Pic chosen by Blacksburg Parks and Recreation as their main pic.
These are some of the Virginia Tech students in the Issues in World History: The African Diaspora class volunteering on Arbor Day with the Blacksburg Town.
Here is a link to more info about this activity.
Video Clip: 400 Millions of Africans
Today (April 20-2013) we began with 2013 Arbor Day activities. The first group of students from this year’s class (Issues in World History: African Diaspora) planted the first trees along Willard Dr. SE– about 40 of them. We ended our planting with a celebratory trip to Carole Lee Donuts! The Blacksburg Town‘s office of recreation makes this possible.
This link for last year’s Arbor Day activities.
As with other years, I offered students a rationale for their involvement.
The objective is to give back to the community at large as an enjoyable and practical way of learning about World History and the African Diaspora.
This hands-on instruction intends to engage students’ learning with some of the industrialization’s unintended effects: its impact on the forests (why most trees around are young?), and the spark of the (romantic) movement for reforestation on industrializing nations (i.e., National Parks).
Yet, the most important goal is to get students involved in local communities as a historical lesson that highlights the ethos of many Black communities across the diaspora, and help them appreciate the differences and similarities between our present experience and the way people thought and lived in the past.
The assumption is that our present-day attitudes toward community differ substantially from that of many people in the past (and from people living in other parts of the contemporary world). Western World’s main cultural currents emphasize individual needs rather than community cooperation. But the historical record seems to show that most people in the past view their existences in more fragile terms, and thus relied on a more collective ethos for survival (networks are more powerful than individuals). Several scholars, including Patrick Manning, have suggested that the African Diaspora have broadly shared a spirit of cooperation, collectivity, and equality. These traits are evident in the performance of Afro-Diasporans cultural events, early political organizations, and even on its commonly simple (if any) social hierarchy.
A good example of this collective ethos is the combite (convite in Spanish), dokpwe or fagina. These terms refer to communal and reciprocal forms of labor. The first term is still common in Haiti (in the D.R. It has taken a more festive meaning); the second in West Africa; and the third among Central American Mayans. These traditions have often brought all able-persons to work on a job that would eventually benefit the entire community. Workers would often perform their work, not in isolation but in groups or gangs. The Haitian combite has a reputation for its feast-like nature marked by upbeat singing as men would work the land for cultivation and women would prepare food for many. At the conclusion of a day’s work in a combite people would join in a party of celebration. As with the dokpwe and fagina, Haitians in these communities would derive a powerful sense of belonging through this type of collaboration.
Maureen Warner Lewis tells us about the combite:
Maureen Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Kingston: Univ. of the West Indies Press, 2003), 65.
Walter Goldschmidt provides this explanation about the Dahomey society and the dokpwe:
Walter Goldschmidt, Exploring the Ways of Mankind (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 197), 313.
So, by planting trees for the Blacksburg community without expecting a direct compensation, I aim for students to appreciate these traditional practices in the African Diaspora. Understanding the ethos of cooperation underlying these practices also helps to perceive the historically persistent call for Pan-Africanism, or cooperation among Afro-Diasporans across national boundaries (i.e., W.E.B Du Bois, Marcus Garvey).
This concept of society is perhaps similar to the way we understand the ecosystem in the natural world–of a society built on broad dynamic cooperation and reciprocity rather than on defining limits of freedom. Our Arbor Day activity, then, endeavors to bring students closer to appreciating the historical and cultural gap that separates us from the people we are studying, and perhaps, fit them with the necessary critical-thinking tools to become independent thinkers in the society in which they now lives.
The purpose of the following entry is to serve as a commentary and an introduction to the reading of chapter 3 and 4 of Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This is the 1991 edition reprinted by Verso in 2006. The chapters’ titles are 3) The origins of National Consciousness, and 4) The Creole Pioneers (follow this link for a more comprehensive overview of Anderson and his book).
We should begin by acknowledging that despite any limitation of Anderson’s thesis (and that of his many propositions), he has forced the scholarly community to reframe the idea of nationalism and nation-building, and help us reconsider many aspect of political and anthropological history, which used to be taken as given. At the end of this book we will read and study a few reviews that have criticized, and by doing so, have dig deeper into the subject, giving us a clearer view of the enigmatic historical process of nation-building.
As with all major works that purported to offer broad explanations of deep historical process, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is rigged with problems and critical historical errors. However, his concepts still illuminate, and his propositions challenge us to both accept and accept partially, and/or to contest them. And in order for us to develop healthy and honest postures of our own regarding his statements on nationalism we need to first read the original and learn his positions directly from him.
Wikipedia has an entry on him that may serve you as an introduction, but keep in mind that this entry (as with everything in Wikipedia) is an ongoing form of knowledge, and we are supposed to soon supersede it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities
Sample of a Protestant pamphlet. Heavy use of printing, in the form of publications like this one, was a common Protestant strategy during the Reformation.
In the Third Chapter, Anderson’s main focus was on the development of the Print Media in conjunction with Capitalism as the propeller of proto-national consciousness. Look carefully at how he explained that both, Print Media and Capitalism, laid down the foundations for a collective sense of imagined community, which slowly came to supplant the Imagined Sacred Community—meaning: the Catholic community at large. Keep clearly in mind the period of time in which this is happening: the slow end of Feudalism, the birth of the “early modern age,” at the turn of the Renaissance, and the beginning of the exploration age and the beginning of absolute monarchies in Europe—he assumed that you would be familiar with the bare-bones of World and Western History.
Absolute monarchs believed that they owned their political powers to divine appointment rather than to common people wishes.
Become familiar with the meaning and significance of vernaculars, class differentiation and religious rivalries in Europe, the end of the “sacred imagined community,” and what he termed as “unselfconscious” processes (I will ask about this in class).
In the Fourth Chapter, Anderson tried hard to explain that not everything of importance in World History has happened only in Europe (in the 1991’s Preface he mentioned how horrified he was to notice how most people in Europe had ignored this chapter when he published it first in 1983, so in 1991 he renamed it as such: “Creole Pioneers,” to make greater impact). It were the Creoles, American-born Spanish and British descendents, which first created modern nations. Why and how come? These are the two most important questions he tried to answer in this chapter, and by doing so, he gave the reader a crash-course in comparative colonial history of the Americas (Spanish and British Colonial Americas).
As you read this chapter, keep in mind the differences and similarities of both histories (south and north), and how the issue of race, and distance (separation of the Atlantic, for example), made such an impact in creating a new group, which could be seen as a class and as an ethnic group: The Creoles. Take into account, also, how the late Bourbon administration in Spain, an enlightened monarchy, tried to make the empire more efficient and by doing so it pushed the American Creoles aside and helped create a sense of nationalism in colonial Latin America—which is somehow similar to what happened in British America (try noticing the way Anderson belittled the Spanish Empire).
Come prepare to class to discuss these issues, to produce your own questions and answer new ones.
It was during the third decade of the 16th century, in the midst of the European Renaissance and of the religious Schism, which non-Catholics prefer to call The Protestant Reformation. Leo Africanus, a man that toddled the worlds of the Christian West and Africa, who was between Christianity and the Islam, published then the first modern ethnographic work about Africa. Since he knew both Europe and Africa well, and had been both Christian and Muslim, he could interpret both universes fairly well. In his effort to “explain” Africa to the European mind he emphasized the similarities: how both were not that different (though some critics have correctly made him responsible of helping in "creating" the false concept of "Africa" as a particular place).
But as the European world expanded beyond its original physical borders, and Europeans saw themselves masters of the rest, they found Africanus's description of the African person insufficiently disparate. There should be more striking differences between the Christian and the Muslim, between the civilized European and the barbaric African. The African and the European, no matter how pale the former would be, should be fundamentally distinct, different in kind, and altogether entirely dissimilar. Otherwise, how could you justify the swelling number of slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas, and some even taking residence as subservient individuals in marginal sectors of European cities? How can you call yourself a "master of equals"? That title did not ring attractive. Enter the Spanish adventurer and writer, Luis del Mármol Carvajal, with a revised edition of the Description of Africa. The first part came out in 1673 (BTW, there is no entry for Mármol in the English Wikipedia as of today).
Differently from Africanus, Mármol stressed the differences between the African, who is more African as he becomes darker, and the European, who is more European as he is more refined, Christian, and of course, lighter. In a recent article Mar Martínez Góngora tells us that Mármol helped initiate the imperialistic discourse, which Edward Said studied, that consisted in circulating a series of knowledges, real and imaginary, about the “Orient.” In other words, this is arguably our first Orientalist. I am not going to spoil the reading of this article, just to encourage you to read it. It is in Spanish, though, but a very readable one. Let me know if you would like a copy.
Mar Martínez Góngora, “El Discurso Africanista del Renacimiento en La primera parte de la descripción general de África de Luis del Mármol Carvajal,” Hispanic Review (spring 2009): 171-189.
This is the first draft of a piece on the Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer. As such, it is still in pre-publication state, and should not be cited. I welcome, however, feedback and constructive cricicism in order to improve it. Dennis R. Hidalgo
Jean-Pierre Boyer (February 28, 1776- July 9, 1850), the longest serving head of state in Haiti, was President from 1818 to 1843. Boyer personified the Creole liberal politics of the affranchis, better known as free persons of color or mulattoes, whose republican rhetoric concealed a wariness of the masses. His ascension to the presidency stands out as one of those rare moments on the island’s history when transition to power did not result from bloody insurrection. The international community admired Boyer for his diplomacy while the majority of Haitians endured his imposing, but erratic grip. He exerted influence beyond Haiti by attempting to secure the ambiguous legacy of the Revolution. This was a hostile time for the first independent black nation, a time when every single Caribbean colony, particularly the neighboring Puerto Rico, Cuba, and even the southern United States were still thriving enslaving societies. Initially, Boyer appeared to preside over a politically stable country. He averted impending foreign intervention, attracted a measure of international recognition, and experimented with modernizing social programs. However, his career deteriorated as his regime sustained a number of natural disasters, political setbacks, and economic downturns. As a result he grew insular and authoritarian. Ultimately, Boyer’s most notable accomplishments, the French recognition and the integration of the Spanish side, helped drive his administration to the ground. His own political class later found him insufferable, and through Charles Rivière-Hérard, deposed him on March 13, 1843. Disempowered, Boyer escaped to Jamaica and from there into exile in France where he remained until his death in 1850. He left a country in debt and with the promise of the Revolution unfulfilled.
Born in Port-au-Prince, Boyer was the son of a Congolese woman and a mulatto tradesman. Like with many young mulattoes, his parents sent him to military school in France, and at sixteen, enticed by the Revolution, he enlisted in the Republican Army. Two years later he joined Jacobin Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Saint-Dominguan mulatto André Rigaud in their efforts to export radicalism to Saint-Domingue. Across the ocean they met with a colony transformed by the Revolution in a conflict where blacks struggled to preserve their independence from mulattoes, royalists and foreign empires alike. After defeat in the 1799 War of the Knives, when the mulatto army lost decisively to Toussaint Louverture in Jacmel, Boyer left for France. His ship, however, arrived in the United States instead, seized because of a brief French-American diplomatic dispute. During his short stay in the U.S., Quakers and Masons offered him hospitality after learning about the Masonic regalia he carried. But, although he gave his Americans counterparts a favorable impression, U.S. racism left Boyer humiliated. He will later remember this sojourn somehow bitterly.
From Paris, Boyer enlisted in yet another Saint-Dominguean military venture. It was 1801, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc led it. Bonaparte had turned his attention to Louverture’s virtual independence, and Boyer embarked hoping that this time the French would recognize mulatto privileges. A year later, with Louverture captured, but with Bonaparte’s anti-revolutionary plans exposed, Boyer did the unthinkable. Together with other mulatto officers who had learned of the French duplicity, he joined the black resistance now led by Jean Jacques Dessalines. In 1804, Boyer partook of the abolition of both slavery and colonial rule, even though his most pressing aspirations had been mulatto interests. Dessalines’ 1806 assassination split the country alongside the color line. The black general Henri Christophe now ruled the north while in the south the mulatto Alexandre Sabès Pétion led a rival state. Christophe evolved into King Henri I, and Pétion into the President of the impoverished Haitian Republic. With little control over these events Boyer stayed at his friend Pétión’s side.
In 1818, hot in the heels of Pétion’s heartrending funeral, senators duly certified Boyer as the succeeding president. Boyer was genuinely concerned with the specter of a French invasion, and accurately recognized the Spanish side as the island most vulnerable part. He quickly began forging secret alliances with generals in the northern kingdom, and businesses in the eastern Spanish colony. His first opportunity for expansion came in 1820, after Christophe’s death. Boyer’s supporters inside the crumbling kingdom summoned him and he easily filled the political vacuum that Christophe had left in the northern capital of Cap-Haïtien.
Not two years had passed when Boyer again expanded. In November 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres had led the Spanish Creole elite to independence from Spain. They called their new nation “Independent State of Spanish Haiti.” The elite, however, had little influence beyond Santo Domingo. The “Haitian Party,” which were Dominicans who had been in contact with Boyer, requested annexation to Haiti, and ultimately carried the day. Boyer preempted his entry into Dominican territory with a deliberately tactful letter and arrived in Santo Domingo with a powerful show of force. In February 1822, city officials not only opened the doors to Boyer, but led in the transferring of power ceremony. Days after taking control, Boyer thwarted French filibusters off the coast of the northeastern peninsula of Samaná, justifying in this way the obligation of his occupation. It did not take long for the insecure Spanish and French elites to emigrate and leave its land behind. In just a few years Boyer had reached the apex of his political life. In both expansions he had managed to cross his army through otherwise unfriendly borders without military conflicts and conspicuous looting. This marked a contrast to previous raucous Haitian expansions.
Legend affirms that in 1818 while in deathbed, Pétion had warned General Joseph Inginac of Boyer’s latent ambitions. After Pétion’s death, however, the equable general still sided with the new president. In fact, Inginac proved as faithful to Boyer, as Boyer had been to Pétion— but longer. Whereas Boyer served Pétion from 1806 to 1818, Inginac was inseparable from Boyer from the start until his overthrown in 1843. Inginac left his marks of erudition in most, if not in all of the new president’s correspondence and writing. After years of debilitating civil war, Boyer had come to embody Haitians hopes of harmony and prosperity. This shows how much Boyer had inherited and learned from Pétion. He watched while in 1816 Pétión assisted Simón Bolivar and prodded him against slavery. Like his tutor, Boyer quickly discovered the convenience of being a President-for-Life rather than a King, as oppose to Christophe, his rival to the north. Like Pétion, Boyer quickly snubbed the idea of a truly but weak democratic president. Instead, like Pétion, Boyer distributed land to win the hearts of the people.
In 1822, shortly after becoming the master of the entire island of Hispaniola Boyer launched his modernization project. He aimed to consolidate the gains of the revolution and to cast Haiti to the world as a genuine modern nation. He performed surgical land distributions designed to increase both political approval and agricultural production. He tried to navigate an imaginary middle between allotting land for commercial cultivation and subsistence agriculture. He eliminated slavery on the east and faced off against the Church. The number of Spanish slaves had never been as high as those of the French in Saint-Domingue, but the mere existence of slavery on the island threatened Haiti’s existence. Boyer was not alone on his stand against the Church. Liberals throughout the hemisphere also viewed its extensive holdings, hefty salaries and cultural monopoly, as the main obstacles toward reengineering modern society. With an unprecedented amount of land and political capital Boyer then consolidated power and redistributed land among his soldiers and peasants. In 1824 he even sent Jonathas Granville to the U.S. to negotiate the immigration of thousands of free blacks whom he then resettled throughout the island.
The last yet most important French offensive came in 1825. Former masters arrived exacting profits lost to the revolution. With warships bullying Haitian ports, Boyer bowed down, and accepted the colossal indemnity of 150 million francs for trading rights and official recognition. The deal opened the doors to Haitian products in France, which had yet to find eager legal buyers on the international market. Boyer’s hope was that with a loyal, happier, and more productive population at home, Haiti would finally spring out of poverty and oblivion. And in fact, with the treaty Boyer lifted forever the French menace, but left the nation scrambling for money to pay the debt. Boyer’s plan for revenue was also his most important legal contribution. In 1826 the Senate approved Boyer’s Rural Code, which was to transform the Haitian economy into a modern industrial agricultural society. Though abolitionists abroad hailed it as an example of Haitian ingenuity, in reality the code was a sort of liberal serfdom. It outlawed vagrancy and allowed certain level of subsistence agriculture, but the emphasis was on keeping peasants tied to the land. The objective was to produce great quantities of cash crop for exportation.
Unforeseen circumstances took Boyer’s plans in the opposite direction when Haitian and Dominican peasants appreciated the redistribution of land, but rejected his enthusiasm for commercial agriculture. The army, which was supposed to police peasants, readily admitted failure, and retired, like the rest, to tend their plot of land instead. Production of coffee, cacao, sugar and tobacco for export plunged severely hurting the government’s coffers. Only lumber continued its exporting frenzy curtailing dramatically the number of forests even while Boyer’s government decried it. While the peasantry became the vast anti-modern sector, the commercial urban class prospered with its new trade freedom, and through a money-less economy. Tax policies meant to exploit a large agricultural production that never happened, quickly trickled down to the peasantry, which sought in turn increasing isolation from government as well as from the middling groups. The commercial class, particularly the Dominicans, presented Boyer with its most difficult opposition. They opposed sharing the French debt and his increasing authoritarian measures. Additionally, Boyer’s diplomatic efforts yielded only minor achievements, leaving him without the international validation and trade contracts he desperately needed to stabilize his government. Under these circumstances the French debt became such an unsettling burden that Boyer and many of his successors spent their tenures trying unsuccessfully to tackle it.
Political upheaval followed discontent toward the French debt and Rural Code. The mood was such that in 1830 Boyer prohibited political meetings to safeguard his damaged authority. That same year a drought curtailed the nation’s agricultural production limiting even further the government’s ability to manage public works. Mounting disappointment with Boyer’s regime brewed, but without public venues the opposition submerged and fragmented. It was not until 1838 when the first significant conspiracies developed. Juan Pablo Duarte led the Dominican bourgeois opposition and helped create the secret society La Trinitaria. Haitian liberals formed The Society for the Rights of Man and Citizen. The insurgents organized, educated and waited for the most opportune moment to strike. The opening came in 1842 when a devastating earthquake shocked the entire island and revealed the extent of Boyer’s crippled and unresponsive government. Because of isolation and the government’s inability to assist those that the earthquake have dislodged, common people perceived Boyer as cruel. In January 1843 the conspirators declared against the regime, and southern peasants supported the coup by denying food to soldiers. Without a functional army, Boyer fled the country on March 13 aboard a British schooner. A year later Dominicans declared independence and create the Dominican Republic. After 25 years of leading Haiti through most of its post-revolutionary period, Boyer spent his last days in France, the same country that facilitated his political demise.
Select Bibliography
Coupeau, Steeve. The history of Haiti. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008.
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour, and National Independence in Haiti. Rutgers University Press; Revised edition, 1995)
Pons, Frank M. History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World. Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007.
ught. And yet, it is not that easy to view our lives as historical because we are frequently caught in the same web of daily contingencies as the people from the past were.
otion and tradition. In scholarly jargon this is akin to the awareness of personal agency. And as students of the past we are certain that our shifting relationship with nature has always had consequences.
eir lot with the green community necessarily think like Al Gore.
uccessfully challenged them.
and social justice activists continue to draw attention to seemingly indiscernible links that may also render our society immoral. For example, they say, New Englanders should know that Colombian coal, from one of the most hazardous open pits in the world, fuels their electricity. In other words, you may not know the origins of what you consume, but that ignorance is dearly expensive and cumulative.
