forms
of detritus and refusal in what Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts call violent
environments.32 My argument is that South Durban has been shaped into
a kind of biopolitical space that has prepared its Indian and Coloured residents for political engagement, within limits set by capital and the racial
state. When the lines have become sharp, the obstacles to change have been
sharpened and expert knowledge about pollution and degradation more
tightly circumscribed. In the face of official dissimulation, I then turn to
critical sentiments fostered in this space, particularly through photography
and film. These have been powerful media for drawing sentiment into the
realm of critique, to question dominant as well as emergent critical imaginations as they literally occupy space.33 Photography and film also provide
an opportunity to think about how expert and disqualified knowledge are
presented alongside each other as spatially subjacent, conserving the means
of argument in ruins.
What follows is an exploration of the conditions for refusal of the lifedegrading presence of the infrastructure of state racism. The immediate paradox that people living in conditions of multifaceted and protracted degradation face is the evasive character of admissible evidence of their plight.
Nothing seems proof enough; not even, in South Durban, incontrovertible
scientific evidence of air pollution. When I told an interlocutor in Wentworth who I call Frank that my broader research project is called Apartheid
Remains, he responded, True! My point was not that all that was solid in
apartheid South Africa lives on, but Franks response is that many remnants
continue to frustrate change today. I conclude with this figure, as he cautiously treads the borders between expert and disqualified knowledge each
day as a self-taught community health care professional.
Racial Remains in Violent Environments

Wentworth is not, two decades after the repeal of the Group Areas Act of
1991, a designated Coloured township. Yet the effects of racial identification stick to people and their neighborhood despite their best intentions.
When residents speak of their race trouble, they follow well-worn tracks,
whether in repeating stories about parents unable to help children complete
assignments on Coloured culture or in statements like We werent white
enough then, were not black enough now. Talk about race trouble circulates with such facility that it ought to be understood as indexing a more
general philosophical problem faced by Indians and Coloureds in the new
South Africa.34
Unlike Indians in neighboring Merebank, who can resignify racial artifacts as markers of culture to engage in moral debate about cultural loss,
as Thomas Blom Hansen notes on the township of Chatsworth, Wentworths
Coloureds constantly face the charge, and challenge, of racial inauthenticity.35 As Grant Farred puts it, Coloureds have no a priori or pre-lapsarian
moment; [nor can they] retreat into a mythic precolonial innocence.
Coloured difference is . . . insufficiently different for them to conceive of
themselves as anything but South African.36 Indeed, if South Africans as
a coherent people do not yet exist, as Ivor Chipkin provocatively argues,
Colouredness presents a yearning for a postracial nation.37 In this popular
turmoil about race and nation, what evades consciousness but permeates practice is the visceral materiality of race as linguistic and bodily performance and as infrahumanity engineered into bodies, hearts, and lived
environs, or rather necropolitical landscapes.38
Wentworths juxtaposition of racialized, polluted life abutting corporate
power represents in microcosm what scholars argue about geographies of
accumulation and disaccumulation across the continent. James Ferguson
perceptively argues that the coexistence of securitized, enclaved, extractive
accumulation alongside humanitarian hinterlands that contain lAfrique inutile or the unusable Africa revives a colonial spatial imaginary of extractive
territoriality alongside structured neglect.39 Modern South Africa, fundamentally shaped by imperial extractive capital and racialized dispossession,
incorporates this dual dynamic in varied ways.40
To call the material effects of these processes imperial formations is
to think beyond functional articulations of racial capital and despoliation, a
key objective in radical anti-apartheid writing on relations between capitalism and apartheid.41 With time, both theory and its political scaffolding have
shifted. Protracted imperial effects continue to shape a fissured landscape of
securitized territoriality and structured neglect in examples that are legion,
from gated communities shielded from shack settlements, to faux-public
shopping malls that exclude informal traders.42
Specific histories of space matters considerably, if we are to understand
138S H A R A D
CHARI
how South Durbans residents have been not entirely excluded but enabled
to participate in what Partha Chatterjee calls a politics of the governed.43
South Durban was forged as a particular kind of biopolitical space through a
set of processes of dispossession, spatial transformation, population movement, and differential investment in the means of life. In the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth, while discourses of contagion were drawn into
new projects of exclusion and segregation across white supremacies, South
Durban was something of a frontier zone. Here, a sprawling black belt
of informal peasant-workers, fishermen, and migrant workers settled the
urban perimeter, making it habitable, cultivable, and open to new uses.
White residents within the Borough of Durban mobilized the city, particularly through discourses of public health, to incorporate the southern
periphery and transform its character.44 Importantly, and decades before
apartheid, the local and provincial state effected mass forced removals of
people by race group in South Durban in the 1930s and 1940s, for industrial or infrastructural spatial uses.45 Durbans undulating hills, rivers, and
ridges provided useful physical barriers for zoning. The relatively flat topography of South Durban was highly sought after for industrial expansion,
and South Durban Basin took its specifically pernicious spatial form by
the 1940s, providing residence for intermediate groups of Indians and Coloureds in a deadly toxic sink.
Forced removals of Indian and Coloured populations to segregated
housing schemes between the 1940s and the early 1970s paralleled the construction of South Durbans two oil refineries and the Mondi Paper Mill. In
1989, just as the Mobil refinery was being divested under pressure from the
Global Anti-Apartheid Movement, the refinery began taking more seriously
the authority of environmental discourse. In 1990 the Merebank Ratepayers
Association (MRA ), the main civic organization in the Indian area neighboring Wentworth, tried to use the moment of the unbanning of the African
National Congress (ANC ) to conduct a survey of residents experience of
atmospheric air pollution and respiratory ill-health; the results were striking and the MRA proclaimed a pollution crisis, but the survey was quickly
disqualified by the Health Department and the refineries for its lack of scientific evidence.46 The refinery attributed problems of ill-health to a generic
industrialization and urbanization, in which it had disappeared as a culpable
agent. If pollution is a thing that knows no color, the corporations were arguing that it knows no owner either.
Industry signaled the possibility, not the actuality, of industrial jobs for
its residential neighbors. While Wentworth surrounds the Engen refinery,
it has never been a company town reliant on local labor, despite the recognized skills of Wentworth men as exemplary industrial artisans who built
refineries across the country. By the 1980s, the most fortunate of these artisans in Wentworth had risen from being semiskilled pipe fitters and boilermakers to being independent contractors of artisanal labor. In contrast,
most of Wentworths residents have watched the refineries turn to contracting out and limiting local employment, particularly after the formation of a
militant independent labor union, the Chemical, Engineering and Industrial
Workers Union (CEIWU ). Wentworths artisans face a final insult when they
return from limited- duration migrant contracts to witness jobless growth in
the transformation of South Durban into a chemical-industries hub in which
their skills have not been considered significant.
An opportune moment for public action emerged in 1995, when the newly
elected President Nelson Mandela stopped en route to the Engen refinery
to listen to the concerns of protesters.47 This chance encounter initiated a
course of events leading to the formation of South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA ) in 1997, linking civic organizations from across
South Durbans racial divides with the mandate of the icon who embodied
democratic transition and racial reconciliation. SDCEA is tied through organizers and campaigns to the neighborhood-based Wentworth Development
Forum (WDF ), and to the environmental justice organization groundWork.
Formed in 1999 to focus on oil and air pollution from chemical industries,
health care waste and incineration, and hazardous waste groundWork subsequently became a chapter of the international NGO Friends of the Earth.
This alliance of organizations links activism across spatial scales, from
fenceline communities that live cheek-by-jowl with industry, to city, provincial, national, and international advocacy.
There are resonances here with the multiscalar Global Anti-Apartheid
Movement, but with a new premium on transparency and publicity not
always possible in the era of apartheid. Indeed, this activism challenges the
valorization of hierarchy and secrecy inherited by the ruling alliance of the
ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP ) from the exiled and
underground liberation movement of the past. The multiscalar alliance of
WDF , SDCEA , and groundWork has effectively pressured all scales of government, juggling research, campaigning, legal activism, street demonstration, and local pollution monitoring.48
Legal struggles highlight concretely how objects from the past persist
past their legitimate expiry date in a democratic era. For years, the key legislation regulating air pollution was the Atmospheric Pollution Prevention Act
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(APPA ) of 1965, which was largely unenforced with respect to black communities.49 An important means to challenge this legislation came from the
environmental clause enshrined in the Constitutional Bill of Rights, which
enshrines the right to an environment that is not harmful to . . . health or
well-being; and . . . to have the environment protected, for the benefit of
present and future generations.50 In fighting for a new air pollution act,
groundWork used this environmental clause and other constitutional and
legal rights to information, protection for whistle-blowers, and representation by parties acting in the public interest.51
As a result of the long history of civic engagement, Durban was chosen as
the site for the piloting of an air-quality management system under the auspices of the Multi-Point Plan, and the new Air Quality Act of 2004 was signed
into law in late 2005, replacing the 1965 act. What this struggle shows is that
elements of imperial power can be consigned to the past through the courts,
but groundWork has remained vigilant of loopholes and backdoors through
which corporate power can continue to hold onto its historic subsidies. In
this spirit, groundWork argues for a broader list of hazardous chemicals,
ongoing ground-based monitoring, strict enforcement of pollution standards, and popular participation in monitoring of enforcement. The struggle
against environmental violence is ongoing.
Local debates in 2004 highlight the importance of naming industrial
waste and attending to its disposal. The key issue was the proposed expansion of the Mondi paper mill through what industry called a combustor,
but which SDCEA and groundWork insisted was an incinerator. Mondi first
made the proposal in 1998 to install a fluidised boiler, following thwarted
attempts to extend their ash landfill sites in Merebank as well as in the
nearby former African township of Umlazi. SDCEA mobilized quickly to prevent both extensions, and effectively closed down the Umlazi toxic dump in
February 1997, a high point in the making of an interracial environmental
movement in South Durban. Faced with rising transport costs for landfills
farther afield, Mondi shifted to re-burn wastes in a boiler on plant. This,
SDCEA argued, is what an incinerator does.
The ensuing struggle brought several points into view. First, definitions
were key: Was this a combustor to produce steam and power, or an incinerator to burn waste? Second, legal activists who caught Mondi out on a
technicality in their exemption from an environmental impact assessment
report illuminated the close level of informal ties between local government
and capital. Finally, tensions between legal counsel and environmental activists over the possibility of negotiating a settlement brought to the fore the
importance for SDCEA and groundWork in maintaining a strong stance

against incineration. Anti-incineration, they found, works as a strong emotive tool for local mobilization, as well as for linking with international antiincineration activism.
A second legal struggle fought by civic and labor organizations in Wentworth, as across South Africa, concerned the renewal in 2007 of the National
Key Points Act of 1980, apartheid legislation to protect places of strategic
national interest from sabotage. Oil refineries and other key industries and
infrastructure were zoned as strategic sites under this legislation. The Wentworth refinery was in fact subject to a failed attack with rocket-propelled
grenades by members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK ), the armed wing of
the ANC , in May 1984; all the militants were killed in a shoot-out with the
police.52 Had the rockets made their mark, the fireball would have decimated
the neighborhood. In contrast to this suicidal impulse to turn the refinery
and its neighbors into ash are ongoing efforts to show concrete evidence of
unemployed workers, infirm bodies, and unlivable environs on the corporations doorsteps. For both labor and environmental activists, the space
around the refinery has been invaluable for collecting evidence of pollution
and for staging confrontation.
After 1994, protest, confrontation, and civic monitoring on the rise
around Engen for both environmental and labor concerns could be deemed
illegal under the National Key Points Act. This is a clear contradiction of citizens democratic rights to gatherings, demonstrations, and information.
Unlike the Air Quality Act, which replaced its predecessor with a potentially
more democratic legal form, the draft National Key Points Act and Strategic
Installations Bill of 2007 sought to renew this remnant of apartheids security apparatus for neoliberal times, criminalizing labor and civic groups employing constitutional rights, while protecting corporate power under the
guise of security.53
Labor and civic organizations came out strongly against the new bill. In
2002, after a militant strike led by the independent Chemical, Engineering and Industrial Workers Union (CEIWU ), supported by a large section
of the neighborhood, the Ministry of Defence arbitrarily extended the National Key Point around Engen Refinery to encroach on a local mosque and
peoples private homes. A subsequent CEIWU workers strike was pushed
out to the grounds next to the swimming pool, and the collection of air
samples by SDCEA was disrupted. This seizure of public space around the
oil refinery was secured through the language of security in the time of the
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United States War on Terror. Contemporary imperialism breathes new life

into corporate power, in a violent environment that further insulates the oil
refineries as occupying powers in South Durban.
Scientific evidence of ill-health continues to be dismissed by the city and
industry as unscientific, clarifying the latent class politics of biopolitical
sovereignty. In a highly visible series of newspaper articles, the journalist
Tony Carnie called South Durban a cancer alleya term used to fight environmental racism in Louisiana, in the U.S. Southwith leukemia rates
24 percent higher than the national average.54 The corporations ignored altogether a more rigorous joint study conducted by researchers from the University of KwaZulu-Natal Medical School with public health scholars from
the University of Michigan. That study found 53.3 percent of students at the
Settlers Primary School between the Engen and SAPREF refineries suffering
from asthma and other respiratory problems. These results were calculated
from a dynamic model, which took into consideration air flows and multiple industries in attributing responsibility for pollution. Neither city government nor industry found this data worthy of significant response. The
refineries question the scientific certainty of medical surveys that use statistical probabilities to argue for causal connections between pollution and illhealth. groundWork argues that the struggle is really against official silence
and the wilful ignorance that serves to frustrate . . . demands that industry
must clean up and compensate those it has harmed.55
SDCEA and WDF continue to use technical language and scientific evidence to attempt to rearticulate biopolitical expertise to community,
whether in community-led air sampling, or in documenting the long-term
damage from exposure to toxic pollutants. Participants in these efforts note
in asides that a long history of embodied suffering is rarely accorded the
status of fact, but the alternative of resignation to biopolitical sovereignty
is actually an investment in premature death. groundWork notes the broader
problem as one in which the state has devolved regulatory responsibility to
civil society, a standard in neoliberal times, with few resources for effective,
ongoing regulation. The result is widespread dissimulation about pollution
knowledge, countered to some extent in South Durban through monitoring
by SDCEA .56
Routine ailment and acceptable ill-health in South Africa involve a profound process of official dissimulation. The Health Department does not
collect statistics to demonstrate long-term exposure. Scientific evidence
is routinely flouted. Population politics in Wentworth is ongoing. SDCEA-
WDF -groundWork continues working on multiple fronts, to fight ruination

in fenceline communities as well as in the apparatus of metropolitan spatial
planning and national infrastructure policy.57
When the municipality has suggested that people relocate, activists and
residents have been vocal at public meetings that they do not want to relive
the forced removals of the past. The refinery and its quasi-public boundary
space continue to be things out of time, cloaked in the security blanket of
the apartheid-era National Key Points Act, remade for todays imperial War
on Terror. One of the effects of environmental justice discourse has been to
powerfully link the violence of the present with the staying power of apartheids corporate subsidies. In their own admission, environmental groups
have not been successful in mass organizing or in popularizing the collection of evidence of pollution-related ill-health. Without an effective counterforce, official dissimulation continues to blunt critique, normalizing South
Durbans violent environment, preventing it being apprehended as an imperial formation of another kind.
Since its formation in the early twentieth century as a particular kind of
biopolitical space that trapped intermediate racial populations in a polluted
industrial valley, South Durban has kept active the politics in biopolitics.
While those entitled to biopolitical expertise were initially white, Indian and
Coloured residents in South Durban sought to use public health, planning,
and environmental knowledge at various points to limit the powerful alliance of capital and racial government. Rather than a Hegelian renovation
of biopolitical tools in the service of decolonization, however, the lessons
of the latter half of the twentieth century have been that the obstacles to
change have been more rigid than many had imagined. After apartheid, environmental groups have sought at various moments to make the lineaments
of this violent environment apparent, only to find new forms of official dissimulation frustrating their attempts. Alongside attempt to wrest control of
expert knowledge, more prosaic forms of knowledge have continued to critique degraded life and environs in other ways.
Critical Sentiments
For much of its apartheid history, Wentworth was seen as a conservative
area buffering African and white zones of the apartheid city. By the 1970s,
the states security apparatus and mainstream press portrayed Wentworth
as preoccupied with gangs, drugs, and violence to such an extent that it was
unlikely to house anti-apartheid activists of any significance. The idea was
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4.1 Playing Soccer at Highbury Sports Ground, Wentworth, 1995. Source: Cedric
Nunn file. Courtesy of the Local History Museums Collection, Durban.
called into question only after the arrests of members of two anti-apartheid
sabotage units operating from Wentworth in the 1980s, as well as the explosion of mass urban revolt across the city of Durban in the 1980s. For various
reasons, Wentworth continues to be thought of from without and within as a
subaltern Coloured area insulated and confined by specific forms of poverty
and suffering. The iconic character of life next to an oil refinery in a particular kind of carceral space, captured perfectly in Cedric Nunns photograph
from the mid-1990s, draws outsiders to think and feel very quickly that they
understand what life here is like (fig. 4.1). This visual ideology is also a ruse
that has drawn experts in poverty, development, and social welfare to Wentworth like moths to a flame. They come, they propose, they leave quickly, and
residents comment on nothing much changing, despite an inflow of projects
and heated debates about tainted money.
When Wentworths residents speak of suffering hidden behind the seemingly decent walls of formal housing, they recirculate dominant stereotypes
of stigma and depravity that permeate poverty talk. Rather than the content
of this circulation, it is the anxious pace with which it circulates that is important. As I replay multiple conversations over periodic revisits between
2002 and 2008, I continue to be struck by the structures of feeling through

which people conserve critical sentiments in the wake of official dissimulation. These sentiments provide a different window into the ways in which
people contend with the degradation of life in Wentworth as they attempt to
articulate critiques of the present. Photography and film have been particularly potent means, for both residents and passing interlocutors, for conserving a kind of critical melancholy, a blues tradition specific to Wentworth.
The interplay of dominant stereotypes and Wentworth blues came to light
in an exhibition at the Local History Museum in Durban in 2002 called The
Cycle of Violence, curated by a resident of Wentworth.58 The focus was on the
rise and decline of gangs in Wentworth, scripted through four movements:
building Wentworth as an unplanned mistake, migrant labor and social
conditions in the apartheid township, a search for the identity? through
gangs, and the community takes charge with the church in the lead. The
script followed a well-worn formula, as it portrayed forced removals of
people to Wentworth in the apartheid era in turn forcing young men into
a dystopian world of gangs, later to meet their redemption through an alliance of church, police, and community. The curators intentions were to
shift focus from dystopian stereotypes about Wentworth, so that when an
outspoken Wentworth resident asked why it was necessary to have another
presentation of gangsterism in Wentworth, the curator responded, We
want to show people how people in Wentworth came out of it, how people
survived it.59
While constructing his intervention in this progressive-redemptive
mode, a wholeheartedly affirmative dialectics, the curator also displayed
private photographs of young men in an area called SANF , for the former
homes of the South African Naval Force (figs. 4.24.3). In this set of images,
quite a different set of relations are set in motion. The micro-neighborhood
of SANF is remembered in Wentworth with a particular reverie, as people
recall life in semidetached homes separated by little lanes running down a
hillside. The lanes are a crucial part of the idyll in these recollections, and
they recur in narratives of gangs ducking from each other, of people avoiding
danger at night, and of anti-apartheid militants escaping the police. These
private photographs taken in the 1970s, largely though not entirely of young
men, provides a particular record of being in the lanes.
What is apparent in these and other images in this sequence are a set of
gendered poses, displays of style and fashion, and an evident pleasure in
being in the lanes. The broader set includes images of girlfriends and families, but the images appear primarily to be of and perhaps for young men.
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4.24.3 Life in the lanes of SANF , ca. 1970s. Private photographs on display at the
Cycle of Violence exhibit, KwaMuhle Museum. Courtesy of Local History Museums
Collections, Durban.
There are no obvious references to gang turf. The most important visual convention across the images is that people share the photographic frame with
the lane, to give the lanes their due. All the photographs either frame people
within the lanes or split the frame between people and the lanes. Several men
and women recall the lanes while describing an early period of settlement in
Wentworth, when recently dispossessed people made a new Coloured township their home. In these narratives, the lanes mark a new common space
after the violence of forced removals and before the arrival of drug lords and
the departure of jobs. They mark exasperation with the interior, with parental authority, and with the heat of Durbans summer in a neighborhood next
to an oil refinery.
What The Cycle of Violence exhibition did not say was that one of the mechanisms used in the eradication of gangs was the privatization of the lanes. The
lanes are now gone, enclosed by private walls, with narrow gaps to mark a
lost geography. The lanes do not appear in anti-apartheid archives. To many,
they would appear illegitimate, insular, and possibly dangerous gang turf.
This is not to say that the photographs do not provide evidence of territorial gangs. They may provide precisely that which is missing in generic accounts of gangs as an inevitable consequence of forced removals, showing
that young men forged what Clive Glaser calls overlapping personal and
territorial familiarity.60
What is certain is that these were intimate spaces of masculine affirmation and stigma, injury and pride worth photographing and keeping. The
lanes may have provided some young men precisely what Jane Glover demands, release from the claustrophobia of everyday life that Lefebvre calls
lived space: emergent, sensual, and practical space appropriated for as
long as is possible, but not codified for easy translation.61 The photographs
demonstrate what Kathleen Stewart calls the strange agency of fashioning
aesthetic effects out of things that are always falling apart or already fallen
into decay.62 In contrast to the mass of objects through which people remember in the ruins of Appalachia in Stewarts work, this space of memory
in Wentworth has been lost. What remains are photographs from personal
albums, now also catalogued at the Local History Museum. People in SANF
recollect the lanes through fragmented comments on masculine style, lowlevel violence, and attachment to neighborhood. While people rarely look at
these photographs in their albums, they recall the lanes with a specific nostalgia.
This structure of feeling is more broadly felt in contemporary South
Africa in forms of nostalgia that hark back to pre-township residence in
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informal and multiracial settlements in early-twentieth- century cities. This

is nostalgia that is specifically geared toward a sense of collective loss of a
pre-apartheid social context.63 The dominant tendency within this nostalgia
is a desire for a late-twentieth- century South Africa that could have taken a
different turn. There are privileged sites of memory where such nostalgia is
reassured, as in the District Six Museum in Cape Town and in various commemorations of life in Sofiatown in Johannesburgs Soweto. What is not
adequately accounted for in such representations is that there were no Halcyon Days of simple happiness in the poverty of informal settlements. Far
less do such memory practices attend to the vibrancy of certain places created as a product of forced removals, like Wentworth.
Walter Benjamin comments on Eugne Atgets photographs of deserted
Parisian streets: He photographed them like scenes of a crime . . . for
the purpose of establishing evidence.64 How might we think about these
photographs of young men in Wentworth, which are anything but deserted?
In what sense might they be crime scenes other than as evidence of youth
descending into gangsterism? In a subsequent essay, Benjamin returns to
Atgets photographs to ask: But is not every square inch of our cities the
scene of a crime? Every passer-by a culprit? Is not the task of the photographerdescendant of the augurs and haruspicesto reveal guilt and to point
out the guilty in his pictures?65
If, as Faisal Devji provocatively suggests, post-apartheid is something like
the scene of a crime, naming this landscape an imperial formation is the beginning rather than the end of the forensic process that must follow.66 One
forensic exercise through film was undertaken by a photojournalist, Peter
McKenzie, who lived in this part of Wentworth and knew its street scene intimately as a young boy in the early 1970s. McKenzie returned when he became
a politicized black photographer documenting township inequalities in the
turbulent 1980s. As he puts it, he returned all the way back to his street corner at Pascal Place, to spend time in the space he had to leave as a young man
tired of its insularity and lack of critique of the broader, crumbling apartheid
order. His film and photography are about capturing the traces of the past,
and of the melancholic afterlife of youth affiliation in the lanes and gulleys
of SANF . In the interim, several of his friends served time in prison, they say
for wrongful arrest. There are multiple layers of ruination in these memories
of lost times in lost places, and of remembered frustrations in a differently
frustrated present.
Over the few times I have interviewed him, McKenzie has always turned
back to his corner or gulley in Wentworth. His memory practice, and the way
he commits it to film, are useful to think with in relation to the possibility of

a critical melancholy in Wentworth that is quite different from the nostalgia
for pre-apartheid settlements.67
There was a corner you could go to, always people you could talk to. There
was help if you needed, to go and fuck someone up on the other side of
town. You learnt about sex on the corner. . . . Everybody walks up and
down cause its too hot to stay inside. You got this continuous mobility
of people going Ey, howzit? The life of those gulleys was also about
being in Durban, and the heat of summer. You could not stay in your
house. It was too crowded. It was too hot. So life was to be lived on the
streets outside.68
McKenzie contrasts the openness of the gulleys to the claustrophobia of
parental authority, to evoke the visceral quality of young male appropriation
of public space. The photographs of the lanes at the Local History Museum
could not quite represent this feeling of compression, though they share a
similar desire to make an apartheid township their home. McKenzies work
and the narrative he provides about his life are shaped by a profound unease.
Frustrated by the insularity of township life, McKenzie left Wentworth, returning years later after embarking on a career as an activist photographer.
When given the choice, he says he picked up a camera rather than an AK -47
machine gun. While he has returned periodically to Wentworth, he maintains a dual sense of being an insider- outsider in his kasie, or township: I
am from Wentworth but not of Wentworth. . . . Ambivalent feelings of frustration, both mine and those of the community, coupled with the apathy of
its peoples within a political system they feel has once again marginalized
them, portray these Coloured folk as waiting, waiting . . .69
Here, McKenzie echoes Vincent Crapanzanos insightful ethnography of
whiteness in a Cape village in the turbulent 1980s as a particular structure
of feeling with respect to time and various others, particularly Coloureds.
In what would be the last decade of apartheid, whites appeared to sense a
narrowing future with no clear object of desire, leaving them waiting for
something, anything to happen.70 Crapanzano suggests that this banalized
fear was shaped by disengagement from those others with whom they cannot vitally engage.71 Less convincingly, with some of the presumptions of
anti-apartheid politics, Crapanzano suggests that whites wait in fear, while
blacks wait in hope, reassured that time will be on the side of justice, and
that Indians and Coloureds wait in some combination.72 Waiting was impor-
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tant for focusing on the pathos of domination from one vantage in uncertain times. However, rather than expecting racially distinct modes of waiting today, we might rather follow Crapanzanos cue in thinking relationally
about the ways in which critics like Peter McKenzie attempt to spark vital
engagement by widening their representational focus.
While the amateur photographs of the lanes can be read as hopeful
and utopian in embracing a local commons in the wake of dispossession
and apartheid, McKenzies work is structured by a profound disenchantment
with both past and present. This is not waiting with a ticking time-bomb of
revolutionary expectation, nor is it nostalgia for lost possibilities about the
past. Rather, McKenzies lens focuses on fraught attempts at spatial introversion and renewed racialization after apartheid. What is at stake here is a
recent sense of suffering, in the 1970s and 1980s, and an ambivalent stance
with respect to anti-apartheid politics then, and democratic politics now.
This is not the kind of nostalgia that the images of the lanes might provoke,
but rather a more ambivalent and charged form of melancholy that disavows
the past while demonstrating its active presence.73
McKenzie turns to these themes in his documentary film of 2007 with
Sylvie Peyre, which links disenchantment with the present with a diffuse
sense of waiting for justice that may never come. The film What Kind? (a greeting like Whats up?) turns to the theme of waiting for justice through
the lives of five of Peters childhood friends, erstwhile members of the K -1
Trucks gang. In 1983 these five received exemplary sentences for the alleged
murder of a young man from the rival Vultures gang territory. To this day,
they claim innocence. Peter Piet Usher repeats ruefully, his hat covering
his eyes, We paid the time; they did the crime. After having served nine to
thirteen years in prison, they began coming out after 1994, and McKenzie
uses the coincidence with the first elections to question their perceptions of
freedom in the new South Africa. The resulting film is powerful and multilayered.
One thread is handheld video footage from a moving car, a passerbys
montage of daily life, with industrial pipes, smokestacks, and barbed wire as
backdrop. Interspersed are black-and-white photographs taken by McKenzie since 1994, the most striking of which are portraits for his project Vying
Posie (Going Home). Another set of interjections are from recognizable
community leaders or experts, two of whom are the key environmental
activists from the area, and another who is the author of a published memoir.74 These experts and McKenzie speak in general terms, with occasional
Coloured township slang, recounting various aspects of Group Areas forced

removals, the emergence of gangs, and the frustrations of youth, not unlike
the narrative in The Cycle of Violence.
What is striking in the visual and documentary evidence is the contrast
between these key personalities, including that of the narrator-filmmaker,
who speak for the situation in the neighborhood, and McKenzies often diffident friends. The experts speak in measured tones and standard English,
looking directly at the camera, while the former gangsters speak in fragmented slang. The filmmakers approach these men carefully, at their shebeen
(informal bar). The camera follows Terrence Terrible Ts Fynn as he laughs,
playfully showing the camera the tattoos all over his body, and his language
is strikingly different. He jokes, When I vyied in [went to prison] I was a
young laaitie [youngster], check Im like a drawing board! There is a pause in
the narrative as music and the shebeen make room, and set a context that is
not meant to be a staged interview. The men do not have the onus of having
to explain anything. They just have to present to the camera that they are
haunted by their past and that they live in a state of despair.
When they recount details from 1983, of the scene of the crime and of
their unheard alibis, they often speak in generalities about the times. Wentworth was bad, my bru. . . . They didnt even have doctors and nurses to stitch
the holes up. They had to bring soldiers in to stitch the people up that time,
for about twothree years, they had to bring the army-ous [army men] to
stitch them up, thats how blind it was, it was bad! (Terrence Fynn). Piet
Usher insists that in this context young men didnt have a choice but to associate with gangs. He speaks softly about his innocence, as someone who
made like [pretended to be] a gangster and was wrongfully arrested: Wherever you went, they included you. They said you come from that area, youre
part of that place, so youre a gangster from that area. . . . There wasnt people
that were gangsters; they just made like gangsters, by the opposition. . . . I
didnt even see the guy who died on that particular day, but I was put in this
case because of the enemy; the enemy. . . . I dont know if they feared me or
what but they just put me in this case, in fact all of us.
What is profoundly unclear, and perhaps necessarily so given the layers of
the accusation he lays, is who exactly the enemy is. The gangsters of Wentworth did not become activists, as, for instance, did Sowetos tsotsis.75 The
lack of a recognizable anti-apartheid idiom brings an anticlimactic character
to the way in which these men respond to the films brief, to reflect on their
release in the time of transition. Terrence Fynn says nothing has changed, repeating the stock racialized statements that circulate in Wentworth. All that
152S H A R A D
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time in jail, nothings changed. . . . Ey, but even like now, it was still like the
same, nevermind things is changing and whatwhat, its like the same, my bru.
Like me I dont even vote, because the witous [white men] were doing things
that time, the darkie-ous [black men, or Africans] are doing the same thing.
Ill tell you waaruit [straight out], its darkie for darkie, witou for witou, charou
[Indian] for charou, my bru. What he does not say is bruinou [brown men,
or Coloureds] for bruinou. Despite repeating the same racial common sense
as the experts in the film, none of these young men reference Coloured or
community figures as their representatives in any way. Neither do they make
any attempt at reclamation of the terms of their ruination, as for instance
attempted by the curator of The Cycle of Violence.
While Fynn speaks about racialization in society at large, Usher, the most
discerning figure in the film, expresses the collective feelings of the five men.
His words are measured, but heavy with remorse: We tried to put our past
behind us . . . but you can see whats happening to us, the people is bring
our past forward. Were marked with our past, for things what we never even
do. The film does not adjudicate on the guilt or innocence of the five men.
In this sense, it leaves a forensic exercise aside. However, it does give them
the space to present themselves as living with the effects of their sentence
and with the injustice of not being able to prove their innocence. They never
actually name the enemy, but they do indict apartheids police and juridical apparatus as much as the rival gang across the street and the forces that
drove them be perceived as dangerous gangsters. They display their despair,
showing off their prison tattoos, as well as their emotional scars. The shebeen they inhabit is saturated with what Frantz Fanon calls a tincture of
decay, protracted suffering that is difficult to identify but that is intensely
felt.76
There are some things that remain unquestioned in McKenzies social
documentary. The refinery and other industry pokes through the narrative
as a backdrop that is always there but not always recognized. Only the experts, who speak with clarity in standard English about Wentworth as a
whole, connect gangs, poverty, apartheid, post-apartheid racism, and life
next to refineries. The former gangsters are left to display their burdens on
their persons. Theirs is a visceral, sentimental critique, a subjacent display
of knowledge that has been disqualified but which retains its critical presence through McKenzies powerful film. The order of things in the film What
Kind? captures a key aspect of life and struggle in Wentworth: the differential
production of community workers and those who embody ruination, and
their divergent modes of critique. These adjacent modes of representation
on film have much to say about the remains of biopolitical struggle in necropolitical times.
Conclusion: Refusal in the Ruins of Biopolitical Sovereignty

The iconic character of life next to an oil refinery, as well as proximity to the
city, has made Wentworth a hub of interest in various kinds of private investments in development and social welfare. This and the mobilization around
environmental and labor concerns have led the city and corporations to try
to engage community representatives through the technocratic language of
stakeholder management. Finance for social projects through the corporate
social responsibility sections of the refineries and other major industry has
been the topic of fierce debate in community meetings. The environmentalists of SDCEA refuse what they see as tainted money, while other groups and
individuals have taken a more pragmatic perspective on making every crumb
from corporations count for something meaningful to the lives of residents.
These debates aside, a significant part of Wentworths population participates in a range of community organizations concerned with social welfare, labor, health, youth, women, domestic violence, and the environment.
Some groups are aligned to churches. Most, though not all, are not formally
employed. Elsewhere, I suggest that this political work is about refusing
participation in the sex and drug economies that erode personal and community resources.77 I argue that this political work mimics the bureaucratic
practices of the development industry more generally.78 What is certainly
important in these organizations is the production of an associational life
forged through rituals of meetings, committees, site visits, consultations,
and, not least, prayer groups. In the wake of multiple forms of degradation,
this connective tissue is a site of uncertainty and frustration in the wake
of corporate occupation.79
Community work, as it is locally called, requires agents and recipients
of betterment. While some experts have become known figures, with ties to
sources of recognition, funding, and support, the lines between expert and
those in need of expertise are often quite blurred. The late Skido Joseph
was one such figure. With complicated and somewhat murky struggle credentials, Joseph was never, in his view, properly recognized for his antiapartheid activism. He bemoaned the trajectories of his former comrades
who managed transitions from the struggle to lucrative careers in government or the private sector. As we drove around the neighborhood in his beat-
154S H A R A D
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up car, he blared struggle music to display his claim to a past that was
never acknowledged.
Joseph repeated the same racialized complaints about the post-apartheid
order that circulate locally, and resolutely supported community work. He
would circuit between organizations and homes, lending an ear, having
a cup of tea, and providing emotional support, particularly to women. It
helped that he was a gifted charmer. Josephs thoughts were saturated with
what I call Wentworth blues, the particular kind of melancholy that also
permeates the work of Peter McKenzie. People knew that Joseph also suffered from alcoholism and depression, which ultimately took his life. What
I witnessed in Joseph was an uncanny ability to play the expert and also to
make it known that his commitments lay beyond a demonstration of respectability.
Another figure, J.D., heads a prominent community organization and is
an articulate man who spent many years in the trade-union movement and in
the private sector before returning to Wentworth to engage with widespread
domestic violence.80 J.D. questions the primacy of environmentalism and the
refusal of social-responsibility funds from the corporations, on the grounds
that if neither industry nor people move from this landscape, there will have
to be a permissible level of pollution. Once this level is reached, residents
will not have recourse to exacting resources from the corporation. He also
expressed to me a view that social welfare and development can only feasibly
reach some people in Wentworth, and that a layer of people at the bottom
will have to be written off. This is the view of someone who is no longer at
risk of falling into this expendable class.
A third figure, whom I call Frank, came out of the same milieu of youth
gangs and drugs as the men in Peter McKenzies film. A chronic asthmatic,
this wiry and engaging man embodies the challenges of fighting for life in
this violent environment. He has worked in various organizations, on environmental issues, public health, domestic violence, and childrens rights,
but has steadily built an expertise in sexuality and HIV/AIDS . Frank has had
no formal training, but has attended workshops and seminars from the city,
and he has a base of clients whom he sees and advises confidentially, in their
homes, across the township. He has had to carefully maneuver around the
churches in Wentworth as their main response to the spread of HIV/AIDS
has been abstinence. Like Skido Joseph, Frank treads the fine line between
experts and the poor, but he also manages to do what Joseph could not.
In acquiring the medical knowledge necessary to work as an HIV/AIDS
counselor and caregiver, and as a kind of community nurse, Frank indexes

the shifting terrain of politics in the 1970s and early 1980s. Efforts such as the
Black Community Programs of the Black Consciousness Movement began to
widen the focus of anti-apartheid activism to the biopolitics of racial infrastructure. Experts in public health and medicine, social work, urban planning, and geography subsequently offered their services in clandestine and
open ways to activist networks. In Durban, the effect was to root the internal
struggle, putatively led by a banned, exiled, and jailed leadership, in the lived
fabric of the city. This effervescence of biopolitical struggle, moreover, called
into question the long history of articulation between biopolitical expertise
and racism, through which South Africas segregated geographies had been
forcibly remade since the early twentieth century.81
If imperial biopolitics in the areas of public health, urban planning, the
circulation of labor, and the regulation of sexuality remain fraught and subject to constant breakdown, the more important question might be to ask
how biopolitical tools are used for a variety of ends.82 Such an approach departs from abstract and ahistorical conceptions of biopolitical sovereignty,
or the use of biopolitical tools in defense of power, as leading inevitably to
the gulag.83 The renewed urban struggles in South Africa in the 1970s and
1980s point to a different possibility. The confluence of mobilizations that
came together under the United Democratic Front of the 1980s were also
drawing on biopolitical expertise, subjectivity, and intervention. They were
doing so, I suggest, to dismantle rather than to construct racial infrastructure.
In the ruins of this recent past, debates about community work in Wentworth take on a different light. Individuals like Frank stand out as artisans
who fashion political tools out of the remains of expert knowledge from a
variety of sources and sites. These are ruins of a different sort: fragments of
anticolonialism and antiracism that are still potent instruments of refusal
of the necropolitical present. In his daily practice as a community HIV/AIDS
counselor, Frank engages resolutely in a Brechtian refunctioning of decaying
remains of biopolitical struggle.
Notes
This chapter emerged from the workshop on Scarred Landscapes, Imperial Debris,
Anthropology Department, New School, New York, October 2006, for which I am
grateful to Ann Stoler, as well as to comments from Faisal Devji, Nancy Hunt, Hugh
Raffles, Genese Sodikoff, and Gary Wilder. Elements of Critical Sentiments draw
156S H A R A D
CHARI
from my Post-Apartheid Livelihood Struggles, for which thanks to the Human Science Research Council of South Africa, and the concluding section draws from part
of my Photographing Dispossession, Forgetting Struggle, for which thanks to Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. For insight at various points, I remain grateful to Gill Hart, Vishnu Padayachee, Richard Pithouse, Kerry Chance, John and Jean
Comaroff, Catherine Alexander, George Steinmetz, and Grant Farred. Last, but not
least, I am grateful to many residents of Merebank and Wentworth in South Africa
whose thoughts have guided my work.
All names of people interviewed have been changed unless they are figures in the
public domain or they have requested that their real names be used. Ethnographic and
historical research for this project was conducted over multiple visits between 2002
and 2008, with support from the London School of Economics and the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
1. Coloured is a complex and changing category in South Africas changing racial
formation: in the early twentieth century it marked anxieties about mixed bloods
and race mixture; it was used to distinguish Africans divisible into tribes from
nonwhites who werent, with implications for residence, work, and possible franchise; it became a race group under the Population Registration Act of 1950, subsequently subdivided in 1959 to include Cape Coloured, Cape Malay, Griqua, Indian,
Chinese, Other Asiatic, and Other Coloured populations, all subject to race determination at various stages and through the workings of a racial common sense. See
Reddy, The Politics of Naming; and Posel, Whats in a Name? In Natal, Coloured
became an affirmative category for some in the 1940s, after mixed-race tenants were
expropriated and located in residentially segregated areas like Wentworth. On the
ways in which the stigma of race mixture and inauthenticity haunts people with
this classificatory baggage, see Erasmus, Introduction, 16. I capitalize Coloured as a
proper noun, like Indian or African, while I leave black and white uncapitalized, realizing that all these are complex racial categories.
2. According to the 2001 census, Wentworth and Merebank areas have roughly
similar populations of twenty-seven thousand and twenty-one thousand, respectively.
Merebank is one small part of Indian Durban, while Wentworth concentrates Durbans working- class Coloureds. Comparison with African townships and with former
white areas places these areas in the middle of the income spectrum. See Statistics
South Africa 2001.
3. Austerville Community Centre, Wentworth, undated recording from early 2003.
Recording in the possession of Jane Glover, Wentworth, Durban, South Africa.
4. Chari, Post-apartheid Livelihood Struggles in Wentworth, South Durban,
43738. Many thanks to Ann Stoler for insisting that I think more carefully about what
is at work in this simple statement, and also for Stolers introductory statement on
ruination at the workshop on Scarred Landscapes, Imperial Debris, Anthropology
Department, New School, New York, October 2006. See Stoler, Imperial Debris, and
her introductory essay to this volume.
5. Chari, Post-apartheid Livelihood Struggles in Wentworth, South Durban;
Chari, How Do Activists Act?; Chari, Silencing the Present; and Chari, State
Racism and Biopolitical Struggle. For provoking me to rethink the question of detritus in relation to ruins and ruination, I am grateful to Ann Stoler and the participants at the workshop on Scarred Landscapes, Imperial Debris, Anthropology Department, New School, New York, October 2006.
6. Thanks to Hugh Raffles on this point, which he noted at the workshop on
Scarred Landscapes, Imperial Debris, Anthropology Department, New School, New
York, October 2006.
7. Desai, We Are the Poors.
8. Pithouse, Solidarity, Co- optation and Assimilation; Comaroff, Beyond Bare
Life; Chance, Living Politics; and Figlan, Mavuso, Ngema, Nsibande, Sibisi, and
Zikode, Living Learning.
9. Farred, The Not-Yet Counterpartisan, 58994.
11. On the political economy of transition, see Fine and Rustomjee, The Political
Economy of South Africa; Freund and Padayachee, (D)urban Vortex; Hart, Disabling Globalization; Marais, South Africa; and Padayachee, Development Discourses. On activism, see Barchiesi, Classes, Multitudes and the Politics of Community Movements
in Post-apartheid South Africa; Desai, We Are the Poors; Gibson, Challenging Hegemony;
and Pithouse, Solidarity, Co-optation and Assimilation. On changing racisms, see
Comaroff and Comaroff, Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction; Farred,
Where Does the Rainbow Nation End?; Mangcu, Liberating Race from Apartheid;
and Posel, Whats in a Name?
12. Key works on the geography of segregation include Swanson, The Sanitation
Syndrome; Robinson, The Power of Apartheid; and Parnell, Creating Racial Privilege.
Insightful work on the instabilities of labor control include Breckenridge, Verwoerds
Bureau of Proof ; and Macdonald, Durban-Bound. On innovations in urbanism,
see Nuttall and Mbembe, Johannesburg; Hansen, Sounds of Freedom; and Robinson
(Im)mobilising Space.
13. Lefebvre, Writing on Cities.
14. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 259.
15. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road; Veitch, Colossus in Ruins; Steinmetz,
Harrowed Landscapes; Steinmetz, Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia;
and Gordillo, Ships Stranded in the Forest.
16. Stoler, Imperial Debris, and her essay in this volume.
17. See Bernd and Becher, Typologies of Industrial Buildings; images of South Asias
ship breaking yards, in Salgado, Workers; the degradation of the Niger Delta, in Watts,
The Curse of Black Gold; and a critique of ruingazers in Namibia and Detroit, in Steinmetz, Harrowed Landscapes.
18. Steinmetz, Detroit, 762.
19. For a thoughtful take on the temporality of post-apartheid, see Farred, The
Not-Yet Counterpartisan. Among several important works on testimony, archives,
and memory in South Africa, see Nuttall and Coetzee, Negotiating the Past; Hamilton,
158S H A R A D
CHARI
Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid, and Saleh, Refiguring the Archive; and Saunders, Ambiguities of Witnessing. There is a much larger genre of post-apartheid memoirs, of which one
important feminist critique situated in Durban is Govender, Love and Courage.
20. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak?
21. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 169; Chari, Subalternities That Matter in Times of Crisis.
22. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
23. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 20.
24. Ibid., 186.
25. Rancire, Disagreement; Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman; Williams, The
Country and the City.
26. Stoler, Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth; Stoler, Along the Archival
Grain; Chari, The Antinomies of Political Evidence in Post-apartheid Durban, South
Africa.
27. Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Breckenridge, The Biometric Obsession; Chari, State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle; Comaroff, Beyond
Bare Life; Robins, From Rights to Ritual; and Fassin, When Bodies Remember.
28. Pithouse, Solidarity, Co-optation and Assimilation; Pithouse, Burning Message to the State in the Fire of Poors Rebellion; Hart, The Provocations of Neoliberalism; Comaroff and Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism; and Gibson, What
Happened to the Promised Land?
29. Chari, Silencing the Present; Li, To Make Live or Let Die. Key to my understanding of biopolitical techniques as part of the broader, spatially differentiated dialectics of state racism and opposition is the distinction Stephen Collier makes between Foucaults early statements on biopower, which are rather epochal and binary,
and his unfinished later thoughts. See Collier, Topologies of Power.
30. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Fassin, When Bodies Remember, 49.
31. Petryna, Life Exposed; McCulloch, Asbestos Blues; and Klawiter, Biopolitics of Breast
Cancer, respectively.
32. Peluso and Watts, Violent Environments.
33. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
34. Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough; Hansen, Melancholia of Freedom, 297.
35. Hansen, Melancholia of Freedom; Hansen, Sounds of Freedom.
36. Farred, Where Does the Rainbow Nation End?, 186.
37. Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist?
38. Saldanha, Re-ontologising Race; Gilroy, Against Race; Mbembe, Necropolitics.
39. Ferguson, Seeing Like an Oil Company, 37782.
40. Legassick, South Africa; Hart, Disabling Globalization; Breckenridge, The Biometric Obsession.
41. Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, Imperial Formations. The classic radical works
include Wolpe, Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa; and Hall,
Race, Articulation and Society Structured in Dominance.
42. Ballard and Jones, Natural Neighbours.
43. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.
44. Sparks, Playing at Public Health; Dianne Scott, Communal Space Construction.
45. Dianne Scott, Communal Space Construction, 118.
46. Sparks, Civic Culture, Environmentalism and Pollution in South Durban,
12.
47. This section draws from Chari, Post-apartheid Livelihood Struggles in Wentworth, South Durban.
48. Peek, Doublespeak in Durban.
49. Butler and Hallowes, The groundWork Report 2002, 10.
50. Government of South Africa, Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.
52. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, AC /2001/128, Amnesty Committee, Application from Special Operations Unit (SOU ) of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK ), Durban,
2001, http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/decisions/2001/ac21128.htm.
53. What is more, the new bill used elements from the Labour Relations Act of
1995limits to strikes and lock- outs in essential servicesto allow National Key Points
to be declared where provision of essential services are in question. See No. 66 of 1995:
Labour Relations Act of 1995, Office of the President, National Employment Center,
13 December 1995, http://www.yourcv.co.za/Documents/Labour_Relations_Act.htm.
54. Wright, Living and Dying in Louisianas Cancer Alley.
55. Hallowes and Munnik, The groundWork Report 2006, 149.
57. Ibid., 67; Butler and Hallowes, The groundWork Report 2003, 168.
58. This section draws from Chari, Photographing Dispossession, Forgetting
Solidarity.
59. Curator of The Cycle of Violence, interview by Sharad Chari, Durban, South Africa,
15 August 2007.
60. Glaser, Swines, Hazels and the Dirty Dozen, 726.
61. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities.
62. Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road, 44.
63. Steinmetz, Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia, 299.
64. Benjamin, Illuminations, 228.
65. Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, 256.
66. Faisal Devjis response to my paper at the workshop on Scarred Landscapes,
Imperial Debris, Anthropology Department, New School, New York, October 2006.
67. I am grateful to Ann Stoler for her provocations about whether a critical nostalgia is possible.
68. Peter McKenzie, interview by Sharad Chari, Cape Town, South Africa, 31 July
2008.
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CHARI
69. McKenzie, Vying Posie.

70. Crapanzano, Waiting, 41.
71. Ibid., 21.
72. Ibid., xxii.
73. George Steinmetzs analysis of nostalgia and melancholy in counterpoint is
particularly insightful on this point. See Steinmetz, Colonial Melancholy and Fordist
Nostalgia, 299.
74. Lottering, Winnifred and Agnes.
75. Glaser, Swines, Hazels and the Dirty Dozen.
76. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; see Stolers essay in this volume.
77. Chari, Post-apartheid Livelihood Struggles in Wentworth, South Durban.
78. Chari, The Antinomies of Political Evidence in Post-apartheid Durban, South
Africa.
79. Comaroff, Beyond Bare Life, 212; see Stolers essay in this volume.
80. J.D., interview by Sharad Chari, Durab, South Africa, 20 March 2005.
81. Chari, State Racism and Biopolitical Struggle.
82. Breckenridge, Verwoerds Bureau of Proof ; MacDonald, Durban-Bound.
83. Comaroff, Beyond Bare Life.
JOHN COLLINS
Ruins, Redemption, and Brazils Imperial Exception
In 1999 I was privy to what I can only recall as a remarkable event, one that
unfolded amidst the $100 million transformation of Brazils first capital into
a restored UNESCO World Heritage site. While interviewing squatters in an
eighteenth- century building located on the twisting Ladeira da Misericrdia (Hillside of Mercy) in the city of Salvador, Bahia, I heard the squeal of
spinning tires. All present rushed to the door since vehicles rarely traversed
the Ladeira da Misericrdia (hereafter Misericrdia) due to its steepness,
its pitted roadbed, its location far from modern shopping centers favored by
the bourgeoisie, and its residents reputation as violent and diseased threats
to the social body.
The van climbing the hillside belonged to CETAD , or the Center for
Studies and Therapy of Drug Abuse. It carried health professionals performing outreach with residents of the Coaty, a poured-concrete nightclub built
in the 1980s into the shell of a ruined Portuguese structure. After middleclass Bahians refused to descend this fraught hillside, the bar was shuttered
and then squatted in the mid-1990s by three families. The new occupants
cooked in its central area, a space from which jiboia vines and a shiny-leafed
mango tree protruded onto a roof from which they could survey the docks of
Salvadors lower city, the Americas most important arrival point of African
slaves.
In spite of the rarity of vehicles on the Misericrdia, the event around
which I drape the present chapter is not CETAD s arrival. It involves in-
stead the remarkable response one resident of the Coaty performed within
the public-health script dispensed by the hygienist team, which invited all
present to learn about health, sanitation, and ourselves. This womans selfinsertion into a pedagogical discourse directed to a purportedly problematic
population spurred an insightful and historically embedded dialogueor
what I will refer to as a gutsy insurrection for reasons that will become
obviousabout health, quotidian practices, and citizenship. My representation of the exchange, enabled by a coincidence that placed the ethnographer
temporarily within an audience composed of marginalized Bahians interpellated as in need of symbolic cleansing, is intended to reveal some of the ways
populations configured as requiring civilizational improvement perceive and
live alongside, or even within, such potentially ruinous forms of attention.
And I argue that this perspective suggests novel means of making out the
contours of empire today.
The extent to which a seemingly beneficial series of initiatives directed
at the preservation of Afro-Brazilian culture as national patrimony in Salvador turn on state- directed attempts to reform Afro-Bahian lifeways and
foment a will to improve suggests something of the ways imperial violence
may spill beyond, and thus gird, those institutions, laws, and histories most
easily identifiable as imperial today.1 I am thus interested in how people situate themselves on the Misericrdia, and in relation to an array of state institutions and NGO s, so as to recognize and even contest those symptoms of
empire too often compartmentalized within concerns over race, class, and
gender-based exclusions. Nonetheless, my approach to specifying the imperial is not some denial of the salience of such categories. It seeks instead
to link them more effectively via an appreciation of a womans performative
historicization that resituates the sliding scales of exclusion central to ongoing and arguably colonial forms of exploitation.2 This chapter is thus at
base an excursion into perception, or the ways engagements with historically sedimented presents might be honed so as to focus more forcefully on
empires troubling appearances and apparent reappearances that take form
today as more than historical remainders of some long-gone colonialism.
In seeking to sharpen an ethnographic focus on empires, I lean on
Richard Parmentiers conceptualization of signs in, as opposed to signs
of, history.3 In analyzing how some Pelourinho residents situate information gathered about them within a type of history conceived of as an ongoing flow in which they participate in a commentary on the past, but not
necessarily an evidence-based, truthful discourse that bears an affinity to
stable objects or events, I thus follow as one person makes clear how her
B R A Z I L S I M P E R I A L E XC E P T I O N 163
interactions with the Bahian state and associated NGO s are essential to the
production of shared stories about what has taken place. Such a move that
engages history as an indexical or deictic exercise which emphasizes the contiguities, if not quite the continuities, between contemporary social processes and representations of the past is more than a deconstruction: it encourages perspectives that may make public how much we are all parts of an
imperial world which gains form, and power, through ongoing claims about
communities and populations apparent deviance from posited norms in
ways that permit, or even encourage, a series of missed connections. I therefore struggle to situate exceptions and temporalities as part and parcel of
that which they supposedly set off. My goal is to come closer to making
visible colonialisms surprising modes of durability or, at very least, the extent to which claims about novelty as well as about unbroken continuity may
obscure the extent to which empire both emerges from and structures our
understandings of the past.
I begin with a discussion of exceptions while offering a snapshot of Salvador and its UNESCO historical center, the Pelourinho, within which the
Ladeira da Misericrdia lies. This highlights how people and buildings consecration as cultural heritage, or objects presented as special in their supposed evocation of or proximity to a societys defining essences, may be reread in ways that specify overlaps between cultural heritage and associated
genres universalizing gestures, the exclusions on which they rest, and the
histories they naturalize. But these insights are not my own: they stem from
a decades-long conversation with a remarkable woman, now deceased, who
does not seem to have benefited from her dialogues with health authorities
or with the author of this chapter. Even as this is not something I can resolve
here, it is not something I can ignore. And this is but one reason an effort to
understand the difference between signs in, and signs of, history seems so
important to carving out a position for making out empire today.
On the Importance of Exceptions

Social scientists have directed substantial attention to the ways communities and those histories imagined as belonging to them distinguish nationstates around specific contents, or a supposedly discrete national culture.
Around the world, such assumptions are basic to the preservation of national heritage as a good, or thing in itself.4 Yet in the decade following the
destruction of New Yorks World Trade Center and the U.S. invasions of Iraq
and Afghanistan it seems increasingly clear that perceptions of empire, and
164J O H N
COLLINS
not just the nation, have taken form around an even wider range of exceptional events and qualities. These include catastrophes, disasters, and assertions of negligence.5 Here it may even appear that the emergency has become
the rule.6 But more important than some epochal argument about empires
contemporary resurgence and thus a fetishization, or even a defetishization,
of exceptions is the observation that claims about informal or indirect colonialism and the insecure boundaries between trusteeship and domination
have long helped except, and thus insulate, the United States from comparisons to European empires.7 Hence exceptions, and the identification of contents or communities particular natures that motivate assertions about
special statuses, figure not simply in defining imperial actors, but also in
shutting down accurate assessments of empires continued effects.
Yet Partha Chatterjee argues that today, with empire immanent in the
nation-state, the imperial prerogative . . . is the power to declare the colonial exception.8 From this perspective, attention to pedagogical or ameliorative projects directed by international bodies legitimated through their
ostensible ability to resolve emergencies or recuperate deviant populations
may permit social scientists to identify imperial actors more clearly.9 Might
the ethnographer who attends to assumptions of global responsibility thus
pinpoint the imperial entanglements of apparently distinct institutions like
the United States Agency for International Development (USAID ), the World
Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB ), and UNESCO without arguing that they fit seamlessly into one dominant, enduring, colonial
web?10
My road into imperial formations associated with claims to exception
passes through Salvador, Bahias Pelourinho Historical Center, a UNESCO
World Heritage Site reconstructed in the 1990s as a symbol of Brazils pasts
and a motor for tourist-based development.11 This restoration draws on
IDB expertise in marketing residents quotidian practices as Afro-Bahian
culture. Such initiatives are resonant sites for making out empire not because development organizations or the United Nations constitute a neat
grid of exploitive actors, but because heritage management purports to
make aspects of the everyday special in the name of collective memory. As
such, Bahian cultural heritages elevation of colonial edifices and citizens
everyday practices to the level of shared and enduring properties supposedly
delivered from a unifying past shines a spotlight on the power of the exceptional, or sacred, in modern life.
A specific conception of the sacred, and its role in the formation of the
political and of definitions of sovereignty, has been influential in anthropoB R A Z I L S I M P E R I A L E XC E P T I O N 165
logical considerations of a modern politicization of life itself, philanthropy,

and Brazilian citizenship in evidence in CETAD s programs.12 In Giorgio
Agambens extension of Michel Foucaults conception of biopower, legality
takes form around a political rationality dependent on the excluded figures
of the sovereign and homo sacer, or a living dead which might be killed but
does not rise to the level of the sacrificial victim.13 Such an assertion might
describe inhabitants of the Misericrdia, where police often murdered to
applause from a bourgeoisie frightened by residents criminalized practices
and association with disease. In fact, the populaces purported immorality
provided a powerful rationale and a public healthoriented methodology for
ridding the Historical Center of people during the 1990s.14
Working- class people first began to occupy the Pelourinhos colonial
buildings as the religious orders and the slave- owning families who dominated Bahia, the worlds richest tropical plantation region from the sixteenth century through the mid- eighteenth, moved to seaside suburbs at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In disseminating their cultural expressions, developing social movements instrumental to civil rights struggles,
and becoming famous for iconoclastic lifeways after taking possession of
this Pelourinho neighborhood construed in nationalist thought as Brazils
cradle and brown mother, the new inhabitants of Lusitanias ruined
mansion gained fame as producers of an Afro-Bahian culture that differentiates their nation. Central to this modern Brazilian exceptionalism are claims
about racial hybridity, tropical joie de vivre, and sexuality. While I cannot
do justice here to recent contestations of this so- called racial democracy, a
configuration predicated on alleged intimacy between nonwhite women and
male slave- owners and their descendants that pulses at the center of Brazil
and its unique history, the recent Pelourinho restoration was conceived in
part as propping up this threatened formation.15
The Bahian states primary means of entifying Pelourinho residents
habits as cultural heritage, a form of property often called a secular sacred
because of its ability to set off almost anything as a possession of the nation
or humankind, has involved the surveying of Afro-Brazilian lifeways by the
institution in charge of the Pelourinho reconstruction.16 This is the Bahian
Institute for Artistic and Cultural Patrimony (IPAC ), founded in 1967 and a
locus of a governmentality enacted through the documentation of domestic habits in reams of archived information about residents. This data is
often employed to grant content to the stories of national character spun
today in the Pelourinho, a depopulated shell from which some five thousand working- class inhabitants were removed during the 1990s. Addition166J O H N
COLLINS
ally, documentation of what become coded as cultural expressions which

define Brazilianness even as their authors have been exiled to distant slums
has generated a ghostlike cast of historical actors, essential to the national
imaginary. One might thus argue that Pelourinho residents like the interlocutors described below are in a sense victims of a progress predicated on
the resuscitation of the past through cultural heritages methods of registry.
As such, they might appear, like Agambens homo sacer, as exceptional figures
which gird the political through their suspension in a patrimonialization
linked to a social death. Yet I offer a different interpretation of this liminal
state, one I hope will improve understandings of the salience of the sorts of
colonial projects still very much a part of the Pelourinhos recuperation
today. But before exploring how a local, objectifying idiom associated with
cultural heritage was redeployed in ways that promise to make clearer global
patrimonys logics and effects due to residents particular takes on how they
are imbricated in histories produced in Salvadors Historical Center, I highlight the stakes and techniques at play in the restoration of colonial Portugals most important South Atlantic entrept.
Brazils Cradle
The Pelourinho, or Pillory, Brazils first capital, the Portuguese South Atlantics commercial center, and Salvadors red-light zone from 1940 until 1992,
has long been central to claims about the inheritances that individuate Brazil. This is perhaps unsurprising given the neighborhoods salience in earlytwentieth- century accounts of Brazilian specificity and the importance of
its Iberian baroque ruins to contemporary attempts to restage colonial origins. In fact, Pelourinho edifices are one manifestation of the preeminence
of Salvador, founded in 1549, in the Atlantic triangle trade. Yet this importance waned by the mid- eighteenth century, as the Caribbean replaced Brazil as the worlds main source of sugar. In 1763 the capital was transferred
to Rio, and by the end of the nineteenth century, workers and immigrants
had begun to occupy and divide downtown mansions built for Bahias elites.
Police reports from the 1920s indicate growing arrests for public indecency, and by the end of the decade the Pelourinhos still-stunning buildings
began to be celebrated, alongside their occupants, in travelogues important
to forging modern Brazil.17 By 1940 authorities had declared the city center
an official red-light zone, or a type of intimate public sphere where powerful
men communed in the bars, brothels, and dance halls that employed mainly
Afro-Bahian women like Topa, this chapters protagonist. Yet by the 1970s,
as Bahia underwent a sexual revolution, the red-light district declined. An

illegal drug trade grew as the community became more impoverished and
buildings increasingly unstable (see fig. 5.1). Crime increased even as the
Pelourinho became a hotbed for the black politics sweeping Salvador during Brazils return from two decades of military rule. This contributed to a
contradictory focus on Salvadors downtown as a site of cultural production,
black mobilization, immoral or diseased people, and threatened colonial
monuments. Thus the federal government landmarked the neighborhood
in 1984, and in 1992 the Bahian state began a $100 million reform based on
what it referred to frequently as a restoration of people and buildings.
Since 1992 IPAC has divided residents into those permitted to stay, because they produced a sanctioned version of Bahian culture, and those
marked for removal through indemnifications calculated by IPAC on the
basis of length of residence, use of space, and a variety of subjective and
even nefarious evaluations.18 This culling based on ethnographic appraisal
means that those who remain have been made aware of social sciences roles
in defining cultural attributes, in controlling territory, and thus in moralizing and representing. Many people point out that across the 1990s they faced
a key irony: as their state claimed to care for popular memories, it removed
their subjects. Thus Afro-Bahians have been preempted by representations
of their lifeways archived by a state that draws visitors to a shrine authorized
by social science. This is critical to understanding how histories, and historicity, have come to be approached by people subject to transformation into
patrimony.
By the early 1990s, IPAC s ethnographers, together with public health researchers such as the leaders of the CETAD discussed below, had become
virtually the only members of the local bourgeoisie who exercised a presence downtown. Interactions between researchers and a community configured as composed of informants produced reports, planning documents,
questionnaires, and blueprints for reforms that codified peoples habits
as culture. Hence a tradition of the oppressed became reconfigured as a
possession of the nation and, following UNESCO s 1985 acceptance of the
neighborhood onto its World Heritage List, of all humanity.19
As they faced quantification and indemnifications calculated in relation
to IPAC s evidence, residents created fictitious personas or fantasmas; invited
people into their households so as to glean a commission from these allies
indemnifications; took up multiple residences so they could profit as IPAC
moved through the neighborhood; and blackmailed IPAC employees into
including them in payments. One result of this co-production of everyday
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5.1 Pelourinho residents extracting possessions from a ruined building, 1998.

Photo by author.
life as a thing measured in anticipation of cash rewards was a fetishization

of interior essences and identities understood as concrete entities made real
by social-scientific enquiry. Here the production of evidence about residents
of a neighborhood configured as a remnant of colonial pasts and African
inheritances helped generate a specific consciousness as to peoples importance to the nation as a historical phenomenon.
Tombamento as Redemption
In April 2000, as carnival morphed into Holy Week commemorations of
Christian resurrection, I found myself near Salvadors So Joaquim market.
Soaked by showers, I sat in a Volkswagen alongside Indio, a twenty-six-yearold former street child. This normally stoic friend, confidant, and former
resident of the Misericrdia who, before he died in 2004, asked that I someday represent him as he was, quivered with emotion. His head lay on Rita,
his wife whose thrust of a paring knife in repayment for his philandering had
left him quadriplegic. The two shed tears as three friends from Ritas birthplace, the peripheral neighborhood of Sussuarana, slouched in the back seat
and suffered alongside us.
The day had begun as I parked above the polymer-roofed house on the embankment in Sussuarana to which Indio had moved after indemnification in
return for his living space in the Pelourinho. He had thus returned to the sort
of neighborhood he fled as a child. Yet even as Indios state sought to banish him from its once ruined, and now valuable, symbolic birthplace, he had
managed to document his HIV + status and claim a disability pension. As his
health deteriorated, Indio gained a place in CAASAH , an NGO dedicated to
the treatment of HIV infection.20 Yet by the time we found ourselves in front
of the market trying to convince Rita to leave her new boyfriend, Indio had
abandoned CAASAH for the distant home he and Rita purchased with IPAC
funds. Nonetheless, Rita experienced her removal from the Pelourinho differently: she refused to enter the car, moaning, I just cant! I cant go back
to that place [Sussuarana]. Theres nothing there for me. Just tedium. And
death. . . . I love you, Indio, but I cant go! Indio, allowing Rita to smooth
his hair, asked me to drive to his brother Gaguinhos home in another neighborhood, Fazenda Grande do Retiro.
As we pulled up, Gaguinho bounded to the car. Like Rita and Indio, he
was HIV +. Also like his brother, Gaguinho had been evaluated by IPAC and
removed from the Pelourinho, receiving $1,100 for the home he had shared
with his common-law wife, Topa, on the Ladeira da Misericrdia. After this
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cash ran out, Gaguinho could not maintain contact with former neighbors
because of fragile health and a lack of money.
Gaguinho was thus overjoyed. As greetings melded into reminiscences,
he introduced a woman whose features recalled another, deceased, Misericrdia resident. This is my mother-in-law, Gaguinho announced as the
woman sobbed, Topa was so beautiful, so smart . . . too smart for the
[Fazenda Grande do Retiro] neighborhood. Rivaled only by her brotherin-law, Indio, Topa had been the Misericrdias most respected inhabitant.
Her kindness permitted me to conduct fieldwork among Misericrdia residents, a group reviled by respectable Bahians, feared by neighbors, and wary
of outsiders due to attacks by death squads hired by business owners. And
now Topas mother explained how her daughter had run away to the red-light
district. During one excursion home, Topa met the younger Gaguinho and
convinced him to join her, arguing, like Rita when denying Indios pleadings
years later, that the Pelourinho offered alternatives to her natal neighborhood. This highlights its role as an apparent zone of moral exception that
animates representations of unruly, Afro-descendant Bahianness in national
imaginaries while also naturalizing calls for improvement of buildings
and people. Yet it points also to the extent to which the supposedly degraded
exception may be, even prior to authorities attempts at sanitization, a rather
iconoclastic means of redemption.
As we rolled up to the general store in Fazenda Grande, relatives greeted
Indio. Beer circulated and Gaguinho introduced me to Topas mother as
Indio announced, Yeah, people. Here I am, patrimonialized in this passenger seat. Looking good, aint I? Thats why the gringo takes such good care
of me.21 Read in English, Indios words indicate that as patrimony he was
able to attract a foreign chauffeur. Yet patrimonialized, or the Portuguese
adjective tombado, has a number of meanings relevant to the discussions of
difference and its reification with which Indio enmeshed himself that day
and throughout his life in the Pelourinho.
Linked to the Latin tumulum, or storehouse, the verb tombar is traceable
to Portugals national archive, the Torre do Tombo. Tombar means to crystallize, to fix the form of something, to fall, to knock down, or to drop dead. In
the Pelourinho, IPAC employees and residents employ the word to describe
registry in archives. Indio, Gaguinho, and Rita joked frequently about what
it meant to tombar, or patrimonialize, people, habits, places, and dwellings.
The claim Est tombado, or He/she/it is patrimonialized, often served as
a way of explaining a buildings poor condition because in anticipation of
eminent domain owners had halted maintenance. Likewise, residents, exasB R A Z I L S I M P E R I A L E XC E P T I O N 171
perated by IPAC , would exclaim, Espero que eles tombem meu predio antes
de eu tombar morto, or I hope they patrimonialize [tombar] my building
before I fall down [tombar] dead. And people often argued that their identities, or inner essences, constituted properties of the nation and were thus
tombado.
This rendering static highlights possessive logics critical to the construal
of difference as economic resource. For residents who faced ethnography
and then, via indemnification, the placing of a price on habits, to be patrimonialized is to be in a sense dead or immobile. But this is also a preservation and evidence about the value of ones being. Hence tombamento is
an entombing that empowers as it exploits: Indio, weakened by AIDS and
unable to walk, sat in a car and recuperated himself by arguing that he was
a bit of patrimony that, despite its frozen state, had value. This drew on residents interpretation of patrimonialization as a gathering of essences. But
they resignified IPAC s designation of the neighborhoods population as in
need of recuperation, or as exceptional, by arguing that their subjection to
such pedagogies was simply the states method of recognizing their intrinsic specialness.
A language of recuperation around cultural essence is apparent in newspapers, speeches, government public relations, and IPAC planning since the
1990s. Yet as illustrated by Indios strategies, claims about reconfiguring formerly stigmatized or no longer useful originsruins, if you willare polyvalent. The downtown to which people fled to reinvent themselves has been
set off as exceptional through purification, rather than denigration. In an example of this processs diffusion, I overheard Indio say about me as I walked
toward Topas mothers house, Eh, and that guys from antiquity [antiguidade] too. Ive known him since I was a [street] kid.22
As part of UNESCO s Living Human Treasures program which seeks to
valorize producers of cultural knowledge, and which gave rise in 2003 to the
augmentation of existing natural and cultural patrimony by a new category
of intangible heritage, people may be construed as possessions of humankind.23 Overseen by UNESCO , which separates out natural, cultural, and
intangible registers, each with distinct archival registries and preservation
protocols, heritage thus links places, phenomena, and life-forms through
property regimes. It mediates different scales and sites within, and for, the
invention of tradition. Indios statement suggests that he comprehends the
power of this technology. He thus points to the power of heritage, a technique employed to lift objects out of impoverished contexts and burnish
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them in the name of some shared, if factitious, basis for belonging. And
what makes heritage special is, tautologically speaking, its exceptionality.
In the 1990s residents became increasingly aware of the ebb and flow of
exception and exceptionalism. This emanated from more than their familiarity with social scientists and, until the 1980s, with the elite men who maintained second families downtown and thus sometimes fathered (but rarely
recognized) some of the people whose stories contribute to this account. It
arose also from peoples transit between a relatively secure downtown where
money flows (corre dinheiro) and the poverty of Salvadors periphery. Residents who fancied themselves malandros, or rogues, skilled with fists, knives,
and capoeira kicks, found themselves in far-off neighborhoods facing shotguns and neighbors who broke down front doors with crowbars. Unlike in
the pre-restoration Pelourinho, they could not turn for help to roving police
patrols. Pickpockets who argued that they could filch a billfold and return
it empty to a drunks pockets complained about having to live with gente
bruta or rude (brutal, rude people). Such accounts indicate how a population
configured as a bit of patrimony, and hence as sacrosanct even as it faced
the symbolic death of removal, represented life on the periphery as indeed
much starker, if not barer. They understood just how special, and easy, life
in the supposedly denigrated downtown really was, at least in comparison
to the rural districts and slums many had fled as street children. And many
struggled, even as few succeeded, to convince IPAC to allow them to remain
in or reenter the city center following the indemnification process of the
1990s.
As it became apparent how Salvadors spatial apartheid hurt their life
chances, it also became clearer to residents how much life was forged around
continually shifting, nuanced gradations of privilege and privation. Claims
about tombamento, the status of former denizens of the red-light zone, and
arguments about knowledge and intercourse with politicians became not
spaces for carving out subjectivities in a context of poverty, but rather relations within larger webs of favor and exclusion that constitute Brazil. There
was, then, no zone of exception: it became clear that Pelourinho residents
were not people who, degraded or exalted, stood askance, outside of the
polity like sacred signs. Rather, all moved both inside and outside in a continual struggle to survive. The exception could never suspend or authorize
the norm because the exception was not a space, but a relation woven in and
out of the social fabric. Hence there was no norm counterposed in a fixed
manner to the emergency or figure in need of tutelage. Instead, much like
the baroque recesses of peoples former abodes celebrated by some as untouchable signs of antiquity and employed by others as toilets and kitchens,
sacrosanct status was an effect of positioning, or a question of multiple,
shifting plays of shadow and illumination. In this sense peoples experiences
mimicked the development of the Brazilian nation that did so much to temper their outlooks. And I turn now to this historical engagement with entwined exception and redemption, both in terms of the nation and the Pelourinhos populace, as forged in a historical space predicated on the treatment
of the biological life of a historicized populace.
At the Margins of History

After I left the gaggle surrounding Indio, I sat with Topas mother and
mourned. Gaguinho then dropped a paperback into my lap, saying, When
Topa died she was reading this. She wanted you to have it. Perhaps he was
being kind, inventing a story and a gift. But at the time, touched, I did not
entertain this possibility. I was curious: What was this gift I could never return? And, moving beyond the logic of the gift, What was Topa reading?
The book, by Euclides da Cunha, one of Brazils pre-eminent nationalist
thinkers, astounded in part because it was unknown to me. In a retrospection made possible by that gift, I have realized that da Cunhas representation of the late-nineteenth- century and early-twentieth- century making of a
Brazilian people configured in tension with landscapes painted as brutal and
degenerative has inflected powerfully my own understanding of the Pelourinhos restoration: sanitation and redemption mean something special in
a Brazil where urban renewal purifies a Pelourinho from which the nation
emerges symbolically today. But here I get ahead of myself.
When I received Topas gift, its title, Margem da Histria (At the Margin
of History), struck me as significant. At the margin of history, I thought,
Topa and the margins, or edges, of history. Topa, a woman called a marginal
throughout her life and then exiled from the Pelourinho. I wanted, in that
ostensibly inclusionary move so basic to modernist anthropology, to prove
that Topa was more than marginal, and thus make her part of universal history. But as I thought about the contradictions at the heart of the recuperative operations, I became dispirited. I cradled Margem da Histria and remained silent as this token, sent by a friend now in her grave, lay weightily
on my rain-soaked shorts, which had begun to dry in the midday heat.
The books objectness faded as conversation resumed. I struggled to
make sense of this addition to my knowledge. Topa, who neighbors used
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to tell me had once been renowned as a beautiful prostitute and had then
become adept at suadeiro, or the robbing of colleagues clients via hidden
doors or duplicate keys, had come to survive through scams and donations
from AIDS -prevention organizations. She would also search through trash,
a practice that led her to share with me castoff texts, including printouts of
indemnification data she extracted ahead of street vendors who wanted to
use them to package their wares. Such uses of writings demonstrate the particularity of my desire to know Margem da Histria by interpreting its contents, rather than by wrapping peanuts. But Topa and I had discussed and
read together many books. And Gaguinho had just made a point of telling
me Topa was reading da Cunha when she passed away.
Here was a text by the engineer and journalist who, in 1902, published
the better-known Os Sertes. Translated as Rebellion in the Backlands, Os Sertes
describes da Cunhas travels to hinterlands with troops sent to quell a rebellion by former slaves and peasants in the Bahian village of Canudos, a space
inscribed in the nations consciousness as a sign of barbarity and resistance
ever since. Da Cunhas ethnography of sertanejos, or backlanders, slaughtered by an army in which the author was embedded, stands as one of the
clearest expressions of the nineteenth- century dialectic of civilization and
barbarism. Such civilization and barbarism is usually portrayed as an attempt to describe relations between cities and countrysides depicted as antithetical to civilization. Fears of oscillation between the two, or of a degeneracy associated with Latin American nature, thus gird Lamarckian theories
of redemption like Brazilian racial democracy.24 In this understanding, by
the 1920s cosmopolitan denunciations of ostensible infection by nonwhite
peoples and degenerative landscapes spurred a countermovement in which
Brazilian thinkers celebrated deviance from European norms as a cleansing
vision of progress, or alternate modernity.
Margem da Histria, like Rebellion in the Backlands, examines an ostensibly
barbarous corner of Brazil, in this case Amazonian borderlands. Again like
its antecedent, the description is ambivalent and strategic: da Cunha worries
about Perus wastrel adventurers . . . opening up with rifle balls and machete strokes new paths . . . where they would leave behind . . . in the [form
of ] fallen-in buildings or the pitiful figure of the sacrificed Indian, the only
fruits of their . . . role as builders of ruins.25 But then he celebrates the colonization of Brazils Amazonian territories by sertanejos, the same people whose
apparent backwardness fascinates him in Rebellion in the Backlands. And even
while lamenting the destruction of indigenous life-ways, da Cunha draws
on models gleaned from the Union Pacific, from comparisons of the Punjab
to the Amazon, and from the British projects in India he took as indicative
of state-of-the-art engineering. However, in working to authorize Brazilian
control of territory by appropriating ideas from European imperial ventures,
he celebrates the sertanejos practical knowledge, rather than Europeans
calculations.26 But, again, these sertanejos are the putative barbarians who
captured his fancy as they were wiped out by the troops with whom he traveled to Bahia in the 1890s.
Da Cunhas account of Amazonian settlement, as opposed to the fanaticism he attributed to sertanejos in Bahia, reveals an ambivalently postcolonial Brazil whose emergence runs contrary to the imaginings of community
in its Hispanophone neighbors. Brazil spent 1808 to 1888 as an American
regency and empire: in a maneuver catalyzed by Napoleons invasion of the
Iberian Peninsula in 1807, the British Navy transported Portugals court,
mint, and archives to Brazil. There, Emperor Dom Joo VI oversaw possessions stretching from the Amazon to Angola and on to Macao and India until
his return to Lisbon in 1822. Thus, Rio de Janeiro served as a metropole, and
an independent monarchy, at a moment when British troops sacked Washington and Latin Americas creole republics waged wars of independence.
And by the time Joos son, Dom Pedro I, took over his fathers American
throne in 1831, Brazil had surpassed Portugal in geopolitical importance.27
Nonetheless, even as Joos grandson, Pedro II, would assume power in
1841 as an emperor born and raised in Rio, the Brazilian empire does not
gain exceptional status through a story of monarchical succession. Nor do I
touch on Luso-American history to prove Brazil imperialist. It is true that the
tropical monarchy threatened its neighbors and appropriated territory. And
the extent to which histories of internal dissent, interclass and interracial
struggle and love, anti-Portuguese sentiment, and national consolidation
around racial ideologies silence accounts of this expansionism is astounding. Yet an attempt to forge a perspective for contesting a much broader
range of imperial mufflings, and relationships between such occlusions and
Topas life and UNESCO s cultural heritage, are what most interest me here.
I began this chapter with observations about exceptions and populations
subject to patrimonialization, treating these as nodes that make aspects of
the everyday special while reflecting a societys techniques for narrating social bonds into existence. At the same time, these techniques are potentially
discriminatory ways of managing the overlaps between different aspects of
political life. I then illustrated how heritage may be reworked by its subjects, who have become invested in the production of ethnographic data that
establish heritage objects as icons of shared pasts and collective futures.
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At each nexus I have struggled to show how that which is exceptional is

part and parcel of mutable forms of inclusion and exclusion selectively available to differentially situated actors. The argument revolves around civilization and barbarism as a trope reanimated, reimplanted, and at times denied at distinct points in the construction of the Brazilian nation.28 And
this civilization and barbarism was imperfectly resolved within Brazilian history through an array of purificatory emphases on racial hybridity brought
together under the umbrella of so- called racial democracy.29
Meanwhile, heritage has come to the fore today at a moment when racial
democracy is under attack, and thus offers an increasingly weak yet accepted
way of including, and excluding, citizens. Nonetheless, an analysis based on
heritage as exception covers up its real links to the sustaining paradoxes of
Brazilian life and histories, a process integral to empires veilings. And for
this reason the exchange between Bahian public health professionals and
Topa, a woman who lived much of her adult life in the midst of sustained
state- and NGO -based attempts to transform her everyday into patrimony
and to sanitize her in the process, presents one way to reconstitute the history of the Pelourinho while suggesting how this production of what might
be called properly historical subjects may help a variety of people understand empire more clearly.
Delineating Self, Other, and Bahianness on the Hill of Mercy

The Misericrdia, where I came to know Topa, Gaguinho, Indio, and Rita,
connects Salvadors waterfront to the Pelourinho. In keeping with its location behind the Hospital of the Santa Casa da Misericrdia (Holy House
of Mercy), the Americas oldest philanthropy, the street appears notably
in eighteenth- century concerns with public health.30 A center of houses of
prostitution by the 1930s, it plays a prominent role in landscape painting,
newspaper reports, and bohemian histories. For example, Godofredo Filho,
the director of the Bahian office of Brazils federal heritage bureaucracy
(IPHAN ) for much of the postwar period, published Ladeira da Misericrdia in 1948. According to Filho, the Misericrdia is
the hill without an origin
or in its very origins, it is without an end . . .
the hill of Bahia . . .
That in the greatest irony
Claims that it arises from mercy . . .
the hill of negressess,

Of syphilitic mulattas,
Of soldiers and drunks
The street of miserable whores . . .
It is I who kisses your stones
I, who, in an agentive lamentation
Find myself thickening, becoming densely real, through your mystery;
Who lashes myself to those, your lips . . .
And who translates it in the light of the pre- dawn
Of impossible redemption31
Yet Filhos memories of carousing and bohemian desires to know others
and selves had been replaced by ethnography and the activities of NGO s
like CETAD by the time I conducted my research in the 1990s. Composed of
medical doctors and outreach workers, CETAD has long worked in Salvadors Historical Center and, especially, on the Misericrdia, which, although
no longer a location for wide-scale prostitution, was home to many prostitutes and an open drug trade.
On the day we crossed paths on the Misericrdia, CETAD personnel
handed out folders, pads, pens, and AIDS education literature designed to
encourage participation in a theatrical exercise. They listed Topa, a resident
of the Coaty, as an event organizer and handed out a sheet titled Awareness: Preventive Information about STD s/AIDS , Drug Abuse, and Quality of
Life.32 Asked to define health and to draw a body, we scribbled while listening to lectures about taking responsibility for our bodies.
As people sketched while mumbling that it was strange that the bourgeoisie should speak about bodies, Topa drifted in and out. She admitted later
that she was upset that her space had been penetrated by experts who judged
her habits, and hence pessoa (person). Agitated, she pulled out a paper, wrote
something, and dropped the sheet in my lap. It read, For those who know,
2 + 2 = 4. Farther down she had written, alongside the number 4, I am Jos.
No, I am nena, neno, as her pen trailed off in a squiggle.33
Soon a nurse from the Pelourinhos medical post asked residents to act
out private activities like bathing, cooking, and washing dishes. My notes,
taken on CETAD s donated paper, indicate that she emphasized, Each person is the owner of her body and You have value.34 In response to a question about parasites, the nurse encouraged proper disposal of feces and toilet paper because uncivilized habits might infect water supplies.35 Topa
huffed and puffed as friends silenced her, embarrassed by their problem178J O H N
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atic neighbor (Pare de ser pobremtica [sic] e deixe de bulir!) who frightened Ministry of Health doctors.36
As the nurse finished, Topa remarked, Doutora, . . . I have just one doubt
that needs to be cleared up about this issue of feces. Doctor, you say that
we should not throw our shit-ladensorry, I mean soiledpaper on the
ground. This is an important issue. I just want to understand it a little better.
The nurse responded, Yes, Im glad youre asking about this. I think we
really need to talk about hygiene.
Topa went on, So as I understand it. Well, let me ask it this way. If I am
walking on a Saturday afternoon, out looking for useful items in the trash in
your neighborhood . . . and I need to defecate, I should look for a bathroom.
Theres no way I should crapI mean defecatein the street. Right?
Right! answered the nurse.
Well, OK, so lets say that I walk up to your house on a Sunday and knock
on the door because I really need to defecate. Or rather, if I am in danger of
soiling my pants [pause] No! What I really mean is, what Im really going to
do is to make poop. If I am going to make [pause] No! Not poop! If I am going
to shit all over myself and the street, and instead I walk up to the door and
knock, and you answer the door [pause] No, sorry, not you, but your maid,
answers the door.
Eh, eh, eh, eh, sputtered the nurse as Topa continued: And I say Excuse
me, I need to use your bathroom so that I dont shit all over the sidewalk and
soil the street and endanger public health, what do you think your maid is
going to tell me? Is she going to let me in to use your bathroom that shes
been scrubbing all morning? Or when she calls back and you answer, Who is
it?, are you going to tell her to let me into your house to use your clean toilet
so I dont get shit and toilet paper on the sidewalk? What if I should need to
defecate in your neighborhood, madame?!?
The educator stood speechless until a social worker asked, Well, what
would you do in that case, Topa?
Topa hissed, Dont butt in! Im doing the asking!37
The nurse, a kind professional I came to know later through my sons
checkups at the Pelourinho health post, responded, Ah ah ah ah ah, well,
I would hope that anyone who answered the door in my house would let
you in.
But would you tell your maid to let me in? insisted Topa.
This is truly a difficult question, responded the nurse, honestly. A
silence settled over CETAD and the residents of Salvador among the most
prone to new HIV infection. Friends hushed Topa as Gaguinho pulled her
from the room. She began crying, refusing to rejoin the end of the lesson.
At that moment, another woman blurted, I just want to know when the
doctors are going to come see us. Ive had enough with this education stuff.
When are the doctors coming? At this, the CETAD team announced that the
meeting and street theater were over. Promising to stop by again, they departed the hill without an origin/or [that] in its very origins . . . is without
an end.38
A Marginal at the Epicenter

There is much to say about acting up in the midst of a public health drama designed to convince Topa she had value at a time when IPAC construed her
habits as patrimony. On one level, it permits the anthropologist to present
himself as occupying an outside more real than the circuits of knowledge
activated by CETAD or IPAC . But if such a position were possible, it would
configure Topa and her neighbors as authentic exemplars of a popular consciousness, a claim I struggle to contest. Nevertheless, as should be apparent, I enjoyed, and find inspiration in, Topas creativity. But backtalk did not
prevent her from losing her home or from serving as fodder for IPAC and
accounts such as the one my reader digests here.
Topa underscores the importance, and the contradictions, of the space
between the two of us and between institutions like CETAD and IPAC and
the Pelourinhos population. It seems that CETAD has taken on something
of the role of the IPAC of 1970s. Even as it did not involve itself in heritage, it
offered holistic care as doctors ministered to the sick and outreach workers
passed out condoms. Meanwhile, IPAC had helped residents obtain medical care in the 1970s, but subsequently sought to configure people as problems. In fact, when I first visited IPAC offices as a new researcher in 1994,
the director of public relations offered a story from a newspaper, controlled
by the then governor of Bahia, that warned of AIDS infection among Pelourinho transvestites. He told me, Look how the press treats these people.
For the press, the people of the Pelourinho are a problem. They are marginals, a scourge, diseased. But here at IPAC we understand the social nature of
these problems and we work to find them homes, to valorize them, and to
get them into treatment centers. Regardless, or perhaps as a result, IPAC
forced a number of HIV + people out of the Pelourinho around the time of
my visit. But in spite of attempts to employ a language of care to paint residents as a scourge to be removed, it is not obvious that the contact zone
between CETAD and IPAC is expressive of, or directed at, anything resem180J O H N
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bling empire. Yet issues of obvious resemblance, or how connections come

to seem evident but unavailable in other contexts, are what I work to connect
to the segmentations of knowledge effected by empire around exceptions
and sentiments. And they are why, in addition to its brilliance, an interaction
between a subject population and the institutions that claim to represent
and mold that group is my focus.
In speaking to CETAD in the Coaty, Topa mimics hygienists, drawing professionals out of their pedagogical roles and transforming them into actors
within, and hence of, their own theater. This rupture of the naturalized position of actor and pedagogue is significant in itself. But Topa then draws in
her teachers by voicing just one doubt that needs to be cleared up about
this issue of feces before moving through a glossary of slang terms for
excrement. She does so while narrating her approach to the nurses home.
Here Topa, who once worked as a servant, raises the possibility of the wrong
type of womans entrance into the bourgeois home, precisely the scene of
the narrative of national purification and hybridity so important to modern
Brazilianness. A maid who guards this space then checks whether or not to
admit the woman from the Pelourinho. Yet Topa, a former prostitute and
hence the doorkeepers immoral doppelgnger, paralyzes the patroa (nurse)
by performing an imagined interaction on the threshold of house and street.
Thus this solicitation of a toilet enables Topa to interpellate the hygienist
who arrived on the Misericrdia so as to educate, or to render palatable to
the public that would soon flock to the historical center some of Salvadors
most marginalized and diseased quasi citizens.
From residents perspectives, CETAD and IPAC are both state institutions. Topas gutsy insurrection may thus be read as an analysis of a states
appropriation of her quotidian through surveillance of hygiene, sexuality,
and domestic habits. The inversions permit Topa to situate her own objectification within a history of IPAC cleansing. More than a Rabelaisian overturning or even an anthropological fetishization of abjection, Topas challenge
recalls Begoa Aretxagas description of political prisoners dirty protest.
There, IRA partisans complaints forged around feces, urine, and menstrual
blood reconstituted colonial representations of Irish filth as a materialization of the buried shit of British colonization, a de-metaphorization of
the savage, dirty Irish.39 In something akin to Topas upending of IPAC
constructions of belonging through the materialization of racial democracy
around her own habits, Irish prisoners manifestations of excreta made public relations to the state, colonial history, and contemporary society. Yet Topa
never manipulates feces in the face of CETAD surveillance. Instead, she emB R A Z I L S I M P E R I A L E XC E P T I O N 181
ploys witty speech to uncover how her role in the production of origins is
hidden. In other words, Topa reveals not the content of biopolitics, or the
histories written around biopolitical surveillance of everyday habits in the
Pelourinho, but the mutual imbrication of socially distinct interlocutors in
a broader, imperial framework. What appears key here is how Topa makes
visible the normalizations and fragmentations of critical-perceptual landscapes that pave the way for accumulation by dispossession.40
IPAC relies, as do historical centers in general, on monumentalized
signs of history that instantiate general patterns of meaningful order
typical of states attempts to widen nationalisms iconic or indexical attachments into a more fully symbolic, or habitual, register.41 Such symbols call
up their objects in manners that construe their significance as turning on an
ability to materialize traces as preserved phenomena, rather than as ongoing
aspects of a still-unfinished history. For example, when, in interactions with
a post-1990 IPAC , a resident answers a questionnaire designed to fix her as
a problem, she may become a manipulatable datum whose form is constituted within the play of the questionnaire and the archive. When that questionnaire remains in the archive as a hidden yet authoritative source of representations in the present, its preserved status pulls it, in a sense, out of
history: the document becomes a sign of history in that its symbolizing activity rests on its storage in an archive of materials that gain power as materials that were there at the moment of field research. As such, they permit
claims about a past moment which, abstracted or distilled from them, requires their preservation, but not necessarily their ongoing activation. They
no longer serve as active signs in ongoing history, but rather as testaments
to what supposedly has taken place. And this is one reason that heritage has
been described as a secular sacred set off from the everyday. In such a linkage of sign vehicle and referent, or of Pelourinho practices committed to
paper and the historical degeneracy IPAC employs them to represent, both
monuments and documents require preservation so as to maintain an aura
of having once participated in what they connote. Nonetheless, such signs of
history may, under certain circumstances, become deployed in social action
in such a way that they stand mimetically within or closer to actions in ways
that continue to comment on what has supposedly already passed. In the
process they may evince a token-level contiguity with [the] ongoing social
processes that they constitute and, thus, become signs in history.42
There is a great difference between standing in monumentalized relation
to history like a bit of patrimony that calls up an event and standing, iteratively deployed, within that history in a manner that nods at its uneven flows.
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And this divergence is key to my attempt to make out empires workings in

light of Topas interventions.43 Put simply, a sign of history represents what
happened. But a sign in history touches or points at, and thus makes clearer
how, that which is said to have happened represents by serving as a type of
present evidence of a significant past that does not so much specify historys contents as gesture at its valences.44 In other words, Topa as a sign in
history illustrates her role in producing the narratives that exclude her. She
does so by highlighting diverse actors ongoing imbrications in a force field
forged in the public health scripts co-produced by CETAD and Misericrdia
residents: rather than demonstrating relations between a context and an
event, Topa shows how relations are delineated as events or spaces in ways
that point to the ongoing production of history and the extension of processes, like colonialism, that might be relegated to the past so as to obscure
their ongoing valences. And if those temporal segmentations produced by,
and definitive of more standard definitions of, empires engaged in the production of mini-events called crises, emergencies, and exceptions are raised
to the level of consciousness, there exists the possibility that all involved,
whether CETAD pedagogue, anthropological analyst, or ethnographic subject, may make out not simply what is arbitrarily available, but rather a spectrum of social processes in which all participate. But how does one inhabit
this slot, one that I refer to as proper historicity?
When Topa inhabited IPAC and CETAD discourses she revealed performatively how Pelourinho institutions identify people and events as problems as well as monuments productive of identity and history. By bringing
to the forefront the hubris of middleclass benefactors who would regulate
her domestic space, Topa makes clear the distinct bases of her own and the
researchers and educators participation in a project configured as shared,
pedagogical, restorative, and productive of both pasts and futures. Yet she
did so in a manner that moved beyond any argument about authority, or
even about who was indeed immoral, unhygienic, or correct. She demonstrated instead a series of connections dependent not on direct contiguity
or a mimetic affinity with the object itselfas is the case in cultural heritage
management where the restoration of buildings mimics colonial origins
or where the surveillance of Afro-Bahians lifeways configures living people
with idealized, folkloric models of black Brazilianness mobilized in nationalist imagerybut on a shared participation in a heritage-based invention of
tradition basic to development projects and liberal democratic participation
in the world today.
Here the pressing issue is no longer one of making out what Bahian oriB R A Z I L S I M P E R I A L E XC E P T I O N 183
gins really are. Nor does it involve demonstrating cultural heritages constructedness. Instead, as the Pelourinho nurse and I discussed subsequently,
Topa forced all present to recognize how erudite knowledge and popular
practice become entwined in producing a version of Bahian origins around
the Pelourinho as exception. Topa thus helps make apparent the sedimentation of IPAC representations, and the temporal and geographical valences
of knowledges that gird them, that establish a ground from which she must
speak and from which her state configures her as a source of information.
Such an ability to demonstrate heritages and thus public historys formulation of a shared yet contested space in real time and alongside its production
of materiality around human figures, and to do so by forcing the exception
to point to the rule, may appear a small contribution by one woman. This is
especially true when viewed in light of the weight of some undifferentiated,
or even quite specifically defined, thing called empire. But it is an important aspect of understanding, and perhaps even altering, empire in light of
contemporary claims about its unbridled novelty, on one hand, or enduring
legacies, on the other.
Conclusion
Topa did much in life. How capably she could open up perspectives became
apparent a year after her insurrection. As the nurse examined my son during
a routine checkup, we talked of the Misericrdia and she exclaimed, These
people are quite difficult. Theyre really needy. One never knows what they
put in their bodies and how those substances are going to make them react. I had felt a kinship with the nurse because her facial expression suggested a recognition of the pain Topa felt when CETAD sought to teach her
hygiene and value. However, this attachment dissipated as the nurse focused
on these people and their neediness. Perhaps Topa was needy. But anthropologists and health professionals who make a career traveling to the Misericrdia are, in their own ways, needy as well.
The nurses explanation of Topas practices through claims about uncontrolled emotions contrasts with Topas actions: in the Coaty Topa did not
claim in a categorical sense a difference from the nurse who interpellated
her. Instead, she illustrated, through metaphor, how she imagined that the
nurse would, and has, construed her in the past, present, and future as an
exception in light of public morality, precisely the sentiment at the core of
Brazils racial democracy and the Pelourinho restoration. She did so by inviting the nurse to specify how she would receive or wall herself off from Topa,
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in her own home. She thus asked the nurse to reflect on how her configuring
of Topa would permit her in turn to appear civilized, or not, in contradistinction to the figure from the Misericrdia her profession suggested she could
sanitize or perfect.
Thus on the terrain of the elite home and its servants, precisely that from
which Brazils racial democracy was materialized and then generalized as
a public formation supposedly emanating from the truths of the intimate
sphere, Topa, a denizen of the red-light district, began a history of her ties to
other citizens.45 And impossible ties to other citizens are what I have argued
racial democracy and cultural heritage function, at different moments, to
resolve or cover up. In other words, Topas challenge to CETAD is a history.
Yet it is not a dispute over facts and interpretations. It is a working out of a
positioning in the world, or a deictics of historical remembering which,
beyond any referential representation of the past . . . legitimates action in
the present through the alignment of remembering agents within a spatiotemporal field.46
Deictics, or indexical, means of historical recollection through the alignment of remembering agents in a given fielda basic feature of cultural
heritage centers experiential histories of the presentare a significant
area of dispute, cooptation, and even new forms of commodification in
Latin America today.47 The Pelourinho is one such landscape in which commemorations constructed around patrimony produce links to the past with
little, if any, referential content.48 In fact, IPAC s expulsion of residents unable to claim an Afro-Bahianness amenable to state-sanctioned representations underscores how constricted versions of cultural inclusion may work
as dissimulatory signs of broader attention to rights and justice.49 In a Bahia
in which the Pelourinho supposedly represents a new type of inclusiveness
inspired by UNESCO s humanistic guidelines, citizenship often becomes
configured as an indexical, presentist relationship to specific forms of belonging to ethnic and racial groups associated in Latin American nationalism with prior states. Here, under neoliberal multiculturalism, the Bahian
state arbitrates correct markers of ethnic identity and national history that
qualify bearers for political rights, while residents who exhibit incorrect behaviors face exile on Salvadors periphery.50 This describes also a situation in
Bahia more generally where peasants who argue that they are part of quilombola (maroon) communities gain land titles, whereas neighboring communities do not.51 Yet, as should now be apparent, such exceptions are not limited to neoliberalism: similar gradations of sovereignty and sliding scales
of differentiation are hallmark features of imperial formations.52 Thus what
is important is not to claim a neoliberal novelty to indexical, deictic claims

to histories and identities. Nor is to show that they are but factitious links or
arguments without a content proper to real history. Rather, it is to begin
to reveal the historical reasons that such claims make sense, and continue
to make both novel and timeworn sense in a shared field, at a moment when
empire seems both eminently deniable and palpably present.
I have sought to explore sliding scales, and their manipulation, by thinking empire alongside Topa, Indio, and their families and neighbors in and
around a Misericrdia of the 1990s tamed through hygienic projects that
continue a Brazilian engagement with civilization and barbarism and prepare the Pelourinhos landscape as a site for the production of value around
cultural difference. This helps make the human and material face and frailties of imperialism more visible, and . . . make challenges to it more likely
while revealing how scaled differentiations framed as unique cases . . . are
exceptions in a context in which such exceptions are a norm.53 And the
overlaps between the apparent ubiquitousness of exceptions, an interest in
approaches to empire that would go beyond macro perspectives, and the
blurred boundaries between everyday life and cultural products suggest in
turn the importance of an ethnographic engagement with empire today.
Instead of focusing broadly on the ways excluded or stigmatized figures
gird the production of a norm portrayed as an essence of the nation or the
true subject of history, the approach begun above turns on the details of
how that norm is negotiated in different series of incomplete exclusions.
What this promises is twofold. First, it follows influential works in colonial
studies that provide a picture of subjectivities developed within the constitution of the social body through exclusions or negations.54 Yet it does so not
in relation to nineteenth- century European initiatives that are by now widely
accepted as constituting the colonial. Instead, it examines models of personhood and belonging that emerge as mutating perches actively co-produced
in state- citizen and NGO - client interactions in a late-twentieth- century
Brazil. And this extension of empires temporal and geographic horizons
through a focus on state- directed research projects makes clear something
else, namely, the extent to which the continuing salience of imperial formations helps structure and fill the evidentiary bases of future histories. This is
especially salient when such histories and their contestations are construed
as rule-bound, symbolic relationships and sources of truth rather than as
more indexical or even contiguous relations between people and objects in
which what counts most is not ones contiguity to the source, or to restored
monuments and authentic Afro-Brazilians, but rather an understanding of
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ones ongoing insertion into this force field. In other words, empire is reproduced today to no small degree through interactions that produce sanctioned forms of knowledge which, as mobilized within the discourse of cultural heritage, individuate the nation and its subjects and objects in ways
that extract them from history while claiming to restore that which lies in
the past. And for this reason the novel approach to retrospective, or historical, interpretation put together by a woman named Topa is so important for
specifying how empire is reproduced, and might be contested, in a world
where some would claim it is no longer salient. This approach involves an
ability to tie oneself not to historys ostensible content, but to its valences
as a space of contestation.
Following Topa, I have thus linked crises or abnormalities and attempts
at their amelioration or resolution. But I have struggled to make out this
space of ongoing emergency through microarguments about practices that
link broad claims to ongoing contestations. Topa looks, from within her own
house invaded by sanitarists, across space and time at multiple exceptions
by means of questions put to a wealthier woman who would teach her correct behavior. She pushes for an analysis that is so dispersed that it leads the
nurse to explain away Topas unruliness in terms of neediness and the influence of illegal substances. Yet Topa does not respond to the AIDS crisis, or
the threat of feces, as a specific problem of her own, delimited context on the
Misericrdia. Instead, she pushes into new contexts and new refusals of the
walling off of the nurses house, gender boundaries, and history as simply
the past or an elite space from which she is barred as a diseased prostitute.
And I have sought to do justice to the brilliant openings she provides by following her genealogically, via an exploration that examines the formation of
exceptions and the production of Pelourinho histories as linked solutions to
enduring problems, rather than through a consideration of individual exceptions and their discrete contexts.
In an imagined dialogue with a now deceased Topa, and drawing on the
gift of a text that she may or may not have willed to me, I have thus extended our shared yet still disparate analyses into the Bahia serto of the
1890s, the Iberian Peninsula of the first decade of the nineteenth century,
and late-twentieth- century NGO politics. And this rethinking of context
both in terms of people and spaces that supposedly have nothing to do with
empire, and components of histories that indicate a shared situation rather
than what really happened, recalls Bruno Latours advice that when speaking of system or structure the researchers first . . . reflex should be to ask
In which building? In which bureau? Through which corridor?55 Here I
5.2 Topa kisses her neighbor JoJo, 1997. Photo by author.
recall that Topa did not denounce the CETAD nurse. She did not slot her
interlocutor into a category of personhood. Nor did she explain that she, as
opposed to nonpopular actors like CETAD s professionals, knew all about
something called public health. Rather, she asked the nurse if she would
allow her to cross the bourgeois homes threshold if she needed a bathroom.
This is a narrow query. But it is also one that might be followed through a
variety of corridors and across a number of spaces and moments. And it is
a fitting question from a woman who knows well that for those who know,
2 + 2 = 4. Perhaps someday we may all begin to realize how 2 + 2 = 4, and
thus how it is that someone like Topa really does know how, who, and what
to count. A critical component of the next stages of this project is to begin
to understand on what basis, and to what effect, we have begun to recognize
and analyze the truth of such an apparently simple statement.
Notes
Research for this chapter was made possible by grants from the Institute of International Education Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Brazilian Programa Institucional de
Bolsas de Iniciao Cientfica (Institutional Program of Scientific Initiation Fellowship), and the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York. Its current form is indebted to discussions organized by Donald Scott at the Queens College
Faculty Workshop, as well as to the New School for Social Researchs Scarred Landscapes/Imperial Debris conference put together by Ann Laura Stoler. I thank these
organizers, and in particular Ann Stoler, together with Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, and
two anonymous reviewers from Duke University Press, for pushing my arguments as
they developed. My discussion draws also on suggestions by Nbia Rodrigues, Roca
Alencar, Val Daniel, Silvia de Zordo, Roger Sansi, and Cam McDonald, who helped me
develop my analysis in relation to insights offered by Topa, Indio, Gaguinho, Bebel,
and their families and neighbors, especially the Famlia Gomes de Jesus. I am indebted
also to Tarcsio Matos de Andrade and the health professionals of CETAD .
1. Li, The Will to Improve.
2. Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty, 137.
3. Parmentier, The Sacred Remains.
4. Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum.
5. Abls, The Politics of Survival; Agamben, State of Exception.
6. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
7. Kramer, The Blood of Government; Neil Smith, American Empire; Stoler, Introduction; Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty.
8. Chatterjee, Empire and Nation Revisited, 495.
9. Even as Chatterjee offers an important response to the issue of the identification
of apparently imperial relations in a world without classical nineteenth- century,

northern European empires, his suggestion that indirect control is new obscures the
extent to which empire has long depended not on stable populations so much as on
highly moveable ones (Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty, 137).
10. Anthropologists attentive to exceptions have done much recently to explore
politics under neoliberalism. Charles Hale (Does Multiculturalism Menace?; Ms
que un Indio3/3More Than an Indian) suggests that under a neoliberal multiculturalism
states withdraw from the provision of basic services to their citizenries by offering
instead, on a selective basis in relation to minority subjects ability to articulate resonant claims to difference, rights based on difference itself. Joo Biehl, working also
in Salvador with Pelourinho residents, has argued that under neoliberalism the poor
are left with little more than networks of relatively isolated spaces where they might
partially transform a diseased biology, marginal and excluded, into a selective means
of inclusion (Biehl, Will to Live, 326). And Aihwa Ong (Neoliberalism as Exception) has
performed for neoliberalism something akin to what Chatterjee suggests may be revelatory of empire: she examines oftentimes contradictory, global, spaces of exception
to argue that neoliberalism depends on the construction of multiple exceptions.
11. Stoler and McGranahan, Introduction.
12. Biehl, Will to Live; Caton, Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib;
Caton and Zacka, Abu Ghraib, the Security Apparatus, and the Performativity of
Power; Fassin and Vasquez, Humanitarian Exception as the Rule; Redfield, Doctors, Borders and Life in Crisis.
13. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
14. Collins, Patrimony, Public Health, and National Culture.
15. Sheriff, Dreaming Equality, 220. Also see Collins, The Revolt of the Saints; Collins,
But What If I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?
16. MacCannell, The Tourist.
17. Collins, X Marks the Future of Brazil.
18. Collins, The Revolt of the Saints.
19. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
20. The Casa de Apoio e Assistncia aos Portadores do Vrus HIV/AIDS (House
for the Support and Assistance of HIV/AIDS Carriers), or CAASAH , is the subject
of Biehls ethnography of pharmaceutical governance and peoples ability to cobble
together lives in Brazilian zones of exception (Biehl, Will to Live). For histories of AIDS
treatment and pastoral institutions in Salvador, see Biehl, Pharmaceutical Governance; Biehl, Will to Live; and Biehl, Will to Live. See also the institutions website
at http://www.caasah.com.br/.
21. Sim, pessoal. Aqui estou, tombado na garupa. Estou bonito, no e no? por
isso que o gringo cuida bem de mim.
22. Esse a da antiguedade. Eu conheco ele desde pivete.
23. Collins, Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being.
24. As Nancy Stepan outlines (The Hour of Eugenics), Brazilian racial thought turns
on Lamarckian theories of ongoing mutability rather than on Darwinian natural selec-
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tion. Thus the manipulation of milieu during a subjects or a populations lifetime is

understood to produce moral and physical redemption in manners that may seem
quite strange in contexts in which more gene-based, and hence biologically genealogical, conceptions of racial belonging operate.
25. Da Cunha, The Amazon, 55, emphasis added.
26. Ibid., 82.
27. I write degenerately metropolitan because Portugal, since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, had been understood as an incompetent and backward
colonial power quite unlike British, French, and Dutch empires.
28. Caldeira and Holston, State and Urban Space in Brazil; Holston, The Modernist
City.
29. Readers unfamiliar with Brazil may find it difficult to believe that hybridity
purifies. Nonetheless, within racial democracy, mixture is configured as leading away
from originary infections and toward a modern, forward-facing, and hence cleansed,
nationalist brownness unique to Brazil (Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves). This is also
called whitening in its more extreme manifestations. For an overview by a U.S. historian, see Skidmore, Black into White.
30. It was also a place denounced by virtuous citizens who opposed the dumping
of animal carcasses and performance of libidinous acts at night. See, for example,
the 23 May 1742 petition from the Santa Casa da Misericrdia bureaucrat Francisco de
Oliveira Telles to Salvadors municipal council requesting that a gate be erected at the
upper entrance of the Misericrdia Hill (Arquivo da Santa Casa da Misericrdia, Book
14, 3d register, 1742), so as to attend to citizens, and the Santa Casas, concerns over
the immoral acts perpetrated on the Ladeira da Misericrdia.
31. Published in Filho, Irm poesia.
32. Sensibilizao: Informaes Preventivas Sobre DST s/AIDS , Abuso de Drogas
e Qualidade de Vida.
33. The words nena and neno are a feminization and masculinization of the Bahian
term for baby, or nen. I understand her use of these words as referring to her own gender identity as well as her infantilization by the CETAD social workers.
34. Cada pessoa dono do seu proprio corpo and Voc tem seu valor.
35. Feces left on hillsides may indeed infect water supplies. Nonetheless, as Briggs
(Stories in the Time of Cholera) points out in relation to Venezuelas 199293 cholera epidemic, most important to protecting water are major infrastructural projects and not
issues of personal sanitation. These are a red herring when directed at the individual
level.
36. Founded in 1985, CETAD by the late 1990s was codirected by Antnio Nery
Alves Filho, a graduate of the Federal University of Bahias medical school who received his psychiatry degree and doctorate in sociology in France, and by Tarcsio
Matos de Andrade, a medical doctor and graduate of the Federal University of Bahia,
who Misericrdia residents respected greatly and always called Dr. Tarcsio. In fact,
before I met him on that day we crossed paths on the Misericrdia, I had been told
by people throughout the Pelourinho that he was not only an excellent doctor, but
someone with whom people can talk easily (a gente conversa legal). According to the
UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC ), CETAD negotiated with police and in 1995
opened Bahias first needle exchange in the Pelourinho and a number of working- class
neighborhoods. After 1997, as crack replaced intravenous injection, CETAD branched
out. Today it maintains a harm-reduction program, mobile prevention educational
service, a community program in outlying neighborhoods, and an initiative designed
to reduce the spread of AIDS in Salvadors penitentiary. In 2002, at which point CETAD
had a staff of slightly more than thirty professionals and provided almost fifty thousand occasions of service annually, UNAIDS declared CETAD a model program. It
has received funding from a number of institutions and private donors, including the
Bahian Ministry of Health, USAID , and a number of social marketing corporations
such as DKT International, a Washington-based charitable organization associated
with UNAIDS and UNICEF that employs market- driven mechanisms to deliver AIDS prevention materials, including female condoms, in eleven nations.
37. No se meta! Estou perguntando!
38. Filho, Irm poesia, 287.
39. Aretxaga, Dirty Protest, 135; see also Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence.
40. Harvey, The New Imperialism.
41. Parmentier, The Sacred Remains, 308.
42. Ibid.
43. In other words I am, in a sense, repeating salient aspects of IPAC and CETAD
research techniques as I seek to gain insight into an other world via Topa as a symbol
deployed in the present text. I do not have a solution to this conundrum at this point.
But to ignore it would be to commit even more violence against Topa and my memories of her. Furthermore, to take the position that I cannot learn from and alongside
Topa, despite the extent to which the geopolitics in which all social scientists are involved in different ways does indeed configure her as a datum for the appreciation of
the outsider, would be to shut down one avenue into the possibility of challenging
such an unequal system.
44. Parmentier, The Sacred Remains, 308.
45. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves.
46. Orta, Burying the Past, 488.
47. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; see also Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum.
48. See also Price, The Convict and the Colonel.
49. Bahias population is usually estimated to be approximately 80 percent Afrodescendant, while, in light of Brazils specific racial ideologies, the percentage of the
national population that calls itself black is, according to the 2000 federal census, only
about 6 percent.
50. Hale, Does Multiculturalism Menace?
51. French, Buried Alive.
52. Stoler and McGranahan, Introduction, 9.
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53. Respectively, Lutz, Empire Is in the Details, 594; Stoler, On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty, 139.
54. Stoler, Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers; Stoler, Race and the Education of
Desire.
55. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 183.
A R I E L L A A Z O U L AY
When a Demolished House Becomes a Public Square
Where Are the House Owners?

Colorful blankets, each different from the others, wrap those sleeping on the
floor, crowded against one another. Without the khaki sleeve that catches
the eye, one can recognize the room as a Palestinian one. A ray of light crossing the frame from the right leads to the sleeve. Then one more easily notices
a pair of army boots peeking out from under another blanket, a flexed knee
in uniform, and an upside- down helmet. These are Israeli soldiers. They are
sleeping in a Palestinian home in Gaza. There is no trace of the inhabitants.
These must have fled once more as refugees.
This photograph (fig. 6.1) showed up along with twenty other photographs in my e-mail inbox on 10 January 2009, a few days after the onslaught
of the Israeli attack on Gaza. The accompanying letter iterated: We should
all be proud of the IDF [Israeli Defense Force]. . . . These brave kids defend
our country. Following this was a recommendationclearly an authorizationto distribute the images.1 The photographs were disseminated as photos of our soldiers, for whom we have to care, whom we have to thank, and
with whom we have to identify. This appeal can be disturbed only once one
realizes that the colorful blankets under which the soldiers are curled up are
not their own, and that the people for whom that place had been home before the soldiers arrived have now been made homeless.
Once we reconstruct the scene shown in the photo for what it isa Palestinian house that has been violated by Israeli soldiers who have evicted its
owners and are now sleeping there peacefullyit becomes clear that what
6.1 Israeli soldiers sleeping in a Palestinian house, Gaza, 2009. Photograph by an

Israeli soldier.
we are facing is actually what Ann Stoler calls imperial debris. Although
this is not a common ruinor a photograph of a ruinwhat can be seen in
it is the ruination of the Palestinian house as a private space, as a space that
should remain outside of the reach of naked political power, designating
its limit. Out of this photo we can reconstruct the uneven temporal sedimentations in which imperial formations leave their marks, as well as the
ways empires ruins carve through the psychic and material space in which
people live, what people are left with, and what compounded layers of imperial debris do to them.2
The Observation Point

Let me dwell briefly on the conditions that prevent such imagesthe violation of a Palestinian housefrom becoming news items. In the past few
years the Israeli authorities have kept the press away from Gaza. The media
have had a meager supply of images of the ongoing horror there. This was
all the more true during the attack on Gaza in January 2009. During that
time, Israel allowed press photographers to set themselves up on a hill adjacent to the Gaza Strip and shootfrom long distancethe smoke billowA D E M O L I S H E D H O U S E 195
6.2 The Journalist Hill, 7 January 2009. Photograph courtesy of Merav Maroody.
ing over the horizon, thus screening the inferno within (fig. 6.2).3 The hill
from which Gaza can be observed is open to visitors. For their convenience,
benches, trashcans, and information about the surrounding landscape have
been placed here. During that assault of Gaza, people came there with binoculars and cameras, and while holding conversations in situ, acquired or
enhanced their military savvy of missiles, range, precision hits, and impact.4 From their observation point, what they see is exactly the picture that
Israel wishes to show: a war fought on equal footing by two sides. Missiles
launched in Gaza hit Israel, and Israel retaliates. The violation and destruction of more than fifteen thousand Palestinian houses is the order of things,
nothing special to report about.
The people who bring their children to this hill to show them Gaza under
bombardment do so in fascinated wonder at Israels might. From this hill,
they can show their children both the symmetry that justifies Israels devastation of Gaza, and Israels spectacular show of force. Their gazes follow the
trajectories of missiles and fighter helicopters; they try to guess the nature
of their hits, and applaud at the sight of smoke billowing (fig. 6.3). Yes!
Weve done it! Weve hit them! Yes! Weve destroyed them! Yes! Weve
shown them. In elated patriotic camaraderie, individuals, couples, and families can go back home, fully certain of their righteousnesstheir governments, their armys, their own.
The combined preparatory work done by the Israeli government, army,
and media concerning the terror of missiles launched at Sderot and making
Gaza inaccessible to the world was systematic and effective to such an extent as to remove all doubt: there could be nothing more just and more right
than to destroy fifteen thousand houses in Gaza. The political and military
leadership that counted on its soldiers to carry out this missionand on
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6.3 Israelis gathered on a hill near Gaza to see the show during one of the
last days of bombing by the Israeli Air Force, January 2009. Photograph courtesy
of Miki Kratsman/Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv.
such citizens who would show up right there to applaud and to misrecognize the continuous exposure of the Palestinian house to ruinationcould
also count on the previous mobilization of its citizens to devastate Gaza.
Nothing new under the sunexcept the magnitude of destruction that can
be effected in a short period of time, which steadily increases. The ritual pattern stands at the ready, both in political lingo (Gaza first) and in military
jargon (terrorist infrastructure). The people who came to that hill do not
need pictures from Gaza. What they see from the Journalists Hill suffices.
Thirteen hundred dead? From this vantage point, it seems justified.
The person who proudly forwarded the photograph of the sleeping troops
did not see in it that which the soldiers of the NGO Breaking the Silence or
a civil gaze sees in such images. The soldiers in the picture, or the person
who took it, all of whom had invaded the home of others and removed its
inhabitants in order to sleep there, were received by the states citizens with
open gratitude. After all, their act is an act of state.5 However, this is not a
simple act of house demolition; rather, it is a colonial debris. It consists in
the ruination of the civil capacity to recognize that such a project is a regimemade disaster that mobilizes citizens and turns them into its executioners.
Lets look again at this photograph of sleeping troops, which is not, on its
A D E M O L I S H E D H O U S E 197
surface, a particularly harsh image. One of the soldiers, wakened by a first ray
of morning light before his pals, is taking picturesfor himself, for them,
for their familiesa souvenir, an image of a nights sleep in Gaza.
But, after all, this is Gaza. How can Israeli soldiers who have participated
in the destruction of Gaza; the devastation of entire neighborhoods and
public buildings; the total ruin of vital infrastructure; the wounding of thousands; the bombing of hospitals, civilian shelters, and schools; the killing
of more than a thousand human beingshow can these soldiers, who are,
to say the least, not exactly welcome guests, how can they possibly afford to
sleep so peacefully in the midst of the inferno they have produced without
fearing for their own lives? The answer lies in one of the occupations most
common practices: the creation of a sterile zone. A sterile zone is an area
emptied completely of Arabs so that the Israeli military can carry out its missions. In the image of the sleeping soldiers we are most likely witnessing the
heart of the sterile zone. We have no knowledge of the exact size of the sterile zone, its perimeters. But for these soldiers to sleep so serenely, so safely,
not only would the dwellers of this house have to have been removed from
the sterile zone, but the residents of the entire area would have to be gone
as well. For the Israeli soldier, a Palestinian home is a violable space, a violability that was not born in the most recent Gaza campaign.
Gaza as the Moral of a Story

The residents of the Arab towns of Al-Ramle, Bir Al-Saba, Al-Majdal, and
Isdud, occupied by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, either escaped or were
forcibly expelled. Most of them were removed to Gaza, which tripled in
population with the influx. At the end of the war, the Egyptians controlled
Gaza and instated their own military administration. Israel had not been
able to manage that last military victorythe conquest of Gazabefore
signing ceasefire agreements with Egypt in 1949, thus giving birth to the
narrow, troublesome strip at the edge of the nascent State of Israel, dooming its houses.
A strip is a military-political term that designates a region that must be
dealt with as undetermined, a situation to be solved. The Gaza Strip was
born as a problem. Since this birth, Israel has never ceased proposing solutions to the problem. In 1949 Israel proposed a political solution, which
was to annex the Strip, along with some of the refugees it harbored. But this
solution, with its military scent, was rejected by the parties involved. In the
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Sinai operation in 1956, the Strip was occupied along with the entire peninsula, and Israel imposed a military administration. This did not last long, as
under American-Russian pressure Israel was forced to retreat from the territory it had conquered.
In 1967 Israel managed to reconquer the Strip and take control of the refugees of 1948 yet again. Since then, for over forty years, Israel has controlled
the Palestinian population in Gaza. At least since the general closure Israel
imposed on the Gaza Strip in 1991 during the first Gulf War, such control
has entailed cutting off the Strip from the West Bank, as well as strict control
over entry into and exit from it. By means of administering the crossings,
Israel regulates life in Gaza. Since the Second Intifada, and ever more tightly
since its disengagement, Israel has been managing a measured, chronic
disaster, ever watchful not to cross the fine line into humanitarian catastrophe, enabling or preventing the flow of goods, people, and means. Following its latest assault, which destroyed fifteen thousand houses in Gaza,
Israel has prohibited the import of building materials, thereby preventing
the Gazans whose homes have been destroyed from rebuilding them.
The House Walls

The house in the photograph from Jayyus (fig. 6.4) stood in the right place
to serve as a military outpost. The houses height and location near the separation wall have turned it into a strategic point for snipers, who could hit
anyone in the crowd that took part in the weekly demonstrations against
this wall. The photograph was taken a few minutes after the soldiers had
entered the house and a few minutes before they clashed with its residents
and ruined their living space. One can see in the photograph how Palestinians, together with Israelis and international activists, reacted to the soldiers
invasion into what used to be a private space. They endowed this no-longerprivate space with a public meaning of gathering together and resisting
power in the place and moment in which they had encountered it.
My house walls, sturdy and protectiveas I experience themisolate me
from the exterior. So far they, or my presence within them, have managed
to keep at bay the madness of political leaders whose malice is steadily on
the rise. The house walls keep out winter storms, occasional showers, the
memory of a pathetic figure that threatened to sneak in like a Trojan mare,
the hum of airplanes dropping bombs, and the rumble of bulldozers constantly grating their colossal teeth on building materials just a few dozen
6.4 Israeli soldiers face resistance as they prepare to take possession of a Palestinian
house, Jayyus, February 2009. Photo courtesy of Keren Manor, Activestills.
kilometers from here. Our house walls enable us to forget the outside even
when it is being experienced as unbearable. Although I have spent many long
days carefully studying the images of house demolitions, as I leaf through
the newspaper that publicizes photographs of the arenas of destruction, and
although I come in from the street and lock the door behind me, sharing the
common space of home with my family, I do not worry that my walls will
tremble in a moment without my understanding what has happened, that
my lungs will be filled with dust, that I will find myself brushing off pieces of
plaster still patchy with flowery wallpaper, or that my picture could be taken
as I stand next to a pile of objects that once were my home.
The moment I finish writing this description, I feel a rush to delete it, not
leaving a trace, to rewrite it as an explicit confession of its factual refutability
and some of the half-knowledge-half-prediction that goes through my head
from time to timeunder circumstances whereby today those are their
homes, but tomorrow they will be our homes. But something urges me
not to give up the description I began, to leave it there and take it seriously,
insist on the reality it depicts and from it outline a psychopolitical reality
that is not private but rather shared by Israeli citizens of Jewish descent. The
regime to which I am subject has demolished close to 300,000 houses since
it was founded in 1948. And yet something in this reality has caused mefor
most of my life, except for those moments when I made myself think about
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the possibility that my home, too, could be demolishednot to sense any

real threat to my home.
What is this confidence that the bulldozernever resting for a moment
would not reach my neighborhood? It is easy to write off this confidence as
marginal to the phenomenon of house demolitions and to regard thinking
about demolitions in that way as a luxury of those who are not the direct victims of them. But any analysis of house demolitions that leaves this thought
unaccounted for actually perpetuates the banality of destruction as it takes
place in democratic regimes. It is banal to the extent that Israeli citizens of
Jewish origin do not wonder why only their houses are demolished and
why those who partake in the whole chain of destructionfrom intent to
finishare not incriminated and prosecuted. The differential demolition
as well as the inability to perceive continuous destruction as a crime organized by the regime are forcibly remnants of imperial time.
The destruction of 250,000300,000 houses since the founding of the
State of Israel, destruction carried out by the state or bodies acting on its
behalf, is a phenomenon that can only be understood in the context of the
regime and as a part of the way in which the regime regulates the mode
of existing-together of all those governed by it. After the mass expulsion
carried out in a relatively short period of timeabout 700,000 Palestinians in the years 194749the demolition of houses has been, and continues to be, the most extensive and consistent disaster carried out by the
regime that came into power here.6 Since it was founded in the late 1940s,
this regime has turned the home into the arena where the boundaries of the
body politic are demarcated. These boundaries separate those whose homes
are protectedand worthy of protectionfrom those whose house walls
are exposed, penetrable, given to violation and demolition. The protected,
confidence-inspiring home space enjoyed by citizens of Jewish descent is a
decisive contribution to the way in which, in spite of the regimes consistent
actions, those citizens continue to imagine the regime under which they live
as a worthy one. They can imagine it this way because they experience it as a
regime in which separation is maintained between the private and the public
domains. They can imagine it as suchjust as this separation is imagined as
realitybecause they imagine the regime only in relation to the body politic
of which they are members (which admittedly does not include those whose
homes may be violated). Destruction is an arena which exposes the lack of
agreement between a certain governed populationthose not considered or
counted in a regimes discourseand the ruling power, a lack of agreement
about the separation between the private and the public domain. I wish to
conceptualize this lack of agreement and contain it in the description of the

regime.
Hannah Arendt turned the actual distinction of the private and public
domains into a political question, thereby reshaping the boundaries of political philosophy. Inspired by her, I return to this distinction, which both
separates and binds the private and the public domains, in order to discuss
the conditions in which the demolition of peoples homes has become a
foundation of a democratic regime, as well as a banal event in it.7 However,
I shall not make do with the manner in which Arendt distinguished between
the two domains; instead, I propose a renewed conceptualization of their relationship that will enable me not only to describe the world and criticize the
way it is run, but also to designate some new possibilities it contains. I do so
through a civil discourse, the principles of which I shall present toward the
end of the present discussion.
No doubt, wherever public life and its law of equality is completely victorious, Arendt wrote in 1949, wherever a civilization succeeds in eliminating or reducing to minimum the dark background of difference, it will
end in complete petrification and be punished, so to speak, for having forgotten that man is only the master, but not the creator of the world.8 From
among the various characteristics that differentiate the two domains, I shall
emphasize one that arises from Arendts own words: the public domain is
characterized by equality and the necessity to protect it, while the private
domain is characterized by difference and the necessity to protect that. Vis-vis the threat of the reasoning of one domain overtaking that of the other,
Arendt rose as a prophet of doom to warn against impending catastrophe.
The separation of the two domains and the protection of their unique characteristics was essential, she claimed, not only to preserve the distinction,
but also to protect humans from mans distorted conception of himself as
creator of the world, instead of understanding himself as one who shares
the world with others, limiting them and being limited by them. The horror clearly emerging from Arendts description results from the fact that
instead of looking for equality in the political realmequality of all those
governedthe desire for equality is aroused distortedly in persecuting its
objects in the private domain and acts to remove anyone designated by it as
a carrier of difference. This desire aspires to create racial, ethnic, or religious
uniformity in the private domain and, in the image of this purified space, to
mark the boundaries of the body politic and the egalitarian political space
that would accommodate it. This accommodation is impossible by definition, even though the powerfulin the modern age, the civil-privileged are
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among themimagine the body politic to which they belong as clear of any
difference as all belong to the same race, ethnicity, or religion. But the differences among individuals can never be erased by political equality, and they
remain constant by the mere singular existence of each and every individual.
Instead of focusing on panic at the sight of the different, Arendt identifies panic at the sight of the same, those who instead of taking part in the
world with others who share its design, act as though they were its creators
and act to establish it in their own image.
Ethnic cleansing is an ultimate solution for the creation of such a world
because it strives toward a complete removal of difference and the eradication of that which is left. However, in most cases efforts at complete ethnic
cleansing end in failure, manifested in a political language that invents such
categories as displaced, dispossessed, and refugees. These categories, describing vast populations the world over (their number in the modern age
is constantly on the rise), are part of a political language that enables political regimes to turn humans into that which is left and therefore can
be thrown into those particular internal- external zones shaped especially
for them. At times, these categories prove beneficial by generating struggle
for recognition and restitution; but in most cases they mask the political
status of those to whom they are attributed. Their political status, in the
space where they live, is first and foremost that of governed, while that of
refugees expelled from their land is nongoverned, with regard to that same
regime that has excluded them from the governed generality. My use of the
category governed (and nongoverned) enables me to emphasize or renew the link between those contained within it and the regime responsible
for it. Furthermore, the use of this category enables me to suspend the differentiation that the governing power creates between those governed, whom
it recognizes as its own, and the others, whom it governs without recognizing its responsibility for them and thus designates as refugees, stateless, or
displaced persons.
Three Relation Forms between the Private and the Public

Although the distinction between the private and the public domains has
ignited stormy debate in the past three decades revolving around the nature
of each of these domains and their interrelatedness, apparently none of the
parties in the debate denies the actual existence of some distinction between
the two. I propose to name this basic relation between the private and the
public which everyone assumes an empty and necessary relation. Empty beA D E M O L I S H E D H O U S E 203
cause its mere existence is not affected by the various forms it takes, and necessary because we do not know of any forms of human coexistence not based
on distinctions and differentiations that enable humans to congregate and
separate by various criteria of limiting and enabling entry, exit, and accessibility. In other words, this basic form describes the separating and binding
relation of various realms of activity that are characterized anew in different
contexts, times, and cultures.
The second form of relation is a specific historical one, and its basic
model is familiar in its various appearances throughout history, at least since
ancient Greece. The condition for partaking in worldly matters, the prerequisite for entering the public domain, wrote Arendt in her discussion of
the Greek world, is home ownership, the possession of a private place in
the world.9 This form of relation I propose to call the protective condition. This
form establishes a relation of conditioning between the two domainsa
place in the one domain as a precondition for placement and protection in
the otherand thus the direction of this conditioning, from the private to
the public. Modern citizenship formed by the French Revolution continued
at first to identify the private place with possession of property and regarded
it as a condition for political participation. However, shortly thereafter, it
was established that human males as sucheven non-owners of property
could partake of political life. It sufficed to be male and placed within the territorial boundaries of France to become a citizen. Placement of ones own
whether as property owner or notbecame institutionalized for centuries
as a condition for moving between the two domains. The form of protective
condition presupposes the differentiation between the two domains as well
as the necessity to keep them separate in order to administer and regulate
the possibilities of passage from one to the other. As long as this form is preserved, the private domain of those allowed to take part in the public domain
is supposed to be protectedor at least negotiablefrom activities taking
place in the public domain, and all the more so from governmental power
intervention. This link between this precondition of access to the public domain and the protection of the private domain (consequence of the separating and binding relation between the domains) should be seen as part of
the regime and the hypothetical agreement between the governed and governmental power over the boundaries of governance. A test of the stability
of this form of relation and the scope and nature of its implementation on
all its governed, as well as the possibilities open to them to demand its enforcement, can attest to the nature of a regime more than do its constitution,
laws, or common representations.
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In discussing a phenomenon such as the massive demolition of houses,

when the governmental power handles the private domain of its governed
as if it were its own theater of operations and destroys their possibilities
of partaking in the public domain, one might claim criticallyor perhaps
hastilythat the first form of relation no longer exists as the private domain
had already lost its main private features (fig. 6.5). However, if one accepts
the ontological claim that an empty or formal relation between the private
and the public domains is necessary and perpetual, one must explore another way of thinking how the reality in which such a relation seems not to
take place can be accounted for. Nor can one rule out the second form of
relation, arguing that it has an ideological role because it creates a false impression of a stable interrelation while rendering accountable only the movement of citizens between the two domains and ignoring that of all other
governed. However, if one wishes to understand the relation between the
domains as a part of the regime, one must take into account the ideological
role played by this form of relation in representing the regime as proper.
Assuming, of course, that this second form of relation does not illuminate the way in which relation between the domains is maintained toward
governed noncitizens, the consistent and massive practice of house demolitions continues to appear as an exception and not as a constitutive part of
the regime.
A third form of relation is therefore necessary to account for the way in
which ongoing massive destruction shapes the relation between the private
and the public. However, if such a form will account only for the condition
of the dispossessed, then it too would contribute to the description of a split
reality such as governmental power wishes to presenta reality involving
citizens and a proper regime versus a reality involving the noncitizens who
are governed only temporarily and as there is no alternative, until circumstances free them of the world of the former. In order to turn massive house
demolition into a part of the discussion of regime, I wish to show that the
third form of relation cannot replace the first two, but rather joins them in
a way that will provide a complex account for reality that encompasses both
the regimes mode of action and the way in which it is experienced and represented by citizens and all governed alike. I propose to name this third form
of relation, which is the reversal of the protective condition, the condition of
unprotected exposure to power. One can identify and characterize it by observing the state of the dispossessed, internally displaced, and refugees against
whom it is directed. Their presence in one political territory or another does
not serve as a condition for their entry into public space, nor does it entitle
6.5 The private domain stripped of privacy, Gaza, Beit Lahiya, 15 August 2010.
Photo courtesy of Anne Pacq, Activestills.
them to a place within the body politic. Moreoverand that is the meaning
of the reversal of the protective conditionthe absence of this place/ment
constitutes a condition for injuring and exposing them to violence within the
private space of their residence. The inhabited house does not pose a physical or symbolic obstacle in the way of rampantly violent governmental force.
It is perceived as a spatial disruption of the movement of the governmental
force that does not regard itself as limited by those whom it does not recognize as its governed. Unlike the protective condition, I claim, the third form
is neither universal nor unanimously acceptable, and it is usually not formulated as an explicit political project, but rather finds its own winding ways
to expand. The displaced and dispossessed are not perceived as a part of the
body politic, and therefore what the regime does to them is not perceived
as a part of the regime. The erasing of their governed-ness from the representations of the body politic fixes the boundaries of the citizens political
imagination. These boundaries do not enable civil intentionunmediated
by some loyalty or other to the differential relation of governmental power to
its governedto find and shape a place for itself. Those governed designated
as displaced, dispossessed, or refugees are not invited to take part in this
act of the imagination, and so this distorted political imagination, without
an iota of civil intention, can proliferate undisturbed. When the protective
condition is reversed, it is not merely the change in direction of movement,
as though the private and the public have remained two stable domains, but
rather disruption of the individuals ability to possess his or her own place/
ment in the common space as a universal condition for participating in public space.
These three formations of relations between the private and the public
domains do not have the same status as categories describing reality, nor any
less as categories through which thought shapes reality. I propose to regard
the first form of relationempty and necessaryas a tool of civil imagination that enables one to retrieve and present as necessary the distinction
between the domains: the public, characterized as aspiring to equality with
all others governed, and the private, characterized as containing difference
of all others governed. In other words, the ontological claim of the necessity of distinction serves as a basis for civil discourse. The demand that is the
very heart of such civil discourseto rehabilitate the distinction between
the spaces in a way that is universally applied to all governedis a demand
to limit the governmental power and a call for a regime change.
This discourse is based on the assumption that although citizens benefit from this form of relation between the domains, it is faulty when the
noncitizens governed alongside them are denied the same benefits. A civil
discourse assumes that the only way to limit the governmental power is to
speak from the point of view of all governed. Thus, in a reality of massive destruction of a certain governed population, it cannot assume that the second form of relationthe protective conditionis maintained. However,
instead of faulting this form of relation, which citizens are right to defend
and keep for themselves, I propose to place it as a favorable form of relation
between the two domains. And as a consequence of this, I propose to regard the third form of relations describing, as it were, only the state of the
displaced and dispossessed as the general form of relation, a description of
the state of things relating not only to this particular population, but a description through which one must think the nature of distinguishing the two
domains in relation to all governed. After all, when house demolitions become a state project, whose perpetrators are the citizens who benefit from
the second form of relationthe form of protective conditionthey cannot
continue to be described as relevant merely to the population whose houses
are being demolished. It must be discussed as a phenomenon that shapes
the form of coexistence of all governed, those who commit house demolition
and those who suffer from it.
What Is House Demolition?

Since 1948, the local landscape of Palestinewhich became Israelhas
been sown with tens of thousands of house ruins (forming statistics that
are sorted by years and regions), photographs of ruins and rubble have been
produced and distributed, and various linguistic patterns have been shaped
to report the destruction (in time of warfare, terrorist nests, illegal construction, razing, military needs, etc.). These are naturally assembled
into the matter-of-fact category of house demolitions, as if it were some
routine phenomenon existing somewhere in the private domain of the relevant homeowners, with no interest whatsoever to the general public in
whose name and for whose sake it is carried out.
What hides behind the category house demolitions that gives a name
to so many horrors? What is counted as such? What exactly does it mean?
What is house demolitions when referred to in the plural sense? Is that
which it refers to even countable? Justifiable? Can the number of houses
that the State of Israel demolished between 1948 and 1949, estimated at
about 100,000, possibly justify any end whatsoever? What does the number
100,000 refer to, reflecting as it were the number of houses that Israel has
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demolished since 1967 to the present?10 This datum must refer to the individual countable units that have been totally demolished. And what about
the collateral damage, the neighbors houses that were not slated for demolition but whose windows and doors were torn out when another house was
demolished? And the house whose walls were only perforated while the
army chased its wanted men? And the house where a huge hole was blown
open in the childrens room because it bordered on the house destined for a
targeted killing? How about the one where only its former peace and quiet
were destroyed? Or the one whose walls, thick as they were, could not shelter its inhabitants from the horrific noise of the demolition of the neighbors house? And the houses scattered in between and around them, a part
of their built-up landscape where the owners of the demolished home and
their neighbors whose houses still stand continue to live their lives? Those
houses not totally demolished are not included in the tally, but their numbers
are legion, and the question begs to be askedwhat is the point in counting
them?11
By acts of destruction, the sovereign shapes the nature of space and
changes it irrevocably. Under such conditions, most of the activity carried
out in space, both by the sovereign and by the subjects, is not the fruit of
regulated negotiations with the governed or of agreement. Such negotiation supposedly held by democratic regimes cannot take place here as long
as the sovereign does not recognize the governed as citizens and the governed do not recognize the regime as their sovereign. By means of the architecture of destruction, the sovereign strives to finalize the lack of structural agreement between it and the governed and the negotiation that has
not taken place.12 The justification that accompanies house demolitions, in
each individual case, presents the policy of destruction as an accumulation
of particular cases that are handled in a matter-of-fact, focused, and legal
manner, and characterize the victims, the homeowners and their families, as
felons who forced the law to act as it did. For many years, these justification
mechanismsand, in a way, the negotiation over concrete justifications as
welldid not enable one to think of the destruction as a complete, independent project, as a form of relation between public and private spacethat
which I have described as the condition of unprotected exposure to powerwhich
the regime intends for Palestinians only.
A comprehensive picture of house demolitions is still inexistent, and can
be only partially assembled from several existing databases. The postulated
solidity of the category house demolitionit seems one can state this with
certainty todayis generated a posteriori, from the ongoing, daily destrucA D E M O L I S H E D H O U S E 209
tion, which is justified by the regime and outrageous to only a few, to the
original, constituent destruction that took place in the late 1940s. The governmental effort to stabilize the category of destruction and limit its discussion to one of ways, means, and justifications preserves house demolitions
as a marginal phenomenon existing within a proper political space where the
protective condition is the dominant, characteristic relation between the
private and public domains.
The current destruction, carried out mainly in the West Bank and Gaza,
but also, on a more modest scale, within the Green Line, uproots house by
house, individually, having established for each a special file and enriched
it with warning notices and decrees, evidence and justifications extracted
from both local and international law. That destructionthe one that constituted the Israeli regime in 1948introduced an outline for a nationwide
destruction plan whose justification has constituted the law, which, in turn,
has furnished it with inspiration and licensea plan as abstract and general
as the aforesaid contours.
The Israeli regime has demolished hundreds of thousands of houses since
1947. The creation of a continuity between these different practices of destruction (in the 1940s and today), as well as the difficulty in seeing through
or beyond this continuity, are part of the system responsible for the transformation of destruction into a means, a part of the constituent violence of
the regime. This continuity is preserved by Israeli citizens of Jewish origin in
their denial that the destruction is part of the regime to which they are subject. The continuity between the current destruction and the constitutive destruction lies primarily in the fact that destruction was shaped as a vehicle
one in a repertoire of available means whose significance is determined only
according to the end to which they are subordinated. There are those whose
home gives them access to public space and is immune to demolition, and
there are those whose own home does not give them a place in public space,
and therefore their home loses its sanctity as a human dwelling and is designated for demolition or invasion.
Thus, while the end is dissociated from the means and determines its
meaning from the outside, the demolition of houses becomes an available
means whose use is self- explanatory. When destruction becomes an automatic means in the hands of the regime, the authorities and their servants
become authorized to generate destruction and to generate knowledge that
enables and justifies the use of destruction to obtain goals defined as external to it. The Palestinian house has thus lost its sanctity as a home, and can
therefore be violated.
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The Condition of Unprotected Exposure to Power

The history of this violability goes back more than sixty years. It can be told
from the destruction of Palestinian houses, but it should be told also from
the silencing of Jewish voices opposing the uprooting of Palestinians from
their houses. These voices were hushed that very moment by the nationalist
voice that overtook the military and political leadership of the Jewish public,
making expulsion a given. This leading voice stammered in its official declarations but was nonetheless determined in its concrete practices and managed to expel 750,000 Arabs from the areas of British Mandate Palestine.
Beginning in 1948, over the course of a year, Jewish soldiers went from village to village and, when called on, from home to home, tearing Arabs away
from their dwellings and lands. At times the soldiers used indirect means
rumors about the destiny of Arabs who chose not to leave their homes, truck
convoys to help them leaveand at others, direct physical threat and violence. Expulsion aimed first and foremost to remove Palestinians from their
place in public space in order not to disrupt the creation of a Jewish majority
with governing institutions in its image.
The exclusively Jewish public space cleansed the Palestinian home of the
sanctity with which individuals imbue their private space and which is supposed to make it inaccessible to others unless they admit them. Since that
time, the Palestinian home has not ceased to be threatened by the very logic
and operating patterns that present that home to the Israeli public (as well
as to world public opinion) as an existential menace to the intactness of the
public space and to the possibility of preserving the protective relation between the private and public space solely for Jews.
The Palestinian home has never been perceived as a private domicile
whose four walls shelter its dwellers from invaders and strangers. The
Israelis do not regard the Palestinians as homeowners in the usual sense of
the term, and do not conceive of themselves as invaders or strangers. Palestinian homes are vulnerable to nightly incursions, bulldozer activity, bombs
dropping from the skies, missile barrages, and shootings that make them
uninhabitable. They are appropriated to create army outposts, positions, and
headquarters, depending on changing circumstances and increased security necessities. The explanation given for these actions is that they are necessary in order to flush out the terrorists from their nests, suppress resistance, or destroy insurgent infrastructure. Thus the Palestinian home
is presented as a military outpost of the enemy, calling for military intervention. The Palestinian home constitutes a problem; military intervention is
its solutionor at least a means to solving the problem. More precisely,

the home becomes penetrable and violable because it has been perceived
by some local Israeli commander as a security problem or as providing a
means toward a solution.
The Enterprise of Destruction

The United Nations Partition Plan of 29 November 1947 was a formative
moment in the process of ruination of Palestine-Eretz Israel.13 It gave international validity to the efforts of Jewish leadership to determine, by themselves, the future of a place with an Arab majority, into which Jewish immigrants had blended over several decades. The establishment of a Jewish state
was the professed, explicit goal, the realization of which entailed mobilizing
the majority of the Jewish population in the land for a whole range of activities. The nation-building (binyan haaretz) ethos infused everything that happened in Palestine in the late 1940s with sense and direction. Under the guise
of construction activities, or concurrent with them, hundreds of thousands
of destructive acts were also carried out. This duality was part of the British
imperial legacy.14 The destructive acts were shaped as a means to obtain an
aforesaid explicit goal. The destruction was built into the discourse as subordinated to a higher cause, whereby it was systematically dwarfed, and for
several decades never emerged in its exposed formas literal destruction.
It was a large-scale destruction enterprise in which thought, resources, and
talents were invested, whose implications went far beyond the instrumental
nature ascribed to it by its architects.
The history of the destruction enterprisewhich has shaped, and continues to shape, the economic, cultural, political, moral, and civil world of
the residents of this placehas yet to be written; on occasion, however,
a fault line may be identified which has begun to mark the destruction as
the object of research independent of the justification story conceived by
those responsible for it. The fault line enables us to start regarding the destruction as an enterprise in and of itself, to gauge its scope, to reflect on
its depth, and to analyze it not only in the national context.15 Such dissociation is necessary, yet it calls for great caution, lest destruction emerge as
one- dimensionalas a delimited activity executed and completed within
the boundaries determined by its perpetrators, an activity affecting only the
lives of those whose homes were destroyedand the assumption emerge
that all that remains is to put it in writing, to record it as a chapter of the
past.
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Transforming destruction into a means expresses the sovereign power,

its strength not only to render destruction a matter of course, but also to
conceal information pertaining to it, thereby striving to stabilize its meaning alone, to compel its derivation from the target and from the intentions
of those implementing it. Tracing the meanings of destruction independent
of the subordinated meansgoal relations, one realizes not only that it is not
a means, but that it is also not entirely in the hands of the perpetrator, as if
there were only one party that could ruin construction and hide the traces of
that ruination. The destruction occurs between those who destroy and those
who suffer destruction, and sometimes also between many, as they were
before splitting into two partiesthose destroying and those suffering destruction. When one begins to regard destruction in this manner, it turns out
that the act of destruction destroys not only that which its architects declare
that they are destroying, but also the very configuration of life which is devoid of destruction, destroyer, and the victim of destruction. The ruination
and its concealment are akin to betrayal of the pact, the partnership, and the
promise which formed the basis for being-together.
The destruction enterprise initiated by the leaders of the Jews in the late
1940s was applied, as aforesaid, to isolated houses only rarely: focused rescue of an ancient synagogue, of a Crusader fortress, or of ordinary buildings which, left isolated and intact, were no longer perceived as a temptation
and a catalyst for the return of the deportees. New construction which soon
surrounded these isolated buildings lent them an antiquated look devoid
of a concrete history. The destruction began with momentum and was aimed
at entire residential environments, whose destroyerswho became the masters of the landno longer wanted their existence. Today it is hard to isolate
a single cause and determine whether it was due to national, political, economic, demographical, spatial, or cultural reasonsor all of these together.
The implementation of the demolition plan was made possible through the
collaboration of the new Jewish citizens of the land. Many of them were
thrilled by the plan to establish a state for the Jewish people, and were thus
harnessed for an act of construction which also included destruction. The
destruction included in the plan was built in as a means to overcome threats
and obstacles on the way to its realization: paving safe roads, creating territorial continuity, or absorbing the persecuted Jews of the world. The general
goal which could have been obtained in different waysestablishment of a
state for the Jewish peoplewas translated by the Jewish leadership (and,
subsequently, of the state) into a destructive goal whose means were equally
destructive: establishment of a state for the Jewish people on the ruins of
the society that had lived here in the late 1940s. In many ways, that society
was already the outcome of Jewish-Arab blending that spawned different
forms of being-together.16 Being-together is not an ideal characterization,
but rather a term intended to describe the way in which people lead their lives
among and together with other people. Against the backdrop of the forms of
life that existed here, the destruction, which was structured and presented as
a means in the service of something other than destruction, became in fact
an end in itselfdestruction of the mixed society that had developed here, and the removal of anything that might enable its resurrection.
A Single (Flawed) Public Space

Through practices of destruction, the Jewish military and political leadership managed to tighten its grip of space, and to administer the movement
of the local population in that spacedifferentially. Immediately following
the United Nations resolution to partition the land, public space was conquered with the military reasoning that enabled the mobilization of Jewish
citizens around the idea of a total national warwith the Arab residents in
the role of the enemy to be vanquishedand around the necessity of creating a public Arab-free living space. Expelling the Arabs from their homes
and the demolition of those homes in order to prevent return was then constructed as a mean to that end. That end would not have been attainable
without mobilizing Jewish citizens to take part in the destruction project as
civilians and as soldiers.17 Thus, the destruction practice expresses not only
power relations between sovereign and governed, but also between the governed of one ethnicity and those of another, relations which, in the State of
Israel, have been polarized and conflictive.
In the years 194749 local space was irrevocably changed: entire Palestinian villages were destroyed; Palestinian construction became sparse in
certain crowded urban areas of the larger cities; Jewish immigrants were
housed in homes of Palestinians who had been expelled; and new construction and forestation enterprises emerged, vigorously covering up much of
the destructions scarring. Of the various characteristics of the new space
that emerged, I point only to the appearance of boundaries and spatial delineations that objectivized the new ethnic division of the space. The Palestinian inhabitants who were expelled were crowded over the border, turning
into refugees, or what I call nongoverned by the new regime that was instated here. The Palestinians who remained in the land and became a minority were concentrated in ghettos and subjected to military rule. The Jews,
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now a majority, were busy building for themselves a national Jewish home.
This violent differentiation of populations and the radically different possibilities that opened up to one population and closed for the other, invite us
to describe the Palestinians as denied public space or as denied the right to
take part in it, and the Jews as permitted to move freely in public space.
But this description misses the point because it presupposes that public space
can be measured regarding one population, while distinguishing it from
another population that is governed alongside it. Moreover, this description
itself bears witness to the public space, flawed as it is, captured in its logic of
replacing generality with differentiality as its organizing principle. In other
words, since 1947 until the present, public space has lost its most important
principlebeing open for participation to anyone who owns his or her own
place/ment in that space. The 1967 Occupation and the horrific destruction
it entailed has settled within this model and was conducted as a part of that
destruction enterprise that has not ceased to this very day.
Destruction as a Regime Feature

Israeli citizens of Jewish descent are permanently living their lives in destruction arenas originating in 194748, but they do not see them as such because in most cases these places have been naturalized through categories
such as ruins, Ottoman architecture, oriental construction, sheikhs
tomb, Forest of the Righteous, and so onthat conceal the violence of
ruination as an active, ongoing process.18 Israelis are also constantly exposed to arenas of destruction that are still produced in the occupied territories. Nor do these appear to them as arenas of destruction, which is due
to the massive justification and intimidation mechanisms of the security
kind. Destruction that does not appear as such. It does not then expose itself
as the naked truthan expression of disagreement between governed and
government as to the nature of the shared space.
The figure of the sovereignfounding cities, appointing architects and
engineers, even commissioning professionals from faraway lands to help
him make his mark on the space without asking permission of the governedis familiar to us since antiquity. Evidence of this dimension of sovereign power abounds in the modern era as well and is manifested in the sovereigns right to erect monuments that change built-up space without official
tender or civil agreement. In modern France, for example, this right
reserved for the president of the republichas an architectural context par
excellence and an explicit royalist connotation: fait du prince. In democratic
regimes the sovereign is entitled to this privilege as long as he makes measured, controlled use of it. The monument is supposed to glorify the president through the pleasure and benefit he bestows on all citizens.
In its more than sixty years in the Gaza Strip, sovereign power has made
extensive use of this privilege reserved for the sovereign in special cases although its governance is not agreed on and although at least its nongoverned
in the refugees camps and its subjects in the occupied territories do not recognize its authority. It has extensively interfered in space without sharing
such space with its governed, the Palestinians. This massive intervention exceeds the authorities and right of the sovereign, and has been enabled chiefly
through the divide and rule policy applied to citizens and noncitizens. The
agreement of the governed and their participation in decision-making
processes about their habitat have solidified in the past decade into important categories of public discourse, promoted by Jews and for Jews, tolerant
of the fact that they have been systematically denied the Palestinians, who
are still naturally perceived as noncitizens and as stateless, and who are
therefore denied the rights to which citizens are entitled.
The Oslo Accords divided the occupied territories into differentiated areas
of Israeli and Palestinian control. But even after the accords, the occupation
regimeusing its massive military mightdid not refrain from functioning
as the ultimate ruler with regard to all matters concerning the administration and organization of space, even in areas assigned to the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli government acts as one who wishes to show publicly and
unequivocally that no walls pose an obstacle and no domicile is a sanctuary.
Homes of those suspected of resisting the occupation serve as a favorite site
for the Israeli governments demonstrations of forcewatch and beware.
Often the inhabitants of demolished houses are not themselves the suspects,
but the families of suspects.
However, resistance to his force is not the only pretext used by the sovereign when he comes to demolish houses. Thousands of homes, vegetable
gardens, fruit groves, and orchards are destroyed because their situation is
in the way of some combat operation or prevents some colony from developing and expanding. In the areas left under its full control, the occupation
rule sanctions the demolition of houses through legalities. The process is
relatively simple and is based on a systematic rejection of applications for
building permits, a diabolical ploy assigning structures an illegal status and
thus fating them to be demolished.
These interventions in space, a sign of frequent exercise of the sovereigns
privilege, hurt Palestinians and cause them immediate damages.19 Such dam216A R I E L L A
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ages, naturally, exceed the simple multiple sum of the damages of home
demolition or checkpoint to their direct victims. Such damages, taking
place in shared space, affect the ways space is used by the population at large,
not only those whose body, property, mind, or private time have been assaulted. These interventions are present in public space in several main forms.
1. Spectacle, usually limited in time, of the momentary occurrence of
destruction.
2. Ongoing presence of the results of the damage in the form of various
textures of destruction.
3. Architectural phrases whose syntax is made up of modular units
created for military needs of administering population.
These three forms are imposed on the Palestinians, hurt them, and perpetuate subjugation in the power relations between them and the Jewish
citizens. The status of Palestinians as noncitizens does not suffice to exclude
them from shaping their living space. To keep them in the status of passive
subjects necessitates subjugation mechanisms that operate everywhere, all
the time. The sovereign, unrecognized by them and not recognizing them,
appears in their living space and disappears from it while pulling the strings
of the disaster it causes them. The disaster and the urgencies it produces, like
the architectural language it dictates, serve to rivet the subjects even after
it retreats from the ground, to administer and monitor their movement, to
diminish their activity to the bare minimum of needs, and to paralyze their
ability to act. These interventions hurt the essence of shared public space:
being open to movement without exercising violence, and being shared by
all subjected to agreed and accepted regulations and standards. The Palestinians are prevented from moving freely; their limited movement is managed through violent means (spatial or others); spatial interventions aspire
to isolate them from others and deny them the ability to maintain ties, hold
public assemblies, andin generallead a reasonable civil life.
Regime-Made Disaster and Civil Discourse

Much has been written about the fragmentation of Palestinian space (beyond the green line) in the early 2000s, and about the exposure of Palestinian homes to military intervention at all times.20 From different reports,
photographs, and descriptions, a horrifying picture arises of Israels systematic effort to seriously hurt the Palestinians ability to take part in public space and be protected within their homes. As a rule, these descriptions
dutifully present the horror of life on the verge of disaster to which the Palestinians are fated. Usually, they allow no more place for the categories private and public and the distinction between them. Giving up this distinction is an indirect contribution to the delineation of the injustice wrought
on Palestinians by the Israeli regime and the construction of such acts of
governance as eternal.
Reviving these categories and distinguishing them in a discussion of
Israels destruction enterprise is therefore necessary to avoid the impasse
of discussing destruction as an accumulation of private instances and to
turn civil discourse into a discussion of destruction as regime-made disaster. Civil discourse does not wish to create something out of nothing. Civil
discourse seeks to observe reality in a complex manner without accepting
a priori the exclusion of certain governed populations from the categories
by which reality is described. Such discourse is characterized by seven precepts, which are based on the discussion of the forms of relation between
the private and the public which I have here presented.
1. Civil discourse suspends the ruling powers point of view and
the national characteristics that serve it to divide the governed
population and set one part of it against the other, and enables
citizens and noncitizens to join the discourse as partners in the
world which they share as governed.
2. In civil discourse, room is made for the form of human beingtogether that is committed to all governed as abstract beings. Civil
discourse is used to resist the outlines of regimes that presuppose
the differentiation between the governed as both problem and
solution.
3. Civil discourse assumes the necessity of distinguishing between
the private and the public as an expression of a being-together
of individuals, and not as a product of the governing power. Civil
discourse activates civil imagination wherever governing powers
logic threatens to take over the form of human being-together and
wherever the common categories help make this reality appear as the
real state of things. Civil imagination is the means of protection that
the governed have from the governing power which holds mighty
means to shape reality so that it would appear as the natural state of
things. Civil imagination is not science fiction, but rather an effort
to locate potentials in reality and activate them wherever sovereign
power threatens to destroy them.
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4. Civil discourse insists on a single form of relation shared by all

governed toward the private and the public domains, a form that
includes protection of public space equally open to all governed, and
protection of private space containing differencesnational ones as
well.
5. Civil discourse insists on a reconceptualization of the categories it
uses and a denser, more heterogeneous description of reality.
6. Civil discourse refuses to identify disaster with the population
implied by it and demands the reconstruction of conditions that
enable one to regard any disaster as disaster and not just disaster from
their point of view, they being those subject to it.
7. Civil discourse insists on seeing disaster striking a certain governed
population as a regime disaster for which the regime is responsible.
In Public
A house demolition, the locus par excellence of private space, always takes
place in public. Invading the boundaries of the Palestinian home and its intimacy, the sovereign also breaches the boundary between the private and the
public. The interior, to which only close friends and family members have
been invited, is exposed to the view of all and sundry, and the homes most
cherished objects fly up in the air and are shattered amid the ruins, abandoned to any hand. However, the distinction between private and public, as
much as the sovereign abhors it and expresses this in acts of destruction, is
never a result of a sovereign plan. The sovereign can hurt this distinction, or
strive to regulate or monitor it, but in fact it is maintained by the governed in
a way not entirely subjugated to the sovereigns intentions and plans.
A look at dozens of arenas of destruction delineates a picture that challenges the existing categories for discussing private and public space. Especially in the arenas of home demolition, where its rule without the governeds
consent and recognition can be seen clearly, we can identify the efforts of
the governed population to reestablish this distinction.
The sovereign power, wishing to display force, turns the arena of destruction into a permitted place of public congregation, while prohibiting it in
other contexts. Thus, the assembly of noncitizens at the arena of destruction becomes the permitted and most common mode of public gathering (fig. 6.6). Such
mass gathering is usually seen both at the time of the disaster and around the textures
of destruction which remain in the space after the disaster and begin to function as public squares. The sovereign wreaking destruction does not bear responsibility
6.6 Brazil camp, Gaza Strip, 2007. Spectators standing together around a crater
where a house once stood is one of the few forms of public gathering in a public
space that the occupation regime not merely tolerates, but even initiates and
supplies with ample spectacle. Photograph courtesy of Miki Kratsman.
for the ruin that it sows, nor does the sovereign handle the consequences of
ruin. The disasters it perpetrates are justified such that the sovereign is able
to shirk its responsibility toward its victims, who become dispossessed and
displaced overnight. It presupposes, in its stupiditycharacteristic of governing power that disregards the agreement of its governedthat it has the
power to determine how the spectators will view the horror spectacle it perpetrates, and to determine what morals and lessons will be drawn and resonate at what has now been turned by the governed from arena of destruction
into a public square. It is likewise convinced that it has the power to brand
these lessons into their consciousness: We have delivered an unequivocal
message to the populationnamely, that anyone engaged in terrorism, as
well as his close family, will pay a steep price.21
But the sovereigns efforts to rule the meanings and uses of space cannot change the ontology of the political as something that emerges among
human beings and is instituted as relations among them. Even when these
spatial interventions are a severe blow to the individuals ability to act and
to their shared horizon, their joint coping with their disaster and with the
restrictions imposed on their movement creates areas in joint space that
are not entirely controlled by the sovereigns intentions, his objectives and
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A ZO U L AY
plans. In shirking responsibility for rubble removal, reconstruction, and

restitution, he leaves sustainable scars in space and forces the Palestinians
but also gives them roomto cope with the consequences and through this
to rehabilitate a space of assembly. During an act of destruction, the Palestinians are distanced from the site, to prevent violent resistance. When they
are permitted to return, they discover that the damage is irrevocable and
that vertical, three- dimensional structures have become horizontal textures
in one fell bulldozer swoop. Movement in the streets has been stopped, and
its renewed flow is reshaped along the new surface, which is but the texture
of destruction, piles of rubble serving as a kind of public square. The Palestinian Authority and various aid agencies, such as the International Red
Cross or the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who care for veteran
refugees as well as new types of refugees that Israel produces at present, and
for the residents themselves, all try to cope with the goings- on under the
harsh limitations which the army imposes on their freedom of action and
movement on the ground.
Thus, from the place of disaster which the sovereign has deserted and
abandoned emerges the acting-together of residents which is prohibited
on other occasions. A view of sites of destruction shows that congregating
around them is not harnessed entirely and merely to address urgent survival
needs and provide caregiving for the wounded. Every focus of disaster becomes a public square in which Palestinians assemble around a common
object of their gaze, and they establish its boundaries during this assembly.
Their stance on the edge of rubble and craters which the sovereign power
has sown in their landscape contains more than a glance of wonder at the
scope of destruction. In their gaze, and most likely in the discussion they
hold while standing there, they link the place of disaster to the rest of the
city. Their faces are sealed and distant, and at times seem to bear contempt
or hatred toward those who have imposed on them to act within a public
space formed by disaster. With endless patience, those who acknowledge the
limited intervention of the ruling power and know that it will never be able
to completely destroy public space and deny them their common existence
view the sights of disaster and dismiss its perpetrators pretension to reduce
the disaster to an unequivocal lesson. At times it is difficult to tell whether
they wonder at the might of human destructiveness or at the stupidity of
the sovereigns behavior. The efforts and resources the sovereign invests in
practices of blocking and separationmeant, among other things, to limit
disaster to only one side of the space and thus to disengage from it and defend itself from itshow how difficult this separation is, and how scant the
chances are to achieve it. The Palestinians viewing of the acts of destruction transcend the urgency wrought by disaster and open a wider perspective through which one can see disaster as a form of ongoing rule and not as
just an event at a certain point in time. The more sovereign power destroys
space and etches it with disasters, blockages, and separations, the deeper its
grip and the more difficult it becomes to pry loose. The gaze is layered and
mutual, and the noncitizens, destined to view their disaster, look through it
at the citizens who view them from afar and deny the active role they themselves play in its production and the way in which this disaster is theirs as
wellthe disaster of being the perpetrators of disaster.
Notes
1. This e-mail was signed by the CEO of the Israeli branch of a large European firm.
His full personal data were prominently noted at the bottom of the letter. This is the
most abstract photograph of a very harsh series, the last two of which come with a
warning: These are not to be viewed by children. The rest, according to the sender,
may apparently be shared with kids, as a part of this wars booty.
3. In order to counter the images coming from this zoom out site, from which
ruination cant be seen, one may look at the project The Destruction of Destruction. The photographs shown there are drawn from an archive titled Verification of
Building-Destruction Resulting from Attacks by the Israeli Occupation, which has
been compiled by Ibrahim Radwan and Mohammed al-Ostaz of the Palestinian Ministry of Public Works and Housing in the Gaza Strip, with photographs by Kai Wiedenhoefer and Antonio Zazueta Olmos, also of the Ministry of Public Works and Housing.
The photos were collected and edited by Eyal Weizman, with Yazan Khalili and Tony
Chakar. This project is based on the idea of a zoom in into the destruction. This collection appeared in the Anti-photojournalism exhibition, curated by Carles Guerra and
Thomas Keenan, held in Barcelona in July 2010.
4. Many of these people, or those close to them, have been in the army and privy
to its codes, and this was their chance to show off their know-how.
5. For more on acts of state, see Azoulay, Atto di stato.
6. An exemplary expression of this is the official position of Israeli political and
military leadership, beginning in the late 1940s, wherein they strive to reduce the
injury to civilians while focusing the damage on their homes. Thus, for instance, in
the assault on Gaza in December 2008, Israel demolished 15,000 houses (with nearly
100,000 inhabitants) and killed only 1,300 persons.
7. Much criticism has been directed at Arendts distinction between the private and
the public domains. It focused mostly on two matters: the identification she drew between the public and the political, and her designation of the home as nonpolitical.
Returning to this distinction within Arendts comprehensive ideas, these claims ap-
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pear inexact. In Azoulay, Civil Imagination, I point at another failing in Arendts thinking about the political (which I shall not elaborate here)turning the political into an
object of the taste judgment it is (not) political in a way that abandons her ontological claim about the political. In her book The Human Condition, Arendt indeed identifies
political action with the public sphere and designates the home as a space outside the
political, but I claim, contrary to the criticism she has received, that she articulates
the relation between the two domains, making the distinction itself unstable and
necessary only as an empty form (on which I shall elaborate shortly), enabling one to
keep the two domains separate. She thus turns the question of boundaries between
the public and the private into a political one, in other words, a question that cannot
be finally resolved and remains open to a permanent participation of humans in its
shaping, just as the very conceptualization Arendt herself proposes actually does. Her
participation is in fact the problematization and historicization to which she subjects
the division and bond between the two domains.
8. See Arendt, The Rights of ManWhat Are They?, 33.
9. See Arendt, The Human Condition.
10. See the website of the Israeli Committee against House Demolition, http://
www.icahd.org/eng/projects.asp?menu=3&submenu=12. The committee, jointly with
Palestinian residents and international volunteers, acts to rebuild some of the demolished houses. On the history of house demolitions, see Badil, A History of Destruction, Electronic Intifada, 18 May 2004, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2700
.shtml. Badils report explicitly states that these data do not include the demolition
of housing units in the refugee camps, among them about ten thousand units demolished in the early 1970s.
11. I do not doubt the necessity of documenting the acts of destruction and insisting on tallying them for specific needs such as preparation for the eventuality of
negotiation over reparations. Such tallying, though, is hardly sufficient on its own,
and does not make superfluous the need to problematize the categories that serve it.
12. I elaborated on the architecture of destruction in the exhibition that was held
under this title at Zochrots Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2009, in Azoulay, From Palestine to
Israel.
13. For a further visual documentation of the beginning of the project of destruction, see Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel.
14. In 1936, allegedly in response to the Arab uprising, the British authorities in
Palestine destroyed the urban heart of Jaffa (a total of 236 houses were demolished)
during the anchor operation. More generally, control over the land and its inhabitants was achieved either by ruination, as in the anchor operation, or through construction, as in the vast architectonic project of installing infrastructure all over the
land. For more on the projects run by the British Mandate, see Rotbard, White City, Black
City.
15. In recent years, Israeli and Palestinian scholars have been gathering data about
the scope of the demolition, but its full history as an enterprise of destruction has yet
to be told. See Khalidi, All that Remains; Weizman, Hollow Land. See also the databases
of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, http://www.icahd.org; the continuous work by the NGO Zochrot; the exhibitions Constituent Violence (2009) and Architecture of Destruction (2008) presented at Zochrot Gallery, Tel Aviv; and Eyal Weizman on
house demolition in Gaza during the last Israeli attack, in Lawfare in Gaza.
16. The fact that no systematic study examines the scope and nature of these relationships, and that trying to explore this is considered an unprecedented move in the
historical research is an effect of intentional measures to erase the memory not only
of the Palestinian Nakba but also of the destruction of the civil mixed society of Jews
and Arabs. For further reading, see Zachary Lockmans Comrades and Enemies, which describes relations between Jews and Arabs working in Haifa in the period prior to the
deterioration of relations that began shortly after the Partition Plan was announced.
See also Local Jewish Resistance to the Palestinian Nakba, an unpublished lecture by
Eitan Bronstein that discusses statements and actions by Jews who explicitly opposed
the obligatory division between Arabs and Jews imposed by the states institutions, or
who did so by not accepting their particular political ideology (Zochrot, 2006, http://
www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=629; Yahav, Paths of Co- existence and the Joint
Arab-Jewish Economic and Social Struggle). See also photographic references to the issue
in Kabha and Raz, Remembering a Place; Sela, Photography in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael in the
1930s and 1940s. And recently, Lev-Tov, Cultural Relations between Jews and Arabs in
Palestine during the Late Ottoman Period.
17. On the participation of civilians in the occupation through commercial firms,
see Weizman, Hollow Land, as well as the Who Profits website, http://www.whoprofits
.org, which offers an initial mapping of those commercial enterprises profiting from
the occupation.
19. Numerous testimonies of people whose homes were demolished, and whom
delays at the checkpoints have physically and psychologically damaged, and whose
lives the Separation Wall has ruined may be found in reports by Btselem, Badil, Physicians for Human Rights, and others.
20. Handel, Chronology of the Occupation Regime; Azoulay and Ophir, This
Regime Which Is Not One.
21. Quoted in Avichai Beker, Enlightened Destruction, Haar etz, 27 December
2002.
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PA RT I I I
Anticipating the Imperial Future
GASTN GORDILLO
The Void
Invisible Ruins on the Edges of Empire
In 1585 Spanish troops founded the town of Concepcin del Bermejo several hundred miles west of Asuncin del Paraguay in a remote region, the
Gran Chaco, which until then had been in full control of local populations.
The Spanish turned Concepcin into a large, profitable slave center, but a
few decades later, in 1632, they had to abandon the town, fleeing a generalized insurrection. Subsequent attempts to reassert imperial power in
that area failed, and armed resistance intensified all across the region.1 The
Gran Chaco remained a space beyond and hostile to state control for close
to three more centuries. This restlessness created a political vortex stretching between the foot of the Andes and the Paraguay and Paran Rivers in
the heart of lowland South America: a dense maze of forests, savannas, and
marshes that allowed highly mobile groups to repel and undermine recurring attempts at domination. The politically dissolving force of this space led
generations of officials to believe that the ruins of Concepcin del Bermejo
had vanished, swallowed up by forests and the emptiness of savagery, and
the Gran Chaco became in their eyes an opaque, feared, uncontrollable void.
No space of the globe is currently beyond the reach of capitalism and imperial military operations. There is no outside, as Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri put it, of global formations of sovereignty.2 But the Spanish and subsequently Argentinean siege of the Gran Chaco reminds us that prior to the
late 1800s, imperial expansion into vast geographies of the world encoun-
tered political limits that acquired a spatial form. To this day, the people
who descend from the original inhabitants of the Chaco articulate a strong
memory of having lived without the state in a space beyond its direct political reach. But this beyondness was not a pristine outside, the product of
closure, separation, or impermeability. The opposite is the case: this was a
political and relational folding of imperial space, the product of anti-imperial
insurgencies, mobile patterns of confrontation, flows of people, goods, and
cattle crisscrossing vast regions, and regular imperial forays into the Chaco.
Yet in these fluid spatial formations, the state encountered a threshold at
which its power was negated, a space in which state settlements were destroyed and turned into ruins that subsequently seemed to vanish. These
positive expressions of power dissolved on the imperial edge of the void: the
unsettling space of friction that is internal and external to the geography of
global imperial formations.
Based on their personal correspondence, Alain Badiou wrote that Gilles
Deleuze saw the expression on the edge of the void as the intersection between the territory and the process of deterritorialization, the overflowing
of the territory by the event.3 And, Badiou tells us, Deleuze argued that this
is the point at which what occurs can no longer be assigned to either the territory (the site) or the non-territory, to either the inside or the outside. And
it is true that the void has neither an interior nor an exterior.4 The Chaco
was for centuries a space of intersection in which the territory of empire
was overflowed by the event of deterritorialization by anti-imperial insurgencies, in a political process in which notions of inside and outside of the
state melted away.
Theodor Adorno argued that the dominant common sense under capitalism emphasizes the positivity of things as they are, making us forget what
these things have negated and destroyed in order to acquire their positive
form.5 And this positivity celebrates manageable spaces bearing noticeable,
positive markers of state sovereignty. The Chaco was a node of negativity
that folded and eroded not only the positive form of imperial space but also
the positive presence of its ruins. And this negativity unsettled state imaginings because it created spaces constituted by absences. W. G. Sebald noticed
what the void created by absences feels like when he visited the place on the
English coast where the medieval town of Dunbwich used to be, whose vestiges have been dissolved by the North Sea: If you look out from the cliff-top
across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense
the immense power of emptiness.6 The void of the Chaco, likewise, was the
immense power of emptiness that state agents experienced when they were
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confronted with a space that negated the state and made imperial ruins elusive, hard to find, invisible.
In this essay, I examine how state anxieties about the invisible ruins of the
Chaco are revealing of the type of space generated on the edges of empire,
but also of the selective patterns of visibility that state agents projected onto
this void. While resisting state encroachment, this allegedly empty space
and the people living there were often ravaged by what Ann Stoler calls imperial ruination, the ongoing, degrading domination that lays waste to certain peoples, relations, and things.7 And this ruination increased after the
void of the Chaco was destroyed by state violence. Yet the officials preoccupied with the invisible ruins of the Spanish empire made these other ruins
invisible. I will examine the history of the Spanish and Argentinean conquest of the Gran Chaco through the lens of these different patterns of ruins,
those generated by anti-imperial resistance and those created by imperial
ruination. I draw from documents by officials, missionaries, explorers, military officers, and from my own fieldwork in different parts of the region
in the past two decades. The ruination of the Chaco produced by conquest
and made invisible by the state, I aim to show, surfaces in the experience of
people living in rural areas and currently haunted by its latent presence on
the landscape.
The Vanishing of Imperial Spaces

In 1733 the Jesuit historian Pedro Lozano wrote that the destruction of
Concepcin del Bermejo a century earlier closed all roads to the light of
the Gospels in the Chaco and meant that local people were condemned
to die in the darkness of their stubborn infidelity.8 A shroud of darkness
had fallen upon the ruins of Concepcin primarily because a century later
Spanish officials had still been unable to reach them and were unsure as to
where they were.9 Concepcin became una ciudad perdida, a lost city whose
ruins seemed to have been wiped off the face of the earth. In the 1600s three
additional towns founded by the Spanish Crown near the western edge of
the Chaco had been abandoned largely due to the resistance posed by local
groups: the two towns of Esteco on the Salado River and Santiago del Guadalczar in the Zenta Valley. These places also came to be known as lost
cities, in most cases with the location of their ruins also relatively unknown.
The exception was the second (and legendary) town of Esteco, devastated
by an attack launched from the Chaco and subsequently by an earthquake,
whose ruins were at the foot of the Andes near a well-traveled road.
T H E VO I D 229
While tales about lost cities hidden in remote geographies have been integral to imperial imaginaries, they tend to refer to places created by local
actors, such as the mythical El Dorado in the Amazon or Machu Picchu in
Peru. The lost cities of the Gran Chaco, on the contrary, were created by the
defeat of European schemes in the face of revolts. And their disappearance
revealed the spatial limits of the project of conquest. This was a spatial voiding created through recurring violence that undermined frontier settlements
but also devastated local populations in the interior of the Chaco. In the
1600s on numerous occasions troops left Esteco or descended from the highlands of the Andes to capture serfs. And in 1710 the governor of the Tucumn Province organized the largest military campaign ever conducted by the
Spanish in the Chaco, instructing his troops to unleash terror and execute
all armed males on the spot, for they were unworthy of Christian mercy.
Shortly thereafter, the western Chaco was littered with the debris of villages
destroyed by Spanish forces or abandoned by people fleeing their advance.10
The impact of this violence reverberated for several decades, and in 1749 another large military campaign consolidated the frontier on the Salado River
with a chain of forts and Jesuit stations.
Yet this violence did not substantially alter the view that the Chaco was a
terrifying space made up of forests and swamps almost impenetrable for
the Spaniard, a space able to withstand wave after wave of state terror, as if
these civilizing efforts, as a missionary put it, were ocean waves that crash
against a granitic rock.11 This allegedly solid impenetrability kept at bay
state power but not the many individuals of European and mestizo background who, as many explorers noted, entered the Chaco fleeing persecution
by the state and lived fully integrated among local peopleand as hostile
and weary of officials as anybody else. For those human constellations, the
Chaco was certainly not a void but, on the contrary, a space of collective affirmation they controlled and defended by negating imperial power. It was
because of this negativity that the Chaco became for the state an impenetrable object whose spatial viscosity had swallowed up Concepcin del Bermejo and other Spanish cities. And these lost ruins were a recurring source
of unease.
State functionaries and Jesuit missionaries tried to counter the void of
the Chaco through the production of maps that, in addition to delineating
rivers and the distribution of various naciones (nations), marked the approximate location of the lost cities with an X that highlighted their vanquished
status. On the most famous colonial map of the Chacoby Father Joaqun
Camao and published in Jos Solss Essay on the Natural History of the Chaco
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7.1 Detail of map of the Gran Chaco by Joaqun Camao,

1789. From Jos Sols, Ensayo sobre la historia natural del Gran
Chaco (Resistencia: Universidad Nacional del Nordeste,
1972 [1789]).
(1789)four different Xs mark the approximate location of the lost cities

mentioned above (fig. 7.1). The caption informs the reader that X stands
for destroyed city, in other words, for a civilizing space negated by the
Chaco.12
Those destroyed places on the maps made it clear that something violent had happened there, powerful enough to force the Spanish forces to
withdraw to the edges of the Chaco for several centuries. These maps sought
to counter the void of the region by historicizing its space and revealing the
past presence of former bastions of Christianity and civilization. Yet in trying
to conjure away this void, these Xs irrevocably brought it to light by evoking
these towns negativity as ghosts, accentuating the perception that the void
emptied out conquest of its positive spatial forms: that is, that this terrain
was a black hole of sorts because everything that had been built there by the
Spanish Crown had been turned to dust. The Xs revealed a geography permeated by absences, for the very idea of a lost city necessitated a surrounding
space of emptiness (fig. 7.2).
T H E VO I D 231
7.2 Jesuit map of the Gran Chaco, 1772. From Guillermo Furlong, Cartografa jesutica
del Ro de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1936).
Many of the officials who looked out to the Chaco from the Andes were
overwhelmed by the view. In 1883 Daniel Campos, a Bolivian army officer,
wrote about how he felt when he was about to descend from the mountains
down into the void: At our feet, immense, mysterious and overwhelming,
like a terrible ocean . . . stands out the incommensurable Gran Chaco. There
was the Chaco, overwhelming us with its immensity, stirring up our soul like
the sea, pulling us like the abyss.13
Entering the Void

The Jesuit missionary Martin Dobrizhoffer wrote that the Chaco is a space
that Spanish soldiers dreaded entering, for it was for them a theatre of
misery.14 In 1759 a large expedition made up of close to a thousand soldiers
led by the Tucumn governor, Espinoza y Dvalos, marched from the Andes
into the Chaco aiming to cut through to its eastern frontier. At one point the
troops were intimidated by the desert and refused to go farther.15 Facing
a mutiny, the governor decided to turn around and ordered that a cross be
carved on the trunk of a large tree together with a written message that read:
Year of 1759. Don Joaqun Espinosa y Dvalos reached up to here [hasta aqu
lleg] with 300 cows, 4,000 horses, and 900 men and they performed well
[y fueron destacados].16
The production of markings such as this became common in Spanish expeditions in the Chaco, and could be seen as what Patricia Seed called ceremonies of possession: the ritualized assertion of colonial power over new
territories.17 Yet in the Chaco, these performative gestures took place in a
hostile space the Spanish did not control. And in the case of the 1749 expedition, the text was an admission of defeat in their attempt to cut through
the region, which required trying to save face by praising the troops that felt
intimidated by that space. The text also marks a spatial limit (reached up to
here), a threshold that imperial forces were unable and unwilling to cross.
And in trying to turn a tree, part of the physical form of the terrain of the
Chaco, into a more manageable and readable space, these officials also revealed that they found the landscape illegible, disorienting. The engravings
testify to the fear that on their leaving the Chaco, space would fold and wipe
out all traces of their presence.
In the 1760s Jesuit missionaries made deep sojourns in the Chaco hinterland and along the Bermejo River in search of converts, and many of them
were also keen to leave traces of their presence, as if trying to counter the
emptiness of the landscape. The positive object they left most regularly was
T H E VO I D 233
the Christian cross, planting large wooden crosses in remote locations to

which they did not plan to return.18 These solitary crosses were attempts to
create positive nodes that would radiate the presence of Christianity around
them. And like the text carved out on a tree by the Tucumn governor, they
were also messages for future explorers to reassure them that fellow civilized
men had already been there. And they were also messages to those living
there, political gestures of defiance that claimed control over uncontrollable
geographies.
Local people understood the political message carved out on that tree by
the Tucumn governor without needing to read the text. In 1774 an expedition led by Governor Matorras reached that area and found feeble traces of
the text. The tree was semi-burnt, and the message was barely legible because the sign has been axed by the Indians.19 That local people had defaced the engravings suggests they seemed committed to negating even the
smallest traces of an imperial presence and that they intuitively knew of the
political salience of spatial markings.
Yet what made Governor Matorrass 1774 expedition historically important was that it represented a new strategy by the Spanish Crown in the
Chaco. Since indiscriminate military force had failed to control the region,
Matorras set out on a diplomatic mission.20 His forces crossed the spatial
threshold marked by that text and pressed on, reaching a site called Lacangay in the geographic center of the Chaco on the Bermejo River. His aim was
to secure a peace treaty with Paikn, a Mocov leader who exerted considerable influence in a wide region. After the governor distributed vast amounts
of gifts, Paikn agreed to become a subject of the king of Spain and to allow
for the future foundation of two mission stations but on condition that his
people retain control of their lands and not be subject to servitude. The treaty
was signed following formal royal protocol, and in order to commemorate
the event, Matorras ordered that numerous texts and signs of the cross be
engraved on trees. On one trunk, one of these texts read: Year of 1774. Peace
between Seor D. Gernimo Matorras, Governor of Tucumn, and Paikn.
Matorras also sent men with the directive of finding the ruins of Concepcin del Bermejo, ruined by these barbarian nations, but the search proved
futile. Yet the expedition had managed to reach a remote area of the Chaco
where, according to the official report, there was no memory of Spanish
troops ever having been there.21
The signing of the treaty led to the first major attempt since the demise
of Concepcin del Bermejo to create a civilizing, positive spatial form in the
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heart of the Chaco. In 1780 Francisco Arias led an expedition to Lacangay

to implement the foundation of the two missions stipulated in the treaty. On
arriving in the area, Arias noted that the texts engraved on trees by Matorras
six years earlier had held their ground and were still there, as if he had not
been sure that would be the case.22 Arias proceeded to found two stations
forty miles apart from each other, Santiago de Lacangay and San Bernardo
de Vrtiz, to be run by Franciscan missionaries, despite noting in his diary
that local people were weary of their presence.
The erection of positive nodes of Christianity in the heart of the Chaco
demanded that the ruins of Concepcin del Bermejo be found and wrested
from that opaque terrain, in order to conjure away their status as a ghost.
Arias sent a party south with the aim of discovering the site of the old Concepcin destroyed and locating it on a map. On returning, his men brought
back a bell and reported they had found la ciudad and its irrigation canals
thirty Spanish leagues (eighty miles) from Lacangay. This is the first recorded visit to these ruins in a century and a half. But these men also warned
that the ruins were amid impenetrable forests.23
Arias ordered that the bell brought from the ruins be used in the chapel
of Santiago de Lacangay, in a clear indication that debris from the lost city
affirmed the continuity of the imperial project initiated in Concepcin del
Bermejo. Yet the discovery of the ruins of Concepcin proved as short-lived
as the attempt to create new centers of imperial socialization in the region.
The two missions were far from the frontier, and their supply lines were weak
and intermittent at best. They lingered in a sorry state for about a decade
and were abandoned in the early 1790s.24 The brief visit to the overgrown
ruins of Concepcin, for its part, did not generate a map.25 Those vestiges
were in hostile territory, and shortly thereafter references to Concepcin
destroyed acquired once again a ghostly aura. The same voiding was to engulf the ruins of the Lacangay and San Bernardo mission stations, which
were to engross the list of places that seemed to have been dissolved by the
Chaco.
The wars of independence of the 1810s and early 1820s, the collapse of the
Spanish empire in South America, and the civil wars that followed independence meant that attempts to conquer and explore the Chaco were put on
hold for several decades. But when a unified Argentinean nation-state finally
consolidated its power in the 1870s, the elites in Buenos Aires began focusing their gaze on this old bastion of barbarism, now seen as an obstacle to
the territorial expansion of capitalism and a new national project.
T H E VO I D 235
The Assault on the Desert

In the late 1800s the Argentinean elites began conceptualizing the voiding
of space by savagery as el desierto, the desert, a term that was used to define
all geographies beyond the reach of the state and that therefore included not
just the Chaco but also the pampas and Patagonia in the center and south of
the country, also under the control of armed nonstate actors. What defined
these geographies as deserts was not the barrenness or dryness of their
physical terrain, which ranged from cold steppes in Patagonia and temperate savannas in the pampas to tropical forests in the Chaco. The desert was
defined by the absence of civilization, state power, and capitalist modernity.
As the noted historian Tulio Halpern Donghi put it, the Buenos Aires elites
sought to create a nation for the Argentinean desert (una nacin para el desierto argentino)that is, filling up that emptiness with the positive form of
the nation.26 And the Gran Chaco was the most overwhelming of the deserts
that prevented that positivity from materializing.27
The first sign that the conquest of the Chaco would not be a smooth process was the collapse of the attempt to create a trade route by steamships on
the Bermejo River in the 1870s, which aimed to light the shining torch of
progress in spaces ruled by barbarism for eternal centuries.28 By the early
1880s, the wrecks of stranded and sunken steamships testified to the obstacles posed by a shallow and meandering river.29 Yet for a few years, during
their slow progress upstream, crewmembers speculated about their relative
distance from the ruins of Concepcin del Bermejo and the Franciscan missions. Suspecting they were somewhere out there, the ruins became imaginary orientation devices amid unknown territory.30
The same preoccupation with these invisible ruins guided the final assault on the region. In October 1884 the Argentinean army launched the
largest military campaign ever conducted in the Chaco, and several cavalry
regiments entered the region from the west, the south, and the east. Local
groups put up a fierce resistance, but the times had changed and they were
no match for well-organized troops armed with Remington rifles. After numerous clashes, most of the regiments converged on Lacangay (now called
La Cangay), the area that the Spanish Crown had been unable to secure
through nonviolent means a century earlier. And teams of technicians, engineers, and scientists accompanied the army with the mandate to survey and
map an unreadable space and gather data on its geography, flora, fauna, and
on the habits of local populations. These men were given the directive to engrave topographic information as well as their names on large trees, drawing
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on an old Spanish practice that was now used to make the terrain readable
and manageable once and for all.31
These men immediately noted, and many were troubled by, how hard it
was to find not just ruins but any trace of the state. An engineer named Gernimo de la Serna noted with disappointment there was nothing on the landscape around La Cangay that signaled this places historical importance as
the site where the Spanish Crown had briefly secured a foothold in the late
1700s. Like other officers, he tried to locate the ruins of the mission of Santiago de Lacangay and the famous engravings written on trees in 1774. But,
he wrote, no vestige was found.32
General Benjamn Victorica, the head of the campaign, shared this concern and sent several telegrams to President Julio Roca from the Chaco informing him of the failure to locate those legendary ruins. One of them read:
We have been unable to find the ruins of Concepcin shown by the maps.
Its vestiges must have disappeared; old Indians born in these places do not
know them.33 Officers operating south of the Bermejo were also disturbed
by their inability to find traces of Concepcin: The Indians who are coming
with us do not give us the slightest indication of the place where these ruins
exist.34 The disappearance of the ruins was even more perplexing because
not even local people seemed to know them, as if the void of the Chaco had
dissolved those vestiges to such an extent that their presence had escaped
even those long assumed to master that space.
The men who participated in the 1884 military campaign articulated a
more openly modernist preoccupation with progress and decay, and their
concerns about the voiding of space were particularly marked. This was often
articulated as the terrifying experience of being immersed in a space of sheer
absences, totally devoid of positivity. Leopoldo Arnaud, the head of the main
scientific team, wrote shortly after entering the Chaco: The trek across the
desert is imposing, it triggers true terror.35 A few days later, Arnaud got lost
in thick forests while on a hunting trip and experienced this spatial voiding
as particularly overwhelming: The Indians, the beasts, the deadly reptiles,
that was the picture I was facing. Nobody can fully understand . . . the sensation you go through when stepping onto a totally virgin terrain, on a land on
which there is not even the slightest trace of civilized man.36 This emptiness
emanated from the terrain and from all its living forms: humans, animals,
and suffocating masses of vegetation had joined forces to wipe out all traces
of civilization and dissolve the very distinction between human and natural
forces.37 And the absence of positive traces of civilized man made the voiding of space all the more unsettling. It is probably not surprising that Arnaud
T H E VO I D 237
and his colleagues, replicating the practices of their predecessors, engraved

their names on trees.38
Yet the members of the expedition eventually did come across traces and
ruins of those who had preceded them. Because the absence of traces of
civilization had long augmented the power of savagery, even the faintest of
vestiges were seen as positive, enthralling presences that seemed to pierce,
at last, through the void.
Pulsating Ruins
While following the old course of the Bermejo River (which had recently
shifted its main course to the north), the troops with which Gernimo de la
Serna was traveling encountered the stumps of numerous axed trees. De la
Serna was deeply moved by the sight, which revealed that civilized people
had been there, most probably the crews of the steamships that had navigated the Bermejo the previous decade and disembarked regularly to obtain firewood. He added that it was gratifying for us, amid those deep solitudes, to evoke the memory of other travelers who had preceded us and who,
like us, had experienced the unforgettable emotion of that immense forested desert [desierto boscoso], with the ambition of incorporating those remote regions into commerce and industry.39 Despite their ruptured form,
those stumps were in de la Sernas eyes sheer positivity: the affirmation of
a civilizing quest and the source of an affective connection with those men
with whom he shared the same unforgettable fragility created by that
immense forested desert. Whereas the absence of positive traces created
anxieties about the voiding of space, the discovery of the weakest of traces
seemed to fill up that void with the prospect of progress.
Shortly thereafter, a cavalry regiment that had entered the Chaco from
the west stumbled on an even larger trace of civilization: the overgrown remains of San Bernardo, one of the two stations founded on the Bermejo in
1780.40 The news soon reached the army headquarters at La Cangay. General Victorica was thrilled and wanted to visit the ruins in person, but since
his health was weak he ordered Arnauds team and a group of engineers to
survey them.41 Thirty Wich men who had surrendered were ordered to clear
and excavate the site. The dig revealed the foundations of a building that contained a chapel and several rooms. In order to commemorate the importance
of the discovery and name those mounds as positive space, as ruins, a message was carved out on the trunk of a large tree: Ruins of the Reduccin San
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Bernardo, founded in 1774 [sic] by the most renowned Don Francisco Gavino
Arias. Victorica Expedition, year of 1884.42
De la Serna joined the group and was profoundly moved by his encounter
with those weak vestiges of civilization, which, he emphasized, all explorers search for with zeal amid that absolute solitude. He noted that
the ruins were orderly, allocated in geometrical lines on the terrain. More
important, those ruins show the traveler, with imposing eloquence, amid
the solitude of the desert . . . how much can be accomplished by perseverance
and divine faith when they are put at the service of a noble, generous ideal.43
The seeming weakness of those ruins, comprising a few overgrown mounds,
in fact revealed their positivity and power. Those were orderly, geometrical,
and ultimately imposing and eloquent ruins, sources of a moral light whose
positive force emanated from their location in the void, the solitude of the
desert.
The army officers and the members of the scientific team were so impressed by their discovery of these ruins that they organized a celebration
in honor of the ancient explorers of the Chaco. On 10 December 1884, the
soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry Regiment stood in formation next to the ruins
crowned by the Argentinean flag. Angel Carranza, the war attorney of the
campaign, read the main speech.
Fellow members of the expeditionary column to the southern Chaco: we
have just wrested the mystery of the ruins that we are contemplating. They
belong to a foundation that reveals the bravery of our elders, who with
their faith as their sole weapon, conducted dangerous tasks, setting off to
live among barbarians, with the aim of taking them to the light of Christianity . . . across these deserts that still today fill up the soul with terror
[pavor]. How many changes in only a hundred years! Of San Bernardo, like
Babylon, only piles of dust remain. . . . But the generations of the future
that he [Francisco Arias] probably invoked, overwhelmed by a difficult
situation, do justice to his merits in the presence of this rubble that does
not speak, but pulsates [palpita].44
Carranza could not have been clearer. The light emanating from those
vestiges reduced, like Babylon, to piles of dust was particularly moving because it emerged from an emptiness that was terrifying: the desert. But this
was light that they had to wrest away from the viscosity of the terrain. These
ruins were silent but not dead, still resonating at the beat of Christianity and
blending the legacy of missionaries from the 1700s with the experience of
T H E VO I D 239
officers and scientists who, like them, had gone there to put an end to barbarism. After the speech, Arnaud read aloud their report on the excavation.
Three copies were made. One of them was put inside a bottle and buried in
the ruins, marking our presence there.45 The officer in charge of the regiment shouted, Viva la Patria! (Long live the Motherland!), and all men
mimicked him in unison.46
In their encounters with these ruins, these men were haunted not only by
the past, but also by the future of the project of conquest. Carranza speculated that back in 1780 Arias had invoked, in that mission station now in
ruins, the generations of the future. Likewise, Carranza finished his speech
emphasizing that the Tenth Regiment of Cavalry was being applauded by
our contemporaries and would be doubly applauded by those to come.47
The engraving on a tree and the burial of their report reveal that they were
aware that those ruins would be soon taken over by the forests surrounding
them. De la Serna suspected that those documents and markings would indeed vanish and feared that those ruins, which he had briefly seen as imposing, would be overgrown and forgotten shortly after their departure. How
long will this inscription [on the tree] be preserved? Will the ruins ever be
found again?48
The remains of the San Bernardo mission were the only ruins found by
members of the Victorica Campaign. Confirming de la Sernas fears, the site
was covered again with forests, and public references about these ruins faded
away, as if the void of the Chaco was as dissolving as ever. Yet the geography that was overgrowing these vestiges was not the same as that which had
long overwhelmed and intimidated officials, missionaries, and explorers.
The firepower of those cavalry regiments that crisscrossed the Chaco from
all sides had indeed caused widespread havoc among the human constellations that had created the negativity of the void in the first place.
The Destruction of the Void

In December 1884, General Victorica sent out a dispatch to celebrate the
most complete success of the military campaign. He began by proudly
pointing out that in the heart of the Chaco the troops raised an Argentinean
flag wrapped up on the blood- drenched spear of the last Toba chief who
paid with his life the affront of having assaulted one of our soldiers. And
as in the ceremony conducted at the ruins of San Bernardo, he drew a direct
genealogy between this civilizing violence and that initiated by the Spanish
empire. He emphasized that the army accomplished in a permanent man240G A S T N
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ner what the Spanish, our elders, had unsuccessfully tried before.49 This
genealogy reached closure with the planting of the flag soaked in the blood
of those who had prevented the territorial expansion of state power for so
long.
The vortex of the Chaco could only be destroyed with indiscriminate violence. While sporadic forms of armed resistance continued in some regions
for a few decades, particularly along the border with Paraguay and Bolivia on
the Pilcomayo River, this former spatial emptiness was now being rapidly
eroded by, and folded upon, state sovereignty. And the Chaco was now
riddled with ruins that state agents could simply not conceptualize as such.
The same officers and observers preoccupied with finding Spanish ruins in
the Chaco noted in their diaries, but only in passing, that as they advanced
on the region they encountered a persistent sight: a widespread detritus of
tolderas (villages) abandoned by people fleeing the army. Shortly after noting
that he was unable to find any trace of the mission of Santiago de Lacangay,
de la Serna wrote: Numerous abandoned tolderas lay all over the place, on
both sides of the river or scattered on the edge of the forest.50 He also wrote
that the men and women surrendering to the army looked worn out and defeated. The look of these prisoners was sad. In general, they were weaklings
without strength to flee.51
Yet while the Chaco was no longer a vortex that unsettled state agents,
for decades many areas remained opaque, heavily forested spaces devoid of
roads or railroads. And the memory of those invisible imperial ruins continued informing state commemorations. In December 1943 the Argentinean government decreed that the ruins of Concepcin del Bermejo and of
the missions of Santiago de Lacangay and San Bernardo were historic sites
and patrimony of the nation. Yet the actual location of the ruins was still to
be determined (or, in the case of San Bernardo, publicly disseminated).52 The
decree was a performative commemorative gesture that, like the old Jesuit
maps from the 1700s, claimed mastery over spectral places whose location
was unknown, but that affirmed that the imperial legacy embodied in those
ruins was now part of the nation.
The transformation of the regional geography via the construction of new
roads was nonetheless by then accelerating. In fact, right before the publication of the decree mentioned above, and as if anticipating their sanctification by the state, in September 1943 a local businessman found vestiges
of an ancient city on a recently cleared dirt road, fifty miles north of Saenz
Pea in the territory of Chaco. Subsequent historical and archaeological research confirmed that those were the ruins of the elusive Concepcin del
T H E VO I D 241
Bermejo.53 The man who found them was in fact an avid ruin-hunter, and in
1945 he also found the vestiges of Santiago de Lacangay.54 Fifty years later,
in 1996, officials announced the discovery of the remains of San Bernardo,
which had already been found in 1884. On the Salado River, for decades
several people searched unsuccessfully for the remains of the first city of
Esteco.55 It was not until the very end of the century that academics located
the site. In 1999 archaeologists from the University of La Plata identified,
amid extensive media coverage, the vestiges of the lost city near the village
of El Vencido in the province of Salta.56
By then it was apparent that the ruins of the Spanish empire in the Chaco
had never fully vanished and had, in fact, been there all along. That these
ruins were so intractable for so long primarily expressed that they were in
a densely striated space that state actors neither controlled nor knew. The
thick foliage shrouding these vestiges certainly contributed to their relative invisibility well into the 1900s. Yet despite the media announcements
made at the time about the discovery of lost ruins, these sites had long
been known by local people and had been excavated by generations of treasure hunters.57 But the experience of these subaltern local actors was usually
silenced in the media for the sake of cultivating the image of these ruins as
self-enclosed relics, fetishized objects disengaged from their surrounding
living spaces.
Similar invisibilizations have guided official commemorations of these
ruins. In 1946 the Catholic Church and functionaries from the territory of
Chaco organized a ceremony at the recently discovered ruins of Santiago
de Lacangay. Jos Alumni, a priest who participated in the dig, wrote that
the aim was to celebrate this bastion of progress and civilization in these
remote regions and the heroes of our past.58 The ceremony focused on
the remains of a missionary buried at the chapel in 1780 and identified by
medical doctors as the human remains of a man of white race. His bones
were transported in a solemn ceremony to the town of Castelli, where they
were reburied underneath the church altar.59 These were not the only human
remains found on the site, however. The ruins of Lacangay were in fact littered with the bones of at least forty-five men, women, and children, scattered inside and around the chapel and with clear signs of having suffered
a violent death. Alumni speculated that they were Mocov converts slaughtered by an Abipn group that attacked the mission.60 Yet whereas he devoted several pages to celebrate and victimize the missionary (of white race)
whose remains were found in the ruins, he wrote about those dozens of
human skeletons only in a footnote.61 This footnote reveals, and also partly
242G A S T N
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hides on the margins of the central text, that the ruins of Santiago de Lacangay were actually a mass grave. And Alumni never said what happened to
those bones, the most bodily of all ruins, and often the most invisible.
The Invisible Ruins of the Chaco

State agents envisioned the conquest of the Chaco as an affirmative negation of barbarism that in destroying the vast emptiness of the desert would
create something positive: a land of enormous prosperity and wealth, or as
de la Serna put it, a promising land destined to become one of the most
productive regions of the Republic.62 The capitalist looting of the Chaco
began as soon as Victoricas 1884 campaign came to an end, and while positive spaces of state and capitalist power were gradually created in the region,
the ruins of this new devastation blended with the older debris created by
state violence. The ruination of the Chaco, therefore, did not finish with military conquest but has been an ongoing force ever since: a destructive process
that, as Stoler would put it, brings ruin upon and has degraded not just
spaces or buildings but primarily lives.63 The Gran Chaco is today the poorest, most marginalized region in Argentina and most of the descendants of
those who were defeated by the Argentinean army face recurring poverty, exploitation, and discrimination.64 This experience has generated perceptions
and imaginings that reveal a damaged collective body, as I have analyzed in
the case of Toba villages where peoples subjectivity is haunted by memories
of alienation.65 But the ruins of the geographies that resisted the state also
involves debris of the type noticed by the army officers advancing on the
region in 1884: abandoned and destroyed hamlets that testified to a widespread defeat. In the Toba villages, people evoked the debris of old settlements as well as the rumored sites of mass graves as ghostly presences that
had been washed away by flooding of the Pilcomayo River and the formation
of marshlands in the 1970s. And they also talked about the bones of their
own people buried in the sugarcane fields at the foot of the Andes, where
they worked for decades and died by the score, decimated by previously unknown diseases.66 But elsewhere in the Chaco people know of the ruins that
testify, in their surrounding spaces, to the destruction of the void.
The area of Esquina Grande in the province of Salta, on the old course of
the Bermejo River, was in 1863 the site of one of the largest massacres in the
history of the Chaco. Amid an insurrection triggered by the arrival of settlers
keen to take advantage of the navigation of the Bermejo, probably two to
three thousand Wich men, women, and children were murdered over sevT H E VO I D 243
eral months.67 In 2006 two Wich men took me to Esquina Grande, now an
outlying area accessible only by trails, to see the feeble traces of a village that
probably dated from the 1850s, for it was once linked to a short-lived and
small Franciscan station abandoned in 1860.68 Tiny fragments of ceramic,
glass, and a few nails covered a relatively wide area of hardened, dry soil. I
would not have noticed that debris if my companions had not pointed it out
to me. As they were showing me around and we were picking up those small
traces here and there, they could not stop evoking memories of bloodshed.
Gabriel, in his late sixties, told me that his father-in-law (who, he said, was a
hundred years old when he passed away) witnessed the massacres as a young
boy and told him about them. They cut their throats like animals, he said
several times. It was a sad life.
Gabriel added that in his youth he once found a huesero, a field of bones
and skulls in the forest. Such a huge amount of bones [semejante huesero].
Just like this place. Years later, I tried to find it again, but I couldnt. He said
he wanted to find the place to prove that what had happened was true. Juan,
who was with us, added, pointing to the traces on the ground, These are the
vestiges that we always come to see. They were drawn to that debris because
it was one of the last feeble traces of the ruination of their ancestors. This
was a node of negativity, a reminder of the now elusive detritus of human
remains generated by state violence.
Farther west, at the foot of the Andes, the former frontier is dotted with
debris of the forts, towns, and mission stations once built by the Spanish
Crown on the edge of the void. Few indigenous people currently live in this
region. Those who inhabit the area see themselves as criollos, people of mestizo background who work as gauchos (cowboys) on cattle farms. Most of
them are well aware that in addition to those more noticeable ruins left behind by the Spanish empire, another type of debris testifies to other types
of ruination.
In 2004 I visited the small criollo village of Balbuena, which bears the
name of a Spanish fort once located a mile away. A tall, bright, energetic
man in his seventies named Carlos took me to see the fort, which is on his
midsize farm and consists of an overgrown quadrangle surrounded by cornfields. The place looks like an ordinary patch of forest, but the four corners
reveal steep mounds, fifteen to twenty feet high. While we were exploring
the mounds, Carlos told me that a group of men came to his house forty
years earlier and asked him for permission to dig the mounds. They were
treasure hunters who suspected that the mounds hid some of the legendary riches allegedly buried in the region by the Jesuits. He agreed to their
244G A S T N
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request, and they all began digging. Yet instead of riches they found human
bones. Plenty of them, all piled up. It was a mass grave, Carlos told me. I
think that when they killed large numbers of indios [Indians], the Indians rebelled. And the army of the Spaniards liquidated them and they buried them
here. Therere four mounds here, and we only opened one. But I think all
four of them are the same and have bones. On discovering the bones, they
covered them up again. On my subsequent visits to Balbuena, other people
confirmed Carloss account about the mass grave.
Over several centuries, state agents imagined the imperial ruins swallowed up by the Chaco as nodes of positivity that countered this regions
emptiness. By contrast, ordinary people in rural areas (indigenous and criollos alike) currently tend to see those ruins, like the ruins of fort Balbuena,
in conjunction with other forms of debris and view these spaces as fractured
nodes that evoke collective patterns of destruction. For Carlos, the mounds
at Fort Balbuena are just huge piles of bones. The site is the sedimentation of
corpses that, he assumed, could not but be those of indios. And the treasure
hunters that in looking for riches found instead human remains probably
learned that behind the forms of an overgrown imperial fortification lies the
hardened, invisible debris of the ruination of the Chaco.
Human remains, as Robert Ginsberg put it, are the most intimate of all
ruins.69 The Baroque poets from the 1600s who fascinated Walter Benjamin
had long identified bones as the epitome of human ruin.70 And the myriad
fields of bones remembered, imagined, or found in actual spaces in the
Chaco confirm that the destruction of the void demanded indiscriminate
levels of violence. These are the invisible ruins of the Chaco, made invisible
by the state and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Myriad books and
documents, after all, have sanctified the remains of Concepcin del Bermejo
as transcendent ruins. And the latter are currently not only open to the public but also marked on most maps of the province of Chaco, fixing in space
and making visible what the Jesuit maps evoked as ghosts.
A growing number of people, however, have been searching for the debris
of the ruination of the Chaco made invisible by the state. The same way that
in the 1940s the triumph of conquest was symbolized by the state celebration
of the formerly lost ruins of the Spanish empire, in the 2000s the activists
and ordinary people seeking to undo this imperial legacy are making public
and in some cases locating the debris of bones created by state violence. This
is best exemplified by the recent court cases and exhumation of mass graves
involving the 1947 massacre of Rincn Bomba (province of Formosa) and
the 1924 massacre of Napalp (province of Chaco), which have attracted the
T H E VO I D 245
interest of the media and have been opposed by the center-left federal government.71 These are patterns of debris that activists and local leaders try to
make visible amid the often overwhelming capitalist and state voiding of the
Chaco.
Ruins and Ruination on the Edges of Empire

As part of the journey this volume is part of, a journey away from ruins as
dead objects and toward ruination as an active process of degradation, it is
now time to see ruins with new eyes. The relative visibility of certain ruins
over others is inseparable from the way they are read politically, based on
their positive or negative connotations. As I argue elsewhere, ruins can be
seen as nodes of negativity congealed in positive spatial forms.72 By the mere
fact of existing and not having fully disappeared, ruins have indeed a positive
presence on the landscape, as Robert Ginsberg and Jon Beasley-Murray have
emphasized; yet they are also spaces that evoke ruptures and absences: what
has been negated and is no longer whole.73 And while no ruin escapes this
unresolved tension between positive and negative elements, social actors
tend to gravitate toward highlighting one over the other.
Imperialism and capitalism have long been founded on the celebration
of existing, positive spatial forms. Likewise, those who view ruins as fetishized objects with transcendental historic value, such as the Colosseum in
Rome or Chichen Itza in Mexico, tend to highlight their positivity, presence,
and resiliencelike the men who in the Chaco commemorated the ruins
of San Bernardo in 1884 or the ruins of Santiago de Lacangay in 1946 as
timeless emblems of civilization. This affirmative view of ruins was exemplified by Albert Speer, who famously persuaded Hitler to remake Berlin using
stone instead of concrete so that in a distant future the ruins of Nazi Germany, like those of Rome, would look grand and imposing.74 The Left has
not been immune from this fetishization, as in its nostalgic idealization of
the ruins of Machu Picchu or Tiahuanacu as epitomizing the ancient grandeur of indigenous Latin America. Except that no ruin is positivity alone.
In the vestiges of Santiago de Lacangay, the presence of myriad solidified
corpses negated the sanitized view of those ruins endorsed by the state and
the Catholic Church. And in Machu Picchu, an indigenous man visiting from
Colombia cited by Michael Taussig could only see in the ruins a monument
to the whip used by the rich to make slaves work to build that place.75 This
is the type of negativity that subaltern actors in rural areas of the Chaco tend
to highlight when referring to the bodily debris that conquest left on space.
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These patterns of destruction reveal not only the political spatiality of

ruins, but also the political nature of space. The view of ruins as affirmative
spatial forms is often inseparable from that of space as an entity free of ruptures. The commonsense view of progress, after all, cannot but see ruination
as the enemy of human beings, as something disturbing that should be
kept at a distance.76 A scene in Terry Gilliams movie Brazil (1985) embodies
this hegemonic attitude toward ruined landscapes: roads walled off with
endless lines of billboards that hide from view, with sunny advertisings, the
scorched and lifeless terrain that dominates the horizon on the other side.
What is feared, and what must be kept invisible, is the voiding of the positivity of space and the political illumination that this may generatethe
same illumination that drew Benjamin to study the petrified debris of bourgeois Paris.77
But this essay has also explored how ruins and ruination are affected by
a particular type of space: those spaces generated on the edges of empires
by collective refusals to abide by state power. These may not be the nonstate spaces that James Scott writes about in the case of Southeast Asia, but
they are spaces in which the state form is negated, dragged down, slowed
down, and often halted.78 Even if today there is no spatial beyond the state,
in a not-too- distant past the edges of empire encountered voids that confounded the very distinction between inside and outside.79 These voids were
not trascendental abstractions; they were tangible, immanent negations that
affected countless bodies and the production of political boundaries over
several centuries. In The Persistence of the Negative, Benjamin Noys wrote that
negativity is an immanent voiding of existent positivities.80 This is what
the Chaco was: a tangible node of negativity that voided imperial territorialization.
Tim Hetheringtons documentary Restrepo shows that in todays globalized geography without an outside, anti-imperial insurgencies still have the
power to void the positivity of imperial space, creating a vortex that overwhelms imperial ground forces.81 Hetheringtons gripping images reveal
one of the voids of the twenty-first century: the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, a feared, uncontrollable space subjected for this reason to imperial
violence and a permanent state of exception. The void in the Korengal Valley, however, is different from that of the Chaco, and is certainly much less
opaque. Imperial forces have now full command of airspace and a vertical
field of vision that enables them to scrutinize and visualize all spaces of the
world from above, and bomb the most entrenched corners of the void from
the distance with unmanned drones. On the imperial frontiers of yesteryear,
T H E VO I D 247
by contrast, the field of vision and mobility of state power was constrained
by the horizontal flatness and dense striations of the terrain. And in the
forests and savannas of the Gran Chaco, those who fought off the state for
centuries were able to do to its ruins what state actors do with the ruination
they create, to make them invisiblepulling them toward the void in which
the solidity of the state melted into air.
Notes
The research for this chapter was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am particularly grateful to Shaylih Muehlmann, Ann L. Stoler, and an anonymous reviewer for Duke University Press for their
critical insights on earlier drafts.
1. On Concepcin del Bermejo, see Torre Revelo, Esteco y Concepcin del Bermejo, dos
ciudades desaparecidas; Zapata Gollan, El Chaco Gualamba y la ciudad de Concepcin del Bermejo.
2. Hardt and Negri, Empire.
3. Badiou, Deleuze, 84.
4. Ibid.
5. Adorno, Negative Dialectics.
6. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 159.
7. Stoler, Imperial Debris, 196.
8. Lozano, Descripcin corogrfica del Gran Chaco Gualamba, 121. My translation. Hereafter, all translations of original quotes in Spanish are mine.
9. No map of Concepcin was produced prior to its destruction, and the scant
documents about it alluded to imprecise references to its distance from the Paraguay
and Bermejo Rivers. See Alumni, El Chaco, 36; Torre Revelo, Esteco y Concepcin del Bermejo, dos ciudades desaparecidas, 135 and n1; Zapata Gollan, El Chaco Gualamba y la ciudad de
Concepcin del Bermejo, 20, 6165.
10. Lozano, Descripcin corogrfica del Gran Chaco Gualamba, 349; also 319, 32627, 348.
11. Ibid., 205; Tommasini, La civilizacin cristiana del Chaco, ii, respectively.
12. On other eighteenth- century maps, the X stands next to Concepcin destroyed or Esteco destroyed (Furlong, Cartografa jesutica del Ro de la Plata, map 18;
see also map 23).
13. Campos and Quijarro, De Tarija a la Asuncin, 4546.
14. Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, 124.
15. Rodriguez, Campaas del desierto, 22.
16. De Brizuela, Diario de Matorras, 141.
17. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europes Conquest of the New World.
18. Furlong, Entre los Vilelas de Salta, 120, 124.
20. See Gulln Abao, La frontera del Chaco en la gobernacin del Tucumn.
248G A S T N
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22. Tomas de Matorras, Diario de Arias, 396.
23. Ibid., 4045.
24. See Fernndez Cornejo, Diario de la expedicin de Cornejo al Chaco.
25. See Tomas de Matorras, Diario de Arias, 4045; Zapata Gollan, El Chaco Gualamba y la ciudad de Concepcin del Bermejo, 49, 59; and Alumni, El Chaco, 41.
26. Halpern Donghi, Una nacin para el desierto argentino.
27. See Wright, El desierto del Chaco.
28. Tommasini, La Civilizacin Cristiana del Chaco, 211.
29. I analyze the contemporary social salience of the debris of ships in the region,
in Gordillo, Ships Stranded in the Forest.
30. See Aroz, Ro Bermejo, 53, 68, 75; Aroz, Navegacin del Ro Bermejo y viajes al Gran
Chaco, 12122, 12526; and Castro Boedo, Estudios sobre la navegacin del Bermejo y la colonizacin del Chaco, 47, 1078.
31. Olascoaga, Instrucciones que Deben Cumplir los Ingenieros, Jefes y Ayudantes de las Comisiones Organizadas para el Estudio y Levantamiento Topogrfico
de la Regin del Gran Chaco, 34.
32. De la Serna, 1,500 kilmetros a lomo de mula, 78, also 81, 91.
33. Victorica, Correspondencia telegrfica del General en Jefe con el Presidente
de la Repblica, 200.
34. Garmendia, Diario del Coronel Garmendia, 102.
35. Arnaud, Del Timb al Tartagal, 38.
36. Ibid., 7677.
37. See also Muehlmann, Where the River Ends; Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the
Wild Man.
39. De la Serna, 1,500 kilmetros a lomo de mula, 12930.
40. These ruins had been briefly explored in 1878 by men who had previously abandoned a stranded steamship downstream (Pelleschi, Eight Months on the Gran Chaco of the
Argentine Republic, 56).
41. Host, Informe del Comandante Host, 661; Arnaud, Del Timb al Tartagal, 116,
140; de la Serna, 1,500 kilmetros a lomo de mula, 88.
44. Cited by Arnaud, Del Timb al Tartagal, 13637; see also de la Serna, 1,500 kilmetros a lomo de mula, 108.
46. See the detailed accounts by Arnaud (Del Timb al Tartagal, 14041) and de la
Serna (1,500 kilmetros a lomo de mula, 108, 112).
49. Victorica, Proclama del General en Jefe en la ceremonia de la inauguracin del
Puerto Presidencia Roca, 7374.
T H E VO I D 249
50. De la Serna, 1,500 kilmetros a lomo de mula, 75, also 84. See also Carranza, Expedicin al Gran Chaco Austral, 54, 58, 63, 81; and Garmendia, Diario del Coronel Garmendia, 103, 107, 108.
52. The information produced in 1884 about the vestiges of the San Bernardo mission remained in the army archives and was mentioned only in obscure publications.
53. Morresi, Las ruinas del km. 75 y Concepcin del Bermejo; Zapata Gollan, El Chaco Gualamba y la ciudad de Concepcin del Bermejo. Previously, the ruins of two villages subordinated to Concepcin, Matar and Guacara, were also partly excavated (Alumni, Nuestra Sra. de los Dolores y Santiago de la Cangay, 45n42; Zapata Gollan, El Chaco Gualamba y la
ciudad de Concepcin del Bermejo, 5758).
54. Alumni, Nuestra Sra. de los Dolores y Santiago de la Cangay, 55.
55. See Gorostiaga, El misterio de Esteco; Reyes Gajardo, La ciudad de Esteco y su leyenda.
56. Tomasini and Alonso, Esteco, el Viejo.
57. The vestiges of Santiago del Guadalczar (a town that lasted for less than a decade and was abandoned in 1632) are the only ones that have not been located, but
scholars agree that the town was north of Orn, province of Salta, in a region whose
landscape has been thoroughly transformed by sugarcane cultivation.
58. Alumni, Nuestra Sra. de los Dolores y Santiago de la Cangay, 6465.
59. Ibid., 62, 65.
60. This is a plausible explanation, for at the time Mocov and Abipn groups were
at war with each other (see Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People
of Paraguay).
61. Alumni, Nuestra Sra. de los Dolores y Santiago de la Cangay, 44n41.
63. Stoler, Imperial Debris, 195.
64. The provinces within the regionFormosa, Chaco, Santiago del Estero, and
the Chaco salteoconsistently rank at the bottom of national indicators of quality of
life, life expectancy, nutrition, and levels of basic infrastructure. Capitalist expansion
and state investments have certainly created zones of prosperity, exemplified recently
by the agribusiness expansion that is transforming the western and southern Chaco.
Yet like the capitalist expansions of the late 1800s and early 1900s, these patterns of
growth have shipped most of their profits elsewhere and left behind social and spatial
dislocation, embodied in the displacement of local populations and the destruction
of vast forested landscapes by the expansion of soybean fields.
65. Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils.
66. Ibid.
67. Fontana, El Gran Chaco, 1057.
68. Teruel, Misiones, economa y sociedad, 8687.
69. Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, 407.
70. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama.
71. Marco Daz Muoz, Masacres de Napalp y Rincn Bomba El Gobierno se ha
250G A S T N
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opuesto a que se sigan excavando las tumbas, Copenoa, 18 September 2006, http://
www.copenoa.com.ar/Masacres- de-Napalpi-y-Rincon-Bomba.html.
72. Gordillo, The Afterlife of Places.
73. Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins; Beasley-Murray, Comments to Ships Stranded
in the Forest: Debris of Progress on a Phantom River.
74. See Woodward, In Ruins.
75. Taussig, The Nervous System, 3940.
76. Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, 287.
77. Benjamin, The Arcades Project.
78. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.
79. Li, Beyond the State and Failed Schemes, 384.
80. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative, 101.
81. See my review- essay on Restrepo, On the Imperial Edge of the Void, Space
and Politics (blog), 27 April 2011, http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/onimperial- edge-of-void.html.
T H E VO I D 251
JOSEPH MASCO
Engineering the Future as Nuclear Ruin
Has any nation-state invested as profoundly in ruins as Cold War America?

While many societies have experienced moments of self- doubt about the
future, perhaps even contemplating the ruins that might be left behind as
testament to their existence, it took American ingenuity to transform ruination into a form of nation-building. In this regard, the invention of the
atomic bomb proved to be utterly transformative for American society: it not
only provided the inspiration for a new U.S. geopolitical strategyone that
ultimately enveloped the earth in advanced military technology and colonized everyday life with the minute-to-minute possibility of nuclear war
but also provided officials with a new means of engaging and disciplining
citizens in everyday life. For U.S. policy makers, the Cold War arms race
transformed the apocalypse into a technoscientific project and a geopolitical
paradigm, but also a powerful new domestic political resource.
Put differently, a new kind of social contract was formed in the first decade of the nuclear age in the United States, one based not on the protection
and improvement of everyday life, but rather on the national contemplation
of ruins. Known initially as civil defense, the project of building the bomb
and communicating its power to the world turned engineering ruins into
a form of (inter)national theater. Nuclear explosions matched with largescale emergency response exercises became a means of developing the bomb
as well as of imagining nuclear warfare.1 This test program would ultimately transform the United States into the most nuclear-bombed country
on earth, distributing its environmental, economic, and health effects in

different ways to each and every U.S. citizen.2 By the mid-1950s it was no
longer a perverse exercise to imagine ones own home and city devastated,
on fire, and in ruins; it was a formidable public rituala core act of governance, technoscientific practice, and democratic participation. Indeed, in
early Cold War America it became a civic obligation to collectively imagine,
and at times theatrically enact through civil defense, the physical destruction of the nation-state.3
It is this specific nationalization of death that I wish to explore in this
essay, assessing not only the first collective formulations of nuclear fear in
the United States, but also the residues and legacies of that project for contemporary American society. For today we live in a world populated with
newly charred landscapes and a production of ruins that speaks directly to
this foundational moment in American national culture.4 The notions of preemption and emergency response that inform the United States war on
terror derive meaning from the promises and institutions built by the Cold
War security state. Indeed, the logics of nuclear fear informing that multigenerational state and nation-building enterprise exist now as a largely inchoate, but deeply embedded, set of assumptions about power and threat.
How Americans have come to understand mass death at home and abroad
has much to do with the legacies of the Cold War nuclear project and with
the peculiar psychosocial consequences of attempting to build the nation
through the contemplation of nuclear ruins.
What follows is largely a study of visual culture, and specifically, the domestic deployment of images of a ruined United States for ideological effect.
I argue that key aspects of U.S. security culture have been formed in relation to images of nuclear devastation; the constitution of the modern security state in the aftermath of the Second World War mobilized the atomic
bomb as the basis for American geopolitical power, but it also created a new
citizen-state relationship mediated by nuclear fear. This essay considers the
lasting effects of nation-building through nuclear fear by tracking the production and ongoing circulation of nuclear ruins from the Cold Wars balance of terror through our current war on terror. It is not an exercise in
viewer response, but rather charts the development and circulation of a specific set of ideas and images about nuclear war. I begin with a discussion
of the early Cold War project known as civil defense, then track how the
specific images created for domestic consumption as part of that campaign
continued to circulate as afterimages in the popular films of the 1980s and
1990s.5 I show that the early Cold War state sought explicitly to militarize
E N G I N E E R I N G T H E F U T U R E 253
U.S. citizens through contemplating the end of the nation-state, creating

in the process a specific set of ideas and images of collective danger that
continue to inform American society in powerful and increasingly complex
ways. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington
in 2001, the affective coordinates of the Cold War arms race provided specific
ideological resources to the state, which once again mobilized the image of
a United States in nuclear ruins to enable war. Ultimately, this essay follows
Walter Benjamins call to interrogate the aestheticized politics that enable
increasing militarization and that allow citizens to experience their own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.6
Be Afraid but Dont Panic!

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. . . . To
think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to
think it.
M A U R I C E
B L A N C H OT,
The Writing of the Disaster
Nuclear ruins are never the end of the story in the United States, but rather
always offer a new beginning. In the early Cold War period, ruins become the
markers of a new kind of social intimacy grounded in highly detailed renderings of theatrically rehearsed mass violence. The intent of these public
spectaclesnuclear detonations, city evacuations, duck-and- cover drills
was not defense in the classic sense of avoiding violence or destruction, but
rather a psychological reprogramming of the American public for life in a
nuclear age. The central project of the early nuclear state was to link U.S.
institutionsmilitary, industrial, legislative, academicfor the production
of the bomb, while calibrating public perceptions of the nuclear danger to
enable that project.7 As Blanchot suggests, this effort to think through the
disaster colonized everyday life as well as the future, while fundamentally
missing the actual disaster. The scripting of disaster in the imagination has
profound social effects: it defines the conditions of insecurity, renders other
threats invisible, and articulates the terms of both value and loss. In the
United States, civil defense was always a willful act of fabulation, an official
fantasy designed to promote an image of nuclear war that would be, above
all things, politically useful. It also installed an idea of an American community under total and unending threat, creating the terms for a new kind
of nation-building which demanded an unprecedented level of militarism in
everyday life as the minimum basis for security.
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After the Soviets first nuclear detonation in 1949, U.S. policy makers
committed to a new geopolitical strategy that would ultimately dominate
American foreign policy for the remainder of the twentieth century. The
policy of containment, as formalized in 1950 in NSC 68: A Report from the
National Security Council, proposed, in response to the Soviet bomb, a total
mobilization of American society based on the experience of the First World
War.8 NSC 68 articulates the terms of a permanent wartime posture funded
by an ever-expanding domestic economy, transforming consumerism into
the engine of a new kind of militarized geopolitics. NSC 68 identifies internal
dissent as perhaps the greatest threat to the project of Cold War and calls
for a new campaign to discipline citizens for life under the constant shadow
of nuclear war. Thus, in Washington, nuclear fear was immediately understood to be not only the basis of American military power, but also a means
of installing a new normative reality in the United States, one that could
consolidate political power at the federal level. The nuclear danger became a
complex new political ideology, both mobilizing the global project of Cold
War (fought increasingly on covert terms) and installing a powerful means
of controlling domestic political debates over the terms of security. By focusing Americans on an imminent end of the nation-state, federal authorities
mobilized the bomb to create the Cold War consensus of anticommunism,
capitalism, and military expansion.
Defense intellectuals within the Truman and Eisenhower administrations,
however, worried that nuclear terror could become so profound under the
terms of an escalating nuclear arms race that the American public would be
unwilling to support the military and geopolitical agenda of the Cold War.9
The immediate challenge, as U.S. nuclear strategists saw it, was to avoid an
apathetic public (which might just give up when faced with the destructive
power of the Soviet nuclear arsenal) on the one hand or a terrorized public
(unable to function cognitively) on the other.10 For example, an influential
civil defense study from 1952, Project East River, argued that civilian response
to a nuclear attack would be all-out panic and mob behavior: American society, it concluded, would be not only at war with the Soviets but also at war
with itself as society violently broke down along race and class lines.11 A long
Cold War consequently required not only a new geopolitics powered by
nuclear weapons, but also new forms of psychological discipline at home.
One of the earliest and most profound projects of the Cold War state was
thus to deploy the bomb as a mechanism for accessing and controlling the
emotions of citizens.
As Guy Oakes has documented, the civil defense programs of the early
Cold War were designed to emotionally manage U.S. citizens through

nuclear fear.12 The formal goal of this state program was to transform
nuclear terror, which was interpreted by U.S. officials as a paralyzing emotion, into nuclear fear, an affective state that would allow citizens to function in a time of crisis.13 By militarizing everyday life through nuclear fear,
the Cold War state sought to both normalize and politically deploy an image
of catastrophic risk. Rather than offering citizens an image of safety or of a
war that could end in victory, the early Cold War state sought instead to calibrate everyday American life to the minute-to-minute possibility of nuclear
warfare. In addition to turning the domestic space of the home into the front
line of the Cold War, Civil Defense argued that citizens should be prepared
every second of the day to deal with a potential nuclear attack. In doing so,
the Civil Defense program shifted responsibility for nuclear war from the
state to its citizens by making public panic the enemy, not nuclear war itself.
It was, in other words, up to citizens to take responsibility for their own survival in the nuclear age. As Val Peterson, the first head of the U.S. Civil Defense Administration, argued,
Ninety per cent of all emergency measures after an atomic blast will depend on the prevention of panic among the survivors in the first 90 seconds. Like the A-bomb, panic is fissionable. It can produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive known. If there is an
ultimate weapon, it may well be mass panicnot the A-bomb.14
Panic is fissionable. The idea that emotional self-regulation was the single
most important issue during a nuclear attack (not to mention the ninetysecond window on success or failure) sought quite formally to turn all
Americans into docile bodies that would automatically support the goals
of the security state. Civil Defense planners sought ultimately to saturate
the public space with a specific idea about nuclear war, one that would nationalize mass death and transform postnuclear ruins into a new American
frontier, simply another arena for citizens to assert their civic spirit and ingenuity. At the heart of the project was an effort to install psychological defenses against the exploding bomb, as well as a belief in the possibility of
national unity in a postnuclear environmentall via the contemplation of
nuclear ruins.
Indeed, as the Eisenhower administration promoted the idea of Atoms
for Peace around the world to emphasize the benefits of nuclear energy and
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management strategy within the United States.15 The domestic solution to

the Soviet nuclear arsenal was a new kind of social- engineering project,
pursued with help from the advertising industry, to teach citizens a specific kind of nuclear fear while normalizing the nuclear crisis. The goal, as
one top-secret study put it in 1956, was an emotional adaptation of the
citizenry to nuclear crisis, a program of psychological defense aimed at
feelings that would unify the nation in the face of apocalyptic everyday
threat.16 This took the form of the largest domestic propaganda campaign
to date in American history.17 Designed to mobilize all Americans for a long
Cold War, the Civil Defense effort involved town meetings and education
programs in every public school; it also sought to take full advantage of
mass mediatelevision, radio, and particularly film. By the mid-1950s, the
Federal Civil Defense Agency (FCDA ) had saturated newspapers and magazines with nuclear war planning advertisements, and could claim that its
radio broadcasts reached an estimated audience of 175 million Americans
per year.
As the campaign evolved, the FCDA turned increasingly to film, creating
a library of short subjects on nuclear destruction and civil defense that was
shown across the country in schools, churches, community halls, and movie
theaters. The FCDA concluded in 1955, Each picture will be seen by a minimum of 20,000,000 persons, giving an anticipated aggregate audience of
more than half a billion for the civil defense film program of 1955.18 A key
to winning the Cold War was to produce the bomb not only for military use
but also in cinematic form for the American public. It is important to recognize that the circulation of these images relied on a simultaneous censorship
of images from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
U.S. authorities made available images of destroyed buildings from Japan, but
withheld the detailed effects of the atomic bomb on the human body, as well
as some firsthand accounts of the aftermath.19 An immediate project of the
nuclear state was thus to calibrate the image of atomic warfare for the American public through the mass circulation of certain images of the bomb and
the censorship of all others. In this way, officials sought to mobilize the power
of mass media to transform nuclear attack from an unthinkable apocalypse
into an opportunity for psychological self-management, civic responsibility,
and, ultimately, governance. Civil Defense ultimately sought to produce an
atomic bomb proof society in which nuclear conflict was normalized alongside all other threats, making public support for the Cold War sustainable.
Civil Defense theorists argued that citizens could achieve this contradictory state of productive fear (simultaneously mobilized and normalized)
only by gaining intimacy with nuclear warfare itself, by becoming familiar

with language of nuclear effects from blast, heat, and fire to radioactive fallout. As the RAND analyst Irving L. Janis put it, the goal of civil defense was
ultimately an emotional inoculation of the American public.20 This inoculation, he cautioned, needed to be finely calibrated: the simulated nuclear
destruction in civil defense exercises, as well as the atomic test film footage
released to the public, had to be formidable enough to mobilize citizens,
but not so terrifying as to invalidate the concept of defense altogether (a distinct challenge in an age of increasingly powerful thermonuclear weapons,
which offered no hope of survival to most urban residents). A central project
of Civil Defense was thus to produce fear but not terror, anxiety but not
panic, to inform about nuclear science but not to fully educate about nuclear
war. The microregulation of a national community at the emotional level
was the goal. Put differently, alongside the invention of a new security state
grounded in nuclear weapons came a new public culture of insecurity in the
United States; figuring the United States as global nuclear superpower was
coterminous with a domestic campaign to reveal the United States as completely vulnerable, creating a citizen-state relationship increasingly mediated by forms of inchoate but ever present nuclear fear.
Indeed, one of the first U.S. civil defense projects of the Cold War was
to make every U.S. city a target and every U.S. citizen a potential victim
of nuclear attack. The FCDA circulated increasingly detailed maps of the
likely targets of a Soviet nuclear attack through the 1950s, listing the cities
in order of population and ranking them as potential targets. In one 1955
FCDA map, the top seventy Soviet targets include major population centers
as well as military bases in the United States, revealing not only the vulnerability of large cities to the bomb, but also the increasingly wide distribution
of military-industrial sites across the continental United States (fig. 8.1).
As the size of U.S. and Soviet bombs, and the means of delivery, grew (from
bombers to intercontinental missiles), so too did the highly publicized target lists. Thomas J. Martin and Donald C. Lathams 1963 civil defense textbook, Strategy for Survival, for example, presented a case for 303 ground zeros
in the United States in case of nuclear war. Designating 303 U.S. cities and
towns that would be likely targets of nuclear attack, they concluded,
No one can predict that any one or combination of these cities would be
attacked in any future war. Thus, it might appear that we are trying to
know the unknowable, to predict the unpredictable, to impose a logical
rationale upon war which is, itself, illogical and irrational. But such an
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8.1 Map of presumed Soviet nuclear targets, Federal Civil Defense Administration,
1955.
inference is incorrect. It was shown in Chapter 5 that there are good reasons to believe that a large fraction of these cities would be attacked in a
future warbut what specific cities would be included in this fraction?
Because there is no precise answer to this question, civil defense planning
must assume that all could be potential targets. Any other approach is
thermonuclear Russian Roulette played with 100 million American lives.21
Thermonuclear Russian roulette. Marking every population center with more

than fifty thousand people a likely target, Martin and Latham saw no safe
area in the United States. From New York to Topeka, from Los Angeles to
Waco, from Albuquerque to Anchorageeach community could increasingly argue that it was a first strike target of Soviet attack. Indeed, citizens
were informed from multiple media sources that their communityindeed,
their very living roomwas the literal front line of the Cold War, with Soviet
thermonuclear warheads poised to attack.22
From 1953 to 1961, the yearly centerpiece of the Civil Defense program
was a simulated nuclear attack on the United States directed by federal authorities.23 Cities were designated as victims of nuclear warfare, allowing
8.2 Simulated nuclear attack pattern from an Operation Alert exercise, Federal Civil
Defense Administration, 1955.
civic leaders and politicians to lead theatrical evacuations of the city for television cameras, followed by media discussions of blast damage versus fire
damage versus fallout, and the expected casualty rates if the attack had been
real. In 1955, for example, the Operation Alert scenario involved sixty cities
hit by a variety of atomic and hydrogen bombs, producing over eight million
instant deaths and another eight million radiation victims over the coming
weeks (fig. 8.2). It imagined twenty-five million homeless and fallout covering some sixty-three thousand square miles of the United States.24 Each year
Americans acted out their own incineration in this manner, with public officials cheerfully evacuating cities and evaluating emergency planning while
nuclear detonations in Nevada and the South Pacific provided new images of
fireballs and mushroom clouds to reinforce the concept of imminent nuclear
threat. The early Cold War state sought to install a specific idea of the bomb
in the American imagination through these public spectacles, creating a
new psychosocial space caught between the utopian promise of American
technoscience and the minute-to-minute threat of thermonuclear incineration. It sought to make mass death an intimate psychological experience,
while simultaneously claiming that thermonuclear war could be planned for
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alongside tornados, floods, and traffic accidents. Civil Defense ultimately

sought to make nuclear war a space of nation-building and thereby bring
this new form of death under the control of the state.
Here is how one of the most widely circulated U.S. Civil Defense films of
the 1950s, Lets Face It, described the problem posed by nuclear warfare.
The tremendous effects of heat and blast on modern structures raise important questions concerning their durability and safety. Likewise, the
amount of damage done to our industrial potential will have a serious
effect upon our ability to recover from an atomic attack. Transportation
facilities are vital to a modern city. The nations lifeblood could be cut if
its traffic arteries were severed. These questions are of great interest not
only to citizens in metropolitan centers but also to those in rural areas
who may be in a danger zone because of radioactive fallout from todays
larger weapons. We could get many of the answers to these questions by
constructing a complete city at our Nevada Proving Ground and then exploding a nuclear bomb over it. We could study the effects of damage over
a wide area, under all conditions, and plan civil defense activities accordingly. But such a gigantic undertaking is not feasible.
The problem voiced here is ultimately one of scientific detail: How can the
security state prepare to survive a nuclear attack if it does not know in detail
how every aspect of American life would respond to both the effects of the
bomb and the resulting social confusion? But after denying the possibility
of building an entire city in Nevada simply to destroy it, the narrator of Lets
Face It reveals that the nuclear state has, in fact, done just that.
Instead we build representative units of a test city. With steel and stone
and brick and mortar, with precision and skillas though it were to last
a thousand years. But it is a weird, fantastic city. A creation right out of
science fiction. A city like no other on the face of the earth. Homes, neat
and clean and completely furnished, that will never be occupied. Bridges,
massive girders of steel spanning the empty desert. Railway tracks that
lead to nowhere, for this is the end of the line. But every element of these
tests is carefully planned in these tests as to its design and location in the
area. A variety of materials and building techniques are often represented
in a single structure. Every brick, beam, and board will have its story to
tell. When pieced together these will give some of the answers, and some
of the information we need to survive in the nuclear age.
A weird fantastic city. This test city was also an idealized model of the contemporary American suburb, and by publicizing its atomic destruction,
the state was involved in an explicit act of psychological manipulation.
The Nevada Test Site was the location of nuclear war simulations involving real nuclear explosions and model American cities destroyed in real
time for a national audience. Each ruin in these national melodramas
each element of bombed U.S. material culturewas presented as a key to
solving the problem of nuclear warfare, a means of cracking the code
for survival in nuclear conflict. But in this effort to control a specific idea
of death, the civil defense strategy also forced citizens to confront the
logics of the nuclear state, allowing many to reclaim and reinvest these
same ruins with a counternarrative and critique.25 Thus, real and imagined
nuclear ruins became the foundation for competing ideas of national community, producing resistance to, as well as normalization of, a militarized
society. But while the early Cold War effort to produce an atomic bomb
proof society may have failed, the psychosocial legacies of this moment
continue to haunt and inform U.S. national culture.26 In the remainder of
this essay, I offer a visual history of nuclear ruins in the United States as a
means both of recovering the affective coordinates of the nuclear security
state, and of exploring the lasting impacts of the Cold War emotional
management strategy on American society.
Cue for Survival

On 5 May 1955, a hundred million Americans watched live on television a
typical suburban community being blown to bits by an atomic bomb.27
Many watched from homes and apartments that were the explicit models
for the test city, and they saw mannequin families posed in casual everyday moments (at the kitchen table, on the couch, in bedor watching TV )
experience the atomic blast. Operation Cue was the largest of the Civil Defense spectacles staged at the Nevada Test Site: it promised not only to demonstrate the power of the exploding bomb but also to show citizens exactly
what a postnuclear American city would look like. In addition to the live
television coverage, film footage was widely distributed in the years after
the test, with versions shown in movie theaters and replayed on television.
Some of the most powerful and enduring U.S. images of atomic destruction
were crafted during Operation Cue, and remain in circulation to this day.
Thus, in important ways, the broken buildings and charred rubble produced
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8.3 Mannequins used in Operation Cue, Federal Civil Defense Administration, 1955.
in Operation Cue continue to structure contemporary American perceptions

of postnuclear ruins, constituting a kind of ur-text for the nuclear age.
As an experiment, Operation Cue was designed to test residences, shelter
designs, utilities, mobile housing, vehicles, siren systems, as well as a variety
of domestic items, under atomic blast. Linked to each of these objects was a
specific test program and research team drawn from Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Federal Civil Defense
Administration. A variety of Civil Defense exercises were conducted in the
aftermath of the explosion as well, including rescue operations, fire control, plane evacuations, communication and sanitation efforts, and mass
feeding. The test city was designed as a representative American community, and was made up of a variety of current building styles (ramblers, twostory brick houses, as well as trailers and mobile homes), a variety of utilities (from electronic towers to propane systems), numerous bomb shelter
designs, as well as efforts to protect records (i.e., a variety of office safes).
More than 150 industrial associations participated in the test, ensuring that
the very latest consumer items from cars to furniture, clothing to dishware,
televisions to radio, were installed in the brand-new houses. Hundreds of
civilian participants were invited to inhabit not the pristine pretest city but
the post-test atomic ruins: civilians were simultaneously witnesses and
test subjects, serving as representative Americans and individuals to be
tested by viewing the blast and participating in mass feeding and emergency
operations. The formal inhabitants of Operation Cue were the mannequin
families, dressed and theatrically posed to suggest everyday life activities,
communicating through their posture and dress that the bombing was an
unexpected intrusion into an intimate home space (fig. 8.3).
Operation Cue was designed to appeal to a domestic audience, and par-
ticularly to women.28 Unlike previous civil defense films, Operation Cue has a
female narratorJoan Collinswho promises to see the test through my
own eyes and the eye of the average citizen.29 In its effort to produce a bomb
proof society, the FCDA was concerned with documenting the effects of
the bomb against every detail of middleclass, white, suburban life. The
media strategy involved recalibrating domestic life by turning the nuclear
family into a nuclearized family, preprogrammed for life before, during, and
after a nuclear war. Gender roles were reinforced by dividing up responsibility for food and security in a time of nuclear crisis between women and
men. Similarly, the civil defense campaigns in public schools were designed
to deploy children to educate their parents about civil defense. Normative
gender roles were used to reinforce the idea that nuclear crisis was not an
exceptional condition but one that could be incorporated into everyday life
with minor changes in household technique and a can do American spirit.
Of particular concern in Operation Cue, for example, were food tests and
mass feeding programs. In each of the model homes, the pantries and refrigerators were stocked with food. In her voiceover, Collins underscores the
Operation Cues address to women, announcing, As a mother and housewife, I was particularly interested in the food test program, a test that included canned and packaged food. Additionally, food in various forms of
packaging was buried along the desert test site, in order to expose it to radiation, and some of the mannequin families were posed to be involved in
food preparation at the time of the detonation. Conceptually, the argument
was that at any moment of the daywhile enjoying ones breakfast, for examplethe bomb could drop. The FCDA sought, as Laura McEnaney argues,
to create a paramilitary housewife, emotionally and materially in control
of her home and thinking about postnuclear social life.30 Formally, the FCDA
was interested in whether or not food would be too contaminated in the
immediate aftermath of a blast to eat, and also what kinds of techniques
would be needed to feed large groups of homeless, injured, and traumatized people. Within this scheme of crisis management, food was positioned
as a primary means of calming individual anxieties and establishing social
authority.31 Informally, the goal was to saturate the domestic space of the
home with nuclear logics and civic obligations, to militarize men, women,
and children to withstand either a very long nuclear confrontation or a very
short nuclear war.
Food was flown in from Las Vegas, Chicago, and San Francisco for the
test to document the states ability to move large quantities of food around
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the country in a time of emergency. The FCDA report Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Frozen Food concludes that under emergency conditions similar to
this exposure, frozen foods may be used for both military and civilian feeding, but this conclusion only hints at the scale of this experiment.32 Frozen
chicken pot pies were a privileged test item and were distributed through the
test homes as well as buried in bulk freezers. The pies were then exposed to
nuclear blast and tested for radiation, as well as for nutritional value, color,
and taste. Thus, while building increasing powerful atomic and thermonuclear weapons, the security state set about demonstrating to Americans
that even if the nation-state disappeared under nuclear fire, its newly developed prepared foods would still be edible (making the chicken pot pie a
curious emblem of modernity in the process). Like these bomb-proof pies,
all commodified aspects of American life were to be tested against nuclear
blast, as the state sought to demonstrate not only that there could be a postnuclear moment, but that life within it could be imagined on largely familiar terms.
Indeed, documenting evidence of material survival after the atomic blast
was ultimately the point of Operation Cue. The mass feeding project, for
example, pulled equipment from the wreckage after the test, as well as the
food from refrigerators and buried canned goods, and served them to assembled participants: this emergency meal consisted of roast beef, tomato
juice, baked beans, and coffee.33 The destruction of a model American community thus became the occasion of a giant picnic, with each item of food
marked as having survived the atomic bomb, and each witness positioned
as a postnuclear survivor. Additionally, the emergency rescue group pulled
damaged mannequins from out of the rubble and practiced medical and
evacuation techniques on them, eventually flying several charred and broken dummies to offsite hospitals by charter plane. The formal message of
Operation Cue was that the postnuclear environment would be only as chaotic as citizens allowed, that resources (food, shelter, medical) would still be
present, and that societyif not the nation-statewould continue. Nuclear
war was ultimately presented as a state of mind that could be incorporated
into ones normative realityit was simply a matter of emotional preparation and mental discipline.
The mannequin families that were intact after the explosion were soon
on a national tour, complete with tattered and scorched clothing. J.C. Penneys department store, which provided the garments, displayed these postnuclear families in its stores around the county with a sign declaring, This
could be you! Inverting a standard advertising appeal, it was not the blue
suit or polka- dot dress that was to be the focal point of viewers identification. Rather, it was the mannequin as survivor, whose very existence seemed
to illustrate that you could indeed beat the A-bomb, as one civil defense
film of the era promised. Invited to contemplate life within a postnuclear
ruin as the docile mannequins of civil defense, the national audience for
Operation Cue was caught in a sea of mixed messages about the power of
the state to control the bomb. This kind of ritual enactment did not resolve
the problem of the bomb, but rather focused citizens on emotional selfdiscipline through nuclear fear. It asked them to live on the knifes edge of
a psychotic contradictionan everyday life founded simultaneously in total
threat and absolute normalitywith the stakes being nothing less than survival itself.
Indeed, while Operation Cue was billed as a test of the things we use in
everyday life, the full intent of the test was to nationalize nuclear fear and
install a new civic understanding via the contemplation of mass destruction
and death. Consider the narrative of Arthur F. Landstreet, the general manager of the Hotel King Cotton in Memphis, who volunteered to crouch down
in a trench at the Nevada Test Site about ten thousand feet from ground zero
and experience the nuclear detonation in Operation Cue. After the explosion
he explained why it was important for ordinary citizens to be tested on the
front line of a nuclear detonation.
Apparently the reason for stationing civilians at Position Baker was to
find out what the actual reaction from citizens who were not schooled
in the atomic field would be, and to get some idea of what the ordinary
citizen might be able to endure under similar conditions. This idea was
part of the total pattern to condition civilians for what they might be expected to experience in case of atomic attack. . . . Every step of the bomb
burst was explained over and over from the moment of the first flash of
light until the devastating blast. We were asked to make time tests from
the trench to our jeeps. We did this time after time, endeavoring to create more speed and less loss of motion. We were told that this was necessary because, if the bomb exploded directly over us with practically no
wind, the fallout would drop immediately downward, and we would be
alerted to get out of the territory. We would have about 5 minutes to get at
least 2.5 to 3 miles distant, so it was necessary that we learn every move
perfectly.34
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The total pattern to condition civilians. Physical reactions to the nuclear explosion are privileged in Landstreets account, but a corollary project is also revealed, that of training the participants not to think but simply to act in a
case of emergency. If the first project was an emotional-management effort
to familiarize citizens with the exploding bombto psychologically inoculate them against their own apocalyptic imaginationthe later effort sought
simply to control those same bodies, to train and time their response to
official commands.35 The atomic bomb extended the docility of the citizensubject to new levels, as Civil Defense sought to absorb the everyday within
a new normative reality imbued with the potential for an imminent and total
destruction.
This short- circuiting of the brain, and willingness to take orders under
the sign of nuclear emergency, reveals the broader scope of the civil defense
project: anesthetizing as well as protecting, producing docility as well as
agency. The effort to document the potentialities of life in a postnuclear environment met with almost immediate resistance. In addition to the mounting scientific challenges to the claims of civil defense, a mothers against the
bomb movement started, in 1959, when two young mothers in New York
refused to participate in Operation Alert by simply taking their children to
Central Park rather than to the fallout shelter.36 The widely publicized effects
of radioactive fallout in the 1950s and the move from atomic to thermonuclear weapons provided ample evidence that Operation Cue was not, in
the end, a realistic portrait of nuclear warfare.37 And indeed by the time
the film Operation Cue was re-released, in 1964, the following text was added
to the introduction, minimizing the claims of the film.
The nuclear device used was comparatively small. It had an explosive force
of 30 kilotons, equivalent to 30,000 tons of TNT . Whereas, some modern thermonuclear weapons are in the 20-megaton rangetwenty million tonsmore than 600 times as powerful as the bomb shown here,
and with a much wider radius of destruction. In this test, many of the
structures damaged by the 30-kiloton bomb were approximately one mile
from ground zero. With a 20megaton blast, they probably would be
obliterated, and comparable damage would occur out to a distance of at
least 8.5 or 9 miles.
They probably would be obliterated. Thus, as a scientific test of everyday objects Operation Cue had less value over time, as the effects of blast and
radiation in increasingly powerful weapons rendered Civil Defense almost

immediately obsolete as a security concept. In Cold War ideology, however,
the promise of nuclear ruins was deployed by the state to secure the possibility of a postnuclear remainder, and with it, the inevitable reconstitution
of social order. The discourse of obliteration here, however, reveals the
technoscientific limitations of that ideological project, as the destructive
reality of thermonuclear warfare radically limits the possibility of a postnuclear United States.
After the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the visual effects of the bomb were
eliminated as atomic testing went underground. The elimination of aboveground tests had two immediate effects: first, it changed the terms of the
public discourse about the bomb, as the state no longer had to rationalize the constant production of mushroom clouds and the related health
concerns over radioactive fallout to American society; second, it locked in
place the visual record of the bomb. Thus, the visual record of the 194563
aboveground test program, with its deep implication in manipulating public
opinions and emotions, remains the visual record of the bomb to this day.
As science, Operation Cue was always questionable, but as national theater
it remains a much more productive enterprise: it created an idealized consumer dream space and fused it with the bomb, creating the very vocabulary
for thinking about the nuclear emergency that continues to inform American politics (fig. 8.4). Thus, the motto of Operation Cue, Survival Is Your
Business, is not an ironic moment of atomic kitsch, but rather reveals the
formal project of the nuclear state, underscoring the link between the production of threat, its militarized response, and the Cold War economic program. As an emotional-management campaign, Civil Defense proved extraordinarily influential, installing within American national culture a set of
ideas, images, and assumptions about nuclear weapons that continued to
inform Cold War politics, and that remain powerful to this day. I turn now to
two afterimages of the 1950s Civil Defense program, each set roughly a generation apart, to consider the lasting consequences of this eras emotionalmanagement strategy, and to explore the psychosocial effects of deploying
highly detailed depictions of the end of the nation-state as a means of establishing national community.
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Afterimage 1: The Day After (1983)

The anticipation of nuclear war (dreaded as the fantasy, or phantasm, of a remainderless destruction) installs humanityand through all sorts of relays
even defines the essence of modern humanityin its rhetorical condition.
J AC Q U E S
D E R R I DA ,
No Apocalypse, Not Now
On Sunday, 20 November 1983, a hundred million Americans tuned in to

watch the United States destroyed by Soviet missiles (ICBM s) and the few
survivors in Lawrence, Kansas, negotiate everyday life in a postnuclear environment (fig. 8.5). Watched by half of the adult population in the United
States, The Day After (directed by Nicholas Meyer) was a major cultural event,
one that refocused public attention on the effects of radiation, mass casualties, and life without a functioning state. Presented as a realistic account,
the blast and radiation effects depicted in the film were supported by statements from health experts and transformed into a moment of national dialogue about the physical and biological effects of nuclear war.38 Immediately
following the broadcast, the ABC network presented a roundtable discussion
of the film and the current state of nuclear emergency. Public school teachers
across the country advised students to watch The Day After in order to discuss
its implications in class, thereby nationalizing the discussion. Even President Reagan, whose arms build-up and provocative nuclear rhetoric helped
instigate the film, watched along with his fellow Americans, announcing
after the program aired that he, too, had been terrified by the filmic depiction of nuclear war. In synchronizing a hundred million viewing subjects, The
Day After created a national community brought together by images of their
own destruction. In doing so, it also replayed the official program of Operation Cue with uncanny precision and demonstrated the enduring nationalcultural legacy of the 1950s emotional-management project.
The Day After follows several idealized Midwestern families, documenting their lives before nuclear war breaks out and then in a postnuclear world.
The first hour of the film is devoted to everyday life in Lawrence (against
the backdrop of increasing international tensions); the second hour is devoted to the brief nuclear attack and then life in a postnuclear environment.
The film rehearses the lessons of Operation Cue with eerie precision: after
nuclear attack, the state is absent and it is up to citizens to provide order,
food, and medical care to survivors. The key difference between The Day After
and Operation Cue has to do with the nature of survival. While Cue argued
that life was possible after nuclear attack and promoted an idea that nuclear
war was simply another form of everyday risk (alongside weather, fire, and
8.4 Photographic sequence of Operation Cue, 1955. Photo courtesy of the U.S.
National Archives and Records Administration.
8.5 Soviet nuclear attack. Still from the television drama The Day After.
traffic accidents), The Day After questioned whether life was worth living after
nuclear war.39 The central protagonist of the story, a medical doctor played
by Jason Robards, is left in the final scene dying of radiation sickness, collapsed in what might be the ruins of his former home, his wife and children
dead from the attack. No triumphal narrative of survival and reinvention
here. Instead, the final moment of the film issues yet another warning: The
catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than
the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike
against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire
the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert
the fateful day. Thus, the realism of The Day After is revealed in the end to
be a deceptionjust as it was in the Operation Cue film a generation earlier
as the filmmakers are forced to admit that the horror of nuclear war is ultimately unrepresentable.
The simulated realism of the film perfectly illustrates Derridas claim that
nuclear war is fabulously textual because until it happens it can only be
imagined and once it happens it marks the end of the human archive.40 As
the only remainderless event, nuclear war is thus in the realm of the sublime, ungraspable and subject only to displacements, compensations, and
misrecognitions. Thus, by rehearsing nuclear war in the imagination or via
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civil defense, one does not master the event or its aftermath. Rather, one
domesticates an image of a postnuclear world that stands in for the actual
failure of the imagination to be able to conceive of the end. This postnuclear
imagination is necessarily an arena of cultural work, as early Cold War officials immediately recognized, one which promotes an idea of order out of
the sublime and often becomes a space of pure ideology. To this end, the consistency of the nuclear tropes presented in The Day After, as well as the nationalization of the televised event, document the multigenerational power of
nuclear ruins in the American imaginary. For a full generation after Operation Cue, filmmakers could rehearse with startling specificity the entire
1950s program of Civil Defense and provoke a national conversation about
life after nuclear war. The state was no longer needed to enact this national
melodrama of destruction; its terms were already installed in American culture and simply subject to citation and repositioning. The entertainment
industry could now provide the firestorm and fallout as special effects,
rehearsing the lessons of nuclear crisis that a live television audience first
experienced in 1955 via a real atomic bomb. This time, however, the ruins
were engineered not to emotionally inoculate Americans to nuclear war,
but rather to shock them into action during the nuclear emergency of the
early 1980s.
Put differently, in response to the Reagan administrations escalating
arms race and talk of winnable nuclear wars was a cultural return to the
images and logics of Operation Cue, mobilized this time as a call to political action rather than normalization.41 Thus, while the form and content
of cinematic nuclear destruction remains unchanged from 1955 to 1983,
its emotional project has been inverted from promoting the docility of the
citizen-subject to mobilizing a national community before the bombs fall.
The Day After reenacted the national melodrama articulated in Operation Cue
twenty- eight years earlier with remarkable precision, but it did so not to
produce a bomb proof society, but rather as a de facto form of nuclear critique. Similarly, activist groups (including Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign) used depictions of nuclear
warfareincluding the targeting and blast damage maps of U.S. cities, and
medical analyses of radiation injuriesto counter the escalating military
budgets and nuclear tensions of the late Cold War.42 In other words, the
calibration of the emotional-management project was no longer controlled
solely by the government, thus allowing counterformulations using the
same texts and images that originally enabled the Cold War cultural project.
Nuclear ruins are revealed here to be the very grammar of nuclear discourse
in the United Statesenabling both pronuclear and antinuclear projects

inevitably deployed to articulate the affective terms of national belonging.
For despite its implicit nuclear critique, The Day After continues to mobilize a
nuclear-bombed America as a call to community rather than as a marker of
the end of sociability itself.
Afterimage 2: Armageddon/Deep Impact (1998)

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state
of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be
described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced
by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of
taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that could not even be privately
acknowledged.
W.
G . S E B A L D,
On the Natural History of Destruction
Questioning the near total silence in German literature about everyday life in
the bombed-out ruins of the Second World War, W. G. Sebald finds an extraordinary faculty for self-anesthesia shown by a community that seemed to
have emerged from a war of annihilation without any signs of psychological
impairment.43 He attributes this absence of commentary (about life in the
ruins of Dresden and other German cities that were firebombed) to a collective understanding that it was Germany who pioneered mass bombing years
earlier in Guernica, Warsaw, and Belgrade.44 Thus, the national repression he
interrogates is doubledthat of life in the postwar ruins and that of a prior
position as mass bomberlinking trauma and destruction as part of the
same psychosocial legacy. The United Statesa country that did not itself
experience mass bombing in the Second World War, but did conduct such
bombings using both conventional and nuclear weaponstook an opposite nationalcultural route in the Cold War. For while nuclear war did not
occur, rather than repress the bomb American culture proliferated its meaning and influence. The bomb became an intimate part of American popular
and political culture, a set of ideas, images, and institutions, installed in the
1950s that soon functioned outside the direct control of the national security state.45 In other words, we live today in the world made by the Cold War,
a global project that engineered everyday lifeand life itselfaround the
technological means of apocalyptic destruction.46
What are we to make, for example, of the Hollywood films of the 1990s
the first period in the nuclear age in which U.S. national security was not
274J O S E P H
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structured in relationship to a nuclear-armed, external enemywhich nonetheless repetitively enact the destruction of the nation on film? While we no
longer detonate atomic bombs on fabricated cities populated with mannequins, we do have yearly spectacles in which Americas cities are reduced to
smoldering ruins all in the name of fun. The Hollywood blockbusterwith
its fearsome life- ending asteroids, aliens, earthquakes, floods, and wars
allows Americans to rehearse destruction of their nation-state much as their
parents and grandparents did in the 1950s and 1980s. These yearly technoaesthetic displays of finely rendered destruction are a unique form of American expressive culture. Only U.S. cinema deploys the cutting-edge technological achievements of computer-generated imagery in order to visualize
the destruction of its cities, and it does so with such fetishistic glee.47
Consider 1998, a year in which the United States was cinematically attacked twice by asteroidsin Armageddon (directed by Michael Bay) and Deep
Impact (directed by Mimi Leder)the second and eighth most successful
films of the year at the box office (figs. 8.68.7). In both cases, life on earth is
threatened from outer space and saved only at the last minute by the heroics
of Americans armed with nuclear weapons. While Armageddon uses the threat
to the planet as a vehicle for resuscitating working- class masculinity as protectors of the nation qua planet (oil riggers are sent via the space shuttle to
destroy the asteroid with atomic bombs), Deep Impact is a study of civil defense and individual sacrifice right out of Operation Cue. In both cases, what
is striking is that the destruction of the United States is presented as a form
of entertainment and redemptive play. A series of summer films in the 1990s
similarly rehearsed the destruction of the United States and demonstrated
the necessity of U.S. nuclear weapons, suggesting that decade as a moment
of psychic and cultural release from the Cold War arms race.48 In the 1990s
Hollywood could work out the details of nuclear war (and various allegorized
nuclear threats) with new computer-generated precisionprecisely because
nuclear terror no longer had the meaning it had had for a previous generation. In the immediate postCold War moment, in other words, life did not
hang so oppressively in the nuclear balance, and thus the cinematic imagination was freed to explore the end of the United States in a new way. Cold War
nuclear cinema always had a moral point to make about the nuclear state of
emergency: not only was nuclear war always marked as an object of distinct
seriousness, but the detonation of the bomb was marked as a political, ethical, and technological failure of the Cold War system. In striking contrast,
postCold War films have no purpose other than patriotism and pleasure;
8.68.7 New York under attack. Stills from the films Armageddon and Deep Impact.
they seek to reinstall American identity through mass violence, suggesting

that it is only threat and reactions to threat that can create national community.49
Regardless of form (asteroid or tsunami or alien invader), these apocalyptic spectacles function as nuclear texts because they use mass destruction as
a means of mobilizing the United States as a global superpower. As allegories
of nuclear war, they both reproduce the emotional language of nuclear threat
(mass death as a vehicle for establishing national community) and allow a
productive misrecognition of its political content. This filmic genre also inevitably reinforces through aestheticized politics the ever-present need for
war and the ubiquity of external enemies with apocalyptic power. And in
doing so, these texts relegitimize the need for nuclear weapons in the United
States, while offering an image of the United States as a reluctant superpower forced into global military action for the greater good. As a maelstrom of meteorites devastate New York in Armageddon, for example, a taxi
driver yells to no one in particular: We at war! Saddam Hussein is bombing
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us! This scene from 1998 prefigures the second Bush administrations successful (but fabricated) effort to link the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington in 2001 to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Naming
the enemy in this way (as science fiction or state propaganda) underscores
the ideological alignment between the Hollywood blockbuster and the U.S.
military, which both rely on rehearsing threat as a means of stabilizing their
industries.50 Cinematic viewers, as Benjamin saw so early on, experience
such ideological projects in a state of distraction, allowing both the covert
habituation of ideas and a broader aestheticizing of politics in support of
increasing militarization and war.51
One afterimage of the Cold War emotional-management campaign is
found in this continued commitment to, and pleasure in, making nuclear
ruins, and then searching the wreckage for signs about the collective future.
The nuclear logics of the Cold War continue to haunt American society, informing how individuals experience acts of mass violence and how the federal government then engages the world. Nuclear cinema in the 1990s transforms anonymous mass death into a vehicle for individuals to demonstrate
their moral character and for the nation to be regenerated through apocalyptic threat. Indeed, the pleasure of postCold War nuclear cinema is precisely in witnessing the destruction of the United States, then walking out of
the theater into the unbroken world. Unlike viewers of Operation Cue in 1955
and of The Day After in 1983, the viewers of Armageddon and Deep Impact were
not addressed as citizens who needed to demonstrate their civic virtue by
performing nuclear fear. Rather, the emotional-management strategy was
transformed into a form of posttraumatic play, with the destruction of the
nation now presented as a diversion rather than a serious threat or opportunity for political mobilization. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize the
remarkable coherence of the nuclear images from 1955 through 1998 to see
the long-term effects of the Cold War emotional-management strategy. It is
also important to interrogate the long-term national cultural effects of rehearsing mass violence in this manner, of repetitively producing images of
destroyed U.S. cities to constitute both pleasure and national community.
Epilogue
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof,
the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
P R E S I D E N T
G E O RG E W. B U S H ,
address to the nation on Iraq
on 7 October 2002
Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.

P R E S I D E N T
M U S H A R R A F O F PA K I S TA N ,
reporting on a message
delivered to him from the U.S. State Department immediately after 9/11
Reclaiming the emotional history of the atomic bomb is crucial today, as

nuclear fear has been amplified to enable a variety of political projects at precisely the moment American memory of the bomb has become impossibly
blurred. In the United States, nuclear fear has recently been used to justify
preemptive war and unlimited domestic surveillance, a worldwide system of
secret prisons, and the practices of rendition, torture, and assassination. But
what today do Americans actually know or remember of the bomb? We live
not in the ruins produced by Soviet ICBM s, but rather in the emotional ruins
of the Cold War as an intellectual and social project. The half- century-long
project to install and articulate the nation through contemplating its violent
end has colonized the present. The terrorist attacks on New York City and
Washington in 2001 may have produced a political consensus that the Cold
War is over and a formal declaration of a counterterrorism project.52 But
American reactions to those attacks were structured by a multigenerational
state project to harness the fear of mass death to divergent political and
military industrial agendas. By evoking the image of the mushroom cloud
to enable the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush appealed directly to
citizens nuclear fear, a cultural product of the very Cold War nuclear standoff he formally disavowed in inaugurating the new counterterrorist state. The
mushroom- cloud imagery, as well as the totalizing immediacy of the threat
in his presentation, worked to redeploy a cultural memory of apocalyptic
nuclear threat (established during the four decades of the Soviet-American
nuclear arms race) as part of the new war on terror. The new color- coded
terrorist warning system (first proposed by Project East River in 1952 to deal
with Soviet bombers) and the Homeland Security Administrations transformation of shampoo bottles on planes into a totalizing threat are official
efforts to install and regulate fear in everyday life.53 In this regard, the war
on terror has been conducted largely as an emotional-management campaign in the United States, using the tropes and logics developed during the
early Cold War to enable a new kind of American geopolitical project. The
war on terror redirects but also reiterates the American assumptions about
mass violence and democracy I have explored in this essay.
If the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington felt strangely
familiar to many U.S. citizens, it was because American society has been
imaginatively rehearsing the destruction of these cities for over three gen278J O S E P H
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erations: in the Civil Defense campaigns of the early and late Cold War, as
well as in the Hollywood blockbusters of the 1990s, which destroyed these
cities each summer with increasing nuance and detail. The genealogy of this
form of entertainment is traumatic; it goes back to the specific way in which
the United States entered the nuclear age with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the specific propaganda campaigns informing
nuclear threat throughout the Cold War. Indeed, the ease with which the 9/11
attacks were nationalized as part of a nuclear discourse by the second Bush
administration has much to do with this legacy.54 Not coincidentally, the two
graphic measures of nuclear blast damage most frequently used during the
Cold War were the Pentagon and the New York City skyline.55 Figures 8.8 and
8.9, for example, are taken from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC )
campaign to document the size of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test from
1952. Fourteen true-to-scale versions of the Pentagon, identified by the AEC
as the largest building in the world, are placed inside the blast crater (the
former Elugelab Island) to document its size, while the New York skyline is
used to demonstrate the vast horizontal and vertical scope of the detonation.
The events of 9/11 were easily nationalized and transformed into a nuclear
discourse precisely because our security culture had imagined and rehearsed
attacks on Washington and New York for generations, and because the specific symbols in the attacksthe Pentagon and the tallest building in the
New York skylinewere also used by the nuclear state for three generations
as part of its emotional-management strategy. The second Bush administration, in other words, mobilized a well-established logic of nuclear attack to
pursue its policy objectives, translating discrete, nonnuclear threats into the
emotional equivalent of the Cold War nuclear crisis.
For a nation that constructs itself via discourses of ruination, it should
not be a surprise to see the exportation of ruins on a global scale. As President Musharraf clearly understood, the with us or against us logics of the
Bush administration in 2001 left no ambiguity about the costs of Pakistan
not aligning with the sole global superpower. The threat to reduce Pakistan
to a Stone Age ruin is the alternative, international deployment of nuclear
fear, constituting a U.S. promise to reduce the country to a prenational, pretechnological state. Thus, the United States enters the twenty-first century as
a nation both fascinated and traumatized by nuclear ruins. It transforms real
and imagined mass death into a nationalized space, and supports a political
culture that believes bombing campaigns can produce democracy abroad. It
is simultaneously terrorized by nuclear weapons and threatens to use them.
The U.S. military both wages preemptive war over nascent weapons of mass
8.8 Before and after images of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion, with
multiple Pentagons depicted in the blast crater, 1952. Photo courtesy of the
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
8.9 Blast radius of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion set against the New
York skyline, 1952. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archive and Records
Administration.
destruction programs and is preparing to build a new generation of U.S.

nuclear weapons.56 American society is today neither atomic bomb proof
nor capable of engaging nuclear technologies as a global problem of governance. Instead, U.S. citizens live today in the emotional residues of the Cold
War nuclear arms race, which can only address them as fearful docile bodies.
Thus, even in the twenty-first century, Americans remain caught between
terror and fear, trapped in the psychosocial space defined by the once and
future promise of nuclear ruins.
Notes
This essay is reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association.
It originally appeared in Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 36198, and cannot be
Research for this essay was enabled by a Research and Writing Grant from the
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I am grateful to Ann Stoler for her
invitation to participate in this volume, as well as for her intellectual engagement.
Many thanks to Mike Fortun and Kim Fortun for their editorial care, and to Shawn
Smith for her critical readings of this essay.
1. For example, see Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons; Kahn, On
Thermonuclear War; Vanderbilt, Survival City.
2. The United States conducted 1,054 nuclear detonations (in addition to bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki) from 1945 to 1992, with 928 explosions conducted at
the Nevada Test Site. On the global health effects of this program, see Richards L.
Miller, Under the Cloud; Makhijani, Hu, and Yih, Nuclear Wastelands; Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, The Human Radiation Experiments; Makhijani and
Schwartz, Victims of the Bomb; and Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands.
3. See Keeney, The Doomsday Scenario; and Office of Technology Assessment, The
Effects of Nuclear War, for damage assessments of a potential Soviet nuclear strike on
the United States.
4. Stoler with Bond, Refractions Off Empire.
5. My understanding of photographic afterimages has been developed in conversation with Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives.
6. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 246. For
a detailed discussion of Walter Benjamins approach to the politics of visual culture,
see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, as well as her reading of art in the years before
the Cold War, Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe.
7. On the constitution of the Cold War state, see Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State; Leslie, The Cold War and American Science; Schwartz, Atomic Audit; and Gaddis,
Strategies of Containment.
8. For the NSC 68 document, as well as detailed commentary, see Ernest R. May,
American Cold War Strategy; for critical analysis, see Brands, The Age of Vulnerability;
and for a review of the concept of containment, see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment.
9. For historical and cultural analysis of the U.S. civil defense programs during the
Cold War, see Oakes, The Imaginary War; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home; Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon; George, Awaiting Armageddon; Grossman, Neither Dead Nor
Red; Krugler, This Is Only a Test; Scheiback, Atomic Narratives and American Youth.
10. Oakes, The Imaginary War, 34; and also George, Awaiting Armageddon.
11. Associated Universities, Report of the Project East River.
12. Oakes, The Imaginary War, 47.
13. See Associated Universities, Report of the Project East River; Oakes, The Imaginary
War, 6263.
14. Peterson, Panic.
15. Osgood, Total Cold War; Craig, Destroying the Village; Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for
Peace and War.
16. In 1956 a report published by the Panel on the Human Effects of Nuclear
Weapons Development, which imagined a Soviet attack in 1959 in which ninety major
cities would be destroyed and fifty million people killed, concluded: In the event of a
massive nuclear attack on the United States, of the proportions assumed above, without drastically improved preparation of the people, support of the National Government and of the war effort would be in jeopardy, and national disintegration might
well result (Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons Development, 9). The panel then argued
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that the problem was how to incorporate the possibility of a Soviet sneak attack into
the feelings of citizens, thus allowing atomic warfare to be naturalized as part of
the everyday world (see Vandercook, Making the Very Best of the Very Worst). One
could productively compare the early Cold War studies to recent studies of nuclear
attack: see Meade and Molander, Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack, for
example, which models a ten-kiloton nuclear explosion in Los Angeles. The study, by
Rand, concludes that the effects of the blast would overwhelm all services and render
a $1 trillion blow to the U.S. economy.
17. Val Peterson, the first director of the Federal Civil Defense Agency, described
the media campaign for atomic civil defense as the greatest mass educational effort
in U.S. history (quoted in Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 36). In this regard, the civil
defense program was also a laboratory for exploring how to mobilize and control a
mass society.
18. Federal Civil Defense Administration, Annual Report for 1955, 78.
19. See Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed; Weller, First into Nagasaki; and the 2006
documentary film White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (directed by Steven Okazaki), which details the history of censorship and presents some
of the once prohibited film footage.
20. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress, 220.
21. Martin and Latham, Strategy for Survival, 182.
22. Andrew Grossman has underscored how governmental, media, and industry
communication explicitly sought to harmonize their civil defense messages, providing
a reinforcing series of messages across the media spectrum (Neither Dead Nor Red, 47).
This worked both to reinforce the civil defense project and to reduce the opportunities
for critique; see also Keever, News Zero; Scheiback, Atomic Narratives and American Youth;
and Rojecki, Silencing the Opposition.
23. See Oakes, The Imaginary War; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home; and Tracy D.
Davis, Between History and Event.
24. Federal Civil Defense Administration, Annual Report for 1955; and Krugler, This Is
Only a Test, 126.
25. For a history of the antinuclear movement see, Rojecki, Silencing the Opposition;
Katz, Ban the Bomb; as well as Wittner, Toward Abolition; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb; Wittner, One World of None.
26. Dee Garrison, in Bracing for Armageddon, argues that the civil defense programs
of the Cold War should be judged as failures because no nationwide system of shelters
was ever built. I would argue that the project of civil defense was about building not a
new urban infrastructure, but rather an emotional one. To this end, the utilization of
the civil defense was much more successful, installing a set of ideas and images about
nuclear warfare that maintained public support for the nuclear state through the end
of the Cold War and provided a set of ideological resources that the Bush administration relied on to initiate its war on terror.
27. See Federal Civil Defense Administration, Operation Cue; and Federal Civil Defense Administration, Annual Report for 1955.
28. See Garrison on the Mothers Protest against the Civil Defense Project (Bracing for Armageddon, 9496); Laura McEnaneys extensive conversation about the role of
women and the militarization of the home, in Civil Defense Begins at Home; Elaine May,
Homeward Bound, on the domestic version of containment; and Scheiback, Atomic
Narratives and American Youth, on the effects of civil defense on youth culture. See Cohn,
Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, for a discussion of
gender in the language of Cold War defense intellectuals; and Orr, Panic Diaries, for a
remarkable study of panic in Cold War psychology and nation-building.
29. Federal Civil Defense Administration, Operation Cue (15-minute film), 1955,
http://archive.org/details/Operatio1955.
30. McEnney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 109.
31. Ibid., 111.
32. Schmitt, Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Frozen Foods, 3.
33. Federal Civil Defense Administration, Operation Cue, 67.
34. Ibid., 75.
35. The project to test the cognitive effects of witnessing an exploding atomic
bomb on citizens was a small part of a larger military project, which involved thousands of troops at the Nevada Test Site. Over a series of aboveground tests, soldiers
were involved in atomic warfare exercises. They were also tested for the cognitive
effects of being exposed to the visual image of the blast. In some cases, this involved
simple cognitive drills administered minutes after the explosion or timing basic military activities, like dismantling and reassembling a rifle. Thus, across a wide spectrum
of public and military projects, the national security state was testing the limits of participation, and conditioning emotions and bodies to the atomic bomb.
36. Garrison, Bracing for Armageddon, 9395.
37. On the politics of atmospheric fallout during aboveground nuclear testing,
see Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands; Richards L. Miller, Under the Cloud; Hewlett and Holl,
Atoms for Peace and War; Kraus, Mehling, and El-Assal, Mass Media and the Fallout
Controversy; Bentz et al., Some Civil Defense Problems in the Nations Capital Following Widespread Thermonuclear Attack; and Makhijani and Schwartz, Victims of
the Bomb.
38. Rubin and Cummings, Nuclear War and Its Consequences on Television
News.
39. Indeed, one of the most powerful voices in the renewed antinuclear movement
of the 1980s was Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR ), which devoted its energies to publicizing the health effects of nuclear war by offering detailed descriptions
of probable attacks on American cities. For its public-health campaign against nuclear
war, PSR won the Nobel Peace Prize. In other words, PSR used the same elements of
the civil defense campaigns of the 1950s, but provided more detailed information
about radiation injury and casualty figures, in order to mobilize resistance to the renewed nuclear project of the Reagan administration. See Forrow and Sidel, Medicine
and Nuclear War.
40. Derrida, No Apocalypse, Not Now.
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41. See Sheer, With Enough Shovels.

42. In response to the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Reagan administration pursued a new emotional-management strategy in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI ), which promised an end to the arms race by installing a system of
space-based lasers to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles (see FitzGerald,
Way Out There in the Blue). Though Reagan offered SDI to the public as a near-term technological fix to the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Uniona way out of the nuclear
dangerit was never a realistic proposal. Over twenty-five years and $100 billion later
it has yet to hit a real-world target, but it has served the emotional needs of its constituency very well, allowing an aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons technology and
the militarization of space all the while praising the goal of disarmament. The Day After,
the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and SDI were all in various ways emotionalmanagement campaigns that drew on the images of nuclear destruction produced
during the aboveground testing regime to mobilize a response to the nuclear crisis of
the 1980s. Rather than moving past Operation Cue, each of these project redeployed
the strategies of the early Cold War state to enable their political projects: activists
working for disarmament, and the state working to maintain support for the Cold War
arms race.
43. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 11.
44. Ibid.
45. For example, see Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds; Sontag, The Imagination of
Disaster; Brians, Nuclear Holocausts.
46. See Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands.
47. The destruction of cities is a recurring theme in the nuclear cinema of Japan, but
is not mobilized as part of a militarized nation-building campaign as it is in the United
States (see Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema). I would also note that there is a fundamental
difference between the disaster movie and nuclear cinema in the United States. The
disaster film uses destruction as a means of establishing drama at an individual level,
while nuclear cinema always nationalizes its content via a friend-enemy configuration.
Thus, while a disaster movie has heroic individuals, the ultimate project of nuclear
cinema is to establish and mobilize a national community through mass violence. For
critical analysis of nuclear cinema, see Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds; Sontag, The
Imagination of Disaster. See Taylor, Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures, on nuclear
photography; and Virilio, War and Cinema, on war and perception.
48. Compare Rogin, Independence Day; Doug Davis, A Hundred Million Hydrogen
Bombs; and Mellor, Colliding Worlds.
49. On the American politics of regeneration through violence, see Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; Rogin, Independence Day; and Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and
Other Episodes in Political Demonology.
50. Armageddon, for example, was supported by NASA , as well as the Department of
Defense, which allowed the producer Jerry Bruckheimer to film on location in military
installations in exchange for script changes that favored the armed services. See Robb,
Operation Hollywood, 9495, for a discussion of the changes to the film script made in
exchange for support from the Pentagon. See also Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and
Other Episodes in Political Demonology, for studies in Cold War cinema, and his detailed
reading (Independence Day) of the militarized gender and race politics in the 1996 film
Independence Day.
51. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History. See also Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster.
52. The Bush doctrine of preemptive war, first articulated in 2002, formally ended
the Cold War doctrines of containment and deterrence that had defined U.S. foreign
policy since the 1950s (see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment).
53. In August 2006, after British authorities broke up a terrorist plot to smuggle
explosive chemicals onto an airline, the Department of Homeland Security raised the
threat level to its highest point, red, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA ) banned fluids from domestic U.S. flights. The British plot was in the very
early discussion phase and not a viable threat to passenger safety, yet the response
from DHS and TSA was total (see the transcript of a press conference held on 10
August 2006, Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and Assistant Secretary for
TSA Kip Hawley, Transportation Security Administration website, http://www.tsa
.gov/press/speeches/dhs_press_conference_08102006.shtm). This totalizing response
to a fantasy threat does not make sense as a security strategy, but is an excellent illustration of the mobilization of affect and the demand for public docility that support
the war on terror. For expert security analysis of British and American reactions
to the liquid explosive plot, see Nafeez Ahmed, Sources: August Terror Plot Is a
Fiction Underscoring Police Failures, Raw Story, 18 September 2006, http://www
.rawstory.com/news/2006/Sources_August_Terror_Plot_Fiction_Underscoring
_0918.html; and Bruce Schneier, Details on the UK Liquid Terrorist Plot, Schneier
on Security (blog), 6 August 2007, http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08
/details_on_the_1.html.
54. See Kaplan, Homeland Insecurities.
55. Compare Eden, City on Fire.
56. In fall 2006, under directives from the Bush administration, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory submitted to the Department of Energy their first new nuclear weapons designs since the end of the Cold
War. This was the first major step toward a return to nuclear testing, and perhaps
underground nuclear testing. For a copy of the redacted 2002 Nuclear Posture Review
see http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/united_states/NPR2001re.pdf.
286J O S E P H
MASCO
V Y J AYA N T H I R A O
The Future in Ruins
Under the lowering, thundery sky, Harsud . . . [appears] like a scene out of a Marquez novel . . . behind the blind buffalo, silhouetted against the sky, the bare bones
of a broken town. A town turned inside out, its privacy ravaged, its innards exposed.
Personal belongings, beds, cupboards, clothes, photographs, pots and pans lie on
the street. . . . The insides of houses lie rudely exposed. . . . Perched on the concrete frames of wrecked buildings, men, like flightless birds, are hammering, sawing,
smoking, talking. If you didnt know what was happening, you could be forgiven for
thinking that Harsud was being built, not broken. That it had been hit by an earthquake and its citizens were rebuilding it. . . . The people of Harsud are razing their
town to the ground. Themselves. The very young and the very old sit on heaps
of broken brick. The able-bodied are frantically busy. They are tearing apart their
homes, their lives, their past, their stories. . . . There is an eerie, brittle numbness
to the bustle. It masks the governments ruthlessness and peoples despair.
A RU N D H AT I ROY, The Road to Harsud
I first encountered the village Jetprole in a sumptuously illustrated, centerspread story about an obscure yet important archaeological project in the
Telangana region of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh that appeared in a major national English-language newspaper. The project, known
widely among Indian archaeologists simply as the salvage archaeology
project, involved the physical removal and transplantation of more than
a hundred monumental temple complexes from their original locations in
9.1 Jetprole submerged: Srisailam Dam reservoir in full spate, July 2006.
Photo by author.
village sites that had been submerged due to the construction of the Srisailam megadam, several kilometers upstream (fig. 9.1). Subsequent to their
transplantation, the temples were also revivified by ritual reconsecration
performed by priests handpicked by the Andhra Pradesh state government.
By the time the article appeared, the village sites had been submerged for
almost a decade beneath the dams reservoir lake. Most of the villages had
disappeared both in name and as communities; others had merged and rearranged themselves as communities in the course of resettlement. More
than 150,000 people were displaced as a result of the submergence. A large
number of people had left the region altogether as they lost lands, homes,
the means for livelihood, and, by many accounts, the will to continue living
in such close proximity to the remains of a settled, if often difficult life.
Yet the newspaper article presented this reconstruction and resettlement
project as an unqualified success, and Jetprole in particular stood out as
a model villagea place where a historically continuous community had
resettled voluntarily and that was chosen, for that reason among others,
as a site for an open-air temple-museum complex. The perfect convergence of modern technology with the preservation of a carefully selected and
curated past received unqualified praise whenever journalists and archaeologists brought the project to the publics attention. Within a vast compound
at the edge of this resettled village, the Andhra Pradesh State Department of
288V Y J AYA N T H I
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Archaeology and Museums had reconstructed a fifth of the rescued monumental temple complexes. In addition, archaeologists also removed, reconstructed, and transplanted Jetproles own monumental temple, the Jetprole
Madanagopalaswamy Temple, although they deviated from their principles
by reconstructing this particular temple within the space of newly resettled
village community of Jetprole, rather than in a museum compound along
with temples of the same period and style. The transplanted monuments
in Jetprole could therefore be placed in two different categories: first, the
archaeology temples that were reconstructed within the temple-museum
complex; second, the Jetprole temple complex, which was transplanted
within the resettled village space.1 The juxtaposition of these differently
placed monuments also made Jetprole a place of special interest and a model
site for showcasing both the technological transformations enabled by the
modernization project and respect for the village spaces and traditions despite the destruction of their everyday material environments.
However, these archaeologically manufactured ruins, made from existing historical materials, both veiled and sur-veilled a historic and psychic
landscape that was far more complicated than that implied by the successful
archaeological rescue operation of the temples. Embedded within the geography of the new village are also the (in)visible remains of the old siteof
homes, fields, village temples, a monumental fort, and royal palacesthat
attest to Jetproles own past as the capital of a little kingdom, a political
entity that was between a feudal estate and a princely state in its scale and
political impact.2 The old village site, which lies beneath the placid lake created by the dam for part of the year, resurfaces seasonally during the dry
months, from March to July, creating a dramatic theater for the play of local
imaginaries and, more practically, providing much-needed additional land
for cultivation, even though cultivation of the submerged land is illegal. The
reservoir and the submerged village site are both easily visible as well as just
a short walk from the new site and thus are integral to the new village. The
remains are always present in some way, even when they are not being used
or actively traversed.
Unmaking Jetprole
What is the relationship between these remains that surface regularly and recurrently and the museum site on which the successful claims of the nations
development project rest? Arundhati Roys image of Harsud, a town actively
being broken, is a powerful reminder of the status of the material debris
T H E F U T U R E I N RU I N S 289
that remains after acts of deliberate and willful destruction, especially those
undertaken in the name of the public good. Like Jetprole, Harsud, a sevenhundred-year-old town in the state of Madhya Pradesh, was slated to be submerged by the Narmada Sagar Dam, which is a part of Indias largest dam
system, second in scale only to Chinas Three Gorges project. Roy argues in
the article that these images make visible a normally invisible relationship
between development and destruction.
Since independence, projects like the Sardar Sarovar (of which the Narmada Sagar Dam is a part) and Srisailam have displaced nearly thirty-five
million people. From the states point of view, Harsuds material destruction appears only as a stepping-stone to development and progress. One
could be forgiven for thinking that this was a town being built, not broken,
as Roy puts it. For the state, the material processes of destruction and the
remains they leave in their wake are willfully acknowledged not as ruins, but
simply as the costs of development. Bland and neutral categories like resettlement, rehabilitation, and project-affected person come to be used
both officially and casually when referring to displaced persons and processes of forced resettlement. For the first time in postcolonial history, the
story of towns like Harsud also makes visible the longer and deeper history
of the costs of development paid by places like Jetprole, as social movements
protesting the dams over the River Narmada in the mid- to late 1990s have
made development projects a major political issue, contesting the rights of
the state to trample citizens rights at will.
This essay is an ethnographic exploration of the particular predicament
of Jetprolewhat it would mean to acknowledge the remains of the old village as ruins, or as the debris of a sustained and protracted process of destruction undertaken in the name of progress and modernization. When I
was doing fieldwork in Jetprole, more than two decades after the completion of the dam, modernization remained an elusive goal. The archaeological
salvage operation was the one concrete sign of the achievements of modern
technologies, aside from the dam itself. But its benefits for the villagers were
ambiguous at best. Despite the evident grandeur of these resurrected ruins,
Jetprole and its people remain remote and unconnected to the circuits of development, heritage tourism, and investment. Their isolation and desperation is all the more evident thirty years after the dam, as the region is now
an active node in a Maoist war against the iniquitous policies of the nationstate and its political technologies. Yet the dam itself and the damage it has
wrought on this region are accepted matter- of-factly in everyday conversations.
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But the silence surrounding the remains of the old village is a veil. As
people moved in and out and around these ruins, their keen understanding
of the effects of the dam became increasingly articulated both in quotidian
conversations with me and in a special repertoire of poetic and musical narratives still performed on ritual occasions in the village. In these articulations, a sharp contrast emerged between a modernist sense of the future,
expressed implicitly in the hopes of progress and modernization through
development projects on the one hand and, on the other, in a sense of being
arrested or imprisoned in a space that was neither progressive nor evidently
continuous with their past. This modernist sense of the future however was
clearly tied, through the archaeological project, to the equally significant
work of taming or containing the past so as to limit any deleterious and
feudal pull it might exert on the future. I focus on the persistent thread
presented by these articulations about the future in the midst of ruins. The
proximity of the abandoned and the rescued, the contrast between the abject
poverty of the villages and the grandiose claims of heritage bring together
two very different projects and the different senses of the future they engender into a relational history.3
Such schizophrenic landscapes of modernist development are neither
particular to India nor unique to Jetprole. The drama created by this villages
particular geography resonates with similar, arresting images across the
world where modernist constructions or ancient sites reclaimed as national
heritage stand in an analogous relation to erased local histories and the material tokens of those histories. But here in Jetprole, the juxtaposition between the abandoned and the rescued provides a particularly vivid context
within which to explore the texture of material traces and their enduring
distribution within everyday life, within the space of that which is left behind and apparently intact. By contrasting these traces, not officially recognized as marks of ruination, with the care provided for the ruins that signify
vestiges of national history, we can track certain complicities between the
colonial project of archaeology, its contemporary practice in India, and the
political technologies of the nation-states agenda for development, modernization, and attracting transnational investment capital.
These complicities and the entanglements between colonial practices
such as archaeology and modernist ones of development, committed to a
project of modernization at all costs, raise questions about the straightforward mapping of the effects of colonial history on a postcolonial landscape.
The expectations postcolonial nation-states have of transcending the effects
of colonial history have been entangled, from the very beginning, with these
modernist agendas. What name could capture these convergences, which,

however, exceed both colonial effects and modernist agendas within the
bounded sovereignties of postcolonial national states? The term postcolony,
as conceptualized by Achille Mbembe, designates a structure of such convergences that subvert and challenge temporal conceptualizations of the postcolonial as a node of dislocations of modernity that dream of transcending
colonial effects or of reversing the hierarchical, ontological relationship between colonialism and its progeny.
Yet this structural account seems incomplete, especially in relation to the
powerful imaginaries of the future exerted by projects of modernization,
their ongoing and constantly deferred temporal effects and the ways in which
these effects continue to be vividly entangled with the colonial and precolonial past. Ann Stoler conceptualizes such temporal effectsof promises deferred as the only ways of fulfilling expectations of modernityas specific
to what she calls imperial formations or forms of political sovereignty and
power that simultaneously exceed and concatenate what scholars have conceived
of as colonial, postcolonial, and modern. In this essay I explore the specificity of such imperial effects by focusing on a place whose relationship with
both the colonial past and the nation-state has been historically oblique and
complicated by the political dominance of native elites as intermediaries.
How do dreams of modernity and aspirations for modernization play out in a
place like Jetprole, in the shadow of a ruthless and obliterating development
machine? What does listening carefully to the silences around the remains
of the old village tell us about contemporary political technologies and their
relationship to historical antecedents? What new vectors of accountability
might emerge from this exercise and what are the ethicopolitical consequences of exploring the effects of these new vectors of accountability?
After Submergence
When I first arrived in Jetprole, people used the phrase after Srisailam a
great deal, expecting me to translate Srisailam as I wished: as a dam that was
constructed at Srisailam; as a traumatic event in their collective history; as
an evocative metaphor for their present condition of being left unmoored,
without land, water, and livelihoods. The phrase covered a variety of conditionsboth material and psychicand was often coupled with assertions
that in fact, nothing had changed from how they had lived their lives in
the village before submergence. This assertion was made time and again despite the fact that the villagers were now living in a space that was utterly
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transformed by the temple-museum at the edge of the village. Despite the

huge shadow cast by the archaeology temples, their presence was largely
ignored. A single priest, paid by the states Hindu Religious and Charitable
Endowments Department, looked after all the temples, opening them up
each day, cleaning them, and making ritual offerings to the deities. The priest
was an outsider, appointed by the local endowments department officials,
and was often absent from his job. The archaeology temples were therefore
falling into neglect and disrepair within a few years of reconstruction.
Although evidently magnificent from a distance, the archaeology templesor group temples (mukalla gudlu) as villagers called thempresented
a very strange sight up close. Each stone of every temple had been marked
indelibly with a code to enable archaeologists to determine its right position
for reconstruction. These marks were still visible after decades, despite the
Archaeology Departments efforts to cover them up with a coat of saffron
paint. Up close, the temples resembled pieces of a giant puzzle rather than
sacred monuments. The sole rescued temple that was in active, daily use was
the Madanagopalaswamy Temple that had stood at the center of the old village of Jetprole and had served as the family temple of the Rajas of Jetprole
since the sixteenth century.
In order to translate after Srisailam and to connect it with the common,
sometimes emphatic assertion that nothing had changed, I had to undertake
a historical ethnography to understand how the pasts of this villagewhich
had little connection to either colonial governance or the nation-state
came to be connected with a particular form of postcolonial political technology that is enacted through the willful destruction of material life and
the persistent exposure of social relations to the deconstructive gaze of postcolonial law. The marginal space of the archaeology temples, rescued and enshrined as vestiges of the past, is an important part of that puzzle.
Rebuilding Jetprole involved an active, everyday, and material engagement
with the submerged village site. On the one hand, villagers had been forced
to contest the state in courts to gain recognition of their claims over the
submerged lands. The ownership of these lands was actively entangled with
forms of tenure that diverged radically from the private-property paradigm,
and the legal battle that ensued over recognition of claims lasted for nearly
two decades. The effects of this legal drama resonate to this day. On the
other hand, within a few years of submergence, villagers had to begin using
their old fields during the dry season, when the dams reservoir emptied,
because they were unable to secure enough land with the meager cash compensations they were offered by the state. These incursions into the submerT H E F U T U R E I N RU I N S 293
gence zone were fraught, both because of the fear of state reprisal, since the
agricultural activity in the submergence zone was a threat to the dam, and
because of the villagers haunting confrontation with their past. The movements in and out of the abandoned village sitewhich was just a short walk
from the new villagecreated new ways of relating materially and mnemonically to the past as well as to the future.
While every place may be composed of a palimpsest of material forms
some in active use, others abandoned or more ambivalent in terms of their
contemporary influencein Jetprole after submergence, there was an active
call to relate to these remainders of the Srisailam project. The archaeology
temples are familiar to a modernist sensibility, signifying structures abandoned by time yet recoverable within an enchanted and linear national history, attesting to the past glory and achievements of the nation. The salvage
archaeology project was thus suffused with the redemptive satisfaction
of chronicling loss, a sentiment that was amply evident in my conversations with various archaeologists involved in the project.4 But it was significant that the archaeology temples, while admired by the villagers, remained
largely invisible in the broader narratives surrounding their own displacement, remaining hidden under other layers of the palimpsest that was Jetprole. The submerged village, on the other hand, exerted a much more ambivalent, psychic pressure on villagers. It marked a deep sense of loss, but
one that could not be mourned as such. Recovering the village as a material
resource was an important reason why the engagement with the submerged
sitethe houses, monuments, and fieldsfelt current and contemporary
rather than like an encounter with a forgotten space from the past.
For the residents of Jetprole, the work of rebuilding the village coincided
with their being interpellated, perhaps for the first time in their history, by
the institutions of the nation-state. Like many regions of what is now India,
Jetprole was never under direct British colonial rule, but rather was governed
by Rajas who were themselves the vassals of the princely state of Hyderabad,
the largest indirectly ruled territory in the subcontinent. The state of Hyderabad was itself integrated into the territory of the Republic of India only after
a short but brutal military action one year after the Indian independence
from British rule. Yet, like many other territories that were formerly princely
states in British India, the state of Hyderabad was poorly interpellated into
the structures and institutions of the newly independent nation. A separate
bureaucracy was created for abolishing jagirs, or landed estates like Jetprole,
within the state of Hyderabad, but the complexities of land-tenure arrange-
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ments were hard to untangle and existing arrangements continued to prevail

until the dams construction was announced.
In the early 1970s, when Revenue Department officials from the capital of
Andhra Pradesh came to Jetprole to decide on land claims and to apportion
cash compensations for lands about to be submerged, issues of ownership,
private property, tenancy arrangements, and the lifeways that went with
them came to the fore with visceral force. Those who could not prove their
status as holders of ownership titles or as protected tenants of legitimate
landowners were cut off altogether from receiving compensation. What ensued were long battles with the state over legitimacy of rights and material
claims as well as over the amounts of cash that were handed out as compensation.
This contestation took place through the court system of Andhra Pradesh,
with the active participation of dozens of lawyers from nearby towns, who
moved quickly into the submergence villages to offer legal advice and help.
Their goals, of course, were neither altruistic nor calculated to expose the
state to critique through the practice of law. As hundreds of thousands of
people were receiving compensations in cash, the customary fee of 10 percent was a major attraction to these mofussil lawyers, some of whom had familial connections to the villages. In these courtroom dramas, the entanglements of the past with the present became sharply visible. As well, the legal
cases had crucial bearing on the future lives of the villagers, for many of
those who were forced to go to court were precisely those whose claims to
landholding were denied by the state. In denying these claims, the state was
refusing to acknowledge the particular history of places like Jetprole.
The Pasts of a Little Kingdom

Like many of the other submerged villages, Jetprole lay in a region between
the two important and historic Saiva pilgrimage centers of Srisailam and
Alampur.5 For several centuries, this region was a frontier over which successive South Indian kingdoms fought for dominion. The rich monumental legacy of the villages was a result of these battles, as each successive kingdom
consolidated its powers by building and endowing monumental temples,
monasteries, palaces, wells, and travelers shelters as signs of power and
status. By the mid-seventeenth century, Jetprole had become the official seat
of an eponymous little kingdom, known in Telugu as samsthanam, ruled by
the Surabhi family.6
In multiple ways, the submerged village site reflected the social life of the
little kingdom. A massive stone fort, several monumental temple complexes, and the palace of the Rajas of Jetprole formed the spatial and political
heart of the now submerged village site. Although the seat of government
was moved in the mid-nineteenth century to another village (Kollapur),
Jetprole continued to be of special importance due to the Madanagopalaswamy Temple, a monumental sixteenth- century SriVaishnava temple that
was at the geographic center of the submerged village and served as the royal
temple even though Jetprole was no longer the capital of the Samsthanam.7
In the nineteenth century, the Rajas of Jetprole, who controlled around
a hundred and fifty villages, became vassals of the Nizam monarchy of the
princely state of Hyderabad, paying tribute in exchange for control over
revenue, autonomous policing, and administration of justice within the
Samsthanam. Unlike much of British India, there was little reliance on land
revenue to generate tax income, and much of the land was in fact governed
by complicated tenurial practices involving hereditary squatting rights over
land in exchange for certain forms of labor. Such services were rendered
either personally for the royal family or to the temples in the direct control of
the Rajas family. These land tenure arrangements were referred to as inams,
conceived as variations on forms of gift- exchange, exchanging labor for
rights to land use across multiple generations. Each specific type of grant,
or inam, had a particular name, depending on the extent to which taxes were
waived or the type of service for which the tax waiver or tenurial rights were
granted.8
Importantly, the arrangements governing the control of land were not
merely administrative but modes of subjectification as well, for they enmeshed generations of villagers in complex social, political, moral, and economic relations with the governing authorities.9 The dam interrupted these
relations while also making visible their deep, structural links to village life.
The remains of the submerged village thus evoke this deep history of subjectification as well. The ruins of monuments, fields, and homes each tell a
story of a particular community within the village and their relation to the
moral centers of authoritythe palace and the temple. The spatial organization of the village, too, divided into caste-based neighborhoods, or geris, provides important clues to understanding the social relations between communities.
Formally, these arrangements continued until 1948, when, after independence, Hyderabad (the largest princely state in British India) was annexed into independent India. Many of the complicated land-revenue grant
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arrangements between the Raja of Jetprole and his subjects continued de

facto well into the 1970s, even though various land-reform acts had been
passed in the 1950s rationalizing and redistributing land according to socialist principles of land to the tiller. The persistence of historic arrangements
in the face of land reform rendered issues of ownership and compensation
immensely problematic, postsubmergence. The tenuous yet real authority
of the little kingdom, which rested on this patchwork of landed arrangements between ruler and subjects, came into direct contact with regimes of
modernization and with the nation-state itself after the dam. During my own
research in Jetprole, I interacted extensively with two groups of villagers,
belonging to the largest caste-groups in the villagethe tenugu bhoyas and
the dalitsand on many occasions I also visited with Muslim families in the
village. Both the Hindu groups had crucial relations to the Jetprole Madanagopalaswamy Temple, and the reconstruction of the temple impacted each
group in a critical though different way.
The history I recount here is embedded and compressed into local imaginaries of the tenugus and the dalits surrounding the aftermath of Srisailam. The states refusal to acknowledge these microrelations of power,
moral authority, and forms of social structuration stood in sharp contrast
with their willingness to rescue the temples around which these social relations were constructed and to reconstruct those temples as objects cast in a
new historical light. Thus the archaeological practice of salvage actively rearranged relations both between people and things as well as among people.
Yet villagers felt deeply ambivalent about the relations that had been displaced in the course of their forced resettlement even as the ongoing engagement with the submerged village site seemed to block a complete disengagement with those relations. This active, ongoing demand to inhabit
and engage with the remains of a life that had not entirely ebbed away while
anticipating the modernization of those social relations through the new
laws and structures of the state translated into a refusal on the part of many
residents to acknowledge the extraordinary transformation of the landscape
of their village. When this transformation was acknowledged, it often came
up swiftly and suddenly, in moments of distraction, marked by a profusion of
what Walter Benjamin has called memoire involuntaire, a state that was closer
to forgetting, but nonetheless tethered to recollection.
An Ungraspable Event
In everyday conversations about the dam project and its effects, many villagers spoke about their relationship with the state in terms of a division
in timebetween a time of promised but deferred development and a time
of deliberate abandonment. The contrast between the time of deferred development, before the dam, and of deliberate abandonment, after the dam,
described the space within which a relationship to the sustained political
project of neglect and disregard, precipitated by the development project,
could be located. After the dam was sanctioned, in the late 1960s, the government stopped all investment in public works in the region on the grounds
that the villages were slated for submergence anyway.
As an example, older residents recounted memories of a destructive flood
that might have been prevented if a small earthen dam had been constructed
at the right time. This period before Srisailam is remembered as a time of
suspension due to the deliberate deferral of even such minor public works.
After the Srisailam dams completion however, villagers found that their
situation had not improved, but perhaps had worsened. The future promised by the state had arrived, arrested in a form that was unexpected. Ironically, the future converged, visually and materially, with the monumental
past, as the village became partially a museum. For the state, the vision of
this region as an ongoing zone of modernization ended with the completion of the archaeology project, thus contributing to the villagers sense that
their expectations for the future had been somehow petrified and forever
arrested.10
The time of suspension that many villagers spoke of seemed to stretch
indefinitely over the dozen years that it took for the dam to be completed
and even beyond, as it became clear later on, years after the dam was completed. During this period, many residents said that they lost faith in the
project, hardly even believing that the dam was actually being constructed.
Four years before submergence, revenue officials started touring throughout the submergence zone, studying land records and deciding on amounts
to be paid as cash compensations for houses and agricultural lands. At the
same time, archaeologists began intensifying their operations in these villages. The extended bureaucratic scrutiny of the revenue officials produced
one of the most extraordinary legal battles against the State in contemporary India as lawyers rushed into the scene and instructed thousands of villagers to accept cash compensations under protest. By accepting the cash
amounts under protest, villagers were retaining their rights to bring suit
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against the State, contesting various aspects of their forced resettlement,

including the amount of compensation. The meager amounts paid set an extremely low value on the lives and livelihoods of the displaced and the lack
of a postsubmergence resettlement plan rendered their situation particularly
precarious.11
In March 1981, when the dam construction was finally completed, many
of the villagers spoke of being rudely awakened from this time of suspension to a nightmarish reality. Not believing the rumors that the dam was
nearly complete, most villagers had not made any plans for the impending
move. Finally, they had to be forcibly evicted from their homes by the police
through a campaign officially labeled Operation Demolition.12 With no
alternative plans, many residents described camping out on the rocky high
ground overlooking the reservoir that had submerged their homes and fields
as they watched. Several people spoke of feeling like castaways, completely
unmoored from the social and moral contexts of their lives. This liminal
period lasted a few years, but there was very little willingness to recall what
things had been like during that time. On numerous occasions, however, I
was directed to talk to a man named Sayalu, from the Madiga community
(one of the two major dalit communities in this village) to better understand
Srisailam, an event whose dimensions were yet to be grasped. When I finally
met him, he was with a large group of his kinsmen when they came to consult a lawyer from Mahbubnagar town (the district headquarters) whose parents lived in Jetprole. In response to my request for an interview, they invited
me to a ritual performance in their geri (neighborhood) the same evening.
A number of men from the community were performing a ritual hagiography of Brahmamgaru, a saintly figure known for his apocalyptic prophesies. Through this ritual performance, Sayalu and his kinsmen, like hundreds of other devotees across the region, hoped to prepare themselves for
the ephemeral nature of human life and its everyday attachments by reminding themselves of imminent apocalypse. In between two acts of this performance, Sayalu picked up his single-string drone and started singing alone,
a very different kind of a song. It was a song he had composed just after the
villagers were brutally evicted, looking down on the reservoir and all that it
had swallowed. Sayalus song, and its affective and melancholic quality, was
known throughout the village as a repository for their collective feelings
about the event. Even though it was an individuals composition without any
ritual significancea secular songit had achieved a measure of fame not
only in Jetprole but elsewhere in the submergence zone as well.
The song comes out of a local tradition of spontaneous poetry called kai
kattu, mostly composed in the fields to pass time during work. Kai kattus distinguishing feature is its context-sensitive nature. Songs in this genre often
refer to current events, rumors, and local gossip. After Srisailam, Sayalus
song and a few other such songs referring directly or obliquely to the experience of dislocation came into circulation, but they were rarely performed.
Many of the other songs and poems about Srisailam were incorporated into
ritual performances on various festive occasions throughout the year. While
performing a mythic poem about a divine figure or a hagiographic song,
a group of song leaders would incorporate a remembered scene or a story
relating to Srisailam into the ongoing song by introducing a refrain about
Srisailam. The other singers would then use the opportunity to add their
own, spontaneously composed recollections. Such spontaneous interjection
about actual historical events or contemporary happenings was not uncommon, and villagers who performed regularly on these festive occasions had
come to expect these interjections as part of the songs routine. Yet when
Srisailam was mentioned during such performances, it always appeared to
surprise both the singers and their audience as an unexpected punctuation
into the space of the everyday. Sayalus song about Srisailam was different
because it was carried only by a singular voice and was not tied to any particular ritual occasion.
As if addressing the unknown, an abyss, not expecting an answer, Sayalu
structured the first lines of his songalso the recurring refrainin the form
of a rhetorical question: Where is this Srisailam? Who built these projects?
The refrain operates as a door to each stanzawhich is preceded by and returns to this lamentopening onto a scene or a space indicated by the name
of a vanished place (see the appendix for the full text of the song). While
the song is also descriptive, its centerpiece is a lamenting rendition of the
names of villages, many of them in the vicinity of Jetprole, which vanished
in the aftermath of Srisailam.13 With dense movement around these names,
the poet suggests that the only thing that can be grasped about Srisailam is
what has vanished, not what has remained. The names themselves stand in
for the communities, and Sayalus song makes clear that these social forms
are gone yet he structures the entire song around the refrainWhere did
this Srisailam come from? or What is this Srisailam?unable to grasp
its effects entirely.
The song ends with the image of people pulling themselves up to the edge
of another land, an image suggesting something beyond the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of everything that makes life possiblethe fields
of millet and peanuts in full crop, for example. But the image is not a hope300V Y J AYA N T H I
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ful one. And the song stopped everyone short, coming as it did in the middle
of another performance about theodicy and apocalypse. The remains of Srisailam are its ongoing effects, but as Sayalus song suggests, understanding
these effects remains out of reach, except for that moment in which everything disappeared for a while.
Ruins and Recollections

Soon after I started living in Jetprole, in early March after the last full moon
of winter, marked by the Festival of Colors and winter bonfires, and before
the festival of Ugadi (New Year), the reservoir ran dry. I was struck immediately by the extraordinary spectacle of the remains. Most of the villagers I
was working with were going into the submergence zone to clear their old
fields of mud and detritus to start planting their peanut and millet crops, as
they had in the old days. They felt lucky that they could harvest an extra crop
from the submerged lands. After submergence, most villagers in Jetprole
had only managed to lease lands from neighboring villages for one crop
every year. Without the second crop harvested from the old fields, many said
that they would be perilously close to starving. I hesitated to follow them
into the fields knowing that they would be very busy with work. However,
on the night of the full moon, just before the reservoir had fully dried up,
Ramuluthe Jetprole temple watchmanand a few other people offered
me a tour of the old fort that the Surabhi Rajas had built and their palace,
which was now reduced to a foundation with a single, free-standing, winding staircase in the middle.
We wandered among those places, with Ramulu telling us stories about
the Rajas, about hidden treasures and treasure hunters. All these stories,
while interesting, were simply partial representations of a very complex field
of social relations. Such stories generically tie history with the sublime aesthetic experience of landscapes considered representative of the past. As
such, they are closer to the experiences that archaeologists and museologists
sought to produce in viewers and consumers of national history. And this
turned out to be just the first of many trips into that submergence zone. An
outsider might expect this dramatic front of mythic stories and rumors to be
played out against the backdrop of the monumental fort and palace, as happens at many sites of historical tourism all over India. My subsequent trips
with different groups of villagers, however, were dedicated to more mundane pursuits. In retrospect they could be conceived as mapping exercises
through which I was being circuitously led to understand the effects of SriT H E F U T U R E I N RU I N S 301
sailam. We looked for the foundations of houses and neighborhoods (geris),

for the original location of the Jetprole temple, marking all the shrines to
the minor village deities and other divine beings that were left behind with
their habitations. I followed people as they worked their fields and listened
to the songs they composed and sang in the fields.
Several months later, just before the reservoir filled up again, I accompanied a group of dalit women to the shrine of a locally famous Muslim
pir (saint) called Darvesh Kadri. Unlike the monumental stone temples that
were rescued by archaeologists, the dargah, or the tomb-shrine, of Darvesh
Kadri could not be moved. Nevertheless, it was clearly not abandoned. Each
year, before the annual festival of the saint (the urs), the villagersboth
Hindu and Muslimstill crossed the muddy remains to clean the dargah
and to whitewash its walls, preparing for the urs as before. Even before they
began to reclaim their fields on a regular basis, this annual ritual drew them
into the zone of submergence without fear or hesitation. When I started my
research, almost two decades had passed since the submergence. The visit to
the dargah was the first invitation for me to personally cross into that zone,
which remained unspoken in my daily conversations with many of the villagers.
Until that moment, my insistent questions about what had changed
were often met with the cryptic response that nothing had changed. This
was incomprehensible to me, particularly in the light of the ruptures visible
in the material landscape that appeared so clearly, albeit only to me. If I had
expected a neat division of time and space into the old and the new, the past
and the present, I was, of course, constantly confounded by the assertion
that nothing had changed. That claim, however, had little to do with the
continuity of the monumental past represented by the various reconstructed
and resurrected temples, as I understood from the conversations that developed on the way to the dargah.
In response to my persistent question about how life was different after
Srisailam, Lakshmamma, an outspoken Madiga woman and a group of her
friends, asked me, Do you know what happens when we go back to our
old fields to work? In the fields, they said, their children ask, Where is
home?14 We take them there, we point outtheres the granary, there are
the pots, there are the sleeping quarters, there we areall this was ours.
We swallow our sorrow and we move on, we peek into other peoples houses.
Theres Balaiahs house and theres Rosaiahs house. They then spoke as if
transfixed, We think of our own condition. At our age, our grandfathers had
everything, but we, we are already drowned.
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The stillness of the air as we wandered through the muddy paths of the
old village to get to the dargah perfectly matched the stillborn quality of the
lives that the women were describing to their children. They were speaking
of their lives, post-Srisailam, as if they were already dead, and yet we were
all forcefully aware that they were speaking about their present, about the
village and the life from which we had walked the short distance to the dargah. But in that distance, they had conveyed to me a sense of despair about
change. Forced to abandon a life with all its trappings of settled domesticity
and intergenerational ties, the women worried that their future was already
prophesied in the life that they were now living, in the village they had put
together using bits and pieces of their old homesdoor frames, wooden
beams, and other objects. That future was suffused with a feeling of going
nowhere, of being rooted and arrested in an unchanging scenario.
The women were viscerally aware that even this cobbled-together foundation for their futures and those of their children was inherently precarious.
On another day, standing at the edge of the reservoir, when it was full and
they could no longer see their old homes, Lakshmamma and others said to
me, We wonder when the day will come for us to destroy even this hearth.
We wait for the day when a catastrophe will befall us again. One day when
we are asleep we wonder if the flood will drown us and move on. Like those
villages, which were washed away in the flood three years ago. Crops, goats,
sheep, cattle, cots, jars, clocks, thresholds of housesthe flood tossed them
our way. We saw those things, we saw the big wardrobe marooned in the
mud at the edge of the reservoir. We grieved for ourselves as we grieved for
those who had drowned there.
Built on promises of a better future in exchange for the sacrifice of their
homes and lands and livelihoods for the sake of the public good, the expectations of these women for a stable, secure, and indeed modern future were
constantly dashed by the realities of living amid the ruins produced by the
modernization project in the form of the archaeology temples and among
the silences surrounding the ruination of the social and material ecologies
of their old lives. The deterioration of intergenerational relations, competition among kinsmen for scarce land, and strained relations with their natal
homes over new laws granting equal property rights to women were often
mentioned as among the intangible hardships engendered by Srisailam. If
there was a sense that mere abandonment of their old livesthe recognition
of those ecologies as ruins whose place was in the pastcould allow people
to move on with their lives, the situation they found themselves in was an intolerable one. They could neither move forward nor step back fully into what
they had lost. Their engagement with these forms of ruination was an ongoing process, traced in their daily movements between the new village and
the old, between new kinds of social relations and the persistence of older
structures of oppression and power.
However, living in this zone of abandonment and reconstruction
obliquely conditioned their expectations of the future. What was there made
clear what was missing: there were archaeology temples, but no factories or
even tourists; there was the dam, but no electricity for illumination or for
irrigation; there were houses, but no land. Everything was incomplete and
therefore precarious. These observations, shared by many of the villagers,
were critical of the modernization project, but specifically through the recognition that the deleterious effects of Srisailam were distributed not just by
the dam at a distance, but by the very presence of the archaeology temples,
close at hand. These impotent markers of modernization, mute, abandoned
by both villagers and tourists, were routinely ignored in daily life and conversationbut therein also lay their power and hold over local imaginaries
of suffering.
Living Monuments, Dead Pasts

The archaeological project began nearly a decade after the dam was approved. In the mid-1970s, a high-power committee consisting of representatives of the Ministries of Irrigation, Archaeology and Museums, and
Tourism, as well as of various experts, sanctioned the massive project, which
competes in scale with the famous monument salvage project undertaken
by UNESCO in Egypt.15 Archaeologists, technicians, and armies of laborers
were involved in the project. The temples to be moved were first identified
based on their historical importance and the feasibility of moving them.
Their stones were marked with indelible ink to identify their location, and
then the temples were dismantled. The stones were transported to the new
locations for reconstruction. In case the temples had been actively in use
prior to submergence, the idols were removed to a temporary sanctuary after
elaborate rituals, justified by reference to ancient texts, were performed.
Similarly, after reconstruction, the state of Andhra Pradesh facilitated the
performance of equally elaborate reconsecration rituals for all the transplanted temples, thus resurrecting the temples for worship while also
turning them into national monuments (see fig. 9.2).
By the late 1990s, when I was doing research in the area, the salvage archaeology project was nearly complete, with just a few disputed temples
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9.2 Temple museum compound at Jetprole crossroads, July 2006. Photo by author.
remaining to be reconstructed. The decision to remove the temples from

their original village contexts had caused problems in cases where villagelevel attachments to the particular shrines had to be reckoned with politically. In the case of Jetprole, an important exception was made to accommodate the interests of the Raja of Jetprole, then living in the city of Hyderabad.
At his request, the monumental Madanagopalaswamy Temple of Jetprole
was removed and transplanted to a site that would become the geographic
center of the reconstructed village, rather than into a museum with other
temples from the same period or built in the same style. Like most of the
submerged villages, a part of Jetproles territory remained outside the submergence zone and this remainder was appropriated for the reconstruction
of the Madanagopalaswamy Temple. The new village grew around this transplanted temple since its reconstruction was already in progress when the
dam was completed and the residents displaced. In addition, Jetprole was
chosen as a site for a temple-museum, given its prior historical importance.
It is important to note, however, that the Jetprole temple was the proprietary temple of the Surabhi family, in which the Surabhi Rajas family and
their invited guests enjoyed exclusive rights of worship.16 Apart from highcaste families, the village public rarely participated in the temple rituals, and
many, especially the untouchable communities in the village, saw the deity
only when specially made procession idols (utsava vigrahalu) were taken out
into the streets of the village during festivals. The two main communities in
the village, the tenugus and the dalits, had intimate yet different relations to
this temple. While the former experienced a form of intimate inclusion, performing various services in the temple, the latter experienced a form of intimate exclusion in which the temple featured prominently because they were
not allowed to enter the temple at all.17 Moreover, the remainder of Jetprole
villages official revenue territory, which was appropriated for transplanting
the Jetprole temple, was being used by certain dalit families who claimed
hereditary squatting rights to the land as an inam for serving the Rajas of
Jetprole for various personal needs not involving the temple. Their dispossession was emblematic of the complex forms of displacement that took place
after Srisailam. These groups formed the main population of the village,
while the remaining groupsmostly upper- caste farming familieshad
largely moved out of the social life of the village after submergence, since
many had homes in district towns even though they continued to maintain
homes and farms in Jetprole.
From 1968, when the dams construction began, to the late 1990s, the
entire submergence zone was being incorporated into national geography
in new ways. Already known for being major suppliers of labor to construction sites all over India, these districts were seen by the state as hopelessly
underdeveloped and remote. Yet the interventions into the region brought
many outsiders into the region including state officials, ambulance- chasing
lawyers who enabled villagers to contest the compensations being paid to
them, and construction laborers working on archaeological sites. The remoteness of these villages should be understood in the phenomenological
sense, experienced, perceived, and evoked by villagers in their stories about
the development project.
The project brought new relations to the world, but at the same time the
proximity of the past in its material forms drew the place into other lived
times and spaces. These development- driven interventions had juxtaposed
the large-scale ruin-making capacities of the state, the willful and calculated disregard for how people would survive without land or water, with
the loving care the state extended to the temples that it chose to rescue as
vestiges of a glorious, precolonial national past. The sense of neglect experienced by the people of these villages was evidenced by comments that they
made about archaeologists being the only agents of the state that they saw
with any regularity both before and after the submergence. This sense was
also conveyed to me by many archaeologists who felt uncomfortable with the
role they occupied as agents of a neglectful and indeed irresponsible state
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as they witnessed, at very close quarters, the hardships experienced by the

villagers throughout the process of displacement.
Yet the archaeologists were both motivated and even excited by the historical and aesthetic opportunities afforded by the project. Postreconstruction, the monuments manufactured by the salvage process occupied a very
particular kind of past tense, the past perfect. The archaeologists whom I
interviewed over the course of my research were clear about the role of archaeology in rescuing the relics of the past. They viewed these monuments
as tokens of a bygone era, even those temples, such as the Madanagopalaswamy Temple of Jetprole, that clearly continued to play a complex role in
the social, economic, and political life of the villages in which they were
located. The formal and aesthetic aspects of these monumental temples were
what most interested the archaeologists, since style, according to their analytic, signified period of construction and thereby allowed them to draw historical conclusions about precolonial South Indian polities.
As in many countries, archaeology in India is tied intimately to the state.
The archaeologists involved in the salvage project were, first and foremost,
civil servants, rather than university-based research archaeologists. The
latter were able to undertake field research only in collaboration with stateemployed archaeologists. Another important feature of archaeological practice in post-independence India is precisely its intimate connection to the
development regime. As the then director of the Andhra Pradesh state department of Archaeology and Museums, who supervised much of the Srisailam salvage project, stated in a written report on this project, These salvage
operations have become a catalyst for even the normal work of archaeology
in a country lacking in the resources for expanded archaeological activities,
causing archaeologists to move from one scene of submergence to the next,
excavating and choosing remains destined for museums.18 The sense that
the rescued temples were remains, leftovers, from a past that was decisively
separate from the (modern) present was dominant, at least among this particular community of archaeologists.
This melancholic but redemptive understanding of the ruin as the decayed
remnant of a vanished past is certainly modernist, but at the same time the
archaeological ruin is not found but made. The salvage operation is but an
extreme practice in a genealogy of practices that actively constitute relations
between history and identity through material artifacts, rather than merely
reflecting a preexisting relation between history and identity.19 Recent histories of archaeology in India trace the continuities between the institutions of
postcolonial archaeology and their colonial predecessors.20 In particular, the

distinction, made by colonial archaeologists, between living and dead
monuments, or between monuments in active use and abandoned or disused
monuments, continues to animate the concerns of contemporary archaeologists. A large number of the historic monuments tended to by archaeologists
in India are also actively occupied and therefore objects of contest between
the state and the occupants, or between different communities with competing claims over these monuments.
The distinction between the living and the dead monument is significant to understanding how and why the material trace of the past has come
to assume such a contentious position in debates about national identity
in recent years. Combined with archaeological methods of excavation, the
proper positioning of material remains has proved, as it has in so many
other places, to be a volatile practice in contemporary India where the more
temporally recent layers have been interpreted to embed signs of iconoclasm and desecration. The violent debates over the Babri Mosque in northern India, which was claimed by both Muslims and Hindus as a holy site, for
example, have animated a virulent, exclusionary identity politics for over two
decades. The passage of the mosque into the trusteeship of the state after
independence contributed to an imaginary of its being a dead monument,
while the claims of Hindu nationalist politicians and archaeologists, aligned
by their mutual contention that the foundations of the mosque lay on top of
the foundations of a destroyed temple, contributed to a fierce debate over
the site itself, which culminated in the physical destruction of the mosque
by armies of youth members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other, similar, xenophobic Hindu nationalist groups.
The salvage archaeology project highlights similar processes of historymaking by aligning layers of spatial forms to the temporal ideologies of historical periods. More important, by transplanting the temples and reorganizing their relations to one another as evocative ruins within the open-air
museum compounds, the salvage archaeology project follows a modernist
aesthetic attitude, both in terms of its organization of time and in terms of
its organization of individual sensory experience.21 Such an organization of
time foregrounds a particular emphasis on understanding the past as a completed process, as history outside of lived reality.22 As Jacques Rancire
elaborates in his recent work, the aesthetic focus on particular objects, considered to fall solely within the sphere of art, attempts to fundamentally affect the redistribution of the relations between the forms of sensory experience.23 Yet the archaeology temples are caught in a paradoxical ontological
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bind: the salvage process turns them into objects of an aesthetic regime of
recognition, while at the same time the reconsecration ceremonies attempt
to bring them into a different order of time, to reconstruct their qualities as
living monuments.
The archaeologists work, tied to the modernization project, is central to
a politics of dislocation as well as to an apportioning of risks.24 The state and
its allies envision development as a normative project whose overall benefits
are not blunted by the costs borne by some populations. The sustained disregard for the lives of people in the submergence zones of dams, in the forests
being extracted for resources, or in the shadows of the high-rise buildings of
globalizing cities is recast as a necessary cost of progress. But the state is
well aware that acknowledgment of the large-scale ruin-making required by
the project of modernization is not enough to justify these processes. Other,
more calculated projectssuch as the salvage archaeology project and other
schemes of compensationare in fact required to supplement and substantiate the necessity of development. Such schemes and schemas trace
the continuity between imperial pedagogic projects that projected natives
as children in need of an education and the policies of postcolonial states.25
These schemas also recast the ruination of life, opportunities, and aspirations by cutting off specific material ecologies from the flow of time and
pushing the ways of life associated with these ecologies into the sphere of
history outside of lived reality. Yet this cordoning off of space and time
hardly stems the flow of history or the seepage of these very material ecologies into the political imaginaries of the present as people struggle with the
ambivalence of letting go of an oppressive past in the context of a hopeless
present.
The salvage archaeology project struggles to contain these imaginaries,
restricting the understanding of the past to the loss documented, archived,
and aesthetically repackaged by the project. This imperialist nostalgia, however, is called into question when that which is destroyed demands to be
recognized as having an influence on the imaginaries and possibilities of the
future. The archaeological refusal to establish a relationship to the destroyed
is turned on its head by the villagers, who in turn refuse to acknowledge the
transformative, aesthetic effect of the salvaged temples. Through the salvage
archaeology projectin the attention to the material trace of history, in its
relocation and repositioning as an evocative ruinan evasive history of empire reappears and is joined to a sustained biopolitical project to disregard
the agency of particular populations, populations already rendered vulnerable by hurts that can be traced back through time.
The Disappearance of Jetprole

If modernization projects have a particular relation to that which they lay
waste toviewing the pasts of villages they submerge or the spaces of slums
that they redevelop or the depths of mines and forests that they extract resources from as necessary and inevitable wastethen projects like the salvage archaeology project pick up that waste and attempt to curate and control its effects.26 The salvage archaeology project cultivates a particular,
modernist sensibility of the past as a space that can be cordoned off from
the flow of time and whose symbolic effects on the present and the future
can be carefully controlled through the control of the material objects representing the past. Yet this process of control gives rise to unexpected, critical encounters that reveal new possibilities for grounding processes of recomposing lives. In this concluding section, I turn to narratives surrounding
the relocation of the Jetprole Madanagopalaswamy Temple to explore these
encounters.
The archaeological relocation of Jetproles monumental temple provided
an important element of physical continuity between the old village and the
new. But it also proved temporally disorienting to the villagers because, after
reconstruction, worship was resumed in the temple but with very different
vectors of authority since the management of the temple had been radically
transformed. Although the Raja of Jetprole retained rights of worship and
other kinds of honors as the hereditary trustee, the temple was now fully
managed by the Religious Endowments Department of the Andhra Pradesh
government, which controlled everything from the budget to appointments
of temple servants. This situation particularly affected the many families
both tenugu and dalitattached to the temple through rights of use over
temple lands. These landsnumbering hundreds of acreshad been endowed to the temple by the Rajas of Jetprole over the course of four centuries. Rights of use over these temple lands were, in turn granted to different families in the village in exchange for specific services: pouring oil into
the lamps, supplying flowers for daily worship, washing vessels, bearing the
processionary idol, and, of course, priestly duties among numerous other
major and minor duties.27
After the reconstruction of the temple, the cash compensations paid for
these lands were collected by the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE ) Department and deposited in a bank account from which
salaries were paid to a few villagers for taking care of the daily operations of
the temple. The staff was reduced to a priest, a watchman, a sweeper, and
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a gardener, who struggled to maintain the huge, magnificent temple complex. They spent their days in the temple gossiping and waiting for the very
occasional visitor to drop by. Villagers still refrained from going into the
temple without a specific reason for doing so because it remained tied, in
their memories and in reality, to the family of the Raja of Jetprole, who now
resided in Hyderabad city and visited the village only on rare occasions.
Other families, who had served in the temple until it was dismantled and
who had cultivated the temple lands, were locked up in a legal battle with
the state, arguing that they, and not the HRCE Department, should rightfully receive the cash compensation for the temple lands. For these families,
there was a deep sense of disappointment; they were no longer servants of
the temple, nor were the rights accrued from their previous position serving
the temple recognized after the submergence. The legal battle and the forms
of testimony required by these families required them to relive memories of
particular forms of oppression and humiliation that they had suffered for
the rights to cultivate the temples fields. This, coupled with the fact that
the dam project had failed to materialize a radical transformation in their
living conditions, contributed to their repeated assertions about the fact
that nothing had changed, despite the extraordinary incursions into their
everyday life by the dam, the reconstruction of the temples, the lawyers, and
the courts.
Not surprisingly, however, the temple formed a central motif in the poetic
language in which experiences of displacement often resurfaced. A story
sung about the transplantation of the Jetprole temple provided an extended
canvas on which to observe these ideas at play. I first heard the song performed during the celebration of Ugadi, the Telugu New Year, which coincides with the harvest in midsummer. On the day of Ugadi, there were
typically celebrations and entertainments in all the different neighborhoods
of the village. In the tenugu neighborhood, a woman named Savaramma
gathered a group of her kinswomen to sing a long and moving song about the
process of dislocation, transplantation, and reconsecration of the temple.
The song was reputed to be Savarammas original composition, which came
to her in a moment of possession by the deity himself. Such moments of
possession led men and women to start singing stories and legends about
deities, especially caste and family deities. That the Jetprole gopalaswamy, as
the deity was affectionately called by the villagers, should possess someone
was somewhat incongruous, given his status as a high god, removed from
everyday life and worshiped only by the highest castes. But the events of the
submergence had rendered him available to treatments similar to those of
the caste, family, and village deities, including practices of storytelling into
which events from everyday life were woven.
Prior to submergence, Savarammas family was intimately associated
with the temple. Men from her family carried the processional idols around
the village during festivals. During its reconstruction, she was employed
as a laborer on the construction site. She was deeply moved by the experience of witnessing the deity removed from his place, being taken away to
a temporary shrine in the neighboring village, and his return to Jetprole,
many years later. Savarammas song referenced the special relations that her
family and community enjoyed with the deity and the Jetprole temple. She
was quite wary of performing the song too frequently, afraid of becoming
possessed as she had been when she first composed the song, but the song
itself had migrated to other neighborhoods and other singers took up the
basic story, weaving in their own stories of displacement. All versions of this
song, regardless of who performed them, turned on a trope of death. They
recounted the scene of the deity leaving the village as a corpse, drained of
his life by the elaborate deconsecration ceremonies. The touch of this corpse
turned the old village site into a ghostly space that people waited to flee, but
they had nowhere to go until they were forcibly evicted, years later. And yet,
Savarammas song suggested, they were unsure that the condition of being
ghosts, of being between life and death, had ended when the village was rebuilt and the temple reconstructed.
Later, on the same Ugadi day, I heard another version of this song, performed by Lakshmamma, the dalit woman whom I had accompanied into
the old village. Her version of the song told the story of her communitys
dispossession from the lands they were cultivating under the decree of the
Raja of Jetprole. These lands, which were appropriated for rebuilding the Jetprole temple, assumed a symbolic charge as the only part of village territory
that was not submerged. Reconstructing the temple on these grounds meant
that the temple would retain its ancient connection to the village. But, as the
song explained, the Madigas who cultivated those lands had no idea what
was in store.28 They assumed that the land was charayi (common land, typically used for grazing) to which the Raja had gifted them squatting rights on
his authority. Yet they discovered that these rights could be taken away just
as arbitrarily. The temple therefore stood as the emblem of a very particular
kind of history in the memory of Lakshmamma and her kinswomen who
sang with her.
Her song was not a direct indictment of the state or the Raja but something more. Lakshmammas song and her story provide an exploration of
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the impermanence and mutability of the relations of care and attachment

across generations. While such arbitrary dispossessions may have been part
of historical memory, the labor needed to resitutate the vanished into the
order of lived time was new. For the vanished objects of intergenerational
transmission, like the landed ties of their inam, marked the difference, for
these women, between life and death, between being corpses and becoming
ghosts. The song decried the foolishness of their elders, who in their ignorance had given away their land to gopalaswamy, and it contemplated the
womens own futures as elders to their children, wondering what would become of them and how they would be remembered. Both in its structure
and its affect, the song exhibited a deep concern with the recognition that
the future, which they were so worried about, might already have arrived,
in a form that could not be changed.29 Their understanding of the future
contrasted distinctly from their aspirations for a life in which their children
would have greater opportunities than themselves.
Many of the women recounted, for example, how they had obliquely become aware of the equal property rights that the government of Andhra
Pradeshs laws had bestowed on women. They only become aware of this
right, they said, when their brothers from other villages in the submergence
zone requested that they sign away their rights to compensation for their
shares in the family property. The women did so, they said, in order to maintain their visiting rights to their natal homes and their rights to receive turmeric and vermillion on ritual occasions. Thus dispossessed many times
over, Lakshmamma and her kinswomen struggled to account for the vanished and the appearance of a stillborn future into their everyday experience.
The Jetprole Madanagopalaswamy Temple became both an emblem of ruination and a token of the capacity to constitute a meaningful understanding of
this experience.
Encountering Srisailam: Modernist

Ruins and Imperial Debris
To encounter Srisailam, the project, and to trace its location is to encounter
this complex terrain of ruins and debris generated by the project of modernization. The resituation of these traces of the vanishedlike the moral
geographies of entitlements that are passed along generationsinto the
order of lived time required the sustained work of confronting the material
remains of this event, of resignifying their status as emblems of progress
or as the wasted matter left over by the project of development or as the maT H E F U T U R E I N RU I N S 313
terials with which to rebuild their lives. The verification of these claims
and entitlements is an extremely complicated process, as the legal cases
make clear. I focus here on the claims that are made in the songs specifically
because my informants and I were never able to discuss their land claims
directly. The larger work of which this essay is a part looks into the ways
in which postcolonial law deals with customary claims as well as into the
broader problematic made visible by different narrative styles of introducing
claims. Claims made in the everyday and poetic speech of ordinary villagers
adversely affected by the dam project stand in sharp contrast to the rationalizing discourses of the law which were deployed both by the lawyers that I
worked with and by literate, upper- caste villagers conversant with the legal
framing of displacement and compensation issues. If the latter narratives
foreground verification and verifiability, the former are more concerned with
affective framing of the spaces and materials that remain and with the contextualization of claims over these spaces in relation to forms of authority
that continue to operate without being visible to the law.
In this ethnographic exploration, I have marked the ways in which the
language and practice of contemporary political activism has been critical in
making visible the connection between public works and evasive histories of
imperial formations in the contexts of large-scale development projects. In
mapping the effects of development on formerly colonized societies, scholars have offered us a rich array of accounts situated in multiple localities.
As many of the accounts make clear, modernization projected above all a
biopolitics directed toward remaking the normative conditions of subjected
societies. Development constituted an ideology of hope, deeply linked to
the aspiration for modernity itself.30 At the same time, such projects also
embedded the experience of violence and catastrophe within the life-worlds
of people and fostered a politics of protest and identity formation.31 Several
accounts have paid close attention to the question of scale, spatiality, and
sovereignty in the formation of such politics of protest and identity.32 Yet
other accounts look at the effects of the violence of development on the constitution of memory and subjectivity and the recovery of everyday life from
such catastrophic experiences that are visited by purely exogenous factors.33
Most accounts, however, do not focus on the relations between subjects and the material ecologies of remains, leftovers, and the debris among
which those subjects must lead their daily lives. To encounter Srisailamthe
projectand to trace its location is to encounter a complex terrain of ruins,
as traces of the vanished as well as the specter of the future in the form of the
phantom debris of the project of modernization. Paradoxically, the archae314V Y J AYA N T H I
R AO
ology temples serve as the only concrete signs of a modernization project

and its promised future, which has come and gone. The temples stand as the
relics and ruins of progress, and they act as fossils of the future, to use the
English writer J. G. Ballards evocative expression. In so doing, they offer a
rearview-mirror look at the future in the absence of any hopeful, redemptive
visions of progress in this space of disappearance, dereliction, and vanishing. Yet, viewed alongside the recurrently reappearing village, these relics of
destruction and construction together open a space in which it is possible
to witness the intertwining of different senses of temporality and historical
consciousness and, in general, different levels of saturation and investment
in debris.
Within a logic of modernization, the memorialization of fragments of
the past as heritage by the archaeological salvage operation takes place by
denying the contemporaneity of these fragments. A utopian notion of the
future is connected to understanding these fragments of the past as a form
of waste, inevitably produced by modernization, permanently withdrawn
from time. In this understanding, waste is material that has no duration,
only durability, for which the passage of time is irrelevant. From this perspective of waste as durable substance without temporality, the utopian
products of modernization and modernismwhether cities like Brasilia and
Chandigarh or the temples rescued by the salvage archaeology projectare
thus waste from the outset, but as examples of perfection. Such a notion of
waste reconfigures the utopian futures of modernization as a future already
in ruins, albeit permanent and aesthetically perfect or correct ruins.
By contrast, an exploration focusing on the material remains that people
are left with in the wake of development projects adds to the literature on
development in one significant way. It brings to the fore some of the historical vectors through which postcolonial regimes of national development
achieve their goals. In the Jetprole case, I have explored in depth the positioning and repositioning of the different categories of monuments manufactured by the salvage archaeology project and placed them in relation to
the remains of the submerged village that are invisible yet viscerally connected to the everyday life of the villagers. This intersection between a stillcolonial practice of archaeology, saturated with an imperialist nostalgia for
resurrecting a glorious past, and the biopolitics of the development and
modernization process that actively disregards and neglects the economic
and social welfare of the villagers suggests the persistent relevance of colonial effects. Yet it also scrambles any sense of analytic neatness in finding
temporal convergences between colonialism and imperial forms of the modT H E F U T U R E I N RU I N S 315
ern, on the one hand, and postcolonialism and utopian forms of modernism
on the otheror, in other words, between political technologies and forms
of power, on the one hand, and aesthetic and subjective experiences on the
other. It is urgent to recognize the persistent relevance of colonial effects
not in order to absolve postcolonial regimes, but in order to recognize the
histories through which they work and that are at work through them. At
the same time, it is necessary to recognize the disjunctive and persistent relations between colonial practices and effects and the modern practices that
Ann Stoler provocatively captures through the term imperial formations.
Certainly, life in Jetprole does go on and new forces are at work within
the village. A more meaningful monument appearing openly in this landscape these days is the memorial marker topped off by the sickle and hammer erected in memory of comrades slain in the extrajudicial encounters
between the police and the Maoist revolutionary guerrillas who constitute
the most active political force in this region today. Yet the scars and wounds
of Srisailam, the ecologies of remains, are precisely the signs whose presence concretely ties this geography of despair to a larger canvas of colonial
privilege and its distribution of the vulnerabilities that continue to play an
active role in the politics of the present.
In Jetprole these material remains are hardly forms of waste in the modernist sense. Rather, they are actively morphing, changing, and being recycled in local imaginaries around displacement, suffering, and life-making.
The active and ironic disregard that the people of Jetprole and other villages
show, in everyday conversation, to the archaeology temples and their museological settings and the deployment of all forms of remains in their poetic
narratives about displacement are both significant ways in which villagers
grapple with the ongoing effects of Srisailam. These veiled and oblique attempts to grasp at the event and to situate its effects point not to a passive acceptance of their fates, but rather to an active and ongoing engagement with
ruins, not as remains to be feared for what they predict about their future or
as intimations of loss, but as sites from which to direct and sharpen political and affective states of sustained resentment that redirect what will be in
ruins and who will be living in them.34 An exploration of those active forms
of political resentment being played out today through sustained everyday
insurrections and insurgencies across India today is beyond the scope of this
essay. However, to understand the specificity of new forms of action, visibly
symbolized by new memorial markers such as those of slain Maoist cadres,
it is necessary to follow the traces of histories embedded in these scarred
landscapes.
R AO
Appendix: Sayalus Song

Where is this Srisailam? Who built these projects?
Land, like the mother who bore me,
vanished from the sight of my eye.
Fields, full of standing crops,
drowned in the water.
For destroying cultivated land,
they gave us money.
For destroying cultivation,
the government gave us money.
One part for the losers soil,
another for the lawyers bribe.
Six thousand apiece,
six thousand a head,
six thousand a portion of land.
Six thousand they promised,
but not even three can be accounted for.
Land, like the mother who bore me, vanished from the sight of my
eye.
(Lament on names of disappeared villages)
: Kurramu, Bollaram, O Brother, Amaragiri, Marugocche . . .
Drowned, mingled in the waters . . .
(Lament on names of disappeared villages)
: Kurramu, Bollaram, O Brother, Amaragiri, Marugocche . . .
: Siddheswaram, Malleswaram
Mingled in the waters . . .
: Malleswaram, Sangameswaram
Drowned . . .
But Koppunuru and Jetprole, they sank without a trace . . .
(Lament of names)
: Peddamarur, Chinnamarur, Kanuru, Erupalle

Disappeared . . .
: Sangameswaram, Kudavelli [important pilgrimage centers, at the
confluence of several rivers, that were submerged by the reservoir]
Sealed up and drowned . . .
Land, like the mother who bore me, vanished from the sight of my
eye . . .
Fields in which young peanuts ripened,
fields in which young millet ripened,
lie engulfed in the middle of waters . . .
Our lives drained,
weve taken refuge on these rocky shores,
we pulled ourselves to the edge of disappearing,
we reached the edge of another land . . .
Notes
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance offered by the Surabhi family and the support
of my extended family in Hyderabad. My late father-in-law, Dr. P. V. R. Bhaskar Rao,
especially encouraged me through the most difficult periods of my research with his
warmth, affection, and practical advice. My research was funded by a grant from the
American Institute of Indian Studies. I am deeply grateful to Ann Stoler for inviting
me to consider parts of my dissertation under the rubric of imperial debris, which allowed me to highlight the singular theoretical significance of material landscapes in
accounting for postcolonial development regimes.
1. The location of these reconstructed monuments mattered greatly to their influence on local imaginaries and on accounts of the development project.
2. The term little kingdom is used by Nicholas Dirks in his book, The Hollow Crown,
a historical ethnography of a minor political entity in southern India. Dirks argues
that the concept of the little kingdomwhich symbolically perpetuated the sumptuary practices central to precolonial tactics of power, while itself being eviscerated of
real poweris crucial to understanding the British colonial rule of South Asia. Such
vassal states worked by maintaining their rulers symbolic power while real political
authority was ceded to the British.
3. See Coronil, Editors Column.
5. See Bruno Dagenss Entre Alampur et Srisailam, an archaeological survey of his-
R AO
torical artifacts and monuments in the presubmergence villages. Dagens, a French

indologist, suggests, from his survey of inscriptions and types of monuments that his
team found and classified in each village, that the submersible zone appeared to have
an identity, not so much through any recognizable essence like language or religion,
but in fact as the place that many successive southern Indian empires sought to control in order to secure their access to these two major pilgrimage towns. While this
might be a highly simplified characterization of the social history of these villages, it
can nevertheless be used as a shorthand for understanding the wealth of monumental remainsboth sacred and secularin these villages. As I showed in my unpublished masters thesis, Itinerant Temples and Monumental Ruins, the construction
and endowment of temples, mosques, monasteries, and other similar institutions
was essential to the consolidation of imperial powers, especially in frontier zones, for
these institutions performed vital economic functions by redistributing agricultural
surplus and by providing local employment on the lands endowed to these religious
institutions. See also Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule; and Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice.
6. The following account of Jetproles history is compiled from various sources,
including interviews with the Surabhi family head, S. V. K. V. Aditya Lakshma Rao;
Bhattara Srinivasacharyas Jetprole Samsthanam Pariseelana, an M.Phil. thesis in
history submitted to Telugu University, Srisailam; interviews with M. R. Sarma of Osmania University; and local accounts. There is little written material apart from Srinivasacharyas thesis and a few manuscripts relating to royal history.
7. See Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule, for a detailed history and
sociology of the SriVaishnava sect and their religious institutions. Here it is sufficient
to note that the SriVaishnavas exclusively worshipped different physical forms and
manifestations of the deity Lord Vishnu.
8. For a detailed analysis of the system of inams and the roles that such arrangements played both in direct rule and indirect rule in the colonial period, see Dirks, The
Hollow Crown; and Frykenberg, The Silent Settlement in South India.
9. Numerous local accounts make reference to these relations as if they were social
facts, well understood even though they are not officially recorded in revenue documents and other official forms of post-independence recordkeeping.
10. I thank Ann Stoler for referring me to the work of Carol McGranahan on arrested histories, on which I build this notion of an arrested future.
11. There is a rich literature on rehabilitation and resettlement: Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed; Fernandes and Thukral, Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation;
Kaushik Ghosh, Between Global Flows and Local Dams; Economic and Political Weekly
(June 1996), special issue on Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation; McCully, Silenced Rivers.
12. The evacuation of the villages was carried out with brutal insensitivity towards
the feelings of the villagers who, not unnaturally, were bewildered and distressed at
being forced out of their homes. The villagers were not properly informed about the
details of the evacuation: some did not even know where to go once they had been
ordered to move. Many villagers did not take government announcements about the
evacuation seriously. The government is always announcing things which it never
carries out, they told us. Some refused to believe that their villages would be submergedor thought that, at worst, their lands would only be flooded when the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers were in spate. Still others delayed moving either because
they had no money to do so or because they had failed to find alternative housing and
employment. The evacuation programme was so rushed that few villagers had enough
time to move all their belongings to the resettlement sites. Worse still, when the villagers reached the new sites, they found them lacking in basic amenitiesincluding
proper housing.
During the last week of March 1981, the government announcedfor the first
timethat all villagers had to leave their homes. Two months later, convinced that
the villagers would not move whilst their houses and huts were still standing, the authorities launched Operation Demolition. Under heavy police guard, officers and
staff from the Departments of Revenue and Irrigation and Power, accompanied by
hired labourers from the towns, set about demolishing those villages which were to be
flooded. Some twenty thousand houses and huts were destroyedleaving a hundred
thousand people (twenty- one thousand families) homeless. The houses were either
knocked down or dismantled by removing doorframes, window frames and roofs.
Demolition work on the huts was carried out with much vigour and zeal. Utensils and
other belongings were thrown out on to the streets, cattle were let loose and entire
families were unceremoniously driven out of their homes. The operation was carried
out without any regard for the villagers, who were already in a state of shock. An old
woman in Rolampad village reported that her ankle and the bone of her right hand
were broken when she was dragged by the police from her hut. Not surprisingly, the
villagers are still bitterly resentful of the behaviour of the authorities (Fact-Finding
Committee on the Srisailam Project, Srisailam Resettlement Experience, 258, 259).
13. D. Venkat Rao, writing about a similar tradition of rural and revolutionary
song-making, notes that the tune or the refrain . . . works as a trace, as an already
glimmering grapheme. The source of the trace is in other peoples voices (Writing
Orally, 256).
14. Dalit which literally means oppressed is the political term used by the formerly untouchable communities to identify themselves. It emerged as a term of contrast and confrontation with the term harijan (children of god), which was coined
by Gandhi. Arguing that harijan glossed over a highly oppressive history, the former
untouchables preferred dalit as a label for self-identification. Many of my older informants, however, preferred to refer to themselves as harijan. I worked with both the
main dalit communities in the villageMalas and Madigaswho had little contact
with each other and largely behaved like autonomous caste groups.
15. The project came close on the heels of a similar initiative, on a much smaller
scale, to rescue and museumize Buddhist relics that were discovered in Andhra during
the construction of the Nagarjuna Sagar dam.
16. The Madanagopalaswamy Temple was likely constructed during the period of
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the Vijayanagara empire (circa sixteenth century CE ) and was dedicated to an unusual
form of Vishnu known as Madanagopalaswamy, affectionately called Gopalaswamy by
the villagers. This iconographic form is extremely rare, making the temple an exceptional monument.
17. The Muslims of the village also had an interesting relationship to the Jetprole
temple. According to local legends, the deity Madanagopalaswamy regularly played
chess with the Muslim pir Darvesh Khadri, and during the annual urs of the saint, the
temple sent sandalwood to the dargah as a birthday gift from the deity. The sandalwood gift was reciprocated during the annual temple festival in the summer season.
18. Sastri, Salvage Archaeological Operations under Srisailam Project.
19. See Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground.
20. See especially Chakrabarti, A History of Indian Archaeology.
21. As Jacques Rancire puts it in his recent book, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Aesthetics . . . is a form for identifying the specificity of art and a redistribution of the
relations between the forms of sensory experience. . . . [A] regime for identifying art
[that] is linked to the promise of an art that would be no more than an art or would no
longer be art. . . . The stake here does not only concern those objects that fall within
the sphere of art, but also the ways in which, today, our world is given to perceiving
itself and in which the powers that be assert their legitimacy (1415).
22. See S. Stewart, On Longing.
23. Rancire, Aesthetics and Its Discontents.
25. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Cooper and Packard, International Development and
the Social Sciences.
26. See Bauman, Wasted Lives, for a development of the relationship between modernity and waste. Baumans implicit understanding of waste as substance withdrawn
from time is politically salient for his establishing a relationship between waste and
modernity.
27. These services were also encoded into the names of the fields themselves, which
in turn were an important mnemonic device within local narratives about the submerged village.
28. The Madigas, as explained above, are a subgroup of the larger dalit community.
29. In this understanding, the future has none of the positive instability attributed to it by various theorists of modernity, including Marx and Reinhardt Koselleck,
among others, who write of this instability as central to modern historicity.
30. See Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal, Regional Modernities; Ferguson, Expectations
of Modernity.
31. See Das, Remaking a World; and Kaushik Ghosh, Between Global Flows and
Local Dams.
32. See especially Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed; Gupta, Post- colonial Developments; and Kaushik Ghosh, Between Global Flows and Local Dams.
33. Das, Remaking a World; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity.
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CONTRIBUTORS
is a writer, curator, and filmmaker. She is the author of Civil

Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2011), From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 19471950 (2011), and The Civil Contract
of Photography (2008).
A R I E L L A A ZO U L AY
is an associate professor at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa,

and the anthropology department at the University of the Witwatersrand in South
Africa. He is the author of Fraternal Capital (2004), The Development Reader (2008), and
articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Radical History Review, South Atlantic
Quarterly, and other journals. He is currently completing a monograph titled Apartheid Remains.
SHARAD CHARI
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 Brazilian World Heritage site in the ruins of the Portuguese South Atlantic, is forthcoming from Duke. He is currently conducting fieldwork for a new project on hunters of
white-tailed deer in central New Jersey.
JOHN COLLINS
E . VA L E N T I N E DA N I E L
City of New York.
is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in the
is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of

British Columbia. He is the author of Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory
in the Argentinean Chaco (Duke, 2004) and the forthcoming The Afterlife of Things: Ruins
and the Destruction of Space, also with Duke.
G A S T N G O R D I L LO
G R E G G R A N D I N is a professor of history at New York University and a member of

the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Fordlandia (2009),
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book
Critics Circle Award; Empires Workshop: The United States, Latin America, and the Rise
of the New Imperialism (2006); The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War
(2004); and The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Duke, 2000), winner
of the Latin American Studies Associations Bryce Wood Award. He is coeditor, with
Gilbert Joseph, of A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during
Latin Americas Long Cold War (2010). He is currently writing a book on Herman Melville
and free and unfree labor in the Americas during the Age of Revolution.
is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and was

a Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellow in 201011. She received the Herskovits Prize
for her A Colonial Lexicon (Duke, 1999). A Nervous State is forthcoming, also from Duke.
N A N C Y RO S E H U N T
is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post Cold War
New Mexico (2006).
JOSEPH MASCO
V Y J AYA N T H I R AO
is an assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for
Social Research.
A N N L A U R A S TO L E R is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. Her publications include Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009);
Imperial Formations, with Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue (2007); Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Duke, 2006); Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002); Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), with Frederick Cooper; Race and the Education of Desire:
Foucaults History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Duke, 1995); and Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatras Plantation Belt, 18701979 (1985; 1995).
356C O N T R I B U TO R S
INDEX
abandonment, 18, 22, 23, 28, 298, 303,

304
Abdul, Lida, 16
Abir (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and
Exploration), 3948, 50, 5556, 60n2
Abu El Haj, Nadia, 20, 33n73
Abu Ghraib, 3
acoustic debris, 4750
acoustic register, 17, 39, 51, 58
activism, 13334, 136, 140, 142, 154, 156,
158n11, 314
Adorno, Theodor, 228
affect, 22, 72, 88; affective connection,
238; affective coordinates, 254, 262;
affective space, 33n66; affective states,
29, 256, 316; fear, 48, 50, 74, 15052,
253, 25558, 266, 27779, 281; resentment, 2729, 316; terror, 4, 45, 12425,
196, 230, 237, 239, 25556, 258, 275,
281. See also emotional management
Afghanistan, 19, 115, 16465, 247
African National Congress (ANC ), 139
Agamben, Giorgio, 23, 137, 16667
Agee, James, 2425; Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, 2425
Agent Orange, 13, 26, 35nn1045

Aida Refugee Camp, 2021
Algeria, 10, 29
Algerian War, 29
Alumni, Jos, 24243
Amazon, 18, 24, 11823, 12527, 17576,
230
America. See United States
American South, 2425
Andes, 227, 22930, 233, 24344
Andhra Pradesh, 28789, 295, 304, 307,
310, 313
Antigua, 15
apartheid, 1718, 13340, 142, 14446,
14856
Arabs, 20, 44, 198, 21114
archives, 4748, 68, 72, 166, 176; apartheid and, 135, 148, 158n19; Jacques
Derrida and, 27273; mode of reading,
5859; postcolonial scholarship and,
4, 12; the state and, 168, 17172, 182
Arendt, Hannah, 28, 113n80, 2024,
222n7
Aretxaga, Begoa, 181
Argentina, 2, 23, 12324, 134, 243
Arias, Francisco, 235, 23940

Armageddon, 27477, 285n50
Arnaud, Leopoldo, 23738, 240
arrested futures, 2122, 291, 298, 303,
319n10
arrested histories, 4, 319n10. See also
arrested futures
Atget, Eugne, 149
atomic bomb, 25253, 257, 262, 265, 267,
273, 275, 27879, 281, 284n35
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC ), 263,
279
Australia, 6, 24
auto industry, 117, 125
Badiou, Alain, 228
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51
Ballard, J. G., 315
Bataille, Georges, 5152, 64n80
Baucom, Ian, 2728
Baudelaire, Charles, 51
Bauman, Zygmunt, 2324, 321n26
Beasley-Murray, Jon, 245
Belgian Congo. See Democratic Republic
of the Congo
Bemba, Jean-Pierre, 39, 54
Benjamin, Walter, ix, 9, 22, 71, 131, 133
35, 149, 245, 247, 254, 277, 282n6,
297; Paris, 131, 149, 247
Biehl, Joo, 23, 190n10, 190n20; Vita: Life
in a Zone of Social Abandonment, 23
Bikini Atoll, 13, 22
biopolitical sovereignty, 137, 143, 15456
biopolitics, 23, 136, 182, 31415; of refusal, 13156. See also biopolitical sovereignty
Blanchot, Maurice, The Writing of the Disaster, 254
Blumberger, Hans, x
Boali, 4044, 5759
Bolivia, 241
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 15, 176
Bosnia, 55
Brazil, 23, 23, 27, 11824; as imperial
358I N D E X
exception, 16289; race and, 191n29,

192n49
Brazil (Terry Gilliam), 247
Brecht, Bertolt, 116, 156; Rise and Fall of the
City of Mahagonny, 116
Britain, 4142, 59, 68, 117. See also England
British, the: Ceylons independence from,
107n12; colonization, 181, 29495,
318n2; imperial legacy of, 21213; imperial pursuits, 4; public, 41; state policies, 23
British South Africa Company, 16
Brown, Wendy, 10
Brussels, 43
Buck-Morss, Susan, ix
Buenos Aires, 124, 23536
Burgher, 9192, 112n67
Bush, George W., 27779, 286n52,
286n56
Cambodia, 9, 15, 117
Cape Town, 16, 149
capitalism: Adorno and, 228; American,
117; apartheid and, 138; Cold War consensus and, 255; colonial, 7071; creative construction, 115; empire and,
23, 118, 22728, 247; financial, 45, 125;
industrialization and, 11516, 120, 123,
126; modernity and, 24, 236; relationship to ruin, 115; territorial expansion
of, 235; welfare, 46
carceral archipelago of empire, the, 22
Caribbean, the, 1415, 167
Carranza, Angel, 23940
Caruth, Cathy, 41
Casement, Roger, 17, 4345, 4752, 55
caste: India, 29697, 3056, 31112, 314,
320n14; Sri Lanka, 73, 86, 92, 111nn55
57, 112n60, 112n62
Catholic Church, 15, 242, 24546
Center for Studies and Therapy of Drug
Abuse (CETAD ), 162, 166, 168, 17884,
189, 191n36
Cesaire, Aim, 10
Ceylon, 67, 78, 91, 107n12, 113n81. See also
Sri Lanka
Chatterjee, Partha, 139, 165, 189n9
Chemical, Engineering and Industrial
Workers Union (CEIWU ), 140, 142
Chile, 15, 23, 12324
Christianity, 231, 23435, 23940
civil defense, 25264, 26668, 273, 275,
279, 282n9, 283n17, 283n22, 283n26
civil discourse, 202, 2078, 21719
Clichy-Sous-Bois, 2829
Cliff, Michelle, 19, 33n68
Cold War, the, 21, 117, 25260, 262, 268,
27379, 281, 282n7
colonialism, x, 6, 1516, 26, 28, 30n9, 70,
134, 16365, 183, 292, 31516
colonial studies, 7, 12, 29, 186
Comaroff, Jean, 136
Concepcin del Bermejo, 227, 22930,
23437, 24142, 245, 248n1
concepts, x, 4, 12, 133
Congo. See Democratic Republic of the
Congo
Congo Free State, the, 3940, 4344,
54. See also Democratic Republic of the
Congo
Congo Reform Association (CRA ), 4043
Conrad, Joseph, 47, 53
coolies, 26, 6770, 73, 75, 77, 7981, 83,
9394, 100, 106n2, 108n19, 112n75,
113n83
Cooper, Frederick, 7
Coronil, Fernando, 24
Crapanzano, Vincent, 15051
cultural heritage. See heritage: cultural
Cycle of Violence, The, 14648, 15253
da Cunha, Euclides, 17476; Rebellion in the
Backlands, 17576
Day After, The, 269, 27274, 277
Deep Impact, 27477
de la Serna, Gernimo, 23741, 243
Deleuze, Gilles, 90, 228
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC ),

3, 17, 22, 26, 3960, 60n1, 65n99;
gender relations in, 5758; rape and,
3960, 65n99; visual narratives of,
3943, 48, 5860
Department of Homeland Security, 1112,
278, 286n53. See also United States:
national security
Derrida, Jacques, 269, 272
Detroit, 18, 32n51, 11527, 128n8, 135,
158n17
Detropia (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady),
116
development, 145, 154, 155, 165, 29092,
298, 307, 309, 31415; costs of, 290;
critique of, 22; modernist, 291; national, 15, 22, 174, 315; policies, 21;
projects, 22, 27, 183, 28991, 298, 306,
31315
Devji, Faisal, 28, 149
Dialectics of Seeing, The (Walter Benjamin), ix
Diderot, Denis, 15
Dow Chemicals, 2627
Drake, Sir Francis, 1, 2
Dresden, 25, 274
Durban, 1718, 13156
Eagleton, Terry, 7
Eastwood, Clint, Gran Torino, 117
Egypt, 15, 198, 304
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 117, 25556
emotional management, 262, 26769,
273, 27779, 285n42
empire: edges of, 22729, 24647;
ethnographic engagements with, 186
87; labor and, 7883; Roman, 30n2,
126; Spanish, 229, 235, 240, 242, 244
45; studies of, 26, 12, 2324, 29; temporality of, 14, 57, 10, 2324, 29,
16364, 184, 186
England, 2728, 102, 126
environmentalism, 133, 13637, 155
environmental racism, 1112, 143. See also
ruins: environment and
I N D E X 359
quateur, 3940, 4446, 55, 62n28

Esteco, 22930, 242
Ethnography, 2325, 6768, 72, 150, 172,
178, 293
Europe, 20, 41, 118; European imperialism and, 4, 10, 1516, 20, 52, 109n29,
109n31, 165, 176, 186, 189n9; industrialization and, 11821; protestant Reformation and, 125
everyday, the, 4, 19, 32n32; cultural heritage and, 165, 16869, 17677, 182,
186; Henri Lefebvre and, 148; nuclear
war and, 25254, 25657, 26264,
26669, 274, 278; Srisailam Dam and,
28991, 293, 299300, 31116
Ewing, Heidi, Detropia, 116
Falcon, 12425
Fanon, Frantz, 10, 19, 2829, 153
Fassin, Didier, 136
Federal Civil Defense Administration
(FCDA ), 25660, 26365
Ferguson, James, 138
fertility, 4546, 55
Filho, Godofredo, 17778; Ladeira da
Misericrdia, 17778
First World War, 255
Fischer, Michael M. J., 67
Ford (Motor Company), 11625; Highland
Park factory, 11819; Model T, 11819
Ford, Henry, 18, 11719, 12223, 12527
Fordism: as foundation of U.S. empire,
12027; Taylorism and, 120
Fordlandia, 18; founding of, 11819,
126; industrialization and, 123, 127;
inequality and, 122; as parable of
ignorance, 125; ruins of, 11921; vice,
119
Foucault, Michel, 12; Giorgio Agamben
and, 166
France, 6, 10, 28, 30n11, 35n114, 204, 215;
French empire, 4, 28
Francis, Baron Dhanis, 4748, 5051,
5354, 56
Franciscans, 23536, 244
360I N D E X
Gaza, 17, 19499, 206, 210, 216

gaze, the, ix, 9, 1215, 19697, 22122,
293
gender, 1617, 57, 14647, 163, 187, 264,
284n28
General Motors (GM ), 11617
Germany, 2223, 246, 274
Gilliam, Terry, Brazil, 247
Ginsberg, Robert, 24546
Glissant, Edouard, 8
Global Anti-Apartheid Movement, 139
40
globalization, 24, 116
Grady, Rachel, Detropia, 116
Gran Chaco, 2, 134, 22748
Grand Tour, the, 15
Grant, Kevin, 41
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood), 117
Grossman, David, 19
groundWork, 14044
Guantnamo, 3
Gueye, Khalil, Les mes brises, 54, 56
Gulf of Mexico, 24
Haiti, 19
Haitian Revolution, 19
Hansen, Thomas Blom, 138
Harley-Davidson, 12223
Harris, Alice, 4143, 55
Harsud, 28790
heritage: cultural, 1415, 16467, 17273,
17677, 180, 18285, 187, 29091, 315;
history and, 74, 109n26; national, 22,
16465, 17273, 291
Hetherington, Tim, Restrepo, 247, 251n81
Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE ) Department, 293,
31011
Hindus, 108n17, 297, 302, 308
Hiroshima, 257, 279
HIV/AIDS , 55, 136, 15556, 17072, 175,
17880, 187
Hochschild, Adam, 41, 43, 52, 59, 61n20;
King Leopolds Ghost, 41, 52
Hollywood, 116, 119, 135, 27477, 279
Homeland Security Administration, 11,

278, 286n53
humanitarianism, 4, 40, 43, 57
Hyderabad, 29497, 305, 311
imperial debris: allocation of, 78;
Benjamin and, 9, 71; definition of, x
xi; gender and, 1617; modernist ruins
and, 31316; nature of, 31n21, 134; race
and, 2427; toxic, 40
imperial formations, 31n21, 138, 144,
149, 165, 185, 186, 195, 228, 292, 314,
316; definition of, 23, 5, 810, 12, 19,
24, 29
imperialism. See empire
imperial ruins, ix, 13, 1516, 22, 229, 241,
245
India, 7, 13, 17, 2122, 27, 111n55
Indonesia, 14
Institute for Artistic and Cultural Patrimony (IPAC ), 166, 168, 17073, 18085
Iraq, 3, 4, 9, 19, 115, 125, 164, 27778
Iron Mountain, 119
Israel, 3, 6, 13, 17, 1920, 19596, 19899,
201, 2089, 212, 214, 21718, 221
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF ), 194
Ivory Coast, 24
Jamaica, 1920
Japan, 6, 257
Java, 13, 25. See also Indonesia
Jayyus, 199
Jesuits, 22930, 23233, 241, 24445
Jetprole, 28797, 299302, 3057, 310
13, 31517, 319n6
Jews, 211, 21316
Kabila, Joseph, 3940, 57
Kahn, Albert, 119
Kennedy, John F., 117
Kincaid, Jamaica, 15
King Leopold, 17, 26, 3943, 45, 47,
5859. See also Leopolds Congo
King Leopolds Ghost (Adam Hochschild),
41, 52
Kinshasa, 40, 54, 57

Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine, 23
Korengal Valley, 247
Kuklick, Henrietta, 16, 20
Kuletz, Valerie, 12
Lacangay (Santiago de Lacangay), 234
37, 24143, 246
Lahore, 13, 27
Lajee Childrens Center, 2021
Laos, 117
Latham, Donald C., Strategy for Survival,
25859
Latin America, 122, 12425, 17576, 185,
246
Latour, Bruno, 187
laughter, 17, 44, 48, 5054, 64n80
Law of Conquest, the, 78, 109n31
Law of Nature (John Locke), 78
Leary, John Patrick, 11516, 125, 127n3
Lefebvre, Henri, 134, 148
Leopolds Congo, 17, 4041, 47, 53, 55,
5758. See also Democratic Republic of
the Congo; King Leopold
Les mes brises (Khalil Gueye), 54, 56
Lets Face It, 261
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (James Agee),
2425
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 13, 22, 2728, 81
Lloyd, David, 23
Locke, John, 78, 109nn2930; Law of
Nature, 78
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 263
Machu Picchu, 230, 246
Manaus, 12123, 12627
Mandela, Nelson, 140
Marcus, George, 67
Martin, Thomas J., Strategy for Survival,
25859
Mbeki, Thabo, 133, 136
Mbembe, Achille, 45, 64n80, 292
Mbweni Ruins Hotel, 1516
McEnaney, Laura, 264, 284n28
McKenzie, Peter, 14953, 155
I N D E X 361
McNamara, Robert, 117, 124

Merebank, 131, 134, 13839, 141, 157n2
metaphors, x, 12, 10, 12, 22, 28, 30n1,
46, 90, 181, 18485, 292
Middle East, 4
militarization, 254, 277, 284n28, 285n42
Miller, Daniel, 5
Miller, Perry, 12526
missionaries, 4849, 57, 22931, 233,
235, 23940
Mobutu, Joseph Dsir, 44
modernity: alternate, 175; Argentine, 124;
capitalist, 236; colonialism and, 292;
future and, 314, 321n29; reproductive,
46; ruins and, 15, 21, 24, 134, 291, 303,
308; waste and, 321n26
modernization, 18, 120, 28992, 29798,
3034, 30910, 31315
Mojave Desert National Preserve, 24
Mongo, the, 4546
Monsanto, 2627
MONUC , 40
Morel, E. D., 40, 41, 4243, 53, 59, 61n7.
See also rubber: red rubber
Musharraf, Pervez, 278
Muslims, 297, 302, 308
mutilation, 3, 17, 4042, 44, 47, 55;
photographs, 3, 4041
Nagasaki, 257, 279
Naipaul, V. S., 2728
national heritage, 22, 16465, 17273,
291
National Key Points Act, 142, 144
negativity, 228, 23031, 240, 244, 246
47. See also positivity
neoliberalism, 12325, 136, 14243, 185
86, 190n10
Netherlands Indies, 13, 15. See also Indonesia
New York City, 20, 164, 254, 259, 267,
27679, 281
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, x, 107n13,
113n80
9/11, 3, 27879
362I N D E X
Nixon, Rob, 23
North Africa, 4, 28
Noys, Benjamin, The Persistence of the Negative, 247
NSC 68: A Report from the National Security
Council, 255, 282n8
Nsongo Mboyo, 3940, 5456
nuclear ruins, 21, 253, 254, 256, 262, 268,
273, 277, 279, 281
nuclear war, 21, 25259, 26162, 26465,
267, 269, 27276
nuclear weapons, 1213, 22, 24, 25281,
282nn12, 282n16, 285n42, 286n56
Ochagavia Hospital, 21
oil refineries, 18, 131, 133, 13940, 142
45, 148, 15354
oil spills, 24, 34n89
On the Natural History of Destruction (W. G.
Sebald), 2223
Operation Alert, 260, 267
Operation Cue, 26270, 27273, 275,
277
Operation Demolition, 299, 319n12
Oslo Accords, 216
Pakistan, 27879
Palestine, 1923, 208, 21112
Palestinian Authority, 216, 221
Palestinians: dispossession of, 3, 13;
expulsion of, 23
Palestinian villages, 20, 214
Paraguay, 241
Paris, 131, 149, 247; 2005 riots, 2829
Paris (Walter Benjamin), 131, 149, 247
Parmentier, Richard, 163
Partial Test Ban Treaty, 268
partition: Ireland, 23; Palestine, 23, 212,
214
patrimonialization, 167, 172, 176. See also
heritage
patrimony. See heritage
peasants, 83, 110n43, 175, 185
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 106n4
Pelourinho, 16374, 17787
Peluso, Nancy, 137

Pemberton, John, 25
Pentagon, the, 117, 124, 27980
Persistence of the Negative, The (Benjamin
Noys), 247
Philippines, the, 4
photography, 116, 13435, 137, 146, 148
49, 195, 208; magic lantern shows,
4142, 53, 55, 57
Pinochet, Augusto, 21
plantations, 20, 25, 13536; Brazil, 119,
126, 166; Congo, 46, 56; Sri Lanka,
6771, 74, 113n82
poetry, 12, 26, 67, 6972, 107n5, 299
300
political economy, 24, 7071, 158n11,
pollution, 11, 18, 122, 13135, 137, 139
44, 155
Portugal, 3, 167, 171, 176, 191n27
positivity, 228, 23639, 24547. See also
negativity
postcolonialism, 56, 316. See also postcolonial scholarship
postcolonial scholarship, 57, 12, 135
poverty: American South, 2425; Argentina, 243; Brazil, 16, 122, 17374;
Detroit, 116, 118; India, 291; South
Africa, 145, 149, 153
Price, Richard, 14
Project East River, 255, 278
public/private: distinctions of, 3, 109n30,
178; Hannah Arendt, 2024, 222n7;
Israel and Palestine, 19811, 21421;
Jetprole, 29395
race, 81, 111n49; authority and, 53; degeneracy and, 4546; imperial debris
and, 2427; race mixture, 157; race
trouble, 13839
racial democracy, 166, 175, 177, 181, 184
85, 190n24, 191n29, 192n49
racial infrastructure, 134, 136, 156
racialization, 8, 10, 13, 16, 1819, 2425,
29, 133, 136, 138, 15153, 155
racial ontologies, 23
racial remains, 13744

racism, 28, 131, 13334, 136, 143, 153,
156, 158n11, 159n29; environmental,
1112, 143
Rancire, Jacques, 308, 321n21
rape, 17, 3940, 44, 5459, 64n91,
65n99. See also ruination, reproductive;
sexual violence
Reagan, Ronald, 125, 269, 273, 285n42
repetition, 3940, 42, 44, 47, 5455,
5859, 64n85
Restrepo (Tim Hetherington), 247, 251n81
Rhodes, Cecil, 16
Rio de Janeiro, 121, 167, 176
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Bertolt
Brecht), 116
Robert, Karen, 12425
Rosaldo, Renato, 16; imperialist nostalgia, 16, 309, 315
Roy, Arundhati, 287, 28990
rubber, 3, 1314, 18, 26, 3945, 4752,
5457, 59, 60n2, 68, 7980, 110n32,
11819, 121, 125, 127; red rubber, 41,
44, 56, 61n7 (see also Morel, E. D.)
ruination, reproductive, 17, 4446, 53.
See also rape; sexual violence
ruins, 7, 9, 13; absence of, 14, 25, 22730,
234, 23638, 243, 246; aesthetics of,
9, 242, 25253, 275, 308; affect and,
1516, 2728, 273, 27879; Amazon
and, 11819; Benjamin and, ix, 9, 71,
131; biopolitics and, 137, 154; colonialism and, 13435, 167, 175, 22730,
234, 23840, 24445, 291; death and,
26, 24243, 24546, 253, 256, 262,
272; environment and, 9, 11, 1315, 18,
20, 2122, 2426, 134, 137, 227, 229,
23537, 23942, 24648, 289, 303;
Haiti and, 19; heritage and, 14, 172,
241, 29091; history and, 229, 135,
148, 156, 237, 24143, 246, 289, 291,
308; infrastructure and, 23, 628,
208, 213, 215, 219, 235, 25253, 263,
28990; invisible, 22829, 236, 241,
243, 245, 248; leisure and, 1516; as
I N D E X 363
ruins (continued)
made, 2021; modernity and, 15, 134,
291, 303, 308; modernization and,
29091, 303, 31315; nostalgia and,
ix, 1516, 2728 (see also Rosaldo, Renato: imperialist nostalgia); photography and, 116, 13435, 137, 148, 195,
208; race and, 1617, 2429, 156, 242;
ruination and, ix, 23, 5, 7, 913, 20,
23, 2526, 29, 134, 195, 229, 24648,
291; ruin porn, 18, 125; ruins of empire, 9, 1113, 40, 47; United States
and, 115, 126, 25254, 256, 263; Walcott and, ixx, 12, 1314, 1719; W. G.
Sebald and, 71, 274
Ruins of a Great House (Derek Walcott), 1, 17
Salado River, 22930, 242
Salvador, Bahia, 16268, 170, 173, 176
81, 185, 187, 192n49
salvage anthropology, 1415, 2122
salvage archaeology, 2122, 28788, 290,
294, 297, 3045, 30710, 315
San Bernardo de Vrtiz, 235, 23842, 246,
250n52
Sans Souci, 19
Santiago del Guadalczar, 229, 250n57
So Paulo, 121
Scott, James, 247
Sebald, W. G., 2223, 25, 29, 71, 228,
274; On the Natural History of Destruction,
2223, 274
Second World War, 23, 253, 274
Seed, Patricia, 233
September 11, 3, 27879
sexual violence, 17, 3940, 47, 5354,
5758. See also rape; ruination, reproductive
Shock Doctrine, The (Naomi Klein), 23
Simmel, George, 71
social abandonment, 23
Sommer, Doris, 14
sounds, 4244, 4753, 5758, 69, 72;
364I N D E X
fields of sound, 4244; Roman Jakobson, 109n28

South Africa, 16, 18, 13156, 157n1,
158n19
South African Naval Force (SANF ), 14647
South America, 227, 235. See also Latin
America
South Durban Community Environmental
Alliance (SDCEA ), 14044, 154
Southeast Asia, 14, 18, 247
sovereignty, 2, 4, 7, 16566, 18586, 209,
21322, 22728, 241, 292, 314; biopolitical, 137, 143, 15456; gradated
forms of, 8
Spanish empire, 229, 235, 240, 242,
24445
Speer, Albert, 246
Spivak, Gayatri, 135
Sri Lanka, 2, 26, 6768, 7374, 82, 84,
89, 97, 107n12
Srisailam Dam, 2122, 288, 290, 29295,
297304, 3067, 31318
Stewart, Kathleen, 2425, 148
Stoler, Ann Laura, 40, 48, 53, 13435,
195, 229, 243, 292, 316
Strategy for Survival (Thomas J. Martin and
Donald C. Latham), 25859
structure of feeling, 146, 14850
Sumatra, 1314, 13536. See also Indonesia
Tamils, 6771, 73, 78, 83, 107n12
Taylor, Frederick, 120
tea estates, 71, 74
terrorism, 4, 197, 208, 211, 220, 254,
27778, 286n53
Tomas de Matorras, Gernimo, 23435
torture, 4, 43, 5253, 12425, 278
tourism, 13, 1516, 22, 32n51, 71, 78, 165,
290, 301, 304
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 19
Truman, Harry S., 255
UN , 55, 165, 212, 214

UNESCO , 172, 304
UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 23, 9,

1415, 16265, 168, 176, 18586
United Nations Mission to the Congo
(MONUC ), 40
United Nations Partition Plan, 212, 214
United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA ), 39, 54, 5657
United States: Americanism, 120, 127;
domestic history of, 67; foreign policy
of, 30n2, 117, 252, 255, 286n52; indigenous people and, 12, 22, 24; mutilation photographs and, 41; permanent
creative destruction and, 15; as surveillance state, 4; nationalization of
death, 25381; national security, 252
81; production of scholarship in, 3; use
of cluster bombs, 34n102
unsayable, the, 44, 48, 5054, 58
Uruguay, 23
Valry, Paul, 69
Victorica, Benjamn, 23740, 243
Vietnam, 13, 2527, 34n102, 35nn1045,
117
Viscount Mountmorres, 4546
visual culture, 253, 282n6
Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
(Joo Biehl), 23
Voas, David, 55
Walcott, Derek, 10, 25, 30n1, 67; England

and, 27; ruins and, ixx, 12, 1314,
1719; Ruins of a Great House, 1,
17
Ward Valley, 24
War on Terror, 14344, 253, 278
Washington, D.C., 115, 124, 176, 254,
255, 27779
Watts, Michael, 137
Wentworth, 13140, 14246, 14850,
15256, 157n2
Wentworth Development Forum (WDF ),
132, 140, 14344
West Bank, 199, 210
What Kind? (Peter McKenzie and Sylvie
Peyre), 15153
Williams, Raymond, 8
World Bank, 14, 165
World War I, 255
World War II, 23, 253, 274
Writing of the Disaster, The (Maurice Blanchot), 254
Zaire, 44. See also Democratic Republic
of the Congo
Zanzibar, 1516, 47
Zimbabwe, 16, 20
Zuma, Jacob, 136
I N D E X 365

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IMPERIAL DEBRIS

On Ruins and Ruination

Duke University PressDurham and London2013

2013 Duke University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

All rights reserved

Imperial debris : on ruins and ruination / edited by

Printed in the United States of

Ann Laura Stoler.

ISBN 978- 0- 8223-5348-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

This volume is dedicated to

who died suddenly of heart failure

An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in Congo

2. The Coolie: An Unfinished Epic

4. Detritus in Durban: Polluted Environs and

5. Ruins, Redemption, and Brazils Imperial Exception

7. The Void: Invisible Ruins on the Edges of Empire

conference on Scarred Landscapes and Imperial Debris, Claudia Baracchi,

ANN LAURA STOLER

The Rot Remains

A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone,

critically on when a present political reality, a set of social representations, a

called postcolonial studies is deemed so poorly equipped to speak to the

Ruinous Processes in Imperial Formations

To Ruin: A Virulent Verb

ruins redirects the engagement elsewhere, to the politics animated, to the

tribute people, making their ways of being vital to national development

precisely the bucolic vision that imperial architects harbored to domesticate

refineries of post-apartheid Durban, and it is in the songs of lament that

Imperial Debris by Other Names

One impulse in addressing the admittedly broad sense of imperial ruin

Race and Imperial Debris

Groaning among the ShadowsOr Resentment in Them

17. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 20.

74. See Joseph Mascos essay in this volume.

estimates of unexploded ordnance range from 300,000 tons to as much as 800,000

%Decompositions of Matter and Mind

NANCY ROSE HUNT

Boali and Visual Debris

Roger Casements incriminating report to the British Parliament and Morels

of particular interest. Roger Casement found people frightened and frail

forced labor, while less murderous, remained a form of structural violence

A Callous Eye and Acoustic Debris

Sentries, Laughter, the Unsayable

Repetition and Difference

intervention is highly medicalized and bureaucratized. In Congo it involves

gathered in a Catholic Caritas project are disconcerting. They are learning

Rather, tethering to the present should be about locating repetitions and

sion Mbandaka, Kisangani, Kindu, Kalemie, Bukavu, Goma, Kinshasa, du 4 au 21

States regime (Sliwinski, The Childhood of Human Rights, 35758n2). Sliwinski

112. Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers, The Politics of Rebellion and Intervention in

digenous, Sri Lankan Tamils by dialect and habitation. My father worked

are given a supportive and constraining role. Whereas poiesis is responsible

are likely to be partial and selective at best, decontextualized snippets of

tion economyone of colonial capitalisms most productive enterprises of

The chunks of narrated and observed predicaments, and of expressions of

(In order of appearance)

Appu: The multiskilled servant of an Englishman named Mr. Chauncey.

This chapter introduces a blacksmith named Adhipathy and his young

Generations and Time