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In This Issue
| The October issue contains three articles and an AHR Forum, along with our usual extensive book review section. The articles take us first to the moon (in the company of seventeenth-century English writers), then to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Africa, and finally to the Roman Empire. The Forum is on the timely subject of anti-Americanism. |
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Articles | |
In "Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon," David Cressy suggests that 1638 was England's lunar moment. For it was about then that speculation about the plurality of worlds, the likelihood that the moon was inhabited, and the possibility of space travel bringing humans and lunar creatures into contact fostered a veritable lunar discourse among clerics and others in Stuart England, drawing upon ancient and medieval astronomical, theological, and literary traditions. Cressy demonstrates that lunar interest was hardly limited to astronomical or scientific circles. Indeed, a high proportion of those who wrote about the moon were churchmen who wondered how lunar inhabitants would fit into Christian history and whether they too were the seed of Adam. Cressy's article shows that in a post-Copernican, post-Reformation, and post-Columbian Europe, the bounds of wonderment were virtually unlimited.
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Derek Peterson's "Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928" offers a corrective to conventional views of Africa's legal history as defined in terms of a perpetual contest between modern governance and inflexible tradition. The essay focuses on the history of conjugal litigation in late-nineteenth-century Tanganyika. Anglican missionaries used record books and marriage certificates to define marriage as a contract authorized by God, thus allowing them to punish extramarital sex as adultery. Litigants, however, were hardly passive in the face of such efforts; they learned to use these bureaucratic modes of religious and social control to their own advantage. Husbands and wives entered into the legal process by articulating their own interests and complaints in a recognizable moral discourse that could draw judges' attention and sympathy. In this way, they were able to pursue claims concerning such pertinent issues as wives' deference, payment of bridewealth, or marital residence. By naming their spouses as adulterers, litigants could co-opt judges, who were bound to punish wrongdoers, to rule in matters of fundamental importance to them. Peterson's article contributes to the growing literature on colonial agency in an African context.
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"Peregrini, Barbari, and Cives Romani: Concepts of Citizenship and Legal Identity of Barbarians in the Later Roman Empire" by Ralph W. Mathisen offers us an example of an expanding empire of many different peoples confronting the vexed question of inclusion through the granting of citizenship. In the Roman case, the question was merely opened, not decided, in 212 c.e., with the emperor Caracalla's issuance of the Antonine Constitution. Mathisen notes that, contrary to what is generally thought, this move did not put an end to distinctions created by different kinds of citizenship—civic, provincial, religious, and ethnic. Roman citizenship encompassed all of these, creating an assortment of personal and legal identities. And this very complexity defined how Romans dealt with barbarian settlers. Caracalla's grant was meant to be self-perpetuating, with Roman citizenship offered to "barbarian" foreigners who subsequently settled in the Empire. Barbarian settlers and their descendants had the opportunity to make use of Roman civil law in the same way it was used by other Roman citizens. Evolving concepts of citizenship thus facilitated the integration of foreign, barbarian populations into the western Roman world during the fifth and sixth centuries. Mathisen's article offers a distant model of how citizenship can be made inclusive.
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AHR Forum | |
The AHR Forum, "Historical Perspectives on Anti-Americanism," looks at this phenomenon from four different parts of the world. Greg Grandin's "Your Americanism and Mine: Americanism and Anti-Americanism in the Americas" begins with the emergence of the concept itself, showing that it was first voiced in the nineteenth century as a charge against supporters of European tariffs placed on U.S. goods. In the early twentieth century, commentators broadened the definition of "anti-Americanism" to cover the growing popular opposition to American power. That Latin Americans, especially during the early Cold War years, challenged the U.S. largely from the standpoint of the liberal democratic ideals it claimed to espouse, created a serious crisis of legitimacy for Washington. In response, policy elites, scholars, and pundits marshaled the concept of "anti-Americanism," drawing on ideas associated with psychology and psychoanalysis—resentment, fear, and ambivalence—to argue that eruptions in Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere sprang not from legitimate grievances, but from dislocation and uncertainty caused by the transition to modernity. They forged "anti-Americanism" into a malleable interpretive concept that served to link Latin America's revolutionary nationalist movements to a general assumption that the "third world" was in revolt against modernity.
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"Always Blame the Americans," Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht's contribution to the Forum, looks at debates about philo- and anti-Americanism in Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe from 1776 to September 11. She argues that European anti-Americanism has had very little to do with the U.S. or its policies, and even less with transatlantic relations. European anti-Americanism is not monolithic or constant, but heterogeneous and episodic in its eruptions. Most important, she insists, anti-Americanism cannot be understood without its flip side, philo-Americanism. Indeed, the tension between the two embodies the very condition necessary for both: high expectations and bitter disillusionment are always conjoined. European anti-Americanism has always been fueled by defenders of European culture, conservatives, and a strain of elitism, while the fascination with Taylorism, Fordism, technology, and sports has consistently fostered its opposite, philo-Americanism.
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As a region of enormous diversity of cultures and political systems, Asia's contacts with America are varied as well, making generalizations about Asian anti-Americanism difficult. Nevertheless, Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, in "America in Asian Eyes," see a pattern that spans this diversity over more than a hundred years. Asians find much in America to admire and emulate, but they are also troubled by the role the United States has played in the region and in the world at large. They lament the inability of the U.S. to act in accordance with its rhetorical commitment to its liberal values, especially democracy and self-determination. Thus Asians questioned American's anti-imperialism in the wake of U.S. actions in the Philippines and doubted the commitment to self-determination when, in the years after World War I, Wilson's inspirational words proved increasingly meaningless. The Cold War reinforced images of the United States as the land of opportunity and freedom, but Washington's support for regional dictators, the behavior of American troops in Asia, and the war in Vietnam only lent credence to communist anti-American propaganda. It is perhaps not surprising that anti-Americanism has soared in Asia's Muslim countries since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Less predictable has been the sharp decline in favorable views of the U.S. throughout the region, partly for local reasons, but largely because of the widespread perception of American arrogance.
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| Finally, Juan Cole's "Anti-Americanism: It's the Policies" comments on the Forum as a whole, offering a critique of some of the authors' interpretations as well as the underlying logic of their analyses. Drawing upon contemporary opinion polls and quantitative studies, he also is able to provide evidence on what is undoubtedly the region where contemporary anti-Americanism is both most pronounced and of greatest concern: the Middle East. |
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