T h e R i g h T To Lo o k

Duke University Press Durham & London 2011

 T h e R i g h T To Lo o k

A C o u n t e r h i s to ry o f V i s uA l i t y

Nicholas Mirzoeff
© 2011 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
For K r i s, Ka r i n, and Kat h l e e n

with great love and respect, and in solidarity.

And for h a n n a h in hope of better futures

 ConTenTs

ix l i s t o f i l lu s t r at i o n s

xiii P r e fac e . Ineluctable Visualities

xvii ac K n o w l e d g m e n t s

1 introduction . The Right to Look, or,

How to Think With and Against Visuality

35 .......................... Visualizing Visuality

48 one . Oversight: The Ordering of Slavery

77 two . The Modern Imaginary: Antislavery
Revolutions and the Right to Existence

117 .......................... Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

123 three . Visuality: Authority and War

155 four . Abolition Realism: Reality, Realisms,
and Revolution

188 .......................... Puerto Rican Counterpoint II

196 five . Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality,
Ancient and Modern
232 six . Antifascist Neorealisms: North-South
and the Permanent Battle for Algiers

271 .......................... Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint

277 seven . Global Counterinsurgency

and the Crisis of Visuality

311 n ot e s

343 BiBliograPhy

373 index
 i L Lu s T R aT i o n s

P l at e s     (Appear after page 204)

1 Anonymous, Johnny Heke (i.e., Hone Heke), 1856

2 Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, “Indigoterie” (detail), 1667
3 Anonymous, The Awakening of the Third Estate, 1789
4 José Campeche, El niño Juan Pantaleón de Avilés de Luna, 1808
5 William Blake, God Writing on the Tablets of the Covenant, 1805
6 James Sawkins, St. Jago [i.e., Santiago de] Cuba, 1859
7 Camille Pissarro, The Hermitage at Pontoise, 1867
8 Francisco Oller y Cestero, El Velorio [The Wake], 1895
9 Cover of Paris-Match
10 Bubbles scene from Rachida, 2002
11 Still of Ofelia from Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006

figures

1 Marie-Françoise Plissart from Droit de regards, 1985 2

2 Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, “Indigoterie,” Histoire générale des
Antilles Habitées par les François, 1667 36
3 Plan of the Battle of Waterloo 37
4 John Bachmann, Panorama of the Seat of War: Bird’s Eye View of
Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia, 1861 38
5 “Multiplex set” from FM -30–21 Aerial Photography: Military Applications,
1944 39
6 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Master Sergeant Steve Horton, U.S. Air
Force 40
7 Anonymous, Toussaint L’Ouverture, ca. 1800 42
8 Dupuis, La Chute en masse, 1793 43
9 Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Untitled [Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation near
Beaufort, South Carolina], 1862 44
10 Emilio Longoni, May 1 or The Orator of the Strike, 1891 45
11 Ben H’midi and Ali la Pointe from The Battle of Algiers, 1966 46
12 An Inconvenient Truth, 2006 47
13 “Overseer,” detail from Du Tertre, “Indigoterie” 53
14 Anthony Van Dyck, Charles I at the Hunt, ca. 1637 54
15 Thomas Jeffreys, Map of Jamaica, 1794 57
16 “Plantation form,” from Jacques-François Dutrône la Couture, Précis
sur la canne, 1791 72
17 “Sugar Cane,” from Jacques-François Dutrône la Couture, Précis sur la
canne, 1791 74
18 Anonymous, “Terre des Esclaves—Terre de la Liberté” 81
19 Anonymous, Lantern Looks at 14 July, 1789 85
20 Claude Niquet the younger, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen, 1789 89
21 Jacques-François Le Barbier, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen, 1789 90
22 Anonymous, La Constitution Française, 1791 93
22a “The Asian Despot,” detail from La Constitution Française 94
23 Anne-Louis Girodet, Untitled [Sketches after Nature] 97
24 Edward M. Geachy, A Plan of the Negro Grounds, Green Valley
Plantation, 1837 101
25 Jacques Louis-David, Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard Pass, 1800 108
26 José Campeche, Don Miguel Antonio de Ustáriz, ca. 1792 119
27 Giuseppe Bagetti, Bataille au pont de Lodi, 1796 126
28 William Blake, “Four Zoas,” from Milton 128
29 Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Carlyle, 1867 131
30 Anonymous, Sojourner Truth 149
31 Camille Pissarro, Two Women Chatting by the Sea, 1856 163
32 Henry P. Moore, J. F. Seabrook’s Flower Garden, Edisto Island, 1862 168
33 Henry P. Moore, G’Wine to de Field, 1862 169

x Illustrations
34 Félix Nadar, Alexandre Dumas, père 173
35 Paul Cézanne, The Negro Scipio, 1865 175
36 Edouard Manet, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico,
1867 180
37 Edgar Degas, Interior of a Cotton Buyer’s Office in New Orleans, 1873 182
38 “The Couple,” detail from Oller, The Wake 191
39 “The Elder,” detail from Oller, The Wake 192
40 “The Owner,” detail from Oller, The Wake 192
41 Gustave Courbet, The Winnowers, 1854 194
42 Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bearing the Bodies of the Dead Sons of
the Roman Consul Brutus, 1785 194
43 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1601 194
44 Camille Pissarro, Evening Ball in a Posada during the Carnival in
Venezuela [sic], ca. 1852–54 194
45 Anonymous, “Te Atua Wera [Papahurihia?],” from Frederick Maning,
Old New Zealand, 1863 201
46 Anon, “Kororareka [Russell],” from Frederick Maning, Old New
Zealand, 1863 203
47 Maori text of the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840 207
48a–e Stills from J’ai huit ans, 1961 248
49 Information pyramid from Battle of Algiers, 1966 254
50 Dancing woman from Battle of Algiers, 1966 256
51 “One day we decided to kill him,” from Eije-Liisa Ahtila, Where Is
Where? 2007 261
52 Rachida (Djouadi Ibtissem) in Rachida, 2002 264
53 Still of Ofelia’s eye, from Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006 272
54 Still of the Faun, from Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006 273
55 Still from When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, 2006 281
56 Still from the video of the execution of Saddam Hussein 289
57 Major-General Peter Chiarelli, “Full Spectrum Information
Operations” 299
58 Capt. Travis Patriquin, “Group of Insurgents” 304
59 Anonymous, “PowerPoint Slide of Situation in Afghanistan
2009” 306

Illustrations xi
 P R e faC e

Ineluctable Visualities

It’s a while now that I’ve been tarrying with what James Joyce, in Ulysses,
called “the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality.” That typically
Joycean phrase could detain us for a while: why is visuality ineluctable?
Who has made it so? It’s a repetition with a difference of a phrase that ap-
pears earlier in Ulysses—“ineluctable modality of the visible”—and both are
part of Proteus, Stephen Dedalus’s interior monologue on the beach early
in the day. Visuality is not, then, the visible, but it is twice ineluctable, un-
avoidable, inevitable. Nor, to be brief, is it a new way of thinking, any more
than that currently fashionable term modality. By linking visuality with the
archaic ineluctable, Joyce pushes us in the direction of seventeenth- century
metaphysics, and behind them Aristotle, appropriate to Dedalus’s concern
with the “veil” between life and death as he mourns his mother and seeks
the “word known to all men.” So visuality is not the visible, or even the
social fact of the visible, as many of us had long assumed. Nor is it one of
those annoying neologisms that are so ripe a target for the book reviewer,
for, as Joyce perhaps realized, the word became part of official English in
1840, in the work of Thomas Carlyle, fulminator against modernity and
emancipation of all kinds. As Carlyle himself emphasized, the ability of the
Hero to visualize was no innovation but “Tradition,” a mighty force in the
eyes of imperial apologists. To get the measure of this long Tradition and
the force of authority that renders it so ineluctable takes some time and
space with no apologies. That story, the one implied by an Anglo- Celtic
(Carlyle was Scottish) imperial imaginary, is the one whose counterhistory
is offered here.
For in trying to come to terms with the ineluctable qualities of visu-
ality, I have wanted to provide a critical genealogy for the resistance to
the society of the spectacle and the image wars of recent decades. In turn,
that genealogy would provide a framework for critical work in what has
become known as visual culture, not because historicizing is necessarily
always good, but because visuality both has an extensive and important
history and is itself a key part of the formation of Western historiogra-
phy. More precisely, visuality and its visualizing of history are part of how
the “West” historicizes and distinguishes itself from its others. In this view,
the “visual turn” represented academically by visual culture was not liber-
ating in and of itself, but sought to engage the deployment of visualized
authority at its points of strength. In so doing, I have crossed multiple bor-
ders, whether literally in pursuit of archives or other materials researched
on three continents and in two hemispheres, or figuratively in the interface
with academically discrete sets of area studies, historical periodization, and
media histories. One of the early criticisms of the field of visual culture
was its apparent hesitation to engage with weighty issues. The publication
of such major books as W. J. T. Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want? (2005) and
the late lamented Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Micro-
soft (2006) has handily disposed of such objections. In this book I hope to
follow in such exalted footsteps by developing a comparative decolonial
framework for the field. I was impelled to do so by the questions raised in
my study of the war in Iraq, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual
Culture (2005). Writing quickly, in the sadly mistaken belief that this would
be a short conflict, I came up against the paradox that the immense quan-
tity of imagery generated by the war had relatively little effect on the gen-
eral public, a phenomenon I labeled the “banality of images.” Nor did the
Abu Ghraib photographs, disturbing as they of course were, challenge that
view. The photographs were not mentioned in the U.S. elections of 2004,
and no military figure above the level of the prison itself was subsequently
disciplined: indeed, everyone in the chain of command leading to the Abu
Ghraib scandal was promoted. Against all traditions of photojournalism
and other modes of visual revelation, it seemed that visuality had become a
weapon for authority, not against it. In order to make sense of the apparent

xiv Preface
conundrum that such shocking images have had so little public effect, it is
critical to locate them in the genealogy I describe here.
I am not trying to reduce the materialized visualization to a cipher. On
the contrary, it seems to me that one of the major implications of W. J. T.
Mitchell’s famous claim, in 1994, that visual materials of all kinds are as
complex and significant as print culture is that the visual image is an archive
in its own right. Without extending this discussion, one issue of border
crossing in this regard can be taken as an example of the issues involved. In
a number of instances drawn from the plantation complex of the Atlantic
world, I have used images—or sometimes even the knowledge that there
were images which have been lost—as a form of evidence. When I draw
inferences from enslaved, formerly enslaved, subaltern, or colonial subjects,
there is often no textual support I can draw on beyond the visual image.
Therefore I use the formal analysis of style, composition, and inference
that is commonplace within the Western canon and its hinterlands to sup-
port my arguments. I further claim that the wider historical frame I am de-
veloping here would reinforce such interpretations, just as many cultural
historians have done before me. I may be wrong, of course, but the use of
the visual archive to “speak” for and about subaltern histories of this kind,
as opposed to simply being illustrative of them, seems to me an important
methodological question. If formal use of that visual archive is to be dis-
allowed in, say, Puerto Rico, then I want it disqualified in Rome as well.
And if that is not going to happen, then what methodological objection is
operative in one place but not the other? This objection comes most often
from those in the field of art history, where attribution is a central ques-
tion. I do not, however, conceive of this book as art history, but rather as
part of the critical interpretation of media and mediation, performing what
Mitchell has usefully called “medium theory,” all puns intended. In this
sense, I consider visuality to be both a medium for the transmission and
dissemination of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subject
to that authority.
The main text will either justify these claims to readers or not. Here I
would like to indicate one or two omissions that might not be self- evident.
As a matter of framing and containing this project, I have used the tradi-
tion of authority that first inspired Carlyle and then was inspired, directly
or indirectly, by him. That is to say, this is a genealogy of the Anglo-French
imperial project that was launched in the direction of plantation colonies
in the mid-seventeenth century and then diverged radically with the out-

Ineluctable Visualities xv
break of the French and Haitian Revolutions (1789–1804). This legacy was
disseminated to the United States in its capacity as a former British colony
and by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s adaptation of Carlyle, published as Represen-
tative Men (1850). While some scholars might question so extensive a reach,
the imperial project writ large was (and is) an actively conceived zone of
experience, intervention, and imagination. James Anthony Froude called it
“Oceana,” in imitation of James Harrington’s seventeenth- century treatise.
On the other hand, for some this sphere may not go far enough. I recognize
the extent to which this Anglo-French-American “imagined community”
was contrapuntally interfaced with the Spanish empire, and I have given
this practical expression in a set of “counterpoints” from the Hispanophone
Americas. These sections deal with various forms of visual imagery, not be-
cause I conceive of Spanish empire “as” an image, but because this is per-
haps as far as I dare trust my knowledge and language skills. I have risked
these brief moments of imperial interpenetration as a sign of my sense that
a very promising direction for new research would be a collaborative explo-
ration of the intersections of such globalizing visualities. While I certainly
imagine these zones as extending to South and East Asia, it has not been
within my skill-set to include them in this book, which I now conceive as
simply the first step in a longer project. Would it not, then, be prudent to
conceive of this current volume as several books? It is certainly true that I
can imagine a book project on each of the different complexes of visuality
that I describe here. If the mode of critical analysis that I promote here takes
hold, then I certainly see a place for multiple books, whether written by
myself or by others. Here I felt it was important to set out the framework as
a whole in sufficient detail that its outlines became clear, yet without pre-
suming that no modifications would be later necessary. Another suggestion
to write a very short introduction to the topic seems to me to prioritize the
current fashion in publishing over sustained argument: I do not see how a
project for a reevaluation of modernity could be undertaken seriously in
the hundred-page “very short” format so popular these days. Enough, then,
of what this book is not, and on to what it, for all its faults, actually is.

xvi Preface
 aC k n o w L e d g m e n T s

This book has benefited from so many people’s advice, insight, and ma-
terial support—in part because it took me longer to finish than I would
have liked—that I cannot possibly list them all. The project’s first steps were
taken under the auspices of a fellowship at the Humanities Research Cen-
ter at the Australian National University, Canberra, in 2001, and developed
at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massa-
chusetts, in 2002. My research into Maori history and culture was enabled
when I was a visiting scholar in the department of American studies at the
University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2005. Support for my
research was provided by the deans of the College of Arts and Sciences at
Stony Brook University and later by Dean Mary Brabeck of the Steinhardt
School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York Uni-
versity. I owe much to librarians and archivists at: Charlotte Amelie Pub-
lic Library, St. Thomas; University of Puerto Rico, Rio Pedras; the Mac-
millan Brown Library–Te Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown, University
of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand; the Australian National Library;
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Musée Nationale de la Révolution Française,
Vizille, France; the British Library; the New York Historical Society Library;
Melville Memorial Library at Stony Brook University; and the Elmer Bobst
Memorial Library at New York University. Of the venues where I have pre-
sented portions of this project I would like to especially thank the “Trans”
conference at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2006; the AUP- NYU
Media and Belief conference in Paris, in 2009; the Visual Culture Confer-
ence 2010 at University of Westminster, London; the George Levitine Lec-
ture at the University of Maryland, in 2010; as well as the Modern Language
Association, College Art Association, and a variety of events at New York
University and around New York City.
Among the many people that I want to thank, first place goes to the
anonymous readers for Duke University Press, who extended and chal-
lenged my thinking. This was one instance of the double-blind peer review
that really worked. Other readers and advisers who provided beyond-the-
call-of- duty contributions were Terry Smith, Marita Sturken, and Dana
Polan. I’d like to thank all my current colleagues in the department of
media, culture and communication at New York University and those in
the departments of art and comparative literature and cultural studies at
Stony Brook University. Further, my thanks go to all those students who
helped me figure this project out as I went along and experienced its grow-
ing pains. The picture research was enabled by the excellent work of first
Max Liboiron and then Ami Kim, to whom special thanks are due. At Duke
University Press, Ken Wissoker, Mandy Early, Jade Brooks, Tim Elfenbein,
and Patricia Mickleberry have done sterling work keeping me focused and
actually editing the manuscript, a rarity these days in my experience. Tara
McPherson, Brian Goldfarb, Joan Saab, and Wendy Chun, my colleagues
on the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture project, have had to listen
to versions of these ideas many times, and for this and their inspiration and
excellence, many thanks. I owe much to the friendship and intelligence of
a remarkable group of people at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance
and Politics, especially Marcial Godoy, Jill Lane, and Diana Taylor. My peer
network of friends and colleagues, thank you all, especially: Arjun Ap-
padurai, Jon Beller, Laurie-Beth Clark, Jill Casid, David Darts, Dipti Desai,
Hank Drewal, Kevin Glynn, Amelia Jones, Alex Juhasz, Ira Livingston, Iona
Man-Cheong, Carol Mavor, Jo Morra, Tom Mitchell, Lisa Nakamura, Lisa
Parks, Carl Pope, Marq Smith and everyone at the NEH-Vectors Summer
Institute “Broadening the Digital Humanities” at the University of Califor-
nia Research Institute in 2010.
There’s no adequate formula to express what this book, and indeed my
entire career and, even more, my life beyond work, owe to Kathleen Wil-
son. Above and beyond using the direct ideas, references, and insights that
she has offered on almost every page, I have had the remarkable experience

xviii Acknowledgments
of learning from and living with an intellectual of the first rank, as she re-
configures her entire field. Latterly, I have witnessed her overcome some
of the most serious challenges a person can face with courage, intelligence,
and even good humor. That is an inspiration I seek to live up to every day,
just as I try to become a better parent for the young woman that my daugh-
ter Hannah has become during the time it has taken me to write this book.

Acknowledgments xix
 inTRoduCTion

The Right to Look

Or, How to Think With and

Against Visuality

I want to claim the right to look.1 This claim is, not for the first or the last
time, for a right to the real.2 It might seem an odd request after all that we
have seen in the first decade of the twenty-first century on old media and
new, from the falling of the towers, to the drowning of cities, and violence
without end. The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal
level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity,
or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it
fails. As such, it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not
individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and
collectivity: “The right to look. The invention of the other.”3 Jacques Der-
rida coined this phrase in describing Marie-Françoise Plissart’s photo-essay
depicting two women in ambiguous pursuit of each other, as lovers, and in
knowing play with practices of looking (see fig. 1).4 This invention is com-
mon, it may be the common, even communist. For there is an exchange,
but no creation of a surplus. You, or your group, allow another to find you,
and, in so doing, you find both the other and yourself. It means requiring
the recognition of the other in order to have a place from which to claim
rights and to determine what is right. It is the claim to a subjectivity that
has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable. The
right to look confronts the police who say to us, “Move on, there’s nothing
to see here.”5 Only there is, and we know it and so do they. The opposite of
figure 1. MArie - frAnçoise PlissArt froM Droit De regarDs
(PAris : editions de Minuit, 1985).

the right to look is not censorship, then, but “visuality,” that authority to
tell us to move on, that exclusive claim to be able to look. Visuality is an old
word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory word meaning the totality
of all visual images and devices, but is in fact an early-nineteenth-century
term meaning the visualization of history.6 This practice must be imagi-
nary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too sub-
stantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images,
and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority
of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent
renewal in order to win consent as the “normal,” or everyday, because it is
always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus
opposed by the authority of visuality. But the right to look came first, and
we should not forget it.7
How can we think with and against visuality? Visuality’s first domains
were the slave plantation, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer,
operating as the surrogate of the sovereign. This sovereign surveillance was
reinforced by violent punishment but sustained a modern division of labor.
Visualizing was next the hallmark of the modern general from the late
eighteenth- century onward, as the battlefield became too extensive and
complex for any one person to physically see. Working on information sup-

2 Introduction
plied by subalterns—the new lowest-ranked officer class created for this
purpose—and his own ideas and images, the general in modern warfare, as
practiced and theorized by Karl von Clausewitz, was responsible for visu-
alizing the battlefield. At this moment, in 1840, visuality was named as such
in English by the historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) to refer to what he
called the tradition of heroic leadership, which visualizes history to sustain
autocratic authority. Carlyle attempted to conjure the Hero as a mystical
figure, a “living light fountain that it is good and pleasant to be near . . .
a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven.”8 If visuality had been the
supplement to authority on the plantation, authority was now that light.
Light is divine. Authority is thus visibly able to set things in motion, and
that is then felt to be right: it is aesthetic. Visuality supplemented the vio-
lence of authority and its separations, forming a complex that came to seem
natural by virtue of its investment in “history.” The autonomy claimed by
the right to look is thus opposed by the authority of visuality. Visualiz-
ing is the production of visuality, meaning the making of the processes of
“history” perceptible to authority. Visuality sought to present authority as
self-evident, that “division of the sensible whereby domination imposes the
sensible evidence of its legitimacy.”9 Despite its name, this process is not
composed simply of visual perceptions in the physical sense, but is formed
by a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into
a rendition of physical and psychic space. I am not attributing agency to
“visuality” but, as is now commonplace, treating it as a discursive practice
that has material effects, like Foucault’s panopticism, the gaze or perspec-
tive. A given modality of visuality is composed of a series of operations
that can be summarized under three headings: first, visuality classifies by
naming, categorizing, and defining, a process defined by Foucault as “the
nomination of the visible.”10 It was founded in plantation practice, from the
mapping of plantation space to the identification of cash-crop cultivation
techniques and the precise division of labor required to sustain them. Sec-
ond, visuality separates the groups so classified as a means of social organi-
zation. Such visuality separates and segregates those it visualizes to prevent
them from cohering as political subjects, such as the workers, the people, or
the (decolonized) nation. Third, it makes this separated classification seem
right and hence aesthetic. As the decolonial critic Frantz Fanon had it, such
repeated experience generates an “aesthetic of respect for the status quo,”
the aesthetics of the proper, of duty, of what is felt to be right and hence
pleasing, ultimately even beautiful.11 Classifying, separating, and aestheti-

The Right to Look 3

cizing together form what I shall call a “complex of visuality.” All such Pla-
tonism depends on a servile class, whether formally chattel slaves or not,
whose task it is to do the work that is to be done and nothing else.12 We may
engage in whatever labor is required to do that work, visual or otherwise,
but for us, there is nothing to be seen.
The right to look claims autonomy from this authority, refuses to be
segregated, and spontaneously invents new forms. It is not a right for dec-
larations of human rights, or for advocacy, but a claim of the right to the
real as the key to a democratic politics. That politics is not messianic or to
come, but has a persistent genealogy that is explored in this book, from the
opposition to slavery of all kinds to anticolonial, anti-imperial, and anti-
fascist politics. Claiming the right to look has come to mean moving past
such spontaneous oppositional undoing toward an autonomy based on one
of its first principles: “the right to existence.” The constitutive assemblages
of countervisuality that emerged from the confrontation with visuality
sought to match and overcome its complex operations. I shall gloss these
terms here using the radical genealogy of the philosopher Jacques Rancière,
whose work has been central to this project, while emphasizing and insist-
ing that they are derived from historical practice. Classification was coun-
tered by education understood as emancipation, meaning “the act of an
intelligence obeying only itself, even while the will obeys another will.”13
Education has long been understood by working and subaltern classes as
their paramount means of emancipation, from the efforts of the enslaved to
achieve literacy, to nineteenth- century campaigns for universal education
that culminated (in the United States) with the Supreme Court case Brown v.
Board of Education (1954). Education was the practical means of moving on
from the work allocated to you. Separation was countered by democracy,
meaning not simply representative elections but the place of “the part that
has no part” in power. Plato designated six categories of people with title to
power: all those who remained, the great majority, are those without part,
who do not count.14 Here the right to look is strongly interfaced with the
right to be seen. In combining education and democracy, those classified as
good to work and nothing else reasserted their place and title. The aesthet-
ics of power were matched by the aesthetics of the body not simply as form
but as affect and need. This aesthetic is not a classificatory scheme of the
beautiful but “an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics . . . as the system of a priori
forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”15 In this book,
these forms center around sustenance and what I shall call the “politics of

4 Introduction
eating,” adapting a phrase from African and African diaspora discourse. It
might now be described as sustainability. These countervisualities are not
visual, you might say. I did not say they were. I claim that they are and were
visualized as goals, strategies, and imagined forms of singularity and col-
lectivity. If they do not seem “realistic,” that is the measure of the success
of visuality, which has made “vision” and “leadership” into synonyms. It is
precisely that extended sense of the real, the realistic, and realism(s) that is
at stake in the conflict between visuality and countervisuality. The “realism”
of countervisuality is the means by which one tries to make sense of the un-
reality created by visuality’s authority from the slave plantation to fascism
and the war on terror that is nonetheless all too real, while at the same time
proposing a real alternative. It is by no means a simple or mimetic depic-
tion of lived experience, but one that depicts existing realities and counters
them with a different realism. In short, the choice is between continuing
to move on and authorizing authority or claiming that there is something
to see and democraticizing democracy.

c o m P l e x e s o f v i s ua l i t y

The substance of this chapter—it is more than an introduction to the rest of

the book, although it is of course also that—explores how to work with the
interfaces between visuality and countervisuality within and between com-
plexes of visuality from a decolonial perspective. “Complex” here means
both the production of a set of social organizations and processes that form
a given complex, such as the plantation complex, and the state of an indi-
vidual’s psychic economy, such as the Oedipus complex. The resulting im-
brication of mentality and organization produces a visualized deployment
of bodies and a training of minds, organized so as to sustain both physical
segregation between rulers and ruled, and mental compliance with those
arrangements. The complex that thus emerges has volume and substance,
forming a life-world that can be both visualized and inhabited. I consider
the complexes of visuality to be an articulation of the claim to authority
in what decolonial theory has called “coloniality,” meaning “the transhis-
toric expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation of its effects
in contemporary times.”16 As Achille Mbembe has shown, such coloniality
is formed by modes of “entanglement” and “displacement,” producing “dis-
continuities, reversals, inertias and swings that overlay one another.”17 This
sense that the “time is out of joint,” appropriated by Derrida from Hamlet,

The Right to Look 5

has come to be seen as the expression of the contradictions of globaliza-
tion.18 Identifying these entanglements and moments of displacement are
central to defining the genealogies of visuality and form the material for the
chapters that follow. Such networks also remind us that no such genealogy
can be comprehensive. Mbembe’s emphasis on complex temporality fur-
ther suggests that one modality of visuality was not simply succeeded by
another, but rather that their traces linger, and can be revived at unexpected
moments. The present is precisely one such moment, in which the legacies
of the plantation complex are once again active in the United States, due to
the Obama presidency, while imperial dreams are being worked out glob-
ally in full interface with the military-industrial complex. The very emer-
gence of all the modalities of visuality at once suggests an emergency, as
both the condition of a critique of visuality and the possibility of the right
to look. The symptom of that emergency is precisely the ability to detect
the crisis of visuality, such that the visibility of visuality is paradoxically the
index of that crisis.
The authority of coloniality has consistently required visuality to sup-
plement its deployment of force. Visuality sutures authority to power and
renders this association “natural.” For Nelson Maldonado Torres, this colo-
nial violence formed a “death ethic of war,” meaning the extensive presence
of war and related social practices, such as mass incarceration and the death
penalty, to which I would add slavery, understood as being derived from
“the constitutive character of coloniality and the naturalization of human
difference that is tied to it in the emergence and unfolding of Western
modernity.”19 This decolonial genealogy means that it will not be sufficient
to begin a critique of visuality in the present day, or in the recent past, but
that it must engage with the formation of coloniality and slavery as moder-
nity.20 As Enrique Dussel has aptly put it: “Modernity is, in fact, a Euro-
pean phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-
European alterity that is its ultimate content.”21 In order to challenge the
claimed inevitability of this history and its hegemonic means to frame the
present, any engagement with visuality in the present or the past requires
establishing its counterhistory. In fact, I suggest that one of the very consti-
tutive forms of visuality is the knowledge that it is always already opposed
and in struggle. To coin a phrase, visuality is not war by other means: it is
war. This war was constituted first by the experience of plantation slavery,
the foundational moment of visuality and the right to look. In antiquity,
authority was literally a patriarchal modality of slavery. The modern hero’s

6 Introduction
authority restates the ancient foundations of authority as slave-owner and
interpreter of messages, the “eternal” half of modern visuality, to paraphrase
Baudelaire, the tradition that was to be preserved.
Authority is derived from the Latin auctor. In Roman law, the auctor
was at one level the “founder” of a family, literally the patriarch. He was
also (and always) therefore a man empowered to sell slaves, among other
forms of property, which completed the complex of authority.22 Authority
can be said to be power over life, or biopower, foundationally rendered as
authority over a “slave.”23 However, this genealogy displaces the question:
who or what empowers the person with authority to sell human beings?
According to the Roman historian Livy, the indigenous people living on
the site that would become Rome were subject to the authority (auctoritas)
of Evander, son of Hermes, who ruled “more by authority than by power
(imperium).” That authority was derived from Evander’s ability, as the son
of the messenger of the gods, to interpret signs. As Rancière puts it, “The
auctor is a specialist in messages.”24 This ability to discern meaning in both
the medium and the message generates visuality’s aura of authority. When
it further becomes invested with power (imperium), that authority becomes
the ability to designate who should serve and who should rule. Such cer-
tainties did not survive the violent decentering of the European worldview
produced by the multiple shocks of “1492”: the encounter with the Ameri-
cas, the expulsion of the Jews and Islam from Spain, and the heliocentric
system of Copernicus. At the beginning of the modern period, Montaigne
could already discern what he called the “mystical foundation of authority,”
meaning that it was ultimately unclear who or what authorizes authority.25
As Derrida suggests, “Since the origin of authority, the foundation or
ground, the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but
themselves, they are themselves a violence without a ground.”26 Authority’s
presumed origin in legality is in fact one of force, the enforcement of law,
epitomized in this context by the commodification of the person as forced
labor that is slavery. This self-authorizing of authority required a supple-
ment to make it seem self- evident, which is what I am calling visuality.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Scythians of an-
tiquity blinded their slaves. As the Scythians were horse-riding nomads,
modern historians have concluded that this practice was designed to pre-
vent the slaves from escaping.27 It cannot but also suggest that slavery is
the removal of the right to look. The blinding makes a person a slave and
removes the possibility of regaining the status of a free person. While chat-

The Right to Look 7

tel slavery did not physically blind the enslaved, its legal authority now
policed even their imagination, knowing that their labor required looking.
For example, in the British colony of Jamaica the enslaved were forbid-
den even to “imagine the death of any white Person.”28 By contrast, in the
metropole it became a capital offence for subjects to imagine the death of
a king only during the revolutionary crisis of the 1790s.29 The difference in
these laws suggest that any white person in the plantation colony was the
equivalent of the sovereign in the “home” nation. Such laws became nec-
essary when authority feared that the enslaved or feudal subject might act
on such imaginings, the always possible revolutionizing of the plantation
complex. This anxiety moved from plantation to metropole. In the North
American context, “reckless eyeballing,” a simple looking at a white person,
especially a white woman or person in authority, was forbidden those classi-
fied as “colored” under Jim Crow. Such looking was held to be both violent
and sexualized in and of itself, a further intensification of the policing of
visuality. As late as 1951, a farmer named Matt Ingram was convicted of the
assault of a white woman in North Carolina because she had not liked the
way he looked at her from a distance of sixty-five feet.30 This monitoring
of the look has been retained in the U.S. prison system so that, for example,
detainees in the Abu Ghraib phase of the war in Iraq (2003–4) were force-
fully told, “Don’t eyeball me!”31
In short, complexes are complex. They are divided against themselves
first as configurations of visuality against countervisuality and then as ma-
terial systems of administering authority interfaced with mental means of
authorizing. In tracing a decolonial genealogy of visuality, I have identi-
fied three primary complexes of visuality and countervisuality in this book,
from the “plantation complex” that sustained Atlantic slavery, via what was
known to certain apologists for the British empire as the “imperialist com-
plex,” to President Dwight Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,”
which is still very much with us. Each responded to and generated forms
of countervisuality. The clash of visuality and countervisuality produced
not just imagined relations but materialized visualizations as images of all
kinds, as natural history, law, politics, and so on. The extended encounter
between the right to look and visuality created a “world-generating optic”
on modernity, such that “modernity is produced as the West.”32 What was
at stake was the form of the real, the realistic, and realism in all senses. From
the decolonial perspective used here, it is the way that modernity looks
when seen from the places of visuality’s application—the plantation, the

8 Introduction
colony, the counterinsurgency—back toward the metropole. That look is
not a copy, or even a reverse shot, but is equally constitutive by means of its
own reality effect of the classified, spatialized, aestheticized, and militarized
transnational culture that in its present- day form has come to be called
“globalization.” Indeed, the contradiction that has generated change within
the complexes of visuality has been that while authority claims to remain
unchanged in the face of modernity, eternally deriving authority from its
ability to interpret messages, it has been driven to radical transformation by
the resistance it has itself produced. This force has applied to visuality and
countervisuality alike as what Michel Foucault called “intensity,” rendering
them “more economic and more effective.”33 Under the pressure of inten-
sification, each form of visuality becomes more specific and technical, so
that within each complex there is, as it were, both a standard and an inten-
sified form. That is the paradox glimpsed by Carlyle, in which history and
visualization have become mutually constitutive as the reality of modernity,
while failing to account entirely for each other.34 It is that space between
intention and accomplishment that allows for the possibility of a counter-
visuality that is more than simply the opposition predicated by visuality as
its necessary price of becoming.
In significant part, therefore, these modes of visuality are psychic events
that nonetheless have material effects. In this sense, the visualized complex
produced a set of psychic relations described by Sigmund Freud as “a group
of interdependent ideational elements cathected with affect.”35 For Freud,
the complex, above all the famous Oedipus complex, was at first the name
of the process by which the internal “pleasure principle” became reconciled
with the “reality principle” of the exterior world. Following the experi-
ence of shell shock in the First World War, Freud revised his opinion to see
the psychic economy as a conflict between the pleasure drive and the death
drive, leading to a doubled set of disruptions. For Jacques Lacan, as Slavoj
Žižek has described, the subject was constituted by the inevitable failure to
overcome this lack: “The place of ‘reality’ within the psychic economy is
that of an ‘excess,’ of a surplus which disturbs and blocks from within the
autarky of the self-contained balance of the psychic apparatus—‘reality’ as
the external necessity which forces the psychic apparatus to renounce the
exclusive rule of the ‘pleasure principle’ is correlative to this inner stum-
bling block.”36 The diagram that visualizes this process is an arrow that
travels around a circle until it is blocked at the last minute. The pleasure
principle cannot quite fulfill its wish because something from outside its

The Right to Look 9

domain intrudes and prevents it from doing so. For Lacan that “thing” was
epitomized by the Oedipus complex in which the law of the father pre-
vented the infant from achieving its desire to possess the mother. Authority
thus counters desire and produces a self- conscious subject who experiences
both internal desire and external constraint as “reality.” In this book, I take
the existence of this doubled complex to be the product of history, as op-
posed to a transhistorical human condition, specifically that of the violence
with which colonial authority enforced its claims. From the dream-world
of the Haitian and French Revolutions and their imaginaries to the im-
perial investigation of the “primitive” mind and Fanon’s deconstruction of
colonial psychology, producing and exploring psychic complexes and com-
plexity was central to the labor of visualization. Needless to say, visualiza-
tion has in turn now become part of the labor of being analyzed.

t h e P l a n tat i o n c o m P l e x: au t h o r i t y, s l av e r y, m o d e r n i t y

Visualized techniques were central to the operations of the Atlantic world

formed by plantation slavery and its ordering of reality. The plantation
complex as a material system lasted from the seventeenth century until
the late nineteenth, and affected primarily those parts of the globe known
as the Atlantic triangle: the European slave- owning nations, Central and
West Africa, the Caribbean and the plantation colonies of the Americas.
The plantation complex designates the system of forced labor on cash-
crop plantations, in which the role of authority was described by histo-
rian Phillip Curtin: “The [slave] owner not only controlled his work force
during working hours, he also had, at least de facto, some form of legal
jurisdiction. His agents acted informally as policemen. They punished most
minor criminals and settled most disputes without reference to higher au-
thority.”37 Sovereign authority was thus delegated to the plantation, where
it was managed in a system of visualized surveillance. While the overseer
was always confronted with revolt large and small, his authority was visu-
alized as the surrogate of the monarch’s and hence Absolute. The overseer,
who ran the colonial slave plantation, embodied the visualized techniques
of its authority, and so I call them collectively “oversight.” Oversight com-
bined the classifications of natural history, which defined the “slave” as a
species, with the spatializing of mapping that separated and defined slave
space and “free” space. These separations and distinctions were enabled by
the force of law that allowed the overseer to enforce the slave codes. This

10 Introduction
regime can be said to have been established between the passing of the Bar-
bados Slave Code, in 1661, and the promulgation of Louis XIV’s Code Noir,
in 1685. This ordering of slavery was interactive with the “order of things”
famously discerned as coming into being at the same period in Europe by
Foucault. A certain set of people were classified as commodifiable and a re-
source for forced labor. By means of new legal and social codes, those so en-
slaved were of course separated from the free not just in physical space, but
in law and natural history. Once assembled, the plantation complex came to
be seen to be right. In his justifications for slavery, the nineteenth- century
Southern planter John Hammond turned such stratagems into axioms of
human existence: “You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The
answer is that he can and actually does all the world over, in a variety of
forms, and has always done so.”38
Under the plantation complex and in the long shadow of its memory,
a moment that has yet to pass, slavery is both literal and metaphorical: it
is the very real trauma of chattel slavery and an expression of a techni-
cally “free” social relation that is felt to be metaphorically equivalent to
slavery. So, too, is abolition literal and metaphorical. It expresses a moment
of emancipation, but also a condition in which slavery of all kinds would
be impossible. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, the enslaved had de-
vised counters to the key components of oversight. Maroons, or runaway
slaves, had established settlements in many plantation colonies, sometimes
signing formal treaties with colonial powers and thereby remapping the
colony. The enslaved had a superior understanding of tropical botany and
were able to put this knowledge to good effect in poisoning their mas-
ters, or so it was widely believed. Finally, the syncretic religions of the
plantation complex had produced a new embodied aesthetic represented in
the votive figures known as garde-corps, literally “body guard.” The revolt
led, in 1757, by François Makandal in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, united
these different techniques into an effective countervisuality that came close
to overthrowing slavery. The plantocracy, as the ruling planter class was
known, responded by intensifying slavery. By the time of the revolution, in
1791, Saint-Domingue was the single greatest producer of (colonial) wealth
in the Western world. Huge numbers of people were imported as forced
labor as the planters sought both to achieve autonomy for the island from
the metropole and to automate the production process of the cash crops,
especially sugar. This intensification in turn produced the world-historical
event of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the first successful act of de-

The Right to Look 11

colonial liberation and the key transformation in producing modern visu-
ality. This intensification in the countervisuality of antislavery produced
the revolutionary hero as the embodied counter to the sovereign authority
represented by the overseer. The popular hero, such as Toussaint L’Ouver-
ture, incarnated democracy as the representative of the people, embody-
ing a willed emancipation that was at once education and, in his or her
symbolic form, an aesthetic of transformation. Almost immediately, the
hero was subject to its own intensification within the new imaginary of
the “people.” This pressure produced a cleft within the revolution: was the
priority now to be the imagined community of the nation-state or the sus-
tainable community at local level? In the events covered by this book, this
question has been persistently resolved by force in favor of the nation-state
from Toussaint’s 1801 Constitution for Haiti, to the ending of Reconstruc-
tion in the United States, in 1877, and the reconfiguration of the Algerian
revolution, in 1965. The shared subsistence economy claimed by subaltern
actors in each case, most familiar now in the Reconstruction slogan “forty
acres and a mule,” was presented as naïve, even reactionary, as it still is today
in the face of the disaster of climate change. The perceived necessity to re-
state national authority opened the way for the imperial appropriation of
the revolutionary hero in the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, the archetype
of the modern Hero for Carlyle.
The specter of Haiti haunted the long nineteenth century that ended
with decolonization. The images of Dessalines cutting the white section
out of Haiti’s flag, in 1804, even as he declared it illegal for “whites” to own
property on the island were, to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s trenchant term,
“unthinkable.” The permanent alienation of “property” by the formerly en-
slaved in Haiti claiming their own right to autonomy forced the remaking
of visuality as a permanent war, visualized as a battlefield map. These two-
dimensional representations of the array of forces as they confront each
other became the visualization of history in Carlyle’s imagination. Given
this separation, I will describe the forms of visuality and countervisual-
ity separately from this point forward. Visualizing was the hallmark of the
modern general from the late eighteenth century onward, as the battle-
field became too extensive and complex for any one person to physically
see. The general in modern warfare as practiced and theorized by Karl von
Clausewitz was responsible for visualizing the battlefield. He worked on in-
formation supplied by subalterns—the new lowest-ranked officer class cre-
ated for this purpose—and by his own ideas, intuitions, and images. Carlyle

12 Introduction
and other defenders of authority appropriated the hero from the Atlantic
revolutions and merged it with military visualization to create a new figure
for modern autocracy. Although Carlyle liked to assert that visuality was
an attribute of the hero from time immemorial, he was above all haunted
by the abolition of slavery. In his monumental history of The French Revolu-
tion (1837), all revolution from below is “black,” a blackness that pertained
to the popular forces in France, described as “black sans-culottes,” from the
storming of the Bastille, in 1789, but especially to Saint-Domingue, “shak-
ing, writhing, in long horrid death throes, it is Black without remedy; and
remains, as African Haiti, a monition to the world.”39 This “blackness” was
the very antithesis of heroism that Napoleon finally negated. For Carlyle, to
be Black was always to be on the side of Anarchy and disorder, beyond the
possibility of Reality and impossibly remote from heroism. It is precisely,
then, with “blackness” and slavery that a counterhistory of visuality must be
concerned. The function of the Hero for Carlyle and other devotees, appro-
priated from those revolutions, was to lead and be worshipped and thereby
to shut down such uncertainties. His visuality was the intensification of the
plantation complex that culminated in the production of imperial visuality.

i m P e r i a l c o m P l e x: m i s s i o n a r i e s, c u lt u r e ,

and the ruling class

Carlyle’s attempt to embody visualized authority in the Hero might have

appeared somewhat marginal in the immediate aftermath of the emancipa-
tion of the enslaved and the envisaged self-determination of many British
colonies, to which India, as a dependency, was understood as an exception.
However, the multiple shocks generated by the Crimean War of 1856, and
the return to a centralized model of empire following the Indian “mutiny”
in 1857, and other acts of anticolonial resistance from Aotearoa New Zea-
land to Jamaica, reversed the position. Direct rule became the favored model
of British imperial administration, emancipation and self-rule were out of
favor, and Carlyle’s views became mainstream. The crisis of imperial rule
caused the opening of what became known as the “ruling class” in Britain to
certain sectors of the educated middle- classes, who would be central to the
governance of the immense empire. The “eminent Victorians” debunked
by Lytton Strachey were emblematic of that class, as was Strachey himself,
as part of the Bloomsbury group. As Edward Said famously pointed out, by
1914 some 85 percent of the world’s surface was under the control of one

The Right to Look 13

empire or another.40 Nonetheless, the imperial complex was presented as
if it were a form of mental disorder. In 1883, the historian J. R. Seeley de-
scribed the British empire as having been acquired in a “fit of absence of
mind.”41 The term “fit” is striking, as if the mental condition of “absence of
mind” was closer to epilepsy than to forgetfulness. The phrase soon entered
political language. For example, the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald ar-
gued, in 1923, having cited Seeley: “It was only when we found ourselves
in occupation of vast expanses of territory in all parts of the world that
we developed what psychoanalysts would call the ‘Imperialist complex.’”42
This modality of denial produced its counterpart in the colonized, as Fanon
argued in a well-known passage of Black Skin, White Masks: “By calling on
humanity, on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity, it would be easy to
prove, or to win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white. But
my purpose is quite different: What I want to do is help the black man to
free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the
colonial environment.”43 The contest of visuality and countervisuality is
not, then, a simple battle for the same field. One sought to maintain the
“colonial environment” as it was, the other to visualize a different reality,
modern but decolonized.
In this second alignment of visuality, an imperial complex had emerged,
linking centralized authority to a hierarchy of civilization in which the
“cultured” were necessarily to dominate the “primitive.” This overarching
classification was a hierarchy of mind as well as a means of production. Fol-
lowing Charles Darwin’s proposal of the theory of evolution, in 1859, it was
now “culture” that became the key to imagining the relations of colonial
centers and peripheries, as visualized by the colonizers. In 1869, Matthew
Arnold famously divided British modernity into tendencies toward desired
culture and feared anarchy, while giving unquestioned support to the forces
of law: “While they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart sup-
port them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there
can be no society, and without society there can be no perfection.”44 With
an eye to the political violence in London in 1866, Arnold claimed “heredi-
tary” authority from his father for his remedy, namely “flog the rank and
file,” even if the cause were a good one, such as the “abolition of the slave-
trade.” Ending slavery itself would not by 1869 take priority over maintain-
ing authority. The classification of “culture” and “anarchy” had become a
principle of separation whose authority was such that it had become right
in and of itself.

14 Introduction
 Political divides at home between the forces of culture and those of an-
archy were subsequently mapped onto the distinctions between different
layers of civilization defined by ethnographers. So when Edward Tylor de-
fined culture as the “condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom and the
like” in primitive societies, he was clear that European civilization (as he
saw it) stood above all such cultures.45 This dramatic transformation in con-
ceptualizing nations as a spatialized hierarchy of cultures took place almost
overnight: Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) was followed by Darwin’s
Descent of Man and Tylor’s Primitive Culture, in 1871. Tylor presented Dar-
win’s description of the evolution of humanity as existing in real time, with
the “primitive” being separated only by space from the “civilized.” Whereas
Carlyle’s hero was a literally mystical figure, it was now “civilization” that
could visualize, whereas the “primitive” was ensconced in the “heart of
darkness” produced by the willed forgetting of centuries of encounter. In
this way, visuality became both three-dimensional and complexly separated
in space. As Western civilization tended, in this view, toward “perfection,” it
was felt to be aesthetic and the separations it engendered were simply right,
albeit visible only to what Tylor called “a small critical minority of man-
kind.”46 That minority was nonetheless in a position to administer a cen-
tralized empire as a practical matter in a way that Carlyle’s mystical heroes
could not have done. The “white man’s burden” that Rudyard Kipling en-
shrined in verse was a felt, lived, and imagined relationship to the imperial
network, now visualized in three dimensions. Its success was manifested
in the visualization of the “primitive” as the hallmark of the modern, from
Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1903) to the recent monument to the French
president François Mitterand’s imperial ambition that is the Musée du quai
Branly, a museum of the primitive in all but name.
The foot soldiers of this labor of imperial visuality were Christian mis-
sionaries, who directly represented themselves to themselves as Heroes in
the style of Carlyle, bringing Light into Darkness by means of the Word.
One of the distinguishing features of imperial visuality was its emphasis on
culture as language, or more precisely on the interpretation of the “signs”
produced by both the “primitive” and the “modern.” As W. J. T. Mitchell
among others has long stressed, word and image are closely imbricated, and
this relation forms a field in itself, central to the understanding of mod-
ernism.47 Rancière understands this as the “sentence-image . . . in which
a certain ‘sight’ has vanished, where saying and seeing have entered into a
communal space without distance and without connection. As a result, one

The Right to Look 15

sees nothing: one does not see what is said by what one sees, or what is
offered up to be seen by what one says.”48 This chaos of the “civilized” was
articulated in relation to the excavation of the “primitive” as a resource
for the understanding of modernity and its civilization. Just as the plan-
tation was the foundation of discipline, so can we see the missionaries as
the agents of what Foucault called the “pastorate,” the model for govern-
mentality. The Christian pastorate moved beyond territory, operating “a
form of power that, taking the problem of salvation in its general set of
themes, inserts into this global, general relationship an entire economy and
technique of the circulation, transfer and reversal of merits.”49 The global
pastorate proceeded by specific techniques for the care and production of
souls. Whereas in the West, the priority was from the first the conduct of
souls, imperial visuality sought first to create them from the raw materials
of the “heathen.” There is an entanglement that could be developed here
with the genealogy of imperial visuality in the Americas, with the differ-
ence that the Carlyle-inspired missionaries never imagined the conversion
of entire peoples so much as the delegated control of populations by means
of targeted Christianizing. In this process, the colonized had to be made to
feel and visualize his or her deficiency or sinfulness. This awareness would
both lead them to Christianity and generate desires for the consumer goods
of civilization, such as Western-style clothing. Only then could the newly
minted “soul” be subjected to discipline, and these subjects, the mimics of
the colonizers, were always a minority within the colony. The emblem-
atic new souls were the indigenous baptized and especially the priesthood.
Within the former plantation complex, the “souls of black folk” were, to
borrow W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous phrase, subject to a “double conscious-
ness” across the primary mode of division and separation in the twentieth
century, the color line.
In this book, I explore these entanglements via the concept of mana,
so central to modern theories of the “primitive” from Durkheim to Lévi-
Strauss, which was reported to Britain’s Royal Anthropological Society,
in 1881, by the missionary R. H. Codrington. Relying on two indigenous
priests as “native informants,” Codrington had elaborated a theory of mana
as that which works by the medium of spiritual power. This majesty and
force then attached itself to specific individuals, the precursors of the mod-
ern hero. In short, the primitive mind was used as a source of, and justi-
fication for, the imperial theory of domination. Almost at once, by virtue

16 Introduction
of the prevalent uniformitarianism, mana became central to the modern
theory of the global primitive. However, mana has since been shown to be a
verb, not a noun, expressing an abstract state rather than a spiritual medium.
Imperial visuality was based on a set of misrecognitions that nonetheless
sustained and enabled domination. In an often- overlooked moment in
1968, under pressure from radical students, Jacques Lacan admitted that the
Oedipus complex was a colonial imposition. The Oedipus complex, com-
plex of all complexes, instigator of the unconscious being structured as a
language, stood refashioned as a tool of colonial domination, just as Fanon
and others had insisted, marking a certain “end” to the imperial complex.
The viewpoint from which imperial visuality contemplated its domains
was first epitomized in the shipboard view of a colonial coastline, generat-
ing the cliché of gunboat diplomacy—to resolve a problem in the empire,
send a gunboat. This view was represented in the form of the panorama
and told in the form of multi- destination travel narratives. Just as the theo-
rist of the “primitive” relied on information supplied by missionaries that
was actually obtained from a handful of local informants, imperial visuality
displaced itself from the “battlefield” of history itself, where Carlyle had
romantically placed his heroes. The place of visualization has literally and
metaphorically continued to distance itself from the subject being viewed,
intensifying first to that of aerial photography and more recently to that
of satellites, a practical means of domination and surveillance.50 The calm
serenity of the high imperial worldview collapsed in the First World War.
Far from being abandoned, it was intensified by bringing colonial tech-
niques to bear on the metropole and the aestheticization of war, a merger
of formerly distinct operations of visuality under the pressure of intensifi-
cation. In this vein, the formerly discarded concept of the mystical hero-
leader was revived as a key component of fascist politics, but, as Antonio
Gramsci properly saw, this leader was the product of the centralized police
state, not the other way around. In this context, fascism is understood as a
politics of the police that renders the nation, the party, and the state as one,
subject to the leadership of the heroic individual, defined and separated by
the logics of racialization. The combination of aestheticized leadership and
segregation came to constitute a form of reality, one which people came to
feel was “right.” Fascist visuality imagined the terrain of history, held to be
legible only to the fascist leader, as if seen by the aerial photography used to
prepare and record the signature bombing campaigns of blitzkrieg. Fascists

The Right to Look 17

from Manchester to Milan acclaimed Carlyle as a prophet and a predeces-
sor, just as decolonial critics from Frantz Fanon on have seen fascism as the
application of colonial techniques of domination to the metropole.

t h e m i l i ta r y- i n d u s t r i a l c o m P l e x: g lo B a l

c o u n t e r i n s u r g e n c y a n d P o s t- Pa n o P t i c v i s ua l i t y

While in Western Europe the end of the Second World War marked a break
in this domination, these conditions were not changed in the colonies. This
continuity was exemplified by the violent French repression of a national-
ist demonstration, in 1945, in the town of Sétif, Algeria, on V-E Day itself
(8 May 1945), with estimated casualties ranging from the French govern-
ment figure of 1,500 to Fanon’s claim of 45,000, following Arab media re-
ports of the time. However, the war of independence that followed (1954–
62) was not simply a continuance of imperialism. For the French, Algeria
was not a colony, but simply part of France. For the resistance movement,
led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN ), much energy was expended
in trying to gain the sympathies of the United Nations, including the
legendary general strike known as the “battle of Algiers.” Algeria marked
the failure of the imperial aesthetic to convince its subject populations that
their domination was right. As part of the wave of decolonization, it was a
central moment in the failure of the classification of “civilized” and “primi-
tive” that was asserted as clinical fact by colonial psychology of the period.
Despite their best efforts, the French were unable to sustain the physical
and mental separation between the colonizer and the colonized. Counter-
insurgency in Algeria began the practice of “disappearing” those suspected
of aiding the insurgency in material or immaterial fashion, beginning the
sorry genealogy that reaches from Argentina and Chile to today’s “rendi-
tions” of suspected terrorists to so-called black sites by the CIA and other
U.S. government agencies. Yet today French cities and villages are increas-
ingly decorated with monuments and inscriptions to what are now called
the wars in North Africa, marking the consolidation of global counterin-
surgency as the hegemonic complex of Western visuality.
The emergence of the Cold War division between the United States
and the Soviet Union almost immediately forced metropolitan and de-
colonial politics into a pattern whereby being anticolonial implied com-
munist sympathies and supporting colonial domination was part of being
pro-Western.51 This classification became separation in almost the same

18 Introduction
moment, at once aestheticized as “freedom.” The Cold War quickly be-
came a conflict so all-enveloping by 1961 that even President Dwight Eisen-
hower famously warned of the “total influence—economic, political, even
spiritual” of what he called “the military-industrial complex.”52 In 1969,
the novelist and former president of the Dominican Republic Juan Bosch,
who had been deposed in a coup seven months after his election, in 1963,
warned that “imperialism has been replaced by a superior force. Imperi-
alism has been replaced by pentagonism.”53 Bosch saw this “pentagonism”
as being separate from capitalism, a development beyond Lenin’s thesis
that imperialism was the last stage of capital. In common with the Situa-
tionists, Bosch envisaged a militarization and colonization of everyday life
within the metropole. While his analysis is rarely remembered today, the
global reach of counterinsurgency since 2001 and its ability to expand even
as capital is in crisis has borne him out. The tactics of the now notorious
COINTELPRO , or Counter-Intelligence Program (1956–71), of the FBI have
now been globalized as the operating system of the Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA ). Launched at the end of the Cold War, the RMA was at first
conceived as high-technology information war, but has intensified into a
counterinsurgency whose goal is nothing less than the active consent of the
“host” culture to neoliberal globalization.
The entanglements and violence of counterinsurgency that began in
Algeria and continued in Vietnam and Latin America have intensified into
today’s global counterinsurgency strategy, known to the U.S. military as
GCOIN , which combines the cultural goals of imperial strategy with elec-
tronic and digital technologies of what I call post-panoptic visuality. Under
this rubric, anywhere may be the site for an insurgency, so everywhere
needs to be watched from multiple locations. Whereas during the Cold
War, there were distinct “battle lines” producing “hot spots” of contesta-
tion, the entire planet is now taken to be the potential site for insurgency
and must be visualized as such. Thus Britain, the closest ally of the United
States, has also produced a steady stream of violent insurgents. Despite this
literal globalization, visualizing remains a central to counterinsurgency.
The Field Manual FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency, written at the behest of Gen-
eral David Petraeus, in 2006, tells its officers in the field that success depends
on the efficacy of the “commander’s visualization” of the Area of Opera-
tions, incorporating history, culture, and other sets of “invisible” informa-
tion into the topography. This visualization required of the commander in
Iraq or Afghanistan—of the flow of history as it is happening, formed by

The Right to Look 19

past events with an awareness of future possibilities—would have been en-
tirely familiar to Carlyle, even if the digital metaphors and technologies
would have eluded him. GCOIN is an entanglement of nineteenth-century
strategy with twenty-first century technology. The counterinsurgency
commander is further recommended to read T. E. Lawrence (of “Arabia”),
whose First World War heroics were the apogee of imperial visuality, and
such works as Small Wars, by a nineteenth- century British general. Today’s
counterinsurgent is encouraged to see him or herself in a continuum with
wars ranging from Algeria to Malaya (as was) and Latin America, and cog-
nitively part of a history that is held to begin with the French Revolution,
in 1789. In a further amalgam of past strategies of visuality, the distinction
of “culture” that spatialized the imperial complex has now become the very
terrain of conflict. Anthropologists are attached to combat brigades under
the rubric of Human Terrain Systems so as to better interpret and under-
stand local cultures. It has been with the counterinsurgency phase of the
military-industrial complex that the “soul” of the (neo)colonized has most
fully entered the frame. In this form of conflict, the counterinsurgent seeks
not simply military domination, but an active and passive consent to the
legitimacy of the supported regimes, meaning that regime change is only
the precursor to cultural change. This desire for consent reaches across the
entire population. As Carlyle would have wanted, today’s global hero wants
both to win and to be worshipped.
The post-panoptic visuality of global counterinsurgency produces a visu-
alized authority whose location not only cannot be determined from the
visual technologies being used but may itself be invisible. This viewpoint can
toggle between image sets, zoom in and out of an image whether by digi-
tal or optical means, and compare them to databases of previous imagery.54
It is able to use satellite imagery, infrared, and other technologies to cre-
ate previously unimaginable visualizations. In everyday life, the prevalence
of closed-circuit television (CCTV ) surveillance marks this switch to post-
panoptic visualization, with its plethora of fragmented, time- delayed, low-
resolution images monitored mostly by computer, to no other effect than to
make the watching visible. For while CCTV has been able to track the path
of the 9/11 or 7/7 terrorists after the fact, it did nothing to prevent those
attacks, let alone reform those observed, as the panopticon was intended to
do. The signature military technology of GCOIN is the Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle (UAV ), a computer- controlled drone armed with missiles that is
manipulated by operators at any location, usually in safe spaces within the

20 Introduction
United States, rather than in proximity to the battlefield itself. The rise of
the UAV has caused controversy among the theorists of GCOIN , such as
David Kilcullen, who feel that the tactic undermines the strategic goals of
winning the consent of the population. As James der Derian has eloquently
argued: “The rise of a military-industrial-media- entertainment network
(MIME- NET ) has increasingly virtualized international relations, setting the
stage for virtuous wars in which history, experience, intuition and other
human traits are subordinated to scripted strategies and technological arti-
fice, in which worst- case scenarios produce the future they claim only to
anticipate.”55 Ironically, the script of using cultural understanding from his-
tory and experience to win consent has now simply been declared to have
been enacted. The 2010 campaign in Afghanistan was marked by extraordi-
nary theater in which General McChrystal announced his intention to cap-
ture Marja and Kandahar in advance, hoping to minimize civilian casualties,
but this tactic also reduced Taliban casualties, so that it is entirely unclear
who is really in charge on the ground. This suggests GCOIN is now a kind
of theater, with competing stunts being performed for those who consider
themselves always entitled to see. The U.S. military are having an intense
internal debate about which form of GCOIN is the future of military tactics.
It is clear that UAV missile attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been
notably accelerated. These tactics increasingly resemble those of the Israeli
Defense Force, in which the real goal is maintaining a permanent state of
crisis, rather than achieving a phantasmatic victory. In the game context in
which war is now visualized, the point is less to win than to keep playing,
permanently moving to the next level in the ultimate massively multiplayer
environment.
In sum, the revolution in military affairs has designated the classification
between insurgent and counterinsurgent as the key to the intensified phase
of the military-industrial visuality. The separation to be enacted is that of
insurgent from the “host” population by physical means, from the barriers
separating the newly designated “Shia” and “Sunni” districts of Baghdad to
the Israeli defense barrier in the Occupied Territories and the wall between
Mexico and the United States, where border agents now use the rubrics
of counterinsurgency. With the triumph of The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn
Bigelow, 2008) in the movie awards ceremonies in 2009, counterinsurgency
has achieved an “aesthetic” form. In this view, duty is its own narrative,
giving pleasure in its fulfillment, as one bomb after another must be de-
fused. The “enemy” are largely invisible, motiveless, and entirely evil. The

The Right to Look 21

film’s closing scene depicts Staff Sergeant James ( Jeremy Renner) striding
off, not into the sunset, but to defuse yet another bomb, opening an imag-
ined unending future of counterinsurgency. In its aestheticization of sac-
rifice and duty, The Hurt Locker gained the recognition that had eluded the
many films that attempted to critique the war, even though it failed to
achieve much success at the box office. Whether this alignment of counter-
insurgency is any more stable than its predecessors remains to be seen. What
seems likely is that the overarching project of designating a global will to
power as counterinsurgency will remain active for some considerable time
to come, even though, as I complete this book, it is being challenged by a
new form of revolutionary politics across North Africa and the Middle East
in early 2011.56

c o n c e P t ua l i z i n g c o u n t e r v i s ua l i t y

Carlyle presented visuality as naturally authoritative while being aware not

only of opposition, but of foundational defeat during the Atlantic revolu-
tions. However, not all opposition to visuality can be considered counter-
visuality, a point which will help us to understand the difficulties involved.
Considering the development of globalization around the end of the twen-
tieth century, Arjun Appadurai noted the “split character” of the globalized
work of imagination: “On the one hand it is in and through the imagination
that modern citizens are disciplined and controlled—by states, markets, and
other powerful interests. But it is also the faculty through which collec-
tive patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge.”57 In the
case of visuality, we need to introduce a similar distinction. As a discursive
organization of history, visuality was never able to achieve its goal of rep-
resenting totality, because “history” itself as a form of the historicopolitical
was not monolithic, but structured as conflict. In his study of Marx’s theory
of capital, Dipesh Chakrabarty has described two modes of history as it
was formed under capitalism. History 1 is that history predicated by capi-
tal for itself “as a precondition” to its own existence, whereas History 2 is
that which cannot be written into the history of capital even as prefigura-
tion and so has to be excluded.58 Chakrabarty has sought to recover that
History 2 without privileging it either as the new dominant mode of His-
tory, or as the dialectical other to History 1. Rather, he suggests, “History 2
is better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly
interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.” This doubled interaction

22 Introduction
offers a model for thinking about visuality that incorporates its embodied
dimension at an individual and collective level, together with visuality as
cultural and political representation.
In these terms, Visuality 1 would be that narrative that concentrates on
the formation of a coherent and intelligible picture of modernity that al-
lowed for centralized and/or autocratic leadership. It creates a picture of
order that sustained the industrial division of labor as its enactment of the
“division of the sensible.” In this sense, photography, for example, contrib-
uted to Visuality 1 in the manner famously critiqued by Baudelaire as the
tool of commerce, science, and industry.59 This form of visuality, one proper
to the docile bodies demanded by capital, developed new means of disci-
plining, normalizing, and ordering vision, ranging from the color-blindness
tests that were introduced for industrial workers in the 1840s, to state-funded
compulsory literacy and the public museum. Consequently, the modern
production process that culminated in Taylor’s and Ford’s systems came to
rely on a normative hand-eye coordination, trained in sport, managed by the
distribution of corrective lenses, and controlled with sight tests.60 In visual
representation, its dominant apparatus would become the cinema, under-
stood in the sense of Jonathan L. Beller’s “cinematic mode of production,”
which creates value by attracting attention.61 Its logical endpoint was what
Guy Debord famously called the “spectacle,” that is to say, “capital accumu-
lated to the point where it becomes an image.”62 In this sense, then, a certain
history of visuality—or at least Visuality 1—has already been written and is
not unfamiliar. This book does not revisit that story for several reasons. The
History that Chakrabarty describes as being the precondition for capital is
not exactly the same as the History visualized by visuality (and this is, of
course, no criticism of Chakrabarty—quite the contrary). Whereas it may
be said that capital will do anything to preserve and extend its circulation,
so that even carbon emissions are now being formulated into a market, visu-
ality was concerned above all to safeguard the authority of leadership. So
whereas Chakrabarty established a diachronic binary distinction between
the two modes of History under capitalism, I have tried to define a suc-
cessive set of synchronic complexes for visuality and countervisuality from
slavery to imperialism and global counterinsurgency.
How should we conceptualize, theorize, and understand countervisual-
ity in relation to this divided visuality? It is not simply Visuality 2. If Visu-
ality 1 is the domain of authority, Visuality 2 would be that picturing of the
self or collective that exceeds or precedes that subjugation to centralized

The Right to Look 23

authority. Visuality 2 was not invisible to authority and has been figured as
the barbaric, the uncivilized, or, in the modern period, the “primitive.” In
the imperial complex, an army of self-styled “hero” missionaries generated
an epistemic apparatus to discipline and order it, whereas the “primitives”
in the metropole were to be controlled by the new imperial Caesar and his
command of imagery. The leading taxonomies of such “primitive” visu-
ality were idolatry, fetishism, and totemism, in order of seniority.63 This
definition of Visuality 2 was enacted in the colonial and imperial domains
that Conrad called the “blank spaces of the map,” the blind spots of visu-
ality. Within the metropole, an artistic version of Visuality 2 was that “ir-
rational modernism. . . . that escapes . . . appropriative logic,” such as Dada
and Surrealism, often of course using the forms and ideas of indigenous art
and culture from colonized domains.64 By now, surrealism in particular has
nonetheless been thoroughly appropriated, especially by advertising and
music videos. For Visuality 2 is not necessarily politically radical or pro-
gressive; it is only not part of authority’s “life process.” There are multiple
forms of Visuality 2, because that difference “lives in intimate and plural
relationships to [authority], ranging from opposition to neutrality.”65 The
two modes of visuality are not opposed in a binary system, but operate as a
relation of difference that is always deferred. So not all forms of Visuality 2
are what I am calling countervisuality, the attempt to reconfigure visuality
as a whole. For example, many forms of religion might deploy some mode
of Visuality 2 without seeking to change the perceived real in which that
religion is practiced.
Countervisuality proper is the claim for the right to look. It is the dis-
sensus with visuality, meaning “a dispute over what is visible as an element
of a situation, over which visible elements belong to what is common, over
the capacity of subjects to designate this common and argue for it.”66 The
performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a counter-
visuality into play. Like visuality, it interfaces “formal” and “historical” as-
pects. The “right” in the right to look contests first the “right” to property
in another person by insisting on the irreducible autonomy of all citizens.
Autonomy implies a working through of Enlightenment claims to rights
in the context of coloniality, with an emphasis on the right to subjectivity
and the contestation of poverty.67 By engaging in such a discussion, I am
implicitly rejecting the dismissal of rights as a biopolitical ruse presented
by Agamben.68 There is no “bare life” entirely beyond the remit of rights.
Hardt and Negri powerfully cite Spinoza to this effect: “Nobody can so

24 Introduction
completely transfer to another all his right, and consequently his power, as
to cease to be a human being, nor will there ever be a sovereign power that
can do all it pleases.”69 Ariella Azoulay has expressed the legacy of revolu-
tionary discourses of rights as precisely “struggles pos[ing] a demand that
bare life be recognized as life worth living.”70 Azoulay rightly sees these
demands being enacted in feminism from Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen (1791) on. As Rancière points out, de
Gouges’s insistence that if women have the “right” to be executed, they
are foundationally equal, also shows that “bare life itself is political.”71 Pre-
cisely the same argument can be made with regard to the enslaved, who
were subject to legal codes specifying punishments. In following what you
might call “Carlyle-ism” (a pattern of discourse concerning the visualiza-
tion of imperial autocracy) to shape this book, I was at first concerned that
his emphasis on heroic masculinity would engender a similarly masculinist
project. However, I came to notice that all the efforts at countervisuality
I describe here centered on women and children both as individual actors
and as collective entities. The actions and even names of individual women
and children (especially of the enslaved) have to be reclaimed from histori-
cal archives that are not designed to preserve them and have not always
done so.

t h e r i g h t to t h e r e a l

The claim of the right to oneself as autonomy further implies a claim of

the right to the real. The Italian political organization Autonomia, which
was active in the 1970s, defined autonomy as “anti-hierarchic, anti-dialectic,
anti-representative. It is not only a political project, it is a struggle for exis-
tence. Individuals are never autonomous: they depend on external recog-
nition.”72 By the same token, the right to look is never individual: my right
to look depends on your recognition of me, and vice versa.73 Formally, the
right to look is the attempt to shape an autonomous realism that is not only
outside authority’s process but antagonistic to it. Countervisuality is the
assertion of the right to look, challenging the law that sustains visuality’s
authority in order to justify its own sense of “right.” The right to look re-
fuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power,
first as law and then as the aesthetic. Writing of such refusals of legitima-
tion, Negri points out: “It is once again Foucault who lays the foundation of
this critical experience, better still of this unmasking of that (in our civili-

The Right to Look 25

zation) ancient Platonism that ignores the right to the real, to the power
of the event.”74 The right to look is, then, the claim to a right to the real.
It becomes known by genealogical investigation that is here always repur-
posed as decolonial critique. It is the boundary of visuality, the place where
its codes of separation encounter a “grammar of nonviolence,” the refusal
to segregate, as a collective form. Confronted with this double need to ap-
prehend and counter a real that did exist but should not have, and one that
should exist but was as yet becoming, countervisuality has created a variety
of “realist” formats structured around such tensions. Certainly the “realism”
usually considered under that name in the mid-nineteenth century is one
part of it, as is the neorealism of postwar Italian visual culture, but count-
ervisuality’s realism was not necessarily mimetic. To take a famous example,
Picasso’s Guernica both expresses the reality of aerial bombing that was and
is central to contemporary visuality, and protests against it with sufficient
force that American officials asked for the replica of the painting at the
United Nations to be covered when they were making their case for war
against Iraq, in 2002.
The realism of the right to the real highlights the “struggle for exis-
tence,” meaning a genealogy of the claim of the right to existence, begin-
ning with the enslaved, via the banners claiming the “right to life” in the
Paris Commune of 1871 and the “new humanism” of decolonization sought
by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Throughout the struggle to abolish chat-
tel slavery in the Atlantic world, countervisuality endeavored to construct
what I call “abolition realism,” in homage to Du Bois’s concept of abolition
democracy, where there would be no slavery, rendering what seemed un-
imaginable into “reality.” This realism represented the “enslaved” as being
of equal status with the “free,” while also showing the realities of slavery
for what they were, as opposed to the benign picture of paternal leadership
presented by apologists like Carlyle. This picturing therefore created and
worked in realist modes of representation from painting to photography
and performance in an intense moment of challenge to visualized authority.
The defeat of Reconstruction in the United States together with that of the
Paris Commune marked the defeat of abolition in the Atlantic world as an
index of reality, as indicated by the persistence of racism.
Autonomy has also expressed the indigenous desire for self-government
or regulation. In this book, I take the transformation of Aotearoa into New
Zealand (1820–85) as a key site of entanglement and displacement in this
process because James Anthony Froude, Carlyle’s biographer and succes-

26 Introduction
sor as the dean of British historians, saw it as the place from which a new
“Oceana” could be launched, meaning a global Anglophone empire. For the
Polynesian peoples living in Aotearoa, a wide-ranging series of adjustments
had to be made in their imagined communities, resulting from their inter-
pellation as “native” and “heathen” by the missionaries and settlers. Follow-
ing prophets and war leaders like Papahurihia (?–1875), the Maori imagined
themselves as an indigenous and ancient people, the Jews of the Bible, the
ancient bearers of rights, rather than “primitive” savages. They deployed
their own readings of the Scriptures to assert that the missionaries were in
error, created rival flags to those of the British, and imagined themselves
to be in “Canaan.” This imagined community compelled the British Crown
to sign a land-sharing agreement known as the Treaty of Waitangi (1840),
which, although nullified by legal fiat within two decades, has proved de-
cisive in shaping modern Aotearoa New Zealand into a bicultural state. In
both metropolitan and colonial contexts, the performative act of claiming
the right to be seen used the refusal to labor as one of its key strategies, from
written accounts that considered the Israelites leaving Egypt as a general
strike, to the campaign for May Day holiday, and the contemporary poli-
tics of the refusal of work. Although the general strike was adopted by the
Confederation Générale du Travail, the French trade union, in 1906, and
was famously endorsed by Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet of the same
year, the failure of the Second International to resist mobilization for what
became the First World War ended the hope that it might in fact be the
revolutionary form for the twentieth century. Emblematic of the transfor-
mation in Europe of the period was the shift of the once-anarchist Georges
Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence (1908) had contained the most elaborated
theory of the general strike as a means of creating the “general image” of
social conflict, to an anti-Semitic Royalism, which Mark Antliff has called
a “proto-fascism.”75
Writing in the 1930s with a full awareness of fascism’s dominance, both
W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonio Gramsci came to see the need for a new
point of view that both in different ways called the “South.” For Du Bois,
the South was the southern part of the United States that practiced seg-
regation under so- called Jim Crow laws, whereas for Gramsci it was the
Italian mezzogiorno, a mix of feudal rural areas and unregulated modern
cities like Naples. The South was, of course, intensely contested, rather than
some imagined point of liberation, but for both thinkers no strategy could
be successful that did not imagine itself from the South. Understood in

The Right to Look 27

this sense, fascism did not end in 1945, as the names Franco, Pinochet, and
many others attest. Antifascism has had, therefore, to create a neorealism
that could counter fascism’s sense of ordering engendered by subjugation
and separation. It must do so from within the “South” and as the South op-
posed to the North. This doubled realism can be hard to see. In The Battle of
Algiers, the resistance leader Ben H’midi tells Ali la Pointe that if it is hard
to start and sustain resistance, the hardest moment of all comes when you
have won.
We might take Bertolt Brecht’s caution about working with “reality”
and realisms to heart here: “Reality is not only everything which is, but
everything which is becoming. It’s a process. It proceeds in contradictions.
If it is not perceived in its contradictory nature, it is not perceived at all.”76
This creation of reality as a perceptual effect is not the same as realism
as it has usually been defined in literature and the visual arts. The realist
painter Gustave Courbet, for instance, is supposed to have said that he could
paint only that which he could see with his eyes, making it impossible for
him to render an angel. Realism has largely been understood in this sense
as meaning the most sharp- edged, lens-based representation of exterior
reality possible, from photography to the 35-millimeter film and most re-
cently high-definition video. In the terms that I have sketched here, that
would be a realism of Visuality 1, the sensory training and standardization
required by industrial capital. Countervisuality seeks to resituate the terms
on which reality is to be understood. If, as Barthes famously formulated
it, all reality is an “effect,” then that effect can be subject to change. For
Freud, the ego engages in a persistent reality-testing which, as Avital Ronel
elucidates, “should in the best of worlds, confirm and countersign the sat-
isfaction of our wishes but in fact put the self at risk.”77 In this sense, all
realisms are an attempt to come to terms with the tendency of modernity
to exceed understanding in its permanent revolutionizing of conditions
of existence. As the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini later mused in his consider-
ation of Antonio Gramsci, “Perhaps we should, in all humility and with a
bold neologism, simply call reality that-which-must-be-made-sense-of.”78
Countervisuality is not, as this example suggests, simply a matter of as-
sembled visual images, but the grounds on which such assemblages can reg-
ister as meaningful renditions of a given moment. Thinking the genealogy
of visuality and its countervisualities produces both a sense of what is at
stake in present-day visualizing and a means to avoid being drawn into a
perpetual game in which authority always has the first move. This book

28 Introduction
is a claim for a different form of visualizing by those who would oppose
autocratic authority. This visualizing would take the planetary viewpoint in
giving priority to the biosphere and the survival of all forms of life over the
continuance of authority. The image of the biosphere is a countervisuality
to the partisans of the “long war” against terror and the permanent state of
emergency. The vernacular countervisuality of the “South” has centered
on democracy, sustainable production, education, and collective solutions
to social problems as a different mode of visualizing cultural possibilities
since the Atlantic revolutions of the 1790s. While this approach has for just
as long been condemned as impractical by leaders of Left and Right, it has
come to seem like the last option remaining. In the aftermath of the earth-
quake that struck Haiti in 2010, sustainable local agriculture was finally ad-
vanced as the best solution for the country.79 Nonetheless, the emergence
of government strategies such as “climate security” shows that this posi-
tion offers no guarantees of success. Here we take the measure of the long
success of visuality. It seems “natural,” or at least reasonable, that visuality
should visualize war and that different groups of people should be physi-
cally separated. This project hopes to call such assumptions into question
and make us take a second look at some old choices.
One response to my claim for the right to look might be: so what? In
other words, while these issues may be of importance, what difference does
my claim make and why should you care? I take it that many of my readers
will be in some way engaged with universities and academic life, so my
response is shaped in that domain. In March 2003, a law professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, named John Yoo, who was then work-
ing in the Justice Department as a deputy assistant attorney general, wrote
a memorandum regarding the interrogation of so- called enemy combat-
ants. Relying on his interpretation of “the President’s authority to success-
fully prosecute war,” Yoo notoriously concluded that there were in effect
no limits on what could be done, claiming that “the Framers understood
the Commander-in- Chief Clause [of the Constitution] to grant the Presi-
dent the fullest range of power recognized at the time of the ratification as
belonging to the military commander.”80 From this academic interpretation
of authority, stemming, like visuality, from the eighteenth- century gen-
eral, resulted the scandals of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the renditions
of suspects to places where torture is openly practiced, and, more broadly,
the hubris of presidential authority. In the summer of 2009, faced with a
difficult financial situation the chancellor of the University of California,

The Right to Look 29

Mark Yudof, had the regents ascribe to him hitherto unknown “emergency
powers,” resulting in redundancies, tuition raises, class cancellations, and
“furloughs” (meaning days for which one would not be paid for work) for
all staff, including, one hopes, John Yoo, who has returned to his academic
job. In 1988 I happened to visit the University of California, Berkeley, and
what I saw then was the inspiration that led me to an academic career in
general and to one in the United States in particular. The new deployment
and interpretation of authority by academics in government and in the uni-
versity has changed the world we live and work in. Networks long in the
making are rapidly being undone, while new ones are being made. Atten-
tion should be paid.

chaPter Plan

I conclude this opening section with a brief chapter plan. The first four
chapters deal with the plantation complex and its transformation into the
imperial complex. In the first chapter, I describe the ordering of slavery by
means of visual technologies and surveillance under the headings of map-
ping, natural history, and the force of law. In the British and French Carib-
bean, a rapid revolution created the possibility of this regime in the years
either side of 1660. In the generations that followed, the enslaved learned
how to counter each aspect of oversight. In the second half of chapter 1, I
describe first the attempted revolution led by François Makandal on Saint-
Domingue, in 1757, and then the planters’ attempt to create an independent
slave-owning republic in the early years of the French Revolution. These
mutually contradictory claims to autonomy opened a space for a differ-
ent revolutionary imaginary, which I explore in chapter 2. Throughout I
counterpoint the metaphorical slavery being challenged by revolutionaries
in France with the revolution against chattel slavery in Saint-Domingue. I
stage this interaction in five moments, beginning with the visualization in
popular prints first of the “awakening” of the French Revolution, in 1789,
and next the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. I emphasize
that the Declaration at once claimed to end “slavery” and defined racial-
ized and gendered exclusions from the category of rights. These exclusions
led to a new claim to a “right to existence” embodied in the hero as the
leader of the “imagined community” of the postmonarchical nation-state.
The revolt of the enslaved in Haiti successfully used the tactic of the hero
to focus their resistance to the authority of oversight. Slave-owning sover-

30 Introduction
eignty found itself confronted by a person invested with authority by those
it claimed had none to give—the people, the enslaved, and women. Dur-
ing the revolution, a further contest emerged between the national hero as
Great Man, who incarnated authority, and what I call vernacular heroism,
whose primary function was to make enslavement impossible. These dif-
ferent claims could not and did not cohere. I end chapter 2 by looking at
the violent confrontation between Toussaint L’Ouverture and the subaltern
rank-and-file in Saint-Domingue over the question of land. The formerly
enslaved wanted self-sufficiency, while the leadership demanded the main-
tenance of cash- crop agriculture to fund the emergent nation-state. At the
same moment, the first person to ask for a position as an anthropologist,
the Frenchman François Péron, was engaged in an encounter with the ab-
original people of Tasmania that foreshadowed the hierarchy of “culture”
that was to shape imperial visuality. I counterpoint these chapters with a
reading of the double vision of reality in the paintings of José Campeche,
the Puerto Rican painter, perhaps the first artist to emerge from slavery that
we can name.
In the early nineteenth century, radicals imagined new strategies like the
Jubilee and the National Holiday to advance their claim to represent the
nation. In response, visuality, named and deployed by Thomas Carlyle in
1840, appropriated the revolutionary tactic of the national hero as leader to
reclaim the altered terrain of history into a renewed system of domination
(chapter 3). His model was the visualization of the battlefield by the modern
general, epitomized by Napoleon, in order to gain tactical advantage over
a closely matched enemy. It was the visualization of a revived sovereignty
that might again own slaves, as decreed by Napoleon, or, that might, as in
the case of British imperialism after the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857,
reassert a centralized colonial authority. Inspired by its desire to prevent all
challenges to authority, Carlyle’s visuality claimed boundless dominion for
its heroes and refuted all emancipations. As a result, leaders like Sojourner
Truth and W. E. B. Du Bois actively contested this “heroism” with different
modalities of heroism. The nineteenth century saw a protracted struggle as
to whether and how a reality could be shaped that did not sustain and sup-
port slavery. In chapter 4, I look at this interpenetrated history of metro-
pole and colony around the Atlantic world, from the abolition of Danish
slavery witnessed by the future impressionist painter Camille Pissarro to the
Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States and the Paris Commune
of 1871. The reality and realisms of modern Paris, Benjamin’s capital of the

The Right to Look 31

nineteenth century, are placed in counterpoint to the reality and realisms
of the abolition of slavery. I look first at the visualized policing of “eman-
cipated” plantations, followed by the visualization of freedom during the
Civil War in the United States. Then I survey the contradictions of realism
and abolition in 1867 in artistic visualizations by Pissarro, Manet, and Degas.
I conclude chapter 4 with the attempt to institutionalize autonomy during
Reconstruction and the performance of autonomy during the Commune.
The counterpoint to these chapters is a reading of Francisco Oller’s master-
piece El Velorio (1895), or The Wake, which I interpret as a mourning both for
the hopes of abolition, achieved in Puerto Rico in 1873, and also for the lost
opportunities of realism.
By this point the “imperial complex” had become the dominant form of
visuality. In chapter 5 I examine how visuality became imperial visuality as
an impersonal form of power, generalized and globalized within an Anglo-
phone network of power sustained by naval domination. Here I take Aotea-
roa New Zealand as the key point of entanglement, as described above,
both because Froude had seen it as the key to his Oceana, the global empire
of visuality, and because Maori resistance in the form of self-identifying as
“Jews” was so notable a claim to autonomy. The bishopric of New Zealand
was also the site of the ethnographic “discovery” of the concept of mana,
held to be what one might call the aura of authority. Introduced to Euro-
pean anthropology in 1880, the idea took hold at once and has continued to
play a role in recent debates about the state of exception. This empire was
subject to a new Caesar, more imagined than actual, but distinguished by
his ability to dominate the mass population by means of the image. Within
imperial nations, radical movements similarly sought to challenge the au-
thority of imperial capital by claiming a genealogy from what they called
the “ancient lowly,” meaning the workers of ancient Greece and Rome.
Heroes like Spartacus were taken both as a validation for modern claims and
as a means of creating a history for those without it. This countervisuality
used this history to claim a “general picture” of the social by means of new
institutions, such as museums of labor, and new actions, such as the general
strike.
After the First World War, the collapse of high imperialism brought
down the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires and trans-
formed Caesarism from a theory of imperial leadership into a violent ex-
altation of the leader as Hero in fascism (chapter 6). As noted above, anti-
fascism must find a means to render a neorealism capable of resisting fascist

32 Introduction
ordering. After analyzing the turn to the “South” made by Gramsci, Du
Bois, and other intellectuals, I take the fifty-year-long crisis of decoloniz-
ing Algeria (1954–) as a case study of the entanglement of the legacies of
fascism, imperialism, the Cold War, and decolonization. I concentrate on
the battles for Algiers in psychiatry, film, video art, and literature that have
been fought almost without a break over this period. I set the legendary
neorealist film The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) into the con-
text of innovative film practice in the Algerian revolution, including a re-
markable short film documentary made in 1961 and inspired by Fanon’s
work with children in Algerian refugee camps in Tunisia, as well as the
“ciné pops” movement of popular film and the first features created in in-
dependent Algeria. Since the invasion of Iraq, Fanon’s experience in Algeria
has generated new visualized responses from the Finnish video artist Eije-
Liese Ahtila and the African American novelist John Edgar Wideman, while
the Algerian revolution haunts recent films like Caché (dir. Michael Han-
neke, 2005). This entanglement of decolonization and independence with
its many displacements is counterpointed by Pan’s Labyrinth, a film about
Spain, directed by a Mexican-American, which spoke as strongly to its own
time as the fascist period under Franco it depicted.
If antifascism quickly became anticommunism in the Allied nations,
especially in the United States, the resulting military- industrial complex
linked the antislavery with new antiterror rhetoric to justify its formation
of what Paul Edwards has called “the closed world.” In this closed world,
every enterprise is linked to the central struggle to separate and defend
the “free” world from the terror of the communist world to prevent it be-
coming enslaved. As General Douglas MacArthur declared to Congress,
in 1951, this threat of slavery meant that communism had to be resisted
everywhere.81 From the outset, the classification of separation was not only
right, but justified any action in its name. The resulting counterinsurgency
against communism spanned the globe from Algeria to Indochina and Latin
America. Visualizing became a key strategy of what the U.S. military has
termed the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA ) since 1989 (chapter 7).
The RMA is the intensification of the Cold War. It makes information the
key tool of war, visualized by the commander to gain control of the area
of operations. Drawing at once on imperial era heroes like T. E. Lawrence
and postmodern theorists of nomadism, the RMA found its high point of
revolution in the war in Iraq. An active neovisuality has been enshrined as
a key part of United States global counterinsurgency strategy, supported

The Right to Look 33

by an entire discursive apparatus from the Ivy League universities, to the
media, to military theorists, many of whom are connected to the Obama
administration. This apparatus rejects Guantánamo Bay and other such
visible means of punishment as both unnecessary and jeopardizing to the
mission of winning full and permanent cooperation. Neovisuality is a doc-
trine for the preservation of authority by means of permanent surveillance
of all realms of life, a Gesamtkunstwerk of necropolitics. Needless to say, it
not only expects but needs resistance to its visualizing of the geopoliti-
cal as always already potential terrorism. In its current manifestation as
counterinsurgency, it has developed a new radicalism, resisting challenges
to its authority from within and without the military. Paradoxically, visual-
ized information war depends increasingly on making the visible invisible,
provoking a crisis of visuality itself. The simple fact that a counterhistory
of visuality can be written suggests that it has lost its force as “natural” au-
thority. A tremulous moment of opportunity awaits to set aside visuality for
the right to look, to democratize democracy. Or to once again authorize
authority. It’s up to us.

34 Introduction
 Visualizing Visuality
Visual Guide

c o m P l e x e s o f v i s ua l i t y

Table 1. Complexes of Visuality 1

Period of
comPlex m e to n y m i c f i g u r e dominance

Plantation Complex Overseer 1660–1860

Imperial Complex Missionary 1860–1945
Military-Industrial Complex Counterinsurgent 1945–present

Table 2. Complexes of Visuality 2

v i s ua l i t y c o u n t e r v i s ua l i t y

Plantation Complex Oversight Revolutionary realism

(standard form) (1660–1838) (c. 1730–1838)
Plantation Complex Visuality Abolition realism
(“intensified” form) (1802–1865) (1807–1871)
Imperial Complex Imperial visuality Indigenous counter-
(standard form) (1805–1914) visuality (1801–1917)
Imperial Complex Fascist visuality Antifascist neorealism
(“intensified” form) (1918–1982) (1917–present)
Military-Industrial Complex Aerial visualization Decolonial neorealism
(standard form) (1924–present) (1945–present)
Military-Industrial Complex Post-panoptic Planetary visualization
(“intensified” form) visuality (1989–present) (1967–present)
f o r m o f m at e r i a l v i s ua l i t y

1. o V e r s i g h t: t h e s u r V e i l l A n C e o f t h e o V e r s e e r

The duty of an overseer consists in superintending the planting or

farming concerns of the estate, ordering the proper work to be done,
and seeing that it is duly executed.
—John Stewart, Jamaican planter, A View of the Past and Present State
of the Island of Jamaica (1823)

Note the overseer in white at the center, managing fourteen operations

by visual surveillance alone. | figure 2. JeAn - BA P t i s t e du t e r t r e , “i n d i g o -
terie ,” Histoire générale Des antilles Habitées par les François (PA r i s, 1667).

36 Visualizing Visuality
2 . V i s u A l i t y: t h e B At t l e P l A n

War [is] an act of imagination . . . imprinted like a picture,

like a map, upon the brain.
—Karl von Clausewitz, On War

Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, seen here as an after-the-fact visualiza-

tion of the “mind’s eye” of the general, combined with the physical
realities of the locale. A symbolic and nontransparent mapping of his-
tory. | figure 3. plan oF tHe battle oF Waterloo. Photo courtesy of david rumsey
Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com.

Visualizing Visuality 37
3. iMPeriAl VisuAlity

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.

There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It ap-
pears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign
dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out
all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let
her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky,
and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop,
would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and van-
ish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a
feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There
was a touch of insanity in the proceeding.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

figure 4. John BACh MAnn, panorama oF tHe seat oF War: birD’s eye VieW oF Vir­

ginia, marylanD, DelaWare anD tHe District oF columbia (1861). Photo courtesy

of david rumsey Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com.

4 . M i l i tA r y- i n d u s t r i A l V i s u A l i t y

In general, mass movements are more clearly apprehended by the cam-

era than by the eye. A bird’s eye view captures assemblies of hundreds
of thousands. And even when this perspective is no less accessible to the
human eye than to the camera, the image formed by the eye cannot be
enlarged in the same way as a photograph. This is to say that mass move-
ments, and above all war, are a form of human behavior especially suited
to the camera.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility”

The aerial photograph visualized the viewpoint of blitzkrieg, so that

the world can be seen for bombing, but it was also a political view-
point. | figure 5. “MultiPlex set” fro M fM- 30 – 21 aerial pHotograpHy: military
applications (WAshington: WAr dePArt Ment, 1944).

Visualizing Visuality 39
5 . P o s t- PA n o P t i C V i s uA l i t y

Commander’s visualization is the mental process of developing situational

understanding, determining a desired end state, and envisioning how
the force will achieve that end state. It begins with mission receipt and
continues throughout any operation. The commander’s visualization
forms the basis for conducting (planning, preparing for, executing, and
assessing) an operation.
—FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency Section 7–7

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle provides remote surveillance of the

Mexican-U.S. border, the divine viewpoint of visuality now from an
unknowable location. | figure 6. unmanneD aerial VeHicle. Photo by Master
sergeant steve horton, u.s. Air force.

40 Visualizing Visuality
c o u n t e r v i s ua l i t y

Table 3. Countervisuality

c o u n t e r v i s ua l i t y v i s ua l i z at i o n

Revolutionary realism (c. 1730–1838) The Hero/the popular hero

Abolition realism (1807–1871) A real without slavery
Imperial countervisuality (1801–1917) The general strike
Antifascist neorealism (1917–) The “South”
Planetary visualization (1967–) The biosphere

Visualizing Visuality 41
1A. the hero

An expression in the form of a question that would become famous is

“How is thinking possible after Auschwitz?” . . . Who has ever asked
the question: “How is thinking possible after Saint-Domingue”?
—Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light. (Sala-Molins is referring
here to Adorno’s often (mis)quoted remark that lyric poetry was
impossible after Auschwitz)

Toussaint L’Ouverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and

defeater of colonial slavery. | figure 7. Anon yM o u s, toussaint l’ouVer­
ture , leaDer oF tHe insurgents oF santo Domingo, Domingue (C A . 1800). Color

engraving. Photo by Bulloz, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, france. Photo courtesy of réunion des

Musées nationaux / Art resource, new york.

42 Visualizing Visuality
1 B. t h e V e r n A C u l A r h e r o

“Republican electricity gives Despots a shock that overturns their

thrones.” The vernacular hero visualized as a generic Sans-Culotte turns
an electric generator to overthrow the crowned heads of Europe (1793).
figure 8. duPuis, la cHute en masse (PAris, 1793). Photo courtesy of Corbis images.

Visualizing Visuality 43
2. ABolition reAlisM

This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis
against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly
in the end perhaps half a million people.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

The general strike against slavery in South Carolina. | f i g u r e 9. t i Mot h y h.

o’sulliVAn, untitleD [slaVes, J. J. smitH’s plantation, near beauFort, soutH

carolina] (1862). Albumen silver print, 21.4 x 27.3 cm. Courtesy of the J. Paul getty Museum,

los Angeles.

3 A . i n d i g e n o u s C o u n t e r V i s u A l i t y: t h e i n d i g e n o u s g e n e r A l s t r i k e

(see plate 1)

There was a Crusade at the Time among the Natives, so that everything was
at a Stand-Still; they had no opportunity of getting on with anything. That
was occasioned by a new Religion, which has sprung up, called Papahurihia.
—Joel Polack, quoted in the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords
Appointed to Inquire into the Present State of the Islands of New Zealand (1838)

44 Visualizing Visuality
3 B. i n d i g e n o u s C o u n t e r V i s u A l i t y:

t h e M e t r o P o l i tA n g e n e r A l s t r i k e

[The general strike is] an arrangement of images capable of evoking instinc-

tively all of the sentiments which correspond to the various manifestations
of the war waged by socialism against modern society. Strikes have inspired
in the proletariat the noblest, deepest and most forceful sentiments that it
possesses; the general strike groups them all into a general unified image. . . .
Thus we obtain that intuition of socialism that language could not give in
a perfectly clear way—and we obtain it as an instantly perceivable whole.
—Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1906)

The general strike for a May Day holiday called by the Second Inter-
national in Milan. | figure 10. eMilio longoni, may 1 or tHe orator oF tHe
strike (1891).

Visualizing Visuality 45
4 . A n t i fA s C i s t n e o r e A l i s M : t h e “ s o u t h ”

The South [is] a metaphor for human suffering under global capitalism.
—Enrique Dussel, quoted in Walter Mignolo “The Geopolitics of
Knowledge.”

The opening scene from The Battle of Algiers shows the torture room
that was supposed to remain unseen, countering the imperial worldview.
figure 11. tHe battle oF algiers (dir. gillo Pon t e C o rVo, 1966).

46 Visualizing Visuality
5. t h e B i o s P h e r e

“It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the
end of capitalism.”
—Frederic Jameson

Each of the last ten years, counting back from 2010, is one of the eleven
warmest years on record. Global emissions of carbon dioxide and equiva-
lent gases reached record highs in 2010, despite the recession, at a level
measured at 394 parts per million, compared to the level of 350 parts
per million considered safe. | figure 12. an inconVenient trutH (d i r . dAV i s
guggenheiM, 2006).

Visualizing Visuality 47
one

Oversight
The Ordering of Slavery

The deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social

technique for ordering was decisively shaped by the experience of planta-
tion slavery in the Americas, forming the plantation complex of visuality.1
If it has often been claimed that modernity was the product of slavery, there
has been insufficient attention to the ways in which the modern “ways of
seeing” also emerged from this nexus.2 What one might call the received
genealogy of modern visual culture begins with the major change in the
mid-seventeenth century in the European division of the sensible. It cre-
ated what Foucault called “the division, so evident to us, between what we
see, what others have observed and handed down, and what others imag-
ine or naïvely believe, the great tripartition into Observation, Document, and
Fable.”3 In this new formation, there was a gap between things and words,
a gap that could be crossed by seeing, a form of seeing that would dictate
what it was possible to say. As the seeing preceded the naming, that which
Foucault called the “nomination of the visible” (132) was the central prac-
tice. He emphasized that this was not a question of people suddenly learn-
ing to look harder or more closely, but a new set of priorities attached
to sensory perception. Taste and smell became less important, now being
understood as imprecise, hearsay was simply excluded, while touch was
limited to a series of binary distinctions, such as that between rough and
smooth. This new “order of things” was itself produced by the necessities
of European expansion and encounter, above all in the plantation colonies.
As W. J. T. Mitchell has cogently put it, “An empire requires not just a lot of
stuff but what Michel Foucault called an ‘order of things,’ an epistemic field
that produces a sense of the kinds of objects, the logic of their speciation,
their taxonomy.”4 Empire thus claims objectivity. What we need to insist on
here, at the risk of seeming blunt, is that the primary “thing” being ordered
was the “slave.”5 The “slave” was first classified by natural history, which
created a relevant modality of “species,” then separated from “free” space by
mapping, while the force of law embodied in slave codes that sustained the
logic of the division, enforced it against challenge, thereby making it seem
“right,” and hence aesthetic.
This transformation has been clearly summarized by David C. Scott:
“The slave plantation might be characterized as establishing the relations
and the material and epistemic apparatuses through which new subjects
were constituted: new desires instilled, new aptitudes molded, new dis-
positions acquired.”6 Such changed relations were not uniform among the
European colonizing powers but were enacted primarily in British and
French colonial space by the Barbados slave code (1661) and the Code Noir
(1685) respectively. In Spanish America, a violent visual transformation had
begun as early as the sixteenth century, seeking to transform the “idols” of
the indigenous into “images.”7 While that history is far from irrelevant here
and indeed will keep insisting on being included, it has not been within my
powers to include it throughout and retain coherence within the compass
of a manageable book. On the sugar islands of the Caribbean, the colonizers
were more concerned with slaves than with the indigenous, whose geno-
cide was all but complete by the time that the seventeenth- century “sugar
revolution” shifted emphasis within the “plantation complex” from Dutch
Brazil to the French and British possessions in the Caribbean.8 It was not
by chance that these were the locations that influenced Carlyle’s formation
of the discourse of visuality. So the slavery under discussion in this book is
not a metaphysical condition of servitude (as in Hegel, for example), but
the legally regulated, visually controlled, hyperviolent condition of forced
labor in Atlantic world cash- crop plantations. What results is therefore not
that which Foucault has called the classical order of representation, derived
from the great image of Spanish absolutism, Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1651).9
The ordering of slavery was a combination of violent enforcement and

Oversight 49
visualized surveillance that sustained the new colonial order of things. I
call it here “oversight,” meaning the nomination of what was visible to the
overseer on the plantation.

v i s ua l i z i n g t h e P l a n tat i o n

Oversight was the product of the interaction of the universalizing frames

of Christianity and sovereignty in the context of the drama of “race” and
rights created by seventeenth-century expansion and the beginning of the
plantation system. It created a regime of taxonomy, observation, and en-
forcement to sustain a visualized domain of the social and the political that
came to be known as “economy.” It maintained a delineated space in which
all life and labor were directed from its central viewpoint because the pro-
duction of colonial cash crops, especially sugar, required a precise disci-
pline, centered on surveillance, while being dependent on spectacular and
excessive physical punishment. While this may appear as a contradiction
between traditional spectacular punishment and the discipline that Fou-
cault argues succeeded it in the modern period, the modernity of over-
sight was precisely its combination of enforcement and discipline. Indeed,
as we shall see, the planters in Saint-Domingue attempted to modernize the
colony within the plantation system. This effort failed because the enslaved
had created a “counter-theater” to the system of surveillance and disci-
pline from natural history to mapping and law.10 For planter and enslaved
alike, the frame of the local plantation as the sovereign space of oversight
was broken by conflicting desires for autonomy from both the enslaved and
the plantocracy, meaning the ruling classes of the plantation colony. The
enslaved aspired to self-regulation, but so did the planters, who hoped to
create a colonial republic supported by slavery. Indeed, Saint-Domingue
imported more slaves and produced more goods in the years immediately
preceding the revolution than ever before.11
In the plantation complex, the overseer was the surrogate of the sover-
eign, entrusted with power over many life-forms that were not his (gen-
der intended) equal.12 The monarch was superior to ordinary people, even
aristocrats, by virtue of having been anointed in coronation, making him
or her in a certain sense divine.13 By the same token, the overseer domi-
nated those classified as different, spatially displaced, and without legal
personality or standing. The power of sovereignty was in the last instance
the power to give and take life, surrogated to the overseer in the colony

50 Chapter One
as a regime that Achille Mbembe has called “commandment” (commande-
ment). Commandment is a “regime of exception” in which the slave-owner
or colonist takes on the attributes and rights of royal power itself.14 Cen-
tral here was what Foucault saw as the principle of all Western judicial
thought since the Middle Ages: “Right is the right of royal command.”15
This command had not always reached to the New World, as one scandal-
ized French traveler reported from Brazil, in 1651: “Everyone leads a las-
civious and scandalous life—Jews, Christians, Portuguese, Dutch, English,
Germans, Blacks, Brazilians, Tapoyos, Mulattos, Mamelukes and Creoles—
living promiscuously, not to speak of incest and crimes against nature.”16
The ordering of slavery that began soon afterward was therefore intended
to restrain planter and enslaved alike. The extravagant consumption of the
planters was matched only by their excessive punishment of the enslaved.
In one sense, the notorious violence of slave plantations mimicked the mi-
nutely prescribed ceremonies of execution and punishment that Foucault
described as “spectacular.” At the same time, as Kathleen Wilson points out,
“given that penal remedy for the enslaved was transmitted through perfor-
mance and custom, rather than statute, slave punishments did not enact a
prior law but were the law performed.”17 In the regime of oversight, even
the abstraction of the law was made visible and performative.
This order of colonial things was itself visualized in the practical guides
for the practice of planters published in the period. Books of this kind were
not just produced as a form of travel literature, or as an entertainment for
those remaining in Europe, but as practical manuals for plantation and colo-
nization. To give an example that maximizes time and distance, the British
officer Philip Gridley King wrote to the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, resident
in London, describing the progress in cultivation and botany being made
in the new colony of Australia in 1792. He detailed his success in plant-
ing indigo, guided by Jean-Baptiste Labat’s account, in 1722, of the process
in the French Caribbean.18 From this example, one can see that oversight
was temporally and spatially complex, crossing presumed divides such as
those between the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, Anglophone and Franco-
phone colonization, and different models of forced labor. What one might
call (with a pinch of the proverbial salt) the Las Meninas of oversight were
the plates to the missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s history of the French
Caribbean, published in 1667 (see plate 2).19 These images have remained
part of the cultural memory of the region and were incorporated into an
installation entitled The Indigo Room, by the Haitian artist Edouard Duval

Oversight 51
Carrié, in 2004.20 In fact, the first plate of the volume concerning natu-
ral history illustrates the workings of indigo cultivation.21 Eleven enslaved
Africans are shown working at all the stages of this complex process, while
at the precise center of the plate stands the outlined figure of a white over-
seer in European dress (see fig. 13). He is posed with a lianne, the rod used
to discipline the enslaved, but posed here as if it were a cane or walking
stick. The overseer’s cane was as thick as a man’s thumb, described by the
English botanist Hans Sloane as “lance-wood switches.”22 Ironically, lance-
wood was a species native to the Caribbean, used to punish its forced mi-
grants. This incongruous scene is not a literal depiction of indigo produc-
tion, although it depicts each stage of the necessary work and its resultant
division of labor, but its schematic representation, which makes visible both
the process and the power that sustained it. This was a drama of culture and
cultivation enacted as work, strikingly codified after only twenty-five years
of French colonization.23 While the overseer is present as sign of the com-
pulsion that ultimately underpinned the labor force, his cane is at rest. It is
his eyes that are doing the work. As the only waged laborer in the scene, the
overseer’s job is to maintain the flow of production. Symbolized by the cane
that could wield punishment, his looking is thus a form of labor that com-
pels unwaged labor to generate profit from the land. In Du Tertre’s visual-
ization, the overseer is the central point of contradiction in the practice of
forced labor. Looking at Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I (1635), the would-
be absolutist monarch of England, after thinking about Du Tertre’s repre-
sentation of the overseer is to have a flash of recognition: Van Dyck’s calm
aristocratic figure standing with one hand on his hip and the other resting
on his cane might have served as Du Tertre’s model (see fig. 14). Indeed,
the sight of a ship at anchor in the sea visible behind Charles I reminds the
viewer that the source of monarchical power was England’s naval empire.
Portraits of seventeenth- century European monarchs often showed them
carrying a cane, rod, or even a scepter, the ultimate source of this symbol
of domination. In visual representation and plantation practice alike, the
overseer was the surrogate of the sovereign.
Even the landscape attests to the transformation wrought by European
oversight on the indigenous condition of the land, which Du Tertre called
“a confused mass without agreement.”24 The mountains and indigenous
wilderness visible in the background of his image give way to the regularly
divided and organized space of plantation. This change was represented as

52 Chapter One
figure 13. “oV erseer,” detAil froM du tertre’s “in d i g ot e r i e ,” Histoire
générale Des antilles Habitées par les François (PAr i s, 1667).

what later colonists would call the “civilizing process,” but it was in fact
evidence of the emergent environmental crisis caused by plantation. Sugar
in particular required so much wood to heat the boilers of the sugarcane
juice that islands like Barbados had become deforested as early as 1665, caus-
ing soil erosion and depletion of water sources.25 In a striking phrase, the
historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals has described the plantation itself as a
“nomad entity.”26 Planted as a monoculture, sugarcane exhausted even fer-
tile soils more rapidly than they could be replenished by manuring or other
fertilization techniques of the period. With the conjunction of soil deple-
tion and the deforestation caused by the processing of the sugar, it was esti-
mated at the time that a mill could remain in one location for a maximum of
forty years before environmental exhaustion set in. By way of tracking this
destruction, it can be seen that whereas in 1707 Hans Sloane noted that in
Jamaica “their Agriculture is but very small, their Soil being as yet so fruit-
ful as to not need manuring,” by 1740 Charles Leslie remarked that the ne-
cessity of manuring required double the number of workers than “while the
land retain’d its natural Vigour.”27 By 1823 John Stewart reported that the ac-
cessible land was “almost denuded of timber trees,” forcing the importation

Oversight 53
figure 14. Anthony VAn dyCk , cHarles i at tHe Hunt (C A . 1637).
oil on canvas, 266cm x 207cm. inv. 1236. Photo by C. Jean, louvre, Paris, france.
Photo courtesy of réunion des Musées nationaux / Art resource, new york.
of pine timber and coal to burn in the mills.28 The practice of the plantation
destroyed its own conditions of possibility and forced it to move physically
and conceptually, a movement that it was ultimately unable to sustain.
For the technicians of oversight, surveillance and the management of
time and labor were the key functions of the practice. The Jamaican planter
John Stewart held that “the duty of an overseer consists in superintending
the planting or farming concerns of the estate, ordering the proper work to
be done, and seeing that it is duly executed.”29 By means of such ordering,
the overseer produced slavery itself as a mode of labor and value generation.
It began with the cultivation of plants, requiring the coordination of a net-
work of labor, transport, and supplies that utterly transformed its environ-
ment. In the plantation economy, art and culture were techniques to gener-
ate increased biomass of cash crops without regard to other considerations.
The imperative for the overseer was, therefore, as one Saint-Domingue
planter put it, “to never leave the slave for an instant in inaction; he keeps
the fabrication of sugar under surveillance, never leaving the sugar-mill
for an instant.”30 For all its implied and actual violence, being an overseer
was a complex task of time management and asset allocation. As befitted
and defined a capitalist enterprise, the labor force was also divided because
the multistage operation of sugar (or coffee, indigo, or cotton) produc-
tion could not be carried out or supervised by one person, as the naturalist
Patrick Browne observed in Jamaica: “The industrious slaves, frequently
undressed, are obliged to watch by spells every night, and to engage with
equal vigour in the toils of the day; while the planter and the overseer pass
the mid-night hours in uninterrupted slumbers, anxious to secure the re-
ward of their annual labours.”31 Note the sense that the enslaved were in-
dustrious, that is to say, disciplined, even if naked, while the overseer slept
on. While modern European labor resisted time management, plantations
were (at least in theory) in permanent production.32 With the expansion in
demand for sugar in the eighteenth century, it became standard plantation
practice to suggest that a minimum of two hundred enslaved people was
required to maintain a sugar plantation, thereby making competent over-
seers in great demand.33 Oversight became a career path open to people of
all literate backgrounds, which is to say, of the middling classes and up.34
In practice, much of the necessary surveillance was delegated to the en-
slaved drivers, or assistants to the overseer, who were rewarded with better
food and clothing in exchange for maintaining discipline and production.
The head overseer, usually but not always European, had a series of depu-

Oversight 55
ties that the historian Michael Tadman has called “key slaves.” These people
were enslaved but held places of importance on the plantation, especially
the driver and the domestic or “house” slaves. Specialist tasks involved in
sugar production, like boiling the cane juice, distilling rum from molasses,
“potting” the granulated sugar into molds, and coopering, all had head fig-
ures.35 Rewarded in terms of material goods, authority, and prestige, the
key slaves were distinguished from the rank-and-file of the three Gangs
that worked the fields under the supervision of the “drivers.” These field
workers, in the famous formulation of C. L. R. James, “were closer to a
modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time,”
and lived in a similar state of deprivation.36 The planters were keenly aware
that the drivers were their sole means to control these field workers, as the
American planter and politician James H. Hammond set out in his “Planta-
tion Manual”: “The head driver is the most important negro on the plan-
tation. . . . He is to be treated with more respect than any other negro by
both master & overseer. He is on no occasion to be treated with any in-
dignity calculated to lose the respect of other negroes without breaking
him. He is required to maintain proper discipline at all times, to see that no
negro idles or does bad work in the field & to punish it with discretion on
the spot.”37 The driver was thus the doubled surrogate of oversight, stand-
ing in for the overseer, who was himself the surrogated representative of
the owner. However, if it became necessary to punish the driver, he was to
be “broken,” meaning demoted but also clearly referring to a humiliating
loss of prestige. In this way, plantation slavery surrogated the psychic vul-
nerability of domination to the slaves themselves, allowing the owners to
maintain what Tadman calls “positive, benevolent self-images,” which were
disseminated in their writings and led to the myth of planter “paternalism.”
Yet many revolts of the enslaved, such as the Hanover revolt in Jamaica, in
1776, were led by precisely these drivers, craftsmen, and domestics, “who
had never before engaged in Rebellions and in whose Fidelity [the planters]
had always most firmly relied.”38 Oversight could and ultimately did turn
against itself, above all in Saint-Domingue.

t e c h n i q u e s o f ov e r s i g h t

As a regime of power, oversight depended on a set of combined techniques,

operated in theory by the one individual known as the “overseer,” but in
practice a combined labor of the plantocracy. These techniques can be sum-

56 Chapter One
figure 15. thoMA s Jeffreys, map oF Jamaica (1794).
Photo courtesy of david rumsey Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com.

marized as mapping, natural history, and the force of law. Mapping reified
observations made at a local level that were systematically categorized and
divided by natural history and made sustainable by the force of law (see
fig. 15). These means of creating “natural” distinctions were challenged and
contested both within the “free” planter and settler population and above all
by the enslaved. In what follows, I outline the patterns of mapping, natu-
ral history, the force of law, and the counters to each of these practices. I
then set out two major efforts to reconfigure the entire apparatus in Saint-
Domingue, selected both because it was the greatest generator of wealth of
all the plantation islands and of course because it was the site of the revo-
lution of 1791. First, I discuss an earlier, ultimately unsuccessful, but wide-
ranging revolt of the enslaved on Saint-Domingue, led by François Ma-
kandal from 1756–58. Next, I consider how the plantocracy there set out to
form an independent, self-regulating colony on which the plantations were
organized automatically. The tensions between these different aspirations to
autonomy created a revolutionary situation in the island.

Oversight 57
MAPPing

How did oversight visualize authority? As a technique of governance, visu-

alized domination was both represented by and encapsulated in the emer-
gent technology of mapping. As recent histories of cartography have made
clear, the map was practically “nonexistent” in Europe at the start of the fif-
teenth century, but was “the bedrock of most professions and disciplines”
two centuries later.39 Following David Buisseret, several key factors can be
identified in the formation of the map, bringing together the new modali-
ties of realism in Northern European art, and the rediscovery of perspec-
tive, with the development of techniques for plotting land to make sur-
veys of state and private property, and the consolidation of the nation-state
apparatus.40 Tom Conley links all these developments to the formation of
“selfhood” and the production of subjectivity. Christian Jacob has further
emphasized the importance of the map “not as an object but as a medium of
communication,” one that makes a claim about the understanding of ex-
terior reality.41 Like other media, the map extends the human sensorium be-
yond its physical capacities and integrates itself with it as “a technical pros-
thesis that extends and refines the field of sensorial production, or rather, a
place where ocular vision and the ‘mind’s eye’ meet.”42 This intersection is
precisely that which will later be claimed as visuality.
As the plantation economy developed, oversight produced a regular
mapping of plantations at the local level, rendering colonized space into a
single geometric plane. This modulation of space developed the distinction
between “cultivated” and “empty” space that motivated settlement into a
determining principle that organized and aestheticized perception.43 It was
calibrated by the practice of land survey, which delineated the extent of a
given plantation.44 This shift to formal representation marked the enact-
ment of oversight as a governmental practice in the Caribbean. In Barbados,
for example, there had been no definition of the boundaries of plantations
until, in 1670, the Council for Plantations ordered “exact mapps, platts, or
charts of all and every our said plantations abroad.”45 The actual work of the
overseer was now complemented by this abstract representation of land as
colonial plantation within a functioning system of imperial power.
In Jamaica, a settler was given as legal title to his or her land a drawing
that “represent[ed] the form of a parcel of land,” to quote the “patent,” as it
was called, held by Francis Price for his Jamaican estate, Worthy Park.46 This
Letter Patent of 1670 contained a line drawing depicting an irregular poly-

58 Chapter One
hedron of land by virtue of its borders with adjacent holdings and natural
features, drawn to scale and in accord with a compass, but not represented
within a larger map. An act of the Jamaica Assembly passed in 1681 per-
mitted “any person or persons whatsoever to survey, resurvey, and run any
dividing lines, and give plats of any land,” meaning by “person” a free, white
settler.47 Oversight of the fundamental division of the land was thus vested
in the entire settler population. The survey would physically mark the di-
viding lines by cutting blazes into trees at regular intervals and noting the
type of tree to be found at each turn in the boundary of the holding. Such
precise understanding of local natural history was so crucial to the mapping
of the plantation that a British survey taken after the end of slavery found
some 675 “colonial names” for plants in use on Jamaica.48 Next, from the
field notes created during the survey, a “plat,” or plan, was drawn to scale.
The scale measured “chains,” the sixty-six-foot-long feudal measuring de-
vice used to make such surveys, which were manipulated in practice by the
enslaved under settler supervision. The plans were guides rather than pre-
cise depictions, but subsequent correlations have found them to be quite
accurate.49 Their purpose was both to create a legal account of the owner-
ship of land and to provide a functional guide for the overseer of an estate
as to where his boundaries lay. A copy of the “plat” was often to be found
in the overseer’s office for this purpose.50 However, the compass on the sur-
veys represented magnetic north, rather than true or meridional north, and
as that varied over time, there were many border disputes in the Jamaica
courts.
Jamaica’s long history of settlement and conquest, its hills, and its com-
plex population made geometric irregularities in its plantations inevitable.
On flatter and more recently colonized islands, simpler solutions were
found. The Dutch exported their medieval system of “long lots” to the
Americas, in which space was divided into abstract rectangles of roughly
1,000 acres with one side bordering on a river. The Brazilian island of Ita-
maraca was thereby divided into forty-seven such lots, in 1648, with a road
built on its longest axis. No allowance was made for the conditions on the
ground or for the placement of existing structures, causing all kinds of prac-
tical problems.51 On the Danish island of St. Croix, which was to Denmark
what Barbados was to Britain—an engine of sugar production that created
spectacular wealth from a relatively small space—the land was divided by
what was called the Center Line, linking the two main white settlements
of Christiansted and Frederiksted. This long straight line was turned into a

Oversight 59
well-made road allowing for speed of access that was essential to the colo-
nizers in repressing the great revolts of 1733 and 1848 (see chap. 4). New
plantations on St. Croix were allocated in 4,000 acre lots, drawn as rect-
angles and arranged either side of the Center Line in one of the nine sec-
tions created by the West India- Guinea Company.52 In the fertile areas of
such spaces, the colonial crops were planted, often represented as a perfect
rectangle of sugarcane, analogous to the “squares” formed by European sol-
diers of the period.53 Within the cane fields, a further geometry attended
the planting of the cane, known as “holing.” The field was divided into
squares and each square was planted with a number of cane “tops,” or cut-
tings of the cane plant, taken from the flowering top of the plant, where
the buds were most fertile. This orderly planting was also designed to allow
better oversight of the enslaved.54 If Cartesianism was the mathematiciza-
tion of space in theory, sugar planting was its implementation in practice,
creating a spatialized geometry designed to produce maximum yields and
hence profits. Indeed, the sugarcane plantation gave physical form to the
table as a means of data organization that is often seen to be emblematic
of the period. This functional geometry was the counterpoint to the spec-
tacular mapping that was made of the metropole. The cartographer Jacques
Gamboust produced a detailed map of Paris in 1652, which he dedicated to
the young Louis XIV. Among its uses, Gamboust claimed, the map was de-
signed “in order that, in the most distant countries, those who have believed
the representation of Paris to be above the truth may admire its greatness
and beauty.”55 This mapping was designed to impress the reality of Paris
in representation on people at a distance, whereas mapping in the planta-
tion was addressed primarily to the local audience. Both forms of mapping
relied on the visible nomination of what was depicted in those maps and
ultimately on the force of law that connected the disparate aspects of sov-
ereignty.
Space was mapped by the enslaved to enable entertainment, commerce,
and outright resistance to slavery. Despite many ineffectual prohibitions,
Africans in slavery found ways to congregate to dance, sing, and practice
their religions. So insistent were the enslaved on these performances that
a portion of the calendar was devoted to them as “carnival,” the persistent
tradition whereby the subaltern groups in plantation society reversed the
social order for a brief period of bacchanalia. The costumes for carnival
were often made with fabric and other items purchased with the proceeds

60 Chapter One
of sales made at the markets held by the enslaved on Sundays, where they
exchanged produce grown in their “gardens” to supplement their meager
diet and to generate produce for exchange. These market scenes were often
romantically depicted by colonial artists, such as Agostino Brunias (1730–
96), an Italian painter, who created a series of scenes of Caribbean life in the
1770s, and the French diplomat Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1757–1810), who
made a similar series in Martinique around 1805.56 Brunias’s works were in
no sense realistic: his painting of A French Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a
Negro Wench (1770) shows the woman of the title conveniently disrobed so
as to reveal her breast. In depicting a chain of commerce that ranged from
this simple sale of a piece of garden-grown produce to the complex fash-
ions of the linen-markets that supplied dress and costumes for the carni-
val, Brunias nonetheless recorded the existence of the interstitial subaltern
economy of the plantation. Although “passports” were needed to attend
these markets—meaning a signed permission from the overseer or owner—
these were easily forged or altered for reuse.
This mobility created an understanding of the topography that facili-
tated outright resistance or escape. The Maroons, as those who escaped en-
slavement were known, were found in all slave-based economies. In larger
settlements like Jamaica, or mainland colonies like Surinam, where the for-
est offered shelter, Maroon communities became permanent. Indeed, so
persistent were their attacks on plantations in these two colonies that both
the English and the Dutch came to legal agreements with the Maroons by
treaty and divided the space of the colony. By creating a physical division
of the colony where Maroons, or so- called runaway slaves, could live, Ma-
kandal and later the Jamaican Maroon leader Nanny transformed the theory
and practice of mapping. Indeed, the interior of Saint-Domingue, away
from the plantations that lined the coast, was unmapped right until the
revolution and was first formally represented in an atlas as late as 1985. That
is not to say it was Unknown, but that it was mapped by what in Vodou
is now known as kustom (custom), oral and other forms of vernacular sign
making. The Maroons succeeded in remapping colonial space to create a
permanent zone of exclusion in which slavery was not permitted.57 In his
Histoire des Deux Indes, the abbé Raynal spelled out the meaning of this map-
ping in a passage that has often been taken to be prophetic of the Haitian
Revolution: “Already two colonies of black fugitives [maroons] have estab-
lished themselves safe from your assaults, through treaties and force. These

Oversight 61
streaks of lightning announce the oncoming thunderbolts, and the blacks
only need a leader.”58 Many have seen Toussaint L’Ouverture foretold here,
including perhaps Toussaint himself.

n At u r A l h i s to r y

The possibility of using visual representation as the key to dominant disci-

pline hinged on the new science of natural history in practical and theo-
retical form. In Jill Casid’s groundbreaking analysis (pun intended), it was
by transplantation of plant species and machinery with which to cultivate
and process them that “colonial administration and plantation economi-
cally, politically, and aesthetically refashioned its Caribbean island pos-
sessions as hybrid landscapes.”59 Indeed, as she emphasizes, all the plants
associated with the Caribbean islands were imported, from sugarcane to
coffee, indigo, and even the coconut palm. The planters further intended
that the enslaved should grow their own food, thereby inculcating in them
the mentality of cultivation. Two spaces came to be described as “gardens”:
the “kitchen gardens” immediately surrounding the houses of the enslaved,
and the “provision grounds,” which were located on the margins of the
plantation. However, the planters often complained that the enslaved did
not always grow staple root crops for basic subsistence, and it was widely
noted that they grew tobacco for their own use and for trading.60 The “plan-
tations” of the enslaved were often cited by defenders of slavery as examples
of the generosity and benevolence of the plantation system.61 The reality
was somewhat different. On St. Croix, for example, the space formally allo-
cated to slaves for their gardens was some thirty square feet, not much more
than a patch of ground. In Jamaica, where the fertile land was entirely given
over to sugar, the provision grounds were often displaced to remote re-
gions of the hills, making them even harder to cultivate, or were omitted
altogether.62 On those Jamaica plantations where provision grounds were
created, they were often described in the surveys as being part “ruinate,”
and, according to Barry Higman’s calculations, were located at least a mile
from the plantation buildings.63
In addition to these practicalities, the Atlantic world was also a prime
location for the establishment of natural history as an abstract science cen-
tering on observation. However, although sight became its preeminent
sense, it, too, was subject to restrictions. The botanist Linnaeus ruled, “We
should reject . . . all accidental notes that do not exist in the Plant either for
the eye or for the touch.”64 One example of such accidental detail was color,

62 Chapter One
whose variations and subtleties were held to elude precise categorization.
The result was that natural history relied on what Foucault described as a
“visibility freed from all other sensory burdens and restricted, moreover, to
black and white.”65 In the context of slavery, in which a visible racialization
came into being in precisely this period, this distinction must give us pause.
It suggests that in this period “race,” while being neither invented nor ren-
dered exterminationist in the period, became visualized in terms of a binary
distinction between black and white, reinforced by the new natural history.
While Foucault was usually circumspect about dating his transitions from
one epistemological frame to another, in this instance he offered a very pre-
cise reference, namely the publication of Jonston’s Natural History of Quadru-
peds, in 1657. Although there are of course many ways to nuance this asser-
tion, this shift from general history to natural history is an “event,” to wit
“the sudden separation, in the realm of Historia, of two orders of knowledge
henceforward considered to be different.”66 History had become the field
of what would become known as visuality. It was marked by a division of
the sensible that produced the new slave law codes, the creation of planta-
tion maps, and the split within History itself around 1660.
Given that Jonston’s book was published in Amsterdam, it is striking to
read Charles Ford’s observation that “the first Dutch ‘racist’ text (and per-
haps the first racist text in any language) is Johan Picardt’s Korte beschryvinge
of 1660.”67 Picardt created a genealogy that traced the division of peoples
back to Noah and to the story, which has since become notorious, that
the “blackness” of Africans was a punishment for Ham looking at Noah’s
nakedness. Here illicit looking was punished by a visible distinction. Al-
though centuries of racism have claimed that this story dates from time im-
memorial, Benjamin Braude has recently shown that it was in fact an early
modern extrapolation of the Bible that has no basis in Genesis. The very
convenience with which the story fits the new paradigm of natural his-
tory should be enough to alert suspicion. Whereas the Elizabethan writer
George Best had argued that the dark color of African skin was the result
of an infection, seventeenth- century writers like George Sandys insisted
on the curse of Ham. From a close reading of the elusive texts, Braude con-
cludes: “Slavery seems to have been the new element that made Sandys’s
arguments more persuasive than Best’s.”68 In properly genealogical fash-
ion it can be concluded that rather than modern visualized racism taking
its cue from the story of Ham’s punishment, the story was used to justify a
shift that had already taken place. Perhaps no objects so epitomize this shift

Oversight 63
than the casta paintings created in Mexico, beginning in the early eighteenth
century, to represent the different forms of “miscegenation” between Afri-
can, Spanish, and Indian residents of New Spain. These small paintings were
arranged in the form of a table, allowing the viewer to track the progres-
sion of a particular kind of person. This tabulation might also allow for the
nomination of tropical fruits, vegetables, or other objects of curiosity to
natural history. Casta paintings did not entirely essentialize “race,” allow-
ing the “crossed” child of a Spaniard to “return” to Spanishness in two or
three generations, but a reverse journey “out” of Africa was not permitted.
Such paintings had not been seen before, and they did not survive the era
of natural history, disappearing before 1810.69
Natural history provided significant purchase for those trying to resist
oversight. The botanical knowledge and tastes of those in forced diaspora
in the Caribbean changed the development of the plantation system in nu-
merous ways. The Africans on plantations knew to eat the berries of certain
trees, like the Black-heart Fiddlewood, while the fishermen among them
ate the common sea crab as a mainstay of their diet.70 They were held to be
especially partial to avocado, leading to the extensive cultivation of these
trees. Plantains were a staple in the diet of the enslaved, but came to be an
item of choice for Europeans as well.71 The Jamaican Jews introduced to the
island a number of fruits and vegetables not usually eaten by gentiles, such
as the “Brown-Jolly” (or eggplant, which was salted and boiled in place of
greens, although it was otherwise not eaten by gentiles in the Americas),
sesame seeds, and even tomatoes.72 The ambivalent interaction of European
natural history and African cultivation found its point of intersection in
the cassava. The root of this plant was dried and ground to make a form of
flour that was a staple for the enslaved, bringing an African vegetable to the
Americas. Yet its juice was said to be extremely poisonous—although some
disputed the claim—and planters feared that the enslaved might introduce
it into their food. Consequently, among the planters was a widespread sus-
picion of any enslaved person seen to have a longer-than-average fingernail,
because that was held to be the method by which cassava poison could be
carried and delivered.73 Soon the colonizers feared that “there [were] hardly
any slaves . . . who in [their] colonies [did] not have knowledge of vari-
ous plants containing poisons.”74 However, African medical knowledge was
literally vital to the transplanted population. The British naturalist Hans
Sloane, for instance, recalled that an enslaved African had cured a swollen
limb that had been bothering him for some time.75 The enslaved also kept

64 Chapter One
and maintained in oral form genealogical information about themselves
and others. Hughes recorded that on a Barbados plantation then belonging
to Thomas Tunckes, one family of the enslaved knew themselves to be de-
scended from “the first Negroes that ever came hither from Guiney.” They
also remembered that before the land on which the plantation now sat was
deforested, there had been an indigenous settlement in the woods at a place
that they still called the “Indian Pond.” The Africans recalled that these
Indians fiercely resisted what Hughes called “Subjection by the Whites” and
finally departed the island in canoes, rather than submit.76 Ethnographic
research has shown that these oral traditions are often substantially accu-
rate. There is a more permanent record. When the revolutionaries of Saint-
Domingue achieved independence, in 1804, they named the island Haiti, in
memory of the indigenous population, a permanent memorial to the first
Atlantic genocide.

forCe of lAW

The map and the table depicted an abstract field of visible nomination that
was sustained by the force of what was taken to be law, whether human or
natural. The law, although invisible, thus formed the ground for the possi-
bility of representing space and species in distinct but exchangeable form.
It followed that because “free” men (predominantly “whites”) had rights
over the enslaved, those so subjugated could have no rights at all. Just as
all “persons” could survey land, so did all slave-owners have a wide range
of discretion over the treatment of the enslaved. While the law codes of
different colonial systems varied in degree, some measure of corporal pun-
ishment was permitted to all slave-owners, racializing the function of the
“police” in the plantation system. For example, the Colonial Council in
Saint-Domingue declared in 1770 that “neither the royal prosecutor nor
the judge have the right to monitor the severity of the police that masters
exercise over their slaves, even if there is mutilation of limbs.”77 Only a few
years after the first natural history was published, a slave code was passed
in Barbados, in 1661, as part of the reestablishment of sovereignty entailed
in the restoration of the English monarchy, in 1660. This code was influen-
tial across the Anglophone Atlantic world, being formally adopted later in
Jamaica, South Carolina, and Antigua. Its declared purpose was the “better
ordering and governing of Negroes.” In order to separate and distinguish
them, the law defined Africans as “a heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine
dangerous kinde of people,” thereby justifying their being treated in the

Oversight 65
same way as “men’s other goods and chattels.”78 Almost as soon as natural
history had been defined, it was being used as a form of legal division be-
tween legal subjects and other forms of people.
With the sugar trade growing in importance, Louis XIV published his
Code Noir, in 1685, to regulate the French slave trade and its plantations. Its
preamble established the dialectic of dominant discipline under the uni-
versalizing premise of Catholicism. Louis demands “obedience” to him-
self and to the “discipline” of the Catholic Church, of which he is the pro-
tector. The code was intended to overcome the physical separation of the
plantations from the metropole by establishing “the extent of our power
[ puissance].” As Louis Sala-Molins points out in his exemplary commentary
on the code, the term slave is introduced “without a line of judicial justi-
fication or theorization.”79 Indeed, its very title defined the subject of the
code as “the discipline and commerce of black slaves in the French islands
of America,” further racializing the term slave.80 In the racialized Catholic
commercial discipline instituted by the code, the “nègre” is “‘canonically’
a man, but he is ‘juridically’ an item of merchandise.”81 Yet the “nègre” was
no more defined than the “esclave,” creating an aporia that can only be re-
solved by force of law: the “slave” is the person enslaved by the law, and the
“black” is a person enslaved, unless otherwise freed by law. Consequently,
the code was careful to define the legal outcome of marriages across the
free-slave divide. In the version of the code that appeared in 1685, a free
man who married his slave according to the rites of the Catholic Church
thereby freed her, a regulation rescinded in 1725, when all marriages be-
tween “blanc” and “Noir” were forbidden. In order for planters to main-
tain control of reproduction, all marriages between the enslaved had to be
approved by their owners, while enslavement descended in the matrilineal
line only. The force of law, and its transparency, were above all questions of
filiation, as Edouard Glissant has pointed out, avoiding the opacity of all so-
called miscegenation by the tactic of oversight.82 Here the immediate and
constant intermingling, whether forced or consensual, between Africans
and Europeans was deliberately overlooked in order to allow the divisions
of the law to retain force. While it has been repeatedly observed that the
Code Noir and all other slave codes were rarely, if ever, followed in detail,
the proper purpose of such codes was above all to legitimate force in the
minds of those using that force. For all its manifest hypocrisies, the slave
code was a necessary component to the plantation system in order to sustain
its reproduction at the biological and ideological levels.

66 Chapter One
 Those on the margins of freedom, like Jews and free people of color, at-
tempted from the very inception of plantation slavery to use the colonial
legal system to assert their claims. In 1669, only nine years after the slave
code was passed, Antonio Rodrigues-Rezio successfully petitioned that
Jews in Barbados should be allowed to give legal testimony, taking an oath
on the Old Testament, unlike the enslaved, whose testimony was banned.83
In 1711, it was the turn of John Williams, a free African, to claim such tes-
timonial rights. When he was denied, a further demarcation of the racial-
ized division between “white” and “black” came into being, vacating the
term “freedom” of substantive meaning.84 That is to say, these Africans were
emancipated insofar as they were not chattel, but they remained legally
minors, unable to speak as an adult in court. In 1708, the Jamaican Assem-
bly moved to preempt any such action by decreeing that “no Jew, mulatto,
Negro or Indian shall have any vote at any election of members to serve in
any Assembly of this Island.”85 As ever, such prohibitions imply that some
people were making precisely such claims. With the passage of the Planta-
tion Act, in 1740 (13 Geo. II), Jews who had been resident in British colo-
nies for seven years could be naturalized, taking an oath on the Old Tes-
tament. Abraham Sanchez, who had become naturalized, took the logical
next step in 1750 and demanded the right to vote. After being refused by a
returning officer in the parish of St John, Kingston, he asked the assembly
to overturn the decision. The parishes of St Andrew and St Catherine pre-
sented opposing petitions, and the assembly ruled against Sanchez and had
the resolution printed in the Jamaica Courant.86 The public sphere, as mani-
fested in the colonial assembly and the newspaper, used its racialized con-
sensus to suppress rights that were legitimately claimed. That is to say, first,
that the “public” was defined as “white,” meaning not “Jew, mulatto, Negro
or Indian.” Second, when one puts these traces from the archive together
with the long history of slave revolt, there was a consistent counterpoint of
rights claims in the Atlantic world that long preceded the Age of Revolu-
tion, so often held to be the agent of such actions.

au to n o m y o f t h e e n s l av e d

The confluence of a counter to oversight in mapping, natural history,

and the force of law can be illustrated through the remarkable history of
François Makandal (d. 1758), a disabled, Islamic, sexually promiscuous, Afri-
can resistance leader and priest in the plantation economy. Makandal incar-

Oversight 67
nated what was and, in the current moment appears to remain, the night-
mare of white domination.87 Enslaved in Africa at the age of twelve, he was
able to read and write Arabic and had an extensive knowledge of medical
and military botany. In maronnage for eighteen years, Makandal created
an extended network of associates across Saint-Domingue (present- day
Haiti), as well as establishing a mountain settlement in which cultivation
was extensively practiced. He disseminated a form of power-figure known
as a garde-corps, literally “body- guard,” which contained various elements
that could induce forces from the dead to protect the living. These power-
figures were the syncretic product of Kongolese and Fon power-figures
(minkisi and bo) together with colonial practices that have become known
as “Vodou,” a spiritual means of understanding and controlling the relation
of space, time, and causality. When Saint-Domingue was isolated by the
outbreak of the Seven Years War, in 1756, Makandal set his network to in-
stigate an insurrection against the colonists. The plan, as the French came
to understand it, was to poison the water in all the houses in Le Cap, the
colony’s capital, and then send bands of insurgents out into the country-
side to liberate the enslaved. It was believed that he intended to kill all the
whites in the colony. In revenge, the French planters instituted a veritable
moral panic, burning dozens of people at the stake on the basis of the most
tenuous connection to the Makandal network. Makandal himself was ar-
rested by chance and later executed.
Under interrogation, Brigitte, Makandal’s wife, described a magic phrase
with which the power-figure was invoked: “May the good god give eyes
to those who ask for eyes.”88 This form of second sight was the counter to
oversight. In Kongo cosmology, the second sight was that used in the space
of the dead, normally invisible to the living. It is noticeable that Makandal
used the term “the good god [bon Dieu],” which was to become the domi-
nant figure in the invisible spirit world as conceived by Haitian Vodou.89
Makandal made this second sight available to his followers via the garde-
corps. The figures were invoked to perform a service, deal with a complaint,
or even to harm others, and the French judge Courtin accepted that “it is
indisputable that this brings harm to anyone one wants.” That is to say, the
colonial powers accepted that minkisi makandal had power and therefore that
the balance of power in the colony had changed. Makandal was known for
performing a symbolic enactment of this transformation. He would stage
a demonstration of his powers in which he pulled out of water a cloth that
was colored olive, for the original inhabitants of the island. At the next

68 Chapter One
pass, the cloth would be white, for the present rulers, and finally it emerged
black, to indicate the future passage of the island to African control.
By the end of Makandal’s revolt, Saint-Domingue had two versions of
visualized power in contestation with each other, European oversight and
Caribbean second sight. Makandal had remapped the island as a kinship
and commercial network. According to Carolyn Fick, Makandal “knew the
names of every slave on each plantation who supported and participated in
his movement.”90 His itinerant traders ( pacotilleurs) traveled to the planta-
tions from his mountain sanctuary and remapped the French colony into a
place of his own making. In the third element of his contestation of over-
sight, Makandal directly challenged the force of colonial law by claiming a
liberty that instantiated the right to look. All sources are agreed that Ma-
kandal and his followers sought liberty. From the perspective of the plant-
ers, the insurrection was caused because the enslaved had noticed that mas-
ters offered in their wills to free their slaves after their own deaths, as a mark
of wealth and civility. The poisoning sought to hurry this process along,
according to the official theory. The view from the enslaved was far more
direct. According to a man named Médor, arrested for poisoning at the La-
vaud plantation, “If slaves commit acts of poisoning, they do it in order to
obtain their freedom.” Under interrogation as to whether she had poisoned
her master, a rebel named Assam testified that a free African named Pompée
had encouraged her to do so. When she refused, he declared: “‘Well! So
much the worse for you since you do not want to become free.’”91 The in-
volvement of Pompée and many other free Africans in the insurrection
shows that the freedom sought was not simply personal, because they were
already free, but political. It practiced a view that another’s lack of freedom
denatures one’s own. At the famous meeting at Bois- Caiman, in 1791, that
instigated the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Vodou priest Boukman
expressed this theory of freedom to the Saint-Domingue masses: “Listen
to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the heart of us all.”92 The meeting
was not far from the Le Normand plantation where Makandal had been en-
slaved.
The French authorities went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that
they had defeated Makandal, showing him to his associates after his capture
and commissioning a portrait painted by a Parisian artist named N. Dupont
(d. 1765), as if to create their own counter power-figure. However, the exe-
cution itself was botched, as Makandal was able to free himself from the
pyre, and he tumbled to the ground to the sound of the crowd shouting,

Oversight 69
“Makandal is saved!” In Moreau de St. Mery’s account, “the terror was ex-
treme, all doors were locked.” Although Makandal was recaptured and
burned, “many of the blacks believe even to the present day [1796], that he
did not die in the torture.”93 The African population may have literally be-
lieved that Makandal escaped, or they may have meant that he continued
to be a powerful spirit within the world of the living although present in
that of the dead. Phrased in the terms that would become current during
the revolutionary period, Makandal had become and continues to be a hero.
His revolutionary and magical powers remain part of cultural memory in
Haiti to this day, where his name is invoked in popular songs and in the
present-day genealogies of the gods.94 In Edouard Duval-Carrié’s powerful
painting, La Voix des Sans-Voix (1994), Makandal is shown as one of the revo-
lutionary pantheon, alongside Toussaint, Dessalines, and Pétion, watching
the coup against Aristide, who is represented as the latest such figure to
speak for those “without voice,” the spokesperson for the part that has no
part, the people.95

c o lo n i a l au to n o m y: r e g e n e r at i n g ov e r s i g h t

On the eve of the Atlantic revolutions, the planters in Saint-Domingue

sought to restore each of the different components of oversight within
a structure less dependent on individual supervision, whether free or en-
slaved. Having defined the borders of the colony, the planters intended to
strengthen the force of law by making power local, and to transform the
production of sugar into an automated, high-volume process. This strategy
was itself a recognition that the supervisory regime I have called oversight
had broken down. Strikingly, the plantocracy envisaged a modernization of
government, cultivation, and the public sphere within the regime of slavery
but independent of the monarchy. In effect, they imagined an independent
Saint-Domingue. The resistance of the enslaved that became outright revo-
lution in Saint-Domingue began as a strike over the new labor conditions
generated by the new production processes that then generalized into a re-
volt against the entire means of production.
The key to the planter strategy was the formation of what the histori-
ans James McClellan and François Regourd have called the “colonial ma-
chine,” which endeavored to automate oversight into an autonomous form,
governed locally. It was produced by the interaction of colonial learned
societies, botanical gardens, chambers of agriculture, hospitals, newspapers,

70 Chapter One
and “functionary experts” like botanists.96 This newly formed apparatus set
out to enhance what it saw as the outdated methods of colonial agriculture,
botany, engineering, and medicine, all centered around the authority of the
state but acting independently of it. Whereas natural history in the colonies
had been the preserve of motivated individuals compiling texts, botanists
were now directing the formation of specific botanical gardens designed
to enhance colonial production of cash crops. At the same time, agricul-
ture was being directed by new bureaucracies like the Chambre d’Agricul-
ture established in all the French islands in 1763. The first work in tropi-
cal medicine and disease took notable initiatives, such as the vaccinations
against smallpox carried out in Saint-Domingue from 1745, including the
mass vaccination of the enslaved after 1774, long before they were prac-
ticed in metropolitan France.97 All of these activities came to be discussed
by the self-styled “enlightened public” of Saint-Domingue, ranging from
grand planters to aspiring intellectuals among the small but well-connected
membership of its learned society, the Cercle de Philadelphes (1784), later
the Société Royale des Sciences et Arts.
The impetus to independence was a peace agreement with the Maroons
in 1785, defining a border on the French and Spanish sides of the island. This
new mapping promised to enable better control of runaways with Maroon
cooperation, as had been the case in Jamaica. The new colonial apparatus
could now be devoted to the creation of a disciplined, numerically regu-
lated form of sugar production, known as the “vegetable economy.”98 De-
pendent on a handful of printed guides, traditional sugar production was an
art not a science, a skill handed down from refiner to refiner, incarnated in
an obscure and specialized language. The planter Barré de Saint-Venant ar-
ranged for a young naturalist named Jacques-François Dutrône la Couture
(1749–1814) to come to Saint-Domingue from Martinique, in 1784, in order
to inculcate his new methods of cultivation.99 By the time Dutrône’s book
on sugar was published in 1791, on the eve of the revolution, he had worked
on six plantations and had become a member of the Société Royale des Sci-
ences et Arts.100 Dutrône sought to transform the techniques of a tactile
and verbal artisanal craft into a visualized, modern technology, all designed
so that “blacks of a very ordinary intelligence can direct [the work].”101 In
short, he envisaged a Taylorism of the vegetable economy, by which the
plantation could function as an unskilled, automated factory visualized and
regulated by numerical data.
First, he reorganized plantation labor by means of a tabulated form that

Oversight 71
figure 16. “PlAntAtion forM,” froM JACques - fr A n ç o i s d u t r ô n e
lA Couture , précis sur la canne (PAris, 1791).

allowed the overseer to tell at a glance the monthly patterns of labor, pro-
duction, and weather conditions (see fig. 16). Columns identified the health,
work detail, and status (Maroon, runaway, ill, etc.) of each enslaved per-
son, as well as specifying the quantities produced of sugarcane juice and
each of the different forms of sugar. Even the quantity of rain was to be re-
corded. Surveillance was improved, even as the individual overseer was not
required to be physically present to sustain it. This visualized and statistical
tabulation of labor accorded with the physiocratic principles of François
Quesnay, who argued for the use of graphs and tables to create an “eco-
nomic picture” that was held to be unachievable by means of discourse.
Dutrône’s system was designed to further reduce the difficulties of over-
sight’s surveillance by standardizing sugar production. The old inefficient
iron boilers and cement basins would be replaced with copper apparatus,

72 Chapter One
better suited to heating without overboiling and not subject to decay from
the sugar. The established system relied on the expertise of the refiners, who
had an arcane vocabulary of artisanal terms designed to designate stages of
readiness of the heated cane-juice that would require transfer from one
boiler to the next in a sequence of five, until the final stage of readiness,
in which the sugar would make a string between finger and thumb when
drawn out.102 Readiness would now be simply determined by temperature.
Sugar begins to form, according to Dutrône, at 83 degrees Réaumur, and the
water remaining in the juice was entirely evaporated when it had reached
110 degrees.103 The new “laboratory” could therefore work all night under
the supervision of one of the enslaved drivers, rather than having to be sus-
pended between midnight and the early morning as was traditional.104 In
short, making sugar was far less complicated than had been thought and
could be achieved by a simple regulatory process. Furthermore, Dutrône
claimed that the use of his strategy at the de Ladebate plantation had raised
net receipts of sugar by 80 percent, a startling gain.105
His gains may have come from a change in the cane being cultivated.
The sugarcane in use in the Caribbean was known as the “creole” cane, one
of several varieties of Saccharum officinarum, as Linnaeus named it (see fig.
17). It grew to about six or seven feet tall and was easy to grind, although
relatively little bagasse, or “trash” as the English called it, was produced to
burn for fuel. In the late eighteenth century, planters across the Carib-
bean began to experiment with what they called “Otaheite” cane, using the
European misnomer for Tahiti. It was both taller, reaching thirteen feet, and
thicker, growing up to six inches in diameter. It was first planted in Cuba
around 1780, the sources being very unclear on these matters.106 At the same
time, another even larger cane, known as the Bourbon variety, from its
presumed origin on the Ile de Bourbon, began to be widely used. Accord-
ing to the Jamaica planter John Stewart this fifteen-feet-tall, eight-inch-
wide cane came into use around 1790 and had taken over as the dominant
variety by the time he was writing, in 1823. Although these names were not
used in Saint-Domingue, the new canes were clearly being cultivated there.
Dutrône called them “strong” canes, which he contrasted with the older
“weak” canes, a reasonable distinction in that all the plants were varietals
of the same species. In 1799 a naturalist observing abandoned plantations
saw that some canes grew to five feet while others reached fourteen feet
in height, making it clear that different varietals had been in cultivation.107
The Bourbon cane was at first far more productive than the older varieties,

Oversight 73
figure 17. “s ugAr CAne ,” froM JACques - frAnço i s du t r ô n e
lA Couture , précis sur la canne (PAris, 1791).

but it also required intense labor to maintain because it exhausted the soil at
a rapid rate, requiring extensive manuring.108 Given that the Bourbon cane
was three times the size of the older Creole variety, work in the cane fields
trebled in quantity. As the larger varietals spread around the Caribbean,
from 1780 onward, one part of the heightened resistance of the enslaved
came from the greatly increased workload the new plants required.
These changes were not intended, however, to simply improve the cul-
tivation of sugar. By transforming the colonial machine, they implied a
new mechanism of power. In the influential view of Emmerich de Vattel,
cultivation was not only the first responsibility of government, but it also
justified colonizing North America because the land was not being used.109
Dutrône implied a similar theory of government in describing the adminis-
tration of a plantation: “The Master, being he who governs and commands,
must absolutely be present at all times. The Art of governing a Plantation

74 Chapter One
is necessarily tied to the art of cultivation. The Master must therefore be a
Cultivator. Since the cares of his government are very extended and multi-
plied, he shares them with trustworthy men, white and free like himself,
charged with transmitting his orders and seeing to their execution.”110 This
insistence that oversight (commandement) must be both present and involved
in cultivation was nothing short of a call for a colonial republic.
These implied reforms were spelled out, in 1789, when the planters came
to present their grievances to the Estates- General, called in France to detail
all such local concerns. While much attention has been paid to the illegal
election of these deputies and their rebuff by the Estates-General, the con-
tent of their program has often been overlooked. It was, however, pub-
lished in Saint-Domingue, making their plans clear on the island itself.111
The leading planters were aiming for functional independence, allowing
the monarchy to retain direct authority only in military and diplomatic af-
fairs. They demanded free trade for their products and raw materials, espe-
cially in forced African labor. With this new force of local law, the planters
intended to reform what they called the “police” of the island, especially
as regards the enslaved. The costs of liberating an enslaved person were to
be raised, even as marriage between whites and nonwhites of all kinds was
to be severely restricted. The regulations, instituted in 1785, granting more
“free” time to the enslaved and a less onerous workday were to be repealed.
Each district was to be allocated a new judge lieutenant of crime and police,
with wide authority over economic and police matters. The complicated
legal system was to be reorganized and codified. The planters envisaged
what they called “the complete regeneration of the Colony in all aspects
of its administration.”112 Regeneration was a privileged term among the re-
formers of the French Revolution, marking an understanding of a physical
need to repair the body politic. The colonists emphasized that “local experi-
ence is more certain than the best theory” and set out as a result to establish
permanent local assemblies, both colony-wide and provincial, to administer
this regeneration.113 As was later admitted, the move to give power to the
assemblies implied that “Saint-Domingue is not the subject but the ally of
France,” to quote an address to the Constituent Assembly in Paris in 1790.114
These Assemblies were, among other functions, to replace the Chambres
d’Agriculture and to reinforce their mission with greater authority. Among
the first tasks proposed was the production of a new topographic map of
the island and the precise determination of the boundaries of holdings by a
surveyor.115 Taken together these projects amounted to a local regeneration

Oversight 75
of oversight, with new formations of mapping and the force of law sustain-
ing the disciplined production of sugar.
The establishment of a plantation complex of visuality in the seven-
teenth century had entered into crisis, challenged first by the enslaved
themselves and now by the plantocracy. From the Makandal period on,
the enslaved had developed effective counters to the strategies of visual-
ized domination that had been forged in the settler plantation colonies. Far
from being deterred, the plantocracy sought to intensify their regime by
automating production, increasing labor, and tightening restrictions on the
enslaved, even as they claimed autonomy for the island from the metropole.
Both challenges to metropolitan authority came at a time of external dis-
ruption: Makandal had used the tumult of the Seven Years War to launch
his revolt, while the planters adapted the rhetoric of liberty and grievances
against the monarchy that were prevalent in the first years of the French
Revolution (1786–90). Oversight had sought to frame its authority locally
within the bounds of a given plantation that was subject to the surveillance
of a particular overseer. This authority gained force as the surrogation of the
omniscient gaze of the sovereign, even as it was granted an exceptional au-
tonomy from the procedures of judgment. By the late eighteenth century,
this localized practice was challenged from within and without by Ma-
roons, abolitionists, rebel slaves, and finally even the planters themselves.
Unable to sustain its form, the plantation complex entered a period of crisis,
competing with a new visualized regime of “liberty,” whose counterpoint
would be visuality.

76 Chapter One
 Two

The Modern Imaginary

Antislavery Revolutions and

the Right to Existence

The revolutions of France (1789–99) and Haiti (1791–1804) challenged and

overturned the ordering of the plantation complex, defeating both mon-
archy and slave-owning authority.1 While the overthrow of monarchs was
not without precedent, nowhere had plantation slavery been reversed. The
formation of Haiti as an independent nation on what had been the richest
plantation island of the Atlantic world marked a decisive turning point in
the ways that it was possible to imagine the relations of the people and au-
thority. The specter of African communism has haunted modern empires
ever since. This revolutionary geoimaginary was and is a central and in-
dispensable part of modernity. However, as it erupted into the plantation
complex, it was also paradoxically “unthinkable,” even as it happened in a
series of radicalizing steps that “challenged further the ontological order
of the West and the global order of colonialism.”2 The existence of this
new order within the old was constituted by a tension between new “lib-
erty” and old “slavery” in colony and metropole alike. Unlike the plantation
imaginary dominated by a single authority, this visualized revolution was
therefore structured around division. It was the modern form of dissensus,
defined by Rancière as “putting two worlds in one and the same world,”
that constitutes the political. In the antislavery revolutions of the period,
the imaginary of this dissensus was the question of “rights” and the right-
ing of wrongs. The decisive intervention in a dissensus over rights comes
when a person who does not have a given right claims it as if they already
do. It is a performative claim, validated only by the act of making it and
visualized as what I have called the right to look. The active imagining of
that right and its visualization produced modernity as the visualized con-
testation of right between authority and the people. So effectively was this
claim “unthought” by Carlyle and other apologists for autocracy that it is
only now fully being realized to what extent such diverse questions as sus-
tainability and the concept of universal history should be thought in rela-
tion to the antislavery revolutions. Far from being the preserve only of spe-
cialists, footnoted as a gesture to diversity by grand theorists of the modern,
it is here that the modern imaginary was formed.
The process produced what one might call a new imaginary of the
imaginary itself. For the division and dissensus imagined and enacted by
the Haitian Revolution was produced in the visualizing and understanding
of the psychic economy in equal measure with that of political economy.
The first moments of revolution were understood as an “awakening,” cre-
ating a vernacular form of what Walter Benjamin would later call the “opti-
cal unconscious.” From the realms of “sleep,” popular forces shook off the
literal and metaphorical chains of slavery. In the metropole, this awaken-
ing produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789),
designed both to recognize certain gains, especially the end of feudalism,
and to prevent new concessions. It was left to the enslaved and urban radi-
cals to revolutionize the revolution. Using the terminology of the African
diaspora, I call this new distribution of order “the politics of eating,” entail-
ing both the literal production and distribution of food (both staples and
cash crops), and the resulting authority. This politics challenged the “big
men” of slavery and created embodied counterpoints in the revolutionary
hero and the “people” who authorized him. For the Saint-Domingue rank-
and-file, sustenance and sustainability were the key issues, named in France
by the radical sans- culottes as the “right to existence.” Against all hitherto
existing concepts of history, the enslaved and their allies visualized them-
selves not only as acting within history, but as making History. Invested in
the hero was a willed emancipation in which those absolutely without a
part in the slave colony instituted their claim to be seen, a claim that gen-
erated an embodied aesthetic. Those so designated as heroes would ulti-
mately choose to sustain the nation-state rather than those without title,
creating a dissonance within the revolution that allowed figures like Napo-

78 Chapter Two
leon to emerge and remaster the popular imagination. For this supreme act
of self-fashioning, he would later become the prototype of the antirevolu-
tionary, anti-emancipation Hero for Carlyle. Nonetheless, the enslaved had
renamed themselves as the people, classified themselves as rights-holders,
and aestheticized their transformation in the person of the Hero and the
concept of History. This was not just an act of revolt, but the inauguration
of antislavery as revolution.
The resulting symbolic forms were both a representation of the revolu-
tionary process and an event within it. Their rapid circulation caused them
to “condense,” by which I mean that (for example) a designation of the
equality of the three “Estates,” or orders of French society, condensed from
being the subject of an entire representation to a symbolic triangle. In the
contested new imaginary, relations between the nation, the multitude and
liberty were literally worked out and visualized. With the collapse of royal
censorship in France and its empire, revolutionary events were visualized
as prints, engravings, or even paintings, ranging from the anonymous ver-
nacular caricature to works by pillars of the Royal Academy of Painting,
with some of the most interesting images being popular themes rendered
by elite artists.3 Further, the revolutionaries visualized new social agents,
such as the Third Estate (all the population who were not nobles or clergy),
the sans-culottes (the vernacular term for artisans and other middling
groups), and above all the formerly enslaved. By 1800, we can identify men
and women descended from the enslaved engaged in visualization: Madame
La Roche, a silhouettiste, in Saint-Domingue (fl. ca. 1800), and the painter
José Campeche (1751–1809), in Puerto Rico. The revolutionary geoimagi-
nary entailed new spatial imaginaries, such as the “land of liberty,” the space
in which rights were held to pertain. Colonial anthropology ventured into
the South Pacific in the hopes of locating a topographical origin for these
rights. Ironically, these ventures served as the beginnings of imperial visu-
ality structured around a distinction between “civilization” and the “primi-
tive.” Taken as a necessarily contested whole, this imaginary was not all
there was to the revolution, but it was nonetheless a revolutionary form, as
Lynn Hunt and Jack Censer have recently shown: “Artistic representation
of events and people was integral to the conflict over the meaning of the
French Revolution.”4 If “art” means visual representation and imagination
in its broadest sense, this position suggests that the visual image as a rep-
resentation of visualization did revolutionary work. Rather than merely
illustrate decisive events, visualized power worked as one of several episte-

The Modern Imaginary 79

mic apparatuses that were involved in producing the discursive practice of
the reality and realism of the Atlantic revolutions. Whereas monarchy was
eternal (“the King is dead, long live the King”), the sheer pressure of change
transformed visual form, creating a legacy that defined the contradictions
of modernity. To render the production of this imaginary comprehensible, I
have highlighted five central moments of entanglement between the revo-
lution against plantation slavery and that against feudal slavery that pro-
duced the new imaginary with which we are still in some senses engaged.
Consequently, the fifth act is not a dénouement so much as a further in-
tensification of revolutionary authority that would spark the beginnings of
both visuality and imperial visuality.

a wa K e n i n g s

It is the early days of the French Revolution, in August 1789. A technically

accomplished print produced anonymously shows a National Guardsman
running from a burning pile of feudal insignia, showing that the abolition
of feudalism, on 4 August 1789, was its cue (see fig. 18). It was an intersti-
tial moment, after the setting aside of feudal droits de seigneur (rights of the
lord), but before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had
been issued by the National Assembly. The scene depicts a low-lying colo-
nial island, with commercial ships visible sailing off the coast. Outside the
picture space, printed captions separated the “Land of Slaves,” at left, from
the “Land of Liberty,” at right, the direction in which the guardsman is
running. In the land of slaves, some plantation buildings can be seen flying
a flag, whereas in the land of liberty, the sun shines on free people, some
of whom are people of color, dancing around a Liberty tree and having a
celebratory drink. No work is being done. A Greco-Roman temple in the
background reinforces the allusiveness of the Phrygian cap, better known as
the liberty bonnet, on top of the tree. This awkward headgear had been the
symbol of emancipated slaves in the Roman empire. It was a visual icon of
freedom in the revolution in the North American British colonies, in 1776,
and came to be a garment worn during the French Revolution. Liberty in
general was understood here as the abolition of colonial slavery, bringing
freedom first to the colonies and then to the metropole. The print created
a universalized figure of slavery to refer to abuses colonial and domestic
that could never be restored once rectified. The colonial setting thus re-
called at once the slavery of feudalism and the beginnings of revolution in

80 Chapter Two
figure 18. AnonyM ous, “terre Des esclaVes—terre
De la liberté,” Collection de Vinck, tome 44, no. 6032, Biblio-
thèque nationale de france, Paris.

the Americas that was to be completed in France. The caption reads, “Once
there, you never go back,” referring to the land of liberty. This is the new
imaginary of revolution, visualized as a postslavery colonial space.
This print displays a vivid range of intellectual and visual reference to
represent the popular metaphor of life under the ancien régime as slavery.
It captures the paradoxical frame of mind described by Jean Jaurès (later
cited by both C. L. R. James and Christopher L. Miller) in his understand-
ing of the relation of slavery and the French Revolution: “The fortunes cre-
ated at Bordeaux, at Nantes by the slave trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that
pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.”5 This
contradiction was that visualized in this print, strikingly distinct from the

The Modern Imaginary 81

formal means used either by the painters of the Royal Academy or popular
woodblock prints of the period. It captures the sense of transformation as
described in a contemporary newspaper: “Finally, the moment has arrived
where a great revolution in ideas and things is going, so to speak, to trans-
port us out of the mire of slavery into the countries of liberty. . . . In the
new world, the brave inhabitants of Philadelphia have given an example
of a people reclaiming their liberty; France will give it to the rest of the
world.”6 From slavery via the Americas to freedom has been visualized as
“from slavery to freedom in the Americas.” This sense of permanent trans-
formation was also a revolutionary political aesthetic, later canonized in
Thomas Paine’s classic Rights of Man (1791). Paine consistently referred to
monarchic regimes as “slavery,” which were vulnerable to the revelation
of liberty: “The mind, in discovering truth, acts in the same manner as it
acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been
seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in
before it saw it.”7 Once seen, one never goes back. By extension, then, it is
not possible to “unknow . . . knowledge, or unthink . . . thoughts.” Once
seen, liberty cannot be unseen. “Unfreedom,” as slavery was euphemisti-
cally described in the late eighteenth century, become freedom could not
revert. This imaginary of the mind as physically retaining an irreversible
trace of intellectual ideas both anticipates Freud’s idea of the unconscious
as a writing pad and also looks back to the Enlightenment goal of per-
petual peace. Both were held to be irreversible: the unconscious never for-
gets and universal peace cannot be disturbed. In keeping with this psychic
dimension to revolutionary imaginary, the visual impact of the print relies
in significant part on the disproportionate size of the guardsman relative to
the background, as if he is intended to be “real,” while the background is a
metaphor. The background is a form of dream-work, given that it is obvi-
ously imaginary and that the symbols at work are highly condensed. These
impressions must be registered and described in a form of archiving that is
also the formation of a certain optical unconscious.8
Such visualizations seem poised between the iconography of monarchy
and Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Monarchy sustained a knowing dis-
tinction between the individual royal person, often frail, old, or tired, and
the unchanging glory of Majesty, visualized as the Sun itself, incorporating
a set of symbols, ranging from flags to coins and the paraphernalia of king-
ship, such as scepters and crowns. For Freud, dreams condense the complex
dynamics of the psyche into symbols. In his view, condensation creates “an

82 Chapter Two
intermediate common entity” out of the conflicting elements that are sub-
ject to being “overdetermined,” that is to say, used repeatedly with multiple
associations. This condensation is crucial for the dream-symbol to achieve
the intensity to force it out of the unconscious into dream-work.9 This con-
densation was achieved in revolutionary images by the intensity of social
conflict being represented, images that then circulated around the Atlantic
world. The combination of conflict and circulation produced the embodied
form of the hero. This hero was not necessarily a named individual so much
as the visualized embodiment of revolution. The National Guardsman was
one such imagined hero in the moment of transformation, like Superman
emerging from his phone-booth. Perhaps the best-known popular image of
1789 was of this kind, known as The Awakening of the Third Estate (see plate 3).
In this relatively simple lithograph, a then new technology designed for
mass reproduction, a figure representing the Third Estate awakes in the
shadow of the Bastille, the notorious royal prison that had been stormed
on 14 July. The caption, written in popular argot, reads, “What a con, time
I woke up, the oppression of these chains is giving me a nightmare that’s
a little too strong.” The popular print medium combined with the dialect
made this in every sense a vernacular image. The Third Estate was a ver-
nacular hero, while the ancien régime was now literally represented as a bad
dream from which the Third Estate was struggling to wake, laden down
with chains, creating the overdetermined reference to chattel slavery. As
the Third Estate wakes, he finds himself surrounded by weapons, causing
fear and panic in the priest and the noble standing nearby. The transforma-
tional experience of revolution was visualized as the awakening of a heroic
popular figure from a nightmare incarnated as slavery into a new possi-
bility of liberty. Of course, the other possibility is that this “awakening”
was itself part of the dream and not yet achieved. The Third Estate was an
“intermediate entity,” whose identity was subject to intense questioning. In
the best-known account of the Third Estate by the abbé Sieyès, there is no
need to have a monarchy to have a nation, the very situation that the print
visualizes.10
If monarchy was the Sun, which also made its power visible, it was in a
certain sense blind, insofar as it did not see specific events. As Foucault em-
phasized, sovereignty was the power to withdraw life.11 It repaired damage
to the body-politic by inflicting retributive violence on the body of the
condemned, but it did not see the crime as it was happening. By challeng-
ing royal authority, forever symbolized by the storming of the Bastille, the

The Modern Imaginary 83

popular forces claimed a different means to see events and to administer
justice. Both were expressed as the Lantern, literally meaning the révèr-
beres, the mirror-based streetlights installed in Paris, in the 1760s, to illumi-
nate the night. The cry “To the lantern!” was a call for summary execution
from the sturdy metal lampposts. The image of the Lantern emerged as a
visible symbol of popular justice, directed at the physical bodies of the First
Estate, or the nobility, and at the metaphysical body of Majesty and its claim
to illuminate the world. Writing in that summer of 1789, Camille Desmou-
lins proposed a new national holiday: “Passover will be celebrated on the
14th of July. It is the day of the liberation from servitude in Egypt. . . . [I]t
is the great festival of lanterns.”12 The proposed festival of popular liberation
was a prophetic celebration of the end of slavery in which the new Moses,
showing the way to the promised land, was the people itself, symbolized
by the Lantern. The Lantern was the people and it was also a living ma-
chine in the service of the revolution, always on hand to accelerate change
and to eliminate obstacles. It was shown with its own viewpoint on 14 July
(see fig. 19). It was depicted flying with wings to chase the enemy or as a
walking machine labeled “First Avenger of Crimes.” This Avenger marked
the historical halfway point between the Golem and the Terminator as mo-
dalities of the automated popular hero. Vernacular images, like that of the
Lantern, now became political agents in themselves. For instance, immedi-
ately after the passing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citi-
zen, there was an effort to restrict the franchise to the wealthy, thereby re-
futing any claim to universality. One such proposal was that only those who
paid a marc d’argent in taxes could be eligible to vote. As a silver mark was
worth fifty-two livres, or pounds, that would have excluded almost all the
population. A similar proposal from Saint-Domingue specified that only
those identified in the census as owning twenty slaves would be allowed to
vote.13 This exclusionary rule failed, noted Condorcet, because “the carica-
tures had made it ridiculous.”14 For example, a print entitled Balance Eligible
du Marc d’Argent shows the Lantern supervising a balance between a heavy
boar, signifying the aristocracy, and the Third Estate, which it outweighs.
The idea of a fat pig outweighing the people was enough to make the care-
ful phrases about property and responsibility seem absurd.
Much of the politics of the revolution was enacted in direct action that
also had profound symbolic form. The prints and lithographs that survive
were part of this extended performative drama. In this case, the visibility
of colonial slavery contradicted the claim that the revolution had created

84 Chapter Two
figure 19. AnonyM ous, tHe lantern looks at 14 July (PA r i s, 1789).
Photo courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de france.

liberty for all. In August 1789, the same month as the Declaration of the
Rights of Man was made, a group of the enslaved wrote to the governor
of Martinique: “We know we are free.”15 Those who are “slaves” cannot say
“we are free,” except in dissensus. By the same token, Olympe de Gouges
later claimed civil rights for women because they were liable to legal penal-
ties. Her point was that if women are legal subjects when accused of crimes,
they should be majoritarian legal subjects at all times.16 That same hot sum-
mer of 1789, the Saint-Domingue revolutionary Vincent Ogé, a wealthy
planter of color, demanded admission to the National Assembly of white
colonists from the island at the Hotel Massiac. This address was in and of
itself destructive of the colonial order of things, by its refusal to acknowl-
edge the colonial color line. As he attempted to cross it, Ogé declared that
the “union” of liberty and reason “produces a uniform light, ardent and
pure, which, in enlightening our spirits can inflame all hearts.”17 By his

The Modern Imaginary 85

very embodiment, Ogé testified that the color line was more honored in
the breach than the observance. In speaking the metaphorical language of
sexual reproduction, he became “unthinkable” to the colonists, who denied
him access. His assertion that revolution was so pure a light that all became
color-blind challenged the light of monarchy as well as the racialization
of slavery. Rebuffed, Ogé returned in secret to Saint-Domingue, where he
launched an uprising, in October 1790, for those he called “the American
colonists formerly known under the insulting epithet ‘mixed blood.’”18 Un-
able to support the enslaved, or recruit local people of color in force, he
fled, only to be deported back to Saint-Domingue, where he was brutally
executed. Not all awakenings had been realized. Once seen, it seems, one
can still go back.

t h e wa l l o f r i g h t s

That possibility was produced in both practical and representational politics

concerning the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, issued by
the National Assembly of France in August 1789. The Declaration (as I shall
call it from now on) opened a visualized problematic as to who was and was
not included in the “universal,” limiting the right in rights. This perfor-
mative representation necessarily set limits, just as a perspective drawing
shapes and directs the field of vision. In another famous lithograph, from
1789, the figure of the Third Estate is again seen, now reaching down to lift
a bundle labeled “the rights of man” from a figure representing liberty, with
another argot caption: “Ha, I’ll be well pleased when we have all these here
papers.” Here progress is represented as upward movement and the passing
of legislation both from the netherworld into the light and metaphorically
from the visible to the sayable. The dream of transformation took on textual
form to prevent any regressions. The mythical space below ground was tra-
ditionally that of Hell or the grave, but here it has become a popular zone,
the land of the people, hitherto excluded, now coming into view.19 The land
of the people may have existed previously, but it was not a political actor,
or recognized as such. We need to distinguish between “the people” ruled
over by a monarch and the anti-state popular forces so detested by thinkers
like Hobbes, who distinguished the two senses: “The People, stirring up the
Citizens against the City, that is to say, the Multitude against the People.”20 In
contemplating the French Revolution, the British conservative Edmund
Burke similarly condemned the “swinish multitude.” So this image might

86 Chapter Two
also be seen as the dream-world of the multitude, moving from the night-
mare of the ancien régime to the imagined future of the rights of man. This
unconscious was necessarily in the dark, out of sight of the Sun (King). The
question was exactly what would or could be written on those papers. These
are, then, literally dream images, the formation of a group psychology try-
ing to imagine different futures that seem to be at hand.21
When the actual “papers” reached the light of day, far from proposing
a universalism based on nature, the Declaration upheld a series of national
claims and positions, inflected by race, gender, and class. In the final text,
there was no abolition of slavery; it limited the “universal” to those al-
ready “free,” that is, the non-enslaved adult male citizen. This position was
not simply one of omission, for slavery had been much discussed. Jacques
Necker, Louis XVI’s leading minister, for example, spoke against chattel
slavery in 1789, noting “these men similar to us in thought and above all
in the sad faculty of suffering.”22 In many of the drafts proposed over the
five weeks of debate, a clause would have offered all citizens the property
of their own person, thereby making slavery illegal. Such a clause was in
fact inserted by the Convention, in 1793, prior to the abolition of slavery,
in February 1794. In 1789, one proposal, claiming to have been written by
a peasant, made this the very first article of the Declaration, and it was in-
cluded in several others.23 Another proposal, by the noble de Boislandry,
declared that “France is a country of liberty, where no man can be subject
to mainmort, be a serf or a slave: it is enough to live to be free.”24 Indeed, a
number of slaves had successfully claimed freedom in French courts under
this rubric during the ancien régime. Now the “land of liberty” was being
recast as always and already “France.” During the 1789 debate, the liberal
aristocrat the Comte de Castellane reminded the National Assembly of this
uniquely French quality of rights: “However, gentlemen, if you deign to
cast your eyes around the world’s surface, you will without doubt shiver as
I do to see how few nations have preserved not even what I would call the
totality of their rights, but some ideas, some remains of their liberty; with-
out being obliged to cite the entirety of Asia, or the unfortunate Africans
who have found in the islands an even harder slavery than that they ex-
perienced in their own country; without, I say, leaving Europe, we can see
entire peoples who believe themselves to be the property of some master.”25
Despite recent assertions that the Declaration granted rights by simple fact
of birth, they were clearly limited, not universal even within Europe, with
boundaries delimited by slavery and the “Oriental.” In fact, many mem-

The Modern Imaginary 87

bers of the National Assembly argued against the Declaration altogether,
saying that its principles were self-evident, that it should be accompanied
by a list of “duties,” or that it should be postponed until a constitution had
been written. All these maneuvers had the more or less explicit goal of pre-
venting a declaration and it was not until the proposal to add duties to the
articles of rights had been defeated, on 11 August 1789, by the relatively
close margin of 570 to 433 that it was clear that it would pass.26 For many
delegates, even France was not to be imagined as a land of liberty so much
as one of duty.
The Declaration should thus be understood less as a precisely formu-
lated set of words and more as a symbol, interpreted differently from place
to place and person to person. A well-known print, from 1789, by Claude
Niquet the younger placed the full text of the Declaration on a tablet sup-
ported by a vaguely biblical palm tree, itself a symbol of regeneration (see
fig. 20). The tablet was placed so as to catch the light coming from the sun,
which can be read as the monarchy in the tradition of the Sun King. The
regenerative power of the Declaration was symbolized by a woman show-
ing a child the text. In the light, a group of figures dance around a liberty
pole, a symbol of the American Revolution (itself a Dutch Protestant em-
blem) and thereby also an allusion to the concept of the American “land of
liberty.”27 In the dark shadows of Niquet’s image, feudalism is laid low by
lightning, an attribute both of Moses receiving the tablets of the Law on
Mount Sinai, and of the Ark of the Covenant.28 The monarchy had long ap-
propriated these biblical references, most notably in Louis XIV’s personal
chapel at Versailles, decorated with bas-relief carvings of the Ark and the
Tablets of the Law. Niquet’s print was dense with such reference, appealing
to the educated rather than the vernacular audience, with its final meaning
being a monarchical endorsement of the Declaration as light over shadow
and thereby of monarchy as the savior of France. France was free by virtue
of its subjection to monarchy, which had offered rights to the people as
a gift.
These complex allegories condensed into an intermediate form as the
Tablets of the Law. This image, which became hegemonic for the Decla-
ration, was created by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier (1738–1836), a his-
tory painter from the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, with the
print itself being made by Pierre Laurent (1739–1809) (see fig. 21).29 Le Bar-
bier adapted quickly from being a painter for the king to being one for

88 Chapter Two
figure 20. ClAude niquet the younger, Declaration
oF tHe rigHts oF man anD tHe citizen (PAris, 1789).

the revolution—and later back again. His print of the Declaration was first
sold at the high price of four livres from the academy’s own shop in Paris,
in August 1789, before being distributed nationwide.30 His image was thus
formed and disseminated within the institutions of the ancien régime and
literally contained radical interpretations. The picture space was almost en-
tirely taken up with the text of the Declaration, depicted as if carved into
stone in the shape of Moses’ tablets. As expected from the Academy, there
was neoclassical imagery, such as the fasces, together with the revolutionary
liberty bonnet. The monumental size of the tablets formed a wall, marking
a limit to those with rights and those without, as if Niquet’s tablets had been
raised to dominate the entire space of representation. Such projective and
theatrical facades would have been familiar to eighteenth- century citizens
from Baroque churches. The device thus incorporates classical, “Jewish,”
and Catholic imagery into the emblem for rights, giving it visual authority
and power.
A wall is designed both to keep something out and to keep something

The Modern Imaginary 89

figure 21. JAC ques - frAnçois le BArB ier, Declaration
oF tHe rigHts oF man anD tHe citizen (1789, PAr i s).
in. The “wall” of rights was designed to serve as a reconfigured mode of
separation within the continued monarchical order. The Declaration was
a structure to ensure the continuation and expansion of private property
without the encroachments of past feudalism or any future egalitarianism.
Its exclusions were also questions of boundaries and limits, denoted by the
two allegorical female figures sitting on top of the wall. On the left was
France, holding the now obligatory broken chains of feudal slavery, and on
the right a winged figure of Law. Light comes from the Eye of Reason in a
triangle above, itself a condensed form of the three-sided balance that had
become a symbol of the unity of the three estates in the National Assembly.
Further, the eye had been an attribute of the allegorical figure of Reason,
which she would carry on a scepter that quickly condensed to represent
Reason, as it does here.31 The image was a projection of the new terrain of a
united France, held together by what the text called “liberty, prudence and
the wisdom of government,” rather than by the body of the King. It was
also a taxonomy of the tenets of that liberty, and as a decree of the National
Assembly, it had the force of law. This was an image designed to end debate
and contain the radical potential of the Declaration and vernacular imagery
alike into recognizable forms within the framework of colonial monarchy.
Widely disseminated in France and still recognizable today, the Declaration
as a wall of law named the classifications of limited rights, separated those
with right from those without, and aestheticized the resulting visualization
of the new form of France as an imagined community.
The separation was directed in no small measure to the French colo-
nies and plantations, where the revolution created expectations of radi-
cal change, leading images and texts to circulate in unaccustomed and
newly powerful ways. For example, on 28 May 1790, the colonial assembly
at Saint-Marc on Saint-Domingue claimed that the Declaration gave the
planters the right to supervise all the internal affairs of the colony, meaning
above all their “right” to continue to own human property.32 At the same
time, they feared an “awakening” of the enslaved and would always claim
that it had been instigated from “outside,” ignoring a century of evidence
to the contrary.33 In the first days of the Saint-Domingue revolution, in Au-
gust 1791, a planter claimed to have captured an enslaved rebel with “pam-
phlets printed in France [concerning] the Rights of Man. . . . On his chest,
he had a little sack full of hair, herbs, bits of bone, which they call a fetish.”34
The description of the “fetish” fits that of the power-figures associated with
earlier claims to liberty and figured the Declaration as another “primitive”

The Modern Imaginary 91

fetish. Another planter, named Félix Carteau, later went so far as to argue
that books and visual images had caused the revolution, especially the en-
gravings that the enslaved could look at “and listen to the interpretation
of the subject, which was repeated from mouth to mouth.”35 At the same
time, if it did not create the idea of freedom, the Declaration gave support
to the enslaved and their claims. A “mulatta” woman named Dodo Laplaine
was whipped and branded in Le Cap, the capital of Saint-Domingue, at the
end of 1791 for reading the Declaration to the enslaved.36 French percep-
tions of the centrality of the Declaration were not met by the experience of
the revolution itself. When the French commissioner Sonthonax declared
slavery abolished, in August 1793, the first article of his Decree of General
Liberty provided for the publication and display of the Declaration “every-
where it is needed.”37 But, as it had become clear that the Declaration had
not been intended to grant liberty to the enslaved, Haiti’s 1804 Declaration
of Independence did not refer to it.38
If it was widely agreed that authority was now limited by a culture of
rights, it did not necessarily follow, as the Saint-Domingue planters argued,
that chattel slavery had to be opposed. Rights were always about boundaries
and limits, the practicalities of the universal they claimed to be. An impor-
tant print produced in Paris after the festival of 14 September 1791, cele-
brating the passing of the constitution, visualized these limits. It depicted
the allegorical figure of the Nation carving the Declaration and the Con-
stitution, using the scepter of legislative power as a chisel (see fig. 22). The
symbol of the wall used to denote the Declaration had literally condensed,
enabling its boundaries to be made visible within the picture space. The
“land of slaves” that bordered the “land of liberty” could now be seen. On
the far right is the tomb of Mirabeau, a hero of 1789, who had recently died,
evoking his claim that the Declaration should have abolished slavery: “The
distinction of color destroys equality of rights.”39 On the far left, an “Asian
despot” looks on in fear, a familiar caricature from sources as varied as Mon-
tesquieu’s classic Lettres Persanes and the anti-Islam doctrines of Christianity.
In an interesting conflation, the text identifies him as a “rich slave of Asia,
who does not know what all of this might mean: the poor thing, in his
country even the name of liberty is not known” (see fig. 22a). The majori-
tarian Frenchmen who gained rights in 1789 insisted that “universal” liberty
was specific to their national territory, a form of ius soli (law of the soil) that
could in no way be exported or even explained to Asians or Africans, who
were similarly defined by their unfreedom. Awakening and the visualiza-

92 Chapter Two
figure 22. Anon yMous, la constitution Française (1791),
from Michel Vovelle, ed., la révolution française: images et recit, tome 2, 307.
 fi g u r e 22A .
“ t h e A s i An d e sP ot,”
d e tAi l f r o M la con­
stitution Française.

tion of the land of the people had been met by walls and limits, symbolized
by the borders of France. Attempting to contain an explosion can, however,
simply magnify its effects.

t h e P o l i t i c s o f e at i n g

If rights had become a limit, the “work of righting wrongs” had to be re-
configured.40 The imaginary centered on a “land of liberty” from which
no retreat could be made had turned out to be simply an awakening of ex-
pectations. These hopes might be summarized as the desire for the end of
slavery and the institution of a new ordering of “eating.” In West Africa and
Kongo and their diaspora, the “politics of eating” expresses a concept of
social ordering:41 “An ordered society is one in which ‘eating,’ both literal
and metaphorical . . . is properly distributed.”42 A ruler should eat, prodi-
giously, but should also ensure that all the people do, entailing some nego-
tiations with the spirits who need “feeding” and ndoki (witches) that “eat
people.” Eating is, then, the distribution of the sensible and its resultant
ordering to sustain itself. The subalterns of the Saint-Domingue revolu-

94 Chapter Two
tion were above all concerned to create a sustainable local economy out-
side slavery. Although it was the producer of the greatest colonial wealth,
Saint-Domingue was a place of extreme material deprivation for the en-
slaved population, a situation attested to by its failure to reproduce itself.
While over 800,000 enslaved Africans were brought to the colony during
the eighteenth century, the resident population was only just over 400,000
in 1788, a population loss caused partly by violence, but mostly by depri-
vation. By the same token, the revolutionary unrest from below in France
was linked to the failure of the king to sustain food provision, the most
fundamental function of sovereignty, necessitating vengeance. The radi-
cal sans-culottes in Paris formulated this need into a political project that
they called “the right to existence.”43 Colonial produce was central to the
food supply of the Parisian multitude, linking the two modalities of eating.
In the revolutionary crisis, a performative iconography of eating explored
power, the righting of wrongs, and the distribution of material goods to
create an imaginary of modernity.
A predatory, vampiric modernity was engendered by the slave trade
across the Atlantic world that persists until the present.44 The right to exis-
tence sought to right this wrong. In a brilliant interpretation of witch-
craft among the Temne people, in Sierra Leone, Rosalind Shaw shows that
“witchcraft” was at once produced by the slave trade and intensified it as an
economy of power. Before slavery, misfortunes were dealt with by making
requests of the gods and spirits, which Europeans called “idols.” The evils of
slavery led Temne people to attribute their wrongs directly to the actions of
an individual, a “witch,” whose agency could be unmasked. Witch-finding
allowed those discovered to be enslaved in turn as a punishment for their
own presumed “eating” of others. This divination allowed for “an ‘eating’
in which the appearance and accumulation of new wealth was engendered
by the disappearance of people into oblivion.”45 The witch was reputed to
have four eyes, two to see in the spirit world and two for material space. The
witch-finder, too, claimed special powers of seeing and interpretation. This
symbolic order allowed for the righting of wrongs by attributing them to
the agency of specific individuals, known as witches, magicians, conjurors,
those who fooled the people—or traitors, (counter-)revolutionaries, or any
of the other categories of wrong-doer referenced in the revolution. Such a
person could be enslaved. One measure of the politics of eating was literal
and metaphorical size. A “big man” might be on the people’s side against
the witches, but might also use witch-finding skills to enslave them. Witch

The Modern Imaginary 95

trials in seventeenth- century Europe and North America were, it should be
remembered, followed by the creation of modern circulation embodied in
people reputed to be witches and sold into slavery. In the revolution, the
people responded by endorsing their own champions, those who became
“heroes” or “great men” (the French grand homme can mean “big man” or
“great man”). Slave traders were also known as “big men,” in the same way
as the African leaders they dealt with, because both “ate” the people.46 Euro-
peans in Saint-Domingue were known as “big whites” or “little whites” ac-
cording to their social and financial status. In 1791, the French Revolution
had constructed a pantheon to its grands hommes, beginning with the ashes
of Voltaire, who had invested in the slave trade and even had a slave-ship
named after him, while on other occasions he had roundly condemned the
institution.47 It was this modernity that was challenged in Saint-Domingue
and Paris alike.
To take an example of that imaginary, which featured largely in both
Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution and Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two
Cities: early in the French Revolution, on 22 July 1789, the detested govern-
ment minister Joseph Foullon, who had suggested that the hungry people
eat grass, was hanged from a streetlamp in the Place de Grève, Paris, scene
of the spectacular execution of the regicide Damiens forty years previously.
The Lantern revenged the people against the Crown, where the monarchy
had previously restored itself. The mouth of Foullon’s decapitated head was
then stuffed with hay and paraded through the streets, an apotropaic per-
formance that visited the fate intended for the masses on the minister.48
The artist Anne-Louis Girodet, later to paint Jean-Baptiste Belley, an Afri-
can delegate to the National Assembly from Saint-Domingue, was on the
scene, and he made some sketches “after nature,” or, more exactly, of the
new reality created by the revolution.49 In this new realism, Foullon’s head
was sketched from the front and the rear, showing the hay in his mouth
sprouting out beneath a handlebar moustache in a way that is unmistakably
comic, albeit in a terrible way (see fig. 23). It was one of a sheet of sketches
of decapitated heads that also showed the head of the marquis de Launay,
governor of the Bastille, on a pitchfork, with a look of surprise on his face,
and the mutilated head and heart of Bertier de Sauvigny, intendant of Paris,
on pikes. The last was Foullon’s son-in-law, executed on the same day, for
the kin of a witch were also considered witches. In a ritual symbolizing the
reversal of power from kinship network to popular sovereignty, Bertier
was presented with Foullon’s head on a pike to chants of “Baise papa” (kiss

96 Chapter Two
figure 23. Anne - louis g irodet, untitleD [sketcHes aFter nature ] (1789).

Daddy).50 Bertier’s own symbolic “eating” was then made plain by the dis-
play of his heart as a trophy alongside his head. While artists had long been
urged to draw from classical sculptures showing the effects of personal suf-
fering, these drawings are evidence of a new revolutionary realism, trying
to keep pace with changing events. It is not what one might call natural-
ism, or an attempt to depict exterior reality as closely as possible. In French,
a still life is nature morte, dead nature. Revolutionary executions prompted
a debate about end of life and whether the head continued to “live” briefly
after decapitation. These are, then, studies after undead nature, an explo-
ration of the interstitial, magical zone that the revolution had engendered.
The revolution did not create this vampiric eating, but visited it in kind on
those who had done so.
Indeed, the threat of decapitation entered into the dream-work of
French citizens not as the now standard Freudian formula “decapitation =
castration,” but as itself, a fear of (and desire for) execution.51 Dreaming and
madness explored the new imaginary and exposed its limits. Philippe de
Pinel, the famous liberator of Bicêtre, is supposed to have cast off the chains
of those detained as insane, a widely celebrated “liberation” that metonymi-
cally replicated the revolution itself. Pinel compared the former regime
in what he called “lunatic hospitals” to that of “despotic governments,”

The Modern Imaginary 97

where the inmate was treated as “an untameable being, to be immured in
solitary durance, loaded with chains, or otherwise treated with extreme
severity.”52 While this description seems designed to recall slavery, Pinel
emphasized that it would be “ridiculous” to treat everyone in the same way:
“A Russian peasant, or a slave of Jamaica, ought evidently to be managed
by other maxims than those which would exclusively apply to the case of a
well-bred irritable Frenchman.”53 It seems that “breeding,” mixing race and
class together, trumps insanity. Further, as Foucault has emphasized, Pinel’s
liberation of madness entailed a new “enslavement,” to the institution of
the asylum.54 He stressed that the “notion of madness, such as it existed
in the nineteenth century, took shape inside a historical consciousness.”55
For Pinel, slavery existed “outside” history, just as the French revolutionary
process had depicted it. By contrast, the revolution was everywhere in his
asylum, where there could be found a watchmaker who believed that he
had been guillotined but then, having had his sentence reversed, had been
given the wrong head back. Another believed he was to be executed, and
still a third lived in perpetual fear that he might be tried.56 None of these
men could be persuaded otherwise, even in the case of the last, the tailor
Poussin, for whom Pinel staged a mock trial and acquittal. Such traumas,
caused by what we call history, were understood by Pinel as derangements
of the imagination, whose excess was considered the prime cause of mad-
ness throughout the eighteenth century.57 The intensification of the imagi-
nation caused by the revolution had in turn engendered an explosion of
madness.
For Freud, as Foucault goes on to say, madness was considered a moral
and social question, “the hidden face of society.” Nonetheless, revolution-
ary beheading did not necessarily symbolize castration. Freud considered
the experience of Maury, a French doctor and his precursor in the study of
dreams, who had dreamed that he had been tried, condemned, and exe-
cuted by the guillotine, right up to the point where he felt his “head being
separated from his body.”58 It turned out that a piece of wood from the top
of Maury’s bed had fallen and struck his neck in the place where a person
might be executed. Freud discussed the remarkable length of the dream
from trial to execution in response to this instantaneous stimulus. He con-
cluded that the dream was a “phantasy which had been stored up ready-
made in his memory” and was accessed because of the sensation on the neck.
Freud indulged himself in recreating this phantasy involving the gallantry
and wit of the aristocrat on the scaffold, “bidding a lady farewell—kissing

98 Chapter Two
her hand and mounting the scaffold unafraid!” Or maybe ambition was the
key, a desire to “picture himself as one of the Girondists, perhaps, or as the
heroic Danton!”59 No need here to explore the sexualized ramifications of
all this, the erotics of picturing oneself a hero at a century’s remove from
the scene of visuality’s formation. It seems that the revolution retained a
capacity for mental damage by overstimulus to the imagination for Maury/
Freud and the countless readers of Carlyle, Dickens, Anatole France, and
the other dramatizers of the revolutionary scene in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Note also that one identification is impossible or at least inadmissible
within all this dream-work, mania, and phantasy: an identification with the
revolution. The revolution was the “bad liberty” that led to the tyranny of
popular rule, opposed to the “good liberty” that simultaneously unchained
the well-bred mad, separated them from criminals and other subjects of de-
tention, and then inserted them into the institutional structure of the asy-
lum.60 An entire imaginary of modernity is condensed into these formulas
of limit, fantasy, exclusion, excess, desire, and the dream.
In Saint-Domingue, the very outside of the European dream-world,
the revolution that began in August 1791 was a decapitation of the means
of (sugar) production, led by the enslaved elite, such as the drivers, most
notably Toussaint from the Bréda plantation, who took the name L’Ouver-
ture, the opening. The surrogates of the overseers revolted against the new
forms of oversight, tending toward the automation of production. The pat-
tern of events in 1791 made it very clear that the enslaved would no longer
be “eaten” by the means of wealth production. The revolutionaries de-
stroyed sugar mills, burned cane fields, and killed such overseers and plan-
tation owners as they could find, a noticeable change from the “traditional”
revolt in which the trash-house, where the dried cane fibers used to fuel the
burners were stored, was set on fire. Fields were even flooded to prevent
any return to full-scale plantation cultivation.61 In November 1791, Dutty
Boukman, the first leader of the revolution and a former slave-driver, was
captured. He was beheaded, and his head was publicly displayed to dispel
the myth of his invincibility. The remaining leaders, such as Jean-François
and Georges Biassou, now sought a settlement. They proposed an amnesty
for all the revolutionaries; the banning of the whip and the cachot, or prison,
on the plantations; freedom for four hundred of the commandeurs; and the
abolition of all attorneys and bookkeepers.62 In short, the labor hierarchy
that planter regeneration depended on was to be abolished, even if slavery
was not. For the historian C. L. R. James, these proposals were therefore

The Modern Imaginary 99

nothing short of an “abominable betrayal,” one that has more recently been
castigated, by Robin Blackburn, as “servile trade unionism.”63 If these judg-
ments seem harsh, they also show that the long history of modernity is
understood to be condensed into these first revolutionary exchanges. How-
ever, other than the Maroon partitions of colonies, no revolt of the enslaved
had yet succeeded in making permanent gains. Indeed, the Le Chapelier
law, of 1791, which outlawed trade unions in France, had long-lasting nega-
tive consequences for the nineteenth- century French labor movement.
Finally, any negotiated settlement would have entailed a recognition of
the enslaved as rational human beings that was a critical gain in itself. For
twentieth- century writers, these gains would never have been sufficient,
threatening to erase the possibility of revolution that still seemed alive in
their own time.
Unaware of this future to come, the rank-and-file of the revolutionary
armed forces were above all concerned to ensure their “right to existence”
by winning their “three days,” meaning three days during which they would
not have to work on the plantation but could attend to their own culti-
vation. These subalterns and their leaders were formulating what would
have seemed “unthinkable” until 1791: vernacular demands on sovereign
power.64 The planters rejected this interim proposal, further radicalizing
the enslaved under arms, whose slogan now became “bout à blancs,” that is,
“an end to the whites.”65 The subaltern strategy countered planter regen-
eration by imagining a general self-sufficiency created by the allocation of
small parcels of arable land to each person, reinforced by a local market
economy for non- essential and recreational goods and to exchange sur-
plus. The subalterns were in effect claiming the right to eat via ownership
and extension of the “slave gardens,” which already generated a good deal
of revenue for the enslaved in Saint-Domingue at the Sunday food market
in Le Cap. The means of exchange was by barter or by pieces of sugarcane
that in an evocative fashion became a money-form for the enslaved.66 We
can get a sense of what postslavery cultivation might have looked like by
comparing two surveys taken of “Negro Gardens” in Jamaica. In a survey
taken in 1811, with slavery in full vigor, each person was allocated a small
plot of about half an acre in a rigidly geometric pattern. By 1837, during
the “apprenticeship” that led to full abolition, in 1838, the area of each plot
was much larger, reaching as much as sixteen acres, and the cultivation was
shared on each plot among men, women, and children of all ages (see fig.
24). Crops grown ranged from staples like yam, cassava, and plantain to cash

100 Chapter Two
figure 24. edWArd M. g eAC hy, a plan oF tHe
negro grounDs, green Valley plantation (1837),
from Barry higman, ed., Jamaica surveyed.

crops like sugarcane and guinea grass.67 It seems reasonable to assume that
this difference did not reflect the attitude of the planters in these locations,
but how the formerly enslaved envisaged their future. This style of culti-
vation could certainly have supplied enough to eat and a surplus for local
exchange. Even hostile observers remarked on the diversity of the local
markets, seeing products from hats and sculpted calabashes to fish, fruit
and game.68 The market during slavery and the “garden” after it, with their
associated economic and social structures, embodied the politics of eating
in Saint-Domingue in all senses.
The very success of the revolution in Saint-Domingue generated in
France shortages and price rises of colonial products like sugar and cof-

The Modern Imaginary 101

fee, which set off popular agitations and even riots, bringing to a head the
contradictions of national and social revolution. Sugared coffee had become
a staple foodstuff of the Parisian working classes, especially for breakfast, as
it is today. When these commodities seemed to be both rising in price and
in short supply, the popular forces were not inclined to accept these changes
as a market response to the revolution of 1791, as merchants wanted to
present them. Rather, seeing well-stocked storage places, they intervened
directly to ensure fair prices. Even government officials described the mer-
chants’ idea that prices should be set by “the consumer’s fancy,” that is to say,
by demand, as nothing more than a “sophism.”69 The realism of the market
that is now all but unquestionable had yet to claim the definition of reality.
The “wall” of property rights that sustained the revolutionary leadership
seemed on the verge of collapse, creating the same fear of anarchy that
the planters had experienced in Saint-Domingue. Such interventions were
justified as a protection of the “indigent,” the symbolic vernacular figure
of poverty.70 From this position, a society could be run to ensure the sus-
tenance of the neediest, rather than the “equality” of value offered by the
market. Into this charged environment emerged new popular discourses. A
typical police report of February 1793 described an intervention at a sugar
warehouse, beginning with the dramatic cry of a pregnant woman: “I must
have sugar for my little one!”71
The commissioners for the Arsenal section described another such event
in detail.

There was a woman of fairly good appearance, unknown to me but

whom we would recognize perfectly. . . . She was about five feet, one
inch tall, thirty years old, with blonde hair, white skin and slightly red
eyes. She wore her hair in a demibonnet to which a rose-colored ribbon
was attached. She was dressed in a déshabillé made out of linen with a blue
background and a standard design on it. She wore a mantlet of black taf-
fetta and a gold watch on a steel chain. . . . This woman did everything
in her power to add to the sedition. She had gone on the inspection [of
the warehouse]. And once they returned, it was she who set the price for
soap at twelve sous per pound and for sugar at eighteen.72

This passage attests to the observational power of the police, whose eye
for detail makes the account read like a realist novel, accruing its “reality
effect” item by item. It creates a compelling image of the seditious woman,
stylishly dressed as bohemian, cutting sugar prices from sixty sous a pound

102 Chapter Two
to eighteen, a rate even below the pre-speculation price of about twenty-
five sous. Egalitarian price control was the metropolitan equivalent of the
land-sharing politics of the Saint-Domingue subalterns, and it is appropri-
ate that colonial produce should have sparked the dissensus. This combina-
tion of colonial goods, popular agency in the market, the politicization of
women’s roles as mothers and as consumers, and police observation is a dia-
lectical image in which the egalitarian, vernacular forces of the revolution
can be seen for an instant.
For the sans-culotte movement of artisans, shopkeepers and laborers, the
renewed Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in 1793, came
to imply a “right to live” that surpassed the rights of property.73 They con-
demned “those who, using liberty and their rights as property-owners as an
excuse, think that they can squeeze the last drop of blood from the miser-
able and starving section of the population.”74 In the terms of the politics
of eating, one might summarize this position as “No more vampires!” or the
more familiar “bloodsuckers” of popular discourse. This movement reached
its highpoint with the imposition of the “maximum,” meaning price ceil-
ings for basic foodstuffs in the Year Two (1793–94). Indeed, the price of
bread was set by the state until 1978, a legacy of this popular struggle. The
sections of the Paris Commune referred directly to the Declaration in sup-
port of price regulation, citing article 4’s proposition that liberty consists
in not hurting others and article 6 to the effect that one does not have
the liberty to harm others. Their opponents consistently referred to the
“sacred right of property” as trumping all such secondary concerns.75 Their
fears were soon realized as radical thinkers began to draw the conclusion
that ownership of land itself should be limited, to as little as twenty acres
in some proposals.76 In 1804, independent Haiti would forbid all property
ownership for “whites,” and insistent political demands by the veteran sol-
diers led to an extensive division of the former colonial estates (1809–19).77
The right to live came to be extended to the need for universal educa-
tion. Michel Le Peletier (now best remembered as a revolutionary martyr
painted by Jacques-Louis David) argued that education was “the Revolution
of the poor, but a gentle and peaceful revolution” to be developed via “the
meeting of citizens in popular societies, theatres, civic games, military evo-
lutions and local and national festivals.”78 Combined with sustainable econ-
omy, this performative, collective sense of education in the broadest sense
was central to the imaginary of vernacular heroism. It was “visible” because
it was collective, open to debate, and shaped by performance, sport, and

The Modern Imaginary 103

military training, like the disciplinary society that would coopt its forms
and supplant it in the nineteenth century. As the radical pedagogue Joseph
Jacotot emphasized in the early nineteenth century, any education that
did not subjugate the pupil to the schoolmaster was a form of emancipa-
tion.79 Consequently, it is not surprising to see a strong emphasis on edu-
cation in independent Haiti, beginning with the presidency of Alexandre
Pétion (1770–1818) in the Republic of Haiti, established in the southern
half of the modern nation in 1806. Pétion not only distributed small plots
of agricultural land to former soldiers, but established education for boys
and girls. Combined with his assistance to Simón Bolívar, the liberator of
South America, in exchange for his support for the abolition of slavery,
Pétion’s regime (1806–18) endeavored to enact the full meaning of emanci-
pation implied in the politics of eating. An imaginary constructed around
democracy (meaning here the place of the people as having title within the
state), sustainability, and education was in place, only to be dislocated by
the massive indemnity imposed by France in 1825 as “reparations” for their
lost colony.

heroes and their discontents

Righting such wrongs came to take embodied form in the figure of the
leader and the hero, who became the image of the revolution in order to
sustain the authority of a nation. The hero had the avenging power of the
Lantern and took on responsibility for the politics of eating. Heroes were
first the condensation of the popular movements, as in figures like Jean-Paul
Marat or Toussaint L’Ouverture, and later the means to contain them, epito-
mized by Napoleon Bonaparte, the paradigm of the Hero for Carlyle. This
investment in the hero was divided into two competing imagined futures,
which might be characterized as “vernacular” and “national.” The central
tension within the revolutionary movement over its mode of realization
would echo down the long nineteenth century. As early as 1793, Georges
Biassou declared the revolution in Saint-Domingue to be “a period that will
be forever memorable among the great deeds of the universe.”80 Prints and
engravings of Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines, Pétion, and other Saint-
Domingue leaders circulated around the Atlantic world, forming the figure
of the African hero, bringing a new kind of memory into play, and giving
the enslaved everywhere a new weapon. This embodied heroism was able,

104 Chapter Two
like the imagined figure of the Third Estate or the Sans- Culotte, to en-
capsulate a social movement.
In France, in 1793, the Committee of Public Instruction, directed by
Léonard Bourdon, a follower of Le Peletier, published a list of popu-
lar heroes in pamphlet and poster form. It was part of the instruction in
the “Rights of Man, the Constitution and the list of heroic or virtuous
acts” now required in the new state schools for children aged from six to
eight.81 Bourdon’s list of heroes for the age of mechanical reproduction ran
for only five editions, but was printed in runs of up to 150,000 copies in
1794. He argued for a realist style of writing in which “the writer must en-
tirely disappear, the actor alone should be seen.” These “pure” word pictures
would replace the functions of the catechism, which “prepares children for
slavery.”82 The stories themselves present some sanctified accounts of rank-
and-file military heroism, including that of the drummer boy Joseph Barra
painted by David, as well as some intriguing slices of everyday life. We
hear of a gardener named Pierre Godefroi, who saved a little girl, Goyot,
from drowning in a mill trace, or of a woman named Barbier, from Mery,
who, seeing that there were no horses to carry her grain, said, “Eh bien,
sisters, let’s get sacks and carry the wheat on our backs to our brothers in
Paris.” All were described as the actions of the “sans- culottes of regener-
ated republican society.”83 Alternative histories come to light, such as that
of Rose Bouillon, who demanded a discharge from the army, in which she
had served and fought “as a man” for six months after her husband, Julian
Henri, had been killed in action.84 These sans- culotte politics echoed in the
colonies, where the French commissioner Sonthonax justified his addition
of a de jure abolition of slavery, in 1793, to its de facto accomplishment by
the revolution by arguing “the blacks are the true sans- culottes of the colo-
nies, they are the people, and only they are capable of defending the coun-
try.”85 What was at stake in such claims around the Atlantic world was the
transformation of what Marat had called le menu peuple, the little people,
into the people as such, the subject of the revolution and its realization.86
The “little people” had become “Big Men.”
This imaginary of the people emerged in visualized form as the new sub-
ject of the Declaration. In a striking print by the otherwise unknown Du-
puis entitled “La Chute en Masse” (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale [1793]),
an idealized sans- culotte is seen turning the wheel of an electric generator,
labeled “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (see fig. 8, p. 43). His power-

The Modern Imaginary 105

ful musculature referred to the sense that revolutionary regeneration had
worked on the body of the people, transforming the figure of the Third
Estate into the sans- culotte. From the pole of the Declaration- Generator,
decorated with a liberty bonnet, a conducting cord leads to a sequence of
European monarchs such as the pope, the Emperor Joseph, and George III,
all designated by unflattering nicknames. The shock throws them to the
ground as a caption says: “Republican electricity gives Despots a shock that
overturns their thrones.” That electricity was generated by the people using
the force of rights to transmit an insuperable message, spelled out along
the cord: “Liberty, equality, fraternity, unity, indivisibility of the Repub-
lic.”87 The chains of slavery had become an electrifying means of liberation.
This metaphor transformed Paine’s rational and irreversible “impression” on
the mind into a visualized medium that has corporal and political power.
This image of the electronic Declaration of Rights further condensed into
a composite symbol of the electrified Tablets of the Law, in the representa-
tion by sans-culotte printmaker Louis-Jean Allais (1762–1833) of the Decla-
ration and the 1793 constitution as flashing lightning into darkness.88
This transitional moment produced not just new modes of represen-
tation but new collective means of creating visual images. The royal aca-
demies, including the Academy of Painting, were abolished in 1793, lead-
ing to the creation of the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts.89 In
its brief span, the society created a stir mainly by those it invited to sit in
judgment on the arts, including a shoemaker, Plato’s symbol of the worker
who should do his work and nothing else. Equally striking was the recon-
figuration of the map office in the reformed military and colonial office
under the command of General Etienne-Nicolas Calon. The Committee
of Public Safety created a new Agency of Maps, on 8 June 1794, bring-
ing army and navy maps into one unit that also took over a mass of maps
from private, that is to say aristocratic, hands. Recognizing mapping as the
“most useful science for the communication of peoples,” Calon purged the
office of “aristocrat” artists and replaced them with “patriots,” including
the marine painter Genillon, a wine-seller named Macaire, soldiers, clerks,
and many sons of geographical engineers. Astronomers, engravers, profes-
sors of mathematics and drawing were brought in to educate this unlikely
crew, who were to contribute to a proposed museum of geography, mili-
tary topography, and hydrography in the Louvre.90 As quickly as such radi-
cal changes were reversed after the fall of the Jacobins, they laid the ground
for the transformation of military mapping under Napoleon and therefore,

106 Chapter Two
ironically, for the defeat of popular heroism and its replacement by the
national Hero.
The revolutionary leaders in Saint-Domingue fully understood the
importance of a heroic visual iconography. Dessalines, while still a gen-
eral under Toussaint, had a life-size portrait of himself surrounded by his
troops painted in oils at the house he had expropriated.91 When he took
over power, in 1804, Dessalines symbolically cut the white section out of
the French tricoleur to make the new nation’s flag, a nation that he renamed
Haiti in homage to the Indian ancestors.92 There was a flourishing visual
culture in Le Cap, before and after 1791, for the new order to draw on. In
the period of slavery, paintings of all genres were frequently offered for sale
in Saint-Domingue, including a purported Michelangelo. Resident artists
included Noël Challes, a prize-winner at the Royal Academy of Painting in
Paris, while artistic education was available for both men and women from
artists such as Jubault and Madame de Vaaland respectively.93 Marcus Rains-
ford, a sympathetic British witness to the revolution, noted that the theater,
“always so prevalent in St. Domingo,” continued “in more strength and pro-
priety than it had done before.”94 While there were still some French actors,
the pieces were played mostly by “black performers,” who performed Mo-
lière, but also a new piece called The African Hero (1797).95 This three-act
pantomime was set in Kongo, but other than that we know nothing of it.
Sibylle Fischer has suggested that it was a deliberate riposte to a pair of per-
formances under the title The American Hero, staged by the French actor and
future revolutionary Louis-François Ribié in Le Cap during 1787.96 Cer-
tainly, the title of the 1797 piece was highly suggestive of the strategy of
the post-1791 revolutionary leadership to create African heroes from the
formerly subjugated ranks of the enslaved and people of color.
A common icon of Toussaint showed him on horseback in full uniform
with raised sword against a generically tropical background (see fig. 7, p. 42).
In this image, Toussaint was depicted as having mastered several codes of
conduct that were typically held to be beyond Africans: control of a rearing
horse, the symbolic deployment of European modes of clothing to claim
high rank, the use of the cavalryman’s saber, and indeed the command of
disciplined soldiers. Seen from a European perspective, the horseback pose
seems to be derived from David’s famous equestrian portrait Napoleon at
the St. Bernard Pass (1799), where the consul masters his rearing horse on
the verge of the conquest of Italy (see fig. 25). David painted the names of
Charlemagne and Hannibal in the rock under Napoleon’s feet, to show his

The Modern Imaginary 107

figure 25. JAC ques louis - dAVid, napoleon crossing tHe st. bernarD
pass (1800), ChArlottenB urg CAstle , s tiftung P r e u s s i sC h e sh l ö s s e r
und gärten Berlin- BrAndenB urg, Berlin, g erM A n y. Photo courtesy of
Bildarchiv Preussischer kulturbesitz / Art resource, new york.
mastery of History. The painting further evokes the equestrian statues of
monarchs that had been destroyed in the early years of the French Revo-
lution. If we look at the Toussaint print in this light, his horse stands over
both a colonial fortress and a ship, the essential technology of the Atlantic
triangle. Toussaint was visualized as having authority over colonialism and
slavery, in direct contrast to the subservient imagery of white abolition-
ists, such as the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” motif showing a kneeling
African man requesting emancipation. By contrast, Toussaint is seen fight-
ing for liberation. The visual homonym created an association between the
two leaders, one that Napoleon was determined to eliminate, leading to
the French expedition to Saint-Domingue, in 1802, and Toussaint’s death
in exile.
Srinivas Aravamudan points out that these images can also be under-
stood in terms of Vodou: “The French law (loi) is a Kréyole homophone for
the personal deity (lwa), and the terms for the human as the religious ve-
hicle for the manifestation of the deity as chwal, analogical to a horse being
mounted by its rider. A more knowing interpretation of Toussaint’s eques-
trian portrait may now come to mind.”97 Toussaint could be understood,
then, as being a lwa, riding his people as the personification of the law. The
image is not just generically allusive but a specific visual homonym for the
divinity known as Sen Jak in Kreyòl, St James in English, Santiago in Span-
ish, and Saint Jacques in French, who always appears armed on horseback.
Introduced into Kongo by Portuguese missionaries in 1480, the saint was an
important syncretic figure in Africa before Atlantic slavery. In Vodou, Sen
Jak is a key avatar of the Ogou family of warriors and fighters for justice,
who is, appropriately enough, depicted in present- day images in a mystical
merger with Toussaint.98 This heroic visualization was a final rebuttal to the
force of law that had structured oversight. Joan Dayan has emphasized the
importance of such possession: “To conceive of the image of the god in one-
self is to be possessed. It is a deed of the most serious conception. Thought
realizes itself in the imaging of the gods.”99 This performative act of imagi-
nation was to allow oneself to be possessed by others, a voluntary subjection
made by people who were claimed as possessions. The “dancer” is not domi-
nated by the spirit, but performs it, discovering a new sense of “self ” via this
other in a body that the dancer had not previously been at liberty to make
available for this or any other purpose. This imaging, for all its psychologi-
cal and performative density, leaves no representative traces, being rather

The Modern Imaginary 109

the product of a trance. The embodied image of the gods produced in this
performance was the subaltern hero.
For this second reading to be available, it is necessary to show that the
image could have been made or at least seen in Saint-Domingue. Arava-
mudan speculates in what he calls counterfactual fashion about a potential
woman reader for such images, whom he names as Toussaint’s daughter-in-
law. The more intriguing possibility is that a woman may have made them,
or at least something like them. Rainsford, who met Toussaint, noted that
around 1800 “painting, from some recent specimens, appeared to be en-
couraged, and cultivated as an accomplishment.” By the latter phrase, Rains-
ford meant that it was taught to women as a “proper” activity for them to
pursue, an implication borne out by his following sentence: “A young lady
of colour, of the name of La Roche, presented a large company, of which
the writer was one, in the course of a few minutes, with their likenesses,
very accurately cut in profile.”100 He was describing the then fashionable
practice of making silhouettes, sometimes using a specially designed ma-
chine, which would show the subject’s face in profile, cut from black paper.
Here we have perhaps the first named African diaspora woman artist, the
silhouettiste La Roche. Her work reminds us of Moses Williams, the en-
slaved silhouetteist of Charles Wilson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum.101 As
far as we know, Williams cut only one silhouette of an African American,
although he was cutting over 8,000 portraits a year.102 Clearly, La Roche
was depicting the revolutionary society of Le Cap, a very different situa-
tion from that of Williams, who used the money he earned to purchase his
own freedom. A sympathetic eye might even discern that the equestrian
portrait of Toussaint has a formally “flat” feel, as if the French version had
been adapted from a silhouette. While the association is certainly unprov-
able, the fact remains that the free island of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti,
created a heroic iconography for its own cultural imaginary that included
work by women of color.

c r i s i s : d i v i d i n g t h e r e vo lu t i o n a r y s e n s i B l e

By 1801, the revolutionary imaginary was in crisis, divided against itself and
uncertain of its purpose. While this turning point is usually marked by the
triumph of Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1799, I identify the divide in the revo-
lutionary sensible by means of a colonial counterpoint between the crisis
in Saint-Domingue and a French attempt to reinvent the land of liberty in

110 Chapter Two
the South Pacific. The result of this counterpoint was simply discord, rather
than a dissensus or even a transculturation. From the beginning of his public
career, Toussaint had asserted that in order to create a modern nation-state,
the revolution in Saint-Domingue needed to be forged from a balance of
liberty, meaning freedom from slavery, and responsibility, meaning con-
tinued agricultural labor on cash-crop plantations for the majority.103 His
goal was to render the revolutionary imaginary into an “imagined commu-
nity” of workers and leaders under the control of the army and pursuing
Catholic observance. By the same token, the subalterns had consistently
imagined sustainability as their key goal, from the “three days” campaign, in
1791, onward. Now Toussaint observed with concern that groups of workers
were banding together to “buy a few acres of land, abandoning plantations
already in use to go and settle on uncultivated land.”104 In the 1801 Con-
stitution, he therefore required all those who were capable to work on the
land unless they had another profession. All were forbidden from purchas-
ing land in lots smaller than roughly 150 acres, excluding almost all people
of color. The goal was above all to generate exports, meeting the needs of
the treaties signed in 1798 with the United States, and to reinforce the place
of the state and the army.105 It has perhaps only been very recently that it
has become possible to imagine that local, sustainable agriculture might
have been preferable to a “modern” nation, and that discussion is still con-
troversial today. In 1801, workers were no longer slaves, but they were tied
to their plantation and under the watchful eye of the new police Touissant
had created and his own police générale.106 If slavery was over, it now seemed
that the plantation complex was not, and it was exactly such a going back
that the subaltern classes had feared.
These new rules provoked an uprising by the subalterns who had fought
the revolution throughout the north of the colony in October 1801. Their
leader (whether by acclamation or intent) was the formerly enslaved Gen-
eral Moïse, not only an associate of Toussaint’s, but his nephew and adopted
son. As the agricultural inspector for the north, Moïse knew the aspirations
of the workers and was in favor of dividing the plantations among junior
officers (literally, the subalterns) and soldiers from the ranks.107 While
rumors unfairly abounded that Toussaint was reintroducing slavery for all,
as the French had done in Guadeloupe, he had legislated the right to “im-
port” workers from Africa, who were unlikely to be volunteers. The ten-
sion within the imaginary of the revolution between subaltern vernacular
heroism and the national hero had now become an open conflict. With

The Modern Imaginary 111

the support of the army, Toussaint quickly defeated Moïse and had him
summarily executed. In an extraordinary proclamation, which he ordered
to be read after Sunday Mass, Toussaint railed against the entire populace,
describing the postslavery population as comprising “bad citizens, vaga-
bonds, thieves. And if they are girls, then they are prostitutes.”108 The his-
torian Laurent Dubois has called this rant, with its subsequent imposition
of security passes and other surveillance techniques, a “delirium.”109 Pinel
might have agreed: he saw delirium as a form of mania incited by strong
and furious passions, such as those that “originate in fanaticism or chimeri-
cal delusion.”110 What was Toussaint’s delusion? He believed that he could
create what has been called “egaliberty” (equality and liberty in one) by
means of his own personality. It was, in short, the delusion of the hero.
Heroes are not good for popular movements, as we have had to learn time
and again from, as C. L. R. James would have it, Toussaint to Castro: and
now, perhaps, Obama. By the same token, as the diffuse and inchoate revolt
of November 1801 showed, popular movements are unpredictable, hard to
control, and likely to be defeated by the persistent application of intense
violence.
This moment has been much discussed. It inaugurates, from the perspec-
tive of this project, the possibility of counterrevolutionary visuality, ironi-
cally incarnated in Toussaint’s conqueror Napoleon. For James and after
him, Aimé Césaire, it was the tragedy of revolution, a dialectical image
that jumped out of history. Both writers compared Toussaint’s situation to
that faced by Lenin after the October Revolution of 1917, when tsarist offi-
cials and bourgeois economics had to be restored to save the nascent state,
known as the New Economic Policy. Although James shaped the conflict
between Toussaint and Moïse in terms of race and imperialism, rather than
political economy, he acknowledged the severity of this crisis: “To shoot
Moïse, the black, for the sake of the whites was more than an error, it was
a crime. It was almost as if Lenin had had Trotsky shot for taking the side
of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.”111 Not to mention—as James did
not—the extensive and more or less random execution of subaltern com-
batants on mere suspicion of having sympathies for Moïse. For James, Tous-
saint crossed an irrevocable line with these actions, but his proposed solu-
tion of a campaign of explanation and mobilization is unconvincing: such
proposals had been made to the subalterns under arms since 1791, and they
had always rejected them. David Scott has nuanced James’s position by ar-

112 Chapter Two
guing that Toussaint and others like him were the “conscripts of moder-
nity,” forced to involve themselves with its project.112 In this discussion, it
seems that the entire scope of one form of modernity became visible to the
decolonial historians of Haiti in this moment. That genealogy was encom-
passed by the Haitian and French Revolutions via the October Revolution
of 1917 and perhaps ended in 1989. But why not, as Diana Taylor has sug-
gested in a different context, take the comparison from within Toussaint’s
terms?113 It might be said that Toussaint could no longer ride the lwa/loi, the
“horse” that had carried him through the revolution. If that horse was the
people, it seems that they had thrown him. Present- day accounts of spirit
possession emphasize the total exhaustion of the rider when the spirit de-
parts.114 The people no longer imagined themselves as Toussaint, who could
in turn no longer imagine what it was that they needed.
In 1799, as if accepting that the Atlantic world revolution had faltered,
the French had literally set sail in search of a different narrative on history,
rights, and the means of representation. The Directory-sponsored Austra-
lian expedition of Nicolas Baudin (1754–1803) arrived in Van Diemen’s Land
(modern Tasmania) in the decisive year 1801. Organized by the newly cre-
ated Society for the Observation of Man, in Paris, Baudin set out to liter-
ally explore the origin of human rights, a mission to regenerate the French
Revolution by means of knowledge transplanted from the South Pacific.115
On board was François Péron (1775–1810), a twenty-five-year-old member
of the society, and the first person ever to apply for a position as an anthro-
pologist—which he did not get (he was sent as a zoologist). This curious
venture was a fusion of Atlantic world slavery, the French Revolution, and
Pacific discovery. Baudin had served in the Caribbean and as a slaver in
Mozambique, where he learned some of the local language that he was
later to try to use in Van Diemen’s Land.116 He was a convinced supporter
of the revolution because its abolition of feudal privileges in the armed
forces had allowed him to be promoted to the rank of captain. Likewise,
the naturalists and artists on the expedition were all children of the revo-
lutionary era, accustomed to acting on its principles. Whereas oversight
had been a general surveillance that often ignored details, Baudin’s voyage
was scrutinized, catalogued, and collected in the pursuit of difference.117
Over 100,000 animal specimens were collected, including live kangaroos
and other species transported back to Europe. All of this was depicted by
the artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846) and Nicolas-Martin Petit

The Modern Imaginary 113

(1777–1805) in minute, almost hallucinatory detail. The expedition sought
to create a synthesis of philosophical imagination with practical observa-
tion, a philosophical taxonomy characterized by attention to detail.
A key question for the expedition was whether the aboriginals were
in the state of nature and hence the predicate of Rousseau’s “man is born
free,” to which the French had become the object of “but is everywhere in
chains.” While sailing off Maria Island, a small islet close to Van Diemen’s
Land, Péron saw a fire and landed with a small party. The aboriginals he met
were probably Tyreddeme people of the Oyster Bay group.118 The Tyred-
deme invited them to sit down, suggesting that they interpreted the meet-
ing as a friendly one for the exchange of goods, as was a common experi-
ence with other locals and also a few European travelers. In what was one
of the first pieces of anthropological fieldwork, Péron proceeded according
to the plan devised by the Society of the Observers of Man. In nine sub-
heads, the paper, drawn up by the society’s secretary, Jauffret, emphasized
that “difference” and the “place in the living scale of things” was the key
to observation.119 Péron attempted to communicate in gesture, using signs
that had been taught to him at the newly established Institute for the Deaf
in Paris, but it was the Tyreddeme’s physical inspection of the genitalia of
a young sailor, causing him to get erect, that opened a field of exchange.
Unsuccessful translations continued, as Péron addressed the aboriginals in
pidgin Polynesian and attempted in vain to test their strength on a dyna-
mometer.
Unlike earlier accounts of encounter in the South Pacific, Péron drew
no parallels with classical antiquity or European painting. In his notebooks,
he adopted the role of philosopher, using the encounter to imagine him-
self to himself, employing the indigenous people as a medium. Working
hard to acquire the “habit of observation,” Péron deployed a modern gaze
that validated the self through its mediation with what he called “the zero
point of civilization,” projected onto the Tyreddeme. This observational
gaze sought to suppress the self in favor of a picturing from the outside,
while being confident of its superior state of culture. This was to become
imperial visuality, coeval with the visuality of the hero and that of the right
to look. His sense of the encounter was disrupted by the feeling that he
was becoming the object of their gaze, restoring his sense of self: “They
seek to interpret our looks. They observe us closely. Everything they see
us do, they suppose to be something mysterious, and always their suspi-
cions of us are unfavorable.” Péron’s observation of difference required that

114 Chapter Two
his object not look back, for to do so was a threat of violence. In appar-
ently contradictory fashion, he nonetheless argued that this Natural Man
was the “faithful trustee for the fundamental rights of the human species,
he preserves them intact in their basic completeness. . . . It is among these
people, then, that we are able to discover those precious rights which we
have lost following the upheavals among peoples and the progress of civili-
zation.”120 Péron framed rights in a hierarchical, stadial notion of history,
in which natural rights were observable but lost. Uncertainty abounded; he
wondered whether “this state of nature, so celebrated today, is truly one of
innocence, virtue and happiness.” Perhaps, then, Tasmania was terra nullius,
as the British colonizers would later decide, leading to a genocide of the
indigenous population.
The picturing of the revolution had failed to hold. I find myself haunted
by three images, which I imagine projected simultaneously, like Abel
Gance’s silent film Napoléon (1927), about Carlyle’s prototype hero. At the
left is Moïse, the African general, being shot by African troops: “He died
as he had lived. He stood before the place of execution in the presence of
the troops of the garrison, and in a firm voice gave the word to the firing
squad: ‘Fire, my friends, fire.’”121 In the center is the almost farcical scene of
Péron pointing his musket at an aboriginal man, who wanted to trade for
his waistcoat, while shouting “mata,” the Polynesian word for death. And on
the right is Bonaparte as a young artillery officer, mowing down Parisian
radicals in the street in 1795, the scene that endeared him to Carlyle. These
are scenes of actual and potential violence, none of which could have been
imagined in 1789. A Corsican artillery officer was as unlikely as an African
general in the hierarchical world of monarchy. While Kant had lectured on
anthropology since 1774, he meant by that something called “human na-
ture,” rather than Péron’s empirical study of human beings. So something
had radically changed. But this was not yet the perpetual peace of the land
of liberty, with French slavery about to be restored, while British and U.S.
slavery had decades ahead of them. The revolutionary use of violence as a
social actor, epitomized in the Lantern, had been intended to be a singu-
lar or foundational event, like the burning of feudal insignia. But as Allen
Feldman has shown, “Violence itself both accelerates and reflects the ex-
perience of society as an incomplete project, as something to be made.”122
Here we might understand that “society” as the very possibility of a modern
imaginary. The revolutionary era and its defeats had first engendered the
possibility for the transformation of the plantation complex into the mod-

The Modern Imaginary 115

ern imaginary. It was to be produced by heroes for the people, who claimed
their right to existence and a politics of eating. Not for the first or last time,
that moment ended in failure. The way was open both for what Carlyle
would name “visuality,” a perpetual conflict to prevent perpetual peace, and
for the imperial visuality that would claim to end that conflict in the Pax
Britannica. That modern visualization was and is nonetheless haunted by its
unthinkable others. The next three chapters trace the dynamic unfolding of
visuality from these beginnings in the Atlantic revolutions. The following
chapter shows how Carlyle appropriated the revolutionary strategy of the
hero for anti- emancipation goals, leading to an intense contestation over
the hero. As chapter 4 describes, this contest came to a head in the entangle-
ment of the abolition of slavery in the United States and the last Atlantic
revolution that was the Paris Commune. Chapter 5 then shows how im-
perial visuality globalized and institutionalized the use of culture as an ab-
stract form of biopower.

116 Chapter Two
 Puerto Rican Counterpoint I
José Campeche y Jordan

The entanglements of the revolutionary challenges to slavery and the plan-

tation complex were visualized in the paintings produced by the remarkable
Puerto Rican artist José Campeche (1751–1809), perhaps the first nameable
painter to emerge from slavery in the Caribbean. Campeche was the son of
an enslaved gilder, decorator, and painter, Tómas de Rivafrecha Campeche,
who had purchased his own freedom (coartación).1 As his father was of Afri-
can descent and his mother was deemed Spanish, Campeche was described
as a “mulatto” under the precise racializing tabulations of the day. He gained
his training in part, presumably, from his father, in part from books and en-
gravings, in part from African artists among the enslaved, and finally from
the fortuituous presence in Puerto Rico of the exiled Spanish painter Luis
Paret, in 1775–76.2 Campeche’s earliest surviving works are clearly directly
indebted to Paret’s rococo style, although Paret also used his time on the
island to paint a striking self-portrait in the costume of a jibaro, that is to
say, a rural peasant, as well as some depictions of the enslaved. Almost all
of Campeche’s known work was commissioned by the church and colonial
state, and so it had to operate within clearly defined limits. Nonetheless, he
was able to visualize both the operations of oversight and the alternatives
to it in a series of meticulous works that operated a colonial double vision.
Just after the outbreak of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Campeche
was commissioned to paint the portrait of the new governor of Puerto Rico
(see fig. 26). Campeche’s midsize canvas conveyed the full range of over-
sight available to the new governor in the revolutionary moment. As the
deputy of the king in the colonies, the governor carried the powers of sov-
ereignty, marked in the painting by his combination of noble dress, sword,
and the cane of office. On his desk are two forms of cartography: a plan
of the city of San Juan, showing its recent expansion, and an architectural
elevation of an ecclesiastical building, linking church and state as means of
visualizing space. On the other side of the governor is a display of books,
arranged to be seen rather than read, another instrument of power. Behind
and above him, Campeche represented three alternative modes of depicting
colonial space. On the right, as we see it, is a bucolic landscape featuring a
proposed bridge for San Juan, represented as if spanning a romantic wilder-
ness. Above billow the folds and cords of sovereign drapery, the theatrical
and antirealist shaping of space that marks the presence of power. Perhaps
the most widely commented on section of the painting is that seen to our
left, through what appears to be a window but might also be another paint-
ing. Here Campeche has depicted an idealized scene of San Juan as an ex-
tensive modern city laid out on a grid, featuring commodious two-storey
buildings. On the street, there are a number of activities in progress. Some
women street vendors offer their wares from their broad hats. A funeral
party proceeds down the street, carrying a coffin. And an overseer directs
a work party of enslaved Africans and indentured servants in repairing the
road. The overseer carries his cane, just as the governor does, so that the
painting visualizes the chain of authority from God to king, king to gov-
ernor, governor to planter, planter to overseer, and overseer over the en-
slaved.
Contemporaneous with the portrait of the governor was another of the
bishop of Puerto Rico, Obispo Don Francisco de la Cuerda y Garcia (Collecion
Arzobispado de San Juan de Puerto Rico, 1791–92). Whether by coincidence
or design, the portrait is much larger than that of the governor, but it is not
executed with the same level of skill, suggesting that much of it was exe-
cuted by Campeche’s studio assistants. The painting is in a sense interesting
for what it does not show. Although depicted in the pomp associated with
his office, Don Francisco was a Jansenist who preferred to live outside San
Juan, in the Cangrejos district of Santurce, a neighborhood of freed former
slaves—like Campeche’s father.3 There seems to be a hint here that Cam-
peche was more favorable to the (briefly) antislavery church than to royal
authority. Certainly, he was able to convey very different versions of the

118 Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

figure 26. José CAMPe Che , Don miguel antonio De ustáriz
(CA . 1792), gAlleriA n ACionAl , sA n JuAn, Puerto riC o.
same event for different audiences. After the Spanish repelled an English
attack on the island, in 1797, in which Campeche participated as a member
of the militia, he created two different commemorative paintings. One was
a commissioned portrait of the then governor Don Roman de Castro (Museo
de San Juan, ca. 1800), showing him in dress uniform overlooking the de-
fenses of Fort San Cristobal that he had constructed. The portrait is a con-
ventional depiction of the military and colonial officer of the period, so
much so that the individual is almost invisible.
The other commemorative image was made on his own initiative for the
church as an Ex-voto of the Siege of San Juan by the English (Collecion Arzo-
bispado de San Juan de Puerto Rico, ca. 1798), a very different image in
style and intent. Painted in a naïve fashion, the Ex-voto depicted the city
under siege from a high viewpoint, as if from the battlements of the for-
tress. It shows the course of the military action across several engagements,
rather than in a single moment. The text underneath attributes the safety
of the town not to the twenty-five-year fortification project, but to the
presence of a sixteenth- century Flemish painting of the Virgin of Bethlehem
in the Dominican convent. Citing “the general opinion, pious and Chris-
tian, of the inhabitants of this noble island,” Campeche wrote in the text
at the bottom of the painting that the retreat of the English was due to
the “continual prayers that the faithful offered to the beloved image of the
Virgin.” In other words, the oversight here was divine, not human, in re-
sponse to the will of the people, directed by a power-figure. Similar ver-
nacular objects were found throughout Puerto Rico in the form of the
santos, carved wooden figures of saints. Whereas a depiction of a saint in a
church might have offerings or prayers made to it, the santos were kept in
the home and were expected to intercede directly for their household. If
they failed, they might find themselves turned to the wall as a punishment,
out of sight of daily life.4 These figures were Kongolese in inspiration and
often represented the African magus Melchior, one of the Three Wise Men
who attended the birth of Christ. In some surviving nineteenth- century
versions, such as examples made by Zoilo Cajigas Sotomayor (1875–1962),
the three kings represent the Caribbean diversity of “white,” “brown,” and
“black,” suggesting that they were seen as symbols of syncretism (Galleria
Nacional, San Juan). Certainly Campeche’s painting shows a doubled re-
sponse to oversight, like Makandal’s second sight, creating images that de-
picted the world as subject to the sovereign gaze of the colonizer for their
consumption, but also depicting a popular syncretic vision of the made ob-

120 Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

ject as a powerful agent for the oppressed. This second mode of visualizing
is necessarily implied, in the manner of all syncretic doubled imagery in the
Americas, rather than literally depicted. For that reason, Spanish imperial
policy became increasingly suspicious of the indigenous and non-European
worship of images, leading the Spanish Academy of History to denounce
even the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe as “fanaticism,” in 1794.5 In that
context, Campeche’s exaltation of the Virgin of Bethlehem was certainly open
to a range of interpretations.
A few years later Campeche further visualized this doubled sense of
looking in the Atlantic world in his extraordinary portrait El niño Juan
Pantaleón de Avilés de Luna (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, 1808) (see
plate 4). Campeche’s portrait showed a twenty-one-month-old child who
had been born without arms and with diminutive legs. He did so giving the
child a remarkable dignity, modeled on depictions of the Infant Jesus. In
the painted text, Campeche named the child and his parents, Luis de Avilés
and Martina de Luna Alvarado, making Juan Avilés one of the few among
the subaltern masses of the plantation system for whom we have both an
identifiable image and a genealogy. That right, denied to the enslaved, was
visualized through the disabled body of a child, literally labeled as being
from the working classes in Campeche’s text.6 Most accounts suggest that
the painting was made out of scientific curiosity, with hints of a possible
Puerto Rican nationalism.7 Yet its very status as a necessarily colored paint-
ing, rather than a line drawing, as well as its substantial size, suggests that
other forces were at work here. By its very presence as a named portrait of
colonial subaltern disabled child, Juan Avilés is a powerful syncretic image.
The picture was a power-figure, a local hero in an era of revolution but not
in a revolutionary situation. I want to draw out one possible interpretation
that would have been available to some viewers in the period. Although
Puerto Rico had not been a significant sugar colony prior to 1760, its planta-
tions were given a dramatic boost by the decline in Saint-Domingue’s sugar
industry, especially after 1800. By 1815, shortly after Campeche painted this
piece, there were some 18,000 enslaved Africans in Puerto Rico, most of
whom had come from Dahomey and Kongo.8 Juan Avilés was painted pre-
ternaturally “white” for a working- class child in a slave colony, which in
itself indicates that the painting was not intended to be mimetic. In Vodou,
any disabled child is part of the Vodou spirit group known as tohosu, whose
powers were described by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits: “The to-
husu are held able to speak at birth, and to turn at will into men of any age,

Puerto Rican Counterpoint I 121

in order to pit their strength against giants, sorcerers and kings.”9 This way
of seeing leaves its questions open. What is Juan Avilés looking at, away to
his right? What did he want? An end to slavery, an end to monarchy—or
just the right to be, to look, and to be seen?
Soon after Campeche made this painting, Cuban authorities were ap-
palled to discover a volume of some sixty pictures depicting religious, his-
torical, and political subjects in the possession of a free moreno (African)
named José Antonio Aponte. Further, his pictures had been viewed by a
number of others arrested—all enslaved, would-be rebels.10 According to
his sentence of execution, in 1812, Aponte’s book was part of “an attempt
to overturn the old and well-established submission of the serfs.”11 There
were images in the book that were held to be depictions of the revolution
in Saint-Domingue, as well as representations of Africa and an image of a
broken crown that Aponte said he had acquired at the time of the French
Revolution. Although he admitted having made portraits of Toussaint,
Dessalines, and Jean-François, Aponte claimed to have copied them from
widely circulating images available in Havana’s harbor, together with one
of Christophe as emperor. Witnesses at his trial described the popularity of
these images with the rebels, both free and enslaved. As the insurrection
plans unfolded, word spread throughout the African population that “black
generals” were coming from Haiti to set them free. As Sybille Fischer puts it
in her discussion of Aponte’s trial and his book, “The question of verisimili-
tude becomes a question of life and death.”12 If we connect the visual pro-
duction of Saint-Domingue to Campeche’s art and the circulation of these
popular images, it becomes clear that there was an extensive revolutionary
realism in the Caribbean. We can go further. In response to the hallucina-
tory hierarchies of slave-owning sovereignty, realism was revolutionary.

122 Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

 ThRee

Visuality
Authority and War

The organizing conceit of slave- owning sovereignty, surrogated to the

overseer, was its unopposed visualized dominion, represented as light itself.
This principle was appropriated by counterrevolutionary visuality for its
version of the hero, with the radical distinction that it was now aware of
being permanently opposed. This visuality visualized authority to cohere
the chaos of the modern. Visuality was permanent war against an enemy
that had threatened the “reality” prized by authority in the attempts to
make revolution legitimate and to abolish slavery. The terrain of this war
that visuality visualizes is what we call history. Visuality extended its claims
from actual battlefields to assert that it was representation in and of itself,
or “ordering.” This principle was embodied in, and manifested as, the Hero
celebrated by Thomas Carlyle, the theorist of visuality. The Hero embodied
the idea of the nation, overcoming the centrifugal forces of labor by means
of Tradition. To use Carlyle’s capitalizations, the Hero was Tradition, could
visualize visuality, and lead with Authority. The mystical and unclassifi-
able hero was nonetheless separated from all others by his ability to visual-
ize history as it happened, thereby gaining an authority that was aesthetic.
By this set of maneuvers, the plantation complex was to be sustained, even
though its literally and metaphorically enslaved subalterns were assumed to
be in permanent revolt. In the face of this reaction, a new countervisuality
claimed representation in all senses to be the work of the people, the really
heroic forces within the nation, its tradition, and of course its labor power.
This countervisuality deployed its own forms of anarchic authority, such as
the Jubilee and the National Holiday (early forms of what would become
known as the general strike). At the same time, unwilling to abandon a suc-
cessful strategy, radicals and abolitionists continued to present heroes and
heroism as a means of achieving change. Given this swirling kaleidoscope of
revolution, counterrevolution, abolition, restoration, innovation, and tra-
dition, it is perhaps not hard to understand that people felt modernity was
hard to see, let alone visualize.

wa r

The sense of visuality as war was concrete, not abstract. It referred both to
the necessity for modern generals to visualize a battlefield that could not be
seen from a single viewpoint, as theorized by the theorist of modern war
Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), and to the revival of military painting that
constructed battle scenes from the perspective of the general. In both cases,
the motivating “hero” was Napoleon, Carlyle’s “bronze artillery officer,”
whose tactics and means of representing them transformed modern war-
fare.1 In Clausewitz’s theory, battle was a complex event that did not resolve
itself in a single moment. War now required the ability to grasp topogra-
phy as “an act of imagination . . . imprinted like a picture, like a map, upon
the brain.”2 The commander-in- chief had to keep a “vivid picture” of an
entire province or country in mind, unlike the subordinate dealing with a
far smaller area. Each of these areas was a “theater” for the performance of
war that was invisible to its actors, discernible only to the leader. Clause-
witz emphasized the necessity of what he called “the genius for war,” like
that of a painter or poet but understood as the capacity to take decisions
by deploying “a power of judgment raised to a marvelous pitch of vision,
which easily grasps and dismisses a thousand remote possibilities which an
ordinary mind would labor to identify and wear itself out in so doing.”3
Modern war was fought between armies so closely matched in weapons and
training that, other than sheer force of numbers, leadership was the primary
cause of victory, or, by its absence, defeat. Clausewitz called this capacity
“the sovereign eye of genius,” bringing together the ability to imagine with
the absolute authority of monarchy.4 Further, this ability to decide was the
distinguishing mark of the leader: “Boldness, governed by a superior intel-

124 Chapter Three
lect is the mark of a hero.”5 Clausewitz’s exemplar of the heroic leader was
the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, subject of a vast biography by
Carlyle.
Carlyle would simply generalize (as it were) the principle by extending
the battle to all aspects of modern life, a battle that could only be won by
the Hero. In 1840, eight years after the posthumous publication of Clause-
witz’s work, Carlyle coined the terms visualize and visuality to describe this
dominant view of the Hero over History.6 Whereas Clausewitz had defined
a military strategy of rendering the battlefield as a mental picture, Carlyle
generalized the visualizing of History itself as being the means to order and
control it. In so doing, he epitomized Michel Foucault’s reversal of Clause-
witz’s well-known aphorism that “war is merely the continuation of poli-
tics by other means” to read, “Politics is the continuation of war by other
means.”7 If the exceptional capacity for vision and imagination was first for-
mulated as a tactic for war, it was then reverse- engineered by Carlyle as a
mode of governance. In Carlyle’s view, the agent of the war that is visuality
was the Hero. He took this tactic from the revolutionaries of France and
Haiti, his epitome of all that was wrong with modernity, and repurposed it
to serve the counterrevolution. Its terrain was authority, a subject on which
Carlyle had little of originality to say. He was merely one of many En-
lightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers to grapple with the dilemma
of authority’s continuance in a period in which even monarchs could no
longer claim absolute authority. In his little essay “What Is Enlightenment?”
Kant had gone to considerable lengths to emphasize that the emancipation
of knowledge could not be offered to the “thoughtless multitude.” There-
fore he enjoined those who practiced public reason to limit it to the “pri-
vate,” meaning to the offices and business of the state. Here, obedience to
obligation, such as paying taxes, is required to stave off the multitude, lead-
ing to Kant’s maxim: “Reason as much as you please, and on what you please, but
obey! ”8 By the same token, Alexis de Tocqueville worried, in 1835, that the
principle of popular sovereignty in America was so extended that “there are
no authorities except within itself,” whereas in France “the people despise
authority but fear it.”9 The result was a “strange confusion,” as the old order
seemed to be moving inexorably toward equality and democracy. Even ex-
treme proponents of the restoration of monarchy in France accepted the
transition to popular sovereignty.10 Determined to prevent such a revolu-
tion of sovereignty in England, Carlyle turned its techniques against itself
as heroic visuality.

Visuality 125
figure 27. g iusePP e BAgetti, bataille au pont De loDi (1796).

Napoleon would come to be the defining example of such heroic visu-

ality, a direct result not only of his well-known propaganda but also of
his bureaucratization of visuality as a tool of imperial government. The
revolution dismantled the state apparatus of mapmaking that had evolved
as a colonial resource under the ancien régime. One of Napoleon’s deci-
sive changes as first consul was to reintroduce and strengthen the ingenieurs
géographes, geographer engineers, and to introduce a new category, the in-
genieurs artistes, artist engineers. These technicians were charged with cre-
ating images of battles as seen from the point of view of the commanding
general as a military resource.11 Bonaparte had seen both the military and
political value of such images during his Italian campaign. The Italian artist
Giuseppe Bagetti (1764–1831) produced large-scale (50 x 80 cm) watercolors
of various engagements, accompanied by an outline to guide the spectator
around the ideas represented (see fig. 27).12 This outline allowed the viewer
to experience the visuality that the general demonstrated in the field. The
Dépôt de la Guerre issued the artists with precise descriptions of the point
de vue (point of view) to be used, so that Bagetti’s view of the famous en-
counter at Arcola was defined as being situated on the riverbank 140 meters
away. These battle views were to be painted as far as possible, in the words of

126 Chapter Three
the official instructions, “to represent the terrain as the general command-
ing the troops saw it at the moment of combat; therefore it should not be
too much in isometric perspective.”13 If this form of perspective was used,
the optical angle should be marked on the canvas. Figures should be at least
four centimeters high if in the main action, or two centimeters otherwise.14
There is what would in the period have been understood as an “ideologi-
cal” force of belief in realism behind these instructions. Later these scenes
were combined into a General Map of Bonaparte’s Campaign in Italy, which was
sold for the substantial price of 140 francs. These successful strategies were
institutionalized as Bonaparte rose to power. After the Battle of Marengo
(1800), Bonaparte maintained his own topographic office, and by the end
of the consulate, he had the largest map collection in the world, estimated
at some 70,000 individual sheets.15 Perhaps the most monumental project
undertaken in this imperial cartography was the mapping of Egypt, both
ancient and modern, in the wake of Napoleon’s ultimately unsuccessful
campaign, a project that was not completed until long after Waterloo. The
revival of military mapping had its corollary in the arts, where the salon ex-
hibition of 1801 saw a return to large-scale military painting, as Susan Locke
Seigfried has shown.16 These paintings, such as the work of the baron Gros,
were interpretative versions of the mass-produced battle views generated
during the Napoleonic wars.

the condition of england question

Visuality marked a crossroads in the plantation complex. Throughout the

Atlantic world, the crossroads is a dangerous place. In many African reli-
gions, tricksters like the Yoruba divinity Eshu await the unwary at the
crossroads. In England, gibbets were placed there, like the infamous Tyburn
Tree, and the bodies of the condemned were buried on the spot to prevent
them from returning to seek vengeance. The spirit of this crossroads of
visuality is William Blake, a trickster if ever there was one. Blake created
a world that would have been very recognizable from Saint-Domingue,
one of complex vision that was not restricted to the sense of sight and
one of powerful spirit forces in contestation. Blake’s Four Zoas were the
British lwa, divinities or spirits that contested the dogmatic machine-reason
of commodity capitalism (see fig. 28). He mapped space and time in the
form of a dialectic that centered on London, the capital, as the battlefield
for and against Empire.17 In 1805, one year after the new nation of Haiti had

Visuality 127
figure 28. Wi lliAM BlAke , “four ZoAs,” fro M milton.
declared its independence, the year that Napoleon crowned himself em-
peror, Blake created a series of biblical illustrations for the Scottish official
Thomas Butts. Blake knew what had come before, had a good sense of what
could have happened next, and what, unfortunately, probably would come
to pass. He took the imagery of the Rights of Man and reconfigured it for
the emergent era of visuality in a drawing called God Writing on the Tablets of
the Covenant (National Gallery of Scotland, 1805) (see plate 5). In the draw-
ing, God stands before the tablets and begins to write the Law, whose first
Hebrew character has just been inscribed by His finger, the ur- digital cul-
ture. As the Second Commandment has not yet been written, Blake can
depict the form of God without being in breach of the Law. The space is a
flowing series of curving flames, which both contain and are the angels and
seraphim, trumpeting the definition of the Law. God here is light, devoid of
color and shadow because He is illumination. For all the purple-darks of the
picture, there are no shadows, as there is nothing material to cast a shadow.
At last one notices the huddled figure of Moses, literally under God’s feet
on the top of Mount Sinai. Utterly unable to look, Moses shows that under
the regime of the Law, there is and can be no right to look.
In Blake’s prophecies, the figure of the Law is Urizen, described by
W. J. T. Mitchell as consumed by a “rage for order, system, control and
law.”18 Note that “rage,” order, and Law are the very opposite of peace. That
rage would consume Carlyle and his ilk. It was the self-proclaimed “Party
of Order” that would initiate the massacre of the Paris Commune, in 1871,
for instance, at a cost of some 25,000 lives. Blake described how Urizen
writes in the “Book / Of Eternal brass / One curse, one weight, one mea-
sure / One King, one God, one Law.” Blake knew that Law was as much
visible in the weight of sugar produced by the plantation as in the whip, and
that its insistent claim to singularity and noncontradiction marked out its
dominance. For the historian E. P. Thompson, this passage suggested both
the drawing from the Butts Bible and the questionings of sovereignty made
by the seventeenth- century English radicals, the Diggers and the Ranters.19
Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger leader, asked General Fairfax, the army
commander, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, “whether all Lawes
that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal free-
dom to all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King’s
head? We affirm they ought.”20 This radicality was typical of Winstanley,
who insisted on following through first principles, all of which can be de-
rived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group

Visuality 129
were beginning to reclaim the common and waste land on St George’s Hill,
Surrey: “In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth
to be a common treasury.”21 Divinity was expressed as rationality, present
in each individual, who had to reconcile that potential with the corrupting
effects of “covetousness,” whose agency was the bodily senses. Against these
forces were arrayed “vision, voice and revelation,” a trinity of rationalized
and internalized understanding that motivated the direct action of culti-
vating the land.22 The result was that the long slavery dating from the Fall
of Man was now to be overturned by a new age of righteousness.23 Win-
stanley’s goal of restoring the righteousness that pertained before the Fall
entailed abolishing the Law that was not written until the time of Moses.
Blake’s image is one of the beginning of the end of that possibility, as His-
tory begins with the first character of the Law having been written. Fallen,
the people are now subjected to the Law. From Paradise, the wind begins to
blow. It catches the wings of the Angel of History and propels him toward
the future, and unable to free his wings, he sees the first catastrophe, the
writing of the Law.
Blake’s dark twin in what Saree Makdisi has called “romantic imperi-
alism”—his Spectre, to use his own term—was the mystical, dogmatic
chronicler of History, Thomas Carlyle (see fig. 29). A sufficiently contra-
dictory figure that his Past and Present could be used as the name of a jour-
nal founded by members of the British Communist Party History Group,
in 1952, while also being Hitler’s favorite author in the Berlin bunker. In
Carlyle’s view, the upheavals of Chartism, Luddism, and Captain Swing
that shook Britain from the 1820s onward were all of a piece: a British
equivalent to the French Revolution in which the working classes were ex-
pressing their discontent. Unlike Edmund Burke, Carlyle accepted that the
French Revolution did have the merit of sweeping aside corruption and
opening the way for the best to prevail. That in no way implied a form of
democracy, for “of all the ‘rights of man,’ this right of the ignorant man to
be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by
him, is the indisputablest.”24 Carlyle felt the question of England’s future
was one of heroic leadership, requiring a “perfect clearness” of the elites
to dispel the popular adherence to what he called “an obscure image dif-
fracted, exaggerated in the wonderfullest way.”25 The Hero, or Great Man,
was able to withstand the feminized hordes of the deluded masses and was
distinguished from such popular heroes as the “Dogleech” Marat. For the
ordinary person, history is invisible. At the beginning of his history of the

130 Chapter Three
figure 29. JuliA MArgAret CAM eron,
tHomas carlyle (1867).

French Revolution, Carlyle provided a panorama of France at the death

of Louis XV, in 1774: “Such things can the eye of History see in this sick-
room of King Louis, which were invisible to the courtiers there.”26 The
narrator, and by extension the reader, are allowed to know better. Visuality
went one stage further, able to read “Futurity” into the present moment.
No sooner had the Bastille fallen, in Carlyle’s account of the French Revo-
lution, than the popular forces were described as “Sansculottism,” a name
that did not circulate in the revolutionary period for four more years, in a
very different moment. To the Eye of History, that futurity was present as
soon as the Revolution began: “the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of
disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority.”27 The goal of
heroic visuality was to contain anarchy and restore Authority to the “sov-
ereign eye of genius.” Great men are great by virtue of their ability to visu-
alize History while being in the midst of it, making them into Heroes. It
is given that they are men, or masculine, gendering all countervisuality as
feminine. In the 1840s, all political tendencies in Britain from Chartism to
patrician aristocracy negotiated their strategies in relationship to the dis-

Visuality 131
course of Carlyle’s visualized Heroism.28 The key questions about Heroic
leadership and the visuality it deployed were: how was the authority to lead
conveyed? Was the nation itself Heroic? or its people? a specific set of indi-
vidual leaders? or the individual Hero? In other words, the emergence of
visuality was not a discourse about sight at all, but about power and its rep-
resentation, now conceived in visualized terms as part of a new division of
the senses.
Carlyle’s arguments in Chartism and On Heroes were a counterpoint to
the charter’s democratic principles in general and the radical William Ben-
bow’s theory of the National Holiday in particular. The charter called for
universal manhood suffrage; a secret ballot; equal electoral districts; abo-
lition of the property qualification for members of parliament (MP s); sal-
aries for MP s; and, latterly, for annual parliaments. Several of these claims,
like the last, were directly descended from the seventeenth- century radi-
cals. Like Thomas Hardy, the chair of the radical London Corresponding
Society, Benbow was a shoemaker by trade, precisely the worker whom
Socrates had declared in The Republic should “make shoes and occupy him-
self with nothing else.” Commenting on this seemingly specific insistence,
Jacques Rancière clarifies that “shoemaker is the generic name for the man
who is not where he ought to be if the order of estates is to get on with the
order of discourse.”29 This insistence on staying in place, obeying the leaders
and doing what one should and nothing else was very much Carlyle’s re-
sponse to the radicalism of the shoemakers of his day. In his pamphlet Grand
National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes (1832), the nonconform-
ist Benbow overturned any respect for traditional hierarchies, denouncing
the “preposterous right to exercise a monstrous power over almost every
man,” claimed by those who thought of themselves as “the people of sub-
stance” but were in fact no more than “the pick-pockets, the plunderers, the
pitiless Burkers,” referring in the last example to Edmund Burke’s hostility
to the French Revolution and the culture of rights.30 Benbow challenged
authority at the center of modern everyday life by calling into question the
absolute compulsion to work for a wage. He called for the working classes
to take a month away from work in pursuit of “ease, gaiety, pleasure [and]
happiness,” expanding Jefferson’s inclusion of “happiness” as a right in the
Declaration of Independence into a platform of rights to enjoyment. As
this phrase suggests, Benbow’s strategy was a simple and potentially effec-
tive withdrawal from the market economy of wage-labor and consump-
tion. This refusal was intended to cause the collapse of the commercial

132 Chapter Three
economy, establishing fair prices and fair labor practices as one part of an
egalitarian life composed of “equal rights, equal liberties, equal enjoyments,
equal toil, equal respect, equal share of production.”31 Benbow’s vision of a
fair economy, taking some substance from the sans- culotte strategy of price
“maximums,” was a politics for a commodity-dominated society, an attempt
to level not land ownership but the emergent capitalist political economy.
The National Holiday was, like Blake’s image, the product of a long his-
tory of Atlantic world resistance to slave- owning authority. During the
English Revolution, Winstanley called on “all labourers, or such as are called
poor people” to cease working for landlords and large farmers as “hirelings.”
He did not argue for dispossession of the rich, but instead encouraged
laborers to refuse to work for them, which would lead to the inevitable
collapse of large farms and estates. The historian Christopher Hill noted
the repeated “call to refuse to work for landlords for wages: he advocated,
that is to say, something like a general strike.”32 Like the subsequent general
strike, the Digger action was opposed to the very form of wage-labor and
was intended to spark a widespread movement first in England, then glob-
ally. Accordingly, a former ironmonger named John Sanders was reduced to
the lower status of nailer by 1655, when he appeared on the streets of Bir-
mingham, dressed in rags, and calling on the nailers to “hold together, by
assisting and maintaining one another one fortnight or a month, and forbear
working.”33 These ideas so exactly foreshadow Benbow’s National Holi-
day that it is difficult not to suspect an oral tradition had kept it in circula-
tion in the intervening century and a half. If so, it was literally a vernacular
strategy. Benbow directly acknowledged inspiration from the Jewish tra-
dition of the seven-year Sabbatical, or release, and the fifty-year Jubilee,
at which all servants and slaves were freed and all debt rescinded. Jubilee
had spread around the Atlantic world as a radical image for the abolition
of slavery and was now becoming a figure for the refusal of the political
economy of wage-labor that was replacing chattel labor.34 The idea of the
Jubilee gathered force in England during the early years of the nineteenth
century, promoted by the Newcastle radical Thomas Spence as a combina-
tion of Jacobinism and millenarianism.35
The abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, son of the Jamaican planta-
tion owner James Wedderburn and an enslaved woman in his ownership,
Rosanna, saw the possibilities of applying the Jubilee to the British Carib-
bean colonies.36 Wedderburn was first a sailor, then a member of the radi-
cal London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, leading to his becoming

Visuality 133
a Wesleyan preacher, fulminating against slavery and oppression. In 1817
he began publishing a radical newssheet entitled The Axe Laid to the Root,
which supplied details of how to enact the Jubilee in slave-owning islands:
“My advice to you is, to appoint a day wherein you will all pretend to
sleep one hour beyond the appointed time of your rising to labour; let the
appointed day be twelve months before it takes place; let it be talked of
in your marketplace, and on the roads. The universality of your sleeping
and non-resistance, will strike terror to your oppressors. Go to your labour
peaceably after the hour is expired; and repeat it once a year, till you obtain
your liberty.”37 This tactic of nonresisting resistance was the hallmark of the
general strike to come, but also of the past refusal in Saint-Domingue to
accept new labor conditions on the plantations, as Wedderburn made clear:
“Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you.”38
The threat of the appropriation of property was close behind the Jubilee in
these sentiments that Wedderburn claimed to be disseminating in Jamaica
via his sister Frances Campbell, a Maroon. A letter attributed to her was
published in The Axe Laid to the Root, in which she described her conver-
sion to the Jubilee and her attempt to liberate her own enslaved workers.39
Whether the letter was really from Jamaica or not, Wedderburn himself
stands as testimony to the transnational discourse of the Jubilee that fed
into the Grand National Holiday. The holiday brought together different
strands of radical discourse from the Old Testament calls for emancipa-
tion to antislavery activism, revolutionary practice in England, France, and
Saint-Domingue as collective action against a wage-labor economy visu-
alized as both an extension of the plantation complex and as interactive
with it.
Although Benbow had only a rudimentary plan for the implementation
of the holiday, the Chartists called for one to begin on 12 August 1839, only
to cancel it at the last moment.40 The moment nonetheless arrived, in July
and August 1842, when half a million workers were on strike, from Dundee
to Cornwall, in a series of actions that lasted longer than the better-known
general strike of 1926.41 The principle at stake was what one Glasgow-based
group had described as the workers’ goal to “desist from their labour and
attend wholly to their Rights, and to consider it the duty of everyone not to
recommence until he is in possession of those Rights which distinguish the
Freeman from the Slave, viz. that of giving consent to the laws by which
he is governed.”42 Here rights, labor, freedom, and slavery were linked by
means of the idea of a general cessation of work into an idea of representa-

134 Chapter Three
tion. In similar fashion, Thomas Attwood declared, on presenting the first
Chartist petition, in July 1839: “They would prove that the men of Bir-
mingham were England.”43 That is to say, the Chartists and other radicals
claimed that their political demonstrations represented a clear statement of
their desires and goals, to which the body-politic must respond, because the
Chartists were the nation. A political aesthetics was at work here, in which
representation corresponded exactly to that which it was supposed to de-
pict, just as the new technology of the photograph was supposed to do. In
short, realism. In 1845, Friedrich Engels argued that the strikes and other
strategies of the Chartists would overthrow the “sham existence” of parlia-
ment. The assertion of “real public opinion in its totality” would soon lead
to the “whole nation” being represented in parliament. Once this old goal
of British radicalism, dating back to the seventeenth-century Levellers, had
been accomplished, Engels believed that the “last halo must fall from the
head of the monarch and the aristocracy,” ushering in a new Jerusalem.44
Engels deployed an anti-illusionist theory of representation, in which the
body politic would come to be composed by the body of people, rather
than by the head of the hereditary rulers. In a striking moment of opti-
mism, Engels claims that Carlyle “has sounded the social disorder more
deeply than any other English bourgeois, and demands the organization of
labour. I hope that Carlyle, who has found the right path, will be capable
of following it.”45 For Engels, writing like a latter-day Blake, “prophecy is
nowhere so easy as in England. . . . [T]he revolution must come.”46
That it did not was due in some part to Carlyle, whose anticapitalism
was no radicalism. Carlyle understood that what he called the “cash nexus”
of Victorian capitalism created condensations of the social that enabled
revolutionary change, as it had done in France. Produced in the same year
that Benbow’s holiday had been called and cancelled, his rapidly written
book Chartism denounced all these changes. Carlyle sought a restoration
of Heroic “kingship,” not revolution. He claimed that “the deep dumb in-
articulate” crowds of Chartist demonstrations were manifesting a desire
that they could not name, symptoms of a “disease” within what he famously
called “the condition of England.”47 This condition was mental, rather than
physical, an examination of what he would come to call “the deranged con-
dition of our affairs.”48 The people and the modern were, then, literally in-
sane, just as Pinel had seen the French Revolution as accelerating madness.
In this regard, Carlyle was a modern, insofar as he recognized the existence
of unconscious motivations and desires. Nonetheless, he insisted that the

Visuality 135
workers could not represent themselves because their condition had to be
diagnosed by another. In the Platonic tradition, any representation was in-
adequate to the Ideal. As if in ironic refutation of the concept of Chartism
as the “mobility,” Carlyle’s political solution to the problem of representa-
tion was that the working-classes should emigrate to the colonies, making
empire the cure to the disease of England.49 He recognized that the prob-
lem was caused by a laissez-faire approach in economy and government, but
“the Working Classes cannot any longer go on without government; with-
out being actually guided and governed.”50 The solution he arrived at was a
return to a “real Aristocracy” formed of “the Best and the Bravest,” rather
than to the hereditary aristocracy that dominated British society.51 As be-
fitted an admirer of Frederick the Great, Carlyle envisaged an enlightened
despotism, not a democracy. For having conquered the world, the second
task of the “English People in World-History,” as Carlyle put it, was how to
share the “fruit of said conquest.”
The way not to accomplish it was such “Benthamee” (that is to say, Ben-
thamite) ideas as “elective franchise, ballot-box, representative assembly.”52
Following the publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Jeremy Ben-
tham’s reforming Panopticon has become understood as the epitome of
disciplinary surveillance in the period. However, panopticism was con-
tested not just from the Left, but also from the imperial Right. It might
be thought that the observation of work was simply a transposition of the
overseer’s work on the plantation to the industrial factory. The difference
was not in the practice of surveillance, but in the ethics of reform espoused
by Bentham. In keeping with the transition from owning labor power to
regulating it in order to maximize production, panopticism sought a trans-
formation of the subject to what Foucault called the “docile body,” a person
that accepted the goals of the institution and embodied them. This form of
production might be considered a form of compromise between workers
and employers—in exchange for suitably concentrated work, a diminished
violence of the conditions of work. In the period 1801–71, such contracts,
whether actual or virtual, were far from universal, even in the factories or
military barracks that were supposed to be paradigms of panopticism, let
alone in the colonies. Carlyle opposed any contractual arrangement be-
tween the Hero and the mass in favor of the duty of obedience, and he saw
all such reform efforts as doomed to failure. Carlyle held that criminals,
“the Devil’s regiments of the line,” were not to be dealt with domestically.
A proper prison governor “will sweep them pretty rapidly into some Nor-

136 Chapter Three
folk Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote domestic Moor-
land, into some stone-walled Silent System.”53 Norfolk Island was a penal
colony within the penal colony, an island off the coast of New South Wales,
where truly draconian measures were applied to discipline recalcitrant con-
victs from 1825 onward. Far from being the origin of human rights, as Péron
had hoped, the islands of Australia were now the site of penal punishment.
The “silent system” was the regime of compulsory silence in prison intro-
duced in the nineteenth century over Bentham’s vigorous objections: “This
species of punishment . . . may overthrow the powers of the mind, and
produce incurable melancholy.”54 What Bentham saw as an occasional pun-
ishment came to be adopted as a system, endorsed by Carlyle and other
conservatives. Carlyle’s visuality was, then, opposed to panopticism both
as a mode of visual order and as a specific system of controlling punish-
ment. Hostile to Chartism, and laissez-faire economics, to social reform and
emancipation, it offered a modern mode of picturing history, which con-
tested panopticism and liberalism throughout the nineteenth century with
both theoretical and practical consequences.

the triumPh of the hero

History, understood as a form of thought, took on a new centrality in the

nineteenth century, when, as Foucault has shown, “philosophy was to re-
side in the gap between history and History, between events and Origin,
between evolution and the first rending open of the source, between obliv-
ion and the Return.”55 Where history had been the chronicle of events, His-
tory was to speak of Origins, causes and impersonal forces. The nature of
this terminology also indicates the distance between this form of History
and the work done by present-day historians. For many reformers and con-
stitutionalists after the French Revolution, representation no longer repre-
sented other representations, as it had done in the past, but had to be located
in History, whose characteristics were the subject of immense new efforts.
Writing in 1827, the same year that Nicéphore Nièpce first succeeded in fix-
ing a plate with a light-sensitive image, Augustin Thierry described his am-
bition to write “a history of France that reproduces with fidelity the ideas,
the sentiments and the customs of the men who have transmitted to us the
name that we carry, and whose destiny has prepared our own.”56 This his-
tory required the “real” production of a feeling of the national out of the
divergent materials to hand, rendering History into the very science of the

Visuality 137
Real. If oversight had marshaled the material domains of the plantation
complex, visuality orchestrated its place in time.
Thierry had argued, in 1820, that all French history had been that of a
divide between Gallo-Romans and Germans: “We believe ourselves to be
a nation, but we are two nations within one land, two nations which are
enemies because of what they remember and because their projects are ir-
reconcilable: one once conquered the other.”57 The nobility were the de-
scendants of the conquering Germans, whereas the majority of the Third
Estate was descended from the serfs of the medieval communes. Where
Carlyle was to depict the French Revolution as a generalized war of all
against all, Thierry saw it as a reconciliation between these two warring
“races” in which all inequalities such as that between “master and slave”
were eradicated—ignoring plantation slavery as usual. Indeed, he perceived
the subsequent revolutions of 1848 (which did abolish slavery) as a “catas-
trophe,” causing him to abandon his research for years.58 Looking back in
1866, Thierry claimed that he had begun his work in 1817 to promote his
constitutional politics, without regard for his materials. But his manuscript
and archival research generated a desire to understand the past for its own
sake, which, when he realized it “in a piece of life or local color, I felt an in-
voluntary emotion.”59 His history was intended to reproduce this physically
felt love of country, which was indispensable to the work of producing a
single “nation.” Thierry warned his readers, in 1827, “It will not be enough
in any sense to be capable of this mutual admiration for that which is called
the Hero; one must have a larger manner of feeling and judging,” which
entailed a sympathy for the “mass of men.”60 If his warning was against the
emergence of revolutionary Heroes, rather than the aristocratic Heroes en-
visioned by Carlyle, the issue remained pertinent. For Thierry, the “imag-
ined community” of the modern nation required universal participation,
making slavery impossible, even as subjection to the Hero. For Carlyle, only
such subjection could ensure the avoidance of chaos.
Carlyle’s work was part of a dramatic reconfiguration of historical events
into the metaphysical narratives of History that involved both new tech-
nical procedures and new literary styles, derived from German Romanti-
cism.61 Carlyle did not follow those of his contemporaries, like Leopold
von Ranke, who famously claimed to write history “to show what actually
happened,” albeit with a clear bias to what he called the “German race.”62
Indeed, Carlyle’s dramatic sleight-of-hand in Chartism was to rewrite the
Norman Conquest so that, rather than being a domination of French over

138 Chapter Three
Saxon, the arrival of the Normans was a supplement of a French-speaking
variety of Teutons to the already resident Teutonic Saxons. The difference
was only that the Normans were in a “condition to govern,” while the Sax-
ons were not.63 At once, Carlyle had refuted Thierry’s theory of History
and countered one of the most enabling of radical narratives, the Norman
Yoke, meaning the suppression of Saxon freedom by Norman oppression.
Whatever the difference between Saxons and Normans, the change must
have been, as Carlyle put it, “rather tolerable” or it would not have endured.
As such rhetorical maneuvers suggest, Carlyle also refused the new techni-
cal apparatus of historical research promoted by Ranke, such as the use of
documentary archives, or even libraries, seeing them as the product of “Mr
Dryasdust.”64
For Carlyle, History was far more than the accumulation of facts, and
historians themselves were often questionable because they presented
events as “successive, while the things done were often simultaneous.”65 To
capture this simultaneous quality, Carlyle wanted to convey an “Idea of
the whole,” which he rendered by means of what he called “a succession of
vivid pictures.”66 Unlike Chartist representation, Carlyle’s visuality was a
counter-phantasmagoria that imagined modernity as a Platonic cinema of
Ideas, cutting backward and forward across the flow of time.67 By contrast,
Ranke aspired to a “colorless” history that refused to create a false sense of
unity, even if that meant becoming what he called “disconnected.” His con-
temporaries recognized the unusual nature of Carlyle’s writing. In a letter
to Carlyle, written in 1837, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson praised his new
style, asserting, “I think you see in pictures.”68 Emerson’s remark implied
that it was possible to see otherwise than in pictures, meaning as a series of
unconnected images or impressions, such as those Paine had hoped would
render rights irreversible. This pictorial vision was in a sense literally His-
tory painting, that is to say, the leading genre of painting that was cele-
brated for its ability to sustain a narrative within a single frame and reached
its highpoint as official art in the nineteenth century. In similar fashion,
visuality ordered and narrated the chaotic events of modern life in intelli-
gible, visualized form into moving pictures. At the very moment in which
natural history with its reliance on visibility was becoming biology, based
on what Foucault calls the “internal principle . . . of organic structure,”
History took what we might now call a visual turn.69 Consequently, Car-
lyle was explicitly opposed to the new physiology of vision in which seeing
and understanding was the same process.70 For example, the British scien-

Visuality 139
tist David Brewster explained, in 1832, that “the ‘mind’s eye’ is actually the
body’s eye and that the retina is the common tablet on which both classes
of impressions are painted, and by means of which they receive their visual
existence according to the same optical laws.”71 The Hero, by contrast, was
not to be limited to such external impressions, “as if no Reality any longer
existed but only Phantasms of realities.”72 The Hero was marked by his
effortless ability to combine sensory data and other information and intu-
ition into a picture visible to the inner or spiritual eye, which, once opened,
rendered the observer into a “Seer.”73 The homonym between see-er and
Seer was part of Carlyle’s intent to stress a spiritually motivated vision of
History, distinct from the conflation of vision with Reason that had domi-
nated Enlightenment discourse. The overseer was now simply the Seer: a
prophet, a Hero, and a King.
This visualized history was contrasted to the “Phantasmagories, and
loud-gibbering Spectral Realities” that dominated popular understanding
of history as it happened, locked into an unseeing present.74 First incarnated
as an entertainment projecting ghosts and other specters by Philidor, the
phantasmagoria became famous when Etienne Gaspard Robertson’s ver-
sion appeared in Paris, in 1797. Robertson created high camp Gothic per-
formances in which various “shades” would be resuscitated for the audi-
ence’s delight, ranging from the revolutionary Marat to Virgil and famous
lost lovers, using effects ranging from magic lantern slides, to sound, and
magnification. The phantasmagoria quickly turned into a metaphor for
the haunted qualities of modern life. Blake had peopled his London with
the Spectre, Marx saw commodity fetishism as a phantasmagoria, while
Benjamin made it a feature of his Arcades Project, and even today Sla-
voj Žižek warns us against the “fantasy of the real.” In short, there is some
agreement among critics of the modern that its form is the phantasmagoria,
an illusion of light and sound that displaces the real. For Carlyle, the mod-
ern was dominated by “the loud-roaring Loom of Time with all its French
Revolutions, Jewish Revelations,” creating a phantasmagoria that obscured
Tradition and the Seer.75 In counterpoint to this spectral vernacular reality
of everyday people, with their eternal tendency to amalgamate as Revolu-
tion, Carlyle conjured a visualized form of History, dominated by Heroes.
Following his rebuttal of Chartism, Carlyle developed his ideas on visu-
alized power in an acclaimed series of lectures entitled On Heroes and Hero
Worship, given in 1840 and published the following year. In grand indif-
ference to all possible objection, and as if being wholly original, Carlyle’s

140 Chapter Three
lectures described a tradition of Heroes running from the Norse gods, via
Muhammad and Dante to Cromwell and Napoleon. Carlyle consolidated
and embodied his theory of History into the Hero, who had the vision to
see History as it happened, a viewpoint that was obscured for the ordi-
nary person by the specters and phantasmagorias of emancipation.76 The
Hero that stood against the modern tide of darkness was “the living light-
fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which en-
lightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world: and this not as
a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift
of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of
manhood and Heroic nobleness; in whose radiance all souls feel that it is
well with them” (2–3). The Hero was a projection into visuality, not visu-
ality in and of himself. This sense of light extending in a fountain was con-
gruous with—and perhaps appropriated from—the exactly contemporary
sense articulated by John Williams, the London Missionary Society evan-
gelist, of his South Pacific mission as a “fountain from whence the streams
of salvation are to flow to the numerous islands and clusters scattered over
that extensive ocean.”77 In both cases, the object of visuality’s work was
the “soul,” in need of leadership or conversion. The visualized Hero was the
true source of light and enlightenment, his insight stemming from a quasi-
divine nobility to which it is pleasurable to submit, generating its sense of
the aesthetic. Indeed, visuality was named as part of the Christian Hero-
ism of Dante. For Carlyle, the Divine Comedy was a Song, in which “every
compartment . . . is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into
clear visuality,” that became a “painting” (79). Interestingly, then, from its
very conception visuality was a multimedia term, connecting art, literature,
and music, as Carlyle insisted that “Dante’s painting was not graphic only,
brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night” (80). This form of lan-
guage offered strong visual metaphors, even as its meaning was opaque, per-
haps unknowable. Carlyle created a visual Platonism in which the shadows
on the cave wall are all mere humans can see, yet they are nothing but error.
The pleasure came from the binding of the “mystical foundation of au-
thority” to the Hero in and as visuality. The Hero has authority because he
can perceive visuality and in mystical fashion thus becomes the source of
life-giving light in himself. His task is the “making of Order” (175). This
order was what Carlyle called “Protestantism,” a return to Reality that had
to be carried out on three occasions. The first was Luther making the Protes-
tant Reformation and overturning the false idols of Catholicism. Next came

Visuality 141
Oliver Cromwell, who was “the one available Authority left in England”
and saved it from anarchy (199). Finally came Napoleon, repeating the task
with the French Revolution but performing the necessary additional func-
tion of disposing of Divine Right and “opening careers to all the talents”
(205), creating a Democracy that was not Anarchy. On each occasion, au-
thority reclaimed its force. For Carlyle, this was a three-act play in which
the defeat of the French Revolution marked the final “return to reality . . .
for lower than that savage Sansculottism men cannot go” (203). The gaze of
the Hero in the modern period was to be a form of Medusa effect, petrify-
ing the transformations of modernity into recognizable social relations. This
castrating gaze was paradoxically universal, affecting all men and women,
leaving only the Hero capable of visuality. No doubt the Great Man was
the product of “manhood” alone, in keeping with colonial views of proper
masculinity, opposed to the feminized collective of the crowd, or as Car-
lyle usually put it, the mob.78 Visuality was embodied in the Hero, rather
than the regenerated rights-bearing body of the French Revolution, and
the Heroic masculine body was worthy of worship. Now only the Hero
stands against the “cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know
not what:—the notes being all false” (12). For in the mimetic realism of rep-
resentation by the people, there was no true means of founding authority,
leading instead to unrepresentable chaos. Implicit in this view is a parallel
between the Hero and the historian, who both stand against the chaos of
modernity, for History is the history of Heroes.79 Although Carlyle spoke of
the Hero and Hero-worship as “the one fixed point in modern revolutionary
history” (15), he had here doubled that point so that it represented both the
Hero and his worshiper-chronicler the historian, making the Heroic view-
point complex, even paradoxical. Visuality had its double-vision as well.
Carlyle created a counterrevolutionary sense of past time by erasing the
complex time of rights in favor of a subjugating Tradition. Yet he continued
to frame this conception of history in visual terms. Writing just after Louis
Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot had announced the success of their
photographic devices, Carlyle declared: “What an enormous camera-obscura
magnifier is Tradition! . . . Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost dis-
tance, some gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enor-
mous camera-obscura image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a mad-
ness and nothing, but a sanity and something” (23). Whereas the Revolution
relied on a condensation of visual symbols, Tradition expanded the visual
field from a single point of light, that place where law and force joined

142 Chapter Three
together to found authority. In visuality, the future is always already sub-
jected to the past, when that past is codified into Tradition. Even then out-
dated as a physiological model of perception, the camera obscura revealed
rather than obscured those truths inherent in Time that Carlyle called Tra-
dition.80 This antitheoretical, antichronological History is a light penetrat-
ing the darkness of the camera in the hope of preserving sanity, meaning
that perception attested to an actually existing reality and was not merely a
hallucination. If, to adapt W. J. T. Mitchell’s question, we ask, “What does
visuality want?,” Carlyle’s answer is clear: “order” (175). Like Urizen, Car-
lyle opposed Order to anarchy as the necessary movement of human life,
understanding that movement was the inevitable corollary of modernity,
but insisting that it be toward order not chaos.

c h ao s, c u lt u r e , a n d e m a n c i Pat i o n

Carlyle’s work on Heroism was well received and his influence continued
to grow, giving him a “long (and largely unremarked) legacy in reactionary
thought.”81 Yet his views became even more pessimistic as he grew older, as
he confronted the possibility that the French Revolution was not the final
act of Protestantism. For there was one more descent into anarchy that
might transpire, namely that the emancipation of the enslaved might lead
to the dissolution of the British empire. If Carlyle’s first thoughts on visu-
ality were prompted by the memory of the French Revolution, after the de-
cade of Chartism culminated in the revolutions of 1848, he then turned his
attention to the state of the British empire after emancipation in a series of
essays, published, in 1855, as Latter-Day Pamphlets. The eschatological tenor
of his title was reflected in the tragic structure of modernity presented in
the essays that set the tone for the assumption of imperialism not as ex-
ploitation but as a titanic struggle between the forces of “Cosmos, of God
and Human Virtue” and those of “Chaos.”82 Carlyle denied the very possi-
bility of reform and emancipation: “Yes, my friends, a scoundrel is a scoun-
drel: that remains forever a fact.”83 It was the central issue of emancipation,
especially as regarded the formerly enslaved, that led Carlyle’s position to
gain more adherents over time. In his notorious essay in Fraser’s Magazine
(1849), reprinted as a pamphlet under the title “Occasional Discourse on
the Nigger Question,” Carlyle reiterated the impossibility of emancipa-
tion.84 The essay has been widely cited for its revolting depiction of the
emancipated Africans in Jamaica idling the day away “with their beauti-

Visuality 143
ful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins.”85 This refusal of the colonized to
labor, while finding food all around, served as Carlyle’s exemplary moment
of the failure of what he called the “Emancipation-principle,” that lowest
of all sansculottisms. In short, Carlyle suggested that the emancipated had
refused to sell their labor-power and instead cultivated their own “gardens.”
This dialectic between national economy and local subsistence had struc-
tured the Saint-Domingue revolution, and it played a central role in British
debates over the abolition of slavery before and after the fact.86 Carlyle’s
nasty parody would have been immediately recognizable to those familiar
with these debates and served to accelerate a growing consensus that the
enslaved had failed to become workers. That is to say, the plantation com-
plex could not be reformed; it had to be reinforced. In this view, abolition
had instead turned “the West Indies into a Black Ireland,” meaning a place
where work was not properly carried out.87 Like many other commenta-
tors in the period, Carlyle insisted that emancipation had failed to create
a black working class in the Caribbean and had instead produced lazy and
immoral individuals. It was the other side of Chartism, a similar failure of
the vernacular to rise to the challenge of leadership. From the decline of the
Jamaica plantations and the experience of the Demerara rebellion of the en-
slaved, in 1823, Carlyle concluded: “Except by Mastership and Servantship,
there is no conceivable deliverance from Tyranny and Slavery. Cosmos is
not Chaos, simply by this one quality, That it is governed. Where wisdom,
even approximately, can contrive to govern, all is right, or is ever striving to
become so; where folly is ‘emancipated,’ and gets to govern, as it soon will,
all is wrong.”88 Order required governing, governing required great men,
great men visualized history as its sole actors.
The Occasional Discourse marked a transition in British public opinion in
which, as Catherine Hall has put it, “the tide was running against abolition-
ist truths.”89 In 1857, the aftermath of the so-called Indian Mutiny, or First
War of Indian Independence, would mark the assumption of direct colo-
nial control in the subcontinent, suggesting that order could not be left
to the market alone, as represented by the East India Company. Order re-
quired government. This anti-abolition and pro-colonial shift had impor-
tant political consequences in the aftermath of the Morant Bay uprising of
1865 in Jamaica: “Months of tension between black people and white over
land, labour and law erupted after an unpopular verdict from magistrates
led to a demonstration and attempted arrests.”90 In the ensuing violence,
eighteen officials and members of the militia were killed, leading Governor

144 Chapter Three
Edward John Eyre to call out troops. More than 400 people were executed,
another 600 flogged, and 1,000 homes were destroyed. In the ensuing furor,
the Eyre Defence Committee was established in Britain, with Carlyle being
joined by such leading cultural figures such as Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord
Tennyson, and John Ruskin, the champion of Turner’s work. The commit-
tee made its case so well that Eyre was never prosecuted for his actions, and
Jamaican home rule was rescinded in favor of direct governance from Brit-
ain. Eyre explained, “The Negroes are most excitable and impulsive, and
any seditious or rebellious action was sure to be taken up and extended.”
His belief that colonial authority could not “deal” with Jamaicans in the
way that one might treat “the peasantry of a European country” was re-
inforced by the scientist Joseph Hooker, for whom it was self- evident that
“we do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaican negro to be convertible
terms.”91 Abolitionism had posed an enslaved man asking, “Am I not a man
and a brother?” By 1865, the answer was “no.” Carlyle’s view of the ne-
cessity of mastery, far from being marginal, was now imperial policy. The
Chartist goal of total representation was firmly set aside in favor of a non-
equivalence between different British subjects.
This distinction within visuality was the move that would allow it to
become a practical strategy of imperial governance, concentrating on the
separation and segregation of colonizer and colonized. This additional di-
mension to visuality came from the addition of “culture” to the battlefield
of the social imagined by Carlyle. Just as there was a certain convergence
around 1660 that permitted the formation of oversight as a combination of
mapping, natural history, and the force of law, so, too, did the concept of
culture become deployed very quickly, around 1870. In Matthew Arnold’s
foundational account, culture meant “trying to perfect oneself,” whereas
its opposite was “anarchy,” defined as “doing as one likes.” Culture created
light, which in turn enabled people “to like what right reason ordains and
to follow her authority, then we have got a practical benefit out of culture.”
This chain of visualized command was all the more necessary in an “epoch
of expansion,” meaning industrial development, population growth, and
imperial expansion. If this pattern of explanation recalls Carlyle’s vision of
authority and the ills of emancipation, that is not surprising, for it comes
from a passage in which Arnold was modifying Carlyle so that aristocra-
cies did not gain their privilege by birthright alone: “The very principle
of authority which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy is right
reason, ideas, light.”92 Such principles were central to the Carlyle of 1840,

Visuality 145
who had become somewhat obscured by the dyspeptic later writings. The
key here is to note that culture and authority have become synonyms. Cul-
ture thus came to be understood as what the ethnographer Edward Bur-
net Tylor called the “complex network of civilization.”93 This network was
locally divided and globally staged into ranks of “development.” Tylor as-
serted that there was “scarce a hand’s breath difference between an English
ploughman and a negro of Central Africa,” refining Hooker’s refusal to con-
vert Jamaicans and English by a distinction of class. Among rural working
classes, while there was a distinction, it was narrow, whereas the gap be-
tween British elites and Jamaicans was so broad as to be incommensurable.
From this premise, Tylor drew the inference that if there was law at all, it
was universal, but “actually existing among mankind in different grades”
that could be assessed by virtue of the “general improvement of mankind by
higher organization of the individual and of society.”94 This view of human
progress as a uniform advance from barbarism to civilization, rather than
the present-day “savage” marking a decline from an originary state of cul-
ture, was endorsed by Darwin in his Descent of Man, published in the same
year, which made use of Tylor’s researches.95 All these opinions from Car-
lyle and the Duke of Argyll on the “Right” to Arnold’s centrist position and
Tylor and Darwin’s “liberal” opinion form what Rancière calls a consensus,
meaning not a single point of view, but a uniform range of views. In this
case, it was agreed that culture was a temporal hierarchy, existing in real
space and time, in which a minority were advanced ahead of the majority
and thereby entitled to the authority to make choices and distinctions. This
visualization of hierarchy over time gave depth and spatial dimension to
culture as an actually existing means of classification and separation. In
short, culture authorized empire.

counter-heroes

That imperial visuality will be considered in chapter 5, but we should not

let Carlyle’s sleight- of-hand deceive us. Emancipation and the imperial
crisis were not supposed to happen in his scheme of ordered reality. That
is to say, if the Reformation, English Revolution, and French Revolution
were, against all appearances, nonetheless part of Visuality 1 and part of
visuality’s life-process, the self-directed emancipation of the enslaved and
the colonized was not. Any such imagining was held to be insanity. Abo-
lition and decolonization were the outside to Visuality 1’s reality effect,

146 Chapter Three
creating a plurality of realisms. Visuality 2 is composed of other ways of
ordering reality that do not tend to support a single authority. In the gene-
alogy of visuality, then, realism cannot be contained to a period in capital’s
early development. Precisely because such abolition realisms have not fig-
ured in the standard accounts of modernity, the next chapter is devoted
to them. Here I want to show first that abolitionist and decolonial prac-
tice engaged with Carlyle’s visuality throughout the nineteenth century by
contesting heroism at the heart of the still- existing plantation complex in
the Americas. At first it was not clear that promoting heroism implied re-
jecting abolition. In a telling moment, in September 1840, Carlyle spurned
a delegation of American women to the world congress on the abolition of
slavery, who had thought that the author of On Heroes must be a supporter
of their cause.96 He insisted it was nothing to do with him, as he disparaged
emancipation as a failure. That warning was increasingly to dominate Car-
lyle’s sense of the modern phantasmagoria, as revolution seemed to spread
around Europe from the Chartists to the radical year of 1848 with its final
abolition of slavery in French and Danish colonies. So central was Car-
lyle’s visualized heroism in the period that even those adamantly opposed
to his system had to pass by it. I next consider some representative examples
of abolition “heroes” whose gender, sexuality or ethnicity would have ex-
cluded them from all consideration by Carlyle.
Sojourner Truth’s self-presentation as a hero of abolition in the United
States challenged the gendering of heroism as inevitably masculine.97 Truth,
as Nell Irvin Painter has pointed out, was the only woman who had been
enslaved to take an active role in the emancipation movement (Harriet
Tubman’s work being of a different character).98 Part of Truth’s power as
a spokesperson for emancipation was her visual presence, as Olive Gilbert,
who wrote her celebrated Narrative, emphasized: “The impressions made
by Isabella on her auditors, when moved by lofty or deep feeling, can never
be transmitted to paper, (to use the words of another), till by some Da-
guerrian act, we are enabled to transfer the look, the gesture, the tones of
voice, in connection with the quaint yet fit expressions used, and the spirit-
stirring animation that, at such a time, pervades all she says.”99 Gilbert per-
sisted in naming her subject by using her slave-owner given name of Isa-
bella van Wagenen, rather than by the evocative name Sojourner Truth that
she adopted in 1843. Nonetheless, Gilbert’s sense of Truth’s heroism antici-
pated and created a desire for cinema in her wish to transfer Truth’s “look”
to others. Truth herself was skilled in deploying her “look” as evidence of

Visuality 147
her own right to look and right to be seen, by using photographs of herself
to fund her activities. She manipulated a series of carefully chosen signs,
making full use of the rhetoric of the pose that was already well-established
by the 1850s (see fig. 30). In the best-known of these images, she is seen
dressed in respectable middle- class attire, posed as if caught in the middle
of knitting. Her gender-appropriate activity and dress allowed her to sig-
nify her engagement with ideas and learning, shown by her glasses and the
open book. The caption that she provided for the cards showed her aware-
ness of the ambivalences of photography: “I sell the shadow to support
the substance.” Photography is represented as a mere shadow, rather than
the Truth that is the subject herself, the substance. Here the emancipated
woman makes her image the object of financial exchange in place of the
substance, her whole person, which had once been for sale. That commodi-
fication was justified by the substantive use to which their sale was to be
put, namely abolishing the ownership of people. At the same time, by in-
sisting on her own control over the financial process, Truth asserted a proper
freedom that the “emancipated” did not quite fully possess.100 As Kenneth S.
Greenberg argues, “An emancipation that assumed the form of a gift from
the master could only be partial,” for a gift always implies an obligation.101
It was for that reason that W. E. B. Du Bois would insist that the enslaved
had freed themselves, and it is why Truth put her image into the world in
this way, claiming to own not just her person but the substance of rights-
bearing freedom.
Truth performed this freedom at an abolitionist meeting in Indiana in
1858, where she was directly challenged over her right to be seen. The men
in the audience claimed that Truth was a man and demanded to see her
breasts. That is to say, they recognized her claim to personify a Hero, but
asserted that any such person must be male. Here was a direct embodiment
of the slave-master’s dominant gaze in the person of one Dr. Strain, a pro-
slavery spectator.102 Following a voice vote that upheld the doubters, ac-
cording to the contemporary account of the Boston Liberator, “Sojourner
told them that her breasts had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion
of her own offspring; that some of these white babies had grown to man’s
estate; that, although they had suckled her colored breasts, they were, in
her estimation, far more manly than they (her persecutors) appeared to be;
and she quietly asked them as she disrobed her bosom, if they too wished
to suck!”103 Truth rejected the slaver’s gaze by claiming the right to be seen
as a human. Further she classified her own body as exhibiting what Judith

148 Chapter Three
figure 30. AnonyMous, soJourner trutH.
gladstone Collection, Prints and Photographs division, library of Congress.
Halberstam has called in a different context “female masculinity,” uphold-
ing both terms of the identification.104 Truth asserted that her body was
certainly female, yet it was better able to engender manliness than those
men around her, whom she reduced to infants by offering them her breast.
This deployment of the body further contested anthropological ideas that
the breasts might index racial difference, white notions of beauty, and the
symbolically revealed breasts of the revolutionary figure of Liberty.105 For
Liberty nurtures the nation at her symbolic breast, whereas Truth revealed
the known but hidden truth that enslaved African women actually nur-
tured white male infants, who would become slave-owners. She claimed
that men so suckled became more “manly” men than her detractors, despite
the fact that African breasts were taken as signs of degeneracy and ugliness.
Here she invented the other in one of the most direct ways possible, while
claiming her own right to look and to be seen.
Truth was constantly nomadic, always in pursuit of emancipation, gen-
erating a complex, even chaotic, visuality out of the stale clichés of her
time. As Daphne Brooks has put it: “From the darkness of the void which
she creates, surplus Truths are put into play.”106 This was Carlyle’s heroism
reversed, a countervisuality of the hero. For whereas his camera obscura of
tradition had magnified a single point of light, Truth deployed an array of
imagery to explore the tensions between the shadows and the substances
of embodied labor, reproduction, and representation. Sustaining that com-
plexity was the key, for merely gendering Carlyle’s Heroism female could
produce disparate effects. Gayatri Spivak has shown, for example, how the
contemporaneous practice in India of sati, or widow immolation, was pre-
sented as a form of heroism that generated admiration for what one com-
mentator called “the cool and unfaltering courage of Indian women.” If
imperialism rendered the woman what Spivak calls the “object of protection
from her own kind,” it also made them into heroes for refusing that protec-
tion.107 Like visibility within the Panopticon, counterheroism was a trap as
well as a resource, one that mobilized an entire genealogy of nineteenth-
century gender.
The impact of these refigured modes of heroic visuality in the Americas
can be traced via an apparently unlikely example of heroism: the figure of
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. In 1865, Carlyle considered
writing a pamphlet in defense of Davis as a Heroic figure, a choice he for
once rejected as being too outrageous even for him.108 Both Oscar Wilde
and W. E. B. Du Bois pursued this untaken road, intending to authorize

150 Chapter Three
anti-imperial and antiracist heroisms respectively, but by different means.
Of course, these complex figures cannot be fully understood simply with
reference to their response to Carlyle’s and Emerson’s theory of the Hero,
but as a line of inquiry it has much to say about both of them. Accord-
ing to W. B. Yeats, Carlyle was the “chief inspirer of self- educated men in
the ‘eighties and early ‘nineties,’” even including such unlikely figures as
Vincent van Gogh, who thought On Heroes to be “a very beautiful little
book.”109 Wilde, prime mover of such aspiring artists in Britain, was taken
by the “stormy rhetoric” of Carlyle, whom he met in 1874 and whose writ-
ing table he later purchased for his own use. Wilde was able to quote long
passages of The French Revolution by heart, and his own writing bears the
marks of Carlyle’s influence.110
On his tour of America, in 1882, Wilde appeared as an Elizabethan aes-
thete, as seen in the photographs of Napoleon Sarony, a direct challenge to
the aesthetics of the hero. His pose was that of a member of “a race once
the most aristocratic in Europe,” namely the Irish.111 Wilde assumed that his
class would sustain his pose as a hero, deflecting any other criticism, but his
perceived effeminacy created a clear sense of gender and sexual difference.
However, as so often in the United States, this difference was displaced
into “race” as the most effective form of classification and separation. The
Washington Post invited its readers of 22 January 1882 to consider “How Far
Is It from This to This?,” which captioned two drawings: one of the legend-
ary Wild Man of Borneo, the other of Wilde holding a sunflower. This
pseudo-Darwinian fear of so-called reverse evolution was condensed into
a composite visual symbol the next week by Harper’s Weekly as a monkey
admiring a sunflower.112 Far from seeming Heroic, Wilde’s aestheticism was
perceived as a reverse or inverted effeminacy that was figured as racial de-
generation. Accordingly, in Rochester, New York, students hired a laborer
to parody Wilde as a blackface minstrel, as if to suggest that his whiteness
was forfeited by his effeminacy.113 This caricature persisted throughout his
career, as in Pellegrino’s caricature of him as “The Ape” (1884) and a Punch
cartoon depicting the “Christy Minstrels of No Importance” (1893) at the
time of A Woman of No Importance.114 Wilde found that being a colonial sub-
ject did not make him a “white Englishman” when questions of difference
were being put. As if reinventing himself as Carlyle, Wilde responded by
making a public visit to none other than Jefferson Davis, in June 1882, where
he compared the struggles of the Irish for independence within the British
empire to that of the Confederacy: “We in Ireland are fighting for the prin-

Visuality 151
ciple of autonomy against empire, for independence against centralization,
for the principles for which the South fought.”115 The countervisual claim
to autonomy was staged against Carlyle’s Protestant reality, even if it tended
to very different effect. If his being Irish could not be posed as Heroic aris-
tocracy because of his perceived embodied difference, Wilde repositioned
it as a form of Heroic resistance to tyranny that nonetheless endorsed the
continuance of a decentralized British empire. He presumably did not
know that Davis’s plantation had been repossessed from African Americans
who had been bequeathed the estate by the former Confederate president’s
brother. Nonetheless, Wilde was claiming the place of the slave-owner as
the one from which to “see the Irish people free,” an emphatic designation
of the place of the master in what he would elsewhere call “Hegel’s con-
traries.”
For W. E. B. Du Bois, the legacy of Carlyle’s visualized Hero had to be
veiled rather than appropriated. As a student at Fisk, Du Bois was much
taken with Carlyle’s writing, especially The French Revolution, which re-
mained a stylistic influence throughout his long career. When editor of the
Herald, the student newspaper at Fisk, Du Bois urged his readers to adopt
Carlyle’s viewpoint and even to take Bismarck as their Hero.116 During his
time at Fisk (1885–88), Du Bois heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group de-
voted to the performance of African American spirituals and other ver-
nacular music that celebrated the concept of the Jubilee; the group used
revenues from their performances to fund the university. Later Du Bois
used quotations from such songs as the headings for his chapters in The
Souls of Black Folk, where he also elegiacally discussed the history of the
Fisk Jubilee Singers.117 From the beginning of his adult life, then, Du Bois
experienced and thought through the counterpoint of Carlyle’s Hero and
the Jubilee. Once at Harvard, in 1888, Du Bois absorbed a further espousal
of Carlyle’s views on the Hero from William James. In 1890, he wrote both
an essay on Carlyle and a commencement speech for Harvard on “Jeffer-
son Davis as a Representative of Civilization.”118 The reference here was to
Emerson’s reworking of Carlyle in his own lectures published as a book
under the title Representative Men, in 1850. If Emerson was opposed to
slavery, he did not question the primacy of the “Saxon race.”119 Working
in this context, Du Bois noted that Davis’s militarism and love of adven-
ture made him “a typical Teutonic Hero.” Unlike Wilde, Du Bois deployed
Davis the Hero as a figure of failure, rather than of triumph, for as a “type of
civilization,” Davis’s vision of the “Strong Man” had ultimately led to “ab-

152 Chapter Three
surdity, the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that
another people should not be free.” This was the step that Wilde had failed
to make eight years previously, and it led Du Bois to reconsider the entire
system of the Hero. In casting himself as a Hero, Davis—and by extension
proslavery culture as a whole—had come to adopt “the overweening sense
of the I and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.” In historical terms, the
result had been the crushing of the Negro by the Teuton. Du Bois argued,
however, that the role of the Negro was not simply to provide grist for
the world-historical mill, but to challenge the Strong Man thesis with that
of the “Submissive Man,” exemplified by the Negro. The result would be
“the submission of the strength of the Strong to the advance of all,” a more
perfect individualism that would assert the contribution of even “the very
least of nations” to civilization. This interaction would prevent the disas-
trous extremes of despotism and slavery. Rather than being a simple refu-
tation of Carlyle, Du Bois was attempting to meld his discussion of the “I”
and the “Thou” from Sartor Resartus with the Great Men thesis of On Heroes.
As Shamoon Zamir has pointed out, Du Bois’s speech on Carlyle from the
same year championed “not only the admirer of Bismarck and the author
of Hero Worship, but also the critic of industrialization and the advocate of
ethical culture.”120 Du Bois would later set aside this ultimately contradic-
tory project in favor of a more radical contestation of heroism.
Du Bois drew from Carlyle a sense of the necessary entanglement of
past and present, but he arrived at a very different conception of the inter-
twining of what he later called, in Souls of Black Folk, “the Old and the New,”
which made him “glad, very glad, and yet—.”121 It is in that pause marked
by the dash that one can see Du Bois thinking through his own intellec-
tual formation in grammatological form, not quite ready to reject hero-
ism, but not content to endorse its autocratic form. His highly influential
solution to the need for African American representative men was to hail
the leadership of those he called “The Talented Tenth.” Following Emer-
son’s definition of the “Representative,” Du Bois held that “an aristocracy
of talent and character” was to perform a necessary action on behalf of
their fellows: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its ex-
ceptional men.”122 This formula was strongly derivative of Carlyle’s and
Emerson’s Hero theory, even if the former at least might have rejected this
application.123 By rethinking the Hero within the frame of “race,” Du Bois
restated the tension between the individual and the collective that he had
highlighted in the Jefferson Davis speech, but now as an exchange within

Visuality 153
his own community. For Carlyle, the very concept of the Hero was always
opposed to “Blackness” in its racialized and metaphorical senses, insofar as
they can be distinguished. Wilde, Truth, and Du Bois tried in their different
ways to revisualize the domain of the hero, as an inclusive space. In each
case, the embodiment of the countervisual hero was the key figure that
ultimately could not be sustained in the face of persistent racialized classifi-
cation and separation that famously led Du Bois to conclude that “one ever
sees his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-
reconciled strivings.”124 Visuality dominated or converted souls, but count-
ervisuality found itself with a doubled vision, two souls. The alternative was
to take the visuality imagined by antislavery and abolition and attempt to
instantiate a unified realism derived from it.

154 Chapter Three
 fouR

Abolition Realism
Reality, Realisms, and Revolution

Modernity did not simply end the plantation complex, as is still evident
in present-day America, with its seemingly permanent state of racialized
controversy, from Rodney King to Barack Obama. The intensification of
the plantation complex in its policed form interpenetrated the formation
of self-proclaimed modernity in both colony and metropole. The policed
plantation that emerged after abolition had formally ended slavery was
interactive with the reconstruction of Paris under state-of- emergency
regulations. In response, the dynamics of abolition, colonization, and revo-
lution formed a new realism that, in affiliation with W. E. B. Du Bois’s con-
cept of abolition democracy, I will call “abolition realism.” Abolition real-
ism brought together the general strike and the Jubilee in order to forge a
refusal of slavery, such that abolition was observable and capable of being
represented and sustained. Consequently, it was important that it be legible
as “real” to others, as well as to those involved in making it. This abolition
realism engaged with and shaped the realist means of visual representa-
tion that were central to the painting and photography of the period. In
this chapter I map the confrontation of realisms created by this interpene-
tration of metropole and plantation from the revolutionary year of 1848 as
seen from the plantation, via the abolition of slavery in the United States to
a point of entanglement between them in 1867, whose terms were played
out in the Paris Commune of 1871. In short, I place the reality and realism
of modern Paris, legendary capital of the nineteenth century, in counter-
point with the reality and realism of the abolition of literal and metaphori-
cal slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas.
At the head of his prospectus (1935) for The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
placed a quotation from Paris, capitale de la France (1897), the Vietnamese poet
Trong Hiep Nguyen’s now-obscure volume, as if to suggest that it was the
source of his own, now legendary title “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth
Century.”1 Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century not because it
dominated economically or politically, but because of its colonization of the
imagination, which led the Vietnamese poet to visualize it as a place where
“one goes for a walk.” In The Arcades Project itself, Benjamin returned to this
theme, musing on the way that the Place du Maroc, in Belleville—site of
some of the fiercest fighting during the Paris Commune—became a “monu-
ment to colonial imperialism,” concluding: “What is decisive here is not the
association but the interpenetration of images.”2 If the modern imaginary
was formed in the crucible of the Atlantic revolutions, now modernity’s
image was formed in a contested process by which plantation, colony, and
commercial city confronted, constructed, denied, and displaced each other
within the state of emergency. In his essay of 1935, Benjamin later quoted
an essay, which he (somewhat inaccurately) identified as having appeared
in 1831, from the Journal des Débats to suggest the precariousness of capital-
ist domination: “Every manufacturer lives in his factory like a plantation
owner among his slaves.” The quote in fact comes from the journalist Saint-
Marc Girardin’s summary (1832) of the consequences of the silk riots in
Lyons: “Let us not dissimulate; reticence and evasion will get us nowhere.
The uprising at Lyons has brought to light a grave secret, the civil strife that
is taking place in society between the possessing class and the class that does
not possess. . . . [Y]ou will be frightened by the disproportion: every factory
owner lives in his factory like a colonial planter in the middle of his slaves,
one against a hundred; and the uprising at Lyons is to be compared with the
insurrection at Saint-Domingue.”3 In this view, the “real” visualization of
the class struggle in France understood it not as the revival of 1789, or even
of 1793, but of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, at once the first anticolo-
nial and proletarian uprising. Just as in the eighteenth century, this revolu-
tion was framed as something that had been hidden now coming to light. As
Carlyle’s biographer and successor James Anthony Froude often observed in
relation to Haiti, what so concerned capital was not just the independence
of the island but the 1804 constitution, which prohibited white ownership

156 Chapter Four
of land.4 The fear that the European “planter” would face not just revolt but
a revolution in property relations was something not to be dissimulated—it
was the “real conditions of existence.”
To map the formation of this interpenetrated visualization of moder-
nity, I consider the Danish Caribbean colonies, where the entanglement of
metropole and plantation was instantiated between the two islands of St
Thomas and St Croix during the revolutionary year of 1848, leading to the
policed plantation. That interpenetration was central to the reimagining of
Paris as an imperial metropole in the aftermath of 1848, when Louis Napo-
leon, nephew to the first Napoleon, became Napoleon III by coup d’état, in
1852. The metaphorical connection between the Danish Caribbean islands
and the French capital was embodied by Camille Pissarro, who witnessed
the 1848 revolution of the enslaved in St Thomas, where he grew up, and
then moved to Paris, in 1856, to become one of the now legendary Impres-
sionist group, known for their visualization of Haussmann’s modern Paris.
Abolition was intensified by the emancipation of the enslaved in the United
States, especially as Reconstruction mobilized a social imaginary centered
on democracy, education, and sustainability—the right to look. Under this
intensification, the tensions in Parisian modernity came to a head in the last
days of the empire and the brief interlude of the Commune.

18 4 8 : t h e P o l i c e d P l a n tat i o n / t h e s e g r e g at e d m e t r o P o l i s

All we girls must keep heads together,

King Christian have sent to free us all,
Governor Sholten [sic] had a vote for us,
King Christian have sent to grant us all;
We have signed for liberty, . . .
Oh yes! Oh yes! Hurra! Hurra!
All we girls must keep heads together.
—Old Year’s Night song recorded in St Croix, Danish Virgin Islands,
1845, two years before King Christian declared apprenticeship would
replace slavery.5

In 1848, St Thomas was a bustling commercial entrepôt, where all Royal

Mail steamers from the United Kingdom to the Caribbean made landfall.
Its capital, Charlotte Amalia, was the second largest city in Danish hands,
after Copenhagen, with a population of 32,000, making it what one might

Abolition Realism 157
call a colonial metropole.6 There were nonetheless 3,500 enslaved people
working plantations in 1846, and the island experienced “significant” ma-
ronnage to independent Haiti right up to abolition, in 1848.7 Close by, to
the south, was St Croix, a sugar plantation island, where, despite the grad-
ual Danish abolition of the slave trade in 1792, some 21,000 people were
enslaved in 1848.8 In fact, Danish slavery had increased since the revolution
in Haiti, as plantation owners took advantage of the market opportunity in
sugar.9 The two islands thus formed a modernized plantation complex. De-
spite active censorship, both islands had predominantly Anglophone news-
papers, as English was the commercial lingua franca, catering to the self-
described urban “intelligent middle- class,” aspiring to what they called, in
1848, at the height of the ferment, “constitutional institutions and social
progress,” or, as we might now put it, an imagined community.10 Members
of this group included the Jewish dry-goods merchant Frederick Pissarro,
Camille’s father, who advertised as the agent for the estate of Dalmevda and
Company.11 Despite the geographic location, news from Europe predomi-
nated in the papers, from the famine in Ireland to the Chartist movement
in England. All local aspirations to cultural development were avidly re-
ported, from violin recitals to theatrical performances by visiting groups
and art exhibitions. This last included a variety of realisms ranging from
daguerreotypes displayed and taken by the New York photographer Henry
Custin to a “Cosmorama,” a form of magnified panorama, showing views of
Paris, Havana, and Vienna. For some months in 1847, the British geologist
and artist James Gay Sawkins was resident in Charlotte Amalia, offering his
landscapes for sale and art lessons. Sawkins showed landscapes of Mexico
that impressed locals: “The delicacy and finish of his likenesses are in a style
rarely seen in the West Indies.”12 Sawkins’s careful anthropological style,
evidenced in his surviving work from Cuba and Australia, concentrated on
observation rather than moral commentary (see plate 6).
A formal analysis suggests that his work influenced the young Pissarro,
who had just returned to the island from his school in France. Soon after-
ward, Pissarro began his own drawings of the local African population
in apparent imitation of Sawkins. These observations were sketches for
a postslavery imagination, detailing the actions of those who might be-
come either laborers or revolutionaries, such as the washerwomen, coalers,
and journeying traders of the town, as well as documenting the lush land-
scape that could provide alternative free means of subsistence. For everyone

158 Chapter Four
knew that slavery was coming to an end. There was a perceived need among
the Europeans to acculturate those about to become the formerly enslaved
to the disciplines of waged labor. On St Thomas, the Rev. J. P. Knox and
others therefore formed a savings bank with the aim of “promoting among
the industrial classes of the community a desire to economize and accu-
mulate the surplus profits of their labor.” By the summer of 1847 this bank
had holdings of $114 (rijksdallers), dwarved by the $1.2 million in the com-
mercial Bank of St Thomas under the care of its president S. Rothschild.13
The virtues of thrift and accumulation offered to the working classes and
the soon-to-be-free were satirized by one correspondent to the newspaper,
who pointed out that a saver would have to wait decades until the 3 per-
cent interest awarded on these microsavings would amount to anything of
use. Stern injunctions about the morality of work and the importance of
virtuous habits followed apace. In September 1847, Governor Van Schol-
ten returned from Denmark with news that slavery was being abolished
in favor of a twelve-year apprenticeship, “the necessity of which had been
amply demonstrated by the consequences of the precipitate measures which
were a few years since adopted in the British West Indies Islands.”14 Carlyle’s
strictures about the failure to create a laboring class from the formerly en-
slaved had been fully understood, even as the fears instilled by “Haiti” re-
mained active.
These gradual plans were challenged by the French revolution of Feb-
ruary 1848, which brought abolition to Guadeloupe and Martinique
in March. While the Danish monarchy faced open revolt in Schleswig-
Holstein and war with Germany, St Thomas remained open to all ships for
business, placing commerce over patriotism. The enslaved on St Croix lost
their patience. Under the leadership of Gottlieb Bourdeaux, also known
as Buddho, a general strike against slavery began on 3 July 1848.15 It can be
called a general strike because the enslaved were at first determined to use
no violence other than the refusal to continue being enslaved. The only
eye-witness account published at the time, while very much opposed to the
strikers, emphasized that, at the outset, as they advanced on Frederiksted,
one of the two towns on St Croix, “their leaders [were] strenuously recom-
mending and ordering that there should be no bloodshed.”16 Consequently,
their song ran,

All we want we freedom

We no wan’ no bloodshed

Abolition Realism 159
 Clear d’road
Le’ de slave dem pass.17

Later that day, Governor Scholten decreed the absolute abolition of slavery
without apprenticeship. Early the next morning, a detachment of troops
under one Colonel de Nully encountered a “band of the now emancipated
peasantry . . . and their leader armed with a musket (who was shot).” This
parenthetical killing changed the strike into a revolution. Hours later, thou-
sands of rebels approached Frederiksted, armed and with “trash” from the
cane fields to set fire to the town, “in open and warlike array, sounding
the Toksin [sic], by the blowing of shells and other never to be forgotten
sounds.”18 The Danish contingent were rescued by a detachment of six hun-
dred Spanish troops, dispatched from Puerto Rico by order of Governor de
Reus, onboard the Eagle, a British Royal Mail steamer.19 European national
rivalries were set aside at a time of war in the interest of maintaining inter-
national colonial order with the means of communication becoming mili-
tarized. The Spanish troops remained in St Croix until 26 November 1848,
with the country under martial law. At least seventeen leaders of the revo-
lution were hanged in public, and other unofficial reprisals were carried
out. The Danish myth of the “velvet” abolition of slavery turns out to have
been a screen for a violently suppressed revolution.20 This transnational co-
operation was enacted, as the new Danish governor Peter Hansen put it
in his official statement of thanks, “to ward off the horrors of a successful
Negroe [sic] insurrection.”21 The goal was not to preserve slavery as it had
been but to maintain a modern form of plantation colony using highly
constrained wage-labor under a state of exception and thereby to avoid a
revolution in the manner of Saint-Domingue, which might echo in Europe.
In short order, Hansen established a structure to sustain this colonial
government. He abolished the burgher’s council, a form of colonial repre-
sentative assembly, and took on direct powers, a colonial state of exception.
Governing by decree, of which sixteen were issued in the first six months
of 1849, Hansen made field labor compulsory, except for those explicitly
qualified for skilled work, just as Toussaint had done, in 1801. All the condi-
tions of slavery relating to place of work, length of the workday, mandatory
extra work at harvest, and even provisions grounds were to remain in force.
Laborers were to be paid fifteen cents a day, but a deduction of five cents
could be made if meals and herrings were provided—a little Danish touch
there. Most notable was the displacement of authority from the overseer to

160 Chapter Four
the police. The eighty-four-square-mile island was now divided into four
police districts and the police were placed in charge of everything from li-
censing boats to certifying marriages of the fieldworkers and dismissing the
driver of the field gangs.22 All workers on the plantations and in the towns
were to be enrolled at the police office, and field workers required passes
to enter the towns. The state of exception was no longer localized to the
plantation, as it had been under slavery, but was nationalized and enacted
under the supervision of the police, rather than by overseers, who served
at police pleasure. The functions of plantation oversight that foreshadowed
panoptic discipline were thus directly transferred to the police, but with no
pretense that moral reform was intended. Rather than relying on one indi-
vidual, policing was depersonalized and bureaucratic, forestalling insurrec-
tion in the manner of Haussmann’s later disciplining of Paris. Although
the editors of the local press pointed out that in Denmark a constitutional
monarchy with freedom of the press had been established, censorship re-
mained in force in the colonies. The result was that over ten million pounds
of sugar were exported from St Croix from January to May 1849, almost
all going to Denmark.23 Just as the revolutions of 1848 in Europe began in
optimism only to end in setback for the working classes, so did the colo-
nial revolt transpire with all conditions for the workers, other than their
existential freedom, unchanged. On the commercial island of St Thomas,
a similar system was announced, but most of the fieldworkers had already
abandoned the plantations and headed into Charlotte Amalia, where they
now worked day-to- day on the docks, the steamers, or as best they could.
Capitalized, trading St Thomas, with its new urban lumpenproletariat,
confronted and interfaced with the highly policed cultivation of St Croix.
This counterpoint enacted the model to be described by Marx, in 1852, as
having defeated the revolutions of 1848—an imperial order, backed by the
military, the clergy, and the violence of marginal urban groups, stood in
tension with the peasantry.24 Whereas Marx saw the French peasantry as
divided between revolutionaries and those who imagined themselves to
benefit from the Second Empire, the colonial peasantry was under less illu-
sion but greater duress. The policed plantation allowed for the maintenance
of cash-crop colonialism until the riots of 1878, which, combined with the
availability of sugar beet and Indian sugarcane, finally ended the regime of
bonded labor. The islands were sold to the United States, in 1917, and be-
came the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Abolition Realism 161
 The lives of the newly emancipated African working class on the “metro-
politan” St Thomas side became the central subject for Pissarro’s drawing
and sketching until he left the island, in 1852. Recent scholarship has re-
attributed to Pissarro a large number of works formerly believed to be by
the Danish artist Fritz Melbye, with whom Pissarro was to travel to Vene-
zuela in 1852–53. If one accepts these sometimes controversial attributions,
Pissarro also made drawings in Christiansted on St Croix, and in Santo
Domingo, the other nation on the island of Hispaniola, which it shared
with Haiti.25 Pissarro would have been well-informed about Haiti as his
mother (and aunt: his father married his brother’s widow), Rachel Mon-
santo Pomié, was from Saint-Domingue, which the family had abandoned
in haste, in 1796.26 Rachel brought with her two formerly enslaved servants,
who continued in her employ even when she later moved to France. So
Pissarro cannot have been lacking in information or opinion about aboli-
tion and the revolutions of the enslaved. Furthermore, he had grown up in
a district of Charlotte Amalia that was as much African as Jewish. Edward
Wilmot Blyden, later a Liberian statesman and theorist of African diaspora,
was born in this neighborhood, in 1832, and later recalled “for years, the
next-door neighbours of my parents were Jews. I played with the Jewish
boys and looked forward as eagerly as they did to the annual festivals and
feasts of their church.”27 Blyden’s continuing sense of African-Jewish af-
finity even led him to suggest that the diaspora Jews of Europe should re-
settle in Africa to contribute their experiences of exile and cultural accom-
plishment to the development of the continent.
Pissarro’s Caribbean drawings and later paintings depicting life after abo-
lition were by contrast studiously without comment, whether sympathetic
or hostile, leading to divergent critical responses. Whereas one American
critic has recently disparaged these works as “fundamentally colonialist,” a
Venezuelan curator has suggested that Pissarro’s “reproductions of the An-
tilles society’s poorest class did not intend to draw an exotic image from
cultural difference.”28 Elements of both views were made available by the
artist, as the poet Derek Walcott has seen.

The St. Thomas drawings have it, the taint

of complicit time, the torpor of ex-slaves

and benign planters, suffering made quaint

as a Danish harbour with its wooden waves.29

162 Chapter Four
figure 31. CAMil le PissArro, tWo Women cHatting by tHe sea (1856).
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Photo courtesy of national gallery of Art, Washington.

Take Pissarro’s painting Two Women Chatting by the Sea (1856), made shortly
after his arrival in Paris that same year (see fig. 31). At first it seems a quiet
rural scene. Two African women dominate the foreground, pausing in con-
versation on their journey. In the background, other women can be seen at
the water’s edge. To a St Thomas resident, it would have been clear that they
were just outside Charlotte Amalia, so that the painting’s spectator would
be looking, as it were, from the city. Here the metropole looks at the newly
emancipated (lumpen)proletariat, creating a range of possible meanings in
the aftermath of the slave revolution of 1848. There were over two thou-
sand African women in Charlotte Amalia, considerably outnumbering the
men. While many were domestic servants, women also served to unload
and coal the steamers that plied the port. The women in the foreground of
Pissarro’s painting were journeying traders, who had the greatest freedom
of movement in the African population before and after slavery.30 It was
widely believed that they had in fact distributed instructions for the insur-
rections of July 1848. Governor Von Scholten reported: “Women . . . do the
same work that men do and their physical build and size render them formi-
dable adversaries in a fight. Throughout the disturbances, they were more

Abolition Realism 163
aggressive, vengeful and altogether more violent than the men.”31 Pissarro’s
painting could be interpreted as showing the leaders of a successful slave
revolt to a Parisian public that had just experienced its own 1848 revolution
one of whose achievements had been the abolition of slavery. In that sense,
these women were heroes of countervisuality. By the same token, Pissarro
could also be taken to have represented the unimpassioned surveillance of
the postrevolutionary policed plantation. It can be affirmatively said that
the painting does not participate in the racialized or sexualized caricature
that was so common in the period. Rather, in using Sawkins’s anthropologi-
cal distancing, Pissarro left it to the spectator to choose what he or she be-
lieves is represented. While few French people knew about the events in St
Thomas, debates over the status and humanity of Africans relative to Euro-
peans were well-known. Are these women simply enjoying a break from
work? Or are they idling away the day and refusing to work, as the oppo-
nents of abolition maintained was endemic to all Africans? Or are they even
engaged in plotting the overthrow of colonial slavery? The small painting
represents the ambivalence in the metropolitan consideration of abolition
and defers its own response by asking its audience to make a decision as to
what they see.
It is important that the painting was made in Paris, not in the Caribbean.
The presumed audience were, then, French subjects of the Second Empire
(1852–70), rather than Danish colonials or emancipated slaves. The paint-
ing had resonance not just as Orientalism but as an expression of the new
imperial condition. Baron Haussmann had instigated a transformation of
Paris that drove long straight avenues through the formerly narrow streets
of the city center, displacing working-class neighborhoods in order to aid
troop movements, create lines of fire, and prevent traditional barricades.
These new clear lines of sight in Paris recalled the careful clearing of space
around the plantation house and the colonial militarization of everyday life.
Benjamin reiterated Haussmann’s own view that the Baron succeeded “by
placing Paris under an emergency regime.”32 Haussmann suspended mu-
nicipal government in Paris to prevent any objection to his radical project
of rebuilding, and by relocating the laboring population away from the
city center to the suburbs, he created what was known at the time as “seg-
regation,” albeit on the lines of class rather than ethnicity. Slavery’s politics
of policing and separation had now interpenetrated the metropole. Louis
Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, who some believed to have been in-
spired by Carlyle’s vision of the Hero, had occupied himself while in prison,

164 Chapter Four
during 1842, with writing an Analysis of the Sugar Question.33 His vision of
sugar as key to the “Napoleonic idea” led him to energetically support both
the cultivation of sugar beet and the “maintenance of slavery. . . . We may
as well suppress the cultivation of the cane, as proclaim emancipation.”34
Deprived of slavery by the emancipation proclamation made in 1848, Louis
Napoleon nonetheless availed himself of its absolute sovereignty by means
of the state of exception. The first Napoleon had decreed that a city could
be designated as under a state of siege “whenever circumstances require,” a
power that Napoleon III abrogated to himself in January 1852.35 Indeed, the
state of exception is centrally concerned with space and its management,
a practice with which Haussmannization has become synonymous. In this
context, the “inside” of the metropole became interpenetrated with the
“outside” of the colony, so that the maintenance of order became equated
with the necessity of sugar production, a commodity ventriloquized by
Louis Napoleon as saying, “‘I organize and moralize labour.’”36 The order of
the plantation was interfaced with the reforming goals of the disciplinary
institution in the framework of imperial capital. This blurring produced the
sensation of phantasmagoria identified by Marx, Carlyle, Benjamin, and Du
Bois alike as epitomizing the modern. Modernity was, then, the product of
the real interpenetration of colony and capital that realist means of depic-
tion struggled to represent.

a B o l i t i o n a n d t h e r i g h t to lo o K

The modernist attempt to depict the real created by modern capital suf-
fered from a permanent disadvantage. Whereas the “state of emergency”
permitted authority to act with a clear degree of impunity and impreci-
sion under the Roman law rubric “necessity has no law,” modernist real-
ism struggled to both represent that imprecision and to suggest some form
of alternative, as Pissarro’s Caribbean painting and drawing illustrates. At
precisely this moment, Marx summarized the dilemma of revolutionary
change as “the creation of something which does not yet exist.”37 In the
terms under discussion here, that creation took two forms. It was neces-
sary, first, to name what was being created, and then to give it visualizable
and recognizable form. In short, this was a task of imagination. The en-
slaved in the United States engaged in this representative labor immedi-
ately at the outbreak of the Civil War. As soon as hostilities commenced,
the Sea Islands of South Carolina were captured in a swift attack by Union

Abolition Realism 165
forces, in 1861, causing the plantation owners to flee in disarray. With the
Emancipation Proclamation still two years off, the status of the enslaved
Africans left behind was unresolved, in a kind of juridical no-man’s-land
or interregnum. It was clear enough to many African Americans that this
kind of freedom was better than none, and enslaved Africans from Savan-
nah and elsewhere made their way behind the Union lines. The nurse Susie
King Taylor later described how she joined the exodus with her uncle, his
family of seven, and over twenty others. In June 1862 a rumor circulated
that the war might be settled and the Africans on the Union side would be
sent to Liberia. King told a chaplain that she would choose this expatriation
over any return to Savannah.38 For Du Bois, writing in 1935, such expres-
sions showed that this mass migration was not a casual activity but a gen-
eral strike of the enslaved, a decisive move to end forced labor: “This was
not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against
the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the
end perhaps half a million people.”39 Even today one can read historical ac-
counts claiming that the abolition of slavery had been inevitable since 1776,
as the logical endpoint of the Declaration of Independence. King, Du Bois,
and many others insisted to the contrary that slavery was ended by the en-
slaved themselves.
Timothy O’Sullivan, who later became famous for his photographs of
the American West, captured the “general strike” against slavery as official
photographer for the Army of the Potomac.40 At the Old Fort Plantation,
Beaufort, O’Sullivan took a group photograph of well over a hundred Afri-
can Americans (see fig. 9, p. 44).41 The group represented a mix of those
on the move during the war and those to whom the war had suddenly ar-
rived where they were already located. There were African Americans ille-
gally volunteering for the Union army, known as “contrabands,” wearing
soldier’s caps (most clearly visible at the extreme left of the image, third row
back). The term was a legal fiction, allowing the soldiers to serve as, in effect,
spoils of war, reinforcing the paradox that these soldiers fighting for free-
dom were not free and had “stolen” themselves. In O’Sullivan’s photograph,
many people are carrying small bundles of personal property, all that they
could bring with them from slavery to this interstitial space. The camera
was placed high up, seemingly on the roof of a former slave cabin in order
to get everyone into the shot in a bright sharp light that produced some
strong contrasts leaving some faces in “white-out,” others too dark to see.
Others moved before the exposure was complete, creating a “ghost” at the

166 Chapter Four
left edge and many blurred expressions. The long exposure time prevented
any overt displays of celebration, but the very event of the photograph itself
suggests that all the participants were aware of the historical significance of
the moment. There was no leader present, no suggestion of a hierarchy. Men,
women, and children are gathered together in a collective assertion of their
right to look and therefore be seen. Under slavery, the enslaved were for-
bidden to “eyeball” the white population as a whole, an injunction that was
sustained throughout the period of segregation and is active in today’s prison
system. So the simple act of raising the look to a camera and engaging with
it constituted a rights claim to a subjectivity that could engage with sense
experience. The photograph can therefore be seen as depicting democracy,
the democracy so feared by Plato and Carlyle, the absence of mastery. Under
Roman law, an interregnum was a state of exception that called for the ap-
pointment of an interrex, the king of the in-between. In O’Sullivan’s photo-
graph we can see the interplebs, the in-between people. On the Sea Islands,
the space between regimes became a space without regime, democracy.
This interstitial space was further visualized by the New Hampshire
photographer Henry P. Moore, who accompanied the Third New Hamp-
shire Volunteers to the Sea Islands during this interregnum period. In his
photograph Rebel General T. F.Drayton’s House, Hilton Head, S.C. (1862–63),
the gates to the plantation house, which would formerly have been inac-
cessible to field hands, now stand wide open, held apart by a Union soldier
in uniform, on the right and an African American woman, on the left, who
wears the African kerchief and strong clothes typical of field hands.42 An
unlikely coalition of a New England soldier and a formerly enslaved woman
opens the door to a new future, even as they seem to keep the maximum
distance between them. This doubtless posed scene has attracted the inter-
est of two other African women on the steps of the house itself, whether
former “house” slaves or curious outsiders. The house seems unforgiving,
with its front door shut and much of the façade obscured, as intended, by
the hedges and trees at the edge of the garden. In another striking photo-
graph, J. F. Seabrook’s Flower Garden, Edisto Island, S.C. (April 1862), Moore
appropriated the planter’s hidden viewpoint from within the “big house”
(see fig. 32). Taken from an upstairs window in the mansion of the departed
Seabrook, Moore’s picture shows a world turned inside out, but not, as
the Confederates had predicted, reduced to chaos or disorder. The calm,
orderly transition made visible here put the plantation economy into the
background, where the slave quarters and open fields of the plantation are

Abolition Realism 167
figure 32. henry P. Moore , J. F. seabrook’s FloWer garDen,
eDisto islanD (1862).

clearly visible. Indeed, the photograph shows quite well how plantations
were designed to be fully visible from the planter’s viewpoint. In the fore-
ground, representing the present, the elaborate artifices of the planter’s gar-
den can be seen, with its paths now peopled by a mixture of soldiers (in-
cluding the commanding officer Colonel Enoch Q. Fellows, in the right
foreground, with folded arms), former slaves, and contrabands. On a pedes-
tal that might have been intended for a neoclassical statue, a young African
American boy stands and salutes next to an officer also posing elaborately.
This satirical gesture of obedience to the planter’s house would have been
impossible only weeks before, and its irony is mixed with a respect for
the forces of liberation represented by the camera. There is an unintended
resonance with Marx’s description of slavery as the pedestal of wage labor

168 Chapter Four
figure 33. henry P. Moore , g’Wine to De FielD (1862).

and an anticipation of Barthes’s famous analysis of another saluting teen-

age African soldier during the liberation struggle in Algeria (see chap. 6). In
these photographs, men, women, and children; former slaves, contrabands,
and Union soldiers all show an awareness of the rhetorics of the photo-
graphic pose and their possibilities.
Moore also created staged photographs of enslaved life, lifeless tableaux
such as Sweet Potato Planting and the minstrel-titled G’wine to de Field (both
April–May 1862). This latter would become his best-known photograph
despite—or because of—its hollow feel and the careful absence of any sol-
diers, whether white or contraband (see fig. 33). It shows a line of some
ten African Americans, presumed to be former slaves because of their uni-
formly dark skin tone, centered around a two-wheel cart hitched to a pony
and being driven by a child. It was seen as sensational because it represented
a historic transition. When published in the Philadelphia Photographer, in 1865,
the caption declared: “Such a one as we present in the issue can never more
be taken. When they were taken, they were slaves; now they are free men
and women.”43 In this view, abolition realism was a single, never-to-be-

Abolition Realism 169
repeated moment, rather than a division of the sensible. Against that snap-
shot version of abolition, General Sherman’s Special Field Order no. 15,
dated 16 January 1865, imagined what became known as Reconstruction.
Under the command of General Saxton, inspector of settlements and plan-
tations, the islands were to be the exclusive site of resettlement for displaced
free people. When three or more families expressed the desire to settle, the
inspector would allocate to each group the famous forty acres of tillable
land. Here oversight and the policed plantation were to be reversed so that
the police were now in charge of reallocating the land in small holdings to
the formerly enslaved, just as they had long desired. Sherman was respond-
ing to the revolutionary change enacted since the fall of Port Royal, in 1861,
and by institutionalizing and bureaucratizing a procedure for Reconstruc-
tion, he opened the possibility of a distinctly different postbellum South.
The freed responded to the invitation with alacrity, creating new politi-
cal, financial, and educational networks that enacted the popular heroism
of Atlantic revolutions. Just as in Saint-Domingue and France, the franchise
was expanded beyond people of means; new state-organized education was
created; and those formerly considered commodities were recruited into
the capitalist means of circulation. I am referencing here the research find-
ings made by Du Bois, as both valid information in themselves and evidence
for the strategic use he made of them. He highlighted the reforms enacted,
in 1868, by the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, whose scandal
was that “twenty-three of the whites and fifty-nine of the colored [dele-
gates] paid no taxes whatever.”44 It was, argued Du Bois, “singularly to the
credit of these voters that poverty was so well represented” (391). At the
state labor convention in 1869, workers demanded half the crop or a wage
of seventy cents to a dollar a day, depending on the nature of the task. At
the heart of the freedmen’s project was education. Du Bois insisted “public
education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea” (637).
A school had been opened in Port Royal as soon as it fell, and others fol-
lowed in Beaufort and Hilton Head as early as January 1862 (642). In South
Carolina, the new State Constitution of 1868 provided for universal educa-
tion from the age of six to sixteen, as well as opening schools for the dis-
abled. By 1876, when Reconstruction came to an end, some 123,000 stu-
dents were enrolled (649–50). In the economic field, the Freedmen’s Bank
in Charleston, South Carolina, held over $350,000 in deposits from 5,500
depositors by 1873, indicating that the laboring classes were the key to the
bank (416). Taken together with the homesteads, wage-labor rates, and the

170 Chapter Four
right to vote, South Carolina enacted a radical alternative to slavery, replac-
ing chattel labor with a rights- centered democracy. These forms of abo-
lition democracy so contradicted majoritarian concepts of representation
and realism in the United States that even today they sound “unrealistic,”
unachievable, even hard to imagine. In part, that difficulty is the legacy
of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation (1918), which depicted the South
Carolina legislature so scurrilously but so unforgettably that its images have
overdetermined the historical account.
Despite Sherman’s field order, it was sharecropping that became the
“standard” form of labor in the postbellum South and kept the majority
of African Americans in poverty. Sharecropping was a system in which a
group worked a given plot of land in exchange for a percentage of the crop,
usually to the marked advantage of the planters. The crop share was not
made until the end of the year, so a credit system emerged, making it diffi-
cult for the share croppers to ever lay their hands on money, let alone accu-
mulate capital.45 Du Bois represented this reversion as a second civil war, “a
determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition
of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foun-
dation” (670). During Reconstruction, farm workers organized to try and
improve their conditions, in which their crop shares ranged from a tenth
to a third, while wages were at no more than fifty cents a day, resulting in
farm strikes in 1876 (417). However, the Bureau of Freedmen insisted on the
freed signing year-long labor contracts that locked them into disadvanta-
geous situations, and after the end of Reconstruction, no other redress was
available. Cotton was best suited to sharecropping, and by 1870 it was domi-
nant across the South. So by the time Winslow Homer depicted The Cotton
Pickers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1876), there was no reasonable
doubt that their labor was unfairly rewarded. Homer’s painting suggests
as much in the disengaged and abstracted quality that the African Ameri-
can women of the title bring to their work, contrasted by the art historian
Katherine Manthorne with Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field (Metropolitan
Museum, New York, 1865), in which a former Massachusetts Union (white)
soldier sets about reaping wheat, a crop that implies his ownership of the
land. By contrast, the cotton pickers are overwhelmed by the field in which
they find themselves, highlighting what Manthorne calls “the paradox of
the plantation: images of harvest usually connote settlement, a stake in the
earth, while the plantation bespeaks the opposite.”46 For the new plantation
refused the freed the ownership of land that they had wanted in order to

Abolition Realism 171
create a new global class of cash-crop producers on whom industry would
depend. While the cotton pickers in Homer’s painting are “free,” they cer-
tainly do not have autonomy or manifest a right to look.

18 6 7 : a B o l i t i o n e n ta n g l e m e n t

In 1867, Reconstruction was just beginning in the United States. It was also
the year of Baudelaire’s death, marking the end of an era in Paris. The up-
heavals in the Americas came back to the “capital” of the nineteenth cen-
tury, in a series of interpenetrated cultural and political shocks. In this year,
Edouard Manet began his series of paintings depicting the results of French
imperial adventurism in Mexico; Pissarro developed a “revolutionary” new
style of painting in dialogue with the Puerto Rican antislavery painter Fran-
cisco Oller; and Marx finally published the first volume of Capital. These
events were more than coincidence. Rather, the plantation was a signifi-
cant “entanglement” within European modernity, to use Achille Mbembe’s
useful term.47 If one looks around the virtual portrait gallery of the period’s
avant-garde created by Félix Nadar’s photographs, in whose studio the first
Impressionist exhibition was held, in 1874, many had a direct relationship to
the interpenetration of the city and the plantation. First, there was Charles
Baudelaire, seen by Walter Benjamin as the poet of modernity because it
embedded itself in his body, like a photographic negative.48 That embodi-
ment was itself in counterpoint to that of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s part-
ner, usually described as his “mistress,” an odd title for the granddaugh-
ter of an enslaved woman, whom Baudelaire represented as a sex worker.
Then there was Victor Schoelcher (1804–93), the leading abolitionist cam-
paigner in France, and Alphonse Lamartine, who decreed abolition. Alex-
andre Dumas, père, was, whether one thinks it relevant or not, very visibly
the son of his African- descended mother from Saint-Domingue (see fig.
34). When one sees the poet Charles Cros (1842–88), known as a precursor
to the surrealists, it is not hard to see why many people thought he was of
African descent. Others, at one degree of separation, would include Dela-
croix, painter of the French occupation of Algeria, in 1832, and the anar-
chist Proudhon. There was Manet, whose antislavery radicalism was part
of his work.
By 1867 Pissarro was part of a group of younger artists struggling for ac-
ceptance, who were to become known as the Impressionists, while he con-
tinued to socialize and work with Caribbean acquaintances, like his cousin,

172 Chapter Four
 f i g u r e 34. f é l i x n A dA r ,
alexanDre DaVy De la
pailleterie , calleD alex­
anDre Dumas, père (1855).
Photograph. Photo courtesy of
Adoc-photos / Art resource, new
york. dumas (1802–1870) was a
noted french writer.

the novelist Jules Cardoze, and the Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller y
Cestero.49 The two artists had very distinct conceptions of themselves. Pis-
sarro was, and remained throughout his life, a Danish citizen, a fact that he
later used to free his son Lucien from the obligation of French military ser-
vice. Although he worked with the Danish artist David Jacobsen, Pissarro
never went to Denmark or otherwise expressed interest in his nationality
of convenience, imagining himself “French” in all but name. Oller by con-
trast was strongly invested in an independent postslavery Puerto Rico. He
clearly felt a strong identification with his predecessor José Campeche, as
he copied Campeche’s self-portrait—which unusually depicted the artist as
a dark-skinned man, although one cannot be sure that Campeche’s original
did so—and later even lived in his house. This cross-ethnic identification
with the past was both nationalist and decolonial. Although he spent ex-
tended periods of time in France and Spain, Oller predominantly lived and
taught in Puerto Rico, to the mystification of his European artist friends.
The counterpoint between the two artists, who met only once after 1867,

Abolition Realism 173
turned on the questions of slavery, abolition, and the politics of (national)
representation.
Oller seems to have known Pissarro from 1859 onward, when they were
taking classes in Paris, with the juste-milieu artist Thomas Couture and the
landscapist Corot respectively. A handful of letters survive, giving us a frag-
mentary view of the friendly and intimate exchanges between the emerg-
ing artists. In December 1865, writing in reply to Oller’s letter from Puerto
Rico, Pissarro expresses relief at knowing Oller’s whereabouts and jokes
that he and Guillemet had assumed Oller had disappeared into “some cor-
ner of Paris in the company of some beauty.”50 Although Pissarro under-
stood Oller’s need to earn some money, he warned him away from offi-
cial commissions, especially from the church, following Oller’s gift of his
painting of the crucifixion Les Ténèbres (exhibited at the Salon of 1864) to
the Jesuits.51 Strikingly, Pissarro encouraged Oller to begin a “study of a
mulatresse,” an apparently unlikely suggestion. However, both artists had
become friends with Paul Cézanne at the Académie Suisse in 1861. Accord-
ing to Cézanne’s dealer Ambroise Vollard, it was in 1865 that he painted his
study of The Negro Scipio, a model at the Académie Suisse (see fig. 35).52 This
substantial portrait, once owned by Monet, has been largely ignored by art
history but resonates with the abolition debates of the time. It shows Scipio
seated, wearing only worker’s blue trousers, leaning forward onto a white
mass. The painting exaggerates the length of his back and creates a strong
resemblance to the notorious photograph known as The Scourged Back (1863).
The photograph showed a man known as Gordon, who had escaped from
slavery to enlist in the Union Army, only to be recaptured and whipped on
Christmas Day, 1862. As a result, his back was covered in scars, which form
the subject of the photograph, reprinted in Harper’s Weekly for 4 July 1863.
The dates are significant: Christ was scourged before his crucifixion, lend-
ing the photograph its title, while the publication of the photograph on
Independence Day was surely intended to remind readers of the justice of
the Union cause. The textured surface of Cézanne’s painting of Scipio, with
a red suggestive of blood clearly visible in places seems intended to evoke
Gordon’s scars. Certainly his unlikely classical name—contrasted with the
“Jeanne” who was a model for Manet’s Olympia, also in 1865—suggests that
he was born into American slavery, where such naming practices were com-
mon. In this context, the white mass might be read as a bale of cotton, em-
phasizing the American dimension of the image. Whatever Cézanne’s poli-

174 Chapter Four
figure 35. PAul Cé ZAnne , tHe negro scipio (1865), M u s e u d e A r t e ,
sAo PAolo. Photo courtesy of Bridgeman- garaudon / Art resource, new york.
tics in his later days, The Negro Scipio deserves to be discussed in the context
of Atlantic world abolition.
Certainly, Oller produced a painting more in keeping with abolition
realism than with the Caribbean ambivalences suggested by Pissarro. Oller’s
Negresse libre et mendiante (now lost) was exhibited at the Salon of 1867, and to
judge by the title, it did not depict a “mulatta,” but a free African woman,
forced to beg to support herself. Such scenes were taken to be an indict-
ment of slavery, still in force in Puerto Rico. Indeed, another painter from
this group, Antoine Guillemet, wrote to Oller, at Pissarro’s suggestion, in
September 1866, offering an unusually extended critique of an abolition
realist painting. While the painting had “much character,” Guillemet told
Oller, “Your two figures do not agree with the background, you like Manet
and will understand. The figures are very well modeled but lack appropri-
ate tâches.”53 This remark suggests that the woman was accompanied by a
child, perhaps lighter skinned to indicate the familiar scandals of misce-
genation under slavery. The tâche, or patch, was the central idea of the new
painting, seeking to develop form by color, rather than by line drawing.
Guillemet wanted Oller to reconfigure his entire style and “treat [figures]
like landscape.” He criticized the portrait as having “an atrocious red back-
ground, why not work in the open air,” the famous plein air mantra of the
1860s group. He worried further that the figure of the African woman did
not stand out enough from the background. In a contradictory passage,
Guillemet continues: “Your technique is good, we don’t give a fuck about
the rest, you know that. See by patches, technique is nothing, pâte and jus-
tesse [precision], those are the goals to pursue.” Guillemet argued that “there
is nothing more than the tâche juste,” blending the exactness of justesse with
the connotation of “justice,” as if color properly seen and described would
in and of itself entail justice—an abolition realism accomplished by tech-
nique as much as subject matter.
For there was a strong sense that radical aims could be now achieved by
formal visual means, tending away from the content of the image toward
a radicality of style. Courbet’s famous claim that, as a realist, he could only
paint what he saw was now being broken down into the constituent units
of seeing, a riposte to those worldviews, like visuality, that claimed a unity
of visual perception and understanding. The novelist and journalist Emile
Zola articulated the connections between radical politics and the new aes-
thetics as what can be called corporal anarchy. In his review of the Salon
of 1866, Zola hailed Pissarro as a fierce revolutionary, describing his paint-

176 Chapter Four
ing in terms that evoked the virtue espoused by the Jacobins of 1793: “A
painting austere and serious; an extreme concern with truth and accuracy,
a will fierce and strong.”54 This realism was taken to be radical in and of
itself, whatever the subject matter. Against the heroism of empire, Zola
deployed an individualism that he called “the free manifestation of indi-
vidual thoughts—what Proudhon calls anarchy.”55 Rather than accede to
heroic visuality, Zola described a particularity of individual perception that
could not be fused into one grand vision, except as the stale and moribund
production of the academies: “It is our body that sweats the beauty of our
works. Our body changes according to climate and custom, and the secre-
tion changes accordingly.”56 This desire to individualize, to break up the
heroic imperial body into its constituent parts, did not predicate a future
reordering of the social. It was as pure opposition to the empire that the
aesthetics of national unity could be sustained, an illusion that ended even
before the conflict of the Commune.
This political aesthetic of individualized rebellion by formal means was
less coherently expressed by Guillemet in the conclusion of his (unpunctu-
ated) letter to Oller.

Courbet has become classic. He does superb things next to Manet it is

tradition and Manet next to Cézanne becomes it in turn. Try to come
back. Borrow from your sister-in-law, get money there is only Paris—
what the devil, do you want to do in Porto Rico [sic] what Pissarro did
in St. Thomas, what I did in China we are painting on a volcano the ’93
of painting is going to sound its funeral toll the Louvre will burn the
museums the classics will disappear and as Proudhon says, only from the
ashes of the old civilization can the new art come. Fever burns us; today
is separated from tomorrow by a century. The gods today will not be
those of tomorrow, to arms, seize in a febrile hand the knife of insur-
rection, let’s demolish and build—and exegi momumentum aere perennius
[“I have built a monument more lasting than bronze,” Horace].57

Guillemet saw his present as the returned Jacobin moment of 1793, now in
painting not politics, and thereby as the anarchist refoundation of society—
Zola’s blend of Jacobin austerity and Proudhonian individualism. Paris was
capital of all revolution and all ferment, whereas the colonies, whether in
Asia or the Caribbean, were not even its suburbs. All this from the tâche,
from seeing color “as it is,” from treating the body as a landscape and as
the source of art. And the leading practitioner of this revolution was to be

Abolition Realism 177
Pissarro, who “makes masterpieces . . . he even had the audacity to send a
realist slice of life to the Universal Exhibition.”58
So what did all this realist revolution look like? Pissarro’s painting The
Hermitage at Pontoise (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1867) was by far
the largest painting yet attempted by the artist, suggesting that it sought
to visualize the ambitious project Guillemet had described (see plate 7). It
renders what at first sight seems like a minor scene on the scale of a history
painting. The painting shows a little hamlet among some hills and fields
with a few figures. The meeting between two women from his St Thomas
painting was now reworked and reduced in the foreground. These meetings
in turn foreshadow those he would paint in decades to come, extensively
analyzed by T. J. Clark.59 One woman, standing with a child, appears to be
in authority, shading her face from the sun with a parasol, which makes it
clear that she does not work outdoors. She is speaking to a woman who
is darker-skinned, from field labor, standing with her arms deferentially
held behind her back, leaning in as if to hear her instructions. Here the en-
counter is between women of different classes, a difference that is signified
through the small “patches” of skin color. Yet Guillemet’s direction should
send us to the landscape, for the corollary of painting the body as a land-
scape might be to paint the landscape as a body, as Monet would later do.
As one looks at Pissarro’s landscape, it does not represent a single body, but
rather a division of the sensible appears. On the left-hand side of the can-
vas, the smaller houses of the peasantry are jumbled together in a mass, with
one open window visible, high in the attic of a house. On the right, a larger
collection of buildings, which can be presumed to be that of the landlord-
farmer or his local deputy, overlooks the entire hamlet through a sequence
of windows. Despite the heat, a fire is going in the main house—perhaps a
meal is being prepared—while the peasant houses are closed up and quiet,
in the middle of the working day. The land on the right is dedicated to pas-
toral, whether as garden, uncultivated land, or fruit trees. On the left, the
working fields are visible, albeit at a vertiginous angle. The three working
people and two village children that can be seen keep to “their” side of the
hamlet, marked by the unpaved path. There is a zone of transition between
the two spaces, a fiercely worked “patch” of brown paint that perhaps rep-
resents a wall, but is really nothing more than paint. It is the color of the
fields, of the peasants’ skin. In its wet-painted-into-wet swirls and valleys,
this patch of color suggests the violent affect of rural class struggle in a
deferential society, a threat that was always present, if rarely articulated.

178 Chapter Four
The painting itself defers its explication of difference, with the transitional
zone pushed back in the picture space, just off the center that is taken by
the white house. If this is “’93 in painting,” it was displaced because Paris
was under a state of emergency that was rendered here as the plantation
evoked by Girardin, a watchful waiting for a peasant insurgency that may
be imminent or may never come. One has to look hard to see this differ-
ence in the painting, a sign of Pissarro’s persistent hesitation to be too direct
or unambiguous. Taken with Guillemet’s enthusiasm, it perhaps explains
Cézanne’s cryptic remark that if Pissarro “had gone on painting as he was
doing in 1870 he would have been the strongest of us all.”60 It did not last
long. In that same year, Guillemet wrote to Zola: “To put one violent tone
against another as I did at Aix [with Cézanne] leads nowhere. It is the an-
archy of painting, if I can call it that.”61 The proud claims of 1867 had been
renounced even before the Paris Commune made such associations literally
dangerous.
The short-lived aesthetic of corporal anarchy was the counterpoint to
the disciplined body of the newly policed plantation. Nor was this counter-
point distant from the radical art of 1867, for it was in that year that Manet
began his series concerning The Execution of Maximilian (see fig. 36).62 As
part of his project of heroic imperialism, Louis Napoleon installed Maxi-
milian as a puppet in Mexico, only for him to be quickly defeated and exe-
cuted. Manet’s paintings of this moment, iconographically derived from
Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, were understood as critiques of Louis Napo-
leon, who even appears to be depicted as part of the firing squad in one of
the paintings.63 In these works, Maximilian appears as a hero by default,
paying the price for the follies of imperial adventure. Others were less im-
pressed. In Capital, published that same year, Marx noted that in Mexico,
“slavery is hidden under the form of peonage. . . . Juarez abolished peon-
age, but the so- called Emperor Maximilian re- established it by a decree
which was aptly denounced in the House of Representatives in Washington
as a decree for the re-introduction of slavery into Mexico.”64 That being so,
the studied neutrality of the peons looking over the wall at Maximilian’s
execution in the third version painted by Manet (now in Mannheim) takes
on a different resonance.65 So did Manet know? It seems unlikely that he
did not. As a young man Manet had visited Brazil and seen slavery at first
hand, visiting the “revolting spectacle” of a slave market.66 He carefully
studied newspaper accounts of Maximilian’s death and altered details of his
paintings to be more exact. In 1864 he painted two scenes from the Ameri-

Abolition Realism 179
figure 36. edouArd MAnet, tHe execution oF tHe emperor maximilian
oF mexico (19 June 1867). oil on canvas, staedtische kunsthalle, Mannheim, germany.
Photo courtesy of erich lessing / Art resource, new york.

can Civil War naval battle that had taken place off the coast of France, the
well-known Battle of the Kearsage and Alabama, and, to emphasize his support
for the Union, a less well-known study of the Kearsage in harbor in Bou-
logne.67 His work as a whole was understood as implicating slavery’s his-
tories. For example, a caricature version of his solo exhibition during the
Universal Exhibition of 1867 featured a drawing of his scandalous painting
Olympia (1865), in which the African servant speaks to the white prostitute
in Haitian Kreyol, as if it were a form of abolition or revolution to paint
the two women together.68 Above all, there is the evidence of the paintings
themselves. For why did Manet repeat this scene in three distinctly differ-
ent ways if he did not feel that there was something fundamentally wrong
with his earlier versions? Did not that sense of error stem from his knowl-
edge that Maximilian was no hero, even in death, and that the real suffer-
ing lay with the laboring poor? It was not until he found a way to include
them in his piece that he finally set the subject aside. All these debates were

180 Chapter Four
undoubtedly well-known to Pissarro and Guillemet—and thereby Oller—
because, in 1868, Guillemet was the model for the cigarette-smoking man
in Manet’s classic scene of modern life The Balcony.
Oller refused the lure of Paris’s capital and remained in Puerto Rico,
living in Campeche’s house, painting against slavery, which he called “an
institution which is an outrage to human nature.”69 Slavery disrupted in
this view the very workings of the body that so exercised Zola. In six years,
Oller created a corpus of antislavery work, known now only by their titles:
A Slave Flogged; A Slave Mother; The Punishment of a Slave in Love; A Beggar;
Stonecutter; Rich Man’s Lunch, Poor Man’s Lunch; and Negresse libre et mendi-
ante. Together with his work as the founder and teacher of Puerto Rico’s
Academy of Drawing and Painting, where he had eight students, both men
and women, Oller had decided to use art as abolitionist activism.70 For in
nineteenth- century Puerto Rico the enslaved population had tripled and
production had increased by over one thousand percent. In 1870, the Span-
ish government decreed a gradual abolition of slavery by emancipating
those over sixty and all newborn children. The Moret Law, as it became
known after the foreign minister Don Segismundo Moret y Pendergast,
rendered the freed into a form of apprenticeship, the patronato. At the same
time, a forced labor regulation of the revolutionary era of 1849 was revived.
The enslaved responded by what the British consul called “an outbreak of
the slaves, or at least their refusal to work.” This general strike came to a
head on the Hacienda Amelia, where the leader of the strikers was publicly
flogged in contravention of the Moret Law.71 So when Oller’s next sub-
mission to the Paris Salon was his Flogged Slave (1872–73, now lost), it was
a gesture of protest. Known only through a mediocre print that plays up
the sexualized aspect of the African body in pain, the painting nonetheless
wanted to insist that what was real was not the “patch” but the violence
of slavery. Rather than being a generalized protest, as has usually been as-
sumed, it depicted the scene at Hacienda Amelia, showing the rebel tied to
the ground as he is flogged by an overseer in the presence of other enslaved
witnesses and a protesting white woman. This corporal realism did not in-
sist on a separation of visual and physical perception in its assemblage of
the real, including pain, especially pain inflicted by others in the name of
profit. One might say that there is nothing more real than pain as it is being
experienced, yet it resists representation.72 Oller’s painting was refused by
the Salon and ignored by the press in the Salon des Refusés of 1875, where
it was finally exhibited, two years after colonial slavery had finally been

Abolition Realism 181
figure 37. edg Ar degAs, interior oF a cotton buyer’s oFFice
in neW orleans (1873), Musée des BeAux- Arts, PAu, f r An C e .
Photo courtesy of réunion des Musées nationaux / Art resource, new york.

abolished in Puerto Rico. In the Salon catalog the painting carried a caption
from Mirabeau: “Is to defer anything other than to tolerate a crime?”73 That
deferral might have been the system of apprenticeship at first proposed by
the Spanish government or even the delay in exhibiting Oller’s work. The
delay has consigned Oller to the status of a footnote in Pissarro’s history in
most Western accounts of modernist painting.
With the emancipation of the enslaved in the United States, latter-day
histories of modernity and modernism have declared slavery to be over, and
move on in the endless pursuit of the new. In the period, matters were not
so clear. One might point to the painting by Edgar Degas entitled A Cotton
Buyer’s Office in New Orleans (1873) as an example (see fig. 37).74 A group of
white men in New Orleans examine cotton samples, read the newspaper
the Daily Picayune, study ledgers, or merely observe the proceedings. In
Benedict Anderson’s well-known analysis, the newspaper was central to
the “imagined community” of nineteenth- century print culture. Here it
was being read by René Degas, the artist’s brother, at a time of crisis for

182 Chapter Four
the extended Degas family. The cotton business depicted was on the verge
of collapse because Michael Musson, seen in the left foreground examin-
ing cotton, had invested heavily for ideological reasons in Confederate war
bonds, which had now defaulted. New Orleans was one of the most con-
tested locations during Reconstruction. African Americans organized po-
litically from the beginnings of the war to be met with violence in the New
Orleans riot of 1866, which killed thirty-four African American and three
white delegates to the recalled constitutional convention.75 Degas’s uncle
was a leading member of the Crescent City White League, which would
defeat Republican militia and police in an open battle in New Orleans in
September 1874.76 Two years later, Degas’s painting was exhibited at the sec-
ond Impressionist exhibition, where it received favorable comment. The
African American labor that produced the cotton, the majority population
of New Orleans, or indeed the “mixed-race” relatives of the Degas family
were again nowhere to be seen. The abolition counterpoint between Sci-
pio’s scarred back and the smooth white bale of cotton had been forgotten.
For if the avant-garde artists now known as the Impressionists had engaged
with abolition politics against the Napoleonic empire and slavery, they had
already set it aside in favor of formal experimentation before the radical
popular revolution of the Paris Commune.

t h e Pa r i s c o m m u n e (1871): a B o l i s h i n g r e a l i t y

“Travailler maintenant, jamais, jamais; je suis en grève”

[Work now? Never, never. I’m on strike]
—Arthur Rimbaud, 13 May 1871 77

The Paris Commune was a moment of decentralized communal authority

experienced in the wake of national defeat, a general strike against reality.
It was the last of the Atlantic revolutions that began with the revolts of the
enslaved, engendered the great revolutions in Haiti and France, and con-
cluded with the wave of refusals that linked abolition in the United States,
the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, and other post-abolition risings
in the Caribbean. To briefly summarize the often retold history: Napo-
leon’s disastrous war against Prussia ended in defeat at Sedan and the proc-
lamation of a republic on 4 September 1870. Carlyle wrote a famous letter
to the Times, in 1870, supporting the Prussians and denouncing the French,
that was held to have been influential in reducing British sympathies for

Abolition Realism 183
France. However, there was as yet no peace. Prussia besieged Paris through-
out the winter of 1870–71, turning the metaphorical state of siege declared
by Napoleon III and Haussmann into a literal conflict. The city refused to
surrender, despite an almost absolute lack of supplies, until 28 January 1871.
After an attempt to seize artillery pieces by the national government at Ver-
sailles failed, the Commune was declared on 18 March 1871, defended by
some 200,000 National Guards and the armed citizenry. For several weeks,
a unique experiment in communal administration in one of Europe’s largest
cities played out, inspiring radicals and revolutionaries for over a century. It
ended in terrible reprisals during the “bloody week” of May in which some
25,000 people were killed.
Although the Commune was brief, its example has been endlessly con-
sidered by supporters and opponents alike, keen to discern what kind of
political moment it had represented. While much of this discussion has
centered around its relationship to the Bolshevik revolution, in the period
parallels between the Commune and the American Civil War abounded on
both sides of the Atlantic.78 Victor Hugo had denounced the execution of
John Brown after the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859, and the future Commune
member Pierre Vesinier wrote a book placing Brown in a genealogy of
revolutionary martyrs that included Vincent Ogé of Saint-Domingue.79 In
his report to the International, Marx described the Commune as “the war
of the enslaved against the enslavers, the only justifiable war in history.”80
Marx repeated the metaphor of slavery throughout his text, turning the
language of morality against the self-styled party of order. After the Com-
mune’s fall, many of those who survived, like the radical Louise Michel,
were deported to the French penal colony of Nouvelle Caledonie, in the
South Pacific, a return to actual slavery. And for those opposed to the Com-
mune, it meant what Léon Daudet called “Paris in the hands of the blacks.”81
The lesson was not forgotten. In his play The Days of the Commune (1956),
Bertolt Brecht directed that the set incorporate a series of banners, evoking
the posters that were a key part of the ideological struggles of the event.
The first poster read “The Right to Live,” meaning a right to autonomy, a
life lived outside the social death of literal and metaphorical slavery.82
The claim that the Commune represented an opposition to slavery
illustrated its enactment of a different form of authority than the mysti-
cal foundation of law, as visualized by visuality. In the struggle to form the
Commune, new political bodies appeared, such as the Central Republican
Committee of the 20 Arrondissements, formed after the declaration of the

184 Chapter Four
republic. In a declaration published 9 October 1870, the Central Republi-
can Committee redefined authority as autonomy: “Citizens: in this supreme
danger to the homeland, with the principle of authority and centraliza-
tion being convicted of powerlessness, we have hope only in the patriotic
energy of the communes of France, becoming, by the very force of events,
FREE , AUTONOMOUS and SOVEREIGN .”83 Here the law of necessity, usually
cited to reinforce absolute state authority, was reconfigured and invoked
as “the force of events” to institute an autonomous decentralization of all
authority. When the events of 18 March 1871 required a response, it came
from another new grouping, the Central Committee of the National Guard
(hereinafter “the Central Committee”). Formed from men hitherto un-
known in French or even Parisian public life, the Central Committee, as
the Communard Prosper Lissagaray pointed out in his history, was the only
body that articulated the popular demand for communal authority. The
Central Committee organized elections and stepped down from power,
declaring, “You have freed yourselves. Obscure a few days ago, obscure we
shall return to your ranks.”84 From this place of obscurity, they had watched
“the most grandiose popular spectacle that has ever struck our eyes and
moved our souls. . . . Paris is opening a blank page in the book of history
and is writing its powerful name therein.”85 Rather than the visuality of the
hero, the Commune deployed from obscurity a dazzling popular spectacle
that attempted to rewrite history not as the biography of great men, but as
the actions of autonomous Paris, a collective name for the diverse popula-
tions of the city. “Paris” here updates the vernacular hero of earlier revolu-
tions, such as the Third Estate and the sans- culottes, but did so with a strong
sense of its genealogy.
In its autonomous impulse to decentralize, the Commune had strong
affinities with antislavery revolutions in the Caribbean and the “general
strike” against slavery in the United States. All these popular movements
envisaged communities of small producers, whether on the provisions
grounds of the formerly enslaved in the Caribbean, the “forty acres” of
the United States, or the workshops of the Commune. It is noticeable that,
just as in Saint-Domingue in 1791, the first efforts of the Commune were
directed at working conditions, such as the regulation of night work, and
the living conditions of the citizenry, especially as concerned rents. The ex-
perience of the Commune was, as many have remarked, one of a holiday
or festival. It was the enactment of Benbow’s Grand National Holiday, or
general strike, at the level of the metropolis. One famous account, perhaps

Abolition Realism 185
by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, declared: “One enters, one leaves, one circulates,
one gathers. . . . For the first time workers can be heard exchanging their
appreciations on things that hitherto only philosophers had tackled. There
is no trace of supervisors; no police agents obstruct the street hindering
passers-by.”86 Here, then, in Rancière’s sense, was a different division of
the sensible, in which circulation did allow for the formation of a political
subject of a kind appropriate to “the demonstrative temperament of essen-
tially artistic people,” as Jules Claretie put it.87 The object of their practice
was what Kristin Ross has called “the transformation of everyday life,” an
autonomy from state power.88 When the Prussians entered Paris, the streets
were decked with black flags, the fountains were dry and lights not lit. On
the day after the elections for the Commune, by contrast,

200,000 “wretches” came to the Hôtel- de-Ville there to attend their

chosen representatives, the battalion drums beating, the banners sur-
mounted by the Phrygian cap and with red fringe around their mus-
kets. . . . In the middle of the Hôtel-de-Ville, against the central door, a
large platform was raised. Above it towered the bust of the Republic, a
red scarf slung around it. Immense red streamers beat against the frontal
and belfry, like tongues of fire announcing the good news to France. A
hundred battalions thronged the square. . . . The banners were grouped
in front of the platform, some tricolour, all with red tassels, symboliz-
ing the advent of the people. While the square was filling, songs burst
forth, the bands played the Marseillaise and the Chant du depart, trumpets
sounded the charge, and the cannon of the old Commune thundered on
the quay.89

Here the conscious echoes of the Commune of 1792–93 were performed

in a context that made it clear that a new cultural politics of the “people”
was being practiced and celebrated. Alain Badiou’s assertion that “the Com-
mune is what, for the first and only time, broke with the parliamentary
destiny of popular and workers’ political movements” properly evokes the
palpable sense of rupture that the Communards experienced (if it is too sin-
gular in its forgetting of those like the Diggers and Saint-Domingue’s radi-
cals who had advocated a decentralized polity long before).90
That break can be characterized as a sense of being in history as an actor,
rather than, as visuality would have it, as a simple follower. In the group
photographs of the Communards, one sees this desire to be seen and ac-
knowledged as part of the event in which the right to live evoked the right

186 Chapter Four
to look. Often a group of National Guards, accompanied by civilians, stand
in line to pose for the camera on the barricades, recalling O’Sullivan’s photo-
graph in the Sea Islands. A trumpet can be seen being played on the barri-
cade in the rue Saint Sébastien, where one man supports his infant child so
it can be seen standing.91 On other occasions, the Commune’s troops can be
seen in the Hôtel- de-Ville or the courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
where the “people” would not ordinarily have been seen. There are many
notorious photographs from the Commune, ranging from the staged de-
struction of the Vendôme column; to the photomontages created to show
the “outrages” of the Commune, such as the assassination of the archbishop
of Paris, who had been held hostage against government attack; and finally
to the many images of Paris in ruins after the Versaillais had attacked. But
it is these group portraits, carefully arranged and posed as if for a holiday or
wedding photograph, usually taken by unknown photographers, that stay
with me. The carefully arranged paving-stone barricades were no match for
modern artillery, especially now that Haussmann had arranged a clear line
of fire, as they must have known. The conviction that history was on their
side, no matter what happened in the short term, is what seems irrecuper-
able here, rather than the foretold and chosen deaths of those posing. I am
tired of mourning. I would like to know what it would feel like to feel so
engaged with history rather than death. Is there not a terrible suspicion at
large in the West that did so much to prevent this history from playing out
that the defiance of death has passed to those imbued with the divine rather
than the historical?

Abolition Realism 187
Puerto Rican Counterpoint II
Mourning Abolition Realism

After the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, Francisco Oller worked on

two dialectically related series of works (see plate 8). The first depicted
plantations under postslavery conditions, paintings that seem to resist in-
terpretation as either critiques or endorsements of agriculture.1 In counter-
point, Oller made a series of paintings of locally grown fruits and plants,
such as pineapples, plantains, and bananas, as if suggesting that these offered
the possibility of a sustainable agriculture that did not need to rely on the
international cash- crop market. In 1891 he painted a major canvas de-
picting Maestro Raphael Cordero, a formerly enslaved tobacco worker of
color who had founded a school in San Juan which educated children of
all classes and ethnicities. In this period of emergent nationalism, Cordero
was being claimed as a prototype nationalist hero by reformists and conser-
vatives alike, leading to Oller’s painting being displayed in the conservative
Ateneo club.2 The recuperative claim to the subaltern project of education
and sustainable agriculture that Oller had been exploring provoked a new
direction in his work. He returned to international exhibition, in 1895, with
a monumental painting, El Velorio, or The Wake, showing it first in Puerto
Rico, then at two locations in Havana, Cuba, and finally it was shipped to
France.
Oller traveled with the painting, which he showed to Cézanne in his
studio and to Pissarro by photograph.3 Neither artist liked Oller’s new
piece, but he sent it to the Paris Salon of 1895, where it was accepted. It was
also ignored there, because even Salon reviewers saw grande machine paint-
ing as fit for nothing other than disappearing into some institution, where
it would hang unseen and unregarded.4 As if in anticipation of being over-
looked, this was a painting of disillusion, mourning, and coming to terms,
both politically and artistically. Rarely even a footnote in Anglophone his-
tories of modernism, it has been a foundational painting for Puerto Rican
art, literature, and even national identity.5 It should be required viewing for
any discussion of post-abolition representation. If this was not a work of the
avant-garde, measured in terms of style within a particular time period, it
nonetheless reflects on how advanced painting had become detached from
the counterpoint of visuality and abolition realism. Indeed, The Wake is in
mourning for the failed project of abolition and the realism that would
have depicted it. If it is, as Nietzsche or Benjamin might have said, “un-
timely,” that constitutes the grounds for its successes and failures.
The painting is so large, at some 13 x 7 feet, and so crowded with inci-
dent, that its very subject has been obscured. It depicts a wake held to cele-
brate the death of a child, a formula whose oddity indicates the disjunc-
tured nature of the painting. The syncretic ceremony, known as baquine,
blended Kongo and Catholic beliefs that a deceased innocent child went
directly to the spirit world or to Heaven, respectively, and should not be
mourned, as that would hinder their journey. Oller accurately depicted the
Kongo ceremonial, with an altar being made out of a table covered in a
white cloth, with its libations of food and drink, and with the performance
of songs to help the journey of the spirit.6 At the same time, this was also
a Catholic ceremony, known in Spain as the florón, commemorating the
direct passage of the angelito, the little angel, to Heaven. Thus the child is
surrounded by flowers and dressed in white. Such acceptance indicates that
the infant had been baptized despite its young age, creating a visual mem-
ory connection with José Campeche’s portrait of Juan Avilès.
No reading hitherto has suggested that this was a syncretic ceremony,
because all the authority has been ceded to the text published in the catalog
for the Salon of 1895.

Astonishing criticism of a custom that still exists in Puerto Rico among

country people and which has been propagated by the priests. On this
day the family and friends have kept vigil all night over the dead child,
extended on a table with flowers and laces. The mother . . . does not

Puerto Rican Counterpoint II 189

 weep for fear her tears might wet the wings of this little angel on his
flight to heaven. She laughs and offers a drink to the priest, who with
eager eyes gazes up at the roast pig whose entry is awaited with enthusi-
asm. Inside this room of indigenous structure, children play, dogs romp,
lovers embrace, and the musicians get drunk. This is an orgy of brutish
appetites under the guise of a gross superstition.7

Attributed to Oller himself, the text castigates the baquine as a clerically in-
spired orgy. Many scholars have followed this lead, all noting the “couple
in full-fledged romance grabbing each other,” in the left foreground.8 But
they are not (see fig. 38). As anyone who has seen the actual painting can tell,
the couple are grieving. The woman has her arm across her eyes and uses
her other hand to fend off the sight of the incoming sacrificial pig, while a
man standing behind her holds her to offer comfort. Another man empties a
bottle over their heads, oblivious to their grief. This visual oversight has the
same cause in all cases. Whoever wrote the Salon entry in France—clearly
it cannot have been the artist—was no doubt working from a photograph,
such as that seen by Pissarro, who had no hesitation in criticizing the paint-
ing as “banal” on that basis. In a photograph the dark corner becomes ob-
scure, so if one does not look closely, it can seem that the couple are em-
bracing. The painting is not a simple one. It offers a series of counterpoints,
visual allusions, hesitations, and dramas.
The space of the painting constructs a series of interacting groups in an
off-center and apparently askew arrangement, using the pyramids and di-
agonals of classical composition. A pyramid links the musicians at left to the
roasted pig and the celebrating priest, which also dominates the attention of
one cheering man in the left background and another who reaches for a ma-
chete to carve it at the extreme right. The dead child is linked to the other
children in the painting by a diagonal from the bottom left. Two children
are seen having fallen down in the left corner and one standing, who can be
characterized as being white, brown, and black respectively, all connected
by the invisible line leading up to the dead child. He or she is illuminated
by a stream of light entering through a hole in the wall, visible next to the
hat of the man standing at center, enhancing the atmosphere of divinity and
rendering the skin intensely white. The mourning couple are linked to two
men at the extreme right-hand edge of the painting, dressed as peasants,
one of whom gestures across at them. At the center of the painting stands
an older African man, contemplating the dead child (see fig. 39). Finally,

190 Puerto Rican Counterpoint II

 figure 38. “ t h e C o uP l e ,”
detAil froM o l l e r, tHe Wake.

the painting creates an empty space in the right foreground from which
the implied spectator’s viewpoint is constructed. Located at the intersec-
tion of the gaze of the little dog at left center and the standing woman at
the right-hand side, the spectator is positioned very low, as if fallen on the
floor, or from the viewpoint of a child. This open space focuses our atten-
tion on the dead child, in sympathy with the African man and the mourn-
ers, prompting us to condemn the celebrations going on all around, caused
by the entrance of the pig. That commotion distracts our attention from the
real source of authority in the picture—the disappearing landowner, seen
out of the left-hand window, who has retained power despite the formal

Puerto Rican Counterpoint II 191

f i g u r e 39. “ t h e el d e r ,”
d e tAi l f r o M o l l e r,
tHe Wake.

f i g u r e 40. “ t h e
o Wn e r ,” d e tA i l f r o M
o l l e r, tHe Wake.
end of slavery (see fig. 40). In mourning one individual, the painting also
mourns the artist’s vision of a future that has failed to arrive, namely the
future of abolition, as symbolized by the children. In this realist painting,
Oller was trying to visualize a cross-racial society for Puerto Rico, only to
collide with the unchanging realities of poverty and power in rural life.
In this context, the confrontation between the dead child and the older
African man is most poignant. Whatever his personal status may have been,
the elder would have been born in the period of Puerto Rican slavery and
was racialized as such. The prospect of a future in which society was not di-
vided by race, which might have been imaginable in the optimism of 1873,
no longer seems available—it was as dead as the child. If we assume the
other children to be the dead child’s siblings, then it is also conceivable that
the African elder is her grandfather or other relative. Certainly, his presence
is not only accepted; he is being ignored, almost as if he is a ghost. His atten-
tion is fixed directly on the child, undistracted by the revelers and mourn-
ers alike. The intensity of this look between the living and the dead across
the invisible temporal disjuncture of abolition and (apparently) across the
color line is “untimely” because it should be the young mourning the old,
and not vice-versa. Nor should those of the era of slavery mourn moder-
nity, yet they have cause. It is for this reason that the painting constructs its
unusual viewpoint. Either the spectator is a fallen adult, one who has failed
to do what should have been done, or s/he is a child, looking at the appar-
ent chaos of the scene and gradually deciphering its meanings. These view-
points could be combined as that of an adult who was nonetheless legally
without personality and hence a minor.
More allusively still, there were a series of references within the painting
to the visual conventions of Realist style. To work across from left to right:
the mourning woman on the left is derived from Courbet’s peasant figures,
such as The Winnowers (see fig. 41). The empty Roman-style chair next to the
dead child recalls David’s Brutus, as does the extended hand of the mourner
at right and the semantically significant empty space at the center of the
painting (see fig. 42).
Centered on the conflict between private need, and grief, and public
necessity, David’s work had been interpreted as revolutionary when it was
first displayed, in 1789. The artful foreshortening on the chair at extreme
right recalls Caravaggio’s similar (if more dramatic) trick in The Supper at
Emmaus, a painting concerning the Resurrection (see fig. 43). In the startled
recognition of the disciples in Caravaggio’s painting was mingled the sight

Puerto Rican Counterpoint II 193

of the impossible become real and the possibility of a Catholic Church that
might enable that fantasy, both of which seemed unavailable in the late
nineteenth century. Finally, in an almost private reference, Oller’s entire
painting alludes to a drawing made by Pissarro in Venezuela at the start of
his career, in 1853, that is usually known as Dance at the Inn, although Oller’s
allusion here makes it intelligible as a similar wake (see fig. 44).
Pissarro’s drawing was also dominated by the figure of a grieving African
man being comforted by two children. Its relatively large scale suggests that
he was considering turning it into a large-scale painting, a choice he later
backed away from in favor of “French” subjects like The Hermitage. Oller, as
it were, finished the job for him in another part of the Caribbean at a very
different moment. The implied reproach was not just a reflection on a single
unfinished work, but a suggestion about the road not taken, for all Pissarro’s
avowals of radicalism. There was also a measuring of differing visualities
being performed here. When Pissarro drew his sketch, slavery was about
to be abolished in Venezuela, meaning that the mourning of the “father”
was for a child who would not experience freedom. When Oller made his
painting, Puerto Rico was about to be invaded by the United States, in 1898,
inaugurating what is now over a century of occupation. While he could not
have foreseen that drama, his work mourned a freedom that had failed to
materialize and a right to look that had failed to perform as abolition real-
ism. Despite the general strikes of 1848, abolition, and the Commune, visu-
ality had succeeded in becoming imperial.

(opposite, clockwise from upper left)

figure 41. g ustAVe CourBet, tHe WinnoWers (1854). 131 x 167 cm. inv. 874. Photo
by g. Blot. Musée des Beaux-Arts, nantes, france. Photo courtesy of réunion des Musées
nationaux / Art resource, new york.

figure 42. JAC ques - louis dAVid, tHe lictors bearing tHe boDies oF tHe
DeaD sons oF tHe roman consul brutus (1785). oil on canvas, 323 x 422 cm, Photo
by g. Blot and C. Jean, louvre, Paris. Photo courtesy of réunion des Musées nationaux / Art
resource, new york.

figure 43. MiChelAngelo Merisi dA CArAVAggio, supper at emmaus (1601),

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, italy. Photo courtesy of scala / Art resource, new york.

figure 44. CAMille PissArro, eVening ball in a posaDa During tHe carniVal
in Venezuela [sic] (CA . 1852 – 54). sepia watercolor on paper, 36.4 x 53 cm. Banco Central
de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela. Photo courtesy of snark / Art resource, new york.

Puerto Rican Counterpoint II 195

five

Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality,

Ancient and Modern

In a sense, all visuality was and is imperial visuality, the shaping of moder-
nity from the point of view of the imperial powers. This chapter examines
the formation of imperial visuality both in the colonies and in the metro-
pole at the interface of colonizing authority with the hierarchy of the “civi-
lized” and the “primitive.” Whereas visuality had been the prerogative of
the individual Hero, imperial visuality was an abstracted and intensified
means of ordering biopower. It understood history to be arranged within
and across time, meaning that the “civilized” were at the leading edge of
time, while their “primitive” counterparts, although alive in the same mo-
ment, were understood as living in the past. This hierarchy ordered space
and set boundaries to the limits of the possible, intending to make com-
merce the prime activity of humans within a sphere organized by Chris-
tianity and under the authority of civilization. Imperial visuality imagined
a transhistorical genealogy of authority marked by a caesura of incommen-
surability between the “indigenous” and the “civilized,” whether that break
had taken place in ancient Italy with the rise of the Romans, or was still
being experienced, as in the colonial settlement of Pacific island nations.
Thus it claimed an authority analogous to what it (incorrectly) took to be
the aura of mana (power or prestige) attributed to Melanesian and Polyne-
sian leaders. This universal authority derived from the “primitive” mind
sustained the new modern Caesarism called for by Carlyle’s biographer and
successor James Anthony Froude (1818–94). These abstract modalities of au-
thority were enabled and reinforced by the local endeavors of missionaries
who sought to bridge the ancient and the modern, as they saw it, by means
of disciplinary religious missions. The classification of ancient and modern
cultures, overlaid with that of “primitive” and “civilized,” designated a sepa-
ration in space and time that was aestheticized by European modernism.
Despite the seemingly arbitrary nature of such formulae, the result was an
effective suturing of authority to the newly centralized modalities of im-
perial power. In response to the crisis of authority after the First World War,
there was nonetheless in some places a return to charismatic leadership in
the form of fascist dictatorship.
Just as visuality itself was an antagonistic response to revolutionary tac-
tics, so was imperial visuality an intensification of that visuality mandated
by new tactics deployed by the indigenous. I map this process in Aotearoa
New Zealand, both because Froude imagined New Zealand as England re-
born in the empire, and because the theorizing of mana relied on fieldwork
performed by missionaries and their surrogates in the extended diocese of
New Zealand. The Maori repurposed Christian texts into a renewal move-
ment that cast them as “Jews” to the missionaries Christians. This claiming
of an authority at once more ancient than Christianity and more mod-
ern than received Maori belief served both to unify formerly antagonistic
groups into one anticolonial force and to undermine the missionaries’ credi-
bility. This strategy forced the British Crown into a direct claim of sover-
eignty in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which required ratification by Maori
leaders, giving them legal personality and hence authority. These challenges
led to a further intensification of imperial authority. Described by Froude
as “Oceana,” this visualization of history projected specific notions of the
sacred into a generalized and abstracted “necropolitics,” demarcated into
two zones. One was the “normal” zone of imperial authority designated by
the new science of statistics, describing patterns of life and death. The other
was the space of imperial exception in which all those excluded from the
normal—here the colonized and racialized body—were subject to excep-
tional authority, epitomized as the right of the imperial power to withhold
life from the colonized. Or to kill them, in plain English. That authority was
legitimized by the “discovery” of mana as the “primitive” origin of hero-
ism, now rendered as Caesarism. Metropolitan imperial visuality was chal-
lenged from within by a countergenealogy for authority, stemming from
the “ancient lowly,” or the proletariat of antiquity. Epitomized by the heroic

Imperial Visuality 197
figure of Spartacus, the ancient “strikes” against empire created an alter-
native genealogy to authorize the modern labor movement. Such visual-
izations relied less on realist visual media than abolitionism had done and
turned instead to new visualized forms like the Museum of Labor, the red
flag, and the May Day campaign, culminating in the idea of the general
strike as an alternative means of picturing social totality. In the crisis of
authority produced by the combination of radical movements and the col-
lapse of empires after 1917, Caesarism became a new modality of dictatorial
“heroism.”

m i s s i o n a r i e s a n d “J e w s ”: au t h o r i t y

a n d c o lo n i z at i o n i n aot e a r oa

Papa having to do with earth

huri  with turning over
hia
—Kendrick Smithyman, “The World Turned Upside Down”

It was the universalizing project of evangelical Christianity that engaged

in the practical construction of imperial visuality on Carlyle’s model.1 If
Carlyle and Froude were visuality’s theorists, its labor force was the massed
ranks of global missionaries, busy in overturning idols, shipping them to
museums in Western capitals, and instituting the rule of private-property
rights under regimes of visualized surveillance. If missionaries were once
decried as the “running dogs” of imperialism, recent studies have sought
“to understand missionaries in the context of a globalizing modernity that
altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries; missionaries, in other words, were simultaneously
agents of the spread of modernity vis-à-vis non-Western societies, and prod-
ucts of its emerging hegemony.”2 Nowhere was this more the case than with
imperial visuality as the agent and product of globalizing, capitalist moder-
nity. Missionaries envisaged themselves bringing light to darkness through
a series of epistemically and physically violent techniques, writing what
David Livingstone famously called “Christianity, commerce and civiliza-
tion” over those “blank spaces of the map” that later so fascinated Joseph
Conrad. Livingstone was speaking precisely: Christianity was to be intro-
duced first, creating a desire for commerce that would in turn produce
civilization.

198 Chapter Five
 Missionaries actively considered themselves to be heroic figures in the
style of Carlyle. As Jean and John Comaroff have insightfully argued, mis-
sionaries “were the prototypical subjects of a modern ‘history as biogra-
phy,’ producing a range of heroic texts whose linear progression gave puta-
tively sufficient account of human motives, actions, and consequences.”3
For example, in 1837, the British missionary John Williams published a best-
selling account of his travels in the South Pacific, highlighting his destruc-
tion of the “idols,” or tiki, on the island of Rarotonga, part of the present day
Cook Islands. The tiki were nonrepresentational figures, carefully wrapped
to prevent their mana from escaping or harming passers-by. Williams de-
stroyed them all, excepting one specimen that he sent back to London, now
in the collections of the British Museum. The small woodcut frontispiece
shows Williams seated in public, every inch the Hero, accepting the public
offering of the now-disgraced power figures of the Rarotongans. With that
indigenous visuality erased, his next act was to promulgate a code of laws
based on property rights.4 The missionary hero has brought light to dark-
ness, forced a recognition of that light, and thereby effected the moment
of conversion. Conversion is an internal process of the “soul,” precisely that
object targeted by the new disciplinary apparatus of normalizing modernity
in which “the soul is the prison of the body.”5
Here I will take Aotearoa (Land of the Long White Cloud) as an example
of the formation of imperial visuality and indigenous countervisuality in
the period in which it became the crown colony of New Zealand, Froude’s
ideal colony. It was also the site of concerted Maori resistance to colonial-
ism, which led to the formation of an indigenous countervisuality. This
countervisuality sought to contest both the genealogy of imperial visuality
and its symbolic forms, and to visualize its own modality of power. British
missionaries arrived in Aotearoa in 1814, but they did not succeed in making
their first converts until the 1830s. For example, in 1834 one leader, accord-
ing to missionaries, dismissed Christianity: “This doctrine . . . may do for
Slaves and Europeans, but not for a free and noble people like the Ngapuhi,”
meaning the dominant confederation of peoples on the north island.6 At
this point, the indigenous remained confident of their strength in num-
bers and in ideas. The missionaries took such remarks seriously and prose-
lytized to the enslaved and other marginal figures in Maori society. Around
1830, as the number of Pakeha (Europeans) increased, together with a high
Maori mortality rate caused both by war and disease, the level of Christian
observance began to rise dramatically.7 Scholars have variously attributed

Imperial Visuality 199
this progress to the missionaries’ role as peacemakers in regional conflicts;
to the perceived benefits of textual literacy that the colonizers offered once
printed texts in the vernacular became available, after 1827; the material
goods, such as blankets and muskets, provided by European commerce; and
the devastation of indigenous populations by exogenous disease. All these
tended toward the accidental and deliberate effacement of what contempo-
raries called the “primitive” communism of the Maori in favor of property-
based relations.8 First, the indigenous had to be made to realize the defi-
ciency that attested to their primitivism. One leading missionary, William
Yate, found the Maori deficient above all in their lack of lack, declaiming
to the Church Missionary Society, in 1829, that “there is no seeking after
Christ till the fetters of sin and satan [sic] gall the Spirit.”9 He recognized the
acute sense of “dread” caused by tapu (Maori te reo equivalent to the Poly-
nesian taboo), but claimed that its transient and human forms made it an in-
ferior form of subjection. Yate’s sense of sinfulness was perhaps all the more
acute because of his purchased erotic encounters with young Maori men
that were soon to lead to his dismissal. Nonetheless, in a travel narrative of
his time in New Zealand, published in 1835, Yate was pleased to observe that
the “real and imaginary wants” of the Maori had increased, so that “indus-
try, regularity, and a desire to make improvements in their land, their habits,
and customs, are upon the increase.”10 The Maori described this process as
“going mihanere,” a homonymic spelling of “missionary.”11 This cultivation
of a sense of need where none had existed before epitomizes what John and
Jean Comaroff have called the missionary “colonization of consciousness.”12
In encountering Pakeha determined to settle, the indigenous found
themselves confronted with a group that homogenized all the different iwi
(peoples) into one “Maori” whole and had designs on their most funda-
mental cultural resource, the land itself. The tohunga (priest) Papahurihia re-
sponded by creating the prophetic discourse of Te Atua Wera, the Red God,
uniting the “Maori” in counterpoint to the Pakeha (see fig. 45). In response
to his understanding of the missionary teachings and texts, Papahurihia
claimed that the Maori were Hurai, or Jews, giving them “ancient” found-
ing authority in relation to the missionaries, rather than being subalterns.
He celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday, according to the Old Testament
(rather than the Christian Sunday), and raised a symbolic flag to testify to
his actions.13 By moving the Sabbath to Saturday, Papahurihia and his fol-
lowers reclaimed the shaping of time that was an instrumental part of mis-
sionary settlement and their primary evangelical claim. For Sabbath obser-

200 Chapter Five
figure 45. AnonyMous, “ te AtuA Wer A [PAPAhurihi A ?],”
froM frederiCk MAning, olD neW zealanD (london: 1863).

vance was the quantitative indicator by which the missionaries marked their
progress, prompting Henry Williams to denounce the missionary-educated
rebels as “two-fold more the child of the devil than they were before.”14
The missionaries themselves had suggested that the Maori might be one of
the lost tribes of Israel and had seen them as having “Jewish” characteristics,
such as greed and a propensity to business.15 So the Maori knew both why
Jews were considered important in Pakeha religion and how they were the
object of systematic racialized degradation.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Maori chose to identify with
Jews because they knew exactly how much it would annoy the Pakeha.
“Carlyle,” wrote Froude, “detested Jews,” and his description of Disraeli
(cited in Froude’s novel The Earl of Beaconsfield ) as a “superlative Hebrew
conjuror,” echoes the missionary William Woon’s puzzled description of
“Papaurihia [sic] who has fallen in with some Jews and learned juggling etc.
and on this account he is regarded as a wonderful man.”16 Unable to credit
that he might have created this movement, the British believed that Papa-
hurihia had been corrupted by a “Hebrew traveler. . . . [H]e was a sea cap-
tain, and he had some skill as a juggler and a ventriloquist.”17 It was not al-
together impossible, for there were a number of Jewish settler-traders in the
Hokianga region.18 Certainly, many writers believed that tohunga used ven-
triloquism. What was meant by juggling is less clear. At the same period,

Imperial Visuality 201
Darwin used “jugglery” to refer to his use of technology in South America,
so Papahurihia may have had some knowledge of Western technology.19
He was both a vernacular and a national hero, intent on the creation of an
imagined community. His movement was literally based on an “against the
grain” reading of Protestant doctrine translated into the vernacular, while
his political goal was to forge something that might be called a Maori “na-
tion.” His appropriation of the double negative connotation of both indi-
geneity and Jewishness thus marks an instance of what Stephen Turner has
called “native irony,” meaning “the anamorphic distortion of an ‘official’
reality, that which is already known, expected, and elaborated in conven-
tionalized form, through the interference of the affective consciousness of
the native or local.”20 Papahurihia’s movement, replete with appropriations,
aporia, and performative display seems always already postmodern, a fitting
subject for Kendrick Smithyman’s remarkable deconstructive poem cycle
Atua Wera (1997). Papahurihia’s claim to be Jewish was repeated by later re-
newal movements led by figures such as Te Ua Haumene (ca. 1820–66) and
Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (ca. 1814–91), which continue to have adher-
ents today.21 Te Ua claimed descent from the twelve sons of Jacob, while Te
Kooti framed his dramatic escape from the prison of the Chatham Islands
and his march into the interior, in 1868, as an exodus to the Promised Land
of Moses. This nationalism was prophetic, contradictory, imaginative, and
visualized.
If he claimed ancient authority as a “Jew,” Papahurihia was modern in
his synthesis of tradition and current circumstances. He conjured the spirits
of the dead to speak and advise the people in their new circumstances, as
the tohunga had always done, but now he spoke of Te Nakahi, the serpent,
who was a syncretic combination of the serpent in Genesis, the fiery ser-
pent on the rod used by Moses, and the long-standing Maori lizard spirit.22
He raised a flag on his Jewish Sabbath, just as the British would do on the
Christian Sunday. The missionaries used a variety of flags to mark their mis-
sions, often decorated with a text in Maori. The British resident John Busby
had then imposed a “New Zealand” flag on a gathering of rangatira (leaders
or chiefs), in 1835, and the renewal movements all used them.23 While Papa-
hurihia’s flag is now unknown, later flags used by Te Ua and Te Kooti sug-
gest that it would have had a combination of symbols, colors, and perhaps
text. Te Ua had a flag with the word “Kenana” (Canaan) written on it to in-
dicate that he considered himself Jewish. One of Te Kooti’s flags used a cres-
cent moon to indicate a new world, a cross, and the letters “WI,” referring

202 Chapter Five
figure 46. Anon, “kororArekA [russell],” froM
frederiCk M Aning, olD neW zealanD (london: 1863).

to his Sabbath. On another one of his flags, the quadrants of the Union Jack
were colored green and brown (rather than white and blue), as were the
stars denoting the four islands of New Zealand.24 Te Kooti seems to have
imagined a postcolonial power-sharing in which the form of the colonial
was blended with the content of the indigenous population.25 In 1845, Papa-
hurihia became the war tohunga during Hone Heke’s attack on the Pakeha
settlers, which revolved around the repeated destruction by Maori of the
flagstaff at Kororareka (present-day Russell) (see fig. 46). A flag is inherently
a militarized object, and Papahurihia and other Maori leaders understood
it as such. The flag attempted to perform the authority of sovereignty. It
indexically marked a territory as a new national possession, symbolically
designated the cultural history of the flagmakers, and iconically attested to
the presence of sovereignty. Such performances only work if received as
intended by the indigenous audience. The photographer William Lawes,
the London Missionary Society’s emissary to Papua New Guinea, attended
a “proclamation of British sovereignty,” as he called it, in 1888: “There was
not much display, and it was well that there was not, for flag-hoisting must
seem to the natives to be a white man’s amusement. The function of the 4th
[November] was the tenth at which I had been present on New Guinea. It

Imperial Visuality 203
is getting monotonous.”26 Perhaps the index of the desire to colonize is the
amount of such ritualized boredom that can be tolerated.
Against the tedium of imperial symbol, Papahurihia deployed a complex
visualized rhetoric in keeping with Maori usage of metaphor and allusion.
The French missionary Louis Catherin (or Catherin Savant) offered a ver-
sion of the imagery he was using around the time of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Tanakhi [Te Nakahi, the serpent] has compared heretics to the aotea tree:
this tree is placed in a straight line, another tree is placed in a curving
line, starting at the foot of the straight tree. This tree is called the tree
of judgement. At the end of the curved tree are the heretical Missionar-
ies who pray: they take the road leading to Satan’s fire and they go. . . .
Tanakhi, the new god, appears under the bent tree and goes off to stoke
up the eternal fire, then he comes up the straight tree, whose top touches
heaven; the heretics also try to climb up there but when they think they
have reached heaven, heaven disappears above them and they fall back
into the abyss.27

For all the Christian language of heresy and heaven, Papahurihia’s visual
metaphor emerges clearly: while the missionaries falsely claim a route to
salvation, it is the renewal movement that really knows how to find it. The
use of indigenous plants and the question of direction-finding must have
rung a chord with local listeners, who would have noticed the difference
between Pakeha ignorance and their own designation of over six hundred
plant species. The movement caused many Maori to abandon the loose re-
lationship they had with Christianity and to move into a form of opposi-
tion to the colonizers. The missionaries blamed ships’ captains for convinc-
ing the Maori that their “object is only to gain possession of the land: that
when they are made Christians we shall make slaves of them.”28 It was not
an inaccurate forecast, if slavery is understood, as the Maori would have
done, as meaning reduction to a landless condition.29 In te reo, the indige-
nous population often called themselves tangata whenua, meaning “people
of the land.” Conversion prompted some agonies of double-consciousness,
as the missionary Yate recorded in a series of letters from Maori converts of
the period. Hongi, “a married man living with Mr. Clarke,” wrote that he
sometimes thought: “‘Ha! What are the things of God to me? I am only a
New Zealander: they will do very well for white and learned people but as
for us—!’” Many other letters attest to such internal conflicts, disputes be-
tween what Henry Wahanga called his “native heart” and his “new heart.”30

204 Chapter Five
Plate 1. Ano nymous, Johnny Heke (i.e ., Hone Heke) (1856).
Photo courtesy of National Library of Australia.
(opposite)
Plate 2. Jean- ­B a pti ste du T ertre , “I ndigoterie” (d e ta i l), f r o m Histoire
générale des Antilles Habitées par les François (Pa r i s : 1667).

Plate 3. A nonymous, The Awakening of the Third Estate (1789), Pa r i s.

Photo courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.

(above)
Plate 4. José Cam peche , El niño Juan Pantaleón de Avilés de Luna
(1808), Ins tituto de Cultura Puertorriquena .
Plate 5. William Blake , God Writing on the Tablets of the Covenant (1805).
Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Scotland.
Plate 6. James Saw kins, St. Jago [i.e ., San tiago de] Cuba (1859).
Photo courtesy of National Library of Australia.

Plate 7. Camille Pissarro, The Hermitage at Pontoise [Les côteaux

de l’Hermitage , Pointoise] (c a . 1867). Oil on canvas, 595/8 x 79 inches.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Thannhauser Collection.
Gift of Justin K Thannhauser, 1978. 78.2514.67.
Plate 8. F ran cisco Oller y Cestero, El Velorio [The Wake ] (1895), U n iv e r s i ty o f
Puerto Ric o, Rio Pedras.
Plate 9. Cover of Paris -­Match.
Plate 10. Bu bbles scen e from Rachida (2002).

Plate 11. Sti ll of O felia from Pan’s Labyrinth

(dir. Gui llermo del Toro, 2006).
With due allowance for the writers saying what they knew Yate wanted to
hear concerning their awareness of the struggle against sin, these dilemmas
must have seemed very acute. While the missionaries spoke of the influence
of the devil and the decline in Sabbath attendance, the (as-it-happens Jew-
ish) sailor Joel Polack testified to the House of Lords in London of a more
thoroughgoing transformation: “There was a Crusade at the Time among
the Natives, so that everything was at a Stand-Still; they had no opportunity
of getting on with anything. That was occasioned by a new Religion, which
has sprung up, called Papahurihia.”31 Labor at a standstill suggests a colo-
nial general strike in religious dress, much like the contemporary Chartist
National Holiday.

s ov e r e i g n t y o r Ka wa n ata n g a

During the Papahurihia insurrection, Aotearoa formally became the British

Crown colony of New Zealand by means of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed
on 6 February 1840 by British representatives and Maori leaders. A Chris-
tian diocese was declared the following year with the appointment of an
Anglican bishop.32 Papahurihia and Waitangi were both part of the in-
digenous response to settler colonization. The insurrection had forced the
Crown to recognize the standing of indigenous authority in order to de-
fend its position. Polack told the House of Lords, in 1838, “It is astonishing
how the Natives have gone back,” meaning reverted to indigenous religion
from Christianity.33 For Papahurihia and his followers, “going back” was a
challenge to the imperial future that he seems to have correctly visualized.
While it is usually said that the treaty followed the New Zealand Associa-
tion (later the New Zealand Company) proposal of colonization, in 1838,
which had been discussed in the House of Lords, it should be added that
these hearings made it clear that British authority was far from unques-
tioned.34 The association presumed that “the Savages are to be dealt with as
children,” meaning that they were legal minors, to be protected but with-
out rights.35 The Church Missionary Society objected that such a designa-
tion had no basis in law, because Britain had “no claim of Sovereignty or
Jurisdiction whatever.” When challenged that they themselves had sought
to buy land whenever possible, the missionaries pointed out that such pur-
chase did not make a claim to sovereignty.36 The Treaty of Waitangi was de-
signed to end all such disputes and to give the British a basis for expansion.
At the same time, by seeking out indigenous consent and thereby presum-

Imperial Visuality 205
ing their majoritarian legal status, the treaty marked an acknowledgment
of indigenous participation in sovereign claims and thereby ownership of
a certain authority.
The question of sovereignty was the key issue in the Treaty of Waitangi
and its subsequent history. The treaty was prepared in English and in te reo
(Maori), with Maori leaders signing or marking the te reo version (see fig.
47). However, the two were significantly different. Article 1 of the treaty in
English has signatories “cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England, abso-
lutely and without reservation, all the rights and powers of sovereignty.”
In te reo, it reads in Ranganui Walker’s English translation: “The Chiefs of
the Confederation and all the Chiefs not in that Confederation cede with-
out reservation to the Queen of England forever the Governorship of all
their lands.”37 The key term sovereignty was rendered, in what the historian
Ruth Ross has aptly called “missionary Maori,” as kawanatanga, a neologism
formed by taking the missionary word kawana, a transliteration of governor,
and adding the suffix -tanga, meaning “things pertaining to,” in order to
render governorship.38 At this point, Maori had no concept of “governorship,”
so the signatories cannot have been clear as to what they were conceding.
In James Busby’s earlier dealings with a smaller group of chiefs, leading to
what has been called the Declaration of Independence (1835), he had used
the important term mana. Walker concludes that had the treaty used the
significant phrase mana whenua (power over the land), “it is highly probable
that they [the chiefs] would not have signed the Treaty.”39 In Maori trans-
lations of New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer, kawanatanga
tends to refer to God’s authority, suggesting that the signatories might
have considered that they were making a spiritual accommodation with
Christianity.40 In one legal view, the practice whereby documents should
be interpreted contra preferentem, that is to say, against the person offering
it, means that the treaty should not be interpreted as ceding sovereignty.
Others agree that kawanatanga was an unclear concept, but that the right of
the Crown to govern was ceded.41 Ironically, kawanatanga has now come to
be used to mean “self-determination.”42 In any event, scholars now consider
that because the treaty explicitly reserves to Maori te tino rangatiratanga, or
“the customary authority of the chiefs over their own people,” signatories
would have presumed that their traditional authority remained intact. The
legal scholar Paul McHugh emphasizes that rangatiratanga is a concept for
which there is no simple Pakeha equivalent, for “it is an integrated concept
tied into the mana of the individual and the . . . community.”43 In other

206 Chapter Five
figure 47. MAori text of the treaty oF Waitangi (1840).
Photo courtesy of Alexander turnbull library, Wellington, Aotearoa, new Zealand.
words, whether by accident or design, the English version of the Treaty of
Waitangi claimed Maori mana for the Crown, an imperialism of the “soul”
forged by imperial discipline. The treaty’s colonization of all “rights and
powers” anticipated the imperial appropriation of mana itself.
It was not long before the treaty itself was set aside altogether. The Na-
tive Land Act of 1862 nullified the presumption of what in English law was
known as “aboriginal title” in order to legalize transactions between indi-
vidual Maori and settlers, undermining the collective ownership of land.
The land grab that followed led to the outbreak of the New Zealand Wars
(formerly known as the Maori Wars), a protracted and serious conflict.
Taken together with other colonial experience in the post- emancipation
period, such as the so- called Indian Mutiny (1857), the establishment of
internment camps for Australian aboriginals (1860), and the Jamaican Mo-
rant Bay revolt (1865), the wars led to a reconfiguration of British self-
representation in relation to indigenous and subject peoples. During the
period of emancipation, the state took a relatively expansive view of soci-
eties with whom it ought to negotiate and settle by treaty any British settle-
ment or colony. However, in the case Wi Parata v. The Bishop of Wellington
(1877), Chief Justice Prendergast devalued the treaty to what one might call
lex nullius [a nothing law]: “So far indeed as that instrument purported to
cede the sovereignty . . . it must be regarded as a simple nullity. No body
politic existed capable of making cession of sovereignty, nor could the thing
itself exist.”44 In this view, the Maori could not be considered “civilized”
enough to enter into legal relations with the Crown. It followed that Maori
relations were the business of the Crown in which the courts could not
and did not interfere for the following century. Prendergast was reverting
to the legal fictions under which British imperial rule in Ireland had been
established and adding a new severity to them. Edward Coke had notori-
ously declared, in 1608, that non- Christian peoples were “in law perpetui
inimici, perpetual enemies (for the law pressures not that they will be con-
verted, that being remota potentia, a remote possibility) for between them,
as with the devil, whose subjects they be, and the Christian, there is per-
petual hostility, and can be no peace.”45 By renewing this formula, Prender-
gast gave legal sanction to Carlyle’s fears that colonies were new forms of
a “black Ireland.” In short, “conversion” was impossible and the permanent
war of visuality had to be supplemented with a permanent religious divide,
understood as that between the primitive or heathen, and the civilized or
Christian.

208 Chapter Five
 Coke’s opinion had been declared “extrajudicial” by Lord Mansfield, the
same judge who declared slavery to be illegal on British soil. Now Prender-
gast was reviving the doctrine of a permanent state of exception for in-
digenous peoples, without even the possibility of redemption by religious
conversion. For the Maori renewal movements had convinced British au-
thorities in New Zealand that no such conversion could be trusted and that
the Maori were always of the devil’s party. In place of negotiated sover-
eignty, the colonial assembly created what one modern legal scholar has
called a “highly coercive system of confiscation, regrant and military settle-
ment . . . similar to the policies of the English Government in 17th cen-
tury Ireland,” a resemblance also noted by critics in the period.46 The treaty,
already ignored de facto, was now de jure a nullity. By the time Froude
visited New Zealand in 1885, he did not even mention the treaty to dispar-
age it. Maori rights to British citizenship, defined in article 3, were also set
aside by Wi Parata, placing Maori in a permanent state of exception, subject
to British Crown authority but with no legal standing to challenge that au-
thority. Whereas missionaries had set out to colonize indigenous conscious-
ness, imperial authority designated the native as a legal child, incapable
either of being converted or of owning property. Under this new hierarchy
of the soul, it was now possible to imagine a different form of empire.

oceana

I shall take the transformation of James Anthony Froude, Carlyle’s biog-

rapher and successor, from self-styled radical to Caesarist imperialist as a
guide to this emergence of imperial visuality, which is not to say that he
caused it. However, while we would now be hesitant to ascribe respon-
sibility for a major change in discursive practice to one historian, many
who were both opposed to and supportive of imperialism in the twenti-
eth century did just that.47 Just as with Carlyle, I understand Froude as a
symptomatic interpreter of the discourse of power, certainly with personal
influence, but significant mostly as an indicator of the patterns of circula-
tion that those supportive of imperialism could perceive. Expelled from
Oxford for his seemingly atheist novel, The Nemesis of Faith, in 1849, Froude
quickly abandoned his youthful radical views of the 1840s, under the in-
fluence of Carlyle’s On Heroes: “The natural, Carlyle said, was the super-
natural; the supernatural, the natural; . . . he showed how the great course
of the world had been directed by gifted men who could see this truth

Imperial Visuality 209
and dared to speak to it, and to act upon it; who had perceived the Divine
presence and Divine reality . . . the rule of gods being for a time or times
made visibly recognizable.”48 Froude sought this connection in the history
of the British empire and built his reputation on a monumental history of
Tudor England, published between 1856 and 1870. Over twelve volumes,
he narrated England’s rise as a naval power, especially in the Americas, cul-
minating with its defeat of the Spanish Armada. This new power was in
equal measure attributed to the virtues of Protestantism, to which Henry
VIII had committed the country in 1538, and to the sterling character of the
English yeomanry. Although much criticized by other professional histo-
rians, Froude’s History of England was immensely popular and helped recon-
figure the popular history of Britain on the Tudor-Stuart period (such that
there still seems to be a new film about Elizabeth every year, usually fea-
turing Cate Blanchett in the title role).
Visuality was now to be understood as History linked to the Divine by
the agency of the British empire. Froude’s own history was in that sense
an Old Testament foretelling the British seaborne empire of his own day,
for which he and Carlyle were the prophets. Indeed, after he had finished
the History of England, he began to advocate in journalistic essays published
in Fraser’s under his own editorship for a wider federation of the colonies
who “are part of ourselves” (meaning Canada, Australia, South Africa, and
New Zealand) with Britain.49 When a Conservative government was re-
turned to power in 1874, Froude carried out a diplomatic mission to South
Africa, giving him the opportunity to push his case for federation within
government. In two subsequent travel accounts of expeditions to the South
Pacific (1886) and the Caribbean (1888), he mapped a global imperial policy
for a wider audience, updating Carlyle for the high imperial era. In his first
such book, Oceana, Froude looked at the ways in which Carlyle’s heroism
had entered its twilight but had generated its successor in the global Anglo-
phone empire. Froude claimed to recall how he had imagined emigrating to
New Zealand in the “revolutionary time which preceded the convulsions of
1848,” seeing his future as working on the land, rather than the scholarly life
of a gentleman—he had in fact been offered a teaching position in Hobart
Town, in Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tasmania, then and now part of
Australia.50 This displacement can be attributed to his sense that New Zea-
land was a regeneration of England as it should be and had been in the past:
“England over again, set free from the limitations of space.”51 Space here
was the key to a hierarchy of culture maintained without recourse to chat-

210 Chapter Five
tel slavery. The Medusa effect of visuality, its attempt to petrify all attempts
to modernize, was deployed here to move a nation in space and time for a
second effort at heroism.
On his travels Froude met some men who had taken the path of Antipo-
dean regeneration, which led him to conclude that the “colonies in propor-
tion to their population, have more eminent men than we have,” meaning
the Hero as evoked by Carlyle.52 By contrast, he would soon write with his
usual distasteful racism that there had been no heroes in the Caribbean,
“unless philonegro enthusiasm can make one out of Toussaint.”53 Ironically,
Froude’s hostile account of the post-emancipation Caribbean would create
a tradition of vernacular heroes that has had global impact. The Trinidadian
schoolmaster John Jacob Thomas (1840–89) was so incensed by Froude’s
work that he wrote and published in London a detailed refutation, wit-
tily entitled Froudacity. Born just after the end of slavery to a working-class
family, Thomas was a product of the denominational and ward school sys-
tem in Trinidad, as he proudly declared, in 1884, in a dispute with a Catho-
lic priest: “I, who am born of the people, and who belong to them, have
better opportunities of knowing their feelings and their needs than any
outsider.”54 Thomas was so much a vernacular hero that he compiled an in-
fluential study of Creole, The Creole Grammar, which both validated the lan-
guage and gave fascinating insights into its use. For example, he documents
how in allegorical stories “cockroach” (ravette) was a term used to refer to
the enslaved, while the “chicken” ( poule) was the slave-owner.55 His critique
of Froude similarly detailed how the British claim to “fair play” was in fact
undermined by such tactics as the use of Barbadian “rowdies” as policemen
in Trinidad.56 Thomas inspired his fellow Trinidadians, such as the world-
renowned C. L. R. James, who re-read him in 1968 and concluded: “From
Toussaint Louverture to Fidel Castro, our people who have written pages
on the book of history, whoever and whatever they have been are West
Indian, a particular social product.”57 James’s remark, and personal example,
show that vernacular and national heroes had combined in the Caribbean as
a counter to the persistent claim that European values and examples were
still the driving force in the region after emancipation.58
Returning to Froude’s fantasy of England renewed in the South Pacific,
we find him visiting Sir George Grey, governor of New Zealand in 1845–53
and again in 1861–68, who was now playing the part of an imperial éminence
grise. As Froude sat in Grey’s study on the island of Kawau, surrounded
by medieval illuminated manuscripts, texts published under Cromwell’s

Imperial Visuality 211
British Commonwealth, and other obscurities, the two dreamed of a global
Anglophone empire, bringing the United States back into federation with
Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.59 Yet Martin and Grey were men in
retirement, aware that their day was past and Froude hinted that, for all his
devotion to Carlyle, the era of the Hero was similarly in its twilight years.
Froude’s enthusiasm for the Anglo-Saxon life in Australia and New Zea-
land was matched by his purported regret at the condition of the post-
emancipation Caribbean, which he saw as threatening to descend into “an-
archy” on the model of Ireland in terms of the British empire and that of
Haiti in terms of the Caribbean.60 By contrast, Froude claimed to find an
already existing state of revived Englishness in the southern hemisphere.
These experiences in the colonies made him an advocate for a centrally con-
trolled empire that would build on the model of his new historical hero,
Julius Caesar, rather than on that of even a limited democracy.61 He was
careful to say that the motive force of empire was the necessity of finding
space to restore the working population to rural activity and healthy living
in order to sustain “the native vigour of our temperament.”62 Whereas Car-
lyle had seen empire as the place to dispose of excess and diseased portions
of England, Froude gave expansion a vitalist tinge, while also claiming the
status of indigeneity for the English. In taking his title from James Harring-
ton’s seventeenth- century work of constitutional theory, he made it clear
that he was proposing a regeneration of the empire on the naval model.
That is to say, he wanted to see the colonies and the metropole recognized
as “one majestic organism which may defy the storms of fate” (15). In this
way, Froude used the modern form of biopower to reframe the traditional
concept (as he saw it) of empire. Writing in the midst of the perceived im-
perial crisis that followed the death of Gordon at Khartoum, Froude found
the “fault not in individual ministers but in the parliamentary system” (151),
and while making careful use of syntax to preserve what is now called de-
niability, he hoped for the coming of a “new Caesar” (152). He attributed to
Carlyle the idea that since the Reform Act of 1832, England had been under
a “spell” that had rendered it a “nation of slaves,” meaning that emancipa-
tion for the actually enslaved had rendered the former masters into slaves.
Now the “ocean empire” that Carlyle had dreamed of was at hand (153),
in which “the nation was administered as a ship of war” (183). Rather than
divide the empire into relatively autonomous nations with separate navies,
Oceana would again become one under a single command, operating to the
codes of military discipline. Command would not be bestowed in some im-

212 Chapter Five
precise way on Carlyle’s mystical Hero, but the ship of state would instead
be subject to its captain, the new Caesar.

mana and BioPower

The new imperial Caesar was empowered by an authority understood to

be the modern counterpart to the “primitive” theory of mana. The British
missionary Robert Henry Codrington (1830–1922) began the Western theo-
rization of mana in Melanesia as part of a transformed missionary practice
of the Anglican diocese of New Zealand, established after the signing of
the Treaty of Waitangi under the leadership of George Augustus Selwyn,
an old Etonian and Cambridge don. Inspired by Newman’s Oxford Move-
ment, like the young Froude, Selwyn envisaged a re- creation of the prin-
ciples of the early church, in its first three centuries, by aristocratic English
missionaries in the islands of the South Pacific.63 This imagined imperial
community made use of Christian rather than capitalist notions of simulta-
neity. Prefigured or prophetic events were in this view simultaneous with
that which they prophesied or with any future fulfillment of them, one
of the capacities of Carlyle’s visualizer.64 Selwyn’s dream was enabled in
1861, when the Colonial Office agreed to allow Anglican dioceses to ex-
tend beyond the borders of British sovereignty, thereby directly expand-
ing the British imperial sphere of influence. At this moment, missionaries
literally became the foot soldiers of imperialism. As a result, a new Bish-
opric of Melanesia was created, under the direction of another Etonian,
J. C. Patteson (1827–71), who created a missionary station named St Barna-
bas on the former penal colony of Norfolk Island. In another curious co-
incidence, the island had recently become home to the descendants of the
Bounty mutineers against Captain Bligh, who had been moved from their
refuge on Pitcairn Island. Patteson established a classic disciplinary institu-
tion on the island, with life being regulated by the ringing of bells in accord
with a strict timetable. The station was intended to train Melanesians in
Christianity, who would then serve as missionaries to their home islands—
even conversion was a hierarchical process. In accord with Selwyn’s heroic
concept of the missionary, there were no distinctions at the station, with
all participating in some form of manual labor. Late-nineteenth- century
photographs of St Barnabas (too poor in quality to reproduce) show a re-
creation of an Oxbridge college dining hall, with Gothic-style vaulting and
gloomy oil paintings hung too high to be seen in detail. In accord with the

Imperial Visuality 213
public-school ethos, physical exercise was conducted outside in all weath-
ers year round. Codrington arrived on the station in 1863, where he was
to stay for twenty years. Although remote, the islands were not excluded
from global labor processes. The Queensland parliament passed the Poly-
nesian Labourers Act in 1868, allowing plantation labor “recruiters” to visit
the islands; in 1871 such “recruiters” took over fifty men and killed eighteen
more from the island of Nggela alone. In September of that year, Bishop
Patteson was killed on the island of Nukapu, most likely due to resentments
over what Codrington accurately called “the slave trade which is desolat-
ing these islands.”65 The British sent a gunboat and shelled the tiny island
in retaliation, completing the story’s metonymic character as an illustration
of high imperialism.
Codrington derived his understanding of Melanesian language and cul-
ture from the missionary recruits that came to St Barnabas. However, he
indicated that the majority of his sources came from the small island of
Mota Lava, in the Banks Islands, and the even smaller islet of Ra, fifteen
kilometers to the north of Mota.66 What these islands had in common was
an established Christian mission under local auspices. Sarawia, known to
the missionaries as George, the first ordained indigenous Christian priest,
created a successful mission on Mota in 1869, complete with a church, gar-
den, and “boarding-school.” Codrington visited in 1870, commenting, with
annoyance, “They assured me that they were quite enlightened and had
done away with all bad customs and were just like us.”67 In fact he found
his efforts at conversion satirized by a local man who, after a stint of labor in
Queensland, wore Western dress and smoked a pipe. In his extensive photo-
graphic work, Codrington was careful to exclude all such contaminating
evidence of modernity. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that “everything in
this work depends on getting a native who can work on his people.”68 How-
ever, a hurricane that struck in 1873, resulting in food shortages and epi-
demics, was blamed on the new religion and the new recruits fell away, re-
verting by 1875 to a state that one British officer found “very dirty compared
with those of Samoa or Fiji even.”69 That left only the small station on Ra,
under the command of Henry Tagalad, where things continued to proceed
“quietly and orderly,” as a mission statement asserted in 1876, always to the
sound of bells. The place of intersection between the West and its primitive
ancestry had become almost vanishingly small.
Codrington’s theories need to be understood as the product of a cer-
tain form of imperial Englishness, rather than as modern anthropological

214 Chapter Five
fieldwork, just as the revisionist historiography of anthropology of the past
twenty-five years would lead us to expect.70 To be fair, in his first article (al-
though much less so in the subsequent book to which most have referred),
Codrington was aware of the difficulties of establishing communications
about indigenous beliefs: “The young people among the islands know very
little indeed of what the elders believe, and have very little sight of their
superstitious observances. The elders are naturally disinclined to commu-
nicate freely concerning subjects round which, among Christian converts,
there hangs a certain shame; while those who are still heathen will speak
with reserve of what retains a sacred character.”71 At the same time, his
theoretical understanding of religion was well suited to anthropological
uses. He believed that no religion was without value and that there was in
all people “the common foundation . . . which lies in human nature itself,
ready for the superstructure of the Gospel.”72
His findings on mana were presented first to the Royal Anthropologi-
cal Society, in 1881, and then published in his book The Melanesians (1891),
where he defined mana as “what works to effect everything which is be-
yond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature;
it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons and things,
and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation.”73
Mana was, then, the motivating power of life, that which gave it direction.
Properly harnessed, it would be a vital medium for modern biopower, in
the sense that a medium sustains a biological culture grown in it. When
Codrington presented his theory in London, his audience immediately ex-
tended his inference, in keeping with Tylor’s contention that what is law
is law everywhere, drawing comparisons between mana and African, Aus-
tralian, Babylonian, and Egyptian beliefs. It was, said one, “the ancient type
of fetishism.”74 In the imperial worldview, there was now an ethnographic
hierarchy of time in which people, living and dead, were allotted places
on the ladder of civilization. If that ladder allocated places to all, it did not
mean that all were capable of climbing it, but rather that History was now
the means of distributing and organizing the sensible. The zones of exclu-
sion and inclusion crossed and divided geographical and political borders,
so that the metropolitan working class, or the inhabitants of the “South”
within Europe, such as the Italian mezzogiorno or the whole of Greece,
were considered closer to the actually existing “primitives” of the South
Pacific than to the imperial elite because of their regressive adherence to
the collective form of life. What was being enacted in the high imperial

Imperial Visuality 215
period, and is being revisited in certain quarters today, was a visualization
of History that projected specific notions of the sacred into a generalized,
hierarchical, and abstracted “biopower.” Mana was identified as majesty and
force because the missionaries brought with them a strong sense of History
as being shaped by precisely such supernatural powers.
Two modes of social, cultural, and governmental classification rendered
these abstractions concrete. The first was the concept of the “norm” and the
resulting predication of social laws from what has been called the “rise of
statistical thinking.”75 Understood as a form of observation, statistics were
first applied to the production of actuarial predictions for insurance compa-
nies. Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian scientist, applied this probability theory
to what he called “social mechanics” in order to generate his concept of
l’homme moyen, or the average man. As Lennard J. Davis has shown, Quete-
let’s exaltation of the average, well suited to Louis-Philippe’s monarchical
strategy of the juste milieu, was revised by the eugenicist Francis Galton to
what was known as a normal distribution in ranked order. This tabulation
could then valorize desired characteristics, such as height or intelligence,
rather than tending to the average.76 The rankings were divided into quar-
tiles, allowing for a clear distinction to be made between those above and
below average. It was not for nothing that one account of statistics declared
that “humanity is regarded as a sort of volume of German memoirs, of the
kind described by Carlyle, and all it wants is an index.”77 Galton believed
that his statistical method provided that index and sought to demonstrate
that genius was hereditary and limited to a very small number of people,
numbering some 250 in every million. He studied various categories of
distinction, from judges to rowers and (oddly) hereditary peers, and con-
cluded, in the style of Carlyle, that no one “who is acquainted with the
biographies of the heroes of history, can doubt the existence of grand-
human animals, of natures pre-eminently noble, of individuals born to be
kings of men.”78 Heroes were now a standard deviation. In 1900, W. E. B.
Du Bois named the second institution of division predicated on the hier-
archy of civilization as “the color line.” As Marilyn Lake and Henry Rey-
nolds have recently emphasized, the color line was global, reaching from
America to Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific as an institutional divide be-
tween the lighter and the darker skinned. In an article entitled “The Souls
of White Folk” (1910), Du Bois emphasized that material advantage lay be-
hind this division: “Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and
ever, Amen.”79 It need hardly be added that these two modes of division

216 Chapter Five
tended to overlap each other, so that Galton argued for eugenic improve-
ment of the racial stock both by excluding so-called undesirables and by
sustaining the color line to prevent social and sexual interaction between
“races.”
In the early twentieth century, leading up to the outbreak of the First
World War, this hierarchy was organized into a discursive structure, linking
missionary activity and anthropology to classical scholarship in a sharing of
the imperial sensible. By the time of the first World Missionary Confer-
ence, held at Edinburgh in 1910, there was majority support for the concept
that “animistic religions” had some “points of contact” with Christianity
and were not, then, wholly false.80 Here Codrington and his fellow aristo-
cratic missionaries had developed Carlyle’s vision of heroism as a gradually
accumulating form of Truth, which was known in some respects to the
Norse legends and to Islam. Now this accumulation was seen to be taking
place in the same moment of time in different places at separated levels of
History, demarcated as the primitive and the civilized. Codrington’s con-
cept of mana (as opposed to the Melanesian’s own understanding of it) was
vital as a form of connection between these zones of culture, and as such it
played a central role in the modern theorizing of the primitive from Marcel
Mauss to Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a
chain of intellectual reinforcement, these ideas found their way into in-
terpretations of Roman imperial power and from there into theories of
the state of exception. Giorgio Agamben has recently seen this sense of
mana as being essential to the “undefinability” of the force of law and au-
thority: “It is as if the suspension of law freed a force or a mystical element,
a sort of legal mana (the expression is used by Wagenvoort to describe the
Roman auctoritas).”81 In Agamben’s view, then, the modern use of mana has
reinforced and transmitted the ancient slaveholding concept of authority as
power over slaves complemented by the interpretation of messages.
While that analogy was certainly made, what should be taken into ac-
count here are the very unusual circumstances of Codrington’s research and
the resulting error in his conclusions. Far from being a universal trope of
the “primitive” mind, the idea of mana was an imperial genealogy of High
Church Anglicanism derived from what the missionaries believed to be the
originary primitiveness of the Melanesians. This idea was one so shaped
by the imperial state of exception that it is hardly surprising that it seems
congruous with it. Agamben’s historico-philosophical version of biopower
misses the critical genealogical lesson and takes effect for cause. It is im-

Imperial Visuality 217
portant to emphasize that it has now been established by the anthropolo-
gist Roger Keesing that mana is a “stative verb not a noun.” Consequently,
“things that are mana are efficacious, potent, successful, true, fulfilled, real-
ized: they ‘work.’ Mana-ness is a state of efficacy, success, truth, potency,
blessing, luck, realization—an abstract state or quality, not an invisible
spiritual substance or medium.”82 That being the case, there is no sense in
which a state of exception could be enabled by mana, given that the state
of exception is a crisis of governance. Precisely because “terminology is the
properly poetic moment of thought,” these issues matter greatly.83 For we
are now being asked to accept that “sacredness is a line of flight still present
in contemporary politics,” a view that would have been congenial to the
missionaries and imperial administrators under discussion here. That is not
to say that there is no place for religion in understanding politics today, of
course, but that there is not a persistent and consistent transhistorical dis-
course of power that can be named as that religion. When former President
George W. Bush claimed wide-ranging authority after 9/11, it was under
article 2 of the Constitution.
This sense of mana as a transhistorical source of authority nonetheless
played a key role in modern thought, precisely as engendered by its differ-
ence from the primitive. In Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion, published
in 1912, mana was majesty, force, and the Hero rendered into a religious
principle: “The idea of majesty is essentially religious.” His example was
taken from the select number of “souls” or tindalo that were worshipped
in Melanesia: “Not every tindalo is the object of these ritual practices. That
honor goes only to those that emanate from men who, during their life-
times, were credited by public opinion with the very special virtue that the
Melanesians call mana.”84 He then cited Codrington’s definition of mana
in full to complete his definition of what one might call the primitive
Hero, constructed in and as biopower. Durkheim developed his concept of
mana by arguing that totemism represents in imaginary forms taken from
plants and animals all the nonphysical forces that the “diffuse and anony-
mous force” of mana comprehends. He rhetorically asked, “Does a man win
out over his competitors in the hunt or in war? It is because he has more
orenda,” an Iroquois term that Durkheim proposed as yet another synonym
for mana.85 Developing Marcel Mauss’s theory that all magic is mana, Durk-
heim argued that such social harnessing of force was also seen in modern
historical events, such as the Crusades or the French Revolution, thereby
crossing the divide between primitive and modern.86 The idea of the Hero

218 Chapter Five
that had taken the missionaries into the South Pacific and shaped their sense
of evangelism as a projection of light into the space of early history had
come full circle to its beginnings in Carlyle’s choleric study of revolution-
ary France.
Scholars and administrators of what Foucault called governmentality
consequently became interested at this point in what Robert R. Marett
(1866–1943) considered to be the observable “phenomena of transition” be-
tween the primitive and the modern. In this view, “the types of human
culture are, in fact, reducible to two.” One would be the subject of anthro-
pology, which Marett created as a degree field at the University of Oxford,
in 1908, and the other that of the humanities, with the latter finding its
“source in the literatures of Greece and Rome.” Thus, anthropology could
help classicists interpret the ancient foundations of Greece and Rome in
the period prior to surviving textual sources in Latin. Trained as a classi-
cist, Marett wrote extensively on mana and the Australian aboriginals, de-
spite making only one brief visit to Australia, in 1914. For, like Tylor, he
presumed that “the ethnographer in his library may sometimes presume
to decide, not only whether a particular explorer is a shrewd and honest
observer, but also whether what he reports is conformable to the general
rules of civilization.”87 In order to determine those rules, Marett organized
a lecture series on “Anthropology and the Classics” at Oxford in 1908, in-
cluding scholars like Warde Fowler (1847–1921), whose theories of homo
sacer have recently become the subject of renewed attention.88 Fowler’s own
investigations into “primitive Italy” were predicated on a direct analogy
between Polynesian and Melanesian practice as described by Marett. He
cited with approval Marett’s thesis that sacer was originally a form of taboo,
although Marett had no experience of the South Pacific whatsoever.89 Led
by H. J. Rose, British classical scholarship continued to draw a close connec-
tion with Codrington’s view of mana until after the Second World War, by
which time it had become an element in texts aiming at the general book-
reading public.90 This change at Oxford was not a simple antiquarian diver-
sion, but a shift in the mode of imperial discourse from what one might
call “separate spheres,” the radical distinction between the “savage” and the
“civilized,” to a continuum that extended from the primitive to the mod-
ern across an invisible but decisive break at the point when the “indigenous”
Italians began to become “Romans” under Greek influence. Imperial visu-
ality “froze” the implicit possibility of an ongoing progression in human
society in this anthropological model into a permanent separation.

Imperial Visuality 219
 The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was among the first to criticize
such parallels between the Polynesians and the ancient Romans, in 1950.
Lévi-Strauss asserted that the “mystification” of the concept of mana had
obscured its general condition as an expression of the “relationship of non-
equivalence . . . between signifier and signified.” For Lévi-Strauss, mana
functioned like the general term truc in French, that is to say, as a notion
that a person “‘has something,’” as in the expression that “a woman has got
‘oomph.’”91 His investment was in presenting mana as a “universal and per-
manent form of thought” that, far from being divided by History, was in
effect outside history altogether. While this antiracist form was certainly
preferable, the sexist choice of example was unfortunate and perhaps re-
vealing. It is by no means unsayable what “oomph” might mean, except
that it might breach the conventions of polite (sexist) society. Lévi-Strauss
dismissed the religious concept of mana as the sacred, but replaced it with
the transcendental signified to which any signifier must be in a relation of
“‘inadequation.’”92 The brilliance of this strategy is undermined when it is
realized that mana is not a “thing” (truc), but a verb—it cannot therefore be
a “floating signifier” or have “zero symbolic value,” because it is a term con-
cerning action. Even Lévi-Strauss’s intervention did not put the theory to
rest within classical history. Ironically, when Georges Dumézil did finally
challenge the idea that mana was the key to understanding early Roman
religion, he did so by means of substituting another mythology, that of the
perfect continuity of “the Indo Europeans who became the Romans, who
preserved without a break, without a slump, the conception which had
already formed before their migrations and which is indicated everywhere
and has been since the dawn of history,” that is to say, the idea of God.93
The concept of the “Indo-European” has gone out of favor in recent years,
but such transhistorical generalizations have a life of their own. So even
though the debate over the supposedly “conservative” nature of ancient
Roman religion is now literally academic, albeit with the leading scholars
now seeing the historical process as far more complicated, its deployment
by Agamben and others within discourses surrounding the current “state of
exception” continues to make the issue contemporary.94 By using mana in
the traditional fashion to indicate a quality of the ancient “West” deduced
from modern “primitives,” Agamben postulates a history of the “state of
exception” that of necessity has its own exception—all those nations and
legal systems that are not posited on Roman law and its presumed univer-
sality. Further, this “Western modernity,” however little he finds to praise

220 Chapter Five
in it, must be considered in a state of advancement over its “primitive” ori-
gins. The discourse of the state of exception has thus ironically proved to
be a reinforcement to the idea of Western exceptionalism.

P r o l e ta r i a n c o u n t e r v i s ua l i t y

By contrast, nineteenth-century working-class and radical intellectuals cre-

ated a decolonial genealogy of the classical period that could inform and
authorize resistance to modern imperialism as a continuance of ancient
class struggle. These activist scholars used modern scholarship to present an
alternative understanding of classical history that characterized the Romans
as slave-owning aristocrats, actively resisted by proletarian leadership. Just
as the Maori had deliberately predicated themselves as Jews to the British
Christians, so did European radicals identify as the descendants of Roman
slaves in ongoing resistance to classicizing aristocrats. In this view, the proles
of ancient Rome had engendered the proletarian of industrial Europe, a
Tradition from below to set against Carlyle’s Tradition of Heroes. Its pri-
mary strategy was the “general strike,” looking back to Chartism and the
Commune and anticipating a twentieth-century revolution that was yet to
come. It was placed in a genealogy beginning with Moses and the Israelites
leaving Egypt, continuing with the slave revolts of Antiquity epitomized
by Spartacus, and revived in the modern period as the definitive means of
proletarian emancipation. As the counterpoint to the hierarchy of imperial
visuality, the general strike was a tactic for visualizing the contemporary by
creating a general image of the social. Often inspired by Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, such accounts represented Christianity
as a negative and destructive force, rather than as the epitome of the civi-
lized. Reviewing these efforts, the historian Raphael Samuel has suggested
that the articulation of “the class struggle in Antiquity . . . may be said to
have been the principal site on which the claims of historical materialism
were advanced.”95 This alternative genealogy would produce the May Day
holiday, Georges Sorel’s 1906 theory of the general strike, the Spartacists of
1918 in Germany, and the radical Plebs League in early-twentieth-century
Britain. The “general strike” is here understood not simply as a work stop-
page but as the right to look: to see and be seen by each other within a his-
torical moment and to know how things stood.
An early example of the linkage of ancient and modern class struggle
was the collection of essays by the Chartist leader James O’Brien, known as

Imperial Visuality 221
Bronterre O’Brien, published in 1885, some twenty years after his death, in
1864, entitled The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery. O’Brien offered a
concise and compelling world history, arguing “what are called the ‘Work-
ing Classes’ are the slave populations of civilized countries.” Furthermore,
the genealogy of these new slaves led directly back to the slaves of the
ancient world, for ancient Roman proletarians were “the descendants of
manumitted slaves” who had no property but their children ( proles). These
emancipated slaves, whose sign, the so- called Phrygian bonnet, became the
emblem of revolution and equality in the modern period, formed the ranks
of hired labor in the ancient world, as well as its beggars, thieves, and pros-
titutes. In O’Brien’s view, the modern period saw the “development and
progress of Proletarianism, which was consequent upon the breaking up of
the old system of slavery, and has ever since gained more and more strength
in every age, till, in our own times, it has made Proletarians of three-fourths
of the people of every civilized country.”96 Ancient and modern slavery had
combined to produce the proletarian, a new name for an old figure in West-
ern history.
Most influential of all such publications was C. Osbourne Ward’s (1834–
1902) two-volume history, The Ancient Lowly (1888), originally printed and
circulated privately, and then reissued, in 1907, by a “co-operative publish-
ing house owned by sixteen hundred socialist clubs and individual social-
ists.”97 Ward had been a member of the Working Men’s Party in 1870s New
York that later became the People’s Party, in 1874.98 He went on to work as a
translator for the United States Bureau of Labor, from 1885 until his death.99
His substantial history of the class conflict in antiquity was presented as
work in tune with the latest scholarship, inspired by the legendary German
classicist Theodor Mommsen. It was based on his reading and translation
of the inscriptions he had gathered, blended with his eclectic reading from
modern anthropology and garnering of information from encyclopedias
and dictionaries. His philological concerns and explorations of the origins
of certain ancient rituals and practices seem curiously familiar in the wake
of the classicizing impulse in recent critical theory. At the same time, Ward
offered his book as academic sociology and popular “news,” information to
motivate his readers in the present day, highlighting the simple existence
of figures like Eunus, Achaeus, and Cleon, whose army of rebel slaves in
Sicily was composed of 200,000 men at its height, in 140 B.C.E. According
to Ward, under the self-created monarchy of Eunus, the formerly enslaved
dominated the region from 143 to 133 B.C.E., defeating Roman armies in

222 Chapter Five
numerous encounters.100 He gave a lengthy account of the triumphs of the
revolutionary gladiator-slave Spartacus, composed from ancient and mod-
ern authorities, motivated by strong support for the rebels, in contrast to
the standard hostility.
Nonetheless, even in the case of Spartacus, Ward emphasized that all the
“general strikes” of antiquity met with the same ultimate fate of violent
defeat and mass executions as a “suggestive hint to modern anarchists.”101
It was also a “new” account in its presentation of the ancient past such that
the ancient collegii were described as “trade unions” rather than “guilds” or
any such neutral term, and the gaps in the historical record pertaining to
the general strikes of ancient times were attributed to the censorship of the
“slave-owning aristocracy.” One assertion that particularly incensed those
few professional scholars who noticed Ward’s work was that the red flag
adopted by socialists in the nineteenth century was the vexillum of ancient
origin, generating “the ineffaceable love in the strictly proletarian class, for
the beautiful and incomputably aged red banner.”102 In support of this asser-
tion, Ward cited Tylor’s Primitive Culture on the power of habit, just as the
Caesarists used mana as evidence of their case. In short, like C. L. R. James
after him, Ward used the language and concepts of the class struggle of his
own time to offer a historical genealogy of conflict from within the very
heart of the legacy claimed by the ruling classes of his own day. This history
from below in all senses recognized that its task was to create an alternative
mode of historical identification for the (would-be) revolutionary, entail-
ing the creation of a countervisuality. The British anarcho-syndicalist J. H.
Harley even claimed the same origin for this politics, in 1912: “The nine-
teenth century presented itself to the great writer, Thomas Carlyle, who
was the first to catch its syndicalist spirit, as primarily a century of revolu-
tion.”103 Revolutionaries must then express themselves in the terms set by
Carlyle, as the manifesto of the Plebs League, formed from British miners
and railwaymen, declared, in 1909: “Inability to recognize the class cleavage
was responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. Let the Plebs of the
20th century not be so deluded. The clear seeing of the field of battle will
alone save us from the follies and tragedies of compromise.”104
For over twenty years prior to this declaration, artists and activists in
the European labor movement had tried to realize this “clear seeing.” The
countervisuality that the radical political groups of the period were at-
tempting to create came to use different tools than the traditional work of
art as its means of experimenting with both form and content. Anarchist

Imperial Visuality 223
newspapers, magazines, and journals extensively discussed and debated art
from the late 1880s onward. Yet writers often expressed a perplexity as to
the meaning of art or aesthetics in the context of modern social crisis and
were more forceful in denouncing the prevailing art establishment. The
syndicalist activist and writer Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901) created a jour-
nal entitled L’Art Social, in 1891, to “add to the communism of bread, the
communism of artistic pleasures,” refering to Joseph Tortellier’s practice of
distributing free bread in working- class districts.105 Pelloutier and others
were by now convinced both that the Rights of Man were permanently
in default under the system of industrial capital, and that the urban insur-
rections of 1789–1871 stood no chance of success against modern armies.
In 1898, when Pelloutier visited an anti-Dreyfusard meeting in a working-
class area of Paris, he was disturbed to hear chants of “Long live the King!
Down with the Jews!” This experience prompted him to imagine the cre-
ation of a museum of labor to counter such prejudices. His idea followed
the establishment of courses and libraries for those in search of work at
the bourses de travail, and the “museums of the evening” that the art critic
Gustave Geoffroy had proposed to inspire industrial design. The proposed
Museum of Labor would have had as many sections as there were local
unions to display the history of their products, as well as “the comparative
situation of the capitalist and the worker,” which Pelloutier believed would
be far more effective than yet more oratory.106 Unlike other museums, the
Museum of Labor was to visualize the present by making the class struggle
known through the silent eloquence of its displays, “because in the general
insanity that characterizes this century, words themselves lose their mean-
ing.”107 Using the comparative method, Caesarism’s mana was to be coun-
tered with a visual display of the power of labor.
Like the Panopticon, the Museum of Labor was not actually built, but it
was performatively created by means of the struggle to establish an inter-
national holiday of labor on the first of May, now known as May Day,
widely understood across the radical movement as the first step toward
a society- changing general strike. For Rosa Luxemburg, May Day was a
“festival [that] may naturally be raised to a position of honor as the first
great demonstration under the aegis of mass struggle.”108 In its nineteenth-
century form, the May Day “holiday,” or mass refusal to work, was called in
support of the eight-hour working day. The eight-hour day had first been
claimed by white trade unionists in the colony of Victoria (now federated
within Australia) as early as 1856.109 Radicals in Chicago demonstrated for

224 Chapter Five
the shorter day on May Day 1886, leading to police violence and the retalia-
tion several days later that is known as the Haymarket Affair. The American
example led the first meeting of the Second International Working Men’s
Association of 1889 to call for a global observance of May Day in 1890. On
that day, Engels wrote the fourth preface to the Communist Manifesto and
observed: “The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalists
and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands
are, in very truth, united. If only Marx were with me to see it with his own
eyes!”110 The May Day demonstration, like the general strike, was intended
to make the strength of the proletariat visible to itself and to visualize the
class struggle.
In Milan, where the working week was some sixty-three hours, orga-
nized labor called a general strike in support of May Day.111 Fully aware of
what was at stake, the Italian army attacked the demonstrators. The Italian
artist Emilio Longoni painted the scene, including the army’s assault, first
exhibited at the first Brera Triennale, in 1891, under the title May 1, now
known by its later title The Orator of the Strike.112 The painting is dominated
by a mason in his work clothes addressing the crowd while hanging loosely
from a height of scaffolding. Longoni placed a red lantern at the corner of
the scaffold, evoking the French revolutionary imagery of the Lantern (the
street lighting from which those declared to be enemies of the revolution
were hanged). While the Lantern harked back to 1789, Longoni painted it
red, the color of modern socialism. The Lantern reframes the space away
from the edge of the canvas, offering only a blurry view of the main body
of the crowd and the intrusion of the army. Although he was experiment-
ing with the divisionist brushstroke, that is to say the “dot” technique asso-
ciated with Seurat and Signac, May 1 is more notable for its unusual pictorial
space. The orator’s body angles out over the crowd, supported only by his
right hand, which grips the scaffolding, and by his feet, which are precari-
ously balanced on the top of a fence. His left fist thrusts toward the specta-
tor, and two other clenched fists rise from the crowd toward him, although
only the front row of men are distinguishable as individuals. The painterly
innovations that Longoni used paradoxically mitigated against a “clear see-
ing” of the strike as a collective action. Further, Longoni’s retitling of the
painting called attention to the orator as the subject rather than to the col-
lective practice of the strike. By naming the speaker as an orator, Longoni
referenced the classical tradition of oratory as practiced in the Roman Sen-
ate and the French Revolution. If May 1 is a remarkable evocation of the

Imperial Visuality 225
continuity between 1789 and 1891, it did not in itself manage to create a
counter to imperial visuality. That was the function of the great demon-
strations themselves, as none other than Lenin observed in an early pam-
phlet, written from prison in 1896, calling May Day “a general holiday of
Labor. Leaving the stifling factories they march with unfurled banners, to
the strains of music, along the main streets of the cities, demonstrating to
the bosses their continuously growing power.”113 For activists like Rosa Lux-
emburg, May Day was an internationalist, anti-imperial, and antiwar tactic
that showed that international laborers would never go to war against each
other, an illusion shattered in 1914.
In this moment of coming into visibility, proletarian countervisuality
adopted the strategy of the general strike as the means of creating a “gen-
eral image” of the state of the class struggle. Since the Chartist National
Holiday, the general strike had emerged as a composite of revolution and
messianic hope for the future in the face of modern armed forces. In his ad-
dress to the 1899 Congress of the Socialist Party, Aristide Briand, a future
government minister, argued that the general strike could change the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen from words to realities,
while avoiding violence.114 This assertion of the revival of rights by means
of the strike was a consistent feature of radical propaganda. Consequently,
the general strike was often described as utopian, a characterization revo-
lutionaries at different moments refused and embraced. Even in the syn-
dicalist newspaper La Grève Générale (The General Strike), it was argued, in
1894, that the general strike was only a “dream” because the impoverished
workers would not have enough food to survive the weeks or months that
the strike would take to prevail.115 Such was the outcome of a miners’ strike
depicted by Emile Zola in his novel of the same name. At the same time,
a popular anarchist song hailed the strike: “Voila, voila, voila mon rêve!”
[There, there, there it is my dream!], a tradition that foreshadowed the 1968
slogan “Take your dreams for reality.”116
Following the successful agitation for May Day, the general strike seemed
to have become a viable strategy for French workers to attain specific goals.
In 1906, the Conféderation Générale de Travail, the leading French trade
union, adopted the general strike as its political strategy. Rosa Luxemburg
understood the Russian Revolution of 1905 as the enactment of the general
strike that showed “a typical picture of the logical development and at the
same time of the future of the revolutionary movement on the whole.”117
The mass strike could be used to “visualize” the proletariat and the class

226 Chapter Five
movement as a key tactic of “demonstration,” whether or not it achieved an
overall change in social relations.118 The strikes she cited were often local,
spontaneous actions, sometimes following the “state of exception” that is
caused by a holiday for a monarch’s funeral or coronation. These strikes
were “general” not because everyone took part, but because their aim was
a general transformation and renunciation of domination. The effect was
to transform the “theoretical and latent” class consciousness imbued by the
activities of political parties into a “practical and active” strategy on what
she called “the political battle field.”119 Here she mixed the metaphors of the
“dreamwork” of the general strike visualizing latent understandings with
the long-standing sense of history itself as a visualized conflict.
It was left to a retired civil servant and political theorist named Georges
Sorel to draw all these strands of activism and theory together in a series
of essays written from 1905–7, published in book form as Reflections on Vio-
lence, in 1908. Sorel endorsed the general strike as pure revolt, to be enacted
on the Greek model of selfless individual warfare, rather than that of the
disciplined but bloodthirsty modern army. The Homeric hero, or the foot
soldier in France’s revolutionary wars, fought as an individual on whom all
depended, in contrast to the modern war directed by generals as theorized
by Clausewitz. Against the lone Hero who could visualize the battlefields of
modern life, it was the collective visualization of the workers that enabled
them to understand modern life as war. Proponents of the general strike
came to see it as a transposition of war into the social terrain, a counter
to visuality visualizing the social as a battlefield. Edouard Berth quoted
Proudhon’s definition of war as applying to the general strike: “A mixture of
genius, bravery, poetry, passion, supreme justice and tragic heroism—their
majesty astonishes us.”120 For Sorel, the general strike was the expression of
“individualistic force in the rebellious masses”; it followed that “we are led
to regard art as an anticipation of the highest form of production,” an idea
that has been fulfilled in today’s virtuoso and creative workforce.121 Thus
the general strike formed by a series of individual choices akin to that of
the artist would create a complete picture of history as it then was. Sorel
saw this picture as incarnating the popular “will to act” inherent in the
various declarations of the Rights of Man, and thus as depicting a popu-
lar history of centuries standing.122 While radicals felt that the texts of the
Rights of Man were now ignored, this visualization was the means to re-
store their efficacy. The general strike, notes Sorel, is the most effective tool
available to radicals because it “encompasses all of socialism; that is to say

Imperial Visuality 227
. . . [it is] an arrangement of images capable of evoking instinctively all of
the sentiments which correspond to the various manifestations of the war
waged by socialism against modern society. Strikes have inspired in the
proletariat the noblest, deepest and most forceful sentiments that it pos-
sesses; the general strike groups them all into a general unified image. . . .
Thus we obtain that intuition of socialism that language could not give in a
perfectly clear way—and we obtain it as an instantly perceivable whole.”123
Following Bergson’s notion of the “intuition of reality,” Sorel argued that it
was through the general image produced by the strike that the movement
comes to a collective self-awareness that it otherwise lacks, albeit only for
that moment.124 For Sorel (quoting Bergson), “the moments where we cap-
ture ourselves for ourselves are rare and that is why we are rarely free.”125 In
short, the general strike creates countervisuality, a brief possibility of seeing
things as they actually are, who is with you and who against, just as Carlyle
had claimed the Hero could do. If visuality was the visualization made by
a general, countervisuality emerged in the modern period as the collective
picture produced by the right to look claimed in the general strike.
It was nonetheless just a few years after Sorel had theorized the visualiza-
tion of the general strike that he joined Mussolini in search of a new Caesar-
ism. Like many others, Sorel had been influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s tract
The Psychology of Crowds (1895), which reconceptualized visuality for the era
of mass society and mass organization.126 Le Bon’s work was extensively
critiqued by Freud and was hailed in 1954 as “perhaps the most influential
book ever written in social psychology.”127 It certainly grasped the balance
of visuality and countervisuality that this chapter has attempted to describe.
Le Bon identified the then present as a key turning point in history, brought
about by the entry of the popular classes into politics. Here he was think-
ing not just of universal suffrage, but also of syndicalism and trade-union
activism, which would culminate in the politics of May Day and then the
general strike. Like Carlyle, Le Bon feared that such efforts “in spite of all
economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labor and wages . . . and
amount to nothing less than a determination to destroy utterly society as it
now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive commu-
nism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn
of civilization.”128 He thus equated the social egalitarianism of the Second
International and syndicalist groups with the “primitive communism” held
to be endemic in undeveloped societies such as those of the South Pacific.
Against the new “divine right of crowds” could be found only the modern

228 Chapter Five
equivalent of the “world’s masters,” who fully understood the psychology
and character of crowds. These new heroes would offer up images to the
crowd because “[a] crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immedi-
ately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the
first.”129 This irrational mode of thought led to the crowd having respect
only for “force” as manifested by a certain kind of hero: “The type of hero
dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar.”130 For Le Bon,
the crowd thinks in images, like the “savage,” the child, or women. Its desire
for a return to primitive communism can only be countered by a leader
with sufficient power, or mana, to sway its unconscious desires, namely
a Caesar. Le Bon seemed to at once imagine and desire the Caesarism of
Italian fascism in particular and the charismatic dictatorship so pervasive
in the twentieth century in general. In Froude’s view, the uniting force be-
hind this single organic entity was the common “stock,” the formation of a
“race” of forty-five million “Anglo-Saxons” dispersed across the globe. Le
Bon shared this emphasis on the “fundamental notion of race which domi-
nates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men.”131 Visuality was now the
imagining of this global racialization within a hierarchical concept of civili-
zation. With the collapse of the imperial age following the First World War,
the hierarchy of races was to become racialized war under fascism.

the hero as Duce

Fascism created a visuality closer to Carlyle than to Froude, an aesthetic

glorification of the leader.132 No moment more clearly enshrined the leader
as a Hero with capacities exceeding those of all others. The beholders of the
fascist leader had two functions: first, to form a ground against which the
leader’s brilliance could be seen; and, second, to serve as the raw material
for the leader to work with, as if he were an artist, but also to hate, moti-
vating fascism’s violence. Beginning with this distance between the leader
and the mass, fascism aestheticized separation and the separation of bodies
in physical space. Fascism is the highpoint of what Susan Buck-Morss has
called the “theme of the autonomous, autotelic subject as sense-dead, and
for this reason a manly creator, a self-starter, sublimely self-contained.”133
Many in the period saw this idea as originating with Carlyle’s encomium to
the Hero. Carlyle had been cited with approval by Edouard Drumont, the
French theorist of antisemitism, in his defining text of modern reaction,
La France Juive (1886), a reference later expanded by Maurice Barrès, the

Imperial Visuality 229
anti-Dreyfusard writer and politician.134 Such connections led to Carlyle
being seen as a prophet of fascism in general and of Mussolini in particu-
lar. With fascism in the ascendant in Italy, a professor named Guido For-
nelli published a short biography of Carlyle in 1921, comparing his work to
that of Marx: “Carlyle had a more objective vision of the social problem,
he understood the complexity and instability of its aspects, and perhaps
we shall see in the very near future that he did not speak in vain.”135 Once
the fascist regime had been established, in 1922, another professor, named
Licciardelli, published a similar comparative study of Carlyle and Musso-
lini, proclaiming the former as “the prophet of a new social order, which,
at the distance of a century, it has been given to Benito Mussolini to put on
a solid footing, inaugurating the realization of the work conceived by the
great English idealist.”136 Such views were also common in the Anglophone
world. A British literature professor named Herbert Grierson published a
lecture entitled Carlyle and Hitler, whose title tells all one needs to know of
it. An American academic got into the act by publishing a newspaper article
of similar import under the title “Carlyle Rules the Reich,” which wanted
to show Anglophone readers that the “strange philosophy of Hitler” was in
fact very similar to the “solutions proposed by Carlyle to the problems of
our industrial civilization.”137 These ideas did not go unnoticed in Germany
itself, where Carlyle was hailed a forerunner of “Fuhrer-thinking” by aca-
demics in the newly purged German university system.138
The fascist leader was nonetheless by no means identical to the Hero.
Fascist leadership required that its self- containment be acknowledged by
the masses. Consequently, the masses were needed as the object of the fas-
cist artist-leader’s work, causing him to both need and detest them, as Mus-
solini attested, in 1932: “When I feel the masses in my hands, since they be-
lieve in me, or when I mingle with them, and they almost crush me, then
I feel like one with the masses. However there is at the same time a little
aversion. . . . Doesn’t the sculptor sometimes break the marble out of rage,
because it does not precisely mold into his hands according to his vision?
. . . Everything depends on that, to dominate the masses as an artist.”139
What the fascist wanted was to be seen but in an entirely passive mo-
dality. Whereas Bentham had wanted his jailer to see without being seen,
the fascist leader wanted to be seen without anyone looking, if we take
looking to be an active critical engagement with sense perception. At the
Nuremburg rallies, designed by the architect Albert Speer to create a cathe-
dral of light, the mass needed to be in attendance to create the proper en-

230 Chapter Five
vironment for the Führer to be seen. This was in no sense an exercise of
the right to look by the mass, but rather its utter negation. The light pillars
created by Speer seemed to give material form to the concept of the Hero
as what Carlyle had called a “light fountain,” while the vassals of the Hero
formed material shadows to put him into relief. In making that darkness
part of its bureaucratic policy, fascist terror tried to normalize genocide.
In terms of fascist visuality, if the presence of the mass created the shadow
necessary to make the leader visible, the victims of genocide were the in-
visibility against which fascist visuality visualized itself. The work of geno-
cide was to take those who it was believed should be invisible and render
them hypervisible as a means to make them properly, finally, invisible. Such
measures as the Nuremberg Laws of 1934, with the infamous requirement
of the yellow (and other) stars, the street violence that culminated in the
Kristallnacht of 1938, and the segregation of Jews rendered these racial-
ized Others into hypervisible form. The work of genocide was to make the
Other permanently invisible. As is now well-known, the Nazis made every
effort to keep their crimes secret and invisible. Among those who remained,
regardless of whether or not they “knew,” this invisibility of the Jews and
other Others was, as intended, intensely visible, following their previous
hypervisibility. It was “unspeakable” in both senses, unnameable and revolt-
ing, yet present. It was this rendering of racialization by means of spacing,
the massive bureaucracy of coordinated dispersal, dissemination, and secret
regathering, that epitomized the work of fascist visuality to create a ground
against which the Leader might be beheld.

Imperial Visuality 231
six

Antifascist Neorealisms
North-South and the

Permanent Battle for Algiers

Confronted with the disasters of the twentieth century (and now those of
the twenty-first), antifascism has had two tasks. First, to depict the reality
of fascist violence as violence, and not as an artwork. Next it must offer a
different possibility of real existence to confront the fascist claim that only
the leader could resolve the problems of modern society. It meant claiming
a place from which there is a right to look, not just behold the leader. For
both W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, that place
was what they called the “South,” understood as the complex and difficult
place from which resistance had to begin and also as the emergent future.
The mistake of the antifascist Left, in this view, was to ignore the “South”
as an atavistic relic of servile relations, failing to realize that such relations
were as much part of modernity as heavy industry. Fascism itself can be
situated as a South-North flow of colonial politics, sometimes literally, as
in the case of Franco’s use of Moroccan armies in Spain, more often meta-
phorically in the installation of a police state, above all in Germany. Anti-
fascism did not fully succeed in creating a form of realism from the “South”
until after the Second World War—which was by no means the end of
fascism, as Frantz Fanon made clear in his writing on Algeria. Indeed, in
thinking through how fascist visuality came to be the intensified modality
of the imperial complex, I kept coming up against the place of Algeria and
the battle for Algiers during and after the revolutionary war (1954–62). The
Algerian War was a crucial turning point for European and Third World
intellectuals alike, a scission point that has reemerged in the present crisis
of neo-imperialism and the revolutions of 2011. Independent Algeria was
further the site of a second disastrous civil war, in the 1990s, between the
army as the defender of the revolution of 1962 and what has been called
“global Islam,” which is ongoing. Both the country and the city were and
are, then, key locations on the border between North and South, as a place
of oscillation between the deterritorialized global city and the reterritorial-
ized postcolony. “Algeria” is thus a metonym for the difficulties of creating
a neorealism that can resist fascism from the point of view of the “South.”
As an extensive literature has shown, fascist visuality was designed to
maintain conflict. Like the colonialism of which it was an intensified form,
fascism is a “necropolitics,” a politics that determines who may allocate,
divide, and distribute death.1 Within colonial-fascist necropolitics, there
was always the possibility of genocide that represented the intensification
of the imperial complex. In 1936, Walter Benjamin made his now famous
analysis that these strategies were “the aestheticizing of politics, as prac-
ticed by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.”2 While the first
part of this proposition is widely understood as the cult of fascist leader-
ship, its response as the politicizing of art is still debated and indeed current.
Although Benjamin’s essay sought to formulate “revolutionary demands in
the politics of art,” he did not return to his earlier endorsement of the gen-
eral strike in his “Critique of Violence” (1921). Acknowledging Sorel and
the German revolution of 1919, led by Luxemburg’s Spartacists, Benjamin
had countered the state of exception with an exception on the side of the
multitude in the form of the (then) “right to strike [which] constitutes in
the view of labor, which is opposed to that of the state, the right to use
force in attaining certain ends.”3 By 1936, such rights had disappeared due to
the triumphs of fascism over organized labor, requiring a new modality of
countervisuality. To take a decolonial perspective, antifascism first refused
the idea of the heroic leader, by describing him as a form of police function,
then named the “South” as a place to look, refusing the subjection of fas-
cism. From that viewpoint, it became possible to define a new realism that
both described fascism as it was and predicated a different possible means of
imagining the real. Just as Benjamin had come to his proposition regarding
fascism from a reading of the impact of film, so I will consider how anti-
colonial cinema in Algeria explored the possibilities of realism from the lit-
erally guerilla documentary to the Italian neorealist-style The Battle of Algiers

Antifascist Neorealisms 233
(dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) and Algerian post-independence feature films.
While this book was in production, the region was swept by revolutions,
whose outcome is at the time of writing unclear, but whose lines of force
were set down by the process described here.

t h e s o u t h a n d a n t i fa s c i s m

Both Du Bois and Gramsci proposed new realisms as a counter to fascism.

Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Gramsci’s prison writings undertook a de-
tailed and archival description of their historical moment. Du Bois’s recon-
figuration of Reconstruction ran against a revisionist Confederate history
that had portrayed the enslaved as loyal to their owners and Reconstruc-
tion as at best a disaster and at worst a crime.4 Du Bois was therefore con-
cerned to convey as many of the words of the historical actors as he could
and then contrast them with the then “scholarly” accounts that still make
shocking reading today.5 Gramsci was equally concerned to restore what he
called the “history of the subaltern classes” that the “modern dictatorship”
tried so hard to eliminate from what he called the culture of the period. It
was nonetheless present in the phenomena that he called “folklore,” ranging
from popular culture to newspapers, gossip, and myth. From these strata,
at once present and invisible, the subaltern classes could act with an unpre-
dictable “spontaneity” that cut against the grain of fascism’s rage for order.
For Gramsci, this “spirit of cleavage—that is the progressive acquisition of
the consciousness of one’s historical identity”—was the means by which
antifascism could be actively engaged.6 Fascist Caesarism by contrast held
that the subaltern had no historical identity that could be distinguished
from the leader.
In 1918, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, Gramsci had seen histori-
ography forming a dialectical pattern between Carlyle’s conservative evo-
cation of the hero and the bourgeois sense of history as the measure of
progress, which he connected to Herbert Spencer. He contrasted the “mys-
tical synthesis” in Carlyle and the “inanimate abstraction” of Spencer with
Marx’s sense of how “an idea becomes real.”7 Within a few years, fascism
had shown that the question of heroic leadership could not be so easily
set aside. Gramsci stressed that there was no “essence” of fascism. Rather
it should be understood as “a particular system of relations of force” that
has “succeeded in creating a mass organization of the petty bourgeoisie.”8
Given the Romanizing aspect of Italian fascism, he called this organization

234 Chapter Six
“Caesarism,” which “can be said to express a situation in which the forces in
conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner.”9 In moments of social
crisis there was a possibility of mutual destruction that Caesarism held in
check rather than resolving. While Caesarism had traditionally been the
domain of “a great ‘heroic’ personality,” such as Napoleon, it had become a
bureaucratic system, expressed as much by Ramsey MacDonald’s coalition
governments in Britain as by dictatorship. Crucially, Gramsci understood
that “modern Caesarism is more a police than a military system.”10 Fascism
is when the boundary created by the police between what they can see and
what we can see extends to the totality of the social. It was not Caesar (the
Führer, the Duce) that created the police, but the police that created and
sustained Caesar. Similarly, W. E. B. Du Bois set aside theories of the Tal-
ented Tenth in favor of his defense of “the Negro race” as a whole in the
work of Reconstruction. He showed that the falsified history of the past
produced “the current [1935] theory of democracy . . . that dictatorship is
a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income and
strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for nar-
rower ends because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly
distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist because we do not
believe in men.”11 In the limited racialized democracy of America in the
1930s, “fascism” was the potential outcome of a series of stopgap policing
measures that became permanent as a means of controlling space.
Gramsci felt it was essential to establish and fix this new reality from a
new perspective, which he named that of the “subaltern classes,” a new ap-
plication of military terminology to everyday life.12 Subalterns were the
junior officers introduced into European armies in the nineteenth century
as a means of communicating the leadership’s commands to the rank-and-
file. One might say that they were the embodiment of visuality, enacting
the general’s superior visualization of the battlefield. In Gramsci’s view,
the First World War had shown that armies now depended on these links,
which he compared to the interface between the mind (the generals) and
the body (the soldiers), making the subaltern a medium of transmission for
what Descartes had called the mind-body hybrid.13 In the general social
context, visuality was that medium. If Gramsci retained the military name,
he reversed its intent so that the subaltern became an alternative way to
mediate the “war” of the social itself. Gramsci understood the subaltern
classes as all those excluded from power, centered on industrial workers,
but including peasants, women, and other marginalized groups. He consid-

Antifascist Neorealisms 235
ered that the Risorgimento (1814–61), which created the Italian state had,
by contrast, retreated to a pre-Napoleonic consideration of the people as
dispensable units of foot soldiers, rather than as “thinking men” who could
play an active part in the contest.14 The “class struggle” had to be understood
in advanced societies as having changed from a “war of maneuver,” that is to
say a pitched battle in the sense of Clausewitz, to a “war of position,” a more
cautious, long-term engagement measured in cultural form. The war of
maneuver that inspired Carlyle’s concept of visuality was the war of move-
ment waged by Prussian generals since the late eighteenth century, which
led both to the destruction of Louis Napoleon in the Franco-Prussian war
of 1870 and to the Nazi- era concept of blitzkrieg. Gramsci was recognizing,
as many radicals had already done, that modern mechanized warfare in the
imperial bureaucratic states could not be defeated by traditional methods of
insurrection. By contrast, the war of position required a catharsis, as in clas-
sical tragedy. For Gramsci this entailed “a struggle for a new culture, that is,
for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intu-
ition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.”15 Du
Bois expanded this countervisuality into “a clear vision of a world without
inordinate individual wealth, of capital without profit, and income based
on work alone, [which] is the path out not only for America but for all men.
Across this path stands the South with flaming swords.”16 Here he reiterated
the long-standing effort to imagine a biopolitics designed for sustainability,
rather than for maximizing the exploitation of labor.
To deploy the medium of the subaltern against the police bureau-
cracy of Caesarism, a place of articulation or transmission had to be de-
fined. For both Du Bois and Gramsci that complexly overdetermined space
was the South, within and without the imperial nation-state. The South
is not a geographic location, but what Enrique Dussel has called a “meta-
phor for human suffering under global capitalism.”17 The concept of the
South emerged from the postslavery Atlantic world as a means of thinking
through the legacies of plantation slavery and of imagining an alternative
future. In Pétion’s Republic of Haiti, his education adviser, named Colom-
bel, had reported on the success of examinations at the new Lycée Pétion
in soaring terms: “Haitians, you are the hope of two-thirds of the known
world.”18 A group of intellectuals who graduated from the Lycée founded
the journal Le Républicain (later L’Union), in 1837, to examine the specificity
of Haiti.19 For one of these writers, the historian and politician Beauvais
Lespinasse (1811–63), Haitian leadership could be accomplished by empha-

236 Chapter Six
sizing the African past common to all and imagining a future as part of the
global South. Relying on a social theory of evolution, Lespinasse mused,

Africa and South America, these great lands which have almost exactly
the same shape, and which regard each other as twin sisters, . . . await
their destiny. These two Southern continents, the Caribbean and the in-
numerable islands of the Pacific will continue the work of the civiliza-
tion of the North . . . The time of the races of the South is not yet come;
but it is firmly to be believed that they will send to the current civilized
world intellectual works along with their merchandise and the immense
current of hot air, which each year softens the climate of Europe.20

Such ideas were most likely known to Du Bois. Since the occupation of
Haiti by U.S. forces, in 1915, the affairs of the island had become a critical
point of engagement for African American politics. Du Bois met the former
Haitian education minister and writer Dantès Bellegarde at a Pan-African
Conference in 1925 and later published his work in the review Phylon. Du
Bois himself summarized for Phylon a speech given by Bellegarde on the
development of “autonomous” Haitian literature, including references to
Lespinasse.21
Both Du Bois and Gramsci developed such nineteenth-century aspira-
tions, that the South might be the agent of global liberation, by examining
how it was at the same time the key location for reaction. While there were
very significant differences between the North-South pattern of domina-
tion in Italy and the United States, it may be more productive to think
about the similarities. If the United States was, of course, not ruled by a
fascist party, its South had a clear pattern of racialization and separation,
which became known as segregation. As Du Bois convincingly argued, this
violent mode of domination constrained democracy both locally and glob-
ally. Although there was no single autocratic leader in the American South,
the ideologists of segregation spoke fondly and at length of its principles
of anti-industrial aristocracy, which they derived from British conserva-
tives like Carlyle.22 At the end of Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du
Bois outlined the discursive formation of the post-Reconstruction South
around the intersecting axes of whiteness, the penitentiary, and sharecrop-
ping. These disciplinary institutions so effectively divided and separated the
working classes of the South that the distinction came to appear “natural.”
Gramsci summarized the Northern Italian view of the South in very similar
terms: “Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi-barbarians

Antifascist Neorealisms 237
or out and out barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is underdeveloped
it is not the fault of the capitalist system, or any other historical cause, but
of the nature that has made Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and bar-
baric.”23 Looking back on the Fascist takeover of Italy, which had seemed
inconceivable even when Mussolini’s party first dominated parliament,
Gramsci came to see this divide between the North and South as the key
to the emancipation of the nation as a whole because the South had be-
come an internal colony: “The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the
South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies.”24
The “South” was then reduced to a condition in which the only resistance
it could imagine was a “great ‘undoing’ (revolt).”25 Nonetheless, it was pre-
cisely the spontaneity of this spirit of resistance that offered the possibility
of a transformation of political culture into a form that could not sustain
the racialized segregations of Caesarism.
In calling these approaches “neorealist,” I am evoking the Italian post-
war cinema and photography of that name without wanting to suggest a
simple resumption of that tactic. While Neorealism was antifascist, the di-
rector Pier Paolo Pasolini recalled, “I also criticized it for remaining subjec-
tive and lyricizing, which was another feature of the cultural epoch before
the Resistance. So, neo-realism is a product of the Resistance as regards con-
tent and message but stylistically it is still tied to pre-Resistance culture.”26
If Italian neorealism was a product of the resistance to fascism, such stylistic
failures suggest that the project should not be still defined by it. Even the
“content” of that neorealism is no longer controversial, in that the Euro-
pean dictatorships, and indeed the Jim Crow South, are now, quite rightly,
among the most reviled political regimes. Indeed, the place of such regimes
in cultural work today is more often to express a sense of progress and the
impossibility of recurrence. Against that comforting consensus, antifascist
neorealism understands the contradictory nature of a conflicted reality held
in place by the operations of the police. It wants to make the continuing
realities of segregation—the combination of spatial and racial politics—
visible and to overcome that segregation by imagining a new reality.

B at t l i n g f o r a l g i e r s

I decided against posing such questions to the fascism of the 1930s, which
is both so extensively documented and so reviled that it has almost ceased
to have substantial contemporary meaning, as evidenced by the accusation

238 Chapter Six
that the U.S. healthcare proposals of 2009–10 were fascist or Nazi. Instead,
I want to use the still controversial continuing struggle in and about the
decolonization of Algeria as a test case. From Delacroix’s Women of Algiers
to Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar, Algiers was and is a key node in the net-
work that has attempted to decolonize the real, to challenge segregation,
and to imagine new realities. It is not exactly the same as the historical
Alger, or Al-Djazaïr, but its visualization on the border between North and
South, recalling Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the fascist state of emer-
gency as a “zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude
each other but rather blur with each other.”27 The Algerian decolonization
movement led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN ) and the revolu-
tionary war of 1954–62, in particular the contest for control of the capital
city, Algiers, in 1957, radicalized a generation of European intellectuals and
was noted for the participation of the Caribbean theorist Frantz Fanon.28 It
was Fanon, having escaped from Vichy-controlled Martinique to enlist in
the Free French Army, who later posed the question in his decolonial clas-
sic The Wretched of the Earth: “What is fascism but colonialism at the heart of
traditionally colonialist countries?”29 This rewriting prefigures the recent
turn to understanding coloniality as the very being of power. By consider-
ing Algeria as a locale of antifascist neorealism, I continue the decolonial
genealogy that has motivated my entire project. The Algerian War became
a test case for the war in Iraq that began in 2003 and the subsequent U.S.
strategy of global counterinsurgency, so it is still worth concentrating on
the battles for Algiers in psychiatry, film, video, and literature that have
raged since the end of the Second World War to the present. Finally, many
of the unresolved issues in the decolonization of North Africa dramatically
returned to global attention when autocratic regimes in Tunisia and then
Egypt were overthrown by popular revolutions in 2011. At stake through-
out has been the imaginary of decolonization and the postcolonial imperial
power. Was decolonization a victory or a gift? Were the rebels terrorists or
nationalists? As for France, in the case of decolonizing Algeria, was it the
moral victor of the Second World War, the inventor of human rights, or
just another tired European power trying to maintain its dominion?
Algeria had been colonized by France, in 1832, and following the par-
ticular pattern of French colonization, it was not considered separate or dis-
tinct, but as a “department” of France. At one level the revolutionary war
concerned a simple incompatibility between the French view that Algeria
was in all senses part of France and the indigenous claim for independence.

Antifascist Neorealisms 239
Then and now it was clear that there was no solution to this counterpoint:
one side would have to dominate. However, the country was entirely domi-
nated by the French settler population, backed up by the military. By 1950,
1 out of 9 Muslim Algerians were out of work, 25 percent of the land was
owned by 2 percent of the (white) population, and only enough food was
being produced for 2–3 million people, despite a Muslim population of
9 million.30 The battle for Algiers refers to the events of 1957, in which
the FLN , which had begun the active guerilla war of liberation, in 1954,
called for a general strike in Algiers. The FLN included the French defini-
tion of human rights as an “equality of rights and duties, without distinc-
tion of race or of religion,” in their charter (1954) and pursued them along-
side the armed struggle. They hoped for United Nations intervention on
their behalf and claimed that their action was justified by the right to strike
under the French constitution. Led by the infamous General Jacques Massu,
French paratroopers repressed the strike and the FLN by the widespread use
of torture to extract information. Nonetheless, the battle of Algiers came to
seem a turning point in the liberation struggle, which was finally successful
in 1962. Looking back on the events at a distance of forty years, the com-
munist activist and journalist Henri Alleg, who was “disappeared” and tor-
tured by French troops, reconfigured what had happened: “In reality, there
never was a battle; only a gigantic police operation carried out with an ex-
ceptional savagery and in violation of all the laws.”31 Just as Gramsci under-
stood the fascist Caesar to be the product of the police state, so, too, was the
imperial president sustained and produced by colonial policing under mar-
tial law. One felt the forceful echoes of this history in the 2011 Tunisian and
Egyptian revolutions, when the armies of both countries stood by as the
revolutionary populace contested the authority of the police. In this sense,
the popular takeover of the Egyptian secret police building and its archives
in March 2011 marked the “undoing” of former President Hosni Mubarak’s
autocratic police state.
The consistent and persistent return of the battle for Algiers in art, films,
television, literature, and critical writing in the period and subsequently as a
figure for war, nationalism, the migrant, torture, colonialism, and its lega-
cies suggests that what was in the period known as the “Algerian question”
remains unanswered. Where is this Algiers? In Africa, Europe, or the Ma-
ghreb? And we shall ask: where is where? Whose Algiers are we describing?
How is Algiers separated in time and space, now and then, and why does
this battle continue? At the time of writing, the revolutionary wave that

240 Chapter Six
began with demonstrations in Algeria against the rise in the price of food
in January 2011 has produced an end to the nineteen-year-old state of emer-
gency, but has not transformed the regime. It is precisely such questions
that the cultural work on Algiers has raised from France to Finland, Italy,
the United States, and, of course, Algeria itself. At stake is the possibility
of a movement toward the right to look, the counter to visuality, against
the police and their assertion that there is nothing to see here. Less clear has
been the question of what would come afterward. In Gillo Pontecorvo’s
film The Battle of Algiers (1966), the resistance leader Ben H’midi says to Ali
La Pointe that the hardest moment for a revolution comes after its victory.
If colonization means, as Albert Memmi put it, that the colonized is “out-
side history, outside the city,” what does it look like when that viewpoint
is restored?32 How can a right to look, framed in the language of Western
colonial jurisprudence, be sustained as the place of the decolonized inside
history and inside the city, whether that city is Algiers, Paris, Cairo, New
York, or the civis of civilization itself ? As the case of Algeria itself suggests,
such questions have yet to generate sustainable answers, here or there. For
the Algerian insistence on a nationalist solution that would, in Fanon’s fa-
mous phrase, create a “new man” set aside questions of Islam as belonging
to the past. If that “new man” was the image of decolonization, the invest-
ment in a new imagined community, the independent post- colonial re-
public, was such that it was felt to be capable of solving the questions of a
postcolonial imaginary.33 The antifascist investment in the “spontaneity” of
the people was a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, it was capable of
evading and overcoming even the most dedicated repression as the French
discovered to their cost. At the same time, spontaneity was not invested
in building institutions, allowing the FLN ’s Army of the Frontiers to pre-
side over what the writer Ferhat Abbas has famously called “confiscated
independence” almost as soon as the French had departed, in 1962.34 Still
worse, as the world knows, the Islamic Salvation Front won the elections
of 1991, which were invalidated by the ruling FLN and the army, unleashing
a civil war that cost an estimated 160,000 lives, including some 7,000 “dis-
appeared” by the government. The practice of “disappearing” antigovern-
ment activists—meaning having them killed and disposed of in secret—was
begun by the French during the revolution and later exported by them to
Latin America, most notably in Argentina and Chile.35 Such practices, far
from forming a decolonized visuality, epitomize the secrecy of the police
in separating what can be seen from what must be declared invisible.

Antifascist Neorealisms 241
 Fanon had accurately defined this condition in colonial Algeria. As a
counter to what he saw as colonial fascism, he imagined the decolonization
of colonial visuality as a process that “transforms the spectator crushed to a
nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose
fashion by the spotlight of History.”36 The reply to the view of history as
the plaything of the Hero was to transform the spectator from the passive
onlooker demanded by fascism into an active participant in visualizing. The
changes required were physical and mental. Fanon understood the colonial
as “a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by
the barracks and the police stations.”37 These were, of course, the institu-
tions that created Caesarism, and the border was the line where there was
nothing to see. Above and beyond the physical separation of “native” sec-
tors from “European,” these divides had come to produce “aesthetic forms
of respect for the status quo.”38 This aesthetic engendered a sense of what
is proper, normal, and to be experienced without question. In reading this
passage, Achille Mbembe has stressed that the emphasis on the police and
the army means that behind this division of space lies a “spirit of violence.”39
The segregation of colonial space was thus experienced as violence by the
“native,” but also as the proper way of living that was visibly right by the
“European.” This legacy of separation has survived formal decolonization
and the end of legal segregation in the United States, for, as Mbembe shows,
segregation created a “large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. These imagi-
naries gave meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing cate-
gories of people for different purposes within the same space; in brief, the
exercise of sovereignty. Space was therefore the raw material of sovereignty
and the violence it carried with it.”40 It is this aestheticized segregation that
antifascist neorealism has set out to describe, define and deconstruct.
Fanon emphasized in The Wretched of the Earth that this aesthetics was a
“language of pure violence,” generating a sense that the “native” sector was
“superfluous” with the result that “the gaze that the colonized subject casts
at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy” (5). Sexualized desire
was displaced onto a desire for space, because that space represented pos-
session in every sense of the term. Separation by violence produced a mir-
roring desire for violence: “To blow the colonial world to smithereens is
henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colo-
nial subject” (6). While most discussion has centered on the question of
violence, I want to stay with Fanon’s concept of the imagination, for this
was an imaginary destruction. He was intentionally using the language of

242 Chapter Six
Lacan’s gaze here, as he had already done in Black Skin, White Masks (1951),
a text that he presented as a “mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in
which the Negro could retrieve himself on the road to disalienation.”41 Just
as Sartre insisted that the antisemite made the Jew and Beauvoir claimed
that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Fanon did not under-
stand identity as being shaped only by private or family dynamics. Rather,
all three socially engaged critics shared Beauvoir’s assumption that “only
the intervention of someone else can establish the individual as an Other.”42
Fanon has often been faulted on his use of psychoanalysis here, with critics
urging him to have read other essays by Lacan or pay more emphasis to the
theory of castration.43 Yet under the impact of the revolutions of 1968, none
other than Lacan himself allowed that for the colonized “the unconscious
. . . had been sold to them, along with the laws of colonization, this exotic
regressive form of the master’s discourse, in the face of the capitalism called
imperialism.”44 That is to say, there was a colonial Oedipus complex and re-
lated phenomena, such as the gaze, but they had been instilled by colonial
domination.45 In a surprising reversal, little noticed among all the mathe-
matical symbols of his often disrupted seminar at Vincennes, Lacan had
come to endorse the cultural construction arguments of Fanon and Beau-
voir, whose goal was to understand the constitution of inequality, rather
than that of an eternally unchanging unconscious.46
The projected imago of the mirror stage theorized by Lacan was simply
not available to the colonized subject, according to Fanon, given that the
ideal body in colonial culture was of necessity “white” and that subaltern
peoples were by definition not white. Indeed, in many fictional and auto-
biographical accounts, subaltern people of “mixed” background are repeat-
edly represented as staring into mirrors, trying to discern if that mixture
is visible. In the racialized context, this looking meant discerning whether
or not African, Indian, or Jewish ancestry was “visible,” according to the
stereotypes of the time. This mirror anxiety was not limited to subaltern
groups. Given the widespread miscegenation of the Atlantic world, few
“white” people were exempt. The mirror was in this sense a scene of colo-
nial dispersal, rather than identification. Further, Fanon insisted that slavery
and colonialism disrupted, and perhaps made impossible, Oedipal belong-
ing, understood as a technique of colonization. For, as Deleuze and Guat-
tari later put it: “To the degree that there is oedipalization, it is due to colo-
nization.”47 That is to say, the divided self, or constitution by lack, is not a
transcendental human condition, but a historically generated division of

Antifascist Neorealisms 243
the sensible. What Fanon and others have looked for was a means of transi-
tion away from that division to another possible mode of engagement with
the self and with others. The goal is not some impossible constitution of a
whole, but the possibility of equality. Fanon’s concept of looking was there-
fore transitional, rather than foundational, a means of working through
violence that could not but acknowledge that the desire for equality be-
tween subaltern classes was the desire for the same, a desire that the regime
of Oedipus reduced to deviance. As Greg Thomas has emphasized, this
desire would lead Fanon away from the frame of the national to his sup-
port for pan-African revolt, as if, even during the course of the nationalist
revolution, he had come to realize its limitations.48 As events have shown,
the violence that was supposed to be instrumental in disposing of colonial
rule has become institutionalized through the place of the army in govern-
ing independent Algeria. Here arises the interfaced question of what one
might call, following Ngũ gı̃ wa Thiong’o, decolonizing the imagination.49
While Ngũ gı̃’s concentration on using indigenous language remains a con-
troversial issue in Algeria, split between French, Arabic, Berber, and other
indigenous languages, the politics of the image have received less attention,
but were no less significant.

c o lo n i a l m y t h o lo g i e s, g u e r i l l a d o c u m e n ta r i e s

One of the first steps in the French declaration of a state of emergency in

Algeria, in April 1955, was the assertion of powers to “take all measures
to ensure control of the press and of publications of all kinds, as well as
radio transmissions, showings of films and theatrical performances.”50 This
law was revived during the riots and demonstrations in the French banlieux
(suburbs) in 2005, indicating that there is still a battle for a certain Algiers
in Europe. This active censorship introduced an element of ambiguity into
French cultural work of the period. For instance, the critic Roland Barthes
began his now classic essay “Myth Today,” published in 1957, with an at-
tempt to disrupt the “naturalness,” as he called it, of media imagery. Waiting
in a barbershop, he happens on a copy of Paris-Match, published in June 1955,
just after the law was passed (see plate 9). “On the cover, a young Negro
in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a
fold of the tricolor. All this is in the meaning of the picture. But, whether
naïvely or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great
Empire that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve

244 Chapter Six
under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an
alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-
called oppressors.”51 It took a certain daring for Barthes to use this emblem
of the French empire to present his theory of signification, that is to say, the
combination of the effect of what is seen, what it literally depicts, and what
it implies. Paris-Match, a relatively new magazine (founded in 1949), relied
on scandalous and eye-catching photographs to attract its audience. In this
case, the saluting young soldier appears to be very young indeed, younger
than military recruitment age, as the caption “the night of the army” sug-
gests. Further, if he was a soldier, he was probably one of the notorious
Zouaves, African troops who were used to carry out much of the most vio-
lent work in Algeria and other French colonies.
Ignoring these connotations, Barthes developed his analysis to show
that what he called “myth” froze the historical meaning of the message
and rendered it neutral as what he called “depoliticized speech.” He sug-
gested that myth was naturally at home on the Right, whose great cause
Algeria had become, and that an anticolonial interpretation would end the
mythic status of the image. As complex as that signification was, there was
also an anticolonial signification at work in his use of the image. In a foot-
note, he proposed, “Today it is the colonized peoples who assume to the
full the ethical and political condition described by Marx as being that of
the proletariat.”52 If the French Communist Party (PCF ), and other leftist
groups would not necessarily have agreed, the Right would have found the
proposal close to treasonous. Further, the picture had an unmentionable
resonance. When the FLN killed sub-Saharan African soldiers, they would
sometimes fix them upright in a pose of saluting.53 The FLN knew that
the French government were using these African troops symbolically (or as
Barthes would put it, mythologically) and countered with their own sym-
bolism. While Barthes’s anti-imperial semiotics has been cited in countless
academic texts, the counterperformance of the same “message” by the FLN
has been forgotten. A recurrent theme in Western discourse against political
violence waged by nongovernmental agencies is that violence is senseless,
meaningless, and pointless. To the contrary, as Allen Feldman has pointed
out in the different context of Northern Ireland, “violent acts on the body
constituted a material vehicle for constructing memory and embedding the
self in social and institutional memory.”54 The place of violence in decolo-
nizing visuality is a place of difficulty, certainly, but not a discourse devoid
of meaning.

Antifascist Neorealisms 245
 Colonial mythologies of the type discussed by Barthes were actively
disseminated by cinema. In Algeria, twenty-four feature films were pro-
duced from 1911–1954, whose functions were later defined by Hala Sal-
mane: “1. To distort the image of colonized people in order to justify to
Western public opinion the policy of colonization; the natives therefore
had to be portrayed as sub-human. 2. To convince the ‘natives’ that their
colonial ‘mother’ protected them from their own savagery.”55 As Fanon had
described in Black Skin, White Masks, such cinematic fictions as Tarzan, car-
toons set in “Africa,” and well-meaning documentaries on poverty or dis-
ease also contributed to this colonial cinema, whose aim was keep those
in the colonies and in the colonizing nations invested in the aesthetics of
separation. Salmane argued for restoring African identity from the distor-
tions of colonial imagery. As a first step in this direction, the FLN estab-
lished a film unit, in 1957, led at first by René Vautier, a French documentary
filmmaker and former Resistance fighter, and the Algerian Chérif Zenati.56
Vautier’s first films in French colonial Africa had led to his prosecution and
sentencing under still current Vichy laws, but he remained dedicated to
the issue of ending and documenting colonialism. Working undercover as
a filmmaker during the Algerian War, using the pseudonym “Farid,” Vau-
tier trained a group of Algerian filmmakers, including Chérif Zennati and
Abd el Hamid Mokdad.57 Nine of these filmmakers died in the conflict. His
own 16 mm short documentaries were widely shown in the Arab world and
in the Eastern bloc, beginning with Algérie en flames (1957), which showed
footage taken during actual combat, making it among the first decolonial
combat documentaries. Fanon met Vautier at this time, but opposed even
allowing him to work in North Africa because he was French and a commu-
nist to boot.58 Indeed, the filmmaker was later imprisoned by the Algerian
resistance on suspicion of being a spy. He nonetheless continued to work
with them after his release, participating in creating an unfilmed screenplay
of The Wretched of the Earth.59
These projects generated the innovative short film J’ai huit ans (I Am
Eight Years Old), officially attributed to the Maurice Audin Committee,
including the filmmakers Olga Poliakoff and Yann Le Mason, commemo-
rating a young French mathematician who had been tortured to death by
the French occupation forces. The film was attributed as being “prepared
by Frantz Fanon and R. Vautier,” despite their earlier disagreement.60 It was
the product of a new therapeutic strategy of visualization that Fanon was
experimenting with in his clinical work with Algerian refugees in Tunis.

246 Chapter Six
Perhaps the best known of these patients was the writer Boukhatem Farès,
who became an artist and created a series of works, called “Screams in the
Night,” in the Tunis hospital.61 Farès later recalled that Fanon had told him
to “visualize” what was troubling him and gave him a book on Van Gogh
to help advance his artistic ideas. By 1961, when the film was made, there
were 175,000 Algerian refugees in Tunisia and another 120,000 in Morocco,
many of them very young. At the children’s house in Tunis, Fanon asked the
refugees to work through their experiences, in writing, speech, or drawing.
Paper and crayons were distributed to the child refugees, who created an
extensive archive of the war in the rural areas. Later published and trans-
lated into Italian by Giovanni Pirelli, a sympathetic wealthy Italian, the
children’s accounts range from those of aerial bombardments to those of
ground warfare and torture (see figs. 48a–e).62 For example, a line drawing
by Mili Mohammed shows a French soldier whipping a man who is shack-
led by the arms. Ahmed Achiri produced a detailed drawing showing sol-
diers attacking a village, torturing men with fire and rounding up women
and children. While not all the works are attributed, at least two drawings
were by girls, identified as Fatima and Milouda Bouchiti, showing veiled
women with children. Anonymous cutouts depict a man being shot and
another man being whipped. A drawing shows the corpse of a man being
carried through a village by cavalry horses. So if the torture and violence
of the war were in some sense a “secret” in France, although one preserved
more by denial than by actual secrecy, it was well-known to the young
people of Algeria. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were all politically radi-
calized as a result. One sixteen year old stated that France wanted Algeria
for its oil, while an eleven year old dated the outbreak of the revolution to
the massacre in Sétif in 1945—six years before he was born. Another eleven
year old, an orphan, said that his ambition was to return to an independent
Algeria.63 Collectively, these documents form the archive against which
the famous case study in The Wretched of the Earth, describing the killing of a
French child by two Algerians, should be judged, as we shall see.
In the period, it seems that Fanon or others realized the dramatic poten-
tial of these accounts, leading to both the book publication and the film.
According to the titles of one version, René Vautier was responsible for col-
lecting the images for the film. J’ai huit ans was made when the FLN ’s war
of liberation was eight years old, thus memorializing the war itself, as well
as the children seen in the film. It began with a minute-long sequence of
filmed head-and-shoulder portraits of apparently eight-year-old children

Antifascist Neorealisms 247
figu r e 48A – e .
stil l s f r o M J’ai
Huit ans (1961, d i r .
ren é VAu t i e r , 1961).
looking straight into the camera to the percussive sound of gunfire.64 The
cut to black-and-white paintings of violent scenes comes as a surprise, even
a shock, enhanced by the speeded-up gunfire. A narrative in voiceover by
children speaking Algerian French in seemingly deliberate monotones de-
scribes attacks on the villages by French troops and the subsequent rescue of
some of the children by FLN forces, illustrated with a series of the drawings,
often seen in close-up. Tanks and machine guns are accurately depicted.
One French soldier appears with a tail. One drawing is signed by “Hadim,”
another by “Madjid.” As the film progresses, a variety of voices and stories
are heard, which all contribute to the theme of conflict and loss. A child
says that a plane “looked at me,” and then it proceeded to fire, while she hid
under a large stone. Music is added. FLN guerillas lead them to the border,
cut the fence, and they find refuge—one child even finds his parents. Suit-
ably happy images follow to the sound of a chant for an independent Alge-
ria. These visualizations of the hidden realities of the war became a form of
accusation, in the classic format of Zola’s “J’accuse.”
Short as it is, the film contains a range of potential looks to counter
colonial visuality that were not allowed expression in the colonial context.
From the opening shot of the children facing the camera, the central focus
is the look of the child, usually ignored in such contexts. Now we are so
inured to repeated displays of impoverished children in underdeveloped
countries that these images have attained a new invisibility. In the period,
they were both striking and a riposte to the idea that this was a war for
civilization. The children’s story also made visible the French soldiers, who
would rather not have been seen at all, and the torture chambers, whose
existence were officially denied until a former general admitted to them,
in 2002. In the period, those taken in for interrogation were known as the
“disappeared,” attesting to the importance of invisibility for, and as a means
of, torture. These looks became visible by means of the children’s draw-
ings, which were both a means for the children to work through their own
traumatic experience and, by the very fact of their authorship, an unim-
peachable source for the violence being carried out by the French. Finally,
and counterintuitively, the war itself uses the film, as it were, to claim an
age and the right to be seen. By emphasizing the duration of the conflict,
the film reminded metropolitan viewers, who might have been trying to
forget, that the war persisted; to the Algerians and their allies, it showed
that the full might of colonial power had not succeeded in repressing the

Antifascist Neorealisms 249
resistance. Realizing that this apparently humanitarian content was also a
history of the war, French police seized the film at least seventeen times
over many years. The French government replied by arranging some 7,500
showings of its own propaganda films in venues such as rotary clubs and
other such institutions in the six months following the United Nations de-
bate on Algeria during September 1957 alone.65 J’ai huit ans was banned in
France until 1973, whereupon it won a prize for best short film of the year.
This little-remarked collaboration between Fanon and Vautier marked
a critical intersection between radical psychiatry and activist cinema.
Fanon had created a practice in which staff worked with patients to address
their conflicts, eating and socializing with them, rather than maintaining
the classic clinical distance. Drawing on the teachings of Fanon’s profes-
sor, the Spanish antifascist François Tosquelles, this now familiar strategy
was then new, certainly in the colonial context, where colonial psychol-
ogy had claimed that all Algerians were in an infantile state.66 As late as
1952, the Algerian School of Medicine declared in its handbook for physi-
cians: “These primitive people cannot and should not benefit from the ad-
vances of European civilization.”67 The spatialized and separated hierarchy
of culture created in the late nineteenth century continued to inform such
purportedly clinical judgments. Such pronouncements make it easier to
understand the involvement of certain psychiatrists in torturing Algeri-
ans. Indeed, during the revolution, Antoine Porot, founder of the Alge-
rian school, and one of his followers attributed the uprising to a pathologi-
cal form of “xenophobia” among Algerians “against subjects belonging to
an occupying race.”68 Hence revolutionary action was a form of madness,
as Pinel had suggested in immediate aftermath of the French Revolution
of 1789. Fanon’s innovative ethnopsychiatry refused such stereotypes and
worked to create culturally appropriate treatments, including creating a
café, a mosque, and a newspaper for patients. Fanon endeavored to treat
his patients on a day-clinic basis, meaning that they returned home at night
and some even stayed in work. This approach required those in treatment
to deal with their symptoms in everyday life as well as in the clinic.
In a lecture series he gave at the University of Tunis in 1959 and 1960,
Fanon developed a theoretical framework for his decolonial psychiatry. He
recharacterized the insane person as “a ‘stranger’ to society.” Anticipating
Foucault, Fanon saw that the internment of this “anarchistic element” in
society was a disciplinary measure that rendered the psychiatrist into “the
auxiliary of the police, the protector of society.”69 The segregation between

250 Chapter Six
the European and the native that had led Fanon to revolutionary politics
was both replicated and produced in and by colonial psychiatry. Rather than
segregate the patient, Fanon sought to achieve his or her “resocialization,”
following his emphasis on the dehumanizing effects of colonialism.70 Yet,
Fanon asked, into what group was the patient to be resocialized, and “what
are the criteria of normality?” His answer was to create a “society in the
hospital itself: this is sociotherapy.”71 Fanon went on to discuss neurological
and psychoanalytic approaches, including Lacan’s mirror stage, before turn-
ing to the psychological effects of time discipline and surveillance. He con-
sidered the psychic impact of the time clock on factory workers, of closed-
circuit television on shop assistants in large American establishments, and
of auditory monitoring on telephone operators.72 He completed the circuit
by casting the presumed “laziness” of the colonized as a form of resistance
to the idea that they could not be unemployed because their function was
to work as and when required. The colonial system thus visualized its colo-
nized subjects as the perfect Platonic workers, whose function was to do
what was required of them and nothing else. In this context, Fanon’s en-
gagement with children as social actors and as the index of the Algerian
revolution marked his commitment to the cultivation of a “new man,” un-
constrained by discipline or colonization. Read optimistically, had he lived
longer, Fanon might have moved away from his emphasis on masculinity
to imagine new modes of postrevolutionary gender identity, as part of this
analysis of the racialized disciplinary society, a connection made by many
radical black feminists in the United States from Angela Davis to Toni Cade
Bambara and bell hooks.73
In this connection, it is noticeable that a number of early post-
independence Algerian films, such as Une si jeune paix (dir. Jacques Charby,
1964)—explicitly inspired by Fanon’s work—and the multi-authored L’enfer
à dix ans (dir. Ghaouti Bendeddouche et al., 1968), featured the children of
the revolution as subjects, nonprofessional actors, and screenwriters. Film
was a vital medium in Algeria, where 86 percent of men and 95 percent of
women were estimated to be illiterate at the time of independence. Some
330 cinemas for 35 mm films were left behind by the colonial forces that
now showed both the new films produced by the independent government
and Hollywood productions. Vautier took a different approach, working
with Ahmed Rachedi to create the Centre Audio-visuel (CAV ), in 1962. The
center developed what were called “ciné-pops” (popular cinema), building
on the cinema club tradition that Fanon had participated in while working

Antifascist Neorealisms 251
at Blida.74 The “ciné-pops,” recalled Vautier in a later interview, were de-
signed to “initiate the people to progressive cinema with the goal of sup-
porting them in their march towards socialism, by semantically illustrating
the aspects of discourse proper to this form of socio-economic organiza-
tion. Thus we always insisted on the militant and political aspects of film
rather than its human value.”75 This agitprop form, recalling early Soviet
cinema, organized 1,200 screenings in 220 locations in their first six months,
using two projection vans taken from the old Psychological Service of the
French Army. These films included Chinese works like The Red Detachment of
Women (dir. Xie Jin, 1961), shown to a large women-only crowd just outside
the Casbah; Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, screened for dockers in Alger,
who identified directly with the famous staircase scene because of a simi-
lar structure in their own city; and locally made shorts, including J’ai huit
ans. The postwar Algerian films were silent montages accompanied by a
live verbal commentary that became the basis for Peuple en marche (dir. René
Vautier, 1963), a documentary about the new Algeria shown at the first FLN
post-independence conference in Algiers.76 Despite gaining some 60,000
members, the ciné-pops movement collapsed as the government moved
away from revolutionary politics, and the center was closed, in 1964. The
missed encounter to develop radical cinema and psychiatry as part of de-
colonial governance continues to haunt attempts to visualize a postdiscipli-
nary society.
By contrast, the FLN cadre and former businessman Yacef Saadi created
Casbah Films, in 1962, and later collaborated with Pontecorvo in filming The
Battle of Algiers.77 As Pontecorvo had himself been the leader of the youth
section of the Italian resistance, in which the screenwriter Franco Solinas
had also been involved, the film was a collaboration between anticolonial
and antifascist resistance fighters. The Algerians financed 45 percent of the
costs of the film, and Saadi helped Pontecorvo identify the exact locations
in the Casbah where the events on which those depicted were based had
taken place. For example, the house where the FLN resistance leader Amar
Ali, known as Ali La Pointe, died was entirely rebuilt so that it could be
blown up for the film. In keeping with this desire for authenticity, all the
actors bar one, who played the paratrooper Colonel Mathieu, were ama-
teurs, recruited in Algiers. Saadi played himself, under the name Djafar,
while Ali La Pointe was played by a street hustler named Brahim Hadjadj,
who went on to act in many Algerian films. Saadi was concerned to pro-
duce “an objective, equilibrated film that is not a trial of a people or of a

252 Chapter Six
nation, but a heartful accusation against colonialism, violence, and war.”78
In fact, Pontecorvo rejected his original treatment as being too much like
propaganda and instead worked with Solinas to generate a neorealist film
under a regime that he called the “dictatorship of truth.” Pontecorvo shot
the film on low- cost stock to enhance the grainy newsreel feel, while ex-
posing for very strong black-and-white contrasts in the Italian neorealist
style.
As a result, The Battle of Algiers allows for different points of interpreta-
tion. It is clearly anticolonial, but also antiwar, while arguing for the inevi-
tability of armed conflict given the intransigence of French colonial policy.
The film depicts the story of the struggle for control of Algiers in 1957. It
begins just after torture has broken an FLN operative, who has revealed the
hiding place of the FLN leader Ali La Pointe. From these opening moments
in a French torture chamber, the viewer is plunged into the conflict. By its
nature, torture is a practice that wants to be offstage, literally ob-scene. To
be confronted with the tortured body, even in the current era of official
avowal of so-called harsh techniques, is a visual shock. In using this shock
in the opening, rather than as a central moment, as in more recent films like
Rendition (dir. Gavin Hood, 2007), Pontecorvo visualized the normalization
of torture. Henri Alleg, a French communist newspaper editor in Algiers,
who was tortured by paratroopers, described this as the “school of per-
version” for the young French conscripts and volunteers.79 The actor used
to play the torture victim in The Battle of Algiers was serving a sentence for
theft in the notorious Barberousse prison, from where he was released to
play the part, no doubt accounting for his confused air. By the same token,
the dramatic scene that follows the titles, depicting the radicalization of
Ali La Pointe in the same prison, showed the execution of an FLN activist,
a key intensification of the conflict in 1956. The actor was a man who, like
Saadi himself, had been sentenced to death by the French, but was not in
fact executed. Pontecorvo further implicates the implied viewpoint of the
spectator with the FLN . When Colonel Mathieu ( Jean Martin), the fictional
representation of General Marel-Marice Bigeard, sets out his information
strategy to his colleagues, he shows them films taken at French checkpoints
to point out that although surveillance was in effect, Algerian activists were
succeeding in evading the checkpoints.80 At that moment, a woman that
we already know to have to planted a bomb passes by, creating what Soviet
director Sergei Eisenstein called a montage effect in which the viewer cre-
ates knowledge that is not directly presented by the film.

Antifascist Neorealisms 253
figure 49. inforMAtion PyrAM id froM
battle oF algiers (1966)

Mathieu presents to his staff a means of overcoming their inability to

see by transforming people into information. He demonstrates what Saadi
called the “pyramid” scheme, in which each person in the organization
knows only two others. In order for the French to reach the top- level
commanders, information must be obtained that allows them to particu-
larize the pyramid with names (see fig. 49). This “method” is Mathieu’s eu-
phemism for torture, under the excuse that there was a twenty-four-hour
period to act before the organization modified its structure. This rhetoric
is what is now known as the “ticking bomb” justification for torture. Un-
like present- day politicians, Mathieu does not shy away from the realities
of the question at stake. If, he demands, you want Algeria to remain part
of France, then this is the way to do it—and he reminds the journalists
that even L’Humanité, the French communist newspaper, adhered to the
notion of Algérie française. For Republican rhetoric insisted that the country
was “one and undividable,” unlike a federal nation like the United States,
where one state or another always seems to be contemplating secession. In
interviews, Saadi argued that Mathieu had to be played by a professional
actor in order for this explanation of the pyramid system to be convincing.
Indeed, some have argued that it was precisely this professionalization of
bureaucracy that limited the radicality of the FLN to that of a nationalist
revolt, rather than a socialist or self-directed revolution. The French tactic
rendered the body of the tortured into data, disguising the erotics of vio-
lence that generated it, as part of an information flow that would have been
understood as “cybernetic” in the period. As N. Katherine Hayles has sum-

254 Chapter Six
marized it, Norbert Weiner decontextualized information “as a function
of probabilities representing a choice of one message from a range of pos-
sible messages.”81 Thus the paratroopers find the leader of the organization
(FLN ) by means of tracking “messages” around their information system.
This rendering of information into binary code was the reality that colo-
nial authority now sought to find in its subject peoples, abstracting their
individual identities but ensuring the free flow of information. Its obscene
counterpart was that such information was for the most part obtained by
the flow of electricity, the predominant method of torture used in Algeria.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a gulf between the European and the
Algerian experience of realism in this and other filmed representations
of the war. In later interviews, Jean Martin, the French actor who played
Mathieu, described the powerful affect of working with Algerians who
had experienced the revolution. Martin had come to prominence playing
Lucky, one of the tramps in the Paris premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot (1953). Ironically, he had been blacklisted for supporting the FLN
by signing the famous Petition of the 121 against the war, and The Battle of
Algiers itself would be banned in France until 1971. For Martin, the drama
of the film came from the sight of “people reliving events,” such that they
were caught up in real emotions as they passed a “French” checkpoint in
the film because they had so often done so in reality. For Saadi, however,
making the film was a “game” compared to the reality. Pontecorvo seemed
to understand that the lack of real threat diminished the experience for
his nonprofessional cast, and so he shot repeated takes of even very short
sequences, rendering the actors tired and frustrated. This real experience
of irritation with the filming process ended up creating a “real” effect of
fear, exhaustion, or anger when seen in the finished production. For many
years, the film carried an opening disclaimer noting that no documentary
or newsreel footage had been used, even though it wanted to generate pre-
cisely that sensibility. This decolonial dialectic of neorealism can be found
across the range of cinema dealing with the Algerian War. For instance,
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1960) dealt with the violence of the war
under the rubric “Photography is truth, cinema is truth twenty-four times a
second!”82 But for the Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra, writing the first
history of Algerian cinema, in 1971, Godard’s film was nothing more than
a “film of neo-fascist tendency” because of its sequences showing the FLN
engaging in torture while quoting revolutionary texts.83
The women characters in The Battle of Algiers have an important role in

Antifascist Neorealisms 255
figure 50. dAnCing Wo MAn froM battle oF algiers (1966)

terms of the action, but have relatively little to say. In the dramatic scene
in which women who are about to plant bombs in the French quarter are
disguised as “modern,” French- oriented women by means of hairstyle,
clothing, and make-up, the original dialogue was replaced by up-tempo
drumming, much to the initial shock of the scriptwriter, Franco Solinas.84
According to an interview with Pontecorvo, Solinas later agreed that his
dialogue had been weak, and he approved of the final version. Pontecorvo
further emphasized that even while he was making the film, the situation
of Algerian women was noticeably worsening, leading him to emphasize
their place in the liberation struggle. The final scene of the film, in which
independence is achieved, is marked by the ululation of women in celebra-
tion, a sound that might seem alien to many Westerners, in the way that
the Islamic call to prayer has recently been stereotyped in some quarters.
It was taken as the key to Ennio Morricone’s powerful soundtrack for the
film, or what Pontecorvo calls “music-images.” The final shot of the film is
a close-up of a dancing woman, in traditional dress but not veiled, which
Pontecorvo intended as a symbol of the revolution, in the fashion of Eisen-
stein (see fig. 50). Unfortunately, the process of segregating genders has
continued, rendering what the Algerian writer Assia Djebar has called the
“severed sound” of Algerian women when “the heavy silence returns that
puts an end to the momentary restoration of sound.”85 This silencing was
an accompaniment to what she calls the “forbidden gaze” of women, hid-
den behind the walls of the home and the reimposed veil. Sight and sound
were and are inextricably linked in decolonizing visuality, just as they had
been in forming the concept.

256 Chapter Six
real sPecters

Soon after the achievement of independence, a silence fell over the sub-
ject of Algeria in Europe. Kristin Ross has emphasized, for example, how
such erasures have distorted the understanding of “May ’68,” which she
shows needs to be understood as beginning with the “mobilization against
the Algerian war.”86 For despite a seemingly endless series of books, essays,
and films, the real subject of the Algerian revolution was permanently dis-
placed, namely the fundamental wrong of colonization. Indeed, many
former French settlers in Algeria have recently sought to create memo-
rials and museums to the “culture” of French Algeria, which they seek to
separate from “politics,” meaning decolonization. The politics that mattered
were of course those of imperialism. It has returned in the past decade as a
correlative of the neo-imperialism with which we are all familiar, calling
for a renewed neorealism. The Battle of Algiers was notoriously screened at the
Pentagon, in 2003, advertised as a chance to see “how to win the war on ter-
rorism and lose the battle of ideas.” While it is unclear what lessons were in
fact learned, the screening shows that neovisuality has come to trace its own
genealogy of counterinsurgency to Algeria. The interrogation and torture
methods used by the French in Algeria were disseminated by the notorious
School of the Americas to Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and
1980s, and have been revived for use, since 2001, by the United States. In
recent years, the “Algerian” has come to be the figure of the non-Western
immigrant to Europe, at first needed and now reviled, which has led to a
resurgence of fascist parties across Europe, matched by anti-immigrant and
anti-refugee sentiment in Australia, Britain, and the United States. So do
the necessities of an antifascist neorealism reimpose themselves in the light
of both the electoral success of the far Right in Europe, from France (2002)
to Italy (2007) and Austria (2008), and the appropriation of powers by the
Bush-Cheney administration (2000–2008) in the United States under the
cover of counterinsurgency. These questions continue to converge within
the frame of global cinema, from France to Spain, Finland, the United
States, Mexico, and Algeria itself, indicating the centrality of “Algeria” and
its location as the border of North and South to the neovisuality of the
present. A recent group of films have returned to Fanon, the psychology of
civil war and fascism, and the viewpoint of the child.
Perhaps the best-known of these films in the West has been Caché (2005),
made by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, which deals with the con-

Antifascist Neorealisms 257
troversial legacy of the Algerian War in France. The film centers on Georges
Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife, Anne ( Juliette Binoche), two self-
described Parisian “Bobos” (Bourgeois-Bohemians), working in television
and publishing. Their comfortable lives with their son, Pierrot (Lester
Makedonsky), are interrupted by the arrival of a series of anonymous video-
tapes showing their apartment under surveillance, accompanied by violent
drawings of a child vomiting blood or a chicken being slaughtered. As the
mysterious tapes continue, it gradually emerges that the drawings repre-
sent scenes from Georges’s rural childhood, when his parents employed as
workers two Algerians, who lived at the farm along with their son, Majid.
The two workers disappeared after attending the now infamous demonstra-
tions in Paris on 17 October 1961. Called by the FLN to show the support
of Algerians in France for independence, the demonstration was met with
the most extreme police repression led by the former Vichy police chief
Maurice Papon. Hundreds were killed and deposited in the river Seine, a
moment that seems to be recurringly forgotten and remembered in France.
Majid comes to live with Georges’s family, causing the six-year-old Georges
to stage some clumsy attempts to have Majid sent away, which culminate in
success after he tricks Majid into slaughtering a rooster. These scenes are de-
picted in the drawings that accompany the videos, which have now moved
on to show Georges’s family home. Enraged, Georges tracks down Majid
(Maurice Bénichou), who denies all involvement with the tapes as does his
son, Hashem (Walid Afkir). Nonetheless the tapes continue to arrive, and
Majid, who has continued to deny being their author, commits suicide by
cutting his throat in Georges’s presence, an incident again videotaped and
distributed.
For all its excellent intentions, Caché exemplifies what Walter Mignolo
has called the “Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism.”87 Indeed, much
of the discussion of the film has centered on the ever-elusive “universal”
values it supposedly embodies. What matters for Caché is the impact of
Algeria on French lives and minds. Majid and Hashem are undeveloped
as characters to the point of being ciphers for immigrant victimhood and
angry second-generation Frenchness respectively. Majid’s suicide is unin-
telligible except as a device to shock watching (Western) viewers. All the
videos in the film, from the opening shot of Georges’s and Anne’s apart-
ment to the closing sequence of Pierrot’s school, use the same angle of
vision. The camera is placed at a medium distance from the events being
watched, slightly to the right of center. Within the film, this place is identi-

258 Chapter Six
fied as that from which the child Georges watched Majid being taken away
to the orphanage. It is the viewpoint, then, of (colonial) guilt, betrayal, and
later repression. One needs to qualify this “knowledge,” because it comes,
like all our visual understanding of the childhood drama between Georges
and Majid, from Georges’s dreams. While allowing for the obvious fact that
these dream sequences are constructed, that construction was enacted by
filmmakers very much aware of the mechanisms of condensation and dis-
placement that shape dream imagery. Michael Haneke suggested that the
entire film was designed to explore the “collective unconscious” of the West
and that it had changed Godard’s formula from Le Petit Soldat into “film is a
lie, twenty-four frames a second.”88 That is to say, what Caché tries to do is
undermine the cinematic consensus in which what is seen is true, without
any recourse to what Georges, in cutting an edition of his show about Rim-
baud, disparagingly calls “theory.” There may be a “hidden” reference here
to Rimbaud’s lapidary phrase Je est un autre: for Georges there is no other, the
I is all there is. Some have seen the drawings in the film as reminiscent of
J’ai huit ans but here the purpose and meaning of the drawings are obscure,
and they are also the agent of violence, rather than simply its record.89
Fanon had taken a strongly critical approach to this framing of Algeria.
For example, in 1957, Georges Mattéï published in Les Temps Modernes an
essay arguing that the drafting of French youth into Algerian service was
teaching them to be reflexively racist and violent: “What is going in Alge-
ria today is a large-scale attempt to dehumanize French youth.” Fanon re-
torted: “It is worth thinking about this attitude. Such exclusion of Algeri-
ans, such ignorance about the men being tortured or of the families being
massacred constitutes an entirely new phenomenon. It is related to the ego-
centric, sociocentric form of thought that has become characteristic of the
French.”90 Even more characteristically, Caché centers on the exploration of
the male ego. Conveniently, neither Hashem’s mother nor Georges’s father
appear in the film, allowing the drama to circle around male egos in con-
flict, culminating in the dream/surveillance of the meeting of the two sons.
Anne features as a plot device to exemplify Georges’s inability to trust and
to set up Pierrot’s oedipal rebellion when he suspects her of having an af-
fair. Caché invites the viewer to judge whether Majid or Hashem made the
tapes, whether Georges was objectively guilty of betraying Majid, whether
Anne was having an affair, and whether the sons were in league with each
other. Like Freud and, all sophistication to the contrary notwithstanding,
like Fanon, Caché cannot ask what the women in its drama might have done

Antifascist Neorealisms 259
or wanted in their own right. Although it visualizes a France damaged by
the police actions of 1961, it cannot engage with a right to look, but offers
instead a different form of (ego) policing.91
I want to develop these themes by counterpointing two recent treat-
ments of one of the most difficult sections in Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth, in which he transcribed an interview with two teenage Algerian boys
who had killed their French friend. The action was revenge for a preemp-
tive massacre of Algerians by French militia at Rivet, in 1956, in which two
of one of the Algerian boy’s relatives had died.92 All three boys had gone
out to play as usual, but the two young Algerians killed their friend with
a knife. Neither expressed remorse, “because they want to kill us” and be-
cause, although Algerians were being killed on a daily basis, no French were
in prison. Fanon offers no commentary on the transcripts, in which he tried
to emphasize that their friend had done nothing wrong, with which they
agreed, and that he did not deserve to die, which they denied. In short, the
boys acted on a theory of collective responsibility for which youth was no
protection, just as children were involved in French attacks like those seen
in J’ai huit ans. As Fanon suggested, “It is the war, this colonial war that very
often takes on the aspect of a genuine genocide, this war which radically
disrupts and shatters the world, which is in fact the triggering situation.”93
While the specific violence is acknowledged to be unjustified, the general
political context made it seem that this was the only action the boys could
take, because, as they said, they could not overpower an adult and they were
too young to join the resistance. In response to the disaster of the post-1991
Algerian civil war, UNICEF has sponsored children’s “activities such as draw-
ing alongside group play, theatre and sport.”94 While worthy enough, such
diversions cannot by their nature offer the children what Fanon’s patients
were claiming in a displaced and perhaps even psychotic fashion: the right
to be seen as political subjects. Instead, their actions only attracted the gaze
of the police and their auxiliaries, the psychiatrists, a dehumanized form of
their desire to be recognized.
In 2007, the Finnish video artist Eije Liisa Ahtila created a six- screen
installation entitled Where Is Where?, which dramatized Fanon’s text as a
fifty-three-minute film. Four screens showed the dramatization, while two
others, placed out of the room, showed newsreel footage of a French mas-
sacre like that at Rivet. It was therefore impossible to see the entire “film,”
or perhaps Where Is Where? can be seen as a challenge to the concept of
“film” in the digital-video era. In her account of this project, Ahtila de-

260 Chapter Six
figure 51. “o ne dAy We deCided to kill hi M,”
froM eiJe - liisA AhtilA , WHere is WHere? (2007),
MArion goodMAn gA llery, n eW york .

scribed how she began by writing a script that incorporated Fanon’s words
into a poetic drama, revolving around what she calls “words, death, space
and time.”95 Language implies death that negates space and time, restored
by the specificity of words to time and place. In the four-screen main space
of the piece, a Finnish woman, known as the Poet, has a series of meetings
with Death, dressed in the conventional black cowl and holding a scythe.
She then finds Algeria literally coming through the walls of her comfort-
able Helsinki apartment as an allegorical space of death. The rather kitsch
magic realism of these scenes and those of a mythic “Algeria” shadowed by
death contrast with the cinematic realism of the later scenes from Fanon’s
case study (see fig. 51). In a sense, the Helsinki scenes prepare the viewer
for what is to come, which dominates the experience. The overlap of space
and time culminates with the manifestation of the two Algerian boys in
the Poet’s deserted swimming pool, sitting in a small rowing boat. Looking
lost and alone, the boys have become Algerian migrants, representative of
the migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers whose presence is challenging
the homogeneity of white Europe. The space was darkened for the screen-
ings, but you were in no sense immobile like the spectator in a theater. As
you turned from screen to screen to see the action, you became a vigilant
soldier, aware that what there is to see exceeds your capacity to monitor it.
The implied viewer is by implication, therefore, European or in the place
of the European. Consequently, the visitor experiences no sense of a right
to look, let alone the traditional dominance of the cinematic spectator. If

Antifascist Neorealisms 261
there is such a place, it can only be that of the artist. Yet given its length,
Where Is Where? is more than just a video installation, being intentionally
closer to the immersive experience of classic cinema. If narrative cinema
replicated the experience of dreaming, Ahtila’s piece was closer to that of
the nightmare or hallucination.
This imagined clash of realisms can be interestingly counterpointed with
the recent novel Fanon (2008) by the African American novelist John Edgar
Wideman, which used the same scene involving the two Algerian boys as a
central moment. It was inspired by a chance meeting between Wideman’s
mother and Fanon, while she was a nurse in a hospital in Bethesda, Mary-
land, where he was being treated for his ultimately fatal leukemia. Wide-
man’s novel is a complicated piece of writing, deliberately hard to follow,
featuring both a character called John Edgar Wideman and his brother, who
has been imprisoned for murder, as the writer’s own sibling has been. Fur-
ther, like the actual Wideman, the fictional Wideman has lost his nephew,
the son of his imprisoned brother, to murder at the age of fifteen. Another
layer in the novel contains a character Thomas, who is writing a book about
Fanon in a book written by Wideman. These complicated changes of autho-
rial voice place the engagement with Fanon behind a “mask,” explicitly in
imitation of Black Skin, White Masks,96 as if he cannot be directly approached
precisely because the hegemonic narrative codes of realism forbid such “un-
likely” encounters. However, the characters in Fanon are African Ameri-
cans making use of character masks, whether “white” or otherwise. Indeed,
Wideman has a country house in France, emphasizing the country’s domi-
nant place in the modern imagination, but also a practice that reads “white,”
even if a residence in Paris might be read as “black,” given the long-term
African diaspora presence in the city. As Wideman’s musing continues, “it
becomes clear that Fanon is not about stepping back, standing apart, analyz-
ing and instructing others but about identifying with others.”97
In a striking change of voice, Thomas then shifts his proposed novel into
a would-be screenplay for a film to be set in the African American neigh-
borhoods of Pittsburgh, which he pitches at great length to none other than
Jean-Luc Godard in a distinctively “black” voice. In the novel Godard is
imagined to retort: “Images are slaves, prisoners. Images kidnapped, copy-
righted, archived, cloned. Property” (80). Nonetheless, Wideman proposes
a re-creation of the same scene from The Wretched of the Earth as that visual-
ized by Ahtila: the killing of the French child. Only in this case it is to be
set in counterpoint with Homewood, Pittsburgh, an underprivileged Afri-

262 Chapter Six
can American neighborhood. The imagined film opens with a bird’s- eye
view of the corner of Frankstown and Homewood, placed above a “crawl”
of Fanon’s text, which quickly dissolves into a re- creation of the scene (113–
14). Dissolve back to Homewood, where a teenager, the same age as his
murdered nephew, Omar, stares at Mason’s bar, watched in turn by Wide-
man’s elderly mother from her assisted-living apartment as a “sign” on the
“grid” of streets below. The teenager waits and watches for a parent who
seems unlikely to emerge, placed in the streets not because of a revolution,
but because a social order has collapsed. The only person left to care for
this child—and teenagers, reviled as they are, are children—is a disabled
senior citizen, who can offer only her benevolence. The disjunctured chain
of looking performed here neither protects nor prevents. In this context,
Wideman wonders, “Where do you go if someone thinks of you as dead”
(116), rhyming with Ahtila’s questions “When you die where are you? And
where is where?” There is a section break, indicated by an asterisk, and it
emerges that the teenager has been shot and killed (120). A long reminis-
cence from Wideman’s mother about the decline of the area culminates in
her account of the murder, which she had heard but not seen, and her wit-
nessing of the police and family approaching the scene. Death negates the
difference between Helsinki and Pittsburgh, but the colonial difference of
“Algeria” restores time and place. Both the video piece and the novel present
the Algerian experience as a direct intervention into their very different
present experiences, one in the comfort of Helsinki and the other in the
impoverished suburbs of post-industrial Pittsburgh. Where Ahtila finds the
history of Algeria floating in her pool in uniformly white Helsinki, Wide-
man sees a parallel between colonial Algeria and what is happening today
in segregated Homewood with its 96 percent African American population.
Both see that there is an “Algeria” that marks the border between European
space and that of the immigrant; and white U.S. space from African Ameri-
can space. Ahtila claims that death takes away time, leaving only space.
What is left behind is the ghost or the specter. For Jacques Derrida, himself
Algerian, the ghost is that which sees us but which we do not see: “It is still
evening, it is always nightfall along the ‘ramparts,’ on the battlements of an
old Europe at war. With the other and with itself.”98 The ramparts are those
of Elsinore, in Denmark, a place now associated with its reductive cartoon-
ing of Muhammad as an assertion of the rights of old Europe. Algeria is one
name for that space that the old Cold War alliance cannot escape on either
side of the Atlantic, a space that returns.

Antifascist Neorealisms 263
figure 52. rAChidA (dJouAdi iBtisseM),
in racHiDa (2002)

In Algeria itself, civil war returned as an uncanny double of the FLN ’s

war against the French, as represented in Yamina Bachir’s film Rachida
(2002). Bachir studied at the National Algerian Film School, first estab-
lished by Vautier. Rachida was Bachir’s first film, made in the face of what
she calls the “dismemberment of the film industry” in Algeria, after the
elections of 1991. It evokes the collapse of Algerian civil society by means
of the story of a young woman teacher named Rachida (Djouadi Ibtissem)
(see fig. 52). Bachir developed her idea from an incident in which antigov-
ernment militants tried to compel a teacher to carry a bomb into her own
school. When she refused, she was shot, as is Rachida in the film. The film
then imagines what might have happened next, as Rachida goes into hiding
in the countryside, having survived being shot, for fear that her assailants
would return to kill her. At first understandably depressed, Rachida returns
to teaching and is attending a wedding when the local version of the terror-
ists (the term used in the film) attack and devastate the community. Bachir
created what she calls “a ‘perfect’ victim” as the center of her protest, and
the film suffers somewhat from this idealization. At the same time, the film
was made against the background of censorship; thus, for example, when a
young woman is raped in the village and soldiers come to investigate, her
distress at the fact that her attackers also wore military uniforms is the only
hint the film can offer to suggest the army, as well as the “terrorists,” is com-
mitting outrages. The film gains in texture when seen against its predeces-
sor, The Battle of Algiers. Early in Rachida, the television news declares that
“terrorists attacked a man in the Casbah,” evoking the French propaganda

264 Chapter Six
of the 1950s, just as a bomb-making scene recalls the similar FLN activity
in The Battle of Algiers. However, in Rachida a woman has to be coerced into
carrying a bomb, whereas in The Battle of Algiers there were many volunteers.
In another scene, Rachida watches a television news report of the murder
of several monks, an incident recently made into a popular French film,
Des hommes et des dieux [Of gods and men] (2010, dir. Xavier Beauvois). By
contrast, Hors la loi [Outside the law] (2010, dir. Rachid Bouchareb) caused
widespread controversy for its story of three brothers who witnessed the
Sétif massacre in 1945 and were drawn into the revolutionary struggle in
different ways. As an indication of French revisionism on the Algerian war,
in part caused by the palpable difficulties of the postcolonial state, there was
even questioning as to whether Sétif had really been a massacre.
While there is a postcolonial state of denial in France concerning Alge-
ria, Bachir was trying to evoke what is repeatedly called in her film a mutual
“culture of hate” operating between all sides in the country itself. Rachida
needs to hide not from a colonial army but from her own neighbors, cre-
ating such great anxiety that she thinks she is going mad. A local woman
doctor in the village diagnoses “post-traumatic psychosis,” but adds that the
“whole country suffers from it.” Rachida later dreams that she will be assas-
sinated by terrorists in the village in a very realistic scene that emerges as a
dream only in its aftermath. The level of persistent psychic damage in Alge-
ria depicted in Rachida reinforces the importance and necessity of the return
of Fanon’s case studies in The Wretched of the Earth in Wideman’s and Ahtila’s
projects. Indeed, the inaugural conference of the Société Franco-Algérien
de Psychiatrie, in 2003, heard case studies that Robert Keller, who attended,
described as “near replications” of Fanon’s from fifty years earlier.99 Fanon’s
clinic in Blida is now within a center of the Groupe Islamique Armée, and
the facilities are described as ruins, with the wards reduced to a “warehouse
of bodies.” During the revolutions of 2011, it was noticeable that people in
Tunisia and Egypt repeatedly referred to losing their sense of fear. Once
that fear had been set aside, it became possible to imagine a very different
future. One of the most damaging legacies of the civil war in Algeria has
been that people still seem unable or unwilling to set aside that fear. To be
fair, if one considers the impact of under three thousand casualties on 9/11
in the United States, and then bear in mind how much smaller Algeria is, it
is perhaps not surprising that after so much death, people are not yet ready
for another experiment.
The village life evoked by Bachir has more texture than the simple peas-

Antifascist Neorealisms 265
ant scenario sketched by Ahtila. The one public telephone in the village,
for instance, is constantly used by Khaled, a young man who is in love with
Hadjar, whose father, Hassen, will not sanction the match because Khaled
is too poor. Hadjar’s arranged marriage ends the film, a counterpoint to
the love match seen in The Battle of Algiers. In Pontecorvo’s film, the FLN
official apologizes for the simple ceremony, but evokes the possibility of
a transformed future that Rachida suggests is still yet to come. The violent
scenes are shot with a hand-held camera, giving the “realistic” jerky feel
pioneered by Pontecorvo, but there are also long interludes in the separate
spaces of the women, from the courtyard to the baths. Here the lyricism of
Ahtila’s Algeria is matched by reveries such as one evoked by the scent of
figs. But Bachir brings us back to earth when in a subsequent scene a local
man harasses Rachida, gesturing with a carrot and saying he can smell the
scent of a woman. There are only two moments in the film that step out-
side the realism sustained by terror. As Rachida is teaching in the village,
she sees a bubble floating near her head. She turns and all the children in
her class are blowing bubbles at her (see plate 10). This moment is recalled
at the very end of the film when, in what Bachir calls a Brechtian moment,
Rachida dresses in her clothes from Algiers, sets her hair loose, and heads
through the devastated village toward the school in order to teach. Several
children emerge from nowhere, and they sit down in a class held in a van-
dalized room. Strikingly (for a Western viewer), Rachida begins the class by
telling the students to take out their slates, a tool that evokes a remote past
for those in wealthier locations. Although she writes “today’s lesson” on
the board in Arabic, she does not specify a topic. Since the Atlantic revolu-
tions of the eighteenth century, the education of the working and subaltern
classes has been central to the consolidation of the right to look. Although
it proposes no solution, the ending to Rachida imagines another reality, in
which today’s lesson is always open to question, always about to be begun,
and not yet foreclosed.
While that would be a satisfying place to conclude, it would overlook
many more complex realities. Algerian schools have been the subject of
intense national controversy, first stressing Islam and Arabic, and then re-
turning to a curriculum that includes French and science. However, jour-
nalistic estimates in 2008 suggested that, although there is 70 percent liter-
acy (cited without definition), only 20 percent of eligible children attended
high school, with the majority dropping out for economic, political, or reli-
gious reasons. After forty years of independence that figure seems very low.

266 Chapter Six
During the revolutionary period, Fanon suggested that the FLN was not
paying sufficient attention to the peasantry or what he called the “lumpen-
proletariat,” meaning the dispossessed urban population, “the pimps, the
hooligans, the unemployed and all the petty criminals [who], when ap-
proached, give the liberation struggle all they have got.”100 Some of the
characters in The Battle of Algiers, for example, certainly fit this description.
Like Gramsci, Fanon saw that the revolution depended on the “sponta-
neity” of this group, but that the leading party was not thinking about
how to use that energy once independence was achieved. To put it briefly,
the FLN stressed elements of the “North” within Algeria, such as the small
urban proletariat, and did not develop a theory or practice to integrate the
“South,” the peasants and the dispossessed. Fanon’s own belief in the “new
man” that would be created by the revolution owed more to the regenera-
tion theory of the French Revolution than to modern politics and failed
to think through the practicalities of transformation, hoping instead that
nationalism (or later pan-Africanism) would simply deliver them. Algeria’s
first difficult and then disastrous post-independence history can be seen as
a working out of this failure, the internal contradiction between the FLN
leadership and those in whose name the revolution was carried out.
By the same token, in 2002, the year that Rachida was released, French
electoral politics came to a dead end when the first round of the presidential
election saw the avowed racist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had been a torturer
during the Algerian War, win through to the second round, defeating the
socialist Lionel Jospin. The choice was now between the “right extreme”
and the “extreme right,” as the queer novelist Virginie Despentes put it.101
Diagnosing a “French psychosis” that one could put alongside the Algerian
“post traumatic psychosis” discussed above, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem went fur-
ther still. He called the situation “fascist democracy,” because no criticism
of the democractic system itself was permitted. Suggesting that any proper
commitment to democracy would have led to a refusal to participate in the
second round, ending the Fifth Republic just as the Fourth Republic had
collapsed over Algeria, Kacem concluded that, in present circumstances, the
“extreme right is the real.”102 In his view, the riots of December 2005 were
perpetrated by disaffected minority youth in the French suburbs (banlieux),
who had come to understand that their lives were being carried out in what
he calls the “place of the ban” (a pun on ban, meaning “ban,” and lieu, mean-
ing “place”).103 Consistent with this analysis, Nicolas Sarkozy, who came
to prominence by describing the rioters as “racaille” [a mob], was elected

Antifascist Neorealisms 267
president of France, in 2007. Soon afterward, he was declaring in Dakar
that Africa had “not yet fully entered history.”104 This parody of Hegel has
at least had the benefit of opening and extending academic debate of de-
colonization and postcolonial theory to wider discussion. More accurately,
it might be said that a history that can account for Africa within modernity
has yet to become accepted in the West. One key element of the crisis that
is currently afflicting visuality is, then, this refusal to acknowledge the per-
sistence of imperial visuality in both its “normal” and intensified (fascist)
form. Time, that which visuality visualizes as History, is out of joint. The
effort to restore visuality has become global, leaving the nation behind as
one element among many in the pattern of global counterinsurgency.

P o s t s c r i P t: 18 m a r c h 2 011

At the time of writing, the autocratic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia have
fallen. There is open war against the people by the autocrats in Libya and
Bahrain, while Yemen seems set to be the next “hot spot” of the extraordi-
nary events of 2011. As I am working, the United Nations Security Coun-
cil has passed a resolution authorizing intervention in Libya. Safe to say,
then, that this is not over.105 By the time you read this, you will know what
will have happened, whether the dramatic events of January and February
have been forgotten as globalized capital restores business as usual, or new
forms of governance and activism have continued to emerge. Nonetheless,
whatever the outcome, and however “success” is defined and by whom, it
is clear that the entanglements of half a century of decolonization, glob-
alization, neo- colonialism, and counterinsurgency described in this chap-
ter have produced a striking challenge to the autocracies of the region.
Often “invisible” to Western audiences, in the sense that they rarely fea-
ture in news and media reporting, the oil-producing and -protecting auto-
crats have nonetheless been indispensable to neoliberal geopolitics. These
regimes operated a classic form of imperial visuality. Their classification was
simple: for or against the regime, whether divided by family ties, religion,
ethnicity, or political allegiance. Separation was effected by the traditional
means identified by Fanon, the barracks and the police station. In Tunisia,
there was one police officer for every forty citizens at the time of Ben Ali’s
fall. The Egyptian Army has over 450,000 men. Nonetheless, their regimes
fell. The “aesthetics of respect for the status quo” described by Fanon disap-
peared as young populations—it is often said that 70 percent of the region

268 Chapter Six
are under 30—networking via globalized media and interfacing with desti-
tute rural and urban underclasses, decided that nothing was worse than the
continuance of the regime.
Across the region the slogan has been, “the people demand the fall of the
regime.” There is no classification within the people, only one between the
people and the regime. The performance of “the people” has constituted a
new political subject that refuses to see or hear the regime, except when it
resigns or falls. The mobilization of the army against the police in Tunisia,
the popular resistance in Egypt against the police, and the contest in Bah-
rain for Pearl Square, culminated in the war of the state against the people
in Libya in order to sustain the authority of the autocrat. Even in Libya, no
one believes in the status quo. It is no longer right; it no longer commands
assent. The status quo can be enforced but it will be a long time before it
is once again invisibly “normal.” The security states watched the subject
populace and guarded the autocrat. Now the revolution is watching. That
is to say, the revolution is watching us and we are watching the revolu-
tion. It is also to say that there has been a certain revolution in watching,
although the casual use of “revolution” in such contexts is less convincing
now. Nonetheless, despite all injunctions to the contrary, to watch is a form
of action. The 2011 revolutions are reconfiguring the places of the political
and the everyday. It is a watching that demands to see and be seen. It has
formed a new distribution of the sensible to allow for the emergence of
a new political subject, a mobility whose characteristics are constantly up-
dating. There has been a radical reconfiguration of the attributes often asso-
ciated with the private to the public—peace, security, a sense of belonging,
and the absence of fear.
The location of this new sharing of the sensible has been the “square,”
epitomized above all by Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The square was transformed
from one of the banal “public” spaces of the thirty- year state of emergency
into a site of emergence, whose form became that of the revolution. The
“square” is not, in fact, square. It consists of a polyhedron, shaped some-
thing like a hatchet, with a central circle and a large gathering space. The
entrance used by the revolutionaries was via a checkpoint on the Kasr al-
Nil bridge, won in combat with the police on 29 January 2011.The Janu-
ary 25 movement called the square “Free Egypt,” sending up chants of
“these are the Egyptian people.” Food, medical care, and civility were all
provided. The poor, destitute, middle ranks of business, academics, law-
yers, and filmmakers were all able to recognize each other. The guards, who

Antifascist Neorealisms 269
greeted each new member of this emergent Cairo commune, as if follow-
ing the Commune of 1871, wore improvised helmets made from kitchen
bowls labeled “the government of the revolution.” Tahrir Square became
an alternative city within the city, a rival source of affiliation to the nation-
state. People lived there and treated it as a place of belonging. In popular
discourse, the interim government is held to account with the slogan “We
know the way to Tahrir Square,” a line of force that was sufficient to drive
out the Mubarak holdover prime minister Ahmed Shafiq on 3 March 2011.
In the “square,” real and virtual, people are enacting wakeful watching: an
active form, wide-awake, concentrating and alert with intent. No longer
subject to the police, the people move around, circulate, and are very aware
that there is something to see here. People read newspapers, talk, rest, but
above all they are present: alive, in the present, attesting to their presence,
refusing to depart. It is simply the sense that something has snapped into
focus for the first time in ages. This watching is live and alive—it is of the
present but an expanded present in which certain moments are again alive,
not as specters or echoes, but as actors in the new network. We shall always
know the way to Tahrir Square, even if we have not quite got there yet.

270 Chapter Six
 Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint
Pan’s Labyrinth

The most successful attempt to frame antifascist neorealism in the present

moment has come from Guillermo del Toro, a Mexican film director work-
ing on a Spanish subject.1 The remarkable El Laberinto del Fauno, or Pan’s
Labyrinth (2006), unexpectedly found a means to counter the hegemonic
violence of our own time by mixing a specific moment of antifascist resis-
tance with archetypes from fairytales and digital special effects created for
horror fantasy films. The film is not a template for antifascism, but an in-
stance of it that crosses national boundaries both in its production and its
narrative. Pan’s Labyrinth begins by setting the film as a retelling, a reinscrip-
tion of history. Set in 1944, the film recovers an often forgotten resistance
to Franco that continued until 1948. While France was still occupied, the
resistance might have been taking comfort from the invasion of Italy and
the D-Day landings, hoping for an extension of the war to Spain. Our first
sight is of the dying child Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) at the heart of the laby-
rinth (see plate 11). At once the time reverses, the blood flows back into her,
and the camera enters her eye, the one eye capable of seeing the two reali-
ties of the film, that of the fascist state and that of the netherworld, which
are immediately in tension (see fig. 53). That tension is visualized as blind-
ness by means of a whiteout. In the cinematic context, this focus on the eye
cannot but recall Luis Buñuel’s famous scene, in Un Chien andalou (1929), de-
picting a woman’s eye being cut with a razor. The eye is not visuality, we are
figure 53. still of o feliA’s eye ,
froM pan’s labyrintH (2006)

reminded, either in the age of mechanical reproduction or in our present

digital cinema. We cut (in the editorial sense) from that blindness into the
ruined city of Belchite, a densely overdetermined site of memory. It was the
site of a key battle in the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, when the Republican
Army launched a counterattack on the eastern front, seeking both to re-
take Zaragoza and to distract Franco in the north. As well as regular troops,
members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were involved in the conflict, in-
cluding some African American soldiers reported on by Langston Hughes
for a Baltimore newspaper. The town was taken and then lost, repeatedly
bombed, and left in ruins by Franco as a memorial to Republican brutality.
It remains in that state today.
The ruins have become a film set on a number of occasions, such as for
Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1987). In 1989, the Spanish
artist Francesc Torres incorporated Belchite into his controversial installa-
tion Belchite/South Bronx, which merged the damaged built environment
and social fabric from these two locations, but at fifty years distance. While
the South Bronx has to a certain degree recovered, Torres has recently
documented the forensic excavation of the mass graves of the victims of
Spanish fascism, which are only now being documented, with great contro-
versy. Indeed, Franco’s self- declared “Crusade” to conquer Spain, with its
evocation of the Reconquest and the Inquisition, sounds less archaeological
now than it might have done in 1989, when the ancien régimes of Europe
were falling all around. Given that the narrative departs from here, it is clear
that the film is an exploration of what one might call the historical present.

272 Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint
figure 54. still of the fAun,
froM pan’s labyrintH (2006)

Ofelia finds and explores a counterreal to the world of violent domina-

tion in which she lives. Her name is of course intensely suggestive, as the
madwoman of Hamlet’s desire, but the madness here is political, not per-
sonal. Ofelia is accompanying her widowed mother (Ariadna Gil) to the
mountains where her new stepfather (Sergi López), a captain in Franco’s
army, is fighting the Republicans. She likes to read fairytales, and, guided
by an insect that will turn out to be magical, she finds an ancient statue that
visually evokes a similar figure in the Spanish film classic Spirit of the Beehive
(dir. Victor Erice, 1973). In that film, Ana (Ana Torent), a seven-year-old
girl, creates her own fantasy world in the post–civil war Spain of 1940, after
being intrigued by watching Frankenstein. Films, del Toro seems to suggest,
are our present-day mythology, which is not to say that they are without
meaning or politics. Ofelia discovers the existence of a netherworld, ac-
cessed by the labyrinth of the title. It was here that she was born as a prin-
cess named Moana, but she later ran away, like a latter- day Persephone, to
experience the world of the living. Ofelia meets a faun (Doug Jones), who
reveals this story to her and sets her a series of tasks that she must accom-
plish in order to return (see fig. 54). The faun is the Pan of the title, the
Greek god of shepherds, but also the originator of “panic,” the fear of open
space, that has morphed into the “moral panics” that so characterize modern
authoritarian regimes. The character was created using animatronics, inter-
facing a “real” actor with costume and computer effects. The present-day
viewer is taken to be able to “read” the meeting of this composite with a
“human” character without difficulty. There are, then, at least three com-

Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint 273
peting layers of reference within Pan’s Labyrinth: the specific historical ref-
erences, a set of parallel associations with mythology and archetypes, and,
finally, carefully placed allusions to cinematic classics. This density of refer-
ence, whether fully understood or not, is part of the film’s compelling feel,
making it impossible not to watch.
For example, within the diegesis of the film, the netherworld is clearly
not “real” in the material sense, nor is it the same space as the above-ground
experience of fascism: but it is not pure fantasy. Events in the netherworld
correlate to those experienced in the fascist world and interface with them
to material and embodied effect. The faun gives Ofelia a mandrake to place
under the bed of her mother, who is having a complicated pregnancy, and it
breaks her fever, leading to her recovery, much to the surprise of the doctor.
However the Captain discovers Ofelia’s intervention, and he blames Ofelia’s
reading for her belief in magic, just as certain Enlightenment thinkers wor-
ried that reading novels would corrupt women’s morals. The mandrake dies
in the wood fire, where the Captain throws it. Although it is undecidable
whether this would have been visible to people other than Ofelia in the fas-
cist world of the film, we the audience see it and are moved by it. Further,
the mandrake’s demise quickly entails the death of Ofelia’s mother in child-
birth. This archetypal narrative sets up subsequent confrontations between
the Captain and, first, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), the undercover resistance
liaison who works as a servant in the barracks, and, then, Ofelia. Even after
she has been detected, Mercedes taunts the Captain that she was able to
smuggle goods and information under his nose because, as a woman, she
was “invisible” to him, a consequence of fascism’s segregation by gender. He
repeats this mistake by dismissing the guard as he prepares to torture her,
which allows her to attack him with her concealed knife. Hollywood’s stan-
dard imaginary cannot think past depicting a “good” violence to counter
the “bad” violence of the irrational other. But del Toro shows the quiet
refusal of the doctor to participate in fascist torture, to the bafflement of
the Captain, who repeatedly asks why he did not obey. The doctor replies,
“Obeying—for people like you that’s all there is.” Authority here does not
authorize and does not carry legitimacy. In 1944, countless thousands went
to their deaths at the hands of fascists with a quiet determination to remain
in control in a world gone mad. The Captain shoots the doctor, as his logic
dictates, but the moral economy of the netherworld has intruded into the
fascist space and is set to disrupt the order of violence. By this time, we are

274 Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint
prepared to accept this fantasy of justice because we have already seen the
materiality of the netherworld in operation.
Perhaps the most incisive moment of Pan’s Labyrinth is the end that is also
its beginning: the death of Ofelia. A modern Antigone, she sacrifices herself
to the overweening Law represented by the Captain (who would be equiva-
lent to Creon in Sophocles’s tragedy), but in this case she saves her brother’s
life rather than burying him. As a child and as a woman under fascism, she
is twice over a minor, but here she achieves the ability to choose before the
law and to represent. Her passing marks the culmination of both antifascist
narratives. In the world of fascist domination, the forces in the border out-
post have suffered a defeat, but Franco will remain in power, as the audience
knows, for over thirty years. The victory is twice bitter-sweet, for it has cost
the life of Ofelia without leading to the hoped-for better future. Further,
if Ofelia has regained her place in the netherworld, it comes at the cost
both of her human life and of her resistance to patriarchy.2 For the nether-
world is the domain of her father, the king, and her resistance to her step-
father ends up reinscribing her in patriarchal relations, whether willingly or
not. For some, this conclusion is a disappointment, even a relapse. Another
view might see it as a corollary of antifascist realism. Gramsci argued that
one of the reasons that the subaltern classes could not be fully absorbed
into the dominant hegemony, and thus retained the potential for revolu-
tion, was their folklore. Folklore maintained an “unstable and fluctuating”
element in the nation-state that provided the potential for a spontaneous
uprising, the “great ‘undoing.’”3 It could offer something significant to the
organic intellectual, who was charged with overcoming the “segregation”
between North and South: “It is necessary to represent concretely to his
fantasy those human beings as beings who live and work daily, to represent
their sorrows, the sadness of a life they are forced to live.”4 A tragic realism,
then, but within the frame of fantasy—that sounds like Pan’s Labyrinth. The
frame of folklore nonetheless tended, as Gramsci also acknowledged, to the
mythology of patriarchy. Think here of Freud’s peculiar fantasy, in Totem
and Taboo, of the murder of the “primal father” that inaugurates the social
itself, understood as the ur- example of magical thinking. Freud held that
the so-called primitive belief in magic recurred in so- called modern chil-
dren especially insofar as the totem animal represents the father. You could
read Pan’s Labyrinth that way if you wanted. I prefer to think that the primal
father fantasy, the construction of the child as primitive, even the subjuga-

Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint 275
tion by the male gaze are all really existing moments that are in themselves
subject to the division of the sensible that sustains the possibility of visuality
as a system of power.
Pan’s Labyrinth is, then, a key example of the tension between the right
to look and the law of the gaze, which it is prone to become. That is to say,
the subaltern revolt tends to become reified as what Gramsci called the
modern Prince, or the centralized, hierarchical political party, a form of
the police technique that is Caesarism. If we rely on folklore, popular cul-
ture, call it what you will, to do the undoing of visuality, the regime of the
Hero, then the final undoing, that which folklore retreats from as its condi-
tion of possibility, is that of undoing itself. The fear of undoing has been the
greatest motivator of visuality, beginning with the great undoing of Saint-
Domingue into Haiti by the revolt of the enslaved, which persuaded Britain
to abolish slavery rather than risk a viral undoing of the mystical founda-
tions of sovereignty. The specter of emancipation in Jamaica and Chartism
in Britain prompted Carlyle to reassert the power of mysticism as visuality
over that of unbinding. Without proposing a last, the first undoing, as radi-
cal movements have known and then disavowed for generations, must be
the frame of the national that so effectively lends itself to the domination
of the police. In short, the mystical regime of visuality can be undone by
magic, as long as the next thing magic does is undo itself.

276 Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint
 seven

Global Counterinsurgency
and the Crisis of Visuality

The first, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman
and the commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which
they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, some-
thing that is alien to its true nature.
—Karl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), quoted by Col. Daniel S. Roper,
“Global Counterinsurgency”

Politics is the continuation of war by other means.

—Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”

The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.
—Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

Visuality was a technique for waging war appropriated as a means to jus-

tify authority as the imagining of history. The end of the Cold War, in 1989
might have been expected to create a postvisuality era. Instead, the global
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA ) has extended and transformed visu-
ality, using digital technology to pursue nineteenth-century tactical goals.
The “small wars” of imperial revolt, contrasted to the large wars against
the national armies of other colonial powers, have been digitally upgraded
into a global insurgency that requires a matching global counterinsur-
gency. It should be said that from the decolonial perspective, the Cold War
was always already a counterinsurgency, from Algeria to Indochina, Latin
America, and now the Middle East. Classifying a conflict, as Clausewitz
emphasized, was the first task of the leader and therefore the first step of
visuality. As an index of the interaction of the first iteration of visuality
theory and its current intensification as global counterinsurgency, Clause-
witz’s passage was cited by Colonel Daniel S. Roper, director of the U.S.
Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, himself commenting
on then British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s assertion, in 2007, that the defi-
nition of a global war against insurgency was the first task in winning that
war. By defining counterinsurgency as an existential struggle, the stage is set
to ensure that “they” must die so that “we” may live. This “asymmetric war-
fare” is visualized as the Darwinian “struggle for life,” or, in Roper’s words,
as a way “to preserve and promote the way of life of free and open societies
based on the rule of law, defeat terrorist extremism and create a global en-
vironment inhospitable to extremists.”1 Foucault’s assertion that politics is
war by other means is now policy. It has entailed the adoption of popula-
tion control as military tactics. Counterinsurgency manages populations,
not individuals, being “a population- centered approach, instead of one fo-
cused primarily, if not exclusively, on the insurgents.”2 Achille Mbembe
has argued that such controls in the context of war should be considered
“necropolitics,” a question of who shall live and who shall die, entailing
“the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction
of human bodies and populations.”3 Mbembe derives the genealogy of “sover-
eign right to kill” from slavery and colonial imperialism, where it could act
with impunity and without rules. Expressed in today’s military format, this
becomes the mantra of counterinsurgency: “clear, hold and build,” meaning
remove insurgents from a locality using lethal force, sustain that expulsion
by physical means such as separation walls, and then build neoliberal gover-
nance in the resulting space of circulation. Counterinsurgency classifies and
separates by force to produce an imperial governance that is self-justifying
because it is held to be “right” a priori and hence aesthetic. This governance
is what I shall call “necropolitical regimes of separation.”
The goal of such governance is not to produce disciplined, docile bodies,
so much as to manage what Deleuze called the “society of control.” In the
parlance of counterinsurgency, this terrain is known as “culture,” sometimes
even defined and described using poststructuralist and cultural-studies theo-
rists—including Deleuze. This post-panoptic imaginary operates a control

278 Chapter Seven
that seeks to separate the “host population” from the “insurgent,” as if quar-
antining the former from infection by the latter. This necropolitics is in-
visible to the insurgent, with no expectation of reforming or disciplining that
person, hence the sense that it is post-panoptic. For Bentham’s Panopticon
was designed above all to reform and improve the inmate, pupil, or factory
worker, while post-panoptic visuality centers on population control. De-
spite an apparent but carefully stage-managed success in Iraq, which seems
to be coming unstuck after the failed elections of 2010, global counterinsur-
gency has struggled to deliver basic services and public safety in its key areas
of operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen. These quantitative
shortcomings are perhaps the corollary of the qualitative failure to define
the practice of counterinsurgency beyond the classification and separation
of the insurgent. Precisely because this is the era of globalization, character-
ized by transnational migration and electronic media, the digitized “border”
between insurgent and host population consistently fails to hold. In the re-
sulting crisis, the very pattern that counterinsurgency is trying to sustain is
unclear: a centralized nation, a client state, or a global market? Although the
U.S. military continue to use a moralized rhetoric of nation-building, their
practical administration of counterinsurgency has significantly shifted to
the management of disaster by means of targeted killing of insurgents using
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV ), Special Forces, and private contractors.
Ironically, perhaps, the Bush-era pursuit of governmentality in regions like
Afghanistan has yielded to Obama’s necropolitics, in which killing enemy
leaders is the priority, epitomized by the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The long-standing project of defining the social from the perspective of
militarized visuality has been deliberately made incoherent. Today’s tech-
nologically mediated means of material visualization do not generate in-
formation about the presence of the human visualizer, if indeed there even
is one. If we look at the drawings made by Bagetti for Napoleon, and other
such battlefield visualizations of the Clausewitz era, the viewpoint of the
commanding general was critical to the technical production of the map.
By contrast, a satellite image, or one taken from a UAV , tells us nothing at
all about those who wanted the visualization made. In a somewhat un-
canny fashion, the Medusa effect, which I ascribed to Carlyle’s concept of
visuality, has now found a technological analogy. By the Medusa effect, I
intended to convey visuality’s politics of making the separation between
autocrat and ruled so permanent that it was, as it were, set in stone. A new
military device known as the “Gorgon Stare” has been devised to generate

Global Counterinsurgency 279
twelve separate visual feeds from one UAV platform, covering four square
kilometers of territory. Each feed can be viewed separately and concur-
rently. While the feeds are low-grade, they can be used to direct the full-
motion video feed to specific targets.4 With perhaps surprising satire, the
device is named after the mythical Gorgon, whose castrating stare turned
people to stone. It is intended in part, then, to intimidate and to make it
seem that whatever insurgents might do is visible and will be seen. De-
humanized weapons are certainly fear-inducing, for, in Thomas Pynchon’s
famous phrase, “a screaming comes across the sky.”5 Journalistic reports in-
dicate a similar anger in present- day Pakistan, where airborne drone attacks
have increased such that as many as eighteen were launched in a few days
after the failed Times Square bombing of May 2010. However, it was pre-
cisely such attacks that some consider to have motivated the attempt to
target New York in the first place, forming a familiar asymmetric feed-
back loop: increased remote attacks of increased sophistication provoke in-
creased attacks against U.S. civilians using improvised and nonmilitary ma-
terials, like fireworks. Any such attack generates further reprisals on both
sides. Further, the chaos produced by post-panoptic visuality is its condi-
tion of existence. Whereas Carlyle offered the Hero and his visualization
as the only defense against chaos, the counterinsurgent requires chaos, or
at least its possibility, as the means of authorization in all senses. Its gambit
is simply that civilian governance lacks both the authority and the imagi-
nation to resolve any of the crises that generate the need for counterinsur-
gency. Increasingly, the result has been to create the seemingly contradic-
tory practice of counterinsurgent governance, the necropolitical regimes of
separation.
It is at the borders of the United States and European Union that these
asymmetric flows and counterflows are worked out domestically. Other
modes of separation and distinction, such as the color line, are mobilized
by this intensification because they are already there. For example, the U.S.-
Mexico border is a racialized distinction, just like that between “Europe”
and “Africa” on Spain’s southern coasts and islands. Domestic segregation
is complexly interactive with the global counterinsurgency. It also visual-
izes its tasks as “to clear” and “to hold,” which is to say to classify residents
(as insurgent/illegal or “legitimate” resident) and separate them by physi-
cal means. In the United States, the domestic use of counterinsurgency
became apparent in the response to Hurricane Katrina. In a (now deleted)
article that appeared in the Army Times on 2 September 2005, Brig. Gen.

280 Chapter Seven
figure 55. still froM WHen tHe leVees broke :
a requiem in Four acts (dir. sP ike lee , 2006)

Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force,
declared, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. . . . We’re going
to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get
this city under control.” The journalist understood this to mean that the
National Guard would be combating “an insurgency in the city.”6 In Spike
Lee’s powerful documentary of the events, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem
in Four Acts (2006), several sequences demonstrate the practical consequence
of this division of the sensible. We see then governor of Louisiana Kathleen
Blanco histrionically announcing the deployment of the National Guard
into the city with the remark that they have just returned from Iraq and
will shoot to kill. We see a reporter for the BBC , usually the most decorous
of journalists, quivering with rage as law enforcement near the Superdome
surrounded one man accused of looting while dozens of others struggled
through the by then polluted waters unassisted. We see Lt. Gen. Russel
Honoré arriving in New Orleans on Friday, 2 September 2005, telling the
soldiers, “Put those damn weapons down”—and their palpable reluctance
to do so (see fig. 55). We realize that for the past four days U.S. troops have
routinely been training their weapons on their own citizens. Ironically, the
historian Douglas Brinkley, featured in Lee’s film, reports that the terror-
ism security apparatus slowed the Department of Homeland Security’s re-
sponse because of all the background checks.7 This adaptation of domestic
politics to the regime of counterinsurgency has since gone viral. Opponents
of gay marriage in the United States refer to such couples as “domestic ter-
rorists.” High-school principals describe their work in inner- city schools

Global Counterinsurgency 281
as “classic counterinsurgency.” Border patrols in Nogales, Arizona, follow
the counterinsurgency mantra “clear, hold, build” as the guiding light for
their enforcement of immigration law. In April 2010, a strikingly uncon-
stitutional state law was passed in Arizona, requiring police to pursue those
who appeared to be illegal immigrants and criminalizing any immigrant
at large without documentation. While the law may well be invalidated, it
was widely agreed that it was passed for “domestic” political reasons within
the state. The intent is to intensify the racialized divide between the citizen
and the undocumented migrant worker, creating a nomadic border that can
be instantiated whenever a “citizen” looks at a person suspected of being a
migrant. Indeed, the UAV is now widely used in cross-border surveillance,
flying first on the border and more recently in Mexico itself.8 British police
have advanced plans for the extensive use of drones as domestic surveil-
lance tools.9 Test flights in Liverpool produced a first arrest in February,
2010, only for the drones to be grounded by the Civil Aviation Authority
for lacking the requisite license.10
These imbrications of classic population-management discourses, from
sexuality to education and immigration, with low- intensity asymmetric
urban warfare both produces, and is a product of, the crisis in visuality. In
1990, Deleuze emphasized that Foucault had only been able to perceive the
constraints of the disciplinary society because they were coming undone
as the society of control took over. The coils of the serpent Leviathan, the
state and its population management, had so extensively succeeded in driv-
ing Marx’s “old mole” of class struggle underground that population could
now be managed, rather than disciplined. The corollary here is that visu-
ality itself has today become “visible” at a point of intensification in which
it can no longer fully contain that which it seeks to visualize. That is to say,
chaos is now not the alternative to visuality but its condition of necessity.
The so-called visual turn in the humanities since 1989 is, then, a symptom-
atic response to first the neovisuality of the RMA , which followed the end
of the Cold War, and now the intensified crisis of that visuality. Take the
axiomatic phrase “Move on, there’s nothing to see here,” which I have bor-
rowed from Rancière. Under conditions of (counter)insurgency, everyone
knows that not to be the case. In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents and sui-
cide bombers have often dressed in military and police uniforms to further
confuse relations of visuality. Circulation itself becomes dangerous when
roadside explosive devices and marketplace suicide bombings are the tac-
tics of choice. The Chinese artist Cai Guo- Qiang visualized this contra-

282 Chapter Seven
diction in his spectacular sculpture Nothing to See Here (2006). It consists of
a sixteen-foot-long fiberglass crocodile, impaled with bamboo spears and
hundreds of “sharp objects” confiscated by Chinese transport police, such
as forks, chopsticks, and scissors. The confiscations allow the passenger to
keep circulating, but perhaps we are all missing the five-hundred-pound
crocodile in the room. With his trademark subtlety, Cai makes us question
whether the crocodile is the enemy insurgent or perhaps the body-politic
of our own society, so enmired in “security” as to have lost a sense of pur-
pose. As the economic crisis has shown, circulation is not always possible
and is certainly not always an answer as to what to do next. If that circula-
tion is by car, as in the French circulation, meaning “traffic,” then it adds to
the disaster of climate change as well. Caught between the car crash, the
car bomb, and the fossil fuel–generated climate crisis, it seems impossible
to know which way to turn.

m i l i ta r y r e vo lu t i o n s

One index of the present crisis is the difficulty of periodization. The claim
that the entire planet is a potential space for insurgency and thus requires
a waiting counterinsurgent force indicates the attempt to update and in-
tensify the Cold War. In this view, if globalization has again become the
“global civil war” that was the Cold War in networked form, or has cre-
ated a new state of “permanent war,” then war is global politics.11 At the
beginning of the Cold War, President Harry Truman denounced the “ter-
ror” of the Soviet Union, creating a vocabulary that came readily to hand
post- 9/11. The military-industrial complex was designed to resist regression
into its own colonial past of slavery and to maintain the present condition
of “freedom.” U.S. National Security Council doctrine held that it was “the
implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of free-
dom,” meaning that Soviet communism was slavery that must be resisted
by the free.12 This conflict was thus to be engaged wherever and whenever
it manifested itself under the rhetoric of paying any price and bearing any
burden in order for things to remain exactly the same. Under the threat of
nuclear war, as Donald Pease put it, “Hiroshima had turned the entire U.S.
symbolic system into the afterimage of a collectively anticipated spectacle
of disaster.”13 Given that there had never been a nuclear war (as opposed to
the single detonation of Hiroshima or later tests), this spectacle was para-
doxically imaginary despite its status as afterimage: a war that will have

Global Counterinsurgency 283
been. The endlessly discussed war was always in the future anterior—this
will have been the nuclear war. For Derrida, the status of nuclear war as
“fabulously textual” generated the very status of “the old words culture,
civilization . . . [and] ‘Reality.’”14 This “Reality” was understood as binary,
structural, and violent. The future that will (never) have happened was
specular but textual, generating among its multiple side effects the 1980s
era of “reading images.”
The counterinsurgency theory launched at the end of the Cold War as
the RMA , however, has always already happened and is always to be visu-
alized as part of culture. Its academic creature was visual culture. Military
theorists presented the emergence of “information warfare” as the twelfth
in a series of military revolutions that began with Napoleon, following the
genealogy of visuality. This is myth-making of the first order, but its use of
actual historical experience within a framework long dedicated to making
“history” tell the story of the West allows it to have the aura of reality.
The term revolution was not used idly. For the military have been devoted
readers of revolutionary and guerilla theory ranging from the French and
Indian Wars of colonial North America to Mao and the Zapatistas. Indeed,
the RMA is widely considered to have been developed first in the Soviet
Union, where it was also known as the “scientific-technical revolution.”
The RMA was designed to give the military the advantages of speed and sur-
prise usually held by guerilla and revolutionary groups. Consequently, the
new mode of war was said to involve “dispersed ground forces,” with the re-
sult that “conventional ground operations come to resemble high intensity
guerilla warfare.”15 Of course, the more effective guerilla warfare is, the less
visible its activities are to the opposing forces. The goal of this mode of in-
visible war was to establish a permanent dominance in command, control,
communications, intelligence (C3I ), and information that would in turn
ensure military hegemony. U.S. military planners envisaged a range of new
weaponry, such as “precision guided munitions, combat vehicles that re-
quire no fuel or ammunition, directed energy weapons launched from plat-
forms not yet invented, infrasonic weapons, and computer viruses used as
weapons.”16 In 1999, when the Defense Department budget was a relatively
modest $263 billion, analysts questioned whether expenditures of over $50
billion on these new weapons, exceeding in themselves the entire military
budget of Russia at that time, were necessary or affordable. The counter-
argument was that C3I dominance would actually reduce costs elsewhere
in land forces and other projects. Such worries seem quaint in an era of de-

284 Chapter Seven
fense budgets of some $680 billion, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, estimated as an “additional” $149 billion for 2010.17
In this incarnation, the RMA implied both new forms of weaponry and
significant use of information technology to control and destabilize the
opponent.18 This intensification in military-industrial visuality amounted to
a revolution. It shifted focus from the counterpoint of spectacular (nuclear)
warfare and its documentation and classification by aerial photography to
that of information and disinformation. The assemblage of information was
the primary tactic of colonial counterinsurgency now applied to a global
digitized warfare that had yet to be encountered but was assumed to be
imminent. The Information War strategy developed into the complemen-
tary tactics of “cyberwar” and “netwar.” In the view of John Arquilla and
David Ronfeldt, the most prominent theorists of Information War, cyber-
war involved “information-based military operations designed to disrupt an
adversary,” whereas netwar is “low intensity conflict at the societal end of
the spectrum” of war, whose polar opposite was battlefield conflict.19 The
network form of war, including but not limited to the Internet, produced
an opponent without leaders or with multiple leaders, making it hard to
combat by traditional means: “Netwar is about Hamas more than the PLO ,
Mexico’s Zapatistas more than Cuba’s Fidelistas . . . and Chicago’s Gang-
sta Disciples more than the Al Capone Gang.”20 If this sounds more like a
cultural-studies paper (remember this was 1996) than a military think-tank,
so it should.
Indeed, the RMA ’s height of ambition was to turn the military strategy
into a cultural project. In a essay published, in 1997, in the Marine Corps
Gazette, one general argued: “It is no longer enough for Marines to ‘reflect’
the society they defend. They must lead it, not politically but culturally.
For it is the culture we are defending.”21 Cultural war, with visuality play-
ing a central role, takes “culture” to be the means, location, and object of
warfare. In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell coined the slogan “War
Is Peace,” anticipating the peace-keeping missions, surgical strikes, defense
walls, and coalitions of the willing that demarcated much of the last de-
cade of the twentieth century. It was striking to observe the Israeli Defense
Force making extensive use of poststructuralist thinkers like Deleuze and
Guattari, the situationist Guy Debord, or the deconstructionist architect
Bernard Tschumi in thinking about how to fight urban counterinsurgency
warfare in the period following the al-Aqsa intifada of 2000.22 If the con-
clusion was to begin “walking through walls” as a bizarre form of nomad-

Global Counterinsurgency 285
ism, meaning literally piercing holes in building walls to gain the element
of surprise, the rhetoric of the Operational Theory Research Institute is
nonetheless disconcertingly familiar to any reader of critical theory.
The Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine (2001–6) intensified these modes of
counterinsurgency into full-blown preemptive warfare as part of their de-
clared “Global War on Terror.” While returning to the rhetorics of the Cold
War, the so-called war on terror relied on the counterinsurgency and in-
formation war tactics of the RMA , creating a new hybrid. What W. J. T.
Mitchell has called “image wars” were a central part of this doctrine, which
imagined decisively defeating its enemies in battle and in ideology. The new
techniques could not only visualize the battlefield, but also engage in it,
demoralizing the opponent by demonstrations of mastery, like the “surgi-
cal” strike with computer-guided weapons that visualize their own targets.
This moment was the high point of the RMA , quite literally its reign of ter-
ror. Like Robespierre, Bush assumed that no opposition could be tolerated
and that all measures were permitted in defense of the republic. As secre-
tary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld implemented a strategy in the invasion
of Iraq in 2003, marked by a high-tech, high-speed, lethal force capable of
accomplishing significant goals with a relatively small number of person-
nel. It was supposed to be the apex of the RMA , integrating extensive use of
“smart” weapons, dispersed ground forces, and intensive use of information
war. This “Rumsfeldism” added an additional component to the war with
the use of the image as a tactical weapon. As I have analyzed at length in
Watching Babylon, the first three years of the Iraq war (2003–5) saw images
used as weapons, designed to suppress dissent at home as well as resistance
on the ground. These uses of the image-weapon were the culmination of
a generation of Anglo-American information strategy, beginning with the
Falklands/Malvinas War, in 1982, where both images and information were
subject to extremely close state control. In Iraq, the strategy of embedding
journalists with troops often led to them identifying with the men and
women they were working with, as well as enabling control of what might
be seen. One instance of the information-war policy was the creation of
the Iraqi Media Network by the Coalition Provisional Authority, in 2003.
An initial $15 million no-bid contract was awarded before the invasion
took place, to the contractor Science Applications International Corpora-
tion (SAIC ) to generate television, radio, and a six-day-a-week newspaper.
Against all the odds, the renamed Iraqi Public Service Broadcaster did get
on the air and opened its programming with a verse from the Koran. That

286 Chapter Seven
gesture was at once cancelled by Washington, which compelled the net-
work to broadcast instead an hour-long daily show called Towards Freedom,
produced by the British government. Unsurprisingly, six months after the
war a State Department poll showed 63 percent of Iraqis watched al-Jazeera
or al-Arabiya, but only 12 percent watched the government station. The re-
sponse was to award a new $95 million no-bid contract to the Harris Cor-
poration, a manufacturer of communications equipment with no television
production experience.23

s a d da m e f f e c t s

As a metonym of the stages of image war in Iraq, I want to consider here

a variety of images of Saddam Hussein. The war began with the famous
shock-and-awe bombings, seen live on television. It is less often recalled
that the hope had been to kill Saddam Hussein with the first attack, based
on information received from Iraqi sources. It is possible that, had this at-
tack achieved its goal, the war might have unfolded differently. As it was,
repeated claims of Saddam’s death were soon refuted or forgotten, so a
substitute had to be found. In April 2003 newspapers and television-news
programs around the world led with the story of Iraqis in Baghdad de-
molishing a statue of Saddam. Such demolition of the images of kings has
a long and resonant history, most recently with the destruction of social-
ist monuments in the former Soviet bloc post-1989. Americans might re-
call the overturning of a statue of King George III in New York during
the American Revolution. This mock execution seemed to encapsulate the
symbolic power of the American victory and locate it in a series of popu-
lar revolts. And so it was intended by the unnamed marine corps colonel
and his psychological-operations team who were commended by the army
a year later for their “quick thinking.” Even at the time, the event seemed a
little too neat and the “crowd” seemed small for so symbolic an event. By
the time it became clear that the statue demolition had been an operation
of information war, the insurgency was starting to take the shine off the
supposed triumph.
Aware that events were not moving quickly enough, military intelli-
gence came under immense pressure to discover Saddam’s whereabouts in
late 2003. This necessity was one of the motivating factors that led to the
intensification of interrogations in Iraqi prisons, known as “Gitmo-izing,”
that is to say, making them like Guantánamo Bay. That need to generate

Global Counterinsurgency 287
“actionable” intelligence was directly responsible for the scandals that are
now summarized by the name “Abu Ghraib” and that have been widely ana-
lyzed. In other words, pressure for a flow of information led Americans in
Iraq, like the French in Algeria, to resort to torture in order to accelerate
results. In this context, the capture of Saddam was presented as a success-
ful effort of information war, involving the use of layered social-network
analysis by Major Brian J. Reed.24 For all the social-science nomenclature,
the tactic was largely the same as that used by the French in Algeria: reach
the head of the network from its outlying points of contact, in this case, one
of Saddam’s drivers. Again, the initial impact was strong, leading one CNN
anchor to ask, “What is there left to talk about in Iraq?” As this comment
illustrates, the capture of Saddam was meant, like the declaration “Mis-
sion Accomplished” and the demolition of the Saddam statue, to end what
Mark Danner usefully called “the war of the imagination.”25 The war had
been imagined in Rumsfeldism as a Hollywood film, with a necessarily dra-
matic and heroic ending.26 It now seemed that the scenario had changed
from a John Wayne drama with a suitably uplifting denouement into a self-
referential independent picture in which every apparent ending turned out
to be the beginning of another episode. The capture of Saddam was another
moment when the “democratic tsunami” predicted by the supporters of the
war could finally be unleashed without fear of the return of dictatorship.
It was also assumed that anticoalition resistance would soon collapse with-
out its leader. As we know, these predicted movements never took place.
The insurgency in fact accelerated dramatically after Saddam’s capture, and
the long-awaited enthusiasm for America never materialized. The endlessly
repeated video clip of Saddam being examined by a doctor presented the
United States as a benign power, concerned for the health of even its worst
enemy. It may also have been a search for poison or concealed information.
More precisely, it represented modern biopower, the use of power to sus-
tain life even and especially when the state is on the point of withdrawing
that life.
On 30 December 2006 that moment was reached, when the chronicle
of Saddam’s foretold death came to its inevitable conclusion on the gallows
(see fig. 56). What surprised and shocked the world was that it was not just
told but seen. While the cell-phone video that was “accidentally” released
was not officially authorized (meaning known to the occupation), there was
also an official version, which lacked the soundtrack. So, unlike the “dis-
ciplined” execution presumed to be normative in the West, it was always

288 Chapter Seven
figure 56. still froM the Video of the
exeCution of sA ddAM hussein

intended that the moment of Saddam’s death be seen, just as the bodies of
his sons had been shown to the world media. It no doubt seemed important
that, in the swirling, rumor-driven climate of the occupation, some form of
proof be made available. It was telling that the video was first broadcast by
the pro-occupation Fox News cable channel, known for their distribution
of officially sanctioned “leaks.” The video was always unlikely to be able to
serve as proof, given that the Internet was already awash with theories that
the person being held was one of Saddam’s doubles, that he had not been
arrested in March but six months earlier, as evidenced by some unripe dates
in one of the photographs of his so-called rat hole, and so on. Yet there was
an older impulse at work here: the desire of those appropriating sovereignty
to show that it does not adhere to the living body of the deposed sover-
eign. From the execution of Charles I, in 1649, via that of Louis XVI, in
1793, and the counterspectacle of the assassination of too many slave owners
and plantation managers to name, the new power wants to claim that au-
thority has passed from the dead sovereign and now adheres not to the heir
but to the executors. The double-meaning of executor, in which the modern
sense of legal performer has replaced the older sense of executioner, sug-
gests a legal sleight of hand following the executioner’s coup de grâce, in
which the last will and testament of the executed is rewritten by the will to
power. In this tremulous moment, the social contract that sustains authority
is made dangerously visible, and, as Foucault liked to remind us, public exe-
cutions are always therefore double-edged moments, full of potential for
riot and revolution. Sedated by the minimal contact between the U.S. state

Global Counterinsurgency 289
and those it condemns to death by automatic injection, the occupation did
not think to police its own policemen, assuming they would adhere to their
rules.
In fact, the cell-phone video of the execution was a palpable horror,
a digitized rendition of the realities of the quasi-judicial process. Abuse
was hurled at Saddam by his guards, including a chant of “Moqtada! Moq-
tada!” (referring to the Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr). One person tried
to calm matters by reminding those in attendance that this was an execu-
tion, a legally ordained withdrawal of the right to live. Ironically, this furor
seemed to break the deposed dictator out of a state of shock, provoking
him to a sardonic rebuke and to carry out his final prayers. As if sensing
that the spectacle was not progressing as intended, the executioner opened
the trapdoor of the gallows before the prayer was complete. Nothing can
mitigate what it means to have seen and heard an execution. It does not,
of course, condone or exonerate Saddam’s excesses, which were first criti-
cized by the global Left while he was still the favored creature of Anglo-
American machinations against Iran. Whatever this execution was, it failed
in its primary goals to emulate the Nuremberg trials and to both legitimize
the new regime and cast a pall over Baathism.

f r o m wa r a s c i n e m a to d i g i ta l wa r

The dissemination of the video was the culmination of the cinematic era
of the RMA , a documentation of war by its participants that was supposed
to have been seen only by those participants and those they trusted. In the
era of networked communications, it was no longer possible to contain
these images within the circle marked out by the police, beyond which we
are instructed to “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” In fact, we might
say that if what a picture wants is above all to be seen, what the digitized
image wants is to be circulated, whether by copying, linking, or forward-
ing. Much of the military video and photography from the Iraq war has
reflected this uncertain status. Raw TIFF files circulate with no means of
contextualizing them, while unedited video footage of routine military
events is interrupted on shocking occasion by the eruption of violence. Ex-
planations, context, and consequences are rarely available, whether in U.S.
or purported insurgent video.27 In one notorious instance, digital images
of the war in Iraq were bartered for access to an amateur pornography site,
the appallingly accurately named nowthatsfuckedup.com. Chris Wilson,

290 Chapter Seven
the site’s owner, recognized that soldiers could not use their credit cards
while serving, because their companies flagged their locations as question-
able. He therefore offered an exchange, whereby posted photographs of
the war, whether standard poses or those in the notorious “Gory” folder,
would allow the user access to the pornographic sections of the site. By the
time the site was closed down, in 2004, by Florida sheriffs on grounds of
obscenity relating to the pornography, there were some 1,700 photographs
on the site, including two hundred “gory” images.28 It cannot have been
important to the soldiers to see this particular collection of pornography,
given the plethora of such material online. Rather it seems that they wanted
to show their actions to a wider audience, mirroring the shock-and-awe
philosophy of their commanders and claiming a similar level of entitlement
both to see and display and to be seen and displayed.
In similar fashion, digitized images accumulate on sites such as Flickr
and YouTube, hoping to “go viral,” a metaphor derived from infectious dis-
ease that is very appropriate to this biopolitical moment. Even the military
have tried to get involved, creating a Multi-National Force Iraq YouTube
channel, which unsurprisingly attracted few viewers.29 To render the digi-
tal image into a cultural virus, it must go into a frenzy of circulation, being
copied, linked, and forwarded as fast as possible. But for every Obama Girl,
whose homemade video of a song called “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” had
millions of viewings in 2008, there are thousands of YouTube clips that
languish without circulation and it is not yet predictable how and why cer-
tain scenes go viral. Visuality has always been violent and expropriative, so
there is a certain homology at work in the dominance of violent scenes in
the most notorious moments of twenty-first- century visual culture (9/11,
Shock and Awe, Abu Ghraib, the Danish cartoons, Hurricane Katrina: this
list is also a barebones syllabus). However, it is important to restate that
the violence is inherent not to the content, but to visuality. While there
may be a distinction between a photograph of an American soldier giving
a thumbs-up gesture while standing next to an Iraqi child, and the same
soldier repeating her gesture next to an Iraqi corpse, both scenes represent
violence. Nowhere was this made clearer than in Errol Morris’s documen-
tary on Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure (2008). In the film, the now
notorious former Specialist Lynddie England claimed that although she had
been photographed holding a prisoner on a leash, that leash had simply been
handed to her, that she had not herself dragged the prisoner out of the cell.
Similarly Specialist Sabrina Harman, seen posing next to a corpse packed

Global Counterinsurgency 291
in ice, giving a broad smile and a thumbs up, asserted that this was simply
her automatic response to being photographed. While this may seem like
defensive rhetoric, at the end of the film the army’s own investigative offi-
cer Brent Pack declared that the repeated photographs showing prisoners at
Abu Ghraib in so- called stress positions, with or without wearing women’s
underwear or hoods on their heads, were not torture but the eponymous
standard operating procedure.
Violence is the standard operating procedure of visuality. While set-
ting out to distinguish between when it is acceptable and when excessive
in visual images is not my intent here, in the hands of lawyers and NGO
workers such distinctions can mitigate actual harm to people, and of course
I applaud such work. In the case of visuality, its violence has paradoxically,
as the counterinsurgents like to put it, turned on the materialized visual-
ization itself. This perhaps final intensification of the violence of visuality
attempts to render the visible invisible, even within the zone of those au-
thorized to see—or at least so uncertain that it cannot be decided what has
been seen. There is nothing to see here, because it has been rendered un-
decidable, or even in a sense nonexistent. The Rumsfeld stage of the RMA
attempted to achieve this undecidability by generating so many images and
visualizations that no single instance could be decisive. The sovereignty of
the visualizer shifted ground so that authority was now derived from the
ability to ignore the constant swirl of imagery and persist with a “vision”
above and beyond mere data. The justification for the invasion of Iraq cen-
tering on the “weapons of mass destruction” purportedly held by Saddam
Hussein has therefore survived the apparently clear demonstration, by 2003,
that there were none. Following an article by Ron Suskind that appeared,
in 2004, in the New York Times Magazine, this attitude became celebrated
as a contempt for the so- called reality-based community articulated by a
“senior adviser” to Bush.30 Less remembered in that citation was the com-
mitment to continue “creating other new realities,” a policy that has be-
come enshrined as the counterinsurgency doctrine of necropolitical gov-
ernmentality.

counterinsurgency

The fall of Rumsfeld, in 2006, did not mean the end of the RMA , any more
than the fall of the Jacobins, in 1794, ended the French Revolution. In this
new moment, the past excesses of the Global War on Terror are ritually dis-

292 Chapter Seven
paraged, much as the French Executive Directory of 1795 decried the Ter-
ror of 1793, but claimed to be continuing the revolution.31 Reframed as the
“long war,” counterinsurgency, COIN in the military acronym, has in no
way diminished its ambitions. Its leading theorist, John Nagl, has argued
that as well as the Department of Defense, the State Department, the De-
partments of the Treasury, and the Department of Agriculture need to be
thinking in terms of counterinsurgency.32 The project was repackaged as
“countering global insurgency” (GCOIN ), a project whose range and ambi-
tion is every bit as grandiose as before.33 The premise is that if insurgency
is global, then counterinsurgency must be as well, taking the entire planet
as its “area of operations.” The new doctrine (a term of art in the military)
was encapsulated in the publication of Field Manual FM 3–24 Counterinsur-
gency issued by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, in December 2006, its first
statement on counterinsurgency since Vietnam.34 Written in great haste
at the instigation of General David Petraeus, in a single year from its first
conception, in December 2005, this Field Manual aims at nothing less than
making counterinsurgency the primary responsibility of the military, a mis-
sion that is described as both cultural and political. The project renders the
biopolitical governance of populations into a military mission, now known
as population-centric counterinsurgency. It contains a timeline for its pre-
determined success and continued application in the extended future, mea-
sured as far as fifty years ahead. Here, counterinsurgency is explicitly a cul-
tural and political war, fought as much in the United States as it is in Iraq
or elsewhere. As an indication of its significance, the new Field Manual was
downloaded from the Internet over two million times by 2007, making it
something of a digital global best-seller. In an extraordinary step, it was
then republished by the University of Chicago Press in a $25 hardcover edi-
tion, complete with an introduction by the Harvard professor Sarah Sewall,
former deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping in the Clin-
ton administration and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at
Harvard, now an adviser on national security for Barack Obama.35
In Sewall’s manifesto, she calls counterinsurgency “paradigm shattering”
because it argues for the assumption of greater risk in order to succeed, re-
quiring “civilian leadership and support” for the long war. Indicating a cer-
tain continuity with Rumsfeld, she claims counterinsurgency to be superior
to what she calls the “Weinberger-Powell doctrine of overwhelming and
decisive offensive force.”36 The term doctrine is being used specifically here:
it is the military term for the principles governing fundamental choices

Global Counterinsurgency 293
about how and when to fight war. Colin Powell’s theory was not limited,
however, to overwhelming force. In 1991, he was among those advising
then President George H. W. Bush not to occupy Baghdad on the so- called
Pottery Barn principle—that is to say, you break it, you own it. The radi-
cal RMA strategy espoused by the Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine overturned such
caution with results that engendered the new need for counterinsurgency
tactics. Like all revolutionary strategies, the RMA has taken the emergency
presented by the disaster of the Iraq war as an opportunity. The publication
of the new counterinsurgency strategy, designed both for strategic plan-
ning and for daily use in the field, was a tactical transformation of RMA and
its strategic continuation. General Petraeus has thus served as the Napo-
leon of the RMA , a hero figure whose utterances were beyond question
until the mission seemed to stumble in Afghanistan, which may serve as his
Waterloo.

c o m m a n d v i s ua l i z at i o n a n d v i s ua l i z e d i n f o r m at i o n wa r

COIN has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to

produce legitimacy. It insists that the “commander’s visualization” is the
key to success in the conflict against insurgents, but there is “paradoxi-
cally” less visual content (traditionally defined) to such visualization. It cen-
ters on the cultural and historical elements of a particular place, imagined
and accessed as a network within a digital framework. Such paradoxical
visualization seeks to generate legitimacy by means of population control,
blending imperial strategy with the governmentality of developed soci-
eties. The doctrine is defined as a return to the cultural politics of war and
to the concept of war as culture.37 A digitally enabled military, using sur-
veillance and information as its primary tools, seeks to dominate culture
using a networked leadership, in patterns set by imperial regimes, that is
invisible to those led. Unlike the Panopticon or plantation, the place of sur-
veillance is not just invisible, but unknown, what one might call its undis-
closed location. This is post-panoptic visuality for a new era, a neovisuality
enabled by global digital technology that nonetheless understands itself to
be part of a centuries-old tradition. In the first pages of the Field Manual
insurgency is defined as existing on a continuum from the French Revo-
lution of 1789, with insurgency as one “extreme” and a “coup d’état” as
the other. Not by chance, figures from Napoleon on can now be presented
as counterinsurgents, a version of history that would have been congenial

294 Chapter Seven
to Carlyle. Counterinsurgency, imagining itself quashing all modern re-
volts from the French Revolution to the military coup, thus figures itself
as legitimacy. It seeks both to produce an acquiescent national culture and
to eliminate insurgency, understood as any challenge to power. It does so
not simply by means of repression, but by the progressive application of
techniques of consent under the imperative “culture must be defended.”
The Field Manual offers an instrumental definition of power as “the key
to manipulating the interests of groups within a society” (3-55). But power
alone is not enough: “Victory is achieved when the populace consents to
the government’s legitimacy and stops actively and passively supporting the
insurgency” (1-14). Dominance must be accompanied by a consensual hege-
mony that generates the legitimacy of counterinsurgency in thought and
deed. This ideological idealism is still offered as a political justification for
the war, even as the tactics have become directed at a necropolitical man-
agement of hostile populations.
While COIN wants to be framed as a heroic narrative—a story of over-
coming resistance—it can best be analyzed as a set of related techniques.
Resting on visualization as a military tactic enabled by digital technologies,
COIN seeks to render a culture in its own image that will actively want
to be subject to biopolitical imperial governance. Visualization is the key
leadership tactic that holds together the disparate components of counter-
insurgency into what one might call “visualized information war.” Indeed,
according to the counterinsurgency manual, it is policy that “the com-
mander’s visualization forms the basis for conducting . . . an operation”
(A-20). In the section of the manual intended to be read by officers in the
field, this visualization is defined as the necessity of knowing the map by
heart and being able to place oneself in the map at any time. Nowhere is the
legacy of the history of visuality described in this book clearer than in these
instructions. Media and other imagery are components of the visualization,
rather than its substance. For instance, “media activities” can be the primary
activity of an insurgency, according to the army, while “imagery intelli-
gence” in the form of still and moving images are vital to counterinsur-
gency (3- 97). Visualization by contrast requires commanders to know “the
people, topography, economy, history, and culture of their area of opera-
tions” (7- 7). The counterinsurgent thus transforms his tactical disadvantage
into strategic mastery by rendering unfamiliar territory into a simulacrum
of the videogame’s “fully rendered actionable space.”38 Counterinsurgency
cultivates optical invisibility in support of a digitized surveillance and com-

Global Counterinsurgency 295
mand structure. Its favored tactics include “disappearances,” renditions, the
“invisible” prison camp, no-fly lists, no-fly zones, electronic surveillance,
and non-accountable interrogators, known as Other Government Agency
personnel. When counterinsurgency deploys itself as a visualized field, it
does so by means of representation in which the place of observation is in-
visible or obscured, for the state of exception is a non-place, like the mys-
tical perception of Carlyle’s Hero. Comprised of digitized images, satellite
photographs, night-vision goggles, and map-based intervention, post-
panoptical space creates a 3-D rendition of the insurgency that corresponds
to the counterinsurgent’s experience of space in a grid accessible only to
the “commander,” the modern- day Hero. Taken together, these abilities are
summarized as the “commander’s visualization,” using Carlyle’s own term,
but this visualization is now comprised of data and imagery invisible to the
unaided human eye.
In this chaotic zone of neovisuality, counterinsurgency can allow the
forbidden to emerge into visibility, whether by choice or accident. So there
was a deliberate “revealing” of the coercive tactics used at the otherwise in-
visible Guantánamo Bay camp in order to strike fear into actual and poten-
tial insurgents as to what awaited them if captured. On the other hand, the
photographs from Abu Ghraib emerged in a way that was clearly acciden-
tal, even if the army had taken no precautions to prevent it. The “revela-
tions” prevented neither the generalization of torture nor the expansion of
the counterinsurgency, although they have led to limitations on cameras
among enlisted personnel. A good example of the paradoxes resulting from
this blurring can be seen in the new place of mapping. Whereas mapping
was for centuries associated with colonial power as a technology of visu-
ality, recent neocolonial occupations, such as that in the Occupied Territo-
ries of Israel/Palestine or in Iraq have made mapping an oppositional prac-
tice.39 This indifference to what is known or unknown has become one of
the strengths of the counterinsurgency’s aspiration to a totalizing vision.
No countervisualization can damage its claim to totality. The Field Manual
embraces a fully sovereign visuality: “Soldiers and Marines must feel the
commander’s presence throughout the A[rea of ] O[perations], especially
at decisive points. The operation’s purpose and commander’s intent must
be clearly understood throughout the force” (7-18). Visualized informa-
tion war is imagined as a perfect signal-to-noise ratio, with messages con-
veyed perfectly from leader to field and back in real time. Command visu-
alization is the field version of the nineties- era RMA term “full spectrum

296 Chapter Seven
dominance,” the neovisuality of our times, based on dominating “offense,
defense, stability, [and] support.”40 Counterinsurgency is thus legitimate
because it alone can visualize the divergent cultural forces at work in a
given area and devise a strategy to coordinate them.
When soldiers refer to action as being like a videogame, as they fre-
quently do, it is not a metaphor. By turning the diverse aspects of foreign
life into a single narrative, the counterinsurgent feels as in control of the
situation as a player in a first-person-shooter videogame. The commander
thereby feels him- or herself to be in the map, just as the game player is
emotively “in” the game. This experience is sufficiently real that video-
games are now being used as behavioral therapy for psychologically dam-
aged soldiers. Numerous first-person accounts by rank-and-file U.S. troops
testify to their confusion as to where they were and what direction they
were going during combat missions, perhaps contributing to the high levels
of suicide, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by
veterans. The popular videogame Full Spectrum Warrior, played using a
virtual-reality helmet, has become an effective therapeutic tool for sol-
diers suffering from such post-traumatic stress. In this instance, a modi-
fied version of the game places the soldier back in a situation similar to
that in which s/he was traumatized as a behavioral tool to normalize re-
sponse. While the game is quite well rendered, you would not ordinarily
mistake it for reality. However, a soldier engaged in visualized informa-
tion war can and apparently does take this rendition as equivalent to the
interface experienced in the insurgent environment. Re-performing the
war can restore mental equilibrium in the “shell-shocked” patient by dint
of repetition. The medium-resolution 3-D digital videogame experience is
indistinguishable from the “reality” of counterinsurgency.
The counterinsurgent understanding of culture is, however, a reversion
to imperial governance under a model of cultural hierarchy: “Cultural
knowledge [is] . . . essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency.
American ideas of what is ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ are not universal” (1-80).
This cultural hierarchy is derived directly from nineteenth- century im-
perial practice. Consequently, readers of the Field Manual are advised to
consult such apparently unlikely works as Small Wars: A Tactical Handbook
for Imperial Soldiers (1890), by Charles E. Callwell, produced at the height of
British imperialism. The U.S. Army does not ask its soldiers to accept differ-
ence, but rather to understand that Iraqis cannot perform like Americans.
Such references reframe counterinsurgency as the technical management

Global Counterinsurgency 297
of neo-imperial dominions, even as the notion that Iraq or Afghanistan are
“small wars” undermines public assertions that they are the moral equiva-
lent of the Second World War. Instead, it accurately locates these wars as
a technique of imperial governance, rather than as an existential struggle.
The counterinsurgency manual often draws parallels with the imperial hero
T. E. Lawrence’s experience in “Arabia,” citing his maxim “Better the Arabs
do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly” (1-155) as one of the “para-
digm shattering” paradoxes that conclude the opening chapter of the Field
Manual. Against this lesson from the past, Lawrence himself had advised
that his “Twenty-Seven Articles” on working with Arab armies were in-
tended only for those engaged with the Bedu[ouin], and he was, after all,
promoting an anti-imperial Arab revolt. He also advised borrowing a slave
as a manservant. On the other hand, for all his racialized characterizing of
the “dogmatic” Arab mind, Lawrence insisted that the would-be ally of the
Arabs must “speak their dialect of Arabic.”41 By contrast, the U.S. Army
began, in 2007, offering soldiers a pamphlet with some two hundred Ara-
bic words and phrases, spelled out phonetically. Culture as the ground for
counterinsurgency is understood in this contradictory fashion as a total-
izing system, governing all forms of action and ideas, in an oscillation be-
tween Victorian anthropology and the first-person-shooter videogame. The
anthropologist Edward Tylor argued in Primitive Culture that “Culture or
Civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man.”42 The counterinsurgency strategy
similarly understands culture as a “web of meaning” or as an “‘operational
code’ that is valid for an entire group of people,” acquired by all members of
a particular society or group by means of “enculturation” (3-37). According
to the manual, culture therefore conditions how and why people perform
actions, distinguish right from wrong, and assign priorities, as if it were a
set of rules (3-38).

n e c r o P o l i t i c a l r e g i m e s o f s e Pa r at i o n

Counterinsurgency directly concerns itself with governance and the main-

tenance of life. The still current Small Wars Manual (1940) argues that “small
wars are operations undertaken wherein military force is combined with
diplomatic pressure in the affairs of another state whose government is un-
stable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such

298 Chapter Seven
figure 57. MAJ or- generAl Peter Chi Arelli,
“full sPeC truM infor MAtion oP erAtions.”

interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.”43 Here

military intervention is again understood as militarized necropolitics: the
preservation of life, determined by foreign-policy interests. By extension,
lethal force may be used in the preservation of certain lives on the basis
of judgments made by the counterinsurgent. Command visualization thus
generates legitimacy not just by military operations, but by a militarized
governmentality, as summarized in the diagram (see fig. 57).
Devised by then Major General Peter Chiarelli, in 2005, to illustrate his
concept of “Winning the Peace,” this visualization imagines security as one
of a cluster of required “information operations” that combine to produce
“legitimacy.”44 The object of control has moved from being History in gen-
eral to the population, in this case the Iraqi population, whose security is
now to be ensured by means of a series of coordinated techniques, from the
implementation of neoliberal economics to the reestablishment of essential
services and the retraining of security forces within the counterinsurgency
paradigm. The outcome is imagined to be “legitimacy,” or what I have been
calling “authority,” that moment when the government is simply obeyed
because it is recognized as having legitimate authority. Having achieved
legitimacy, the theory goes, the war will have rendered a culture in its own
image with elections and a free-market economy. It is important to note
the audacity of this strategy, for “legitimation” is precisely the weak point

Global Counterinsurgency 299
of constitutional theories of the state in general and the state of exception
in particular. In a move typical of the radical Right, that potential weak-
ness is turned into a point of strength, as counterinsurgency assumes legiti-
macy as both its justification and its mission. Perhaps the greatest success of
such operations has been on what is still called “the home front,” that is to
say, domestic U.S. political opinion and mass media culture. Its success in
these domains is unquestioned: who in public life is against counterinsur-
gency, even if they oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or interventions
elsewhere? Ironically, there is significant dissent only within the military,
where many remain unconvinced by the new doctrine.
Tactically, COIN now considers its terrain to be what it calls the “host na-
tion population,” a militarized form of biopolitics.45 While the governance
and services categories now included in this Full Spectrum Operation
were formerly understood by Foucault as part of civilian governmentality
in Western nations, the introduction of military and police components
within the context of a counterinsurgency visualized information war
clearly represents a new formation. More exactly, this means of control-
ling the population is a “necropolitics,” meaning the management of the
withholding of life. These benefits are offered to the occupied “host popu-
lation” as a whole, not to insurgents. It was notable that, in early 2010, it
was announced that all Afghans were to be issued identity cards with bio-
metric date and that the military were maintaining a “kill or capture” list of
those they considered insurgents. Biometrics are here directly at the service
of necropolitics.46 Accordingly, the three stages of counterinsurgency are
described as “first aid,” “in-patient care—recovery,” and the final achieve-
ment of “outpatient care—movement to self-sufficiency.”47 Counterinsur-
gency now actively imagines itself as a medical practice: “With good intel-
ligence, counterinsurgents are like surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue
while keeping other vital organs intact” (1-126). It is not a perfect metaphor:
most cancer patients would require chemotherapy or radiation treatment
to prevent recurrence, which impacts the entire system, precisely the kind
of crisis counterinsurgency wants to avoid. The use of cancer indicates here
not a specific medical parallel, but an unmistakable threat to life, requiring
radical intervention. As cancer is a rapidly multiplying life-form, its (meta-
phorical) eradication is a necropolitics: this parasitic life must be withheld
so that the “host” can live.
Counterinsurgency’s means of accomplishing such necropolitical trans-
formations were developed from the imperial hierarchies of sovereign and

300 Chapter Seven
subject peoples. Although the manual disavows biological constructs of
race, it consistently emphasizes cultural difference, with a strong view that
“Western democracy” is the superior form of culture. The long-established
model for such tactics is that used by Israel in its governance of the Occu-
pied Territories. Indeed, the de facto strategy of the “surge” was to segre-
gate Shia from Sunni by means of walls similar to that constructed on the
West Bank.48 These barriers reified the mass internal and external displace-
ment of Iraqi citizens, estimated at some four million of the twenty million
Iraqi population. Just as in the colonial segregation of Algeria, the resulting
relative decline in violence has led Western audiences to accept this violent
divide of a formerly integrated population as “normal.” Writing in the con-
text of Israel/Palestine, Hilla Dayan argues that “regimes of separation . . .
develop unprecedented mechanisms of containment, with forcible separa-
tion and isolation of masses trapped in their overextended political space.”49
Visualized information war produces necropolitical regimes of separation.
These regimes are global, just as the terrain of counterinsurgency is global,
evidenced by the extensive construction of exclusion barriers on the U.S.-
Mexico border, between “Spain” and Morocco around the still- colonized
cities of Ceuta and Melilla, and elsewhere, not to mention a long list of
states operating internal regimes of separation. Such regimes are nomadic,
requiring the immigrant—and sometimes the citizen—to have their iden-
tification cards available at all times, on threat of deportation.
The establishment of these regimes is a key goal of the counterinsur-
gency, both at “home” and in the global occupied territories. The geogra-
pher Trevor Paglen has documented and tracked the extensive network of
“invisible” or “black” state operations in the United States, demonstrating
that at least $32 billion is budgeted for such activities per year, “more than
the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National
Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administra-
tion.”50 The rendition of the war as counterinsurgency centers on the need
for what is known as “actionable intelligence.” Anglo-American govern-
ments have transformed this need into an unparalleled surveillance of their
own populations, largely in secret in the United States, but quite openly
in the United Kingdom. When the full extent of email and phone surveil-
lance became known in the United States, in 2008, a cowed Democratic
Congress soon offered full immunity to telecom companies and officials.
On the other hand, in the United Kingdom, it was a Labour government
that presided over the erasure of rights. The United Kingdom has now be-

Global Counterinsurgency 301
come the surveillance capital of the planet, with a staggering five million
closed- circuit television (CCTV ) cameras estimated to be in operation in
2006, one for every twelve citizens and 20 percent of the global total.51 By
2010, each Londoner was thought to be photographed 300 times a day by
CCTV . Not for nothing, it seems, was George Orwell’s vision of Big Brother
set in Britain. Police procedural television dramas in the United Kingdom
now routinely center around the use of CCTV footage, rendering the emer-
gency into the new normal. So far have things deteriorated that the refusal
of Parliament, in 2008, to extend a 28-day detention period (in which a per-
son that authorities declare to be suspected of terrorist activities can be held
without legal rights of any kind) to 42 days was presented as a victory for
civil liberties. It increasingly seems that a key goal of global counterinsur-
gency is to render legitimate this massively extended domestic surveillance
society that would formerly have been seen as illegal.
The necropolitical regime of separation has no hestitation in using tor-
ture and other forms of violent interrogation, derived from Cold War
counterinsurgency methods. French torture methods in Algeria were trans-
mitted to American instructors at the School of the Americas and then on
to various Latin American regimes. For instance, the methods used at the
ESMA concentration camp, in Buenos Aires, during the Argentine dictator-
ship (1973–82) have an unpleasantly familiar ring: hooding, sensory depri-
vation, shackling, and electricity, all designed to “dehumanize” the victim
in order to obtain information. In congressional hearings and other forums,
Bush administration officials repeatedly described torture as the application
of “techniques.” For all the doublespeak at work here, counterinsurgency
relies on the gradated use of force as a technique of legitimation. It is legiti-
mate to use torturing force on the recalcitrant body of the person desig-
nated as an insurgent because the counterinsurgency is legitimation and the
insurgency must acknowledge it to be so. In this sense, Iraq, Afghanistan
and other ventures of counterinsurgency, such as Iran, Palestine, or Paki-
stan, are technical experiments in the production of necropolitical regimes
of separation.

Pa r a d ox e s o f v i s ua l i z e d wa r

The goal of these techniques is the sustained need for the regime of sepa-
ration, meaning that the ultimate paradox of counterinsurgency is that the
measure of its success is its permanent continuation. The more these para-

302 Chapter Seven
doxes proliferate, however, the greater the uncertainty and hence the con-
tinued need for counterinsurgency. This is a long- standing argument of
counterinsurgents. In 1977, the Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan de-
clared that the issue of the Palestinian territories should be reframed: “The
question was not, ‘What is the solution?’ but ‘How do we live without a
solution?’”52 As Eyal Weizman has shown, the use of unmanned drone air-
craft has been essential to this strategy in Israel/Palestine. It is therefore
not surprising that in the era of paradoxical global counterinsurgency Un-
manned Aerial Vehicles (UAV ), such as the Predator and the Reaper, are be-
coming the weapon of choice in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. While
the UAV certainly visualizes the area of operations, it generates a paradox
within the totalizing mission of Global Counterinsurgency (GCOIN ) by
being an agent of violence alone. The UAV is launched by specialists in the
area, but is then managed in flight by operatives situated in Nevada or Cali-
fornia. Far from being fully conversant with the cultural “map” of the area
of operations, these soldiers are on a different continent. Further, each indi-
vidual controls several drones at once, coordinating them via screens using
a joystick familiar to videogame players. Inevitably, this style of warfare has
led to repeated civilian deaths alongside those of the “targets” identified by
the UAV s, bringing protests not just from local populations, but also from
the theorists of counterinsurgency like David Kilcullen: “These attacks are
now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed
at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics
of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effec-
tive.”53 In short, they are not proper counterinsurgency. In April 2010, it
was leaked that UAV s launched at least fifty attacks in Pakistan during 2009,
resulting in some five hundred casualties. By February 2011, it was reported
that, while 581 insurgents were claimed killed by UAV s in Pakistan in 2010,
only two were top-ranked targets.54 The UAV is emerging as the signature
technology of the new paradoxical visuality of global counterinsurgency,
even being touted as environmentally friendly, relative to ground opera-
tions. On the one hand, the UAV epitomizes what Derek Gregory has called
the “visual economy” of the “American military imaginary.”55 At the same
time, it is clearly a departure from conceiving counterinsurgency as “armed
social work.”56 Further, the current results in Afghanistan and Pakistan are
unclear even by counterinsurgency standards. In asymmetric warfare, how
does one even measure success?
Military discussion, both official and unofficial, has centered this ques-

Global Counterinsurgency 303
figure 58. CAP t. trAVis PAtriquin, “grouP of ins u r g e n t s.”

tion on the way in which digital visualization has in some sense become the
mission itself. Today’s junior officers spend much of their time compiling
PowerPoint presentations that digitally render their visualizations. The ad-
vance on past modes of visualization was noted in the pro- counterinsurgency
blog Small Wars Journal: “The graphics used in PowerPoint replace the mas-
sive campaign maps and problematic acetate overlays which were used by
armies for decades, allowing these documents to be easily produced and
mass-distributed with the click of a mouse.”57 On the other hand, in 2009,
an essay in the Armed Forces Journal noted the “dumb down” effect of the
bullet-point process of PowerPoint, which often elides the key question as
to who is actually going to carry out the tasks in a list.58 As has been widely
discussed in digital circles, PowerPoint is a marketing tool, designed to sell
products. An article in Small Wars Journal pointed to a PowerPoint made by
the late Captain Travis Patriquin, in 2006, during the campaign in Anbar
Province, Iraq. It was circulated widely during the military surge, including
by national media outlets like ABC News, as an example of visual material
that was highly effective on the ground. Although he was an Arabic speaker,
Patriquin’s “population centered approach” was more than a little reduc-
tive (see fig. 58). Insurgency here is reduced to an Islamic slasher movie, in
which the only extant motive is to cause chaos and gain power for oneself.
It so happened that the extreme violence of groups like the so- called Al-

304 Chapter Seven
Qaeda in Mesopotamia did lead many Sunni leaders in Anbar to cease their
support, making for a tactical alliance with the U.S. Army. Using a standard
phrase of Muslim piety like “Allahu akhbar” as the insurgent catch-phrase,
however, shows that Patriquin had no strong understanding of the Iraqi
situation.
The reverse problem was manifested in a plan shown to General Stanley
McChrystal in the summer of 2009, aiming to show the flows of insurgency
and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where he was the U.S. commander.
Some months later the slide was released to the New York Times journal-
ist Elisabeth Bumiller, previously best-known for her fawning coverage of
George W. Bush (see fig. 59).59 The analysis presented here does not lack for
sophistication. It would, however, be hard to tell what one was supposed
to do after examining it. The visualization shows only that there is no solu-
tion available. The intent behind the leak is precisely that: to show that
Afghanistan remains in chaos and will need military presence for the fore-
seeable future. It was a continuation of the strategy whereby McChrystal
leaked his request for 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan in advance,
giving Obama the choice between declaring his own general insubordinate
or alienating his own supporters by sending more troops. This new leak was
the first shot in the campaign over Obama’s announced withdrawal date
of July 2011. Using this image, McChrystal might claim either that condi-
tions justify a longer mission or that he cannot be held responsible for any
perceived failure of the mission. McChrystal soon learned to his cost that
media war needs to be waged intelligently, when his insubordinate com-
ments to a Rolling Stone journalist led to his dismissal in June 2010. His suc-
cessor, none other than Gen. David Petraeus continues to assert that victory
in Afghanistan is at hand but requires ongoing support.
Indeed, counterinsurgency has for some time deployed an apparently
“paradoxical” coordinated political and military strategy to sustain chaos
as a means of requiring military intervention. Those supporting the long-
term occupation of Iraq claimed that future chaos would be the conse-
quence of withdrawal and current chaos was the necessity of remaining.
Whereas Carlyle persistently raised the specter of chaos as the alternative to
heroic leadership, creating chaos is now a matter of technique and strategy.
In December 2006, an Iraqi woman who blogged as “Riverbend” described
the technique: “You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly,
but surely, it begins coming apart. . . . This last year has nearly everyone

Global Counterinsurgency 305
 Afghanistan Stability / COIN Dynamics =
Significant
Delay
Population/Popular Support
Infrastructure, Economy, & Services
Government
Afghanistan Security Forces
Insurgents
Crime and Narcotics
Coalition Forces & Actions
Physical Environment

ANSF &

OUTSIDE SUPPORT
Coalition
Damages/
Casualties

ANSF
ISR / Open
Source Ops Total
Security Targeted
TO INSURGENT Counter- Narcotics/

FACTIONS
Force Strikes Crime Ops

TACTICAL ANSF Unit

Capacity &
Focus Sweep Ops
(Clear)
Ins. Damages
& Casualties
Fear of
Gov’ t/ANSF/
Coalition
Coalition Leadership ANSF Policing & Repercussions
& Tactical Capacity, Security Ops Outside
Knowledge Havens / Ability to Support/
& Underst. Coalition Capacity Priorities & (Hold)
‘COIN Effectiveness Operate Enablement
of Social ANSF of Ins.
Structures Support’
Strategy & Manpower Ins. Coordination
Recruiting & ANSF Avg. Offensives & Among Ins.
Duration of Unity Coalition Professionalism Insurgent
Operation Retention Territory Not Presence Factions Ins. Terrain
Adjustment Skill, Discipline, Under Gov’t (Clear & Hold) Insurgent
Coalition of Approach & Morale Leadership, Recruiting, Advantage
ANSF Control (Afghan
ANSF
Appropriate to Fit Afghan Appropriate & Pakistan) Training, Skill Retention,
Balance of ANSF Use of Force & Experience Manpower Criminal/
Effort & ANSF Training &
INSURGENTS
Ins. Provision & ISR Trafficking
INSTITUTIONAL
Force Institutional & Mentoring Capability &
Of Gov’t & Insurgent
Execution Services Capacity, Coercion
Coalition Capacity ANSF Perceived Ties to
Coalition Dev. Ops- Priorities & Narcotics &
Coalition Corruption & Ins. Strategic Damages & Effectiveness
Avg COIN ANSF
NARCOTICS
Tribal Other Criminal
Experience Execution Advisory Favoritism
R.O.L. Policy, Commun/IO Use of Force Ins. Targeted Funding
& Skill Capacity & & Aid Execution & & Affiliation w/ by Ins. Attacks on Funding &
Priorities Perceived Population Progress/ Material
Fairness Support to
ANSF Support
COALITION
Perceived Relative Insurgents Likelihood of
Coalition Funding Gov't Damages/Use for Gov’t Popular Crime/Violence
Visibility to Adequacy Security of Force by Support/ /Ins. Support
Population Policy
CAPACITY &
Relative Gov’ t & Coalition Perception of /Tolerance for Payment
Resource Coalition Quality & Message Insurgent Gov’t vs Narcotics
Coalition Investment Insurgents
Levels Strategic Dev. Ops- Coalition/Homeland Quality Strength & & Criminal

PRIORITIES POPULATION
(Mil. & Civ. Commun./IO Gov’t Acceptance of Gov’t ’vs Ins. Intent Activity
Levels
OVERALL
Forces, Advisory Afghan Methods
Aid Levels) & Aid

CONDITIONS
Gov't/ANSF Population Neutral/On Population Population
Population
& GOVERNMENT
Strategic Actively the Fence Sympathizing Actively
Central Gov't Sympathizing
CENTRAL Institutional
Commun/ Supporting Supporting
w/ Insurgents
& BELIEFS
IO Gov’t & SF w/ Gov’t
Execution Insurgency IllegitAgric
US Gov't
Support for
GOV’T
Capacity
CAPACITY Relative
Relative WOM
Message
Fear of Ins.
Attack/
Production,
Trade &

POPULAR
Operation Gov't Message Amplification Repercussions Employment
Funding Impact Gov’t Gov’t vs Ins Potential
Breadth of Adequacy Gov't vs Ins Attractiveness Terrain
Integration of
SUPPORT
Gov't Training Western of Gov’t vs. Harshness
US Domestic Coalition & Mentoring, Local Tribal Affiliation Insurgent Path
Duration
Perceived Support Gov't Structures & Breadth of
Vetting, and Backlash Perception of Operation
Cost/Benefit Hiring Workforce Coalition Intent
& Support Skill & Avail & Commitment Perception Fraction of
Of Gov’t Workforce
US Domestic/ Transparency Strength
of Gov’t Gov't And Agric.
Int'l Strategic Overall Gov't Strength of & Intent Legit vs
Commun. Processes & Professionalism Reach, Illegit
Investments Policy Quality Execution Religious Legit Agric
& Diplomacy
COALITION
Media
& Fairness Capacity &
Investment
Ideology &
Tribal
Structures Cultural Erosion/ Ability to
Satisfaction
w/ Gains in Infrastructure
Private Sector Production
Workforce

DOMESTIC
Sensationalism Displacement Reconcile Skill & Avail
TRIBAL
Bias Security, Services Dev. Adequacy Population
Religious & Employment Visible Gains & Sustainment
Recognition/ Ideology, Basic Needs
SUPPORT
Coalition
Gov't/
Contractor
Corruption &
Engagement to
GOVERNANCE
Integrate
Tribal
Ethnic/Tribal
Rivalry
Tribal
Structures
w/ Gov’t
In Security,
Services &
Employment
Service Levels
& Employment
Dev.Ops- Tribal Favoritism Structures& Expectations Legit Other Civilian Legit vs.Illegit
Path for Security, Relative
Infrastructure, Beliefs Production Services
Services, Average Services, & & Services (SWET, Economic
Econ. Tax Connectedness Employment Non- Agric Healthcare, Opportunity
Advisory Revenues Perceived
of Population Security Education)

INFRASTRUCTURE,
& Aid
Ability to
Move Private Sector Legit Economic
SERVICES &
People Capital Mgmt., Activity,
Infr, Services, Econ. & Goods Investment & Trade &
Policy & Execution Rapidly Spending Employment
Provide
Humanitarian
Relief
/Perceived Fairness
ECONOMY

WORKING DRAFT – V3

© PA Knowledge Limited 2009 Page 22

figure 59. AnonyMous, “PoWerPoint slide

of situAtion in AfghAnistAn 2009.”
convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many
blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders.”60 If this seems
excessive, consider the facts documented by Oxfam in July 2007: in a popu-
lation of some 27.5 million, 8 million people were in need of emergency
aid, composed of 4 million at risk of famine, 2 million internally displaced
people, and 2 million refugees outside Iraq. Forty-three percent of Iraqis
lived in “absolute poverty,” while 70 percent had inadequate access to water,
and 80 percent lacked access to sanitation.61 While violence had decreased by
2009, these indicators have remained strikingly bad. In February 2009, the
Brookings Institute compilation of Iraq-related statistics showed that 2.8
million Iraqis were internally displaced and another 2.3 million were living
abroad. Fifty-five percent of Iraqis still lack access to drinkable water, and
only 50 percent have what is described as “adequate” housing.62 Afghani-
stan in 2010 remains a disaster area at all levels, from the narcoeconomy to
corruption and poverty. The brief resurgence of education for women has
ended. According to the CIA , Afghanistan has the second-highest rate of
infant mortality worldwide and ranks 219 out of 224 for life expectancy.
Forty percent of the population were unemployed in 2009, and per-capita
income was only $800.63 Figures of this kind indicate clearly that what is
being enacted is a necropolitics, rather than a biopolitics. If the priority was
to sustain the population, rather than to allocate and withhold death, such
conditions would rightly be considered intolerable. In the “game environ-
ment” created by counterinsurgency, the trick is to get to the next level,
rather than to complete every action at the current stage of play. For the
goal of counterinsurgency is not to create stability, but to naturalize “the
disequilibrium of forces manifested in war,” not as politics, but as “culture,”
the web of meaning in a given place and time.64 Counterinsurgency is try-
ing to produce the Middle East and Central Asia as cultures of weak or fail-
ing states requiring permanent counterinsurgency. Indeed, the new mantra
of the GCOIN strategists is the need to engage with the “global jihad,” deriv-
ing from a newly “global Islam . . . a structureless, leaderless archipelago of
communities whose energy is aroused by a nervous system based on com-
munications technology.”65 Contrary to some assertions, such protagonists
of GCOIN assert a distinction with paranoia, such as that of the Cold War,
and argue the definition of the “enemy” is no longer black-and-white, but
“shaded.”66

Global Counterinsurgency 307
B e yo n d c o u n t e r v i s ua l i t y ?

If counterinsurgency uses neovisuality as a strategy, can we construct a

countervisuality to counterinsurgency? Like all visuality, neovisuality is al-
ready a countervisuality. For it requires an opposing insurgency as a means
of legitimation and will seek it out if none is forthcoming, under the slogan
“Bring ’em on!” Further, its means of visualization are increasingly anti-
visual, making any countervisualization likely to be ineffective. Above all,
if the designation of counterinsurgency as a necropolitics is right, then it
cannot be opposed in its own terms. In the case of biopolitics, by contrast,
there have been a range of tactical responses, including a recent edited vol-
ume entitled Tactical Biopolitics. Contributors working at the intersection of
science, art, and questions of “life” have created public biolabs, amateur sci-
ence, tactical media projects, and theoretical critiques.67 Imagine a book or
conference called “Tactical Necropolitics.” In fact, of course, we don’t have
to, because violent terrorism, especially suicide bombing, is precisely such
a necropolitics. As George Bataille put it long ago, “Sacrifice in reality re-
veals nothing.”68 Consequently, those opposed to the counterinsurgent for-
mation of necropolitical regimes of separation can in no way identify with
any “insurgency” that uses a micro-necropolitics of separation. Nonethe-
less, this is a moment of paradoxical emergency for authoritarian visuality,
which requires a new “mobility” to refuse to move on. While critics of visu-
ality are not going to affect military policy as such, the continuing critique
of their claims to visualize remains salutary. Why would the Obama admin-
istration have so strenuously resisted releasing the remaining Abu Ghraib
photographs if they did not fear the reaction?
It is now time, however, to stop playing the second move to whatever
deployment of militarized information war comes next. The tools of de-
mocratization, education, and sustainability are to hand and have not ex-
hausted themselves. While democracy is part of the mission of counter-
insurgency in theory, the practice reveals otherwise. Rather than concern
ourselves with such geopolitics as day-to- day politics, it will be more effec-
tive to consider combining democratization issues with education and sus-
tainability in the institutions of education, where most of my readers are, I
presume, engaged. As Rancière has long argued, how can the nineteenth-
century hierarchies of most higher education continue to be justified in
the same space as calls for radical change? What are the goals of educa-
tion for a post-growth sustainable economy? Can universities democra-

308 Chapter Seven
tize themselves or should there be an emphasis on alternative modalities?
All of these rethinkings will have to be accomplished, for those outside
China and India, in the context of disinvestment, unemployment, and the
casualization of labor. In short, it seems to me that the present conjunc-
ture, as we used to say, bears more than a passing resemblance to that in
which the cultural-studies project was first formed. Once again it becomes
of the first importance to reclaim, rediscover, and retheorize the practices
and spaces of “everyday life,” but now in the context of permanent war. As
the example of post–Katrina New Orleans shows, there is nothing banal or
quotidian about this “new everyday.”69 At the same time, the case of New
Orleans shows that simple visibility or media coverage does not ensure any
change in political practice. Where once consumer and subcultural prac-
tices seemed to offer new modes of resistance, the task now is more para-
doxical. In a period in which we are all suspects, provisionally guilty until
proved otherwise, the need is to assert the continuance of an everyday that
does not require militarization to carry on. The everyday form created in
Tahrir Square, Cairo, has been the best example to date of the possibilities
of a praxis of the everyday that is not found but made. Nonetheless, the
spectacular, spectral, and speculative traces of visuality continue to walk
the earth. It is the interim, a moment that could generate momentum for
a new common, the mobility, or revert to an interregnum for a new form
of autocracy. Several outcomes seem possible from this swirling crisis: a
new authoritarianism, a perpetual crisis, or, just possibly, a time in which
my claim to the right to look is met by your willingness to be seen. And I
reciprocate.

Global Counterinsurgency 309
 n oT e s

i n t r o d u c t i o n.  t h e r i g h t to lo o K

1 A claim that is continued on my blog at http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL.

2 Any such claim stands on the shoulders of the critical thinking about vision and
visuality, which (in recent times) runs from Laura Mulvey to W. J. T. Mitchell,
Anne Friedberg, Martin Jay, and other theorists of the look and the visual. The
phrase “right to look” was previously used by Clare Whatling in a somewhat
different context. See Whatling, Screen Dreams, 160.
3 Derrida, Right of Inspection; Derrida, Droit de regards, xxxvi. I have modified the
translation used by Wills, “rights of inspection,” because it attempts to bridge
the gap between right and law, which I feel should be kept open.
4 For an insightful discussion of this text and its implications, see Villarejo, Lesbian
Rule, 55–82. On looking itself, see Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking.
5 Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” Originally published as “Dix theses sur la
politique,” in Aux Bords de Politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 1998), 217.
6 For an analysis of visuality’s use in visual culture, see my essay “On Visuality.”
The term was widely referenced to Hal Foster’s Vision and Visuality, which did
not refer to the earlier history of the term.
7 Compare Derrida’s insistence that writing preceded speech (Of Gramma-
tology, 14).
8 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, 3–4.
9 Rancière, Aux bords de la politique, 17.
10 Foucault, The Order of Things, 132.
11 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3.
12 Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor.
13 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 13. I would like to thank Kristin Ross for her
brilliantly insightful introductions to Rancière’s work, in print and in person.
14 Rancière, Hatred of Democracy.
15 Rancière, Politics and Aesthetics, 13.
16 Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui, “Colonialism and Its Replicants,” 2.
17 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.
18 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 3.
19 Maldonado Torres, Against War, xii.
20 See Smith, Enwezor, and Condee, Antinomies of Art and Culture.
21 Enrique Dussel, quoted in Mignolo, “Delinking,” 453.
22 Wagenvoort, Roman Dynamism, 17–23.
23 This approach differs from the distinction between “bare life” and “social life”
proposed by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: here, “bare life” is the “simple
fact of living” (1), whose “politicization . . . constitutes the decisive event of
modernity” (4). This production of a biopolitical body is seen as key to sov-
ereign power, especially under the regime of the society of the spectacle that
produces a convergence between modern democracies and totalitarian soci-
eties (10). The absence of slavery from Agamben’s analysis creates an odd and
insurmountable lacuna, as indicated by Ewa Plonowksa Ziarek in “Bare Life
on Strike,” 94–98.
24 Rancière, Aux bords de la politique, 31.
25 See the monumental essay by Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” 937–43.
26 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 943.
27 Timothy Taylor, “Believing the Ancients,” 37–38.
28 Kathleen Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom,” 52.
29 Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death.
30 Berry, “‘Reckless Eyeballing.’”
31 Greenberg and Dratel, The Torture Papers, 1214.
32 On the world-generating optic, see Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and
the Research Imagination,” 9. On “worlding,” see Spivak, A Critique of Postcolo-
nial Reason, 114–15, 228. On modernity’s production as the West, see Timothy
Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” 15.
33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 207, quoted in Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault,
32 (see 32–53 for more detail on this concept).
34 Raymond Williams argued that Victorian writers like Carlyle asked the right
questions but supplied the wrong answers (Culture and Society, 75–77).
35 Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910), in The Standard Edition of the Works of
Sigmund Freud, 11:31.
36 Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 57.

312 Notes to pages 3–9

37 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 12.
38 John H. Hammond, quoted in Eudell, Political Languages of Emancipation in the
British Caribbean and the U.S. South, 30.
39 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 2:222.
40 Said, Orientalism, 41.
41 Seeley, The Expansion of England, 14.
42 Daily Herald, 13 August 1923, quoted by Dutt, “The British Empire,” available at
the Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/.
43 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 30.
44 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 135.
45 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 5.
46 Ibid., 12.
47 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 84–85.
48 Rancière, The Future of the Image, 47.
49 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 183.
50 See Parks, Cultures in Orbit.
51 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 5–8.
52 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address” (1961), reprinted in Pursell, The
Military-Industrial Complex, 206.
53 Bosch, “Pentagonism” (1969), reprinted in Pursell, The Military-Industrial Com-
plex, 298.
54 I owe the vocabulary of “toggle and zoom” to Tara McPherson’s response to
the Animating Archives conference held at Brown University, 4–5 December
2009, and I thank her for allowing me to use it.
55 Derian, Virtuous War, 218.
56 See my blog, at http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL, for more on the 2011 revo-
lutions and visuality.
57 Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” 6.
58 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 63–64.
59 Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859,” 222–24.
60 Terry Smith, Making the Modern.
61 Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production.
62 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 35.
63 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 156–65.
64 Jones, Irrational Modernism, 24.
65 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 66, adapted.
66 Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” 6.
67 Casarino and Negri, In Praise of the Common, 86–88.
68 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 126–35. Agamben asserts that “life” becomes a political
term with the formation, in “1789,” of a discourse of the Rights of Man, setting
aside the entire question of slavery that is central here.

Notes to pages 10–24 313

 69 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 75.
70 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 64; see also Docherty, Aesthetic Democ-
racy.
71 Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 60.
72 Lotringer and Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” 8.
73 See Oliver, “The Look of Love.”
74 Negri, Time for Revolution, 142.
75 Antliff, “The Jew as Anti-Artist,” 51.
76 Quoted in Haug, “Philosophizing with Marx, Gramsci and Brecht,” 153.
77 Ronel, The Test Drive, 69.
78 Viano, “The Left according to the Ashes of Gramsci,” 59.
79 Stoll, “Toward a Second Haitian Revolution.”
80 Yoo, “Memorandum for William J. Haynes II, General Counsel for the Depart-
ment of Defense,” 2, 4–5.
81 Paul Edwards, The Closed World, 11.

o n e .  ov e r s i g h t

1 For pioneering work on the visual culture of slavery, see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and
the Culture of Refinement, and Kriz and Quilley, An Economy of Colour.
2 See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; and James,
The Black Jacobins.
3 Foucault, The Order of Things, 129. Subsequent page references appear in the
text.
4 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 155.
5 See Paton, No Bond but the Law, 9–12 for a concise summary of the various his-
torical revisions of Foucault’s account from the viewpoint of slavery and the
plantation system. Ann Laura Stoler has also suggested the use of a “colonial
‘order of things’” in her Race and the Education of Desire.
6 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 127.
7 See Gruzinski, Images at War, 30–61.
8 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 82–83.
9 Foucault, The Order of Things, 1–16.
10 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, 155.
11 See Drescher, Abolition, 147.
12 On surrogation, see Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2–3.
13 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies.
14 Mbembe, De la postcolonie, 48. See 39–93 for a full development of the concept
of commandement.
15 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 25.
16 Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 222.

314 Notes to pages 25–51

17 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, 152.
18 Philip Gridley King to Sir Joseph Banks, Series 39.004 (8 May 1792), the Banks
Collection, Mitchell and Dixson Collections at the State Library of New South
Wales, available online at http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/.
19 See Casid, Sowing Empire, 31.
20 Joel Weinstein, “Memory and Its Discontents,” in Sullivan, Continental Shifts,
57–61.
21 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles Habitées par les François, 2:107.
22 Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, 1:lvii.
23 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 17–21.
24 Ibid., 419.
25 Grove, Green Imperialism, 68 and 276.
26 Moreno Fraginals, The Sugar Mill, 20.
27 Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, xlv. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of
Jamaica, quoted by J. H. Galloway, “Tradition and Innovation in the American
Sugar Industry,” 336.
28 Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica, 61.
29 Ibid., 187.
30 Malenfant, Des Colonies (1814), quoted in Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Fran-
çaises, 116.
31 [Browne], The Natural History of Jamaica, 25.
32 See E. P. Thompson’s classic essay “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capi-
talism.”
33 Bernard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire, 45–47.
34 For details of the different tasks in the ranks of oversight, see Debien, Les Es-
claves aux Antilles Françaises, 105–34; and Bassett, The Plantation Overseer.
35 Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation, 105–6.
36 The Great Gang was the largest and undertook the heaviest labor, whereas the
Second Gang mostly comprised women, and the Third children. James, The
Black Jacobins, 86.
37 James H. Hammond, “Plantation Manual” [1844], quoted in Tadman, Speculators
and Slaves, xxxvi.
38 Letter of 1776, quoted in Craton, Testing the Chains, 172. For further details on
the Hanover plan, see ibid., 172–79.
39 Conley, The Self-Made Map, 1. See also Jacob, The Sovereign Map, especially chap-
ter 4, “The Cartographic Image,” 269–360.
40 See Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps.
41 Jacob, The Sovereign Map, xv.
42 Ibid., 11.
43 For a comparison with similar processes of colonization in Australia, see Terry
Smith, “Visual Regimes of Colonization.”

Notes to pages 51–58 315

44 On the development of the land survey, see Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze,
38–39.
45 Quoted in Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 202.
46 Reproduced in Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation, 28.
47 Quoted in Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 20.
48 Nathaniel Wilson, “Outline of the Flora of Jamaica.”
49 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 49–59.
50 Ibid., 78.
51 Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 203.
52 Hennigsen, Dansk Vestindien I Gamle Billeder.
53 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles Habitées par les François, 122.
54 Galloway, “Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry,” 346.
55 Quoted in Marin, The Portrait of the King, 174.
56 For a full account of Brunias’s work, see Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 139–73.
On Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, see Lise, Droits de l’homme et Abolition d’esclavage,
21 et seq.
57 See Kathleen Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom.”
58 Raynal, Histoire des Deux Indes, quoted in Aravamudan, “Trop(icaliz)ing the En-
lightenment,” 54. Aravamudan includes (and translates) these important lines,
which are usually deleted from citations of the passage.
59 Casid, Sowing Empire, 31.
60 [Browne], A Natural History of Jamaica, 167; Hughes, The Natural History of Barba-
dos, 171.
61 See Casid, Sowing Empire, 198.
62 Worthy Park took over “580 remote acres of the Cocoree” for slave gardens
in 1787 (Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation, 105). Stewart noted that the
1787 law was “not so strictly attended to as it should be” (A View of the Past and
Present State of the Island of Jamaica, 64).
63 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 80–83. For the individual plantation, see 84.
64 Foucault, The Order of Things, 163n3.
65 Ibid., 133.
66 Ibid., 128–29.
67 Ford, “People as Property,” 14.
68 Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical
Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” 137–38.
69 For more on the casta paintings, see the full and interesting account by Ilona
Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico.
70 [Browne], The Natural History of Jamaica, 265 and 421.
71 Long, History of Jamaica, 3:120.
72 [Browne], The Natural History of Jamaica, 173, 175, and 270.
73 Long, A History of Jamaica, 3:779.

316 Notes to pages 58–64

74 “Letter of 1758,” quoted in Fick, The Making of Haiti, 67.
75 On Sloane, see Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities and Transplanted Bodies in
Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of Jamaica.’”
76 Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados, 8.
77 Quoted in Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue à Haïti, 197.
78 Quoted in Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 239.
79 Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan, 90. The full text of the code
in its 1685 and 1725 versions is included along with commentary.
80 “Code Noir, ou Receuil d’Edits, Déclarations et Arrêts, Concernant la Disci-
pline et le Commerce des Esclaves Nègres des Isles de l’Amérique Française”
(1685), reprinted in Le Code Noir et autres textes de lois sur l’esclavage, 9. Both pre-
amble and title were omitted from Edward Long’s translation (A History of
Jamaica, 3:921). See Dayan, “Codes of Law and Bodies of Color,” 285.
81 Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan, 104.
82 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 61 and 190–91.
83 Wilfred S. Samuel, A Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados in the Year 1680, 23.
84 Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Euro-
peans in the East and West Indies, 5:37.
85 Cited in Judah, “The Jews Tribute in Jamaica: Extracted from the Journals of
the House of Assembly In Jamaica,” 153.
86 Cundall, Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 198.
87 The details of Makandal’s career are summarized by Fick in The Making of Haiti,
60–72. Many documents relevant to the case are reprinted by Pierre Pluchon
in Vaudou, sorciers, empoissoniers de Saint-Domingue à Haïti, although as the some-
what sensationalist title suggests, his interpretations are questionable.
88 Report of Jacques Courtin (1758), quoted in Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empois-
soniers de Sainte-Domingue à Haïti, 210.
89 Métraux, Haiti, 60.
90 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 62.
91 Ibid., 71 and 257.
92 James, The Black Jacobins, 87. Fick quotes the Kreyol: “Couté la liberté li palé nan
coeur nous tous” (The Making of Haiti, 93).
93 Moreau de St Mery, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique
de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, 2:631.
94 Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 31.
95 Edouard Duval- Carrié, La Voix des Sans-Voix (private collection, 1994), re-
printed in Consentino, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, 262.
96 McClellan and Regourd, “The Colonial Machine,” 35. See passim for further
details.
97 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 144–45.
98 Dutrône la Couture, Précis sur la canne.

Notes to pages 64–71 317

 99 Barré de Saint-Venant, Des Colonies Modernes sous la Zone Torride et particulièrement
de celle de Saint-Domingue, 393.
100 Dutrône la Couture, Précis sur la canne, x and 152.
101 Ibid., xxv.
102 The boilers were named as running from Grande to Propre, Flambeau, Sirop, and
finally Batterie (ibid., 137–39). The chain of sugar readiness was described as
running from perlé to lissé, à la plume, and faire la Goutte to faire le fil (ibid., 177–
79).
103 Ibid., 177–83.
104 Here French colonial practice appears to be different from the English one of
delegating authority to the drivers.
105 Ibid., 31.
106 For instance, Moreno Fraginals gives dates of 1780 and 1789 for its first use,
both dates appearing in the same book, The Sugar Mill, on pages 35 and 160n63,
respectively.
107 Descourtilz, Voyage d’un naturaliste en Haiti, 54.
108 Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica, 65–67.
109 Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, 36–37.
110 Dutrône la Couture, Précis sur la canne, 328.
111 Maurel, Cahiers de Doléances de la colonie de Saint-Domingue pour les Etats-Généraux
de 1789, 11.
112 “Cahier des Doléances de la Colonie de Saint-Domingue, à présenter au Roy
dans l’Assemblée des Etats- Généraux de la Nation, par MM. les députés de
cette colonie” (1789), reprinted in Maurel, Cahiers de Doléances de la colonie de
Saint-Domingue pour les Etats-Généraux de 1789, 263. See 263–82 for the full de-
tails.
113 “Plan Proposé par la Colonie pour la formation des Assemblées Coloniales,
Assemblées Provinciales, et de comités intermédiaires permanens tant dans la
colonie qu’à Paris” (1789), reprinted in Maurel, Cahiers de Doléances de la colonie
de Saint-Domingue pour les Etats-Généraux de 1789, 283.
114 Pétion, Discours sur les Troubles de Saint-Domingue, 16.
115 “Cahiers de Doléances de la Chambre d’Agriculture du Cap” (1789), reprinted
in Maurel, Cahiers de Doléance de la colonie de Saint-Domingue pour les Etats-Généraux
de 1789, 305.

t w o.  t h e m o d e r n i m ag i n a r y

1 See in particular James, The Black Jacobins; Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History”;
and Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.”
2 Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History,” 89.
3 Many thousands of prints circulated during the French Revolution, known to

318 Notes to pages 71–79

 us now through collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Musée Carna-
valet, and other institutions, available in a five-volume collection, published
under the editorship of the distinguished historian Michel Vovelle, La révolu-
tion française: Images et recit 1789–1799. See the online prints archive, “Imaging the
French Revolution,” available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/.
4 Censer and Hunt, “Imaging the French Revolution.”
5 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 58.
6 Quoted in Antoine de Baecque’s “‘Le choc des opinions’,” in his L’an 1 des droits
de l’homme, 14.
7 Paine, The Rights of Man, 130.
8 See Derrida, Archive Fever.
9 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, esp. 383–413 (quotation on 402; reference to
overdetermination, 389; condensation in dream-work, 753–54).
10 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 218.
11 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 135–37.
12 Desmoulins, quoted in Reichardt, “Light against Darkness,” 118.
13 Faits et idées sur Saint-Domingue, relativement à la revolution actuelle.
14 Condorcet, “Fragment de Justification” (1793), in Oeuvres, 1:576.
15 Reinhardt, “French Caribbean Slaves Forge Their Own Ideal of Liberty in
1789,” 29. The anonymous manuscript letters are accepted by historians as
genuine, although some suggest that the authors may have been free people of
color.
16 See Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 109–41.
17 “Motion Faite par M. Vincent Ogé, jeune, à l’Assemblée des COLONS, Habi-
tans de S-Domingue, à l’Hôtel de Massiac, Place des Victoires,” 2.
18 Vincent Ogé, “Letter” to the Provincial Assembly of the North, Sainte-
Domingue, in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 77.
19 Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People.
20 Hobbes, De Cive, chap. 12, section 8, quoted in Virno, A Grammar of the Multi-
tude, 23.
21 Freud observed of those of his contemporaries hostile to the crowd, like Gus-
tave Le Bon, “The characteristics of revolutionary groups, and especially those
of the great French Revolution, have unmistakably influenced their descrip-
tions” (The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, 26).
22 Quoted in Césaire, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 171.
23 The text reads: “Tout homme a la très sûre propriété de sa personne, de toutes
ses facultés personnelles, physiques et intellectuelles, de tout ce qu’il possedait
lors de son association, et de ce qu’il acquiert ensuite,” in Project de déclaration des
droits naturels civils et politiques de l’homme fondés sur des principes évidents et des vérités
incontestables par un paysan, reprinted in Baecque, L’an I des droits de l’homme, 306.
See also the proposal by the revolutionary leader Sièyes, which offered “tout

Notes to pages 79–87 319

 homme est propriétaire de sa personne” (ibid., 72), and another, by Target,
giving each ownership of “la vie de l’homme, son corps, sa liberté” (ibid., 81).
24 De Boislandry, Divers articles proposés pour entrer dans la déclaration des droits (Ver-
sailles, August 1789), reprinted in Baecque, L’an 1 des droits de l’homme, 285.
25 Quoted in Baecque, L’an 1 des droits de l’homme, 101.
26 Baecque, “‘Le choc des opinions,’” 20.
27 Fisher, Liberty and Freedom, 42.
28 Claude Niquet Le Jeune, “Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen”
(1789, musée Carnavalet, Paris), reprinted in Vovelle, La révolution française,
2:299.
29 In the Salon of 1789 Le Barbier had shown a drawing of Harné—one of the
first to storm the Bastille, who had arrested its governor, de Launay—an ex-
ample of the new vernacular hero. Pupil, “Le dévouement du chevalier Desilles
et l’affaire de Nancy en 1790,” 83.
30 Collection Henin, vol. 119, no. 10428, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
31 Demange, Images de la Révolution, 9.
32 Maurel, Cahiers de doléance, 63.
33 Speech given to the National Assembly by the deputies from Saint-Domingue,
3 November 1791, translated as A Particular Account of the Commencement and Pro-
gress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo (London: J. Sewell, 1792), 20.
34 Quoted in Fick, The Making of Haiti, 111.
35 Félix Carteau, Soirées bermudiennes (1802), quoted in Dubois, A Colony of Citi-
zens, 105.
36 Benot, La révolution française et la fin des colonies 1789–1794, 39.
37 Sonthonax, “Decree of General Liberty” (1793), in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave
Revolution in the Caribbean, 123.
38 Dahomay, “L’Esclave et le droit,” 40.
39 Cited by Dorigny and Gainot, La Société des Amis des Noirs, 243n43.
40 Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” 525.
41 Bayart, The State in Africa, xvii. To those worried about anachronism, I point to
Bayart’s conclusion, where he suggests that Paul Bois’s classic study of peasants
in the French Revolution, Paysans de l’Ouest, is an “excellent methodological
introduction to the study of Africa” (265). And vice-versa.
42 MacGaffey, “Aesthetics and Politics of Violence in Central Africa,” 70.
43 Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 55–66.
44 Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade, 211.
45 Ibid., 223.
46 Rediker, The Slave Ship, 82 and 97.
47 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 77.
48 See Roberts, “Images of Popular Violence in the French Revolution.”

320 Notes to pages 87–96

49 See the extensive study by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in her Extremities, 9–63.
See also Crow, Emulation, 119.
50 Janes, “Beheadings,” 25.
51 From “Notes on Medusa’s Head,” in Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 18:273–74.
52 Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 82 and 89.
53 Ibid., 66.
54 Foucault, A History of Madness, 460.
55 Ibid., 378.
56 Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 69, 144, 226–28.
57 Ibid., 73; Foucault, A History of Madness, 436.
58 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 88.
59 Ibid., 638.
60 Foucault, A History of Madness, 480.
61 Descourtilz, Voyage d’un naturaliste en Haiti, 55.
62 A demand made by Jean-François (see Fick, The Making of Haiti, 114).
63 James, The Black Jacobins, 106. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 194.
64 Trouillot, “An Unthinkable History.”
65 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 116; she translates bout à blancs as “end to the whites.”
66 Moreau de Saint Mery, Description topographique de l’isle de Saint-Domingue,
1:433–36.
67 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 269–76.
68 Descourtilz, Voyage d’un naturaliste en Haiti, 125.
69 Charles-A. Alexandre, “Parisian Women Protest via Taxation Populaire in Feb-
ruary, 1792,” 115.
70 Mathiez, La Vie Chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur, 32.
71 “Police Reports on the Journées of February, 1793,” 134.
72 Ibid., 139.
73 Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 55–66.
74 Ibid., 56.
75 Mathiez, La vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur, 40–42.
76 Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 67.
77 Lacerte, “The Evolution of Land and Labor in the Haitian Revolution,” 458–59.
78 Respectively, Bourdon, Rapport de Leonard Bourdon au nom de la commission d’In-
struction Publique, 8; quoted and translated by Michael J. Sydenham in his Léonard
Bourdon, 223. On David’s painting, see Clark, “Painting in the Year Two.”
79 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 17.
80 Quoted in Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, x.
81 Sydenham, Léonard Bourdon, 224. See 223–33 for full details.
82 Bourdon, Recueil des action héroïques et civiques des Republicains Francais, 3 and 6.

Notes to pages 96–105 321

 83 Bourdon, Recueil des action héroïques et civiques des Republicains Francais, no. 3.
84 Thibaudeau, Recueil des action héroïques et civiques des Republicains Francais, no 5.
85 Sonthonax (19 August 1794), quoted by Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 167.
86 See Vovelle, Marat, 210–24.
87 Reprinted in Vovelle, La révolution française, 2:296.
88 Reichardt, “Light against Darkness,” 124. Soboul documented at least fifty-two
members of the comités civils of the Paris sections that worked in the arts (The
Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 46). On Allais, see Roux, Inven-
taire du Fonds Français, 117–51.
89 Detournelle, Journal de la Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, 1–4. See Mir-
zoeff, “Revolution, Representation, Equality.”
90 Berthaut, Les ingenieurs géographes militaires, 1:126–38.
91 Descourtilz, Voyage d’un naturaliste en Haiti, 166.
92 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 3.
93 Jean Fouchard, Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue, 43.
94 Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 222.
95 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 186.
96 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 210–12.
97 Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 322.
98 The painting of Toussaint is reproduced in Consentino “It’s All for You, Sen
Jak!,” 252.
99 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 72; she also makes the comparison of lwa
and loi here.
100 Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 223.
101 Lillian B. Miller, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 5:321.
102 Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic, 71; Peale, “Letter” (17 Decem-
ber 1805), in Lillian B. Miller, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His
Family, 2:916.
103 “Toussaint L’Ouverture to his Brothers and Sisters in Varettes” (22 March 1795),
in Nesbitt, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 13–15.
104 Quoted in Césaire, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 268.
105 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 207–8. On the central place of war to the eighteenth-
century state, see Brewer, The Sinews of Power, and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of
the People, 180–204.
106 The full constitution is reprinted by Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, 11:539–55.
107 Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, 144–46. Incidentally, James’s startling comment that
“Toussaint favoured the whites against the Mulattoes” (The Black Jacobins, 277)
reworks Madiou’s less incendiary comment that “Toussaint wanted [Haiti] to
become independent by the union of Black and the white colonist” (Histoire
d’Haiti, 144). See Paul B. Miller, “Enlightened Hesitations.”

322 Notes to pages 105–11

108 Toussaint L’Ouverture, “Proclamation” (25 November 1801), in Nesbitt, Tous-
saint L’Ouverture, 66–67.
109 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 248.
110 Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 157.
111 James, The Black Jacobins, 284, see 276–88; Césaire, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 273–75.
112 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 162–65 (on Hamlet) and 203–6 (on Moïse).
113 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 14–15.
114 See the remarkable photographic essay by Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wam-
baugh, Crossing the Water: A Photographic Path to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World, esp.
fig. 99, pp. 113–14.
115 For full details, see Mirzoeff, “Aboriginality.”
116 Horner, The French Reconaissance, 24–25.
117 Carter, “Looking for Baudin,” 18.
118 Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 16–17.
119 L-F Jauffret, “Considerations to serve in the choice of objects that may assist in
the formation of the Special Museum of the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme,
requested of the Society by Captain Baudin,” appendix 8, in Baudin, The Journals
of Post-Captain Nicolas Baudin, 594–96.
120 Plomley, The Baudin Expedition, 89.
121 James, The Black Jacobins, 277.
122 Feldman, Formations of Violence, 5.

P u e r to r i c a n c o u n t e r P o i n t i

1 Hartup, with Benítez, “The ‘Grand Manner’ in Puerto Rican Painting,” 5. On

coartacion, see Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth Century Puerto
Rico, 84–85 and 226–27n8.
2 Sibylle Fischer has pointed out that, in 1791, a correspondent to the Havana
newspaper Papel Periódico attributed faults in church frescoes to “some blacks
. . . recently arrived from Angola” (quoted in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 61).
3 René Taylor, José Campeche y su tiempo, 160 and 160n1.
4 See Sullivan, “The Black Hand.”
5 Gruzinski, Images at War, 211.
6 The painting text reads: “Juan Pantaleón hijo legítimo de Luis de Avilés y de
Martina de Luna Alvarado. Vecinos labradores de la Villa de/ Coamo en la Isla
de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico. Nació el día 2 de julio de 1806, y condu-
cido por sus padres a esta Capital/ le confirió el Sacramento de la Confirma-
ción el 6 de abril de 1808 el Ilmo. Sr. Obispo Diocno D. D. Juan Alejo de Ariz-
mendi por cuya orden/ se hizo esta copia cogida del natural. José Campeche.”
7 Taylor, José Campeche, 211.

Notes to pages 112–21 323

 8 Moreno Vega, “Espiritismo in the Puerto Rican Community.”
9 Quoted in Houlberg, “Magique Marasa,” 269. The tohosu are all water spirits,
whose worship continues today in West Africa. On disabled children as tohosu,
see Blier, “Vodun,” 64.
10 For full details, see Childs, “‘A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the
Island.’”
11 Quoted in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 41.
12 Ibid., 43.

t h r e e .  v i s ua l i t y

1 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 3:319.

2 Clausewitz, On War, 109.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 112.
5 Ibid., 192.
6 Carlyle would later write of Clausewitz: “a truly able man, of strong judg-
ment, clear utterance,—tho’ highly metaphysical (lost frequently in defini-
tions, theoretic hair-splittings); a visible contemporary of Kant. Except Lloyd;
much more, except Napoleon, and Fred[eric]k himself in the best moments,
he is the cleverest man I have heard speak of War” (letter to Lord Ashburton,
23 January 1856, The Carlyle Letters Online, at http://carlyleletters.dukejournals
.org/).
7 Clausewitz, On War, 87. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 48.
8 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightening?” (1784), reprinted in Eliot and Stern,
The Age of Enlightenment, 250–55.
9 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 60 and 15.
10 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 229–32.
11 Berthaut, Les ingenieurs géographes militaires, 1:124.
12 Ibid., 1:286. See Godlweska, “Resisting the Cartographic Imperative.”
13 Berthaut, Les ingenieurs geographes, 1:125.
14 Ibid., 1:292.
15 Ibid., 1:281–85.
16 Siegfried, “Naked History.”
17 Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 156–72, especially his figure of Blake’s map of the
world (168).
18 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Chaosthetics,” 453.
19 Thompson, Witness against the Beast, 225.
20 Gerrard Winstanley, “A Letter to the Lord Fairfax” (1649), reprinted in Sabine,
The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 190. See the discussion in Hill, Winstanley,
35–42.

324 Notes to pages 121–29

21 Winstanley, “The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced” (1649), reprinted in Hill,
Winstanley, 77.
22 Ibid., 84.
23 Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 106.
24 Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism” (1839), in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 4,
157.
25 Ibid., 122–23.
26 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1:15.
27 Ibid., 1:211.
28 Morris, “Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley,” 287.
29 Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 25 and 48.
30 Benbow, Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, 3–4. See
also Rüter, “William Benbow’s Grand National Holiday and Congress of the
Productive Classes.” Benbow’s pamphlet retained its original page numbers.
31 Benbow, “William Benbow’s Grand National Holiday and Congress of the
Productive Classes,” 8.
32 Hill, Winstanley, 41. Hill had long argued for this notion (see Manning, The Far
Left in the English Revolution 1640–1660, 63–93).
33 Quoted in Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution 1640–1660, 65–66.
34 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 290–300.
35 On Spence, see Chase, The People’s Farm, chaps. 2–3.
36 Robert Wedderburn, “The Horrors of Slavery” (1822), in Wedderburn, The Hor-
rors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, 44–45.
37 Wedderburn, “The Axe Laid to the Root” (1817), in Wedderburn, The Horrors of
Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, 81–82.
38 Ibid., 86.
39 Ibid., 105–8.
40 Rüter, “William Benbow’s Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Pro-
ductive Classes,” 225. See also Prothero, “William Benbow and the Concept of
the ‘General Strike.’”
41 Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842, 21.
42 Ibid., 32.
43 Plotz, “Crowd Power,” 88.
44 Friedrich Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), in
Marx and Engels, Marx and Engels 1844–1845, 518.
45 Ibid., 578n.
46 Ibid., 581. On Carlyle’s influence on Marx and Engels, see Stedman Jones, “The
Redemptive Power of Violence?”
47 Quoted in Plotz, “Crowd Power,” 97.
48 Carlyle, “Model Prisons,” 2.
49 Carlyle, “Chartism” (1839), in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 4, 234–38.

Notes to pages 130–36 325

 50 Ibid., 197.
51 Ibid., 201.
52 Ibid., 214.
53 Carlyle, “Model Prisons,” 14.
54 Semple, Bentham’s Prison, 132.
55 Foucault, The Order of Things, 219.
56 Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 10.
57 Thierry, “Sur l’antipathie de race qui divise la nation française” (1820), in
Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 483; quoted in Foucault, “Society Must Be
Defended,” 226.
58 Thierry, Essai sur l’histoire de la formation et des progrès du Tiers Etat, 4.
59 Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France, 2.
60 Ibid., 11.
61 Stedman Jones, “The Redemptive Power of Violence?,” 8–9.
62 Quotations from Ranke in this paragraph are taken from Docker and Curthoys,
Is History Fiction?, 56–57.
63 Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 94–95.
64 Carlyle, Past and Present. See also Rigney, “The Untenanted Places of the Past”;
and Schoch, “‘We Do Nothing but Enact History.’”
65 Schoch, “‘We Do Nothing But Enact History,’” 29.
66 Ibid., 38. On the idea of the whole, see Rigney, “The Untenanted Places of the
Past,” 344.
67 See Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time.
68 Lavally, Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern, 12.
69 Foucault, The Order of Things, 227. On the visual turn of history, see W. J. T.
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 20.
70 Crary, “Modernizing Vision.” See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
71 Quoted in Smajic, “The Trouble with Ghost-seeing,” 1115.
72 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1:212.
73 Smajic, “The Trouble with Ghost-seeing,” 1118.
74 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1:189.
75 Carlyle, “Goethe.”
76 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Subsequent page refer-
ences appear in the text.
77 John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands, 2,
quoted in Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen, 2.
78 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race. See also Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics,
258–59.
79 Rigney, “The Untenanted Places of the Past,” 351.
80 Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
81 Plotz, “Crowd Power,” 95.

326 Notes to pages 136–43

82 Carlyle, “Model Prisons,” 16.
83 Ibid., 42.
84 Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.”
85 Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” 295.
86 See Holt, The Problem of Freedom.
87 Ibid., 298.
88 Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” 306. On the De-
merara rebellion, see da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood.
89 Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 353. See also her analysis of the interplay of
race and colonial masculinity in Occasional Discourse, 347–53.
90 Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 23.
91 Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 305–6.
92 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 55–57.
93 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 16.
94 Ibid., 22–23.
95 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 181–84.
96 Heffer, Moral Desperado, 208.
97 See Morris, “Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley,” 285–307.
98 Painter, Sojourner Truth, 1–3.
99 Gilbert, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 31.
100 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 115–24.
101 Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 66.
102 Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 158–60.
103 Painter, Sojourner Truth, 139.
104 Halberstam, Female Masculinity.
105 On racial difference, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, 177–89. On white
notions of beauty, see Dyer, White. On the revolutionary figure of Liberty, see
Pointon, Naked Authority.
106 Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 160.
107 Spivak, A Critique of Colonial Reason, 290–91 and 294.
108 Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 186n60.
109 W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1927), and Vincent van Gogh, Letters to His Brother
(1883), quoted in Carlyle, On Heroes, lxiv.
110 For a full account, see Mirzoeff, “Disorientalism.”
111 Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 225.
112 Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America, 33.
113 Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 157.
114 O’Toole, “Venus in Blue Jeans,” 80.
115 Lewis and Smith, Wilde Discovers America, 372.
116 Zamir, Dark Voices, 23–67. See also David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois:
Biography of a Race, 115–16.

Notes to pages 143–52 327

117 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 87–93.
118 Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, 811–14. All references to this speech are from these
pages.
119 Emerson, Representative Men, 13.
120 Zamir, Dark Voices, 65.
121 Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, 412.
122 Ibid., 847 and 842.
123 Zamir, Dark Voices, 65.
124 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5.

f o u r .  a B o l i t i o n r e a l i s m

1 Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 32. Trong Hiep
Nguyen’s book is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where Benjamin
must have read it, but it is not listed in WorldCat or other online catalogs.
2 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 518.
3 Quoted and translated in Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 266. One wonders
whether Benjamin omitted the telling last sentence of the passage for reasons
of space or because twentieth- century European Marxisms no longer used the
colonial model after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
4 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 89.
5 Quoted in Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 119.
6 Paiewonsky, “Special Edition,” 12.
7 Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 5 and 133.
8 Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 429.
9 Drescher, Abolition, 169.
10 St. Thomae Tidende, 20 November 1848.
11 St. Thomae Tidende, 17 May 1848.
12 St. Thomae Tidende, 26 June 1847.
13 St. Thomae Tidende, 17 July and 28 August 1847.
14 St. Thomae Tidende, 25 September 1847.
15 Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 370.
16 Saint Croix Avis, 18 July 1848.
17 Paiewonsky, “Special Edition,” 14.
18 Ibid.
19 St. Thomae Tidende, 5 August 1848.
20 See Drescher, Abolition, 280.
21 Saint Croix Avis, 21 September 1848.
22 “Provisional Act to regulate the relations between the proprietors of landed
estates and the rural population of free laborers,” Saint Croix Avis, 29 January
1849. See also regulations published 2, 4, and 29 January 1849.

328 Notes to pages 152–61

23 Saint Croix Avis, 14 June 1849.
24 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, esp. 125–32 on the peas-
antry and 73–76 on the lumpenproletariat.
25 Brettell and Zukowski, Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 22 and 39.
26 Cohen, Through the Sands of Time, 12–13, 38.
27 Blyden, “The Jewish Question (1898),” 209.
28 Respectively, Brettell, “Camille Pissarro and St. Thomas,” 16; Carlos Ledezma,
“Chronological Reading of Camille Pissarro’s Political Landscape,” 26.
29 Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound, 16.
30 Matos-Rodriguez, “Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop- Owners and Domestics.”
31 Quoted and translated in Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 226.
32 Benjamin, Arcades, 128. Taken from a speech delivered by Haussmann in 1864.
33 See the remarks of the Comte de Ludre, Le Correspondant, 25 June 1883, and
Carey Taylor, Carlyle et la pensee latine, 8:119–21.
34 Napoleon, Analysis of the Sugar Question, 2:82–83.
35 Agamben, State of Exception, 4 and 12.
36 Napoleon, Analysis of the Sugar Question, 88.
37 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 146.
38 Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (Boston, 1902), reprinted in
Collected Black Women’s Narratives, 12.
39 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 67.
40 Horan, Timothy O’ Sullivan, 34–35.
41 J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, catalogue number 84.XM.484.39, re-
printed in Jackie Napolean Wilson, Hidden Witness, n.p.
42 See Bolster, “Strange Familiarity.”
43 Quoted in Bolster and Anderson, Soldiers, Sailors, Slaves and Ships, 81.
44 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 390. Subsequent page refer-
ences appear in the text.
45 See Foner, Reconstruction, 106–8, 164–74, 402–9.
46 Manthorne, “Plantation Pictures in the Americas,” 345.
47 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.
48 See Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe.”
49 Cardoze’s novel Lina, histoire vraie was published in 1860. On Oller, see Lloyd,
“Camille Pissarro and Francisco Oller.”
50 Pissarro to Oller, 14 December 1865, reprinted in Venegas, Francisco Oller, 224.
Translations by the author, unless specified. These letters were not included in
the Pissarro correspondence, being located in Oller’s papers.
51 Ibid., 126.
52 Vollard, Paul Cézanne, 28. Art historians dispute the dating for formalist rea-
sons, due to Cézanne’s use of the palette knife, already begun in 1865, and to
the purported resemblance to the “dusky seducer” in The Rape (1867). The latter

Notes to pages 161–74 329

 is quite invisible to me, but even if it is there, it has no deciding authority. See
Gowing et al., Cézanne, 130.
53 Quoted and translated by Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting, 37. All
references to this letter come from this source.
54 Quoted and translated in DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition,”
720. I have benefitted from DeLue’s important emphasis on Zola’s understand-
ing of Pissarro.
55 Quoted and translated in Athanassoglou-Kalmyer, “An Artistic and Political
Manifesto for Cézanne,” 485.
56 Quoted and translated in DeLue, “Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition,”
726.
57 Quoted and translated by Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting, 37.
58 Ibid.
59 T. J. Clark, “We Field-Women.”
60 Quoted and translated by Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting, 38. There
is a question as to whether Cézanne meant by “1870” the way in which Pissarro
had been painting up until 1870, around 1870 specifically, or the decade of the
1870s as a whole. I have taken the first meaning to be most likely, because 1871
was such a radical break in French history that any date prior to it would have
been taken as referring to the earlier period.
61 Quoted and translated in Peter Mitchell, Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet 1841–
1918, 11.
62 See Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian for full details.
63 Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, 104–5.
64 Karl Marx, Capital, 271n3.
65 Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, 137.
66 Manet, letter dated February 1849, Lettres du Siège de Paris, précédés des Lettres de
voyage à Rio de Janeiro, 23.
67 See Wilson-Bareau with Degener, Manet and the American Civil War, which
nonetheless does not mention slavery.
68 G. Randon in Le Journal Amusante, 29 June 1867, reprinted in Armstrong, Manet
Manette, 12.
69 Quoted and translated by Delgado Mercado, “The Drama of Style in the Work
of Francisco Oller,” 69.
70 Haydee Venegas, “Oller Chronology,” 133.
71 See Luis A. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto
Rico, 48–49 for figures; 113–17 for the Moret Law, 115.
72 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.
73 See the reprinted catalog in Salons of the Refusés (London: Garland, 1981), n.p.
74 Brown, “Degas and A Cotton Office in New Orleans.”
75 Foner, Reconstruction, 262–64.

330 Notes to pages 176–83

 76 Ibid., 551; Lemann, Redemption, 76–78.
77 Quoted and translated in Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 59.
78 See Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, esp. 85–117.
79 Drescher, “Servile Insurrection and John Brown’s Body in Europe,” 522–23.
Drescher misspells Vesinier’s name throughout.
80 Marx and Lenin, The Civil War in France, 77.
81 “Paris au pouvoir des nègres,” quoted by Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 149.
82 Brecht, The Days of the Commune, ii.
83 Quoted in Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune, 188.
84 Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, 83.
85 Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune, 362.
86 Quoted by Badiou, “The Paris Commune,” 261.
87 Jules Claretie, Histoire de la révolution (1872), quoted by Lefebvre, La Proclamation
de la Commune, 25.
88 Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 38.
89 Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, on the Prussian entry, 55; and the
elections, 105.
90 Badiou, “The Paris Commune,” 272.
91 Dittmar, Iconographie de la Commune de Paris de 1871, 357. No sources are supplied
by Dittmar for his photographs.

P u e r to r i c a n c o u n t e r P o i n t i i

1 See Katherine Manthorne, “Plantation Pictures in the Americas.”

2 Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, 136–37.
3 Cézanne, Letters, 242–43.
4 Roger Marx, “Salon de 1895.”
5 The current budgetary crisis in Puerto Rico has restricted access to the painting
and made it impossible to have new photographs taken for this book, which I
regret.
6 Moreno Vega, “Espiritismo in the Puerto Rican Community,” 348–50.
7 Quoted and translated in Delgado Mercado, “The Drama of Style in the Work
of Francisco Oller,” 50.
8 Soto- Crespo, “‘The Pains of Memory,’” 450. Soto- Crespo’s piece has many
strengths, and I cite it only because it is recent and in a major refereed journal.

f i v e .  i m P e r i a l v i s ua l i t y

1 Clearly, there is an implied need to consider the related and contrasting work
of Catholic missionaries, especially in South America, for the syncretic visual
work of Catholicism leads in interestingly different directions.

Notes to pages 183–98 331

 2 Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism,” 318. See also van der Veer, Conversion
to Modernities.
3 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:35; on Carlyle, 1:52–53.
4 John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands, 30–34.
5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30.
6 H. Williams, “Diary,” 514.
7 In Aotearoa New Zealand it is now conventional not to italicize the words in
te reo, or Maori, because it is a bicultural society.
8 See Binney, “Christianity and the Maoris to 1840.”
9 Quoted in Binney, “Whatever Happened to Poor Mr Yate?,” 113.
10 Yate, An Account of New Zealand, 247.
11 Quoted in Binney, “Christianity and the Maoris to 1840,” 158. This essay clearly
outlines the process being described here.
12 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:8 and passim.
13 See Ormond Wilson, “Papahurihia: First Maori Prophet.”
14 Quoted in Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 40.
15 Binney, “Papahurihia,” 325.
16 Froude is quoted in Markus, J. Anthony Froude, 268. Woon (1836) is quoted in
Ormond Wilson, “Papahurihia,” 477.
17 Quoted in Eric Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions, 160.
18 See Rosenthal, Not Strictly Kosher, 16. Gluckman, Identity and Involvement, 75–76.
19 Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 38.
20 Turner, “Sovereignty, or the Art of Being Native,” 87.
21 See Binney, Redemption Songs.
22 See Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 37–49; Binney “Papahurihia, Penetana.”
23 See “Flags” and “Untitled,” in Smithyman, Atua Wera, 45–46.
24 These flags can be seen today in Te Papa, the national museum of Aotearoa
New Zealand. Unfortunately it was not possible to obtain permission from the
relevant iwi to reproduce them here.
25 Binney, Redemption Songs, plates following 198.
26 Quoted in Moore, New Guinea, 133.
27 Servant, Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 1838–42, 56–57.
28 William Williams, “Diary,” 515, entry for 17 March.
29 See Rosenfeld, The Island Broken in Two Halves, 51–52.
30 Letters published in Yate, An Account of New Zealand, 253 and 259. See 249–281
for more such accounts.
31 Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 87.
32 Annals of the Diocese of New Zealand.
33 Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 88.
34 Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, 25–26.
35 Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 133.

332 Notes to pages 198–205

36 Ibid., 243 and 263.
37 Walker, Nga Pepa A Ranginui, 52–53.
38 See Durie, Te Mana te Kawanatanga, 1–2.
39 Walker, Nga Pepa A Ranginui, 53.
40 Brookfield, Waitangi and Indigenous Rights, 103.
41 See ibid., 99–106, for a summary of the different positions.
42 Durie, Te Mana Te Kawanatanga, 1–6.
43 McHugh, The Maori Magna Carta, 9.
44 Quoted in McHugh, “Tales of Constitutional Origin and Crown Sovereignty
in New Zealand,” 77.
45 Quoted in McHugh, The Maori Magna Carta, 88.
46 Boast, “Recognising Multi-textualism,” 556.
47 Evans, The Victorian Age, 360; Newton, A Hundred Years of the British Empire, 206–
7; and Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century and After, 410. Cited by
Willy, “The Call to Imperialism in Conrad’s ‘Youth,’” 40n3.
48 Quoted in Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 1:73.
49 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 3. For a partisan account favorable to
Froude, see Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 1:251–60.
50 Froude, Oceana, 241. Froude lost the job when his controversial novel Nemesis
of Faith was published—rather different from his fantasy of living off the land
(Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 1:131 and 1:137).
51 Froude, Oceana, 86. See Young, The Idea of British Ethnicity, 215–19.
52 Froude, Oceana, 180.
53 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 347.
54 Quoted in Faith Smith, Creole Recitations, x. See 38–40 for Thomas’s education
and passim for the intellectual context of his work.
55 Ibid., 99.
56 John Jacob Thomas, Froudacity, 96–97.
57 James, “The West Indian Intellectual,” 27.
58 Although this chapter does not take this path, it would be perfectly possible to
expand this brief paragraph into a detailed exegesis of a similar pattern of im-
perial visuality and countervisuality in the Caribbean to that described here in
the South Pacific.
59 Froude, Oceana, 312.
60 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 360.
61 Froude, Julius Caesar.
62 Froude, Oceana, 9. Subsequent references by page number appear in the text.
63 For full details of the Melanesian mission, see Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen.
64 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.
65 Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen, 68. See 65–68 for the full account.
66 Codrington, “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” 266–67.

Notes to pages 205–14 333

67 Codrington, manuscript letter dated 11 September 1870, in possession of the
Melanesian Mission, Watford, U.K.; viewed on microfilm at the Mitchell
Library of the State Library of New South Wales.
68 Codrington, manuscript letter dated 15 September 1871, in possession of the
Melanesian Mission, Watford, U.K.; viewed on microfilm at the Mitchell
Library of the State Library of New South Wales.
69 Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen, 61. See 59–61 for the full account.
70 See Knauft, From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology.
71 Codrington, “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” 262.
72 Ibid., 312.
73 Codrington, The Melanesians, 118. For a parallel case, in which anthropologists
attributed a Supreme Being to the Maori, see Simpson, “Io as Supreme Being.”
74 Codrington, “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” 315–16.
75 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking.
76 Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy,” 23–49.
77 Quoted in Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 16.
78 Galton, Hereditary Genius, 24.
79 Quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line, 2.
80 Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen, 191.
81 Agamben, State of Exception, 51.
82 Keesing, “Rethinking Mana,” 138.
83 Agamben, State of Exception, 4.
84 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 58–59.
85 Ibid., 196. See Lévy-Bruhl, The “Soul” of the Primitive, 16–20, for an elaboration
of these ideas in French anthropology.
86 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 212–13.
87 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 9.
88 Marett, Anthropology and the Classics. Fowler, “The Original Meaning of the
Word Sacer.” The homo sacer was a person who, although sacred, could be killed
with impunity, but not sacrificed. Agamben has influentially compared homo
sacer to the Jew in the Nazi concentration camp. His methods of analogy and
inference are directly derived from the interface of classics and anthropology
being discussed here. He describes Lévi-Strauss’s characterization of mana
as the excess of the signifying function over signifieds and adds: “Somewhat
analogous remarks could be made with reference to the use and function of
the concepts of the sacred and the taboo in the discourse of the social sciences
between 1890 and 1940” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 80).
89 Fowler, “The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer,” 22, referencing Marett, The
Threshold of Religion, 90–92.
90 See Jennings Rose, Ancient Roman Religion, 12–14, where Codrington is exten-
sively quoted.

334 Notes to pages 214–19

91 Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 55–56.
92 Ibid., 62.
93 Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, 31.
94 See Beard, The Roman Triumph.
95 Raphael Samuel, “British Marxist Historians,” 5.
96 O’Brien, The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery, 307–10.
97 Charles Kerr, “Publisher’s Note,” in Osborne, The Ancient Lowly, 1:iii.
98 “Working Men’s Party: Their Platform,” New York Times, 9 October 1871. “City
and Suburban News,” New York Times, 25 January 1874.
99 “Obituary: C. Osbourne Ward,” New York Times, 21 March 1902.
100 Ward, The Ancient Lowly, 1:151–204.
101 Ward, Ancient Lowly, 1:ix.
102 Ward, Ancient Lowly, 1:427.
103 Harley, Syndicalism, 14.
104 Quoted in Raphael Samuel, “British Marxist Historians,” 6.
105 Pelloutier, L’Art et la Révolte, 5.
106 Fernand Pelloutier, “La musée du travail” (1898), reprinted in Juillard, Fernand
Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme d’action directe, 92–97.
107 Pelloutier, L’Art et la Révolte, 18.
108 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 47.
109 Rae, “The Eight Hours’ Day in Australia,” 528.
110 Friederich Engels, “Preface to the Communist Manifesto, May 1, 1890,” avail-
able at the Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/.
111 Huberman and Minns, “The Times They Are Not Changin,’” 545, table 1.
112 See Gines, “Divisionism, Neo-Impressionism, Socialism.”
113 Alexander Trachtenberg, The History of May Day (1932), available at the Marxists
Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/.
114 Briand, La Grève Générale et la Révolution.
115 La Grève Générale, 13 January 1894.
116 La Grève Générale, 3d annee no. 1, 1 March 1899.
117 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 42.
118 Ibid., 66.
119 Ibid., 67.
120 Berth, Les Nouveaux aspects du Socialisme, 60–61.
121 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 238–44.
122 Ibid., 25–29.
123 Ibid., 118.
124 Ibid., 121.
125 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris, 1889), quoted in
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 26.
126 See Thiec, “Gustave Le Bon, prophète de l’irrationalisme de masse.”

Notes to pages 220–28 335

127 Gordon W. Allport, quoted by Robert K. Merton in the introduction to Le
Bon, The Crowd, v. The French title of Le Bon’s work was Psychologie des Foules,
but it has become known as The Crowd in English.
128 Le Bon, The Crowd, 16–17.
129 Ibid., 41.
130 Ibid., 55.
131 Ibid., 54.
132 See, for Germany, Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 38; and for Italy,
Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle.
133 Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 10.
134 Drumont, La France Juive, 436 and 529. On Barrès and Carlyle, see Carey Taylor,
Carlyle et la pensée latine, 330–32.
135 Fornelli, Tommaso Carlyle, 19.
136 Licciardelli, Benito Mussolini e Tommasso Carlyle, 32.
137 James Ellis Baker, “Carlyle Rules the Reich,” Saturday Review of Literature,
25 November 1933, 291.
138 Liselott Eckloff, Bild und Wirklichkeit bei Thomas Carlyle (Konigsberg and Berlin:
Ost- Europa-Verlag, 1936).
139 Quoted in Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 21.

s i x .  a n t i fa s c i s t n e o r e a l i s m s

1 Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”
2 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,”
122.
3 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 243.
4 For a concise summary of this historiography, see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The
Fight for Equality and the American Century, 352–56.
5 See especially Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 711–29.
6 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 53.
7 Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 37.
8 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 260.
9 Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 269.
10 Ibid., 272.
11 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 382.
12 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 15.
13 Urbinati, “The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony,”
140–41.
14 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 88.
15 Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, 98.
16 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 707.

336 Notes to pages 228–36

17 Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 66.
18 Quoted in Logan, “Education in Haiti,” 414.
19 Bellegarde, Ecrivains Haitiens, 38–39.
20 Lespinasse, Histoire des affranchis de Saint-Domingue, 20–21.
21 Du Bois, “A Chronicle of Race Relations.”
22 John Crowe Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” (1930), in [Ransom
et al.], I’ll Take My Stand, 15.
23 Gramsci, The Southern Question, 33.
24 Ibid., 71.
25 Ibid., 59.
26 Sillanpoa, “Pasolini’s Gramsci,” 133n34.
27 Agamben, State of Exception, 23.
28 See Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, and Le Sueur, Uncivil War.
29 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 48n7.
30 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 62.
31 Quoted in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 300.
32 Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé (1957), quoted in Ramdani, “L’Algérie, un dif-
férend,” 10.
33 I use post-colonial to mean “after the colony” and postcolonial to mean the “re-
thinking of the colonial.”
34 Abbas, L’indépendance confisquée.
35 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 299 and 320.
36 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2.
37 Ibid., 4.
38 Ibid., 3.
39 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 175.
40 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 26.
41 Quoted and translated in Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask,” 580.
42 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 281.
43 Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask,” 589–90.
44 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 92. See also Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 21.
45 See Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, 71–73.
46 See Clemens and Grigg, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, wherein
sixteen essays on the seminar let this passage pass without comment.
47 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 169.
48 See especially Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power, 76–103.
49 Ngũ gı̃ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind.
50 Stora, Algeria 1830–2000, 52.
51 Barthes, Mythologies, 116.
52 Ibid., 148n25.
53 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 135.

Notes to pages 236–45 337

54 Feldman, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory,” 60.
55 Quoted by Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 107. For more on the films produced from
1911–54, see Kenz, L’Odysée des Cinémathèques, 73.
56 The Cinema in Algeria, 9–14. Kenz, L’Odysée des Cinémathèques, 79.
57 Vautier, Camera citoyenne, 142.
58 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 103. Vautier, Camera citoyenne, 146–47.
59 Mohamed Bensalah, “Tébessa: Premiers journées cinématographiques,” El
Watan, 17 April 2008.
60 The Cinema in Algeria, 13. Vautier, Camera citoyenne, 165–66.
61 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 321.
62 See Racconti di bambini d’Algeria. Discussed by Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 128. The
originals are said to be with the Red Crescent in Tunis. There are references to
a French translation, but I have not been able to locate it.
63 Racconti di bambini d’Algeria, drawings from 10–14, testimony cited from 47–55.
64 See Boudjedra, Naissance du cinéma algérien, 40.
65 Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, 138–39.
66 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 146–52.
67 Manuel alphabétique de psychiatrie (1952), quoted in Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 65.
68 Keller, Colonial Madness, 152.
69 As Foucault worked in Tunis, during the 1960s, it is not impossible that he was
aware of Fanon’s work.
70 Fanon, Rencontre de la société et de la psychiatrie, 2. See Keller, Colonial Madness, 171.
71 Fanon, Rencontre de la société et de la psychiatrie, 3.
72 Ibid., 8–9. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 326.
73 Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power, 77.
74 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 56.
75 Quoted in Kenz, L’Odysée des Cinémathèques, 146.
76 Vautier, Cinema citoyenne, 179–88.
77 Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 107.
78 Ibid., 108.
79 Alleg, La Question, 65.
80 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 293.
81 Hayles, How We Became Post-Human, 89.
82 See Stora, Imaginaires de guerre, 135.
83 Boudjedra, Naissance du cinema algérien, 25.
84 Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 132.
85 Djebar, The Women of Algiers, 151.
86 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 26.
87 Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 63.
88 Porton, “Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility,” 50–51.
89 Austin, “Drawing Trauma.”

338 Notes to pages 245–59

 90 Quoted and translated in Macey, Frantz Fanon, 351.
91 See Gilroy, “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel.”
92 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 199–201.
93 Ibid., 183.
94 Austin, “Drawing Trauma,” 135.
95 Durand, “Eija-Liisa Ahtila,” 24.
96 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 36.
97 Wideman, Fanon, 99. Further page references appear in the text.
98 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 14.
99 Keller, Colonial Madness, 223–26.
100 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 82.
101 Cited in Kacem, La psychose française, 13.
102 Ibid., 15 and 56–62.
103 Ibid., 16–19.
104 Quoted in Coquery-Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de l’histoire coloniale, 11.
105 See my blog, at http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL, for ongoing thoughts about
these developments.

n ot e s to m e x i c a n - s Pa n i s h c o u n t e r P o i n t

1 Paul Julian Smith, “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

2 Kim Edwards, “Alice’s Little Sister: Exploring Pan’s Labyrinth.”
3 Respectively, quoted in Urbinati, “The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the
Concept of Hegemony,” 142; Gramsci, The Southern Question, 59.
4 Urbinati, “The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony,”
145.

s e v e n.  g lo B a l c o u n t e r i n s u r g e n c y

1 Roper, “Global Counterinsurgency,” 101.

2 Sewall, “A Radical Field Manual,” xxv.
3 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14.
4 Michael Hoffman, “New Reaper Sensors Offer Bigger Picture,” 16 February
2009, available at the Air Force Times website, http://www.airforcetimes.com/.
5 Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1.
6 Quoted in “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans,” Army Times,
2 September 2005, which itself is quoted in “Al-Cajun? Army Times calls NOLA
Katrina Victims ‘the Insurgency,’” posted by Xeni Jardin, on 3 September 2005,
at the boingboing website, http://www.boingboing.net/. The link to the Army
Times provided in the boingboing post generates the message “The story you
are looking for cannot be found.”

Notes to pages 259–81 339

 7 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 412.
8 Ginger Thompson and Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Drones Fight Mexican Drug
Trade,” New York Times, 16 March 2011.
9 Paul Lewis, “CCTV in the Sky: Police Plan to Use Military-Style Spy Drones,”
Guardian, 23 January 2010.
10 Joseph L. Flatley, “UK Police Drone Grounded for Flying Without a License,”
16 February 2010, http://www.engadget.com/.
11 On global civil war, see Arendt, On Revolution. On the new state of permanent
war, see Retort, Afflicted Powers, 78.
12 National Security Council Resolution 68, quoted by Paul Edwards, The Closed
World, 12; for a thorough account, see 10–12.
13 Pease, “Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War,”
563.
14 Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven
Missives),” 23.
15 Vickers, “The Revolution in Military Affairs and Military Capabilities,” 30.
16 Williams and Lind, “Can We Afford a Revolution in Military Affairs?,” 2.
17 See U.S. Department of Defense, “DoD Releases Fiscal 2010 Budget Proposal,”
news release no. 304–09, 7 May 2009, available at the website for the U.S. De-
partment of Defense, http://www.defense.gov/.
18 See Pantelogiannis, “RMA .”
19 Arquilla and Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar, vii.
20 Ibid., 5.
21 Murphy, Are We Rome?, 83.
22 Weizman, Hollow Land, 187–200.
23 Chandarasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 133–36.
24 See the report “Sociological Skills Used in the Capture of Saddam Hussein,” by
Victoria Hougham, available at the American Sociological Association’s online
journal Footnotes ( July–August 2005), http://www.asanet.org/.
25 Danner, “Iraq.”
26 Gregory, The Colonial Present, 211–13.
27 For an annotated selection of military video, see Jennifer Terry, design by
Raegan Kelly, “Killer Entertainments,” available at the online journal Vectors,
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/. For insurgent videos, see the Internet Ar-
chive, http://www.archive.org/, under “Iraq War: Non-English Language
Videos,” such as the video “IED Attack in Samara [sic],” which purports to
document an attack on U.S. forces in Samarra, but could easily be staged.
28 Karen J. Hall, “Photos for Access: War Pornography and U.S. Practices of
Power,” paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual
Conference, Vancouver, 2006. My thanks to Professor Hall for sharing her
work.

340 Notes to pages 281–91

29 Payne, “Waging Communication War.”
30 Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.”
31 Arquilla, “The End of War as We Knew It?” This essay marks an effort by the
leading theorist of information war to reframe COIN in his paradigm.
32 McElvey, “The Cult of Counterinsurgency,” 21.
33 Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency.”
34 Field Manual 3–24: Counterinsurgency (Washington: Headquarters Department of
the Army, 2006); republished, in 2007, as The U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterin-
surgency Field Manual.
35 Sewall is “a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Agency Review
Working Group responsible for the national security agencies” (see “Working
Group Members” for the National Security Policy Working Group, available
at the Change.gov website, http://change.gov/).
36 Sarah Sewall, “A Radical Field Manual,” xxv.
37 Gray, Recognizing and Understanding Revolutionary Change in Warfare, 19–23.
38 Alexander Galloway, Gaming, 63.
39 Weizman, Hollow Land, 262.
40 Ricks, Fiasco, 152.
41 Lawrence, Secret Despatches from Arabia, 153–60.
42 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1.
43 Small Wars Manual, 1.
44 Burton and Nagl, “Learning as We Go,” 311.
45 Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror.
46 Coll, “War by Other Means.”
47 Gregory, “The Rush to the Intimate.” This important essay provides a close
reading of counterinsurgency that is similar to mine, but phrased more in the
language of geography and anthropology.
48 Niva, “Walling Off Iraq.”
49 Hilla Dayan, “Regimes of Separation,” 285.
50 William J. Broad, “Inside the Black Budget,” New York Times, 1 April 2008.
51 Brendan O’Neill, “Watching You Watching Me,” New Statesman, 6 October
2006.
52 Quoted by Eyal Weizman, “Thantato-tactics,” in Ophir et al., The Power of In-
clusive Exclusion, 565.
53 David Kilcullen, “Death from Above, Outrage Down Below,” New York Times,
16 May 2009.
54 Greg Miller, “Increased U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan Killing Few High-Value
Militants,” Washington Post, 21 February 2011.
55 Derek Gregory, “American Military Imaginaries,” 68.
56 Ibid., 75.
57 Blog post by Starbuck, “The T. X. Hammes PowerPoint Challenge (Essay

Notes to pages 291–304 341

 Contest),” 24 July 2009, available at the Small Wars Journal website, http://
smallwarsjournal.com/.
58 T. X. Hammes, “Dumb Dumb Bullets,” Armed Forces Journal, July 2009, http://
www.armedforcesjournal.com/.
59 Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Powerpoint,” New York
Times, 26 April 2010.
60 Riverbend, “End of Another Year . . . ,” blog post, 29 December 2006, Baghdad
Burning, http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/. In July 2007, “Riverbend”
herself left Iraq for Syria.
61 “Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq,” Briefing Paper no. 105, Oxfam/
NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, 2007.
62 O’Hanlon and Campbell, Iraq Index, 3.
63 Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook,” available in the “Library”
section of the CIA website, https://www.cia.gov/.
64 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 16.
65 Mackinlay and al-Baddawy, Rethinking Counterinsurgency, 41.
66 Ibid., 56.
67 Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics.
68 Bataille, quoted in Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 38.
69 This is the name of a Media Commons project that I edit. See http://media
commons.futureofthebook.org/the-new- everyday/about/.

342 Notes to pages 304–9

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 index

Numbers in italics indicate illustrations

ABC News, 304 75, 111; counterinsurgency and, 293;

Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 272 sharecropping, 171; sustainable, 29,
Abu Ghraib, xiv, 8, 29, 288–96, 308 188
Achiri, Ahmed, 247 Ahtila, Eise-Liese, 263, 265; Where is
aesthetics: anarchy and, 14, 176–79, Where? (Ahtila), 260–62, 261
224; Fanon on, 3, 242; fascism and, al-Aqsa Intifada, 285
229, 233; visuality and, 3–4, 11–12, 15, Algeria, 172, 263; 1991 civil war in, 241,
17–19, 21–23, 78–79, 123, 135, 141, 151, 260, 264–67; revolution in, 12, 18–20,
246, 278 33, 169, 232–33, 239–42, 258–60; state
Afghanistan, 19–21, 279; metrics for, 307 of emergency in, 244
Africa, 5, 10, 18, 68, 109, 111, 122, 146, Algérie en flammes (Vautier), 246
240, 244–46, 280; communism of, 77; Algiers, 239–41
diaspora from, 13, 75, 78, 94–95, 110, Alleg, Henri, 240, 253
162–63, 172, 176, 190–95, 237, 262; in Analysis of the Sugar Question (Napo-
history, 268. See also Algeria; Sierra leon III), 165
Leone Ancient Lowly, The (Ward), 222–23
African Americans, 33, 110, 132–33, 166– antifascism, 271–76. See also neorealism
71, 183, 237, 262–63, 272 Antigone, 275
Agamben, Giorgio, 24, 217, 220, 239, Aotearoa New Zealand, 13, 26–27, 32,
312n23 197, 199–212; diocese of, 213–15
agriculture: colonial, 31, 53–54, 70–71, Aponte, José Antonio, 122
Argentina, 18, 241, 302 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, 255
Arizona, 282 Belchite, 272
Armed Forces Journal, 304 Belchite/South Bronx (Torres), 272
Arnold, Matthew, 14–15, 145–46 Beller, Jonathan L., 23
Arquilla, John, 285 Ben Ali, Zine el Abidine, 268
Australia, 51, 113, 137, 158, 208, 210, 212, Benbow, William, 132–34
215, 219, 257, 315n43; Queensland, Bendeddouche, Ghaouti, 251
214; Victoria, 224 Benjamin, Walter, 32, 39, 78, 146, 154,
authority, xiv–xv, 2–6, 8–10, 23–26, 172, 233
29–34, 58, 75–78, 118, 160, 165, 240, Bentham, Jeremy, 136–37, 230, 270
280, 289, 292, 299; auctor and, 7; fas- Bergson, Henri, 228
cism and, 274; imperial, 196–98, 255; Berth, Edouard, 227
indigenous, 205–9; mana and, 213, Biassou, Georges, 99, 104
217–18; Papahurihia and, 198; Paris biopolitics, 236, 307; biometric ID s, 300;
Commune and, 183–87; visuality and, as counterinsurgency, 300; Tactical
123–54 Biopolitics, 308
autonomy, 1–4, 11–12, 24–26, 30, 32, 50, biopower, 7, 116, 196, 212–18, 288
57, 152; colonial, 70–76; of the en- Blackburn, Robin, 100
slaved, 67–70; Paris Commune and, Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois),
184–86 44, 148, 170–72
awakenings, 79–86 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 14, 262
Azoulay, Ariella, 25 Blair, Tony, 278
Blake, William, 127–30, 128, 133, 135, 140
Bachir, Yamina, Rachida, 264–67, 264, Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 162
pl. 10 Bosch, President Juan, 19
Badiou, Alain, 186 Bouchareb, Rachid, 265
Bagetti, Giuseppe, 126–27, 126, 279 Bouchiti, Fatima, 247
Bahrain, 269 Bouchiti, Milouda, 247
Bambara, Toni Cade, 251 Boujedra, Rachid, 255
Barbados, 53, 58–59, 56, 67; Slave Code Boukman, Dutty, 69, 99
(1661), 11, 49, 65–66 Bourdeaux, Gottlieb, 159
Barthes, Roland, 28; on French colonial- Braude, Benjamin, 63
ism, 169, 244–45 Brecht, Bertolt, 28; The Days of the Com-
Bataille, Georges, 308 mune, 184
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), 33, 46, 233– Brinkley, Douglas, 281
34, 241, 252–53, 264–65; information Britain, 13–19, 59, 130–31, 145, 151, 205,
pyramid in, 254; women in, 255–56 210–12, 221, 235, 257, 276, 312
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 252 Brooks, Daphne, 150
Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 172 Brutus (David), 193, 194
Baudin, Nicolas, 113 Buck-Morss, Susan, 229
BBC News, 281 Buisseret, David, 58
Beauvois, Xavier, 265 Buñuel, Luis, 271

374 Index
Bush, George H. W., 294 44; counterinsurgency and, 280–82,
Bush, George W., 218, 286, 292–94, 304–5
302–5 Charby, Jacques, 251
Charles I, 52, 54, 289
Caché (Haneke), 257–60 Charles I at the Hunt (Van Dyck), 52, 54
Caesar, Julius, 212–13 Chartism, 132–36, 143–44, 226, 276
Caesarism, 24, 32, 196–98, 209, 212–13, Chartism (Carlyle), 135–38
223–24, 228–29, 234–42, 276 Chiarelli, Peter, 299, 299
Cai Guo Qiang, Nothing to See Here, Chile, 18, 241
282–83 Christianity, 16, 50, 92, 196–99, 204–6,
Cairo, 241, 269–70, 309 213, 217, 221
California, 303 Chute en Masse, La (Dupuis), 43
Callwell, Charles E., Small Wars, 297 cinema, 39, 147, 238, 272–80, 288; in
Campeche y Jordan, José, 31, 117–22, Algeria, 251–56, 264–67; colonial,
119, pl. 4 233, 246; digital-era, 260, 271; post-
Capital (Marx), 172, 179 colonial, 257–67
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, The cinematic mode of production, 23
Supper at Emmaus, 193–95, 194 classics, 219–20; historical materialism
Carlyle, Thomas, xiii–xiv, 3, 12, 139, and, 221
280; abolition of slavery and, 147; classification, visuality and, 3–4, 11, 14,
Chartism, 135–38; on condition of 18, 21, 33, 146, 151–54, 197, 216, 268–
England, 130, 212; on Dante, 141; 69, 278–80, 285
Engels on, 135; fascism and, 130, 230; Clausewitz, Karl von, 3, 12, 124–25, 236,
The French Revolution, 13, 131–33; Haiti 277–79; Carlyle on, 324n6; On War,
and, 13; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 143–46; 37, 227
Occasional Discourse, 143–45; On Heroes closed- circuit television (CCTV ), 20, 302
and Hero Worship, 140–43, 199, 209, Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq),
217–19; Paris Commune and, 183; 286
syndicalism and, 223; visuality and, Code Noir (1685), 11, 49, 66, 317n80
141 Codrington, Robert Henry, 213–14, 217–
carnival, 60–61 19; The Melanesians, 215–16
Casid, Jill, 62 Cold War, 278, 282–83, 307
Casta painting, 63–64 Comaroff, Jean, 199–200
Catherin, Louis, 204 Comaroff, John L., 199–200
Censer, Jack, 79 command, control, communications,
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), 307 intelligence (C3I ), 284
Centre Audio-Visuel, 251; ciné-pops at, Commune, Paris, 31, 183, 185–87, 270;
251–52 slavery and, 184
Cézanne, Paul, 177, 179, 188; The Negro complex, 3, 5; Freud and, 9–10; im-
Scipio, 174–75, 175 perial, 13–18; military-industrial, 8,
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 22–23 18–22; plantation, 10–13, 49
chaos, 16, 123, 167, 193; in Carlyle, 138– condensation, of images, 79, 92

Index 375
Conley, Tom, 58 decapitation, 97–99
Conrad, Joseph, 24, 38, 198 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Copernicus, Nicholas, 7 the Citizen, 84–85, 103; in Saint-
Cotton Office in New Orleans, A (Degas), Domingue, 78–79, 91–92; visualized,
182–83, 182 86–94
counterinsurgency, 18–22, 40, 239, 257, Declaration of the Rights of Woman,
268, 277–309; as asymmetric war- 25
fare, 278; Full Spectrum Informa- Degas, Edgar, A Cotton Office in New
tion Operations in, 299–300; global, Orleans, 182–83, 182
18–23, 34, 239, 268, 277–80, 293, 302– Deleuze, Gilles, 243, 277, 278, 285
3; legitimacy and, 299, 299; in United del Toro, Guillermo, 271–76
States, 280–82; visuality in, 295–97 democracy, 125, 212, 235, 301; aboli-
countervisuality, 4–5, 22–25, 41, 123–24, tion and, 26, 155; Carlyle and, 130,
308–9; as feminine, 131; of general 136, 142; in France, 267; as goal of
strike, 226–28; indigenous, 44–45, countervisuality, 4–5, 12, 29, 34, 104,
199–205; proletarian, 221–29. See also 157, 167, 308; in Reconstruction, 171
realism; neorealism Denmark, 59, 159, 161, 173, 263
Courbet, Gustave, 28; The Winnowers, Derrida, Jacques, 1, 5, 7, 263, 284, 311n3,
193, 194 311n7
culture, 13–15, 19–20, 153, 197, 210, Des hommes et des dieux (Beauvios), 265
238, 250, 307; Carlyle and, 143–46; Despentes, Virginie, 267
counterinsurgency and, 278, 284–85, Dessalines, 12, 70, 107
294–301; cultivation and, 52–55, 114; Dickens, Charles, 96
popular, 234–36, 276; print, 182. See Diggers, 129, 186
also visual culture disability, 67, 121, 170, 263. See also Cam-
Curtin, Philip, 10 peche y Jordan, José
Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 136–37
Dance at the Inn (Pissarro), 194, 195 Djebar, Assia, 239, 256
Danner, Mark, 288 Drumont, Edouard, 229
Darwin, Charles, 14–15, 146, 202, 278 Du Bois, W. E. B., 16, 26, 31, 216; Black
David, Jacques-Louis, 107; Brutus, 193, Reconstruction in America, 44, 148, 170–
194; Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 108 72; on Carlyle, 150, 152–54; on Haiti,
Davis, Angela Y., 251 237; on the South, 27, 234–37
Davis, Jefferson, 150; Du Bois and, 152– Dumas, Alexandre, père, 172, 173
53; Wilde and, 151–52 Dumézil, Georges, 220
Davis, Lennard J., 216 Dupuis, 105; La Chute en Masse, 43
Dayan, Hilla, 301 Durkheim, Emile, 16, 217–18
Dayan, Joan, 109 Dussel, Enrique, 6, 46, 236
Dayan, Moshe, 303 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, 36, 36, 51–53,
Days of the Commune, The (Brecht), 184 53, pl. 2
De Beauvoir, Simone, 243 Dutrône la Couture, Jacques-François,
Debord, Guy, 23, 285 71–75, 72, 74

376 Index
Duval Carrié, Edouard: The Indigo Room, Fornelli, Guido, 230
51; La Voix des Sans Voix, 70 Foucault, Michel, 3, 9, 11, 16, 25, 63, 98,
125, 219, 282, 314n5, 338n69; Discipline
eating: enslaved and, 99–101, 111–12; and Punish, 136–37; on history, 137–38;
politics of, 5, 78, 94–96 The Order of Things, 48–51, 139; Society
education, 107, 282; in counterinsur- Must Be Defended, 277
gency, 306, 307; as goal of counter- Foullon, Joseph, 96–97
visuality, 4, 12, 29, 103–4, 157, 266, 1492, shocks of, 7
308; in Haiti, 235–36; in Puerto Rico, Fowler, Warde, 219
188; in Reconstruction, 170 Fox News, 289
Egypt, 27, 84, 126, 215, 221; 2011 revolu- France, 18, 100–101, 125, 131, 137, 170,
tion in, 239–40, 265, 266–68 172–73, 180, 271; Algeria and, 239–68;
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 8, 19 Oller and, 188–90; Paris Commune
Eisenstein, Sergei, 253, 256; Battleship and, 184–84; Pissarro and, 156–58;
Potemkin, 252 revolution of 1789, 10, 13, 30, 75–94,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 139, 151–53; Rep- 96–99, 102–6, 134, 290–94; revolution
resentative Men, xvi of 1848, 158. See also Carlyle, Thomas
Engels, Friedrich, 135, 225 France Juive, La (Drumont), 229
England, Lynddie, 291 Franco, Francisco, 28, 33, 232, 271–75
Estates-General, in Saint-Domingue, 75 Frankenstein, 273
everyday, the, 2, 309 French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 13, 131–33
Execution of Maximilian (Manet), 179–81, Freud, Sigmund, 9, 28, 82, 97–99, 217,
180 228, 259; Totem and Taboo, 275
Eyre, Edward John, 145 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN ),
239–41; Barthes and, 245
Falklands/Malvinas Islands, 286 Froude, James Anthony, xvi, 26, 132,
Fanon, Frantz, 3, 10, 17–18, 33, 268; on 156, 201, 213; History of England, 230;
Algeria, 267; Black Skin, White Masks, Nemesis of Faith, 209; Oceana, 210–12
14, 262; Lacan and, 243; lectures in
Tunis, 250–51; psychiatry of, 250–51; Galton, Francis, 216
work represented, 257–67; Wretched Gance, Abel, 115
of the Earth, 239–47, 260–63, 265 garde-corps, 68
Fanon (Wideman), 262–63 Gilliam, Terry, 272
Farès, Boukhatem, 247 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 96–97, 97
fascism, 5, 17–18, 27–28, 32–33, 229–31, Godard, Jean-Luc: Le Petit Soldat, 255,
271–80 259; in Wideman’s Fanon, 262
Feldman, Allen, 115, 245 Gordon, Charles George, 212
Fick, Carolyn, 69, 317n92 Gouges, Olympe de, 25, 85
Field Manual FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency, Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 27–28, 33, 267,
293–98 275; Carlyle and, 234–38; fascism and,
Fischer, Sybille, 122 234–40; modern Prince and, 276; sub-
Ford, Charles, 63 altern and, 235–36

Index 377
Greenberg, Kenneth S., 148 colonized and, 241–42; Du Bois and,
Gregory, Derek, 303, 341n47 234–45; Du Tertre and, 51–59; Froude
Grève Générale, La (newspaper), 226 and, 210; imperial visuality and,
Grey, Sir George, 211–12 196–99, 215–19; James and, 211; Napo-
Grierson, Herbert, 230 leon, Toussaint, and, 109–12; in nine-
Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), 29, 34, 287, 296 teenth century, 137; Paris Commune
Guattari, Félix, 243, 285 and, 184–87; Pinel and, 96; radical of
Guillemet, Antoine, 176–78 Antiquity, 33, 221–24; shift around
1660 in, 63; Spanish Academy of, 121;
Hadjadj, Brahim (Ali la Pointe), 252–55 stadial, 113; subaltern, 78; Thierry
Haiti, 10–13, 67, 111–13, 158–59, 276; and, 137–38; visuality and, 123–25,
Du Bois and, 236–37; earthquake in, 223, 277
29; Manet and, 180; Pissarro and, 162, History of England (Froude), 230
172; revolution in, 10, 31, 42, 61–62, Hitler, Adolf, 231; Carlyle and, 130, 230
65, 103–4, 113; Vodou in, 68–70, Homer, Winslow, 171–72
77–78. See also Saint-Domingue Honoré, Russel (Lieutenant General),
Halberstam, Judith, 150 281
Hamlet, 5, 273 hooks, bell, 251
Hammond, John, 11, 56 Hors la loi (Bouchareb), 265
Haneke, Michael, 257–60 Hughes, Langston, 272
Hansen, Peter, 160–61 Hughes, Patrick, 52–53, 65
Hardt, Michael, 24 Hunt, Lynn, 79
Harley, J. H., 223 Hurt Locker, The (Bigelow), 21–22
Harman, Sabrina, 291 Hussein, Saddam, 287–90; execution of,
Haussmann, Baron, 157, 161, 164–65, 288–90, 289; statue of, destroyed, 287
184, 187
Hayles, N. Katherine, 254 Inconvenient Truth, An (Guggenheim),
Haymarket Affair, 226 47
Hegel, Georg, 49, 152, 268 India: Mutiny, 13, 31, 144, 208; women
Helsinki, 261, 263 in, 150
Hermitage at Pontoise (Pissarro), 178–79, indigo, 51–53
pl. 7 Indigo Room, The (Duval Carrié), 51
hero: Carlyle and, 123–26, 140–43, 217– information, 2–3, 12, 17, 19, 33–34, 65;
19, 280; counterhero, 146–54; as Duce, command, control, communications,
229–31; revolutionary, 42–43, 104–10 intelligence (C3I ), 284; Hero and, 140;
Herodotus, 7 visuality and, 279; visualized infor-
Hiroshima, 283 mation war, 294–303, 308, 341n31;
history, xiv–xvi, 2–6, 9–13, 17–21, 184, war, 240, 253–55, 284–88
220, 284, 299; Africa and, 268; Blake insurgency, 277, 283
and, 130; British Communist Party intensification: Foucault and, 9; visu-
Group of, 130; Carlyle and, 30, 96, ality and, 9–12, 17–21, 33, 35, 76, 98,
130–43; Chakrabarty and, 22–23; 155–57, 197, 232–33, 268, 282

378 Index
Iraq, xiv, 8, 19, 26, 33, 239; metrics for, Las Meninas (Velazquez), 49, 51
307; war in, 279–82, 285–307 Latter-Day Pamphlets (Carlyle), 143–46
Iraqi Media Network, 287–88 law, 7–8, 10, 14, 275, 278, 282; Brown v.
Ireland, 208–9; compared to Jamaica, Board of Education, 4; colonial, 208–9,
144; compared to South, 151; famine 240, 244; force of, 49, 57, 60, 65–67,
in, 158; Northern, 245 70, 75–76, 215–17; of the gaze, 276;
Islam, 7, 67, 92, 217, 233, 241, 256, 265– Moret, 181; Roman, 165, 167, 220;
66, 304; global, 307; Sunni, 305 slavery and, 11, 51, 63; Tablets of, 88,
Israel, 21, 285, 296, 301–3 91–92, 129–30, 196; Wi Parata v. Bishop
of Wellington, 208–9
Jacob, Christian, 58 Lawes, William, 203
Jacotot, Joseph, 104 Lawrence, T. E., 33, 298
J’ai huit ans (Maurice Audin Commit- Le Barbier, Jean-Jacques-François, 88–91
tee), 246–50, 248, 260 Le Bon, Gustave, 228–29, 319n21
Jamaica, 8, 13, 33, 55–62, 71, 100–101, Lee, Spike, 281
133–34, 183, 276; Morant Bay uprising Lenin, V. I., 19, 112, 226
in, 143–46, 208 Le Peletier, Michel, 103–4
James, C. L. R., 56, 81, 99, 112, 211, 223 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 267
Jews, 7, 27, 224; in Caribbean, 51, 54, 67, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 16, 217, 220
158, 162; Carlyle and, 140, 201; Maori Libya, 268–69
self-fashioning as, 32, 192, 197, 200– Linnaeus, Carl, 62
205; Nazis and, 231; Sartre and, 243 Livy, 7
Jospin, Lionel, 207 Locke, Susan, 126
Joyce, James, xiii London, 14, 51, 132–33, 140–41, 199, 203–
Jubilee, 31; Jewish origins of, 133 5, 211, 215, 302; Blake on, 127
Longoni, Emilio, May 1, 45, 225–26
Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj, 267 Louis XVI, 87, 289
Kant, Immanuel, 125 Louverture, Toussaint, 12, 62, 99, 104;
Katrina (hurricane), 291, 309; counter- Carlyle and, 211; crisis of 1801 and,
insurgency response to, 280–81 110–13; print of, 42, 107–10, 122
kawanatanga, 206–8 Luxemburg, Rosa, 27; on general strike,
Keesing, Roger, 218 224–26
Keller, Robert, 265
Kilcullen, David, 303 Makandal, Brigitte, 68
Kipling, Rudyard, 15 Makandal, François, 11, 30, 57, 61, 120,
Kongo, 68, 94, 107–9, 120–21, 189 317n87; portrait of, 69; revolt led by,
Kororareka, 203, 203 67–70. See also Maroons
Maldonando Torres, Nelson, 6
Lacan, Jacques, 9–10, 17, 243, 251 mana, 16–17, 32, 196–97, 206–8, 213–21,
Lake, Marilyn, 216 229
Lantern, 84, 85 Manet, Edouard, 31; Execution of Maximil-
La Roche, Mme, 79, 110 ian, 179–81, 180; slavery and, 179–80

Index 379
Maori, 27, 32, 197, 199–209 Mokdad, Abd el Hamid, 246
mapping, 3, 10–11, 37, 57–62, 106, 126, monarchy, symbolism of, 82–84
145, 296 Montaigne, Michel de, 7
Marett, Robert R., 219 Moore, Henry P., 167–70
Marine Corps Gazette, 285 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel, 53, 318n106
Maroons, 11, 61, 71–72, 100, 134 Morocco, 247, 301
Martin, Jean (Colonel Mathieu), 253–55, Morricone, Ennio, 256
254 Morris, Errol, Standard Operating Proce-
Marx, Karl, 22, 225, 230, 245, 282; Capi- dure, 291–92
tal, 172, 179; on Paris Commune, 184; Mota Lava, 214
phantasmagoria and, 161, 165 Mubarak, Hosni, 240, 270
Massu, Jacques, 240 Museum of Labor, 224
Matéï, Georges, 258 Mussolini, Benito, 228, 230, 238
Mauss, Marcel, 218
Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico), Nagl, John, 293
179–80, 180 Napoleon I, 37, 115, 126–27, 129, 284,
May Day, campaigns for, 224–25, 228 294; Carlyle and, 12–13, 31, 104, 124,
May 1 (Longoni), 45, 225–26 141; painted by David, 107–8; Tous-
May 1968, 257 saint and, 107–9
Mbembe, Achille, 5–6, 51, 172, 242, 278 Napoleon III, 157, 164; Analysis of the
McChrystal, Stanley, 305 Sugar Question, 165; Maximilian and,
McClellan, James, 70 179; Paris Commune and, 183–84
McHugh, Paul, 206 Napoleon Crossing the Alps (David), 108
McPherson, Tara, 313n54 National Holiday, 31, 124, 132–34, 185,
Melanesians, The (Codrington), 215–16 205, 226
Melbye, Fritz, 162 Native Land Act (1862), 208
Memmi, Albert, 241 natural history, 8–11, 30, 49, 52, 59,
Mexico, 21, 64, 158, 179–80, 257, 271, 62–67, 71, 139, 145
280–85, 301 Nazism, 231
Mignolo, Walter, 46, 258 necropolitics, 34, 197, 233, 278–79, 299–
migrants, 52, 261, 282 300, 307–8
Miller, Christopher L., 81 Negri, Antonio, 24, 25
missionaries: in Aotearoa New Zealand, Negro Scipio, The (Cézanne), 174–75, 175
198–206; as heroes, 199, 217; in Mela- Nemesis of Faith (Froude), 209
nesia, 213–17; World Missionary Con- neorealism, antifascist, 28, 46, 232–70
ference (1910), 217 neovisuality, 257, 278
Mitchell, W. J. T., xiv, xv, xviii, 15, 49, Nevada, 303
129, 143, 286 New Orleans, 281, 309
mobility, the, 29, 136, 269, 308–9 New York Times, 292
Mohammed, Mili, 247 New Zealand. See Aotearoa New
Moïse, General, 111–13, 115 Zealand

380 Index
Nicquet, Claude, 88, 89 Paris, xviii, 32, 60, 75, 84, 140, 158, 163,
North Carolina, 8 181, 224, 241, 262; in Caché, 258–60;
Nothing to See Here (Cai), 282–83 in French Revolution, 90–96, 102–7,
Nuremberg, trials at, 290 113; Haussmannization in, 155–57, 161,
164, 179. See also Commune, Paris
Obama, Barack H., 6, 34, 112, 305, 308 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 28, 238
Obama Girl, 291 patriarchy, 275
O’Brien, James (pseud. Bronterre), 222 Patriquin, Travis, 304
Occasional Discourse (Carlyle), 143–45 Patteson, J. C., 213–14
Oceana (Froude), 210–12 Peale, Charles Wilson, 110
Oedipus complex, 9–10, 17, 243–44 Pease, Donald, 283
Ogé, Vincent, 85–86, 184 Pelloutier, Fernand, 224
Oller, Francisco, y Cestero, 173–77; Pentagon, 257
slavery and, 181–82; syncretism in, people, the: in French Revolution, 86; in
189–90; El Velorio, 188–95, 191, 192, North African revolutions, 269
pl. 8 Péron, François, 113–15
On Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle), perspective, 3, 39, 59, 86; military use of,
140–43, 199, 209, 217–19 124–26
On War (Clausewitz), 37, 227 Pétion, Alexandre, 70, 104, 236
Order of Things, The (Foucault), 48–51, 139 Petit Soldat, Le (Godard), 255, 259
orientalism, 87, 92 Petraeus, David, 19, 293, 305
Orwell, George, 285 Peuple en marche (Vautier), 252
O’ Sullivan, Timothy, Untitled, 44 phantasmagoria, 139–40, 147, 165
overseer, 2, 10, 35, 50–56, 72, 99, 118, photography, 137, 142–43, 290–91;
160–61, 181 aerial, 39; of Paris Commune, 186–87;
oversight, 10–11, 30–31, 35–36, 48–77, of Sojourner Truth, 148; in U.S. civil
99, 109, 113, 117–18, 120, 137, 315n34 war, 166–69
Oxfam, 307 Picasso, Pablo, 15, 26
Pinel, Philippe de, 97–99, 250
Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, 82, 106, 139 Pirelli, Giovanni, 247
Painter, Nell Irvine, 148 Pissarro, Camille, 31, 188, 190; Dance at
Pakeha, 199–206 the Inn, 194, 195; in France, 172–74;
Pakistan, 21, 279, 303 Hermitage at Pontoise, 178–79, pl. 7; in
Palestine, 296, 301–3 St. Thomas, 157–64; Two Women Chat-
panopticon, 3, 136–37, 150, 161, 172–77, ting, 163–64
224, 290; post-, 18–20, 40, 278–80, Pitcairn Island, 213–14
294, 296 Pittsburgh, 262–63
Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro), 33, 271–76, plantation, xv; complex, 10–13
272, 273, pl. 11 Plato, 4, 26, 106, 136, 141, 167, 251
Papahurihia, 27, 44, 200–205, 201 Plebs League, 223
Papon, Maurice, 258 Plissart, Marie-Françoise, 1–2

Index 381
Polack, Joel, 44, 205 Reflections on Violence (Sorel), 227–28
police, 183, 248, 258–60, 276, 282–83; Regourd, François, 70
Algerian revolution and, 241–42, 263; Rendition (Hood), 253
in Britain, 302; colonial, 8–10, 75, Representative Men (Emerson), xvi
211; in Egypt, 269–70; fascism and, Revolution: American, 287; in Egypt
17, 233–38; in Iraq, 290; Paris Com- and Tunisia, 239–40, 265, 268–69; in
mune and, 186; plantation and, 161– Military Affairs, 33, 277, 282–84. See
64, 170, 179; in Rancière, 1; in Saint- also Algeria; France; Haiti
Domingue, 65, 75, 111; in Tunisia, Reynolds, Henry, 216
268–69 rights, 1, 24–30, 65–67, 77–92, 102–3,
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 33, 46, 234, 241, 106, 115, 130, 132–34, 206–9, 240, 242,
252–56, 266 263, 301–2; general strike and, 226–
pornography, Iraq war and, 290–91 27; property, 198–99
Porot, Albert, 250 Rights of Man (Paine), 82, 106, 139
Powell, Colin, 294 right to look, 1–6, 25–26, 29, 34, 114,
PowerPoint, 304–5, 304, 306 129, 157, 232, 241, 249, 261; aboli-
Prendergast, Sir James, 208–9 tion and, 165–72, 215; in Algeria, 232,
primitive, 27, 91, 250, 275; civilized 241; Caché and, 260; education and,
and, 10, 14–18, 24, 79, 196–97, 213–21; 157, 266; general strike as, 221, 228;
communism, 200, 228–29 negated by fascism, 231; Pan’s Laby-
proletariat, derived from proles, 221 rinth and, 276; in Saint-Domingue,
Proudhon, Pierre-Paul, 227 69; Sojourner Truth and, 148–50;
psychiatry, 265; colonial, 250. See also sustainability and, 78, 157
Fanon, Frantz Rimbaud, Arthur, 183, 259
Puerto Rico, 117–22, 160, 188–94 Riverbend (pseud.), 305
Pynchon, Thomas, 280 Rivet, 260
Robespierre, Maximilien, 286
Quetelet, Adolphe, 216 Rolling Stone (magazine), 305
Ronfeldt, David, 285
Rachedi, Ahmed, 251 Roper, Daniel S., 277–78
Rachida (Bachir), 264–67, 264, pl. 10 Rose, H. J., 219
Rancière, Jacques, 4–5, 7, 15, 25, 77, 132, Ross, Kristin, 186, 257, 312n13
146, 186, 282, 308 Ross, Ruth, 206
Ranke, Leopold von, 138 Royal Anthropological Society, 215
Raynal, Abbé, 61–62 Rumsfeld, Donald, 286, 293–94
realism, 5, 8, 25, 135, 142, 147, 190, 261–
62; abolition, 26, 32–33, 44, 58, 90, Saadi, Yacef, 252; Battle of Algiers and,
155–87, 189, 195; nuclear, 284; in Pan’s 252–55
Labyrinth, 275; as revolutionary, 35, Sadr, Moqtada al-, 290
96–97, 122. See also neorealism Said, Edward, 13
Red Detachment of Women, The (Xie), 252 St. Croix, 59–62, 157–62
Reed, Brian J., 288 Saint-Domingue, 11, 30–31, 42, 50,

382 Index
 55–57, 65–69, 84, 94–96, 99–102, slavery, 2–3, 6–8, 48–76
121–22, 127, 134, 180, 276; in Carlyle, Sloane, Hans, 52–53, 64
13; crisis in revolution, 111–13; Pissarro Small Wars (Callwell), 297
and, 162, 172; planters’ autonomy Small Wars Journal, 304
movement in, 70–76; revolution in, Small Wars Manual, 298–99
77–79, 85–86, 103–10, 144, 156. See also Smith, Terry, 315n43
Haiti; Makandal, François Smithyman, Kendrick, 198, 202
St. Mery, Moreau de, 70 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), 277
St. Thomas, 157–64 Solinas, Franco, 256
Saint-Venant, Barré de, 71 Sorel, Georges, 27; on general strike, 45,
Sala-Molins, Louis, 42 227–28; Reflections on Violence, 227–28
Salmane, Halla, 246 South, 27, 217; antifascism and, 233–37;
Samuel, Raphael, 221 in Italy, 237–38; in U.S., 237
sans-culottes, 43; Carlyle and, 13, 131, sovereignty, 2, 8, 10, 12, 25, 31, 50–52,
142; former slaves as, 105; right to 83, 95–96, 118, 123–26, 242, 312n23;
existence and, 78–79, 95 in Aotearoa New Zealand, 197, 203,
Sarawia, George, 214 205–9; in counterinsurgency, 292,
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 267–68 296, 300; in Iraq, 289; right to kill
Sarony, Napoleon, 141 and, 278
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 243 Soviet Union, 284, 287
Sawkins, James Gay, 158, 164, pl. 6 Spain, 7, 33, 64, 173, 189, 232, 257; bor-
School of the Americas, 257 ders of, 280, 301; civil war in, 272–76
Scott, David C., 49, 112–13 Spartacus, 31, 198, 221–23
Scythians, slavery and, 7–8 Speer, Albert, 230
Seeley, J. R., 14 Spinoza, Baruch, 24–25
Selwyn, George Augustus, 213 Spirit of the Beehive (Erice), 273
sensible, 25; division of, 3, 23, 47, 63, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 150
94, 186, 246, 276, 281; imperial, 217, Standard Operating Procedure (Morris),
243–44; Pissarro and, 178; in revolu- 291–92
tion, 110–16, 269 Stewart, John, 53, 55
separation, 3–4, 10–18, 21, 26, 28, 33, 63, Strachey, Lytton, 13
66, 93, 164, 197; counterinsurgency strike, 18, 27, 32, 41, 44–45, 133–34, 221–
and, 278–80; decolonization and, 28, 233; adopted by Conféderation
242–46, 268; fascism and, 229; necro- Générale de Travail, 226; in Algiers,
political regimes of, 298–302, 308; as 240; against colonization, 205; Paris
segregation, 145–46, 151–54, 237, 280 Commune as, 185; against reality, 181;
Sétif, 18, 247, 265 against slavery, 159–60, 166, 181. See
Sewall, Sarah, 293 also Luxemburg, Rosa; Sorel, Georges
Shafiq, Ahmed, 270 Sturken, Marita, 311n4
Shaw, Rosalind, 94–95 subaltern, xv, 3–4, 121, 123, 188, 243; in
Sherman, William Tecumseh, 170 Gramsci, 235–36; hero, 110; in mili-
Sierra Leone, 94–95 tary, 12, 235; in Saint-Domingue, 31,

Index 383
subaltern (continued) United States, xvi, 4, 6, 12, 18, 20–21,
60–61, 94, 103, 110–12; visuality and, 26–34, 212, 222, 254, 288; abolition
235, 266, 275 of slavery in, 155–57, 171, 182–83, 185;
sugar, 60, 71–74, 161, 165; in the French Army, 277–78; borders of, 280; civil
Revolution, 102–3 war in, 165–72; COINTELPRO pro-
Supper at Emmaus, The (Caravaggio), gram of, 19; counterinsurgency in,
193–95, 194 280, 293; feminists in, 251; Haiti and,
surveying, 59 111; National Security Council of,
Suskind, Ron, 292 283; 9/11 attacks, 257, 283; nuclear
policy of, 283; Puerto Rico and, 195;
Tactical Biopolitics (Costa and Philips), 308 race in, 151–57; Reconstruction in,
Tadman, Michael, 56 170–72; segregation in, 242; South of,
Tahrir Square, 269–70, 309 237; surveillance budget of, 301; Vir-
Taylor, Diana, 113 gin Islands of, 161
Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, 202–3 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, 40, 40, 279,
Terry, Jennifer, 340n27 282, 303; Gorgon Stare, 279–80
Te Ua Haumene, 202
Thierry, Augustin, 137–39 Van Diemen’s Land, 113–14, 210
Thiong’o, Ngũ gı̃ wa, 244 Van Dyck, Anthony, Charles I at the Hunt,
Third Estate, 79, 83–86, 105–6, 138, 185 52, 54
Thomas, Greg, 244 Van Gogh, Vincent, 247; Carlyle and,
Thomas, John Jacob, 211 151
Times Square, 280 Vattel, Emmerich de, 74
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 125 Vautier, René: Algérie en flammes, 246;
Torres, Francesc, Belchite/South Bronx, 272 Fanon and, 246–47; J’ai huit ans, 246–
Tortellier, Joseph, 224 50, 248, 260; Peuple en marche, 252
torture, 29, 70, 240, 246–49, 253–59, Velazquez, Diego, Las Meninas, 49, 51
267, 274, 288, 294, 296, 302 Velorio, El (Oller), 188–95, 191, 192, pl. 8
Tosquelles, François, 250 video, 24, 28, 33, 239, 258–63, 280, 290–
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 275 91; of Saddam’s execution, 288–89
Trouillot, Michel-Rolphe, 12 videogame, 295–303, 340n27; Full Spec-
Truth, Sojourner, 31, 147–50, 149 trum Warrior, 297
Tschumi, Bernard, 285 violence, 233; in Fanon, 242. See also
Tunisia, 246–47, 250–51; 2011 revolution torture
in, 239–40, 265, 268–69 visual culture, 14, 26, 48, 107, 284, 291,
Two Women Chatting (Pissarro), 163–64 311n6
Tylor, Edward, 15, 146, 223, 298 visuality, xiii–xvi, 1–34, 116, 228, 276;
Tyredemme, 114–15 as battle, 37, 124–26, 235–36, 277;
Carlyle and, 123–54; complexes of,
UNICEF , 260 3–10, 35; counterinsurgent, 294–98;
United Kingdom, 157; surveillance in, counterrevolutionary, 112; crisis of,
301–2 268, 277–310; fascist, 231–34; im-

384 Index
 perial, 38, 76, 114, 196–231, 242; Wedderburn, Robert, 133–34
Medusa effect of, 142, 211, 279; Weiner, Norbert, 255
military-industrial, 39; plantation When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four
complex of, 48–67, 76, 127–28; statis- Acts (Lee), 281, 281
tics and, 216; violence and, 291–92; Where is Where? (Ahtila), 260–62, 261
visuality 1 and visuality 2, 22–24, Wideman, John Edgar, 33, 262–63, 265;
146–47. See also countervisuality; neo- Fanon (Wideman), 262–63
visuality; panopticon: post- Wilde, Oscar, 151–53
Vodou, 61, 68–69, 109, 121–22 Williams, John, 141, 199
Voix des Sans Voix, La (Duval Carrié), 70 Williams, Moses, 110
Wilson, Kathleen, 50–51, 314n10,
Wagenvoort, Hendrik, 217 312n28, 316n57, 322n105, 326n78,
Waitangi, Treaty of, 27, 119, 205–8, 207 327n105
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 255 Winnowers, The (Courbet), 193, 194
Walcott, Derek, 162 Winstanley, Gerrard, 129–30, 133
Walker, Ranganui, 206 Worthy Park, 58–59
war, xiv, 3–8, 10–13, 17, 20–22, 26–32, Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 239–47,
34, 37–39, 45, 159–60, 218; Cold War, 260–63, 265
18–19, 33, 263, 277–78, 282–83; digi-
tally mediated, 277; First World, 9, Xie Jin, The Red Detachment of Women,
197, 217, 226, 229, 235; Full Spec- 252
trum Information Operations, 299;
global, on terror, 286; in Gramsci, Yate, William, 200, 204–5
235–36; New Zealand, 199–203, 208; Yemen, 268, 279, 303
paradoxes of visualized, 302–9; Sec- Yoo, John, 29–30
ond World, 219, 232; Seven Years’, 68, YouTube, 291
76; Sorel on, 227–28; U.S. Civil War,
165–71, 180–84; visuality as, 123–27. Zennati, Chérif, 246
See also Algeria; information; Iraq Žižek, Slavoj, 9, 140
Ward, C. Osbourne, 222; The Ancient Zola, Emile, 176–77, 179, 226, 249
Lowly, 222–23

Index 385
Nicholas Mirzoeff is professor of media, culture, and communi-
cation at New York University. He is the author of An Introduction
to Visual Culture (1999; second edition, 2009); Watching Babylon:
The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005); Bodyscape: Art,
Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (1995); Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and
Visual Culture in Modern France (1995), and the editor of The Visual
Culture Reader (1998; third edition, 2012); Diaspora and Visual Culture:
Representing Africans and Jews (2000). He is a contributing editor of
Media Commons, and a member of the Social Text collective.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 1962–
The right to look : a counterhistory of visuality / Nicholas Mirzoeff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-4895-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-4918-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mass media and world politics. 2. Communication and culture—
Political aspects. 3. Mass media—Political aspects. 4. Visual
communication—Political aspects. I. Title.
P96.W62M57 2011
302.2′22—dc23  2011027508