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Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference
Edited by Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek, & Anand Pandian
Duke University Press Durham and London 2003

∫2003 Duke University Press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
‘‘Masyarakat Adat, Difference, and the Limits of Recognition
in Indonesia’s Forest Zone’’ by Tania Murray Li originally
published in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (2001).
Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University
Press.
Paul Gilroy retains the copyright for his essay ‘‘After the
Great White Error... The Great Black Mirage.’’
Donna Haraway’s chapter, ‘‘For the Love of a Good Dog:
Webs of Action in the World of Dog Genetics,’’ is a slightly
expanded version of her chapter that appears in the University
of California Press book Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropol-
ogy and Science Beyond the Two Culture Divide, edited by
Alan Goodman et al., forthcoming March 2003. Permission to
reprint this chapter is granted by Donna Haraway and by the
University of California Press.

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
INTRODUCTION. The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature:
Terrains of Power and Practice. Donald S. Moore,
Anand Pandian, and Jake Kosek1
PART ONE. Calculating Improvements 71
1. After the Great White Error... The Great Black Mirage.
Paul Gilroy73
2. Simians, Savages, Skulls, and Sex: Science and Colonial Militarism
in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Zine Magubane99
3. ‘‘The More You Kill the More You Will Live’’: The Maya, ‘‘Race,’’
and Biopolitical Hopes for Peace in Guatemala. Diane M. Nelson122
PART TWO. Landscapes of Purity and Pollution 147
4. ‘‘There Is a Land Where Everything Is Pure’’: Linguistic Nationalism
and Identity Politics in Germany. Uli Linke149
5. ‘‘On the Raggedy Edge of Risk’’: Articulations of Race and Nature
after Biology. Bruce Braun175

6. Beyond Ecoliberal ‘‘Common Futures’’: Environmental Justice,
Toxic Touring, and a Transcommunal Politics of Place.
Giovanna Di Chiro204
PART THREE. Communities of Blood and Belonging 233
7. Inventing the Heterozygote: Molecular Biology, Racial
Identity, and the Narratives of Sickle-Cell Disease, Tay-Sachs,
and Cystic Fibrosis. Keith Wailoo235
8. For the Love of a Good Dog: Webs of Action in the World
of Dog Genetics. Donna Haraway 254
9. Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood.
Robyn Wiegman 296
PART FOUR. The Politics of Representation 321
10. Men in Paradise: Sex Tourism and the Political Economy
of Masculinity. Steven Gregory323
11. Pulp Fictions of Indigenism. Alcida Ramos356
12. Masyarakat Adat, Difference, and the Limits of Recognition
in Indonesia’s Forest Zone. Tania Murray Li380
Bibliography 407
Contributors 461
Index 465

Acknowledgments
Generous funding from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation,
and the Rockefeller Foundation enabled our contributors to attend a con-
ference we convened at the Institute of International Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, in February 2000. Eowyn Greeno, Estee Neuwirth, Dar
Rudnyckyj, and Jennifer Sokolove provided crucial assistance for the work-
shop. Michael Watts took an early interest in the project, and his inspired
support remained critical to its completion. Our contributors are appreciated
interlocutors whose work is the condition of possibility for this volume. Col-
leagues in the Departments of Anthropology and Geography at UC Berkeley
offered enabling dialogues. We also wish to thank colleagues whose par-
ticipation in the conference contributed to our collective insights: Iain Boal,
Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Lawrence Cohen, Caren Kaplan, Ruthie Gilmore,
Allan Pred, Ato Quayson, Helena Ragone, Ajay Skaria, and Steven Small.
Funding from the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University provided cru-
cial support. For their critically constructive comments on previous ver-
sions, giving weapons to the weak, we thank Arun Agrawal, Shubhra Guru-
rani, James Scott, and Margaret Sommers. Conversations with Gillian Hart,
Barnor Hesse, Orin Starn, Amita Baviskar, Leti Volpp, and Vron Ware helped
clarify key moves, taking us beyond the pale. Paul Gilroy and Donna Hara-
way offered more than small acts and situated knowledges generative to the
project; our thanks for their gracious engagement and challenges. We are es-
pecially grateful to David Theo Goldberg and Hugh Rafﬂes, whose extensive
critical comments sharpened our introduction; their rigorous involvement
proved both formidable and formative. At Duke, Ken Wissoker’s supportive

viii Acknowledgments
yet critical editorial savvy and Rebecca Johns-Danes’s insights improved the
assemblage through a Latour de force. Ginger Doll’s spirit and generosity
engendered insights about race, nature, and difference as well as a politics of
the possible. With unwavering love and guidance, Lalitha and Ganesa Pan-
dian have provided the freedom to imagine these themes otherwise. Jon and
Margaret Kosek, Julie Greenberg, and the spirit of Adam Kolff have provided
critical encouragement and continual inspiration. Our thanks for all these
ensouled practices that informed our articulations.

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

INTRODUCTION. The Cultural Politics of
Race and Nature: Terrains of Power and Practice
Donald S. Moore, Anand Pandian, and Jake Kosek
Perhaps it is wrong to speak of [race] at all as a concept rather than as a group of contradictory
forces, facts, and tendencies.—W. E. B. Du Bois
∞
Employed as a metaphysical concept, which it mainly is in the argument of philosophy,
‘‘nature’’ is the concept through which humanity thinks its difference and speciﬁcity.
—Kate Soper
≤
Why do ideas of race and nature incite such passion and protest? Pervasive in
their reach and forceful in their effects, the two work together in strikingly
powerful ways. Images of wild nature animate racial anxieties about crime
and poverty in the urban jungle.
≥
In the global south, indigenous peoples
must often describe themselves as Noble Savages to claim rain forest re-
sources. From Paris to Buenos Aires, medical metaphors of disease and con-
tagion circulate through cultural imaginaries of the dangers posed by ra-
cialized foreigners and immigrants. Race and nature work together.
∂
And it is
their recombinant mutations that so often haunt the cultural politics of
identity and difference. Discourses of race and nature provide the resources
to express truths, forge identities, and justify inequalities. They form a vast
terrain for the exercise of power, spanning the distance from genetic coils to
national territories and diasporic communities. Race, Nature, and the Poli-
tics of Difference explores these landscapes of affect and effect, the busy
trafﬁc of nature and culture that articulates racial formations and their con-
tested legacies.
We begin this project with a question: how do race and nature work as
a terrain of power? The phrasing is deliberate. We argue that these three

2 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
terms—work, terrain, and power—offer a useful means to illuminate the
cultural politics of race and nature. We understand cultural politics as an
approach that treats culture itself as a site of political struggle, an analytic
emphasizing power, process, and practice. Cultural practices bear tangible
political effects: they forge communities, reproduce inequalities, and vindi-
cate exclusions. Yet they also provide the means by which those very effects
are challenged. Cultural politics insists that such struggles are simulta-
neously material and symbolic, taking seriously the ties that bind ﬂeeting
signs to embodied practices and living bodies. Refusing to accept that race or
nature are matters of common sense, we insist that neither keyword is natu-
ral.
∑
Neither can be taken as a foundational ground beyond the bounds of
history and social struggle. We follow instead the means by which such
essences of race and nature are fashioned, and we track their echoes and
movements through time and space. By attending to the struggles through
which races and natures are made and unmade, bound together and pried
apart, we actively encourage new ways of imagining these tenacious terms.
With what imaginings do we struggle? Race and nature are often opposed
in both popular and technical discourse. Many natural scientists have sought
to describe a material world free from human inﬂuence. And reciprocally,
critics of racism often insist that there is nothing natural about social differ-
ences. Their insistence is instructive. The invocations of race with which
they struggle rely on ideas of nature. And there are few forms of nature that
do not bear the traces of racial exclusion. From eighteenth-century assertions
that climate determined racial character, to twentieth-century medical de-
bates concerning the racial dimensions of genetic disease, race and nature
meet on a well-worn path. The contributions to this volume underscore
what Donna Haraway terms the ‘‘trafﬁc between what we have come to
know historically as nature and culture.’’
∏
They chart this trafﬁc’s routes
across diverse sites, moments, and contexts. In so doing, they illuminate the
practices, processes, and power relations that articulate race, nature, and the
politics of difference.
Nature is not merely the material environment, nor is race merely a prob-
lem of social relations. Race and nature are both material and symbolic. They
reach across this imagined divide, acting at once through bodies and meta-
phors. Natural character is written into discourse and expression but is also
worked into ﬂesh and landscape. Racialized discourses mark both living
beings and geographical territories with the force of their distinctions. We
take both race and nature as historical artifacts: assemblages of material,

Introduction 3
discourse, and practice irreducible to a universal essence. Imagined as an
ontological foundation, nature has served as the generative terrain from
which assertions of essence emerge. Nature appears to precede history, even
as it wipes away the historical traces of its own fashioning.
π
Race has pro-
vided mobile markers of identity and difference on this naturalizing ground,
rationalizing orders of exclusion as laws of necessity. Race provides a critical
medium through which ideas of nature operate, even as racialized forces
rework the ground of nature itself. Working together, race and nature legiti-
mate particular forms of political representation, reproduce social hierar-
chies, and authorize violent exclusions—often transforming contingent rela-
tions into eternal necessities.
For precisely this reason, we insist on the historical speciﬁcity of particu-
lar racisms and naturalisms.
∫
We agree that racial and natural verities must
be rigorously denatured, robbed of their naturalizing power. But this is not
enough. Couplings of these two persistent terms gain their speciﬁc character
on what Gramsci termed ‘‘the terrain of the conjunctural.’’
Ω
These con-
tingent formations are at times profoundly dangerous but at other moments
potentially liberating. They bear contradictions both enabling and disabling.
Both fascist Nazis and radical environmentalists have shared a passion for
organic bread in twentieth-century Germany. Both Hitler and Black Na-
tionalist LeRoi Jones used the notion of a lebensraum—living space—to
make racial claims to national territory, as we later discuss. Their sharing of
symbols is troubling but does not produce an allied political vision. Argu-
ments for Aryan supremacy in 1930s Germany differ radically from asser-
tions of African American identity in the United States in the 1960s. The
political stakes of race and nature lie in the ways they become articulated
together in particular historical moments.
Here, we have in mind not the clunky, economistic articulation of 1970s
structural Marxism and the modes of production debates. Rather, as Stuart
Hall notes, articulation carries within it the twin concepts of joining and
enunciation.
∞≠
An articulation both brings together disparate elements and,
in the process of assemblage, gives that constellation a particular form and
potential force. The shape of this formation, the effectiveness of the linkages
established among its elements, and the impact it will have on cultural,
social, and political processes is historically contingent, not able to be ‘‘read’’
off from an underlying structural logic. A critical question becomes how
contingent constellations come together in particular historical contexts,
the heterogeneity of practices and cultural forms they authorize—in other

4 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
words, what novel forms emerge from this provisional ‘‘unity’’—and how
these linkages inform political subjectivities and cultural identities.
∞∞
Thus conceived, articulation offers a means for understanding emergent
assemblages of institutions, apparatuses, practices, and discourses. Nodal
points of intersection give shape to formations that are reworked through
historical agency rather than structurally determined. The distance of this
vision from Althusserian structuralism is most clear not simply in the rejec-
tion of the economic as the determinative ‘‘last instance’’ but also in the
proliferation of sites that constitute subjects. Rather than positing the state
as overdetermining subject formation, we see the discursive contours of race
and nature as critical to shaping identities enacted through historical strug-
gles and the practices of everyday life. Structural determination is here sup-
planted by a politics of contingency, open-ended historical processes without
guarantees.
∞≤
Within this conceptual framework, we ask: how do race and
nature invoke each other, speak through each other, build on each other?
Race may work to biologize culture.
∞≥
But cultural difference also may be
seized as a means of marking race.
∞∂
These mutual entanglements and rela-
tional histories inform one another dialectically, animating the forms of
practice, process, and power our contributors explore.
Racial and natural essences are forged in the crucible of cultural politics.
How do they claim authority as foundational truths? On the one hand, invo-
cations of race and nature often betray a sense of stable ﬁxity, a settled
character beyond the ﬂux of history and politics. On the other hand, these
very ideas traverse vast scales—indeed participate in the production of those
scales—moving ﬂuidly across radically different historical and geographic
contexts: from blood to soil, from courtrooms to laboratories, from national
parks to toxic neighborhoods. As race and nature move across time, scale,
and context, their ‘‘polyvalent mobility’’ links distinct subjects, artifacts,
and environments.
∞∑
Yet there is no paradox in these widely traveling claims
to stability. Time and again, race and nature stake claims to commonsensical
truth. These verities can be discovered and rediscovered in the most distant
of places and the most disparate of times precisely because their essence can
be taken for granted. Their sense of universality both makes race and nature
continually available for naïve rediscovery and continually obscures the his-
torical conditions that make and remake them. Because race and nature
always seem to precede history, they can be taken again and again as the very
substrate on which myriad social truths are built.
This volume explores disparate sites where articulations of race and nature
work together to powerful effect. We envision the cultural politics of race

Introduction 5
and nature as an emergent ﬁeld that cuts across disciplinary divides and
established intellectual communities. For this reason, the volume’s inter-
disciplinary contributors employ a variety of theoretical and methodological
perspectives. While our approaches are often distinct, they converge in a
shared emphasis on the articulated effects of race and nature. In charting this
ﬁeld, we draw especially on the following bodies of work, which we later
elaborate, building on established routes while advocating emergent paths to
explore novel terrain. Our aim is to signal suggestive genealogies that inform
an emergent analytic—the cultural politics of race and nature—without po-
licing the boundaries of an exclusionary ﬁeld.
Scholars of the ‘‘cultural politics of difference’’ have understood identities
and afﬁnities as constructed through social struggle, positioning subjects
within multiple matrices of power.
∞∏
Black cultural studies and race critical
theories foreground race as both a constitutive feature of modern power and a
formative prism shaping lived experience. Stressing the historical speciﬁcity
of racisms, they have challenged an understanding of race as a transhistori-
cal, universal category.
∞π
Postcolonial theorists have ‘‘provincialized’’ Eu-
rope’s claims to universal reason by conceptualizing metropole and colony as
mutually constituted, ﬁnding global logics of racial exclusion in the ‘‘rule of
colonial difference.’’
∞∫
Environmental justice scholars remind us that in both
north and south the violence of racial exclusion manifests itself in the dras-
tically heavier burdens of environmental hazard borne by marginalized com-
munities of color.
∞Ω
Political ecologists have also brought the tools of political economy to bear
on environmental inequalities. Differential histories of access to natural re-
sources, they argue, shape struggles over social reproduction between state,
capital, and community.
≤≠
Environmental historians—insisting that nature
too has a history—have tracked the imperial circuits fashioning natural re-
sources into modern objects of science and management. Anthropologists
have chronicled myriad livelihood practices in vastly diverse cultural con-
texts, exploring alternative maps of both human and natural worlds.
≤∞
Their
challenges to normative notions of Western nature echo feminist insights
that trouble a ﬁxed, stable boundary between the bodily truths of sex and the
social relations of gender. As Marilyn Strathern stresses, both anthropolo-
gists and feminists share the project of actively interrogating ‘‘the ‘natu-
ralness’ of structures.’’
≤≤
Feminists illuminate the articulation of multiple
modalities of power—notably those of race, class, gender, and sexuality—
whose naturalizing effects work relationally and conjuncturally, as social
assemblages rather than as isolated essences. In turn, we draw from science

6 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
studies the insight that nature is at once social construct and material ar-
tifact. Much like feminisms, science studies expands the boundaries of the
political itself while alerting us to the consequential assemblages of nonhu-
man actants and human agents.
≤≥
Taken together, these accumulated insights ground what we have come to
understand as the cultural politics of race and nature. We hope that readers
familiar with each of these ﬁelds will ﬁnd in this volume not only an echo of
their own interests but also a compass orienting disparate endeavors toward
a common project. Our intent is to encourage recognition of terrain both
familiar and unfamiliar in the hope you will ﬁnd the footing to carve new
paths across landscapes entangling nature and culture. In the following
pages, we refract our discussion of the cultural politics of race and nature
through three conceptual prisms: work, terrain, and power. Our engagement
with the ﬁelds laid out above motivates our use of these metaphors as critical
tools. In turn, it shapes our subsequent discussion of four prominent themes
organizing this emergent domain. We conclude by positioning the project in
relation to the constitutive exclusions of liberalism and to contemporary
forms of liberal multiculturalism—powerful normative discourses that have
naturalized particular formations of race and culture. In this new century,
violence waged against alterity and cultural difference remains haunted by
historical exclusions of speciﬁc identities, practices, and communities from
the fully human. Our hope is that a critical genealogy of the articulation of
race and nature may provide both insight and challenge to these forms of
social injustice and their afﬁliated political technologies of violence.
Work
One must start... from the concrete historical ‘‘work’’ which racism accomplishes under
speciﬁc historical conditions—as a set of economic, political and ideological practices,
of a distinctive kind, concretely articulated with other practices in a social formation.
—Stuart Hall
≤∂
One of the great shortcomings—intellectual and political—of modern environmentalism
is its failure to grasp how human beings have historically known nature through work.
—Richard White
≤∑
A bumper sticker sold in the Paciﬁc Northwest sharply poses a trenchant
question: ‘‘Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?’’
≤∏
Deeply rooted contrasts oppose the labor of work to the care of nature.

Introduction 7
For many environmentalists, work itself—and especially modern industrial
labor—requires and sustains the destruction of nature. Memories of Eden
haunt such narratives, which echo that catastrophic fall from original natu-
ral leisure into the degraded toil of a working world. A similar origin story
animates much modern Western discourse on nature and history from the
Enlightenment onward. John Locke argued that sovereign individuals gained
rights to their share of the primordial commons through labors of improve-
ment: ‘‘In the beginning all the World was America,’’ he wrote, evoking the
fallow condition of a continent awaiting the redemptive touch of European
labor and private property. Karl Marx described a metabolism shared be-
tween humanity and the natural world, powered by the act of labor: through
their work people develop the ‘‘potentialities slumbering within’’ both the
external natural environment and their own material bodies. In accounts
such as these, history itself begins with strenuous exertions on a pristine
nature.
≤π
These propositions yield a difﬁcult double bind for modern developers and
environmentalists alike. On the one hand, because play is natural—that is,
because bodies in their original state tend to idle dissipation—natural bodies
must be trained and taught to do productive work. Visions of wasted lands
and their idle inhabitants, for example, authorized violent colonial interven-
tions into both land and livelihood in the name of improvement. On the
other hand, because history requires such work, only bodies and landscapes
that evade its force qualify as properly natural. Environmental discourse
routinely suppresses evidence of the insistent human labor that has shaped
and reworked the very terrain to be protected from the corrosive force of
history. In Richard White’s terms, ‘‘We seek the purity of our absence, but
everywhere we ﬁnd our own ﬁngerprints.’’
≤∫
What has often vexed Western environmentalists, of course, is that such
ﬁngerprints are not their own but those of racialized others. Inﬂuential En-
lightenment theories of climate, for example, made productive labor into the
very index by means of which races were distinguished and natural environ-
ments classiﬁed. In his 1748 Natural History, Buffon argued that the climate
of the tropical New World produced an inferior race of peoples, unable to
develop nature for the higher purposes of civilization because of their en-
vironmentally conditioned indolence. Native plants and peoples in the tropi-
cal New World, Buffon believed, shared a nature inferior to Europe’s. In the
same year, Montesquieu published his Spirit of the Laws, ﬁnding justiﬁca-
tion for different human characters and spirits, including slavery, in relation

8 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
to ‘‘the nature of the climate.’’
≤Ω
Hume wove the inﬂuence of natural climate
on racial character into his infamous assertion of racial inferiority: ‘‘I am apt
to suspect the negroes and in general all other species... to be naturally
inferior to the whites.’’ Nature, Hume argued, ‘‘made an original distinction
between these breeds of men.’’ Kant, too, praised nature’s climatic foresight,
ﬁnding the ‘‘strong, ﬂeshy, supple’’ Negro well suited to his climate, but also
ﬁnding in this very environment a reason for his ‘‘lazy, soft and dawdling’’
nature.
≥≠
These ideologies suggest ways in which notions of race and nature them-
selves work as instruments of power. Neither ancestor of nor victim to hu-
man toil, nature itself is a means of enacting, expressing, and reproducing the
works of humanity. Natures are made and manifest through embodied ac-
tivity; notions of nature work as discourse and ideology; and natural bodies
are sustained through repeated material and symbolic practices. Race works
alongside these constructions of nature in a host of related and sometimes
contradictory ways, at times providing a means of biologizing the cultural,
and at other times racializing the biology of nonhuman species. We call
attention in this section to working nature and working race.
A distinction between natural and artiﬁcial objects runs deep in the West-
ern imagination, sustaining what Donna Haraway has described as a ‘‘pro-
ductionist logic’’ that takes nature as the raw material for cultural and
capitalist elaboration.
≥∞
Cultural and political ecologists have excavated cul-
tural alterity to unsettle this divide, ﬁnding environments saturated by dif-
fering understandings and practices of human labor in diverse non-Western
contexts.
≥≤
But even within the West, the notion of a working nature has a
long and complicated history. As early as 1658, Kenelm Digby conceived the
‘‘oeconomy of nature’’ itself as a working household managed by the hand of
God, and this metaphor has reverberated profoundly over the course of mod-
ern ecological science.
≥≥
For Marx, the worker made his own human nature
by making over that of the world. Foucault upturned this dialectic, ﬁnding
free man—the very spirit that Marx sought to liberate from the clutches of
capital—produced by the disciplinary force of modern power.
≥∂
At stake for
both Marx and Foucault was the simultaneous cultivation of labor and the
labor of cultivation—the conjoined fashioning of useful workers and prof-
itable environments. Following these thinkers, we suggest that the very
substance of nature is made and manifest through material and symbolic
practices.
≥∑
‘‘Cultivation’’ provides an especially apt metaphor for a working nature.

Introduction 9
Stemming from the Latin verb colere—to till, tend, or care for—cultivation is
a term for social practice rooted in engagements with nonhuman nature. The
word surpassed its agrarian connotations in the eighteenth century to gain
social, educational, and moral signiﬁcance. Modern arts of cultivation fab-
ricate manifold natures. Animal breeders, hydraulic engineers, and social
planners mold natural bodies to develop their qualities. Landscape archi-
tects, park rangers, and forest dwellers fashion the very environments that
viewers and visitors take as pristine and natural. Each of these cultivating
practices acts simultaneously on worldly environments, bodily capacities,
and interior dispositions. The English planted gardens in the New World
both to establish rights of possession and to nurture civilized dispositions
that would legitimate those claims. And mission gardens in nineteenth-
century South Africa cultivated both crops and selves, an ordering of nature
in the Lord’s ﬁelds that produced both commodities for market and souls for
salvation.
≥∏
As soils and selves become fused through work they also produce racial
orders of difference. When Billie Holiday sings the haunting words of Abel
Meeropol’s 1939 song ‘‘Strange Fruit,’’ she grafts images of lynching onto
harvested crops: ‘‘Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit
hanging from the poplar trees.’’ While Gone With the Wind played in the-
aters, the song invoked unnatural aberrations such as ‘‘Blood on the leaves
and blood at the roots’’ to critique a brutal history of racialized violence.
Black bodies shaped the very landscape yielding slavery’s bitter fruit. Culti-
vated crops and human harvests provide ample means of illuminating what
the seeds of racism have sown. Such historical entanglements, in turn, shape
the cultivation of racialized subjects whose natures are frequently grafted to
metaphors of roots, blood, and soil. In the late 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr.
professed that ‘‘white America is still poisoned by racism, which is as native
to our soil as pine trees, sagebrush and buffalo grass.’’ These powerful images
bear witness to the many kinds of work—material, ideological, and senti-
mental—done by both race and nature.
≥π
But as many of the chapters of this volume suggest, notions of nature often
function by effacing the very traces of their fabrication through human labor:
witness the primordial status ascribed to racial bloodlines, national bound-
aries, and instinctual behaviors. This naturalization of identities and differ-
ences is one of the most powerful means by which race works. Like the
Guatemalan images of a moronga brain that Diane Nelson describes in chap-
ter 3, racial essences are congealed and hardened by historically speciﬁc

10 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
practices. Popular understandings took Guatemalan political violence ﬁrst
as a problem of class and then as a problem of race at different historical
moments. Nelson’s discussion echoes longstanding Marxist concerns with
the relative autonomy of race and class and the work that each performs in
the reproduction of social inequalities. Racialized distinctions have both
material and ideological effects that stabilize ‘‘race’’; these effects must in
turn be reproduced to secure enduring hierarchies.
≥∫
The reassuring stability of race and nature is one of their most powerful
ﬁctions. But race and nature often fail to work as they should. Closely man-
aged game animals drop suddenly and precipitously in numbers; indigenous
communities lose legal claims to the forests with which they are identiﬁed;
dark kinky hair in a newborn child betrays the genetic impurities of an Af-
rikaaner family.
≥Ω
Constructions of race and nature are repeatedly challenged
by the recalcitrance of the very bodies and groups they deﬁne. Like all
hegemonies, they have ‘‘continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and
modiﬁed.’’
∂≠
Manifold and ongoing practices are required to sustain the self-
identity of cultivated natures, from the sexual assignation of hermaphroditic
infants to the policed boundaries of ‘‘native’’ spatial reserves. A host of agents
seeks to keep races and natures as they should be: activists and ofﬁcials,
scientists and tourists, planners and lovers. Their labors combine to maintain
both the clarity of nature’s differences and the persistence of its inequalities.
Terrain
If landscape carries an unseemly spatiality, it also shuttles through temporal processes of
history and memory.—David Matless
∂∞
You come to situations with a history and the enunciation is always in the light of an
existing terrain.... There are collective projects and there are therefore collective identi-
ties. Those identities are not given forever, but they’re hard to shift.—Stuart Hall
∂≤
The cultural politics of race and nature shape terrain both material and meta-
phorical. As environmental historian William Cronon argues, ‘‘Nature will
always be contested terrain. We will never stop arguing about its meanings,
because it is the very ground on which our debates must occur.’’
∂≥
Conten-
tious and disputed natures point to the power-laden practices that simulta-
neously create and unfold on natural sites, idioms, and grounds. Gramsci
reminds us that ‘‘ideologies... organize human masses, and create the ter-
rain on which men [and women] move, acquire consciousness of their posi-
tion, struggle, etc.’’
∂∂
Nature as contested terrain both grounds material

Introduction 11
struggles over environmental resources and refracts racial essences through
the discursive prisms of nation, population, and gene. Race and nature reach
far beyond biology and ecology, science and state, also crafting interior land-
scapes of sentiment and selfhood. Our contributors traverse conceptual and
material ground from wombs to wilderness. Rather than presume inherent
afﬁnities between nature and environment or race and biology, the analytic
of terrain calls attention to the historical formation and discursive effects of
these powerful grounds for struggle.
The concept of landscape provides a useful means for understanding the
workings of natural terrain.
∂∑
John Berger describes landscape as a ‘‘way of
seeing.’’ Inherently duplicitous, the term ‘‘landscape’’ refers both to this vi-
sual perspective and to the geographical territories that are seized by it. Land-
scapes articulate both culture and nature, seer and scene. But equally at stake
in landscape are the embodied practices that transform the objects of a pro-
prietary gaze. A multiplicity of situated practices—of cultivators and pastor-
alists, slaves and colonists, labor migrants and adventure travelers—shapes
both terrain and identity. We thus move beyond Berger’s emphasis on the
hegemony of vision, stressing also the cultural practices that cultivate both
landscapes and subjects. Cultivating practices traverse the interior topogra-
phies of body and self as readily as exterior expanses of environment and
resources.
∂∏
Marxists, in particular, have stressed the kinds of historical relationships
among perspective, power, and property that landscape both reﬂects and
reproduces.
∂π
Nature’s provenance, for example, differs radically for poacher
and proprietor. What Marx termed the ‘‘customary rights of the poor’’ to
harvest the ‘‘alms of nature’’ hinged crucially not on nature’s inherent prop-
erties but rather on the proprietary claims asserted on nature’s bounty.
∂∫
Britain’s 1723 Black Act criminalized efforts by the poor to provide for them-
selves as poaching, afﬁrming instead the rightful possession of the coun-
tryside by the landed gentry.
∂Ω
Such insights do not reduce the study of
landscapes to class analyses of property and proﬁt but rather remind us of the
social orders often reproduced by these perspectival formations of nature. At
the same time, they persistently ask about the work that landscape does in
relation to the work performed upon it. Thinking through landscape invites
us to reconsider the relationship between an assumed objective ecology of
natural processes and the human, all too human, world of ideology, dis-
course, and history.
∑≠
As prominent theorists of colonial discourse have argued, imperial ex-
plorers, natural historians, and colonial administrators tended to abstract

12 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
indigenous people out of landscapes of imperial encounter and contempora-
neous history.
∑∞
A widely shared imperial taxonomic impulse assigned ab-
original peoples their presumed proper place in a natural order along with the
ﬂora and fauna whose habitat they shared. This placement in a Natural
Order of Things was simultaneously a ﬁxing of racial hierarchy and an as-
sertion of essential differences—between natives and their colonizers and
among distinct ‘‘primitive’’ groups. Images of ‘‘wild men’’ in Europe and
lands both mythical and distant informed racialized perspectives on cultural
and phenotypical difference; these envisioned natures and cultures were
deeply entangled with understandings of evolution, species classiﬁcation,
and beastly alterity. Linnaeus, whose vision of taxonomic orders shaped the
modern imagination of nature, biological being, and racial classiﬁcation lo-
cated homo monstruosus within the homo sapien species. His system of na-
ture was simultaneously a system of race. By 1753, Systema Naturae was in
its tenth edition, where the ‘‘Wild Man’’ shared a common species, along
with the ‘‘European,’’ with Homo africanus, whose ‘‘apelike nose’’ betrayed
an external body reﬂecting an inferior nature ‘‘ruled by authority.’’ Linnae-
us’s search for savagery in his own Swedish backyard underscores the global
routes of natural history, comparative ethnology, and imperial science that
converged to map race and nature at ‘‘home’’ and worlds away. He fashioned
his ‘‘Sami savage,’’ based on his 1732 travels in Lapland, from ethnographic
images of American, Indian, and West African peoples as well as those of
Inuits and others.
∑≤
Colonial discourses of savagery and barbarism linked understandings of
natural history and racial essence. These formations often deﬁned normative
European humanity in relation to an imagined ‘‘constitutive outside’’ that
located racialized alterity in bodies and landscapes at once wild, unculti-
vated, and prehistorical. Conrad’s inﬂuential exploration of nature, culture,
and the savage customs of colonialism in the African interior turns pivotally
on the boundary between the human and nonhuman. Rather than ﬁnding a
‘‘conquered monster’’ in the Belgian Congo, his narrator is both thrilled and
repulsed by a recognition of a common humanity bridging racial divides,
reaching back across an imagined passage to prehistory: ‘‘what thrilled you
was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your
remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.’’
∑≥
During the rubber
boom in the Colombian Amazon, colonial discourses of terror and labor
extraction imagined the savage auca as an ‘‘ethereal mingling of animal and
human’’ in El Oriente’s Heart of Darkness.
∑∂
In southern Africa, the South
African Defense Force’s use of so-called Bushmen as trackers in the service of

Introduction 13
apartheid’s regime of regional rule relied on their constructed proximity to a
primitive, instinctual animality.
∑∑
The circuits of imperial science and colonial legislation mingled from
Cuba to the Congo, targeting the conduct of racialized bodies in domestic
spaces and regulating mixed-race unions as well as legitimate forms of in-
terracial intimacy such as domestic labor arrangements.
∑∏
Bodies, social
and environmental milieux, and their entangled racialized relations became
the ground of colonial discipline. Interventions sought to police normative
boundaries in defense of dangerous transgressions deemed immoral and re-
pugnant precisely because they challenged the natural and racial order of
things. Naturalists followed Darwin’s search for ‘‘constancy of character’’ in
their taxonomies of race and nature while imperial projects often sought
their transformation through management and improvement.
∑π
Ideologies of
‘‘good breeding’’ found common bedfellows in fears of racial degeneration,
the wild passions of lascivious natives in the tropics, and imperial tropes of
the prophylaxis of social distance from primitive proximity. The ‘‘problem’’
of mixed-race progeny, of course, attests to the historically gendered patterns
of unsafe sex, suffused with power and imperial anxiety.
However, colonial visions of a native proximity to nature made for an
‘‘ambivalent primitivism.’’
∑∫
Rousseau’s Noble Savage, living harmoniously
as gentle custodian of a bountiful nature, also preyed on wildlife and environ-
mental resources desired exclusively for colonial use. In many cases, colonial
constructions of a pristine nature entailed the forced removal of local inhabi-
tants from the landscape. This reorganization of landscapes and livelihoods
in the tropics, trafﬁcking in both nature and culture, emerged out of the
powerful circuits of imperial science, natural history, and regimes of rule—a
formation Richard Grove terms ‘‘Green Imperialism.’’
∑Ω
In Africa’s white
settler colonies, state laws effectively created national parks and game re-
serves out of racial land designations. Customary practices of African hunt-
ing were criminalized as poaching and trespass.
∏≠
Primitive proximity to a
nature ‘‘before’’ history helped legitimate these forcible expropriations. At its
extreme, in the brutal extermination of the Herero in the 1904 colony of
German South West Africa, ofﬁcials let ‘‘nature’’ ﬁnish their project of gen-
ocide. The German General Staff’s ofﬁcial publication, Der Kampf, reported:
‘‘like a half-dead animal he was hunted from water-hole to water-hole until
he became a lethargic victim of the nature of his own country.’’
∏∞
Brutal
nature here abets the cultural, social, and political practices of genocide.
When these insights from imperial contexts are brought home to the West,
they illuminate the racialization of national landscapes often seen as natu-

14 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
rally white. National parks in the United States such as Yellowstone, Glacier,
and Yosemite were established by forcibly moving Native Americans from
the landscapes they inhabited. Mark Spence has chronicled these Native
American evictions and ‘‘the cultural myopia that allows late-twentieth-
century Americans to ignore the fact that national parks enshrine recently
dispossessed landscapes.’’
∏≤
In erasing Native American presence from his
own writings on the area, John Muir followed the trail blazed by the capture
and removal of Chief Tenaya from Yosemite. In many contexts, the celebra-
tory tenor of white histories is predicated on the removal—both rhetorical
and material—of racialized others from natural landscapes protected in the
national interest.
∏≥
Echoes of these racial erasures haunt even emancipatory visions of nature,
nation, and history. Raymond Williams’s laudatory socialist humanism,
critics have noted, neglected the effects of empire on the formation of British
nationalism and its racialized landscapes.
∏∂
Ingrid Pollard’s photographs of
dreadlocked black bodies in the pastoral landscapes of Britain provide a
powerful complement to such critique.
∏∑
Pollard’s images challenge the no-
tion of a people’s proper place in a natural terrain beyond the reach of impe-
rial politics and diasporic migration. Depicting a black woman holding a
baseball bat for protection in what appears an otherwise bucolic pastoral
scene, she reminds us that geographies of belonging privilege particular sub-
jects’ positioning while simultaneously rendering other bodies vulnerable to
violence.
∏∏
Race, nation, and subjugation are powerfully entangled in geogra-
phies of belonging and exclusion. Bodies, populations, histories, and geogra-
phies—understood as contested terrain—converge to illuminate the cultural
politics of race and nature.
Power
To dominate is to ignore or attempt to crush the capacity of action of the dominated. But to
govern is to recognize that capacity for action and to adjust oneself to it. To govern is to act
upon action.—Nikolas Rose
∏π
If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is because of a recent return of the
ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the
species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.—Michel Foucault
∏∫
Nature too can be politics by other means. Nature, in other words, works as a
contested arena and an effective means for the exercise of power. From the

Introduction 15
victimization of inferior races to the making of national spaces to the replica-
tion of inherited differences, natural bodies form the terrain and instruments
of power’s expression. We suggest that power works on and through nature in
several overlapping ways: through violent acts of domination, through the
constitution of subjects and truths, and through the maintenance of these
identities and differences across time and space. This section elaborates
these repressive and productive operations, arguing that race and nature are
constitutive features of modern power.
Many contemporary discussions of the politics of nature take power as a
repressive force from which downtrodden natures and cultures must be liber-
ated. Liberal discourses of tolerance, for example, often depict race as a ﬁc-
tion peddled by particular individuals and institutions to obscure the univer-
sality of human nature. Studies of rural political ecology often focus on
people’s legitimate struggles against state and capital over access to and con-
trol of natural resources. In these cases, agents ﬁnd their true nature through
concerted action against oppressive structures. These contemporary calls for
nature’s liberation from social power echo—ironically—an earlier Western
understanding of nature itself as a sovereign force constraining the possibili-
ties of human agency. Enlightenment thinkers conceived of nature as a dom-
inating environment that had to be overcome to enable the full development
of humanity and its capacities. Freud argued much later that civilization
emerged from the renunciation of instinct.
∏Ω
We suggest that such under-
standings of a repressive nature—one that itself demanded repression—form
one of the original maps of the structure-agency problematic.
Marx took the model of a repressive nature and used it as a means of
challenging the exploitative social conditions of capitalism, precisely by de-
picting these conditions as the naturalization of a human-made order.
π≠
Inso-
far as these conditions represented a form of repression, they demanded to be
overthrown. But what Marx sought to liberate through this struggle against a
hostile environment was itself an essential human nature, realized fully
through the exercise of labor. When taken as a problem of structure and
agency, then, power is opposed to nature: power represses human nature on
the one hand, but nature itself becomes the ground from which struggles
against power are staged.
Critical histories of nature’s repression are embedded in stories of racial
bondage, exclusive entitlements, and unequal exposure to environmental
hazards. Environmental justice became a means of understanding both the
global asymmetries between north and south and the unequal burdens of

16 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
risk, resource deprivation, and ecological degradation borne by racial minor-
ities in the United States. Bullard’s pioneering work, for example, chronicled
the location of waste disposal sites in black working-class neighborhoods in
the U.S. South.
π∞
Scholars have more recently mapped environmental haz-
ards and differential resource access onto racialized geographies, showing
historical patterns of environmental injustice. Such treatments, while crit-
ically insightful, have often treated nature as a given material environment
and race as a ﬁxed ﬁeld of difference. Both are understood through an analytic
of repression. We must also consider, however, nature’s ongoing formation
and reformation in the contested realms of culture, power, and history.
Struggles over resources and territory are simultaneously material and
symbolic, as scholarship in the ﬁelds of political ecology and environmental
politics demonstrates. These perspectives build on and rework Marxian po-
litical economy, treating struggles over cultural meanings as constitutive of
agrarian politics rather than as epiphenomenal trappings to deeper structural
truths. For Sara Berry and others, contests over access to land and labor si-
multaneously call into question the meanings of ‘‘custom’’ and ‘‘commu-
nity.’’
π≤
Conﬂicts over social boundaries provide common ground for debat-
ing nature and culture, casting as a cultural problem the very question of
what constitutes a ‘‘natural’’ resource. We follow these scholars in connect-
ing agrarian and environmental concerns to questions of gender, cultural
politics, and environmental justice. Feminists, for example, have long ex-
plored the power-saturated entanglements of gender and nature.
π≥
How does nature come to provide a language for the truths of bodies,
selves, and landscapes while also becoming a medium for their transforma-
tion? First, we call attention to the taxonomic orders through which nature
and race are made intelligible as objects of knowledge. The truths of differ-
ence are recorded in hierarchies of value that oppose and rank particular
natures according to endless criteria: skin color, cleanliness, physical and
mental capacity, spatial location, historical depth, and so on. Scientiﬁc, ad-
ministrative, and popular classiﬁcations often deﬁne the essence of both
human races and natural landscapes by establishing a boundary between
them. Deﬁning a natural site as wilderness, for example, can erase the traces
of certain peoples from the places they inhabit. These active erasures power-
fully shape struggles for resource and land rights. Second, a host of social
technologies also make people into subjects of their own nature. Individuals
come to recognize themselves as embodiments of racial essences and natives
of particular landscapes. Racialized subjects take up their own natures as

Introduction 17
objects of labor, training their bodies, desires, and dispositions. Foucault
himself relied on a term with rural roots to describe such ‘‘pastoral’’ care.
π∂
Cultivated nature provides both materials for the exercise of power and
means for its analysis.
An array of scholars have conceived race and racisms as ‘‘formative fea-
tures of modernity, as deeply embedded in bourgeois liberalism, not as aber-
rant offshoots of them.’’
π∑
Modern technologies of rule have targeted ra-
cialized bodies, populations, and territories in the project of ‘‘improvement,’’
a theme we later elaborate. The exercise of power has relied on race’s mobil-
ity across these sites and surfaces, producing discourses of fundamental dif-
ference that shuttle across the divide between nature and culture. In many
colonial contexts, censuses, surveys, ethnographic maps, and development
schemes made ‘‘natives’’ and their natural milieu into the object of racial
betterment through administrative management.
π∏
These instruments of
colonial governmentality interpellated subjects both in the metropole and
its hinterlands, linking colonizer and colonized through a grid of racial in-
telligibility. Race was not an afterthought to imperialism but rather con-
stitutive of the colonial encounter itself.
ππ
Claims of racial superiority—
authorized by the laws of nature, legitimating violence, dispossession, and
the subjugation of racial alterity—also lurked in Europe. Bauman’s germinal
study of the Holocaust argues that the modernity of racism required that a
‘‘new naturalness’’ had to be ‘‘laboriously constructed’’ to ﬁx the racial dis-
tinctions that underwrote genocide.
π∫
Imperialism, the Holocaust, and apart-
heid are all interwoven from the threads of race and nature. Yet so also are
Texas’s death row, racial proﬁling on the New Jersey turnpike, and adivasi
struggles against massive dams in India. While the powerful work of race and
nature shifts across historical, geographical, and cultural contexts, it re-
mains integral to the rule of modernity rather than an exception.
The following sections trace this fabric of violent exclusions and produc-
tive techniques through four distinctive articulations of race and nature. The
ﬁrst three describe inﬂuential treatments of the nature of race: as a terrain
of management and improvement, as a domain of distinction and protection,
and as a site of felt attachment. The fourth section attends more closely
to the practices of representation through which natures are recognized and
races are naturalized. Work, terrain, and power provide critical tools within
each thematic section. While contributors differ in their disciplinary per-
spectives and conceptual frameworks, we all share a commitment to under-
standing the articulated effects of race and nature. Race, Nature, and the

18 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
Politics of Difference signals directions for the further development of an
emergent ﬁeld of critical inquiry.
PART ONE. Calculating Improvements
At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of
man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.
—Charles Darwin
πΩ
Racism is a policy ﬁrst, ideology second. Like all politics, it needs organization, managers
and experts.—Zygmunt Baumann
∫≠
In his 1749 essay ‘‘The Oeconomy of Nature,’’ Swedish natural historian
Linnaeus suggested that each species was provisioned with adequate food
and range thanks to the beneﬁcent foresight of a divine Creator. The word
oeconomy, used as early as 1530 to describe the art of household manage-
ment, shares its Greek root oikos with ‘‘ecology,’’ a neologism proposed by
Ernst Haeckel in 1866 to christen the nascent science of nature’s house-
holds.
∫∞
The invocation of Haeckel’s famous adage ‘‘politics is applied biol-
ogy’’ by Nazi propagandists reminds us of the historical routes connecting
ecology and fascist social engineering.
∫≤
Yet invocations of ‘‘liberation ecolo-
gies,’’ ‘‘social ecology,’’ and ecology as a ‘‘subversive science’’ signal alterna-
tive political projects also harnessed to Haeckel’s household.
∫≥
Across di-
verse contexts, metaphors like oikos call attention to nurtured natures.
Raymond Williams has pointed out that the word ‘‘manage’’ came into
English from the Italian maneggiare: ‘‘to handle, and especially to handle or
train horses.’’ The term evokes acts of force and discipline considered neces-
sary for the proper care of natures both human and nonhuman. In the late
eighteenth century, Malthus stressed the ‘‘ﬁxed laws of our nature’’ that
placed limits on the relationship between population, resources, and wealth.
His proposal to abolish the social welfare policies of parish laws was ‘‘calcu-
lated to increase the mass of happiness among the common people of En-
gland’’ whose care could be managed while improving national wealth and
natural resources. At stake is a concern for the welfare of subject populations
that Foucault conceived as crucial to modern biopower. This historically
speciﬁc formation, he argued, brought life itself into the realm of explicit
calculation and improvement.
∫∂
Political and social technologies targeted
bodies, populations, and environments, seeking to nurture and manage their
welfare. Logics of racial difference infuse the workings of such improvement.

Introduction 19
Hegel found in Africa a people ‘‘wrapped in the dark mantle of night’’
beyond the Enlightenment’s noble glow, their inferior nature effectively re-
moving them from the course of History.
∫∑
Hegel’s ‘‘universal reason’’ gained
a later corollary in Lewis Henry Morgan’s model of social evolution, which
assigned each race a particular place in a necessary progression from savagery
to barbarism to civilization. In this unilineal teleology, those who occupied
the highest rung of civilization held both the moral duty and political right to
rule subject races. Victorian discourses of social evolution thereby legiti-
mated the violence of imperial conquest as part and parcel of a civilizing
mission. In the 1837 Natural History of the Negro Race, Virey asserted:
‘‘Negroes cannot be managed, except by captivating their senses with plea-
sures, or striking their minds with fear.’’ Because ‘‘natural desires’’ rule the
Negro character, Europeans must rule their racial inferiors through forceful
subjugation. ‘‘Their character being more indolent than active,’’ Virey rea-
soned, ‘‘they seem more ﬁtted to be ruled, than to govern, in other words
they were rather born for submission, than dominion.’’ Here, racialized dif-
ferences of culture legitimate the use of force in a project of imperial subjuga-
tion, at once authorizing colonial rule and offering a violent blueprint for
labor discipline and political control. In colonial contexts, discourses of es-
sential differences in ‘‘character,’’ ‘‘race,’’ and ‘‘culture’’ all rely on regimes of
truth that ground the qualities of colonized alterities in ‘‘nature.’’
∫∏
Imperial projects of improvement targeted cultural characteristics, seek-
ing their transformation through social and political technologies of rule. In
turn, by referencing race and nature as the foundations for cultural alterity,
colonial policies invoked the discourse of improvement to legitimate sub-
jugation. Architects of colonial rule such as Lord Frederick Lugard argued
that imperial states had the ‘‘grave responsibility of... ‘bringing forth’ to a
higher plane... the backward races.’’ Europeans were responsible for de-
veloping ‘‘the bounties with which nature has so abundantly endowed the
tropics’’ precisely because subject races were ‘‘so pathetically dependent on
their guidance.’’
∫π
His famous Dual Mandate did double duty: the white
man’s burden of colonial rule required administration of both nature and
natives in the tropics; both were resources to be managed, improved, and
developed for the beneﬁt of metropole and colony.
The temporal teleology that underwrote visions of ‘‘backward’’ cultures
also invoked a resonant notion of racial inferiority as a justiﬁcation for Euro-
pean imperial rule. Kipling’s infamous 1899 poem ‘‘The White Man’s Bur-
den’’ legitimates a project of racial and cultural improvement. He urges

20 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
imperialists ‘‘To serve your captives’ need,’’ to attend to their demonic, in-
fantilized nature imagined as ‘‘Half devil and half child.’’ We write in the
wake of President George Bush’s 2001 proclamation of a ‘‘Crusade’’ against
terrorism—mapped, in hegemonic political and popular imagination, to a
satanic threat envisioned as Islam run amok. Recall that Kipling launched
his defense of imperialism amidst ﬁerce debates over U.S. policy in the Phil-
ippines. At the time, the term moros, derived from the Spanish term for
Muslims, fused Western fears of Islam with concerns about robust indige-
nous political movements in the Philippines. A full century later, such ra-
cializations of cultural difference haunt Bush’s call for a U.S. crusade.
∫∫
Entrenched imaginaries of civilizational difference, founded on the radical
alterity of enduring essence, have long fused culture and race. The current
‘‘clash of civilizations’’ discourse pits a ‘‘traditional’’ Islam against the ‘‘mod-
ern’’ West, normatively Christian but complexly allied with particular for-
mations of Judaism.
∫Ω
The teleological trope of ‘‘modernizing’’ the culturally
‘‘backward’’ forces of terrorism does not simply mistake the profoundly mod-
ern formations of political Islam in the contemporary world. It mimics impe-
rial discourses of a ‘‘civilizing mission’’ entangled with notions of cultural
transformation and racial progress. The Bush administration’s feeble at-
tempts to invoke liberal multiculturalism cannot mask the enduring impe-
rial logic of a self-proclaimed Crusade.
Yet we must also consider divergences in such teleological thinking. Con-
sider two prominent formulations of natural history and social evolution
that have left enduring legacies: those of Darwin and Lamarck. Darwin at-
tributed a distinct history to the natural world, the laws of which would
work on society as an external impetus for change.
Ω≠
He held a somber belief
in the competitive replacement of inferiors who must be ‘‘beaten and sup-
planted’’ by their superiors. Progress demanded that ‘‘an endless number of
lower races’’ be wiped out by ‘‘higher civilized races.’’ Reﬂecting on the sav-
ages of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin notes: ‘‘I could not have believed how wide
was the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than be-
tween a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater
power of improvement.’’ Like other Victorians, Darwin derived great satis-
faction from what Donald Worster terms the ‘‘march of improvement’’ set in
motion by Christian missionaries and the British empire, much like Lord
Lugard’s civilizing burden.
Ω∞
Such improvement worked for Darwin through the violence of extinction.
But Lamarck, in contrast, placed a greater degree of faith in the mutability of

Introduction 21
organic beings. Lamarck understood nature as a historical process linking
living beings and their environmental milieu in a dialectical relationship.
Organic beings were plastic, responsive, molded by the qualities of their
surroundings.
Ω≤
Habits stimulated the further development of particular
organs and their faculties, acquired characteristics that could then be passed
on through reproduction. Habits and habitats were thus bound through proj-
ects of social transformation. The Lamarckian milieu provided planners and
reformers in both Europe and its colonies a useful metaphor for society itself
as a manipulable object of improvement. Latin American scientists and ofﬁ-
cials, for example, found Lamarck’s theory of the ‘‘inheritance of acquired
characteristics’’ much more palatable than the blind evolution Darwin pro-
posed, precisely because it promised the possibility of national—and racial—
evolution through social reform.
Ω≥
In the United States, Social Darwinism—propelled by Herbert Spencer’s
dictum ‘‘survival of the ﬁttest’’—inﬂuenced late-nineteenth-century think-
ing on race and social evolution.
Ω∂
Galton’s notion of eugenics crossed the
Atlantic near the turn of the century to reach U.S. shores along with waves of
immigrants. Ideas of racial improvement found common cause with projects
of social engineering that would manage the health of the national body,
policing the dangers of crime, disease, and moral degradation posed by for-
eign bodies.
Ω∑
There were, of course, regional variations in patterns of eu-
genic ideology and practice. While Southerners sang the popular hymn,
‘‘There is Power in the Blood’’ in the early twentieth century, many struggled
to reconcile eugenics with prevailing norms and forms of family, kinship,
and agrarian populism. Poor whites were frequently the targets of class-
inﬂected fears of racial degeneration. H. L. Mencken advocated the steriliza-
tion of whites and blacks in the South, fearing that sharecroppers would
migrate north, threatening to ‘‘swarm like a nest of maggots.’’ During the
1920s, a state mental health ofﬁcial enthusiastically supported proposed
legislation in Louisiana requiring the mentally ill to ‘‘voluntarily submit to a
sterilizing program’’ in the hopes of promoting ‘‘the aristocracy of health.’’
Ω∏
Yet eugenic thinking was not exclusive to the political right. While followers
of Weisman and Mendel sought the ‘‘pruning out of biological weakness’’ in
society, neo-Lamarckians saw the reduction of social inequalities as another
means of biological improvement.
Ωπ
Debates contested the appropriate lever-
age point for reform: should programs target individual bodies, populations,
environments, or social arrangements? Answers hinged on placing race in
relation to nature and culture.
Ω∫

22 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
Such questions turned on the protection of society—and its nature—from
those who threatened its well-being. Distinctions of race supported such
efforts. Ann Stoler argues that the cultivation of bourgeois civility in the nine-
teenth century was underpinned by racial discourses reverberating across
metropole and colony, cordoning an emerging ‘‘European’’ middle class from
the degenerate morals, habits, and desires of creole neighbors, colored ser-
vants, the urban poor, Irish peasants, and others. The ‘‘crucible of empire’’
informed the changing contours of racial formations in the wake of European
immigration to the United States, including the instability of categories such
as White, Black, Jewish, and European.
ΩΩ
In this context, U.S. debates over
Social Darwinism often hinged on the relation between the natural order of
things and the social hierarchies of race, class, and sex seen to reﬂect a
universal design. The normative nature of heterosexuality, for instance, has
been defended through theories that saw homosexuality as a form of heredi-
tary degeneration but also as a social contagion of modern culture. Whether
seen as aberrant nature or culture, deviant bodies were targeted, pathologized,
and medicalized in efforts to ensure society’s welfare.
∞≠≠
In the urban environments of colonial India, miasmatic ﬁlth prompted
draconian sanitation and public-health measures that put native bodies un-
der the ‘‘watchful care’’ of colonial administration. However, such measures
sought mainly to protect resident European bodies from contamination. In
colonial metropoles such as Calcutta, urban planners wrote off the noxious
and refuse-laden spaces of the native quarters, securing instead the health
and sanitation of European neighborhoods. Administrators’ seasonal spatial
remove from urban centers to British hill stations, colonial ofﬁcials rea-
soned, served Europeans’ mental and physical health because, as one colonial
quipped, ‘‘like meat, we keep better there.’’ In South Africa, black miners
infected with tuberculosis, attributed by ofﬁcials to migrants’ inability to
adjust to urban living conditions, became suffering subjects dumped by state
administrators and mining companies into the welcoming pastoral care of
rural environs. These rural landscapes and communities—spatially and ra-
cially removed from white privilege—were celebrated by ofﬁcials for their
allegedly natural capacities to nurture the afﬂicted bodies of miners, thus ob-
viating the need for state assistance. Racialized discourses of welfare bound
bodies, populations, and landscapes of improvement and decay. These prac-
tices killed not with kindness but with pastoral ‘‘care,’’ while reproducing the
seemingly natural properties of race and the social beneﬁts of segregation.
∞≠∞
Such exclusions in both colonial and postcolonial settings have often been

Introduction 23
described and justiﬁed in the purportedly apolitical language of technical
management—what James Ferguson terms the ‘‘anti-politics machine’’ of
development discourse. State claims to conserve and develop national re-
sources, framed frequently under the rubric of Western science, often disen-
franchise marginal communities from the right to steward local environ-
ments. In West Africa, for example, the legacies of imperial science and
colonial administration continue to pin the blame for forest degradation on
local forest users. Powerful outsiders thereby occlude effective management
of the landscape by small swidden agriculturalists. One need not assume that
‘‘traditional’’ resource uses are inherently sustainable ecologically. Yet ‘‘eco-
logical managerialism’’ often categorically dismisses such possibilities.
∞≠≤
Hegel’s geist still casts a long shadow on the Dark Continent. Primitives,
in this logic, cannot represent themselves nor can they represent nature.
Powerful outsiders must preserve, protect, and rule them both.
∞≠≥
Nationalist politics has often seized the racial elaborations of imperial
science for anti-imperialist agendas. Liberatory struggles in the global south,
especially during the era of decolonization, turned the very promise of a
liberal humanism against its colonial roots. At the Asian-African Confer-
ence in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 President Sukarno envisioned an anti-
imperialism ‘‘united by a common contestation of racialism.’’
∞≠∂
The shared
project of opposing the historical alignments of race and nature could thus be
marshaled in pursuit of diverse imaginations of nation, community, and
belonging.
Competing regimes of truth have linked the cultural politics of race, na-
ture, and nation to social movements waged in the name of democracy,
freedom, and liberation. In the early 1960s, with the Civil Rights movement
rendering the cultural politics of race highly visible, the American Anthropo-
logical Association passed a resolution repudiating statements of racial in-
feriority: ‘‘there is no scientiﬁcally established evidence to justify the exclu-
sion of any race from the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United
States.’’
∞≠∑
Such pronouncements echoed the anthropologist and public intel-
lectual Franz Boas’s earlier call for democratic nonracialism. Forty years
later, at the United Nations’ 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, ﬁerce de-
bates surrounded the speciﬁc wording of racial discrimination and the politi-
cal boundaries of ‘‘racism.’’ These contentious disputes pivoted on deﬁni-
tions of ‘‘culture’’ and deployments of difference. Cultural politics, rather
than a singular scientiﬁc consensus, formatively shaped pronouncements on

24 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
restitution for transatlantic slavery, on Zionism’s relationship to forms of
ethnic absolutism, and on Palestinian national determination.
The contentious volatility of these political positions animates recent de-
bates while highlighting the historical salience of competing legacies of race
and nation, science and sentiment, managerial expertise and popular democ-
racy. Who is capable of managing what nature on whose behalf? How do
these acts of improvement racialize their targets and with what exclusionary
effects? Each of the three chapters in this section explores different means by
which natures are managed and races nurtured. Paul Gilroy, Zine Magubane,
and Diane Nelson each investigate colonial and postcolonial arenas where
national welfare has been articulated through idioms of racial progress. Tak-
ing in turn the disparate sites of imperial ambitions, colonial Africa, and
postwar Guatemala, each chapter describes how notions of natural history
make particular racial forms intelligible. The campaigns for national im-
provement that these authors describe harness racial assessments to dy-
namic understandings of natural capacity.
In his chapter, Paul Gilroy reﬂects on the disputed genealogies of antiracist
projects, exploring Fanon’s radical historicization of racism in colonial rela-
tions. Both remind us of the relational histories of racialized identities, colo-
nial governmentality, and national territories. Gilroy highlights the imperial
dynamics that linked political technologies of rule with bodies, the state,
and violence. In the spirit of C. L. R. James, he calls both for a nuanced
appreciation of the historical work of racisms in the imperial world and for
a revival of neglected traditions of antiracism within black political cul-
tures.
∞≠∏
Harvesting a counterhistory of modern governmentality while elab-
orating a vision of cosmopolitan humanism, Gilroy charts an alternative
imaginary of community and identity. Crucial to this project of fomenting a
‘‘new rebel humanism’’ is a critical interrogation of many of liberal politics’
most naturalized keywords: sovereignty, market, nation, and state.
∞≠π
Zine Magubane describes how colonial sciences of the body placed African
natives, simians, and European women in the same position at an earlier
moment in evolutionary time. Analogical reasoning, she argues, is crucial to
racial regimes of truth and their attempts to establish what Fanon famously
termed ‘‘the fact of blackness.’’ She eloquently traces the legacy of scientiﬁc
racism as it crosses from colony to metropole, and shows how race is made
intelligible within Europe itself. This naturalizing of social difference not
only produced new forms of scientiﬁc knowledge but also justiﬁed the need
for imperial violence. She stresses, however, that this process is not entirely

Introduction 25
hegemonic, analyzing Xhosa critiques of colonial reason and other African
refusals to recognize the logic of European classiﬁcation. By unpacking the
cultural politics of imperial science and colonial governmentality in south-
ern Africa, Magubane reveals racial fact as historical artifact.
Lamarckian grammars of racial improvement animate Diane Nelson’s dis-
cussion of race wars and blood talk in contemporary Guatemala. Nelson
ﬁnds multiple metaphors of pure blood and mixed descent at the center of
recent political violence in Guatemala. Violence and genocide cannot be
explained by recourse to bad faith, duplicity, or a virulent hatred of ‘‘other-
ness,’’ she argues. She probes instead the passionate attachments through
which race works, attending to the powerful ways in which the body politic
may be imagined as an arena of racial progress. As an anthropologist long
involved in solidarity work with Guatemalans, Nelson grapples with the
complex cultural politics of representing race within competing grids of in-
telligibility. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the loyalties and
afﬁnities that draw racialized identities together in political struggle.
PART TWO. Landscapes of Purity and Pollution
When do we begin to look? Or does the landscape enter the bloodstream with the milk?
—Ronald Blythe
∞≠∫
And despotic hands clapping limitations on dawns of brown eyes, America is my song, red
blood of native Americans eavesdropping on the heavy sack my mother pulls. This land is
my landscape of inherited harvests.—Sterling D. Plumpp
∞≠Ω
From violent expressions of exclusionary nationalism to the genetic deter-
minations of bodily pathology, race and nature do some of their most power-
ful work as keys to essential qualities and differences. Hidden away in the
blood or expressed directly on the skin, elaborations of racial nature root
identity and difference in the unchanging material of bounded bodies. In the
annals of the social sciences, to ‘‘naturalize’’ is to assign such stable and
intrinsic essences to people, relations, and things. But what practices enable
‘‘nature’’ to name the given? How is nature equipped with its ‘‘naturalizing
power’’?
∞∞≠
If nature is itself artifactual, as we suggested earlier, how is it
made to work as a terrain of immutable identity and difference? At stake in
this idea of natural essence, Raymond Williams suggests, is ‘‘the fusion of a
name for the quality with a name for the things observed.’’
∞∞∞
Bodies as wildly
dissimilar as blood cells and nations have been subject to the force of such

26 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
idealism. It is the very possibility of a given, underlying, essential being
that enables racial ideologies to ‘‘discover what other ideologies have to
construct.’’
∞∞≤
Where are such essences recorded? Race is often taken as a question of
phenotypical variation, colored surfaces expressing biological difference.
The racializing gaze, writes Franz Fanon, settles on the epidermal fabric of
the black body as the locus of its identity. But essences are drawn just as
readily from the depths of a body’s being.
∞∞≥
Labor discipline on the ma-
quildora assembly lines along the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, relies on
work performed by ‘‘naturally’’ nimble ﬁngers. Mine managers in South Af-
rica used the supposed ethnic qualities of workers, including their bodily
capacities and natural dispositions, to legitimate differential compensation
in both food and pay, effectively constructing many of the very ethnic differ-
ences they attributed to native natures.
∞∞∂
Recent analysts have called atten-
tion to a nano-politics that ﬁnds difference expressed by the interior coils of
the gene. Paul Gilroy sees the shift to the molecular as a displacement of
previous hegemonies of vision: ‘‘Screens rather than lenses now mediate the
pursuit of bodily truths.’’
∞∞∑
New genetic and reproductive technologies have
indeed reworked relations between power and visibility, between identity
and essence.
Novel racial imaginaries such as these, however, must compete with more
entrenched popular understandings and a robust array of vernacular forms of
recognizing race.
∞∞∏
Ironically, Gilroy, who has insightfully stressed the dy-
namism and politics of black popular culture, attends little to the disar-
ticulations between scientiﬁc and popular images in his discussion of nano-
politics. A key question remains the relationship between new technologies
of imaging race and the embodied politics and social relations in bars, buses,
and Babylons near and far. In Guatemalan race talk, for example, as Diane
Nelson’s contribution to this volume sketches, medical markers of blood
purity jostle with superﬁcial signs such as the cara de indio, the face of the
Indian. The vagaries of racial essence bear what W. E. B. Du Bois described as
‘‘illogical trends and irreconcilable tendencies.’’ Spatial practice, class rela-
tions, and cultural context radically shape the articulation of racialized iden-
tities that shift across locations.
∞∞π
These ﬁssures and displacements in racial formations, postcolonial theo-
rists argue, enable emergent discourses of hybridity that further trouble cul-
tural logics of purity. Narratives of national essence often elide the sedi-
mented histories of mongrelization, transcultural processes, and relational

Introduction 27
routes that challenge nativist myths of origin and roots. Homi Bhabha re-
serves hybridization to refer to enunciatory processes of appropriation, posi-
tioning, and subjectivation within radically asymmetrical ﬁelds of power.
While his poststructuralism refuses the notion of a sovereign subject autho-
rizing her own identity, his inﬂuential vision ﬂirts with the danger of vol-
untarism, of neglecting the power relations that position subjects in racial-
ized locations not of their choosing.
∞∞∫
In Central and South America, for
instance, discourses of mestizaje—mingling metaphors of mixed race, cul-
ture, and blood—have been ‘‘radically polysemic,’’ deployed for both progres-
sive and reactionary political agendas. Indigenous social movements, trans-
national activist networks advocating human rights, and also national elites
who endorse an imagined community’s generative myth have all struggled
over the term’s meanings and traction. Purity of blood, rooted ethnic es-
sences, gendered normativities, and tropes of authenticity all animate the
cultural politics of mestizaje. Invocations of creolization and transcultura-
tion similarly turn on the relational routes of representational forms and em-
bodied practices that infuse cultural imaginaries of identity and difference.
∞∞Ω
Amidst a world of unequal travel and mobility, attributions of bodily na-
ture help ﬁx racial distinctions to the national order of things. Such ad-
herence has been effected in part by the transformation of cultural difference
itself into something of a biological quality.
∞≤≠
Nation and nature articulate
in postwar Britain, argues Gilroy, through a form of ‘‘ethnic absolutism’’
where ‘‘culture [is] almost biologized by its proximity to race.’’ These politi-
cally charged formations fuse race, nation, ethnicity, and culture in hybrid
formations difﬁcult to disentangle. ‘‘Biological racism and cultural differen-
tialism,’’ Hall asserts, ‘‘constitute not two different systems, but racism’s
two registers.’’
∞≤∞
Recent anti-immigrant rhetoric in Europe differs from
older variants of racism in its stress on incommensurable cultural traditions
rather than distinctive biological endowments. This assertion of fundamen-
tal cultural difference, observes Verena Stolcke, assumes that ‘‘because hu-
mans are inherently ethnocentric, relations between cultures are by ‘nature’
hostile.’’
∞≤≤
A Hobbesian residue haunts these formations: atavistic individu-
alism scaled up to the ‘‘natural’’ social antagonism among differing cultures.
Those who occupy hegemonic positions of race and class privilege do not
monopolize such exclusionary cultural logic. Zulu articulations of ethnic
nationalism in South Africa follow the contours of an ‘‘ethnogeneticism,’’
what Rob Nixon describes as ‘‘biology by other means.’’
∞≤≥
In instances such
as these, culture is grafted to biology as a fact of nature—conceived as ﬁxed,

28 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
inherent, primordial—and opposed to the malleable contingencies of history
and society.
In the early twentieth century, the anarchist formerly known as Prince
Kropotkin brushed social theory’s engagement with Darwin against the
grain. He criticized those who ossiﬁed the ‘‘struggle for the means of exis-
tence’’ as a universal ‘‘law of Nature.’’ Kropotkin sought evidence from ani-
mal behavior and comparative ethnology to argue for the importance of ‘‘mu-
tual aid’’ and social cooperation as a factor in evolution, stressing that his
research articulated a neglected Darwinian insight.
∞≤∂
In 1950, unesco’s
First Statement on Race sought to both reﬂect and shape scientiﬁc consensus
on the topic, claiming ‘‘biological support’’ for ‘‘the ethic of universal broth-
erhood; for man is born with drives toward co-operation.’’ A number of physi-
cal anthropologists and geneticists objected to the implicit Kropotkinian
position and the offending passage was removed in unesco’s revised State-
ment on Race issued the following year. Yet subsequent statements echoed
the initial unesco position: ‘‘For all practical social purposes, ‘race’ is not so
much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.’’ For this reason, the panel
of experts recommended ‘‘to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of
ethnic groups.’’
∞≤∑
While midcentury debates unyoked biological fact from
racial destiny in scientiﬁc circles, they failed to capture popular sentiments.
In the wake of unesco’s statements, moreover, exclusionary forms of eth-
nic absolutism and cultural fundamentalism could sidestep the tag of ‘‘rac-
ism’’ by making recourse to the essential differences of culture, custom, and
tradition.
∞≤∏
Racial logic sustains vast landscapes of inclusion and exclusion. At stake
here are the myriad forms of ‘‘boundary work’’ that maintain the self-identity
of dominant groups and ideologies: the cultural against the natural, the do-
mestic against the wild, the city against the country, the masculine against
the feminine, the West against the Rest.
∞≤π
The plastic pink ﬂamingo, Jen-
nifer Price has documented, emerged in the late 1950s on lawns whose own-
ers sought to project particular aesthetics of race, class, and beauty. She
traces the cultivation of a class- and race-distinct ‘‘taste’’ for adorning minis-
cule enclosures of nature to property relations and to vacation circuits link-
ing northern working-class subdivisions to Florida’s colorful allure. Class,
cultural dispositions toward nature, and spatial transgressions converge in
the placement of plastic pink ﬂamingos in ‘‘white-trash’’ trailer parks and
John Waters’s ﬁlms.
∞≤∫
Cultural politics here turn on how people and nature are positioned as out

Introduction 29
of place, disturbing the natural and social order. Popular and scientiﬁc fas-
cination with ‘‘queer animals,’’ for example, reveals a complex fabric of re-
cursivity weaving anxieties about ‘‘unnatural acts’’ into challenges to hetero-
normative constructions of gender and sexuality. During his bid for the
Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1992, Pat Buchanan described
aids as ‘‘nature’s retribution,’’ placing unnatural acts of homosexuality be-
yond the pale of heteronormativity.
∞≤Ω
Hitler’s Mein Kampf also took re-
course to natural ground, yoking race to nation in demands to protect a
‘‘racial purity, universally valid in Nature.’’ Signiﬁcantly, Hitler saw a ‘‘spa-
tially delimited state’’ as the ‘‘basis on which alone culture can arise,’’ root-
ing national destiny in territorial ambitions.
∞≥≠
Claims such as these call to mind the germinal arguments of Mary Doug-
las concerning purity, pollution, and the social order. Douglas suggested that
‘‘dirt’’ ﬁnds its own nature through efforts to protect the social order, strat-
egies that deﬁne and exclude certain bodies and substances as ‘‘matter out of
place.’’ Building on these insights, Julia Kristeva argues that subjects too
depend on the expulsion of contaminating elements—ﬁlth, ﬂuids, decay—for
their very identity and integrity.
∞≥∞
‘‘Geographies of exclusion’’ thereby segre-
gate both pure and deﬁled spaces and the kinds of people that are expected to
belong naturally to them. State legislation mapped Vancouver’s Chinatown,
for example, as an exclusive ethnic enclave through discourses of racial
hygiene, foreign contagion, and the social and moral degeneration of ra-
cial mixing. Discourses of purity have demonized invading aliens—at times
weaving exotic plants and abject alterities into a common ﬁeld of moral
panic. Accusations of arson from southern California to southern Africa
have targeted foreign invaders who threaten the purity of geobodies of nation
and state. Immigrants to Los Angeles—shifting from Oakies to Chicanos in
different historical moments—have been targeted as incendiary others in the
wake of large-scale ﬁres. During World War II, a Japanese submarine ﬁred
incendiary shells into Los Padres National Forest, igniting racialized anxi-
eties around threats to the purity of nation and protection of nature. Smokey
the Bear, the guardian of a nation’s nature, was born from these ashes. In
South Africa, both ‘‘non-native’’ plants and peoples came under ﬁre as ‘‘in-
vading aliens’’ in the wake of a prominent 2000 conﬂagration in the Western
Cape.
∞≥≤
The chapters in this section explore the natural and racial politics of exclu-
sive geographies. In each, human bodies and social collectives are united and
divided on landscapes of purity and pollution. Racial and spatial divides

30 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
protect vulnerable bodies from the essentially dangerous. Crossing the bor-
ders of these exclusive spaces—national bodies, uninhabited wilds, racial-
ized ghettoes—unsettles natural orders. Spatial transgression itself becomes
a deeply political act, demanding repression in the case of Linke, unsettling
the naturalized in the case of Braun, and enabling new formulations of place
and identity in the case of Di Chiro.
In Uli Linke’s account of linguistic nationalism in Germany, projects of lan-
guage puriﬁcation are tied to natural symbols of national belonging. A deeply
corporeal imaginary links nature and nation, human bodies and the body
politic, ﬂows of blood with migrations of people. Excavating historical de-
bates that stretch back for centuries, Linke demonstrates how origin stories of
common descent bind linguistic purists in the seventeenth century with anti-
immigration sentiments in the 1990s. Building on Adorno’s argument that
deemed foreign words ‘‘the Jews’’ of the nation, she traces relations between
linguistic puriﬁcation and Nazi racial hygiene. The seventeenth-century
project of ‘‘landscaping the speech-garden’’ of nature ﬁnds its twentieth-
century resonance in exclusionary fantasies of purifying blood, soil, and lan-
guage. Robert Proctor has described the ‘‘organic monumentalism’’ through
which ideologies of Aryan destiny were inscribed into natural spaces such as
forests.
∞≥≥
In a similar vein, Linke ﬁnds in linguistic nationalism a means of
cultivating nation-loving subjects on landscapes purged of alterity.
Bruce Braun is equally concerned with the spatial consolidation of white-
ness, but his essay dwells on a different means by which the color of place is
naturalized. Braun focuses on the discursive practices that frame contempo-
rary American narratives of ‘‘risk culture’’ and adventure travel. Black adven-
turers, he argues, are illegible in the pages of magazines such as Outside.
Like Linke, he suggests that this whitening of the normative adventurer
echoes earlier consolidations of racial space, in his case the colonization of
the North American frontier. The frontier was a zone of puriﬁcation, carving
out the essence of American and Canadian national identity on the receding
threshold of a wild ‘‘beyond.’’ The unstated and insidious presence of these
very norms in the contemporary annals of adventure travel enables a racializ-
ing series of metonymic displacements: from climber to explorer to Euro-
pean to white. Nature, nation, and whiteness ﬁnd a common body of expres-
sion in the heroic adventurer as Braun renders visible the trope of white
mobility animating North American cultures of nature.
From the vantage point of Braun’s texts, the image of a black voyager
charting a tenuous path through the risky terrain of an urban jungle could

Introduction 31
only be parodic, if possible at all. However, it is this very landscape that
Giovanna Di Chiro seizes for her reﬂections on the promises of ‘‘toxic tour-
ism.’’ Environmental justice movements have adopted the ‘‘fallen’’ land-
scapes and ‘‘sacriﬁce zones’’ of the urban jungle as their object of struggle,
committing themselves to the recovery of polluted space.
∞≥∂
Unlike the purg-
ing of alterity that Linke describes, these activists practice a ‘‘borderlands’’
politics of difference, one that embraces hybridized and situational identities
rather than clinging to the vanishing residues of historical essence. Their
ventures in toxic tourism transgress the borders dividing racial others from
more privileged populations, transforming blackened space into an incendi-
ary force for cooperative organizing. Di Chiro powerfully documents the
alternative possibilities for coalition politics afforded by activists and the
alliances they forge. Environmental justice struggles hinge crucially, in this
vision, on a cultural politics of place and identity that grounds shared proj-
ects in speciﬁc sites of struggle.
PART THREE. Communities of Blood and Belonging
As I face Africa I ask myself: what is it between us that constitutes a tie which I can feel
better than I can explain?—W. E. B. Du Bois
∞≥∑
To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately
attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and
the mimosa trees of the bushveld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a
sense of personal renewal.—Nelson Mandela
∞≥∏
Passions for body and blood, place and community, race and nation: nature
makes a powerful terrain of sentimental attachment for its human subjects.
Each of the chapters in this section situates the emotional dispositions of
individuals and communities in wider topographies of fear and love, suffer-
ing and belonging. Trespassing the thin boundary of the skin, these three
themes chart workings of identity and afﬁnity that sculpt both interior
senses of selfhood and natural environments of nativity. These landscapes of
affect, as one might call them, enable the simultaneous imagination and
fabrication of inner selves, social bodies, and environmental milieux. Race
and nature gain their tangible presence in the lived experience of individuals
and communities through this play of passionate desires, fears, and faiths.
‘‘As places make sense, senses make place,’’ writes Steven Feld. Selves and
environments are fashioned together in a dialectical movement shuttling

32 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
between physical worlds of experience and psychic dispositions. Landscapes
both interior and exterior are made simultaneously.
∞≥π
Edouard Glissant ar-
gues that self, community, and landscape are ‘‘inextricable in the process of
creating history.’’ On the one hand, the material practices through which
places ‘‘make sense’’ often have profound emotional reverberations. Urban
planning regimes that ghettoize impoverished racial minorities, for example,
contribute to suburban fear and loathing of the concrete jungle. On the other
hand, the sentiments themselves work to fashion the living world of experi-
ence. Raymond Williams argues that nature has always served the West as a
projection screen for social hopes and anxieties.
∞≥∫
Whether ﬁgured as a
hostile terrain to be conquered violently, an indifferent milieu to be sur-
vived, or a nurturing cradle for human development, the natural landscape is
repeatedly invested with emotional dispositions that both mirror and chal-
lenge those of its inhabitants. These ‘‘environmental imaginaries’’
∞≥Ω
dispose
thinking and feeling subjects to undertake particular kinds of creative work
on worldly nature, to make certain kinds of places. Images of the tropical
Antilles, asserts Derek Walcott, were depicted by ‘‘travellers [who] carried
with them the infection of their own malaise.’’ The melancholia of their own
nostalgia inscribed landscapes with lament and desire; these images were
then read as reﬂections of an inherent nature of tropicality, as essential prop-
erties of environment, climate, and landscape. Tristes Tropiques, for Lévi-
Strauss, have a deep structuralist logic. When willows weep, an environmen-
tal milieu takes on human sentiments to convey a structure of feeling bind-
ing intimate feelings and animate landscapes.
∞∂≠
As the hinge of articulation between interior dispositions and exterior
environments, bodily nature forms a vital terrain of ‘‘passionate attach-
ment.’’ The surface of the skin has often been marked as a measure of ra-
cial difference. For Fanon, the white racialized gaze interpellates the Negro
through the ‘‘epidermalization’’ of ‘‘inferiority.’’ Subjected to this hegemony
of colonizing vision, Fanon experiences an exclusionary violence over which
he cannot ‘‘choose’’ his blackness. The black subject thus dwells in a ‘‘zone of
nonbeing,’’ from which self-liberation articulates an alternative to colonial
violence and its constitutive dehumanization.
∞∂∞
In stark contrast, Zora
Neale Hurston refuses a sense of feeling ‘‘tragically colored,’’ criticizing
those ‘‘who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal
and whose feelings are all hurt about it.’’ Crucially, her liberation from the
violent histories of racialization is only afforded by a sovereign subject’s
choice to escape history: ‘‘At certain times I have no race, I am me.... I

Introduction 33
belong to no race nor time.’’
∞∂≤
Political and aesthetic debates around racial-
ization have turned, crucially, on the kind of subject—and related processes
of subjection and subjugation—who experiences ‘‘race.’’
∞∂≥
In turn, how these
subjects position themselves—and are positioned—in relation to nature, cul-
ture, and history remains critical to the practices of identity, analysis, and
politics.
The suffering body often provides a living map to chart wider landscapes of
emotion and experience. Grappling with the violence of exclusive geogra-
phies, Aimé Césaire wrote of a ‘‘world map made for my own use, not tinted
with the arbitrary map of scholars, but with the geometry of my own blood.’’
Césaire’s anti-imperialism broke the shackles of biological destiny, elaborat-
ing a pan-Africanist concept of negritude that was ‘‘no longer a cephalic
index, or plasma, or soma, but measured by the compass of suffering.’’ In the
1940s, Senghor lamented his black brothers’ ‘‘blood that cleansed the na-
tion,’’ only to have their heroic struggles forgotten by imperial France.
∞∂∂
Sartre too considered the critical geography made by sentiments of negri-
tude—what he termed a project of ‘‘antiracist racism’’—emphasizing its ‘‘af-
fective attitude toward the world.’’ Negritude wrote suffering onto both
bodies and landscapes together, cultivating interior souls by evoking the
‘‘mystical geography’’ of violent imperialism and the remembered trans-
atlantic slave trade.
∞∂∑
Pan-Africanist visions mapped imaginative geographies to imagined com-
munities. Du Bois’s reﬂections on the souls of black folk understood a racial
identity built around shared experience rather than biological destiny, held
by those who ‘‘have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster
and have one long memory.’’ The political community of African Americans,
he expected, would emerge not from their common geographical roots but
from their shared history: ‘‘the real essence of this kinship is its social heri-
tage of slavery.’’ Historical experience, mediated by the cultural politics of
memory, shapes Du Bois’s vision of community: routes rather than roots,
bondage rather than blood lines, and experience rather than essence articu-
late ‘‘race’’ to self, soul, and embodied practice. Breaking from the meta-
phorics of blood, Du Bois links his assertion that ‘‘Race is a cultural... fact’’
to a shared notion of group belonging. In Dusk of Dawn he explains to a
mythical white man that ‘‘the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim
Crow’ in Georgia.’’ Du Bois renders visible the interpellation of a racialized
subject, situating both his experience and ‘‘race’’ in history, social relations,
and cultural practices.
∞∂∏

34 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
One of the most profound imaginations of a natural environment of be-
longing has been, of course, the nation. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson notes,
the ‘‘profoundly self-sacriﬁcing love’’ that nations inspire is often expressed
through the idioms of home and family.
∞∂π
Yet as Liisa Malkki emphasizes,
nationalist discourses frequently reveal ‘‘the metaphoric slide from har-
monious egalitarianism to steeply hierarchical family and gender meta-
phors.’’ These gendered constructions of national belonging articulate rela-
tions among body, kinship, nation, and race. National territories become
motherlands or fatherlands, nations claim patrimonies, and a body politic
becomes bounded and defended. Violence waged in the name of ‘‘ethnic
cleansing’’ has targeted women’s bodies, including brutal campaigns of mass
rape undertaken to violate purity, honor, and ethnic essence. Militarized
masculinities gender the nation-state, mingling with discourses of exclu-
sion that target forms of impermissible differences—cultural, ethnic, or reli-
gious—that racialize both domestic and foreign ‘‘enemies.’’
∞∂∫
When and why
are citizens willing to die for their nation? This sacriﬁcial love often relies on
a play of identiﬁcation between the living body of the citizen and the mortal
body of the nation.
∞∂Ω
But critical scholarship on the nation has demonstrated
that such intimate feelings of belonging are by no means ‘‘primordial’’ bonds
of loyalty and afﬁnity.
∞∑≠
Rather, natural afﬁnities are historical artifacts;
natural identiﬁcations with native place must themselves be cultivated.
Enlightenment legacies of environmental thinking have provided one pow-
erful means of cultivating such attachments to national place. Friedrich Rat-
zel’s nineteenth-century ‘‘anthropogeography’’ conceived the Volk as sharing
a historical relationship to common territory, what he described as their
lebensraum, their living space.
∞∑∞
Ratzel’s notion of living space has found
ironic reverberations not only in Hitler’s exclusionary soil politics but also in
a Black Nationalist vision of community expressed by LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka. ‘‘Black people are a race, a culture, a nation,’’ he proclaimed, needing
‘‘what the Germans call lebensraum (living room), literally space in which to
exist and develop.’’
∞∑≤
The radically different political valences of these two
echoes remind us to pay close attention to the concrete relational histories of
race, nature, and nation. In modern ‘‘ecologies of belonging,’’ rooted identities
contest with routed ones as histories of migration, diaspora, and displace-
ment transform stable senses of community and places of belonging.
∞∑≥
Ironically enough, these very passions for national belonging have traveled
in and out of the annals of positivist social science. For example, twentieth-
century geographers and cultural ecologists such as Carl Sauer, Alfred Kroe-

Introduction 35
ber, and Julian Steward built up the ‘‘Culture Area’’ concept on the founda-
tions laid by German Romantics. By treating the natural properties of place as
the template for mapping differences and similarities among cultural traits,
these academics further reinforced assumptions about the natural isomor-
phism of people, place, and culture formulated by Herder. For Kroeber, ‘‘ ‘nat-
ural’ factors such as climate, soil, and drainage’’ conditioned but did not
determine cultural activities. Sauer argued that ‘‘ ‘natural resources’ were in
fact cultural appraisals’’ and that ‘‘the history of mankind is a long and diverse
series of steps by which he has achieved ecologic dominance.’’ Moreover, his
notion of landscape morphology stressed ‘‘a strictly geographic way of think-
ing about culture; namely, as the impress of the works of man upon the area.’’
Following suit, Steward saw ecological adaptation as the motor of cultural
history, and the resultant ‘‘culture area’’ became ‘‘a construct of behavioral
uniformities which occur within an area of environmental uniformities.’’
∞∑∂
If locations of culture travel, so too do geographically uneven racial forma-
tions. And as embodied subjects journey through landscapes of differential
affect, they encounter disparate forms of racialization. A U.S.-born-and-
based ‘‘black’’ anthropologist ﬁnds himself hailed as a ‘‘gringo’’ and ‘‘white
man’’ on the Nicaraguan coast while a Peruvian anthropologist, constructed
as ‘‘white’’ in Cuzco and Lima, ﬁnds colleagues positioning her as a ‘‘woman
of color’’ in the U.S. academy.
∞∑∑
The performative possibilities of racial
‘‘passing,’’ of course, do not extend equally across hierarchies of difference.
Not all passings are created equal. Just as the location of race—in genes,
blood, skin, customs, or community—traverses scales and sites, so also ra-
cialized subjects move across a geographically differentiated terrain of racial
formations that resists homogeneity.
The global trafﬁc of commodities, representations, and cultural practices
that have routed through China, an array of scholars have argued, articulate
both distinctively national visions of ethnicity and localized imaginations of
community and identity. From the racial hierarchies that shaped jazz perfor-
mances in the early twentieth century, to ethnic minorities enlisted in the
production of state-sponsored ethnology, to the performance of ethnicity for
tourists: contested moral geographies of belonging link Chinese places to
translocal travels.
∞∑∏
Recent explorations of the inﬂuence of Spanish dis-
courses of race in the U.S. Southwest and their relationship to African Amer-
ican and other subaltern histories provide yet another example of a robustly
entangled and geographically differentiated history of racialization’s compet-
ing processes. Neither the location of culture nor of race remain ﬁxed in

36 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
place. Stuart Hall has famously reﬂected on how he became ‘‘black’’ only
after migrating fom the Caribbean to Britain. Migratory subjects, of course,
are not uniformly positioned in relation to other ﬁelds of difference—notably
class, gender, and sexuality.
∞∑π
The relational histories of people, place, and culture—and their racialized
routes—lead us to ask how people make their homes in communities of be-
longing. The three chapters in this section probe the sentimental attachments
that motivate constructions of place and identity. Keith Wailoo, Donna Hara-
way, and Robyn Wiegman describe different coagulations of community feel-
ing around blood, gene, and place in contemporary America. Each chapter
tracks simultaneous mutations in technobiological nature and senses of be-
longing, suggesting that a love of one’s own guides attachments to a changing
nature. The objects of attachment borne by the subjects of each of these
studies vary widely. What they do share, however, is a common terrain of
biosocial identiﬁcation that has been radically unsettled by new medical and
biological interventions into bodily nature. Normative liberal notions of
property and personhood get entangled in webs of technobiopower linking
labs, kennels, and courtrooms as well as genes, wombs, and persons. Such
cross-fertilizations open up novel ways of imagining race and nature.
Keith Wailoo describes the invention of the ‘‘heterozygote’’ as a category of
American personhood in the decades after the Second World War. Echoing
Paul Rabinow’s discussion of biosociality, Wailoo ﬁnds racial communities
forming around the biological truths of sickle-cell disease, Tay-Sachs dis-
ease, and cystic ﬁbrosis. Rabinow predicted that biosocial communities
would soon have ‘‘medical specialists, laboratories, narratives, traditions,
and a heavy panoply of pastoral keepers to help them experience, share,
intervene and ‘understand’ their fate.’’
∞∑∫
Wailoo ﬁnds much of this apparatus
at work already—albeit in quite different ways—in the case of these three
racialized diseases. His contrasts illustrate the distinctive means by which
attachments to racial nature may be experienced and expressed. African
Americans incorporated biomedical discourse on sickle-cell disease, for ex-
ample, into historical narratives of community pain and suffering. Ash-
kenazi Jewish narratives, on the other hand, represented Tay-Sachs as a mark
of community survival in the face of oppression.
Wailoo concludes his discussion with the possibility of a genomic eclipse
of heterozygotic discourse. Donna Haraway argues that this shift from popu-
lation to genome has already occurred in the world of North American dog
breeding. Tracking racial discourse into the canine world, her chapter charts
a series of transformations in the means by which a lovable breed is identi-

Introduction 37
ﬁed, produced, and protected. Evolutionary understandings of a breeding
population, she argues, supplanted Victorian notions of a racial pedigree,
only to be superceded in recent years by the manipulable matter of genomic
discourse. Foucault himself is disciplined and punished for his ‘‘species chau-
vinism’’ as dogs are brought into the domain of what Haraway terms tech-
nobiopower. These relations of power and affect forge novel bonds of afﬁnity
across the boundaries of species and community, drawing unlikely fellows
into webs of study, care, and intervention. These ‘‘naturalcultural’’ webs are
woven through a diverse spread of places, from pet kennels to scientiﬁc
society meetings, from neighborhood parks to Internet Web sites.
Robyn Wiegman casts a net just as wide to understand the transformations
in American race and kinship wrought by new reproductive technologies,
tacking between legal rulings on a mistaken case of in vitro fertilization,
contemporary legacies of U.S. slavery, and a recent cinematic representation
of multiracial family. Techniques such as in vitro fertilization pry apart bio-
logical paternity and paternal feeling, enabling the fulﬁllment of sentimen-
tal hopes for multiracial kinship without the disturbing possibility of in-
terracial sex. Wiegman points to an emerging form of white masculinity
founded on a contractual relationship to one’s own colored kin. Grappling
with the legal constructions of contract and property that inform contempo-
rary American personhood, she suggests that liberal notions of personhood
are paradoxically sustained by metaphoric recourse to slavery as a critique of
these transactions.
∞∑Ω
Nature itself is being transformed by these new possi-
bilities, Wiegman argues, shifting from the essential ground of racial differ-
ence to the sentimental terrain of a nation imagined as Benetton family.
PART FOUR. The Politics of Representation
By being embodied as qualitatively different in their substantial natures—by creating group
identities in difference—communities of individuals were placed outside the liberal universe
of freedom, equality, and rights. In effect, a theory of politics and rights was transformed into
an argument about nature; equality under liberalism was taken to be a matter not of ethics,
but of anatomy.—Nancy Leys Stepan
∞∏≠
So how are we ever going to achieve some kind of language which will make my experience
articulate to you and yours to me?—James Baldwin to Margaret Mead
∞∏∞
Reﬂecting on the political constraints precluding peasants from articulating
their class interests in nineteenth-century France, Marx famously declared,
‘‘They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.’’ Signiﬁ-

38 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
cantly, for Marx, the relationship of these peasants to nature constrained
their political agency and class consciousness. The small-holding peasants’
mode of production, Marx argued, isolated them on self-sufﬁcient farms like
‘‘potatoes in a sack.’’ This socioeconomic isolation grounded peasant liveli-
hoods ‘‘more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with so-
ciety.’’ Recognizing peasants through organic metaphors yet denying them
status as organic intellectuals, Marx echoes discourses of primitivism, pre-
viously discussed, that treat particular subjects’ proximity to nature as a
negation of their historical agency and political representation.
∞∏≤
Gayatri
Spivak invokes his germinal position to underscore how contemporary the-
ory often falters on the slippage between two senses of representation, a
political sense of ‘‘speaking for’’ and a literary sense of re-presentation as
‘‘speaking of.’’
∞∏≥
The cultural politics of representation revolving around
race, nature, and difference frequently hinges on this complex coupling.
∞∏∂
Natural objects cannot speak of their own accord: they require a medi-
ator—a proxy, a speaker, and an active subject—to draw them into articula-
tion.
∞∏∑
The politics of representation reveals a frequent elision of nature and
race, as subjects located within historically contingent discourses struggle to
position themselves.
∞∏∏
Indigenous activists asserting their ecologically sus-
tainable resource management practices may voice a ﬁercely felt sense of
localized knowledge, resource rights, and political entitlement. Before his
execution by the Nigerian military state, Ken Saro-Wiwa insisted on calling
his homeland ‘‘Ogoni’’ rather than Ogoniland: ‘‘this is because to the Ogoni,
the land and the people are one.’’ Similarly, indigenous movements such as
the Huaorani—who opposed the ravages of oil exploration and extraction in
Ecuador’s El Oriente—have countered the federal state’s claims to subsur-
face mineral rights by invoking cultural identities asserted as essentially
grounded in the local environment.
∞∏π
Yet, as they invoke an inherent bond with particular landscapes, indige-
nous social movements confront the possibility that their asserted proximity
to nature may unintentionally enable their own dispossession and exploita-
tion. Enlightenment legacies—enduring discourses of primitivism, evolu-
tionary teleologies, the grounding of cultural differences in nature—prove
formidable. Moreover, the political realities of differentiated communities
undermine the very metaphor of speaking in a single representative voice.
Saro-Wiwa’s execution by the Nigerian military regime and armed escorts
who accompanied oil executives to visit El Oriente are a stark reminder of
the bloody business of petroleum development. Violence, state power, and

Introduction 39
capital accumulation work through the cultural politics of race and nature.
Yet so do potentially oppositional social movements.
Consider, for example, the contradictory political possibilities opened by
what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has named the ‘‘savage slot,’’ a triangular rela-
tion between order, utopia, and savagery proposed by Western epistemic
traditions.
∞∏∫
Contrasting images of the ‘‘wild man’’ as guileless native and
violent savage have framed radically different reformist interventions into
society and nature. ‘‘Edenic narratives’’ echoing Rousseau’s pastoral visions
have grafted the garden’s grace onto the contemporary Amazonian land-
scape.
∞∏Ω
Transnational environmentalists often use such a ‘‘green lens’’
∞π≠
to
buttress their critical claims, while liberals in the north typically ﬁnd its
depictions of ‘‘primitive ecological wisdom’’
∞π∞
much more attractive than
the hues of radical red. However, these bucolic representations of the Noble
Savage must still compete with more hard-bitten perceptions of primitives
locked in a Hobbesian ‘‘horrible world of struggle.’’ In France, for example,
anti-immigration sentiments of the 1970s and 1980s explicitly invoked im-
ages of ‘‘l’immigration sauvage,’’ a wild, unruly ﬂow threatening the nation’s
own race and culture.
∞π≤
Recent debates over the cultural politics of identity and difference hinge,
as Diana Fuss underscores, on theorizing the relationship between the social
and the natural. We ﬁnd her cautionary tale especially instructive:
Too often constructionists presume that the category of the social auto-
matically escapes essentialism, in contradistinction to the way the cate-
gory of the natural is presupposed to be inevitably entrapped within
it.... If we are to intervene effectively in the impasse created by the
essentialist-constructionist divide, it might be necessary to begin ques-
tioning the constructionist assumption that nature and ﬁxity go to-
gether (naturally) just as sociality and change go together (naturally). In
other words, it may be time to ask whether essences can change and
whether constructions can be normative.
∞π≥
We build on Fuss’s refusal by emphasizing the work performed when iden-
tities are rendered as natural and essential, by stressing how these effects
unfold differentially in historically speciﬁc contexts, and by attending to the
ways these articulations bind together particular formations of race and dif-
ference. Such a perspective requires an understanding of how race and na-
ture interpellate their subjects and how they come to recognize themselves
within its material and discursive formations. Far from false consciousness,

40 Moore, Pandian, and Kosek
the deep attachments many actors may hold to essential identities emerge
through a complex cultural politics of difference. As Stuart Hall argues,
‘‘identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by,
and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.’’
∞π∂
Our contribu-
tors seek to trace the discursive effects of these deployments, the tactics
of subjects who make histories while inhabiting identities not entirely of
their choosing.
∞π∑
Rather than conceive of sovereign subjects who choose and
deploy ﬁxed identities, we appreciate how historical agents are positioned
within discourses of development, environment, and globalization. Savage
slots shift a lot. Yet within this shifting terrain of struggle, subjects acknowl-
edge and engage their relationships to race and nature, acting as agents in
provisional ﬁelds of political possibility.
Following Fuss, we might spend less energy arguing over the inherently
emancipatory or necessarily repressive character of ‘‘essence.’’ Instead, as
recent debates encourage, we might consider with an open mind the situated
struggles waged in particular landscapes. Such mobilizations may turn, cru-
cially, on how identities are articulated in relation to race and place, nature
and environment. Apartheid’s system of spatial control mapped ethnic iden-
tities to ﬁxed territories in the so-called ethnic homelands or Bantustans.
∞π∏
But in Latin America today, highly sophisticated indigenous federations are
also actively mapping ethnic identity to territory, tactically deploying a ‘‘sed-
entarist metaphysics’’ to claim deep cultural roots in place.
∞ππ
These distinct
histories necessarily create different ﬁelds of political possibility.
A second implication follows. Judith Butler identiﬁes a recent tendency
among some leftists to oppose the ‘‘materialist project of Marxism’’ to the
‘‘merely cultural’’ struggles of new social movements.
∞π∫
Here, insights from
agrarian studies complement poststructural pyrotechnics focused on the pol-
itics of identity in the metropolitan West. In both cases, we emphasize the
simultaneity of symbolic and material struggles, refusing an assumed dis-
tinction between ‘‘merely’’ symbolic recognition and material resource re-
distribution. The cultural politics of representation, in the two senses we
elaborated above, enables us to conceive of how race, nature, and differ-
ence simultaneously shape both the very terrain that produces political sub-
jects and the claims that these subjects make to rights, resources, and their
redistribution.
Our authors develop these insights, offering ethnographically enlivened
instances of the contingent cultural politics of race, nature, and difference. In
Steven Gregory’s chapter, international tourism and sex work position Do-

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and justice over shams and falsehoods a corner-stone of his system.
It has been asked, in fact, whether there is not a gross inconsistency
here. If Cromwell's success proved him to be a hero, did not the
Restoration upset the proof? The answer, frequently and
emphatically given by Carlyle, as in the lecture on the hero as king,
is an obvious one. Cromwell represents an intermediate stage
between Luther and the French Revolution. Luther told the Pope that
he was a 'chimera;' and the French gave the same piece of
information to other 'chimeras.' The whole process is a revolt against
certain gigantic shams, and the success very inadequately measured
by any special incident in the struggle. The French Revolution, with
all its horrors, was a 'return to truth,' though, as it were, to a truth
'clad in hellfire:' and its advent should be hailed as 'shipwrecked
mariners might hail the sternest rock, in a world otherwise all of
baseless seas and waves.' And throughout this vast revolutionary
process, our hope rests upon the 'certainty of heroes being sent us;'
and that certainty 'shines like a polestar, through murk dustclouds,
and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.'
It is well that we have a 'certainty' of the coming hero; for the essay
seems to show the weakness of all excessive reliance upon
individuals. Cromwell's life, as he tells us emphatically, was the life of
the Commonwealth, and Cromwell's life was at the mercy of a 'stray
bullet.' Where then is a certainty of progress in a world thus
dependent upon solitary heroes, in a wilderness of fools, liable to be
snuffed out at a moment's notice? So far as certainty means a
scientific conviction resting on the observation of facts, we, of
course, cannot have it. It is a certainty which follows from our belief
in the overruling power which will send heroes when there is work
for heroes to do. And Carlyle can at times, especially in his earlier
writings, declare his faith in such a progress with full conviction. 'The
English Whig,' says Herr Teufelsdröckh, 'has, in the second
generation, become an English Radical, who, in the third, it is to be
hoped, will become an English rebuilder. Find mankind where thou
wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower;
the phœnix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling earth

with her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swansong
immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing
the clearer.' And the phrase, as I think, gives the theory which in fact
is more or less explicitly contained in all Carlyle's writings.
It is plain, however, that progress, so understood, is a progress
consistent with long periods of the reverse of progress. It implies an
alternation of periods of reconstruction and vital energy with others
of decay and degeneration. And in this I do not know that Carlyle
differs from other philosophers. Few people are sanguine enough to
hold that every generation improves upon the preceding. But the
modern believer in progress undoubtedly believes that this actual
generation is better than the last, and that the next will be better
still; and is very apt to impute bad motives to anyone who differs
from him. Here, of course, he must come into flat opposition to
Carlyle. For Carlyle, to put it briefly, regarded the present state of
things as analogous to that of the Lower Empire; a time of
dissolution of old bonds and of a general ferment which was
destroying the very tissues of society. So far he agrees, of course,
with many Conservatives; but he differs from them in regarding the
process as necessary, and even ultimately beneficial. The disease is
one which must run its course; the best hope is that it may run it
quickly; the attempt to suppress the symptoms and to regain health
by making time run backwards is simply chimerical. Thus he was in
the painful position of one who sees a destructive process going on
of which he recognises the necessity whilst all the immediate results
are bad.
To the ardent believer in progress such a state of mind is, of course,
repulsive. It implies misanthropy, cynicism, and disbelief in mankind.
Nor can anybody deny that Carlyle's gloomy and dyspeptic
constitution palpably biassed his view of his contemporaries as well
as of their theories. The 'mostly fools' expresses a deeply-rooted
feeling, and we might add 'mostly bores,' and to a great extent
humbugs. And this, of course, implies a very low estimate of the
powers of unheroic mankind, and therefore of their rights. If most

men are fools, their right to do as they please is a right to knock
their heads against stone walls. Carlyle perhaps overlooked the fact
that even that process may be useful training for fools. But even
here he asserted a doctrine wrongly applied rather than false in
principle. It shocks one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black
Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for the reasons given by
Carlyle, that even slavery may be better than sheer anarchy and
barbarism; that, historically speaking, the system of slavery
represents a necessary stage in civilisation; and therefore that the
simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of unconditional 'right'
without reference to the possession of the instincts necessary for
higher kinds of society—might be disguised cruelty. The error was in
the hasty assumption that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded
state; and the haste to accept this disheartening belief was but too
characteristic. That liberty might mean barbarism was true; that it
actually did mean it in certain given cases was a rash assumption
too much in harmony with his ordinary aversion to the theorists of
his time.
This applies to all Carlyle's preachings about contemporary politics;
the weakest of his writings are those in which his rash dogmatism,
coloured by his gloomy temperament, was employed upon unfamiliar
topics. But the pith and essence of them all is the intense conviction
that the one critical point for modern statesmen is the creation of a
healthy substratum to the social structure. That the lives of the great
masses are squalid, miserable, and vicious, and must be elevated by
the spread of honesty, justice, and the unflinching extirpation of
corrupt elements, the substitution of rigorous rulers for idle
professors of official pedantry, busy about everything but the
essential—that is the sum and substance of the teaching. That he
attributes too much to the legislative power, and has too little belief
in the capacities of the average man, may be true enough. But this
one thing must be said in conclusion. The bitterness, the gloom,
even the apparent brutality, is a proof of the strength of his
sympathies. He is savage with the physician because he is appalled
at the virulence of the disease and the inadequacy of the remedy.

He may shriek 'quack' too hastily, and be too ready to give over the
patient as desperate. And yet I am frequently struck by a contrast. I
meet a good friend who holds up his hands at Carlyle's ferocity. We
talk, and I find that he holds that in politics we are all going to sheer
destruction or 'shooting Niagara'; that the miserable Radicals are
sapping all public spirit; that faith is being undermined by
malcontents and atheists; that the merchant has become a gambler,
and the tradesman a common cheat; that the 'British workman' is a
phrase which may be used with the certainty of provoking a sneer;
and, briefly, that there is not a class in the country which is not on
the highroad to decay, or an institution beyond the reach of
corruption. And yet my friend sits quietly down and enjoys his dinner
as heartily as if he were expecting the millennium. What shall I say?
That he does not believe what he says, or that his digestive
apparatus was in most enviable order? I know not; but certainly
Carlyle was not capable of this. He took things too terribly in
earnest. When workmen scamped the alterations in his house, or the
railway puffed its smoke into his face, he saw visible symbols of
modern degeneracy, and thought painfully of the old honest
wholesome life in Annandale—of steady God-fearing farmers and
self-respecting workmen. All that swept away by progress and
'prosperity beyond example'! That was his reflection; perhaps it was
very weak, as certainly it was very unpleasant to worry himself
about what he could not help, and sprang, let us say, all from a
defective digestion. And yet, though I cannot think without pity of
the man of genius who felt so keenly and thought so gloomily of the
evils around us, I feel infinitely more respect for his frame of mind
than for that of the man who, sharing, verbally at least, this opinion,
can let it calmly lie in his mind without the least danger to his
personal comfort.

THE STATE TRIALS
It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the
whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally
share that impression; and, on the contrary, have said a great many
fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of
all ages, with the innuendo, to use the legal phrase, that they
themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid
choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our
teachers. Are you not, we observe, exceedingly given to humbug?
The youthful student takes the poet's ecstasies and agonies in
solemn earnest. We who have grown a little wiser cannot forget with
what complacency the poet has often devised a new agony; how he
has set it to a pretty tune; how he has treasured up his sorrows and
despairs to make his literary stock in trade, has taken them to
market, and squabbled with publishers and writhed under petty
critics, and purred and bridled under judicious flattery; and we begin
to resent his demand upon our sympathies. Are not poetry and art a
terrible waste of energy in a world where so much energy is already
being dissipated? The great musician, according to the well-worn
anecdote, hears the people crying for bread in the street, and the
wave of emotion passing through his mind comes out in the shape,
not of active benevolence, but of some new and exquisite jangle of
sounds. It is all very well. The musician, it is probable enough, could
have done nothing better. But there are times when we feel that we
would rather have the actual sounds, the downright utterance of an
agonised human being, than the far-away echo of passion set up in
the artistic brain. We prefer the roar of the tempest to the squeaking
of the Æolian harp. We tire of the skilfully prepared sentiment, the
pretty fancies, the unreal imaginations, and long for the harsh,
crude, substantial fact, the actual utterance of men struggling in the
dire grasp of unmitigated realities. We want to see Nature itself, not
to look at the distorted images presented in the magical mirror of a

Shakespeare. The purpose of playing is, as that excellent authority is
constantly made to repeat, to show the very age and body of the
time his form and pressure. But, upon that hypothesis, why should
we not see the age itself instead of being bothered by impossible
kings and queens and ghosts mixed up in supernatural
catastrophes? If this theory of art be sound, is not the most realistic
historian the only artist? Nay, since every historian is more or less a
sophisticator, should we not go back to the materials from which
histories are made?
I feel some touch of sympathy for those simple-minded readers who
avowedly prefer the police reports to any other kind of literature.
There at least they come into contact with solid facts; shocking, it
may be, to well-regulated minds, but possessing all the charm of
their brutal reality; not worked into the carefully doctored theories
and rose-coloured pictures set forth by the judicious author, whose
real aim is to pose as an amiable and interesting being. It is true
that there are certain objections to such studies. They generally
imply a wrong state of mind in the student. He too often reads, it is
to be feared, with that pleasure in loathsome details which seems to
spring from a survival of the old cruel instincts capable of finding
pleasure in the sight of torture and bloodshed. Certainly one would
not, even in a passing phrase, suggest that the indulgence of such a
temper can be anything but loathsome. But it is not necessary to
assume this evil propensity in all cases; or what must be our
judgment of the many excellent members of society who studied day
by day the reports of the Tichborne case, for example, and felt that
there was a real blank in their lives when the newspapers had to fill
their columns with nothing better than discussions of international
relations and social reforms? You might perhaps laugh at such a man
if he asserted that he was conscientiously studying human nature.
But you might give him credit if he replied that he was reading a
novel which atoned for any defects of construction by the
incomparable interest of reality. And the reply would be more
plausible in defence of another kind of reading. When literature palls
upon me I sometimes turn for relief to the great collection of State

Trials. They are nothing, you may say, but the police reports of the
past. But it makes all the difference that they are of the past. I may
be ashamed of myself when I read some hideous revelation of
modern crime, not to stimulate my ardour as a patriot and a
reformer, but to add a zest to my comfortable chair in the club
window or at the bar of my favourite public-house. But I can read
without such a pang of remorse about Charles I. and the regicides. I
can do nothing for them. I cannot turn the tide of battle at Naseby,
or rush into the streets with the enthusiastic Venner. They make no
appeal to me for help, and I have not to harden my heart by
resisting, but only feel a sympathy which cannot be wasted because
it could not be turned to account. I may indulge in it, for it
strengthens the bond between me and my ancestors. My sense of
relationship is stimulated and strengthened as I gaze at the forms
sinking slowly beyond my grasp down into the abyss of the past, and
try in imagination to raise them once more to the surface. I do all
that I can for them in simply acknowledging that they form a part of
the great process in which I am for the instant on the knife-edge of
actual existence, and unreal only in the sense in which the last
motion of my pen is unreal now. 'I was once,' says one of the
earliest performers, 'a looker-on of the pageant as others be here
now, but now, woe is me! I am a player in that doleful tragedy.' This
'now' is become our 'once,' and we may leave it to the harmless
enthusiasts who play at metaphysics to explain or to darken the
meaning of the familiar phrase. Whatever time may be—a point, I
believe, not quite settled—there is always a singular fascination in
any study which makes us vividly conscious of its ceaseless lapse,
and gives us the sense of rolling back the ever-closing scroll.
Historians, especially of the graphic variety, try to do that service for
us; but we can only get the full enjoyment by studying at first-hand
direct contemporary reports of actual words and deeds.
The charm of the State Trials is in the singular fulness and apparent
authenticity of many of the reports of vivâ voce examinations. There
are not more links between us for example, and Sir Nicholas
Throgmorton—whose words I have just quoted—than between us

and the last witness at a contemporary trial. The very words are
given fresh from the speaker's mouth. The volumes, of course,
contain vast masses of the dismal materials which can be quarried
only by the patience of a Dryasdust. If we open them at random we
may come upon reading which is anything but exhilarating. There
are pages upon pages of constitutional eloquence in the Sacheverell
case about the blessed revolution, and the social compact, and the
theory of passive resistance, which are as hopelessly unreadable as
the last parliamentary debate in the 'Times.' If we chance upon the
great case of Shipmoney, and the arguments for and against the
immortal Hampden, we have to dig through strata of legal
antiquarianism solid enough to daunt the most intrepid explorer.
And, as trials expand in later times, and the efforts of the British
Barrister to establish certain important rules of evidence become
fully reported, we, as innocent laymen, feel bound to withdraw from
the sacred place. Indeed, one is forced to ask in passing whether
any English lawyer, with one exception, ever made a speech in court
which it was possible for any one not a lawyer to read in cold blood.
Speeches, of course, have been made beyond number of admirable
efficacy for the persuasion of judges and juries; but so far as the
State Trials inform us, one can only suppose that lawyers regarded
eloquence as a deadly sin, perhaps because jurymen had a kind of
dumb instinct which led them to associate eloquence with humbug.
The one exception is Erskine, whose speeches are true works of art,
and perfect models of lucid exposition. The strangely inarticulate
utterance of his brethren reconciles us in a literary sense to the rule
—outrageous in a moral and political point of view—which for
centuries forbade the assistance of counsel in the most serious
cases. In the older trials, therefore, we assist at a series of tragedies
which may shock our sense of justice, but in their rough-and-ready
fashion go at once to the point and show us all the passions of
human beings fighting in deadly earnest over the issues of life and
death. The unities of time and place are strictly observed. In the
good old days the jury, when once empanelled, had to go on to the
end. There was no dilatory adjourning from day to day.
[9]
As

wrestlers who have once taken hold must struggle till one touches
earth, the prisoner had to finish his agony there and then. The case
might go on by candlelight, and into the early hours of a second
morning, till even the spectators, wedged together in the close
court, with a pestilential atmosphere, loaded, if they had only known
it, with the germs of gaol fever, were well-nigh exhausted; till the
judge confessed himself too faint to sum up, and even to recollect
the evidence; till the unfortunate prisoner, browbeaten by the judge
and the opposite counsel, bewildered by the legal subtleties, often
surprised by unexpected evidence, and unable to produce
contradictory witnesses at the instant, overwhelmed with all the
labour and impossibility of a task to which he was totally
unaccustomed, could only stammer out a vague assertion of
innocence. Here and there some sturdy prisoner—a Throgmorton or
a Lilburne—thus brought to bay under every disadvantage, managed
to fight his way through, and to persuade a jury to let him off even
at their own peril. As time goes on, things get better, and the
professions of fair-play have more reality; but it is also true that the
performance becomes less exciting. In the degenerate eighteenth
century it came to be settled that a minister might be turned out of
office without losing his head; and it is perhaps only from an
æsthetic point of view that the old practice was better, which
provided historians with so many moving stories of judicial tyranny.
But in that point of view we may certainly prefer the old system, for
the tragedies generally have a worthy ending; and instead of those
sudden interventions of a benevolent author, which are meant to
save our feelings, at the end of a modern novel, we are generally
thrilled by a scene on the scaffold, in which it is rare indeed for the
actors to play their parts unworthily.
The most interesting period of the State Trials is perhaps the last
half of the seventeenth century, when the art of reporting seems to
have been sufficiently developed to give a minute verbal record—
vivid as a photograph—of the actual scene, and before the interest
was diluted by floods of legal rhetoric. Pepys himself does not
restore the past more vividly than do some of those anonymous

reporters. The records indeed of the trials give the fullest picture of
a social period, which is too often treated from some limited point of
view. The great political movements of the day leave their mark
upon the trials; the last struggle of parties was fought out by judges
and juries with whatever partiality in open court. We may start, if we
please, with the 'memorable scene' in which Charles I. won his title
to martyrdom; then comes the gloomy procession of regicides; and
presently we have the martyrs to the Popish Plot, and they are
followed by the Whig martyr, Russell, and by the miserable victims
who got the worst of Sedgemoor fight. The Church of England has
its share of interest in the exciting case of the Seven Bishops; and
Nonconformists are represented by Baxter's sufferings under
Jeffreys, and by luckless frequenters of prohibited conventicles; and
beneath the more stirring events described in different histories, we
have strange glimpses of the domestic histories which were being
transacted at the time; there are murderers and forgers and
housebreakers, who cared little for Whig or Tory. Superstition is
represented by an occasional case of witchcraft. And we have some
curious illustrations of the manners and customs of the fast young
men of the period, the dissolute noblemen, the 'sons of Belial flown
with insolence and wine,' who disturbed Milton's meditations, and
got upon the stage to see Nell Gwynn and Mrs. Bracegirdle in the
comedies of Dryden and Etherege. It is unfair to take the reports of
a police court as fully representing the characteristics of a time; but
there never was a time which left a fuller impression of its
idiosyncrasies in such an unsavoury Record Office. Let us pick up a
case or two pretty much at random.
It is pleasantest, perhaps, to avoid the more familiar and pompous
scenes. It is rather in the byplay—in the little vignettes of real life
which turn up amidst more serious events—that we may find the
characteristic charm of the narrative. The trials, for example, of the
regicides have an interest. They died for the most part (Hugh Peters
seems to have been an exception) as became the survivors of the
terrible Ironsides, glorying, till drums beat under the scaffold to
silence them, in their fidelity to the 'good old cause,' and showing a

stern front to the jubilant royalists. But one must admit that they
show something, too, of the peculiarities which made the race
tiresome to their contemporaries as they probably would be to us.
They cannot submit without a wrangle—which they know to be futile
—over some legal point, where simple submission to the inevitable
would have been more dignified; and their dying prayers and
orations are echoes of the long-winded sermons of the Blathergowls.
They showed fully as much courage, but not so much taste, as the
'royal actor' on the same scene. But amidst the trials there occurs
here and there a fragment of picturesque evidence. A waterman tells
us how he was walking about Whitehall on the morning of the 'fatal
blow.' 'Down came a file of musketeers.' They hurried the hangman
into his boat, and said, 'Waterman, away with him; begone quickly.'
'So,' says the waterman, 'out I launched, and having got a little way
in the water, says I, "Who the devil have I got in my boat?" Says my
fellow, says he, "Why?" I directed my speech to him, saying, "Are
you the hangman that cut off the King's head?" "No, as I am a
sinner to God," saith he, "not I." He shook, every joint of him. I
knew not what to do. I rowed away a little farther, and fell to a new
examination of him. "Tell me true," says I, "are you the hangman
that hath cut off the King's head? I cannot carry you," said I. "No,"
saith he;' and explains that his instruments had been used, but not
himself; and though the waterman threatened to sink his boat, the
supposed hangman stuck to his story, and was presumably landed in
safety. The evidence seems to be rather ambiguous as concerns the
prisoner, who was accused of being the actual executioner; but the
vivacity with which Mr. Abraham Smith tells his story is admirable.
Doubtless it had been his favourite anecdote to his fellows and his
fares during the intervening years, and he felt, rightly as it has
turned out, that this accidental contact with one of the great events
of history would be his sole title to a kind of obscure immortality.
Another hero of that time, unfortunately a principal instead of a
mere spectator in the recorded tragedy, is so full of exuberant
vitality that we can scarcely reconcile ourselves to the belief that the
poor man was hanged two centuries ago. The gallant Colonel Turner

had served in the royal army, and, if we may believe his dying
words, was specially valued by his Majesty. The colonel, however,
got into difficulties: he made acquaintance with a rich old merchant
named Tryon, and tried to get a will forged in his favour by one of
Tryon's clerks; failing in this, he decided upon speedier measures. He
tied down poor old Tryon in his bed one night, and then carried off
jewels to the value of 3,000l. An energetic alderman suspected the
colonel, clutched him a day or two afterwards, and forced him to
disgorge. When put upon his defence, he could only tell one of those
familiar fictions common to pickpockets; how he had accidentally
collared the thief, who had transferred the stolen goods to him, and
how he was thus entitled to gratitude instead of punishment. It is
not surprising that the jury declined to believe him; but we are
almost surprised that any judge had the courage to sentence him.
For Colonel Turner is a splendid scoundrel. There is something truly
heroic in his magnificent self-complacency; the fine placid glow of
conscious virtue diffused over his speeches. He is a link between
Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Bobadil, and the audacious promoter of
some modern financiering scheme. Had he lived in days when old
merchants invest their savings in shares instead of diamonds, he
would have been an invaluable director of a bubble company. There
is a dash of the Pecksniff about him; but he has far too much pith
and courage to be dashed like that miserable creature by a single
exposure. Old Chuzzlewit would never have broken loose from his
bonds. It is delightful to see, in days when most criminals prostrated
themselves in abject humiliation, how this splendid colonel takes the
Lord Chief Justice into his confidence, verbally buttonholes 'my dear
lord' with a pleasant assumption that, though for form's sake some
inquiry might be necessary, every reasonable man must see the
humour of an accusation directed against so innocent a patriot. The
whole thing is manifestly absurd. And then the colonel gracefully
slides in little compliments to his own domestic virtues. Part of his
story had to be that he had sent his wife (who was accused as an
accomplice) on an embassy to recover the stolen goods. 'I sent my
poor wife away,' he says, 'and, saving your lordship's presence, she
did all bedirt herself—a thing she did not use to do, poor soul. She

found this Nagshead, she sat down, being somewhat fat and weary,
poor heart! I have had twenty-seven children by her, fifteen sons
and twelve daughters.' 'Seven or eight times this fellow did round
her.' 'Let me give that relation,' interrupts the wife. 'You cannot,'
replies the colonel, 'it is as well. Prythee, sit down, dear Moll; sit
thee down, good child, all will be well.' And so the colonel proceeds
with amazing volubility, and we sympathise with this admirable
father of twenty-seven children under so cruel a hardship. But—not
to follow the trial—the colonel culminated under the most trying
circumstances. His dying speech is superb. He is honourably
confessing his sins, but his natural instinct asserts itself. He cannot
but admit, in common honesty, that he is a model character, and
speaks under his gallows as if he were the good apprentice just
arrived at the mayoralty. He admits, indeed, that he occasionally
gave way to swearing, though he 'hated and loathed' the sin when
he observed it; but he was—it was the source of all his troubles—of
a 'hasty nature.' But he was brought up in an honest family in the
good old times, and laments the bad times that have since come in.
He has been a devoted loyalist; he has lived civilly and honestly at
the upper end of Cheapside as became a freeman of the Company
of Drapers; he was never known to be 'disguised in drink;' a small
cup of cider in the morning, and two little glasses of sack and one of
claret at dinner, were enough for him; he was a constant churchgoer,
and of such delicate propriety of behaviour that he never 'saw a man
in church with his hat on but it troubled him very much' (a phrase
which reminds us of Johnson's famous friend); 'there must be,' he is
sure, when he thinks of all his virtues, 'a thousand sorrowful souls
and weeping eyes' for him this day. The attendant clergy are a little
scandalised at this peculiar kind of penitence; and he is good
enough to declare that he 'disclaims any desert of his own'—a
sentiment which we feel to be a graceful concession, but not to be
too strictly interpreted. The hangman is obliged to put the rope
round his neck. 'Dost thou mean to choke me, fellow?' exclaims the
indignant colonel. 'What a simple fellow is this! how long have you
been executioner that you know not how to put the knot?' He then
utters some pious ejaculations, and as he is assuming the fatal cap,

sees a lady at a window; he kisses his hand to her, and says, 'Your
servant, Mistress;' and so pulling down the cap, the brave colonel
vanishes, as the reporter tells us, with a very undaunted carriage to
his last breath.
Sir Thomas More with his flashes of playfulness, or Charles with his
solemn 'Remember,' could scarcely play their parts more gallantly
than Colonel Turner, and they had the advantage of a belief in the
goodness of their cause. Perhaps it is illogical to sympathise all the
more with poor Colonel Turner, because we know that his courage
had not the adventitious aid of a good conscience. But surely he was
a very prince of burglars! We turn a page and come to a very
different question of casuistry. Law and morality are at a deadlock.
Instead of the florid, swaggering cavalier, we have a pair of Quakers,
Margaret Fell, and the famous George Fox, arguing with the most
irritating calmness and logic against the imposition of an oath. 'Give
me the book in my hand,' says Fox; and they are all gazing in hopes
that he is about to swear. Then he holds up the Bible and exclaims,
'This book commands me not to swear.' To which dramatic argument
(the report, it is to be observed, comes from Fox's side) there is no
possible reply but to 'pluck the book forth of his hand again,' and
send him back to prison. The Quakers vanish in their invincible
passiveness; and in the next page we find ourselves at Bury St.
Edmunds. The venerated Sir Matthew Hale is on the bench, and the
learned and eloquent Sir Thomas Browne appears in the witness-
box. They listen to a wretched story of two poor old women accused
of bewitching children. The children swear that they have been
tormented by imps, in the shape of flies, which flew into their
mouths with crooked pins—the said imps being presumably the
diabolical emissaries of the witches. Then Sir Thomas Browne
gravely delivers his opinion; he quotes a case of witchcraft in
Denmark, and decides, after due talk about 'superabundant
humours' and judicious balancing of conflicting considerations, that
the fits into which the children fell were strictly natural, but
'heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the devil co-
operating with the malice of the witches.' An 'ingenious person,'

however, suggests an experiment. The child who had sworn that the
touch of the witch threw her into fits, was blindfolded and touched
by another person passed off as the witch. The young sinner fell into
the same fits, and the 'ingenious person' pronounced the whole
affair to be an imposture. However, a more ingenious person gets up
and proves by dexterous logic, curiously like that of a detected
'medium' of to-day, that, on the contrary, it confirms the evidence.
[10]
Whereupon the witches were found guilty, the judge and all the
court being fully satisfied with the verdict, and were hanged
accordingly, though absolutely refusing to confess.
Our ancestors' justice strikes us as rather heavy-handed and dull-
eyed on these occasions. In another class of trials we see the
opposite phase—the manifestation of that curious tenderness which
has shown itself in so many forms since the days when highway
robbery appeared to be a graceful accomplishment if practised by a
wild Prince and Poins. Things were made delightfully easy in the race
which flourished after the Restoration. Every Peer, by the amazing
privilege of the 'benefit of clergy,' had a right to commit one
manslaughter. Like a schoolboy, he was allowed to plead 'first fault;'
and a good many Peers took advantage of the system.
Lord Morley, for example, has a quarrel 'about half-a-crown.' A Mr.
Hastings, against whom he has some previous grudge,
contemptuously throws down four half-crowns. Therefore Lord
Morley and an attendant bully insult Hastings, assault him
repeatedly, and at last fall upon him 'just under the arch in Lincoln's
Inn Fields,' and there Lord Morley stabs him to death, 'with a
desperate imprecation.' The Attorney-General argues that this shows
malice, and urges that Mr. Hastings, too, was a man of good family.
But the Peers only find their fellow guilty of manslaughter. He claims
his privilege, and is dismissed with a benevolent admonition not to
do it again. Elsewhere, we have Lord Cornwallis and a friend coming
out of Whitehall in the early morning, drunk and using the foulest
language. After trying in vain to quarrel with a sentinel, they swear
that they will kill somebody before going home. An unlucky youth

comes home to his lodgings close by, and after some abuse from the
Peer and his friend, the lad is somehow tumbled downstairs and
killed on the spot. As it seems not to be clear whether Lord
Cornwallis gave the fatal kick, he is honourably acquitted. Then we
have a free fight at a tavern, where Lord Pembroke is drinking with a
lot of friends. One of them says that he is as good a gentleman as
Lord Pembroke. The witnesses were all too drunk to remember how
and why anything happened; but after a time one of them is kicked
out of the tavern; another, a Mr. Cony, is knocked down and
trampled, and swears that he has received what turned out some
days later to be mortal injuries from the boots of Lord Pembroke.
The case is indeed, doubtful; for the doctor who was called in
refused to make a post-mortem examination on the ground that it
might lead him into 'a troublesome matter;' and another was
disposed to attribute the death to poor Mr. Cony's inordinate love of
'cold small beer.' He drank three whole tankards the night before his
death; and when actually dying, declined 'white wine posset drink,'
suggested by the doctor, and 'swore a great oath he would have
small beer.' And so he died, whether by boots or beer; and the Lord
High Steward in due time had to inform Lord Pembroke that his
lordship was guilty of manslaughter but, being entitled to his clergy,
was to be discharged on paying his fees. The most sinister figure
amongst these wild gallants is the Lord Mohun, who killed, and was
killed by, the Duke of Hamilton, as all the readers of the 'Journals' of
Swift or of 'Colonel Esmond' remember. He appears twice in the
collection. On December 9, 1690, Mohun and his friend Colonel Hill
came swaggering into the play-house, and got from the pit upon the
stage. An attendant asks them to pay for their places; whereupon
Lord Mohun nobly refuses, saying, 'If you bring any of your masters
I will slit their noses.' The pair have a coach-and-six waiting in the
street to carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle, to whom Hill has been making
love. As she is going home to supper, they try to force her into it
with the help of half-a-dozen soldiers. The bystanders prevent this;
but the pair insist upon seeing Mrs. Bracegirdle to her house, and
mount guard outside with their swords drawn. Mrs. Bracegirdle and
her friends stand listening at the door, and hear them vowing

vengeance against Mountford, of whom Hill was jealous. Presently
the watch appears—the constable and the beadle, and a man in
front with a lantern. The constable asks why are the swords drawn.
Mrs. Bracegirdle through the door hears Mohun reply, 'I am a Peer of
England, touch me if you dare.' 'God bless your honour,' replies the
constable, 'I know not what you are, but I hope you are doing no
harm.' 'No,' said he. 'You may knock me down, if you please,' adds
Colonel Hill. 'Nay, said I' (the lantern-bearer), 'we never use to knock
gentlemen down unless there be occasion.' And the judicious watch
retire to a tavern in the next street, in order, as they say, 'to examine
what they (Mohun and Hill) were, and what they were doing.' There
was, as the constable explains, 'a drawer there, who had formerly
lived over against him,' and might throw some light upon the
proceedings of these polite gentlemen. But, alas! 'in the meantime
the murder was done.' For as another witness tells us, Mr. Mountford
came up the street and was speaking coolly to Mohun, when Hill
came up behind and gave him a box on the ear. 'Saith Mr.
Mountford, what's that for? And with that he (Hill) whipped out his
sword and made a pass at him, and I turned about and cried
murder!' Mountford was instantly killed; but witnesses peeping
through doors, and looking out of windows, gave conflicting
accounts of the scuffle in the dim street, and Lord Mohun, after
much argument as to the law, was acquitted. Five years later, he
appears in the case reported by Esmond, with little more than a
change in the names. An insensate tavern-brawl is followed by an
adjournment to Leicester Fields; six noblemen and gentlemen in
chairs; Mr. Coote, the chief actor in the quarrel, urging his chairman
by threatening to goad him with his sword. The gentlemen get over
the railings and vanish into the 'dark wet' night, whilst the chairmen
philosophically light their pipes. The pipes are scarcely alight, when
there is a cry for help. Somehow a chair is hoisted over the rails, and
poor Mr. Coote is found prostrate in a pool of blood. The chairmen
strongly object to spoiling their chairs by putting a 'bloody man' into
them. They are pacified by a promise of 100l. security; but the chair
is somehow broken, and the watch will not come to help, because it
is out of their ward; 'and I staid half-an-hour,' says the chief witness

pathetically, 'with my chair broken, and afterwards I was laid hold
upon, both I and my partner, and kept till next night at eleven
o'clock; and that is all the satisfaction I have had for my chair and
everything.' This damage to the chair was clearly the chief point of
interest for poor Robert Browne, the chairman, and it may be feared
that his account is still unsettled. Mohun escaped upon this occasion,
and, indeed, Esmond is unjust in giving to him a principal part in the
tragedy.
Such were the sights to be seen occasionally in London by the
watchman's lantern or the candle glimmering across the narrow
alley, or some occasional lamp swinging across the street; for it was
by such a lamp that a girl looked into the hackney coach and saw
the face of a man who had sent for Dr. Clench ostensibly to visit a
patient, but really in order to strangle the poor doctor on the way.
These are strange illuminations on the margin of the pompous page
of official history; and the incidental details give form and colour to
the incidents in Pepys' 'Journals' or Grammont's 'Memoirs.' We have
kept at a distance from the more dignified records of the famous
constitutional struggles which fill the greatest number of pages. Yet
those pages are not barren for the lover of the picturesque. And
here I must put in a word for one much reviled character. If ever I
were to try my hand at the historical amusement of whitewashing, I
should be tempted to take for my hero the infamous Jeffreys. He
was, I dare say, as bad as he is painted; so perhaps were Nero and
Richard III., and other much-abused persons; but no miscreant of
them all could be more amusing. Wherever the name of Jeffreys
appears we may be certain of good sport. With all his inexpressible
brutality, his buffoonery, his baseness, we can see that he was a
man of remarkable talent. We think of him generally as he appeared
when bullying Baxter; when 'he snorted and squeaked, blew his
nose and clenched his hands, and lifted up his eyes, mimicking their
(the Nonconformists') manner, and running on furiously, as he said
they used to pray;' and we may regard him as his victims must have
regarded him, as a kind of demoniacal baboon placed on the bench
in robes and wig, in hideous caricature of justice. But the vigour and

skill of the man when he has to worry the truth out of a stubborn
witness is also amazing. When a knavish witness produced a forged
deed in support of the claim of a certain Lady Ity to a great part of
Shadwell, Jeffreys is in his element. He is perhaps a little too
exuberant. 'Ask him what questions you will,' he breaks out, 'but if
he should swear as long as Sir John Falstaff fought' (the Chief
Justice can quote Shakespeare), 'I would never believe a word he
says.' His lordship may be too violent, but he is substantially doing
justice; and shows himself a dead hand at unmasking a cheat. The
most striking proof of Jeffreys' power is in the dramatic trial of Lady
Lisle. The poor lady was accused of harbouring one Hicks, a
Dissenting preacher, after Sedgemoor. It was clear that a certain
James Dunne had guided Hicks to Lady Lisle's house. The difficulty
was to prove that Lady Lisle knew Hicks to be a traitor. Dunne had
talked to her in presence of another witness, and it was suggested
that he had given her the fatal information. But Dunne tried hard in
telling his story to sink this vital fact. The effort of Jeffreys to twist it
out of poor Dunne, and Dunne's futile and prolonged wriggling to
escape the confession, are reported at full, and form one of the most
striking passages in the 'State Trials.' Jeffreys shouts at him; dilates
in most edifying terms upon the bottomless lake of fire and
brimstone which awaits all perjurers; snatches at any slip; pins the
witness down; fastens inconsistencies upon him through page after
page; but poor Dunne desperately clutches the secret in spite of the
tremendous strain. He almost seems to have escaped, when the
other witness establishes the fact that some conversation took place.
Armed with this new thumbscrew, Jeffreys leaps upon poor Dunne
again. The storm of objurgations, appeals, confutations, bursts forth
with increased force; poor Dunne slips into a fatal admission; he has
admitted some talk, but cannot explain what it was. He tries dogged
silence. The torture of Jeffreys' tongue urges him to fresh
blundering. A candle is held up to his nose that the court 'may see
his brazen face.' At last he exclaims, the candle 'still nearer to his
nose,' and feeling himself the very focus of all attention, 'I am quite
cluttered out of my senses; I do not know what I say.' The wretched
creature is allowed to reflect for a time, and then at last declares

that he will tell the truth. He tells enough in fact for the purpose,
though he feebly tries to keep back the most damning words.
Enough has been wrenched out of him to send poor Lady Lisle to
the scaffold. The figure of the poor old lady falling asleep, as it is
said, while Jeffreys' thunder and lightning was raging in this terrific
fashion round the feeble defence of Dunne's reticence, is so
pathetic, and her fate so piteous and disgraceful, that we have little
sense for anything but Jeffreys' brutality. But if the power of
worming the truth out of a grudging witness were the sole test of a
judge's excellence, we must admit the amazing efficiency of Jeffreys'
method. He is the ideal cross-examiner, and we may overlook the
cruelty to victims who have so long ceased to suffer.
In the post-revolutionary period the world becomes more merciful
and duller. Lawyers speak at greater length; and even the victims of
'45, the strange Lord Lovat himself, give little sport at the
respectable bar of the House of Lords. But the domestic trials
become perhaps more interesting, if only by way of commentary
upon 'Tom Jones' or 'Roderick Random.' Novelists indeed have
occasionally sought to turn these records to account. The great
Annesley case has been used by Mr. Charles Reade, and Scott took
some hints from it in one of the very best of his performances, the
inimitable 'Guy Mannering.' Scott's adaptation should, indeed, be
rather a warning than a precedent; for the surpassing merit of his
great novel consists in the display of character, in Meg Merrilies and
Dandie Dinmont and Counsellor Pleydell, and certainly not in the
rather childish plot with the long-lost heir business. He falls into the
common error of supposing that the actual occurrence of events
must be a sufficient guarantee for employing them in fiction. The
Annesley case is almost the only one in the collection in which facts
descend to the level of romance. The claimant's case was clearly
established up to a certain point. There was no doubt that he had
passed for Lord Annesley's son in his childhood; that he had for that
reason been spirited away by his uncle, and sold as a slave in
America; and, further, that, when he returned to make his claim and
killed a man by accident (an incident used by Scott)—his uncle did

his best to have him convicted for murder. The more difficult point
was to prove that he was the legitimate son of the deceased lord by
his wife, who was also dead. A servant of the supposed mother gave
evidence which, if true, conclusively disproved this assumption; and
though young Annesley won his first trial, he afterwards failed to
convict this witness of perjury. The case may therefore be still
doubtful, though the weight of evidence seems decidedly against the
claimant. The case—the 'longest ever known' at that time—lasted
fifteen days, and gives some queer illustrations of the domestic life
of a disreputable Irish nobleman of the period. Perhaps, however,
the most curious piece of evidence is given by the attorney who was
employed to prosecute the claimant for a murder of which he was
clearly innocent. 'What was the intention of the prosecution?' he is
asked. 'To put this man out of the way that he (Lord Anglesea, the
uncle) might enjoy the estate easy and quiet.' 'You understood,
then, that Lord Anglesea would give 10,000l. to get the plaintiff
hanged!' 'I did.' 'Did you not apprehend that to be a most wicked
crime?' 'I did.' 'If so, how could you engage in that project, without
making any objection to it?' 'I may as well ask you,' is the reply,
'how you came to be engaged in this suit.' He is afterwards asked
whether any honest man would do such an action. 'Yes, I believe
they would, or else I would not have carried it on.' This is one of the
prettiest instances on record of that ingenious adaptation of the
conscience, which allows a man to think himself thoroughly honest
for committing a most wicked crime in his professional capacity. The
novelist who wishes rather to display character than to amuse us
with intricacies of plot, will find more matter in less ambitious
narratives. A most pathetic romance, which may remind us of more
famous fictions, underlies the great murder case in which Cowper,
the poet's grandfather, was defendant. Sarah Stout, the daughter of
a Quaker at Hertford, fell desperately in love with Cowper, who was
a barrister, and sometimes lodged at her father's house when on
circuit. She wrote passionate letters to him of the 'Eloisa to Abelard'
kind, which Cowper was ultimately forced to produce in evidence. He
therefore had a final interview with her, explained to her the folly of
her passion, there being already a Mrs. Cowper, and left her late in

the evening to go to his lodgings elsewhere. Poor Sarah Stout
rushed out in despair and threw herself into the Priory river. There
she was found dead next morning, when the miller came to pull up
his sluices. All the gossips of Hertford came immediately to look at
the body and make moral or judicial reflections upon the facts.
Wiseacres suggested that Cowper was the last man seen in her
company, and it came out that two or three other men attending the
assizes had gossiped about her on the previous evening, and one of
them had, strange to relate, left a cord close by his trunk. These
facts, transfigured by the Hertford imagination, became the nucleus
of a theory, set forth in delicious legal verbosity, that the said
Cowper, John Masson, and others 'a certain rope of no value about
the neck of the said Sarah, then and there feloniously, voluntarily,
and of malice aforethought did put, place, fix, and bind; and the
neck and throat of the said Sarah, then and there with the hands of
you, the said Cowper, Masson, Stephens, and Rogers, feloniously,
voluntarily, and of your malice aforethought, did hold, squeeze, and
gripe.' By the said squeezing and griping, to abbreviate a little, Sarah
Stout was choked and strangled; and being choked and strangled
instantly died, and was then secretly and maliciously put and cast
into the river. The evidence, it is plain, required a little straining, but
then Cowper belonged to the great Whig family of the town, and
Sarah Stout was a Quaker. Tories thought it would be well to get a
Cowper hanged, and Quakers wished to escape the imputation that
one of their sect had committed suicide. The trial lasted so long that
the poor judge became faint and confessed that he could not sum
up properly. The whole strength of the case, however, such as it
was, depended upon an ingenious theory set up by the prosecution,
to the effect that the bodies of the drowned always sink, whereas
Miss Stout was found floating, and must therefore have been dead
before she was put in the river. The chief witness was a sailor, who
swore that this doctrine as to sinking and swimming was universal in
the navy. He had seen the shipwreck of the 'Coronation' in 1691. 'We
saw the ship sink down,' he says, 'and they swam up and down like
a shoal of fish one over another, and I see them hover one upon
another, and see them drop away by scores at a time;' some nine

escaped, 'but there were no more saved out of the ship's
complement, which was between 500 and 600, and the rest I saw
sinking downright, twenty at a time.' He has a clinching argument,
though a less graphic instance, to prove that men already dead do
not sink. 'Otherwise, why should Government be at that vast charge
to allow threescore or fourscore weight of iron to sink every man,
but only that their swimming about should not be a discouragement
to others?' Cowper's scientific witnesses, some of the medical
bigwigs of the day, had very little trouble in confuting this evidence;
but the letters which he at last produced, and the evidence that poor
Miss Stout had been talking of suicide, should have made the whole
story clear even to the bemuddled judges. The novelist would throw
into the background this crowd of gossiping and malicious quidnuncs
of Hertford; but we must be content to catch glimpses of her
previous history from these absurdly irrelevant twaddlings, as in
actual life we catch sight of tragedies below the surface of social
small-talk. Sarah Stout was clearly a Maggie Tulliver, a potential
heroine, unable to be happy amidst the broad-brimmed, drab-coated
respectabilities of quiet little Hertford. Her rebellion was rasher than
Maggie's, but perhaps in a more characteristic fashion. The case
suggests the wish that Mr. Stephen Guest might have been hanged
on some such suspicion as was nearly fatal to Cowper.
Half a century later our ancestors were in a state of intense
excitement about another tragedy of a darker kind. Mary Blandy, the
only daughter of a gentleman at Henley, made acquaintance with a
Captain Cranstoun, who was recruiting in the town. The father
objected to a marriage from a suspicion, apparently well founded,
that Cranstoun was already married in Scotland. Thereupon Mary
Blandy administered to her father certain powders sent to her by
Cranstoun. According to her own account, she intended them as a
kind of charm to act upon her father's affections. As they were, in
fact, composed of arsenic, they soon put an end to her father
altogether, and it is too clear that she really knew what she was
doing. It was sworn that she used brutal and unfeeling language
about the poor old man's sufferings, for the poison was given at

intervals during some months. But the pathetic touch which moved
the sympathies of contemporaries was the behaviour of the father.
In the last day or two of his life, he was told that his daughter had
been the cause of his fatal illness. His comment was: 'Poor love-sick
girl! What will not a woman do for the man she loves!' When she
came to his room his only thought was apparently to comfort her.
His most reproachful phrase was: 'Thee should have considered
better than to have attempted anything against thy father.' The
daughter went down on her knees and begged him not to curse her.
'I curse thee!' he exclaimed. 'My dear, how couldst thou think I
should curse thee? No, I bless thee, and hope God will bless thee
and amend thy life.' And then he added, 'Do, my dear, go out of the
room and say no more, lest thou shouldst say anything to thy
prejudice; go to thy uncle Stevens, take him for thy friend; poor
man, I am sorry for him.' The tragedy behind these homely words is
almost too pathetic and painful for dramatic purposes; and it is not
strange that our ancestors were affected. The sympathy, however,
took the queer illogical twist which perhaps, who can tell? it might
do at the present day. Miss Blandy became a sort of quasi saint, the
tenderness due to the murdered man extended itself to his
murderer, and her penitence profoundly edified all observers. Crowds
of people flocked to see her in chapel, and she accepted the homage
gracefully. She was extremely shocked, we are told, by one
insinuation made by uncharitable persons; namely, that her intimacy
with Cranstoun, who was supposed to be a freethinker, might justify
doubts upon her orthodoxy. She declared that he had always talked
to her 'perfectly in the style of a Christian,' and she had read the
works of some of our most celebrated divines. In spite of her moving
conduct, however, the 'prejudices she had to struggle with had taken
too deep root in some men's minds' to allow of her getting a pardon.
And so, 5,000 people saw poor Miss Blandy mount the ladder in 'a
black bombazine, short sack and petticoat,' on an April morning at
Oxford, and many, 'particularly several gentlemen of the University,'
were observed to shed tears. She left a declaration of innocence
which, in spite of its solemnity, must have been a lie; and which

contained an allusion from which it appears that Miss Blandy, like
other prisoners, was suspected of previous crimes.
'It is shocking to think,' says Horace Walpole, in noticing Miss
Blandy's case, 'what a shambles this country has become. Seventeen
were executed this morning, after having murdered the turnkey on
Friday night, and almost forced open Newgate.' Another woman was
hanged in the same year for murdering her uncle at Walthamstow;
and the public could talk about nothing but the marriage of the Miss
Gunnings and the hanging of two murderesses. Fielding, then
approaching the end of his career, was moved by this and other
atrocities to publish a queer collection of instances of the
providential punishment of murderers. Another famous author of the
day was commonly said to have turned a famous murder to account
in a different fashion. Foote, it is said, was introduced at a club in
the words, 'This is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately
hung in chains for murdering his brother;' and it is added that
Foote's first pamphlet was an account of this disagreeable domestic
incident. A more serious author might have found in it materials for
a striking narrative. Captain Goodere commanded his Majesty's ship
'Ruby,' lying in the King's Road off Bristol. He had a quarrel with his
brother Sir John Goodere, about a certain estate. The family solicitor
arranged a meeting in his house, where the two brothers appeared
to be reconciled. But Sir John had scarcely left the house, when he
was seized in broad daylight by a set of sailors who had been
drinking in a public-house, and carried down forcibly to the Captain's
barge. The Captain himself followed and rowed off with his brother
to the ship. There Sir John was confined in a cabin, a suggestion
being thrown out to the crew that he was a madman. A few hours
later, one Mahony, who played the part of 'hairy-faced Dick' to
Hamilton Tighe, strangled the unfortunate man, with an accomplice
called White. Attention had been aroused amongst the crew by
ominous sounds, groans, and scufflings heard in the dead of the
night, and next morning, the lieutenant, after a talk with the
surgeon, resolved to seize their captain for murder. A more
outrageous and reckless proceeding, indeed, could scarcely have

been imagined, even in the days when a pressgang was a familiar
sight, and the captain of a ship at sea was as absolute as an Eastern
despot. Every detail seemed to be arranged with an express view to
publicity. One piece of evidence, however, was required to bring the
matter home to the captain; and it is of ghastly picturesqueness.
The ship's cooper and his wife were sleeping in the cabin next to the
scene of the murder. The cooper had heard the poor man exclaim
that he was going to be murdered, and praying that the murder
might come to light. This, however, seemed to be the wandering of a
madman, and the cooper went to sleep. Presently his wife called him
up: 'I believe they are murdering the gentleman.' He heard broken
words and saw a light glimmering through a crevice in the partition.
Peeping through he could distinguish the two ruffians, standing with
a candle over the dead body and taking a watch from a pocket. And
then, through the gloom, he made out a hand upon the throat of the
victim. The owner of the hand was invisible; but it was whiter than
that of a common sailor. 'I have often seen Mahony's and White's
hands,' he added, 'and I thought the hand was whiter than either of
theirs.' The trembling cooper wanted to leave the cabin, but his wife
held him back, as, indeed, with three murderers in the dark passage
outside, it required some courage to move. So they watched
trembling, till he heard a sentinel outside, and thought himself safe
at last: he roused the doctor, peeped at the dead body through a
'scuttle' which opened into the cabin; and then urged the lieutenant
to seize the captain. The captain was deservedly hanged,
bequeathing to us that ghastly Rembrandt-like picture of the white
hand seen through the crevice by the trembling cooper on the throat
of the murdered man. There is no touch which appeals so forcibly to
the imagination in De Quincey's famous narrative of the Mar
murders.
I have made but a random selection from the long gallery of grim
and grotesque portraiture of the less reputable of our ancestry. It
must be confessed that a first impression tends to reconcile us to
the comfortable creed of progress. The eighteenth century had some
little defects which have been frequently expounded; but it can

certainly afford to show courts of justice against its predecessor. The
old judicial murder of the Popish Plot variety has become extinct; if
the judges try to strain the law of libel, for example, the prisoner has
every chance of making a good fight; for which the readers of Horne
Tooke's gallant defences, and of some of Erskine's speeches, may be
duly grateful. The ancient brag of fair play has become something of
a reality. And the character of the crimes has changed in a
noticeable way. There are hideous crimes enough. A brutal murder
by smugglers near the case of Mary Blandy surpasses in its barbarity
the worst of modern agrarian outrages; though it is not clear that in
number of horrors the present century is unable to match its
predecessor. When the wild blood of the Byrons shows itself in the
last of the old tavern brawls à la Mohun, we feel that it is a case (in
modern slang) of a 'survival.' The poet's granduncle, the wicked Lord
Byron, got into a quarrel with Mr. Chaworth about the game laws at
a dinner of country gentlemen at the Star and Garter; whereupon, in
an ambiguous affair, half-scuffle and half-duel, Byron sent his sword
through Chaworth's body, and then politely requested Mr. Chaworth
to admit that he (Byron) was as brave a man as any in the Kingdom.
But this little ebullition required Byronic impulsiveness, and was not
a recognised part of a gentleman's conduct. Lord Ferrers, a short
time before, was hanged, to the admiration of all men, like a
common felon, for shooting his own steward; whereas in our day, he
would almost certainly have escaped on the plea of insanity. Other
cases mark the advent of the meddlesome, but perhaps on the
whole useful person, the social reformer. Momentary gleams of light,
for example, are thrown upon the scandals which ruined the trade of
the parsons of the Fleet. Poor Miss Pleasant Rawlins is arrested for
an imaginary debt, carried to a sponging-house, and there
persuaded (she was only seventeen or thereabouts) that she could
obtain her liberty by an immediate marriage to an adventurer who
had scraped acquaintance with her and taken a liking to her fortune.
The famous (he was once famous) Beau Feilding falls into a trap
unworthy of an experienced man of the world. He is persuaded that
a lady of fortune has fallen in love with him on seeing him walking in
her grounds at a distance. A lady, by no means of fortune, comes to

his lodgings, and passes herself off as this susceptible person.
Hereupon Feilding sends off for a priest of one of the foreign
embassies, gets himself married at his lodgings the same evening,
and discovers a few days afterwards that he is married to the wrong
person. It is exactly a comedy of the period performed by real flesh
and blood actors. The catastrophe is painful. Mr. Feilding ventures to
grant himself a divorce, and to marry the wretched old Duchess of
Cleveland; and in due time the Duchess finds it very convenient to
have him tried for bigamy. It did not take more than half a century
or so of such scandals to get an improvement in the marriage law,
which implies, on the whole, a creditable rate of progress. Another
set of cases illustrates a grievance familiar to novel-readers. In
'Amelia' the atrocities of bailiffs, sponging-houses and debtors'
prisons are drawn with startling realism. We may easily convince
ourselves that Fielding was not speaking without book. The bailiff
who has arrested Captain Booth gives a 'wipe or two with his
hanger,' as he pleasantly expresses it, to an unlucky wretch who
gives trouble, and delivers an admirable discourse upon the ethics of
killing in such cases. It might have come from the mouth of one
Tranter, a bailiff, who, a few years before, had stabbed poor Captain
Luttrell, for objecting to leave his wife in a delicate state of health.
Soon after, we find a society of philanthropists headed by Oglethorpe
of 'strong benevolence of soul,' endeavouring to expose the horrors
of the Fleet and the Marshalsea. A series of trials, ordered by the
House of Commons, had the ending too characteristic of all such
movements. Witnesses swore to atrocities enough to make one's
blood run cold—of men guilty only of impecuniosity, half-starved,
thrust naked into loathsome and pestiferous dungeons, beaten and
chained, and persecuted to death. But then arise another set of
unimpeachable witnesses, who swear with equal vigour that the
unfortunate debtors were treated with every consideration; that they
were made as comfortable as their mutinous spirit would allow; that
they were discharged in good health and died months afterwards
from entirely different causes; that the accused were not the
responsible authorities; that they had never interfered except from
kindness, and that they were the humanest and best of mankind.

Nothing remained but an acquittal; though the investigation did
something towards letting daylight into abodes of horror which Mr.
Pickwick found capable of improvement a century later.
Other cases might show how in various ways the strange power
called Public Opinion was beginning to increase its capricious and
desultory influence. The strange case of Elizabeth Canning (1753) is
one of the most picturesque in the collection. Miss Canning was a
maid-servant, who disappeared for a month, and coming home told
how she had been kidnapped by a gipsy and finally escaped.
Officious neighbours rushed in, and by judicious leading questions
managed to help her to manufacture evidence against a poor old
gipsy woman, preternaturally hideous, who sat smoking her pipe in
blank wonder as the crowd of virtuous avengers of innocence rushed
into her kitchen. Mary Squires, the gipsy, was sentenced to be
hanged, and doubtless at an earlier period she would have been
turned off without delay. But in that delicious calm in the middle of
the last century, when wars, and rebellions, and constitutional
agitations were quiet for the moment, and people had time to read
their modest newspapers without spoiling their digestions and their
nerves, the case aroused the popular interest. If the news did not
flash through the country as rapidly as that of the Lefroy murder, it
slowly dribbled along the post-roads and set people gossiping in
alehouses far away in quiet country villages. A whole host of
witnesses appeared and proved an alibi by giving a diary of a gipsy's
tour. We follow the party to village dances; we hear the venerable
piece of scandal about the schoolmaster who 'got fuddled' with the
gipsies; and what the gipsies had for dinner on January 1, 1753, and
how they paid their bill; we have a glimpse of the little flirtation
carried on by the gipsy's daughter, and the poor trembling little letter
is produced, which she managed to write to her lover, and which
cost her sevenpence; threepence being charged for it from
Basingstoke to London, and fourpence from London to Dorchester.
After more than a week spent in overhauling this and other
evidence, proving amongst other things that the scene of the girl's
supposed confinement was really tenanted the whole time by a man

strangely and most inappropriately named Fortune Natus, the jury
decided that the accuser was guilty of perjury, but boggled
characteristically as to its being 'wilful and corrupt.' However,
Elizabeth Canning got her deserts and was transported to New
England, still sticking to the truth of her story. Her guilt is plain
enough, if anybody could care about it, but the little details of
English country life a century ago are as fresh as the doings of the
rustics in one of Mr. Hardy's novels.
It all happened a long time ago, but we cannot hope with the old
lady who made that consolatory remark about other historical
narratives that 'it ain't none of it true.' On the contrary such vivid
little pictures flash out upon us as we read that we have a difficulty
in supposing that they were not taken yesterday. Abundance of
morals may be drawn by historians and others who deal in that kind
of ware; it is enough here to have indicated, as well as we can, what
pleasant reading may be found in the dusty old volumes which are
too often left to repose undisturbed on the repulsive shelves of a
lawyer's library.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] In the trial of Horne Tooke in 1794 it was decided by the
judges that an adjournment might take place in case of
'physical necessity,' but the only previous case of an
adjournment cited was that of Canning (in 1753).
[10] This case was in 1665. It is curious that in the case of
Hathaway, in 1702, a precisely similar experiment convinced
everybody that the accuser was an impostor; and got him a
whipping and a place in the pillory.

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Race Nature And The Politics Of Difference Donald S Moore Editor Jake Kosek Editor Anand Pandian Editor

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Race Nature And The Politics Of Difference Donald S Moore Editor Jake Kosek Editor Anand Pandian Editor

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