POLITICS, FULLY GENDERED Politics is always gendered, and one could argue that it is always fully gendered insofar as the men and women who engage in politics are the products and producers of gendered worlds. That women and men do not play politics on equal terms, in the same places, using similar tactics is itself part of the gendering process. It is much harder to say that the analysis of political systems is fully gendered. Analyzing, or simply describing to an outsider, how a political system works often requires leaving things out, or including them in forced or awkward ways. Women are often the object of these exclusions and incorporations, and three of our contributors explore the consequences of this politics—whose gendering is partial—by studying its effects in contexts of suffrage, revolution, and war.
Katherine Bowie challenges one of the great orthodoxies of modernist historiography: namely, that the women's suffrage movement began and succeeded in Europe, then was imitated in Europe's Third World dependencies. Bowie notes that women in Thailand were given the right to vote in village elections in 1897, just four years after women were granted the vote in New Zealand and decades before they became voters in France, Belgium, or Switzerland. Suffrage for Thai village women was so early, and so taken for granted, that it has fallen out of historical consciousness, and its potential for unsettling stereotypical notions of “progress” has been lost. Bowie retrieves this potential by looking for the roots of early suffrage in Thailand. She finds them not in the culture of the court, or colonial mimicry, or in the opinions of the progressive American missionaries who were favorites at court, but in ideas of women's participation that were common in matrilineal village life.
Suzy Kim takes us next to North Korea, where revolutionary gender ideologies appeared, in the early years of the regime, anything but radical. North Korea in the late 1940s embraced a Russian-style communism that had abandoned, in practice, much of the anti-family, anti-marriage stance adopted, in theory, by Engels and Marx. The North Korean regime denounced “feudal” practices like child marriage, forced unions, and the “sale” of brides, but the role of family, home, and motherhood was deemed essential to the success of the revolution. The revolutionary family was a modern family, a facsimile of the state and a link to salvageable tradition. The revolutionary mother was the ideal citizen. She represented the ideal virtues of all citizens, male and female. The revolutionary mother, Kim shows us, could “have it all,” and was expected to do it all, whether she wanted to or not. This meant working outside the home, raising children, keeping house, preparing meals, and setting aside time for personal study and improvement, with six and a half hours for sleep. The revolution was fully gendered, and just like home.
Carol McGranahan attempts perhaps the most radical reworking of expectations, fully gendering her analysis within the silences and poorly articulated spaces of Tibetan historical consciousness. By doing so, she reveals the complex worlds of authority, voice, and exception embedded in these spaces. McGranahan's informants, refugees displaced by the Chinese military, assured her that women did not participate in the armed struggle against Chinese troops. Women have the power to pollute; their bodies and their menstrual blood could put male soldiers at risk. Yet in personal conversations with Tibetan women, McGranahan found many instances of women at war, fighting and even leading in battle. What keeps these stories, which are told in private circles, from entering the public canon of remembrance? Instead of mapping out and, in effect, re-imposing the hegemonic patterns of speech and silence that shape Tibetan history-making, McGranahan uses the misfit materials she extracts from oral discourse to pull out the contradictions built into Tibetan gender systems, creating alternative versions of past and present. All of these alternatives are fully gendered, all are linked to Tibetan possibilities, but none is reducible to fixed assumptions of what men and women can do as makers of Tibetan history, or as political actors anywhere.
FAVORED VICTIM STATUS No one wants to be a victim, especially when the status means pain, dispossession, or death. Yet the fact of victimhood, once it has occurred, can acquire sacred dimensions. It is worth remembering, even celebrating, and once it becomes a singular possession, sharing it, or keeping it, is a consummately political act. National communities, ethnoracial groups, and world religions are all built on selectively remembered traumas, and they guard them jealously. Because it creates solidarity, victimhood can be a source of power and reparation. It also prompts comparison, even imitation. Contests over who can be a victim, over who can rightfully embody this status in order to create solidarity, political power, and change, are now a routine aspect of pluralist politics. Two of our essays deal with the tense politics, and the reformative potential, of two great traumas: New World slavery and the Holocaust. How, our authors ask, does the politics of memory associated with these traumas affect immigrants in the United States and Europe, who must overcome their own marginalization, building solidarity out of exclusion, in nation-states that bestow “favored victim status” on Jews and African Americans? What problems of recognition and redistribution ensue?
Nancy Foner and Richard Alba show how the legacies of slavery and the Holocaust have played out very differently for immigrants to the United States and their counterparts in Europe. Although coming to terms with the Holocaust—acknowledging it, memorializing it, making amends for it, and guarding against its repeat—has become central to popular notions of tolerance and pluralism in Europe, Foner and Alba suggest that the memory of the Holocaust has actually worked to the disadvantage of new immigrants to countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Instead of promoting tolerance of Muslim immigrants (Turks, Maghrebis, other Arabs, and Africans), Holocaust memory is used to exclude immigrants, to paint them as anti-Semites, backward, and intolerant, and to justify harsh policies against them. By contrast, in the United States new immigrants have been able to build effectively on the legacy of slavery and the Civil Rights movement, making adept use of policies like affirmative action that were devised to address structural racism in the United States. Foner and Alba suggest that these corrective policies now function more effectively to advance immigrant populations and their interests than they do those of African Americans. The issue of who can and cannot be a victim is central to all these trends.
Damani J. Partridge takes us from Foner and Alba's high-altitude comparison of Europe and North America to an intimate, sometimes disturbing look at how Holocaust memorialization works to marginalize new immigrants in Germany. In his research on young Turks, Arabs, Africans, and other immigrants of color in Berlin, Partridge joined field trips to Holocaust memorial sites. These experiences are often unsatisfying for students and their teachers and guides. The links between the worlds of immigrant youth and the genocidal politics of Nazi Germany are sometimes hard to forge. Teachers think students are not respectful of the sites; students think the sites are used to silence their own grievances, the daily mistreatment they receive in Germany, or their dispossession by the Israeli state. In a vivid exploration of mixed feelings and partial identifications, Partridge brings us along on a trip to Auschwitz, where students struggle to understand a past and present that is alien to them, and which many (Germans and immigrants alike) believe does not belong to them. Partridge argues that the encounter between Holocaust memorialization and anti-racist politics too often breeds estrangement between Germans, immigrants, and the children of immigrants. The latter are neither incorporated nor fully excluded from the nation. The stigma they carry (ironically, because they did not perpetrate the Holocaust and cannot be redeemed by atoning for it) is one that, according to Partridge, can be overcome only by the “touch,” the caring and fellow feeling, that the politics of victimhood in Germany cannot yet extend to Muslim immigrants.
LAWS OF EMPIRE Inequality and sovereignty are essential aspects of empire. The Roman is of higher status than the Barbarian. The Sultan holds power of life and death over his subjects. These qualities are best interpreted as claims, not facts, and Roman villas sacked by Vandals, or a Sultan's head under a shepherd's foot are proof that the claims require constant effort to uphold. Making the claims seem factual is the work of law, and it is law-like work. Imperial governments, in their mature forms, are strewn with jurists, judges, gendarmes, and prisons. Three of our authors show how the laws of empire work: at ground level, where colonial officers meet natives; in the practicalities of policing, where sovereignty is performed and enforced; and in ideologies of dominance, where the right to rule others is discerned, or inscribed, in the laws of nature.
Katherine Hoffman offers us a close look at French imperial law as practiced in Morocco. Here, in 1930, French authorities imposed their infamous distinction between Berber populations, who would be subject to tribal customary law, and Arab populations who would be subject to Islamic law. The policy was filled with holes and overlaps, since customary and Islamic law were combined in myriad ways across North Africa, and still are. If the realpolitik behind the French policy was to prevent the Arabization of Berber tribes, Hoffman argues that the unintended result was to increase the presence of Arabic, Muslim jurists, and Islamic law in the exercise of Berber customary law. French Native Affairs officers relied heavily on local learned men to interpret and record court proceedings. These men, literate in Arabic, versed in local interpretations of Islamic law, and sometimes of Arab descent themselves, created the Arab/Berber mergers the French wanted to prevent. In Morocco, Hoffman concludes, imperial “oversight” (in the dual sense of the term) undermined its own sovereign intention, and its own legal apparatus enabled this outcome.
Tong Lam moves us from the tribal hinterland to the contest between old and new imperial centers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China's Qing rulers, dominated by European powers, adopted a Japanese-style embrace of the international imperial ethos, imposing modern standards and institutions in a last ditch attempt to compete with the British, Americans, French, and other colonial powers intent on limiting Qing sovereignty. Essential to this enterprise was the creation of a “modern” police force. Lam describes how the Qing created this force by sending student delegations to Japanese police academies, importing Japanese trainers, and, most important of all, boxing out, co-opting, and reconfiguring the local constabularies that for centuries had performed policing functions in city and countryside. Lam argues that this campaign to produce a form of sovereignty recognizable to European powers brought with it a shift toward Foucauldian governmentality. This change did not proceed by way of a generalized biopolitics, Lam argues, but in the service of a “civilized repression” that would perhaps secure for the Qing the recognition and respect enjoyed by the proprietors of “international law.”
Robert Vitalis shifts our focus from a weak and aging Asian empire to a vigorous, newly ascendant, North American rival. If the Qing and the U.S. empires, circa 1900, shared an inferiority complex in relation to the British, the United States, exulting in recent victories over colonial Spain, was confronted with the ideological problem not of decline, but of a rapid increase in its global presence and power. As Vitalis shows, this development had almost immediate effects in the academy, where political and social scientists began to develop the fields now known as international relations and development studies. These new intellectual pursuits gave their attention to administration, governance, and law. As Vitalis demonstrates in a dogged march through intellectual terrain many political scientists would now look away from in shame, the field of international relations was formed in dialogue with a higher law of racial hierarchy. The management of race wars and the betterment of the “child races” was its unabashed subject matter. Vitalis takes apart this all-too-common ideology of European dominance; he explains how anti-colonial nationalism gradually blunted its more egregious claims; but he does nothing to diminish the clear moments of recognition that will dawn on contemporary readers (especially American ones) as they scrutinize their ancestors in Vitalis’ “family album” of imperial history.
