The US Academy and the Provincialization of #Fanon
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-us-academy-and-the-provincialization-of-fanon
Fanon’s well-known skepticism of the French Left was perhaps well deserved. One of the central messages of the book is that a new world order, needed for the survival of humanity at large, would not emerge from the revolutionary traditions of Europe. “Come, comrades,” he wrote, “the game of Europe is definitively over, we must look for something else.”
Alternative Internets and Their Lost Histories, by Lori Emerson
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/alternative-internets-and-their-lost-histories
Silicon Valley’s Hidden Voices
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/silicon-valleys-hidden-voices
Très belle critique de la version anglaise « Seeing Silicon Valley » qui va paraître en avril aux Presses de l’université de Chicago.
Rappel : la première édition de ce livre est parue en France :
Visages de la Silicon Valley
25 € - ISBN 978-2-915825-86-2 - nov. 2018
►https://cfeditions.com/visages
Two new books — Seeing Silicon Valley and Voices from the Valley — reveal, if not the future I thought I would find, a critical part of Silicon Valley that most people never look for or think about, let alone see. These two books’ goal is the same: to reveal the Valley’s forgotten but essential communities — obscured more often than not by hyperbolic press releases, lawyers waving non-disclosure agreements, and journalists’ myopic view of what “working in tech” means. In some cases, these are the “people behind the platforms” — the unheralded engineers and programmers who, despite being paid far above the median salary still find themselves living precariously in houses they can’t afford to furnish. In other cases, they are the nannies, cooks, and gardeners whose hidden labor keeps the Valley’s financial, familial, and social circuits humming. That newly minted billionaire you read about might drive a McLaren but someone has to wash and wax it.
After a brief essay from Fred Turner, a communications scholar at Stanford, Seeing Silicon Valley deploys an array of pictures captured in 2017 by Mary Beth Meehan, a photographer known for her “community-based portraiture.” For six weeks, Meehan rented an Airbnb in Menlo Park, introduced herself to strangers, and took photographs. She kept the statement “Invisible Community, Invisible Relationships, Invisible Human Beings” written on a sticky note above her desk.
Meehan’s color photographs are accompanied by short but powerful life histories of her subjects. Along the way we meet, for example, Justnya, a Polish-born engineer who shares a mansion in Cupertino with other technologists, and Victor, an elderly man originally from El Salvador who lives in a small trailer a few miles from Google’s campus. Each photograph tells a story, and it’s rarely the one you might imagine. There’s a photo, for example, of “Mark,” a young white man. On closer inspection, you sense something wrong with his body position and facial expression. You learn that Mark’s mother worked for years in an electronics plant making lasers for supermarket checkout scanners. Every night she came home with “green gunk” on her face and hands. Only years later, after Mark was born with extreme developmental issues, mental and physical, did she learn this gunk was a mixture of chemicals, primarily lead. What was once billed as “the Valley of Heart’s Delight” became the eventual home of nearly two dozen Superfund sites created by now-defunct electronics companies. The non-defunct ones have taken their manufacturing, their jobs, and their gunk overseas.
Meehan’s photos and captions sometimes reveal human warmth transcending the tragedy and unfairness. In another photograph, Abraham and Brenda are captured hugging each other in that special golden glow one sees near sunset in coastal California. But that glow can only do so much. They are in front of their dilapidated RV, which they have lived in since they lost their house in 2008. Normally, they parked on the edge of Stanford University’s land holdings along El Camino Real. But not on game days when the university forces them to move. On those days, like Steinbeck’s Okies, they drive their aged vehicle over the Santa Cruz Mountains to Half Moon Bay and look at the ocean together.
The aforementioned essay by Stanford professor Fred Turner, which heads the Meehan collection of photographs, is titled “The Valley on the Hill.” It compares Silicon Valley’s present to the worldview of 17th-century Pilgrims recently arrived in the New World and seeking to build a “City Upon a Hill.” Technologists, many from outside the United States, flock to the Bay Area with “their sense of mission and their search for profits,” and — like their Puritan ancestors — they are motivated by deep, almost compulsive work ethics, argues Turner. He doesn’t say quite enough to give the analogy the depth it deserves — in part because his essay is a mere six pages, a disappointment given his oft-cited expertise on the topic. Still, in his erudite yet truncated telling, the idea of a “New Jerusalem,” a.k.a. Silicon Valley, goes back some 50 years to when Santa Clara County became a hotbed of innovation, albeit one eventually strewn with oozing Superfund sites.
Turner’s comparison to the Puritans perfunctorily cuts in a couple of other ways. As a religious sect, the Puritans were notoriously dogmatic, and eager to sacrifice heretics. Some programmers share their belief in eschatology and denial of the body, he suggests. It thus makes a kind of sense that Soylent — a start-up company based on marketing a meal-replacement product named after a creepy post-apocalyptic movie — was developed there. But Turner sees present-day “denials of the body” primarily in people’s eager atomization into digital data to be “aggregated and repurposed.” He could go further. Believers in a coming technological Singularity imagine dispensing with the body altogether by uploading their minds. A hundred years ago, the mirage factory of Los Angeles produced the evangelist-huckster Aimee Semple McPherson. Today we have engineer and self-confessed felon Anthony Levandowski and his scheme for a religion based around worship of artificial intelligence. Long live the new flesh. Or, if another variant of Silicon Valley’s fixations is to be believed, long live the old flesh, rejuvenated by steroids and blood transfusions from the young.
Eventually fruit and vegetable production in the Valley became the dominant crop. The number of workers needed — then and now — exceeded the local population. And so the labor-intensive work of picking and preserving the fruit fell largely to invisible Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Filipino, and Mexican workers. Much of it was performed by women employed as seasonal contractors and segregated by race and ethnicity, and they were the first to be let go when hard times came. The xenophobia, discrimination, and misogyny that runs throughout both books thus goes back a lot farther than when William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and committed racist, arrived in the Valley in 1956 and started an electronics company.
Shockley Semiconductor begat Fairchild Semiconductor begat Intel and scores of other companies, large and small. Engineers accordingly multiplied. They flocked to the region and in general came to represent the second largest segment of American professionals — behind school teachers. Engineering was the most common occupation pursued by white-collar men.
Along with their readers, the people who cover “tech” — whatever that term even means these days — too often portray Silicon Valley as a place apart from America. But, as Seeing Silicon Valley and Voices from the Valley reveal, with its racism, casual misogyny, economic inequality, and environmental devastation concentrated among poor communities, Silicon Valley is America. Given its innumerable sins, venal and moral alike, punching at Silicon Valley is as easy as ordering an Uber. Critiques of it take many forms, and the best of these are informed by an understanding of the region’s long and fraught history. These two books don’t fully take that history into account but they do point to the heart of what makes the region run: people, many of them hidden or invisible. Making them visible is a start to creating a more praiseworthy place. Silicon Valley may never be the Puritan’s “City Upon a Hill.” But in its pursuit of the future, it can and must do better.
The Morals of the Market. Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism
IN THE MID-1980s, Rony Brauman, who, at the time, was the president of the leading humanitarian organization Médecins sans Frontières, established a new human rights group called Liberté sans Frontières. For the inaugural colloquium, Brauman invited a number of speakers, among them Peter Bauer, a recently retired professor from the London School of Economics. Bauer was an odd choice given that he was a staunch defender of European colonialism; he had once responded to a student pamphlet that accused the British of taking “the rubber from Malaya, the tea from India, [and] raw materials from all over the world,” by arguing that actually “the British took the rubber to Malaya and the tea to India.” Far from the West causing Third World poverty, Bauer maintained that “contacts with the West” had been the primary agents of the colonies’ material progress.
Bauer hammered on this point at the colloquium, claiming that indigenous Amazonians were among the poorest people in the world precisely because they enjoyed the fewest “external contacts.” Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, he continued, showed proof of the economic benefits such contacts brought. “Whatever one thinks of colonialism it can’t be held responsible for Third World poverty,” he argued.
In her illuminating new book, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte recounts this story only to ask why Brauman, a leading humanitarian activist, invited Bauer — whom the Economist had described as being as hostile to foreign aid as Friedrich Hayek had been to socialism — to deliver a talk during the opening event for a new human rights organization. Her response is multifaceted, but, as she traces the parallel histories of neoliberalism and human rights, it becomes clear that the two projects are not necessarily antithetical, and actually have more in common than one might think.
Indeed, Liberté sans Frontières went on to play a central role in delegitimizing Third World accounts of economic exploitation. The organization incessantly challenged the accusations that Europe’s opulence was based on colonial plunder and that the world economic system made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And while it may have been more outspoken in its critique of Third Worldism than more prominent rights groups, it was in no way an outlier. Whyte reveals that in the eyes of organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for instance, the major culprit for the woes of postcolonial states was neither Europe nor the international economic order but rather corrupt and ruthless Third World dictators who violated the rights of their populations as they undermined the development of a free economy. This approach coincides neatly with neoliberal thought.
Whyte contends that we cannot understand why human rights and neoliberalism flourished together if we view neoliberalism as an exclusively economic doctrine that favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over public institutions and government. Although she strives to distinguish herself from thinkers like Wendy Brown and Michel Foucault, she ends up following their footsteps by emphasizing the moral dimension of neoliberal thought: the idea that a competitive market was not “simply a more efficient means of distributing resources; it was the basic institution of a moral and ‘civilised’ society, and a necessary support for individual rights.”
She exposes how neoliberal ideas informed the intense struggle over the meaning of “human rights,” and chronicles how Western rights groups and neoliberals ultimately adopted a similar interpretation, one that emphasizes individual freedoms at the expense of collective and economic rights. This interpretation was, moreover, in direct opposition to many newly independent postcolonial leaders.
Whyte describes, for instance, how just prior to the adoption of the two 1966 human rights covenants — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, coined the term “neo-colonialism” to refer to a series of mechanisms that perpetuate colonial patterns of exploitation in the wake of formal independence. Nkrumah “argued that the achievement of formal sovereignty had neither freed former colonies from the unequal economic relations of the colonial period nor given them political control over their own territories,” thus preventing these states from securing the basic rights of their inhabitants. A “state in the grip of neo-colonialism,” he wrote, “is not master of its own destiny.”
Nkrumah thought that only when postcolonial states fully controlled their natural resources would they be able to invest in the population’s well-being. In the meantime, neo-colonial economic arrangements were denying African states the ability to provide adequate education and health care as well as other economic and social rights to their populations, thus revealing how these economic arrangements were welded in a Gordian knot with international politics. Any attempt to understand one without the other provided a distorted picture of reality.
Such combining of the economy with the political, however, was anathema to neoliberal thought. In 1927, exactly three decades before Ghana’s new leader led his country to independence, Hayek’s mentor, economist Ludwig von Mises, had already argued that colonialism took advantage of the superior weaponry of the “white race” to subjugate, rob, and enslave weaker peoples. But Mises was careful to distinguish colonial oppression from the economic goals of a competitive market, noting that Britain was different since its form of colonialism pursued “grand commercial objectives.” Similarly, the British economist Lionel Robbins separated the benign economic sphere from the merciless political one, writing in the 1930s that “[n]ot capitalism, but the anarchic political organization of the world is the root disease of our civilization.”
These thinkers set the tone for many neoliberal economists who have since defined colonial imperialism as a phenomenon of politics, not capitalism, while casting the market as a realm of mutually beneficial, free, peaceful exchange. In this view, it is the political realm that engenders violence and coercion, not the economic sphere. Yet, during the period of decolonization neoliberals also understood that they needed to introduce moral justifications for the ongoing economic exploitation of former colonies. Realizing that human rights were rapidly becoming the new lingua franca of global moral speak, Whyte suggests that they, like Nkrumah, began mobilizing rights talk — except that neoliberals deployed it as a weapon against states who tried to gain control over their country’s natural resources as well as a shield from any kind of criticism directed toward their vision of a capitalist market.
Their relation to the state was complicated, but was not really different from the one espoused by their liberal predecessors. Neoliberal thinkers understood that states are necessary to enforce labor discipline and to protect corporate interests, embracing states that served as handmaidens to competitive markets. If, however, a state undermined the separation of political sovereignty from economic ownership or became attuned to the demands of its people to nationalize resources, that state would inevitably be perceived as a foe. The solution was to set limits on the state’s exercise of sovereignty. As Friedrich Hayek, the author of The Road to Serfdom, put it, the “taming of the savage” must be followed by the “taming of the state.”
Shaping the state so that it advances a neoliberal economic model can, however, be a brutal undertaking, and the consequences are likely to generate considerable suffering for large segments of the population. Freed from any commitment to popular sovereignty and economic self-determination, the language of liberal human rights offered neoliberals a means to legitimize transformative interventions that would subject states to the dictates of international markets. This is why a conception of human rights, one very different from the notion of rights advanced by Nkrumah, was needed.
In Whyte’s historical analysis the free-market ideologues accordingly adopted a lexicon of rights that buttressed the neoliberal state, while simultaneously pathologizing mass politics as a threat to individual freedoms. In a nutshell, neoliberal economists realized that human rights could play a vital role in the dissemination of their ideology, providing, in Whyte’s words, “competitive markets with a moral and legal foundation.”
At about the same time that neoliberalism became hegemonic, human rights organizations began sprouting in the international arena. By the early 1970s, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists were already active in numerous countries around the globe, and Americas Watch (a precursor to Human Rights Watch) had just been established. According to Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Yale and author of the best seller The Last Utopia, it was precisely during this period that human rights first achieved global prominence. That Western human rights organizations gained influence during the period of neoliberal entrenchment is, Whyte argues, not coincidental.
Although Whyte emphasizes the writings of leading neoliberal thinkers, a slightly more nuanced approach would have framed these developments as the reflection of a conjunctural moment, whereby the rise of neoliberalism and of human rights NGOs was itself part of numerous economic, social, and cultural shifts. Chile serves as a good example of this conjuncture, revealing how a combination of historical circumstances led neoliberal economics and a certain conception of human rights to merge.
Notwithstanding the bloody takeover, the extrajudicial executions, the disappearances and wholesale torture of thousands of dissidents, Hayek’s response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup was that “the world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.” Milton Friedman, a key figure in the Chicago School, later echoed this assessment, describing Chile as an economic and political “miracle.” The two Nobel Prize winners were not detached observers, having provided advice to Pinochet on how to privatize state services such as education, health care, and social security, and it was Friedman’s former students, the “Chicago Boys,” who occupied central positions within the authoritarian regime, ensuring that these ideas became policy.
What is arguably even more surprising is the reaction of human rights organizations to the bloody coup in Chile. Whyte acknowledges that Naomi Klein covered much of this ground in The Shock Doctrine, where she details how Amnesty International obscured the relationship between neoliberal “shock therapy” and political violence. Characterizing the Southern Cone as a “laboratory” for both neoliberalism and grassroots human rights activism, Klein argued that, in its commitment to impartiality, Amnesty occluded the reasons for the torture and killing, and thereby “helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed.” While Whyte concurs with Klein’s assessment, she has a slightly different point to make.
To do so, she shows how Samuel Moyn contested Klein’s claim that the human rights movement was complicit in the rise of neoliberalism; he argued that the “chronological coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism” is “unsubstantiated” and that the so-called “Chilean miracle” is just as much due to the country’s “left’s own failures.” Moyn’s comment, Whyte cogently observes, “raises the question of why, in the period of neoliberal ascendancy, international human rights organisations flourished, largely escaping the repression that was pursued so furiously against leftists, trade unionists, rural organizers and indigenous people in countries such as Chile.”
She points out that the CIA-trained National Intelligence Directorate had instructions to carry out the “total extermination of Marxism,” but in an effort to present Chile as a modern civilized nation, the junta did not disavow the language of human rights, and at the height of the repression allowed overseas human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists to enter the country, giving them extensive freedom of movement.
Whyte explains that in focusing their attention on state violence while upholding the market as a realm of freedom and voluntary cooperation, human rights NGOs strengthened the great neoliberal dichotomy between coercive politics and free and peaceful markets. Allende’s government had challenged the myth of the market as a realm of voluntary, non-coercive, and mutually beneficial relations, and the Chilean leader paid for it with his life. By contrast, the junta with the Chicago Boys’ aid sought to uphold this myth, while using the state both to enhance a neoliberal economic order and to decimate collective political resistance. Whyte acknowledges that in challenging the junta’s torturous means, human rights NGOs arguably helped restrain the worst of its violence, but they did so at the cost of abandoning the economy as a site of political contestation.
Whyte’s claim is not simply that the human rights NGOs dealt with political violence in isolation from the country’s economic transformations, as Klein had argued. Rather, she shows that the gap between Amnesty’s version of human rights and the version espoused by postcolonial leaders, like Nkrumah, was wide. Indeed, Amnesty International invoked human rights in a way that had little in common with Nkrumah’s program of economic self-determination, and the organization was even hostile to the violent anti-colonial struggles promoted by UN diplomats from postcolonial societies during the same period. The story of human rights and neoliberalism in Chile is not, as Whyte convincingly shows, simply a story of the massive human rights violations carried out in order to allow for market reforms, or of the new human rights NGOs that contested the junta’s violence. It is also the story of the institutionalization of a conservative and market-driven vision of neoliberal human rights, one that highlights individual rights while preserving the inequalities of capitalism by protecting the market from the intrusions of “the masses.”
Expanding Whyte’s analysis to the present moment (the book focuses on the years between 1947 and 1987) while thinking of the relation between neoliberalism and human rights as part of a historical conjuncture, it becomes manifest that many if not most human rights NGOs operating today have been shaped by this legacy. One of its expressions is that rights groups rarely represent “the masses” in any formal or informal capacity. Consider Human Rights Watch, whose longstanding executive director Kenneth Roth oversees an annual budget of over $75 million and a staff of roughly 400 people. In four years’ time, Roth will outstrip Robert Mugabe’s 30-year tenure in office; while Roth has dedicated most of his adult life struggling against social wrongs, he has never had to compete in elections to secure his post. Indeed, due to the corporate structure of his organization the only constituency to which he is accountable are Human Rights Watch’s board members and donors — those who benefit from neoliberal economic arrangements — rather than the people whose rights the NGO defends or, needless to say, the “masses.” Moreover, Human Rights Watch is not exceptional within the rights-world, and even though rights organizations across the globe say they are interested in what the “people want,” sovereignty of the people in any meaningful sense, wherein the people can control the decisions that affect their lives most, is not really on the agenda.
Undoubtedly, Human Rights Watch has shed light on some of the most horrendous state crimes carried out across the globe over the past several decades. Exposing egregious violations is not an easy task and is a particularly important endeavor in our post-truth era. However, truth-telling, in and of itself, is not a political strategy. Even if exposing violations is conceived of as a component of a broader political mobilization, the truths that NGOs like Human Rights Watch have been revealing are blinkered. Given that they interpret human rights in an extremely narrow way, one that aligns quite neatly with neoliberal thought, their strategy therefore fails to provide tools for those invested in introducing profound and truly transformative social change.
From the get-go, most Western human rights NGOs had been attuned to Cold War politics and refrained from advocating for economic and social rights for decades, inventing numerous reasons to justify this stance: from the claim that the right to education and health care were not basic human rights like freedom of speech and freedom from torture, to the assertion that economic and social rights lacked a precise definition, thus rendering them difficult to campaign for. It took close to a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ongoing campaigning of Third World activists for the leading human rights organizations to acknowledge that economic and social rights, such as the right to health care, education, and social security, were indeed human rights, rights that they should dedicate at least some of its resources to fight for. But even today, almost 20 years after their integration within Human Rights Watch’s agenda, the resources allocated to the protection of these rights is relatively small, and the way that the organization strives to secure them is deeply skewed by the neoliberal view that politics and markets are separate realms and that human rights work should avoid interference with the capitalist structure of competitive markets. Wittingly or not, organizations like Human Rights Watch have not only bolstered the neoliberal imagination, but have produced a specific arsenal of human rights that shapes social struggles in a way that weakens those who aim to advance a more egalitarian political horizon.
Several years ago, Roth tried to justify Human Rights Watch’s approach, claiming that the issues it deals with are determined by its “methodology,” and that the “essence of that methodology […] is not the ability to mobilize people in the streets, to engage in litigation, to press for broad national plans, or to provide technical assistance. Rather, the core of our methodology is our ability to investigate, expose, and shame.” The hallmark of human rights work, in his view, is uncovering discrimination, while the unequal arrangement of the local and international economy leading to discrimination are beyond the organization’s purview. Not unlike the neoliberal thinkers discussed in Whyte’s book, Human Rights Watch limits its activism to formal equality, adopting a form of inquiry that ignores and ultimately disavows the structural context, which effectively undercuts forms of collective struggle.
Returning to Rony Brauman and the creation of Liberté sans Frontières, toward the end of the book Whyte recounts how in a 2015 interview he understood things differently than he had in the mid-1980s. “I see myself and the small group that I brought together as a kind of symptom of the rise of neoliberalism […] We had the conviction that we were a kind of intellectual vanguard, but no,” he laughed, “we were just following the rising tendency.”
Whyte suggests that this assessment is, if anything, too modest: rather than being a symptom, the humanitarians who founded Liberté sans Frontières explicitly mobilized the language of human rights in order to contest the vision of substantive equality that defined the Third Worldist project. Brauman and his organization benefited from the neo-colonial economic arrangements and, she notes,
were not powerless companions of the rising neoliberals, but active, enthusiastic and influential fellow travellers. Their distinctive contribution was to pioneer a distinctly neoliberal human rights discourse, for which a competitive market order accompanied by a liberal institutional structure was truly the last utopia.
The destructive legacy that Whyte so eloquently describes suggests that the convergence between neoliberals and rights practitioners has defanged human rights from any truly emancipatory potential. Formal rights without the redistribution of wealth and the democratization of economic power, as we have learned not only from the ongoing struggles of postcolonial states but also from the growing inequality in the Global North, simply do not lead to justice. So if the objectives of a utopian imagination include equitable distribution of resources and actual sovereignty of the people, we urgently need a new vocabulary of resistance and novel methods of struggle.
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-human-rights-were-defanged-from-any-truly-emancipatory-potentia
#droits_humains #droits_fondamentaux #néolibéralisme #néo-libéralisme
The Morals of the Market. Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism
Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, #Jessica_Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “#civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
▻https://www.versobooks.com/books/3087-the-morals-of-the-market
#livre #dépolitisation
The Next Great Migration. The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
The news today is full of stories of dislocated people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands, creeping, swimming, and flying in a mass exodus from their past habitats. News media presents this scrambling of the planet’s migration patterns as unprecedented, provoking fears of the spread of disease and conflict and waves of anxiety across the Western world. On both sides of the Atlantic, experts issue alarmed predictions of millions of invading aliens, unstoppable as an advancing tsunami, and countries respond by electing anti-immigration leaders who slam closed borders that were historically porous.
But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, catapulting us into the highest reaches of the Himalayan mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis—it is the solution.
Conclusively tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through today’s anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.
▻https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-next-great-migration-9781635571998
#adaptation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #mobilité #solution #problème #résilience #livre #changement_climatique #climat #réfugiés_environnementaux #migrations_environnementales #histoire #survie #crise #histoire_des_migrations
Climate migration is not a problem. It’s a solution.
Climate migration is often associated with crisis and catastrophe, but #Sonia_Shah, author of “The Next Great Migration,” wants us to think differently about migration. On The World’s weekly look at climate change solutions, The Big Fix, Shah speaks to host Marco Werman about her reporting that considers how the world would be more resilient if people were given legal safe ways to move.
▻https://www.pri.org/file/2020-08-21/climate-migration-not-problem-it-s-solution
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Sonia Shah parle aussi de #musique métissée, dont celle de #Mulatu_Astatke, qui n’aurait pas pu voir le jour sans la migrations de populations au cours de l’histoire :
Migration as Bio-Resilience : On Sonia Shah’s “The Next Great Migration”
DURING THE UNUSUALLY frigid winter of 1949, a breeding pair of gray wolves crossed a frozen-over channel onto Michigan’s Isle Royale, a narrow spit of land just south of the US-Canadian maritime border in Lake Superior. Finding abundant prey, including moose, the pair had pups, starting a small lupine clan. Over the next almost 50 years, without access to the mainland, the clan grew increasingly inbred, with over half the wolves developing congenital spinal deformities and serious eye problems. As the wolf population declined — scientists even found one mother dead in her den, with seven unborn pups in her — the moose population came thundering back, gobbling up and trampling the forest’s buds and shoots. The ecosystem’s food chain now had a few broken links.
The Isle Royale wolf population was saved, however, by a lone migrant. In 1997, a male wolf made his way to the island. Within a generation — wolf generations are a little less than five years — 56 percent of the young wolves carried the newcomer’s genes. In the years since, thanks to ongoing conservation efforts, more wolves have been brought to the island to provide enough genetic diversity not only to save the wolves but preserve the ecosystem’s new balance.
This is just one of many examples of the bio-benefits of migratory species provided by Sonia Shah in her new book, The Next Great Migration. Hers is an original take on the oft-stultifying debate about immigration, most frequently argued over by unbending stalwarts on opposite extremes, or sometimes quibbled over by noncommittal centrists. There are now more displaced humans than ever — around one percent of the total human population — and the climate crises together with humanity’s ceaseless creep are driving an increasing number of nonhuman species to search for more welcoming climes. That half of the story is popularly understood: the world is on the move. What is less often acknowledged, and what Shah convincingly fills out, is its biological necessity. “Migration’s ecological function extends beyond the survival of the migrant itself,” she writes. “Wild migrants build the botanical scaffolding of entire ecosystems.” Besides spreading pollen and seeds — upon which the survival of many plants depend — migrants also transport genes, thus bringing genetic diversity. Migration is not only a human fact but a biological one.
But the understanding of migration’s critical import — whether broadly biological or specifically human — has been a long time coming.
“The idea that certain people and species belong in certain fixed places has had a long history in Western culture,” Shah writes. By its logic, “migration is by necessity a catastrophe, because it violates the natural order.” The so-called “natural order” is actually a construct that has been buoyed for millennia by a broad coalition of scientists, politicians, and other ideologically inflected cavillers. As for the word “migrant,” it didn’t even appear in the English language until the 17th century — when it was coined by Thomas Browne — and it took another hundred years before it was applied to humans. One important migrant-denialist, as Shah details, was Swedish-born naturalist Carl Linnaeus, most famous for formalizing binomial nomenclature, the modern system of classifying organisms as, say, Canis lupus or Homo sapiens.
Shah goes beyond Linnaeus’s contribution to taxonomy — which, notably, is itself subject to critique, as when essayist Anne Fadiman describes it as a “form of mental colonising and empire-building” — to illuminate his blinkered fealty to the dominant narratives of the day. More than just falling in line, he worked to cement the alleged differences between human populations — crudely exaggerating, for instance, features of “red,” “yellow,” “black,” or “white” skinned people. He sparred with competing theorists who were beginning to propose then-revolutionary ideas — for instance, that all humans originated in and migrated out of Africa. With the concept of the “Great Chain of Being,” he toadied to the reigning theological explanation for the world being as it was; this concept hierarchically categorized, in ascending order, matter, plants, animals, peasants, clergy, noblemen, kings, and, finally, God. To support his views, Linnaeus took a trip to northern Sweden where he “studied” the indigenous Sami people, all the while complaining of the climate and the locals not speaking Swedish. Robbing them of a few native costumes, he then freely fabricated stories about their culture and origins. He later tried to give credence to biological differences between Africans and Europeans by committing to the bizarre fantasy that black women had elongated labia minora, to which he referred using the Latin term sinus pudoris. The cultural backdrop to his explanations and speculations was the generally held view that migration was an anomaly, and that people and animals lived where they belonged and belonged where they lived — and always had.
Ignorance — deliberate, political, or simply true and profound — of the realities of even animal migration went so far as pushing scientists to hatch myriad far-fetched theories to explain, for example, where migratory birds went in the winter. Leading naturalists at the time explained some birds’ seasonal disappearance by claiming that they hibernated in lakes — a theory first proposed by Aristotle — or hid in remote caves. Driving such assumptions was, in part, the idea of a stable and God-created “harmony of nature.” When some thinkers began to question such fixed stability, Linneaus doubled down, insisting that animals inhabited their specific climes, and remained there. The implication for humans was not only that they had not migrated from Africa, but that Africans — as well as Asians and Native Americans — were biologically distinct. This kind of racial essentialism was an important structural component of what would morph into race science or eugenics. Linnaeus divided Homo sapiens into Homo sapiens europaeus (white, serious, strong), Homo sapiens asiaticus (yellow, melancholy, greedy), Homo sapiens americanus (red, ill-tempered, subjugated), and Homo sapiens afer (black, impassive, lazy), as well as Homo caudatus (inhabitants of the Antarctic globe), and even Homo monstrosus (pygmies and Patagonian giants).
“Scientific ideas that cast migration as a form of disorder were not obscure theoretical concerns confined to esoteric academic journals,” but, Shah writes, “theoretical ballast for today’s generation of anti-immigration lobbyists and policy makers.”
Here Shah dredges up more vile fantasies, like that of the “Malphigian layer” in the late 17th century, which claimed that Africans had an extra layer of skin consisting of “a thick, fatty black liquid of unknown provenance.” While the Malphigian layer has been roundly dismissed, such invented differences between peoples continue to bedevil medical treatment: even today, black people are presumed to be able to tolerate more pain, and so it’s perhaps hardly surprising that more black women die in childbirth.
The idea was “that people who lived on different continents were biologically foreign to one another, a claim that would fuel centuries of xenophobia and generations of racial violence.” Or, put more simply, Linnaeus and other believed: “We belong here. They belong there.”
¤
“The classifications of species as either ‘native’ or ‘alien’ is one of the organizing principles of conservation,” Shah writes, quoting a 2007 scientific study in Progress in Human Geography. The implications of that dichotomous classification are harmful to humans and nonhumans alike, setting the stage for xenophobia and white anthropomorphism. As a case in point, the son of author and conservationist Aldo Leopold recommended in 1963, that US national parks “preserve, or where necessary […] recreate the ecologic scene as viewed by the first European visitors.” The idea of a pristine, pre-colonial era presumes an ahistorical falsehood: that humans and others left no trace, or that those traces could be undone and the ecologic scene returned to a static Eden. While many indigenous cultures certainly live less disruptively within their environment, in the case of both the Americas and Australia for example, the arrival of the first Homo sapiens heralded the swift extinction of scores of native species — in the Americas, woolly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-toothed tigers, camelops, and the dire wolf. Yet the pull toward preservation persists.
In 1999, Bill Clinton established the National Invasive Species Council, which was tasked with repelling “alien species.” This move was an outgrowth of the relatively recently created disciplines of conservation biology, restoration biology, and even invasion biology. I recall being a boy in northern Ohio and hearing of the horror and devastation promised by the zebra mussel’s inexorable encroachment into the ecosystems of the Great Lakes. One invasion biologist, writes Shah, “calculated that wild species moving freely across the planet would ravage large swaths of ecosystems. The number of land animals would drop by 65 percent, land birds by 47 percent, butterflies by 35 percent, and ocean life by 58 percent.” And while the globe is certainly losing species to extinction, blaming mobility or migration is missing the mark, and buoying up the old “myth of a sedentary planet,” as she puts it.
For millennia, humans had hardly any idea of how some species could spread. They had neither the perspective nor technology to understand that creepy-crawlies have creeped and crawled vast distances and always been on the move, which is not, in the big picture, a bad thing. Zebra mussels, for example, were not the only, or even the greatest, threat to native clams in the Great Lakes. Besides disrupting the local ecosystems, they also contributed to those ecosystems by filtering water and becoming a new source of food for native fish and fowl. Shah notes that Canadian ecologist Mark Vellend has found that “wild newcomers generally increase species richness on a local and regional level.” Since the introduction of European species to the Americas 400 years ago, biodiversity has actually increased by 18 percent. In other words, Shah writes, “nature transgresses borders all the time.”
In her last chapter, “The Wall,” she tackles the immunological implications of migration. While first acknowledging that certain dangers do uncontrovertibly exist, such as Europeans bringing smallpox to the Americas, or Rome spreading malaria to the outer regions of its empire, she metaphorizes xenophobia as a fever dream. To be sure, wariness of foreign pathogens may make sense, but to guide foreign policy on such grounds or let wariness morph into discrimination or violent backlash becomes, like a fever that climbs beyond what the host organism needs, “a self-destructive reaction, leading to seizures, delirium, and collapse.” It’s like a cytokine storm in the COVID-19 era. As Shah told me, “the reflexive solution to contagion — border closures, isolation, immobility — is in fact antithetical to biological resilience on a changing planet.”
¤
In 2017, a solo Mexican wolf loped through the Chihuahuan Desert, heading north, following a path that other wolves, as well as humans, have traveled for thousands of years. Scientists were especially interested in this lone wolf, known as M1425, because he represented a waning population of endangered Mexican wolves dispersing genes from a tiny population in Mexico to a slightly more robust population in the United States.
Like the Isle Royale wolves, “[i]f the two wild populations of Mexican gray wolves can find and mate with each other, the exchange of genetic material could boost recovery efforts for both populations,” a New Mexico magazine reported. But the area where M1425 crossed the international boundary is now closed off by a border wall, and the Center for Biological Diversity counts 93 species directly threatened by the proposed expansion of the wall. This is what we should be worried about.
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/migration-as-bio-resilience-on-sonia-shahs-the-next-great-migration
#bio-résilience #résilience
signalé par @isskein
A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health By Mikkel Krause Frantzen on December 16, 2019, LA Review Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health
The crisis embodied by depression thus becomes a symptom of a historical and capitalist crisis of futurity. It is a kind of structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams would say. Consequently, any cure to the problem of depression must take a collective, political form; instead of individualizing the problem of mental illness, it is imperative to start problematizing the individualization of mental illness. The call is for the left, for these specific reasons, to take seriously the question of illness and mental disorders. Dealing with depression — and other forms of psychopathology — is not only part of, but a condition of possibility for an emancipatory project today. Before we can throw bricks through windows, we need to be able to get out of bed.
We also have to wonder, why does there seem to be so much comfort in psychiatric diagnoses? Because there is comfort in the diagnosis of depression. So that’s why I feel so bad! Depression! A chemical imbalance in the brain! In this way, the diagnosis provides momentary meaning to meaningless misery. The suffering gets a name and a cause: a lack of serotonin. But this cause has causes which in the diagnostic system — and in the capitalist world as a whole — remain undiagnosed and untold.
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Capitalism makes us feel bad and then, to add insult to injury, makes us feel bad about feeling bad.
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Competition is precisely what capitalism is all about, and seeks to intensify, so that we are, simultaneously, alone in our suffering and fighting among each other’s suffering selves.
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the current — social, political, economic, ecological — crisis is thus a mental health crisis as well. The perpetuum mobile of capitalism and its exhaustion of resources also pertains to mental resources. The economic and the psychological seem to have become indistinguishable from each other, as the double meaning of depression would also suggest.
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Therapy as resistance, not as reactionary obedience to the given order. Therapy as a collective project, not an individual one. Therapy as the overcoming of alienation.
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Of course, sometimes staying in bed can be a revolutionary act in itself, a kind of strike, the epitomization of an exhausted and negative No, I can’t in a world that revolves increasingly around an emphatic and positive Yes, I can.
mais aussi #effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène
alors on l’ajoute à la quatrième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/818991
La dépression, finalement c’est l’exemple "facile", la névrose étant un trait de la société bourgeoise. Mais si il est possible (...) de mettre fin ce qu’on nomme aliénation sociale, ou, de manière plus pragmatique, savoir que « le Collectif est une machine à traiter l’aliénation » (Jean Oury), on en a pas fini pour autant avec la souffrance psychique, l’aliénation transcendantale ou psychopathologique.
#psychopatologie
Socialism and Freedom: Karl Polanyi’s Early Writings - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/socialism-and-freedom-karl-polanyis-early-writings
SOCIALISM IS BACK — a phoenix rising from the ashes, or a vampire emerging from the crypt, depending on who you ask. So real is the threat that the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors recently devoted their considerable resources to writing a report, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” warning of the dangers of a socialist system, one in which the state spends other people’s money. Adding to the sense of déjà vu, much of the report concerns itself, not with the policy proposals of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, but with the disastrous collectivization of agriculture under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
Delightful Listening: A Conversation Between Viet Thanh Nguyen with Arundhati Roy - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delightful-listening-a-conversation-between-viet-thanh-nguyen-with-arundhati-roy/#!
THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION between #Viet_Thanh_Nguyen, whose novel The Sympathizer (2015) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016, and #Arundhati_Roy, whose latest novel is The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), took place at the New York Public Library on May 3, 2018.
The Long View: #Surveillance, the #Internet, and Government Research - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-long-view-surveillance-the-internet-and-government-research
At first blush Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018) seems to fit the bill. A former editor of The eXile, a Moscow-based tabloid newspaper, and investigative reporter for PandoDaily, Levine has made a career out of writing about the dark side of tech. In this book, he traces the intellectual and institutional origins of the internet. He then focuses on the privatization of the network, the creation of Google, and revelations of NSA surveillance. And, in the final part of his book, he turns his attention to Tor and the crypto community.
He remains unremittingly dark, however, claiming that these technologies were developed from the beginning with surveillance in mind, and that their origins are tangled up with counterinsurgency research in the Third World. This leads him to a damning conclusion: “The Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today.”
To be sure, these constitute provocative theses, ones that attempt to confront not only the standard Silicon Valley story, but also established lore among the small group of scholars who study the history of computing. He falls short, however, of backing up his claims with sufficient evidence. Indeed, he flirts with creating a mythology of his own — one that I believe risks marginalizing the most relevant lessons from the history of computing.
Human Rights and Neoliberalism - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/human-rights-and-neoliberalism
The puzzle he seeks to explain is: How is it that the era of neoliberalism, commonly said to have begun in the mid-to-late 1970s, coincides almost perfectly with the triumphant rise of a discourse of human rights? In other words, how can it be that an era whose ethical self-conception was rooted in a transnational movement to prevent abuses such as torture, disenfranchisement, and political imprisonment has also been an era in which national and global economies were remade in ways that have allowed wealthy capital owners to capture the large majority of economic productivity gains, creating in-country inequalities not seen since the late 19th century?
Pascal Bruckner’s “Un racisme imaginaire” is a collection of hackneyed attacks on the field of Islamophobia studies
The Politics of the Ostrich : On Pascal Bruckner’s “Un racisme imaginaire : La querelle de l’islamophobie et culpabilité” - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-politics-of-the-ostrich-on-pascal-bruckners-un-racisme-imaginai
Bruckner opens his book by declaring point-blank that his objective is to “delegitimize the term Islamophobia, instil doubt about it, flank it with permanent inverted commas.” He does not therefore even pretend that he is going to engage with objective data, or carry out empirical research. His first round of attack uses etymology to delegitimize the term Islamophobia, and in doing so Bruckner essentially paraphrases the French journalist Caroline Fourest, who claimed in 2003 that Islamophobia as a term was the brainchild of the Iranian 1979 Revolution. [1] According to this theory, the Iranian “mullahs” coined the term to suppress women who refused to wear the Islamic veil. The argument is put forth without a shred of evidence, and as a historian of modern Iran who is familiar with the 1979 Revolution and the discourse of its founders and ideologues, I can confidently assert here that the claim is simply a fabrication and widely acknowledged as such (even by Fourest herself who, embarrassed, edited the online version of her 2003 article accordingly). Undeterred, Bruckner continues to promote the now discredited theory, and another one, also initially made by Fourest, according to which Islamophobia re-emerged during the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses and the fatwa against his life. As with the previous claim, no evidence is to be found, no quotation is reproduced, no source is referenced. And for good reason: the claim is fallacious. It took me about 10 seconds and a simple Google search to find a 2015 article where Rushdie declares, “Today, I would be accused of Islamophobia.” Which means that back in 1989 he was not.
The United States — A Model for the #Nazis - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-united-states-a-model-for-the-nazis
When #Hitler came to power, Nazi lawyers, judges, and officials followed the Führer’s lead and expanded their study of systematic American racial exclusion in preparation for writing the infamous #Nuremberg Laws.
James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and author of several books on criminal justice, recounts this history in his disturbing and alarming new book based on detailed and scrupulous scholarship, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi #Race Law. “Awful it may be to contemplate,” Whitman concludes, “but the reality is that the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example in race law.” Based on Nazi documents and a stenographic record of a pivotal meeting on June 5, 1934, Whitman writes that less than two years after Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, “it was the most radical Nazis who pushed most energetically for the exploitation of American models.” Nazi lawyers “regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law.”
While Hitler’s admiration for the United States’s role in promoting the now-discredited theory eugenics has been well documented, Whitman breaks new ground by upsetting a preexisting consensus among historians who have downplayed America’s influence in the development of Nazi race law. Casting a searching and unapologetic eye on the documentary evidence, Whitman rejects the “reassuring consensus” that the United States’s legal system was insignificant in the Nazis’ quest for a legal solution to “the Jewish problem.”
At a troubling time when the United States is in the throes of a deeply divisive and ugly crisis over restrictions on immigration, exclusion of refugees, bans on travel from predominantly Muslim countries, and openly racist political rhetoric, Whitman’s chilling book forces us to examine some of the most grievous sins of America’s past through an unlikely lens.
Les racines américaines de l’idéologie nazie by James Q. Whitman - Project Syndicate
▻https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/charlottesville-nazis-american-democracy-by-james-q--whitman-2017-08/french
Forte de ses institutions démocratiques pleines de vitalité, l’Amérique s’est tristement distinguée comme la plus grande juridiction raciste de la planète au début du XXe siècle. C’est ce qu’illustrent notamment les lois Jim Crow, qui furent promulguées par des législatures blanches dans les États du sud, imposant un ségrégation raciale et anéantissant de nombreuses avancées obtenues pendant la période de reconstruction ayant suivi la guerre de Sécession. Mais les exemples abondent. Au début du XXe siècle, l’extrême droite européenne admirait elle-même la politique américaine d’#immigration, qui visait à exclure les « races indésirables ». Dans son manifeste Mein Kampf, Hitler salut l’Amérique comme « le seul et unique État » à progresser en direction d’un ordre sain, fondé sur les races.
En effet, 30 états américains appliquaient à l’époque des lois contre le métissage, destinées à préserver la pureté raciale. Les institutions démocratiques américaines ne se sont nullement dressées contre de telles politiques au début du XXe siècle. Au contraire, ces lois anti-métissage ont été le pur produit du système démocratique américain, qui a pleinement permis au racisme de nombreux Américains de se faire entendre. Les tribunaux du pays ont eux-mêmes confirmé ces innovations juridiques, en usant de #jurisprudences flexibles pour décider de qui pourrait obtenir le statut privilégié de « Blanc ».
What America Taught the Nazis in the 1930s - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630
In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in codified racism—the United States.
#Dataism : Yuval Noah Harare on big data, Google and the end of free will : Homo Deus
▻https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c
Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.
Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.
[...]
As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. The new motto says: “If you experience something — record it. If you record something — upload it. If you upload something — share it.”
The book:
▻https://www.amazon.fr/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/1910701882
backup of article:
▻https://www.docdroid.net/file/download/NJ2zTkj/yuval-noah-harari-on-big-data-google-and-the-end-of-free-will.pdf
review / article about this :
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/algorithmic-life
A Happy Monster
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-happy-monster
https://lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Hellboys-World.jpg 
https://lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Hellboy-1.png 
HELLBOY DIED five years ago. His adventures came to an end a little over three months ago. In between, he observed his 20th anniversary.
If this makes no sense to you, don’t worry. Hellboy has a hard time making sense of it himself. He’s a demon who doesn’t want to be a demon. He’s a walking omen who doesn’t want to think about the future. The course of his life has never run smoothly. Depending on when you encounter him, he is old, he is young, he is alive and kicking or he is dead, dead, dead. Always he is stubborn, grumpy, and laconic: a demonic tough guy of few words. This holds true on either side of the veil, for in Hellboy’s world, death is just a change of state. These are comic books we’re talking about, after all.
Hellboy, monster-hero, is the brainchild and handiwork of writer-artist Mike Mignola — a singular creative presence in comics whose style has practically become a brand. Hellboy’s personality and destiny are effects of style. His ethos is written in his looks. He is a devil with skin of blazing red, a right hand of stone, and two stumpy, filed-down horns. A splendid, cockeyed vision, he recalls Jack Kirby’s great comic-book monster-heroes, The Thing and Etrigan the Demon, but he is no mere pastiche. He is the Mignola Effect personified. His adventures are graphic as well as literary excursions: a compound of chiaroscuro; brash, angular abstraction; smothering atmosphere; and minimalist storytelling that never reveals more than it has to. Steeped in this dark, brooding aesthetic, the Hellboy cycle of comic books-cum-graphic novels began in 1994, and reached an end of sorts this summer with the final issue of Hellboy in Hell, an underworld odyssey set after the hero’s death — but no less lively for that.
100 Chinese translations of foreign publications which had strong influence in China, Thomas Kampen
▻http://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/md/zo/sino/institute/staff/kampen/kampen_100_translations.pdf
Between 1840 and 1949, millions of Chinese students, academics and
politicians were influenced by Chinese translations of Western books. But for a long time it was difficult to find details about the publication of these translations and biographical data of the translators.
In 1996, the Chinese scholar 鄒振環 Zou Zhenhuan (Fudan University, Shanghai) published a book introducing one hundred Chinese translations of foreign publications that had strong influence in modern China (影響中國近代社會的一百種譯作 Yingxiang Zhongguo jindai shehui de yibai zhong yizuo, Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fan yi chuban gongsi, 1996). This book provides important information for studying Western influences in China as well as literary, philosophical and political trends in modern China.
Contents
The book includes an impressive selection of novels (Defoe, Dumas, Scott), detective stories (A.C. Doyle), plays (Schiller, Shakespeare), poems (Byron), as well as historical, religious, sociological, philosophical and political studies (Einstein, Huxley, Kropotkin, Marx, Nietzsche, Rousseau). Most of the original worksare from Europe and about Europe; there are about a dozen Japanese books, but most of these are also based on western publications; there is also a small number of Western books about China, including Pearl S. Buck’s Good Earth and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China.
Zou Zhenhuan provides information about
– the original works and authors,
– the Chinese translations and translators
– the impact of the translations in China.
Getting “The Good Earth”’s Author Right: On Pearl S. Buck, By Charles W. Hayford
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/getting-the-good-earths-author-right-on-pearl-s-buck
... the seven pirated translations of The Good Earth into Chinese sold more copies than any other foreign book had up to that point.
Once denounced, now honored—discovering Pearl S. Buck, BookPage Behind the Book by Anchee Min
▻https://bookpage.com/behind-the-book/12261-once-denounced-now-honored-discovering-pearl-s-buck
I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China, where I lived for 27 years. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending middle school in Shanghai.
I was raised on the teachings of Mao and the operas of Madam Mao. I became a leader of the Little Red Guards in elementary school. My mother had been a teacher—she taught whatever the Party asked, one semester in Chinese and the next in Russian. My father was an instructor of industrial technique drawing at Shanghai Textile Institute, although his true love was astronomy. My parents both believed in Mao and the Communist Party, just like everybody else in the neighborhood. I became a Mao activist and won contests because I was able to recite the Little Red Book. In school Mao’s books were our texts.
Trying to gain international support to deny Pearl Buck an entry visa (to accompany President Nixon to China), Madam Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.”
I followed the order to denounce Pearl Buck and never doubted whether or not Madam Mao was being truthful. I was brainwashed at that time and had learned never to question anything. And yet I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I wished that I had been given a chance to read The Good Earth. We were told that the book was so “toxic” that it was dangerous to even translate. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: “Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China.” “She hates us therefore is our enemy.” I was proud to be able to defend my country and people.
Pearl Buck’s name didn’t cross my path again until I immigrated to America. It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, Red Azalea. Afterward, a lady came to me and asked if I knew Pearl Buck. Before I could reply, she said—very emotionally and to my surprise—that Pearl Buck had taught her to love the Chinese people. She placed a paperback in my hands and said that it was a gift. It was The Good Earth.
I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author. I remembered how Madam Mao had convinced the entire nation to hate Pearl Buck. How wrong we were! I had never encountered any author, including the most respected Chinese authors, who wrote about our peasants with such admiration, affection and humanity.
A Guide to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth | Asia for Educators | Columbia University, A Summary of The Good Earth
▻http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_earth.htm
The story begins on the day of Wang Lung’s wedding. Wang Lung is a poor young peasant who lives in an earthen brick house with his father, who has arranged for him to marry a slave girl named O-lan from the great family of the House of Hwang. After Wang Lung brings his quiet but diligent new wife home, she works side by side with him in the fields until their first child is born. They are delighted with their son, and at the New Year O-lan dresses him up and proudly takes him to the House of Hwang to show him off. She discovers that due to ostentatious waste and decadence, the Hwang household has squandered their fortune and is now poor enough to be willing to sell off their land. Since Wang Lung, with the help of O-lan who continues to join him in the fields, has had a relatively good year, he determines to extend his prosperity and better his position by buying some land from the House of Hwang. Although they must work harder with more land, Wang Lung and O-lan continue to produce good harvests; they also produce a second son and a daughter.
But soon Wang Lung encounters difficulties. His selfish and unprincipled uncle is jealous, and demands a portion of Wang Lung’s new wealth, while Wang Lung, obsessed with his desire to acquire more land, spends all the family savings; a drought causes a poor harvest and the family suffers from lack of food and from their envious, starving neighbors’ looting of the little dried beans and corn they have left. O-lan has to strangle their fourth child as soon as she is born because otherwise she would die of starvation. Desperately poor and hungry, Wang Lung sells his furniture for a bit of silver to take his family south, though he refuses to sell his land. They ride a firewagon to a southern city, where they live in a makeshift hut on the street. They survive by O-lan, the grandfather, and the children begging for food and Wang Lung pulling a jinrickshaw (or rickshaw) for the rich, or pulling wagonloads of cargo at night.
In the southern city, Wang Lung perceives the extraordinary wealth of westerners and Chinese aristocrats and capitalists, and he is interested in the revolutionaries’ protests of the oppression of the poor. He watches soldiers seize innocent men and force them to carry equipment for their armies. Yet Wang Lung’s overriding concern is to get back to his beloved land. He gets his chance when the enemy invades the city and the rich people flee; Wang Lung and O-lan join the throng of poor people who loot the nearby rich man’s house and get enough gold and jewels to enable them to return north. They repair their house and plough the fields, having bought seeds, an ox, new furniture and farm tools, and finally more land from the bankrupt House of Hwang.
There follow seven years of prosperity, during which the sons grow and begin school; a third son is born with a twin sister, and the harvest is so plentiful that Wang Lung hires laborers and his loyal neighbor, Ching, as a steward. When a flood causes a general famine in the seventh year, Wang Lung is rich enough not to worry about survival yet, while his lands are under water, he becomes restless in his idleness. Bored with his plain and coarse wife, he ventures into a tea shop in town operated by a man from the south where the rich and idle spend their time drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes. There he begins an affair with Lotus, a delicately beautiful but manipulatively demanding courtesan whom he desires obsessively. Wang Lung is cruel to his wife and children and spends his fortune on Lotus, finally using up much of his savings to purchase her and build an adjacent courtyard for her to live in as his second wife. Here Lotus indolently lies around in silks, eating expensive delicacies, and gossiping with the deceitful and opportunistic wife of Wang Lung’s uncle.
But discord arises immediately. O-lan is deeply hurt and angry, which makes Wang Lung defensively guilty and cold with her; there are conflicts between O-lan and Lotus’ maid Cuckoo who had mistreated O-lan when she was a concubine of the old master in the House of Hwang. Wang Lung’s old father protests the decadence of catering to a “harlot” in the house. Finally, Lotus is intolerant of Wang Lung’s children, especially his favorite daughter who had become mentally disabled due to malnutrition during the famine. As a result, Wang Lung’s passion for Lotus eventually cools, and when the flood recedes and he returns to his farming work, he is no longer obsessed with love.
In the last third of the book, Wang Lung experiences a succession of joys and sorrows in his family relationships and in his farming. Seasons of good harvests are punctuated by occasional bad years, due to a heavy flood, a severe winter freeze, and a scourge of locusts. Yet on the whole Wang Lung continues to prosper. His wealth, however, also brings a series of discontents. His first son is idle and interested only in women; Wang Lung is furious when he finds the son has visited first a local prostitute and then his own Lotus, so he arranges a marriage for him. Moreover, Wang Lung’s good-for-nothing uncle, with his wife and son, force themselves on the family with their demands for money and their morally corrupting influence; Wang Lung must be kind to them because the uncle is a leader of a band of robbers, from which Wang Lung’s prosperous household is protected for as long as he provides for the uncle. He eventually renders the uncle and his wife harmless by making them addicted to opium.
Family affairs continue to have ups and downs. O-lan’s sickness finally overpowers her, and Wang Lung’s tender solicitousness to her on her deathbed cannot fully compensate for the insults she received when Lotus moved into the house. She is content to die only after her first son’s marriage is consummated, so she can expect a grandson. Wang Lung’s father dies immediately after O-lan, and the faithful steward Ching is buried next. But these losses are accompanied by new joys: the first son produces grandsons and granddaughters, and the second son — a successful grain merchant — and the second daughter are also married and have children.
As Wang Lung ages, he rents out his farm land to tenants. His eldest son persuades him to buy the old estate of the House of Hwang in town, both as a means of moving out from the place where the disgraceful uncle and his wife live, and as a symbol of Wang Lung’s elevated social position. Wang Lung is gratified that now he can take the place of the Old Master of Hwang who once intimidated him so much. But although Wang Lung is head of a three generation extended family who live in luxury with numerous servants, he cannot find peace. The two older brothers and their wives quarrel; the youngest son refuses to become a farmer as Wang Lung had intended and instead joins the army. The uncle’s malicious son causes more trouble when he brings his military regiment to camp for six weeks in Wang Lung’s elegant house. And Wang Lung, long tired of the aging Lotus, finds some comfort in taking the young slave Pear Blossom as his concubine.
Finally, Wang Lung returns to the earthen house of his land to die. Material prosperity has brought him superficial social satisfaction, but only his land can provide peace and security. Even his final days are troubled, when he overhears his two older sons planning to sell the land as soon as he dies.
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