Some Recommendations ...

by Cliopatria

First, for visual interest, visit The Sketchbooks from the Archives of American Art. Hat tip to Mr. Sun! And, speaking of his Sunship, for fun, try out his"Make Your Own George W. Bush Stump Speech!" George could've used Mr. Sun's help this past week.

To wind up Dissertation Week, Caleb McDaniel at Mode for Caleb has two posts on"transnational history." In the first, he identifies himself as a"transnational historian" and discusses the movement among some historians to decenter attention from the nation-state. It's a fairly radical move, as he observes, because our tendency to invest the nation with essential qualities goes back far beyond the emergence of the modern nation-state to some of the earliest historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. In the second post, Caleb historicizes the idea of"globalization," from which he believes the tendency to transnational history emerges. The notion that our technology annihilates space is more recent than the belief that nations have essential qualities, but still it has a long history and we must think critically about its implications. This is fascinating work.

My colleague, Tim Burke, recently celebrated his fortieth birthday on a fishing trip to Canada, but he still spins off ideas with the ease of a graduate student. In the first of two posts on the subject, Burke spells out his intuition that some environmentalists' fears of"invasive species" have their origins near, in, or with modern essentialist notions of race, identity, and nationality; and, in a second post's gloss on the first (scroll down; the permalink's not active), he notes other people's suggestions about what he'd written, including Gary Jones's comments at Crumb Trail. I first made some of these connections when I learned that Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who coined the German word for"ecology", was also a major influence in the development of national socialist thought. To put it most crudely in the national socialists' words,"Are Jews [or Muslims or Mexicans -- substitute your choice of target] the invasive species?", is to highlight the connection. No one should take that to mean that the environmentalists' concerns should be dismissed as Nazi propaganda, but there is a rich intellectual history here, more than enough for a single book, and Jones offers some bibliographical starters.

Tim's other post at Easily Distracted,"Stick a Fork in the Road", is a"must read." It's about Zimbabwe and about the United States; it's about when and whether we have choices. It's Burke at his thoughtful and provocative best. Tim doesn't and wouldn't, I think, make the connection, but John Holbo and John Quiggen sparked interesting discussions at Crooked Timber this past week about apocalyptic modes of thinking. Brandon Watson at Siris posts a brilliant apologia for apocalyptic thought. If it's authentic, it's inevitably subversive, he argues. The anemic language of the secular Left might find strength in apocalyptic imagery, as the prophets often have in the past. There's nothing quite so powerful as naming the Whore of Babylon, because the imagery has such resonance.

Finally, our newest colleague, Hala Fattah, goes home this week to visit Baghdad. She promises to post from there, if possible, but in any case to give us her impressions when she returns to Aman. I'm intrigued by her parting word to Oscar that"history trumps reality every time." It gives me reason to look forward to reading Cliopatria in the days and weeks ahead. And, to whatever providence, fate, fortune, or happenstance gave me such richly talented colleagues, I can only say"thank you."

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Ralph E. Luker - 10/4/2004

Point well taken, I think. What bothered me was that Riggs commented on your comment and, in doing so, extended the criticism to a point well beyond what I think you intended to take it. Since Tim had not yet responded, I thought someone should point out to Riggs that he needed to read Tim's post more carefully.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/4/2004

With all due respect, that's why I said it was a matter of emphasis. It's OK to "wonder" about these things and draw interesting connections, but in practical terms there are serious issues of livability. And, as Burke points out, unpredictability, which cuts both ways.

It just doesn't feel quite right to me to lump biodiversity and eugenics arguments together. I understand the historical connection, but the vast majority of us are not EarthFirst!ers.....

Timothy James Burke - 10/3/2004

I hope my point is a bit more subtle than this.

"Native" species, after all, are constantly challenged, replaced, and even extinguished in the ordinary movement of populations, much as human migration is a background dynamic of human history which profoundly transforms the meanings and context of claims to be "native" in human terms. When new islands appear from volcanic activity, eventually life appears in waves on them and there's a fair bit of serendipity as to which species appear and in what order beyond certain basic constants. At least some of the species we today call "invasive" might have made the crossings and travels that we have facilitated on their own, just more slowly. It's the great simultaneity of human-facilitated movement of species that's the issue, not the phenomena itself. When we say something like "Suppose Tasmania has the equivalent of a natural Shakespeare", we essentially take arms not just against human-facilitated movement of species, but all movement of species. Much as I think the radical form of human nativism--and I really had something far less provocative in mind than Nazism or euguenics, something far more ordinary and less obviously objectionable--tends to be uncomfortable with the ordinary history of human migration. We tend to reduce migration in such historiographies to imperialism or nothing. This is one of the reasons that my own field of African history tends to collude in the racialized representation of "African" identity as what the West has imagined as "black" and exclude other populations, like those of south Asian descent in East Africa, as "non-native", even when they've been there for three or four hundred years. It's the reason that in the popular conception of Native American identity we "nativize" the Sioux in the last place they ended up, and ignore the fact of their pre-US imperial mobility and hegemony over other Native American societies.

I think there really is a conceptual and discursive connection between the two discourses, but it's a complicated one, and by no means one that simplistically indicts the fear of "invasives" as misguided. As I hoped I made clear in my blog essay, that fear is in many ways completely rational and legitimate.

Ralph E. Luker - 10/3/2004

Timothy Burke is fully capable of defending himself, but it seems to me that both Jonathan Dresner and Christopher Riggs caricature Burke's argument. _Nowhere_ does he say that there is nothing lost with the introduction of alien species which dramatically transform the local habitat and drive out native species. It seems to me that he makes a positive contribution to the discussion in arguing that a) the introduction of alien species need not be arbitrarily considered grievously wrong; and b) intuiting, rightly, that investing plant and animal species with essentialist qualities occurred at the same time and by the same people who were investing essentialist qualities in ethnic communities. Burke's intuition is correct, Mr. Riggs, and it doesn't mean necessarily that that essentialist investment was in and of itself necessarily wrong. So, it isn't a rhetorical strategy on Burke's part -- it is an intuition which, as a matter of fact, turns out to be correct.

Christopher Riggs - 10/3/2004

Prof. Dresner hits the nail on the head when he points out that the introduction of “invasive species” can result in “the obliteration of unique species and ecosystems found nowhere else in the world.”

To see his point, consider the devastating effects of the “biological expansion of Europe” - to use Alfred Crosby's characterization of the spread of “Old World” peoples, plants, animals, and pathogens into the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Unique ecosystems, cultures, languages, and individuals are forever gone as a result. How do we know that the European invasions didn't destroy the Tasmanian equivalent of Shakespeare or an ecological equivalent of the Everglades? The costs are simply incalculable.

Thus, I don't see why it's so unreasonable to be concerned about the potential impact of “invasive species,” and I frankly think it's unfair of Prof. Burke to dismiss those who have such concerns as advocates of some kind of Nazi/eugenics ideology.

I don't mean to be rude, but I feel compelled to mention this because he seems to have a pattern of using a rhetorical strategy of labeling his opponents. In his “Indian Guides” post/discussion two months ago, he portrayed his own position as that of a scholar while those who disagreed with his interpretation of Indian culture were dismissed as “activists.” Yet his post clearly sought to rationalize his involvement in the “Indian Guides,” and he admitted he had not read one of the key works on the topic. I'm not saying people have to be an “expert” in a subject before they can discuss it, and I'm not saying people don't bring political/cultural “baggage” to the table. But there are people out there who through a process of honest, intellectual inquiry have reached different conclusions than he has, and I don't believe it is conducive to honest, intellectual debate to simply slap inflammatory labels on them. Maybe that is not what Prof. Burke intends in his posts, and maybe it's not how others see them--but that is how they come across to me.

One final point regarding Prof. Burke's Addenda: Yes, Native cultures have changed over time. At least some of that change was imposed on American Indian peoples by U.S. government policies designed to promote assimilation. Yet there are elements of continuity within tribal cultures. To take an example from his recent post: Fish and fishing were integral parts of tribal economies and cultures in the Northwest and Great Lakes regions long before Europeans came along, and they remain important today. I simply don't understand why the idea that there is some persistence of cultural values and practices is so unreasonable.

Thank you for your time and attention. No disrespect is intended.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/3/2004

Tim's essay on Zimbabwe has inspired me. I started making notes back in January for an essay -- which came out of my World History teaching -- comparing US democracy today with 19c Latin American failed states. I have to dig them out again.

Jonathan Dresner - 10/3/2004

Tim's comments on invasive species are OK, but from where I sit (Hawai'i) the emphases are all wrong.

Arguments about eugenics and invasive species are nice and tidy, unless you are looking not at the local replacement of roughly equivalent species common elsewhere, but the obliteration of unique species and ecosystems found nowhere else in the world; then the valence of the argument reverses and it's the invasive species, not the protective ecologists, who start to look like the Nazis. (we could extend the argument to monoculture and biotech crops, which would be interesting....)

I also think the argument about function is underplayed: cases where invasive species are bad not just for the ecosystems but for human life and comfort are becoming more common. The brown tree snake in Guam and the coqui frog in Hawaii are two examples which rank with kudzu.

Yes, ecosystems change. But we accelerate this change, and make unlikely and unsustainable things happen much more frequently by our actions. No, not all change is bad, but not all change is benign, either.