David Scott, On the Problems of Writing Biography.

“What does it mean to write a life, to give intellectual character to a life?” David Scott, Columbia University professor of Anthropology, asked, as he wrestles with a different type of writing than he has done before, a planned biography of Stuart Hall. “Why Hall? Why biography?” As Scott is still grappling with these questions, much of his talk was about the problems he faces rather than his solutions.

An expatriate from Jamaica in his youth, Hall was an early participant in the founding of the British New Left and a leading light in the Cultural Studies and Black Arts movements. He was at the center of debates about identity, neo-liberalism and Thatcherism, the diaspora, Gramsci and Althusser. Yet Hall, Scott said, was a theorist without one big theory or methodology. Rather, he sought to “bend the twig from where it was stuck…. To ask a new kind of question.”

As a very public intellectual, Hall became almost the metaphorical or figurative embodiment of some of these historical conjunctures, their converging and diverging moments. Other intellectuals saw themselves through Hall, or found themselves refracted through Hall’s work. Later in his life, reflecting on his ideas and work in interviews and discussions with Scott, the real and actual Stuart Hall would find himself face to face with the ways he was perceived and represented. As the GC’s own David Nasaw wrote, in the introduction to a group of articles on biography he moderated in 2009, biography shows, “lives in dialectical relationship to the multiple social, political and cultural worlds they inhabit and give meaning to.”[1]

But how to best write this story? Clearly, an intellectual biography of ideas does not capture the largest meaning of Hall’s life. One approach is to place Hall’s work in the context of the succession of intellectual and political movements with which he was engaged. Alice Kessler-Harris has written that biography allows us to see individual or small group agency conflicting or aligning with broader social and political structures; we can see a person fall in and out of fashion with their times. “We will learn something if we watch the weather change, the value systems shift, the storm descend and retreat: as we observe the engaged life struggle to maintain its balance.”[2] Thus, near the end of his life, Scott suggested, Hall engaged less successfully with radical Islam.

A somewhat different approach is to place Hall’s work in the context of his life as a Jamaican entering still-imperial Britain. While Britain made Hall in a way that Jamaica couldn’t or didn’t, Scott is intrigued by the figure of Hall leaving his native land at 18, in 1951, wholly or partially formed by his colonial (family, school, social, and political) experience. Yet, if Scott assesses Hall on the boat, is this already teleological, denying contingency? And if you assume that Hall’s experiences produced a mindset on decolonization, race, and class, how far to cast the net in comparison? In the discussion that followed Scott’s talk, it was noted that Hall’s youthful milieu also produced Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul, other products of a British education intended to produce a “civilized” local elite. Following this line of thought further might lead us out of the Empire to the French Caribbean’s Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, or a back a generation and out of conventional periodization, to C.L.R. James, or across the ocean, to Nehru and Gandhi. These issues also impact on how or whether Scott will place himself in the story, as a Jamaican expatriate of a later generation, yet still, he said, an object of the civilizing mission.

Scott is also enmeshed in the story as a familiar of Hall in his later years, raising issues of distance. In discussion, Scott was asked whether he was in danger of writing a “love letter” to Hall. He responded with a confession that Hall had characterized a Scott communication with him in exactly those terms. Of course, proximity also gives Scott particular insights not always available to the biographer. It allows him the luxury, and also the burden, of weighing the significance when Hall’s and other people’s accounts of the same stories diverged. Hall’s extended interviews with Scott were, in a sense, his own effort to give meaning and coherence to his own life – how much to privilege them? In what ways do the choices Hall made in these discussions provide evaluative grist for the analytic and contextual mill of unpacking Hall’s life? The problem of “I know too much” is obviously a good one to have, yet it imposes fiercer and harder requirements and demands on the author to really see his subject.  

~Marc Kagan.

[1] David Nasaw, “AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography – Introduction,” The American Historical Review. 114, no. 3 (2009): 573.

[2] Alice Kessler-Harris, “Why Biography?,” The American Historical Review. 114, no. 3 (2009): 625.

“Is Punishment Gendered? The Case of Modern Italy,” Dr. Mary Gibson, Department of History, John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Much of the field of prison history has been dominated by a chronological trajectory proposed by Michel Foucault in his seminal work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault argued that between 1760 and 1840 new punishment regimes developed across the Western world.  These new systems moved away from public violence as the central form of punishment, focusing instead on depriving prisoners of liberty, and targeting the spirit rather than the body as the site of transformation.  Foucault noted that in many nations this shift in punishment was tied to a move into modernity. Political figures and public commentators touted their prisons as architectural examples of the power and order of the state. Foucault and scholars who accept his chronological framework have argued that the development of modern prisons in the Western world was influenced by Enlightenment thinking and correlated with the rise of industrial capitalism and liberal government.  They have also focused almost exclusively on men’s prisons. Dr. Mary Gibson, Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, complicates this narrative by examining the emergence of modern prisons in Italy and comparing the development of both men’s and women’s prisons. Gibson considers, in a field dominated by the study of male prisoners, what examining women’s prisons can tell historians about the development of modern punishment systems. And more broadly, are different types of punishment gendered?

Gibson uses Rome as a case study since it was both the capital of the Papal States, and subsequently united Italy, as well as a site where many penal institutions were situated.  In examining changes in punishment practices in Rome, she finds that women were the first beneficiaries of a switch from corporal punishment to imprisonment. This switch, which can be first seen at San Michele prison in 1735, predated the unification of Italy by over one hundred years. Women in San Michele prison lived in separate cells, in which they were overseen by a single guard who could monitor all inmates, and worked in a wool factory for half the wages paid to female workers outside of prison walls. Thus, many of the hallmarks of the modern penitentiary; isolation, supervision, and manufacturing work, all appeared in Italy earlier than would be expected according to Foucault’s chronology, but can only be seen when examining women’s prisons as well as men’s.  Gibson argues that the San Michele women’s prison was part of a web of religious authorities and philanthropic efforts used to control people who existed outside of family units. Women, who were considered both weak and dangerous, were the objects of much of this charity.

Gibson notes that over the course of the 19^th century the conditions of incarcerated women deteriorated. In San Michele, women were paired together in cells, and in some newer institutions, like the Diocleziane Baths, which housed men and women in separate areas, prisoners lived in dormitories.  This crowding together of prisoners was a move away from the isolation seen as central to modern prison architecture and a regression toward pre-modern organization of space. The work experience also changed as women were now trained, not for manufacturing work, but rather for handwork and other gendered labor that was intended to prepare them to serve within a family.  Although women in San Michele had been paid less than non-incarcerated female workers, they had learned a skill, which could then serve them on the labor market outside of prison walls. The transition in the treatment of imprisoned women was overseen by an order of nuns who ran San Michele starting in 1854.  Even after the emergence of the new Italian secular state, the religious control over women’s prisons was not challenged. Gibson notes that the conditions of women’s prisons did not fundamentally change until right before WWI when a series of articles appeared in print that exposed the treatment of women’s prisoners and the rule of nuns over incarcerated women.

The story of the development of men’s prisons in Rome, Gibson finds, was quite different. In contrast to the creation of institutions like San Michele, modern prisons were not established for men until a century later. Male prisoners served sentences of hard labor, chained to their fellow prisoners, until the late 19^th century.  After Italian unification municipal authorities replaced the male section of Diocleziane Baths, with a hard labor camp called Tre Fontane. Supporters of Tre Fontane celebrated outdoor work as well suited to the rural men who comprised the majority of prisoners in the camp, and claimed that this work turned prisoners from brutes into men. This penal camp was closed in 1895 after it was criticized in Parliament, partly due to the extremely high rates of malaria contracted among the prisoners. It was replaced with a cellular prison called Regina Coeli, which was hailed as one of the new institutions that marked the modernization of the city.  Coeli was built by prisoners themselves, suggesting comparisons with the way that convict labor was used in the project of modernizing the American South in the late 19^th century.  Eventually campaigns launched by construction workers against prison labor, again a trend with similarities in the American context, succeeded and prison workers moved out of the construction industry and into the business of printing.  Printers were less organized and the printing press in Regnia Coeli became one of the longest running prison industries. As the debate over Tre Fontane and the building of Regina Coeli suggest, by the late 19^th century men’s prisons were already sites of reform. The development of men’s prisons, therefore, Gibson argues, followed a different path from that of women’s prisons,

Gibson’s work shows the utility of considering gender in connection with punishment. Through detailed research that included prison statistics such as the numbers of letters prisoners received, and information about work hours and penalties for disobedience, as well as the architectural plans of prisons, Gibson tracks changes in the development and functioning of prisons. By comparing the different trajectories of male and female punishment in Italy, Gibson challenges the revisionist model of prison historiography, which has generally accepted a conception of prison as a masculine space. Her work suggests that punishment can be gendered, and that considering how and why can reveal much about the development and functioning of punishment regimes.

~ Emily Brooks.

What are the costs of enacting “appropriate” democratic politics in the face of systematic racial violence? When white citizens and state institutions betray a pervasive lack of concern for black suffering, is it fair to ask black citizens to make further sacrifices so that white citizens can be comfortable? In her powerful talk on the complex responses to the current Black Lives Matter movement, Juliet Hooker explores the forms of politics that Black citizens can and should pursue.

Hooker explores these questions through meditations on the problem of democratic loss. She begins with Danielle Allen, who argues democratic politics is characterized by loss and that we must manage this loss as citizens. There are always situations in which one must be a loser in democracy so democracies have to conceive of how this plays out. Losses are theoretically justified because they happen “arbitrarily” but in actuality, some groups, like African Americans, disproportionately bear this burden of loss. As a result, Allen turns her analysis to holding up citizens who sacrifice as key to democratic stability. She discusses African Americans who responded to racial terror in the 1960’s through non-violence as exemplary citizens making these necessary sacrifices on behalf of the rest of the population. As you might imagine, Hooker argues that this notion of Black sacrifice is problematic and an unfair burden on Black citizens to make others comfortable at the expense of their own wellbeing and freedom. Furthermore, she argues that the underlying historical and theoretical assumptions on which this notion of black politics as democratic sacrifice is based, does not actually hold up.

Hooker notes that the most popular critique of the current Black Lives Matter protests is that protesters have not always engaged in strict standards of non-violence (as compared to memories of the 1960’s protest movements) as they speak out against police brutality, murder and the racism of the criminal justice system. Yet she discusses how this critique is based on three key problematic assumptions. The first is the reduction of a long history of black activism and black political thought to a very sanitized version of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In this romantic narrative of the civil rights movement, the U.S. is seen as a forward-moving democracy where political relations are always moving towards racial equality. This narrative serves to shift attention away from Black loss and long struggles of racial justice toward the idea that black politics should be about peaceful repair within the same democratic system. In fact, the reason Martin Luther King and non-violence movements made an impact is because they were set up in contrast to Malcolm X and movements like the Black Panthers. Both types of movements were necessary to move towards racial equality but we only remember and honor a romanticized version of non-violence and the people that made up these movements.

The second assumption is a mistaken theoretical account of white moral psychology that assumes that whites experience positive ethical transformations as a result of exemplary forms of political activism (i.e. nonviolence) by racialized minorities as they respond to racist violence. But Hooker discusses the fact that there is no evidence that this is true, particularly in our current “post-racial” society with a high degree of white resentment against Blacks and Latino/as. Even in the case of Black unarmed children being murdered by police officers, there is a need to portray each victim of brutality as innocent and deserving of care and citizenship rather than focusing on these deaths as part of a racially unjust system.

Finally, Hooker discusses the third assumption as a characterization of non-violent protest as sacrifice, which she points out, does not necessarily correspond with the way participants in black protest movements actually frame their own actions as defiance or resistance. She uses interpretations of an iconic photograph of Dorothy Counts, one of the first Black students involved in desegregation, as an example. In the photo Hooker references, Dorothy is walking to the school, followed by a mob of white protesters. Many readings of this photograph have centered on Black sacrifice, assuming Dorothy is afraid as she engages in this peaceful protest by going to school and refusing to engage with the mob. In fact, however, Hooker shares that Dorothy’s own reading of her actions are those of defiance, not acquiescence: “if you look at the picture the right way, you see what I see. What I see is that all of those people are behind me. They did not have the courage to get up in my face.”

At the end of her talk, Hooker connects these problematic assumptions to the real world consequences that Black Lives Matters protesters today face as (too many) whites call them criminals and consider them unjustified in their deployment of violence (and nonviolence). There is no room for Black anger and outrage. Thus Hooker asserts that, in this context, peaceful acquiescence will not in fact do the job of creating racial justice. Instead, riots (she uses the term purposefully to leverage its discomfort), or “fugitive black politics” might be a better form of democratic repair for African Americans. They may not always be a solution to structural problems and institutionalized injustices, but they do allow black citizens to express their pain and make their losses visible, and Hooker argues they can help us to theorize how engaging in a politics of active resistance might be crucial to achieving racial justice. Responsibility for racial justice does not lie with those who suffer from racism and so we must stop expecting sacrifice to be enough.

U.S. commentators on inequality have historically inhabited elite positions in American society. Given their postionality—as academics, journalists, pollsters, and politicians—it is not surprising that political and policy responses to inequality in the U.S. are comprised of three main discourses: (1) the tolerance perspective, which draws on the “American dream” ideology, where hard work will result in “fair” outcomes, (2) the ignorance view, which explains that, even though Americans generally desire less inequality, they are largely unaware of how much it has risen, and (3) the ambivalence approach—adopted by experts in the field that are ambivalent because they are uncertain in how to address it, particularly in regards to racial inequality. Leslie McCall takes up a fourth approach—the opportunity model—in her talk on How Americans Think Politically about Economic Inequality. This perspective arises from the desire for equal opportunity and widespread access to employment and education.

McCall’s discussion of the opportunity model focuses on popular American beliefs about inequality and their political implications. Americans generally believe that income differences are too large, inequality continues to exist to benefit the rich and powerful, and large income differences are unnecessary for prosperity. On the issue of “hard work” and its role in “getting ahead,” the American public continues to buy into this ideology, yet there is broad recognition that there are barriers to opportunity such as parental education, coming from a wealthy family, and knowing the right people. The political implications of these views result in emphasizing the limitations of redistributive models—models that largely rest on elite partisan approaches, such as the conservative tendency to equalize opportunities like economic growth rather than outcomes. Democrats, on the other hand, have focused on “equalizing outcomes” through taxing and social spending, while other alternatives like the Civil Rights model advocate for racial and gender equity by aiming to equalize outcomes. While the Civil Rights model developed approaches to expand education and economic opportunities for groups discriminated against by virtue of their race, ethnicity, or gender, McCall underscores that the anti-discrimination strategy has proven insufficient on its own. Equal opportunities in the workplace and in universities through antidiscrimination policies remain within the opportunity paradigm by equalizing outcomes (through affirmative action) to equalize opportunities.

Responses to inequality have, therefore, focused on opportunities rather than outcomes or government intervention. Tailored to appeal to the American majority, who care more about opportunity than equality, Democrats, too, respond to growing inequality through the opportunity model. Given the political implications of American beliefs about inequality, several questions emerge from McCall’s discussion. How does, for example, the American public define the poor? What populations are left out in this model? What types of employment and opportunities in education exist, for instance, for immigrants in the U.S.? Do antidiscrimination laws protect migrant workers? What are the limitations in opportunities for these groups? Can inequality be addressed without engaging in policy, such as immigration reform? These questions foreground whether there can ever be equality of opportunity for all, an assumption the opportunity model appears to rely on.

On November 5^th, ARC Distinguished Fellow, and Professor of History at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Queens College, Amy Chazkel presented her current research, “The Nocturnal Lives of a Nineteenth Century Brazilian City”. Chazkel offered a detailed portrait of nighttime in Rio de Janeiro, and the socio-legal construction of night during the city’s 53-year long curfew, part of her forthcoming book, tentatively titled, Urban Chiaroscuro: Rio de Janeiro and the History of Nightfall. Chazkel opened the talk by challenging the notion of the night as a time of innate danger, and asked the audience to instead see night as a sociolegal construct of control, policing, curfew and states of siege or exception.

Chazkel emphasized Brazil and Rio de Janeiro as a particularly interesting site, where slavery was not abolished until 1888 and urban modernity and slavery overlapped in profound ways. Drawing on an impressively vast archive of information, Chazkel used travel letters, period paintings, maps, newspapers, public records on the theatre, arrest records, police edicts, among other sources to sketch a portrait of night in Rio at this time, in order to further discussions on modernity and social control. The control of public space through curfews, Chazkel argues, gave way to the novel articulation of the ‘right to the city’ and freedom of movement in public space post-emancipation. Chazkel’s project, has literally been that of pulling out from the shadows, as no explicit archives or materials on nightfall or curfews exist. Fascinatingly, a footnote explaining, “after dark a stick became a weapon” piqued her curiosity and led to this research.

Chazkel explained that Francisco Teixera de Aragão instituted the 53-year curfew in 1825 after the Constitution of 1824 upheld slavery. The curfew was imposed at 10 PM and 9PM in winter months, and was signaled by the unceasing ringing of church bells for thirty minutes. After the curfew began, slaves found on the street were subject to arrest, corporal punishment (often public whipping) and detention. The curfew was instituted through polices edicts, practices and city ordinances. Curfew violations were classified under “troublesome activity” and a threat to “public tranquility”. The curfew did not apply to “well known persons of integrity” and free white-persons, though Chazkel was careful to point out the regular, though arbitrary enforcement of the curfew, as police decided a person’s social standing and race in the darkness of night. Slaves that carried written permissions from their owners were not punished. At some points during the 53-years, curfew violation accounted for up to one fourth of all arrests.

Restrictions on movement, through the curfew, did not impair the economy, and served as a means of labor discipline, and class differentiation in the use of public spaces and in the post-colonial distinction of citizen/non-citizen. Most people did not have clocks of their own, though life was structured by time, with a balloon visible throughout the city released at noon, and church bells marking the start of curfew.

Chazkel also profiled the burgeoning demand for public illumination and the growth of theatres, marking a shift towards a culture of night leisure and urban entertainment. Of special importance was the theatre Alcazar Lyrique, which was celebrated as having changed notions of taste, the culture of leisure, and contributed to the growing acceptance of public drinking alongside the growth in theater attendance. By the 1870’s the curfew became more difficult to enforce and it was dropped in 1888 with the end of slavery. The curfew can be seen as the beginning of modern policing, with its eventual end and subsequent growth of vagrancy law thereafter.

Reflecting on Chazkel’s work, one is both enticed by the rendering of the past she evokes, and equally compelled to reflect on her broader questions of the right to the use public space, projects of social control and times and states of exception. Who has a right to the city is as pertinent a question as ever in our contemporary American moment, looking to the neoliberal dilemma of private-public space exemplified during the occupation of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park by Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and public debates around racialized policing practices, most recently decried by the Black Lives Matter movement. The day/night distinction in the use, conception and control of public space persists, and historical work such as Chazkel’s offers a burgeoning, necessary illumination.