Political Tourism and its Texts 9781442688810

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Political Tourism and its Texts
1. Cunard’s Lines: Political Touring and the Making of the Negro Anthology
2. Revolutionary Drag in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War
3. ‘Speaking Bitterness’: Agnes Smedley in China
4. ‘Following in the Footsteps of Che’: Political Tourism as a Strategy for Entering and Leaving Modernity
5. The Postcolonial Migrant as Political Tourist: Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile
6. Political Tourism as Transnational Feminist Practice: Margaret Randall, Rebecca Gordon, and Adrienne Rich
Epilogue
Notes
Works Cited
Illustration Credits
Index

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POLITICAL TOURISM AND ITS TEXTS

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Political Tourism and Its Texts

MAUREEN MOYNAGH

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9845-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Moynagh, Maureen Anne, 1963– Political tourism and its texts / Maureen Moynagh. (Cultural spaces) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9845-0 1. Internationalism in literature. 2. Politics in literature. 3. Politics and literature – History – 20th century. 4. Authors – Political and social views. I. Title. II. Series. PN51.M694 2008

809c.93358

C2008-903589-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Political Tourism and Its Texts 3 1 Cunard’s Lines: Political Touring and the Making of the Negro Anthology 33 2 Revolutionary Drag in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 75 3 ‘Speaking Bitterness’: Agnes Smedley in China 109 4 ‘Following in the Footsteps of Che’: Political Tourism as a Strategy for Entering and Leaving Modernity 137 5 The Postcolonial Migrant as Political Tourist: Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile 177 6 Political Tourism as Transnational Feminist Practice: Margaret Randall, Rebecca Gordon, and Adrienne Rich 213 Epilogue 253

notes 265 works cited 281 illustration credits index 301

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Acknowledgments

I am happy to acknowledge here those institutions and individuals who have sustained me over the course of this project. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided vital research funding in the form of a standard research grant, and the University Council for Research of St Francis Xavier University supported earlier stages of the project. Time spent in archives was made both profitable and pleasant thanks to the effort made by staff and librarians at a number of institutions: the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, both at the University of Texas at Austin; the Special Collections Department of the Hayden Library at Arizona State University; the Huntington Library; and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I would also like to thank the inter-library loans staff of the Angus L. MacDonald Library at St Francis Xavier University for helping me to acquire some of the necessary material for this book. Many of my colleagues read and commented on drafts of chapters; I would like to thank Nancy Forestell, Sherryl Vint, Clare Fawcett, Susan Vincent, Shao-Pin Luo, Jonathan Boulter, Deena Rymhs, Corinna Wagner, and Marie Lovrod for sharing their impressions and making suggestions. My partner, Rod Bantjes, read the manuscript in its entirety and discussed many of the key ideas with me, often

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when those ideas were as yet ill formed and incoherent. As always, his insights, criticisms, and moral support were immeasurably helpful. I also benefited enormously from the energetic and dedicated labour of several research assistants over the years I have been working on this book. I would like to thank Jonathan Cormier, Kathleen Reddy, Caitlin Charman, Jennifer Brown, and especially Janette Fecteau for their vital contributions. I would also like to thank Marie Gillis, secretary of the Department of English at St Francis Xavier University, who helped with the final stages of manuscript preparation. Part of chapter one and earlier versions of chapters two and four were published in New Formations, Studies in Travel Writing, and Genre, respectively. Thank-you to the editors and the publishers of those journals for permission to reprint. Thanks also to Dr A.R.A. Hobson, executor of the Cunard estate, for permission to quote from her manuscripts.

POLITICAL TOURISM AND ITS TEXTS

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INTRODUCTION

Political Tourism and Its Texts

This book is about the cultural practice of political tourism and about the textual representation of their political tours by late modern writers and intellectuals. The political tourist belongs to a particular category of traveller, one who seeks to participate in or manifest solidarity with a political struggle taking place ‘elsewhere’ in the world. Through their touring and their acts of solidarity, political tourists practise a kind of ‘world citizenship’ that is about imagining a different kind of belonging, a different kind of human relationship, and a different practice of the self than are typically afforded through exclusively national, ethnic, or gendered forms of belonging. At once dependent on and troubling a spatial imaginary bound to what Enrique Dussel calls transmodernity, political tourists are engaged in affectively resonant processes of identification and affiliation across international borders and boundaries of cultural difference. Invested less in the cultivation of detachment than attachment, political tourists and their texts represent a means of exploring how transnational affiliations and commitments can be formed and pursued. This study speaks to the efforts of contemporary postcolonial and cultural studies theorists to devise a ‘new’ cosmopolitanism, even as I remain sceptical of the claims to novelty that mark much of this scholarship. Through case studies that span the twentieth

4 Political Tourism and Its Texts century, I show that an anti-imperialist cosmopolitanism attuned to vast disparities in wealth and empowerment is not a recent invention. The acts of international solidarity undertaken by the figures I examine here belie the aura of detachment and rootlessness that haunts cosmopolitanism, at least in its liberal variants, even as the sense of an ethico-political obligation to human communities other than one’s own that characterizes a cosmopolitan ethos is put into practice by these political tourists. As postcolonial studies reassesses its ability to address critically and with political urgency contemporary neo-imperialism and the geopolitics of global inequality, it is important to take another look at earlier moments of anti-imperial struggle, and particularly at the transnational dimensions of those struggles. As Peter Hulme has recently observed in the context of efforts to move ‘beyond’ postcolonial studies, one way of expanding the field consists in ‘unearthing a lot of earlier anticolonial work, often neglected at its time of writing’ (42). In this project, I both draw on the valuable insights and methods generated by postcolonial studies and contribute to the ‘beyond’ of postcolonial studies through my focus on the anti-imperial activism of these political tourists and on their simultaneous implication in many of the very imperial structures they seek to dismantle. Like Leela Gandhi, in her recent book Affective Communities, I am persuaded that there is value in examining the ‘minor narratives of crosscultural collaboration between oppressors and oppressed’ (6), in considering the work of those who, despite the accidents of their birth, chose to align themselves politically with ‘others’ ostensibly situated across the geopolitical divide. Indeed, the editors of the recent collection Postcolonial Studies and Beyond argue that ‘while we cannot gloss over the real differences between our various locations across the globe [at the current historical juncture], and between the histories and realities we analyze, it is equally important to forge connections between the differently positioned subjects of the new empire’ (Loomba et al. 14). Political tourism, both as a cultural

Introduction

5

practice and as a concept, has a great deal to offer activists and intellectuals who are engaged in such an endeavour; after all, the ‘forg[ing of] connections between the differently positioned subjects of the [old] empire,’ as well as the new, is what political tourism, and this book, are about. Cosmopolitanism, Internationalism, Political Tourism ‘These days,’ Paul Gilroy observes, ‘much of what passes for radical and critical thought rests on the notion that the very aspiration toward translocal solidarity, community and interconnection is tainted’ (Postcolonial Melancholia 63). To be sure, one of the more salient dilemmas for contemporary proponents of an ethos one might call cosmopolitanism is the question of how to produce ‘a worldly vision that is not simply one more imperialistic particularism dressed up in seductive universal garb’ (4). The spectre of what Gilroy dubs ‘armoured cosmopolitanism’ (60), under the guise of which the United States and its international partners, pre-eminently the UK, have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of freedom, democracy, and the liberation of women, necessarily haunts any effort to devise an internationalist mode of thinking and acting. Yet precisely because this ‘armoured cosmopolitanism’ relies on the kind of divisive parochialism infamously embodied in Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations,’ an alternative vision of how to address mutual interests, commonality, and plural loyalties – without erasing differences – is an urgent endeavour. What Arjun Appadurai has called the ‘fear of small numbers’ in an extension of Freud’s notion of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ should remind us how profoundly intermixed contemporary polities are even as the difficulty of finally discerning ‘who exactly are among the “we” and who are among the “they”’ leads some to engage in ‘violence, civil war, or ethnic cleansing’ (Fear of Small Numbers 5). Even as he anatomizes the processes that produce the ‘fear of small numbers,’ however, Appadurai affirms that

6 Political Tourism and Its Texts ‘the human faculty for long-distance empathy has not yet been depleted’ (41). It is in coming to understand this ‘human faculty for long-distance empathy’ that, I submit, a study of political tourism can prove useful. It is as a form of ‘long-distance empathy’ that political tourism reveals its cosmopolitan ethos, at least insofar as cosmopolitanism may be understood as an ethical sort of worldliness. Yet by virtue of their partisanship with political struggles, political tourists are not cosmopolitans in the more conventional sense, even as they exhibit some of the features typically associated with cosmopolitanism, such as its privilege. To the extent that political tourists emanate from the ‘West’ or hold citizenship in Western countries, to the extent that they have the economic wherewithal to travel the globe, they are indeed among the more advantaged of those moving across international borders whether at the current juncture or over the course of the twentieth century. Political tourists travel and write against the grain of that privilege, however, and in this respect they resemble those Gilroy characterizes as ‘vulgar’ cosmopolitans, or cosmopolitans from below, for whom cosmopolitanism ‘finds civic and ethical value in the process of exposure to otherness. It glories in the ordinary virtues and ironies – listening, looking, discretion, friendship – that can be cultivated when mundane encounters with difference become rewarding’ (67). Like the cosmopolitans Stuart Hall has described as able to ‘stand outside of having one’s life written and scripted by any one community’ (26), political tourists share the cosmopolitan’s selective affiliations and resistance to the restrictive claims of a given polity. This does not mean, however, that political tourism affords the ‘luxuriously free-floating view from above,’ a perspective that has also come, pejoratively, to be associated with cosmopolitanism (Robbins, ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’ 1). Rather, political tourists differ from those cosmopolitans conceived as rootless and detached by virtue of their pursuit of affiliation and belonging with struggles ostensibly not their own.

Introduction

7

In situating political tourism in relation to contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, I do not mean simply to say that political tourism is an ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism.’1 Rather, I want to argue that a study of political tourism can contribute to our understanding of what enables (or impedes) social justice work across transnational borders as well as radical inequalities and cultural differences between groups of people across the globe. Political tourism illustrates nothing so much as the difficulty of arriving at cosmopolitanism, if the latter is conceived as a profound political commitment to act in transnational and crosscultural solidarity. Indeed, it is in identifying the impediments to transnational solidarity and in exposing the limits of cosmopolitanism that political tourism contributes in urgent ways to the current debates. If cosmopolitanism is an ethos to be embraced, then it is so by virtue of its proximity to the practices of solidarity that political tourists strive to engage in. The Spanish Civil War remains, for literary critics, the exemplary instance of a political conflict that attracted large numbers of writers and intellectuals who produced a body of texts as a consequence of their engagement. Yet the Spanish Civil War has not been the only political struggle to attract ‘outside’ participants and observers. Since then, political tourists have been drawn to the Sino-Japanese War and the Communist revolution in China, to the deposing of dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua, to anti-colonial struggles for independence around the world, and most recently to the rebellion of indigenous communities in Chiapas and to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. The accounts of their travels in diaries, scrapbooks, photograph collections, and published texts of a number of late modern individuals may be mined for what they can tell us about the possibilities of forging alliances, of claiming identities, and of pursuing commitment across social and cultural boundaries and international borders. The work of writer-travellers rather than travel writers, these texts belong to no single genre. Instead, the concept of political

8 Political Tourism and Its Texts tourism entails conceiving its texts as records of the processes of identification and political commitment produced through crosscultural contact. In this way Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology, Agnes Smedley’s Battle Hymn of China, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War, Ernesto Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries and Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Margaret Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters, and Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, an otherwise odd assemblage of texts, can be read as the work of political tourists. I read the texts and archives of these writers’ travels against the horizon of three twentieth-century sites of (inter)national political struggle that drew supporters from around the world. The first three chapters focus on anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggle in the 1930s, and while the first chapter locates anti-imperialism in the 1930s in Harlem and the Caribbean, I concentrate on China during the Sino-Japanese War in the other two. The Spanish Civil War haunts this section of the book, not only because of its significance as a destination for political tourists in the period, but also by virtue of the first-hand experience both Auden and Cunard had supporting the republican cause in Spain. The fourth chapter is a pivotal one in the book: it concerns travel conducted during the period of decolonization following the Second World War, sometimes referred to as the Bandung era, and is devoted to a figure I see as the paradigmatic political tourist, Che Guevara. The Cuban revolution is the most obvious destination here, but both the young Ernesto Guevara’s tourism and the mature Che’s revolutionary aspirations extended to Latin America as a whole and beyond. Chapters five and six are located in Nicaragua in the 1980s in the context of the late Cold War, national liberation struggles, and U.S. imperialism. All of the tourists I consider in these chapters travelled in solidarity with the Sandinista revolution. I have decided to keep my selection of texts small and to select on the basis of what each text and its contexts can tell us about the possibilities for commitment across social, economic, political,

Introduction

9

and national divides in different sites of struggle and at different historical moments in the twentieth century. My purpose, in other words, is not to survey every instance of political tourism over the course of the century, but to proceed via discrete case studies that promise to shed light on the various dimensions of political tourism as a cultural practice. I am convinced that there is more to be learned from a series of distinct case studies than from a broad survey which could only offer a superficial understanding of the subjective processes of political engagement that are a defining characteristic of political tourism. There are nonetheless important linkages to be made, and it is through these linkages that the contours of political tourism emerge. In choosing to look at tourism, I am drawing in part on Dean MacCannell’s claim that tourism is a more adequate structure than language or nation for accounting for the uneven processes of modernization around the world, since the tourist crosses and (re)produces boundaries of economic and social difference as she or he crosses international borders. In choosing to look at political tourism, on the other hand, I am intent on reading against the grain of those processes of modernization to seek out possibilities for imagining and practising resistance. Where tourism entails transitory movement across social boundaries and international borders in ways that tend to leave those lines of demarcation in place if not shore them up, political tourism has as a tacit objective a breaking down of the impediments to the acts of affiliation and commitment that are the purpose of this sort of travel. Thus, while I am indebted to cultural studies work on tourism, my project is less intent on anatomizing the borders than it is on exploring accounts of border skirmishes, both literal and metaphorical. Political tourism as a cultural practice offers a peculiar mix of engagement and detachment, of inside/outside, that at least holds out the possibility of transformation, of affiliation, if it does not always realize them – some of these writer-travellers became lifelong revolutionaries, others returned to a comfortable bour-

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Political Tourism and Its Texts

geois existence. However committed the political tourist in question, one of the markers of the tourist experience is the suspension of everyday obligations (Urry, The Tourist Gaze 10). What does it mean to be a temporary revolutionary? to participate in the forging of a new society and then return ‘home’? ‘Part of what is involved in tourism,’ John Urry observes, ‘is the purchase of a particular social experience’ (141). The particular social experience sought by the political tourist, however tarnished by its association with a superficial radical chic, is the experience of social change and transformation. If tourism tends often toward a confirmation of one’s identity through a temporary encounter with the Other, through its endorsement of transformation political tourism at the very least runs the risk of precipitating new processes of identification that are less easily confined to the time and place of the tour. It is in this respect that political tourism may be understood as a form of transnational identity formation and as a conceptual paradigm for exploring the cultural dimensions of globalization. Most of the writer-travellers I consider here had in common an adherence to or sympathy for socialism, conceived not in terms of party membership so much as what Timothy Brennan describes as ‘a community of feeling that existed with many internal differences following the Russian revolution – particularly the party socialisms of the Third International, their intellectual fellow travelers both within Europe and without, and the (historically related) movements of decolonisation and national liberation’ (At Home 31). Nancy Cunard was one such fellow traveller; she adopted the Communist Party line on race relations and aligned herself with them during the Spanish Civil War. W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood were associated with the left in Britain during the 1930s, even if each later in his own way came either to repudiate or distance himself from socialist politics. Agnes Smedley was allied to both Indian and Chinese Communists; she was married for a time to Virendranath Chattopadyaya and, after she

Introduction

11

had spent nearly a decade in China, applied for membership in the CCP. Ernesto Guevara’s socialism hardly needs pointing out. Margaret Randall co-edited the left-leaning journal El Corno Emplumado in Mexico, joined the Cuban revolutionary project at the end of the 1960s, and worked for the Ministry of Culture in the fledgling Sandinista government in the early 1980s. That most of the political tourists in this book engaged in left internationalism will doubtless prompt some questions about terminology and discourse. Why not simply describe them as internationalists rather than political tourists? Why engage debates about cosmopolitanism, which is arguably quite distinct from internationalism? While Bruce Robbins tends to use the terms interchangeably, Timothy Brennan, for instance, represents cosmopolitanism and internationalism as opposing discourses in one of his critiques of the new cosmopolitanism. While I share some of Brennan’s misgivings about the new cosmopolitanism, I find that he overstates the distinctions between cosmopolitanism and internationalism in ways that are not particularly helpful. I want to outline some of the problems I see with Brennan’s argument before addressing the question of how I situate political tourism in relation to these concepts. Brennan raises three basic objections to cosmopolitanism that in his view internationalism either explicitly or implicitly redresses. First, Brennan holds that cosmopolitanism imposes ‘a theory of world government and corresponding citizenship’ without first ensuring that the ground has been laid for equitable and mutually respectful global relations by establishing the necessary material conditions and an ‘acceptance of differences in polity as well as culture’ (‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’ 76–7). Certainly some current approaches to cosmopolitanism may be charged with taking a Eurocentric and liberal approach to global relations,2 but scholars like Gilroy, Clifford, and Robbins focus precisely on these sorts of problems as they strive to reformulate cosmopolitanism. Thus the implication that only internationalism

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is concerned with the vast inequities of wealth and power across the globe and within most nations seems somewhat forced. Second, Brennan insists that internationalism is superior because it respects national sovereignty in ways that cosmopolitanism does not. While it is true that Marxism has historically acknowledged the political importance of some nationalist movements, Marx and Engels also ‘shared,’ as Alejandro Colás puts it, ‘much of [the] cosmopolitan distrust of nationalism’ (519). More significantly in the current juncture, Brennan’s contention that ‘there is no other way [than nationalism] ... to secure respect for weaker societies or peoples’ (77, emphasis added) fails to address all those for whom the nation, including the decolonized nationstate, has been a repressive if not outright genocidal force. National independence has done little for the tribal peoples of India, for example; nor have the indigenous peoples of the Americas found much in the way of ‘respect’ through the principle of national sovereignty, a fact which has prompted a fair amount of transnational collaboration and solidarity among fourth-world peoples. It is also not the case that cosmopolitanism is any longer opposed to the nation in any straightforward way, as Mitchell Cohen’s notion of a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ or Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ make clear. I would argue that it is possible, within a cosmopolitan framework, to support certain forms of nationalist struggle, specifically those that strive to realize ethico-political goals consonant with a cosmopolitan ethos. Finally, Brennan’s effort to distinguish internationalists from the middle-class travellers and intellectuals he pejoratively classes cosmopolitans fails to account for the many middle-class intellectuals who have historically numbered among those regarded as internationalists – not least Marx and Engels. Among the political tourists I study here, Che Guevara’s standing as an internationalist is unlikely to be in dispute; yet he was also a middle-class traveller and intellectual. A better way of distinguishing between cosmopolitanism and internationalism, it seems to me, is to speak of liberal

Introduction

13

and Marxist cosmopolitanisms. While for Marx and Engels social class was indeed the primary basis for identification across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, it has since become evident that class is not so easily abstracted from its articulations with other categories of social location, like gender, race, and nation. Nonetheless, one can distinguish between liberal and Marxist cosmopolitanisms in terms of how each constructs agency. Rather than the liberal focus on individual agency, Marxist cosmopolitanism would seek to develop transnational alliances organized around collective agency.3 Another, complementary, way of thinking about the relationship of internationalism and cosmopolitanism is in terms of a distinction between a specific political practice and the ethos or world view that gives rise to it. Thus, for Alejandro Colás, the three socialist internationals may be analysed as ‘the concrete political expression of cosmopolitan theory’ (515). The political tourists that I study here, then, whether or not they may be seen as engaged in left internationalism, are concretely or practically engaged in the pursuit of cosmopolitanism. I prefer the term ‘political tourist’ to ‘internationalist’ in part because not all of the figures I examine fit the latter category. Certainly Salman Rushdie, who embraces a decidedly liberal cosmopolitanism, does not, and whatever the sympathies of Cunard, Auden, and Isherwood, they acted very much as individuals and outsiders to the collective struggles they engaged with, even as Cunard, at least, sought to claim a kind of insider status. I also prefer the term ‘political tourist’ to ‘internationalist’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ because it emphasizes the mobility of the tourist, the role that travel and border-crossing play in the practice of political tourism, and thereby stresses the frequently contradictory play between particularism and universality that marks the acts of solidarity and revolution that all these figures represent in their accounts of their experiences. I choose the term ‘tourist’ over ‘traveller’ because I am reluctant to endorse the notion that

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there is some fully authentic way of moving through the world, a view to which distinctions between the traveller and the tourist are frequently bound.4 Political tourism resists the notion of some kind of political purity and thus at the very least serves as an inoculation against the temptation to romanticize acts of international solidarity. Finally, what political tourism offers that other conceptual models do not is a paradigm more attuned to the subjective processes of political engagement across boundaries of social, cultural, and racial difference. More than a ‘cognitive map’ ( Jameson) of transnational economic and political relations, more than a study of discursive constructions of the Other, different from experiences of displacement and exile, although sharing in some of the features of all of these approaches, my study of political tourism focuses on the act of travelling and sojourning and on the ways these experiences inform the political imagination of these figures. In this respect, the range of motives for and modes of engagement represented in these texts, as well as the important differences in the social locations of the writers themselves, are vital to achieving an understanding of political tourism as a cosmopolitical practice.5 Bruce Robbins contends that one of the more ‘widespread obstacles to internationalism’ is the notion that ‘all feeling is national feeling’ (Feeling Global 69). He quotes Benedict Anderson’s rhetorical query, ‘Who will willingly die for Comecon or the EEC?’ countering the implication that no international body can elicit loyalty comparable to the sacrifices commanded by nationalism with the examples of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Amnesty International, and Médecins sans frontières (69). Political tourism complicates the claims made by both Anderson and Robbins. While it is clear that many of the political tourists I study here identified powerfully with a revolutionary internationalism and, in the case of Che Guevara in particular, embraced transnational identities such as ‘Latin America,’ they also developed close affective ties with particular groups, defined at least partly in nationalist terms:

Introduction

15

Chinese peasants and workers, in the case of Agnes Smedley; Nicaraguan women, in the case of Margaret Randall; and Guevara of course came to have a very close relationship to Cuba, acquiring Cuban citizenship, which he later gave up under special circumstances. What political tourism suggests is that internationalism or cosmopolitan practice requires a very complex negotiation of attachments to both international ideals and struggles and to more particular, often nation-based, collectivities. The affective dimensions of political tourism, then, are key to understanding how a cosmopolitical world view is put into practice. This link between affect and the achievement of a cosmopolitical ethos is an important dimension of the texts of political tourism as they become a medium for solidarity no longer bound to the site itself. To the extent that they engage their readers affectively with the far-off (or not so far-off) struggles they record, the writers of political tourist texts are engaged in forging what Robbins calls ‘a transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ (Feeling Global 16) that might help to produce the kind of ‘internationalist ethics of the everyday’ he calls for (23). The narrative acts of political tourists are about imagining ways of belonging in the world that are not easily contained by place and nation, but that recognize how sharply etched demarcations of inequality remain. The struggle of the political tourist to find an ethical way of manifesting solidarity in the face of such inequality offers the reader more than mere dramatic interest; it is, at least potentially, a way of keeping open the reader’s relationship to the struggle. We are invited to witness the struggle through the writer’s account of it, and we are at the same time witness to the writer’s performance of solidarity with his or her subjects and to the tensions and contradictions that beset that performance. ‘Genres,’ observes Fredric Jameson, ‘are essentially literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artefact’ (Political Unconscious 106). If one can, rather improbably,

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speak of political tourists’ texts as constituting a ‘genre,’ their proper use is arguably to extend the time and place of the tour so as to forge in their readers a ‘transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ that would embrace the transnational as the terrain of political engagement. I do not mean to suggest, simplistically, that reading political tourists’ texts leads in any automatic or self-evident way to action. Rather, I see these texts as presenting what Thomas Keenan calls ‘fables of responsibility.’ Responsibility, for Keenan, is less ‘a matter of articulating what is known with what is done’ than it is ‘when we do not know exactly what we should do, when the effects and conditions of our actions can no longer be calculated, and when we have nowhere else to turn, not even back onto our “self”’ (Fables of Responsibility 2). To the extent that the texts I consider here stage the writers’ struggles, in the face of their responsibilities to others, to know how to act, how to perform their solidarity, they do not foreclose upon the reader’s own sense of responsibility. As Keenan puts it, ‘Any political responsibility is nothing other than an experience of a certain encounter at the border, of a crossing and its irreducible difficulty, of the aporia and the no pasarán which mark all frontiers as structurally undecidable’ (12). These texts offer their readers that irreducibly difficult encounter at the border. The political tourists I study here all acted, to varying degrees, on what they knew. In Keenan’s terms, they undertook the responsibility that in Western ethico-political traditions links understanding with doing. In their texts, these same tourists represent their experiences in ways that make evident the ways those experiences are necessarily mediated. In this book, I read the texts of political tourism as ‘socially symbolic acts’ ( Jameson), as instances of the cultural practice of political tourism, which I understand as a commitment to social transformation projected across geopolitical divides and geographical distances. I read with a view to understanding the ways the political tourist as writer/intellectual is fre-

Introduction

17

quently caught up in the very imperial project of global power relations and subject-constitution she seeks to dismantle; in this sense the texts she produces are enacted against the horizon both of imperial narratives and of the anti-imperial struggle she seeks to join. Gayatri Spivak’s work is vital to this aspect of my project, concerned as she has been to theorize the relationship of Western intellectuals to non-Western ‘others.’ The political tourists I study are typically allied less with the subaltern than with traditional and organic intellectuals engaged in anti-imperial struggle in the name of the subaltern, but their texts remain inscribed by this politics of representation nonetheless. Because I am interested in what might enable the formation of a transnational subjectivity, I strive to be attentive to the affective dimensions of these travellers’ accounts of their touring, and in this regard I have found the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruce Robbins useful, as they attend – albeit in very different ways – to the Enlightenment theory of sentiments and its translations both outside the framework of European articulations of modernity and within. In taking account of the ways these tourists negotiate the boundaries they cross in their travels, I have tried to understand the impact on their performances of solidarity of their gendered and racialized embodiment. For thinking about the ways bodies matter and for thinking about solidarity as a kind of performance, I have found Judith Butler’s work particularly valuable. Finally, I have found Derrida’s work on genre useful for thinking about the formal boundaries political tourists both draw and cross in their texts, and his theorizing of the links between the lives lived, the texts, and the readers for whom both the lives and the texts resonate has been particularly helpful for thinking about the exemplary status of political tourists like Che Guevara. I have taken this somewhat eclectic approach to analysing the texts of political tourism out of a reluctance to confer on my object of study a dubious coherence that might obscure the elements of bricolage that the practice of political tourism entails.

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Cosmopolitanism Now The reawakened interest in cosmopolitanism among cultural critics and political philosophers is of relatively recent vintage, fuelled by the sharp increase in global migration in the last thirty to forty years and, more recently still, by the global political situation since 11 September 2001.6 The latter event in particular has added to the urgency with which many intellectuals are currently promoting cosmopolitanism. Certainly, recent global events inform Paul Gilroy’s calls for the development of a ‘planetary consciousness,’ and they serve equally as a warrant for Kwame Anthony Appiah’s most recent contribution, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Sympathetic as I am to many of these discussions, I also share some of the misgivings about the new cosmopolitanism that have been articulated by scholars like Craig Calhoun, Timothy Brennan, and Simon Gikandi, among others, who worry that cosmopolitanism ‘is a discourse centred in a Western view of the world’ (Calhoun 90) or, even more specifically, that it is one grounded in a U.S. view of the world (Brennan, ‘Cosmo-Theory’ 669). Indeed, David Simpson points out that ‘the statistically cosmopolitan list of the dead of 9/11 – some 70 nationalities ... has been displaced by the nationalization of the events as an attack on America and thus the invention of a solidly national self and an Islamic/terrorist other’ (151). The power of certain groups to shift the terms of the debate from cosmopolitanism to nationalism and back again as it suits their interests must give pause to any critic endeavouring to think about inter- or transnational affiliations and solidarities. Powerful economic and political interests can don whatever guise they choose. Writing before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Timothy Brennan contended that ‘cosmopolitanism [functions] as a relay for the center’s values, sublimating differences on grounds of understanding by way of a motive to export ideological products made to the measure of the world of saleable things’ (‘Cosmo-Theory’ 661). Brennan’s

Introduction

19

claims that those theorizing cosmopolitanism ought to be more reflexive about their role in producing ‘local’ ideological wares ‘for consumption as the world’ (661) are worth bearing in mind. Mindful as I am of the lessons to be learned from both current events and current debates, the cosmopolitical practice I am concerned with in much of my study predates by half a century or more the concerns of contemporary theorists of cosmopolitanism. This is not to say there are no connections. In fact, the often uncanny echoes across the decades in invocations of cosmopolitanism by the leaders of imperial powers to legitimize their international interventions suggests nothing so much as the value of looking to earlier moments. Paul Gilroy juxtaposes speeches made by Joseph Chamberlain at a Royal Colonial Institute dinner in 1897 and by Tony Blair in October of 2001 to demonstrate how much ‘Britain’s new liberal and cosmopolitan mission in the world’ borrows from the ‘messianic civilizationism’ that animated Chamberlain a century earlier (Postcolonial Melancholia 61, 60). Political tourism is necessarily implicated in cosmopolitanism’s imperial tendencies, particularly when the tourists in question emanate from imperial centres. In striving to be anti-imperialist, political tourists frequently find themselves confronting the aporia between cosmopolitan ideals and the conditions that enable actually existing cosmopolitanisms. Yet appeals to a cosmopolitan ethos have not been the exclusive preserve of Western nation-states. The struggles with which the political tourists in my study engaged frequently appealed to the notion of a universal humanity, to universal human rights, and to ethical obligations to other human beings irrespective of national or ethnic origin as warrant for anti-imperialist and even nationalist struggles, and reached beyond the territorial, ethnic, and religious boundaries associated with nation to advance their causes. In fact, these struggles arguably offer a reshaping of Eurocentric conceptions of human rights, even as they also invoke a global framework. Paul Gilroy argues, for instance, that the Pan-African

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politics of W.E.B. DuBois is informed by a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ (34), a vision of an end to racist oppression worldwide that is evident in DuBois’s call to participation in the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911: The congress is the meeting of the World on a broad plane of human respect and equality. In no other way is human understanding and world peace and progress possible ... Only then in a worldwide contact of men in which the voices of all races are heard shall we begin that contact and sympathy which in God’s time will bring out of war and hatred and prejudice a real democracy of races and nations ... Not only a tolerance of the Chinese and Hindus on the part of Europeans, but just as necessary comprehension of European thought and morality on the part of millions of darker peoples, who have slight cause to view it with respect. We may sympathize with world-wide efforts for moral reform and social uplift, but before them all we must place those efforts which aim to make humanity not the attribute of the arrogant and the exclusive, but the heritage of all men in the world where most men are colored. (qtd in Gilroy 38)7

More than an endorsement of the need for international collaboration among African and African-descended peoples, this article envisions a unique role for people of colour in the struggle for democracy, peace, and something like ‘world citizenship.’ Studies of black internationalism by scholars such as Robin D.G. Kelley and Sidney Lemelle and Brent Hayes Edwards confirm that there are alternative practices and sites of cosmopolitanism than those bound up with Europe or the United States. Similarly, if the Chinese social radicalism associated with the New Culture and May Fourth movements engaged creatively with Enlightenment thought in order to address its social problems, and thus apparently and problematically reintroduced a European referent for cosmopolitanism, China’s world view was cer-

Introduction

21

tainly not limited to that framework. Arif Dirlik contends that Chinese intellectuals understood their social problems within a global framework. Consequently, argues Dirlik, ‘distinctions were blurred between the problems of China and those of other societies around the globe, a blurring which came easily to a generation nourished on the ideological cosmopolitanism of the New Culture Movement. Global problems were China’s national problems, and China’s national problems were global problems, all of them rooted in the capitalist world system’ (8–9). Vera Schwarcz also characterizes the May Fourth intellectuals as ‘cosmopolitan by temperament and nationalist revolutionaries by vocation’ (9), confirming the notion that the ethos informing the Chinese revolutionary movements, including the Communist movement, was one that opened out onto the world.8 Dirlik argues that the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 occasioned a ‘reorganization of the May Fourth legacy’ such that Chinese socialists ‘were unable ... to sustain either the personal relationships that had once held them together, or the universalistic humanitarianism of May Fourth ideology that had hitherto countered the tensions in their eclectic socialism’ (12). Yet Zhou Enlai would, some decades later at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, include among the seven principles he wished the conference to consider those of racial equality and non-discrimination and the equality of all nations, and China was signatory to the Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, which indicated the support of the conference for ‘the fundamental principles of Human Rights as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations’ (in Kahin 80).9 The Bandung Conference, as it has come to be known, significantly married the support of the twenty-nine participating countries for these universal principles with an explicitly anti-colonial agenda, ‘declaring that colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end’ (in Kahin 81). Indeed the endorsement of human rights is explicitly linked to a

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repudiation of colonialism in the language of the communiqué: colonial and racist policies in Africa and elsewhere are described as ‘not only a gross violation of human rights, but also a denial of the fundamental values of civilisation and the dignity of man’ (in Kahin 81). Anouar Abdel-Malek characterizes Bandung as ‘the first blueprint for solidarity between the colonized countries’ (108) of Africa and Asia. It is hardly surprising that this conference should have attracted an important political tourist, namely Richard Wright, who characterized the gathering in The Color Curtain as ‘the human race speaking’ (15).10 For Robert Young, the Bandung Conference of 1955 marks ‘a foundational moment for postcolonialism’ (191) and a presage of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966, which not only added Latin America to the other continents of the South, but offered a more explicitly radical and socialist response to the economic dependence of the countries of the South created by imperialism. Although Che Guevara was already in Bolivia at the time of the Havana conference, the Tricontinental was clearly influenced by his theorizing and by his practice – his emphasis on internationalism, on the need to ‘feel as an affront to ourselves every aggression, every insult, every act against human dignity and against man’s happiness anywhere in the world’ (‘Building’ 195). Guevara’s articulation of this fundamental principle of solidarity effectively endorses much of the political tourism subsequently conducted in his name. His ‘Message to the Tricontinental’ calls for those interpellated by this internationalist sentiment to act upon it: Let the flag under which we fight be the sacred cause of the liberation of humanity, so that to die under the colors of Vietnam, Venezuela, Guatemala, Laos, Guinea, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil – to mention only the current scenes of armed struggle – will be equally glorious and desirable for a Latin American, an Asian, an African, and even a European. (‘Create Two, Three’ 360)

Irrespective of national origin, and irrespective of the location of

Introduction

23

struggle, those who believe in human dignity are called to join the struggle, to take up arms if necessary. That such anti-imperial, anti-racist struggles as these should manifest what may be read as a cosmopolitan imaginary does not automatically exempt cosmopolitan discourse of unsavoury associations. Guevara’s rather grudging acknowledgment of the desirability of European participation in his vision of internationalist struggle is itself a signal that some alliances are more fraught than others. Nor is it necessarily the case that a cosmopolitan ethos, an internationalist discourse, was proof against internal acts of exclusion or repression. None of these struggles was pure, or exempt from contradictions of its own.11 What I have been trying to show, however, is that anti-imperialists frequently found enabling many of the assumptions that inform contemporary cosmopolitical thinking and that one can locate this sort of thinking outside of the temporal and geopolitical frameworks inhabited by contemporary cultural critics engaging with the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism. Situating the Political Tourist Gaze One way of thinking about what distinguishes political tourists from so-called ‘rootless’ cosmopolitans is that while they think, feel, and act beyond the nation, to paraphrase Robbins, while they clearly also identify beyond the boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, they also participate in national liberation struggles and manifest solidarity in ways that entail very particular ties with a given polity or community within a polity. Arguing that ‘we need to pay attention to the social contexts in which people are moved by commitments to each other,’ Craig Calhoun observes that the ‘cosmopolitanism that does so will be variously articulated with locality, community and tradition, and not simply as a matter of common denominators. It will depend to a very large extent on local and particularistic border crossings and pluralisms, not universalism’ (92). A study of political tourism represents an oppor-

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tunity to consider one kind of social context ‘in which people are moved by their commitments to each other’ or, in some instances, confront the challenges of making those sorts of commitments. In considering, through a series of case studies, several instances of ‘local and particularistic border crossings’ by political tourists, I argue for the value of this sort of cosmopolitanism, even as my case studies furnish considerable evidence of just how difficult it is to achieve. I strive, in this study, to keep front and centre the situatedness of political tourists, who carry with them the nationalities, the racialized and gendered bodies, indeed the ‘rights-bearing bodies,’ to borrow Paul Gilroy’s phrase, that belie any sense that the perspectives they register in their texts represent a ‘view from nowhere.’ The situated gaze of the political tourist represents a very different cosmopolitanism from those Craig Calhoun characterizes as offering ‘a view from Brussels (where the post-national is identified with the strength of the EU rather than the weakness of, say, African states), or from Davos (where the post-national is corporate), or from the university (where the illusion of a free-floating intelligentsia is supported by the relatively fluid exchange of ideas across national borders)’ (90). Instead, the gaze of the political tourist refracts, if it does not manage to reflect, the view from the struggle, even as it can itself be located in geopolitical and social terms by its plural loyalties and affiliations. At the same time, political tourism is engaged with what Etienne Balibar has named ideal universality, a universality, he suggests, ‘which is intrinsically linked with the notion of insurrection, in the broad sense’ insofar as ‘“insurgents” are those who collectively rebel against domination in the name of freedom and equality’ (64). Bound up with narratives of emancipation and ‘introduc[ing] the notion of the unconditional into the realm of politics’ (65), ideal universality is also ideal by virtue of being ‘continuously displaced in history’ (66–7). This insurrectional universality clearly animates both political tourists and the struggles they travel to join, even as its relationship to the real universality – a pro-

Introduction

25

cess of ‘multiplying the interdependencies,’ riven by inequalities, between economic, political and cultural spheres, that tends toward the creation of ‘a single “world”’ – that is the terrain of political tourists’ acts of solidarity remains, as Balibar puts it, aporetic (69). Arguably, many of the contradictions that beset the political tourists I study derive from this aporetic relationship between these inseparable yet ‘irreducible’ realms of universality. The ways that they contend, or fail to contend, with such contradictions is consequently instructive. As a way of knowing the world, political tourism struggles against many of the tropes historically associated with discourses of travel.12 The practice and writing of political tourism, as the late modern counterpoint to epistemological validations of ideological detachment, critical distance, and idealist transcendence, offer a means of rethinking the relationship of writing to politics and, perhaps more importantly, an opportunity for rethinking what may serve as the ground for political commitment. Political tourists, as I have already indicated, pursue attachment, critical engagement, and an emancipatory idealism. Yet because the kind of engagement they seek is transnational, many of the usual grounds for commitment are destabilized. Aijaz Ahmad, among others, regards with suspicion what he takes to be the detachment of cosmopolitan postcolonial intellectuals from filiation, ‘a sense of place, belonging, of some stable commitment to one’s class or gender or nation [that] may be useful for defining one’s politics’ (‘Politics’ 14). But the very notion that class, gender, or nation constitutes a stable ground is challenged by the practice of political tourism. On the contrary, political tourism strives for commitment where social categories such as class, gender, and nation are revealed to be the most unstable, however powerfully they are wielded as mechanisms of control. Political Tourists with Typewriters Several themes emerge from the individual case studies, some of

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which I have touched on already. Perhaps the most important has to do with the possibilities for realizing what, following Peter Hulme, I will call ‘postcolonial allegories of globality’ (41). That is to say, against the grain of an imperial vision of the globe, a ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ perspective, political tourists pursue a kind of insurgent universality that rejects subordination and exploitation and aims for emancipation on a broadly human scale. In this respect, political tourists are ‘vernacular’ or ‘vulgar’ cosmopolitans. Another, related theme has to do with the need to conceive of modernity as a particular cultural imaginary, one that is produced through the differences and inequalities between East and West, North and South. As much as political tourism remains bound to the emancipatory narratives of European modernity, in practice solidarities demand different social and political relationships that relocate Eurocentric discourses of modernity, ‘decomposing’ the historical narrative of development13 and confronting Europe with modernity’s other face(s).14 In the process of rehearsing specifically located solidarities, political tourists are compelled to engage in new practices of the self, yet another thread running through these cases. As tourists move across the boundaries of cultural difference, apparently fixed markers of social location, of belonging and attachment, shift. Gender, race, sexuality, nationality come to mean differently, indeed, have to be negotiated all over again. In the process, new terms for belonging are worked out, or the impediments to belonging confronted, and in the process the affective dimensions of the political tourist experience come to the fore. I begin by addressing the colonial legacy of cosmopolitanism in a chapter that focuses on Nancy Cunard’s travels and writing during the making of her Negro anthology. Rob Wilson points out that ‘almost any use of “cosmopolitan” implies ... some embedded geopolitical allegory, a world mapping of contradictory locations and multiple flights from and/or toward the territory/positioning of the local (nation) and the world-cultural center (cosmos)’ (352).

Introduction

27

In this way, cosmopolitanism reveals its status as a trope of colonial modernity. In the early 1930s Cunard travelled to Harlem and the Caribbean to collect materials for her anthology. In her contributions to the anthology, in a pamphlet she published several months after her first trip to Harlem, and in her scrapbooks and souvenir photographs, Cunard is inclined to situate herself outside of race and class, thereby slipping into the position of the invisible, panoptic viewer, a position complicit with imperialism. Yet as her texts also reveal, in her repeated crossing of race, class, and gender boundaries as well as international borders, Cunard opened herself to experiences that challenged that panoptic stance, that resituated the tourist gaze. In the records of her travels, Cunard makes a discernible effort to transform herself from daughter of Empire to partisan in the cause for racial justice, but in becoming partisan Cunard is also anxious to erase the social and political boundaries that hinder her transformation. The ‘sex scandal’ at the heart of imperial discourse marks Cunard’s political journey but is subsumed in her writing by the binary of black and white. Unable, in the context of her project, to do away with racial difference, Cunard is silent on the subject of gender as a means of effacing her implication in the imperialist discourses she is striving to refute and disown. In the second chapter I focus on the performative character of political tourism and, by implication, on the historically specific discursive and material conditions that characterize any act of solidarity. I argue that in their contribution to 1930s war reportage, Auden and Isherwood perform a kind of revolutionary drag, critiquing the pretensions and limitations of Western intellectuals like themselves, while insisting, at least obliquely, on the value of bearing witness. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of drag as ‘constitut[ing] the mundane way in which all genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done’ (‘Imitation’ 21), I suggest that in Journey to a War Auden and Isherwood exploit the performative character of revolution in order to raise some disturbing

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questions about participating in a struggle that is ostensibly not their own, whatever ideological affinities they might feel for those waging resistance against fascism and imperialism. Butler’s theorizing of drag also offers a way to think about the affective engagement with political ideology and cultural difference that characterizes political tourism, insofar as taking on particular roles in solidarity with a cause constitutes the sojourner as the subject of political tourism, much as we impersonate gender roles in the formation of our gendered subjectivity. In effect, Journey to a War queers the political tourist discourse on Spain, the obvious destination for political tourists in the late 1930s and a constant reference point for these writers in their account of their trip to China, both literally – through what Butler would term Auden’s and Isherwood’s ‘necessary drag’ – and metaphorically, by reinscribing the dominant conventions of solidarity in such a way as to register Auden’s and Isherwood’s ambivalence about their capacity to ‘be’ political tourists. Journey to a War is concerned with exploring the impediments to commitment and participation, with performing the ‘category crisis’ prompted by the idea of the political tourist, the committed intellectual crossing class, race, or national boundaries in the service of a political struggle. In the third chapter on Agnes Smedley’s writing on China during the Sino-Japanese War and leading up to the Communist revolution, I take up the question of universality and the ‘difficult labor of translation’ (Butler, ‘Universality’ 52) that extending an ‘ideal universality’ (Balibar) entails when universalist goals paradoxically confront the limits of the particularist conditions for their articulation. I focus in particular on Battle Hymn of China, which retrospectively records Smedley’s travels through China from 1928 to 1941. In this book, Smedley constructs her role in China as that of witness to suffering, a role that Dipesh Chakrabarty argues defines modern subjectivity. I argue that in Smedley’s text, this modern (Western) subject position undergoes a kind of translation, which enables Smedley repeatedly to call into ques-

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tion the truth claims of documentary and reportage, ostensibly the forms of her own work. In her capacity as witness to suffering, Smedley chafes at the subject-position of disembodied observer – the detached cosmopolitan? – even as it offers her the possibility of social intervention and, paradoxically, of identification. In an effort to resolve these tensions, Smedley strives to represent China by presenting herself as facilitator of ‘speaking bitterness’ narratives, a form that, by means of articulating a relationship to suffering and by making suffering meaningful, came to have a particular role to play in the construction of Chinese modernity and in the constitution of modern Chinese subjects. In Smedley’s writing of her relationship to China one can perceive an attempt to arrive at a different practice of the self – one that is inter-subjective and that thereby extends and revises the languages of European modernity. In chapter four I analyse the uses made of Che Guevara’s image – by which I mean both literal images of Guevara on posters, tshirts, and postcards and the symbolic power of his revolutionary life – alongside his self-representation in his earliest travel diaries, The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road, and in his account of another kind of journey, that of becoming a revolutionary in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. I am interested in the intersections between the motivations of contemporary political tourists and Che’s own narrative. Given that the particular social experience sought by the political tourist is the experience of social change and transformation, Che Guevara may be seen as the paradigmatic political tourist. More importantly, in bringing together Che’s own travel writing with accounts of travel conducted in his name, I think it is possible to take account of the value of utopian endeavours like revolution at a historical juncture when, as Néstor García Canclini puts it, we are told ‘the philosophies of postmodernity disqualify the cultural movements that promise utopias and foster progress’ (1). I focus on the tension within political tourism between veneration and transformation,

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and in tracing this tension in Guevara’s own writing as well as in relation to his status as object of political tourism, particularly in Latin America, I am able to confront another dimension of the colonial history of cosmopolitanism. To the extent that the emancipatory narratives of the Enlightenment mask a profoundly Eurocentric conceit about who the bearer of historical agency might be (see Dussel), Guevara’s enactment of revolutionary transformation and his iconic association with anti-imperialist as well as anticapitalist struggle present a crucially important instance of the way political tourism may intervene in such false universalism, even as it relies on and, to some degree, reproduces versions of these same emancipatory narratives. Given the centrality of the phenomenon of mass migration to the new cosmopolitanism, it is important to consider its impact on political tourists. In chapter five I ask how a transnational imaginary informed by an awareness, if not necessarily direct experience, of the cross-border traffic of refugees, migrant labourers, aid workers, immigrants, peacekeepers, and asylum seekers either enables or forecloses upon the acts of international solidarity that impel political tourists across the globe. To consider some of the implications of this problem, I examine the persona Salman Rushdie creates for himself in The Jaguar Smile, a book he wrote about his three-week sojourn in Nicaragua in 1986, against the ways he has been constructed as author within postcolonial studies and in the international public sphere since the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. This chapter thus also addresses the relationship between cosmopolitanism and postcolonial studies. Few contemporary writers can be more associated with metaphors of migrancy, travel, and displacement than Rushdie, and Rushdie’s ambivalent identification with the Sandinistas turns on a reading of the revolution as a kind of migration ‘home’ for Nicaraguans. Rushdie’s projection of what I call the migrant’s gaze on those he encounters in Nicaragua, his inhabiting of the role of postcolonial migrant during his sojourn, may be read as a self-consciously sub-

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versive strategy on his part, but Rushdie nonetheless fails to make his gesture of solidarity stick. A cosmopolitan of the more conventional sort, Rushdie is clearly uncomfortable with the degree and kind of attachment that transnational solidarity work entails. Feminism, in its transformation of gender identities and gender roles, in its enactment of the ‘performative contradiction’ (Butler, ‘Universality’ 47) required to claim rights and citizenship within a universalist framework that nonetheless excluded women, has historically found it necessary to forge solidarities across national boundaries. In this respect feminism may be regarded as one of the more long-standing cosmopolitanisms, and if it is exemplary in some respects, it also historically reproduced many of the imperial gestures associated with the cosmopolitanism emerging from the Enlightenment. In chapter six I consider the work of three feminists whose political tourism was motivated, at least in part, by their feminism. Beginning with the necessary acknowledgment that feminism is hardly free of asymmetrical power relations, and that first-world feminists have a rather dubious track record when it comes to working in the global South, I argue that with varying degrees of success Adrienne Rich, Margaret Randall, and Rebecca Gordon manage to devise a transnational feminist practice that approaches what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has called ‘feminism without borders,’ which is founded on the principles of decolonization, anti-capitalist critique, and solidarity. I begin by looking at the essays from Rich’s collection Blood, Bread and Poetry that reveal the influence of Rich’s 1983 trip to Nicaragua on her developing understanding of a feminist ‘politics of location,’ before moving to an extended discussion of Margaret Randall’s sojourn in Nicaragua, especially her testimonio work and two books in particular, Sandino’s Daughters and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited. I then turn to a reading of Rebecca Gordon’s epistolary account of the six months she spent in Nicaragua in 1986, Letters from Nicaragua. I also consider the impact of genres such as testimonio and letters on the readers of Randall’s and Gordon’s political tourism texts.

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In the Epilogue I address the implications of reading these accounts of political tourism now. I do so in part by considering current political tourism in Chiapas, Mexico, and in Palestine and by looking at the role the Internet has played in circulating political tourist texts. In effect, political tourists come into being through the material and discursive effects of their touring and their practising of solidarity. In this way, then, one might read Scott Malcomson’s contention that ‘the extension of cosmopolitan ethical practice ... will come from the non-Western world, which is today the more natural forcing ground of cosmopolitanism’ (241) as confirmation that the cosmopolitanism of political tourists, to the extent that they achieve it, is an artefact of their particular(ist) border-crossings, of their loyalties to a specific struggle, of their affiliation to a given community. This sort of cosmopolitanism, in other words, is achieved in the process of transnational acts of solidarity. It is not merely a world view emanating from a ‘world-cultural center’ (Wilson 352) which is borne by travellers to the ‘peripheries’ they visit. This cosmopolitanism entails a revised spatial imaginary, and a revised sense of what cosmopolitical practice looks like.

CHAPTER ONE

Cunard’s Lines: Political Touring and the Making of the Negro Anthology

During the making of the Negro anthology, a project meant to record ‘the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them, of the Negro peoples’(xxxi), Nancy Cunard travelled to Harlem and the Caribbean. I argue that the texts she produced around these struggles can be read as a kind of political tourism, not because her writing fits the category of travel literature, but because it exhibits the ambivalence1 of the tourist’s gaze even as it claims partisanship in the causes it strives to represent. The angle afforded by the concept of political tourism makes it possible to re-map Cunard’s relation to her subject matter: her travels and her writing become records of the processes of identification and political affect produced through the articulation of cultural difference. If tourism may be understood as both movement through, and the (re)production of, arenas of social and cultural difference, it also necessarily entails a staging of self in relation to Other(s). For Cunard, who is endeavouring to speak from a place outside of imperial constructions of whiteness in her political identification with black struggles, that staging of self is particularly vexed, for it is here that she continually risks a rehearsal of the imperial script. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, ‘no perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically

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refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self’ (‘Three Women’s Texts’ 253). An outsider striving for insider status, Cunard continually remakes her identity at the expense of the Other she seeks to represent. If she did not always escape the racist paradigms she sought to undermine, her anti-racism must nevertheless be regarded as remarkable in a period with such entrenched political, economic, and scientific support for racist discourses. The great-granddaughter of the founder of the Cunard shipping lines, she spent much of her life resisting that imperial inheritance. Notes for a projected autobiography invoke what has become the mantra of cultural politics: ‘When of SELF writing: Re the three main things. 1. Equality of races 2. of sexes 3. of classes.’2 Despite the suggestion that race, sex, and class are central to her self-conception, however, in the texts she published over a lifetime, race tended to mean black, class tended to mean working-class, and the third term, sex, rarely made an appearance. In situating herself outside of race and class, Cunard slips into the position of the invisible, panoptic viewer, a position complicit with imperialism. Yet as a tourist who repeatedly crosses race, class, and gender boundaries as well as international borders, Cunard opens herself to experiences that challenge the panoptic stance. The materiality of travel compels a situating of the knowing subject. In this respect, Cunard’s particular silences are telling and may take us some way toward understanding the ambivalence of her gaze as a political tourist. The making of the Negro anthology, arguably Cunard’s most important work, entails most substantively and spectacularly the negotiation of multiple social and geopolitical boundaries. The anthology effectively presents a version of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed the Black Atlantic through its assemblage of contributions by and about blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. That is to say, multiple histo-

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ries and varied constructions of blackness are in evidence. Organized into regional categories, the contributions to the anthology place specific histories of the black diaspora in tension with a European tendency to construct a monolithic notion of blackness as the principle of racial difference. In her travels, her research, her correspondence with contributors, Cunard would have come up against the vicissitudes of racial identification, learning not only about blackness but about whiteness as well, living the tension reproduced in the anthology. As an outsider determined to take a stand on issues that need not have affected her directly, she continually stepped beyond established boundaries and hence continually experienced those boundaries, shifting, unstable, yet inevitably present. In the records of her travels Cunard makes a discernible effort to transform herself from daughter of Empire to partisan in the cause for racial justice, but in becoming partisan Cunard is anxious to erase the social and political boundaries that hinder her transformation. The boundaries Cunard encountered in her travels were not only racialized, but gendered. The ‘sex scandal’ at the heart of imperial discourse marks Cunard’s political journey but is subsumed in her writing by the binary of black and white. Unable to do away with racial difference, Cunard is silent on the subject of gender as a means of effacing her implication in the imperialist discourses she is striving to refute and disown. In this way, her silence about gender comes to be a silence about whiteness, even when she seems to be taking her whiteness into account. Like the repressed that must return, the gender lacuna in effect comes to operate as an aporia in Cunard’s writing on race, persistently undermining her efforts to speak from a place outside of imperialist discourse. Vron Ware asks ‘whether whiteness, as a racialized category, can ever be redeemed from centuries of association with domination’ (‘Defining Forces’ 144). She answers in the negative by proposing, following David Roediger, the ‘abolition’ of whiteness. Whiteness here refers to the reproduction of social patterns that shore up

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domination: ‘I believe it is more radical to reject whiteness and its privileges as far as possible. This means a political choice not to identify with whiteness, to repudiate whiteness as an ontological category, and to refuse to act white’ (144). The effort to ‘reject whiteness and its privileges’ is one way of summing up what the Negro project meant for Cunard. The story of the anthology’s making is, in part, the story of the difficulty of throwing off racial and class privilege, since Cunard’s efforts to speak from outside of imperialism risk reinstating privilege. I must question the adequacy of repudiating whiteness as ontology when an anti-racist stance can nonetheless hypostatize racial constructs; the dynamics of race and racism call for an analysis of the mechanisms that (re)produce racial ontologies. To the extent that Cunard’s travels represent a series of negotiations of self and other, the texts she produced may be mined for their reproduction, not only of relations of dominance, but of the contestations of Cunard’s privilege that are made manifest in the very processes of political identification. Overdetermined by race, gender cuts both ways. In articulation with whiteness and upper-class privilege, gender is embedded in imperial narratives and, particularly when invisible, reproduces patterns of domination. At the same time, Cunard’s deviation from her assigned (gender) role through her involvement in anti-racist struggles opens her to disciplinary actions from within imperial discourse. Striving to speak from outside whiteness meant, for Cunard, trying to speak from outside gender as well. In reading Cunard’s anthology as the text of her political tourism, I aim to brush her story against the grain for what it teaches us about the ways whiteness may unwittingly be reinvented in explicitly and avowedly anti-racist work, and about the role gender plays in that reinvention. At stake is an understanding of some of the impediments to Cunard’s solidarity with black internationalism in the 1930s and a recognition of what she nonetheless managed to accomplish in that direction.

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The Tourist Gaze: Negro as Commodity Spectacle Anne McClintock has remarked of Olive Schreiner: ‘At odds with her imperial world, she was at times the most colonial of writers. Startlingly advanced in her anti-racism and political analysis, she could fall on occasion into the most familiar racial stereotypes’ (259). One could very easily say the same of Nancy Cunard. The ambivalence of Cunard’s gaze as a political tourist bears the traces of the imperial project she is striving to critique, and this ambivalence marks the anthology itself. Negro is at once the work of a privileged European woman, with all of her historically overdetermined relations to her subject matter, and a collection of materials that present a resounding challenge to the very foundations of racist imperial discourse. The anthology’s mammoth size and allencompassing range, its Borgesian Chinese-encyclopedia scheme of classification – America, Poetry, Africa, Negro Stars, the West Indies, African sculpture, and Music – seem unwittingly to betray the presumption that all facets of black culture can be contained and sold in one handsomely produced commodity, a panoptical exhibition of the African diaspora between two covers. Yet who would buy such a commodity only to be faced with contents too troubling to be easily consumed by Europeans with a voguish fascination for things primitive? Cunard herself refers to the contents of the anthology as a ‘panorama’ in her foreword, making a claim for the comprehensive scope of Negro and suggesting the reader is about to enter what Anne McClintock has referred to as ‘panoptical time’ where one is offered ‘the image of global history consumed – at a glance – in a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility’ (37). The original panorama, or cyclorama, was patented by Robert Barker in 1796. The spectator was positioned in the centre of a cylinder, the interior of which was painted with a landscape or other scene. By the mid-nineteenth century, the device was popular as a means

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of displaying scenes from Empire. If conceived as the spectacular equivalent to the literary trope ‘the-monarch-of-all-I-survey’ that pervades imperial travel literature (Pratt, Imperial Eyes 201), the panorama’s role in purveying European dominance and authority becomes clear. The verbal painting Pratt discusses not only represents ‘exotic’ landscapes from and for a distinctively European perspective, but enacts a rhetorical claim to heroic discovery that had to do with translating a foreign scene into something of significance for European readers (202). In characterizing the contents of the anthology as a panorama, Cunard presents the European reader with a spectacle that reinforces the privilege of those in a position to enjoy the panoptical stance. She thus makes possible the consumption of the anthology as commodity spectacle. At the same time, it is important to recognize that Cunard was directing her anthology to a different audience: ‘It is primarily for the Coloured people,’ she wrote in a circular about the anthology project.3 This latter audience compels a re-situating of Cunard’s tourist gaze. In the anthology’s reproduction of the imperial panorama, what I have been referring to as Cunard’s tourist gaze becomes perceptible. The tourist gaze is a mode of apprehension that signals movement through public spaces where individuals gaze upon others and are themselves in turn recipients of other gazes, and where both the spaces for gazing and the nature of the gaze are socially constructed. John Urry, from whom I have borrowed the term, associates the development of mass tourism with new modes of seeing and with the development of photography in Europe in the nineteenth century (The Tourist Gaze 136). Arguing that urban reconstruction, paradigmatically in Haussmann’s Paris, significantly transformed European ways of seeing, Urry identifies the flâneur as a ‘forerunner of the twentieth-century tourist and in particular of the activity which has in a way become emblematic of the tourist: the democratized taking of photographs – of being seen and recorded and seeing others and

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recording them’ (138). John Berger and Allan Sekula, among others, have traced photography’s relationship with surveillance strategies and the history of modernity. Photography can be fairly readily associated with ‘those other panoptic Victorian phenomena – the exhibition, the museum, the zoo, the gallery, the circus – all of which involve the fetishistic principle of collection and display’ (McClintock 123). As a technology whose centrality to European industrial capitalism bespeaks its intimate relation to the new ways of seeing Urry discusses (Berger, About Looking 48), photography becomes at once a metaphor and a tool for Eurocentric epistemologies. If the camera is the quintessential marker of the twentieth-century tourist, it signals the imbrication of the tourist in discourses of social control, and the tourist is wittingly or unwittingly conscripted into a kind of geopolitical police work. Yet it is important not to take the camera as a metonym for the tourist; pace Urry, tourists exceed their gazes, and in that excess lies the potential for disrupting domination. A given tourist may, by virtue of her gender or her political identifications, insert herself only partially and reluctantly into established ways of seeing; may encounter in her travels political, material, and physical impediments to the task of representation; may find herself disconcertingly transformed into the object of a gaze that refuses assimilation. In rendering unstable the tourist’s gaze, these features of travel provide a means of challenging the Eurocentric epistemologies that mark Cunard’s work and threaten to undermine her anti-imperialist agenda. An important dimension of the tourist gaze, as I am using the term, is the history of European travel in colonized lands, where the tourist’s gaze is structured by established patterns of racial, gender, and politico-economic dominance. To return, for a moment, to Pratt’s trope ‘the-monarch-of-all-I-survey.’ In focusing on these textual claims to ‘discovery,’ Pratt traces a peculiarity of this sort of travel, and that is the extent to which it relied on textual instantiation for authority. Only once recorded as maps, travel

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books, diaries, and so forth did the ‘discoveries’ have any substance or currency (Imperial Eyes 204). Validation comes from the Empire, through its discourses and technologies; unless the travels are ‘seen’ by European eyes, they have not happened. Yet as Pratt points out, the heroic dimensions of travel lie less in rhetorical firsts than in ‘the overcoming of all the geographical, material, logistical, and political barriers to the physical and official presence of Europeans in places such as Central Africa’ (202). The latter are displaced by the elevation of scenes that reproduce ‘the-monarch-of-all-I-survey’ where the European traveller is fully in control. In negotiating barriers to European presence, the traveller experiences the contestation or even lack of control; ideologically inadmissible, these experiences recede into the background. Why not then focus on those extra- (in the sense of additional rather than outside) textual moments where the European traveller loses control, where the gaze is returned? This is not to deny that experiences of travel are shaped by established social structures and ways of seeing, but it is to acknowledge that not only tourists see and that bodies travel too. Among the snapshots Cunard took while collecting materials in the Caribbean for the anthology is one of a group of boys clustered around the photographer in the middle of a dirt road. On the back is the inscription ‘Cuba, San José, 1932’ (figure 1.1). The photo appears in the anthology together with essays on ‘Racial prejudice’ and ‘Negro workers starving’ in Cuba, its relationship to the subject matter of the essays apparently dictated only by their common ties to place and to race. Three different lines of sight are visible in this photograph: Cunard’s, her subjects’, and an audience to the spectacle of the photo session itself. It is quite apparent that Cunard herself is the object of scrutiny as much as the boys, the subject matter of her photograph. This is due not so much to the gazes of the boys themselves, but to the men, in the background of the photograph, looking on the scene of the photograph/er from the sidewalk. Largely because of this latter line of

1.1 Cuba, San José 1932.

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sight, Cunard is herself made present in the scene she is capturing on film, and her activity is unwittingly recorded along with her intended subject matter. The boys crowd into the bottom of the frame, looking up into the camera held by the tall woman who stands over them; the men who watch from the sidewalk, from the background of the snap, slip into the top of the frame as though unnoticed by the photographer who is intent on her subject. One of the boys stands in a boxer’s pose as if offering to fight; one frowns, the others gaze quizzically at this woman with the camera. Photographer and subject are in the street, an unpaved roadway of dirt and grass and stones. The men on the paved sidewalk with its protective veranda-like overhang, appear, for the most part, to be going about their business, entering, leaving, or loitering near the various places of business along the sidewalk; several, however, have paused to witness the scene in the street. It remains to take account of a fourth line of sight, not visible in the photograph itself, but central for all that. I am referring to that of the viewer, the person looking at the snap. She is (I am), of course, in the position of the photographer looking through the camera lens, as is necessarily the viewer of any photograph. But she is in this case also behind or to one side of the photographer, as Cunard herself has implicitly become visible in this photograph. She has the illusion of seeing what Cunard seems not to notice in the act of taking the photograph – the audience at the top of the frame. She has the illusion of seeing more, seeing better than the photographer, of seeing what usually lies outside of the scene in a photograph, the scene of the photograph. The lines of sight visible in this photograph (together with the line of sight that is not visible) offer a representation of the relationship between Cunard as political tourist and the ‘material’ she collected for her anthology. Not only do these subjects refuse passivity – the young boy with the raised fists performs a very different response to the European traveller than that conventionally represented in tourist literature – but the men for whom Cunard is a spectacle belie the

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conventional wisdom that the tourist is the only spectator in such encounters. The ambivalence of Cunard’s gaze can itself be held up to scrutiny, and from two angles – from that of the audience in the photograph and from that of the viewer of the photograph. What we see is that Cunard’s privilege does not go unchallenged, either by her subject or by the witnesses to the scene. The possibility of challenging Cunard’s authority lies in keeping in view the situatedness of her gaze, and the limits placed on it, even – or perhaps especially – where the records of her travels remain silent on this score. To the extent that this photograph makes visible the scene of the photograph, it retains the trace of its production and gestures toward the conditions of production. It carries, in an even more obvious way than any photograph or other text, the signature of the photographer/author. To borrow the language of Benveniste, the trace of the act of utterance (énonciation) is perceptible in the utterance (énoncé ) itself. I think it is possible to understand Cunard’s tourist gaze in these terms as well: the gaze that is perceptible in the anthology is the utterance that bears the trace of its conditions of production, its enunciation, the act of gazing (speaking, writing, representing). The body that bears the gaze and that is always situated in a specific context can be understood as the materiality of the gaze. At the same time, the enunciation, the act of gazing, (the body itself) is itself always already enunciated. The fundamental instability of the utterance (and of enunciation as énoncé ) – its vulnerability to contestation, to alternative utterances – provides the scope for challenging the reproduction of dominance associated with tourist gazes and with constructions of racial identity. The conditions for Cunard’s utterances, her representations of the black diaspora in the anthology, are rendered unstable, are continually subject to contestation through her travels, where blackness and whiteness shift, and where she is repeatedly ‘put in her place,’ as white woman, as outsider, as tourist, whenever she tries to step out of it. In my reading of Cunard’s

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texts, I will strive to keep in view the extra-textual challenges to Cunard’s tourist gaze, to focus on what we may think of as the embodiment of her gaze, for it is here that Cunard negotiates cultural difference and performs the processes of identification that both enable political engagement and risk foreclosing it. Against the Grain: Cunard’s Tours and Their Texts Nancy Cunard travelled to Harlem for the first time in 1931. She was accompanied by Henry Crowder, the African-American jazz musician she had met and initiated an affair with in Venice three years earlier. During this brief initial visit of a month’s duration, Cunard met several of the key Harlem Renaissance writers and intellectuals with whom she began corresponding and from whom she solicited contributions for her anthology. Her description of Harlem in one of the essays she contributed to the anthology is part travelogue, part ethnography, and part cultural critique. ‘Harlem Reviewed’ derives much of its rhetorical authority from what Clifford Geertz has identified as a pre-eminent tactic of persuasion in ethnographic texts, the claim to ‘being there.’ In this and her other contributions to the anthology, and in some of the more ephemeral writing she undertook on her travels, Cunard frequently adopts the guise of the anthropologist whose task is to inform and educate a European (in fact, most often English) audience about the customs and characteristics of the people she has encountered. This stance is interspersed – perhaps it would be better to say interrupted – with a different voice, one striving to speak less as a participant/observer than as a participant, tout court. Cunard opens the piece with an abdication of the monarch-ofall-I-survey position, only to strive toward a different sort of authority and a different sort of relationship to the place she describes: ‘Is it possible to give any kind of visual idea of a place by description? I think not, least of all of Harlem’ (67). She finds it at once familiar and unfamiliar. ‘When I first saw it, at 7th Avenue, I

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thought of the Mile End Road ... But no; the scale, to begin with, was different’ (67). She settles, instead, on a description of its geographic boundaries (Central Park, Columbia University, the Harlem River), and the contrast between Harlem and downtown Manhattan, a focus on boundaries and differences. In fact, the ‘geography’ of Harlem seems for Cunard to be littered with the signposts of difference. The passage merits quoting at some length: This capital [of the ‘Negro world’] now exists, with its ghetto-like slums around 5th, bourgeois streets, residential areas, a few aristocratic avenues or sections thereof, white-owned stores and cafeterias, small general shops, and the innumerable ‘skin-whitening’ and ‘anti-kink’ beauty parlours. There is one large modern hotel, the Dewey Square, where coloured people of course may stay; and another, far larger, a few paces from it, where certainly they may not! And this is in the centre of Harlem. Such race barriers are on all sides; it just depends on chance whether you meet them or no. Some Negro friend maybe will not go into a certain drugstore with you for an ice-cream soda at 108th (where Harlem is supposed to begin, but where it is still largely ‘white’); ‘might not get served in there’ (and by a coloured server at that – the white boss’s orders). Just across the Harlem River some white gentlemen flashing by in a car take it into their heads to bawl, ‘Can’t you get yourself a white man?’ – you are walking with a Negro, yet you walk down-town with the same and meet no such hysteria, or again, you do. (68)

Cunard’s assertion that, despite the presence of race barriers ‘on all sides,’ chance dictates ‘whether you meet them or not’ seems rather disingenuous. ‘Chance’ has little to do with it; unfamiliarity with the social terrain – an inability to see the race barriers until they are crossed, or a blithe disregard for such boundaries are more reliable explanations for incidents like those Cunard describes. The peculiarities of the structures of address in this pas-

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sage in fact suggest a speaker both able and unable to read the racial signposts ‘on all sides.’ Although the anecdotes of the icecream parlour and the passing motorists are expressed in the second-person as possible experiences for members of Cunard’s audience – at least those members of her audience who are mixedrace couples visiting New York – they encapsulate Cunard’s own experiences. Henry Crowder refused to enter a ‘certain drugstore’ with Cunard on the grounds that he would not be served, an episode that compels recognition not only of Cunard’s racial privilege that makes restrictions on where she goes inconceivable, but also of her inability to read signs of differentiation in the way that Crowder can. Yet Cunard’s role as ethnographer in this passage dictates that she be able to read and translate these same signs for her audience; she disguises her initiation with the use of the second-person and with the disingenuous consigning of such encounters to chance. There is another authorizing strategy at work in Cunard’s evasion of identification with the neophyte in this and other passages, and again her use of the second-person or the third-person impersonal is revealing. In addition to refusing identification with visitors or newcomers to Harlem (‘If you are “shown” Harlem by day’; ‘At night you will be taken’; ‘One is completely transported’; emphasis added), Cunard studiously avoids identification with the whites she describes in Harlem. Consider, for example, her description of white attraction to the Harlem nightclub scene: Notice how many of the whites are unreal in America; they are dim. But the Negro is very real; he is there. And the ofays know it. That’s why they come to Harlem – out of curiosity and jealousy and don’tknow-why. This desire to get close to the other race has often nothing honest about it; for where the ofays flock, to night-clubs, for instance, such as Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club and Small’s, expensive cabarets, to these two former the coloured clientele is no longer admitted. To the latter, only just, grudgingly. No, you can’t

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go to Connie’s Inn with your coloured friends. The place is for whites. ‘Niggers’ to serve, and ‘coons’ to play – and later the same ofay will slip into what he calls ‘a coloured dive,’ and there it’ll be ‘Evening, Mr. Brown,’ polite and cordial, because this will be a real coloured place and the ofay is not sure of himself there a-tall. (69– 70, emphasis and ellipses in original)

Apart from her evident contempt for the vogue of slumming, Cunard’s key strategy for refusing identification with the whites in this passage is her adoption of African-American argot in her use of the term ‘ofay.’ Racist epithets used by whites, like ‘nigger’ and ‘coon,’ are in contrast placed in inverted commas. With these simple rhetorical moves, she places herself in proximity to the blacks of Harlem and distances herself from whites. These gestures are all the more important when one considers that what attracts Cunard to Harlem is not very different, after all, from what attracts the ‘ofays.’ The most ethnographic passage in the essay is, appropriately, where Cunard most overtly describes her attraction to Harlem. Cunard also uses the first-person here for the first time since the opening paragraph of the text. She describes a revival meeting she attended and the impact it had on her, an impact heightened by her initial disinclination: ‘Beforehand I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand more than ten minutes of it – ten minutes in any church’ (70). What allows Cunard to overcome her distaste for the religious is her ability to focus on the aesthetic: ‘The apex of the singing has come, it is impossible to convey the scale of these immense sound waves and rhythmical under-surges ... It has nothing to do with God, but with life – a collective life for which I know no name’ (71). Her descriptions of the preacher emphasize his artistic rather than spiritual qualities: ‘He is a poet in speech and very graceful in all his movements. His dramatization is generous’ and ‘Becton is the personification of expressionism, a great dramatic actor’ (71). Cunard confidently asserts her apprehension of

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the essence of a people and brushes aside the unauthentic religious accoutrements: These services, really superb concerts, are the gorgeous manifestation of the emotion of a race – that part of the Negro people that has been so trammelled with religion that it is still steeped therein. A manifestation of this kind by white people would have been utterly revolting. But with the Negro race it is on another plane, it seems positively another thing, not connected with Christ or the bible, the pure outpouring of themselves, a nature-rite. In other words, it is the fervour, intensity, the stupendous rhythm and surge of singing that are so fine – the christianity is only accidental, incidental to these. Not so for the assembly, of course, for all of it is deeply, tenaciously religious. I have given all this detail about the revivalist meeting because it is so fantastic, and, aesthetically speaking, so moving. (71)

Cunard’s emphasis here is on affect, the source of which she concedes is very different for her than it is for the people she describes. She identifies with the artistry and identifies the artistry with ‘the emotion of a race.’ The essentializing; the stereotypical association of African-descended peoples with ‘nature-rites’ that, if performed by whites, would be revolting; the veneration of aesthetics are markers that situate Cunard within the discourses of European history and culture in the early part of the twentieth century. The affective experience that Cunard narrates alongside of her ethnographic portrait provides the trace of an identification that is constrained to differentiate itself from certain of those discourses of whiteness, and, indeed, from certain discourses of blackness as well. Cunard’s critique of the nightclub-frequenting ‘ofays’ in Harlem centres on what here and elsewhere she sees as the hypocrisy of racial prejudice. The whites who frequent clubs with a black wait staff and black entertainment, but where a black clientele is

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unacceptable, are not interested, Cunard recognizes, in changing the social status of blacks. ‘From all time the Negro has entertained the whites, but never been thought of by this type as possibly a social equal’ (70). Cunard, in contrast, explicitly identifies with a social group that, according to her, refuses social distinction based on race: ‘There are, however, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals, etc. who have good friends in the dark race,’ and it is to this group that Cunard attributes the authority of ‘a good knowledge of Harlem life’ (70). Knowledge and authority are bound up with this identity defined here less in terms of race or nation (although the artists she refers to are implicitly white) than of vocation. Cunard’s interest in the aesthetics of the revival meeting takes on a different significance. While her identification with this group of artists, writers, intellectuals is less than surprising – Cunard was a writer, this was her circle of acquaintance – and while the group so described is readily recognizable as a cosmopolitan, modernist coterie of voluntary ‘exiles,’ the context of this identification calls for closer scrutiny. Cunard’s desire for an identity that is aesthetically grounded and that challenges social divisions predicated on race is bound up with a desire for belonging in a context where other available identities irrevocably shut her out. This claim to belonging, moreover, is especially tricky given the racial divisions about which she is very conscious and which, despite her obfuscations, have operated against her claims to insider status. As a consequence, certain performances of blackness, as well as whiteness, come in for critique: There are near-white cliques, mulatto groups, dark-skinned sets who will not invite each other to their houses; some would not let a white cross their thresholds. The Negro ‘bluebloods’ of Washington are famous for their social exclusivity, there are some in Harlem too. I don’t know if a foreign white would get in there, possibly not. The snobbery around skin-colour is terrifying. The light-skins and

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browns look down on the black; by some, friendships with ofays are not tolerated, from an understandable but totally unsatisfactory reaction to the general national attitude of white to coloured on the social equality basis. (73)

It seems fairly clear that Cunard encountered a bewildering array of barriers, bewildering, that is, for a privileged English woman accustomed to going where she pleased, with whom she pleased, when she pleased. The barely concealed anxiety over the likelihood of her admission, as a ‘foreign white,’ into the more exclusive circles of black culture in Washington and Harlem, and the obstacle that may present for the making of her anthology, gives us some sense of Cunard’s urge for an identity transcendent of racial difference. The role of the writer seems to offer this identity. The struggle to map out an identity among available performances of whiteness and blackness is embedded in a narrative of transformation. In putting her audience in the position of visitor to Harlem, she displaces her own recent occupation of that position into the past; she is no longer the neophyte, but an insider, and her authority to describe and analyse Harlem rests on that shift in status. More than merely a claim to ‘being there,’ hers is a claim to being of the place in some sense. The implicit transition the narrator has made between arrival and belonging is in fact a conversion of the tourist’s gaze into the participant’s story. This is the dominant trope of Cunard’s writing on black culture and politics. The desire to construct herself, if not as ‘native,’ then at the very least as an atypical outsider is evident not only in texts like ‘Harlem Reviewed,’ but also in her various scrapbooks where the assembled texts, preserved ephemera, and photographs represent a Nancy Cunard who challenges the expectations set up by her race and class origins, and complicates the portrait of the bohemian modernist and femme fatale we see in the photographs of Man Ray and Cecil Beaton (figure 1.2), the works of Richard Aldington or Ezra Pound, or the portraits and sculptures of Banting

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1.2 Nancy Cunard by Cecil Beaton (1904–1980).

or Brancusi. Her scrapbook ‘Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, November 1940,’ for instance, opens with newspaper clippings announcing her arrival in Trinidad. One of the clippings, after identifying her connections with empire – ‘Great-grand-daughter of the founder of the Cunard-White Star Line and cousin of Sir Edward Cunard, the Governor’s Private Secretary’ – comments on her recent travels in Chile and Mexico: ‘She got to know the people as

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in every other place she visits, as she does not accept just the superficial, surface value of a country she visits, but tries ... to see how the people really live.’ The Trinidad Guardian, in its ‘Pen Picture’ of Cunard, corroborates the view of its competitor: ‘In talking about her travels, now and again she would introduce some tiny detail about some person or thing, which is only possible to a keen and observant wayfarer. Miss Cunard has all the qualities that make a good traveller – one who would be welcome in any part of the world.’ Cunard has clearly succeeded, at least in this context, in presenting herself as anti-tourist. The corollary is Cunard as champion of social justice, a vision happily supplied by a left-wing newspaper, The People : ‘We welcome Miss Nancy Cunard to our shores with open arms and a great big salvo. Miss Cunard has worked for years in the interest of Negroes all over the world.’ This portrait of partisanship is at once the basis of Cunard’s authority and the identity for which she struggled. Yet Cunard’s claims to belonging remained difficult to negotiate, as in fact the carefully assembled representations of her ‘life’ in her scrapbooks suggest. That her scrapbooks extend the authorizing rhetoric of partisanship and belonging confirms the interrelationship between her self -representation and her representation of ‘Others.’ Cunard’s apparent confidence in her ability to represent ‘the Negro race’ is belied by her need repeatedly to strive for authority, to assert a place for herself. There are, nonetheless, moments when she acknowledges doubts about her ability to speak for and about the black diaspora. The use she made of the photographs she took during her travels in the texts she contributed to the anthology not only perform a documentary function, apparently corroborating her representations of Harlem, of Jamaica, and so on – ‘This is what you see for yourself.’ For Cunard, it seems, the photographs also compensate for a representational deficiency she evinces in several essays. In ‘Harlem Reviewed’ she opens with an expression of doubt concerning

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whether it is ‘possible to give any visual idea of a place by description’ (67), and in ‘Jamaica – The Negro Island’ she makes a similar observation: ‘It is not possible to describe the rapid changes of this beautiful land; only a film will be able to give any sense of it’ (446). The use of photographs in the anthology supplements Cunard’s verbal representations by placing her on the scene; there is a power and authority in photography not unrelated to the power of ethnography (‘being there’). As Steven Cagan points out, ‘Any photographic image results from a direct brush with the physical world being represented’ and consequently ‘there is a way a photograph is a trace of what “was there”’ (73). In carrying that ‘trace’ of the represented scene, person, object, a photograph, like an ethnography, attests to the presence of the photographer in that scene as well: ‘Photographs appeal to common sense through our understanding that photographers have to go to the places they want to represent’ (73). Cunard’s souvenir photographs provide a different kind of testimony to her having ‘been there’ than a verbal description, be it monarch-of-all-I-survey or ethnography.4 The photographs scattered throughout Cunard’s contributions to the anthology are evidence of her political tourism; in bearing the trace of places she visited and the people she encountered, they put Cunard on the stage of cultural and social difference where she performs her desire to become a participant, on some level, in the struggles she represents. They connect Cunard with the struggles against racism and imperialism in a tangible way, but they supplement her written representations of Harlem and the Caribbean in such a way as to draw our attention to what is missing as much as to what is added. The photographs represent Cunard herself almost more than they do their ostensible subjects, but to the extent that they beg a context in order to mean, they remind us of the need to focus on the arena of political tourism, on the socially inscribed places where Cunard’s authority is potentially in question.

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The Camera’s I: Embodying the Tourist’s Gaze If the photographs serve as a reminder of the embodied, situated dimension of Cunard’s tourist gaze, they can perhaps also serve to remind us of another dimension of cultural identification largely absent in Cunard’s self-authorizing rhetoric – gender. Insofar as Cunard’s gaze is embodied, its gendering or gendered status cannot be overlooked. Again the photograph taken in Cuba that makes Cunard visible through its intersecting lines of sight hints at what is invisible, the sex of the photographer. Yet the audience for whom Cunard is a spectacle in this scene is comprised exclusively of men. In fact, Cunard is the only woman ‘visible’ in this scene; from her position in the street with the young boys, the only visible domain is masculine: the businesses along the sidewalk appear to be patronized by men alone. What did it mean for Cunard, not only a foreigner, not only a European, but a woman, to take this photograph? We have some idea, at least, of what it meant for her to be seen on the street in New York with a black man. Cunard’s anecdote about the carload of white men who assailed her and Henry Crowder with the taunt, ‘Can’t you get yourself a white man?’ is clear evidence that the race boundaries she crossed were also profoundly gendered and sexualized. Cunard remains relatively silent on the subject of gender and sexuality in her writings, but a glimpse of the ways Cunard’s gendered corporeality impinged on her tours is available in the press accounts of her second trip to Harlem and in Cunard’s commentary on it. When Cunard returned to Harlem in the spring of 1932, she had not been there long before a press scandal erupted. On 2 May, the New York Daily Mirror printed a story linking Cunard with Paul Robeson and intimating she had come to New York in pursuit of him. The motives for her travel were thus immediately re-scripted as an interracial love affair rather than a love affair with racial justice. That this re-scripting depended on the meanings that would be ascribed to a link between Cunard’s white, female body and

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Robeson’s black, male one might well seem too obvious to merit comment, but insofar as Cunard’s anti-racist work may be read as a concerted effort to rewrite the dominant script, her own susceptibility to its disciplining regulation is worth underscoring. Both Cunard and Robeson sent telegrams to the press denying the allegations; Robeson’s was published, Cunard’s was not. Any number of newspapers followed suit, and Cunard began to be harassed by the press at her hotel and everywhere she went. She called a press conference at which she attempted not only to set the story straight regarding Robeson but to redirect the publicity to her anthology and the cause of the Scottsboro boys. While she did not succeed in deferring scandal, she did publicize her interest in blacks, and the publicity generated hundreds of letters, among which were two or three dozen filled with threats and obscenities. In these letters, Cunard’s body is hyper-visible: it works to obscure what she insists are her ‘real’ motivations, and, in the eyes of her accusers, her body’s transgressions are on a par with her political transgressions; they become indistinguishable. Almost without exception, the letters she received impugning her interest in African-Americans as a betrayal of her race charged her with betrayal of her gender as well. Her intellectual and political interests were refashioned as the most prurient of sexual obsessions: I don’t know what they call your kind in England but here in America they call them plain nigger fuckers or prostitutes of the lowest kind. You dirty lowdown cocksucker, you are trying to convince the white race of NYC that you came here to write a book about the negro race, we know that you came here to suck the black pricks. I feel certain that in the eyes of this world of white humanity, you Miss Nancy Cunard, are lower, than the lowest of prostitutes, in your phoney outbursts, and belley-hoo[sic] you are making since your

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arrival to this country. If you for one moment think that you are fooling the US people with your book writing pretext, you are mistaken.5

Several of the letters are so extreme as to be ludicrous; yet the letters are but a more explicit and less-sanctioned version of what the press was publishing. Several papers ran a photograph of Cunard with African-American singer Taylor Gordon on a Harlem street corner, the English surrealist painter John Banting having been cut out of the frame, in an effort to support their claims about the sexual character of Cunard’s interest in Harlem. Cunard was besieged with telephone calls and visitors at the Grampion Hotel in Harlem; reporters attempted to track down Henry Crowder; Cunard was pursued even at the home of the restaurant manager she had befriended at the Grampion and who offered her accommodation when it became necessary to leave the hotel. Finally she retreated to a farm in upstate New York for a month, hoping the scandal which was interfering with the making of the anthology would fade from public view in the meantime. Cunard provides her own account of this incident in the anthology, framing it as a commentary on the poles of American popular opinion on race relations. Titled ‘The American Moron and the American of Sense – Letters on the Negro,’ the piece presents Cunard’s analysis of the press as well as selected reprints of letters she received. Cunard ultimately has very little to say about the representations of gender in either the press or the letters; she recognizes these attacks as efforts to discourage her anti-racist work, explaining to readers of her essay that ‘any interest manifested by a white person, even a foreigner to America (such as myself), is immediately turned into a sex “scandal”’ (Negro 197). Sex, in other words, functions as a displacement of political anxiety, the repressed logic of a national imaginary that splits along the Mason-Dixon line: ‘No chance is ever missed by the American press, and the type of American that believes it ... to stir up as

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much fury as possible against Negroes and their white friends. To do this the sex motive is always used. As in the South it is always the lie of the “rape” of white women by black men, so in the North it is always the so-called “scandal” of inter-racial relations’ (197). Cunard’s efforts to participate in anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggle would necessarily have been understood as contraventions of white womanhood. As Anne McClintock and others have demonstrated, imperialism and nationalism are profoundly gendered discourses. At the core of the anxiety expressed in the letters is an assumption about the interrelationship of sex and race fundamental to racism and imperialism: woman, in her reproductive capacity, is either the guarantor or traitor of racial and national purity. The threat women represent in the context of imperialism is further complicated when one considers that the central activities of imperialism – ‘discovery,’ conquest, domination – were performed almost exclusively by white men on foreign territories often constructed as feminine and, in their terrifying strangeness, as castrating (McClintock 25–8). This picture is complicated still further when one considers the role played by many European women who were in a manner of speaking conscripted by the Empire to intervene in practices of interracial marriage and concubinage in the colonies (Strobel 4–6). It is important to recognize, however, that while her political touring threatened imperial and racist discourses in one direction, her position of privilege would be stabilized in another direction by her access to whiteness, if not maleness. As McClintock puts it, ‘the rationalized privileges of race all too often put white women in positions of decided – if borrowed – power, not only over colonized women but also over colonized men. As such, white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire, but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting’ (6). For a political tourist like Cunard, race and class are the more perceptible modes of identification in the context of a project like the making of Negro. However, to the extent

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that gender continues to matter more on the home front, as it were, its traces inform her touring not only through gender’s complicity with discourses of race and imperialism, but through the processes of cultural identification bound up in Cunard’s touring, what we might think of as her baggage (what she takes along) and her souvenirs (what she picks up along the way). To begin with the baggage, Cunard makes an effort to shed some of hers with the publication first of a short essay, ‘Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?’ published in the Crisis, September 1931, and subsequently of a pamphlet which garnered her considerable notoriety, Black Man, White Ladyship. This text, published privately in December 1931, the first year of Cunard’s work on the anthology, and several months after her first trip to Harlem, places Cunard’s investment in anti-racist work into a fairly explicitly gendered framework. Several times during their relationship, Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder travelled together from France to London. On one of these occasions, Cunard’s relationship with Crowder became the source of a dispute with her mother that eventually led to a permanent split, a reduction in Nancy’s allowance, and the threat of disinheritance. Black Man, White Ladyship takes the incident with Lady Cunard as a pretext for a critique of racism and an analysis of the ways class intersects with racism. Some of Cunard’s contemporaries clearly viewed her analysis of racism as a pretext for a personal attack on her mother, but what her analysis displaces, I think, is a longer-standing dispute over gender. The title is evocative of the divisions and inequality Cunard was preoccupied with, since it expresses differences not only in race and sex, but in class. In her choice of the term ladyship, Cunard betrays her concern with a particular construction of white womanhood. ‘Her Ladyship’ was Cunard’s nickname for her mother, but it also marks a particular social identity of which Maud – or Emerald, as she renamed herself – Cunard is taken to be exemplary. In the half of the essay subtitled ‘Her Ladyship,’ Cunard

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sketches a sardonic portrait of an upper-class society hostess who takes seriously her role as guardian of class position, respectability, and, implicitly, Englishness. The race incident at the core of the text is a scandal, Cunard intimates, largely because of the significance it takes on in British society circles. Cunard’s rendering of English society women and the values they uphold predominates in her recounting of the mother–daughter split: At a large lunch party in Her Ladyship’s house things are set rocking by one of those bombs that throughout her ‘career’ Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, has been wont to hurl. No-one could fail to wish he had been at that lunch to see the effect of Lady Oxford’s entry: ‘Hello, Maud, what is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’ ... The house is one in Grosvenor Square and what takes place in it is far from ‘drink, drugs, or niggers.’ There is confusion. A dreadful confusion between Her Ladyship and myself! ... Half of social London is immediately telephoned to: ‘Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?’ (1)

As much as it is a critique of the values of a particular class and race, Cunard’s portrait is also a critique of a particular gender role, one she may well have been expected to take up. Her assessment of the source of the racism – ‘with you it is the other old trouble – class’ – is accompanied by an indictment of the kind of femininity her mother represents. Her Ladyship is described as ‘petite and desirable as per all attributes of the nattier court lady’ (3), whose extravagance in matters of dress is unrivalled, and who is governed completely by the social fashions of the London upper crust: ‘Negroes, besides being black ... have not yet penetrated into London Society’s consciousness. You exclaim, “They are not received!” ... They are not found in the Royal Red Book. Some big hostess gives a lead and the trick is done!’ (2). Such a ‘career’ as this Cunard is determined to escape. If, as I am suggesting, we read Cunard’s break with her mother

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as a break with a particular gendering, it becomes possible to read her unsuccessful efforts to shed the overdetermined mantle of race privilege in her travels as a means of effecting an alternative position for herself as a white English woman. In this respect she does indeed replicate the patterns of Victorian women travellers in the Empire, and in this respect also her ‘silence’ on the subject of gender can be understood rather as a displacement of gender onto her preoccupation with race and class. Her reluctance to see herself in a position of dominance in matters of race and class has to do with the ways whiteness and class privilege articulate with gender to produce ‘ladyship.’ I do not mean to subsume Cunard’s political identifications with blacks and workers under a rejection of a particular femininity, narrowly understood. Rather, my point is that her identification with what may be taken as causes not her own has a logic when identity is conceived as an articulation of available social categories. The ambivalence of Cunard’s representation of her chosen struggles is a trace of the discursive conditions mitigating her identification with an alternate articulation of race, class, and gender. Shaped by her efforts to dissociate herself from constructions of whiteness associated with domination, her representations of blackness remain marked by her desire to step outside of race altogether, while continuing to invoke blackness as a principle of racial difference. Her analysis of her mother’s ‘trouble’ as an issue of class elides whiteness as well as gender. While Cunard makes herself a class traitor through this break with her mother, she does not acknowledge her implication in racialized and gendered discourses. Yet she inevitably ‘colours’ herself through her associations and is unable to evade gender inscriptions, as we have seen. Black Man, White Ladyship is an angry, impassioned text. The lines of affect that cathect Cunard’s repudiation of this family tie and all it represents are transferred to her search for alternative identifications. Her efforts to construct a new identity emerge in her souvenirs, the affectively charged records of Cunard’s travels.

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To the extent that these souvenirs also bear the traces of Cunard’s negotiations of socioeconomic, racial, and sexual difference, the unwitting reinstatement of privilege that accompanies Cunard’s desire for belonging is mediated. Lest this argument seem tautological, I want to stress that the genuine ambivalence of Cunard’s tourist gaze represents at once her incorporation (a taking into the self) of the racial and socioeconomic Other, and a tangible link to the social and political realities Cunard has encountered in her travels that resist incorporation. In other words, if the ambivalence manifest in Cunard’s texts can lead to a rehearsal of the imperial script through its subservience to European subject constitution, it also potentially leads back out to the social arena where specific subject positions are contested and negotiated. If anti-racist work is to avoid an unwitting reinstatement of whiteness, it must retain a focus on the productive tensions that are at play in the social sphere. To subsume those encounters in a bid for insider status and a concomitant claim for authority, as Cunard seems inclined to do, is to mask the processes that make political change possible. To act as though whiteness lies somehow outside of race, even while undertaking anti-racist work, leads precisely to the reification of race and the reproduction of racism. Part of Cunard’s dilemma, in striving to do anti-racist, antiimperialist work in solidarity with the black diaspora, is precisely, as the hate mail renders explicit, that the political tourist’s body matters, to paraphrase Judith Butler. In the context of her Negro anthology project and her activism around the Scottsboro case, what for Cunard is ‘scandalous’ is the abject sexualizing of political solidarity. To ‘admit’ to her sexual desire for black men is, on the one hand, to submit to the policing operations of U.S. racial discourse; to ‘deny’ that same desire in a vain effort to legitimize her anti-racist work is likewise to reiterate those discursive operations. This ‘scandal’ also operates aporetically in Cunard’s antilynching texts, which strive to negotiate the racialized and gendered triangles marking Communist and African-American

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collaborations at the time she was working on Negro. On the one hand, there was the rape myth triangle according to which white men sought to protect white women from black men; on the other, there was the working-class solidarity triangle according to which black and white male workers were united against (feminized) capitalists. As racialized versions of the triangles of ‘homosocial desire’ analysed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, both of these social and rhetorical models perform gendered and racialized exclusions over the bodies of white and, especially, black women. William J. Maxwell argues that these two triangles worked in tandem in the context of Communist organizing around the Scottsboro case. In light of Cunard’s involvement in the case and her writing about it in the anthology, I want to turn to the question of her discursive position as anti-racist and Communist fellow traveller. In recent work by critics writing on modernism and race, Cunard’s invocation of Communist Party rhetoric in the anthology has been taken as evidence of her imperialism and Eurocentrism; Sieglinde Lemke, for instance, charges that ‘[Cunard’s] alleged solidarity with the black race is consistently undermined by her primitivist and communist orthodoxy; in the end, Cunard’s is an antiracist racism’ (138). I will argue that a more complex picture emerges when one takes gender into account. This is not to suggest that Cunard’s writing does not bear traces of her class and race privilege, but it is to argue that her work ought nonetheless to be positioned at the intersection of these intertwining and sexualized struggles for racial and economic justice. Fellow Traveller One place in the United States where interracial relations might have seemed less sexually charged was within the Communist Party (CPUSA).6 That Cunard was already a fellow traveller by the time she began working on the anthology undoubtedly made this route doubly attractive, and Communism would also have

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afforded her an entrée into anti-racist and anti-imperialist work irrespective of her whiteness. As Mark Solomon characterizes it, the CPUSA’s involvement in anti-racist struggle in the early part of the twentieth century had to do with its understanding of ‘the basic structure and character of American society,’ according to which ‘capitalism’s cornerstone was ... laid by slavery and fortified by racism’ (xviii). By the late 1920s, the CPUSA had moved from a ‘colour-blind,’ class-based approach to racial oppression to the notion that the sort of oppression African-Americans experienced was a special ‘national’ oppression, and thus to ‘the strategic concept of a Negro-labor alliance as the cornerstone of progress’ (xix). In the 1930s, the forging of that alliance frequently centred on anti-lynching activism via both the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, initially headed by Langston Hughes, and the International Labor Defense (ILD), which came to lead the twopronged strategy of legal defence and mass protest to free the Scottsboro boys. William Maxwell notes that the party’s position on egalitarianism and racial unity extended to social intimacy within party circles, albeit ‘with lopsided effects’: heterosexual couplings between black men and white women were more common than the reverse and became a point of contention with black women in the party (126). Cunard, however, might have fit in rather well with this social scene and clearly embraced the ideological tenets that underwrote it. On the other hand, moving in Communist circles did nothing to dissociate Cunard from the charge of scandalous sexual behaviour levelled at her by the newspapers and the more vituperative authors of her hate mail. For as Robin D.G. Kelley has pointed out, Communism was explicitly associated in the early twentieth-century United States with ‘sexual promiscuity and miscegenation. ‘In the South,’ he continues, ‘the word communism itself (pronounced ‘com-mune-ism,’ according to W.J. Cash) had a curiously explicit sexual connotation’ (79). Complicating matters for Cunard was the explicitly masculinist

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and homosocial discourse marking expressions of interracial solidarity in the work of writers and artists associated with the Communist Party. Maxwell contends that ‘the opposition of interracial laborers and feminized proprietors provide[d] the gut-level rhetorical architecture,’ and he describes ‘black and white hands joining to defy unmanly disciplinarians of capital’ (130). Such images are to be found in the pages of The Crusader, a magazine edited by Harlem communist Richard B. Moore, in proletarian literature like Mike Gold’s Hoboken Blues, in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Langston Hughes’s ‘Open Letter to the South,’ and in the lithographs of Hugo Gellert. Yet a more troubling homosocial triangle emerged in the context of anti-lynching activities, a triangle that more explicitly counterposed the rape myth triangle. Where the latter figures white men protecting white women from black men, and conceives of the white woman as ‘both prize and pawn’ (Wiegman 102), the Communist anti-lynching triangle that emerged in the early years of Communist-led efforts to free the Scottsboro boys figures black and white men united against the deceitful white woman. As Maxwell puts it, ‘distaste for the Scottsboro boys’ accusers became the affiliative seal between black and white male worker-radicals’ (132). Once again, of course, black women are left out of the picture. As Cunard learned during the course of her activism, the Scottsboro case epitomized the workings of the rape myth narrative and the legal lynchings that frequently substituted for the real thing. On 25 March 1931 nine black youths (‘boys’) ranging in age from thirteen to twenty, who were riding the rails to look for work in Memphis, were hauled off the train in a little town called Paint Rock, Alabama. Also on the freight train were two white women and a white man; they were looking for work as well. While the nine young black men were initially charged with assaulting a group of white men who had jumped off the train earlier and alerted authorities, a few hours later they were charged with raping the two white women on the train, Ruby Bates and Victoria

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Price. An altercation between black and white men, in which the white men were bested, was thus quickly transformed into a rape charge thanks to the presence of Bates and Price, even though they had been in a different car and had been disguised as men (they were wearing overalls) in order to hitch a ride on the freight train. As historian John Goodman put it, an all-white jury would be certain to see that the altercation between the young black men and the white men on the train was ‘both precursor to the rape and proof that it had occurred’ (qtd in Maxwell 132). Although Bates and Price initially denied having been assaulted by the black youths on the train, they were soon persuaded to change their story. Maxwell suggests that their ‘alarm at what it would cost in the coin of southern white womanhood to admit to friendly contact with indigent black men’ prompted their compliance (132). In short order, the youths were tried and convicted of the rape charge, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. It was at this point that the International Labor Defense became involved in the case, undertaking a series of appeals that eventually succeeded in securing the release of four defendants in 1937 and parole for four more in the 1940s; the ninth ‘boy,’ Haywood Patterson, did not leave prison until 1950. So how does someone like Cunard situate herself rhetorically in her own Scottsboro activism, in light of the CPUSA’s emphasis on the ‘disclosure of the repellent, lying prostitute behind the violated white lady’ (Maxwell 140)? In order to answer this question, I want to consider three texts that Cunard published in connection with Scottsboro. The first of these is the poem ‘Rape,’ which was published in one of Cunard’s fundraising leaflets for the Scottsboro Defence in the summer of 1933, as well as in the AfroAmerican in October of that year. The second is also a poem, ‘Southern Sheriff,’ published in the Negro anthology, and the third is a lengthy essay on the Scottsboro case, ‘Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros,’ also published in Negro.7 In ‘Rape,’ Cunard appears not to dissociate herself at all from

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the rhetoric of the vile and deceitful white woman. The poem is written from the point of view of a white ‘farmer’s wife’ who falsely cries rape when her sexual advances are repulsed by a black worker. This insistence on the deceptions of the white ‘victim’ resonates not only through CPUSA anti-lynching propaganda but in Langston Hughes’s Scottsboro works.8 In deliberately focusing on the speaker’s hypocrisy, moreover, Cunard might be seen to echo a point first made by Ida B. Wells which, by the time Cunard was writing, was a well-known part of the African-American analysis of lynching. One of the bravest and most controversial elements in Wells’s sophisticated analysis of lynching was her suggestion that the rape myth deliberately denies white female desire for black men. As she put it in the pamphlet ‘Southern Horrors,’ there are many white women in the South who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law. The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women. (On Lynchings 6)

Not only did this assertion elicit the outrage and condemnation of the white press as well as threats to Wells’s life, but it prompted black leaders to urge Wells to ‘put the soft pedal on charges against white women and their relations with black men’ (Crusade 220). Valerie Smith points out that Wells cannot allow for ‘the veracity of any white woman’s testimony against a black man’ lest it feed into the justifications for lynching she was striving to combat (273).9 The opposition, for Wells, centres on what white men do with impunity versus what black men cannot do, even with con-

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sent. As Smith puts it, ‘While white men assume the right to rape black women or consort with them, black men are killed for participating in any kind of sexual activity with white women’ (273). This formulation, Smith notes, ‘subordinate[s] the sexual to the racial dimension of interracial rape, thereby dramatizing the fact that the crime can never be read solely as an offense against women’s bodies’ (274). In the context of anti-lynching struggles, one is tempted to suggest, ‘rape’ cannot be read as an offence against women’s bodies at all. Certainly Cunard was not disposed to read rape as anything other than a myth constructed by ‘crackers’ to oppress black men. The notion that, far from being the threat, black men are really ‘Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs’ (Wells, On Lynchings 5) remained as incendiary in the 1930s as it was in the 1890s when Wells wrote her essay, and this is, in a nutshell, the situation depicted in ‘Rape.’ That Cunard would have chosen to focus on the hypocrisy of this element of lynching narratives is hardly surprising, given her own intimate relationships with black men. It also seems likely that her desire to manifest solidarity with the cause prompted this emphasis on the black male victim of lynching, even though her partial duplication of the anti-lynching triangle with its lying white woman seems to foreclose upon the participation in the struggle of white and black women Communists (and fellow travellers). In ‘Southern Sheriff,’ Cunard creates a dramatic monologue in the voice of the title persona in order to expose the logic of lynch law. Here the connection between the economic and political threat posed by black men and the use of ‘rape’ as a rationale for lynching is ‘confessed’ by the speaker of the poem. ‘Naw, ain’t no rape, why, a nigger wouldn’t dare ... / Jes’ our word, sorta slogan,’ the sheriff explains, confirming a little later: ‘Them Scottsboro boys is innocent, we all knows that – / But hell, look wha’d happen if they free ’em ... / Other niggers’d be askin’ for their rights.’ Cunard also assigns to the sheriff the standard southern position

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on white womanhood, in terms that neatly correspond to its Communist reversal: ‘a white woman cain’t lie, see?’ The ‘lie’ is exposed in the following lines: ‘Rape? sure they rape white women, / Leas’ways they’d like to – that’s good enough.’ Cunard incorporates documented cases of the workings of lynch law, including those in which the Communists came to be involved through the International Labor Defense. This excerpt offers some sense of her strategy: Yah, we framed up Angelo Herndon, gave him 20 years on the Georgia chain-gang for that Under pre-Abolition law, ‘Incitement to slaves,’ not bad huh? We hoped the ‘Atlanta 6’ bunch Would get the death penalty. Sure, we always let the Mobs take the prisoners unless we Shoot ’em ourselves ; that was the Tuscaloosa lot, Weren’t no gang of masked men at all ...10

In addition to his confessions, the speaker rails against the Communists who were organizing in the South: ‘Tell you what’s worse – that’s them Northern whites / They just turn the niggers, crazy, “equality,” / “Organize for better wages,” “black and white together fight.”’ Those involved with the Scottsboro case are threatened with lynching: ‘We run them International Labor Defense attorneys out the town, / They nigh got lynched on the train, huh.’ The monologue is not subtle; in fact, in the final two lines an authorial voice intervenes to affirm ‘That is the Southern justice, / Not lynch-mobs, but part of the Law speaking’ – just in case we didn’t quite grasp the point. ‘Southern Sheriff’ cannot compete with Hughes’s Scottsboro poems, but the relationship between speaker and auditor in this dramatic monologue offers another variation on the homosocial relations marking both lynching narratives and communist anti-lynching activism. In this instance, the sheriff’s interlocutor is identified as an ‘englishman’

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(my emphasis), a foreigner in need of an explanation, but more importantly, an interlocutor who can supply the white male solidarity needed to elicit a confession such as this. Enacting a different kind of exchange ‘between men,’ this monologue positions black (male) workers and Communists as Other, displacing or masking the role of white women in defining sexual difference. ‘Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros’ effectively dramatizes Cunard’s investment in the ILD-led mass protest and legal defence in support of the Scottsboro boys. Written two and a half years into the case, Cunard’s account is consistent with what William Maxwell characterizes as the tenor of ILD rhetoric after Ruby Bates confessed to perjury and joined the mass action aimed at securing the release of the Scottsboro boys. That is to say, one finds a modification in the rhetoric of the ‘disclosure of the repellent, lying prostitute behind the violated white lady.’ While the caption beneath the photograph of the nine young men that faces the first page of her essay reads ‘the nine innocent Scottsboro boys after their arrest on a false charge of assault on two white prostitutes,’ Cunard refers to Bates and Price as ‘the girls’ throughout her account and makes it clear that they, like the men who were riding the rails at the time of the arrest of the nine black men and boys, were looking for work. That they sometimes also sold themselves becomes, in this context, part of the general economic picture, rather than their identity. Rather than affixing Bates and Price with the sexually abject label ‘prostitute’ and using it to undermine the rape narrative in a way that constructs a negative counterpart to the lynching mythology, Cunard presents them as victims of the same discourse as the Scottsboro boys. Remarking on the first trial and the false testimony given by the two women, Cunard notes that as they were constructed by the southern legal system, ‘The girls were not individuals with alleged wrongs, but had been transformed into part of the lynch machinery which “keeps niggers in their place” by such frame-ups, so that other “niggers” shall not dare to ask for their rights’ (252). At the same

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time, the fact that ‘both girls were known to be prostitutes’ (250) allows Cunard to have it both ways. She points out that Victoria Price had a reputation for having black male customers, presumably not to disparage Price, but to put the lie to the notion of a pure white womanhood that can only be violated by such interracial intimacy. Ruby Bates’s public repudiation of the rape charge, on the other hand, represents ‘the first great crack in the old Southern structure of white supremacy’ (265). Cunard represents Bates’s testimony at the Decatur re-trial in heroic terms: ‘It will never be forgotten, it is a very high and splendid point in the history of black and white. Realise too that it needed very great courage, physical and moral ... With [her] testimony [she] was piercing the whole of the rotten Southern fabric of lies and race hatred’ (265). In Cunard’s presentation of Ruby Bates’s testimony, the abject becomes, in Butler’s words, ‘a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility’ (Bodies That Matter 3). That Cunard identifies with Bates’s ‘disidentification with [the] regulatory norms by which sexual [and racial] difference is materialized’ I think there can be little doubt (Bodies That Matter 4). That she likewise identifies with the international mobilization around the discourse of black and white unity that characterized Communist mass action for the liberation of the Scottsboro boys is clear. In ‘Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros,’ then, the ‘scandal’ of Cunard’s conjoined political and sexual desires can be articulated – both linked and spoken about, if not directly ‘confessed.’ Cunard’s particular identifications and indeed dis identifications in light of the materialization of race and sex in her anti-racist and anti-lynching activism in the United States inevitably entail exclusions. The most glaring exclusion Cunard performs is of black women, and in this way she is complicit with the racialized and gendered triangles marking both lynching narratives and Communist and African-American collaboration. If African-American women were invisible in both triangles, they were nonetheless

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central to theorizing lynching and to waging anti-lynching protest both inside the CPUSA and out. From the pioneering work of Ida B. Wells, who died in 1931, the year the Scottsboro boys were arrested, to Mary Church Terrell and, within the CPUSA, Louise Thompson [Patterson], black women took up the cause of lynching and frequently led it. Angela Davis suggests that ‘it was in response to the unchecked wave of lynchings and the indiscriminate sexual abuse of Black women that the first Black women’s club was organized’ (128). In this understanding of the ways race and sex were materialized during Reconstruction and after, both black men and black women are subjected to sexualized violence. Only in one instance does Cunard make this connection, and that is in Black Man and White Ladyship. Ann Douglas suggests that the very title deliberately alludes to the rape myth narrative of the ‘black brute and delicate white flower,’ arguing that Cunard ‘meant to ironize and reverse its implications’ (277). That Cunard should take up the question of lynching, and of the Scottsboro case in particular, in a text whose impetus was the ‘scandal’ that erupted when her mother learned of her relationship with Henry Crowder, again suggests her investment in disavowing discourses that make abject certain kinds of intimacy between blacks and whites. In this instance, though, Cunard strives to expose the contradictions of lynching narratives by retrieving the missing term: the role of black women. The lynchings of black men, she exclaims indignantly, are conducted ‘in the name of white american [sic] womanhood! Yet the fathers and mothers and ancestors of this superlative womanhood (as well as of the manhood that so superlatively “protects” it) were in a very great number of cases suckled at the black breast’ (Black Man 8). She goes on, parodying an unnamed Virginian interlocutor, ‘d’black women ’r awlright, were very much alright for breeding bastards as new hands on the master’s plantation’ (8). Yet in her Scottsboro texts this link is never made and black women are largely absent, except for several photographs and a brief account, in ‘Scottsboro – and Other

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Scottsboros,’ of the role in the mass mobilization played by Ada Wright, mother of two of the boys. In presenting an account of Cunard’s efforts both to engage in anti-racist activism and to represent ‘the struggles and achievements’ of blacks internationally, it is important to keep in view the social forces that impinged on her touring and on black internationalism itself, to trace the relations between a given text and its contemporary discursive paradigms in such a way as to render racist assumptions visible. As I hope my reading of the Cunard case makes clear, the tourist’s gaze that marks the Negro anthology is at once a trace of its conditions of production, its enunciation of discourses on race that sometimes reproduces imperial paradigms, and the link to the bearer of the gaze, to the public arena where racial difference is produced, contested, negotiated. Here, where Cunard struggles for her authority, lies the possibility of forging an alternative relation to social constructions of whiteness and blackness, the possibilities for overturning racist paradigms. If Cunard’s efforts at occupying an alternate space in hegemonic configurations were only partially successful, it can nonetheless be said that she managed to contest the limits and constraints of the racialized and gendered boundaries she encountered in her travels. Constrained by the policing of her very embodiment, she did all she could to align herself with anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. If that sometimes meant eliding gender identifications, even eliding race, it is important to bear in mind how radical a break she made with the imperial world that forged her privilege. The slippages in gender and race identifications that mark Cunard’s performance of solidarity remain instructive for feminist internationalists throughout the century and on into the twenty-first, as will become particularly evident in the texts Adrienne Rich, Margaret Randall, and Rebecca Gordon produced in solidarity with the Sandinista revolution. In speaking of the disparate, discontinuous, fragmented quality of Negro, Brent Hayes Edwards suggests that ‘what is hinted in the

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breaks ... what must be translated “from one part to another,” is the symposium that is black internationalism in practice,’ and he concludes that ‘reading the Negro anthology ... offers a model for that practice, in which diaspora can be articulated only in forms that are provisional, negotiated, asymmetrical’ (318). It may well be, paradoxically, that Cunard’s access to an imperial panorama enabled the kind of alternative vision of global politics that Negro strives for, however provisionally and asymmetrically. In other words, her effort to produce in Negro, and in her political touring more generally, an alternative ‘panorama’ can be understood as tentatively modelling a ‘postcolonial allegor[y] of globality,’ to borrow Peter Hulme’s phrase once again. This is a key theme running through the texts I take up in coming chapters. Cunard’s attempt to imagine and enact an anti-racist politics on a global scale in solidarity with an existing black internationalism is instructive both for the boldness of her vision and for its blind spots. That Cunard’s vision is made tangible in the form of the anthology itself is perhaps an artefact of her modernism, but the interrelationship of textual form to the practice of solidarity is one that also recurs in subsequent chapters, not least in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War.

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CHAPTER TWO

Revolutionary Drag in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War

China had now become one of the world’s decisive battlegrounds. And unlike Spain, it wasn’t already crowded with star literary observers ... ‘We’ll have a war all of our very own,’ said Wystan. (Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind 289)

In the 1930s, when the Spanish Civil War was the prototypical staging ground for the identity of leftist intellectuals and artists seeking some vision of international revolutionary praxis, ‘Spain’ could serve as a synecdoche for revolutionary tourism in general. Thus Christopher Isherwood could retrospectively represent his and W.H. Auden’s decision to base their contracted travel book on China when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 as having to do with its revolutionary political significance, and with its status as an alternative to Spain. Auden’s remark ‘We’ll have a war all of our very own’ (289) seems to imply that war – particularly, at this time, a war against a fascist and imperialist aggressor – can serve as a kind of cultural capital. The facetious note that is sounded here echoes the predominantly ironic gaze that Isherwood and Auden cast on their surroundings and on themselves during the course of their sojourn in China. Self-consciously playing the role of political tourists, they claim to ‘resemble a group of characters in one of

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Jules Verne’s stories about lunatic English explorers’ (Journey to a War 104), and they consistently draw the reader’s attention to the performative character of their journey. In their contribution to 1930s war reportage, Auden and Isherwood perform a kind of revolutionary drag, critiquing the pretensions and limitations of Western intellectuals like themselves, while insisting, at least obliquely, on the value of bearing witness. In his now classic study of the ‘Auden Generation,’ Samuel Hynes observes that ‘compared to war-reporting of the Spanish war (and of course the comparison would be made, especially by critics of the Left), Journey to a War is superficial and uninformed’ (342). Certainly if one reads the book ‘straight,’ and I use the word advisedly, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Auden and Isherwood took the task of representing war less than seriously. Yet the writers’ insistence, particularly in the travel diary, on their role-playing, their cultural baggage, and sundry distractions from the task at hand prompts another reading. I maintain that it is possible to read Auden’s and Isherwood’s revolutionary drag in earnest. In using the term ‘revolutionary drag,’ I aim to highlight what Marjorie Garber has identified as the function of drag, that is, its capacity ‘to indicate the place of ... “category crisis,” disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances’ (16). In this instance, the dissonances include gender and the other relevant markers of social location – Auden and Isherwood were gay, white Westerners in China – but also genre. As war reportage, even as travel literature, Journey to a War is anything but typical, composed as it is of sonnet sequences, documentary photographs, and a travel narrative or memoir. As an act of political testimony, Journey to a War is unusual for its irony, for the apparent diffidence with which the authors (or their textual personas) approach the question of solidarity with a cause. Yet, ultimately I want to argue that the kind of revolutionary drag performed by Isherwood and Auden in Journey to a War offers the possibility of ‘doing revolution’ by ‘repeat[ing] and displac[ing] through hy-

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 77 perbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and proliferation the very constructs by which [it is] mobilized,’ to retool Judith Butler’s argument about ‘doing gender’ through drag (Gender Trouble 31). In their queering of the political tourist discourse on Spain, Auden and Isherwood produce a text that is no less political and, in its own way, no less engaged than Spanish Civil War poetry, memoir, and reportage. That Spain was a self-conscious reference point for Auden and Isherwood is evident not only retrospectively. In describing their ‘lunatic explorers’ garb, Isherwood remarks, ‘My own beret, sweater, and martial boots would not be out of place in Valencia or Madrid’ (104). Years later Isherwood would confess he had been in ‘masquerade as a war correspondent’ (Christopher 301). These references to costume and performance, even as they imply the inauthenticity of Auden and Isherwood’s imitation, can be read as more fundamental gestures. According to Judith Butler, Drag constitutes the mundane way in which all genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original ; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. (‘Imitation’ 21)

I do not mean to suggest that we merely substitute ‘revolution’ for ‘gender’ here, not least because gender is necessarily a part of revolution; rather, what I am after is the way Auden and Isherwood exploit the performative character of revolution in order to raise some disturbing questions about participating in a struggle that is ostensibly not their own, whatever ideological affinities they might feel for those waging resistance against fascism and imperialism. Butler’s theorizing of drag also offers a way to think about the affective engagement with political ideology and cultural differ-

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ence that characterizes political tourism, insofar as taking on particular roles in solidarity with a cause constitutes the sojourner as the subject of political tourism, much as we impersonate gender roles in the formation of our gendered subjectivity. In effect, Journey to a War queers the political tourist discourse on Spain both literally – through what Butler would term Auden’s and Isherwood’s ‘necessary drag’ – and metaphorically, by reinscribing the dominant conventions of solidarity in such a way as to register Auden’s and Isherwood’s ambivalence about their capacity to ‘be’ political tourists. For political tourists, the binary around which solidarity with a cause is articulated is less original/copy than it is native/foreigner or intellectual/peasant, and it is divisions such as these that Auden and Isherwood struggle with in their efforts to enact solidarity with the Chinese. While Auden and Isherwood ultimately remain modernists who assume the existence of a ‘real’ against which their performance is to be seen as sham, as a mere ‘act,’ reading their performance through Butler’s understanding of drag holds out the possibility of a productive exploration of their engagement with political tourism. If the roles of revolutionary and war correspondent seem contradictory, moreover, the blurring of the boundaries between them in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War may be seen as an artefact not only of the Spanish Civil War, but of China’s particular status in the period. A great many of the journalists who wrote about China in the 1930s and 1940s were sympathetic to socialism and Communism or, like Jack Belden, came to be sympathetic over the course of their war reporting. 1 Beyond the experiment in modernization and democratization on which China embarked in 1911 with the overthrow of the Qing dynasty – an experiment in which Communists and nationalists collaborated until the late 1920s – the imperialist invasion of China by Japan in 1937 attracted a good deal of international sympathy. Many journalists passed through China in 1938. As MacKinnon and Friesen put it, ‘Hankow had international glamour. In 1938 it was catapulted

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 79 to center stage in worldwide press attention because of Franco’s victory in Spain’ (38). Auden and Isherwood were clearly not alone in seeking alternatives to Spain as an international symbol of left-wing political aspirations and of the increasingly urgent struggle against fascism; they were perhaps just slightly ahead of the curve in making their decision to go in 1937, shortly after the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Political Tourism Isherwood’s allusion to Valencia and Madrid in the passage quoted above serves not only as a moment of ironic self-reflection but as a synecdoche for political tourism in Spain and therefore the ostensible ‘original’ that he is imitating through his drag as a war correspondent. That ‘original’ offered writers and intellectuals the opportunity to close, in Cecil Day Lewis’s words, ‘the old romantic chasm between the artist and the man of action, the poet and the ordinary man’ (qtd in Ford 18). The most obvious route for those intent on combining thought and action was to volunteer for the militias, as did George Orwell, André Malraux, Christopher Caudwell, Ralph Fox, John Cornford, and others. The imaginative power of the intellectual-turned-military hero works its way into Spanish Civil War texts like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, where the hero Robert Jordan is both a Spanish professor and an explosives expert fighting with republican guerrillas behind the fascist lines. Journey to a War makes little apparent effort to close this chasm between the poet and the ordinary man; on the contrary, it seems more intent on anatomizing the differences. Nor do Auden and Isherwood make any claim to military heroism. Instead they underplay the extent to which they are ever really in harm’s way during their sojourn. Their Chinese guides indulge their desire to visit the front by taking them as far as the second line, where according to Isherwood’s description, ‘an occasional shot rang out, and once or twice, like the slamming of

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a great door, came the boom of the unalarming “small gun”’ (110). When they persuade their hosts to take them further they do witness an exchange of fire and find themselves in a trench with Japanese planes overhead. Isherwood reports, ‘It was an unpleasant feeling lying there exposed in the naked field’ (115), but then adds that Auden took the opportunity to snap a photograph of Isherwood nervously scanning the skies above, documentary evidence of the writer at the front. In the context of the book, the photograph reads more as high camp than earnest documentary. It is important to point out that the writers who participated in one way or another in the Spanish Civil War were themselves charged with poserism (Grosvenor 253). Arthur Koestler, for instance, observes sardonically in his autobiography that ‘Bloomsbury and Greenwich Village went on a revolutionary junket’ and adds that ‘a good historical time was had by all’ (398–9). Koestler also contrasts the writers he lumps under the rubric of the ‘international Leftist bohemia’ with those who joined the militias. The latter clearly are for him genuine revolutionaries, rather than political tourists. That Auden was seen as belonging to the latter category there can be little doubt. John Cornford, one of the writers who did join the militias and who was in fact killed, similarly disparaged the activity of some of his fellow writers in Spain, and accused Auden and Spender, among others, of attempting to make a ‘literary fashion of “revolution” among bourgeois intellectuals whilst denying the possibility of the growth of a genuinely revolutionary literature with a new class basis’ (qtd in Monteath 81). While it would be specious to dismiss the distinctions Koestler and Cornford are making between those writers who were laying their lives on the line and attempting not merely to represent revolution, but to revolutionize representation, I am less inclined than they to dismiss the contributions to revolution of the ‘international Leftist bohemia.’ More to the point, I see Journey to a War as offering a means of unpacking the opposition between genuine

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 81 and sham revolutionary. In their queering of the political tourist discourse on Spain, Auden and Isherwood were clearly not, like Graham Greene in his 1937 essay ‘Alfred Tennyson Intervenes,’ merely mocking those of their peers (including of course Auden himself) who went to Spain. Rather, their revolutionary drag is more intent on the category crisis prompted by the idea of the political tourist, the committed intellectual crossing class, race, or national boundaries in the service of a political struggle. The ‘crisis’ has to do with the problem of commitment, with the capacity of the political tourist to achieve solidarity with the cause in question, to truly be a participant rather than a ‘mere tripper,’ to use Auden and Isherwood’s characterization of their status in China (53). Journey to a War is concerned with exploring the impediments to commitment and participation, including the categories of social location and the geopolitical divides that separate the tourist from the ‘native.’ ‘Necessary Drag’ One of the ways that Auden’s and Isherwood’s revolutionary drag may be seen to place the idea of the political tourist, at least as conceived of in connection with the Spanish Civil War, into crisis is through their ‘necessary drag,’ their homosexuality. Peter Grosvenor points out that ‘the charge of poserism was often coupled with anti-homosexual bigotry and the allegation that support for “Red Spain” was just another example of transgressive politics as an accompaniment to transgressive sex’ (253). This use of ‘transgressive sex’ to denigrate leftist or revolutionary politics necessarily puts Isherwood and Auden into the category of political tourist by establishing the equation political tourism = homosexuality. To embrace a camp performance of revolutionary tourism, then, is implicitly to queer this homophobic equation, subverting its disavowal of homosexuality and left politics. 2 It is also to inhabit selfconsciously as a role that which in another sense Auden and Ish-

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erwood already ‘are,’ that is, gay and therefore political tourists (or political tourists and therefore gay). Once again, drag turns out to be ‘the mundane way in which all genders’ and, one might add, all sexual and political identities are constituted. In Journey to a War, Auden and Isherwood may be seen to address the discursive constitution of political tourism and homosexuality as subject positions through a parody of the conventional associations between masculinity and war, and between masculinity and adventure travel. Conveniently, they are able to accomplish both simultaneously through their encounters in China with Peter Fleming. 3 ‘Well, we’ve been on a journey with Fleming in China, and now we’re travellers for ever and ever. We need never go farther than Brighton again’ (232), pronounces Auden toward the end of the travel diary section. Peter Fleming serves here and at other key moments of the narrative as an icon of the adventure traveller / war correspondent against whom Isherwood and Auden appraise their own performances. As Auden’s quip implies, Fleming is the normative force who confers authenticity on their journey – or at least he might do if they were not so intent on camping all that Fleming represents. ‘In his khaki shirt and shorts, complete with golf-stockings, strong suede shoes, waterproof wrist-watch and Leica camera,’ Fleming looks as though ‘he might have stepped straight from a London tailor’s window, advertising Gent’s Tropical Exploration Kit’ (207). Fleming’s colonial drag is in sharp contrast with the ‘lunatic explorers’’ garb worn by Auden and Isherwood. ‘Auden, in his immense, shapeless overcoat and woollen Jaeger cap, seems dressed for the Arctic regions ... My own beret, sweater, and martial boots would not be out of place in Valencia or Madrid’ (104), Isherwood reports. The emphasis here is on the inappropriateness for China of what Auden and Isherwood wear, in explicit counterpoint to the hyper-appropriateness of Fleming’s costume. Yet Fleming, too, is clearly in drag, as Marsha Bryant points out, observing that the book’s ‘extended portrait of Fleming ... involves a theatrical understanding of maleness’ (150).4

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 83 Certainly Isherwood seems to regard Fleming’s persona as a performance: ‘Fleming with his drawl, his tan, his sleek, perfectly brushed hair, and lean good looks, is a subtly comic figure – the conscious, living parody of the pukka sahib. He is altogether too good to be true – and he knows it’ (156). Once again the original turns out to be a copy, but in their determined failure to measure up to Fleming, Auden and Isherwood effect a critique of the equation between normative masculinity and heroism in war that Fleming represents. Appropriately enough, when Auden and Isherwood set out to visit the southeastern front, they are joined at Tunki by none other than Fleming, who immediately takes charge, deciding against visiting the Communist-led New Fourth Army. 5 Fleming also takes the lead when the group meets with General Ku later that afternoon. 6 In Isherwood’s account of the interview, Fleming proved to be so expert he and Auden were rendered all but superfluous: Fleming ‘handled the exchange of courtesies with consummate skill; it was unnecessary for either of us to open our mouths,’ ‘he knew just what questions to ask,’ and ‘he knew just how to bring the meeting to a close’ (208). Fleming is constantly showing them up. During a briefing at divisional headquarters, ‘he took exhaustive notes and made us feel ashamed of our laziness’ (210). As they set out from Tien-mu-shan to cross the pass on foot to Pao Fu Chun, ‘Fleming supervised [their] departure with his customary efficiency,’ and Auden and Isherwood, having abandoned their ‘preliminary defensive attitude toward him,’ embrace a caricature of the Fleming persona: ‘Laughing and perspiring we scrambled uphill; the Fleming Legend accompanying us like a distorted shadow. Auden and I recited passages from an imaginary travelbook called “With Fleming to the Front”’ (214). In fact, Fleming is associated with the kind of travel writing that Holland and Huggan characterize as the province of ‘the adventurer-hero or, perhaps better, the would-be hero of the gung ho type most popularly expressed in the Boy’s Own adventure tale’ (76–7). If the ‘Fleming

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Legend’ presents a certain anxiety of influence, Auden and Isherwood choose to effect their resistance through camp performance. In presenting someone like Fleming, whose conservative politics and upper-class allegiance (as opposed to Auden’s and Isherwood’s upper-class treason) would seem to rule him out as a revolutionary model, as their guide to the front, Auden and Isherwood ultimately mock a pseudo-heroism and its associated hypermasculinity, rather than anything they might construe as ‘genuine’ heroism. In constructing themselves as incompetent imitators of Fleming, they signal their anti-heroic inhabiting of the category of political tourist at the same time as they critique the connection between straight masculinity and war. In their account of this journey to the front, they also offer the occasional departure from camp as a strategy for exploring their discomfort with the category of political tourism. There is an episode which brings the political tourists, Fleming included, face to face with the struggle and suffering that are going on around them. Isherwood records a moment of recognition, in the village of Meiki, of the danger their entourage poses to the Chinese soldiers and villagers in the war zone. Meiki is in the process of being evacuated because the front threatens to engulf it, but a small group of villagers is nevertheless standing in the rain at the edge of town to greet them. The travellers later learn that the divisional commander had attempted to prevent their departure from Anchi that afternoon, and he is not pleased to see them: Although very polite he couldn’t conceal his dismay at our presence. We were tiresomely notorious foreigners, who might add to his responsibilities by getting killed. Our proper place was on a platform in London – not here, amongst exhausted and overworked officers and officials. We might have to leave, he warned us, in the middle of the night. The evacuation of the civilian population had started already. Touched, and rather ashamed of myself, I thought of those men and women who had wasted their last pre-

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 85 cious hours of safety, waiting to welcome us with their banner in the rain. (222)

Their adventure seems decidedly unheroic when we learn that, if Isherwood and Auden were not really in harm’s way, they might nonetheless be putting other people at risk. The interruption of the generally amusing account of their travels in quest of the southeastern front with passages such as this gives the lie to the equation political tourism = homosexuality in another way. On the one hand, Auden and Isherwood inhabit the stereotype and through their playful campiness expose the performative character of conventional masculinity and the standard markers of heroism. On the other, they offer a more sober consideration of their unease with their roles as political tourists, sketching a remove from that role, as they come to understand it, by exposing these moments of doubt, of dis-identification, of guilt. The realist narrator is no longer the voice of authority here, nor an observer who is able to remain fully outside of the action. Rather, moments like this in which they are as much gazed upon as gazing, render the inside/outside boundaries of realist narrative unstable, pointing up the more complex and ambivalent relationship Auden and Isherwood have with China and with the struggle they are meant to record. Questions of form in fact turn out to be key in this text, not only because Auden and Isherwood are implicitly engaging debates about the forms of politically committed art that were so much a part of 1930s literary culture, but because they need to find ways of representing both the ambivalence of the self-conscious political tourist and a kind of abiding faith in the importance of the struggle they ‘fail’ to represent. Genre In describing the literature of the Spanish Civil War, Stanley Eskin observes that partisanship is not merely its function or theme,

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‘partisanship is the art’ (77). For Anna Seghers, one of the writers who attended the International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture in Madrid in July 1937, ‘it was a matter of bearing witness: namely to the defence of culture, which today is identified with the defence of Spain’ (qtd in Monteath 68–9). The Congress debated the appropriate forms for partisan art and eventually issued a ponencia colectiva or collective pronouncement to the effect that the writers’ ‘greatest aspiration is to express fundamentally that reality with which we feel ourselves in agreement poetically, politically and philosophically ... Ultimately, there is no clash between objective reality and the private world ’ (qtd in Monteath 71). Auden was one of the delegates at the Congress in Madrid, and while it is impossible to know what he thought of the proceedings, Journey to a War may be read as an engagement with these questions. The art of partisanship might not seem likely to admit of dissonance, yet in highlighting the ‘dissonance,’ ‘hyperbole,’ and ‘internal confusion’ that are among the markers of (revolutionary) drag, Journey to a War nonetheless speaks to the difficulties of enacting solidarity and ultimately affirms the value of bearing witness. The dissonance that signals category crisis is articulated not only through the camp of key moments in the travel diary or some of the photographs; it also emerges through the interrelationships and slippages between travel diary, sonnet sequences, and photographs. Douglas Kerr suggests that there is an irresolvable tension between the prose and the verse in Journey to a War. In his view, the former registers ‘disorientation,’ the difficulties of arrival, certainty, and, presumably, commitment as Isherwood and Auden negotiate the particularities of day-to-day travel in China – a petit récit of doubt. Poetry, on the other hand, exhibits the confidence of abstraction and the grand narratives (54–5). I have been arguing, conversely, that the revolutionary drag enacted in Journey to a War is intent precisely on addressing a kind of category crisis in 1930s left intellectual efforts to close the gap between petits and grands récits; thus if prose and verse seem assigned distinct roles in

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 87 this text, they are nonetheless to be read together and are less neatly divisible than Kerr suggests, with moments of doubt and ambivalence registered in verse and moments of conviction in the prose. The book opens with series of sonnets titled ‘London to Hong Kong.’ The first of these, ‘The Voyage,’ complicates conventional understanding of the relationship between traveller, voyage, and ‘watcher upon the quay.’ To the one staying behind, the journey appears an escape: ‘Where does the journey look which the watcher upon the quay, / Standing under his evil star, so bitterly envies?’ (17). Yet the traveller’s desire for ‘Proofs that somewhere there exists, really, the Good Place’ seems ultimately compromised, for he learns that ‘The journey is false’; the sea on which he travels ‘is the same, always; and goes / Everywhere, joining the false and the true, but cannot suffer’ (18). The sea here does not separate watcher and traveller; it is a global medium conjoining the two and implicating both in the suffering to which the sea itself is oblivious. Journey to a War thus opens with an expression of ambivalence about the nature of journeys, or at least about the journey as utopian impulse and the journey as escape. Two linked sonnets, in contrast, appear to sharpen the distinctions blurred in the first by mocking the imperial presence in China, dubbing Macao ‘A weed from Catholic Europe’ that ‘grew on China imperceptibly’ (22), and in the sonnet ‘Hong Kong,’ counterposing the comic ‘leading characters [who] are wise and witty’ living as they do ‘Ten thousand miles from home and What’s-her-name,’ with the tragic: ‘off-stage, a war / Thuds like the slamming of a distant door’ (23). This mundane image of a slamming door not only diminishes the public battle that is in fact claiming the lives of thousands of Chinese peasants and soldiers, it also implies that the colonial bureaucrats for whom the war has the secondary status of ‘noises off’ need do little more than close the door of their private dwellings to escape the war raging on their doorsteps. Over the course of Journey to a War, Auden and Isherwood focus readers’

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attention on thresholds, barriers, and obstacles of various kinds that interpose between themselves and the putative object of their journey, the Chinese struggle against Japanese imperial aggression. Their own implication in empire represents a key obstacle, however keen they may be to disavow it. Yet a threshold can offer entry into a space as easily as prevent it and consequently offers a useful metaphor for as ambiguous an undertaking as political tourism. The sense conveyed by Isherwood in the travel diary that he and Auden never quite arrive in China would appear to echo, in a different vein, the idea of the false journey in ‘The Voyage.’ Their experience of Hong Kong, for instance, seems more like an entrée into colonial society than the war they are expecting to find: It was all about dinner-parties at very long tables, and meetings with grotesquely famous newspaper-characters – the British Ambassador, the Governor, Sir Victor Sassoon. We seemed to be in a perpetual hurry, struggling into our dinner-jackets, racing off in taxis to keep appointments for which we were already hopelessly late. (28)

Dinner jackets hardly seem the most appropriate costume for a theatre of war, and their efforts to keep appointments for which they were already ‘hopelessly late’ hint at failure before they have even seriously begun. That the British imperial elite with whom they dine are characterized as grotesques, as ‘newspaper-characters’ who are larger than life, implicitly locates the ‘real’ elsewhere. This tension between what they experience and their sense of the ‘real’ pervades the diary. Once they leave Hong Kong on a riverboat bound for Canton, the anticipated arrival seems in view: ‘“Well,” Auden said, “here we are. Now it’s going to start”’ (28). Yet for Isherwood, the moment of arrival occurs later still, when they are taking tea at the home of the British consul, and he begins to hear the thuds of bombs dropping during an air raid:

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 89 Clearing my throat, I said as conversationally as I could manage: ‘Isn’t that an air-raid?’ Our hostess glanced up, smiling, from the tea-tray: ‘Yes, I expect it is. They come over about this time, most afternoons ... Do you take sugar and milk?’ (32)

Isherwood clearly finds it difficult to reconcile the sounds of war with this genteel scene, and the humorous counterpoint between Isherwood’s thinly disguised nervousness and his host’s calm indifference underscores the gap between these ostensibly opposed versions of the ‘real.’ The scene echoes the tension in ‘Hong Kong’ but shifts the location of the ‘wise and witty’ characters who performed while the war sounded ‘off-stage.’ Significantly, it is not until Isherwood is able to reconcile the apparent contradictions that he is able to ‘arrive’: My eyes moved over this charming room, taking in the tea-cups, the dish of scones, the book-case with Chesterton’s essays and Kipling’s poems ... My brain tried to relate these images to the sounds outside ... the distant thump of the explosions. Understand, I told myself, that those noises, these objects are part of a single, integrated scene. Wake up. It’s all quite real. And, at that moment ... suddenly, I arrived in China. (32)

‘China,’ then, becomes synonymous with reconciling private gentility with public war, the familiar with the unfamiliar, the ‘onstage’ spaces where people (at least people like Auden and Isherwood) live their lives with the ‘off-stage’ spaces of fascist invasion and suffering. Yet as this scene suggests, these spaces are not as discontinuous as they might initially appear; the British imperial presence inside is implicated in the Japanese imperial presence outside. Isherwood and Auden move into and out of both of these realms, inhabiting the threshold that joins these domains while setting them apart. If the connections (and disjunctions) between a consular tea

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and an air raid are part of the lesson of arrival, so too are barriers to solidarity of a different sort: the complex tensions between West and East, bourgeois and coolie, insider and outsider. Isherwood, for instance, reflects on what separates himself and Auden from the coolies who convey them across some of the rougher terrain as they journey to the southern front in the company of Peter Fleming. Having walked most of the previous day, Isherwood and Auden decide to give their feet a break and allow themselves to be carried in chairs: The coolies strode along, relieving each other with trained adroitness. We gazed at their bulging calves and straining thighs, and rehearsed every dishonest excuse for allowing ourselves to be carried by human beings: they are used to it, it’s giving them employment, they don’t feel. Oh no, they don’t feel – but the lump on the back of that man’s neck wasn’t raised by drinking champagne, and his sweat remarkably resembles my own. Never mind, my feet hurt. I’m paying him, aren’t I? Three times as much, in fact, as he’d get from a Chinese. Sentimentality helps no one. Why don’t you walk? I can’t, I tell you. You bloody well would if you’d got no cash. But I have got cash. Oh dear. I’m so heavy ... Our coolies, unaware of these qualms, seemed to bear us no ill-will, however. (226)

The imaginary debate Isherwood has with his conscience alternates between recognizing kinship (‘his sweat remarkably resembles my own’) and identifying markers of difference (‘they are used to it’; ‘But I have got cash’). Only one of these rationalizations rests on Auden’s and Isherwood’s non-Chinese status – specifically, that they are paying their bearers more generously than a Chinese would. In the context of the journey, their Chinese companions do also use the chairs, while Peter Fleming, of course, never does. Yet the emphasis falls on the privilege that sets Auden and Isherwood apart from the Chinese masses with whom, as political tourists, they are meant to identify. Ironically it is their very

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 91 mode of conveyance which, in this instance, disrupts identification. Yet they do nothing to overcome the barrier; rather, they allow the coolies’ lack of ill-will, bred of those same divisions, to assuage the guilt they feel. One of the main ways that the fraught intersections between East and West, native and foreigner are emphasized in the travel diary is through Isherwood’s periodic reminders to the reader of the ways he and Auden are implicated in the imperial power structure. They do the dinner-party circuit in Hong Kong, take tea at the British consulate in Canton, and even observe an air raid from the consulate in Hankow: ‘We put on our smoked glasses and lay down flat on our backs on the Consulate lawn,’ Isherwood reports, ‘it is the best way of watching an air-raid if you don’t want a stiff neck’ (172). In Shanghai, they stay in the British ambassador’s private villa in the French Concession, spending their days touring the environs of the Foreign Concessions with Rewi Alley. Isherwood observes, ‘And we ourselves, though we wear out our shoes walking the slums, though we take notes, though we are genuinely shocked and indignant, belong unescapably to the other world. We return, always, to Number One House for lunch’ (252). The emphasis here clearly falls on their outsider status; they are irrevocably set apart from the Chinese soldiers who are engaged in the war Auden and Isherwood purport to write about, and from the Chinese workers and peasants in the factories and slums they tour with Alley. Part of what confirms them as tourists – ‘mere trippers’ (53) to use their wording – is their status as upper-class Englishmen, with a certain reputation as public figures, that allows them to draw on the imperial infrastructure in their travels. But they are also at pains to separate themselves from the infrastructure on which they depend and the imperialist world view it upholds. Their descriptions of ‘Number One House,’ the ambassador’s private villa, for instance, emphasize the contrast between its elegance and perfection and its setting in war-torn China. The contrast, moreover, is once again couched in theatrical metaphors:

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Everything goes off like clockwork. It is a beautifully-contrived charade, the perfect image of another kind of life – projected, at considerable expense, from its source on the opposite side of the earth ... But gaily as the charade-players laugh, and loudly as they chatter, they cannot altogether ignore those other, most undiplomatic sounds which reach us, at intervals, from beyond the garden trees. Somewhere out in the suburbs, machine-guns are rattling. (239)

Auden and Isherwood are among the charade players in this simulacrum of an England, but with their ears attuned to the sounds emanating from the ‘real’ world of the war. In case these subtly critical observations should fail to distinguish Auden and Isherwood from the setting in which they have found themselves, they strive to point out that they are outsiders in this imported world as much as they are in ‘China’: ‘The Ambassador and Lady Kerr are, like ourselves, perfect strangers in this life-size doll’s house’ (238, emphasis added).7 Simultaneously acknowledging their kinship with the charade players that compromises their claims to solidarity with the Chinese, and their lack of ideological fit with the ‘doll’s house’ they inhabit, Auden and Isherwood perform in the threshold between sham and reality, inside and outside. Unable to ‘be’ political tourists but, on some level, identifying with the ethical imperatives of the category, Auden and Isherwood resort to depicting the nature of the crisis. In speaking to (and arguing against) the dominant inclination in Auden studies to accept Auden’s later renunciation of poems like Spain 1937 and ‘September 1, 1939,’ in terms of ‘an enforced liberal separation between general and particular’ which sees the private as authentic and true and the political as alienated and false, Stan Smith observes: ‘For Auden in the thirties, it was precisely the inability to link the particular personal, apparently private life to the larger movements of history and the body politic that had bred both fascism and the moral inertia of the western

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 93 democracies that failed to resist it in time’ (‘Missing’ 165). Following the logic of Smith’s argument, I contend that it is possible to reconceptualize Journey to a War as a staging of that moral inertia, in which the authors implicate themselves, and a reassertion of the importance of making the link between personal, private lives and the larger historical frame that shapes them. The very notion of a revolutionary drag offers this possibility by insisting on living the performance, on recognizing the (public) construction, and (privately) inhabiting it critically and subversively. The Tourist’s Body The photographs in the book, which follow the travel diary in a section titled ‘Picture Commentary,’ may be read in terms of this tension between individual embodiment and historical determinants. The dissonance that is evident in the relationship between image and caption, between image and photographer, and in the relationship between Auden’s photographs and the partisan photography of the Spanish Civil War, allows for a self-critical marking of Auden’s (and, by implication, Isherwood’s) distance from partisanship, even as the historical forces at work in China remain clearly in evidence in those same photographs. In rehearsing yet again the difficulties they faced playing their commitment straight, Auden and Isherwood use the ‘Picture Commentary’ to image the moral inertia they both inhabit and indict in their text. In so doing, they necessarily depart from the largely documentary mode of socially engaged photography in the 1930s, offering instead a more reflexive and allusive pictorial text. Particularly striking is the relationship – or absence thereof – between the photographer-tourist’s body and the bodies in the photographs. There is nonetheless a kind of fascination with bodies and what they mean. The photographs are ordered into categories: ‘The United Front,’ ‘Soldiers and Civilians,’ and ‘War Zone,’ and each photograph or pair of the photographs is captioned. Yet the

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captions rarely have a straightforward relationship to the images and frequently play on the viewers’ expectations, as when the photographs labelled ‘White Russian Restaurant Proprietor’ and ‘Shanghai Business Man’ both feature white men. The captions also address embodiment in other ways. One pairing of photos labelled ‘Children in Uniform’ offers a second, even more poignant, set of captions: ‘With legs’ and ‘Without’ (figure 2.1). While the first image shows a group of boys in uniform who clearly do have legs, the second photograph shows us only the head and shoulders of a young boy. Tactfully refraining from making a spectacle of the boy’s injury, Auden forces us to rely on the caption to tell us something the image does not. On the other hand, this photograph perhaps tells us about loss precisely by not showing us legs; the frame signifies by directing our attention to what lies beyond it and any assumptions we might be inclined to make about what we cannot see. Paired under the captions ‘The Innocent’ and ‘The Guilty,’ another two photographs offer the viewer little that would explain the moral or political judgment implicit in the captions (figure 2.2). The first shows a body on a stretcher, mouth wrenched into a grimace of pain, eyes hidden beneath a piece of cloth. It is impossible to know whether this body is alive or dead. The second is clearly a corpse, although that is about all that is clear. It seems half-buried, half-decomposed, and what determines its guilty status remains unintelligible to the viewer. This gap between what we see and what we are meant to see, while it signifies differently from case to case, nonetheless has the cumulative effect of compelling recognition of the limits of representation, of what can be shown or narrated about a place, a war, a revolution. The individual cases work to point out the ethical ramifications of those limits, and neither spare the photographer nor exculpate the viewer. The absence of bodies in some photographs comes to have meaning in relation to the historical context and to the recently established language of war photography emanating from the

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SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS

With legs

Without CHILDREN IN UNIFORM 2.1 Children in Uniform. With legs. Without.

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WAR ZONE

The Innocent

The Guilty 2.2 The Innocent. The Guilty.

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 97 Spanish Civil War. One image of the Japanese front line could be a placid landscape, so little evidence is there of any military conflict. In the context of a book titled Journey to a War, this image not only confounds the viewer’s expectation of seeing the bodies of soldiers in an image of the front, it seems to underscore how far removed from conflict the photographer is. The contrast with Robert Capa’s most famous photograph of the Spanish Civil War, ‘Death of a Loyalist Soldier,’ is marked. As Peter Monteath points out, ‘much of the impact of the photo [of a falling militia man at the Aragon front] lies in the realization that the photographer was not a distanced observer but a participant’ (132). David Mellor observes that in the case of combat photographers, ‘the motif of risk and danger became attached to their bodies as much as to the scene they represented and recorded. In effect, the scene they represented was a self representation of presenting their bodies; by choice, by sacrifice’ (25). By contrast, the obligatory photograph of Auden in a trench feels staged, as though Auden were literally being cast as participant: he assumes a casual pose and smiles in the direction of the camera; even the uniformed soldier at his side is obviously doing little other than playing tour guide (figure 2.3). The contrast with Capa’s photographs again strikes the viewer, as it undoubtedly is meant to – there is, after all, a photograph of Capa himself, who was in China at the same time as Auden and Isherwood, in the ‘Picture Commentary’ as if to remind us. In Capa’s photographs of the Spanish Civil War, his participant status conferred authority and authenticity on his photographs. 8 Auden, conversely, seems almost determined to undermine any authority that his photographs might have. Paired with the image of Auden in a trench is one of several armed Chinese soldiers crouching in another trench that does resemble Capa’s civil war photography. The juxtaposition of these two images, however, if it does not entirely undermine the impact of the second photograph, at least sets Auden himself apart from the war that is taking place and reiterates Auden and Isherwood’s insistence that

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2.3 In the Trenches.

they are ‘mere trippers,’ not ‘real journalists’ (53). For if ‘the “good” war picture is the one marked by the making presence of the endangered body of the photographer’ (Mellor 25), Auden’s war photographs are clearly not ‘good.’ His body signifies rather, as one of his sonnets implies, ‘the common world of the uninjured’ ( JW 275), which is set apart from the suffering and all those who, as he put it in Spain, 1937, ‘came to present their lives’ (212). Lyrical History In moving from the ‘Picture Commentary’ to the final sonnet sequence, we move from body to voice. In its engagement with history, the lyric voice is transformed in the sonnet sequence ‘In Time of War,’ which, together with its ‘Verse Commentary,’ closes

Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 99 the book. The sequence engages with what I have described as the political tourism binary, and while it is less obviously camp than either the travel diary or the ‘Picture Commentary,’ it too offers a kind of meditation on the problem of staging or enacting solidarity with a ‘foreign’ cause. Stan Smith argues that the sequence ‘turns the genre [of the sonnet] inside-out, evacuating the personal, using it instead as a vehicle for an objective history of the species’ (W.H. Auden 109). Read together with the travel diary and the photographs, the sequence and verse commentary offer another instance where the constructedness of accounts of war and revolution becomes evident. Smith suggests that reading the ‘diachronic, mythic, impersonal’ history offered in the sonnet sequence against ‘the personal, synchronic, autobiographical prose account of two young men’s journey’ has the effect of ‘bar[ing] the device of story-telling itself, and set[ting] the selfcentred subject on a collision course with the realities of an evolution which decentres that subject, where “History opposes its grief to our buoyant song”’ (109–10). As Smith makes clear, baring the device of storytelling by no means diminishes the political force of the account. On the contrary, this self-conscious exploration of the speakers’ implication in a vast sweep of history that is both diachronic and global stresses connectedness rather than distance and aloofness. The relationship of the individual to the larger historical frame emerges within the sequence itself. Most of the sonnets centre on a single speaker, and while it is clear that the speaker is not the same from sonnet to sonnet, each is shaped by and struggles with his (the singular speaker is always ‘he’) version of historical circumstances. If the individual life is set into a historical frame, moreover, it is also measured against the collective. There are those like sonnet XIV that shift to the first-person plural to implicate everyone in the war: ‘Yes, we are going to suffer, now,’ and that suffering is global in scope as ‘the sky / Throbs like a feverish forehead’ and we learn that ‘Behind each sociable home-loving eye /

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The private massacres are taking place; / All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race’ (272). The war in question is evidently not only the struggle in China that Auden and Isherwood have come to witness, but the larger struggle against misogyny, fascism, and hatred of all kinds. The very idea of a private massacre seems oxymoronic, binding the personal sorrow to public loss. These ‘private massacres’ cannot be separated from the public wars that ‘maps can really point to... / Where life is evil now: / Nanking; Dachau’ (274). The suffering caused by wars both private and public produces isolation; sonnet XVII highlights this experience: ‘They are and suffer; that is all they do: / A bandage hides the place where each is living’ (275). Isolation is an effect, not a choice; its causes are structural, Auden suggests: ‘For who when healthy can become a foot?’ On the contrary, when healthy we ‘believe / In the common world of the uninjured, and cannot / Imagine isolation’ (275). Auden and Isherwood are separated from the suffering soldiers and peasants they encounter on their travels by virtue of belonging to this ‘world of the uninjured,’ both literally and metaphorically, and it is against the conditions that impose the isolation of suffering that they must struggle, as sonnet XX suggests. It opens with the distancing third person – ‘They carry terror with them like a purse’ – but shifts in the closing sestet to include the speakers in ‘the new disaster’: ‘We live here. We lie in the Present’s unopened / Sorrow; its limits are what we are’ (278, emphasis added). These shifts from outsider to insider work to highlight the materiality and historicity of the boundaries separating ‘native’ from ‘foreigner,’ while enduring nature frequently serves as the medium for global unification, like the sea that ‘goes / Everywhere, joining the false and the true’ and the sky that ‘Throbs like a feverish forehead.’ The human condition, Auden implies in sonnet XXV, offers opportunities and therefore responsibilities: ‘Nothing is given: we must find our law. / Great buildings jostle in the sun for

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domination; / Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation / The low recessive houses of the poor’ (283). These inequalities are ours to redress: ‘We have no destiny assigned us: / Nothing is certain but the body ... / ... the hospitals alone remind us / Of the equality of man.’ Contra the differentiated embodiment of the photographs, the speaker here insists on an objective equality that is obscured by wealth and other forms of privilege. In the face of historical inequality, moreover, even compassion and resistance to injustice must be taught: ‘We learn to pity and rebel.’ It does not come naturally. The process of learning pity and rebellion is one way of thinking about the evolutionary impulse in both sonnet sequence and verse commentary, and a way of reading the lyrical engagement with history. The poet is but one figure among many in the sequence, but sonnet VII seems to confirm the need for poetry to speak to more than ‘The little tremors of his mind and heart / At each domestic wrong’ (265). When, in sonnet XIII, we return to the theme of poetry, it is with a renewed insistence on its ambiguous role in the face of suffering and injustice: ‘Certainly praise: let the song mount again and again,’ instructs the speaker, at the same time as the poet is cautioned: ‘But hear the morning’s injured weeping, and know why: / Cities and men have fallen.’ The poet can serve at court, or face the more difficult ‘truth’: ‘History opposes its grief to our buoyant song’ (271). Sonnet XIII represents a turning point in the sequence; the remaining sonnets do turn their attention to the particular suffering where ‘Cities and men have fallen,’ and appropriately sonnet XIV opens by affirming ‘Yes, we are going to suffer now’ (272). The shift to the first-person plural marks decisively the broadening of the lyrical voice, which begins to speak of the need for, as well as the difficulty of, engagement. Significantly, both the sequence and the commentary affirm that it is those ‘Far from the heart of culture’ who are most able to teach pity and rebellion.

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The soldier who has been ‘Abandoned by his general and his lice’ may ‘not be introduced / When this campaign is tidied into books,’ but nonetheless he ‘taught us’ ‘that, where are waters, / Mountains and houses, may be also men’ (276). This giving of one’s life for the cause is in sharp contrast with the hypocrisy of the ‘enlightened’ revolutionaries of Europe and the Americas, ‘When Austria died and China was forsaken, / Shanghai in flames and Teruel retaken’ (280). Against such imperial hauteur, the verse commentary reminds us of ‘the Invisible College of the Humble, / Who through the ages have accomplished everything essential’ (298). These are the voices that give ‘us courage to confront our enemies, / Not only on the Grand Canal, or in Madrid, / Across the campus of a university city, / But aid us everywhere, that ... / ... / The enemies of life may be more passionately attacked’ (298). If the speaker moves away again from the specific conflict in China, or its ready parallel in Spain, to the more abstract ‘enemies of life,’ the ‘voice of Man’ that speaks at the end of the commentary nonetheless calls for commitment and action: ‘Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will, / ... / Till they construct at last a human justice’ (301). The invocation emphasizes the tremendous difficulty that this action entails and implies that human justice may well be a distant achievement, but the conviction emerges from the specific circumstances in which the speaker finds himself: the voice of Man is ‘rising round me from Shanghai, / And mingling with the distant mutter of guerrilla fighting’ (300). The verse commentary, moreover, affirms the implicit insistence throughout ‘In Time of War’ that the outsider status of the travellers is ultimately illusory: ‘While in an international and undamaged quarter, / Casting our European shadows on Shanghai, / ... /... / ... / We are compelled to realize that our refuge is a sham’ (291). This recognition stems from the notion that ‘this material contest ... / ... / Is but the local variant of a struggle in which all / ... / In all their living are profoundly implicated’ because all inhabit ‘a world that has no localized events’ (291–2).

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Bearing Witness In their travels in China, Auden and Isherwood encounter Agnes Smedley, whose performance of solidarity with the Chinese negotiates the contradictions of globality somewhat differently, as we will see in the next chapter. Auden and Isherwood represent her as the earnest and committed left intellectual whom they admire but fail to be. Not surprisingly, they meet up with her in Hankow, ‘the real capital of war-time China’ (50). Smedley’s role is scripted accordingly. ‘It is impossible not to like and respect her, so grim and sour and passionate; so mercilessly critical of every one, herself included – as she sits before the fire, huddled together, as if all the suffering, all the injustices of the world were torturing her bones like rheumatism’ (60). Smedley is, in this description, the literal embodiment of commitment to social justice. Isherwood later adds to this portrait, remarking, ‘The Red Army, one sees, is Agnes Smedley’s whole life – her husband and child. “When I was with them,” she told us, “for the first time I felt at one with the universe”’ (166). Her affective and bodily devotion to the revolution in China is made evident in these passages; like the foreign intellectuals who joined the militias in Spain, Smedley is putting her life on the line. There is little derision in this portrait, the irony that pervades the travel diary more subdued. The value of Smedley’s work as witness is implicitly acknowledged. At the same time, Smedley’s role as ‘true’ political tourist serves as a built-in counterpoint to Auden’s and Isherwood’s revolutionary drag, yet another affirmation of their modernist sense that there are authentic, committed intellectuals in the world, even as their account of their journey delineates the crises that beset the category. In an effort to tease out some of the implications of the use to which Auden and Isherwood put Smedley in their drag performance, I want to juxtapose elements of Journey to a War with Smedley’s assessment of the book and with the circumstances of that assessment.

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In notes written for a lecture she was giving to students in California in 1941, after ill health and increasingly repressive conditions in war-torn China forced her to return to the United States, Smedley remarks in passing on Journey to a War. It was, in her estimation, a ‘silly book,’ and the impatience this remark registers seems to confirm Auden’s and Isherwood’s own claims about the sham nature of their journey. 9 Smedley concedes, however, that ‘in that superficial book [there] was one excellent poem by Auden’ about a Chinese soldier. She is referring to sonnet XVIII, which Smedley is likely to have known not only from reading Journey to a War but also from its publication in a Chinese newspaper, the Ta Kung Pao, at the time of Auden’s and Isherwood’s sojourn in Hankow. Auden and Isherwood attended a tea party that had been organized for them to meet ‘the leading Chinese intellectuals’ in Hankow, and Isherwood describes it as a stilted, artificial affair, laden with symbolic value but lacking in meaningful communication: There is no lack of goodwill on either side – indeed, the air positively vibrates with Anglo-Chinese rapprochement – but are we really communicating at all? Beaming at our hosts we exchange words: ‘England,’ ‘China,’ ‘Poetry,’ ‘Culture,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ ‘International Understanding,’ ‘Bernard Shaw’ – but the words merely mean, ‘We are pleased to see you.’ They are just symbols of mutual confidence, like swapping blank cheques. (155)

A Chinese poet named Tien wrote a poem in their honour which he had translated for them; ‘not to be outdone,’ Isherwood tells us, ‘Auden replied with a sonnet, which he finished writing yesterday, on a dead Chinese soldier’ (154). Auden’s sonnet was published in the Ta Kung Pao in manuscript facsimile, together with a Chinese translation and an interview they had given a young Chinese journalist. One line of the sonnet was altered in the Chinese

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translation. As Isherwood put it, ‘The translators had evidently felt that ... “Abandoned by his general and his lice” was too brutal, and maybe, even, a dangerous thought ... So, instead they had written: “The rich and poor are combining to fight”’ (161). Smedley, however, quotes Auden’s original, the version published in Journey to a War. While Smedley’s notes are incomplete and break off shortly after she quotes the poem, it is clear that she is using the poem as a lead-in to talking about her own efforts to represent Chinese soldiers and their role in the struggle for a China where ‘our daughters / Be fit to love the earth, and not again / Disgraced before the dogs.’ Despite Isherwood’s misgivings about his and Auden’s meeting with the Chinese intellectuals and poets in Hankow, despite Smedley’s misgivings about their book, this act of bearing witness and its multiple translations and exchanges – from English to Chinese, Chinese back into English, and its ‘translation’ into Smedley’s lecture on the other side of the Pacific in the context of her own testimony about China – suggests that swapping ‘symbols of mutual confidence’ may not be quite so meaningless after all. Pace John Cornford, Auden and Isherwood were not merely engaged in an attempt to make a ‘literary fashion of “revolution”’ through their revolutionary drag. Journey to a War clearly fails to change the class basis of literature, but that is not its aim. It fails to participate in revolution in the ways Cary Nelson points out much of the literature associated with the Spanish Civil War did, but that is not its aim either (10). Journey to a War bears a different kind of witness to the war in China and struggles like it. The ambivalence Auden and Isherwood register throughout Journey to a War about the role of the committed writer – even as they affirm the value of commitment and signal their recognition that their ‘refuge is a sham’ – is itself set against the political struggle their journey maps. The notion that the journey is false because the false and the true are always already united in suffering is also challenged by

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the mundane contrasts between privilege and deprivation Auden and Isherwood encounter repeatedly in the course of their travels. Rather than a diffident and compromised account of war and revolution, Journey to a War offers an account – or, better, a performance – of diffidence and compromise in wartime that effectively puts the category of political tourist in crisis and asks serious questions about the tension between political faith in international social justice and the practical difficulties of transnational praxis. These remain questions for Western intellectuals to grapple with even as new possibilities for transnational solidarity emerge in a world that, more than ever, ‘has no localized events,’ and they are questions that haunt this book. Auden’s and Isherwood’s revolutionary drag is indeed a slippery kind of performance: in putting the category of political tourist into crisis, they arguably risk putting the category of revolution itself into crisis. It is tempting to argue that they are trying to signal some of the contradictions that inevitably beset revolutionary movements alongside their performance of the contradictions marking their own effort at solidarity, but I do not think that is their aim. Rather, they consistently affirm the value of striving for social justice, of remediating suffering and disenfranchisement, but they also emphasize the gap between recognizing these values and acting on them. This is the gap between knowing and doing that Keenan addresses, the space where we face our responsibility to others. In calling their own performance of solidarity a sham, in insisting on their own failure, Auden and Isherwood call their readers to new practices of the self that might enable the kind of authentic commitment they insist is possible. Several of the political tourists I consider here undertake precisely this sort of transformation, not least Agnes Smedley and Che Guevara. If we take seriously the implications of Auden’s and Isherwood’s revolutionary drag, it is evident that no model (no ‘original’ that might be imitated) for political tourism exists. That does not

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mean, however, that a performance of solidarity has no real impact in the world. Nor does it mean that in calling readers to face our responsibility to others in far-flung places around the world, Auden and Isherwood need offer a program for action. There is rather more value in insisting that no such program exists.

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CHAPTER THREE

‘Speaking Bitterness’: Agnes Smedley in China

In her response to Martha Nussbaum’s essay ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,’ Judith Butler offers a critical take on universalism that nonetheless does not reject the concept outright. She argues instead that ‘there are cultural conditions for its articulation that are not always the same, and that the term gains meaning for us precisely through these decidedly less than universal conditions’ (‘Universality in Culture’ 45–6). While neglecting the culturally and historically contingent articulations of universality leads to the sort of promotion of particularism in universalist guise that so many postcolonial critics have addressed, Butler proposes that we think of universality as an as-yet unrealized condition rather than one whose terms have already been established. In this way, she proposes, those who lay claim to the category, despite their exclusion from it, by means of a ‘performative contradiction’ work to expand and revise the category by implicitly pointing to its insufficiency, its only partially realized status: ‘To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the “not yet” is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains “unrealized” by the universal constitutes it essentially’ (48). I have been arguing that political tourists are engaged in a kind of insurgent or ‘ideal’ universality which is similarly future-

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oriented insofar as, in Balibar’s terms, ideal universality is ‘continuously displaced in history’ (66–7). To the extent that the ideal universality of political tourists is bound up with Enlightenment narratives of emancipation, on the other hand, it remains in need of what Butler proposes is ‘a difficult labor of translation’ (52), a task that arguably belongs less to the political tourists than to many of the anti-imperialist struggles they seek to join. For ‘the extension of universality through the act of translation takes place when one who is excluded from the universal, and yet belongs to it nevertheless, speaks from a split situation of being at once authorized and deauthorized’ (Butler 50). Agnes Smedley’s sojourn in China in the 1930s offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways a political tourist might ally herself with such a project of translation. In this chapter I consider Agnes Smedley’s writing of China in terms of a struggle with form, with subjectivity, and with modernity as a universalist project. More particularly, I am interested in how someone who through her travels and her writing seeks to transform both the world and herself ‘translates’ her role, splits the conditions of her enunciation, in a way that strives to be responsible to the anti-imperial struggle she joins, even as she remains committed to the project of modernity. In some respects, political tourism is fundamentally about an engagement with modernity, not least because the tourists typically originate in the Western nations presumed to be the sources of modernity. At the same time, political tourism is potentially about undoing this axiomatic relationship, its texts demonstrating that modernity is better conceived as ‘an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/ local claims, commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness’ (Rofel 3). To acknowledge these shifting and uneven dialogues is to insist, as Lisa Rofel does, on treating modernity as ‘a located cultural imaginary, arising from and perpetuating relations of difference across an East-West divide’ (xii) and, in

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this way, to embark on the ‘difficult labor of translation’ Butler speaks of. I will focus in particular on Battle Hymn of China, which records Smedley’s travels through China from 1928 to 1941. During this period Smedley worked as a journalist, reporting on the Chinese revolution and the Sino-Japanese War for Western newspapers and magazines. Yet the books she published about her experiences in China are less works of journalism than they are efforts to imagine and articulate new ways of being and belonging in a society that is striving to transform itself. Battle Hymn of China is part autobiography, part travel diary, part reportage, part testimony. The work’s narrative trajectory is defined by the traveller’s movement through socially symbolic places and times; its generic complexity reflects an effort to articulate the processes of identification and the political affect these journeys elicit together with the dynamic social scene through which the traveller moves. Smedley’s writing of China and the form that it takes represent a negotiation with both the universalist impulses of modernity and ‘all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices’ that she encountered during her sojourn (Chakrabarty 11). In this respect, Smedley’s writing resonates with current critical interest in the ‘new cosmopolitanism,’ which Scott Malcolmson has described as ‘a strategic bargain with universalism,’ as well as with postcolonial engagements with that same Enlightenment legacy and its ties to imperialism (234). This is not to suggest, anachronistically, that Smedley herself was a ‘new’ cosmopolitan; rather, I am proposing that her earlier engagement with modernity in a transnational frame is instructive for contemporary cultural critics who are grappling with the recent proliferation of transnational contact and with the ethico-political conundrums it entails. In characterizing Smedley as a political tourist, moreover, I aim to signal a number of things about her travelling and her writing that set her apart from cosmopolitans old or new, even as much of her writing is fundamentally about

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‘thinking and feeling beyond the nation,’ to borrow Robbins’s phrase once again. Distinguishing between a cosmopolitanism historically understood as ‘claim[ing] universality by virtue of its independence, its detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives’ and a newly redefined cosmopolitanism that encompasses ‘transnational experiences that are particular rather than universal and that are underprivileged – indeed, often coerced,’ Robbins nevertheless overlooks the transnational experiences of those who elect to travel in search of belonging and (af)filiation (‘Introduction’ 1).1 This apparently paradoxical quest for attachment outside the nation is characteristic of the political tourist, who travels in order to manifest solidarity with or to participate in political struggle elsewhere. Like the cultural practice itself, the texts produced by a political tourist cross boundaries of various kinds, extending the transnational experiences of the sojourn beyond the time and place of the tour and serving as a formal instantiation of the subjective processes of political engagement. As a political tourist, Smedley is of particular import for her self-conscious grappling with the ethics of representation. Smedley began her sojourn in China in 1928 as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and while that position ended soon after the Nazis came to power in Germany, Smedley continued to write for the Western press for the duration of her time there, publishing in periodicals like New Masses, The Nation, American Mercury, The New Republic, and The Manchester Guardian. While she reported on events of national and international moment, like Sun Yat-sen’s reburial in a mausoleum in Nanking, much of what she wrote is better characterized as autobiographical reportage and it centred on the Chinese poor.2 She initially settled in Shanghai, which was not only the centre for Western trade but also a kind of refuge for Chinese intellectuals and political dissidents trying to evade the Kuomintang. She came to know members of the revolutionary

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movement and by 1930 was helping writers like Mao Tun in the underground literary movement with translations of literary works, and she had befriended Lu Hsun. When members of the League of Left Wing Writers were rounded up and put to death in February 1931, Smedley helped Ding Ling escape from Shanghai and together with Mao Tun arranged for a letter of appeal by Lu Hsun to be published in New York, Berlin, and Moscow (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 153). Increasingly involved with the left-wing cause, in 1935 Smedley helped Madam Sun Yat-sen organize the National Salvation Association, and late in 1936 she began making radio broadcasts from Sian, as the Communists negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek in the weeks leading up to the united front against Japan and the Kuomintang’s suspension of its hostilities against the Communists (167, 177). She continued to participate in the struggle for the remainder of her sojourn, assisting with medical aid, establishing the first formal contact between the Chinese Communists and the Indian nationalist movement through her personal acquaintance with Nehru, working with the Chinese Red Cross to get medical supplies to the Red Army, and reporting to the U.S. embassy in an effort to influence the U.S. policy on China, all the while placing her writing in the service of the Communist-led revolution and resistance to Japanese imperialism (199, 202). Battle Hymn of China was written after Smedley returned to the United States, and it encompasses the entirety of Smedley’s sojourn; for this reason it offers the most comprehensive representation of the subjective dimensions of her long political tour. The first book of Battle Hymn of China sets out the trajectory of Smedley’s life up to her decision to go to China as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, implicitly constructing an explanation for her attraction to the Chinese political struggle in terms of her own experiences. It is, of course, a retroactive explanation, yet Smedley does not lay claim to any inexorable force drawing her to China; she acknowledges the complex contingencies that

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led her to travel there rather than India, the destination she had been set on for so long. Nonetheless, the shape of her autobiographical narrative is significant: Smedley constructs a link between her own suffering and her role as documenter of suffering in China by narrating her experiences of poverty, exploitation, sexism, and ignorance, and by narrating her struggle to overcome these conditions.3 That she has not yet managed to do so when she sets out for China is clear. Her identification with the Chinese revolution is usefully understood in relation to her own struggle, and the peculiar combination of life-writing and documentary that, in varying degrees, one finds in all travel writing is here placed in the service of constructing subjectivity through transnational solidarity.4 In Battle Hymn of China, Smedley narrates her arrival in China in 1928 as a journey back in time: entering China was like entering the Middle Ages. This ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 32) is framed in ethical terms; for Smedley, China’s lack of modernity had specifically to do with its indifference to suffering. Her role, as modern Western observer, is explicitly that of witness to suffering: The men and women who lived behind the walls of these ‘great family’ homes regarded the poverty and suffering about them as only natural. It had always been so and would always be. Even students, more sensitive than others, took public scenes of brutality for granted, just as they took poverty and death. They would notice some cruel street scene only when I called attention to it. In this unawareness and indifference I saw how old and how deep was China’s subjection. (32, emphasis added)

As evidence for her claim, she describes an incident she witnessed involving a coolie who was delivering laundry and who slipped on some ice. His laundry scattered, hitting a passer-by, who spat on him and cursed him, and then a policeman arrived on the scene and began kicking the coolie. According to Smedley, ‘crowds of

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people passed. They either did not see or merely gave an indifferent glance’ (39). For her part, Smedley exclaimed indignantly to her student guide, ‘This is the Middle Ages!’ (39). Dipesh Chakrabarty has explored the relationship between modern subjectivity and the act of serving as a witness to suffering, arguing that ‘the capacity to notice and document suffering (even if it be one’s own suffering) from the position of a generalized and necessarily disembodied observer is what marks the beginnings of the modern self’ (119). As Chakrabarty points out, it is this generalized quality of the witness to suffering that distinguishes him or her from earlier philosophies: ‘If it were said, for instance, that only a particular type of person – such as a Buddha or a Christ – was capable of noticing suffering and of being moved by it, one would not be talking of a generalized subject position’ (119).5 The Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith in whose works Chakrabarty finds the notion of a ‘natural theory of sentiments’ would not have envisioned that the role of the ‘man of feeling’ could be taken up by women and non-European peoples, but part of the history of Enlightenment modernity entails its gradual extension across the globe to those ‘others’ implicitly or even explicitly excluded from the universal subjectivity conceptualized by its proponents. Thus nineteenth-century Indian intellectuals, to take Chakrabarty’s example, can assume the position of modern subjects with a view themselves to transforming their social world, and in ways, Chakrabarty argues, that exceed the conceptions of subjectivity imagined by the European political philosophers of the Enlightenment (148). Chakrabarty also, importantly, distinguishes between the modern witness to suffering and the particular individual who exhibits suffering in an effort to gain sympathy and aid, which he acknowledges is very old. Chakrabarty continues: The person who is not an immediate sufferer but who has the capacity to become a secondary sufferer through sympathy for a general-

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ized picture of suffering, and who documents this suffering in the interest of eventual social intervention – such a person occupies the position of the modern subject. In other words, the moment of the modern observation of suffering is a certain moment of self-recognition on the part of an abstract, general human being ... the moment of recognition is a moment when the general human splits into the two mutually recognizing and mutually constitutive figures of the sufferer and the observer of suffering. (119–20)

As observer and recorder of the suffering of Chinese peasants and workers, not to mention of the soldiers drawn from these classes, Smedley necessarily occupies the position of modern subject. This modern subjectivity is, arguably, an intrinsic facet of political tourism, and of political tourism’s texts, since the reader, too, becomes a (vicarious) witness to suffering. The ethical stance that characterizes her response to China in the passage quoted above enacts a familiar Enlightenment sensibility and would seem necessarily to entail a reproduction of what Gayatri Spivak has dubbed ‘imperialist axiomatics’ (Critique, passim), that is, the consolidation of the Western subject by making the Other into a self. There is no denying Smedley’s implication, as modern (Western) subject, in this imperialist problematic. What for me is compelling about Smedley’s political tourism, however, is the extent to which, in her texts, this modern (Western) subject position undergoes a kind of translation, and the truth claims of documentary and reportage are repeatedly called into question. Modernity is, of course, an already translated discourse in China when Smedley arrives; it serves as a point of entry for her through her relationships with May Fourth intellectuals and writers, and Smedley is undoubtedly shaped by Chinese modernity during her sojourn.6 No translation is seamless, however, and a kind of untranslated residue marks Smedley’s writing of China, thus indicating the limits of this same Enlightenment discourse. In her capacity as witness to suffering, Smedley chafes at the sub-

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ject-position of disembodied observer, even as it offers her the possibility of social intervention and, paradoxically, of identification. More to the point, her discomfort with her outsider status not infrequently articulates with concern about her writing. A passage from an earlier book of reportage about Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism, China Fights Back, presents Smedley’s concern about the role of writer even more starkly than Battle Hymn of China, evidence that Smedley’s misgivings about her outsider status troubled her for some time: I left the miners feeling once more that I am nothing but a writer, a mere onlooker. I look at their big, black-veined hands, at their cloth shoes worn down to their socks or bare feet, at their soiled shirts. I know there is no chance for me ever to know them and share their lives. I remain a teller of tales, a writer of things through which I have not lived. The real story of China can only be told by the Chinese workers and peasants themselves. (148)

Perhaps the first thing that strikes one about this passage is the equation Smedley establishes between writing and ‘merely’ looking on. Her writing not only mediates experience, it is tangential to ‘the real story.’ There is more at issue here than her role as writer, and more than her status as Westerner. It is not only that Smedley is not Chinese that prevents her from writing China ‘authentically’; she has no more faith in the abilities of some Chinese writers than in her own: ‘I do not believe that my companions [writers Hsu Chuen and Li-po], Chinese though they are, can write the real story of the struggle of the Chinese people. They are true Chinese intellectuals, as removed from the life of the masses as I am’ (148). Smedley’s concern about her remove from the life of the Chinese worker or peasant may be read as a version of what Rey Chow has characterized as ‘the fundamental problematic of writing in modern China’ (Woman 111), that is, a dual preoccupation with the suffering of the (Chinese) peasants and with the role

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of the (Chinese) intellectual. Smedley constructs the problem partly in terms of form: she complains of Hsu Chuen that he is ‘first of all interested in style’ (148). Linked to the question of form is the question of who is speaking. The story she is interested in, ‘the real story of China,’ must be spoken by those Smedley regards as the subjects of Chinese history; I might suggest that for Smedley, in order for China to achieve modernity, the subaltern must speak.7 If this passage from China Fights Back emphasizes Smedley’s outsider status, it also arguably marks her desire to belong through the regret she feels at not being able to ‘share their lives.’ It also marks Smedley’s efforts to grapple with the politics of representation while she was still in China. Smedley’s discomfort with her role as writer bespeaks her desire for a different kind of relationship with her Chinese subjects and the struggle she records. Her impatience with Hsu Chuen’s interest in form can also be understood in this light.8 What I am suggesting is that we may take Smedley’s comments about her writing as comments about her role in China. Writing affords Smedley a rationale for being in China and a nominal claim to social intervention; yet insofar as she writes for the West, her claims to representing and intervening in the Chinese struggle remain circumscribed. As political tourist, Smedley is continually thrown up against the contradictions of her desire to make the Chinese struggle her own and her status as sojourner, even ‘foreign devil.’ Thus while Smedley constructs herself as documenting Chinese suffering – as modern (Western) observer, in other words – she also evinces discomfort with the documentary mode, which tends to reify the boundaries separating observer from participant and which tends toward truth claims Smedley ultimately cannot make. Through her writing and her political tourism, Smedley is striving for a mode of representation and a way of being in China that is less rigidly compartmentalized, less boundaried – for a way of speaking and writing China that would simultaneously speak and write herself.

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One strategy that Smedley adopts in an effort to make a place for herself in China is to devote more and more of her time and energy to raising funds for medical supplies, delousing stations, and clothing for the soldiers – in short, to participating in the struggle as far as she is able. She narrates that participation alongside her account of the Chinese (especially Red Army–led) struggle, oscillating between consciousness of her difference and claims to involvement. Both Smedley’s consciousness of the gap between her and the workers and peasants whose lives she records and her palpable desire to overcome the intervening distance echo in her writing. In some works – China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army (1938), for instance – this tension is more sharply etched than in others, and little attempt is made at resolution. In Battle Hymn, on the other hand, discomfort with her outsider status is more muted. While no resolution of the tensions Smedley describes is ultimately possible, she does I think find in Battle Hymn a way of mediating her role as witness to suffering and her concern with what she calls ‘the real story of China.’ In constructing a narrative about China’s revolutionary struggle, Smedley focuses on the political and social education that accompanied Red Army activity – a conscientization which enables Chinese peasants to tell their own stories. Through her participation in the struggle, Smedley presents herself as a facilitator of these speech acts. This engagement obviously does not dissolve Smedley’s privilege, but in performing her identification in this way, Smedley redraws the boundaries separating her from those she seeks to represent. In order to examine the implications of Smedley’s narrative strategies, I am going to redraw some boundaries myself. ‘Speaking bitterness’ is, in this essay, a way of conceiving the articulation of modernity, subjectivity, and form in relation to a specific historical, geopolitical site. I am, of course, taking liberties of a more than merely poetic sort in using this term in conjunction with Agnes Smedley’s writing. The history of speaking bitterness as a

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narrative genre in twentieth-century China is itself dynamic and polyvalent, but as a means of articulating a relationship to suffering and of making suffering meaningful, speaking bitterness, or su ku, came to have a particular role to play in the construction of Chinese modernity and in the constitution of modern Chinese subjects. As Ann Anagnost points out, speaking bitterness narratives were institutionalized when the CCP came to power and were ‘critically important in the formation of a revolutionary consciousness in the period of class struggle and land reform’ (259). ‘Speaking bitterness’ has its origins in village culture; in a public space, the aggrieved person rages about the abuse and injuries, whether emotional or physical, that she has sustained at the hands of family, husband, or landlord.9 The crowd that gathers serves as an informal jury and may intervene in the conflict if it is persuaded the plaints are justified. Anagnost argues that the revolutionary party drew on this indigenous cultural practice as a means of ‘merging the consciousness of the party with that of the people’ (265), sending cadres through the countryside to organize villagers’ public denunciations of the abuses they suffered under the pre-revolutionary system. The elements of personal suffering were reworked into a narrative of class struggle that attacked the Confucian moral order by emphasizing ‘instances of social antagonism between individuals occupying very different positions within hierarchies of power in Chinese society’ (Anagnost 259).10 Through speaking bitterness, a kind of narrative performance act, the speaking subject came to be constituted ‘within a narrative structure of sorrow and loss as an I victimized in the context of enchanted relationships with those who bec[a]me in the process identified as class enemies’ (263). If speaking bitterness was about the assumption of revolutionary class consciousness, it was also about modernity, for the peasants and workers who were newly constituted as the subjects of history represented both China’s achievement of modernity and its capacity to modernize. The conventions of speaking bitterness narratives themselves articulate

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modernity in at least two ways: through a plot that opens with oppression and moves to overcoming, and through a tropological phrase sprinkled through su ku narratives, ‘in the old society ...,’ which might be said to have a quasi-illocutionary function – it effectively pronounces the arrival of modernity. Put another way, through su ku subaltern subjects become modern subjects insofar as they document their suffering and compel recognition of suffering. In invoking speaking bitterness in relation to Smedley’s writing of China, I am engaging in a kind of catachresis: Smedley’s travels and her writing predate the coming to power of the CCP, and as she repeatedly points out in her writing, she is not herself the subaltern Chinese subject who can legitimately speak bitterness. Smedley acknowledges her outsider status vis-à-vis the China she seeks to write, yet in her documentation of suffering, in her identification with Chinese workers and peasants, and in her desire to participate in the revolutionary transformation of China, Smedley creates for herself as political tourist a supporting role in the agonistic national drama of Chinese modernity that su ku narratives may be said to perform. I might suggest that for Smedley, ‘speaking bitterness’ is a way of translating the ‘witness to suffering’ into Chinese and offers her, as political tourist, a means of articulating her desire for belonging. Lisa Rofel argues that ‘as a narrative form, speaking bitterness defines subject-positions of identification and desire’ (141). This is also true of Smedley’s writing of China, particularly where she constructs her relationship to her subject matter. Her representation, in Battle Hymn of China, of her encounter with a peasant women’s organization, is exemplary in this regard. Smedley focuses on the woman who founded and led the Women’s National Salvation Association in the Yangtze Valley; ‘Mother Tsai’ becomes the heroine of Smedley’s narrative as a woman who embraced modernity when it ‘arrived’ in the valley. We are told that ‘as a peasant woman and the mother of many

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sons, Mother Tsai had suffered bitterly all her life, but of this she never spoke’ (270). Significantly, Mother Tsai does not speak of the bitterness she has suffered; Smedley speaks it for her. In Smedley’s telling, the anti-imperialist war is the agent of social transformation and a catalyst for Mother Tsai’s own assumption of agency: Before the war, life in the villages had been drab and monotonous. But when the New Fourth Army had marched into the valley the year before, the world had seemed to enter with it. Many girl students had joined the Political Department of the Army; when they went knocking on the doors of the village women, the old world had crumbled. (271)

While it is clearly Smedley who is speaking here, this passage is not written in the historical voice so much as it is indirectly narrated from the perspective of one who has experienced the transformation of the villages (‘life in the villages had been drab and monotonous’). Through indirect discourse, in other words, Mother Tsai is made to speak through Smedley. The crumbling of the old world announces the arrival of modernity, and with it new subject positions. Through her meeting with the young women from the New Fourth Army Political Department, Mother Tsai takes on the new role of political organizer: ‘Mother Tsai’s lean, tall figure could often be seen walking along the paths from village to village, urging women to join literacy classes, and attend discussion groups to learn what the war was about and how they could help’ (271). Smedley’s narrative about Mother Tsai is about the new role for women in revolutionary China. Smedley narrates the mobilization of the peasant women by the Political Department of the communist-led army, arguing that the classes offered by the young female cadets brought about a shift in consciousness and agency: ‘After that, [the women] never just sat and listened while their

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menfolk dispensed wisdom’ (272). Mother Tsai, in particular, is a subaltern subject empowered to assume a new identity in the wake of changes introduced by the revolutionary army as it fights Japanese imperialism. Not only does she organize other village women, Mother Tsai takes on a local merchant who is trading with the Japanese; despite the reluctance of local officials to do anything about him, Mother Tsai eventually sees to it that Merchant Chang is jailed. While the plot of this heroic narrative is clearly centred on Mother Tsai, the narrator is also accorded a role in the action. On International Women’s Day, Mother Tsai and the other members of the Women’s National Salvation Association call on Smedley to present her with a gift. They ask her ‘to tell Western women how the women of China had struggled to emancipate themselves,’ and Mother Tsai tells Smedley, ‘You ... express the high spirit of womanhood by your willingness to eat bitterness with us’ (274). Smedley’s desire to share her life with the peasants who are engaged in the struggle for social justice achieves momentary realization in this passage, where she is accorded recognition for sharing in Chinese suffering, and she brushes aside the women’s gratitude to her by saying ‘that this was my fight as well as theirs’ (275). Not only does the Mother Tsai story mark Smedley’s desire to share in Chinese suffering in order to intervene in it, it also reveals the extent to which Smedley narrates her own desires through the narrative of overcoming centred on Mother Tsai. Smedley’s desire is bound up with Chinese modernity in such a way that her role as witness to suffering is improperly understood as an ‘outsider’s’ role. As her use of indirect discourse suggests, Smedley implicitly situates herself somewhere between the women of the village and the American women Mother Tsai instructs her to tell about the struggle of Chinese women. She observes: ‘I sat thinking of American women – women well clad and well cared for ... I doubted whether many of them could appreciate the conditions under which Chinese women lived and struggled’ (276). This remark

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may, of course, be taken as an authorizing strategy on Smedley’s part – as, indeed, is Mother Tsai’s injunction that she ‘tell western women’ about the women of China – but it is also an index of the degree to which Smedley had come to inhabit structures of identification that placed her between China and the United States, between privilege and disenfranchisement, in a way that suggests that (af)filiation, like modernity, is to be negotiated, that it is not settled or fixed once and for all. The invaginated relationship between documentary and autobiography in Battle Hymn of China can be seen to register formally Smedley’s reluctance to set herself apart from those whose lives, whose suffering, she recorded in her texts, even as she acknowledges her outsider status. Paula Rabinowitz argues that ‘documentary performance and address is always about crossing boundaries – racial, sexual, class, gender, regional, temporal – as outsiders to a subculture enter into it’ (They Must Be Represented 9); reportage offers an ‘attempt to refigure [the] relations’ between classes, between art and life, between seeing and knowing that documentary enacts, and such a violation of the boundaries ‘confound[s] generic (and gender) conventions’ (60). Where Smedley’s contemporaries, even radical women journalists like Martha Gelhorn, frequently maintained a distance between the observing and speaking ‘I’ and the observed subject of their documentary texts, Smedley consciously rejects that distance (Rabinowitz 60). After narrating the shock of her arrival at the Soviet–Chinese frontier at Manchouli, where six or seven men fought over her luggage and shouted at her for payment, a scene that she later took to be ‘symptomatic of the social system of China,’ Smedley informs the reader of the approach to life in China that she adopted: From the day I set foot on Chinese soil, I began gradually to realize that two paths lay before me. I could protect myself from the flood of abandoned humanity by building around myself a protective wall of coldness and indifference, even of hostility ... Or I could stand in

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the middle of the stream of life and let it strike me full force – risking robbery, disease, even death. For a long time I chose the latter way; then experience taught me to vary it by protecting myself to a certain extent. In my last years in China, I again changed and took the stream full force. (32)

That this approach constituted an ethical stance is confirmed in this passage: ‘Live apart from the Chinese people I would not. The road to an understanding of them and their country led only into their ranks; nor did there seem any other way for me to justify my own existence among them’ (33, emphasis added). This need to find a place for herself in China, and to justify her being there, suggests that for Smedley her role as documentarian was an insufficient justification. Belonging, the filiation she perennially sought, acquires an ethical valence against the role of disembodied observer who remains always partly outside of the suffering she documents, however much she may be moved by what she sees. Smedley sought that belonging in a number of ways, but she sought a particular kind of belonging. Specifically, she sought (af)filiation with the modernization of China, with its liberation from feudalistic and imperialist forces, which in China was linked with the transformation in social and political values emerging from the revolution of 1911 and the May Fourth movement. Her desire to ally herself with the revolutionary cause is frustrated in a couple of ways that may be understood in relation to her status as political tourist. For one, she cannot overlook her implication, by virtue of her U.S. citizenship, her ‘foreign-ness’ in China, in Western imperialism. What we might think of as a contradiction between her identity and her identifications leads to ethical dilemmas of the kind Smedley describes facing when she visits a district town south of Wuhu under the auspices of the New Fourth Army in June 1939. Asked to speak at a regimental training camp, Smedley finds herself telling ‘half-lies’ in an effort to ‘deliver a message that would bring courage and conviction to men who must fight

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and perhaps fall’ (295). The ‘half-lies’ consist of ‘isolated news reports’ that suggest international solidarity with China against Japanese imperialism. The ‘truth,’ as Smedley sees it, lies in Western support for Japanese imperialism, and she fantasizes about telling the truth to soldiers and civilians in the war zones she visited: Brothers! I am a citizen of a country that is supplying your enemy with the means of killing you and your people. A few of us oppose this and are burdened with the shame of blood-guilt. But the industrialists of my country value profits above human lives ... As I move among you, I am amazed at your magnanimity toward me, a citizen of a land that aids your enemy. (296)

Of course, Smedley’s audience for this address is not the Chinese soldiers at all, but her fellow citizens, who are invited to contemplate their own complicity in the suffering Smedley documents. The voyeuristic gaze that Rabinowitz associates with documentary is here turned back on the middle-class reader-spectator, perhaps with a view to disrupting his or her capacity to see only as an outsider. United States citizens, Smedley points out, are already implicated in the Chinese struggle. Smedley remains caught between her identity as Westerner, with the inevitable associations with imperialism that status carries, and her identification with China. One might even argue that in her touring, Smedley finds that she is the object of the other’s gaze and feels called upon to give an accounting of herself.11 Yet Smedley’s identification with the Chinese struggle, her desire for belonging, exceeds whatever conflicts she experiences as a result of her disidentification with Western imperialism. In a sense, Smedley did give an accounting of herself, repeatedly, during her touring of China, and in this self-staging she reiterated her own narrative in relation to the Chinese struggle. Steven MacKinnon and Janice MacKinnon, her biographers, offer this account of

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Smedley’s speech upon her arrival at the New Fourth Army headquarters in November 1938: It was her standard melodramatic performance: she described her poor rural roots, her jail experience in New York, and her revolutionary marriage to [Virendranath Chattopadhyaya], and concluded by praising the Chinese struggle as a crucial part of the international fight against fascism and imperialism. As usual, she brought the crowd to its feet. At the end of the evening, she led a rousing rendition of the ‘Internationale’ in Chinese. (215)

The structure of the performance is reproduced in the structure of Battle Hymn of China, which opens with these same autobiographical elements before turning to an account of her years in China. This performance, too, I want to argue, can be read (catachrestically) as an act of speaking bitterness. In speaking publicly about her own experiences of poverty and injustice, in demonstrating her triumph over these adversities, and in proclaiming her devotion to the struggle against imperialism, Smedley invites her audiences to endorse this narrative, to corroborate her modernity and the generalizable subject position the narrative is meant to affirm. While Smedley does not ask that this public assembly intervene in her suffering in order to end it, she does seem to invite their approbation. More significant is the extent to which these performances strive for a place in the Chinese struggle; Smedley’s story is transplanted to the site of her touring, her singing of the ‘Internationale’ in Chinese testimony to her desire for a located modernity. Another instance where Smedley finds identification with a group of Chinese whose story sketches a trajectory from exploitation to empowerment underscores the extent to which, for Smedley, (af)filiation and modern subjectivity are co-constitutive. Speaking bitterness again conjoins their narrative of overcoming and Smedley’s desire to overcome her outsider status, her status as

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‘foreign devil.’ Appropriately enough, the episode turns around multiple acts of translation. Smedley’s guide translates what the workers say; Smedley ‘translates’ her guide’s observations; and in the absence of her guide, Smedley’s linguistic limitations prompt her to adopt a variety of strategies to engage a group of young women in conversation, including rough sketches on her notepad, even charades. While Smedley is evidently invested in laying claim to solidarity in her narrating of this encounter, and in contrasting her sympathy for the women workers with her academic guide’s evident antipathy, the acts of translation mark the boundaries across which she moves. In 1930, Smedley travelled to Canton in order ‘to study the lot of the millions of silk peasants in a silk industry which was rapidly losing its American markets to Japanese magnates’ (86). Not trusting the Silk Guild to provide the kind of tour she was interested in, Smedley turned to a group of professors at Lingnan Christian University who were conducting research in the industry. In the company of one of these researchers, Smedley spent a number of weeks travelling from village to village, interviewing silk workers and visiting factories. Smedley remarks on her guide’s contempt for the silk workers, in particular for the young women who were filature workers, or spinners. Not surprisingly, her interest in the women is heightened by the young researcher’s hostility, which turned out to stem from the ways the filature workers transgressed established gender roles: He told me that the women were notorious throughout China as Lesbians. They refused to marry, and if their families forced them, they merely bribed their husbands with a part of their wages and induced them to take concubines. The most such a married girl would do was bear one son; then she would return to the factory, refusing to live with her husband any longer. (87)

According to Smedley’s guide, the relatively high wages the

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women earned were ‘the root of the trouble!’ (88). By presenting both the dominant attitude toward these women and an explanation for their relative empowerment through the hostility and invective of her companion, Smedley gives some measure of the struggle the workers had waged. Through the indirect discourse in which she couches the researcher’s comments, moreover, Smedley effectively undercuts his point of view: ‘Until 1927, when they were forbidden, there had been Communist cells and trade unions in the filatures, he charged, and now these despicable girls evaded the law by forming secret Sister Societies. They had even dared strike for shorter hours and higher wages’ (88). In this instance the dialogic quality of indirect discourse situates Smedley in relation to the ‘despicable girls’ whose striking for better working conditions she implicitly endorses and distances her from the criticisms voiced by the Lingnan Christian University researcher. In this way, Smedley’s narrative strategy identifies her guide as the class and gender enemy of the filature workers; his attitude toward them serves as evidence of their suffering. Smedley’s act of witnessing entails an alternative reading of these women. She notes the importance of the contribution the women silk workers made to their families’ economic well-being and the different value accorded girl babies in these villages. She remarks, ‘I began to understand the charges that they were Lesbians. They could not but compare the dignity of their positions with the low position of married women. Their independence seemed a personal affront to officialdom’ (89). Smedley’s recognition of an explicitly gendered suffering (and its overcoming) positions her clearly as modern witness against her guide’s implicitly anti-modern stance. Smedley uses her guide’s antipathy as a foil for her own capacity to share the women’s suffering, a capacity which ultimately affords her a sought-after moment of solidarity with a group of silk workers. The narrative trajectory pursues Smedley’s movement from outsider to ‘one of the girls.’ She begins by describing her escort’s

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rage at comments made by the silk workers at one of the filatures he and Smedley were visiting: ‘They call me a running dog of the capitalists, and you a foreign devil of an imperialist! They are laughing at your clothing and your hair and eyes!’ (89) her guide fumed. Aligned in this caricature with the guide whose attitudes she disavows, Smedley sets about aligning herself with the women workers instead. Abandoned by her guide one evening as the workers leave the filature, Smedley approaches a group of young women herself: A group of girls gathered about me and stared. I offered them some of my malt candy. There was a flash of white teeth and exclamations in a sharp staccato dialect. They took the candy, began chewing, then examined my clothing and stared at my hair and eyes. I did the same with them and soon we were laughing at each other. (90)

Having broken the ice, Smedley is led away to the home of one young woman – ‘Two of them linked their arms in mine and began pulling me down the flagstone street’ (90) – where the women gather along with neighbours and family members. There, despite Smedley’s lack of familiarity with the dialect spoken by the workers, she and they set about interviewing one another. The women, Smedley tells us, ‘seemed interested and surprised’ to learn she is not married and has no children. She explains that she is a writer and, through a man who speaks Mandarin, confirms, ‘Yes, [she] was an intellectual – but was once a worker,’ and adds, ‘When he interpreted this, they seemed to find it very hard to believe’ (91). This bid for insider status is followed, Smedley tells us, by questions about their working conditions and their strategy for winning a ten-hour work day (a reduction from the fourteen-hour day they had worked previously). Thus Smedley lays the ground for the women’s narrative of overcoming, but the women are figured as acting out their own agency. The women respond to her questions by acting out a strike and, most significantly, by drawing

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Smedley into their midst: ‘They crossed their arms, as though refusing to work, while some rested their elbows on the table and lowered their heads, as though refusing to move. They laughed, began to link hands, and drew me into this circle. We all stood holding hands in an unbroken line, laughing’ (91). Smedley encourages us to read this scene as the enacting of a shared modernity; her desire to see herself as participant is at least momentarily indulged and by women who, if Smedley’s guide is to be believed, had once thought her a ‘foreign devil.’ Yet even as she figures herself as participant in the drama, Smedley does not attempt to disguise the acts of translation that are so central to this scene. If her official translator is deemed inadequate to the task, and in fact an impediment to the act of speaking bitterness that unites Smedley with the filature workers, there is much in this encounter that is simply untranslated. What are we to make, for instance, of the ‘exclamations in a sharp staccato dialect’ that the women make when Smedley offers them malt candy? How do we read the ‘surprise and interest’ the women convey when Smedley reveals she is unmarried and has no children? Is this reaction to Smedley’s marital status a sign of her difference or her common ground with the workers charged with being ‘Lesbians’? What of the women’s apparent incredulity in the face of Smedley’s claim to having been a worker? While Smedley performs her solidarity, then, and makes some claims for her capacity to overcome the gap between intellectuals and workers, she also implicitly acknowledges the limits of her position. In fact, Smedley frequently undermines her own truth claims. She repeatedly asserts, either explicitly or implicitly, that she cannot write what she seems to be writing, an account of Chinese suffering and struggle. Effectively, she denies that her book is a representation of China, even as its capacity to intervene in the social struggle she documents relies on its status as an account of that struggle. This tension between truth claims for her writing and her claims to belonging is evident in Smedley’s recounting of

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a conversation she had with Jack Belden about who might be capable of writing a Chinese version of War and Peace. Her response to his query is telling: ‘I said that I thought it could be done only by a Chinese who had actually fought throughout the whole of it’ (506). This position is consistent with the conviction Smedley expresses in China Fights Back that she cannot write the ‘real story’ of China, that such an account could only be written by the subaltern subject of Chinese modernity. Yet she also contends ‘that Jack might one day write a very fine book. He had been with many Chinese armies and in order to reach them had had to use all kinds of maneuvres to get past officials,’ and, she adds, ‘he was more objective than I; he represented no cause and could stand aside and observe, whereas I always forgot that I was not Chinese myself’ (506). Smedley herself is not a candidate, and not because she had not ‘been there,’ the conventional ground for authority in documentary and ethnography alike (Geertz 1–24). Her biographers point out that Smedley’s travels with the New Fourth Army and with armies under nationalist control in the war zone from 1939 to 1941 ‘turned out to be the longest sustained tour of a Chinese war zone by any foreign correspondent, man or woman, including Edgar Snow and Jack Belden’ (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 212). Rather, Smedley is not a candidate because the author of such a work must have been a full participant in the struggle, a Chinese soldier who has ‘fought throughout the whole of it.’ On the other hand, someone like Belden, a neutral observer, might write ‘a very fine book’ about China. Smedley is disqualified from writing either sort of book, we are given to understand, because she is not Chinese and yet forgets she is not Chinese. Whether or not one accepts her assessment of Belden’s qualifications at face value, one cannot help but recognize the way Smedley’s comments place Belden outside the war he observes, and, through ‘forgetting,’ leave Smedley (almost) inside. Once again Smedley’s desire for belonging jostles against the ostensibly documentary status of her writing; the witness who achieves modern

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subjectivity by documenting suffering, that is, by recognizing a general human being with the capacity to suffer, in this instance ‘forgets’ that she is not a particular, embodied sufferer. Smedley’s representation of her attachment to China as a ‘forgetting’ that she was not herself Chinese comes near the end of Battle Hymn, a book that she writes partly as a means of continuing to play a role in the Chinese struggle, having rationalized her return to the United States in 1941 as an opportunity ‘to tell Americans about the way Chinese lived and how they fought for freedom’ (525).12 Of course, Smedley’s claim that she ‘always forgot’ that she was not Chinese is an indirect acknowledgment that she was not, even as it marks her desire for belonging. Another kind of ‘forgetting’ that marks Battle Hymn, and one that underscores the pathos of her contention in the final chapter of the book that she ‘had become part of the vast struggle of China’ (525), is Smedley’s failure to recount the rejection of her application for membership in the Chinese Communist Party. According to her biographers, she was devastated to learn she had been turned down: ‘When she received the rejection she burst into tears and, to the amazement of those on hand, became nearly hysterical’ (MacKinnon and MacKinnon 186). If Smedley found her rejection as traumatic as witnesses have suggested, it is not surprising that she does not explicitly narrate the experience. More significantly, to narrate the rejection would entail acknowledgment of her status as tourist, as outsider. Yet, I would like to take seriously Smedley’s claim that, in her efforts to eat and speak bitterness, she ‘had become part of the vast struggle of China.’ Chakrabarty points out that, in the Indian context, conceptions of modern (Western) subjectivity are transformed by alternative practices of the self that emerge through the act of bearing witness to suffering, ‘practices of the self that call us to other ways of being civil and humane. These are practices of the self that always leave an intellectually unmanageable excess when translated into the politics and language of political philosophies

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we owe to European intellectual traditions’ (148). Without fully assimilating Smedley to the Chinese speech acts she attempted to facilitate – she was herself only too aware that she could not speak for the Chinese subaltern – I would like to suggest that through her political tourism and its texts, she engages in practices of the self which ‘leave an intellectually unmanageable excess’ by virtue of the ways they speak to the possibilities for a transnational subjectivity that does not come to an end when the traveller returns home. When Smedley returned to the United States in 1941 at the end of her long political tour (her own private Long March?), she continued to participate in the Chinese struggle from afar by writing and lecturing – in short, by mobilizing on behalf of China in the U.S. public sphere. That she situated herself within the documentary frame is clear in a piece like ‘The People in China’: ‘To eat bitterness,’ she explains, ‘is a Chinese expression for deep suffering. We ate bitterness. In the guerrilla detachment north and west of Hankow we ate bitterness week after week’ (211, emphasis added).13 In fact, she moves across the frame, from the position of witness to the position of ‘sufferer,’ before our eyes: ‘I suppose the happiest moment I have spent since Hankow fell was when I was with an artillery unit on the North Hupeh front, and was allowed to go right up with them to watch them open the offensive against the enemy. Our guns were mounted on a high plateau and through glasses we could see enemy defence positions’ (210, emphasis added). The shifts in reference register Smedley’s dual identifications, suggesting the shared subjectivity she has come to inhabit. The moment of self-recognition ‘when the general human splits into the two mutually recognizing and mutually constitutive figures of the sufferer and the observer of suffering’ (Chakrabarty 120) is here doubled. Smedley occupies not only the position of the general, disembodied subject in her role as witness to suffering, but also lays claim to the particular, embodied subject. She thus witnesses on behalf of the Chinese and on her own behalf, simultaneously. Added to this already layered and en-

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folded testimony is Smedley’s recognition of herself as imperialist, as inflicting suffering as well. I think it is possible to argue that in the very instability of Smedley’s writing of her relationship to China as illustrated in passages like this, one can perceive an attempt to arrive at a different practice of the self – one that is inter-subjective and that thereby extends and revises, if it does not ultimately exceed, the languages of European modernity. Smedley’s struggle with form can then be understood as an effort to represent adequately this ambiguous, translated subjectivity, one that, to be sure, remains marked by untranslated residues even as it reaches beyond a single ‘language.’ In ‘The Law of Genre,’ Derrida describes a ‘principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy’ as the ‘law of the law of genre.’ He adds that ‘with the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership [in a genre], the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole’ (59). I suggest that, for Smedley, ‘speaking bitterness’ comes to form, by invagination, the internal pocket that is larger than the whole of documentary or any of the other genres – reportage, travel writing, autobiography – that her work comprises. In this way, her work is testimony, not only to the Chinese struggle she is documenting, but to a concerted negotiation with the universalist impulses of political modernity. The parasitical economy of the texts of political tourism offers an accounting of the fractured and multiple attachments, the affective exchanges that mark transnational belonging. Like the discontinuities and disparities that mark Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology, the textual form of Smedley’s work registers the necessarily split and doubled testimony of a solidary traveller. Arjun Appadurai argues that ‘no idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and postnational identities’ (Modernity 166). I suggest that Agnes Smedley’s political tourism, in its textual manifestations, represents one such idiom.

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Smedley’s translation of European discourses of modernity through her particular inhabiting of the role of witness to suffering, through her fractured claims at once to be unable to represent China and to belong to its ‘vast struggle,’ offers a way of thinking about the kind of radical opening out of the self in the face of the other that solidarity entails. To some extent, arguably, all political tourists are witnesses to suffering. We are called to ‘notice and document suffering ... from the position of a generalized and necessarily disembodied observer’ (Chakrabarty 119); this is, at least in part, what motivates our travel. To the extent, moreover, that the sojourn re-situates the tourist’s gaze, this modern self is compelled to recognize its particularity and in so doing to acknowledge the contingent, as-yet unrealized quality of the universality that authorizes both the travel and the witnessing. Smedley is perhaps better positioned than any of the other tourists I study to identify with the suffering of the Chinese poor in other than merely abstract terms, as her narrative performances of her own ‘bitterness’ attest. For one risk of the kind of solidarity-travel that political tourists undertake is that the act of witnessing may be guided too narrowly by the discourse of struggle itself, making certain kinds of suffering unrecognizable.14 There is no evidence that Smedley made this mistake, however much she sought to be a part of the Communist-led revolution in China. Smedley’s writing of China is sufficiently attuned to its own limits, to the ethicopolitical dilemma of the documentarian, not to foreclose upon unscripted performances of universality from those who are both ‘authorized and deauthorized’ (Butler ‘Universality in Culture’ 50) by virtue of being subaltern.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Following in the Footsteps of Che’: Political Tourism as a Strategy for Entering and Leaving Modernity

In the introduction to his seminal study The Tourist, Dean MacCannell notes that ‘originally, [he] had planned to study tourism and revolution, which seemed to [him] to name the two poles of modern consciousness – a willingness to accept, even venerate, things as they are on the one hand, a desire to transform things on the other’ (3). In the end, he opted to present his work on tourism independently of his research on revolution, but in this chapter I would like to return to the link that he initially made between tourism and revolution. This is not to say that I aim to pick up where MacCannell left off. It is, however, to signal my own interest in the tension between a willingness to venerate things as they are and a desire to transform them. While the desire to transform is the more evident motivation propelling political tourists across the globe to sites of struggle in places they do not ‘belong,’ a willingness to venerate certain elements of ‘things as they are’ is also discernible in political tourists’ texts. I want to explore this tension by considering the case of Che Guevara. The consumption of the image of Che Guevara as the sign of a certain radical chic, particularly in recent years when the production of Swatches and designer jeans stamped with the famous face seems to signal that the revolutionary has been made ‘safe’ for capitalism, arguably has a great deal more to do with a willingness

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to accept the status quo than it does with a desire to transform the world. But what of the tourists who travel to Cuba, who make the pilgrimage to Santa Clara, who buy the t-shirts, the key-chains, and the posters the Cuban government produces to commemorate (and market) a revolutionary symbol? Where do they sit between these two poles of veneration and revolution? What of those who, in the name of another struggle, carry with them the symbols of Che? And what of Che himself? Thus far I have been talking about Che as the object of tourism, but it is equally possible through his travel diaries to see Che Guevara as the subject of political tourism, although such a claim will undoubtedly raise the hackles of some of his admirers – and I consider myself one. In this chapter I propose to analyse the uses made of Che Guevara’s image – by which I mean both literal images of Guevara (on posters, t-shirts, postcards) and the symbolic power of his revolutionary life – alongside his self-representation in his earliest travel diaries, The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road, and in his account of another kind of journey, that of becoming a revolutionary in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. My aim is not to rescue the ‘real’ Ernesto Guevara from the ‘myth’ in the fashion of many of his chroniclers, nor is it to separate the ‘authentic’ revolutionary/traveller from the ‘inauthentic’ tourists. Rather, I am interested in the intersections between the motivations of contemporary political tourists and Che’s own narrative. The particular social experience sought by the political tourist, however tarnished by its association with the superficial and the fashionable, is the experience of social change and transformation. In this respect, Che Guevara may be seen as the paradigmatic political tourist. More importantly, in bringing together Che’s own travel writing with accounts of travel conducted in his name, I think it is possible to take account of the value of utopian endeavours like revolution at a historical juncture when, as Néstor García Canclini puts it, we are told ‘the philosophies of postmodernity disqualify the cultural movements that promise utopias and

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foster progress’ (1). In approaching Guevara’s self-representation through the meaning that political tourists have made of his life, moreover, I am proposing that political tourism, associated as it is with both a superficial radical chic and a desire for revolutionary authenticity, may serve as the sort of hybrid strategy for analysing modernity that Néstor García Canclini has called for. Che as Tourist ‘Marker’ In MacCannell’s terms, the t-shirts, postcards, and posters are ‘markers’ which have the function of representing a sight1 to a tourist (figures 4.1 and 4.2). In representing a sight, a marker is constitutive, bringing together within itself an image of the sight and its meaning. In the absence of markers, MacCannell argues, tourists may well pass by a sight without recognizing it as a sight (111). The relationship of a marker to a sight or place is more complicated in the case of tourism that takes Che as its object. Che himself is not a building or a monument or a place that can be visited (although of course he was visited by political tourists of a certain renown during his lifetime, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), and in the instance of places like Santa Clara that are associated with Che, there is arguably a mutually constitutive relationship – Che lends meaning to Santa Clara, and Santa Clara serves as a marker for Che. As a marker, Che’s image constitutes multiple sights, including sights that have no historical association with his life: Che’s image on walls in Paris in May 1968, in anti-war demonstrations in the United States in the late sixties and early seventies, in murals painted in Managua in the aftermath of Sandinista victory, and, most recently, in anti-globalization marches internationally (figure 4.3). In these examples, Che is a mobile marker that arguably constitutes not so much a sight as an ideal, but part of what enables the mobility of his image in contexts such as these is that Che is taken to represent that very mobility in the principle of international revolution that he came to

4.1 Che T-shirts. World Social Forum, Caracas, 2006.

4.2 Political Tourism Postcards. World Social Forum, Caracas, 2006.

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4.3 March against War and Imperialism. World Social Forum, Caracas, 2006.

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embody. For political tourists, then, Che is both destination and travelling companion – or, at least, the signifier of a certain kind of travel, even of political tourism itself. The NGO Global Exchange runs a series of activism-oriented tours they call ‘Reality Tours.’ During the 1990s one of their Cuban tours was called ‘Following in the Footsteps of Che.’ Tours like these are engaged in what MacCannell calls ‘sight sacralization’; that is, in reproducing Che’s revolutionary path, ‘Following in the Footsteps of Che’ marks out the Sierra Maestra as the authentic locus of revolutionary activity.2 As Jonathan Culler puts it, ‘The existence of reproductions is what makes something original or authentic, and by surrounding ourselves with markers and reproductions we represent to ourselves ... the possibility of authentic experiences at other times and in other places’ (132). Che himself is arguably engaged in this same activity in the writing of his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and I will return to this point later. But where are they going, these political tourists? Are they wandering the mountain paths of the Sierra Maestra, or are they travelling through time, attempting to re-enter modernity through the hybrid circuits of postmodernity, to paraphrase García Canclini? MacCannell argues that the ‘actual act of communion between tourist and attraction is less important than the image or the idea of society that the collective act generates’ (14– 15). What, then, is the image or idea of society generated by those political tourists following in the footsteps of Che? What does it mean to consume a revolutionary past? Jean Franco points out that the use made of Che Guevara’s image in Cuba today has to do with an effort to reanimate the revolution in a time of trouble (111). Are those ‘following in his footsteps’ pursuing a similar goal? Or are they engaged in an act of simple veneration, of revolutionary nostalgia that contains any impulse to engage in social transformation? There can be no blanket answer to these questions, and the efforts of cultural critics (myself included) to pronounce definitively on the meaning of Che’s image are bound

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to be frustrated by its semiotic volatility. Jorge Castañeda, for instance, argues that ‘Che Guevara is a cultural icon today largely because the era he typified left cultural tracks more than political ones’ (qtd in Franco 111). Yet Franco reminds us that cultural tracks are not so easily severed from the political: Those cultural tracks are the crossroads of a globalization that cannot control its supplementary effects. But whereas in the rest of the world the icon is used to signify anything from teenage defiance to rebellion, in present-day Cuba, where the concern is with survival rather than revolution, Che both stands for an irrecoverable political past and is constantly evoked to revitalize energies in the present. (111)

Contemporary political tourists who travel to Cuba to consume Che memorabilia and to visit the sights associated with him – La Cabaña in Havana, the monument and grave in Santa Clara, the Sierra Maestra – are themselves caught up in the processes of globalization that allow for the commodification of revolutionary symbols even as those symbols continue to fuel social activism, and not only in Cuba. Just as within Cuba Che is both ‘irrecoverable’ and a source of ‘revitaliz[ation],’ for many political tourists Che is undoubtedly venerated precisely as a model for contemporary struggles, even if he is a ‘model’ that can no longer remain untransformed or, better, untranslated. Ceci n’est pas une pipe One way of following these cultural and political tracks is to consider how Che, as mobile marker, has travelled or, in other words, how the marker or its metonyms have been reconstituted in other settings. A consistent feature of Che iconography, apart from his beret with its comandante star and his beard, is a cigar or a pipe. David Kunzle suggests that the cigar, in particular, represents an

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effort on Che’s part to appear more Cuban (51). In a letter written from the Sierra Maestra to his first wife, Hilda Gadea, Che comments with a certain self-conscious irony on his new role: ‘Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and thirsting for blood, I’m writing these inflamed, Martí-inspired lines. As if I really were a soldier (I’m dirty and ragged at least), I am writing this letter over a tin plate with a gun at my side and something new, a cigar in my mouth’ (qtd in Gadea 167). The numerous photographs of Che with a cigar in his mouth or his hand in the Sierra Maestra, or while signing papers in Havana, or while taking a break from voluntary labour, confirm the iconographic association Che implicitly makes himself between the revolutionary struggle, the Cuban cigar, and his place in that struggle. It is surely significant that a recent publication features a photographic self-portrait of Che in silhouette, wearing the beret and holding a cigar.3 In photographs of Che in the Congo or Bolivia, on the other hand, he is most often pictured with a pipe, an object that acquired quasi-relic status moments before he was killed, as Bolivian soldiers squabbled over who would be given the prized object (Kunzle 52). Today the guerrillero most associated with a pipe is Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). His pipe serves as an iconographic object that implicitly links the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas with the kinds of anti-imperialist struggles in which Che engaged – not to mention the way the pipe marks Marcos as a Che-like figure, a semiotic move of which Marcos, the canny ‘el capo of political hype, performance artist extraordinaire,’ as he has been characterized by Guillermo Gómez-Peña (66), is undoubtedly aware. As Jon Lee Anderson remarks, ‘it is not hard to see Marcos as a reborn Che Guevara, adapted to modern times’ (29). The ski mask is as much, if not more, Marcos’s revolutionary symbol, one that links him to the other masked Zapatistas; the pipe, on the other hand, distinguishes him from the other masked guerrillas and places him in a revolutionary tradition that is not

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only Mexican (the EZLN operates in the name of Zapata, after all), but more broadly Latin American and international. Confirmation of these links may be found in Zapatista murals and banners such as the one photographed by Yuriria Pantoja Millán and titled ‘Los tres.’ This banner bears the images of, from left to right, Subcomandante Marcos, Emiliano Zapata, and Che Guevara. Both images of Marcos himself and the images of Che that have been refigured in the context of the Zapatista struggle are subject to a process of aestheticization that David Kunzle calls ‘posterization,’ that is, the abstraction from a more complex visual field of identifiable features – Marcos’s ski mask, Zapata’s moustache and sombrero, and Che’s beret and beard. This process of visual abstraction is analogous to the treatment of Che as marker and as souvenir, and it is also analogous to his commodification outside of revolutionary struggles, a process that relies on the fetishization of key elements stripped of their place in a more complex social field. Yet in the context of the Zapatista struggle, these iconographic elements are venerated precisely for their political resonance, and they are rearranged into a new narrative of political struggle that is more about social transformation than simple veneration. It is to that promise of transformation that current political tourists travelling to Chiapas are drawn, as much as, if not more than, to the genealogy of revolution narrated in the story of the pipe, and for this destination Subcomandante Marcos is writing the guidebook.4 This paradoxical tension between veneration and transformation that Che, as tourist marker, embodies potentially says a great deal about the fraught legacies of revolution in the era of globalization. Román de la Campa challenges the notion ‘that revolutions belong to modernism and realism, a failed legacy best left behind by a postmodernist aesthetic.’ He continues: Current and old revolutions, different though they may be, face this sort of discursive cul-de-sac. They perform, largely unclaimed, in the

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space vacated by great narratives and ideas. They have thus become, by definition, untenable or undecidable territory at a time when selfreflexive signification occupies the Western tradition. (36)

Following the example set by Borges in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ de la Campa proposes to read ‘how revolutions continue to write themselves’ by tracing the bibliographic connections between Augusto César Sandino; Alberto Bayo, a Cuban national who fought in the Spanish Civil War and wrote 150 Questions for a Guerrilla based on Sandino’s struggle against U.S. imperialism in Nicaragua; and Che Guevara, who, along with the other expeditionary troops on the Granma, read 150 Questions for a Guerrilla while he was trained by Alberto Bayo, and who undoubtedly modelled his own Guerrilla Warfare on Bayo’s book. A bibliography of revolution, this palimpsest of texts and revolutionary authors also forms part of the political tourist’s archive. In what follows, then, I propose to dip into another section of that archive to read Che Guevara’s accounts of his own political tourism, works that are today read by those travelling – and struggling – in his name. But first, I want to take a look at a newspaper clipping drawn from that archive. Communing with the Dead On 10 October 1967 Bolivian news photographer Freddy Alborta’s photograph of the dead Che Guevara on display in a Vallegrande laundry room was transmitted to media outlets around the world.5 John Berger’s analysis of the now-famous photograph performs a kind of translation of corpse into corpus, body into text, that political tourists who travel in Che’s name implicitly mimic. In contesting the ‘intended’ meaning of the photograph – ‘to put an end to a legend’ (‘Che Guevara’ 90) – Berger strives to explain the impact the photograph had on him by comparing it first to Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp

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and then to Mantegna’s painting of the dead Christ. He notes the similarities in the disposition of the corpse in both paintings, and of the positions of the other figures in the photograph and The Anatomy Lesson, with the Bolivian army colonel taking the role of Professor Tulp in pointing out significant features of the corpse. In Berger’s reading, both the painting and the photograph ‘are intended to make an example of the dead: one for the advancement of medicine, the other as a political warning’ (90). Both, moreover, are meant to generalize the particular: Professor Tulp’s anatomy demonstration ‘applies to the arm of every man,’ while the ‘colonel is demonstrating the final fate ... of a notorious guerrilla leader, and what he says is meant to apply to every guerrillero on the American continent’ (90). Mantegna’s painting, on the other hand, offers an emotional correlate between Berger’s reaction on seeing the photograph of the dead Guevara and what he imagines to have been the reaction of ‘a contemporary believer ... to Mantegna’s painting’ (90). While Berger insists there is a difference in effect between paintings and photographs (92), one effect of his comparison is to confer something like an auratic status onto the photograph of the dead Che Guevara. Thus where Berger reads an intent to generalize the fate of Guevara in the circulation of this photograph around the world, his placing of the photograph alongside Rembrandt and Mantegna highlights the particularity of Guevara’s life – or rather, his death. Rather than reading Che’s death as an example, Berger reads his death and his life as exemplary. ‘Guevara,’ Berger acknowledges, ‘was no Christ’ (90), but he grounds the ‘emotional correspondence’ he finds between the Alborta photograph and the Mantegna painting in the notion that ‘in certain rare cases the tragedy of a man’s death completes and exemplifies the meaning of his whole life’ (91). Supplying a text that complements the photograph, Berger reads in the closing passage of Che’s message to the Tricontinental an instance of thanatography:

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Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear, if another hand reaches out to take up our arms, and others come forward to join in our funeral dirge with the rattling of machine guns and with new cries of battle and victory. (‘Create Two, Three’ 362)

This passage represents not only a piece of writing about death, but the last piece of writing Che published before his death. I point out this doubly thanatographical aspect of the passage because of the impact it has on the way the passage may be read. According to Berger, Guevara’s ‘envisaged death offered him the measure of how intolerable his life would be if he accepted the intolerable condition of the world as it is. His envisaged death offered him the measure of the necessity of changing the world’ (‘Che Guevara’ 91). In Guevara’s thanatographic act, Berger reads the meaning of his life: ‘It was by the license granted him by his envisaged death that he was able to live with the necessary pride that becomes a man’ (91). Berger’s act of veneration in this meditation on the meaning of Guevara’s death, then, is inextricably bound up with the meaning he assigns to Che’s life: ‘the necessity of changing the world.’ Berger’s interest (and mine) is in what Derrida refers to as ‘the dynamis of that borderline between the “life” and the “work,”’ a borderline that ‘traverses two “bodies,” the corpus and the body’ (The Ear 5–6). Derrida points out that ‘what one calls life – the thing or object of biology and biography – does not stand face to face with something that would be its opposable ob-ject: death, the thanatological or thanatographical’ (6). Berger’s biographical reading of Che’s life (and death) through a text that he reads as autobiographical assigns to the body (the ‘life’) the meaning of the text (the ‘death’ or thanatography) in a move that Derrida labels otobiographical, that is, written or signed by the ear of the other. What Berger ‘hears’ in the borderline between Che’s ‘life’ and his ‘work’ is ‘the necessity of changing the world.’ Political tourists who travel in the name of

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Che may be said to constitute themselves as the ‘receptive ear[s]’ who ‘come forward to join in [his] funeral dirge with ... new cries of battle and victory’ (Guevara, ‘Create Two, Three’ 362). These otobiographical acts define political tourism’s tension between veneration and transformation, and sign/mark Che as the paradigmatic political tourist. Che as Subject of Political Tourism In turning now to a portion of the Che Guevara corpus, I want to stress the operations of the oto biographical, for there are different ways of approaching these three texts depending on how one understands their relationship to the historical and the auto/ biographical. If one were to read in order of their publication, one would begin with Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria 1963) and end with Back on the Road (Otra Vez 2000). If, on the other hand, one were to proceed in biographical order, one would begin with The Motorcycle Diaries (Notas de viaje 1992) and end with Reminiscences. Regardless of the order in which one reads, however, the early travel texts are inevitably marked by the journey of becoming revolutionary narrated in Reminiscences, not to mention by Che’s subsequent writing and the history of his murder in the Bolivian jungle. It is hardly surprising that The Motorcycle Diaries and Back on the Road have been published posthumously and represented as the combined narrative of Che’s political awakening and development – as, in other words, important stages in the development of an exemplary life. What these texts offer political tourists are narratives of transformation of the self accomplished through travel, the crossing of borders, encounters with the Other, as well as, eventually, political engagement in places away from ‘home.’ The Motorcycle Diaries opens by claiming for the young Ernesto Guevara the status of an everyman-as-witness: ‘Man, the measure of all things, speaks through my mouth in my own words what my eyes saw’ (11). This rather awkward but faithful rendering of the

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original Spanish makes of the narrative ‘I’ a kind of conduit, a recording device not unlike the camera Guevara refers to later in the opening segment of the book.6 Yet the supposed neutrality of the narrative I/eye is put into question in that passage: ‘The reader doesn’t really know what kind of sensitive fluid covers my retina, I’m hardly aware of it myself, so ... unless you actually know the landscape my diary photographed, you’ve no option but to accept my version’ (12). The camera, that ubiquitous instrument of the tourist, registers after all a particular perspective or ‘gaze’7 along with its subject matter, one the reader is compelled to reckon with. In this instance, the gaze comprises a good deal of the readerly interest in The Motorcycle Diaries. The book, after all, was ultimately published because of who Ernesto Guevara later became rather than because of any intrinsic interest it may hold – although it is certainly not devoid of intrinsic interest. The tourist’s gaze that is manifest in the text is most often read biographically as proto-Che. Yet the narrator-Guevara cautions the reader against this sort of reading by setting the travelling subject apart from the narrating subject: ‘The person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentine soil. The person who is reorganizing and polishing them, me, is no longer me, at least I’m not the me I was’ (12). The split subject of autobiographical writing is here foregrounded in the service of a claim about the impact of travel on subjectivity: ‘Wandering around our “America with a capital A” has changed me more than I thought’ (12). If The Motorcycle Diaries are not really about transforming the world, we can nonetheless read them in terms of a transformation of the self more proper to the conventions of travel writing.8 The cover blurb of the Verso edition reads ‘Das Kapital meets Easy Rider,’ and here again one sees evidence of the desire to read the persona of Che back into the book written by the younger Ernesto Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries is a good deal more Easy Rider than it is Das Kapital, but a compelling tension does emerge in the book between the bohemian tourist who cadges food and lodging by any ruse necessary9 and the traveller with a social con-

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science who takes a more self-critical approach. On the one hand, Guevara embraces his new-found identity as a tourist: There we discovered that our vocation, our true vocation, was to roam the highways and waterways of the world for ever. Always curious, investigating everything we set eyes on, sniffing into nooks and crannies; but always detached, not putting down roots anywhere, not staying long enough to discover what lay beneath things: the surface was enough. (57)

In typical tourist fashion, moreover, he is keen to distinguish himself and his companion Alberto Granado from other tourists, especially North American tourists. Guevara’s visit to Machu Pichu inspires a meditation on ‘the most powerful indigenous race in the Americas’ (95), and he is contemptuous of the North American tourists he encounters who, he argues, are incapable of truly understanding the indigenous spirit: ‘North American tourists, hidebound by their practical view of the world ... [are] unaware of the moral distance separating them [from the Inca], since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences’ (96). Guevara here lays claim to a greater authenticity and perceptiveness for the tourist from nuestra América, hinting for the first time in the book at his embrace of a quasi-mestizo pan-Americanism. Later, in a rather grandiose toast at a party in his and Alberto’s honour in the Peruvian leper colony of San Pablo, and under the influence of generous quantities of pisco, Guevara proclaimed that ‘this journey has only served to confirm this belief, that the division of America into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race from Mexico down to the Magellan Straits’ (135). It is tempting for the reader who approaches Guevara’s travel book as part of a larger biographical unity to see in pronouncements like this one an incipient anti-imperialist critique. Yet if the idea of mestizaje inspires Guevara, the series of observations he makes about the

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indigenous people he encounters en route suggest a wider separation between himself and them than he might like to claim for Latin Americans. Newly arrived in Peru, Guevara and Granado are given a lift in a truck that is carrying a group of Aymará whose ‘Spanish,’ Guevara notes more than once, ‘was very poor’ (75), making communication difficult. Guevara does not confess to his own lack of competency in Aymará, however, and when they arrive in the next town his observations about the Aymará echo the denial of coevalness10 that marks so many European and Euro-American encounters with the native Other. For Guevara, the town [Tarata] conjures up the days before the Spanish Conquest. But the people are not the same proud race that time after time rose up against Inca rule and forced them to maintain a permanent army on their borders; these people who watch us walk through the town streets are a defeated race. (76–7)

Not only is the emphasis here on the ‘primitive,’ but the social conditions Guevara observes are projected onto the people themselves; he effectively makes them responsible for their historical treatment at the hands of European settlers. In Puno, Guevara and Granado befriend a schoolteacher ‘who had indian blood and was extremely well versed in indigenous customs and culture’ (80), and Guevara records in indirect discourse this man’s critique of the contemporary conditions in which Indians live, and his disdain for the traitor mestizos who are co-opted through the white man’s education system. Guevara’s ventriloquized critique of colonialism from an indigenous perspective registers sympathy and ambivalence simultaneously, and his insight into the ambiguous position his interlocutor occupies resonates in ironic and discomfiting ways for the reader with Guevara’s pan-American pretensions: As he spoke, the convulsive clenching of his fist betrayed the spirit

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of a man tormented by his own misfortune and also the very desire he attributed to his hypothetical example. Wasn’t he in fact a typical product of an education which damages the person who is granted it as a favour to demonstrate the magic power of that precious ‘drop of blood,’ even if it came from some poor mestizo woman sold to a local cacique or was the result of an indian maid’s rape by her drunken Spanish master? (81)

Guevara’s tourist gaze registers the ambivalence of the traveller who occupies a privileged social position, whatever his espoused sympathies, and throughout the book Guevara’s claims to an egalitarian world view seem more sought after than actual. Even Guevara’s mode of travel both brings him into proximity with those near or at the bottom of the social scale and works to distinguish him from them. Relatively early in their journey, the motorcycle on which he and Granado set out breaks down irreparably. Guevara waxes poetic on the implications of this loss of the motorcycle for their social status as they continue their travels: We were used to attracting idle attention with our strange garb and the prosaic figure of La Poderosa II, whose asthmatic wheezing aroused pity in our hosts. All the same, we had been, so to speak, gentlemen of the road. We’d belonged to a time-honoured aristocracy of wayfarers, bearing our degrees as visiting cards to impress people. Not any more. Now we were just two tramps with packs on our backs, and the grime of the road encrusted in our overalls, shadows of our former aristocratic selves. (49)

It hardly seems coincidental that on the very next page Guevara should represent himself and Granado as social scientists of the slums: ‘As if patiently dissecting, we pry into dirty stairways and dark recesses, talking to the swarms of beggars; we plumb the city’s depths, the miasmas to which we are drawn. Our dilated nostrils inhale the poverty with sadistic intensity’ (50). Having lost their

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halos, these flâneurs revel in the state to which they claim to have fallen. This self-consciously ‘literary’ passage gently mocks, in retrospect, the attitude the ‘doctors’ took to their surroundings, acknowledging that, if they appeared to be ‘shadows of [their] former aristocratic selves,’ they were nonetheless really only engaging in that eminently aristocratic pastime, slumming. It is also clear that the people they encounter on the road have little difficulty in recognizing their privilege. One of the trucks in which they secure a lift is carrying a group of Indians; the driver makes sure to set his white passengers apart from the rest: ‘As a special privilege we were given some planks to sit on which separated us from the smelly, flea-ridden human cargo giving off a heady but warm stench beneath us’ (77). If Guevara draws our attention to the irony of this ‘privilege,’ which in keeping them above the warm bodies below exposes them to freezing cold winds, it is nonetheless apparent to the reader that the travellers remain more than ‘two tramps with packs on [their] backs.’ Similarly, when they secure berths on a riverboat sailing down the Ucayali on their journey to San Pablo, they pay for a third-class cabin but are put in first class (126). In this instance, Guevara’s claims to affinity with the poor and the working classes are made in the context of his and Granado’s rebuff by the first-class passengers: ‘The food is better in first class and there are fewer mosquitoes, but I’m not sure we got the best of the bargain. We get on much better with simple sailors than with that middle class which, rich or not, is too attached to the memory of what it once was to pay attention to two penniless travellers’ (127). Guevara’s evident pleasure in épater les bourgeois should not, I think, necessarily be read as evidence of his working-class solidarity. I do not wish to overstate Guevara’s distance from the social worlds he encounters on his tour, but the interest he manifests in the poor and disenfranchised people he meets betrays a certain detachment and, occasionally, an appalling condescension.11 In one or two passages Guevara-as-narrator is less given to irony

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and offers a more serious account of the social conditions he comes to observe on his travels. In the first of these, he has been called upon to treat an old woman with asthma, and his retrospective account suggests that the experience had a sobering effect: The poor thing was in an awful state, breathing the smell of stale sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxuries in her house. As well as asthma, she had a bad heart. It is in cases like this, when a doctor knows he is powerless in such circumstances, that he longs for change; a change which would prevent the injustice of a system in which until a month ago this poor woman had had to earn her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. (52)

The kind of change Guevara outlines here involves government investment in ‘socially useful projects,’ and while he is rather vague on this point it is the sort of thing that readers would expect the young Guevara to say. The interest he manifests, in this passage, in ‘the life of the proletariat’ (52) is also evident in an encounter with a young couple whose membership in the Chilean Communist Party made it nearly impossible for them to find work: The couple, numb with cold, huddling together in the desert night, were a living symbol of the proletariat the world over. They didn’t have a single miserable blanket to sleep under, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other round us as best we could. It was one of the coldest nights I’ve ever spent; but also one which made me feel a little closer to this strange, for me anyway, human species. (60)

Guevara’s sense that the couple regarded his ‘aimless travelling as parasitical’ is recorded early enough in the book to serve as a commentary on the unencumbered and disengaged rambling Gue-

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vara and Granado undertook. For while the two young men visited atypical sights for tourists, such as mines and leprosaria, this particular journey was not really about engaging in socially useful action. All the more curious, then, is the concluding passage which is titled ‘Acotación al margen’ (Note in the Margin) in the original and ‘As an Afterthought’ in the English translation. Apparently written sometime after Guevara’s return to Argentina, and bearing no reference to an actual place, this quasi-magical real encounter with a trickster-like figure confers retrospectively on the journey recounted in The Motorcycle Diaries the significance of a political awakening. Guevara describes a starry night in a mountain town in which the cold created a mysterious psycho-social effect: ‘as if all solid substances were spirited away in the ethereal space around us, denying our individuality and submerging us, rigid, in the immense blackness’ (150). ‘As if all solid substances were spirited away’ – the phrase is an uncanny (or perhaps all too canny) echo of a passage in The Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engels lay out the internal revolutionary dynamism of the bourgeois social formation which will ultimately lead to its dissolution: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air ... and man is at last compelled to face ... his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. (476, emphasis added)

At the very least, Guevara depicts in this scene a moment of reckoning and recognition that has for him a transformative effect. The mysterious figure he encounters, whose face the darkness obscures, makes an impression with ‘those same arguments’ where others had failed. Those same arguments, in sum, are that ‘the future belongs to the people and gradually or suddenly they

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will take power, here and all over the world’ (151). Significantly for Guevara, his interlocutor adds that those members of the ruling class who cannot adapt – ‘you and I, for instance – will die cursing the power which they helped bring about with often enormous sacrifices’ (151). Thus far, we are fairly close to Marx’s text, but Guevara’s strange companion, in a trickster-like move, suddenly embarks on prophecy: ‘I also know ... that you will die with your fist clenched and your jaw tense, the perfect manifestation of hatred and struggle, because you aren’t a symbol (some inanimate example), you are an authentic member of the society to be destroyed; the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and through your actions’ (152). As this figure fades into the darkness, Guevara tells us he ‘knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people’ (152). The remainder of the passage proclaims his readiness to fight in even more grandiose terms. Jon Lee Anderson, one of Guevara’s biographers, argues that this strange text ‘must be seen as a decisive personal testimonial, for the sentiments it contained would soon emerge from the penumbra of his submerged thoughts to find expression in his future actions’ (125). Yet this reading is clearly only possible because of the direction Che’s life took; that later narrative folds back onto this early text which, apparently, Che instructed Aleida March to burn along with his other early writings (Anderson 755). Instead March chose to publish it as part of Notas de viaje, making both works part of the collective biographical narrative about Che that comes to sign the writings he produced. This ‘note in the margin’ ultimately functions in the way of what Derrida, in his reading of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, would call an exergue, and like the exergue in Nietzsche’s text, which falls between the preface and the first chapter, this ‘note in the margin’ or ‘afterthought’ ‘strangely dislocates the very thing that we, with our untroubled assurance, would like to think of as the time of life and the time of life’s récit, of the writing of life by the living – in short, the time of autobiog-

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raphy’ (Derrida, The Ear 11). Its uncanny effect on the reader of Che’s travel diary, an autobiographical text, has everything to do with the way it speaks of the life lived outside of the time of (this) autobiography, and with the way it speaks of the death: ‘I brace my body, ready for combat, and prepare myself to be a sacred precinct within which the bestial howl of the victorious proletariat can resound with new vigour and new hope’ (152). It is not surprising that readers of the exergue, like Anderson, seek to make it consistent with a posthumously constructed biography, and it is a reading, a signing of the text, to paraphrase Derrida, that once again authorizes the veneration of revolution, a signing of Che as ‘sacred precinct’ for the howl of ‘the victorious proletariat.’ Che as Political Tourist The next instalment of the posthumous auto/biography is Back on the Road: A Journey through Latin America (2001), simply titled Otra Vez (2000) in Spanish. This time Guevara has not ‘ordered and polished’ his travel diary; the editorial work has been left to the editors at the Archivo Personal del Che,12 who have augmented the diary notes with letters and appendices ‘that make it possible to grasp the full profundity of the young author’s reflective and conscientious tone as he embarked on his future life, linked forever with one of the most important events of the twentieth century, the Cuban Revolution’ (v). The prefatory materials supplied by Alberto Granado (‘Foreword’) and Richard Gott (‘Introduction’) do the work of making those links between the elliptical diary fragments, ‘his future life,’ and the Cuban revolution. Granado, for instance, claims that ‘this second journey consolidates the political knowledge he has acquired and fuels a growing need for further study to grasp why and how a struggle must be waged that will culminate in a genuine revolution’ (vii). Gott takes a slightly different tack, arguing that this work presents evidence of a radical transformation in Guevara’s world view during the period

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the diary records: ‘In the two years covered by this narrative Guevara dramatically shifts his outlook. He moves from being a detached and cynical observer to becoming a fully fledged revolutionary, seeking a theoretical framework through which to understand the world, and ardent in his desire to take immediate action to change it’ (xv). In readings like these one finds a desire to forge a link between travel and revolutionary development whereby travel is scripted as a narrative of becoming, or as a narrative of the consolidation of the revolutionary subject. Yet evidence for Guevara’s desire to change the world is to be found chiefly between the lines of the diary – or in the letters he sent home and that are published here to fill in the missing narrative of revolutionary transformation. A careful reading of Back on the Road, in other words, suggests that travel is a much more messy process, however much Guevara’s experiences in Guatemala especially, including the social circles in which he moved there and the reading he undertook, undoubtedly shaped him in particular ways. The sketchiness of the diary in itself encourages a reading that emphasizes political transformation. It is, of course, not surprising that once Guevara met and joined Fidel Castro in Mexico City his diary should be less than forthcoming about his activities or even his political thinking; the absence of written evidence seems only prudent.13 The fact of that encounter and the pleasure Guevara evidently took in it are all that the diary notes: ‘A political event was that I met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary. He is a young, intelligent guy, very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well’ (99). What interests me about Back on the Road is not so much the putative narrative of ‘becoming a fully fledged revolutionary’ (Gott xv) – that narrative is really the focus of Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. Rather, I am interested in the extent to which Back on the Road foregrounds political tourism, the relationship between what he describes, in a letter to his mother on 10 May 1954, as ‘the two I’s struggling inside me: the socialist and the traveller’ (61). While these two

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selves seem opposed to one another in this construction, they are, in context, together opposed to the bourgeois life Guevara could lead ‘by the low method of ratifying my title, opening a clinic and specializing in allergies’ (61). That course of action would, Guevara writes, be a ‘horrible betrayal’ of his socialist and travelling selves. Once again tourism and revolution are linked, and while there is for Guevara clearly a tension between the two, what holds them apart seems to be more a matter of degrees of commitment than the polar opposition suggested by MacCannell. From the outset of this journey, Guevara’s interest in the political is clearly in evidence, as he and Carlos Ferrer, with whom he embarks on his travels, linger in La Paz hoping to witness further developments in the recent nationalist struggle: ‘a revolt was expected at any moment and we had the earnest intention to stay and see it at close range’ (11). Similarly, it is the possibility of witnessing first-hand the transformations in Guatemala brought about by the government of Jacobo Arbenz that decides Guevara against going to Venezuela to join Alberto Granado. Yet when he compares his political convictions with those exiled members of the Cuban July 26th Movement whom he meets, he finds himself wanting in certain respects: I felt very small when I heard the Cubans making grand assertions with total calmness. I can make a speech ten times more objective and without banalities; I can do it better and I can convince the public that I am saying something true. But I don’t convince myself, whereas the Cubans do. Ñico [Antonio López] left his heart and soul in the microphone and for that reason fired even a sceptic like myself with enthusiasm. (45)

Thus, while he is clearly attracted by the passionate political convictions of these men, he remains unable to share in those convictions fully; yet his longing to share in them is palpable. Even in the wake of the CIA-sponsored invasion that led to Arbenz’s resigna-

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tion, Guevara remains undecided about his future, although the impact of witnessing such an event has clearly been momentous, and he participated to the extent that he was permitted to do so: ‘I enlisted in the health brigades to help on the medical side and in the youth brigades that patrol the streets by night’ (62). Yet despite a letter to his mother dated 4 July 1954, in which he presents his analysis of Arbenz’s weakness, and confesses ‘[a] little shamefully ... that I have thoroughly enjoyed myself during these days’ (68), he notes in his diary that he remains uncertain about his future course of action: ‘I’m at one of those moments ... when a bit of lateral pressure can send me off in a completely different direction’ (70). Practically, he must leave Guatemala and is contemplating either Mexico or Belize as his next destination, but of course one can read ‘direction’ more metaphorically here, and this passage suggests that a trip to Paris or New York is as likely at this juncture as joining the Cuban revolutionaries on the Granma. Guevara’s becoming revolutionary was certainly not inevitable, despite the ideological development his reading fostered14 and the taste for participating in political struggle he comes to recognize in Guatemala. Once he has made the conscious decision to join with Fidel Castro and is undergoing preparations for that journey, Guevara writes to his mother hinting of the new direction his life will take. The socialist and the traveller are here united, and the bourgeois life of medical studies has been abandoned: I had a project for my life which involved ten years of wandering, then some years of medical studies and, if any time was left, the great adventure of physics. Now that is all over. The only clear thing is that the ten years of wandering look like being more ... but it will be very different from the kind I imagined. Now, when I get to a new country, it won’t be to look around and visit museums or ruins, but also (because that still interests me) to join the people’s struggle. (111–12)

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This passage is about the consolidation of the political tourist – or at least it can be read in those terms. Revolution need not mean an abandonment of the habit of veneration (visiting museums and ruins), but veneration is clearly of secondary importance; ‘joining the people’s struggle’ is the primary objective of this type of travel. Joining the struggle, significantly, does not in Guevara’s conception of it entail a permanent, national belonging. Rather, that act of political participation is conceived as part of a lifetime of ‘wandering.’ This kind of belonging is reimagined as a transnational project, a conception of political engagement that is itself dependent on the mobility that, Urry reminds us, is a material fact of modernity, and it is this facet of Guevara’s project that aligns him with a certain kind of cosmopolitanism (Consuming 144). The Journey toward a Revolutionary Subjectivity If The Motorcycle Diaries opens by situating the self in relation to travel and memory, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War opens by situating the self in relation to history. An explicitly personal approach to the history of the Cuban revolution, this memoir openly evokes a tension between (collective) history and (personal) narration, as Efrain Barradas has argued (138). In the prologue, Guevara justifies his approach to historiography in two ways. In the first instance, he is concerned that the history of the revolution not be forgotten before the leaders have the time to set down an account; his second concern, which hints at a more dialectical conception of the relation between the personal and the collective, the narratological and the historical, has to do with his desire ‘to bring to life our revolutionary actions’ (29). Thus, while Guevara is careful to emphasize the limitations of his historiography – ‘It is not my intention that this fragmentary history, based on remembrances and a few hasty notes, should be taken as a full account’ – he also suggests that the act of narrating one’s relationship to the historical struggle might become a collective undertak-

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ing: ‘I hope that each theme will be developed by those who lived it’ (29). The first-person account of history, moreover, facilitates the development of an ethico-political theme central to Che’s political theorizing, and that has to do with the development of a revolutionary subjectivity – becoming the ‘new man.’ In this case, the exemplary new man retrospectively narrates his own revolutionary development. As Efrain Barradas points out, Reminiscences can be read as ‘a kind of mini-Bildungsroman in which the narrator achieves his ideal’ (143).15 My interest in this narrative of revolutionary development has to do with the extent to which it is simultaneously a narrative about the development of a transnational subjectivity, the ultimate consolidation of tourism and revolution. Barradas grounds his argument about the Bildungsroman quality of Reminiscences, in part, in the way the text is ordered. He notes, for instance, that it culminates with a short tribute to Julio Roberto Cáceres Valle, nicknamed ‘El Patojo,’ a Guatemalan guerrillero who was killed in revolutionary struggle in his own country. Noting that this segment seems an odd addition to a book on the Cuban revolution, Barradas points out that Guevara’s portrait of Cáceres Valle may be read as a portrait of the ideal guerrillero (144). While Barradas makes much of the fact that this passage is the final one in the book, I would argue that his reading of the significance of the ‘El Patojo’ chapter need not depend on its structural placement. For one thing, it is not really the final segment of the narrative, although it is the final segment in the book: in Pasajes de la guerra revolutionaria, ‘El Patojo’ is the last of three appendices, all of which were originally published in Cuban periodicals prior to their inclusion in this book.16 As an appendix, then, this text is arguably outside of the narrative trajectory of Pasajes, which ends with Guevara’s account of the battle of Santa Clara. Reading this appendix as the culmination of the narrative trajectory, on the other hand, does privilege Che’s development as a subject more forcefully than one which sees as the ending his account of the

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battle of Santa Clara, with its concern for the example Cuba sets the rest of America: ‘We are now in a situation in which we are much more than simple instruments of one nation; we constitute at this moment the hope of unredeemed America’ (254). The focus here, in other words, is on the collective and historical, rather than the personal. Still another reading of the relationship of the personal and the historical is made possible by the English translation of Pasajes. In this edition, ‘El Patojo’ is no longer an appendix; it has been made the opening chapter of Reminiscences, immediately following on the prologue, despite the latter’s explicit reference to the battle at Alegría de Pío as the first episode in the war and the beginning of Che’s narrative. In this ordering of the book, we begin with the portrait of the ideal guerrillero, but there is another detail of Guevara’s reminiscences about Cáceres Valle that perhaps seems more significant in light of its placement at the beginning of the text. Guevara notes that he came to know El Patojo as they both fled to Mexico from Guatemala in the wake of the coup and that in Mexico City they worked together taking photographs in the city parks. Like Guevara, Cáceres Valle volunteered to join the Granma expeditionary force; unlike Guevara, he was turned down, ‘not because of any shortcomings of his, but so as not to turn our army into an international force’ (32). The close parallels between Cáceres Valle and Che which are evident in Guevara’s account thus also turn on the question of the (international) revolutionary’s relationship to national liberation. The exception Castro was apparently willing to make for Guevara’s participation in a rebel army otherwise exclusively composed of Cuban nationals is something that the latter had continually to negotiate, and thus it is possible to read Reminiscences as in part the narrative of Che’s becoming Cuban.17 Yet as the ending of the narrative (if not the book) in both the Spanish original and the English translation suggests, Che continues to think in terms of America and to place the Cuban revolution in that hemispheric framework. The ten-

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sion between ‘belonging’ to a national liberation struggle and participating in that struggle as an outsider is central to the political tourist problematic. That this problematic forms a subtext in Guevara’s account of the process of (his) becoming revolutionary in Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War is clearly significant, particularly in view of the ways in which this book serves as a marker in constructing the Sierra Maestra and Cuba more broadly as sights for the revolutionary tourist. Ileana Rodríguez argues that ‘in the constitution of the revolutionary subject ... revolutionary epistemes propose several simultaneously unfulfilled conflations’ (37). Among the conflations are those ‘between the individual and the collective subject’ and between ‘autobiography and social history, advocating testimonial as a group narrative’ (37). These are clearly key tropes in Guevara’s Reminiscences, a text that also exhibits another feature of revolutionary writing that Rodríguez points to: ‘The fact that revolutionary writing uses the first person plural, we, obscures the relationship between the masses as people, the members of the party as a group, and the singular narrating subject I, which is masculine, and individual, impersonating them all’ (37). That is, the masculine narrating subject occupies all available subject positions, becoming a transcendent subject. I would qualify the argument Rodríguez is making by noting that Guevara remains acutely conscious of the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective, and however much the narrative arc indicates a yearning for revolutionary transcendence, the narrating subject is ultimately much more unstable. Consider, for instance, this passage: The days following our departure from Epifanio Díaz’s house were for me personally the most painful days of the war. These notes have attempted to give an idea of what the first part of our revolutionary struggle was like for all the men involved; if in this section, more than any other, I must refer to my own personal participation, it is

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because it is connected to the later episodes and it was not possible to separate the two without losing the continuity of the narrative. (81)

Guevara here feels obliged to apologize for apparently focusing on himself at the expense of the history of the collective he is attempting to present; on the other hand, that personal narrative cannot be extracted from the larger narrative to which it, moreover, contributes. The notion of a narrating subject, which is both singular and masculine, ‘impersonating’ or standing in for the collective is nonetheless a vital point to consider, particularly for the re-signification of ‘Che’ by contemporary political tourists, many of whom are likely to be women, gay, people of colour – to occupy, in other words, subject positions apparently written out of Che’s revolutionary script. In drawing our attention to the gendering of revolutionary narratives, Rodríguez underscores the process of differentiation inherent in this revolutionary epistemology that marks both Che’s own writing and the ways he is ‘enunciated and consecrated institutionally as the paradigmatic aspiration of the revolutionary man’ (50). That is, political tourists and those engaged in national(ist) struggles who identify with Guevara potentially draw on and reproduce the same revolutionary epistemology. In her reading of the Bolivian Diary Rodríguez anatomizes the ways ‘Guevara the narrator works at constituting disparate subjects at the same time: that of the leader (guerrilla), that of the guerrilla (troops/base) and that of the peasantry (people/masses), where the first is both the least focused, and the place in which he positions himself as the sweet object of desire’ (51). One can read a similar distribution of subjectivity in Reminiscences, with the exception that Fidel is construed as the undisputed leader of the guerrilla troops, and Che himself, while writing as member of the revolutionary vanguard, represents himself as one of the guerrilleros who is learning to become a properly revolutionary subject

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over the course of the war. Through the use of a first-person narrative, Rodríguez argues, ‘various convergences are authorized: the first responds to the narrativization of “El Che” by Che, a self-portrait in steel and iron ... the second, to nationalism and internationalism, as attributes of the guerrilla; and the third, prejudgments and distrust with respect to the differentiated peasant masses’ (53). One of the differences that these convergences introduce and then transcend is gender. In his self-portrait, Rodríguez notes, ‘domesticity, the intersection with the feminine, prevails’ (53), as much of the Bolivian Diary remains preoccupied with finding food and water, and with sorting out personality conflicts among the troops, and thus ‘Che is here leader – but “mother” as well, in Kristeva’s use of the term’ (54). This ambiguous combination of masculine and feminine enables a kind of homosocial emulation and adulation of Che, according to Rodríguez (49), that ultimately facilitates the transformation of the guerrilla troops from ‘the domestic habits of living together’ to the masculine and heroic ‘realities of armed combat’ (56). Yet, any potential for a kind of revolutionary androgyny is undermined, as María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo points out, ‘when time and again the feminine is introduced and appropriated by the new man in order that woman, as sign and referent may ultimately disappear entirely’ (79). The place(ment) of the chapter ‘Lidia y Clodomira’ in Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria is a case in point. The only direct commentary Guevara offers on the participation of women in the revolutionary war, the article that was originally published in Humanismo in 1959 in a section titled ‘Las mujeres heroicas de la Revolución’ (‘Heroic Women of the Revolution’), is included in Pasajes as an appendix. Suggesting that women occupy at best an ancillary place in revolutionary subjectivity, whatever the historical importance of their participation in the revolution, this passage is thus arguably ‘exorbitant,’ in Gayatri Spivak’s usage of the term, to the main narrative of revolutionary subjectivity (In Other Worlds

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246).18 That is to say, the story of Lydia and Clodomira cannot be excluded entirely, but nor can these women be fully incorporated into a narrative that centres on the development of guerrilla troops into ‘new men.’ Consider, too, that their family names are suppressed or merely deemed unimportant – the names that properly ‘belong’ not to the women themselves, after all, but to their fathers or their husbands.19 Guevara’s omission, witting or unwitting, confirms the lack of belonging of these women, their ‘out-of-place’ status in the revolution, even as the substance of the appendix appears to assert their importance. In this way their story is one Guevara can appropriate for himself. In her translation of Pasajes into English, Victoria Ortiz moves the story of Lydia and Clodomira into the main body of the text – a gesture toward a feminist rewriting of Guevara’s account of the war? The consolidation of the revolutionary subject potentially entails a similar subsuming of national difference. In the Bolivian Diary, as Rodríguez points out, there is a tension between the transnational ideal of the Latin American guerrilla for whom national differences are irrelevant and the problems having to do with the national and the local that beset the foco in Bolivia and that manifest themselves in the diary. The Bolivian Communist Party is reluctant to assist Che, and Che argues with party leader Mario Monje about who should lead the guerrilla war in Bolivia. Che worries that relatively few Bolivians are willing to join in the struggle and discourages too many Peruvians from joining the guerrilla forces for fear that international troops would outnumber the national participants, an interesting echo of Castro’s concern about the guerrilla force he assembled in Mexico. The Bolivians who join are represented as mostly inept and ill-suited to guerrilla life. In contrast, Rodríguez points out, ‘Che comes to represent a paradigm and a vanguard. He has transcended the Argentine, he has affiliated himself emotionally with the Cuban and is not inclined to submit his leadership to discussion, leadership originally Bolivian but with a continental geopolitical reach’ (57). One

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of the most salient characteristics, then, of Che’s narrative and of his revolutionary subjectivity, Rodríguez suggests, ‘could be ... this combination of revolutionary subject as transcendent subject that is unconstrained by boundaries – whether of gender or of country – and that nonetheless executes actions both within and without these frames’ (57). In this transcendent subject ‘that is unconstrained by boundaries’ one recognizes elements of both the imperial subject and the subject position for which, willy-nilly, the political tourist longs. Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of the instrumentalist ethic of the imperial project as an injunction to ‘make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself’ (‘Three Women’s Texts’ 248) informs Saldaña-Portillo’s reading of the development of revolutionary consciousness in Guevara’s Pasajes/ Reminscences. Comparing what she terms the subject of development (Spivak’s imperial subject) to the subject of revolution in Guevara’s memoir, Saldaña-Portillo argues for a ‘resemblancein-difference’ between these two forms of subjectivity. This difference turns on the nature of transcendence. For the subject of development, transcendence has to do with ‘the possibility of fully-competitive capitalism,’ whereas for the revolutionary subject, transcendence is to be found in ‘a collective community not bifurcated by class, gender, or race’ (66). To be sure, this difference is hardly negligible and may well seem definitive, but Saldaña-Portillo’s point is that in the ‘conversion narrative’ Guevara presents in Reminiscences, the feminine, the national Other, and, perhaps most crucially, ‘the objects of revolutionary agency, the peasant classes’ (81) are made revolutionary so that they may be treated as ends in themselves. The revolutionary subject is made through regimes of subjection (to military discipline, selfsacrifice, frugality, masculinity, among others) by transforming and subsuming the Other: ‘the unruly, feminized, not-quitehuman / not human, traditional native, the object of perpetual instruction’ (65). Thus the desire for a collective community that

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works across difference to achieve revolution is, on Saldaña-Portillo’s reading of Reminiscences, continually beset by Guevara’s ambivalence toward the peasants in the Sierra Maestra, who are by turns helpful and loyal to the guerrillas, who join the guerrilla troops, and yet are undisciplined, inclined to banditry and betrayal. Saldaña-Portillo suggests that this ambivalence toward the primary objects of revolutionary agency ‘reflects the displacement of a deep anxiety over [Guevara’s] own revolutionary transformation’ (81) from bourgeois intellectual to ‘El Che.’20 How different is the anxiety of the political tourist who crosses international borders, as well as borders of class, gender, and race, in the name of social transformation? The political tourist who frets over her privilege, who desires belonging, who strives for a transnational subjectivity, may well remake herself at the expense of the object of political solidarity. It is tempting to argue, then, that Che is never more of a political tourist than when he aims for his own conversion into revolutionary subject. If Reminiscences is a conversion narrative, a narrative of transcendence, as Saldaña-Portillo suggests, it is troubled not only by its own internal ambivalence, the need to reiterate Guevara’s transformation from médico to guerrillero, but by the subsequent ‘travel diaries’ which show the extent to which the ‘new man’/guerrillero has precisely not transcended particularities of nation, race, class, or gender. Indeed, Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo opens with the sentence ‘Esta es la historia de un fracaso’ (31) (‘This is the story/history of a failure’). Here, as in the Bolivian Diary, it is precisely the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of overcoming differences of race and nation that prevents the development of a revolutionary force on the model of the Cuban revolution. These accounts of Guevara’s subsequent forays into revolutionary tourism present additional force in support of Saldaña-Portillo’s suggestion that a ‘model of transcendence of difference’ is not ultimately the most revolutionary of models (81). More troubling still for political tourists attempting to follow in Guevara’s foot-

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steps is the implication that the gap between the guerrillero and the peasant masses is insuperable. What does that bode for the revolution itself? As the complex and often troubling unfolding of the revolution in Cuba suggests, social transformation often entails its own contradictions – contradictions contemporary political tourists may well be inclined to overlook in their veneration of the revolutionary ideal. Political Tourism as a Strategy for Entering and Leaving Modernity For Néstor García Canclini, the universalizing project of modernity that strives to (re)make itself by transforming or overcoming its Others, be they peasants, indigenous peoples, or other nations, has never been particularly successful in Latin America. García Canclini contends that the specificity of Latin American modernity is precisely its hybridity, its character as a place ‘where traditions have not yet disappeared and modernity has not completely arrived’ and where the traditional and the modern are just as often mixed (2). Postmodernity, one might say following this logic, has arrived in Latin America before the unfinished project of modernity.21 In order to understand these hybrid cultures, García Canclini proposes, we need ‘strategies for entering and leaving modernity’ (1) devised by the practitioners of a new hybrid social science who would ‘enter’ modernity at different points and by different means, and who would perhaps ultimately leave with a sense of ‘what to do – when modernity has become a polemical or suspect project – with this mixture of heterogeneous memory and truncated innovations’ (3). I would like to propose political tourism as a cultural practice whose texts might be ‘entered’ and ‘left’ in a similar vein and with a similar purpose. Certainly global tourism, with its embrace of the local, the indigenous, and the primitive alongside jet travel, cosmopolitan cities, and the theme park, is one of the forces constituting the sort of

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hybridity García Canclini describes. Dean MacCannell famously recognized his fellow tourists as his research associates; I would like to suggest that contemporary political tourists are mine. Clearly those who strive to translate ‘el Che’ into new contexts of transnational struggle must reckon with the ways the universalizing project of revolution that he represents remains necessarily unfinished as its Others engage in various hybrid projects of their own. If political tourists follow too closely in Che’s footsteps – if, that is, we aim for transcendence – we are likely to rehearse the imperialist axiomatics that Spivak warns against. If, on the other hand, we recognize political tourism as a hybrid cultural practice, our goal may be rather to heighten the contradictions and incommensurabilities that we encounter along the way. García Canclini contends that ‘to radicalize the project of modernity is to sharpen and renew this uncertainty [about ‘what it means to be modern’], to create new possibilities for modernity always to be able to be something different and something more’ (268). In place of transcendence, political tourists need to strive for an opening out toward the other, for a situating or framing of our relationship to modernity and to modernity’s ‘others.’ At its best, political tourism mobilizes fragments of the project of modernity – its emancipatory, expansionist, democratizing, and renovating impulses (García Canclini 12) – for ends other than those of the hegemonic powers. At its best, political tourism as a cultural practice affords us a vision of the contradictions of modernity that enables something like a hybrid, activist-oriented social science. Guevara himself clearly did not embrace hybridity in this way. For all of his fascination with the monuments of indigenous culture,22 and his flirtation with the notion of a mestizo identity unifying the nations of Latin America, Guevara concluded that anthropology was ultimately about ‘the study of what is now dead beyond recall’ (Back on the Road 59) and therefore not something to which he could dedicate his life. The struggle for social trans-

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formation, as he understood it, was opposed to ‘tradition,’ however interested he might remain in museums and ruins. Thus, while his writing manifests many of the contradictions and tensions that mark political tourism, with its constitutive paradoxical embrace of both veneration and transformation, Guevara was undoubtedly aiming at a more transcendent praxis. That being said, the appeal of Guevara’s writing for contemporary political tourists such as myself has as much to do with the ways these narratives betray the very hybridity they endeavour to eschew. As a cultural practice that foregrounds social and cultural contradictions, not least the axes of power that produce inequality, even as it strives to overcome them through its promotion of social transformation, political tourism offers at minimum an exemplary instance of the workings of modernity. Its utopian impulse toward social transformation – its effort to imagine across nations, ethnicities, classes, and genders – however much it remains caught in the contradictions that produce modernity in the first place, is nonetheless valuable at a juncture when those divisions seem more entrenched than ever. If, in addition, political tourism may be understood as a hybrid tool for cultural analysis, then perhaps it truly can become a strategy for entering and leaving modernity. To think of political tourism in this fashion, however, is to reinstall at least some of the privilege and detachment of the observer, who abstracts from the particularities of the struggle a vision of transformation. Transnational solidarity arguably relies on this ability to abstract from the particular instance of struggle but also calls upon us to translate between the different languages of modernity, or between modernity and its Others. The tension between Guevara’s faith in revolutionary transcendence and what García Canclini characterizes as the hybrid nature of Latin American modernity recalls Agnes Smedley’s translation of Eurocentric discourses of modernity through her use of ‘speaking bitterness.’ A key difference between these two figures, however, lies in Smedley’s particular attachment to the Chinese struggle, whereas Gue-

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vara remained committed to ‘wandering.’ ‘Joining the people’s struggle’ is for him a transnational endeavour in the broadest possible sense. In venerating Che as revolutionary model, contemporary political tourists endorse this principle of internationalism, but what we may learn from the dynamic relationship between his ‘life’ and ‘work,’ body and corpus, has to do with the difficulty of incorporating – without subsuming – the feminine, the national other, the subaltern classes into that utopian vision of social transformation.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Postcolonial Migrant as Political Tourist: Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile

Migration offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants – borne-across humans – are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples. (Salman Rushdie, ‘Günter Grass’ 278–9)

You see the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports. (Salman Rushdie, ‘“Commonwealth Literature”’ 67)

Mass migration, according to Arjun Appadurai, among others, is a prevailing characteristic of the era of globalization, and one of the key questions of this book concerns how to think about political tourism within this framework. How does a transnational imaginary informed by an awareness, if not necessarily direct experience, of the cross-border traffic of refugees, migrant labourers, aid workers, immigrants, peacekeepers, and asylum seekers either enable or foreclose upon the acts of international solidarity that impel political tourists across the globe? Few contemporary writers can be more associated with metaphors of migrancy, travel,

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and displacement than Salman Rushdie, yet Rushdie’s one travel book, The Jaguar Smile, has been largely overlooked both by postcolonial critics and by scholars of travel writing. Perhaps this is because Rushdie is a different sort of traveller in Nicaragua than he is in London or New York, not the former colonial subject migrating to the heart of empire with subversive intent, but the privileged cosmopolitan aiming at solidarity – and missing. In this chapter I examine the persona Rushdie creates for himself in The Jaguar Smile, a book he wrote about his three-week sojourn in Nicaragua in 1986, when he accepted an invitation from the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the ‘triumph’ of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) over the Somoza dictatorship. I argue that the ambivalent identification of the escritor hindú – a mistaken identity Rushdie adopts with some amusement – with his Sandinista hosts in their struggle against an imperial power turns on his reading of the revolution as a kind of migration ‘home’ for those Nicaraguans disenfranchised by the Somocista dictatorship. A gesture of solidarity that withholds commitment, The Jaguar Smile arguably presents another case of mistaken identity on the order of the political struggle Rushdie has travelled to witness. In pursuing this question of Rushdie’s authorial persona in The Jaguar Smile, I am once again undertaking in deconstructive fashion to ‘loosen the binding of the book,’ in Gayatri Spivak’s words, and to ‘undo the opposition between verbal text and the bio-graphy of the subject [‘Salman Rushdie’]’ (Critique 115). I do this with the aim of considering the relationship between the authorwriter and the author-traveller who share the proper name of Salman Rushdie, and also with the aim of considering the relationship between the subject positions I have identified in my title and that I propose Rushdie may be said to occupy – postcolonial migrant and political tourist. Thus I am interested in the way

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Rushdie constructs his persona as political tourist in The Jaguar Smile and in how that persona articulates both with Rushdie’s persona as postcolonial intellectual and with the paradigm of migrancy. Although The Jaguar Smile was published in 1987, two years before the fatwa that Ayatollah Khomenei issued following the publication of The Satanic Verses, it is difficult to read this travel book now without being conscious of what Rushdie has come to represent in the international world of letters. As Sabina Sawhney and Simona Sawhney put it, ‘At least for one brief moment, he became, in a sense, the very symbol of the literary for many people across the globe’ (431). More importantly, The Satanic Verses affair cannot be discounted because this novel has so often been taken as emblematic of postcolonial migrant literature.1 In fact, Elleke Boehmer suggests that quite apart from its impact on Rushdie himself, The Satanic Verses affair may have ‘contributed to the prominence of migrant writing generally’ (236). The fallout from the publication of The Satanic Verses may be seen, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, as a ‘case of the global Lebenswelt – the praxis and politics of life – intercepting an aesthetic object so that a mere reading of it has become impossible’ (‘Reading’ 217). I will return to the implications of reading Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile post-fatwa later in the chapter. Meanwhile Rushdie’s ubiquity as a figure in postcolonial studies, although that status has not gone uncontested, poses its own challenges.2 I take up the question of Rushdie’s status as postcolonial political tourist not without some trepidation, anticipating a certain amount of exasperation on the part of fellow postcolonial critics. Yet it is in part Rushdie’s neariconic status as a writer associated with the trope of migrancy that interests me. If I revisit some well-worn territory in this chapter, it is with a different objective in view. What sort of political tourist does a figure like Rushdie make, assuming it is possible to generalize at all?

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Rushdie as Postcolonial Migrant I use the term postcolonial migrant to signal that it is the construction of the migrant as paradigmatic figure from within postcolonial studies that interests me here and that it is this notion of migrancy that Rushdie is held to personify. It is also a notion Rushdie himself has helped to develop through his essays as much as his novels. Postcolonial critics have long been interested in what one might think of as the longue durée of globalization, that is, the rise of capitalism and its expansion outward from Europe that mark the beginnings of colonialism. The centrality of travel to the self-conception of colonizers, the emerging transculturation in the contact zones, to paraphrase Mary Louise Pratt, and the impact of what Said terms the ‘voyage in’ on the imperial metropolis are the focus of such influential studies as Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797, and Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Yet it has been the increase in migration in the period of decolonization, and the new hybrid cultural forms that migration generated, that have been most central to the postcolonial paradigm of migrancy. While the figure of the migrant has been used to critique the marginalization of minority populations, to deconstruct notions of a homogeneous or unified national culture, and to reveal the extent to which any act of criticism is necessarily complicit in the discourse and the privilege it strives to indict, another tendency has emerged, and that is a reification of the category of migrancy. Critics like Revathi Krishnaswamy have argued that important differences of class, gender, and circumstance among migrants are frequently elided as those privileged migrant writers and intellectuals who elected migration come to be construed as spokespersons for all migrants. Migrancy itself comes to be transmuted into metaphor and generalized as a universal experience, a move apparently endorsed by Rushdie in the first epigraph of this chap-

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ter in his claim that ‘we all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples’ (‘Günter Grass’ 279). In becoming generalized, Krishnaswamy contends, the paradigm of migrancy accrues ‘an excessive figurative flexibility that threatens to undermine severely the oppositional force of postcolonial politics’ (128). Differences between migrant labourers, economic refugees, those forced into political exile, and those who choose to migrate, not to mention attendant differences of class and gender and racialization, although they are represented in some of the literature, risk being collapsed when these experiences are treated collectively and metaphorically. In another, related narrative thread in what Krishnaswamy terms the ‘mythology of migrancy’ the migrant is also held, paradoxically, to have a special insight, a unique perspective that those who have not experienced displacement lack. Rushdie himself implies as much when he writes: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere.’ This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal. (‘Imaginary Homelands’ 12)

Together the transmuting of migrancy into metaphor and the putatively paradigmatic quality of migrancy as a way of seeing comprise for Krishnaswamy a critical orthodoxy which centres on ‘a migrant who, having dispensed with territorial affiliations, travels unencumbered through the cultures of the world bearing only the burden of a unique yet representative sensibility that refracts the fragmented and contingent condition of both postmodernity and postcoloniality’ (125). The postcolonial migrant is, on this

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view, a member of what Kwame Anthony Appiah has suggested ‘we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’ (‘Post- in Postmodernism’ 348) and is, in Krishnaswamy’s words, ‘segregated from the collective sites of history’ (127). Yet the dislocation of the metropolitan migrant may be seen less as an elected existential state, as Krishnaswamy implies is the case with Rushdie, and more as an artefact of the material and discursive conditions affecting ethnic minorities in the West. Sourayan Mookerjea points out that ‘for the post-colonial migrant, the assurance that one’s experience opens into the realm of the public by virtue of being also the experience of a community is undermined through the privatization of evermore individuated realms of experience in the metropolis’ (110). Ethnicity (and by extension ethnic community) ‘tends to be lived in private,’ which leads, for Mookerjea, to a related question: ‘Is the degree to which experience is privatized, cut off from a common ground of community, not also commensurate with the irreducible specificity of different constructions of migrant subjectivity across the discontinuities of gender, sexuality, class, and race?’ (110–11). If one accepts Mookerjea’s characterization of the impact of metropolitan racism on the postcolonial migrant, a different reading of the passages I have quoted from Rushdie becomes possible. The notion that migrants, ‘borne-across humans’ in Rushdie’s etymology, are essentially metaphorical in their capacity to represent the ways all human beings cross frontiers, perhaps most especially the frontiers of the imagination, may be read as a strategy for addressing what Mookerjea characterizes as the privatization of ethnic experience in the metropolis. That is to say, if migrancy is represented as a generalizable condition, migrants are authorized to access the public sphere in ways they currently are denied. Analogously, the notion that migrants have particular insights to offer based on

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their experience, Mookerjea points out, addresses their marginalization in post-imperial Britain: ‘Rushdie’s valorization of migrancy as paradigm on the supposition that it is a more intense instance of a general condition must be understood in terms of the severity of the difficulties faced by migrants in being outof-language and out-of-country and in the context of the marginalization of these difficulties and their causes by the British “mainstream”’ (118). Hybridity as a general human condition is held out as ‘a kind of ethos to be embraced by the whole of British society’ (119). Against the notion that the migrant is an outsider, Rushdie effectively claims that everyone is a migrant. The effectiveness of such strategies, of Rushdie’s implicit advocacy on behalf of black Britain, is nonetheless mediated by the ways Rushdie is constructed as author-intellectual in the public sphere. Since so many of the postcolonial writers who came to prominence in the West in the last decades of the twentieth century were migrants to metropolitan centres, Elleke Boehmer contends that ‘in the 1990s the generic postcolonial writer is more likely to be a cultural traveller, or an “extra-territorial,” than a national’ (233). Despite their quite considerable differences, Boehmer suggests, their perceived cosmopolitanism and their residency in the West contributed to the ready reception and privileged status of writers like Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Mo, Vikram Seth, M.G. Vassanji, and others.3 Writing of a smaller group of authors that ‘Western reviewers seemed to be choosing as the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World’ and which he has characterized as ‘Third World cosmopolitans,’4 Timothy Brennan has argued that Rushdie’s celebrity status could be conferred on him and these others because although they ‘were black, spoke with accents or were not citizens, they were also like that [Western or first-world] public in tastes, training, repertoire of anecdotes, current habitation’ (Salman Rushdie xviii, ix). In Brennan’s view ‘the publishing industries have actually unified [these writers] in the

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minds of the Western public,’ despite significant differences in their politics, because they share a broad ‘political attitude.’ Brennan characterizes their commonality this way: For all their differences, they seem to share a harsh questioning of radical decolonisation theory; a dismissive or parodic attitude towards the project of national culture; a manipulation of imperial imagery and local legend as a means of politicizing ‘current events’; and a declaration of cultural ‘hybridity’ – a hybridity claimed to offer certain advantages in negotiating the collisions of language, race and art in a world of disparate peoples comprising a single, if not exactly unified world. (35)

These writers, Brennan is arguing, can be constructed as ‘cosmopolitan celebrities’ because these features of their work accord with metropolitan attitudes, most significantly as Mookerjea points out, a ‘critical pessimism toward narratives of national affirmation’ and national liberation (115). Rushdie is thus accorded an authority in the West to speak on behalf of ‘the Third World’ that is denied other writers from India or Pakistan. This is an authority, moreover, that extends to his account of the Sandinista revolution in The Jaguar Smile : Rushdie’s ‘authority to write about Nicaragua for a Western public derives from his being a writer of “high” literary novels’ (Brennan, Salman Rushdie 64), a kind of authority that other literary partisans of the Sandinistas – Julio Cortázar and Lawrence Ferlinghetti come to mind – presumably share.5 Yet in Rushdie’s case, it is difficult to separate his literary authority from his reputation as a writer of migrant literature, so it is important to attend to the ways migrancy is mediated in metropolitan public culture. Nonetheless, the question of what sort of political tourist a postcolonial migrant might make remains open. To what extent does a transnational imaginary – the capacity to ‘think and feel beyond the nation,’ to borrow Bruce Robbins’s phrase – such as that asso-

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ciated paradigmatically with migrancy, entail the capacity for the kind of political commitment that international solidarity involves? To be sure, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to conceive of international solidarity in the absence of a transnational imaginary, but is a transnational imaginary all that it takes? Not all cosmopolitanism need be conceived in terms of a kind of placelessness, as is clear in the writing of a migrant intellectual such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, who argues for what he calls a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (following Mitchell Cohen) or a ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ (‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’ 91), which entails ‘accept[ing] the citizen’s responsibility to nurture the culture and politics of their homes’ (10). In arguing for a cosmopolitan approach to cultural identity against a ‘communitarian’ approach that is committed to singular, organic, particularist notions of cultural identity, Jeremy Waldron identifies Rushdie as an exemplary cosmopolitan. Waldron cites Rushdie’s essay ‘In Good Faith,’ which addresses his embrace of migrancy, hybridity, cosmopolitanism – of his ‘mongrel self’ – in the wake of the fatwa. Rushdie suggests, according to Waldron, ‘that the hybrid lifestyle of the true cosmopolitan is in fact the only appropriate response to the modern world in which we live’ (763). Stuart Hall, in his criticism of Waldron’s position, on the other hand, raises the important question of whether the ‘framework of liberal universalism,’ presupposed by Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitanism, is ‘the only and the best possible shell for cosmopolitan modernity’ (27). Hall answers in the negative, arguing instead for a ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism ... that is aware of the limitations of any one culture or any one identity and that is radically aware of its insufficiency in governing a wider society, but which nevertheless is not prepared to rescind its claim to the traces of difference, which make its life important’ (30). Of course, the fact that Waldron assimilates Rushdie to his vision does not necessarily mean that Rushdie is the sort of liberal cosmopolitan Waldron promotes. The question I wish to pursue here is precisely the extent to which Rushdie’s con-

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ception of migrancy and his sense of his vocation as author-intellectual might enable the kinds of cosmopolitanism from below that work to build global networks of resistance to neo-imperialist politics. Rushdie has also long presented himself as engaged in worldly affairs, as contesting through his fiction and non-fiction such ‘state truths’ as the Pakistani army’s claim to have committed no atrocities in the war in Bangladesh, or Indira Gandhi’s denial that forced sterilizations were carried out under the Emergency in India (‘Imaginary Homelands’ 14). In this context, the migrant’s freedom to imagine or reimagine the world, his insider/outsider status, is potentially about achieving the kind of critical distance Said sees as crucial for intellectuals who seek to situate themselves in the world. The difficulty, for Brennan, is that despite the authorial persona Rushdie has constructed for himself, which ‘ha[s] to do with affiliation rather than filiation: the venerable, new, proudly old-fashioned defender of the novel as a form, of the beneficent state, of tolerant public opinion, and of ethnic crossdressing’ (‘Cultural Politics’ 110), literary critics have insisted on reading Rushdie through the lens of filiation, especially in the wake of The Satanic Verses affair. The paradigm of migrancy, in the case of Rushdie, operates in two contradictory ways: it positions him at once as unencumbered cosmopolitan and as authentic ‘son’ of India and Pakistan. If Rushdie’s status in the West as representative migrant makes him susceptible to critical projects in which ‘affiliation [does] above-ground work for the conservation of filiation’ (Said, ‘Secular Criticism’ 23), it is important to take account of the kinds of affiliations Rushdie himself has sought. Brennan reminds us that the writer who emerges during the Thatcher-Reagan years, characterized as those regimes were by aggressive efforts to undermine anti-colonial uprisings in places like the Philippines, Iran, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, is one who positions himself as a vocal political opponent of the state: ‘His entire career, including the subjects and styles of his fiction, has been indelibly marked by

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a traditionalist defense of political and epistemological values against the public stream’ (‘Cultural Politics’ 109). The cosmopolitanism embraced by a writer like Rushdie, Brennan argues, is one born of disillusionment with the neo-colonialism of many newly independent postcolonial nations and the governments of ‘populist caudillos’ (Salman Rushdie 53), including in Rushdie’s case those of India and Pakistan, and it is a cosmopolitanism that positions the writer not so much against what Gramsci would call the ‘national-popular’ as against the state that has betrayed the ‘national popular’ while claiming to serve its interests. Migrancy is, on this view, an artefact of the writer’s critical rejection of the state, and while it can lead to the sort of readings in the West that Brennan has described – readings that blunt the political edge of Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism – it need not be seen either as a rejection of affiliation or as a compromised reproduction of cultural hegemony. Gayatri Spivak argues ‘we must acknowledge that, writing as a migrant, Rushdie still militates against privileging the migrant or the exilic voice narrowly conceived, even as he fails in that very effort. A mise-en-abyme perhaps, the eternal site of the migrant’s desire, but also a persistent critique of metropolitan migrancy, his own slot in the scheme of things’ (‘Reading’ 222). Spivak is speaking here about The Satanic Verses, but I think it is possible to read the authorial persona that Rushdie crafts for himself in The Jaguar Smile in a similar vein. That is, in Rushdie’s self-deprecation, in his ‘ethnic cross-dressing’ as the escritor hindú, and in his invocation of migrancy as a means of understanding the Sandinista revolution, Rushdie may be seen to ‘militate against’ his privilege as ‘cosmopolitan Third World writer,’ to borrow Brennan’s characterization once again, ‘even as he fails in that very effort.’ Rushdie as Political Tourist The category of political tourist, it should be clear by now, is hardly less compromised or conflicted than that of postcolonial

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migrant. Much like the conflicted relationship between anti-colonial critiques that strive to undermine imperialist institutions and ways of knowing while being themselves susceptible to the commodification of cultural ‘otherness’ in the global marketplace that Graham Huggan argues is the hallmark of the postcolonial exotic (10), political tourism also strives for an oppositional stance, a critique of the very forces of the global market in which it is implicated, as the tourists jet off to sites of struggle, consuming as an experience the ideal of social transformation. As I have already argued in chapter four, this veneration, even nostalgia, for the symbols of a revolutionary life represents only one dimension of political tourism, which is also genuinely invested in the opposite ‘[pole] of modern consciousness’ (MacCannell 3), revolution, but the commodification of radical chic associated with political tourism is difficult to elude. Thus when a writer like Rushdie, however much he may strive to expose the processes of commodification to which his own work has been subjected (Huggan 73), becomes a political tourist, the traffic in what Huggan aptly characterizes as ‘culturally “othered” artefacts and goods’ (28) redoubles. Indeed, the book jacket for The Jaguar Smile proclaims Rushdie’s particular suitability to the task of representing the Sandinista revolution, ‘his special sensitivity to “the views from underneath,”’ announcing that ‘in The Jaguar Smile Rushdie brings us – as no American or European could – the true Nicaragua.’ Despite his long-standing British citizenship, Rushdie is the eternal migrant endowed with filial attachments to the (metaphorical) South – the ‘views from underneath.’ If Rushdie’s status as migrant automatically confers authority on what he has to say about Nicaragua for a certain sector of his metropolitan audience, as Brennan suggests, it hardly ensures that his sympathetic account of the Sandinista revolution will be welcomed in the corridors of power in Reagan’s USA or Thatcher’s Britain. Moreover, the currency of ‘resistance’ as a publisher’s marketing tool seems destined to overtake any effort to forge genuine political affiliation with the Sandinista struggle.

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In this context, Rushdie’s inhabiting the role of postcolonial migrant as his authorial guise in The Jaguar Smile may be read as a self-conscious strategy on his part, an instance of what Huggan calls ‘staged marginality.’ Following Dean MacCannell’s discussion of the trope of ‘staged authenticity’ in modern tourism, whereby tourist sights are designed to meet tourists’ conceptions of the ‘authentic,’ Huggan defines staged marginality as ‘the process by which marginalised individuals or social groups are moved to dramatise their “subordinate” status for the benefit of a majority or mainstream audience’ (87). While for Huggan staged marginality typically operates at home rather than abroad, in The Jaguar Smile Rushdie takes this show on the road, playing as usual for an international English-speaking audience. I do not mean to suggest that Rushdie is intentionally pandering to the exoticizing impulses of the global marketplace in his ‘ethnic cross-dressing’ or in his assumption of what, retooling John Urry’s term, I will call the migrant’s gaze during his sojourn in Nicaragua. Rather, I propose that Rushdie may be taken to engage in what Huggan elsewhere terms a ‘strategic exoticism’ (77). For as Huggan points out in his discussion of staged marginality, this performance ‘is not necessarily an exercise in selfabasement; it may, and often does, have a critical or even a subversive function’ (87). The question, in the case of The Jaguar Smile, is whether the strategy works. Well before his trip to Nicaragua, Rushdie presented himself as a politically engaged writer. In his 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale,’ Rushdie argues for the necessary connection between writing and politics and takes issue, as his title implies, with the position George Orwell elaborated in 1940. Orwell’s ‘Inside the Whale’ represents literature as a refuge from politics. For his part Rushdie argues: ‘The modern world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say,

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the Sandinista version, that there is almost no common ground. It becomes necessary to take sides’ (100). This conviction in the political responsibility of the writer, the sense that ‘if writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history's great and most abject abdications’ (100), presumably informed Rushdie’s interest in accepting an invitation from the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers to visit Nicaragua on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the ‘triumph.’ Although Rushdie declares that he ‘did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book,’ ultimately his ‘encounter with the place affected [him] so deeply that in the end [he] had no choice’ (Jaguar Smile 5). Again, it is tempting to set this declaration alongside a passage from ‘Outside the Whale’: ‘Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success’ (100–1). In his prologue to The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie confesses his sense of connection with the Sandinista revolution, as someone who ‘was [himself] the child of a successful revolt against a great power, [his] consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution’ (4). On the basis of the tentative connection he felt, he ‘became a sponsor of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign in London.’ This patronage makes Rushdie, in his own estimation, ‘part of the storm,’ and thus he feels obliged to confess: ‘I mention this to declare an interest; when I finally visited Nicaragua, in July 1986, I did not go as a wholly neutral observer. I was not a blank slate’ (4). The consonance between Rushdie’s stance as a politically engaged writer and his engagement, as a writer, with Nicaragua is one way of reading Rushdie’s political tourism. Another way is also to be found in the prologue to The Jaguar Smile. Rushdie’s strategies of self-staging in the prologue forge a link between filiation and affiliation that, if it potentially reinforces the filiative authority Brennan argues Rushdie’s metropolitan readers

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confer on him, for that very reason is ideally suited to staging marginality in the ways Huggan defines the term. The passage is worth quoting at length: When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Central America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common – not, certainly anything as simplistic as a unified ‘third world’ outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel. I became a sponsor of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign in London. (4)

Rushdie’s filial relationship to the Indian revolution lays the groundwork for his affiliation with the Sandinista revolution. The shared marginality of those ‘who did not have [their] origins in the mighty West, or North’ is invoked both to explain Rushdie’s sympathy for the Sandinista struggle and to authorize his account. While Rushdie acknowledges that there can be nothing as ‘simplistic as a unified “third world” outlook,’ his insistence on the shared perspective of the geopolitically marginalized can be read as a deliberate staging, particularly if one factors in Rushdie’s account of a more fortuitous connection with Nicaragua: his having once lived in an apartment in London next door to a house bought by Hope Somoza in the mid 1970s. Beyond serving as the target of Rushdie’s trademark sardonic humour – ‘The street was obviously going down in the world’ (3) – Hope Somoza also locates Rushdie in the metropolis, and in a rather upscale neighbourhood, even if he insists modestly that he was living ‘in a small

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flat above an off-licence’ (3). The South–South connection, then, passes through the northern metropolis. Another key detail of Rushdie’s narrative of identification with Nicaragua is the extent to which it turns on his dis -identification with Reagan’s neo-imperialist policies. Thus he ‘recognized a deeper affinity’ with Nicaragua ‘when the Reagan administration began its war.’ Here, once again, migrancy is an artefact of Rushdie’s disaffection for the neo-colonial state and enables a critique from within of neo-imperial powers like Britain and the United States. While Rushdie claims to have been uncertain, in advance of his trip, about the FSLN – ‘Would I find myself disliking the Sandinistas?’ – his criticism of the United States seems far more certain: just prior to Rushdie’s departure, ‘the International Court of Justice in the Hague had ruled that U.S. aid to la Contra, the counter-revolutionary army the CIA had invented, assembled, organized, and armed, was in violation of international law. The U.S. House of Representatives, meanwhile, went ahead and approved President Reagan’s request for $100 million worth of new aid for the counter-revolution’ (5). The critical aims, then, of Rushdie’s self-staging seem clear enough as he embarks on the account of his sojourn. Early in the book Rushdie remarks on the place of masks in Nicaraguan culture, and he assumes one himself while he is there. He is greeted at the door of Vice-President Sergio Ramírez’s house with the words, ‘Ah ... el escritor hindú’ (14). Rushdie comments, ‘Spanish uses hindú to mean “Indian” ... So during my stay I became the hindú writer, or even, quite often, poeta. Which was quite a flattering disguise’ (14). Rushdie’s amused adoption of this ‘disguise’ in Nicaragua may be read a number of ways. That an English speaker might be inclined to read hindú as hindu enables Rushdie to exploit this apparent conflation of India with Hinduism. Rushdie’s donning of this mask, then, may be read as a nudge and a wink at those of his readers who recognize a playful inhabiting of stereotype. That the term is the product of translation

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between languages and cultures conveniently reinforces Rushdie’s well-known claim that as a migrant writer he is a ‘translated [man]’ and his insistence that irrespective of what gets lost in translation, ‘something can also be gained’ (‘Imaginary Homelands’ 17). Finally, Rushdie’s mask is introduced in the context of a discussion of the importance of masks in Nicaragua. The use of masks by Sandinista fighters to disguise their identities from the National Guard is evocative, for Rushdie, of the transformative potential of the revolution itself: One night I went to see a ballet based on the country’s popular dances, and saw that one of the ballerinas was wearing a pink mask. The mask’s association with the revolution had grown so strong that it transformed her, in my eyes at least, into something wondrously strange: a guerrilla in a tutu. The true purpose of a mask, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation. A culture of masks is one that understands a good deal about the processes of metamorphosis. (14–15)

Rushdie’s own assumption of a mask in his ‘ethnic cross-dressing’ as the escritor hindú may be read as a gesture of solidarity on his part both with Nicaragua and with the Sandinistas. Rushdie’s apparent identification with this facet of Nicaraguan culture, and his assumption of a transforming mask that is grounded in what he understands to be a kind of mis recognition, together arguably give the lie to the ‘authenticity’ that is the site both of the tourist’s desire and of the commodifying structure of postcoloniality. If it is possible to read Rushdie’s ethnic cross-dressing as working against the reproduction of social stratification and the commodification of cultural difference conventionally entailed by travel and tourism, some other features of the persona Rushdie works to create in the book are more ambiguous. Consistent with a well-established tradition in travel writing, Rushdie’s voice in The Jaguar Smile is insistently self-deprecating, as if in conscious effort

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to undermine his privilege as tourist and, even more importantly, as metropolitan migrant and respected literary figure. There is, for instance, a running gag that has to do with the number of poets Rushdie encounters during his sojourn. He observes on meeting Luis Carrión, a member of the nine-man governing directorate, ‘Nicaragua made “young novelists” of thirty-nine feel antique. At least Sergio Ramírez was a few years older than me. Then again, he made me feel short’ (17). He quotes President Daniel Ortega, who is attempting to brush off Rushdie’s questions about his poetry with the suggestion that in Nicaragua, poets are nothing special: ‘“In Nicaragua,” he said, “everybody is considered to be a poet until he proves to the contrary”’ (23). And there are frequent asides like the mock exasperation Rushdie expresses on learning that the director of the Germán Pomares field hospital in Jinotega province is a poet: ‘Another poet. There was no escape from the fellows’ (68). The tricky thing about this strategy is that self-deprecation can shore up the authority of the one deploying it almost as readily as it can undermine that authority. It is just possible to hear a note of condescension in Rushdie’s rehearsal of the truism that there is no escaping poets in Nicaragua, and perhaps a note of resentment at the radical democratization of an elite vocation. Rushdie also adopts a deliberately mock-heroic stance with respect to his travels in the theatre of a civil war in a manner that both is reminiscent of the mock-heroics of modernist travel writing and sketches a remove from more serious accounts of the Contra war in Nicaragua.6 On the journey to July 19th celebrations in Estelí, Bayardo Arce, the FSLN’s political chief, is meant to have observed, ‘“It would be a good day ... for the contra-revolución to attack a bridge.” “Hmm,” I agreed, keeping my voice deep and courageous”’ (37). While Rushdie is not necessarily to be taken as downplaying the real need for vigilance and security in light of Contra attacks, he nonetheless appropriately downplays the risks he is undertaking during the course of his very brief visit. It is more

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likely that the peasant militias on security duty will be the ones to incur an attack. Similarly, he links his own mock-risk with the real dangers of the war in recounting the damage caused by Contra troops near the Honduras border: ‘I knew that the road I was on, the one that went up past Jinotega and headed for Bocay, was the one on which the Contra mine had exploded, killing “the thirtytwo,” and even though that had happened a good deal further north than I was going, I felt extremely fearless as we went over the bumps’ (62). Rushdie’s comic acknowledgment of his fear at merely being on the same road as a recent attack implicitly testifies to the real fears Nicaraguans live with on a daily basis. Rushdie himself, as yet another mock-serious passage a few paragraphs later makes clear, will live to see another day: ‘Then there was a tree lying across the road, blocking our way. Was this it? Was this where Contra fiends with machetes between their teeth would burst from the foliage, and goodbye escritor hindú? It was just a tree across the road’ (62). While the jokes here are at Rushdie’s expense, they do have a way of placing him at the centre of the scene and pushing ‘the thirty-two’ off to the side of the road. Thus once again the effectiveness of the strategy is ambiguous. If Rushdie’s self-deprecation is one strategy whereby he strives to situate himself critically between Nicaragua and the neo-imperial metropole, another strategy is his deployment of what I am calling the migrant’s gaze. The tourist gaze, John Urry points out, ‘in any historical period is constructed in relationship to its opposite, to non-tourist forms of experience and consciousness’ (Tourist Gaze 2). By analogy, the migrant’s gaze, particularly in the late twentieth century, is constructed in relationship to non-migrant experiences and consciousness. Certainly Rushdie is known for conceiving of his migrant status as the experience of being between cultures, a consciousness that eschews the notion of singularity that, however dubiously – especially in nations such as India – is associated with the nation. The tourist gaze also emerges out of a particular way of seeing and being seen, one that, Urry argues,

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following Marshall Berman, develops with the restructuring of urban space in nineteenth-century Europe (Tourist Gaze 136–8). Theorists of postcolonial migrancy similarly posit a new way of seeing that is attendant on the experience of being displaced from one’s culture of origin. In Rushdie’s case, the perspective of the migrant entails, in his own estimation, a kind of double vision, one that he characterizes quite specifically in the closing paragraph of The Jaguar Smile. Speaking of himself and a fellow passenger on the flight home, a Nicaraguan woman named Silvia who now lives in France, Rushdie comments: We parted in Madrid, and returned to our separate lives, two migrants making our way in this West stuffed with money, power and things, this North that taught us how to see from its privileged point of view. But maybe we were the lucky ones; we knew that other perspectives existed. We had seen the view from elsewhere. (137)

More than an acknowledgment of his privilege as metropolitan migrant, this passage links the ‘luck’ of the migrant not with the wealth, power, and privilege of the West or North to which he or she has migrated, but rather to the knowledge of non-Western perspectives. The emphasis here is clearly on the migrant’s access to a perspective that enables a critique of the wealth and privilege of Western powers. To the extent, moreover, that it is the migrant’s perspective that Rushdie is bringing back from his trip to Nicaragua, he implicitly makes the migrant’s gaze consonant with the (political) tourist’s gaze in this instance. Not only does the political tourist see with the eyes of a migrant, that is, but the political tourist, too, comes away from Nicaragua with ‘the view from elsewhere’ that resituates the perspective of the powerful West. At the same time, this double perspective (West–East, North–South) is marked by an ambivalence that sometimes in The Jaguar Smile reads as diffidence. Rushdie frequently draws our attention to the migrant’s gaze

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during the course of his sojourn. In response, for instance, to Luis Carrión’s contention that it is the CIA and not the Contras who represent the ‘real’ threat in Nicaragua, Rushdie responds in an aside to the reader: Ah yes, la Cia. My reflex reaction to the Agency’s entry into the conversation was simultaneously Eastern and Western. The Western voice inside me, the voice that was fed up with cloaks and daggers and conspiracy theories, muttered, ‘not them again.’ The Eastern voice, however, understood that the CIA really did exist, was powerful, and although it was easy to make it a scapegoat, it was also just a bit too jaded, too cynical, to discount its power. (18)

The rhetorical force of this passage, while it clearly registers ambivalence, is to credit the ‘Eastern voice,’ the voice that acknowledges the legitimacy of the Sandinistas’ allegation. Similarly, in other passages where Rushdie seems to bring to bear on Nicaragua and especially on the Sandinistas the perspective of the privileged cosmopolitan, we are invited to read an opposing vision. The migrant’s gaze delights in instances of hybridity, such as the notion that in Camoapa one could count ‘amongst other popular local tunes – the Internationale’ (21), and it relishes glimpses of the ironic recontextualizing to which U.S. popular culture is subjected in Nicaragua. Not only does the town of ‘Estelí [dance] to “Rock Around the Clock”’ (39) prior to the revolution’s anniversary acta, but as Rushdie ate his lunch at the Enrique Acuña cooperative, there were children playing in the shack next door ... Their playingcards were made out of rectangles of paper cut out of an old Uncle Scrooge comic book. Waak! My money! You dratted ... Pieces of Huey, Dewey and Louie fled from the rage of the billionaire American duck. While on the radio, I promise, Bruce Springsteen sang ‘Born in the USA.’ (66–7)

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It is tempting to read Huey, Dewey, and Louie as figures for the children who are playing cards, the latter in symbolic, political flight from ‘the rage of the billionaire American duck,’ having cut up Disney, ubiquitous avatar of U.S. cultural imperialism.7 The juxtaposition of this image with Springsteen’s anti–Vietnam War song makes the implicit critique of U.S. imperialism seem fairly explicit. Rushdie maintains a kind of dialogue with critics of the Sandinistas throughout the book, including with his friend, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He outlines some of Vargas Llosa’s criticisms to Sergio Ramírez and Luis Carrión and represents their derision and annoyance in the face of allegations that a majority of Nicaraguans are anti-Sandinista, that ‘the Sandinistas were a Soviet-style state in disguise,’ and ‘that the various nods in the direction of a mixed economy were no more than window dressing’ (17). Although his ventriloquism of these criticisms comes close to aligning Rushdie with the opponents of the FSLN, he seems, in subsequent pages, to take up Ramírez’s challenge to find evidence to support these charges. He reports, for instance, that ‘it wasn’t easy to believe in Vargas Llosa’s hypothetical anti-Sandinista majority’ in Camoapa, although he also outlines steps the FSLN had taken ‘to ensure that communities such as Camoapa remained loyal’ (18). He admires Daniel Ortega’s willingness to ‘[make] himself accountable in a way his main Western critics never would’ (23). He pooh-poohs U.S. allegations of the existence of a Soviet spy base in Nicaragua (23). He notes with approval the flexibility in government approaches to agrarian reform, commenting that such flexibility is ‘not, surely, the way a doctrinaire commune-ist regime would go about its business’ (63). He recognizes that the government’s arming of the civilian population is further testimony to the popularity of the Sandinistas: if ‘the Sandinistas were so unpopular, how was it that the government could hand out all these guns to the people and be confident that the weapons would not be turned against them?’ (64).

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The one issue over which Rushdie-as-migrant cannot side with the Sandinistas is press censorship: I remembered being in Pakistan during the 1965 war with India, and how it felt to be fed information about which the only certain thing was that it was hopelessly and deliberately misleading ... I remembered, too, my outrage at the British government’s manipulation of the news media during the Falklands/Malvinas war. What had been unacceptable to me there was also unacceptable here. (33)

The East–West gaze is redirected North–South, and although Britain is indicted along with Pakistan, the fundamental Western value of freedom of the press is upheld. Rushdie’s disagreement with the Sandinistas over press censorship is a theme that surfaces repeatedly in his brief book. He does not accept their argument about the exigencies of war and is very disparaging about the quality of the official Sandinista newspaper La Barricada. Still, despite the fact that it ‘disturbed [him] that a government of writers had turned into a government of censors,’ Rushdie concludes that ‘imperfection, even the deep flaw of censorship, did not constitute justification for being crushed by a super-power’s military and economic force’ (34). Despite bringing to bear a migrant’s gaze on his governmentsponsored tour of Nicaragua, Rushdie’s sense of identification with the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua does not immediately translate into recognition of the revolution as a kind of migration. According to Rushdie, the seeds for that recognition are sown in a homily Father Uriel Molina delivers at a Misa Campesina Rushdie attends in the Iglésia Santa María de los Ángeles in Managua. Taking his texts from Exodus, Molina establishes an analogy between Nicaraguans and the Israelites in captivity in Egypt in which ‘Somoza was cast as the Pharaoh, and the FSLN was likened to Moses’ (45). At this point in the account of his sojourn, Rushdie

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refrains from developing this idea, contenting himself instead with the observation that ‘the idea that a people could be exiled inside their own country, that Nicaragua could be Egypt as well as the land of milk and honey, was a striking and fertile one,’ and adding wryly, ‘But Molina made no mention, I noticed, of the years wandering in the wilderness’ (45). Given its centrality to his writing, it is hardly surprising that the trope of migrancy eventually does suggest itself to Rushdie as a vehicle for understanding aspects of the Sandinista revolution, even if on the face of it the experience of revolution would seem to have little to do with the experience of migration. Rushdie understands migration to entail what he has described as a ‘triple disruption,’ the loss of language, of roots, and of familiar social norms, ‘three of the most important parts of what it is to be a human being’ (‘Günter Grass’ 277–8). If it is initially difficult to see how Nicaraguans might be understood to have lost any of these three fundamentals under the Somoza dictatorship, Rushdie later learns that in fact to live under repressive social norms, to be illiterate, and to be too poor to build a sustainable existence is rather like losing one’s home – or not having one in the first place. During Rushdie’s visit to the Enrique Acuña cooperative, a Cooperativa Agrícola Sandinista, he chats with some of the campesinos, in particular with an indigenous man called Humberto. Humberto is unsure which indigenous people he belongs to, and this ignorance about his ethnic origins surprises and interests Rushdie. Humberto has also been resettled from where he lived in the north, an area evacuated because of Contra raids, as have several of the other campesinos Rushdie meets, including some who had been fishers. He asks them ‘So do you think of this as your home now? ... Or does it seem like just some temporary place?’ (65). When one of the men responds ‘It’s our first home,’ Rushdie is struck by what the notion of ‘home’ means for these men. He tells us that ‘the penny dropped’ and he remembers Father Molina’s sermon, connecting it to Humberto’s lack of roots and to

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Horacio’s claim that he and other former fishers from a coastal community are in their first home. Rushdie affirms that ‘one’s own country can be a place of exile, can be Egypt or Babylon. That, in fact, Somocista Nicaragua had literally not been these people’s home, and that the revolution had really been an act of migration, for the locals as well as the resettled men. They were inventing their country, and more than that, themselves’ (65). The question of self-fashioning is for Rushdie key; as a consequence of the disruption occasioned by migration, ‘the migrant ... is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human’ (‘Günter Grass’ 278). ‘Home,’ in this instance, means having the political freedom and the land, in the case of these men, to forge their own relationship to a place and to forge an identity. As Rushdie puts it in his essay on Grass, ‘This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade’ (280). That migration need not be from one country to another but from one political condition to another appears to strike Rushdie rather powerfully, and even as he acknowledges his own suspicion of the concept of home – ‘The idea of home had never stopped being a problem for me’ – he also acknowledges his privilege: ‘Nobody was shooting at me’ (66). Despite his identification with these men and, by extension, with all Nicaraguans disenfranchised under Somoza, however, Rushdie cannot identify fully. His particular take on migrancy is too invested in an at least metaphorical homelessness8 to prevent him from sketching a remove even as he acknowledges that the terms of migration apply to Nicaraguans under the revolution. Ironically, of course, he would later find it necessary to embrace the notion of ‘home’ himself, when without it chances were in fact very good that people would be shooting at him. ‘Home,’ in the passage above, is a future-oriented project, an open-ended endeavour to invent Nicaragua as a nation. These are

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the terms of Rushdie’s identification with the Sandinista-led national liberation struggle, and they are bound up with migrancy to the extent that the malleability of the nation is foregrounded. To put it somewhat differently, to the extent that the ‘reality’ of ‘home’ is of one’s own making, that it is less a given than it is a project, Rushdie-the-migrant can endorse a national(ist) struggle. This approach to Nicaragua’s efforts to reinvent itself in the wake of the dictatorship and to fend off U.S. opposition to that reinvention imprints itself on another thread running through Rushdie’s book, and that is the question of literary form. For Rushdie, ‘fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of ... echoing in the form of [his] work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, “modern” world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture which we [migrants] have brought into the heart of a newer one’ (‘Imaginary Homelands’ 19). While in this passage Rushdie is talking about how to contend with the legacies of British colonialism that live on in post-imperial Britain, it is not difficult to translate the passage quoted above into the Nicaraguan situation. How does one build a new Nicaragua out of one haunted by decades of dictatorship and more than a century of U.S. imperial intervention, intervention which continues ‘into the heart of a [new Nicaragua]’? Fantasy, for Rushdie, offers the ‘double perspective’ of the insider/outsider in ways that realism clearly cannot. Homi Bhabha, in an essay that he indicates ‘owes something’ (139) to his own experience of migration, endorses this position on realism. Bhabha draws on Franz Fanon to argue that the notion of a national culture founded on ‘constant principles’ that ‘hark back to a “true” national past’ is most often represented ‘in the reified forms of realism and stereotype’ (‘DissemiNation’ 152). Bhabha, too, identifies the realist novel with a homogeneous conception of the nation that is disrupted by ‘minority discourses that speak betwixt and between times and places’ (158). Migrancy, for both Rushdie and Bhabha, is best articulated in non-realist form. In The Jaguar Smile, then, the migrant’s gaze that Rushdie

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brings to bear on Nicaragua during his sojourn is also perceptible in his association of Nicaragua with Latin American magical realism.9 Rushdie narrates his encounter, at a dance party in Managua, with an elderly man – ‘He was, of course, a poet’ (40) – who wants to talk to him about Rabindranath Tagore, or Tagoré, as the gentleman insists on calling him. ‘I was taken aback,’ Rushdie comments, ‘What was old Rabindranath doing here, with this accent on his final e? “Is he translated here?” I asked’ (40). Tagore (Tagoré), Rushdie learns, had been translated into Spanish by the Argentinean intellectual Victoria Ocampo and had thereby also migrated from India to Latin America, the accent on the final ‘e’ the trace of the difference he underwent in the process. Rushdie is thus preceded in his travels to Nicaragua by another Indian writer. In this exchange, and in subsequent passages of The Jaguar Smile, Tagore comes to represent Rushdie’s alter ego in the writerly sense. The old man, it turns out, admires Tagore ‘for his spiritual qualities, and also his realism’ (40). Rushdie, the great admirer of Latin American magical realism, the writer whose work is known for its fantastic qualities, represents himself as mildly troubled by this comment and is admonished for his interest in fantasy when he demurs: ‘“Many people think of Latin America as the home of anti-realism,” I said. He looked disgusted. “Fantasy?” he cried. “No, sir. You must not write fantasy. It is the worst thing. Take a tip from your great Tagoré. Realism, realism, that is the only thing”’ (40–1). Rushdie claims to effect his escape ‘from the admonitory shade of Rabindranath’ (41) at the dance party, but he maintains a kind of silent dialogue with ‘Tagoré’ about the relationship between fantasy and realism – or at least some notion of the ‘real’ – during the course of his sojourn. When he meets Carlos Rigby, a black poet from Bluefields on the Atlantic coast, for instance, and learns that Rigby is writing a fantasy novel, Rushdie interjects parenthetically, ‘Fantasy? What would Tagoré have thought?’ (115). Appropriately enough, on Rushdie’s departure

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from Bluefields he is accompanied by a cloud of butterflies in a scene straight out of Gabriel García Márquez: ‘On the airstrip the wind got up and blew a great cloud of the butterflies directly at me. As I walked to the aeroplane the swarm surrounded me, escorting me out of town. It felt like a small miracle, an epiphany’ (115). Rushdie’s quiet insistence on the value of fantasy turns out to have a political point. As he attempts to make sense of his experience on the flight back to Europe, he muses: To live in the real world was to act without knowing the end. The act of living a real life differed, I mused, from the act of making a fictional one, too, because you were stuck with your mistakes. No revisions, no second drafts. To visit Nicaragua was to be shown that the world was not television, or history, or fiction. The world was real, and this was its actual unmediated reality. (135)

If Rushdie is talking about neither fantasy nor realism here, but about ‘reality’ and about the challenges it poses from a writerly perspective – ‘no revisions, no second drafts’ – he is also implicitly insisting, once again, on the notion of reality as artefact. The difficulty, though, as he points out here, is that manufactured mistakes take on a life of their own. As he departs Nicaragua, he cannot know the outcome of the revolutionary process he has glimpsed during his visit: ‘I had left Nicaragua unfinished, so to speak’ (135). He finds hope, nonetheless, in insisting on a link between fantasy and reality: ‘Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism (pace Tagore) lacked’ (135). While Rushdie holds out the possibility of a Sandinista-led Nicaragua winning out over the United States, it is worth acknowledging that Rushdie represents this possibility as a fantastic one, as the triumph of ‘Sandinix’ over a latter-day Roman empire (131). Rushdie’s investment in fantasy aside, this hopeful summing up is ultimately not that hopeful. In some ways it merely echoes the

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assertion of his travelling companion that the revolution ‘has to exist, or there’s no hope’ (136), which is not an endorsement of the revolution itself. I am not proposing that we take Silvia’s position to be synonymous with Rushdie’s own, but he does give her, of all his Nicaraguan interlocutors, the last word. She worries that ‘the same old habits of the Somoza time [are] creeping back in’ (133) and sees no end to the war with the Contra, to the economic deprivations and the loss of life it entails. These are sobering concerns for a political tourist striving to manifest solidarity, although solidarity need not be uncritical. Serving as it does as an epilogue, though, this encounter with Silvia reads like Rushdie’s effort to sketch a remove from the revolution he has come to witness. If his representation of her is not entirely uncritical, it is deeply sympathetic, and he represents her as a fellow migrant. More significantly, it is difficult for the reader to know exactly where Rushdie himself stands as he brings his account of his sojourn to a close. In the penultimate chapter, he returns us to the limerick that serves as an epigraph for the book and as the source of its title: There was a young girl of Nic’ragua Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar They returned from the ride With the young girl inside And the smile on the face of the jaguar.

As Rushdie points out, there are a couple of ways of reading the limerick, ‘a conservative and a radical reading’ (129). The radical reading sees the young girl as the revolution riding the geopolitical might of the United States, which threatens to swallow it. ‘But,’ Rushdie adds, ‘what if the young girl were Nicaragua itself, and the jaguar was the revolution? Eh? What about that?’ (129). This doubt is not dispelled in Rushdie’s account. He tells us that he chose between the two readings and that he ‘tore up the picture that looked, well, wrong,’ but he does not tell us which picture

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seemed to him to look right. On the whole, Rushdie’s account is sympathetic toward the Sandinistas and their revolutionary project, so the reader is inclined to assume Rushdie has chosen the radical reading, but the ambiguity remains. He does not commit. Despite Rushdie’s casting his migrant gaze at the evidence of U.S. imperialism in Nicaragua during his sojourn, and despite a staging of marginality that seems meant to align him with revolutionary Nicaragua, Rushdie’s efforts at affiliation seem weak. The migrant gaze, while it purports to offer a perspective critical of Western might, also sees Nicaragua from ‘its [the West’s] privileged point of view.’ To the extent that some of Rushdie’s subversive strategies remain ambiguous, perhaps even backfire, his authorial persona is realigned with metropolitan privilege and away from solidarity with his hosts. Perhaps most tellingly, there is very little in Rushdie’s account of his sojourn that suggests a profound or lasting challenge to his authorial persona. Even Auden and Isherwood, whose revolutionary drag might, at first blush, seem analogous to Rushdie’s staged marginality, subject their inhabiting of the role of political tourists to serious scrutiny. There is very little that is self-conscious in that way about Rushdie’s persona as political tourist. Consequently, this particular postcolonial migrant seems to make a fairly casual political tourist. Rushdie clearly possesses a powerful transnational imaginary, but he seems unwilling to undertake the kind of political commitment that any but the most superficial gestures of international solidarity demand. Rushdie’s political tourism suggests the importance of distinguishing between transnational experience and the range of cosmopolitanisms currently being debated. If Rushdie’s is a ‘postcolonial cosmopolitanism’ (41) as Benita Parry defines the term, it is a cosmopolitanism that stops short of the sort of ethico-political obligation that solidarity demands. I do not mean to dismiss out of hand Rushdie’s suggestion, in identifying a ‘conservative’ reading of the limerick, that the Sand-

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inista revolution might pose threats of its own to ordinary Nicaraguans. Nonetheless, it should be possible to be critical of aspects of the revolutionary process – or to show one’s awareness that some threats to a revolution come from within – without compromising one’s solidarity. Julio Cortázar’s ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ offers an example of how it might be done. A political tourist’s tale about a clandestine trip Cortázar made to Ernesto Cardenal’s community of Solentiname in 1976, ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ identifies two threats to the utopian experiment on the archipelago in Lake Nicaragua: the one represented by Somoza’s National Guard, who did attack and destroy the proSandinista community of campesino artisans in 1977, and the kind of threat represented in Cortázar’s allusion to Roque Dalton’s assassination by rival members of his own resistance group, the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), in El Salvador. Much like Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile, Cortázar as narrator ‘assumes the profile of a visiting famous artist who values the revolution but is not about to nullify his social bearings’ (de la Campa 48).10 Cortázar also departs from realism in this travel tale in ways Rushdie would presumably approve of. On his return to Paris, Cortázar proceeds to view the slides he has taken of the liberation theology mass led by Cardenal, of children playing, and of the primitivist paintings created by the campesinos, but what he sees are scenes of violence and death as uniformed men kill a young boy and lay out a group of corpses. He also sees scenes of violence in Buenos Aires and São Paulo and recognizes Roque Dalton as the revolutionary poet, too, is shot. Cortázar’s partner Claudine, in contrast, sees only the paintings. Cortázar’s vision is informed by the history of military dictatorship and revolutionary struggles in Latin America and seems eerily prescient about the fate of Solentiname at the hands of the National Guard a year after Cortázar’s ‘Apocalypse’ was written. Yet in figuring Dalton’s assassination as part of his nightmare vision of Solentiname, Cortázar also offers a warning about violence and destruction within a revolution in a way that avoids dif-

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fidence, particularly as the narrator Cortázar is clearly shaken by what he sees. Mediating Solidarity If we leave The Jaguar Smile with Rushdie peering uncertainly into the future, in the preface to the 1997 edition we find him looking back on that moment in history as ‘a fairy tale of one of the hotter moments in the Cold War’ (xv). In that exergue Rushdie sketches a remove from the younger, less ‘worldly’ persona that narrates his sojourn. A good part of his supposed naïveté has to do with his failure to anticipate the drubbing he would receive for having declared himself a partisan of the Sandinistas, and not only from conservatives in the United States or members of the Contra leadership, but from members of the ‘bien-pensant liberal élite’ (xv). Rushdie also takes the opportunity to offer a self-critical evaluation of the book, in which he appears chastened, perhaps even embarrassed to have been caught up in the romance of ‘a Davidand-Goliath saga,’ now that it has turned out that the giant won. If he stops short of disavowal, he nonetheless makes clear that he now sees the ‘faults’ of the Sandinistas more clearly than his younger, more politically naive self. He does, however, acknowledge that it is too easy to blame the Sandinistas for their eventual defeat: ‘The power of super-power: first to describe a given leadership as unacceptable; then to create the circumstances in which it becomes unacceptable; and finally to obliterate the memory of its (the super-power’s) own part in the process’ (xvii). In this more recent preface Rushdie effectively re-authors The Jaguar Smile, offering readers an even more deeply ambivalent view of Rushdie-as-political-tourist. He tells us, in a footnote, ‘for the sake of objectivity,’ that in Mario Vargas Llosa’s view, Rushdie has ‘grown more politically sensible and therefore more conservative’ as he has grown older. Rushdie adds, in characteristic fashion, ‘I fear he may be right. I fear he may be wrong’ (xvii). It is impor-

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tant, as well, to take account of the ways that Rushdie himself has been ‘re-authored’ since The Jaguar Smile was first published. After the fatwa issued in 1989, Rushdie-as-author has been aligned more fully with ‘the West,’ an alignment in which, for understandable reasons, he has participated. In the context of the so-called ‘Rushdie affair,’ ‘The West’ is a sign for what Spivak calls ‘Enlightenment rational abstractions’ like secularism, democracy, and freedom of expression, which she argues can be claimed only ‘catachrestically by the postcolonial’ (229). The irony of a writer who had always positioned himself against the state, and had been a vociferous critic of Thatcher in particular – she is caricatured as Maggie Torture in The Satanic Verses itself – needing to seek the protection of Thatcherite Britain could not have been entirely lost on Rushdie – or on Thatcher. In fact, one of the more unexpected outcomes of his sojourn in Nicaragua, at least from Rushdie’s own perspective, was the way his political tourism repositioned him as a writer: For the first time in my life, I realized with surprise, I had come across a government I could support, not faute-de-mieux, but because I wanted its efforts (at survival, at building the nation, and at transforming it) to succeed. It was a disorienting realization. I had spent my entire life as a writer in opposition, and had indeed conceived the writer’s role as including the function of antagonist to the state. I felt distinctly peculiar about being on the same side as the people in charge, but I couldn’t avoid the truth: if I had been a Nicaraguan writer, I would have felt obliged to get behind the Frente Sandinista and push. (52–3)

This repositioning is, however, short-lived. To the extent that The Jaguar Smile functions to extend the time and the place of the tour, to the extent that this work not only represents but is Rushdie’s act of solidarity, its political force is compromised by his evident ambivalence about political commitment, as well as mediated by a

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metropolitan culture industry which, on Brennan’s reading of Rushdie’s celebrity and its links to his critical stance toward projects of national liberation, would find any gesture of solidarity with such a project anomalous. In 1989 Rushdie would be repositioned yet again in relation to the state, but this time his position would be more analogous to riding inside the whale than being outside in the storm. In Brennan’s summation, the ‘affair’ led to a kind of ‘interpretive impasse’ whereby ‘a warmly social democratic public persona came in conflict with a liberal apotheosis of the “literary” in the context of a Western triumphalism’ (117). That is to say, Rushdie’s established persona and political positioning came in conflict with the chief defence that both he and his (mostly Western) supporters mounted, that literature was an autonomous sphere, somehow above politics – an ironic position for the author of ‘Outside the Whale.’ This conflict, further, was exacerbated by the ways the defence of the literary was caught up in the mainstream coding of the affair, a coding which Rushdie himself employed: freedom of speech versus terrorism (‘The Last Hostage’ 223). Rushdie’s writerly relationship to the state was also transformed, as his key strategy for defending himself was to mobilize Western states to pressure Iran to end the fatwa.11 His ability to succeed in this latter endeavour, as well as the particular terms of his critical interception by a liberal defence of the ‘literary,’ owed a great deal to his established celebrity status. To point this out is not to indict Rushdie for his celebrity, but to mark his further ‘irradiation’ by history, to borrow Rushdie’s own phrase from The Satanic Verses. The ‘homelessness’ Rushdie had long embraced as the condition of migrancy could no longer be read in quite the same way, for clearly Rushdie was able to claim not only British Special Branch protection but the protection of a number of states in a way that few migrants could hope to; in this sense, he came to have a home malgré lui. ‘Dislodged’ by the affair ‘from his earlier views’ (Brennan, ‘Cultural Politics’ 118), Rushdie-as-author is remade in ways

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that necessarily have implications for his writing, and not just for what he wrote subsequent to 1989. Brennan argues persuasively that the substantial portions of The Satanic Verses that satirize the imperialist nostalgia of post-imperial Britain, that are pointedly critical of the anti-democratic impulses of neo-liberalism, have been lost to the ‘affair,’ displaced by the book’s parody of Islam (‘Cultural Politics’ 120–1). Similarly, I would argue that the tentative moves toward international solidarity with Sandinista Nicaragua, however ambivalent they are to begin with, are lost to the realigned Rushdie-as-author in the wake of the fatwa. In this respect Rushdie is not wrong to suggest that The Jaguar Smile now reads like ‘a fairy tale of one of the hotter moments in the Cold War’ (xv) from the vantage point of his 1997 preface. Rushdie-as-political-tourist, for all his diffidence, seems a very different figure from the one who came to defend the novel less as a political form than as a literary one. Rushdie’s failure to militate against his status as ‘cosmopolitan Third World writer’ through his attempt at partisanship is multi-layered. It undoubtedly has something to do with his ambivalence toward narratives of national liberation; it undoubtedly has something to do with his preference for novelistic heteroglossia as political device of choice; and it also has something to do with the ways this act of solidarity in its own way – to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak once more – was intercepted by the praxis and politics of the ‘Rushdie affair’ in ways that made a mere reading of it impossible. If Rushdie, post-fatwa, seems to have grown closer to the ‘cosmopolitan Third World writer,’ that figure Western reviewers and publishers look to as spokesperson for the global South on the assumption that Western political attitudes will be confirmed rather than challenged, the implications for a cosmopolitanismfrom-below are sobering. The limits of cosmopolitanism, as they are laid bare here, are several. There is the political tourist’s recourse to kinds of protection not typically available to those she seeks to join in struggle. There is the anti-cosmopolitanism

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of particular constituencies in the global South whose visions of social transformation are not informed by the internationalism that marks the struggles to which political tourists most often are drawn. Finally, there is the ‘armoured cosmopolitanism’ (Gilroy Postcolonial Melancholia 60) of the imperial or neo-imperial powers themselves who intervene by drawing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or by striving to remake the other in their own image. That political tourism is vulnerable in the face of these forces is obvious. Yet several of the political tourists in this book grapple self-consciously with the implications of these limits, forging transnational networks of ‘vulgar’ cosmopolitans in an effort to combat them. If such strategies are not always sufficient in the face of such daunting opposition to an ideal universality, at the very least they speak to the resilience of many who engage in acts of solidarity.

CHAPTER SIX

Political Tourism as Transnational Feminist Practice: Margaret Randall, Rebecca Gordon, and Adrienne Rich

Transnational feminism is neither revolutionary tourism, nor mere celebration of testimony. It is rather through the route of feminism that economic theories of social choice and philosophical theories of ethical preference can be complicated by cultural material. (Gayatri Spivak, Outside 284)

In characterizing transnational feminist practices in a recent essay, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan argue that they ‘involve forms of alliance, subversion, and complicity within which asymmetries and inequalities can be critiqued,’ emphasizing that a feminism ‘free of asymmetrical power relations’ does not exist (par. 4). That political tourists of necessity negotiate asymmetries of power in their efforts at international solidarity is undeniable. That political tourists also strive, in most instances, to forge forms of alliance ‘within which asymmetries and inequalities can be critiqued’ has been evident in the cases that I have considered here, even where those efforts have been limited and even where the efforts failed. In this chapter I want to consider three instances of political tourism undertaken by women who define themselves as feminists and for whom feminism is a key part of the motivation for their acts of international solidarity. Gayatri Spivak’s dismissal of ‘revolution-

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ary tourism’ as a route toward transnational feminism rehearses the conventional wisdom about the superficial and self-serving nature of political tourism; in the context of her essay, the phrase is meant to ward off dismissals of a transnational feminist cultural studies as much as warn against a problematic inhabiting of structures of privilege without engaging in ‘a persistent critique’ (284). In examining three instances of transnational feminism that in fact manifest in ‘revolutionary tourism’ and that produce both testimony and testimonio, I am risking the reproduction of social inequality that tourism typically entails in order to engage transnational feminist critiques of power structures, including the structure of international solidarity work that the feminist political tourist inhabits. ‘Persistently to critique a structure that one cannot not (wish to) inhabit,’ Spivak reiterates, ‘is the deconstructive stance’ (284). The three U.S. feminists whose work I will consider here all travelled to Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution in different circumstances and for different periods of time. Their experiences shaped their work, their sense of themselves as feminists, and helped to shape as well dialogues about feminism within the United States and beyond. Adrienne Rich was invited to participate in a conference on Central America in Managua in July 1983. While her sojourn was very brief, only a week long, it served as the impetus for several of the essays collected in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), not least ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’ (1984), which came to be very influential among U.S. feminists and other anglophone and European feminists outside of the United States. Margaret Randall was invited in 1979 by Ernesto Cardenal, then minister of culture in the newly formed Sandinista government, to ‘come and talk to our women’ (Walking 7). Randall spent three months in Nicaragua from 1979 to early 1980 interviewing the women whose stories comprised the book Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in the Struggle (1981).1 Randall returned to Managua later in 1980 to live there

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with her daughters for another three and a half years, working for the ministry of culture and with the Sandinista women’s organization. During this period, she wrote additional books and articles about Nicaragua, most notably Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution (1983) and Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (1984). In 1992, Randall returned to Nicaragua for an extended period of fieldwork that resulted in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited: Feminists in the Nicaraguan Revolution (1994). Rebecca Gordon spent six months in Nicaragua in 1984, working with a U.S. solidarity group called Witness for Peace. During her sojourn she wrote a series of detailed, reflective letters to her partner, Jan Adams, as well as open letters to a group of their friends, informing them about what was going on in Nicaragua during the U.S.sponsored Contra war. Gordon later edited many of these letters and framed them with a contextualizing narrative that includes excerpts from some of her partner’s letters to Gordon; the result was Letters from Nicaragua (1986). What it might mean to say that feminism motivated the political tours these three women undertook, or that their tours were marked by their feminism, is by no means self-evident. All three of these U.S. feminists are white and middle-class; all three are of Jewish heritage, although only Rich has practised Judaism to any extent; all three identify as lesbian, although Randall did not come out until after she returned to the United States in the mid1980s. These details of their social location, while hardly irrelevant, shed little light on their feminist politics. Feminist political tourists refuse to work only within the circumscribed ambit of their social locations. In fact, political tourists in general typically strain against the notion that, by virtue of who they are and where they are from, there are struggles where they do not belong. In identifying beyond the categories and the locations to which they ostensibly belong, these feminist political tourists strive for what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has called ‘feminism without borders.’ Mohanty’s ‘feminism without borders’ is founded on three princi-

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ples: decolonization, anti-capitalist critique, and solidarity. Solidarity, for Mohanty, is explicitly a corrective to the problematic notion of sisterhood which does not recognize important differences among women. In contrast, in solidarity work ‘diversity and difference are central values ... to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of alliances’ (7). Defining solidarity as the product of an ‘active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences,’ Mohanty argues that ‘feminist solidarity ... constitutes the most principled way to cross borders – to decolonize knowledge and practice anticapitalist critique’ (7). At the same time, the risks are that the (necessarily privileged) feminist political tourist will adopt what Gayatri Spivak long ago called an ‘information-retrieval approach’ to feminist work across First World / Third World2 divides and that she will engage in ‘soul making’ through her encounter with an Other seen less as an end in itself than as a means to a politically engaged ‘global feminist’ identity (‘Three Women’s Texts’ 243–4). The challenge for each of the feminist political tourists I consider here is to devise a transnational feminist practice that does not reproduce the imperialist axiomatics that Spivak warns against. To the extent that they succeed – and they do so to varying degrees – their work serves as an important model for responsible feminist internationalism. A central feature of the transnationalism these writers engage in is their writing itself insofar as it both represents their efforts at international solidarity work and itself crosses borders. I wish, therefore, also to consider how their texts speak to a transnational (feminist) readership. In Feeling Global, Bruce Robbins argues that ‘internationalism demands feeling as well as knowing ... if it is going to rouse any support’ (16). To the extent that they engage their readers affectively with the far-off (or not so far-off) struggles they record, the writers of political tourist texts are engaged in forging what Robbins calls ‘a transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ (16) that might help to produce the kind of ‘internationalist ethics of the everyday’ he calls for (23). Readers witness

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and potentially identify with the writer’s performance of solidarity with her subject(s), but as readers we also risk a vicarious ‘soul making,’ and risk identifying with the tourist rather than the struggle she participates in, not to mention risk simply feeling virtuous for having read an account of struggle and then getting on with our lives as they are. Yet to the extent that these texts are able to keep open our relationship to the struggle in question, to the extent that the writers model an anti-imperialist and anti-racist feminist practice, they may help to forge the kind of ‘transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ that Robbins suggests is needed to rouse support for international solidarity. Through a consideration of their work and, particularly in the cases of Randall and Gordon, the forms in which they represent their experiences, I will argue that these political tourists do engage in a transnational feminist practice that performs solidarity as ‘persistent critique’ and that they invite their readers to do likewise. Political Tourism as a Politics of Location Caren Kaplan has written about the value of Adrienne Rich’s conception of a politics of location for transnational feminist practice. She argues, for instance, that ‘a politics of location that investigates the productive tension between temporal and spatial theories of subjectivity can help us delineate the conditions of transnational feminist practices in postmodernity’ (‘Politics’ 138). Like Rich, Kaplan rereads Virginia Woolf’s famous dictum from Three Guineas – ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ – in order to draw our attention to the usually unexamined ways white women have historically laid claim to public spaces for social action and to modern narratives of progress. She finds in Rich’s attention to the categories of social location that shore up privilege the potential for engaging in more responsible and productive cross-cultural work. Even as she lauds Rich’s consideration of

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the specifics of race, class, and geopolitics within feminist thought and political organizing, however, Kaplan points out that, in tracing her reconceived approach to feminism to her trip to Nicaragua, Rich relies on both ‘the conventional oppositions between global and local’ and ‘the conventional belief in travel as transformation’ (141). To the extent that political tourism is always about remaking the self as much as the world, it is always implicated in this long-standing belief about the significance of travel. Yet travel itself is not necessarily the cause of transformation so much as it is part of the process – or a metaphor for the process. In fact, in a talk originally given in New York in October 1983, and later published as ‘North American Tunnel Vision,’ Rich suggests that her trip to Nicaragua should be understood as part of a longer process: I’m supposed to talk about my trip to Nicaragua. I have taken that assignment in a very loose sense. First, although the week I spent there last July was a process of continuous adult education for me, this process was itself connected with a much longer political education. It would be easier if I could describe a conversion: how an onthe-spot visit to a Central American revolutionary society affected my politics as a feminist. In fact, ‘my trip to Nicaragua’ feels spread over months and years. (Blood 161)

Seen not as a conversion, but as an experience ‘connected with a much longer political education,’ Rich’s trip to Nicaragua accrues a different sort of significance. It comes to symbolize a perspective from elsewhere that resituates what too often is rendered invisible within the locations privileged individuals habitually occupy. Rich identifies several influences on her thinking that predated and effectively laid the ground for her ‘trip to Nicaragua’ – for, in other words, her shift in perspective: meeting feminists from Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Chile whom she credits with having initiated her ‘hemispheric education’ (161); reading an anthology of Cuban women poets edited and translated by Margaret

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Randall called Breaking the Silences (1982); struggling ‘with the meanings of white identity in a racist society’; and exploring ‘the meanings of Jewish identity from a feminist perspective’ (161–2). These experiences had been leading Rich to question her implication, as a feminist, in what she described as a ‘North American tunnel vision’ (162). According to Rich’s narrative, then, ‘when out of the blue came an invitation to a conference in Managua,’ she was predisposed to accept and to see that trip as part of her thinking about the importance of ‘location’ to feminism (162). To be sure, Rich credits her sojourn with expanding her sense of what feminism entails: ‘I found myself having to think about “women’s issues” not just as reproductive issues or the problems of rape, woman battering, child abuse, but as literacy, infant mortality, the fundamental issue of having something to eat’ (163). The brief sojourn in Nicaragua also confronts Rich with her identity as U.S. citizen, whether or not she identifies with U.S. policies in Central America. Rich’s point, though, about her trip to Nicaragua is that it is in some sense emblematic of her transnational political education, rather than entirely responsible for it. Rich’s Nicaragua sojourn, while clearly politically motivated, differs from the travels undertaken by many of the political tourists I have considered in this book insofar as Rich does not go seeking to participate in the struggle in any direct way; her affiliation with the Sandinista revolution and, more specifically, with Nicaraguan feminists is largely conceptual. For Rich, U.S. feminism has the ‘potential’ to ally itself with ‘other liberation movements’ thanks to the leadership of feminists of colour (165): ‘because as North Americans3 of whatever background we inherit this diversity and the resulting intersections of oppression, the leadership ... of women of color both impels and enables us to enter into nonchauvinistic, nonmissionary alliances with those around the world ... who refuse to be dehumanized, who are trying to become more human’ (165). The logic of this claim seems to be that the U.S. women’s movement is already in itself transnational, however

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blind Euro-American feminists have been to this fact, by virtue of the struggles of indigenous, African-American, Jewish, poor, and immigrant women. Yet Rich also acknowledges, in ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location,’ that it was in Nicaragua that she first felt ‘the weight of the United States of North America, its military forces, its vast appropriations of money, its mass media at [her] back,’ and that experience afforded some insight into her implication, willynilly, in U.S. imperialism: ‘I could feel what it means, dissident or not, to be part of that raised boot of power, the cold shadow we cast everywhere to the south’ (220). Entering into ‘nonchauvinistic, nonmissionary alliances with those around the world’ is necessarily complicated by these factors. The struggles of U.S. women of colour cannot be made an alibi for the ‘global feminism’ of white feminists. Aimée Carrillo Rowe points out that ‘“politics of location” discourses constitute “location” through articulations of identity in which belonging is assumed’ (18). To the extent that political tourists push the boundaries of belonging, to the extent that they seek belonging within communities to which they are ostensibly ‘outsiders,’ a politics of location has its limits for the acts of solidarity political tourists engage in. Carrillo Rowe affirms that Rich’s examination of her social positioning is an important step toward seeking ‘a wider solidarity by critiquing exclusionary conditions of subject formation in an effort to denaturalize their effects,’ but she charges that Rich fails to take adequate account of what enabled her shift in perspective: ‘In spite of her efforts to position herself as a coalitional subject Rich fails to locate “location” within community. In this way, she does not hold herself accountable to the allies who enabled her to see from that vantage’ (19).4 As the passage I quoted from ‘North American Tunnel Vision’ suggests, Rich does gesture toward the communities who have enabled her to see the importance of ‘location,’ but gestures are not always enough. For the political tourist striving to do solidarity work, the kind of self-reflexivity Rich argues for is invaluable, but it is also

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insufficient without a deeper commitment to one’s allies. Being accountable to communities other than those to which one already ‘belongs’ is thus arguably a way of extending a politics of location beyond self-reflexivity. Margaret Randall and Rebecca Gordon, who struggle to do feminist work across class, race, and imperial divides, try to find ways of being accountable to both the communities to which they already ‘belong’ and those to which they seek to belong as allies in the struggle. Representing ‘Outside Belongings’ Elspeth Probyn’s notion that belonging ‘expresses a desire for more than what is, a yearning to make the skin stretch beyond individual needs and wants’ (6) is suggestive for understanding the impetus for the kind of international solidarity work political tourists seek to do. Probyn points out that ‘the very longing to belong embarrasses its taken-for-granted nature,’ and consequently what she calls ‘outside belonging [is] already beyond belonging and identity’ (8). While she is specifically interested in ‘figur[ing] the desire that individuals have to belong’ in a postmodern world in which the stability of belonging is a thing of the past (8), for my purposes the notion of ‘outside belonging’ usefully deconstructs conventional assumptions about the geographical and social boundaries that properly circumscribe one’s political engagement. If belonging always entails the notion of an outside, and if it always ‘expresses a desire for more than what is,’ the political tourist who seeks to belong to a political struggle taking place elsewhere, who crosses borders of various kinds to participate in that struggle, is both beyond belonging and identity and engaged in the forging of belonging. This is an ‘outside belonging,’ in other words, that implicates the political tourist in the materiality of the struggle to define a space of ‘belonging’ through her solidarity with a given group or community. Probyn also suggests that ‘the body that writes is ... a body that is fully part

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of the outside it experiments with’ (6). In this sense, the transnational practice of the feminist political tourists I am concerned with here necessarily entails the act of writing, of representing the ‘outside belongings’ that Randall and Gordon strive for through their acts of international solidarity. ‘Genres,’ observes Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, ‘are essentially literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact’ (106). Before addressing Randall’s and Gordon’s sojourns and their texts, I want to talk a bit about genre. The forms in which Randall and Gordon wrote about Nicaragua – testimonio and letters – have in common an implicitly or explicitly dialogic quality. In its appeal to national and international communities alike, testimonio interpellates its readers as witnesses to injustice and to the struggle for redress. Effectively, readers are enjoined to take the part of the speaker(s) in the struggle, to forge in solidarity with the speaker(s) an as-yet-unrealized social justice. The political tourist working as testimonialista is engaged, through her collaboration with the narrator(s), in forging an outside belonging to the place where injustice is committed and resisted. Even for the armchair political tourist reading the testimonio, this interpellative function of the text is an invitation to ‘outside belonging.’ The political tourist who serves as transcriber of the testimony is arguably ‘part of the outside [she] experiments with’ (Probyn 6), by placing her writing in the service of the struggle, in yearning, herself, for more than what is. To the extent that this yearning is self-serving rather than subordinate to the aims of the community that seeks redress for injustice, the political tourist may be guilty of the kind of soul-making Spivak has rightly charged many Western feminists with engaging in. If, on the other hand, the tourist does not strive to erase the differences between herself and her interlocutors, if she engages in a ‘persistent critique’ of the structures of belonging she ‘cannot not (wish to) inhabit’ (Spivak 284), a more relational approach to transnational feminist solidarity may be achieved.

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Letters are undeniably dialogic in form, addressing themselves to a public or to an intimate correspondent. As an intimate form, letters seem particularly suited to articulating desire, including the desire for belonging. The political tourist as letter writer is arguably engaged in dialogue with two parties at once – with her correspondent(s) and with the community whose struggle she has joined. Through her letters, moreover, she indirectly places these two parties in contact with one another. ‘Belonging’ to both communities at once and also, by virtue of distance or difference, ‘outside’ both, she ‘makes [her] skin stretch,’ as Probyn puts it. Associated, particularly in manuscript form, with the bodily trace of the writer, letters lend themselves quite readily to Probyn’s notion of a body that is part of the outside with which it engages. In the case of a political tourist’s letters, that embodiment may carry the additional aura of the body placed at risk for a cause. If the body of the political tourist comes to occupy the attention of the reader(s) more than those of the community with whom she engages in solidarity, however, the dialogue she aims at creating between communities as well as between herself and these communities will break down. Neither letters nor testimonio are unmediated forms. Letters, whether they are ‘real’ or fictional, trade on the common-sense notion that they represent a ‘direct, sincere, [even] transparent form of written communication,’ a notion that can be traced back to the height of the form’s popularity in the long eighteenth century (Cook 16). Yet Derrida’s deconstruction of the form in La Carte postale (1980), with his oft-cited claim that the ‘letter is not a genre, but all genres, literature itself’(48), has taught us to be more circumspect. I will argue, though, that political tourists’ letters, to the extent that they bear witness to historical events, potentially take readers beyond ‘reality effects’ to something like what René Jara describes as ‘a trace of the Real ’ (34). Many critics writing about testimonio have drawn attention to the ways the narrator of a testimonio engages in tropological strategies in an effort both to persuade and, strategically, to elude readers,5 and also to the ways

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the genre establishes ‘an explicit interplay between factual and fictional, between aesthetic aspirations to literariness and scientific claims to objectivity’ (Sklodowska 85). Jara argues that while testimonio does not offer unmediated access to a ‘real’ subaltern voice, while its effects are discursively produced, it nonetheless offers ‘more than an interpretation of reality.’ In offering ‘a trace of the Real’ testimonio offers ‘that history which, as such, is inexpressible’ (34). The risk, for the reader of political tourists’ texts, is mistaking reality effects for the ‘inexpressible history’ Jara refers to, of substituting ontology for relation.6 Randall and Gordon, in their representations of outside belongings, make use of the genres in question in ways that foreground the relational and the material and that keep in view the structures of inequality that mark the desires of the feminist political tourist. Margaret Randall: Testimonial Discourse as Transnational Feminist Practice In Nicaragua, Margaret Randall contends, ‘my family and I were not tourists in the superficial sense’ (Walking 7). She continues: ‘I worked at the Ministry of Culture, for the women’s organization, and with media; my children went to local schools; my vantage point was one of engaged participation rather than what the guardians of the “free” press would call impartial observation’ (8). Not only did Randall live and work in Nicaragua for nearly four years, she spent a total of twenty-three years living and working in Latin America – nearly half her life by the time she returned to the United States in 1984. The notions of citizenship and belonging bound up with the term ‘tourist’ seem stretched to the breaking point in Randall’s case, in a way comparable to Agnes Smedley’s and exceeded only by that of Che Guevara. In fact the challenge to national conceptions of citizenship and belonging posed by Randall’s political tourism seems to have been particularly evident to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials, who

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sought to deny Randall U.S. citizenship and to deport her when she returned to the United States after her lengthy sojourn in Latin America. At issue was the work she produced in published form during that time, work that represented her solidarity with the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, that engaged in ‘bridgebuilding,’ to use Randall’s own term, between North America and Latin America. Nor was this the first time that Randall’s political activity came close to costing her citizenship. In Mexico, Randall’s affiliations with the student movement led to repression of her activities in that country following the police massacre of a thousand student demonstrators in 1968 in the Plaza Tlatelolco.7 Not only was the bilingual literary journal that Randall edited, El Corno Emplumado, eventually forced to close, but Mexican security officials stole Randall’s Mexican passport. It was only via illegal means that she was able to leave the country and, through her solidarity with the Cuban revolution, take up residency in that country.8 Similarly, through her sympathy for and solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution, she was invited to live and work in Nicaragua in the wake of the Sandinista triumph in 1979. Yet if Randall and her family ‘were not tourists in the superficial sense,’ she does not deny that they were tourists in some sense, nor does she deny her sense of belonging to the United States: ‘I never stopped thinking of the United States as my home’ (Walking 6). Randall explicitly represents the work she did in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua as a form of solidarity work between those and other Latin American nations and the United States. In an essay appropriately titled ‘Coming Home: Peace without Complacency,’ Randall uses the metaphor of bridge-building to represent both her increasing political engagement with revolutionary struggle, especially in Cuba, and the work she was doing as editor, translator, and eventually oral historian or testimonialista. While we can read the title of this essay literally, insofar as it was written about Randall’s return to the United States and provides an account of her protracted legal battle with the INS, I think it is also

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possible to read the narrative of her political conscientization in Latin America as a kind of homecoming, one that is not divorced from Randall’s sense of herself as a U.S. citizen. In fact, her desire to return to the United States when she did was motivated in part by a need to ‘understand how the places I’ve lived and the experiences I’ve had engage [her native] language and culture in my life’ (Walking 9). Randall’s sense of herself and of her work, in other words, is explicitly transnational; it is also explicitly feminist. Randall characterizes her work as co-founder and editor for seven years of El Corno Emplumado as having to do with putting North American and Latin American writers and intellectuals in dialogue with one another. More significantly, for her the project also had to do with social justice: those whom Randall increasingly came to publish in the journal were ‘creative thinkers and intellectuals who were deeply concerned with injustice and who directed our creativity toward change’ (Walking 4). Her work on the literary quarterly put Randall in touch with those at the forefront of literary production and social transformation in Latin America, not just in Mexico. The impact of the Cuban revolution on Latin America and, by extension, on the journal and on Randall personally was profound. Randall travelled twice to Cuba in the late 1960s: to a meeting of poets in 1967 in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rubén Dario, the modernist Nicaraguan poet, and then again in 1968 to attend the Cultural Congress of Havana. These trips, Randall reports, ‘had a lasting effect on my outlook. In a complex and profound sense, my own life and work were becoming a bridge’ (4). Moving to Cuba when it became impossible to remain in Mexico meant that Randall was able to pursue her life and work in ways she could not have done had she returned to the United States. As she puts it, ‘Throughout my years in Cuba, I continued to be a bridge; not only through my own writing – dozens of poems and articles, short stories, books of oral history, and essays on women and culture – but through my

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translations of important Latin American poets’ work’ (7). Importantly, Randall understands her residency in Cuba and her participation in the revolution, over and above her contributions as a cultural worker, as a kind of transnational practice. She continued to be a bridge, she tells us, ‘also by my presence: as a woman, a mother of four, a North American living and working within the revolutionary process’ (7). Feminism, including U.S. feminism, also came to be a fundamental part of Randall’s transnational practice during her sojourn in Latin America. It was in Mexico where, as Randall puts it, ‘feminism hit [her]’ (Walking 5), and it was in Mexico where Randall began to read U.S. feminist thought, so feminism was effectively a transnational experience for her from the beginning. One of Randall’s earliest contributions to a transnational feminist dialogue was her book Las Mujeres (1970), a collection of documents from the U.S. women’s movement, which she translated into Spanish and introduced. In Cuba, Randall recounts, it was the intersection of ‘feminist thought [with] the experience of national liberation struggles ... [that] turned me towards oral history as a viable means of bridge-building’ (6). Her first testimonio was La Mujer cubana ahora (Cuban Women Now), which was published in Havana in 1972 and which was followed by Mexican, Venezuelan, and Colombian editions, as well as by an English-Canadian edition (1974) and a Dutch edition.9 In ‘Reclaiming Voices: Notes on a New Female Practice in Journalism,’ Randall observes that the new genre of testimonio was a form ‘explored mainly by women’ (60), a point reiterated by Georg Gugelberger (5), although the importance of testimonio collaborations between Miguel Mármol and Roque Dalton and the work of Miguel Barnet and his interlocutors in Biografia de un cimarrón and La Canción de Rachel cannot be discounted. Randall also argues that feminism informed the method that she and other testimonialistas employed in recording the experiences of those living and participating in the national liberation struggles:

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As feminism pushed us to question our assumptions on all levels, we tended to bring fewer of these assumptions, cultural or otherwise, to bear on the way we conducted an interview. Most of us tried to practice a humility and respect for peoples’ differing histories, customs, dreams. An honoring of our differences as well as of our commonalities became a goal among us as feminist women; such an honoring naturally found its way into our work as transmitters of our sisters’ lives. (‘Reclaiming Voices’ 62)

This emphasis on respecting differences and self-reflexivity in the context of solidarity work suggests the kind of ‘feminism without borders’ Mohanty describes. Randall also contends that the revisioning of authorship that testimonio entails was in her case and that of other women testimonialistas similarly informed by feminism: ‘At times we felt it particularly important to involve the informant, facilitating to the protagonist the role of writer and/or analyst rather than guarding that jealously for ourselves’ (63).10 Randall’s construction of this co-authoring relationship makes it clear that not only differences but inequalities of power and authority remained between editor/compiler and the subject or ‘narrator’ of the testimonio. Randall’s work in this genre, and her role as feminist political tourist, may be understood as efforts to negotiate differential access to structures of authority in what she understands to be a collective project of revolution. In his seminal essay on testimonio, John Beverly characterizes the relationship between recorder and speaking subject in this way: ‘The relation of narrator and compiler in the production of a testimonio can function as an ideological figure or ideologeme for the possibility of union of a radicalized intelligentsia and the poor and working classes of a country’ (‘The Margin’ 31). Implicitly the relationship here described is one of a sought-after political alliance in which the desire of the compiler for transformation of both the world and herself is negotiated through her union with the subaltern narrator. As such, testimonio is a form ideally suited to

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the aims of a political tourist. As Beverly puts it, the relationship between writer and speaker ‘suggests as an appropriate ethical and political response more the possibility of solidarity than of charity’ (31). For her or his part, the subaltern narrator testifies through the intellectual for reasons that may not be entirely consonant with those of the compiler; the testimonio form nonetheless often appears to accommodate the aims of the narrator to an important extent.11 Beverly in fact argues that what distinguishes testimonio from oral history is that in the former ‘it is the intentionality of the narrator that is paramount’ (26). Like Agnes Smedley’s use of speaking bitterness to ally herself in struggle alongside the Chinese workers, peasants, and soldiers she sought to represent, Randall’s ‘bridge-building’ through her work as testimonialista is a means of practising solidarity as an outsider inside the struggle. Beverly himself signals a functional similarity between testimonio and speaking bitterness; both forms have a quasi-legal aim of representing injustice and calling for redress (26). Just as ‘the reader of testimonio is akin to ... a jury member in a courtroom’ (26), Randall’s role implicitly makes her both vicarious witness and prosecutor in an international court of justice. When Ernesto Cardenal invited Margaret Randall to Nicaragua in 1979, she had already published an important testimonio in conjunction with the Sandinista revolution. Somos millones (1976), Randall’s testimonio with Sandinista combatant Doris Tijerino, was produced while Tijerino was in Cuba. The English translation, Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution: Doris Tijerino as Told to Margaret Randall (1978), was rushed into print when Tijerino was imprisoned for a second time in an effort to mobilize international support to prevent her death at the hands of the notorious National Guard (Sandino’s Daughters Revisited 209).12 In this instance, the testimonio is clearly meant to serve as an instrument in the struggle itself. I will focus, though, on the testimonios Randall produced while she was in Nicaragua, especially Sandino’s Daughters (1981) and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (1994), works that, respectively,

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offered support to the new and still struggling Sandinista revolution and a critical retrospective assessment of the place of feminism in the revolution. All of Randall’s Nicaraguan testimonios, with the exception of Somos millones / Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution, stretch the conventions of the genre in two key ways: they are not focused on a single testimony, and those who testify are not exclusively workers or peasants. In fact, in Risking a Somersault in the Air and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, books that are in many respects more properly termed collections of interviews rather than testimonios, Randall’s interlocutors are preponderantly drawn from the middle and upper classes. Carolyn Warmbold argues that because Randall’s oral histories represent the broad-based mobilization of Christians, writers, barrio women, members of the middle classes and the proletariat and peasants in the Sandinista revolution, ‘her books have tremendous potential to ignite dissent within [U.S.] borders’ (276). That is to say, the alliances across categories of social location that were realized during the Sandinista revolution, and that arguably made it successful, potentially resonate in powerful ways in the United States and other contexts where social dissent may most effectively build coalitions among diverse groups. I would add that the diversity of Randall’s interlocutors also works to complicate the lines of power and authority typically involved in both testimonio and political tourism. Randall’s witnessing is chiefly directed toward those striving to effect revolutionary change and not toward those in whose name the revolution is waged. In the preface to Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, Margaret Randall declares of her relationship to this and previous projects: ‘I have never been an impartial observer. I make no claim to neutrality. I am with these women in their efforts to make the liberation of their gender an integral part of the Nicaraguan people’s struggle for dignity and freedom’ (xiii). Being ‘with these women’ is not a straightforward undertaking, even if Randall seems well positioned to travel between ‘worlds’ by virtue of her long residency in

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Latin America, her fluent Spanish, and the decade she spent in Cuba working in conjunction with that revolutionary society.13 In particular the feminism that ostensibly is one of the ‘worlds’ Randall shares with her interlocutors can as easily produce tensions by virtue of the different conceptions of the place of feminism in the revolution, and by different conceptions of the role gender or a feminist politics plays in the lives of these individual women, including of course Randall herself. Doris Tijerino, for instance, whom Randall interviews again for Sandino’s Daughters Revisited once told Randall, ‘I’m not a woman revolutionary ... but a revolutionary who happens to be a woman’ (Revisited 210). That Tijerino’s statement is made in response to Randall’s construction of her seems likely. Randall reports that because the UN had proclaimed 1975 the International Year of the Woman, and because she was eager to tell the story of the women involved in the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, she sought out the FSLN’s Cuban representative to take her proposal to the FSLN leadership. Carlos Fonseca, who was in Havana at the time, was keen on Randall’s proposal and arranged for her to meet with Tijerino, who had come to Cuba for military training (Revisited 208). Thus Randall’s agenda was to tell the story of a ‘woman revolutionary,’ while Tijerino, who was willing for her own reasons to participate in the testimonio, did not see herself in these terms. To Randall’s credit, she acknowledges these differences – at least in the later book. As Caren Kaplan observes, ‘an anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminism must articulate differences in power and location as accurately as possible. It must also find intersections and common ground; but they will not be utopian or necessarily comfortable alliances’ (‘Resisting’ 116). While Randall authorizes her representation of Sandinista women, retrospectively, by disavowing the label ‘tourist,’ and by describing not only her and her family’s residency in Nicaragua, but her daughters’ involvement with the literacy campaigns and their volunteering with the militia (Revisited ix), she rarely erases the differences among women in different

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class and geopolitical positions, or between herself and other less privileged women in Latin America or the United States. Randall’s introduction to Sandino’s Daughters makes very clear the diversity of the women represented by her testimonio and situates their struggle in very specific historical terms. Randall writes: ‘Sandino’s Daughters is about the women of Nicaragua – peasant, working class, professional and bourgeois women who joined with their brothers in the struggle to defeat Somoza’ (iii). She also acknowledges, via one of her interlocutors, important differences in who participated and how: Commander Dora Maria Téllez talked about some of the differences in the development of women’s participation. ‘Peasant women got involved very early,’ she said. ‘They fought heroically in spite of severe repression. It was harder for women in the cities. Political women were looked down on. They were called prostitutes. But by about 1972 more and more women were getting involved. Then, later, organizations like AMPRONAC [Association of Nicaraguan Women Confronting the Nation’s Problems, the first name of the Sandinista women’s organization] were successful in bringing together women of very different backgrounds in one organization.’ (iv)

Randall is also careful to situate the involvement of women in the liberation struggle in relation to the specific social and economic conditions that women faced in Nicaragua leading up to the struggle. Randall conducted eighty interviews for the book, talking ‘with women from very different backgrounds – and women whose levels of involvement varied widely’ (vii). The chapters of the book strive to represent that diversity, in terms of both class background and the nature and degree of involvement. Thus Randall has a chapter on the Sandinista women’s organization, on women who became military commanders, on women who fought as rank-and-file soldiers, on women who worked in the cities as col-

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laborators, including a nun, and on women who went underground and those who remained ‘legal.’ Not only does Randall’s inclusiveness offer a complex portrait of women’s participation in the struggle and in a way that is in keeping with a transnational feminist practice, it potentially offers Randall a way of mediating or negotiating her difference in her conversations with these women. The relationships that the revolution constructed between women of different backgrounds in a sense prepare the ground for Randall’s work.14 The diversity of the women who participated in the struggle is clearly one of the stories that Randall wants to tell, and it is linked to one of the key narratives of Sandino’s Daughters: the link between women’s liberation and national liberation. As Ileana Rodríguez points out, this is a questionable equation (177), and it is one that Randall herself comes to question in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited. In Sandino’s Daughters, however, as in Randall’s first testimonio, Cuban Women Now, this link between the revolutionary transformation of a nation and women’s political self-realization encapsulates the desire of the feminist political tourist. Rodríguez argues that Randall’s testimonio reveals ‘the constitution of the subject Woman – peasant, indigenous, militant – from the point of view of narratives of resistance’ (174), offering a feminist take on the political tourist’s investment in narratives of resistance to dictatorship and imperialism. In her introduction, Randall tells her readers that the women testifying in Sandino’s Daughters ‘speak very personally about their fears and losses, but mostly of their victory as women and as militants’ (iv). Similarly, as Randall makes the link between the recent struggle and participation of women in Sandino’s guerrilla or ‘little war’ to oust the Marines, she contends that under the FSLN ‘women’s militancy ... was transformed and extended to allow for the full participation of women’ (iv). Randall’s investment in this narrative is apparent in the kind of testimonies she has elicited through her interviews and in the way she has organized the material she has collected. As she puts it herself,

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‘the testimonies interweave description and analysis of women’s situation in the old and now the new Nicaragua; and accounts of the struggle itself are presented alongside each woman’s particular life-story – her family, schooling, social activities, religious training and so on’ (vii). In the ‘old’ Nicaragua, we are to understand, women lacked the agency they have come to acquire through their participation in the struggle. The nuances of the women’s stories complicate this narrative, but the basic structure is reiterated by the individual testimonies. In the case of political tourists such as Randall, not to mention her international readers, one may read in this narrative the tourist’s desire for consonance between women’s liberation and revolutionary change at home. Another narrative emerges in Randall’s testimonio, as Rodríguez also points out, that facilitates Randall’s identification with her Nicaraguan interlocutors, and that is a narrative about the relationships between mothers and daughters. Significantly, the chapter in which Randall’s presence is most evident is the one she titles ‘Mothers and Daughters’; this is the only chapter in which Randall is effectively the narrator. Her voice is not italicized as it is in the other chapters, and here the voices of the mothers and daughters she interviewed are represented through quotation. Prior to this chapter Randall finds other ways of highlighting mother–daughter ties. Although she interviewed them separately, for instance, Randall interweaves the testimonies of FSLN commander Dora Maria Téllez and her mother Maria Dora ‘for the sake of the story’ (41). Rodríguez argues that this ‘conservative’ maternal discourse offers a paradigm for solidarity between women; moreover, ‘maternity establishes the link between informant and writer; it is the medium creating solidarity between mothers and daughters with which Randall expresses her solidarity’ (176). To be sure, Randall is careful not to romanticize the mother–daughter relationship, conceding that it is ‘traditionally, a difficult relationship’ (184) and one marked in profound ways by the capitalist social formation in which particular mothers and daughters live. ‘In Nic-

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aragua,’ Randall nonetheless argues, ‘the relationship is being reformed by the Revolution, and women’s participation in it’ (184). Central to her thesis is the joint testimony of a mother and daughter who first discovered each was involved in the struggle when they were arrested by the National Guard on the same day and met up in a prison cell. International (feminist) readers of the testimonio are also, Rodríguez suggests, invited to identify through this maternal discourse. In affirming ‘the political strength of maternity, [the testimonio] document[s] at the same time that political struggles cross the body of international feminist consciousness’ (176), and hence once more feminist political tourists and those readers who travel vicariously with them can dream about bringing this political struggle home. This desire of the feminist political tourist encounters a double impediment a decade after Sandino’s Daughters was first published: the electoral defeat of the Sandinista government in 1990 and the role the United States played in that defeat. In Gathering Rage: The Failure of Twentieth-Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda (1992), Randall offers a meditation on this conjuncture following a trip to Managua in the fall of 1991 to attend an FSLN solidarity conference. Gathering Rage effectively presents the context for the themes Randall pursues in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (1994). Randall opens by citing U.S. President Bush, Sr’s ‘new world order’ as the first impediment to transnational feminist political desires: ‘I began writing this essay at a terrible time. Those of us who engage in the ongoing struggle for justice began to experience our world disintegrating as we watched’ (13). Randall acknowledges that ‘the balance of power, globally, has been against us as long as we can remember’ but argues that there was something qualitatively new about the situation in the early 1990s: ‘So many of the goals we fought for and won in the last several decades – civil rights, affirmative action, welfare, day care, choice – are being decimated by the conservative political agenda’ (13– 14). The ‘we’ Randall refers to here is clearly U.S.-based. The

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other part of the dilemma Randall addresses in this book is, as the title suggests, the failure, in feminist terms, of the revolutions that she and other feminist political tourists supported, if in some cases only at a distance. Now that the Sandinistas are no longer in power, both Randall and her Nicaraguan interlocutors are free to be more openly critical of the revolutionary process itself, as well as of the revolution’s opponents. On her return to Nicaragua, Randall ‘found an explosion of feminist power’ (33) but an unwillingness on the part of the FSLN directorate, still comprised exclusively of men, to engage with feminism in any serious way. Randall identifies as chief among her concerns in this book ‘the need for an autonomous feminist agenda, without which I am now convinced there can be no radical social change’ (39). In this formulation, Randall effectively rewrites the link between feminism and revolution, making the latter dependent on the former. While she was in Nicaragua for the international solidarity conference in October 1991, Randall sought out as many women as she could, and in her conversations with them the idea for Sandino’s Daughters Revisited was conceived. This collection of testimonies from Nicaraguan feminists revisits the earlier work not so much by interviewing all of the same women a decade later as by taking another, more critical look at the link Sandino’s Daughters makes between national liberation and women’s liberation. The problem Randall seeks to address is the failure of the Sandinista revolution ‘to develop a feminist agenda,’ despite the high participation rates of women in the struggle, including as combatants, indeed even as military commanders. A central hypothesis of the more recent book is that because Sandinista women’s organizations like AMPRONAC and its successor AMNLAE (Asociación de mujeres nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinosa / Luisa Amanda Espinosa Nicaraguan Women’s Association) remained answerable to the all-male FSLN national directorate, this ‘lack of autonomy in a succession of women’s organizations stifled or submerged the possibilities for developing a truly feminist agenda’ (17). Thus

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while Randall is careful to acknowledge the accomplishments of the Sandinista revolution – both she and many of her interlocutors stress that women’s lives were made better in many important ways – she is far more critical of the FSLN leadership in this collection of testimonies than in any of her other books on Nicaragua. In reassessing the assumption that a national liberation struggle can, in and of itself, realize feminist goals, Randall reaffirms her investment in a society that strives to improve the lives of all of its citizens through radical social change even as she argues that in order to develop a more fully revolutionary social order, space must be made for the development of ‘a feminist agenda.’ Randall does not, however, explicitly articulate what that feminist agenda might be. While key elements of Randall’s feminism emerge in her introduction, in her methodology, and in the composition of the book, the fact that she refrains from explicitly articulating a feminist agenda is an important dimension of her transnational feminist practice. It is possible to read in this gesture a reticence about imposing her own agenda on Nicaraguan feminists. Instead, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited strives to present ‘as complete a picture of Nicaraguan feminism as possible’ and offers the testimonies of the feminists Randall interviews as ‘a dialogue that both opens a window on Nicaraguan feminism and contributes to the ongoing international feminist discussion’ (xiii). Among the most notable differences between Sandino’s Daughters Revisited and Sandino’s Daughters are the class composition of Randall’s interlocutors and the fact that in the more recent book Randall’s questions, as well as some of the comments that she makes in conversation, are printed in the text. While the first volume was characterized by the diverse class origins of the women testifying, the twelve women whose interviews Randall publishes in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited are overwhelmingly middle or upper class. This is because Randall is clearly only interested in hearing a feminist analysis of the revolution; she is not after an analysis of

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the revolution from the perspective of all of the different kinds of women who lived through it. Randall comments: As has been true in the United States, and for similar reasons, in Nicaragua most of those who speak or write about feminism are from the middle and upper classes. Thousands of working-class and peasant women lead lives of protest and agency. Their experiences are what fuel the best analyses made by those of their sisters who have more time and freedom to explore the issues. (38)

From recording women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle to documenting feminist analyses of that struggle, Randall rethinks what constitutes a representative collection of voices. In striving for ‘as complete a picture of Nicaraguan feminism as possible,’ Randall opts for different criteria for inclusion. She tells us, for instance, that she ‘didn’t want working-class women to be absent from this book,’ and so she includes an interview with Diana Espinosa, a young factory worker who is also a union leader. She interviews Mirna Cunningham, who is a Miskito woman and a long-standing member of the FSLN from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, a woman who speaks to the problems having to do with ethnicity as well as gender within the FSLN. Among her reasons for including an interview with Vidaluz Meneses is her desire to present ‘a picture of the devout Catholic who came to the revolution through her understanding of the requirements of faith’ (38). Finally, she interviews Doris Tijerino once again, the only woman in the collection ‘who does not define herself as a feminist. Her story is included,’ Randall explains, ‘because it is such an extraordinary one, and because I believe it is important to offer the vision of a strong revolutionary woman who is avowedly antifeminist’ (37). If Randall might be accused of tokenism by virtue of the bases on which she includes interviews with women like Diana Espinosa and Mirna Cunningham, we nonetheless learn that class and race continue to be important to her conception of

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feminism. If the interview with Doris Tijerino represents another kind of tokenism – the lone anti-feminist voice – Randall’s willingness to include this note of dissent in her collection nonetheless indicates her apparent willingness to having her own vision challenged by the women she speaks to. This book has a dialogic quality. Most evidently, the form of the book resembles a collection of interviews more than it does a testimonio, although it shares with that genre the presentation of lives lived in revolutionary struggle. In interspersing her questions and comments in the women’s narratives, Randall performs her solidarity through a dialogue with these Nicaraguan feminists. It is in part a means of demonstrating her belonging, of proclaiming that these women are her ‘Nicaraguan sisters’ (xi), but the dialogue is also a means of locating Randall, of challenging some of her assumptions. Because Randall pursues many of the same questions in each interview, moreover, a dialogue emerges among the women she interviews through which disagreements, or qualifications, or contradictions become evident. An exemplary instance of this sort of dialogue emerges around Doris Tijerino’s appointment as director of the Sandinista women’s organization, AMNLAE, and around the question of an autonomous women’s movement more broadly. Randall tells her readers in her introduction to the interview with Tijerino that the FSLN directorate appointed Tijerino head of AMNLAE just as the organization was about to elect its own national leadership. Tijerino’s appointment was controversial, seen by many as a top-down effort at control on the part of an allmale directorate just as Sandinista feminists were moving toward autonomy. Some of the women in Randall’s book are openly critical of Tijerino herself for accepting the position. For Sofía Montenegro, AMNLAE was opposed to the moves many revolutionary women were making toward ‘a structure with sectorial representation and a collective leadership that could be both horizontal and democratic,’ and Tijerino’s appointment was a ‘stifling’ of ‘the

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people’s will’ (309); she also clearly sees Tijerino as complicit in those efforts to undermine the autonomy of the women’s movement. Vidaluz Meneses, on the other hand, defends Tijerino and some aspects of AMNLAE itself: ‘I know there’s been a negative analysis of the organization,’ she remarks, ‘because it put the interests of society as a whole before the interests of women per se ... But AMNLAE has opened up in the past year’ (163). She continues: ‘There are those who blame Doris because, they say, she doesn’t have a feminist consciousness ... I’d be willing to say that Doris began to understand women’s issues when she became general secretary of AMNLAE, when she had to confront both her own contradictions and those of the [women’s] sector’ (163). Tijerino, for her part, has reservations about autonomous women’s organizations operating outside of the structure of AMNLAE (220) and responds to Randall’s question of whether a mass women’s organization should be subordinate to a political party: ‘I know the consensus today is that an autonomous movement is necessary. But I think there’s an initial period in which the Party has to keep control of the different mass organizations. The problem here was that we let that initial period go on too long’ (215). While the majority of the women whose testimonies Randall records support an autonomous feminist movement, a position consonant with Randall’s own, there are dissenting voices and a number of positions on the value of an organization like AMNLAE. In this way Randall manifests her ‘desire to allow readers to examine important issues from a variety of perspectives’ (xiii). In both Sandino’s Daughters and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited Randall is careful to describe the scene of her interviews, including how reluctant, shy, or open her interlocutors are about speaking with her, whether it was difficult to arrange a given interview, and what impediments to the interviews there were. In these ways Randall affords her readers a glimpse of the terms of her performance of solidarity and the means of recognizing that her

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interpretation of the scene of struggle is not all-encompassing. Randall’s methodology strives to model an anti-imperialist feminist practice, exploring outside belonging in ways that serve the communities of women both in Nicaragua and internationally with whom she engages in dialogue through her cultural work. That Randall’s work is published in Spanish and is celebrated in Nicaragua, Cuba, and in Latin America more broadly is testimony to the relationship she has forged with the national liberation struggles in which she participated.15 That it is published in translation, and not only in English, is further testimony to Randall’s ‘bridge-building.’ Rebecca Gordon: The Intimate Politics of Revolutionary Solidarity ‘This is a love story,’ Rebecca Gordon announces in the introduction to Letters from Nicaragua, a love story ‘about a revolution and a marriage’ (2). With this statement, Gordon establishes at the outset what for her is clearly a profound link between her affective ties to the Nicaraguan revolution and her love for her life partner Jan Adams, to whom the vast majority of the letters in this book are addressed. Yet she is also careful to distinguish the kind of love one has for a revolution from other kinds of love. ‘Did I fall in love with the Nicaraguan revolution?’ she muses. ‘I hope not, because the kind of love revolutionaries need is harder than romance’ (2). In taking her distance from a starry-eyed romance with revolutionary struggle, Gordon demands that readers take seriously her sojourn in Nicaragua, a demand that echoes in her insistence that she ‘came to love the Nicaraguan revolution, even though there are things about it I dislike very much’ (2).16 How a U.S. citizen comes to love a struggle that the U.S. government opposes and is working to undermine is one of the stories of this book. This affective relationship to political struggle that Gordon addresses in her introduction is emblematic of political tourism as a practice, and it is

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embodied in the form in which Gordon presents the account of her sojourn. Associated with intimacy and sentiment, letters also are linked to a long-standing Enlightenment tradition of radical political purpose – the ‘open’ letter. Such letters appeal to readers as citizens, that is as private individuals who enter the public sphere as political actors. Despite their personal structure of address, their origin as letters to family and friends, in their content and their purpose, Rebecca Gordon’s letters appeal to reader-citizens in precisely this way. Specifically, Gordon directs her appeal to U.S. citizens, inviting them not only to protest U.S. foreign policy toward Nicaragua, to work toward putting an end to Contra aid and other facets of the so-called ‘low-intensity’ conflict, but also to work toward a feminist revolution ‘at home.’ The authority of the letters resides in the writer’s first-hand experience of the conflict, her bearing witness to the impact of the revolution on women’s lives in Nicaragua, and the effect of Contra raids and bombings on the lives of all Nicaraguans in the conflict zones. Her authority also clearly resides in her having put her own body on the line – however much she emphasizes that the risk to her life was small – and in this way the link between letters and embodiment, the notion that somehow even published letters bear the bodily trace associated with manuscript letters,17 is redoubled in Letters from Nicaragua. The other key feature of Gordon’s letters, and one of the conventions of epistolarity most seductive to readers, is the fact of their intimacy. Not only were the original letters personal, the vast majority were addressed to Gordon’s life partner Jan. More than love letters, though, this correspondence offers a near-daily reflection on Gordon’s activities, on those of her fellow volunteers, on Gordon’s fears and anxieties, including her struggles with spirituality, and on what lessons she thought the U.S. women’s movement might learn from the Nicaraguan struggle. That the intimacy of Gordon’s letters takes such an overtly political form is

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one of the key ways this text invites its readers to make their own intimate connection to political life, including political life lived at a distance.18 Gordon explicitly addresses readerly expectations about love letters in her introduction: It may seem that there’s not much passion in these letters, apart from an obvious sexual connection. A reader looking for romance may think I’ve edited it all out. The truth is I’ve removed very little; the passion is one we share for the fascinating details of the world, and for a politics that make sense to us. This urge to talk, talk, talk to each other is what the relationship is about. And it is passionate. (3)

The particular mix of public and private in these letters does, I think, offer readers a way of thinking about international solidarity in a way that problematizes conventional thinking about ‘our’ relationship to crises ‘over there.’ At one point Gordon writes to her partner about a dream she has had which she interprets as an expression of the guilt she feels for maintaining links with the United States via her letters to friends and family and especially to her lover while she is in Nicaragua. Her partner responds: ‘I have thought a lot about your feeling guilty trying to stay in contact with me and with those you love here while you are there ... In a way, you are there, with them, taking their risks, because you love me and others here, even because you love a possible future for here. It is all of a piece, though everything about the status quo conspires to convince us there aren’t any real connections’ (69). The idea that loving a community at ‘home’ and having a vision for its future logically entails international solidarity work ‘away’ revises belonging in important ways. This is a theme that resurfaces in several letters and that is bound up with Gordon’s sense of herself as a feminist activist opposed to U.S. imperialism. Gordon explains in her introduction that her solidarity work is marked by her sense of herself as a feminist: ‘As a feminist, I went

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to Nicaragua with a special interest in the revolution’s effects on women’s lives, and in discovering what women in the US might learn from Nicaraguan feminists’ (11). This sense of a potential for dialogue between U.S. and Nicaraguan feminists is largely confirmed in Gordon’s letters and is reaffirmed in her afterword. Gordon suggests that there has been ‘genuine cross-fertilization between the US and Nicaraguan women’s movements. While Nicaraguan feminists make it clear that their priorities are often quite different from ours, they have also adopted positions based on the best principles of US and European feminism’ (225). U.S. feminists, for their part, have much to learn from Nicaraguan feminists: ‘It would be absurd to lift the experience of Nicaraguan women out of its context and attempt to apply it unchanged to the issues facing women in this country. But we can still learn a great deal from that experience’ (228). The central lesson that Gordon draws from her encounters with both women and men in Nicaragua involves a rethinking of freedom and self-interest from the perspective of the Nicaraguan revolution. In the United States, Gordon argues, capitalist individualism has ‘debased’ the meaning of freedom in ways that have consequences for political activism, including the women’s movement: ‘This belief that freedom is the property of individuals, rather than something pertaining to a community of people makes united political action very difficult to achieve’ (229). ‘Individualism disguised as empowerment,’ Gordon continues, ‘makes it very difficult to distinguish between private conflicts and genuine political differences’ (230). Alternatively, ‘self-interest’ in the Nicaraguan context is not narrowly bound to the individual; it is rather ‘an ethic based on our needs as members of something larger than ourselves: the community of women’ (230). This is an ethic Gordon encountered repeatedly during her Nicaraguan sojourn: ‘“If I die,” a young woman soldier told me, “it does not matter. Someone will come after me who will benefit from this Revolution”’ (230). Significantly, Gordon also argues that applying this ethic in the United States entails think-

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ing about the ways in which U.S. feminists are implicated in global economic structures as well as in racialized class structures within the United States: ‘If I’m trying to build a feminist ethic of genuine self-interest, based on my membership in a community of women, what does it mean to me as a feminist that my wealth depends on other women’s poverty?’ (231). To think of belonging in these terms means revising what it means to be feminist; specifically, it means thinking about the mutual implication of lives lived across borders of various kinds. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty suggests, a ‘feminism without borders’ does not mean an erasure of differences or borders, but rather an acknowledgment that borders ‘come in many guises,’ cutting through and across nations, classes, races, sexualities, abilities, and beliefs (2). Mohanty argues that ‘a feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division’ (2). Gordon repeatedly revisits in her letters a particular line of demarcation setting her apart – as far as she knows – from the people she is striving to work with, and it is a ‘border’ which causes her no small amount of anguish. In Nicaragua, Gordon’s letters are a private way for her to live what in the United States is a very public dimension of her life but which she fears would only alienate her from the vast majority of the Nicaraguans she must work with and therefore keeps to herself while she is there. In confessing publicly to her readers her silence about her sexuality through ‘private’ letters to her lover, Gordon risks alienating some of her readers, readers inclined to see this silence as a closeting. She speaks often in her letters of experiencing ‘the pain of concealment’ during her sojourn, and she makes it clear in her introduction that she made a point of coming out to the Witness for Peace organization when she applied to be a delegate, even though she anticipated correctly that some members of this Christian organization would find her sexuality an ‘affront to their God.’ In one of her early letters to her lover, Gordon explains that she felt she ‘did not have the right to jeopardize the

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entire program by making shocking declarations about [her] sexuality’ (42). She elaborates: My job was to record the results of my country’s war against Nicaragua. The campesina woman [sic] who leaned toward me across a table and told me about how her husband had been hacked to pieces by the contra was not the appropriate recipient for confidences about – or challenges to accept – my sexual orientation. (42)

Gordon goes on to reflect on the culturally, historically, and materially specific conditions for gayness, but this crucial passage offers her readers a glimpse of how, in the context of a war in which Gordon is implicated as U.S. citizen, this most intimate and most political aspect of her being is resituated, made to mean something different. The ‘pain of concealment’ that Gordon experiences cannot compare with the pain of the grieving women whose testimonies Gordon records. However much such a moment may be folded back into a narrative about the necessary humility and selflessness ‘true’ internationalism requires, the fact that Gordon’s letters repeatedly present such moments of acute discomfort, unease, and psychic pain works against any simple narrative closure and, I would suggest, presents the kind of challenge to the solidity of the reader’s world that John Beverly suggests is also a feature of testimonio as a genre (‘The Margin’ 36). These moments of unresolved tension punctuate a more affirming narrative of selfhood in Gordon’s letters. The familiar motif of self-transformation is an undeniable element of Gordon’s intimate politics, although the convention is deployed with a difference: Gordon argues that her very understanding of selfhood is altered by her temporary inhabiting of the Nicaraguan revolution. She begins by addressing her fears and anxieties in the face of the situations she encounters doing solidarity work. She remarks, for instance, on difficulties she faces when she meets families who have experienced Contra violence: ‘It’s been so hard to know what

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to say or do when confronted with the grief of the people we’re interviewing. Partly because of the language barrier, but mostly because of my own self-involvement, I feel overcome with self-consciousness and have no idea how to behave’ (116). Here Gordon’s sense of self, or more precisely her preoccupation with it, gets in the way of responding to grief in a way that is not awkward or stilted. At a moment when her concern should logically be directed outward, it is directed inward, producing distance and discomfiture. Similarly, Gordon’s first experience of an immediate threat of danger paralyzes her. She was in Jalapa when 15,000 Contra gathered on the Honduran border, near the town, and for the better part of a week, Jalapa prepared for an attack. In a letter she wrote to her partner after the threat dissipated, she confessed to feeling ashamed of the fear she felt: ‘I knew I was likely to die that day, and I was ashamed of my fear. Ashamed that at such a time my thoughts were as much with the people I love and have left in the United States as they were with the people in Jalapa, facing with determination one more assault’ (62–3). Her fear divides her from those with whom she is meant to be manifesting solidarity, and while it is quite understandable that she would think of those she loves at such a moment, her love at this point is directed more toward those ‘at home.’ Toward the end of her sojourn, however, her experience of fear is tempered by a different relationship to the struggle in which she is participating and, most significantly, by a different sense of her ‘self’ in relation to that struggle. She tells her readers: ‘When I heard the first rafagas (machine-gun fire) the night Siuna was attacked, I was afraid, but it was not the bowel-clenching fear I’d felt in Jalapa in June. Something in me had changed’ (163). She describes that change as a ‘shift in consciousness’ about the meaning of her own death, an awareness that ‘I was part of something bigger than me’ (165). As Gordon puts it in the introduction to her book, ‘in Nicaragua I learned some things about history and community that shifted the whole focus of my attention away from my individual survival or “perfor-

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mance”’ (4). If Gordon may be said to engage in what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘soul-making’ through her scripting of this story of selftransformation, she nevertheless also makes clear her awareness of the problems with such a project through this claim to having learned not to focus on herself as an individual. Another facet of the ‘love story’ Gordon tells about her affective relationship to political struggle in Nicaragua has to do with obligation. Her desire for a kind of belonging in Nicaragua resonates for her with a sense of obligation toward the struggles to which she feels she already belongs. After she has been in Nicaragua for some time, she muses about her attachment to it in a letter to her partner: I’m going to have to come back to Central America some day, Jan. Is this seduction? Is it just that it’s easier to identify with the poor of another culture? Maybe. Will you help me to remember the poor women of my own country? The longer I am here, the more I understand why what we have to work for in the US is a genuine revolution. Nothing less will shift the power in the world. But a feminist revolution. And do I even know what that means anymore? (100)

‘Seduction’ as a form of political attachment is suspect, for Gordon, as a form of involvement that is too easy. Her obligation, which she represents as more properly belonging to ‘the poor women of [her] own country,’ is more difficult, perhaps because it is more long-term, and undoubtedly also because there is no revolutionary regime in place in the United States. That struggle lies ahead, as Gordon suggests here. Gordon’s temporary participation in the revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua is clearly not just about taking responsibility for what the United States was doing to the Sandinista government and the Nicaraguan people by funding and training the Contra, or dropping veiled threats of an invasion of U.S. troops. It is rather that in lending solidarity to Nicaragua for a time, she was preparing for the longer, and perhaps

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implicitly harder, struggle at home. As she anticipates her departure, she writes in an open letter to her friends and fellow activists: ‘For six months, Nicaragua has fed me, body and spirit. Now it’s time to keep my part of the bargain, and take up the lucha in the United States. I hope you will all help me move into the work you have been doing all along, while I was permitted to live inside a revolution’ (203). That living inside a revolution is presented as a privilege, a kind of gift, rather than an act of benevolence on Gordon’s part, is an important way of rethinking international solidarity work. In exchange for that gift, Gordon will (re)turn to political work at home, implicitly understood as connected to the struggle she has participated in during her sojourn. Readers are surely reminded of what Gordon argues in her introduction, that ‘the kind of love revolutionaries need is harder than romance’ (2). Letters from Nicaragua is indeed a love story, a story about learning the hard love revolutionaries need. Educated Sentiment and Political Acts In ‘Publicity and Indifference,’ Thomas Keenan argues that the failure of the international community to intervene in events like the massacre of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims indicates the failure of ‘an idea ... of the public sphere as an arena of self-evidence and reason’ (113). That is, the notion that knowledge will automatically lead to action rather than passivity, even indifference, has been put into crisis by events such as this. We must learn to rethink this Enlightenment conception of the public sphere, Keenan suggests, because ‘images, information, and knowledge will never guarantee any outcome, nor will they force or drive any action. They are, in that sense, like weapons or words: a condition, but not a sufficient one’ (114). Bruce Robbins’s contention that internationalism requires feeling as well as knowledge in order to elicit action is one way of moving beyond the problematic articulation of knowledge and action Keenan identifies. There are of course

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no guarantees that a ‘transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ will induce the readers of political tourists’ texts to embark on the kinds of projects undertaken by feminists like Randall and Gordon. Randall and Gordon themselves, however, help to identify some of the conditions beyond images and knowledge that lead to transnational feminist practice, one of which, clearly, is a sense of what it means to be an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist feminist. Gordon’s text is explicit about the role affect plays in her Nicaraguan solidarity work, and Gordon is also clear that the kind of affect she is talking about is political affect. Ideas about remaking the world are at the heart of her relationship with her life partner. It is not surprising, in light of this, that Gordon should choose to act both nationally and internationally in an attempt to realize something of what being in the world means to her. Randall, in her introduction to Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, describes the influence of Che Guevara on women of her generation and in her comments on the affective dimensions of his thought gives some indication of what has impelled her internationalism over the years. Randall quotes approvingly from ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’ the famous phrase about ‘true revolutionaries’ being ‘motivated by great feelings of love,’ adding, ‘We felt represented by ideas that addressed the spiritual and aesthetic within the workers’ state – even when, as women, we were barely mentioned as protagonists’ (2). Even as she affirms the affective dimensions of internationalism, Randall’s wry observation about the absence of a conception of the role women might play in an approach to internationalism points to another important impetus for translating sentiment into action. Despite important differences in their circumstances, including the geographical and social locations in which they developed as feminists, both Randall and Gordon understand their roles as feminists to encompass anti-capitalist critique, anti-imperialist activism, and a desire to move beyond the communities to which

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they ‘belong’ by virtue of accident of birth and social location (that is, by virtue of being white, Jewish, lesbian, middle-class, U.S. citizens) in order to undertake solidarity work. That their feminism, understood in terms of a transnational practice, is central to the kind of work they do, including their political tourism, there can be no doubt. Yet theirs is not a ‘global feminism’ in the sense of espousing a falsely universalist conception of sisterhood. They do not travel or write with the assumption that all women are united by gender, that gendered experiences are fundamentally the same across national boundaries or geopolitical circumstance, or with the expectation of easy identification with the women they encounter during their sojourns. On the contrary, all three of the feminists I have considered here are aware of the often profound differences among women produced by asymmetrical power relations, and they are aware of the need for ‘persistent critique’ of the structures of inequality that they inhabit. It is this awareness, together with knowledge of injustice and political affect, that leads these women to act, including to undertake acts of international solidarity. Transnational feminist solidarity, Spivak insists, cannot consist in ‘mere testimony.’ If, in focusing on these testimonies by feminist political tourists, I have been implicitly resisting Spivak’s dismissal of texts like these, I do not mean to disregard her caution that testimony is not enough. The most engaged of the political tourists in this book have all done more than ‘merely’ testify to their solidarity with anti-imperial struggles. Nancy Cunard campaigned on behalf of the Scottsboro boys, sought funding and legal assistance for refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and collaborated in London with pan-African radicals like George Padmore. Agnes Smedley worked on medical aid, set up delousing stations, worked on Madame Sun Yat-sen’s National Salvation Association, lobbied the U.S. government, and more. Che Guevara’s activism hardly needs rehearsing. Gordon’s principal purpose in going to Nicaragua was to work with Witness for Peace

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to challenge U.S. government support for the Contra. Randall worked for the Sandinista ministry of culture in Nicaragua. Conversely, Auden and Isherwood’s aim, from the outset, was writerly, and although Rushdie claims that his was not, The Jaguar Smile remains the most tangible outcome of his sojourn in Nicaragua. Yet if ‘mere’ testimony is not enough, it does not follow that it counts for nothing. Political tourists’ texts are not how-to manuals for the solidarity-inclined, but they are efforts to combat indifference in the public sphere and to attest to the value of long-distance empathy. In so doing, they present their readers with that encounter at the border that, for Keenan, is the essence of political responsibility.

Epilogue

What does it mean to read these texts now? John Beverly argues that ‘testimonio’s moment ... has undoubtedly passed’ (‘Real Thing’ 281) and it would be easy to suggest that because the texts I have been discussing are bound to particular historical moments – early twentieth-century pan-Africanism, the Sino-Japanese War, the Cuban revolution, the Sandinista effort to transform Nicaraguan society during the course of the 1980s – their moments, too, have passed. Reading these texts today might easily translate into an exercise in nostalgia for brief utopian moments in the struggle against imperialism, neo-liberalism, and superpower politics – into a species of left melancholy, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin. The impulse to venerate, as I have indicated in chapter four, is a troubling feature of political tourism; romantic backward glances in the direction of lost sites of struggle will do little to enable contemporary transnational solidarity. But political tourism is also engaged in establishing what Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith have called ‘new identities of longing (directed toward the past) and belonging (directed toward the future)’ (6), identities that might offer a way of translating the ‘transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ the texts produce for a current and future internationalism. Beverly asks, ‘What is left today of the desire called testimonio?’ and answers with a single, pithy word:

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Chiapas (‘Real Thing’ 282). Political tourists have arrived at the same destination. For of course political tourism continues, and textual accounts of political tourism continue to be produced and disseminated, significantly now also in a new medium, the Internet, a medium which has arguably also significantly altered the way political struggles are conducted and solidarity engaged. Certainly in the case of the insurrection launched by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in January 1994, the almost immediate involvement of transnational and national NGOs with Internet capabilities meant that this particular struggle was not only a remarkable local fusion of indigenous communities with a revolutionary nationalism, but a struggle with transnational implications for those invested in indigenous rights across the hemisphere, for those engaged in anti-globalization struggles, especially against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and for those concerned with human rights. Harry Cleaver argues that the perception of linkages between the Chiapas struggle and the concerns of transnational social movements was largely responsible for the immediate involvement of national and transnational NGOs: So, when the Zapatista National Liberation Army marched into San Cristobal and the other towns of Chiapas not only did those already concerned with the struggles of indigenous peoples react quickly, but so did the much more extensive organizational connections of the anti-NAFTA struggles. Already in place, and tapped daily by a broad assortment of groups were the computer conferences and lists of the anti-NAFTA alliances ... Even if EZLN spokespeople had not explicitly damned NAFTA and timed their offensive to coincide with the first day of its operation in Mexico, the connections would have been made and understood throughout the anti-NAFTA network.

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within days of the armed uprising, and within the year any number of web pages and email listservs had been created in solidarity with the EZLN, including what became the unofficial homepage for the EZLN, a site created by a U.S. student named Justin Paulson. The NGOs used telecommunications technologies to communicate with one another and with U.S. and Mexican government officials, as well as with constituencies ‘at home.’ Listservs, bulletin boards, and web pages carried Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos’s press communiqués as well as reports of what was happening. Significantly, one of Marcos’s first communiqués was a satirical tourist guide, ‘Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, A Storm and a Prophecy.’ From the outset, Marcos sought to mobilize the tourist gaze in support of the Zapatista struggle. Written in 1992, ‘Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, A Storm and a Prophecy’ was sent to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada in 1994 to introduce Mexicans and others to the EZLN and the struggle in Chiapas. According to the letter from the EZLN press office which accompanies it, Marcos’s purpose in composing this ‘tourist guide’ to Chiapas initially was ‘to awaken the conscience of some compañeros who were thinking of joining our struggle’ (31). Accordingly, the text is ostensibly addressed to Mexican ‘tourists’ (‘Suppose you believe in the old injunction ... to “See Mexico first”‘ [32]), although it speaks to any reader in need of a guide to the political terrain Marcos represents. Marcos parodies conventional tourist guides by stressing what is uninviting about daily life in Chiapas, opening with a list of what will greet the prospective tourist: Federal Army barracks, a military airport, and immigration checkpoints despite the absence of a national border. Repeatedly Marcos advises us to avert our gaze, not to go down certain roads, even as he then takes us there and shows us what we do not want to see: No, you better not go down this third-rate road all the way to San Quintín, across from the Montes Azules reserve. Don’t go down to

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where the Jataté and Perlas rivers cross, or walk for eight hours for three consecutive days to arrive at San Martín, a small poor ejido. Nor would you want to get close to the big shed of rusted, corrugated metal that is falling to pieces ... Don’t get close, don’t look inside, don’t see the four groups of children brimming with worms and lice, half naked, taking classes from the four young indigenous people who act as teachers for a miserable wage. (39)

Marcos exploits the gap between more conventional notions of the ‘tourist attraction’ and the sights he places before us to awaken our sense of injustice, to draw us in. His reassuring observation that ‘the worst will always be hidden: too much poverty would scare the tourists’ (38) acknowledges the overwhelming affective power of the sights/sites of injustice and invites a different kind of relationship to the place than that of passive observer, however empathetic. This political tour insists on the gap between tourists and the indigenous poor: ‘In 1988 Chiapas had 6,270 hotel rooms, 139 restaurants, and 42 travel agencies ... Did you add it up? Yes, that’s right. While there are seven hotel rooms for every 1,000 tourists, there are .3 hospital beds for every 1,000 Chiapans’ (38). Implicated in the injustice, the prospective (political) tourist is implicitly invited to support the struggle to close that gap. Thomas Keenan points to another kind of gap in his essay about the failure of the international community to act in order to prevent wars, massacres, and genocides, and that is a crisis over the link conventionally made in Enlightenment conceptions of the public sphere between knowledge and action. It cannot be said that in the case of Bosnia, of Somalia, of Rwanda there was no knowledge, internationally, of what was taking place. International media were on site and transmitted images of the suffering around the world. In fact, in such instances, the camera, Keenan argues, may be understood as ‘the most privileged figure of our ethical consciousness, our conscience, our responsibility itself’ (‘Publicity and Indifference’ 105). And yet the humanitarian

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action that should have followed the knowledge the cameras provided failed to occur. As Keenan puts it, ‘images, information, and knowledge will never guarantee any outcome, nor will they force or drive any action. They are, in that sense, like weapons or words: a condition, but not a sufficient one’ (114). So what of political tourist texts? May they be said to make the necessary connections that bring about social justice? What sort of reading do they enable? Might political tourist texts merely ‘feed [the] need [of Western audiences] to believe in the achievable goals of justice and freedom, to keep faith in narratives of progress, and to believe in the efficacy of collective action against the overwhelming forces of fragmentation’ (Schaffer and Smith 13)? What good is a ‘transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ anyway? In his parodic tourist guide to Chiapas and in so many of his texts, Marcos is a fabulist in the sense Keenan elaborates in Fables of Responsibility. An exemplary narrative, the fable is ‘an address to the other – to the other as at once the you who reads and who might be lured into an identification, into the risk or the experience of an imitation or a comparison’ (57). It is, moreover, through this form of address that the fable entails responsibility: ‘It superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise’ (56). Fabulous apostrophes, Marcos’s letters and communiqués hail both the interlocutor(s) who are identified and anonymous readers who ‘might be lured into an identification.’ Interrupting any programmatic response, any sense that what one must do is self-evident, these texts pose the relationship between knowing and acting as a dilemma, particularly for those anonymous readers who learn of the conditions in Chiapas, of the actions of the Mexican state, of the role of multinationals. For as Keenan argues, ‘my anonymity in the situation, far from offering an excuse to ignore the plea, implicates me directly’ (22–3). In-

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sofar as they, too, are about engaging the reader in the complications of taking part in solidarity, of making decisions about whether to act, or how to act, political tourist texts may be read as fables of responsibility. These are at once exemplary narratives, and narratives about decisions that are anything but self-evident, that reposition or call into question the political tourist as subject. As such, political tourist texts stage for their readers that ‘encounter at the border,’ that experience ‘of a crossing and its irreducible difficulty’ that defines political responsibility (12). Another political tourist text that has been circulating on the Internet is that of Rachel Corrie, the young U.S. student who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza as she attempted to prevent a Palestinian home from being destroyed. While Rachel’s emails to her family were and are circulated as a memorial to her as an individual, and as part of an effort in the United States to mobilize an investigation into her death, they can also be read as an exemplary narrative about Corrie’s performance of solidarity. Corrie worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led group of activists, both Palestinian and international, who aim to resist the Israeli occupation and to raise awareness in Israel and internationally about the daily struggles of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The participation of international activists is understood, as it is in Chiapas, as a way of ensuring the safety of those resisting the violence of the state and the military (whether Israeli or Mexican). The logic is that the presence of the ‘rights-bearing bodies’ (Gilroy, Postcolonial 79) of the internationals will protect the Palestinians engaging in non-violent direct action.1 Corrie’s death and the shooting of other international ISM volunteers Brian Avery and Tom Hurndall, who eventually died of his head injury, clearly challenge this logic. As Gilroy points out, those with ‘rights-bearing bodies’ are subject to reclassification when they engage in acts of solidarity: ‘Once the colonial authorities revise and extend the category of infrahumanity to encompass anyone who is foolish enough to side with the insur-

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gent locals, their fate must also represent a test of the democratic and judicial institutions of the incomer’s country of origin’ (81). Rachel Corrie’s case, like those of Avery and Hurndall, is thus about more than the actions of a moral individual; it is a narrative that powerfully poses as a problem the possibility of (international) justice and the transnational responsibility of states as well as of solidary individuals. Corrie’s reflections on her experiences in Gaza persist in electronic form on the Internet; they were also published in the Guardian newspaper in the days following her death, and they have been republished in two collections of texts about the International Solidarity Movement, Live from Palestine and Peace under Fire, as well as in the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie created by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner. Written in the form of email to friends and family, these epistolary texts offer the same sort of tension between intimacy and the open letter that one finds in Rebecca Gordon’s Letters from Nicaragua. Like Marcos’s letters and communiqués, moreover, they invite the identification of anonymous readers with the ethico-political dilemmas Corrie faced. In an email dated 7 February 2003, Corrie invokes the difference ‘being there’ makes to her sense of the situation, less as a means of claiming authority than as a way of recording how what she sees defies understanding: ‘No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing, or word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it – and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not all the reality.’2 Through her email, international readers are presented with two kinds of difficulty. In the first instance we are confronted by Corrie’s claim that knowledge alone is insufficient preparation for the kind of work she is trying to do. Secondly, we are made aware that any sense of understanding the political tourist acquires is interrupted by an awareness of what separates Corrie from those she is struggling alongside:

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Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown ... When I leave for school or work, I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway between Mud Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I’m done.

Corrie’s acts of solidarity are necessarily shaped by these challenges – by her necessarily limited understanding, by this risky comparison that undermines as much as it authorizes the mutual responsibility and interdependence solidarity entails. Like so many of the political tourists in this book, Rachel Corrie is only too aware of the ways her responsibility is doubled. Not only does she respond as an anonymous individual to the suffering of ordinary Palestinians – through the anonymity that implicates her as responsible to the other – but she feels herself to be responsible as U.S. citizen for the role that U.S. imperialism plays in the conflict. As she puts it in an email to her mother dated 7 February 2003, ‘if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide that I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is responsible.’ Cynthia Franklin and Laura Lyons point out that ‘there is an uncanny quality to Corrie’s formulation, in that even as being a white American protects her, it is American imperialism that also endangers her’ (xix). The uncanny quality of Corrie’s perception of her situation extends to our awareness that Corrie’s white U.S. privilege did not, in the end, protect her, a point Franklin and Lyons also make (xviii). This doubling of responsibility and its uncanny effects operate for readers of Corrie’s text(s) in a manner analogous to the Horatian dictum Keenan argues is key to the way fables function: ‘mutato nomine de te fabula narratur’ [‘change the name and you are the subject of the story’] (quoted in Keenan, Fables

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56 and note 18). That is to say, to the extent that Corrie’s narrative lures us into an identification with her identification with Palestinians, we too are confronted with the complex weave of responsibility that the trajectory from solitary individual to solidary tourist entails – whether we, as readers, are also (white) U.S. citizens or not. Toine Van Teeffelen contends that much of the appeal of solidarity writing of the kind Rachel Corrie and other ISM volunteers produce lies in its ‘focus upon morally motivated human beings who without many means of their own are willing to challenge big, impersonal, and powerful forces like an army or a bureaucracy’ (451). This ‘personal appeal to the moral imagination,’ she goes on to argue, leads ‘millions of Westerners [to] click on the ISM website’ (452). It is tempting to read this activity as Robbins’s ‘transnationally shaped and educated sentiment’ at work. But Van Teefelen worries that one of the risks of solidarity writing is an objectification of those with whom one is meant to engage in solidarity – in this case, the Palestinians: ‘The narrative world that is evoked often puts the Palestinians living under occupation in a passive role as the ultimate victim, representing a world apart that is rejected or forgotten by the rest of the world. They become an object of sympathy, admiration, protection or support – and less so a subject of agency’ (452). Certainly it is easy to focus on Rachel Corrie at the expense of the Palestinian families she represents as feeding her, lecturing her about smoking, making her lemon drinks when she contracts a flu bug, and resisting overwhelming oppression on a daily basis. In fact, the difficulty with My Name Is Rachel Corrie is that however moving an account it presents of Corrie’s activism, it remakes her as the moral individual rather than situating her solidarity within a larger, Palestinian-led movement, which collections like Live from Palestine and Peace under Fire manage to do. Yet the status of Corrie’s texts as fables of responsibility arguably holds regardless of the medium in which they circulate by virtue of

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the ways they exemplify her ethico-political interpellation, her willingness to be accountable for the atrocities she witnesses, and the challenges her solidarity presents to her sense of self. Consider, for instance, this passage from the 27 February 2003 email to her mother: When that explosive detonated yesterday, it broke all the windows in the family’s home. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I’m having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, make it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.

The emphasis here is on Corrie’s affective response to injustice – a response that is necessarily very different from the psychic and material effects of the occupation on Palestinians themselves. Corrie is affected by what to her is an unbearable contradiction between the generosity of her hosts and the ‘destruction of their lives,’ and it is a contradiction that calls her (and her readers) to account for ‘how awful we can allow the world to be.’ Corrie simultaneously acknowledges another kind of accountability, and that is her obligation to represent the Palestinian situation responsibly. As she enumerates the atrocities she has witnessed, she anxiously adds, ‘but in focusing on them, I’m terrified of missing their context’ (173), and she worries about the terms of her representation: So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can’t get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if

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they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don’t remember it right now. I’m going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don’t like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words.

Even as she gestures to her sense of ‘self’ at the end of this passage, she registers uncertainty about her words, about definitions, and about her ‘self ’: ‘I’m going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully.’ Doubt lingers beyond the conviction in her abilities. It is arguably in this very uncertainty that she most opens herself to responsibility, to the ethico-political. To the extent that we, too, in our reading of political tourists’ texts are confronted with doubt, rather than conviction, and with an overwhelming sense of our accountability for the injustices we (indirectly) encounter, we can conclude that these texts open us to an ethico-political determination rather than leave us with any simple affirmation that justice is being done. The political affect that the solidary tourist experiences, that mix of the private and the public so powerfully embodied in the intimacy and the radical political purpose of the epistolary form, is the opening of the self out onto the other that enables the ethico-political bond that is solidarity. It is, moreover, this mutual responsibility, this enactment of transnational interdependence, that enables the linkage between knowing and doing. Corrie writes: ‘This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore.’ This call to action, moreover, is addressed to her readers – us all – who, irrespective of whether we heed the call, must recognize the way we are implicated in it. The value of reading political tourist texts is precisely that they offer this sort of encounter with political engagement. Even if the political tourist in question ultimately fails to become solidary, as I have argued that Salman Rushdie fails, that failure is instructive.

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In the face of the impasses presented by the boundaries the tourists attempt to cross or the aporia between the tourists’ ‘ideal universality’ and the ‘real universality’ that is the unjust terrain of imperialism or financial globalization (Balibar 69), political tourists precipitate themselves into the gap between knowing and doing. The selves that they practise in the process of engagement are resolutely political selves; that is to say, they blur the boundaries between private and public in their affective response to political struggle and (un)make themselves through their political engagement. As narratives of collaboration across imperial divides, moreover, political tourist texts make clear that it is possible, however difficult it remains, to work against the grain of asymmetrical relations of power. In forging connections between those who occupy vastly different positions across the globe while remaining attuned to the inequities that mark global relationships, political tourists practise a ‘world citizenship’ that does more than merely acknowledge our obligation to human communities other than our own. Political tourists enact that cosmopolitical obligation. To read political tourist texts, then, is to work toward a worldly hermeneutic or, perhaps better, to a hermeneutic of worldliness that at least holds out the possibility of a postcolonial vision of globality.

Notes

Introduction: Political Tourism and Its Texts 1 While this phrase has been used by any number of writers in the recent discussions of cosmopolitanism, Scott Malcomson’s witty account, with its persuasive insistence that scholars of cosmopolitanism pay attention to practice, is particularly worthy of mention. 2 Brennan is responding specifically to Daniele Archibugi’s essay ‘Cosmopolitical Democracy’ in this instance, although he generalizes about cosmopolitanism on this basis, rather than limiting his critique to Archibugi’s vision. 3 Alejandro Colás puts it this way: ‘[Cosmopolitanism] is usually associated with the language of Enlightenment ethics, with the rational, autonomous individual as its ideal agent, while [internationalism] is related to the economic determinism of “scientific” socialism, where moral agency is shoved aside by the forward march of history’ (516). Given that for Marx the ‘moral agency’ of internationalism lay very much with the working class, I am less inclined than Colás to leave the human agent out of the picture; hence my claim that Marxist cosmopolitanism centres on collective agency. 4 See Paul Fussell, Abroad. Fussell himself operates with three terms, the explorer, the traveller, and the tourist, and he conceives of their relationship in this way: ‘If the explorer moves towards the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves towards the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveller mediates,

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retaining all he can of the excitement of the unpredictable attaching to exploration, and fusing that with the pleasure of “knowing where one is” belonging to tourism’ (36). In the wake of postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism inherent in the notion that the explorer was engaged in ‘discovery’ of the ‘unknown,’ the first of Fussell’s ‘poles’ seems to me fundamentally untenable, and to the extent that the traveller is meant to ‘mediate’ between the known and unknown, that position too is dependent for its validation on a conception of travel that is bound to the history of European imperialism. However ‘contaminated’ the tourist is by virtue of her association with mass culture and the predictable, the traveller’s connection to the history of imperialism hardly makes her position ‘pure,’ nor are her ways of seeing entirely unpredictable. See also Caren Kaplan’s critique of Fussell in Questions of Travel. I borrow the term ‘cosmopolitical’ from Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, who use it to designate both the ‘force field of the political’ (Cheah, ‘Introduction Part II’ 31) under globalization, and ‘the genuine striving toward common norms and mutual translatability’ in the context of multicultural difference (Robbins, ‘Introduction Part I’ 12–13). According to UN figures, migration has increased sixfold since 1910, and over half of that increase has taken place since 1965. It is explicitly in response to the problem of ‘political membership’ that migrants and refugees currently face that Seyla Benhabib, for instance, has returned to Kant’s essay on ‘Perpetual Peace,’ and in particular to the ‘law of hospitality.’ Jacques Derrida’s rereading of the same essay was initially presented at an International Parliament of Writers meeting on asylum rights. Another kind of response to migrancy may be found in what Pheng Cheah describes in ‘Given Culture’ as the ‘hybrid cosmopolitanisms’ of James Clifford and Homi Bhabha. Originally published in The Crisis, December 1910. Schwarcz’s study takes the Enlightenment as its central term, but she argues that ‘the twentieth-century Chinese enlightenment represents a critical elaboration of its European precedent’ (3), and certainly the anti-imperial dimension to the May Fourth movement and the impetus the movement derived from China’s treatment at the Paris

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peace conference of 1919 suggest these thinkers and activists held a complex and conflicted relationship with ‘the West.’ The text of Zhou Enlai’s speech to the political committee of the conference and the final communiqué of the conference are among the documents in the appendix of George Kahin’s documentary account of the Bandung Conference. Wright apparently contemplated titling The Color Curtain ‘The Human Race Speaking.’ For critical engagement with this and other of Wright’s travel texts, see the collection edited by Virginia Whatley Smith. My focus in this book is on the acts of transnational solidarity themselves and the contradictions that political tourists negotiate in order to participate in key anti-imperial struggles. Because of this focus, I will not address in any extended way the difficulties that inevitably arise when the universalizing ideology of the struggle itself is imposed on a particular people, many of whom will not share the cosmopolitan ethos of those leading the struggle. This is not to say that such difficulties are unimportant, but it is to suggest that an effort to explore them belongs in another book. Caren Kaplan offers a useful critique of these tropes and an analysis of their place in contemporary criticism and theory. See Questions of Travel. See James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity. See Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas.

1: Cunard’s Lines: Political Touring and the Making of the Negro Anthology 1 I am drawing on Homi Bhabha’s elaborations on the term in his essays ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ and ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,’ in Locations of Culture. 2 From a notebook dated 1956, MS Nancy Cunard, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, The University of Texas-Austin. 3 MS Nancy Cunard, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas-Austin. 4 These ‘souvenir’ photographs, the snapshots Cunard took herself

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during the course of her travels, must be distinguished from other kinds of photographs in the anthology: plates of African sculpture, portraits of black contributors, promotional photographs of jazz musicians, singers, boxers, and other performers, etc. MS Nancy Cunard, Hate Mail, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas-Austin. One of Cunard’s key collaborators and advisers on the anthology, moreover, was George Padmore, leading Pan-Africanist and a member of the Communist Party for a number of years before he broke with the Comintern over its policy on imperialism in Africa. Nancy Cunard, ‘Rape,’ Ms Nancy Cunard, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin; ‘Southern Sheriff,’ Negro, An Anthology (429–30); ‘Scottsboro – and Other Scottsboros,’ Negro, An Anthology (245–72). See Langston Hughes, Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse; ‘Columbia,’ ‘Scottsboro,’ and ‘Open Letter to the South’ in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes; and ‘Southern Gentlemen, White Prostitutes, Mill-Owners, and Negroes’ in Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest by Langston Hughes. Maxwell offers an extended analysis of Hughes’s Scottsboro writing, 132–41. Smith goes on to observe that while ‘Wells’s focus on the unreliability of white rape victims may well have been strategic, if not accurate, given the structure of race relations from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth centuries,’ this position nonetheless ‘presents difficulties for feminist critiques of interracial rape in the late twentieth century’ (274). Angelo Herndon was an eighteen-year-old coal miner in Mississippi and a militant African-American Communist. In 1933, an Atlanta, Georgia, court found him guilty of inciting insurrection and sentenced him to twenty years in prison. The ILD stepped in on Herndon’s behalf, holding rallies coast to coast, and won an acquittal. Also in 1933, there was a much-publicized lynching of three black prisoners in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in which county officers were accused of abetting the lynchers. The ILD, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), and the CIC (Commission on Interracial Cooperation) all responded to the incident. I have not been able to identify the ‘Atlanta 6’ more specifically.

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2: Revolutionary Drag in Auden and Isherwood’s Journey to a War 1 See MacKinnon and Friesen, China Reporting, and Li Fu-jen, ‘Report of an Honest War Correspondent.’ 2 Richard Bozorth, in his important study of Auden as a homosexual poet, confirms that ‘homosexuality informed Auden’s political identifications in the 1930s’ (138). 3 Peter Fleming was a well-known English writer of adventure travel; his Brazilian Adventure (1933) garnered him considerable attention. Fleming also got himself ‘special correspondent’ status with The Times newspaper in order to go to China in 1931 (which led to the publication of One’s Company in 1934) and again in 1938, when he met up with Isherwood and Auden. The brother of Ian Fleming, Peter Fleming is rumoured to have been the prototype for James Bond. 4 Marsha Bryant’s reading of Fleming is very similar to the one I offer here, drawing, as does mine, on Butler’s insights about the performative character of gender. Bryant is also one of the few critics writing about Journey to a War to pay attention to the section of photographs. 5 This was the era of the united front, when nationalists and Communists joined forces against the invading Japanese, but readers of Auden and Isherwood might nonetheless have expected the leftleaning writers to seek out one of the Communist-led divisions like the New Fourth or Eighth Route armies. It is Fleming, they urge readers to believe, who derails that plan. 6 I have decided to retain the original Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese names and place names. While pinyin is the system currently preferred, I am analysing a historic text, and it seems sensible to opt for consistency between my representations of Auden’s and Isherwood’s travels and the passages from their work that I will be quoting. 7 While the role of ambassador and his villa are clearly made to stand in for imperialism in Journey to a War, Isherwood also suggests that the Kerrs are not quite suited to their roles, that the ‘doll’s house’ is really outsized, and thus implicitly registers the suspicion with which Sir Archibald Clark Kerr was regarded by some members of the imperial establishment. 8 Capa was accused of having ‘faked’ ‘Death of a Loyalist Soldier,’ but Richard Whelan, Capa’s biographer, has found both documentary

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evidence that supports the argument that Capa took the photograph on 5 September 1936 at the Aragon front in Cerro Muriano and has recently located the brother of the man in the photograph, who has attested to its authenticity. See Richard Whelan, ‘Robert Capa in Spain’ in Heart of Spain: Robert Capa’s Photographs of the Spanish Civil War. 9 Agnes Smedley Collection MS I-63, Hayden Library, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. 3: ‘Speaking Bitterness’: Agnes Smedley in China 1 While ‘filiation’ has to do with ties of blood and kinship, and ‘affiliation’ with elected relationships, I am interested in this chapter in the blurring of the distinction between them, particularly as Smedley repeatedly strives for something closer to filiation with the Chinese peasants and workers whose lives she documents, even as she acknowledges her outsider status. 2 As I did in chapter two, I am following the Wade-Giles romanization, since this is the system Smedley used. 3 Smedley’s autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth [1929] offers another version of this narrative and is today the best known of Smedley’s works, and the only one in print. It has been analysed as a powerful instance of feminist life-writing as well as the ‘Ur-text of women’s proletarian fiction of the 1930s’ (Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire 10). See Paul Lauter, ‘Afterword,’ Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley; Florence Howe, ‘Afterword,’ Portraits of Chinese Women, by Agnes Smedley; Nancy Hoffman, ‘Afterword,’ Daughter of Earth; and Kathleen Nichols, ‘The Western Roots of Feminism in Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth.’ Paula Rabinowitz’s discussion of the ‘seeming incommensurability of the narratives of class and gender difference within traditional realist plots’ (10) highlights, for me, an important tension between documentary and life-writing (or, perhaps, between documentary and the political tourist’s diary) in Smedley’s writing on China; that is to say, Smedley’s narrative of her own experiences arguably disrupts the problematic voyeurism of the documentarian. 4 Drawing on both Freud and Lacan, Diana Fuss describes identification as ‘a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents iden-

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tity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable’ (2). Thus, while identification is ‘the detour through the other that defines a self’ (2), an ethically ambiguous process, it also leaves that self open to destabilizing, to revision and reinvention. David Brion Davis points to the development of this Enlightenment ‘theory of moral sentiments,’ to borrow from the title of one of Adam Smith’s books, as laying the development for the fundamental reversal of European attitudes toward slavery that led to the abolition movement. As Davis puts it, ‘the key to progress lay in the controlled emancipation of innocent nature as found both in the objective slave and in the subjective affections of the reformer’ (23). The notion that a distinctive conception of morality emerges at this historical juncture, after 1750, undergirds both Chakrabarty’s and Davis’s arguments. The May Fourth movement was named after the date in 1919 when Beijing students who were protesting Chinese government policies toward Japan sparked uprisings across the country. It refers to the nationalist project in early twentieth-century China that brought together Chinese of different social classes to challenge the Confucian tradition by recourse to democracy and science. Writers called for a turn to the vernacular and experimented with Western forms of prose fiction. I am, of course, alluding to Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak has of late revisited and revised this essay in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Smedley was very familiar with the debates about form among modern Chinese writers, having formed close friendships with Lu Hsun, Mao Tun, and Hsu Tse-mo (with whom she had a brief affair). She wrote about these questions in ‘Tendencies in Modern Literature,’ and in articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung, classifying the writers not only according to whether they were affiliated with the Crescent Moon or the Creative Society, but whether they were committed to social revolution. The extent to which Smedley found herself in accord with Mao Tun is apparent in her assessment of the aesthetics of Hsu Tse-mo: ‘love and the search for beauty are the problems and

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the needs, not of creative writers close to the fundamental creative forces of society, but of those removed by either wealth or social position from such forces’ (‘Tendencies’ 433). Despite Smedley’s evident approval of those writers who ‘s[a]ng of the lowly and the oppressed in despair and in struggle’ (438) and her desire to emulate them, she is unable to overlook the ways her social position removes her from the category of writers ‘close to the fundamental creative forces of society.’ 9 Anne E. McLaren has studied the transmission of women’s grievance genres in pre-modern China and compared the stylized rhetoric of these laments with the revolutionary grievance genre of ‘speaking bitterness.’ She argues that there are significant continuities between the pre-modern and the revolutionary grievance formulas but points out that in the revolutionary context, ‘speaking bitterness’ had greater ‘illocutionary force.’ 10 These oral histories were subsequently transcribed, a project that Anagnost suggests was especially evident during the ‘Four Histories Movement’ (family history, village history, commune history, factory history) that began in the late 1950s; she adds that the transcription was itself meant ‘to enact the very process it was recording’ (269). William Hinton’s Fanshen, an ethnographic study of a Chinese village’s experience of the revolution, offers one English-language source for acts of ‘speaking bitterness’ as well as an account of their impact in this village. 11 There are suggestive parallels between the gaze of the documentarian (Rabinowitz) and the tourist’s gaze (Urry). Both are socially organized ways of seeing that are authorized by particular institutions; both frequently imply differing relations of power between the producer of the gaze and its object; both share a historical connection to surveillance strategies and the history of modernity (see John Berger, About Looking, and Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain); both frequently miss their mark. This question of the Other’s gaze also resonates suggestively with Julia Kristeva’s account of her experience in Huxian in the early 1970s in ‘Who Is Speaking?’ Unlike Smedley, however, Kristeva remains an outsider whose desire to have the Chinese revolution ‘introduce [a] breach ... into our universalist conceptions of men and history’ (12) seems ultimately not to move beyond

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making the Chinese a function of Western interests. Cf. Rey Chow’s critique of Derrida’s use of the Chinese language in ‘How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.’ 12 Smedley left the war zone in August 1940 to seek medical treatment in Hong Kong. The imminent Japanese invasion of Hong Kong meant that if she had stayed there, she would almost certainly have been imprisoned; yet her health remained too precarious to return to the war zone on the mainland. Thus she opted, reluctantly, to return to the United States. 13 This essay was originally published in The Clipper (August 1941), a monthly periodical published by the Hollywood chapter of the League of American Writers. 14 The use to which speaking bitterness was put during the Cultural Revolution offers a particularly troubling instance of a revolutionary discourse abstracted from the particularities of suffering. 4: ‘Following in the Footsteps of Che’: Political Tourism as a Strategy for Entering and Leaving Modernity 1 I am following MacCannell’s usage of ‘tourist sight’ as opposed to tourist site. While tourists undoubtedly do consume places, as John Urry has suggested, MacCannell’s emphasis is on what tourists see; seeing the sights, I might add, potentially entails a great deal more than seeing the sites. 2 It may seem odd that a tour of the Sierra Maestra should be conducted in the name of Che Guevara exclusively, rather than also in the name of Fidel Castro, who, after all, was comandante en jefe, or commander-in-chief, of the rebel forces. One explanation undoubtedly lies in the Cuban policy of not permitting the ‘fetishization’ of living ‘heroes.’ Thus, while there are schools and other public buildings and monuments dedicated to the fallen heroes of the revolution throughout Cuba, innumerable images of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos on billboards and posters, and monuments commemorating Che in the Plaça de la Revolución and in Santa Clara, Fidel’s image is by and large absent in public spaces. 3 See Self-Portrait: Che Guevara. 4 One of the numerous texts Subcomandante Marcos has produced for

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the Zapatistas’ national and international community of supporters is a witty tourist’s guide, ‘Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, a Storm and a Prophecy,’ that combines political satire with the standard goal of the political communiqué (I discuss this text further in the epilogue). Marcos has been extremely adept at mobilizing the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry) in support of the Zapatistas’ cause, attracting political tourists to Chiapas where their presence has at times provided surety against the depredations of the Mexican army. Marcos himself may be said to follow in Che’s footsteps not only by helping to lead a revolutionary struggle, but also by virtue of his own inside-outsider status visà-vis the indigenous peoples of Chiapas in whose name the struggle is waged. Che Guevara was assassinated on 9 October 1967; his death is commemorated on 8 October in Cuba, the date he was captured in battle. It is tempting to make the comparison with the modernist narrating subject in Christopher Isherwood’s famous ‘I am a camera’ from the Berlin Stories. I have in mind of course the work of John Urry. John Urry notes that this proclivity for the transformation of the personal is a feature of modernity, an epistemology that the social and material institutions of travel made available: ‘Mobility is therefore responsible for altering how people appear to experience the modern world, changing both their forms of subjectivity and sociability and their aesthetic appreciation of nature, landscapes, townscapes and other societies’ (Consuming Places 144). For instance, Guevara and his travelling companion Alberto Granado manufactured credentials as ‘expert’ leprologists by giving a story about themselves to a Chilean newspaper and then showing the clipping to prospective hosts as they continued on their journey. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. In his comments on blacks in Venezuela, Guevara betrays a racism more glaring and overt than any of his sweeping characterizations of ‘the race’ of the Aymará or Quechua: ‘The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: the Portuguese’ (148). The diary fragments were transcribed by Aleida March; Jon Ander-

Notes to pages 159–71

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son, who has seen the original manuscript, confirms that March suppressed only sexually graphic passages in her transcription (xv). In fact, Hilda Gadea confirms this contention in her memoir of Guevara, indicating that Guevara ceased making notations in his diary in an effort to protect the Cubans with whom he was now associating (99). See Hilda Gadea’s memoir for an account of what Guevara was reading during his sojourn in Guatemala. In addition to an impressive list of Latin American and Spanish poets and novelists, Guevara and Gadea read and discussed together José Enrique Rodo’s Ariel, Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism; Marx’s Capital; Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto; and Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Anti-Düring, and Landmarks of Scientific Socialism. The translation from the Spanish is my own. Some of the other chapters of the book also appeared as articles in Cuban or, in the case of the opening and closing chapters, Brazilian periodicals, before being republished as part of Guevara’s booklength account of the revolutionary war. The three appendices are: ‘Un pecado de la revolución,’ originally published in Verde Olivo 6 (12 February 1961): 26–9; ‘Lidia y Clodomira’ originally published in Humanismo 53–4 ( January–April 1959): 388–91; and ‘El Patojo,’ originally published in Verde Olivo 33 (19 August 1962): 36–9. In the English translation published by Monthly Review, ‘El Patojo’ follows immediately after the preface, and ‘Lydia and Clodomira’ is inserted into the middle of the book. At one point, for instance, when Che is concerned about discipline among the troops, but is reluctant to insist on taking charge, he remarks: ‘In that period I still had a complex about being a foreigner, and I did not want to go to extremes’ (88). As Spivak suggests, the exorbitant ‘marks the place of that other that can be neither excluded nor recuperated.’ ‘Draupadi,’ In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (180). Spivak derives the notion of the exorbitant from Jacques Derrida, ‘The Exorbitant. Question of Method.’ The women’s names are Lidia Doce and Clodomira Ferrals. See Margaret Randall’s Cuban Women Now (10). Within the text that transformation is repeatedly figured in terms of

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Guevara’s abandonment of his role as doctor for his new role as guerrillero, a conversion that is nonetheless not stable, as Efrain Barradas points out (142–3). 21 Mary Louise Pratt wryly notes that ‘when the term postmodern began circulating the planet in the 1980s’ Latin American intellectuals tended toward two responses: ‘One was “Dammit, we haven’t even got modernity yet, and they’ve called it off!” The other was “Fragmentation? decenteredness? co-existence of incommensurate realities? – if that’s it, we’ve always been postmodern”’ (21). 22 In addition to the two trips to Machu Picchu, Guevara made a number of trips to Mayan sites in Guatemala and to Aztec and Zapotek sites in Mexico. 5: The Postcolonial Migrant as Political Tourist: Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile 1 Homi Bhabha’s famous essay ‘DissemiNation,’ for instance, draws in part on The Satanic Verses to explore the ways migrant/minority voices disrupt the ‘homogeneous empty time’ of nation-space; his essay ‘How Newness Enters the World’ similarly represents the postcolonial migrant as a transgressive, boundary figure via a reading of The Satanic Verses. For a more critical take on both migrancy and Rushdie see Revathi Krishnaswamy. 2 See for instance Aijaz Ahmad and Dipesh Chakrabarty. 3 It is important to stress that I do not mean, inadvertently, to erase the substantial differences between these writers in an effort to point to the ways those differences tend to get overlooked in their elevation to prominence in the West. Nor do I mean to suggest that these writers are only read in ‘the West’ or that the audiences located in the geopolitical West are homogeneous. 4 Brennan’s list includes Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gabriel García Márquez, in addition to Salman Rushdie, the primary focus of his study. 5 Julio Cortázar maintained a relationship with Nicaragua and with members of the FSLN from the mid-1970s through to his death in 1984 and published Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce, a collection of essays dedicated to the FSLN; the collection has been translated into

Notes to pages 184–213

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English under the title Nicaraguan Sketches. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre, an account of the week he spent as the guest of poet and Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal in 1984. While there is little in her account that is self-aggrandizing, Rebecca Gordon’s Letters from Nicaragua nonetheless makes readily apparent the horrific casualities of the conflict and the real risk that a political tourist in her position incurred. See my discussion in chapter six. For an account of the impact of Disney comics on Latin America in particular, see Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald). Of course, unlike many migrants – refugees and asylum seekers in particular – Rushdie was not literally homeless. Timothy Brennan remarks on Rushdie’s investment in magical realism and the ways it surfaces as a trope in The Jaguar Smile: ‘The influence of García Márquez on Rushdie in a sense passed through Nicaragua. The Anglicization of “magical realism,” and the saleable “Third-Worldism” it represents, required the adoption of a specific attitude towards the colonial legacy’ (Salman Rushdie 65). The Jaguar Smile, on this reading, is less about international solidarity than it is about acquiring political licence for the use of a literary form associated with Latin America. This is not to say that Rushdie felt the need to acquire some kind of ‘authentic’ right to magical realist form; rather, it is to suggest that Rushdie’s interest in Nicaragua was at least as much a literary as a political one. De la Campa offers a more extended reading of the Cortázar story than is appropriate here. See also Barbara Harlow’s reading of it in Resistance Literature. Rushdie describes this struggle to gain the support of politicians and heads of state in an essay titled ‘The Last Hostage,’ republished in Step across This Line.

6: Political Tourism as Transnational Feminist Practice: Margaret Randall, Rebecca Gordon, and Adrienne Rich Parts of this chapter were presented at ‘(Dis)United Empires: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Britain and America’ at Queen’s University

278

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in May 2006. My thanks to Asha Varadharajan and Adnan Husein for their comments. 1 The book was published in Spanish under the title Todas estamos despiertas: testimonios de la mujer nicaragüense de hoy (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1980) the year before the English translation was published in Canada by New Star Books, a small press that published many of Randall’s books. 2 These terms are of course problematic, not least because they falsely imply monolithic geo-cultural entities undisturbed by transnational traffic and transculturation as well as the existence of homogeneous populations within the categories. I retain them only as a shorthand for unequal global power relations and methodologies that work to shore up rather than undermine imperial power. 3 In this and other essays, Rich frequently uses ‘North American’ interchangeably with ‘U.S.,’ and while in the context of this sentence ‘North American’ could well include Canada and Mexico, Rich tends, ironically enough in light of the aims of her ‘politics of location,’ to elide the other nations of North America in her usage of the term. Kaplan, equally problematically, also makes North America synonymous with the United States. 4 Similar critiques have been made by bell hooks and Michelle Wallace. 5 See for example the essays about I, Rigoberta Menchú by Doris Somer and Arturo Arias. 6 As John Beverly reminds us in his discussion of the Lacanian Real in ‘The Real Thing,’ ‘the Real is, like the subaltern itself ... not an ontological category but a relational one, historically, socially, and psychically specific’ (274). 7 Elena Poniatowska’s La Noche de Tlatelolco remains an important documentary account of the massacre. 8 For a detailed account of this time in Randall’s life see Part of the Solution and Coming up for Air. 9 While the majority of scholars writing about testimonio seek to distinguish it from ‘oral history’ (see for instance John Beverly’s seminal essay ‘The Margin at the Center’), Randall uses the terms interchangeably. In fact, she uses the term ‘oral history’ to describe the

Notes to pages 227–42

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work she has done more commonly than she does ‘testimonio.’ Because Randall’s work is usually classed as testimonio by scholars working in this area, however, I will use the term testimonio, even though in a couple of instances – Risking a Somersault in the Air and Sandino’s Daughters Revisited – the form of her work seems almost to push beyond the boundaries of the genre, at least as it has been defined by scholars like Beverly and Yúdice. Randall identifies several of the other women engaged in producing testimonios in the 1970s and 1980s: Moema Viezzer, Elisabeth BurgosDebray, Nancy Morejón, Elena Poniatowska, Laurette Séjourné, Karen Wald, and Medea Benjamin. With the exception of Nancy Morejón and Elena Poniatowska, all of these women were working outside of their national contexts. For a detailed analysis of the discontinuous yet sympathetic aims of testimonialista and subaltern subject, see Barbara Harlow, ‘Testimonio and Survival: Roque Dalton’s Miguel Mármol’; for other accounts of the ways a narrator uses the testimonio form in subversive ways, see the essays by Doris Somer and Arturo Arias on I, Rigoberta Menchú. As Randall reports in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, however, ‘the FSLN had a more effective plan through which they would obtain her release’ (209). Tijerino was released from prison together with many other political prisoners when an FSLN commando staged a successful hostage-taking at the National Palace in 1978. I borrow the concept of ‘world-’travelling from María Lugones. As Randall’s pamphlet Testimonios: A Guide to Oral History suggests, the work of compiling the stories of Nicaraguans was regarded as an important facet of the revolutionary development of Nicaraguan society and something that many Nicaraguans eagerly engaged in, both as narrators and as compilers. See, for instance, Gioconda Belli’s celebration of Randall’s work. Gordon does not dwell on the aspects of the revolution that she dislikes; like so many political tourists allied with anti-imperial struggles, she seems to feel that loyalty to the aims of the revolution should take precedence over overt criticism, at least while the revolution itself is under siege. See Elizabeth Cook (2).

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18 Lauren Berlant’s recent work reminds us that intimacy is always already political, even – perhaps most especially – when it does not take an overtly political form. Epilogue 1 See, for instance, the essays and interviews in the section ‘Founding the International Solidarity Movement’ in Josie Sandercock et al., eds, Peace under Fire. 2 Quotations from Corrie’s emails are taken from the Rachel Corrie Memorial Website, which posts the versions of the emails published in The Guardian (18 March 2003). 28 February 2007 . These versions are somewhat more extended than those reproduced in the printed collections.

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Illustration Credits

Figure 1.1: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The University of Texas at Austin, by permission of the Nancy Cunard Estate. Figure 1.2: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The University of Texas at Austin, courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s. Figures 2.1–2.3: © 1939 by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Figures 4.1– 4.3: Rod Bantjes. Reprinted by permission of the photographer.

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Index

Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 22 activism, anti-fascist, 8 activism, anti-globalization, 254 activism, anti-imperial, 8, 17, 36, 53, 57, 61, 63, 72, 127, 250; and political tourist texts, 17; transnational dimensions of, 4 activism, anti-racist, 34, 36, 53, 55– 7, 61, 63, 72 Adams, Jan, 215, 241, 243 affect, 48, 111, 135, 245–6, 256; as factor in solidarity, 14–15, 60–1, 262; political, 33, 77, 111, 241– 3, 248–51, 263–4 affiliation, 127, 186, 188, 190–1, 206, 270n; cross-cultural, 3, 6; feminist, 219; negotiation of, 124–5; sought by political tourists, 112; transnational, 3–6, 18, 112 Ahmad, Aijaz, 25 Alborta, Freddy, 147 Alley, Rewi, 91 AMNLAE (Associación de mujeres

nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinosa / Luisa Amanda Espinosa Nicaraguan Women’s Association), 236, 239–40 AMPRONAC (Association of Nicaraguan Women Confronting the Nation’s Problems), 236 Anagnost, Ann, 120 Anderson, Benedict, 14 Anderson, Jon Lee, 145, 158–9 anti-imperialism, 110, 122, 145, 152–3, 186, 188, 217, 241. See also imperialism ‘Apocalypse at Solentiname’ (Cortázar), 207–8 Appadurai, Arjun, 5, 135 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 12, 18, 182, 185 Arbenz, Jacobo, 161–2 Arce, Bayardo, 194 art, politically committed, 85–6, 189–90 Asian-African Conference, 21–2 Auden, W[ystan] H[ugh], 8, 27–8,

302

Index

75–107, 206, 252; and cosmopolitanism, 13; and drag, 27–8, 76–8, 81–6; implication in imperialism, 88–9, 91; Journey to a War, 27–8, 75–107; relationship to left in Britain, 10; and reportage, 27–8; and revolution, 27–8; in Spain, 8, 86 Avery, Brian, 258–9 Back on the Road (Guevara), 138, 150, 159–63 Balibar, Etienne, 24–5, 28, 110, 264 Bandung Conference. See AsianAfrican Conference Bandung era, 8 Banting, John, 56 Barker, Robert, 37 Barnet, Miguel, 227 Barradas, Efrain, 164 Bates, Ruby, 64–5, 69–70 Battle Hymn of China (Smedley), 8, 28–29, 111, 113, 119–33 Bayo, Alberto, 147 Beauvoir, Simone de, 139 Belden, Jack, 78, 132 Belli, Gioconda, 279 belonging, 49–50, 118, 121, 171, 241, 245, 251, 253; cross-cultural, 6, 239; impediments to, 52; narratives of, 15, 111, 223; and nation, 224–5; ‘outside,’ 221–2; political tourists’ quest for, 112, 126, 131–3, 166, 220–1, 248; transnational, 6, 135, 163, 243 Benhabib, Seyla, 266n

Benjamin, Walter, 253 Benveniste, Emile, 43 Berger, John, 39, 147–9 Berman, Marshall, 196 Beverly, John, 228–9, 246, 253–4, 278n Bhabha, Homi, 202, 266n, 267n, 276n Black Man, White Ladyship (Cunard), 58–61, 71 Blair, Tony, 19 Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Rich), 214, 217–21 Boehmer, Elleke, 179, 183 Bolivian Communist Party, 169 Bolivian Diary (Guevara), 167–9, 171 Borges, Jorge Luis, 147 Bozorth, Richard, 269n Brennan, Timothy, 10, 183–4, 186–8, 190, 210–11, 277n; and critique of ‘new’ cosmopolitanism, 18, 265n; on internationalism and cosmopolitanism, 11– 12 Bryant, Marsha, 82, 269n Bush, George, Sr, 235 Butler, Judith, 27–8, 31, 61, 109– 11; on gender as drag, 77–8; on performance, 17 Cáceres Valle, Julio Roberto, 164– 5 Campa, Román de la, 146–7 Capa, Robert, 97, 269n Calhoun, Craig, 23–4; and critique of ‘new’ cosmopolitanism, 18

Index Cardenal, Ernesto, 207, 214, 229, 277n Carrillo Rowe, Aimée, 220 Carrión, Luis, 194, 197, 198 Castañeda, Jorge, 144 Castro, Fidel, 160, 162, 165, 167, 169, 273n Caudwell, Christopher, 79 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 17, 28,111, 115–16, 133, 136 Chamberlain, Joseph, 19 Chattopadhyaya, Virendranath, 10, 127 Cheah, Pheng, 266n Chiang Kai-shek, 113 Chiapas: indigenous resistance, 7, 254; as site for political tourism, 32, 254–8 ‘Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, A Storm and a Prophecy’ (Marcos), 255–7 Chilean Communist Party, 156 China, 21; Auden and Isherwood in, 28, 75–6, 81–105; as site for political tourism, 8, 78–9; Smedley in, 11, 28, 110–36. See also Hankow China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army (Smedley), 117–18, 119, 132 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 11, 83, 113, 120, 121–2, 129, 133, 136 Chinese revolution. See under revolution Chow, Rey, 117

303

Christopher and His Kind (Isherwood), 75, 77 citizenship, 31, 224–5; world, 20, 264 class, 34, 36, 57–9, 91,129, 154–6, 175, 218, 232, 237–8, 245, 248; as barrier for identification, 13, 170–1; and gender, 58, 181; as ground for politics, 25; as mode of identification, 57 Cleaver, Harry, 254 Clifford, James, 11, 266n Cohen, Mitchell, 12, 185 Colás, Alejandro, 12–13, 265n Cold War, 8, 208 colonialism, 153, 180; legacies of, 202 Color Curtain, The, 22 commitment, political: 86, 93, 103, 206, 209; impediments to, 28, 79–81, 86–8, 6; to social transformation, 16; transnational, 3; value of, 105–7. See also art, politically committed commodification, 137–8, 144, 146, 188, 193; of ‘otherness,’ 188–9, 193; of the postcolonial migrant, 182 communism, 10, 62–8, 78; association with promiscuity and miscegenation, 63 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 157–8 Communist Party, U.S. (CPUSA), 62–8, 71; anti-lynching activities, 64, 66–8, 71; and homosocial behaviour in, 61, 63–6, 68–9;

304

Index

inter-racial relations in, 63; policies on racial oppression of, 63; and Scottsboro case, 64–8 Cornford, John, 79–80, 105 Corrie, Rachel, 258–63 Cortázar, Julio, 184, 207–8, 276n cosmopolitanism, 49, 111–12, 163, 178, 183–7, 197, 206; anti-imperialist, 4–5, 21–3; armoured, 5, 212; colonial legacy of, 26–7, 30; contemporary debates about, 3– 4, 18–19; as detachment, 3–4; as distinct from internationalism, 11–13; ethos of, 4, 6, 12, 19, 23; imperialist tendencies of, 19, 111; liberal variants of, 4, 12, 185; limits of, 211–12; Marxist variants of, 12–13; of May 4th intellectuals, 21; new, 3, 11, 111– 12; in non-Western world, 32; and patriotism, 12, 185; as political commitment, 7; of postcolonial migrant writers, 183–4, 206; rooted, 12, 185; vernacular, 26, 185–6; vulgar, 6, 26, 212 cosmopolitical practice, 14, 19, 32, 264, 266n Crowder, Henry, 44, 56, 58, 71 Cuba: Cunard in, 40–2; Guevara and, 15, 145; as site for political tourism, 7, 138, 144. See also Santa Clara and the Sierra Maestra Cuban revolution. See under revolution Cuban Women Now (Randall), 227, 233

Cultural Congress of Havana, 226 cultural studies, 3, 9, 214 Cunard, Lady Maud ‘Emerald,’ 58–60 Cunard, Nancy, 8, 26–27, 33–73, 135, 251; Black Man, White Ladyship, 58–61, 71; and cosmopolitanism, 13; in Cuba, 40–2; as fellow traveller, 10, 62–71; and gender, 27, 35–6, 54, 58–60; in Harlem, 8, 27, 44–53, 54, 56; hate mail, 55–6, 61, 63; Negro: An Anthology 33–8, 44–53, 56, 69–73; partisanship of, 27, 35; and racial difference, 27, 34–5, 55–61; relation to imperialism of, 27, 34–5, 37, 61, 72–3; representations of, 50–2; role as ethnographer, 44–8; and Scottsboro case, 55, 61–72, 251; and sex scandal, 27, 35, 56–7, 63; and sexuality, 54; in Spain, 8 Cunningham, Mirna, 238 Dalton, Roque, 207, 227 Dario, Rubén, 226 Daughter of Earth (Smedley), 270n Davis, Angela, 71 Davis, David Brion, 271n Day Lewis, Cecil, 79 decolonization, 10. See also Bandung era Derrida, Jacques, 149–50, 158–9, 223, 266n, 275n; and genre, 17, 135 Ding Ling, 113 Dirlik, Arif, 21

Index

305

Edwards, Brent Hayes, 20, 72–3 embodiment, 17, 43–4, 72, 101, 223, 242–3; classed, 54–61; gendered, 54–61; and photography, 93–8; racialized, 54–61 Engels, Friedrich, 12, 157–8; Communist Manifesto, The, 157–8 Englishness, 59 Enlightenment, the, 209, 242, 266n; conception of the public sphere of, 249, 256; emancipatory narratives of, 30, 110–11; philosophy of, 20, 115–16, 133–4 epistolary form. See under genre Eskin, Stanley, 85 Espinosa, Diana, 238 Eurocentrism, 11, 39, 153, 174 exile, 14 EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de liberación nacional / Zapatista National Liberation Front), 145–6, 254–5, 273–4n

feminism, 31, 222, 230–52; anticapitalist, 220; anti-imperialist, 217, 241, 250; anti-racist, 217, 219; ‘global,’ 220, 251; as motivation for political tourism, 215; transnational practices of, 213– 14, 216–17, 227, 233, 235, 237, 251; ‘without borders,’ 215–16, 228, 245 Ferguson, James, 26, 267n Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 184, 277n filiation, 25, 125, 186, 190–1, 270n Final Communiqué of Asian-African Conference, 21–2 First Universal Races Congress, 20 Fleming, Peter, 82–4, 90, 269n Fonseca, Carlos, 231 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 79 Fox, Ralph, 79 Franco, Jean, 143–4 Franklin, Cynthia, 260 Freud, Sigmund, 5 Friesen, Oris, 78–9, 269n FSLN (Frente Sandinista de liberación nacional / Sandinista National Liberation Front), 11, 138, 178, 190, 192–4, 197–9, 204–5, 207–8, 211, 214–15, 231, 233, 235, 238–9, 248, 252, 253 Fuss, Diana, 270–1n Fussel, Paul, 265n

Fabian, Johannes, 114, 274n ‘fables of responsibility,’ 16, 257– 8, 260–1 Fanon, Franz, 202

Gadea, Hilda, 145, 275n Gandhi, Indira, 186 Gandhi, Leela, 4 Garber, Marjorie, 76

dis-identification, 46–8, 70, 85, 126. See also identification displacement, 14, 178 drag, 27, 76–8, 81–6 documentary. See under genre Douglas, Ann, 71 DuBois, W.E.B., 20 Dussel, Enrique, 26, 30, 267n

306

Index

García Canclini, Néstor, 29, 138–9, 143, 172–4 García Márquez, Gabriel, 204, 276n, 277n Gathering Rage: The Failure of Twentieth-Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda (Randall), 235–6 Geertz, Clifford, 44, 132 Gelhorn, Martha, 124 Gellert, Hugo, 64 gender, 34–6, 54–60, 63–72, 124, 175, 230–8, 251; and drag performance, 76–8, 82–5; as ground for politics, 25; and imperialism, 57–8; as refigured by political tourism, 26; relationship to class, 58–60, 237–8; relationship to race, 36, 43, 58–60; and revolutionary leadership, 166–71; roles, 128–9 genre, 15, 31, 76–7, 85–93, 111, 149–50, 164, 202–3, 222; documentary, 29, 93, 114, 116, 118, 121, 124–6, 132, 134, 135–6, 270n, 272n; epistolary form, 31, 222–4, 242–3, 259, 263; life-writing, 111, 114, 124, 127, 135, 149–51, 158–9, 163, 166, 270n; lyric, 98, 101; and political tourist texts, 7, 16; sonnets, 76, 87, 98–102; speaking bitterness narratives, 29, 119–21; testimonio, 31, 166, 214, 222–4, 227–31, 239, 246, 253, 278n; travel narratives, 29, 42–3, 76, 83, 111, 114, 135, 151, 193–4, 207; war

reportage, 27, 29, 76, 111, 112, 116–17, 124 Ghosh, Amitav, 183 Gikandi, Simon, 18 Gilroy, Paul, 5–6, 11, 19, 24, 34, 212, 258 globalization, 138–9, 144, 146, 172, 177, 180, 188, 245, 254, 264; cultural dimensions of, 10 Gold, Mike, 64 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 145 Gordon, Rebecca, 31, 72, 215, 217, 221–2, 241–51, 259, 277n; and epistolary form, 31; Letters from Nicaragua, 31, 215, 241–9, 259 Gordon, Taylor, 56 Gott, Richard, 159 Granado, Alberto, 152–5, 157, 159, 161, 174n Greene, Graham, 81 Grosvenor, Peter, 81 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che,’ 8, 29–30, 106, 137–75, 224, 250–1, 273n, 274n; Back on the Road, 138, 150, 159–63; Bolivian Diary, 167–9, 171; as exemplary political tourist, 17, 138–9, 144, 148–50; as internationalist, 12, 14; and message to the Tricontinental, 22, 148–9; The Motorcycle Diaries, 138, 150–9; on participation of women in the revolution, 168–9; Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo, 171; relationship to Cuba, 15, 145; Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 138, 150, 163–72; representations of,

Index 29, 137–46; revolutionary transformation of, 160, 162, 164–72; and socialism, 11; and travel diaries, 29, 138 Gugelberger, Georg, 227 Hall, Stuart, 6, 185 Hankow, 78–9, 103–5, 134; Auden and Isherwood in, 103–5; political tourists in, 78–9; Smedley in, 103, 134 Harlem, 8, 27, 44–53, 54, 56 Harlem Renaissance, 44 Harlow, Barbara, 277n, 279n Hemingway, Ernest, 79 Hinton, William, 272n Holland, Patrick, 83 Hsu Chuen, 117–18 Hsu Tse-mo, 271n Huggan, Graham, 83, 188–9, 191 Hughes, Langston, 63–4, 66, 68, 268n Hulme, Peter, 4, 26, 73, 180 human rights, 19, 254; in UN Charter, 21 Hume, David, 115 Huntington, Samuel, 5 Hurndall, Tom, 258–9 hybridity, 139, 143, 172–4, 180, 183, 185, 197 Hynes, Samuel, 76 identification, 44, 46–9, 54, 60, 134, 192, 217, 257, 259; beyond social location, 215, 251; crosscultural, 3, 13, 35, 49, 119; gendered, 54, 70, 72, 234; impedi-

307

ments to, 60, 91; with political struggle, 114, 190, 199, 202, 261; processes of, 10, 33, 36, 44, 58, 111; racialized, 70, 72; structures of, 124–7; transnational, 3, 13 imperialism, 8, 33–6, 116, 125–6, 127, 135, 153, 173, 186, 188, 192, 198, 206, 216, 220, 233, 243, 253, 260, 264; complicity with, 17; role of women in, 57 Indian nationalist movement, 113, 191 Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution: Doris Tijerino as Told to Margaret Randall (Randall), 229 intellectual, role of, 117–18 internationalism, 5, 13, 22, 165, 168–9, 212, 221, 222, 234–5, 246, 253, 258; black, 20, 34–6, 72–3; as distinct from cosmopolitanism, 11–13; feminist, 216, 249–50; impediments to, 171–2; principle of, 175 International Labor Defense (ILD), 63, 65, 68–9 International Solidarity Movement (ISM), 258–9, 261 International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, Madrid, 86 Isherwood, Christopher, 27–8, 75– 107, 206, 252, 274n; Christopher and His Kind, 75, 77; and cosmopolitanism, 13; and drag, 27–8, 76–8, 81–6; implication in imperialism, 88–9, 91; Journey to a

308

Index

War, 27–8, 75–107; relationship to left in Britain, 10 Jaguar Smile, The (Rushdie), 8, 30, 178–212, 252 Jara, René, 223–4 Jameson, Fredric, 14–16, 222 Journey to a War (Auden and Isherwood), 8, 27–28, 75–107; Smedley’s opinion of, 104–5 July 26th Movement, 161 Kaplan, Caren, 217–18, 231 Keenan, Thomas, 16, 106, 249, 252, 256–7, 260–1 Kelley, Robin D.G., 20, 63 Kerr, Sir Archibald Clark, 92, 269n Kerr, Douglas, 86–7 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 179 Koestler, Arthur, 80 Krishnaswamy, Revathi, 180–2 Kristeva, Julia, 168, 272n Kunzle, David, 144–6 Kuomintang, 112–13 League of Struggle for Negro Rights, 63 Lemelle, Sidney, 20 Lemke, Sieglinde, 62 Letters from Nicaragua (Gordon), 31, 215, 241–9, 259 life-writing. See under genre Li-po, 117 Lu Hsun, 113, 271n lynching, 64, 66–7, 69–71

Lyons, Laura E., 260 MacCannell, Dean, 9, 137, 139, 143, 161, 173, 188–9, 273n MacKinnon, Janice, 113, 126, 132– 3 MacKinnon, Stephen, 78–9, 113, 126, 132–3, 269n Malcolmson, Scott, 111, 265n Malraux, André, 79 Mao Tun, 113, 271n March, Aleida, 158, 274n Marcos, Subcomandante Insurgente, 145–6, 255–7, 259, 273– 4n; ‘Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds, a Storm and a Prophecy,’ 255–7 Mármol, Miguel, 227 Marx, Karl, 12, 157–8, 265n; Communist Manifesto, The, 157–8 Marxism, 12 Maxwell, William J., 62–5 May Fourth movement, 20–1, 116, 125, 266–7n, 271n McClintock, Anne, 37, 39, 57 McLaren, Anne E., 272n Mellor, David, 97–8 Meneses, Vidaluz, 238, 240 migrancy, 30, 177–9, 187, 192, 196, 200–2, 210, 266n; paradigm of, 179, 180–3, 186; reification of, 180–2 migrant literature, postcolonial, 179, 183–4, 202–4 migrant’s gaze, 30, 189, 195–6, 199, 202, 206 migration, 177, 180, 199–202,

Index 266n; as hallmark of globalization, 177; and the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism, 30; recent increase in, 18, 180 Millán, Yuriria Pantoja, 146 Mo, Timothy, 183 modernity, 118, 119–23, 121, 127, 131, 132, 139, 143, 163, 172–4, 185; in China, 116; consciousness of, 137; discourses of, 26, 136, 174; emancipatory narratives of, 26; hybrid, 172–3; links to mobility of, 163, 274n; as particular cultural imaginary, 26, 110; relationship to suffering, 114–16; as universalist project, 110–11, 135, 172. See also transmodernity Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 31, 215–16, 228, 245 Monje, Mario, 169 Monteath, Peter, 86, 97 Montenegro, Sofía, 239–40 Mookerjea, Sourayan, 182–4 Moore, Richard B., 64 Motorcycle Diaries, The (Guevara), 8, 138, 150–9 My Name Is Rachel Corrie (Rickman and Viner), 259, 261 nation, 15, 112, 165, 169–71, 175, 195, 201–2, 222, 233, 245, 250– 1, 254; as ground for politics, 25; as refigured by political tourism, 26; as repressive force, 12; sovereignty of, 12. See also transnationalism

309

nationalism, 18, 57, 168, 254 national liberation struggle(s), 8, 165–7, 174–5, 184, 202, 210–11, 227, 233, 236–7, 241; anti-colonial, 7 National Salvation Association, 113, 121, 123, 251 Negro: An Anthology (Cunard), 8, 33–8, 44–53, 56, 69–73, 135 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 113 neo-imperialism, 4 neo-liberalism, 211, 253 New Culture movement, 20–1 Nicaragua: Gordon in, 31, 241–9; Randall in, 31, 224–41; Rich in, 31, 218–221; Rushdie in, 30, 178, 188–212; as site for political tourism, 7, 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 158 ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’ (Rich), 214, 220 Nussbaum, Martha, 109 Ocampo, Victoria, 203 Okri, Ben, 183 Ortega, Daniel, 194, 198 Ortiz, Victoria, 169 Orwell, George, 189–90 Padmore, George, 251, 268n Palestine: as site for political tourism, 32, 258–62; struggle for self-determination of, 7 Pan-Africanism, 19, 251, 253 panopticism, 34, 37–9 panorama, 37–9 Parry, Benita, 206

310

Index

particularism, 25–6, 92–3, 99–102, 109, 115, 136, 185, 216. See also universalism partisanship, 35, 52, 93, 110, 184, 208, 211; with political struggles, 6; rhetoric of, 52, 85–6 Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo (Guevara), 171 Patterson, Louise (née Thompson), 71 Paulson, Justin, 255 performance, 53, 92–3,131, 136, 217, 239–40, 258; ambiguities of, 106; camp, 81–5; racialized, 49–50; speaking bitterness as, 120–1; of ‘staged marginality,’ 189 ‘performative contradiction,’ 109– 11 Phillips, Caryl, 183 photography, 38–9, 40–3, 93–8, 148; and authority, 52–53; documentary, 80 political tourism: affective dimensions of, 15, 28, 77–8; archive of, 147; central problematic of, 166; compromised status of, 187–8; consolidation of, 163–4; as cultural practice, 3–5, 9, 16, 172–4, 241; definition of, 3–5, 7–9, 28, 77–8, 81, 138, 215, 218; and ‘ideal’ universality, 24, 109– 10, 212, 264; impediments to, 24, 235; implication in imperialism, 19, 88–9, 91, 125, 173, 220; motivations for, 14, 24, 137–8, 213, 215, 251; and nation, 14;

and national liberation struggles, 23, 165–6; and particularism, 32; and performative character of, 27, 76–8; purpose of, 9; relationship to cosmopolitanism and internationalism, 11–14, 111; relationship to migrancy, 177–9; relationship to modernity, 110, 116, 173–4; relationship to social transformation, 10, 29; relationship to tourism, 13; responsibility to others in, 16; role of the Internet in, 32, 254; as social science, 7, 23–4, 139, 172–4; subjective dimensions of, 14, 113; tension between veneration and transformation in, 29, 137–8, 143, 146, 149–50, 163, 174, 188; texts of, 14–17, 254, 257–8; as transnational subjectivity, 10; and universalism, 30; as witnessing of suffering, 136 politics of location, 31, 217–20 Poniatowska, Elena, 278n postcolonial exotic, 188 postcoloniality, 193 postcolonial migrant, 178, 181–2, 184, 188–9, 196, 206, 276n postcolonial studies, 3–4, 30, 178– 84, 196 practices of the self, 3, 28–9, 106, 133–5, 247, 264 Pratt, Mary Louise, 38–40, 180, 276n Price, Victoria, 64–5, 69–70 primitivism, 37, 48, 62

Index Probyn, Elspeth, 221–3 Rabinowitz, Paula, 124, 126, 270n race, 45–6, 49–50, 56–60, 63–72, 167, 171, 182, 218–19, 238, 245, 260; constructions of, 33–6, 43; as mode of identification, 57; as refigured by political tourism, 26; relationship to gender, 43; representations of, 43, 52, 60 Ramírez, Sergio, 192, 194, 198 Randall, Margaret, 31, 72, 214, 217–19, 221–2, 224–41, 250–2; and Cuban revolution, 11; Cuban Women Now, 227, 233; as editor of El Corno Emplumado, 11, 225–6; and FSLN, 11; Gathering Rage: The Failure of TwentiethCentury Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda, 235–6; Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution: Doris Tijerino as Told to Margaret Randall, 229; relationship to Nicaraguan women, 15; Risking a Somersault in the Air, 230; Sandino’s Daughters, 31, 214, 229, 232–5, 240–1; Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 31, 215, 229–31, 233, 235–41, 250; and testimonio, 31, 227 reader(s), 38, 126, 235, 240, 245– 6, 250, 253, 257–8, 259; as citizens, 242–3; complicity in suffering of, 126; identification with political tourists of, 235; responsibility of, 16, 106–7, 252, 262–4; and testimonio, 223; veneration

311

of revolution by, 159; as witness(es), 15, 116, 216–17, 222 Reagan, Ronald, 188–9, 192 Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Guevara), 138, 150, 163–72 reportage. See under genre representation: ethics of, 112, 118, 125–6, 136, 262–3; impediments to, 131–3; politics of, 37–9, 52– 3, 60, 118, 136, 262–3 resistance: anti-capitalist, 30; antifascist, 28, 77; anti-imperialist, 28, 30, 77, 110, 117, 145, 178, 186, 251; as marketing tool, 188; narratives of, 233 revolution, 13, 125, 137–9, 205, 207, 228, 230, 234–6, 239, 248– 9; and affective ties, 241–2; Che as principle of, 139; Chinese, 28, 111–14, 119, 125, 136; contradictions of, 106, 172, 205, 207; Cuban, 138, 159–60, 162–5, 171–2, 225–7, 231, 253; epistemology of, 167–8; as fashionable, 80, 105; as ‘migration,’ 178, 199–201; performative character of, 27, 77; place of feminism in, 231, 236; romanticizing of, 241; Russian, 10; Sandinista, 8, 30, 72, 139, 184, 187–8, 190–1, 193, 199–201, 204–5, 207, 214, 219, 225, 230, 233, 236–7, 244, 246, 253; and tourism, 161; as universalizing project, 173 Rich, Adrienne, 31, 72, 214, 217–

312

Index

21; Blood Bread and Poetry, 214, 217–21; ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location,’ 214, 220 Rickman, Alan, 259 Risking a Somersault in the Air (Randall), 230 Robeson, Paul, 54–5 Robbins, Bruce, 6, 11, 14–15, 112, 184, 216–17, 249, 261, 266n Rodríguez, Ileana, 166–70, 233–5 Roediger, David, 35 Rofel, Lisa, 110, 121 role of the intellectual, 117–18 Rushdie, Salman, 30–1, 177–212, 252, 263, 277n; authorial persona of, 30, 179, 186–7, 189, 206; and cosmopolitanism, 13, 185–7; and fatwa, 30, 179, 209– 10; The Jaguar Smile, 30, 178– 212; as postcolonial migrant, 30, 178, 181–2, 184, 188–9; relationship to FSLN, 30; The Satanic Verses, 179, 209–11 Russian revolution. See under revolution Said, Edward, 180, 186 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 168, 170–1 Sandinista(s). See FSLN Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers, 190 Sandinista revolution. See under revolution Sandino, Augusto César, 147 Sandino’s Daughters (Randall), 8, 31, 214, 229, 232–5, 240–1

Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (Randall), 31, 215, 229–31, 233, 235– 41, 250 Santa Clara: as marker for Guevara, 139; as sight/site for political tourists, 138, 144 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 138 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 179, 209–11 Sawhney, Sabina, 179 Sawhney, Simona, 179 Schafer, Kay, 253 Schreiner, Olive, 37 Schwarcz, Vera, 21 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 62 Seghers, Anna, 86 Sekula, Allan, 39 sentiment(s), 15; Enlightenment theory of, 17, 115, 249–50, 271n; transnational, 112, 184, 216–17, 250, 253, 257, 261 sexuality, 54, 76, 78, 81–5, 167, 215, 245–6; as refigured by political tourism, 26 Sierra Maestra, the: as marker for Guevara,143; as sight/site for political tourists, 143, 144 Simpson, David, 18 Sino-Japanese War, 75, 111, 253 Smedley, Agnes, 28–29, 103–6, 110–36, 174, 224, 229, 251; Battle Hymn of China, 28–9, 111, 113, 119–36; China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army, 117–18, 119, 132; Daughter of Earth, 270n; opinion of Journey to a War, 104–

Index 5; relationship to communism, 10; relationship to peasants and workers, 15; and speaking bitterness narratives, 29; and translation, 28–9; and universality, 28– 9; as witness to suffering, 28–9, 103, 123, 129, 134 Smith, Adam, 115 Smith, Sidonie, 253 Smith, Stan, 92, 99 Smith, Valerie, 66–7, 268n Snow, Edgar, 132 socialism, 10, 78, 160; and the Tricontinental, 22 socialist internationals, 10, 13 social movements, transnational, 254–5 solidarity, 36, 76, 82, 86, 155, 171, 174, 177–8, 193, 205–8, 210–12, 227, 234, 236, 239–40, 248–51, 253–5, 258, 263; and affect, 22; and asymmetries of power, 213, 230, 264; and collectivity, 261–2; between colonized countries, 22; conventions of, 28, 78; discursive conditions for, 27, 136; impediments to, 7, 36, 44, 62, 72, 90–2, 99–102, 106, 119, 246– 7; as ‘long-distance empathy,’ 6, 252; material conditions for, 27, 221; narratives of, 261; and particularism, 13; performance of, 15, 72, 103, 106, 129–31, 217, 239–40, 258; political tourist texts as medium for, 15, 73, 112, 114, 128, 131, 135–6, 209–10, 216–17, 225, 229, 243, 252, 257,

313

261; and ‘rights-bearing bodies,’ 258; romanticizing of, 14, 253; sexualizing of, 61, 81; structures of, 214; and testimonio, 229; transnational, 4–5, 12, 18, 25, 30, 32, 106, 114, 174, 177, 185, 213–14, 222, 225–6, 243, 248–9, 251, 253; and universalism, 13; between women, 234–5; working-class, 62–4; as ‘world citizenship,’ 3 Solomon, Mark, 63 Spain: Auden in, 8, 86; Cunard in, 8; as site for political tourism, 28, 75, 77, 79, 81, 86 Spanish Civil War, 10, 75–81, 105, 147, 251; literature of, 77, 85–6, 105; photography of, 93–4, 97–8 spatial imaginary, 3, 32 speaking bitterness, 29, 119–22, 127, 131, 133, 135, 174, 229, 272n, 273n; and modernity, 119–21; origins of, 120, 272n; and subjectivity, 119 speaking bitterness narratives. See under genre Spender, Stephen, 80 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 17, 168–9, 173, 213–14, 248, 251, 271n, 275n; on imperial subjectivity, 33–4, 116, 170, 216, 222; on Rushdie, 178–9, 187, 209, 211; on transnational feminism, 213–14 subaltern, 17, 118, 121, 123, 134, 136, 175, 224 subjectivity, 119, 121, 160, 163–4,

314

Index

166–7, 182, 217; constructions of, 33–4, 50–2, 61, 82, 110, 114, 182, 246; gendered, 78, 82; impact of travel on, 151; imperial, 33–4, 61, 170, 248; modern, 28–9, 115–6, 121, 127, 132–3, 274n; of political tourist, 78, 82; queer, 82; revolutionary, 164, 166–71; subaltern, 121, 123; transnational, 17, 134, 164, 169, 171, 226 Sun Yat-sen, 112 Sun Yat-sen, Madame, 113, 251 Tagore, Rabindrinath, 203–4 Téllez, Dora Maria, 232, 234 Terrell, Mary Church, 71 testimonio. See under genre Thatcher, Margaret, 188, 209 Tijerino, Doris, 229, 231, 238–40 tourism, 137–44, 161, 164, 172, 189, 193, 214, 255–6, 224–5, 265n; definition of, 10, 33, 152; and inequality, 9; and modernization, 9; opposition to travel of, 13–14; and photography, 38– 9; and revolution, 161 tourist gaze, 38–44, 54, 72, 136, 151, 154, 195–6, 255, 272n, 274n; ambivalence of, 33, 37, 154, 195–6 translation, 110–111, 116, 128, 131, 136, 144, 147, 173–4, 192– 3, 241 transmodernity, 3 transnational imaginary, 30, 177, 184–5, 206

transnationalism, 111–12, 173–5, 212, 213–17, 226–7, 254, 263. See also belonging; commitment; feminism; identification; sentiment(s); solidarity; subjectivity travel, 154–5, 160, 193, 218–19, 265n; discourses of, 25, 38–40, 87, 150, 154, 177–8, 218, 246; and imperialism, 39–40, 60, 180; materiality of, 34, 39, 43; and narratives of becoming, 160, opposition to tourism of, 13–14, 52, 138, 151, 265–6n travel narrative. See under genre Tricontinental Conference, 22 universalism, 92–3, 99–102, 109, 111–12, 115, 135–6, 172–3, 185, 216, 251; and Asian-African Conference, 21 Urry, John, 10, 38, 163, 189, 195, 273n, 274n Van Teeffelen, Toine, 261 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 198, 208 Vassanji, M.G., 183 Viner, Katherine, 259 Walcott, Derek, 183 Waldron, Jeremy, 185 Ware, Vron, 35–6 Warmbold, Carolyn, 230 Wells, Ida B., 66–7, 71, 268n Whelan, Richard, 269–70n Wilson, Rob, 26 witness(ing), 103–7, 129, 132, 134, 162, 178, 223, 229–30; to suffer-

Index ing, 28–29, 114–117, 119, 121, 123, 132–4, 136, 262; writer as, 242 Witness for Peace, 215, 245, 251 women’s liberation movement, 233–5, 236, 239, 244; as transnational, 219–20 Woolf, Virginia, 217

Wright, Ada, 72 Wright, Richard, 22, 64, 267n Young, Robert, 22 Zapata, Emiliano, 146 Zapatistas. See EZLN Zhou Enlai, 21, 267n

315