THE RIGHT TO LOOK

A COUNTERHISTORY OF VISUALITY
Nicholas Mirzoeff

Duke University Press

Durham & London
2011

 2011 Duke University Press

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-9372-6 (electronic)

For KRIS, KARIN, and KATHLEEN

with great love and respect, and in solidarity.
And for HANNAH in hope of better futures

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE.

Ineluctable Visualities

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION.

The Right to Look, or, How to Think With and Against Visuality

......................Visualizing Visuality
ONE.

Oversight: The Ordering of Slavery

TWO.

The Modern Imaginary: Antislavery Revolutions and the Right to Existence

......................Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

THREE.
FOUR.

Visuality: Authority and War

Abolition Realism: Reality, Realisms, and Revolution

......................Puerto Rican Counterpoint II

FIVE.
SIX.

Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality, Ancient and Modern

Antifascist Neorealisms: North-South and the Permanent Battle for Algiers

......................Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint
SEVEN.

Global Counterinsurgency and the Crisis of Visuality

GALLERY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES
1 Anonymous, Johnny Heke (i.e., Hone Heke), 1856
2 Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, Indigoterie (detail), 1667
3 Anonymous, The Awakening of the Third Estate, 1789
4 Jos Campeche, El nio Juan Pantalen de Avils de Luna, 1808
5 William Blake, God Writing on the Tablets of the Covenant, 1805
6 James Sawkins, St. Jago [i.e., Santiago de] Cuba, 1859
7 Camille Pissarro, The Hermitage at Pontoise, 1867
8 Francisco Oller y Cestero, El Velorio [The Wake], 1895
9 Cover of Paris-Match
10 Bubbles scene from Rachida, 2002
11 Still of Ofelia from Pan's Labyrinth, 2006
FIGURES
1 Marie-Franoise Plissart from Droit de regards, 1985
2 Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, Indigoterie, Histoire gnrale des Antilles Habites par les Franois, 1667
3 Plan of the Battle of Waterloo
4 John Bachmann, Panorama of the Seat of War: Bird's Eye View of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia,
1861
5 Multiplex set from FM-3021 Aerial Photography: Military Applications, 1944
6 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Master Sergeant Steve Horton, U.S. Air Force
7 Anonymous, Toussaint L'Ouverture, ca. 1800
8 Dupuis, La Chute en masse, 1793
9 Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Untitled [Slaves, J. J. Smith's Plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina], 1862
10 Emilio Longoni, May 1 or The Orator of the Strike, 1891

11 Ben H'midi and Ali la Pointe from The Battle of Algiers, 1966
12 An Inconvenient Truth, 2006
13 Overseer, detail from Du Tertre, Indigoterie
14 Anthony Van Dyck, Charles I at the Hunt, ca. 1637
15 Thomas Jeffreys, Map of Jamaica, 1794
16 Plantation form, from Jacques-Franois Dutrne la Couture, Prcis sur la canne, 1791
17 Sugar Cane, from Jacques-Franois Dutrne la Couture, Prcis sur la canne, 1791
18 Anonymous, Terre des EsclavesTerre de la Libert
19 Anonymous, Lantern Looks at 14 July, 1789
20 Claude Niquet the younger, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 1789
21 Jacques-Franois Le Barbier, Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 1789
22 Anonymous, La Constitution Franaise, 1791
22a The Asian Despot, detail from La Constitution Franaise
23 Anne-Louis Girodet, Untitled [Sketches after Nature]
24 Edward M. Geachy, A Plan of the Negro Grounds, Green Valley Plantation, 1837
25 Jacques Louis-David, Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard Pass, 1800
26 Jos Campeche, Don Miguel Antonio de Ustriz, ca. 1792
27 Giuseppe Bagetti, Bataille au pont de Lodi, 1796
28 William Blake, Four Zoas, from Milton
29 Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Carlyle, 1867
30 Anonymous, Sojourner Truth
31 Camille Pissarro, Two Women Chatting by the Sea, 1856
32 Henry P. Moore, J. F. Seabrook's Flower Garden, Edisto Island, 1862
33 Henry P. Moore, G'Wine to de Field, 1862
34 Flix Nadar, Alexandre Dumas, pre
35 Paul Czanne, The Negro Scipio, 1865
36 Edouard Manet, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 1867
37 Edgar Degas, Interior of a Cotton Buyer's Office in New Orleans, 1873

38 The Couple, detail from Oller, The Wake

39 The Elder, detail from Oller, The Wake
40 The Owner, detail from Oller, The Wake
41 Gustave Courbet, The Winnowers, 1854
42 Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bearing the Bodies of the Dead Sons of the Roman Consul Brutus, 1785
43 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1601
44 Camille Pissarro, Evening Ball in a Posada during the Carnival in Venezuela [sic], ca. 185254
45 Anonymous, Te Atua Wera [Papahurihia?], from Frederick Maning, Old New Zealand, 1863
46 Anon, Kororareka [Russell], from Frederick Maning, Old New Zealand, 1863
47 Maori text of the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840
48ae Stills from J'ai huit ans, 1961
49 Information pyramid from Battle of Algiers, 1966
50 Dancing woman from Battle of Algiers, 1966
51 One day we decided to kill him, from Eije-Liisa Ahtila, Where Is Where? 2007
52 Rachida (Djouadi Ibtissem) in Rachida, 2002
53 Still of Ofelia's eye, from Pan's Labyrinth, 2006
54 Still of the Faun, from Pan's Labyrinth, 2006
55 Still from When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, 2006
56 Still from the video of the execution of Saddam Hussein
57 Major-General Peter Chiarelli, Full Spectrum Information Operations
58 Capt. Travis Patriquin, Group of Insurgents
59 Anonymous, PowerPoint Slide of Situation in Afghanistan 2009

PREFACE
Ineluctable Visualities

It's a while now that I've been tarrying with what James Joyce, in Ulysses, called the ineluctable
modality of the ineluctable visuality. That typically Joycean phrase could detain us for a while: why
is visuality ineluctable? Who has made it so? It's a repetition with a difference of a phrase that
appears earlier in Ulyssesineluctable modality of the visibleand both are part of Proteus,
Stephen Dedalus's interior monologue on the beach early in the day. Visuality is not, then, the visible,
but it is twice ineluctable, unavoidable, inevitable. Nor, to be brief, is it a new way of thinking, any
more than that currently fashionable term modality. By linking visuality with the archaic ineluctable,
Joyce pushes us in the direction of seventeenth-century metaphysics, and behind them Aristotle,
appropriate to Dedalus's concern with the veil between life and death as he mourns his mother and
seeks the word known to all men. So visuality is not the visible, or even the social fact of the
visible, as many of us had long assumed. Nor is it one of those annoying neologisms that are so ripe a
target for the book reviewer, for, as Joyce perhaps realized, the word became part of official English
in 1840, in the work of Thomas Carlyle, fulminator against modernity and emancipation of all kinds.
As Carlyle himself emphasized, the ability of the Hero to visualize was no innovation but
Tradition, a mighty force in the eyes of imperial apologists. To get the measure of this long
Tradition and the force of authority that renders it so ineluctable takes some time and space with no
apologies. That story, the one implied by an Anglo-Celtic (Carlyle was Scottish) imperial imaginary,
is the one whose counterhistory is offered here.
For in trying to come to terms with the ineluctable qualities of visuality, I have wanted to provide a
critical genealogy for the resistance to the society of the spectacle and the image wars of recent
decades. In turn, that genealogy would provide a framework for critical work in what has become
known as visual culture, not because historicizing is necessarily always good, but because visuality
both has an extensive and important history and is itself a key part of the formation of Western
historiography. More precisely, visuality and its visualizing of history are part of how the West
historicizes and distinguishes itself from its others. In this view, the visual turn represented
academically by visual culture was not liberating in and of itself, but sought to engage the deployment
of visualized authority at its points of strength. In so doing, I have crossed multiple borders, whether
literally in pursuit of archives or other materials researched on three continents and in two
hemispheres, or figuratively in the interface with academically discrete sets of area studies, historical
periodization, and media histories. One of the early criticisms of the field of visual culture was its
apparent hesitation to engage with weighty issues. The publication of such major books as W. J. T.
Mitchell's What Do Pictures Want? (2005) and the late lamented Anne Friedberg's The Virtual
Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006) has handily disposed of such objections. In this book I
hope to follow in such exalted footsteps by developing a comparative decolonial framework for the
field. I was impelled to do so by the questions raised in my study of the war in Iraq, Watching
Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005). Writing quickly, in the sadly mistaken
belief that this would be a short conflict, I came up against the paradox that the immense quantity of

imagery generated by the war had relatively little effect on the general public, a phenomenon I
labeled the banality of images. Nor did the Abu Ghraib photographs, disturbing as they of course
were, challenge that view. The photographs were not mentioned in the U.S. elections of 2004, and no
military figure above the level of the prison itself was subsequently disciplined: indeed, everyone in
the chain of command leading to the Abu Ghraib scandal was promoted. Against all traditions of
photojournalism and other modes of visual revelation, it seemed that visuality had become a weapon
for authority, not against it. In order to make sense of the apparent conundrum that such shocking
images have had so little public effect, it is critical to locate them in the genealogy I describe here.
I am not trying to reduce the materialized visualization to a cipher. On the contrary, it seems to me
that one of the major implications of W. J. T. Mitchell's famous claim, in 1994, that visual materials of
all kinds are as complex and significant as print culture is that the visual image is an archive in its
own right. Without extending this discussion, one issue of border crossing in this regard can be taken
as an example of the issues involved. In a number of instances drawn from the plantation complex of
the Atlantic world, I have used imagesor sometimes even the knowledge that there were images
which have been lostas a form of evidence. When I draw inferences from enslaved, formerly
enslaved, subaltern, or colonial subjects, there is often no textual support I can draw on beyond the
visual image. Therefore I use the formal analysis of style, composition, and inference that is
commonplace within the Western canon and its hinterlands to support my arguments. I further claim
that the wider historical frame I am developing here would reinforce such interpretations, just as
many cultural historians have done before me. I may be wrong, of course, but the use of the visual
archive to speak for and about subaltern histories of this kind, as opposed to simply being
illustrative of them, seems to me an important methodological question. If formal use of that visual
archive is to be disallowed in, say, Puerto Rico, then I want it disqualified in Rome as well. And if
that is not going to happen, then what methodological objection is operative in one place but not the
other? This objection comes most often from those in the field of art history, where attribution is a
central question. I do not, however, conceive of this book as art history, but rather as part of the
critical interpretation of media and mediation, performing what Mitchell has usefully called medium
theory, all puns intended. In this sense, I consider visuality to be both a medium for the transmission
and dissemination of authority, and a means for the mediation of those subject to that authority.
The main text will either justify these claims to readers or not. Here I would like to indicate one or
two omissions that might not be self-evident. As a matter of framing and containing this project, I
have used the tradition of authority that first inspired Carlyle and then was inspired, directly or
indirectly, by him. That is to say, this is a genealogy of the Anglo-French imperial project that was
launched in the direction of plantation colonies in the mid-seventeenth century and then diverged
radically with the outbreak of the French and Haitian Revolutions (17891804). This legacy was
disseminated to the United States in its capacity as a former British colony and by Ralph Waldo
Emerson's adaptation of Carlyle, published as Representative Men (1850). While some scholars
might question so extensive a reach, the imperial project writ large was (and is) an actively
conceived zone of experience, intervention, and imagination. James Anthony Froude called it
Oceana, in imitation of James Harrington's seventeenth-century treatise. On the other hand, for some
this sphere may not go far enough. I recognize the extent to which this Anglo-French-American
imagined community was contrapuntally interfaced with the Spanish empire, and I have given this
practical expression in a set of counterpoints from the Hispanophone Americas. These sections
deal with various forms of visual imagery, not because I conceive of Spanish empire as an image,
but because this is perhaps as far as I dare trust my knowledge and language skills. I have risked these

brief moments of imperial interpenetration as a sign of my sense that a very promising direction for
new research would be a collaborative exploration of the intersections of such globalizing
visualities. While I certainly imagine these zones as extending to South and East Asia, it has not been
within my skill-set to include them in this book, which I now conceive as simply the first step in a
longer project. Would it not, then, be prudent to conceive of this current volume as several books? It
is certainly true that I can imagine a book project on each of the different complexes of visuality that I
describe here. If the mode of critical analysis that I promote here takes hold, then I certainly see a
place for multiple books, whether written by myself or by others. Here I felt it was important to set
out the framework as a whole in sufficient detail that its outlines became clear, yet without presuming
that no modifications would be later necessary. Another suggestion to write a very short introduction
to the topic seems to me to prioritize the current fashion in publishing over sustained argument: I do
not see how a project for a reevaluation of modernity could be undertaken seriously in the hundredpage very short format so popular these days. Enough, then, of what this book is not, and on to what
it, for all its faults, actually is.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited from so many people's advice, insight, and material supportin part because
it took me longer to finish than I would have likedthat I cannot possibly list them all. The project's
first steps were taken under the auspices of a fellowship at the Humanities Research Center at the
Australian National University, Canberra, in 2001, and developed at the Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2002. My research into Maori history and culture
was enabled when I was a visiting scholar in the department of American studies at the University of
Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2005. Support for my research was provided by the deans of
the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University and later by Dean Mary Brabeck of the
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University. I owe
much to librarians and archivists at: Charlotte Amelie Public Library, St. Thomas; University of
Puerto Rico, Rio Pedras; the Macmillan Brown LibraryTe Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown,
University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand; the Australian National Library; Bibliothque
Nationale, Paris; Muse Nationale de la Rvolution Franaise, Vizille, France; the British Library;
the New York Historical Society Library; Melville Memorial Library at Stony Brook University; and
the Elmer Bobst Memorial Library at New York University. Of the venues where I have presented
portions of this project I would like to especially thank the Trans conference at University of
Wisconsin, Madison, in 2006; the AUP-NYU Media and Belief conference in Paris, in 2009; the Visual
Culture Conference 2010 at University of Westminster, London; the George Levitine Lecture at the
University of Maryland, in 2010; as well as the Modern Language Association, College Art
Association, and a variety of events at New York University and around New York City.
Among the many people that I want to thank, first place goes to the anonymous readers for Duke
University Press, who extended and challenged my thinking. This was one instance of the doubleblind peer review that really worked. Other readers and advisers who provided beyond-the-call-ofduty contributions were Terry Smith, Marita Sturken, and Dana Polan. I'd like to thank all my current
colleagues in the department of media, culture and communication at New York University and those
in the departments of art and comparative literature and cultural studies at Stony Brook University.
Further, my thanks go to all those students who helped me figure this project out as I went along and
experienced its growing pains. The picture research was enabled by the excellent work of first Max
Liboiron and then Ami Kim, to whom special thanks are due. At Duke University Press, Ken
Wissoker, Mandy Early, Jade Brooks, Tim Elfenbein, and Patricia Mickleberry have done sterling
work keeping me focused and actually editing the manuscript, a rarity these days in my experience.
Tara McPherson, Brian Goldfarb, Joan Saab, and Wendy Chun, my colleagues on the Alliance for
Networking Visual Culture project, have had to listen to versions of these ideas many times, and for
this and their inspiration and excellence, many thanks. I owe much to the friendship and intelligence
of a remarkable group of people at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, especially
Marcial Godoy, Jill Lane, and Diana Taylor. My peer network of friends and colleagues, thank you
all, especially: Arjun Appadurai, Jon Beller, Laurie-Beth Clark, Jill Casid, David Darts, Dipti Desai,
Hank Drewal, Kevin Glynn, Amelia Jones, Alex Juhasz, Ira Livingston, Iona Man-Cheong, Carol
Mavor, Jo Morra, Tom Mitchell, Lisa Nakamura, Lisa Parks, Carl Pope, Marq Smith and everyone at

the NEH-Vectors Summer Institute Broadening the Digital Humanities at the University of
California Research Institute in 2010.
There's no adequate formula to express what this book, and indeed my entire career and, even
more, my life beyond work, owe to Kathleen Wilson. Above and beyond using the direct ideas,
references, and insights that she has offered on almost every page, I have had the remarkable
experience of learning from and living with an intellectual of the first rank, as she reconfigures her
entire field. Latterly, I have witnessed her overcome some of the most serious challenges a person can
face with courage, intelligence, and even good humor. That is an inspiration I seek to live up to every
day, just as I try to become a better parent for the young woman that my daughter Hannah has become
during the time it has taken me to write this book.

INTRODUCTION
The Right to Look
Or, How to Think With and Against Visuality

I want to claim the right to look.1 This claim is, not for the first or the last time, for a right to the real.2
It might seem an odd request after all that we have seen in the first decade of the twenty-first century
on old media and new, from the falling of the towers, to the drowning of cities, and violence without
end. The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone
else's eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing
the other, or it fails. As such, it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not
individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: The right to
look. The invention of the other.3 Jacques Derrida coined this phrase in describing Marie-Franoise
Plissart's photo-essay depicting two women in ambiguous pursuit of each other, as lovers, and in
knowing play with practices of looking (see fig. 1).4 This invention is common, it may be the
common, even communist. For there is an exchange, but no creation of a surplus. You, or your group,
allow another to find you, and, in so doing, you find both the other and yourself. It means requiring the
recognition of the other in order to have a place from which to claim rights and to determine what is
right. It is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and
the sayable. The right to look confronts the police who say to us, Move on, there's nothing to see
here.5 Only there is, and we know it and so do they. The opposite of the right to look is not
censorship, then, but visuality, that authority to tell us to move on, that exclusive claim to be able to
look. Visuality is an old word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory word meaning the totality of
all visual images and devices, but is in fact an early-nineteenth-century term meaning the visualization
of history.6 This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized
is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This
ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of
authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the normal, or everyday, because it
is always already contested. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus opposed by the
authority of visuality. But the right to look came first, and we should not forget it.7

How can we think with and against visuality? Visuality's first domains were the slave plantation,
monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, operating as the surrogate of the sovereign. This
sovereign surveillance was reinforced by violent punishment but sustained a modern division of
labor. Visualizing was next the hallmark of the modern general from the late eighteenth-century
onward, as the battlefield became too extensive and complex for any one person to physically see.
Working on information supplied by subalternsthe new lowest-ranked officer class created for this
purposeand his own ideas and images, the general in modern warfare, as practiced and theorized
by Karl von Clausewitz, was responsible for visualizing the battlefield. At this moment, in 1840,
visuality was named as such in English by the historian Thomas Carlyle (17951881) to refer to what
he called the tradition of heroic leadership, which visualizes history to sustain autocratic authority.
Carlyle attempted to conjure the Hero as a mystical figure, a living light fountain that it is good and
pleasant to be neara natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven.8 If visuality had been the
supplement to authority on the plantation, authority was now that light. Light is divine. Authority is
thus visibly able to set things in motion, and that is then felt to be right: it is aesthetic. Visuality
supplemented the violence of authority and its separations, forming a complex that came to seem
natural by virtue of its investment in history. The autonomy claimed by the right to look is thus
opposed by the authority of visuality. Visualizing is the production of visuality, meaning the making of
the processes of history perceptible to authority. Visuality sought to present authority as selfevident, that division of the sensible whereby domination imposes the sensible evidence of its
legitimacy.9 Despite its name, this process is not composed simply of visual perceptions in the
physical sense, but is formed by a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into
a rendition of physical and psychic space. I am not attributing agency to visuality but, as is now
commonplace, treating it as a discursive practice that has material effects, like Foucault's
panopticism, the gaze or perspective. A given modality of visuality is composed of a series of
operations that can be summarized under three headings: first, visuality classifies by naming,
categorizing, and defining, a process defined by Foucault as the nomination of the visible.10 It was
founded in plantation practice, from the mapping of plantation space to the identification of cash-crop

cultivation techniques and the precise division of labor required to sustain them. Second, visuality
separates the groups so classified as a means of social organization. Such visuality separates and
segregates those it visualizes to prevent them from cohering as political subjects, such as the workers,
the people, or the (decolonized) nation. Third, it makes this separated classification seem right and
hence aesthetic. As the decolonial critic Frantz Fanon had it, such repeated experience generates an
aesthetic of respect for the status quo, the aesthetics of the proper, of duty, of what is felt to be right
and hence pleasing, ultimately even beautiful.11 Classifying, separating, and aestheticizing together
form what I shall call a complex of visuality. All such Platonism depends on a servile class,
whether formally chattel slaves or not, whose task it is to do the work that is to be done and nothing
else.12 We may engage in whatever labor is required to do that work, visual or otherwise, but for us,
there is nothing to be seen.
The right to look claims autonomy from this authority, refuses to be segregated, and spontaneously
invents new forms. It is not a right for declarations of human rights, or for advocacy, but a claim of the
right to the real as the key to a democratic politics. That politics is not messianic or to come, but has a
persistent genealogy that is explored in this book, from the opposition to slavery of all kinds to
anticolonial, anti-imperial, and antifascist politics. Claiming the right to look has come to mean
moving past such spontaneous oppositional undoing toward an autonomy based on one of its first
principles: the right to existence. The constitutive assemblages of countervisuality that emerged
from the confrontation with visuality sought to match and overcome its complex operations. I shall
gloss these terms here using the radical genealogy of the philosopher Jacques Rancire, whose work
has been central to this project, while emphasizing and insisting that they are derived from historical
practice. Classification was countered by education understood as emancipation, meaning the act of
an intelligence obeying only itself, even while the will obeys another will.13 Education has long
been understood by working and subaltern classes as their paramount means of emancipation, from
the efforts of the enslaved to achieve literacy, to nineteenth-century campaigns for universal education
that culminated (in the United States) with the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education
(1954). Education was the practical means of moving on from the work allocated to you. Separation
was countered by democracy, meaning not simply representative elections but the place of the part
that has no part in power. Plato designated six categories of people with title to power: all those
who remained, the great majority, are those without part, who do not count.14 Here the right to look is
strongly interfaced with the right to be seen. In combining education and democracy, those classified
as good to work and nothing else reasserted their place and title. The aesthetics of power were
matched by the aesthetics of the body not simply as form but as affect and need. This aesthetic is not a
classificatory scheme of the beautiful but an aesthetics at the core of politicsas the system of a
priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.15 In this book, these forms center
around sustenance and what I shall call the politics of eating, adapting a phrase from African and
African diaspora discourse. It might now be described as sustainability. These countervisualities are
not visual, you might say. I did not say they were. I claim that they are and were visualized as goals,
strategies, and imagined forms of singularity and collectivity. If they do not seem realistic, that is
the measure of the success of visuality, which has made vision and leadership into synonyms. It is
precisely that extended sense of the real, the realistic, and realism(s) that is at stake in the conflict
between visuality and countervisuality. The realism of countervisuality is the means by which one
tries to make sense of the unreality created by visuality's authority from the slave plantation to fascism
and the war on terror that is nonetheless all too real, while at the same time proposing a real

alternative. It is by no means a simple or mimetic depiction of lived experience, but one that depicts
existing realities and counters them with a different realism. In short, the choice is between continuing
to move on and authorizing authority or claiming that there is something to see and democraticizing
democracy.

COMPLEXES OF VISUALITY
The substance of this chapterit is more than an introduction to the rest of the book, although it is of
course also thatexplores how to work with the interfaces between visuality and countervisuality
within and between complexes of visuality from a decolonial perspective. Complex here means
both the production of a set of social organizations and processes that form a given complex, such as
the plantation complex, and the state of an individual's psychic economy, such as the Oedipus
complex. The resulting imbrication of mentality and organization produces a visualized deployment of
bodies and a training of minds, organized so as to sustain both physical segregation between rulers
and ruled, and mental compliance with those arrangements. The complex that thus emerges has
volume and substance, forming a life-world that can be both visualized and inhabited. I consider the
complexes of visuality to be an articulation of the claim to authority in what decolonial theory has
called coloniality, meaning the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation
of its effects in contemporary times.16 As Achille Mbembe has shown, such coloniality is formed by
modes of entanglement and displacement, producing discontinuities, reversals, inertias and
swings that overlay one another.17 This sense that the time is out of joint, appropriated by Derrida
from Hamlet, has come to be seen as the expression of the contradictions of globalization.18
Identifying these entanglements and moments of displacement are central to defining the genealogies
of visuality and form the material for the chapters that follow. Such networks also remind us that no
such genealogy can be comprehensive. Mbembe's emphasis on complex temporality further suggests
that one modality of visuality was not simply succeeded by another, but rather that their traces linger,
and can be revived at unexpected moments. The present is precisely one such moment, in which the
legacies of the plantation complex are once again active in the United States, due to the Obama
presidency, while imperial dreams are being worked out globally in full interface with the militaryindustrial complex. The very emergence of all the modalities of visuality at once suggests an
emergency, as both the condition of a critique of visuality and the possibility of the right to look. The
symptom of that emergency is precisely the ability to detect the crisis of visuality, such that the
visibility of visuality is paradoxically the index of that crisis.
The authority of coloniality has consistently required visuality to supplement its deployment of
force. Visuality sutures authority to power and renders this association natural. For Nelson
Maldonado Torres, this colonial violence formed a death ethic of war, meaning the extensive
presence of war and related social practices, such as mass incarceration and the death penalty, to
which I would add slavery, understood as being derived from the constitutive character of
coloniality and the naturalization of human difference that is tied to it in the emergence and unfolding
of Western modernity.19 This decolonial genealogy means that it will not be sufficient to begin a
critique of visuality in the present day, or in the recent past, but that it must engage with the formation
of coloniality and slavery as modernity.20 As Enrique Dussel has aptly put it: Modernity is, in fact, a
European phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is
its ultimate content.21 In order to challenge the claimed inevitability of this history and its hegemonic

means to frame the present, any engagement with visuality in the present or the past requires
establishing its counterhistory. In fact, I suggest that one of the very constitutive forms of visuality is
the knowledge that it is always already opposed and in struggle. To coin a phrase, visuality is not war
by other means: it is war. This war was constituted first by the experience of plantation slavery, the
foundational moment of visuality and the right to look. In antiquity, authority was literally a
patriarchal modality of slavery. The modern hero's authority restates the ancient foundations of
authority as slave-owner and interpreter of messages, the eternal half of modern visuality, to
paraphrase Baudelaire, the tradition that was to be preserved.
Authority is derived from the Latin auctor. In Roman law, the auctor was at one level the founder
of a family, literally the patriarch. He was also (and always) therefore a man empowered to sell
slaves, among other forms of property, which completed the complex of authority.22 Authority can be
said to be power over life, or biopower, foundationally rendered as authority over a slave.23
However, this genealogy displaces the question: who or what empowers the person with authority to
sell human beings? According to the Roman historian Livy, the indigenous people living on the site
that would become Rome were subject to the authority (auctoritas) of Evander, son of Hermes, who
ruled more by authority than by power (imperium). That authority was derived from Evander's
ability, as the son of the messenger of the gods, to interpret signs. As Rancire puts it, The auctor is
a specialist in messages.24 This ability to discern meaning in both the medium and the message
generates visuality's aura of authority. When it further becomes invested with power (imperium), that
authority becomes the ability to designate who should serve and who should rule. Such certainties did
not survive the violent decentering of the European worldview produced by the multiple shocks of
1492: the encounter with the Americas, the expulsion of the Jews and Islam from Spain, and the
heliocentric system of Copernicus. At the beginning of the modern period, Montaigne could already
discern what he called the mystical foundation of authority, meaning that it was ultimately unclear
who or what authorizes authority.25 As Derrida suggests, Since the origin of authority, the foundation
or ground, the position of the law can't by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are
themselves a violence without a ground.26 Authority's presumed origin in legality is in fact one of
force, the enforcement of law, epitomized in this context by the commodification of the person as
forced labor that is slavery. This self-authorizing of authority required a supplement to make it seem
self-evident, which is what I am calling visuality.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Scythians of antiquity blinded their slaves.
As the Scythians were horse-riding nomads, modern historians have concluded that this practice was
designed to prevent the slaves from escaping.27 It cannot but also suggest that slavery is the removal
of the right to look. The blinding makes a person a slave and removes the possibility of regaining the
status of a free person. While chattel slavery did not physically blind the enslaved, its legal authority
now policed even their imagination, knowing that their labor required looking. For example, in the
British colony of Jamaica the enslaved were forbidden even to imagine the death of any white
Person.28 By contrast, in the metropole it became a capital offence for subjects to imagine the death
of a king only during the revolutionary crisis of the 1790s.29 The difference in these laws suggest that
any white person in the plantation colony was the equivalent of the sovereign in the home nation.
Such laws became necessary when authority feared that the enslaved or feudal subject might act on
such imaginings, the always possible revolutionizing of the plantation complex. This anxiety moved
from plantation to metropole. In the North American context, reckless eyeballing, a simple looking
at a white person, especially a white woman or person in authority, was forbidden those classified as

colored under Jim Crow. Such looking was held to be both violent and sexualized in and of itself, a
further intensification of the policing of visuality. As late as 1951, a farmer named Matt Ingram was
convicted of the assault of a white woman in North Carolina because she had not liked the way he
looked at her from a distance of sixty-five feet.30 This monitoring of the look has been retained in the
U.S. prison system so that, for example, detainees in the Abu Ghraib phase of the war in Iraq (2003
4) were forcefully told, Don't eyeball me!31
In short, complexes are complex. They are divided against themselves first as configurations of
visuality against countervisuality and then as material systems of administering authority interfaced
with mental means of authorizing. In tracing a decolonial genealogy of visuality, I have identified
three primary complexes of visuality and countervisuality in this book, from the plantation complex
that sustained Atlantic slavery, via what was known to certain apologists for the British empire as the
imperialist complex, to President Dwight Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, which is
still very much with us. Each responded to and generated forms of countervisuality. The clash of
visuality and countervisuality produced not just imagined relations but materialized visualizations as
images of all kinds, as natural history, law, politics, and so on. The extended encounter between the
right to look and visuality created a world-generating optic on modernity, such that modernity is
produced as the West.32 What was at stake was the form of the real, the realistic, and realism in all
senses. From the decolonial perspective used here, it is the way that modernity looks when seen from
the places of visuality's applicationthe plantation, the colony, the counterinsurgencyback toward
the metropole. That look is not a copy, or even a reverse shot, but is equally constitutive by means of
its own reality effect of the classified, spatialized, aestheticized, and militarized transnational culture
that in its present-day form has come to be called globalization. Indeed, the contradiction that has
generated change within the complexes of visuality has been that while authority claims to remain
unchanged in the face of modernity, eternally deriving authority from its ability to interpret messages,
it has been driven to radical transformation by the resistance it has itself produced. This force has
applied to visuality and countervisuality alike as what Michel Foucault called intensity, rendering
them more economic and more effective.33 Under the pressure of intensification, each form of
visuality becomes more specific and technical, so that within each complex there is, as it were, both a
standard and an intensified form. That is the paradox glimpsed by Carlyle, in which history and
visualization have become mutually constitutive as the reality of modernity, while failing to account
entirely for each other.34 It is that space between intention and accomplishment that allows for the
possibility of a countervisuality that is more than simply the opposition predicated by visuality as its
necessary price of becoming.
In significant part, therefore, these modes of visuality are psychic events that nonetheless have
material effects. In this sense, the visualized complex produced a set of psychic relations described
by Sigmund Freud as a group of interdependent ideational elements cathected with affect.35 For
Freud, the complex, above all the famous Oedipus complex, was at first the name of the process by
which the internal pleasure principle became reconciled with the reality principle of the exterior
world. Following the experience of shell shock in the First World War, Freud revised his opinion to
see the psychic economy as a conflict between the pleasure drive and the death drive, leading to a
doubled set of disruptions. For Jacques Lacan, as Slavoj iek has described, the subject was
constituted by the inevitable failure to overcome this lack: The place of reality within the psychic
economy is that of an excess, of a surplus which disturbs and blocks from within the autarky of the
self-contained balance of the psychic apparatusreality as the external necessity which forces the

psychic apparatus to renounce the exclusive rule of the pleasure principle is correlative to this inner
stumbling block.36 The diagram that visualizes this process is an arrow that travels around a circle
until it is blocked at the last minute. The pleasure principle cannot quite fulfill its wish because
something from outside its domain intrudes and prevents it from doing so. For Lacan that thing was
epitomized by the Oedipus complex in which the law of the father prevented the infant from achieving
its desire to possess the mother. Authority thus counters desire and produces a self-conscious subject
who experiences both internal desire and external constraint as reality. In this book, I take the
existence of this doubled complex to be the product of history, as opposed to a transhistorical human
condition, specifically that of the violence with which colonial authority enforced its claims. From
the dream-world of the Haitian and French Revolutions and their imaginaries to the imperial
investigation of the primitive mind and Fanon's deconstruction of colonial psychology, producing
and exploring psychic complexes and complexity was central to the labor of visualization. Needless
to say, visualization has in turn now become part of the labor of being analyzed.

THE PLANTATION COMPLEX: AUTHORITY, SLAVERY, MODERNITY

Visualized techniques were central to the operations of the Atlantic world formed by plantation
slavery and its ordering of reality. The plantation complex as a material system lasted from the
seventeenth century until the late nineteenth, and affected primarily those parts of the globe known as
the Atlantic triangle: the European slave-owning nations, Central and West Africa, the Caribbean and
the plantation colonies of the Americas. The plantation complex designates the system of forced labor
on cash-crop plantations, in which the role of authority was described by historian Phillip Curtin:
The [slave] owner not only controlled his work force during working hours, he also had, at least de
facto, some form of legal jurisdiction. His agents acted informally as policemen. They punished most
minor criminals and settled most disputes without reference to higher authority.37 Sovereign
authority was thus delegated to the plantation, where it was managed in a system of visualized
surveillance. While the overseer was always confronted with revolt large and small, his authority
was visualized as the surrogate of the monarch's and hence Absolute. The overseer, who ran the
colonial slave plantation, embodied the visualized techniques of its authority, and so I call them
collectively oversight. Oversight combined the classifications of natural history, which defined the
slave as a species, with the spatializing of mapping that separated and defined slave space and
free space. These separations and distinctions were enabled by the force of law that allowed the
overseer to enforce the slave codes. This regime can be said to have been established between the
passing of the Barbados Slave Code, in 1661, and the promulgation of Louis XIV's Code Noir, in
1685. This ordering of slavery was interactive with the order of things famously discerned as
coming into being at the same period in Europe by Foucault. A certain set of people were classified
as commodifiable and a resource for forced labor. By means of new legal and social codes, those so
enslaved were of course separated from the free not just in physical space, but in law and natural
history. Once assembled, the plantation complex came to be seen to be right. In his justifications for
slavery, the nineteenth-century Southern planter John Hammond turned such stratagems into axioms of
human existence: You will say that man cannot hold property in man. The answer is that he can and
actually does all the world over, in a variety of forms, and has always done so.38
Under the plantation complex and in the long shadow of its memory, a moment that has yet to pass,
slavery is both literal and metaphorical: it is the very real trauma of chattel slavery and an expression

of a technically free social relation that is felt to be metaphorically equivalent to slavery. So, too, is
abolition literal and metaphorical. It expresses a moment of emancipation, but also a condition in
which slavery of all kinds would be impossible. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, the enslaved
had devised counters to the key components of oversight. Maroons, or runaway slaves, had
established settlements in many plantation colonies, sometimes signing formal treaties with colonial
powers and thereby remapping the colony. The enslaved had a superior understanding of tropical
botany and were able to put this knowledge to good effect in poisoning their masters, or so it was
widely believed. Finally, the syncretic religions of the plantation complex had produced a new
embodied aesthetic represented in the votive figures known as garde-corps, literally body guard.
The revolt led, in 1757, by Franois Makandal in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, united these different
techniques into an effective countervisuality that came close to overthrowing slavery. The
plantocracy, as the ruling planter class was known, responded by intensifying slavery. By the time of
the revolution, in 1791, Saint-Domingue was the single greatest producer of (colonial) wealth in the
Western world. Huge numbers of people were imported as forced labor as the planters sought both to
achieve autonomy for the island from the metropole and to automate the production process of the
cash crops, especially sugar. This intensification in turn produced the world-historical event of the
Haitian Revolution (17911804), the first successful act of decolonial liberation and the key
transformation in producing modern visuality. This intensification in the countervisuality of
antislavery produced the revolutionary hero as the embodied counter to the sovereign authority
represented by the overseer. The popular hero, such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, incarnated democracy
as the representative of the people, embodying a willed emancipation that was at once education and,
in his or her symbolic form, an aesthetic of transformation. Almost immediately, the hero was subject
to its own intensification within the new imaginary of the people. This pressure produced a cleft
within the revolution: was the priority now to be the imagined community of the nation-state or the
sustainable community at local level? In the events covered by this book, this question has been
persistently resolved by force in favor of the nation-state from Toussaint's 1801 Constitution for Haiti,
to the ending of Reconstruction in the United States, in 1877, and the reconfiguration of the Algerian
revolution, in 1965. The shared subsistence economy claimed by subaltern actors in each case, most
familiar now in the Reconstruction slogan forty acres and a mule, was presented as nave, even
reactionary, as it still is today in the face of the disaster of climate change. The perceived necessity to
restate national authority opened the way for the imperial appropriation of the revolutionary hero in
the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, the archetype of the modern Hero for Carlyle.
The specter of Haiti haunted the long nineteenth century that ended with decolonization. The images
of Dessalines cutting the white section out of Haiti's flag, in 1804, even as he declared it illegal for
whites to own property on the island were, to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot's trenchant term,
unthinkable. The permanent alienation of property by the formerly enslaved in Haiti claiming
their own right to autonomy forced the remaking of visuality as a permanent war, visualized as a
battlefield map. These two-dimensional representations of the array of forces as they confront each
other became the visualization of history in Carlyle's imagination. Given this separation, I will
describe the forms of visuality and countervisuality separately from this point forward. Visualizing
was the hallmark of the modern general from the late eighteenth century onward, as the battlefield
became too extensive and complex for any one person to physically see. The general in modern
warfare as practiced and theorized by Karl von Clausewitz was responsible for visualizing the
battlefield. He worked on information supplied by subalternsthe new lowest-ranked officer class
created for this purposeand by his own ideas, intuitions, and images. Carlyle and other defenders

of authority appropriated the hero from the Atlantic revolutions and merged it with military
visualization to create a new figure for modern autocracy. Although Carlyle liked to assert that
visuality was an attribute of the hero from time immemorial, he was above all haunted by the
abolition of slavery. In his monumental history of The French Revolution (1837), all revolution from
below is black, a blackness that pertained to the popular forces in France, described as black
sans-culottes, from the storming of the Bastille, in 1789, but especially to Saint-Domingue, shaking,
writhing, in long horrid death throes, it is Black without remedy; and remains, as African Haiti, a
monition to the world.39 This blackness was the very antithesis of heroism that Napoleon finally
negated. For Carlyle, to be Black was always to be on the side of Anarchy and disorder, beyond the
possibility of Reality and impossibly remote from heroism. It is precisely, then, with blackness and
slavery that a counterhistory of visuality must be concerned. The function of the Hero for Carlyle and
other devotees, appropriated from those revolutions, was to lead and be worshipped and thereby to
shut down such uncertainties. His visuality was the intensification of the plantation complex that
culminated in the production of imperial visuality.

IMPERIAL COMPLEX: MISSIONARIES, CULTURE, AND THE RULING

CLASS
Carlyle's attempt to embody visualized authority in the Hero might have appeared somewhat marginal
in the immediate aftermath of the emancipation of the enslaved and the envisaged self-determination
of many British colonies, to which India, as a dependency, was understood as an exception. However,
the multiple shocks generated by the Crimean War of 1856, and the return to a centralized model of
empire following the Indian mutiny in 1857, and other acts of anticolonial resistance from Aotearoa
New Zealand to Jamaica, reversed the position. Direct rule became the favored model of British
imperial administration, emancipation and self-rule were out of favor, and Carlyle's views became
mainstream. The crisis of imperial rule caused the opening of what became known as the ruling
class in Britain to certain sectors of the educated middle-classes, who would be central to the
governance of the immense empire. The eminent Victorians debunked by Lytton Strachey were
emblematic of that class, as was Strachey himself, as part of the Bloomsbury group. As Edward Said
famously pointed out, by 1914 some 85 percent of the world's surface was under the control of one
empire or another.40 Nonetheless, the imperial complex was presented as if it were a form of mental
disorder. In 1883, the historian J. R. Seeley described the British empire as having been acquired in a
fit of absence of mind.41 The term fit is striking, as if the mental condition of absence of mind
was closer to epilepsy than to forgetfulness. The phrase soon entered political language. For example,
the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald argued, in 1923, having cited Seeley: It was only when we
found ourselves in occupation of vast expanses of territory in all parts of the world that we developed
what psychoanalysts would call the Imperialist complex.42 This modality of denial produced its
counterpart in the colonized, as Fanon argued in a well-known passage of Black Skin, White Masks:
By calling on humanity, on the belief in dignity, on love, on charity, it would be easy to prove, or to
win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white. But my purpose is quite different: What I
want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed
by the colonial environment.43 The contest of visuality and countervisuality is not, then, a simple
battle for the same field. One sought to maintain the colonial environment as it was, the other to
visualize a different reality, modern but decolonized.

In this second alignment of visuality, an imperial complex had emerged, linking centralized
authority to a hierarchy of civilization in which the cultured were necessarily to dominate the
primitive. This overarching classification was a hierarchy of mind as well as a means of
production. Following Charles Darwin's proposal of the theory of evolution, in 1859, it was now
culture that became the key to imagining the relations of colonial centers and peripheries, as
visualized by the colonizers. In 1869, Matthew Arnold famously divided British modernity into
tendencies toward desired culture and feared anarchy, while giving unquestioned support to the forces
of law: While they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing
anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be
no perfection.44 With an eye to the political violence in London in 1866, Arnold claimed
hereditary authority from his father for his remedy, namely flog the rank and file, even if the cause
were a good one, such as the abolition of the slave-trade. Ending slavery itself would not by 1869
take priority over maintaining authority. The classification of culture and anarchy had become a
principle of separation whose authority was such that it had become right in and of itself.
Political divides at home between the forces of culture and those of anarchy were subsequently
mapped onto the distinctions between different layers of civilization defined by ethnographers. So
when Edward Tylor defined culture as the condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom and the like
in primitive societies, he was clear that European civilization (as he saw it) stood above all such
cultures.45 This dramatic transformation in conceptualizing nations as a spatialized hierarchy of
cultures took place almost overnight: Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) was followed by
Darwin's Descent of Man and Tylor's Primitive Culture, in 1871. Tylor presented Darwin's
description of the evolution of humanity as existing in real time, with the primitive being separated
only by space from the civilized. Whereas Carlyle's hero was a literally mystical figure, it was
now civilization that could visualize, whereas the primitive was ensconced in the heart of
darkness produced by the willed forgetting of centuries of encounter. In this way, visuality became
both three-dimensional and complexly separated in space. As Western civilization tended, in this
view, toward perfection, it was felt to be aesthetic and the separations it engendered were simply
right, albeit visible only to what Tylor called a small critical minority of mankind.46 That minority
was nonetheless in a position to administer a centralized empire as a practical matter in a way that
Carlyle's mystical heroes could not have done. The white man's burden that Rudyard Kipling
enshrined in verse was a felt, lived, and imagined relationship to the imperial network, now
visualized in three dimensions. Its success was manifested in the visualization of the primitive as
the hallmark of the modern, from Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon (1903) to the recent monument to
the French president Franois Mitterand's imperial ambition that is the Muse du quai Branly, a
museum of the primitive in all but name.
The foot soldiers of this labor of imperial visuality were Christian missionaries, who directly
represented themselves to themselves as Heroes in the style of Carlyle, bringing Light into Darkness
by means of the Word. One of the distinguishing features of imperial visuality was its emphasis on
culture as language, or more precisely on the interpretation of the signs produced by both the
primitive and the modern. As W. J. T. Mitchell among others has long stressed, word and image
are closely imbricated, and this relation forms a field in itself, central to the understanding of
modernism.47 Rancire understands this as the sentence-imagein which a certain sight has
vanished, where saying and seeing have entered into a communal space without distance and without
connection. As a result, one sees nothing: one does not see what is said by what one sees, or what is

offered up to be seen by what one says.48 This chaos of the civilized was articulated in relation to
the excavation of the primitive as a resource for the understanding of modernity and its civilization.
Just as the plantation was the foundation of discipline, so can we see the missionaries as the agents of
what Foucault called the pastorate, the model for governmentality. The Christian pastorate moved
beyond territory, operating a form of power that, taking the problem of salvation in its general set of
themes, inserts into this global, general relationship an entire economy and technique of the
circulation, transfer and reversal of merits.49 The global pastorate proceeded by specific techniques
for the care and production of souls. Whereas in the West, the priority was from the first the conduct
of souls, imperial visuality sought first to create them from the raw materials of the heathen. There
is an entanglement that could be developed here with the genealogy of imperial visuality in the
Americas, with the difference that the Carlyle-inspired missionaries never imagined the conversion of
entire peoples so much as the delegated control of populations by means of targeted Christianizing. In
this process, the colonized had to be made to feel and visualize his or her deficiency or sinfulness.
This awareness would both lead them to Christianity and generate desires for the consumer goods of
civilization, such as Western-style clothing. Only then could the newly minted soul be subjected to
discipline, and these subjects, the mimics of the colonizers, were always a minority within the colony.
The emblematic new souls were the indigenous baptized and especially the priesthood. Within the
former plantation complex, the souls of black folk were, to borrow W. E. B. Du Bois's famous
phrase, subject to a double consciousness across the primary mode of division and separation in
the twentieth century, the color line.
In this book, I explore these entanglements via the concept of mana, so central to modern theories
of the primitive from Durkheim to Lvi-Strauss, which was reported to Britain's Royal
Anthropological Society, in 1881, by the missionary R. H. Codrington. Relying on two indigenous
priests as native informants, Codrington had elaborated a theory of mana as that which works by the
medium of spiritual power. This majesty and force then attached itself to specific individuals, the
precursors of the modern hero. In short, the primitive mind was used as a source of, and justification
for, the imperial theory of domination. Almost at once, by virtue of the prevalent uniformitarianism,
mana became central to the modern theory of the global primitive. However, mana has since been
shown to be a verb, not a noun, expressing an abstract state rather than a spiritual medium. Imperial
visuality was based on a set of misrecognitions that nonetheless sustained and enabled domination. In
an often-overlooked moment in 1968, under pressure from radical students, Jacques Lacan admitted
that the Oedipus complex was a colonial imposition. The Oedipus complex, complex of all
complexes, instigator of the unconscious being structured as a language, stood refashioned as a tool of
colonial domination, just as Fanon and others had insisted, marking a certain end to the imperial
complex.
The viewpoint from which imperial visuality contemplated its domains was first epitomized in the
shipboard view of a colonial coastline, generating the clich of gunboat diplomacyto resolve a
problem in the empire, send a gunboat. This view was represented in the form of the panorama and
told in the form of multi-destination travel narratives. Just as the theorist of the primitive relied on
information supplied by missionaries that was actually obtained from a handful of local informants,
imperial visuality displaced itself from the battlefield of history itself, where Carlyle had
romantically placed his heroes. The place of visualization has literally and metaphorically continued
to distance itself from the subject being viewed, intensifying first to that of aerial photography and
more recently to that of satellites, a practical means of domination and surveillance.50 The calm
serenity of the high imperial worldview collapsed in the First World War. Far from being abandoned,

it was intensified by bringing colonial techniques to bear on the metropole and the aestheticization of
war, a merger of formerly distinct operations of visuality under the pressure of intensification. In this
vein, the formerly discarded concept of the mystical hero-leader was revived as a key component of
fascist politics, but, as Antonio Gramsci properly saw, this leader was the product of the centralized
police state, not the other way around. In this context, fascism is understood as a politics of the police
that renders the nation, the party, and the state as one, subject to the leadership of the heroic
individual, defined and separated by the logics of racialization. The combination of aestheticized
leadership and segregation came to constitute a form of reality, one which people came to feel was
right. Fascist visuality imagined the terrain of history, held to be legible only to the fascist leader,
as if seen by the aerial photography used to prepare and record the signature bombing campaigns of
blitzkrieg. Fascists from Manchester to Milan acclaimed Carlyle as a prophet and a predecessor, just
as decolonial critics from Frantz Fanon on have seen fascism as the application of colonial
techniques of domination to the metropole.

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: GLOBAL

COUNTERINSURGENCY AND POST-PANOPTIC VISUALITY
While in Western Europe the end of the Second World War marked a break in this domination, these
conditions were not changed in the colonies. This continuity was exemplified by the violent French
repression of a nationalist demonstration, in 1945, in the town of Stif, Algeria, on V-E Day itself (8
May 1945), with estimated casualties ranging from the French government figure of 1,500 to Fanon's
claim of 45,000, following Arab media reports of the time. However, the war of independence that
followed (195462) was not simply a continuance of imperialism. For the French, Algeria was not a
colony, but simply part of France. For the resistance movement, led by the Front de Libration
Nationale (FLN), much energy was expended in trying to gain the sympathies of the United Nations,
including the legendary general strike known as the battle of Algiers. Algeria marked the failure of
the imperial aesthetic to convince its subject populations that their domination was right. As part of
the wave of decolonization, it was a central moment in the failure of the classification of civilized
and primitive that was asserted as clinical fact by colonial psychology of the period. Despite their
best efforts, the French were unable to sustain the physical and mental separation between the
colonizer and the colonized. Counterinsurgency in Algeria began the practice of disappearing those
suspected of aiding the insurgency in material or immaterial fashion, beginning the sorry genealogy
that reaches from Argentina and Chile to today's renditions of suspected terrorists to so-called
black sites by the CIA and other U.S. government agencies. Yet today French cities and villages are
increasingly decorated with monuments and inscriptions to what are now called the wars in North
Africa, marking the consolidation of global counterinsurgency as the hegemonic complex of Western
visuality.
The emergence of the Cold War division between the United States and the Soviet Union almost
immediately forced metropolitan and decolonial politics into a pattern whereby being anticolonial
implied communist sympathies and supporting colonial domination was part of being pro-Western.51
This classification became separation in almost the same moment, at once aestheticized as freedom.
The Cold War quickly became a conflict so all-enveloping by 1961 that even President Dwight
Eisenhower famously warned of the total influenceeconomic, political, even spiritual of what he
called the military-industrial complex.52 In 1969, the novelist and former president of the

Dominican Republic Juan Bosch, who had been deposed in a coup seven months after his election, in
1963, warned that imperialism has been replaced by a superior force. Imperialism has been
replaced by pentagonism.53 Bosch saw this pentagonism as being separate from capitalism, a
development beyond Lenin's thesis that imperialism was the last stage of capital. In common with the
Situationists, Bosch envisaged a militarization and colonization of everyday life within the metropole.
While his analysis is rarely remembered today, the global reach of counterinsurgency since 2001 and
its ability to expand even as capital is in crisis has borne him out. The tactics of the now notorious
COINTELPRO, or Counter-Intelligence Program (195671), of the FBI have now been globalized as the
operating system of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Launched at the end of the Cold War, the
RMA was at first conceived as high-technology information war, but has intensified into a
counterinsurgency whose goal is nothing less than the active consent of the host culture to
neoliberal globalization.
The entanglements and violence of counterinsurgency that began in Algeria and continued in
Vietnam and Latin America have intensified into today's global counterinsurgency strategy, known to
the U.S. military as GCOIN, which combines the cultural goals of imperial strategy with electronic and
digital technologies of what I call post-panoptic visuality. Under this rubric, anywhere may be the site
for an insurgency, so everywhere needs to be watched from multiple locations. Whereas during the
Cold War, there were distinct battle lines producing hot spots of contestation, the entire planet is
now taken to be the potential site for insurgency and must be visualized as such. Thus Britain, the
closest ally of the United States, has also produced a steady stream of violent insurgents. Despite this
literal globalization, visualizing remains a central to counterinsurgency. The Field Manual FM 324
Counterinsurgency, written at the behest of General David Petraeus, in 2006, tells its officers in the
field that success depends on the efficacy of the commander's visualization of the Area of
Operations, incorporating history, culture, and other sets of invisible information into the
topography. This visualization required of the commander in Iraq or Afghanistanof the flow of
history as it is happening, formed by past events with an awareness of future possibilitieswould
have been entirely familiar to Carlyle, even if the digital metaphors and technologies would have
eluded him. GCOIN is an entanglement of nineteenth-century strategy with twenty-first century
technology. The counterinsurgency commander is further recommended to read T. E. Lawrence (of
Arabia), whose First World War heroics were the apogee of imperial visuality, and such works as
Small Wars, by a nineteenth-century British general. Today's counterinsurgent is encouraged to see
him or herself in a continuum with wars ranging from Algeria to Malaya (as was) and Latin America,
and cognitively part of a history that is held to begin with the French Revolution, in 1789. In a further
amalgam of past strategies of visuality, the distinction of culture that spatialized the imperial
complex has now become the very terrain of conflict. Anthropologists are attached to combat
brigades under the rubric of Human Terrain Systems so as to better interpret and understand local
cultures. It has been with the counterinsurgency phase of the military-industrial complex that the
soul of the (neo)colonized has most fully entered the frame. In this form of conflict, the
counterinsurgent seeks not simply military domination, but an active and passive consent to the
legitimacy of the supported regimes, meaning that regime change is only the precursor to cultural
change. This desire for consent reaches across the entire population. As Carlyle would have wanted,
today's global hero wants both to win and to be worshipped.
The post-panoptic visuality of global counterinsurgency produces a visualized authority whose
location not only cannot be determined from the visual technologies being used but may itself be
invisible. This viewpoint can toggle between image sets, zoom in and out of an image whether by

digital or optical means, and compare them to databases of previous imagery.54 It is able to use
satellite imagery, infrared, and other technologies to create previously unimaginable visualizations. In
everyday life, the prevalence of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance marks this switch to
post-panoptic visualization, with its plethora of fragmented, time-delayed, low-resolution images
monitored mostly by computer, to no other effect than to make the watching visible. For while CCTV
has been able to track the path of the 9/11 or 7/7 terrorists after the fact, it did nothing to prevent those
attacks, let alone reform those observed, as the panopticon was intended to do. The signature military
technology of GCOIN is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), a computer-controlled drone armed with
missiles that is manipulated by operators at any location, usually in safe spaces within the United
States, rather than in proximity to the battlefield itself. The rise of the UAV has caused controversy
among the theorists of GCOIN, such as David Kilcullen, who feel that the tactic undermines the
strategic goals of winning the consent of the population. As James der Derian has eloquently argued:
The rise of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET) has increasingly
virtualized international relations, setting the stage for virtuous wars in which history, experience,
intuition and other human traits are subordinated to scripted strategies and technological artifice, in
which worst-case scenarios produce the future they claim only to anticipate.55 Ironically, the script
of using cultural understanding from history and experience to win consent has now simply been
declared to have been enacted. The 2010 campaign in Afghanistan was marked by extraordinary
theater in which General McChrystal announced his intention to capture Marja and Kandahar in
advance, hoping to minimize civilian casualties, but this tactic also reduced Taliban casualties, so that
it is entirely unclear who is really in charge on the ground. This suggests GCOIN is now a kind of
theater, with competing stunts being performed for those who consider themselves always entitled to
see. The U.S. military are having an intense internal debate about which form of GCOIN is the future of
military tactics. It is clear that UAV missile attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been notably
accelerated. These tactics increasingly resemble those of the Israeli Defense Force, in which the real
goal is maintaining a permanent state of crisis, rather than achieving a phantasmatic victory. In the
game context in which war is now visualized, the point is less to win than to keep playing,
permanently moving to the next level in the ultimate massively multiplayer environment.
In sum, the revolution in military affairs has designated the classification between insurgent and
counterinsurgent as the key to the intensified phase of the military-industrial visuality. The separation
to be enacted is that of insurgent from the host population by physical means, from the barriers
separating the newly designated Shia and Sunni districts of Baghdad to the Israeli defense barrier
in the Occupied Territories and the wall between Mexico and the United States, where border agents
now use the rubrics of counterinsurgency. With the triumph of The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn
Bigelow, 2008) in the movie awards ceremonies in 2009, counterinsurgency has achieved an
aesthetic form. In this view, duty is its own narrative, giving pleasure in its fulfillment, as one bomb
after another must be defused. The enemy are largely invisible, motiveless, and entirely evil. The
film's closing scene depicts Staff Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) striding off, not into the sunset, but
to defuse yet another bomb, opening an imagined unending future of counterinsurgency. In its
aestheticization of sacrifice and duty, The Hurt Locker gained the recognition that had eluded the
many films that attempted to critique the war, even though it failed to achieve much success at the box
office. Whether this alignment of counterinsurgency is any more stable than its predecessors remains
to be seen. What seems likely is that the overarching project of designating a global will to power as
counterinsurgency will remain active for some considerable time to come, even though, as I complete
this book, it is being challenged by a new form of revolutionary politics across North Africa and the

Middle East in early 2011.56

CONCEPTUALIZING COUNTERVISUALITY
Carlyle presented visuality as naturally authoritative while being aware not only of opposition, but of
foundational defeat during the Atlantic revolutions. However, not all opposition to visuality can be
considered countervisuality, a point which will help us to understand the difficulties involved.
Considering the development of globalization around the end of the twentieth century, Arjun
Appadurai noted the split character of the globalized work of imagination: On the one hand it is in
and through the imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlledby states, markets,
and other powerful interests. But it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and
new designs for collective life emerge.57 In the case of visuality, we need to introduce a similar
distinction. As a discursive organization of history, visuality was never able to achieve its goal of
representing totality, because history itself as a form of the historicopolitical was not monolithic,
but structured as conflict. In his study of Marx's theory of capital, Dipesh Chakrabarty has described
two modes of history as it was formed under capitalism. History 1 is that history predicated by
capital for itself as a precondition to its own existence, whereas History 2 is that which cannot be
written into the history of capital even as prefiguration and so has to be excluded.58 Chakrabarty has
sought to recover that History 2 without privileging it either as the new dominant mode of History, or
as the dialectical other to History 1. Rather, he suggests, History 2 is better thought of as a category
charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1. This doubled
interaction offers a model for thinking about visuality that incorporates its embodied dimension at an
individual and collective level, together with visuality as cultural and political representation.
In these terms, Visuality 1 would be that narrative that concentrates on the formation of a coherent
and intelligible picture of modernity that allowed for centralized and/or autocratic leadership. It
creates a picture of order that sustained the industrial division of labor as its enactment of the
division of the sensible. In this sense, photography, for example, contributed to Visuality 1 in the
manner famously critiqued by Baudelaire as the tool of commerce, science, and industry.59 This form
of visuality, one proper to the docile bodies demanded by capital, developed new means of
disciplining, normalizing, and ordering vision, ranging from the color-blindness tests that were
introduced for industrial workers in the 1840s, to state-funded compulsory literacy and the public
museum. Consequently, the modern production process that culminated in Taylor's and Ford's systems
came to rely on a normative hand-eye coordination, trained in sport, managed by the distribution of
corrective lenses, and controlled with sight tests.60 In visual representation, its dominant apparatus
would become the cinema, understood in the sense of Jonathan L. Beller's cinematic mode of
production, which creates value by attracting attention.61 Its logical endpoint was what Guy Debord
famously called the spectacle, that is to say, capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an
image.62 In this sense, then, a certain history of visualityor at least Visuality 1has already been
written and is not unfamiliar. This book does not revisit that story for several reasons. The History
that Chakrabarty describes as being the precondition for capital is not exactly the same as the History
visualized by visuality (and this is, of course, no criticism of Chakrabartyquite the contrary).
Whereas it may be said that capital will do anything to preserve and extend its circulation, so that
even carbon emissions are now being formulated into a market, visuality was concerned above all to
safeguard the authority of leadership. So whereas Chakrabarty established a diachronic binary

distinction between the two modes of History under capitalism, I have tried to define a successive set
of synchronic complexes for visuality and countervisuality from slavery to imperialism and global
counterinsurgency.
How should we conceptualize, theorize, and understand countervisuality in relation to this divided
visuality? It is not simply Visuality 2. If Visuality 1 is the domain of authority, Visuality 2 would be
that picturing of the self or collective that exceeds or precedes that subjugation to centralized
authority. Visuality 2 was not invisible to authority and has been figured as the barbaric, the
uncivilized, or, in the modern period, the primitive. In the imperial complex, an army of self-styled
hero missionaries generated an epistemic apparatus to discipline and order it, whereas the
primitives in the metropole were to be controlled by the new imperial Caesar and his command of
imagery. The leading taxonomies of such primitive visuality were idolatry, fetishism, and totemism,
in order of seniority.63 This definition of Visuality 2 was enacted in the colonial and imperial
domains that Conrad called the blank spaces of the map, the blind spots of visuality. Within the
metropole, an artistic version of Visuality 2 was that irrational modernism. that escapes
appropriative logic, such as Dada and Surrealism, often of course using the forms and ideas of
indigenous art and culture from colonized domains.64 By now, surrealism in particular has
nonetheless been thoroughly appropriated, especially by advertising and music videos. For Visuality
2 is not necessarily politically radical or progressive; it is only not part of authority's life process.
There are multiple forms of Visuality 2, because that difference lives in intimate and plural
relationships to [authority], ranging from opposition to neutrality.65 The two modes of visuality are
not opposed in a binary system, but operate as a relation of difference that is always deferred. So not
all forms of Visuality 2 are what I am calling countervisuality, the attempt to reconfigure visuality as a
whole. For example, many forms of religion might deploy some mode of Visuality 2 without seeking
to change the perceived real in which that religion is practiced.
Countervisuality proper is the claim for the right to look. It is the dissensus with visuality, meaning
a dispute over what is visible as an element of a situation, over which visible elements belong to
what is common, over the capacity of subjects to designate this common and argue for it.66 The
performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a countervisuality into play. Like
visuality, it interfaces formal and historical aspects. The right in the right to look contests first
the right to property in another person by insisting on the irreducible autonomy of all citizens.
Autonomy implies a working through of Enlightenment claims to rights in the context of coloniality,
with an emphasis on the right to subjectivity and the contestation of poverty.67 By engaging in such a
discussion, I am implicitly rejecting the dismissal of rights as a biopolitical ruse presented by
Agamben.68 There is no bare life entirely beyond the remit of rights. Hardt and Negri powerfully
cite Spinoza to this effect: Nobody can so completely transfer to another all his right, and
consequently his power, as to cease to be a human being, nor will there ever be a sovereign power
that can do all it pleases.69 Ariella Azoulay has expressed the legacy of revolutionary discourses of
rights as precisely struggles pos[ing] a demand that bare life be recognized as life worth living.70
Azoulay rightly sees these demands being enacted in feminism from Olympe de Gouges's Declaration
of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen (1791) on. As Rancire points out, de Gouges's insistence
that if women have the right to be executed, they are foundationally equal, also shows that bare
life itself is political.71 Precisely the same argument can be made with regard to the enslaved, who
were subject to legal codes specifying punishments. In following what you might call Carlyle-ism
(a pattern of discourse concerning the visualization of imperial autocracy) to shape this book, I was at

first concerned that his emphasis on heroic masculinity would engender a similarly masculinist
project. However, I came to notice that all the efforts at countervisuality I describe here centered on
women and children both as individual actors and as collective entities. The actions and even names
of individual women and children (especially of the enslaved) have to be reclaimed from historical
archives that are not designed to preserve them and have not always done so.

THE RIGHT TO THE REAL

The claim of the right to oneself as autonomy further implies a claim of the right to the real. The
Italian political organization Autonomia, which was active in the 1970s, defined autonomy as antihierarchic, anti-dialectic, anti-representative. It is not only a political project, it is a struggle for
existence. Individuals are never autonomous: they depend on external recognition.72 By the same
token, the right to look is never individual: my right to look depends on your recognition of me, and
vice versa.73 Formally, the right to look is the attempt to shape an autonomous realism that is not only
outside authority's process but antagonistic to it. Countervisuality is the assertion of the right to look,
challenging the law that sustains visuality's authority in order to justify its own sense of right. The
right to look refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power, first as law
and then as the aesthetic. Writing of such refusals of legitimation, Negri points out: It is once again
Foucault who lays the foundation of this critical experience, better still of this unmasking of that (in
our civilization) ancient Platonism that ignores the right to the real, to the power of the event.74 The
right to look is, then, the claim to a right to the real. It becomes known by genealogical investigation
that is here always repurposed as decolonial critique. It is the boundary of visuality, the place where
its codes of separation encounter a grammar of nonviolence, the refusal to segregate, as a collective
form. Confronted with this double need to apprehend and counter a real that did exist but should not
have, and one that should exist but was as yet becoming, countervisuality has created a variety of
realist formats structured around such tensions. Certainly the realism usually considered under
that name in the mid-nineteenth century is one part of it, as is the neorealism of postwar Italian visual
culture, but countervisuality's realism was not necessarily mimetic. To take a famous example,
Picasso's Guernica both expresses the reality of aerial bombing that was and is central to
contemporary visuality, and protests against it with sufficient force that American officials asked for
the replica of the painting at the United Nations to be covered when they were making their case for
war against Iraq, in 2002.
The realism of the right to the real highlights the struggle for existence, meaning a genealogy of
the claim of the right to existence, beginning with the enslaved, via the banners claiming the right to
life in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the new humanism of decolonization sought by Aim
Csaire and Frantz Fanon. Throughout the struggle to abolish chattel slavery in the Atlantic world,
countervisuality endeavored to construct what I call abolition realism, in homage to Du Bois's
concept of abolition democracy, where there would be no slavery, rendering what seemed
unimaginable into reality. This realism represented the enslaved as being of equal status with the
free, while also showing the realities of slavery for what they were, as opposed to the benign
picture of paternal leadership presented by apologists like Carlyle. This picturing therefore created
and worked in realist modes of representation from painting to photography and performance in an
intense moment of challenge to visualized authority. The defeat of Reconstruction in the United States
together with that of the Paris Commune marked the defeat of abolition in the Atlantic world as an

index of reality, as indicated by the persistence of racism.

Autonomy has also expressed the indigenous desire for self-government or regulation. In this book,
I take the transformation of Aotearoa into New Zealand (182085) as a key site of entanglement and
displacement in this process because James Anthony Froude, Carlyle's biographer and successor as
the dean of British historians, saw it as the place from which a new Oceana could be launched,
meaning a global Anglophone empire. For the Polynesian peoples living in Aotearoa, a wide-ranging
series of adjustments had to be made in their imagined communities, resulting from their interpellation
as native and heathen by the missionaries and settlers. Following prophets and war leaders like
Papahurihia (?1875), the Maori imagined themselves as an indigenous and ancient people, the Jews
of the Bible, the ancient bearers of rights, rather than primitive savages. They deployed their own
readings of the Scriptures to assert that the missionaries were in error, created rival flags to those of
the British, and imagined themselves to be in Canaan. This imagined community compelled the
British Crown to sign a land-sharing agreement known as the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), which,
although nullified by legal fiat within two decades, has proved decisive in shaping modern Aotearoa
New Zealand into a bicultural state. In both metropolitan and colonial contexts, the performative act
of claiming the right to be seen used the refusal to labor as one of its key strategies, from written
accounts that considered the Israelites leaving Egypt as a general strike, to the campaign for May Day
holiday, and the contemporary politics of the refusal of work. Although the general strike was adopted
by the Confederation Gnrale du Travail, the French trade union, in 1906, and was famously
endorsed by Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet of the same year, the failure of the Second International
to resist mobilization for what became the First World War ended the hope that it might in fact be the
revolutionary form for the twentieth century. Emblematic of the transformation in Europe of the period
was the shift of the once-anarchist Georges Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence (1908) had
contained the most elaborated theory of the general strike as a means of creating the general image
of social conflict, to an anti-Semitic Royalism, which Mark Antliff has called a proto-fascism.75
Writing in the 1930s with a full awareness of fascism's dominance, both W. E. B. Du Bois and
Antonio Gramsci came to see the need for a new point of view that both in different ways called the
South. For Du Bois, the South was the southern part of the United States that practiced segregation
under so-called Jim Crow laws, whereas for Gramsci it was the Italian mezzogiorno, a mix of feudal
rural areas and unregulated modern cities like Naples. The South was, of course, intensely contested,
rather than some imagined point of liberation, but for both thinkers no strategy could be successful
that did not imagine itself from the South. Understood in this sense, fascism did not end in 1945, as
the names Franco, Pinochet, and many others attest. Antifascism has had, therefore, to create a
neorealism that could counter fascism's sense of ordering engendered by subjugation and separation.
It must do so from within the South and as the South opposed to the North. This doubled realism
can be hard to see. In The Battle of Algiers, the resistance leader Ben H'midi tells Ali la Pointe that if
it is hard to start and sustain resistance, the hardest moment of all comes when you have won.
We might take Bertolt Brecht's caution about working with reality and realisms to heart here:
Reality is not only everything which is, but everything which is becoming. It's a process. It proceeds
in contradictions. If it is not perceived in its contradictory nature, it is not perceived at all.76 This
creation of reality as a perceptual effect is not the same as realism as it has usually been defined in
literature and the visual arts. The realist painter Gustave Courbet, for instance, is supposed to have
said that he could paint only that which he could see with his eyes, making it impossible for him to
render an angel. Realism has largely been understood in this sense as meaning the most sharp-edged,
lens-based representation of exterior reality possible, from photography to the 35-millimeter film and

most recently high-definition video. In the terms that I have sketched here, that would be a realism of
Visuality 1, the sensory training and standardization required by industrial capital. Countervisuality
seeks to resituate the terms on which reality is to be understood. If, as Barthes famously formulated it,
all reality is an effect, then that effect can be subject to change. For Freud, the ego engages in a
persistent reality-testing which, as Avital Ronel elucidates, should in the best of worlds, confirm and
countersign the satisfaction of our wishes but in fact put the self at risk.77 In this sense, all realisms
are an attempt to come to terms with the tendency of modernity to exceed understanding in its
permanent revolutionizing of conditions of existence. As the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini later mused in
his consideration of Antonio Gramsci, Perhaps we should, in all humility and with a bold neologism,
simply call reality that-which-must-be-made-sense-of.78 Countervisuality is not, as this example
suggests, simply a matter of assembled visual images, but the grounds on which such assemblages can
register as meaningful renditions of a given moment. Thinking the genealogy of visuality and its
countervisualities produces both a sense of what is at stake in present-day visualizing and a means to
avoid being drawn into a perpetual game in which authority always has the first move. This book is a
claim for a different form of visualizing by those who would oppose autocratic authority. This
visualizing would take the planetary viewpoint in giving priority to the biosphere and the survival of
all forms of life over the continuance of authority. The image of the biosphere is a countervisuality to
the partisans of the long war against terror and the permanent state of emergency. The vernacular
countervisuality of the South has centered on democracy, sustainable production, education, and
collective solutions to social problems as a different mode of visualizing cultural possibilities since
the Atlantic revolutions of the 1790s. While this approach has for just as long been condemned as
impractical by leaders of Left and Right, it has come to seem like the last option remaining. In the
aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, sustainable local agriculture was finally
advanced as the best solution for the country.79 Nonetheless, the emergence of government strategies
such as climate security shows that this position offers no guarantees of success. Here we take the
measure of the long success of visuality. It seems natural, or at least reasonable, that visuality
should visualize war and that different groups of people should be physically separated. This project
hopes to call such assumptions into question and make us take a second look at some old choices.
One response to my claim for the right to look might be: so what? In other words, while these
issues may be of importance, what difference does my claim make and why should you care? I take it
that many of my readers will be in some way engaged with universities and academic life, so my
response is shaped in that domain. In March 2003, a law professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, named John Yoo, who was then working in the Justice Department as a deputy assistant
attorney general, wrote a memorandum regarding the interrogation of so-called enemy combatants.
Relying on his interpretation of the President's authority to successfully prosecute war, Yoo
notoriously concluded that there were in effect no limits on what could be done, claiming that the
Framers understood the Commander-in-Chief Clause [of the Constitution] to grant the President the
fullest range of power recognized at the time of the ratification as belonging to the military
commander.80 From this academic interpretation of authority, stemming, like visuality, from the
eighteenth-century general, resulted the scandals of Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, the renditions of
suspects to places where torture is openly practiced, and, more broadly, the hubris of presidential
authority. In the summer of 2009, faced with a difficult financial situation the chancellor of the
University of California, Mark Yudof, had the regents ascribe to him hitherto unknown emergency
powers, resulting in redundancies, tuition raises, class cancellations, and furloughs (meaning days

for which one would not be paid for work) for all staff, including, one hopes, John Yoo, who has
returned to his academic job. In 1988 I happened to visit the University of California, Berkeley, and
what I saw then was the inspiration that led me to an academic career in general and to one in the
United States in particular. The new deployment and interpretation of authority by academics in
government and in the university has changed the world we live and work in. Networks long in the
making are rapidly being undone, while new ones are being made. Attention should be paid.

CHAPTER PLAN
I conclude this opening section with a brief chapter plan. The first four chapters deal with the
plantation complex and its transformation into the imperial complex. In the first chapter, I describe the
ordering of slavery by means of visual technologies and surveillance under the headings of mapping,
natural history, and the force of law. In the British and French Caribbean, a rapid revolution created
the possibility of this regime in the years either side of 1660. In the generations that followed, the
enslaved learned how to counter each aspect of oversight. In the second half of chapter 1, I describe
first the attempted revolution led by Franois Makandal on Saint-Domingue, in 1757, and then the
planters attempt to create an independent slave-owning republic in the early years of the French
Revolution. These mutually contradictory claims to autonomy opened a space for a different
revolutionary imaginary, which I explore in chapter 2. Throughout I counterpoint the metaphorical
slavery being challenged by revolutionaries in France with the revolution against chattel slavery in
Saint-Domingue. I stage this interaction in five moments, beginning with the visualization in popular
prints first of the awakening of the French Revolution, in 1789, and next the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen. I emphasize that the Declaration at once claimed to end slavery and
defined racialized and gendered exclusions from the category of rights. These exclusions led to a new
claim to a right to existence embodied in the hero as the leader of the imagined community of the
postmonarchical nation-state. The revolt of the enslaved in Haiti successfully used the tactic of the
hero to focus their resistance to the authority of oversight. Slave-owning sovereignty found itself
confronted by a person invested with authority by those it claimed had none to givethe people, the
enslaved, and women. During the revolution, a further contest emerged between the national hero as
Great Man, who incarnated authority, and what I call vernacular heroism, whose primary function
was to make enslavement impossible. These different claims could not and did not cohere. I end
chapter 2 by looking at the violent confrontation between Toussaint L'Ouverture and the subaltern
rank-and-file in Saint-Domingue over the question of land. The formerly enslaved wanted selfsufficiency, while the leadership demanded the maintenance of cash-crop agriculture to fund the
emergent nation-state. At the same moment, the first person to ask for a position as an anthropologist,
the Frenchman Franois Pron, was engaged in an encounter with the aboriginal people of Tasmania
that foreshadowed the hierarchy of culture that was to shape imperial visuality. I counterpoint these
chapters with a reading of the double vision of reality in the paintings of Jos Campeche, the Puerto
Rican painter, perhaps the first artist to emerge from slavery that we can name.
In the early nineteenth century, radicals imagined new strategies like the Jubilee and the National
Holiday to advance their claim to represent the nation. In response, visuality, named and deployed by
Thomas Carlyle in 1840, appropriated the revolutionary tactic of the national hero as leader to
reclaim the altered terrain of history into a renewed system of domination (chapter 3). His model was
the visualization of the battlefield by the modern general, epitomized by Napoleon, in order to gain
tactical advantage over a closely matched enemy. It was the visualization of a revived sovereignty

that might again own slaves, as decreed by Napoleon, or, that might, as in the case of British
imperialism after the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, reassert a centralized colonial authority.
Inspired by its desire to prevent all challenges to authority, Carlyle's visuality claimed boundless
dominion for its heroes and refuted all emancipations. As a result, leaders like Sojourner Truth and
W. E. B. Du Bois actively contested this heroism with different modalities of heroism. The
nineteenth century saw a protracted struggle as to whether and how a reality could be shaped that did
not sustain and support slavery. In chapter 4, I look at this interpenetrated history of metropole and
colony around the Atlantic world, from the abolition of Danish slavery witnessed by the future
impressionist painter Camille Pissarro to the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States and
the Paris Commune of 1871. The reality and realisms of modern Paris, Benjamin's capital of the
nineteenth century, are placed in counterpoint to the reality and realisms of the abolition of slavery. I
look first at the visualized policing of emancipated plantations, followed by the visualization of
freedom during the Civil War in the United States. Then I survey the contradictions of realism and
abolition in 1867 in artistic visualizations by Pissarro, Manet, and Degas. I conclude chapter 4 with
the attempt to institutionalize autonomy during Reconstruction and the performance of autonomy
during the Commune. The counterpoint to these chapters is a reading of Francisco Oller's masterpiece
El Velorio (1895), or The Wake, which I interpret as a mourning both for the hopes of abolition,
achieved in Puerto Rico in 1873, and also for the lost opportunities of realism.
By this point the imperial complex had become the dominant form of visuality. In chapter 5 I
examine how visuality became imperial visuality as an impersonal form of power, generalized and
globalized within an Anglophone network of power sustained by naval domination. Here I take
Aotearoa New Zealand as the key point of entanglement, as described above, both because Froude
had seen it as the key to his Oceana, the global empire of visuality, and because Maori resistance in
the form of self-identifying as Jews was so notable a claim to autonomy. The bishopric of New
Zealand was also the site of the ethnographic discovery of the concept of mana, held to be what one
might call the aura of authority. Introduced to European anthropology in 1880, the idea took hold at
once and has continued to play a role in recent debates about the state of exception. This empire was
subject to a new Caesar, more imagined than actual, but distinguished by his ability to dominate the
mass population by means of the image. Within imperial nations, radical movements similarly sought
to challenge the authority of imperial capital by claiming a genealogy from what they called the
ancient lowly, meaning the workers of ancient Greece and Rome. Heroes like Spartacus were taken
both as a validation for modern claims and as a means of creating a history for those without it. This
countervisuality used this history to claim a general picture of the social by means of new
institutions, such as museums of labor, and new actions, such as the general strike.
After the First World War, the collapse of high imperialism brought down the Austro-Hungarian,
Ottoman, and Russian empires and transformed Caesarism from a theory of imperial leadership into a
violent exaltation of the leader as Hero in fascism (chapter 6). As noted above, antifascism must find
a means to render a neorealism capable of resisting fascist ordering. After analyzing the turn to the
South made by Gramsci, Du Bois, and other intellectuals, I take the fifty-year-long crisis of
decolonizing Algeria (1954) as a case study of the entanglement of the legacies of fascism,
imperialism, the Cold War, and decolonization. I concentrate on the battles for Algiers in psychiatry,
film, video art, and literature that have been fought almost without a break over this period. I set the
legendary neorealist film The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) into the context of
innovative film practice in the Algerian revolution, including a remarkable short film documentary
made in 1961 and inspired by Fanon's work with children in Algerian refugee camps in Tunisia, as

well as the cin pops movement of popular film and the first features created in independent
Algeria. Since the invasion of Iraq, Fanon's experience in Algeria has generated new visualized
responses from the Finnish video artist Eije-Liese Ahtila and the African American novelist John
Edgar Wideman, while the Algerian revolution haunts recent films like Cach (dir. Michael Hanneke,
2005). This entanglement of decolonization and independence with its many displacements is
counterpointed by Pan's Labyrinth, a film about Spain, directed by a Mexican-American, which
spoke as strongly to its own time as the fascist period under Franco it depicted.
If antifascism quickly became anticommunism in the Allied nations, especially in the United States,
the resulting military-industrial complex linked the antislavery with new antiterror rhetoric to justify
its formation of what Paul Edwards has called the closed world. In this closed world, every
enterprise is linked to the central struggle to separate and defend the free world from the terror of
the communist world to prevent it becoming enslaved. As General Douglas MacArthur declared to
Congress, in 1951, this threat of slavery meant that communism had to be resisted everywhere.81
From the outset, the classification of separation was not only right, but justified any action in its name.
The resulting counterinsurgency against communism spanned the globe from Algeria to Indochina and
Latin America. Visualizing became a key strategy of what the U.S. military has termed the Revolution
in Military Affairs (RMA) since 1989 (chapter 7). The RMA is the intensification of the Cold War. It
makes information the key tool of war, visualized by the commander to gain control of the area of
operations. Drawing at once on imperial era heroes like T. E. Lawrence and postmodern theorists of
nomadism, the RMA found its high point of revolution in the war in Iraq. An active neovisuality has
been enshrined as a key part of United States global counterinsurgency strategy, supported by an
entire discursive apparatus from the Ivy League universities, to the media, to military theorists, many
of whom are connected to the Obama administration. This apparatus rejects Guantnamo Bay and
other such visible means of punishment as both unnecessary and jeopardizing to the mission of
winning full and permanent cooperation. Neovisuality is a doctrine for the preservation of authority
by means of permanent surveillance of all realms of life, a Gesamtkunstwerk of necropolitics.
Needless to say, it not only expects but needs resistance to its visualizing of the geopolitical as
always already potential terrorism. In its current manifestation as counterinsurgency, it has developed
a new radicalism, resisting challenges to its authority from within and without the military.
Paradoxically, visualized information war depends increasingly on making the visible invisible,
provoking a crisis of visuality itself. The simple fact that a counterhistory of visuality can be written
suggests that it has lost its force as natural authority. A tremulous moment of opportunity awaits to
set aside visuality for the right to look, to democratize democracy. Or to once again authorize
authority. It's up to us.

Visualizing Visuality
Visual Guide

ONE
Oversight
The Ordering of Slavery

The deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering was
decisively shaped by the experience of plantation slavery in the Americas, forming the plantation
complex of visuality.1 If it has often been claimed that modernity was the product of slavery, there has
been insufficient attention to the ways in which the modern ways of seeing also emerged from this
nexus.2 What one might call the received genealogy of modern visual culture begins with the major
change in the mid-seventeenth century in the European division of the sensible. It created what
Foucault called the division, so evident to us, between what we see, what others have observed and
handed down, and what others imagine or navely believe, the great tripartition into Observation,
Document, and Fable.3 In this new formation, there was a gap between things and words, a gap that
could be crossed by seeing, a form of seeing that would dictate what it was possible to say. As the
seeing preceded the naming, that which Foucault called the nomination of the visible (132) was the
central practice. He emphasized that this was not a question of people suddenly learning to look
harder or more closely, but a new set of priorities attached to sensory perception. Taste and smell
became less important, now being understood as imprecise, hearsay was simply excluded, while
touch was limited to a series of binary distinctions, such as that between rough and smooth. This new
order of things was itself produced by the necessities of European expansion and encounter, above
all in the plantation colonies. As W. J. T. Mitchell has cogently put it, An empire requires not just a
lot of stuff but what Michel Foucault called an order of things, an epistemic field that produces a
sense of the kinds of objects, the logic of their speciation, their taxonomy.4 Empire thus claims
objectivity. What we need to insist on here, at the risk of seeming blunt, is that the primary thing
being ordered was the slave.5 The slave was first classified by natural history, which created a
relevant modality of species, then separated from free space by mapping, while the force of law
embodied in slave codes that sustained the logic of the division, enforced it against challenge, thereby
making it seem right, and hence aesthetic.
This transformation has been clearly summarized by David C. Scott: The slave plantation might
be characterized as establishing the relations and the material and epistemic apparatuses through
which new subjects were constituted: new desires instilled, new aptitudes molded, new dispositions
acquired.6 Such changed relations were not uniform among the European colonizing powers but
were enacted primarily in British and French colonial space by the Barbados slave code (1661) and
the Code Noir (1685) respectively. In Spanish America, a violent visual transformation had begun as
early as the sixteenth century, seeking to transform the idols of the indigenous into images.7 While
that history is far from irrelevant here and indeed will keep insisting on being included, it has not
been within my powers to include it throughout and retain coherence within the compass of a
manageable book. On the sugar islands of the Caribbean, the colonizers were more concerned with

slaves than with the indigenous, whose genocide was all but complete by the time that the
seventeenth-century sugar revolution shifted emphasis within the plantation complex from Dutch
Brazil to the French and British possessions in the Caribbean.8 It was not by chance that these were
the locations that influenced Carlyle's formation of the discourse of visuality. So the slavery under
discussion in this book is not a metaphysical condition of servitude (as in Hegel, for example), but the
legally regulated, visually controlled, hyperviolent condition of forced labor in Atlantic world cashcrop plantations. What results is therefore not that which Foucault has called the classical order of
representation, derived from the great image of Spanish absolutism, Velazquez's Las Meninas
(1651).9 The ordering of slavery was a combination of violent enforcement and visualized
surveillance that sustained the new colonial order of things. I call it here oversight, meaning the
nomination of what was visible to the overseer on the plantation.

VISUALIZING THE PLANTATION

Oversight was the product of the interaction of the universalizing frames of Christianity and
sovereignty in the context of the drama of race and rights created by seventeenth-century expansion
and the beginning of the plantation system. It created a regime of taxonomy, observation, and
enforcement to sustain a visualized domain of the social and the political that came to be known as
economy. It maintained a delineated space in which all life and labor were directed from its central
viewpoint because the production of colonial cash crops, especially sugar, required a precise
discipline, centered on surveillance, while being dependent on spectacular and excessive physical
punishment. While this may appear as a contradiction between traditional spectacular punishment and
the discipline that Foucault argues succeeded it in the modern period, the modernity of oversight was
precisely its combination of enforcement and discipline. Indeed, as we shall see, the planters in
Saint-Domingue attempted to modernize the colony within the plantation system. This effort failed
because the enslaved had created a counter-theater to the system of surveillance and discipline
from natural history to mapping and law.10 For planter and enslaved alike, the frame of the local
plantation as the sovereign space of oversight was broken by conflicting desires for autonomy from
both the enslaved and the plantocracy, meaning the ruling classes of the plantation colony. The
enslaved aspired to self-regulation, but so did the planters, who hoped to create a colonial republic
supported by slavery. Indeed, Saint-Domingue imported more slaves and produced more goods in the
years immediately preceding the revolution than ever before.11
In the plantation complex, the overseer was the surrogate of the sovereign, entrusted with power
over many life-forms that were not his (gender intended) equal.12 The monarch was superior to
ordinary people, even aristocrats, by virtue of having been anointed in coronation, making him or her
in a certain sense divine.13 By the same token, the overseer dominated those classified as different,
spatially displaced, and without legal personality or standing. The power of sovereignty was in the
last instance the power to give and take life, surrogated to the overseer in the colony as a regime that
Achille Mbembe has called commandment (commandement). Commandment is a regime of
exception in which the slave-owner or colonist takes on the attributes and rights of royal power
itself.14 Central here was what Foucault saw as the principle of all Western judicial thought since the
Middle Ages: Right is the right of royal command.15 This command had not always reached to the
New World, as one scandalized French traveler reported from Brazil, in 1651: Everyone leads a
lascivious and scandalous lifeJews, Christians, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Germans, Blacks,

Brazilians, Tapoyos, Mulattos, Mamelukes and Creolesliving promiscuously, not to speak of incest
and crimes against nature.16 The ordering of slavery that began soon afterward was therefore
intended to restrain planter and enslaved alike. The extravagant consumption of the planters was
matched only by their excessive punishment of the enslaved. In one sense, the notorious violence of
slave plantations mimicked the minutely prescribed ceremonies of execution and punishment that
Foucault described as spectacular. At the same time, as Kathleen Wilson points out, given that
penal remedy for the enslaved was transmitted through performance and custom, rather than statute,
slave punishments did not enact a prior law but were the law performed.17 In the regime of
oversight, even the abstraction of the law was made visible and performative.
This order of colonial things was itself visualized in the practical guides for the practice of
planters published in the period. Books of this kind were not just produced as a form of travel
literature, or as an entertainment for those remaining in Europe, but as practical manuals for
plantation and colonization. To give an example that maximizes time and distance, the British officer
Philip Gridley King wrote to the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, resident in London, describing the
progress in cultivation and botany being made in the new colony of Australia in 1792. He detailed his
success in planting indigo, guided by Jean-Baptiste Labat's account, in 1722, of the process in the
French Caribbean.18 From this example, one can see that oversight was temporally and spatially
complex, crossing presumed divides such as those between the Atlantic and Pacific worlds,
Anglophone and Francophone colonization, and different models of forced labor. What one might call
(with a pinch of the proverbial salt) the Las Meninas of oversight were the plates to the missionary
Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's history of the French Caribbean, published in 1667 (see plate 2).19 These
images have remained part of the cultural memory of the region and were incorporated into an
installation entitled The Indigo Room, by the Haitian artist Edouard Duval Carri, in 2004.20 In fact,
the first plate of the volume concerning natural history illustrates the workings of indigo cultivation.21
Eleven enslaved Africans are shown working at all the stages of this complex process, while at the
precise center of the plate stands the outlined figure of a white overseer in European dress (see fig.
13). He is posed with a lianne, the rod used to discipline the enslaved, but posed here as if it were a
cane or walking stick. The overseer's cane was as thick as a man's thumb, described by the English
botanist Hans Sloane as lance-wood switches.22 Ironically, lance-wood was a species native to the
Caribbean, used to punish its forced migrants. This incongruous scene is not a literal depiction of
indigo production, although it depicts each stage of the necessary work and its resultant division of
labor, but its schematic representation, which makes visible both the process and the power that
sustained it. This was a drama of culture and cultivation enacted as work, strikingly codified after
only twenty-five years of French colonization.23 While the overseer is present as sign of the
compulsion that ultimately underpinned the labor force, his cane is at rest. It is his eyes that are doing
the work. As the only waged laborer in the scene, the overseer's job is to maintain the flow of
production. Symbolized by the cane that could wield punishment, his looking is thus a form of labor
that compels unwaged labor to generate profit from the land. In Du Tertre's visualization, the overseer
is the central point of contradiction in the practice of forced labor. Looking at Van Dyck's portrait of
Charles I (1635), the would-be absolutist monarch of England, after thinking about Du Tertre's
representation of the overseer is to have a flash of recognition: Van Dyck's calm aristocratic figure
standing with one hand on his hip and the other resting on his cane might have served as Du Tertre's
model (see fig. 14). Indeed, the sight of a ship at anchor in the sea visible behind Charles I reminds
the viewer that the source of monarchical power was England's naval empire. Portraits of

seventeenth-century European monarchs often showed them carrying a cane, rod, or even a scepter,
the ultimate source of this symbol of domination. In visual representation and plantation practice
alike, the overseer was the surrogate of the sovereign.
Even the landscape attests to the transformation wrought by European oversight on the indigenous
condition of the land, which Du Tertre called a confused mass without agreement.24 The mountains
and indigenous wilderness visible in the background of his image give way to the regularly divided
and organized space of plantation. This change was represented as what later colonists would call the
civilizing process, but it was in fact evidence of the emergent environmental crisis caused by
plantation. Sugar in particular required so much wood to heat the boilers of the sugarcane juice that
islands like Barbados had become deforested as early as 1665, causing soil erosion and depletion of
water sources.25 In a striking phrase, the historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals has described the
plantation itself as a nomad entity.26 Planted as a monoculture, sugarcane exhausted even fertile
soils more rapidly than they could be replenished by manuring or other fertilization techniques of the
period. With the conjunction of soil depletion and the deforestation caused by the processing of the
sugar, it was estimated at the time that a mill could remain in one location for a maximum of forty
years before environmental exhaustion set in. By way of tracking this destruction, it can be seen that
whereas in 1707 Hans Sloane noted that in Jamaica their Agriculture is but very small, their Soil
being as yet so fruitful as to not need manuring, by 1740 Charles Leslie remarked that the necessity
of manuring required double the number of workers than while the land retain'd its natural Vigour.27
By 1823 John Stewart reported that the accessible land was almost denuded of timber trees, forcing
the importation of pine timber and coal to burn in the mills.28 The practice of the plantation destroyed
its own conditions of possibility and forced it to move physically and conceptually, a movement that
it was ultimately unable to sustain.

For the technicians of oversight, surveillance and the management of time and labor were the key
functions of the practice. The Jamaican planter John Stewart held that the duty of an overseer
consists in superintending the planting or farming concerns of the estate, ordering the proper work to
be done, and seeing that it is duly executed.29 By means of such ordering, the overseer produced
slavery itself as a mode of labor and value generation. It began with the cultivation of plants,
requiring the coordination of a network of labor, transport, and supplies that utterly transformed its
environment. In the plantation economy, art and culture were techniques to generate increased
biomass of cash crops without regard to other considerations. The imperative for the overseer was,
therefore, as one Saint-Domingue planter put it, to never leave the slave for an instant in inaction; he
keeps the fabrication of sugar under surveillance, never leaving the sugar-mill for an instant.30 For
all its implied and actual violence, being an overseer was a complex task of time management and
asset allocation. As befitted and defined a capitalist enterprise, the labor force was also divided

because the multistage operation of sugar (or coffee, indigo, or cotton) production could not be
carried out or supervised by one person, as the naturalist Patrick Browne observed in Jamaica: The
industrious slaves, frequently undressed, are obliged to watch by spells every night, and to engage
with equal vigour in the toils of the day; while the planter and the overseer pass the mid-night hours in
uninterrupted slumbers, anxious to secure the reward of their annual labours.31 Note the sense that
the enslaved were industrious, that is to say, disciplined, even if naked, while the overseer slept on.
While modern European labor resisted time management, plantations were (at least in theory) in
permanent production.32 With the expansion in demand for sugar in the eighteenth century, it became
standard plantation practice to suggest that a minimum of two hundred enslaved people was required
to maintain a sugar plantation, thereby making competent overseers in great demand.33 Oversight
became a career path open to people of all literate backgrounds, which is to say, of the middling
classes and up.34
In practice, much of the necessary surveillance was delegated to the enslaved drivers, or assistants
to the overseer, who were rewarded with better food and clothing in exchange for maintaining
discipline and production. The head overseer, usually but not always European, had a series of
deputies that the historian Michael Tadman has called key slaves. These people were enslaved but
held places of importance on the plantation, especially the driver and the domestic or house slaves.
Specialist tasks involved in sugar production, like boiling the cane juice, distilling rum from
molasses, potting the granulated sugar into molds, and coopering, all had head figures.35 Rewarded
in terms of material goods, authority, and prestige, the key slaves were distinguished from the rankand-file of the three Gangs that worked the fields under the supervision of the drivers. These field
workers, in the famous formulation of C. L. R. James, were closer to a modern proletariat than any
group of workers in existence at the time, and lived in a similar state of deprivation.36 The planters
were keenly aware that the drivers were their sole means to control these field workers, as the
American planter and politician James H. Hammond set out in his Plantation Manual: The head
driver is the most important negro on the plantation. He is to be treated with more respect than any
other negro by both master & overseer. He is on no occasion to be treated with any indignity
calculated to lose the respect of other negroes without breaking him. He is required to maintain
proper discipline at all times, to see that no negro idles or does bad work in the field & to punish it
with discretion on the spot.37 The driver was thus the doubled surrogate of oversight, standing in for
the overseer, who was himself the surrogated representative of the owner. However, if it became
necessary to punish the driver, he was to be broken, meaning demoted but also clearly referring to a
humiliating loss of prestige. In this way, plantation slavery surrogated the psychic vulnerability of
domination to the slaves themselves, allowing the owners to maintain what Tadman calls positive,
benevolent self-images, which were disseminated in their writings and led to the myth of planter
paternalism. Yet many revolts of the enslaved, such as the Hanover revolt in Jamaica, in 1776,
were led by precisely these drivers, craftsmen, and domestics, who had never before engaged in
Rebellions and in whose Fidelity [the planters] had always most firmly relied.38 Oversight could
and ultimately did turn against itself, above all in Saint-Domingue.

TECHNIQUES OF OVERSIGHT
As a regime of power, oversight depended on a set of combined techniques, operated in theory by the
one individual known as the overseer, but in practice a combined labor of the plantocracy. These

techniques can be summarized as mapping, natural history, and the force of law. Mapping reified
observations made at a local level that were systematically categorized and divided by natural history
and made sustainable by the force of law (see fig. 15). These means of creating natural distinctions
were challenged and contested both within the free planter and settler population and above all by
the enslaved. In what follows, I outline the patterns of mapping, natural history, the force of law, and
the counters to each of these practices. I then set out two major efforts to reconfigure the entire
apparatus in Saint-Domingue, selected both because it was the greatest generator of wealth of all the
plantation islands and of course because it was the site of the revolution of 1791. First, I discuss an
earlier, ultimately unsuccessful, but wide-ranging revolt of the enslaved on Saint-Domingue, led by
Franois Makandal from 175658. Next, I consider how the plantocracy there set out to form an
independent, self-regulating colony on which the plantations were organized automatically. The
tensions between these different aspirations to autonomy created a revolutionary situation in the
island.

MAPPING
How did oversight visualize authority? As a technique of governance, visualized domination was
both represented by and encapsulated in the emergent technology of mapping. As recent histories of
cartography have made clear, the map was practically nonexistent in Europe at the start of the
fifteenth century, but was the bedrock of most professions and disciplines two centuries later.39
Following David Buisseret, several key factors can be identified in the formation of the map, bringing
together the new modalities of realism in Northern European art, and the rediscovery of perspective,
with the development of techniques for plotting land to make surveys of state and private property,
and the consolidation of the nation-state apparatus.40 Tom Conley links all these developments to the

formation of selfhood and the production of subjectivity. Christian Jacob has further emphasized the
importance of the map not as an object but as a medium of communication, one that makes a claim
about the understanding of exterior reality.41 Like other media, the map extends the human sensorium
beyond its physical capacities and integrates itself with it as a technical prosthesis that extends and
refines the field of sensorial production, or rather, a place where ocular vision and the mind's eye
meet.42 This intersection is precisely that which will later be claimed as visuality.
As the plantation economy developed, oversight produced a regular mapping of plantations at the
local level, rendering colonized space into a single geometric plane. This modulation of space
developed the distinction between cultivated and empty space that motivated settlement into a
determining principle that organized and aestheticized perception.43 It was calibrated by the practice
of land survey, which delineated the extent of a given plantation.44 This shift to formal representation
marked the enactment of oversight as a governmental practice in the Caribbean. In Barbados, for
example, there had been no definition of the boundaries of plantations until, in 1670, the Council for
Plantations ordered exact mapps, platts, or charts of all and every our said plantations abroad.45
The actual work of the overseer was now complemented by this abstract representation of land as
colonial plantation within a functioning system of imperial power.
In Jamaica, a settler was given as legal title to his or her land a drawing that represent[ed] the
form of a parcel of land, to quote the patent, as it was called, held by Francis Price for his
Jamaican estate, Worthy Park.46 This Letter Patent of 1670 contained a line drawing depicting an
irregular polyhedron of land by virtue of its borders with adjacent holdings and natural features,
drawn to scale and in accord with a compass, but not represented within a larger map. An act of the
Jamaica Assembly passed in 1681 permitted any person or persons whatsoever to survey, resurvey,
and run any dividing lines, and give plats of any land, meaning by person a free, white settler.47
Oversight of the fundamental division of the land was thus vested in the entire settler population. The
survey would physically mark the dividing lines by cutting blazes into trees at regular intervals and
noting the type of tree to be found at each turn in the boundary of the holding. Such precise
understanding of local natural history was so crucial to the mapping of the plantation that a British
survey taken after the end of slavery found some 675 colonial names for plants in use on Jamaica.48
Next, from the field notes created during the survey, a plat, or plan, was drawn to scale. The scale
measured chains, the sixty-six-foot-long feudal measuring device used to make such surveys, which
were manipulated in practice by the enslaved under settler supervision. The plans were guides rather
than precise depictions, but subsequent correlations have found them to be quite accurate.49 Their
purpose was both to create a legal account of the ownership of land and to provide a functional guide
for the overseer of an estate as to where his boundaries lay. A copy of the plat was often to be
found in the overseer's office for this purpose.50 However, the compass on the surveys represented
magnetic north, rather than true or meridional north, and as that varied over time, there were many
border disputes in the Jamaica courts.
Jamaica's long history of settlement and conquest, its hills, and its complex population made
geometric irregularities in its plantations inevitable. On flatter and more recently colonized islands,
simpler solutions were found. The Dutch exported their medieval system of long lots to the
Americas, in which space was divided into abstract rectangles of roughly 1,000 acres with one side
bordering on a river. The Brazilian island of Ita-maraca was thereby divided into forty-seven such
lots, in 1648, with a road built on its longest axis. No allowance was made for the conditions on the

ground or for the placement of existing structures, causing all kinds of practical problems.51 On the
Danish island of St. Croix, which was to Denmark what Barbados was to Britainan engine of sugar
production that created spectacular wealth from a relatively small spacethe land was divided by
what was called the Center Line, linking the two main white settlements of Christiansted and
Frederiksted. This long straight line was turned into a well-made road allowing for speed of access
that was essential to the colonizers in repressing the great revolts of 1733 and 1848 (see chap. 4).
New plantations on St. Croix were allocated in 4,000 acre lots, drawn as rectangles and arranged
either side of the Center Line in one of the nine sections created by the West India-Guinea Company.52
In the fertile areas of such spaces, the colonial crops were planted, often represented as a perfect
rectangle of sugarcane, analogous to the squares formed by European soldiers of the period.53
Within the cane fields, a further geometry attended the planting of the cane, known as holing. The
field was divided into squares and each square was planted with a number of cane tops, or cuttings
of the cane plant, taken from the flowering top of the plant, where the buds were most fertile. This
orderly planting was also designed to allow better oversight of the enslaved.54 If Cartesianism was
the mathematicization of space in theory, sugar planting was its implementation in practice, creating a
spatialized geometry designed to produce maximum yields and hence profits. Indeed, the sugarcane
plantation gave physical form to the table as a means of data organization that is often seen to be
emblematic of the period. This functional geometry was the counterpoint to the spectacular mapping
that was made of the metropole. The cartographer Jacques Gamboust produced a detailed map of
Paris in 1652, which he dedicated to the young Louis XIV. Among its uses, Gamboust claimed, the
map was designed in order that, in the most distant countries, those who have believed the
representation of Paris to be above the truth may admire its greatness and beauty.55 This mapping
was designed to impress the reality of Paris in representation on people at a distance, whereas
mapping in the plantation was addressed primarily to the local audience. Both forms of mapping
relied on the visible nomination of what was depicted in those maps and ultimately on the force of
law that connected the disparate aspects of sovereignty.
Space was mapped by the enslaved to enable entertainment, commerce, and outright resistance to
slavery. Despite many ineffectual prohibitions, Africans in slavery found ways to congregate to
dance, sing, and practice their religions. So insistent were the enslaved on these performances that a
portion of the calendar was devoted to them as carnival, the persistent tradition whereby the
subaltern groups in plantation society reversed the social order for a brief period of bacchanalia. The
costumes for carnival were often made with fabric and other items purchased with the proceeds of
sales made at the markets held by the enslaved on Sundays, where they exchanged produce grown in
their gardens to supplement their meager diet and to generate produce for exchange. These market
scenes were often romantically depicted by colonial artists, such as Agostino Brunias (173096), an
Italian painter, who created a series of scenes of Caribbean life in the 1770s, and the French diplomat
Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (17571810), who made a similar series in Martinique around 1805.56
Brunias's works were in no sense realistic: his painting of A French Mulatress Purchasing Fruit
from a Negro Wench (1770) shows the woman of the title conveniently disrobed so as to reveal her
breast. In depicting a chain of commerce that ranged from this simple sale of a piece of garden-grown
produce to the complex fashions of the linen-markets that supplied dress and costumes for the
carnival, Brunias nonetheless recorded the existence of the interstitial subaltern economy of the
plantation. Although passports were needed to attend these marketsmeaning a signed permission
from the overseer or ownerthese were easily forged or altered for reuse.

This mobility created an understanding of the topography that facilitated outright resistance or
escape. The Maroons, as those who escaped enslavement were known, were found in all slave-based
economies. In larger settlements like Jamaica, or mainland colonies like Surinam, where the forest
offered shelter, Maroon communities became permanent. Indeed, so persistent were their attacks on
plantations in these two colonies that both the English and the Dutch came to legal agreements with
the Maroons by treaty and divided the space of the colony. By creating a physical division of the
colony where Maroons, or so-called runaway slaves, could live, Makandal and later the Jamaican
Maroon leader Nanny transformed the theory and practice of mapping. Indeed, the interior of SaintDomingue, away from the plantations that lined the coast, was unmapped right until the revolution and
was first formally represented in an atlas as late as 1985. That is not to say it was Unknown, but that
it was mapped by what in Vodou is now known as kustom (custom), oral and other forms of
vernacular sign making. The Maroons succeeded in remapping colonial space to create a permanent
zone of exclusion in which slavery was not permitted.57 In his Histoire des Deux Indes, the abb
Raynal spelled out the meaning of this mapping in a passage that has often been taken to be prophetic
of the Haitian Revolution: Already two colonies of black fugitives [maroons] have established
themselves safe from your assaults, through treaties and force. These streaks of lightning announce the
oncoming thunderbolts, and the blacks only need a leader.58 Many have seen Toussaint L'Ouverture
foretold here, including perhaps Toussaint himself.

NATURAL HISTORY
The possibility of using visual representation as the key to dominant discipline hinged on the new
science of natural history in practical and theoretical form. In Jill Casid's groundbreaking analysis
(pun intended), it was by transplantation of plant species and machinery with which to cultivate and
process them that colonial administration and plantation economically, politically, and aesthetically
refashioned its Caribbean island possessions as hybrid landscapes.59 Indeed, as she emphasizes, all
the plants associated with the Caribbean islands were imported, from sugarcane to coffee, indigo, and
even the coconut palm. The planters further intended that the enslaved should grow their own food,
thereby inculcating in them the mentality of cultivation. Two spaces came to be described as
gardens: the kitchen gardens immediately surrounding the houses of the enslaved, and the
provision grounds, which were located on the margins of the plantation. However, the planters
often complained that the enslaved did not always grow staple root crops for basic subsistence, and it
was widely noted that they grew tobacco for their own use and for trading.60 The plantations of the
enslaved were often cited by defenders of slavery as examples of the generosity and benevolence of
the plantation system.61 The reality was somewhat different. On St. Croix, for example, the space
formally allocated to slaves for their gardens was some thirty square feet, not much more than a patch
of ground. In Jamaica, where the fertile land was entirely given over to sugar, the provision grounds
were often displaced to remote regions of the hills, making them even harder to cultivate, or were
omitted altogether.62 On those Jamaica plantations where provision grounds were created, they were
often described in the surveys as being part ruinate, and, according to Barry Higman's calculations,
were located at least a mile from the plantation buildings.63
In addition to these practicalities, the Atlantic world was also a prime location for the
establishment of natural history as an abstract science centering on observation. However, although
sight became its preeminent sense, it, too, was subject to restrictions. The botanist Linnaeus ruled,

We should rejectall accidental notes that do not exist in the Plant either for the eye or for the
touch.64 One example of such accidental detail was color, whose variations and subtleties were held
to elude precise categorization. The result was that natural history relied on what Foucault described
as a visibility freed from all other sensory burdens and restricted, moreover, to black and white.65
In the context of slavery, in which a visible racialization came into being in precisely this period, this
distinction must give us pause. It suggests that in this period race, while being neither invented nor
rendered exterminationist in the period, became visualized in terms of a binary distinction between
black and white, reinforced by the new natural history. While Foucault was usually circumspect about
dating his transitions from one epistemological frame to another, in this instance he offered a very
precise reference, namely the publication of Jonston's Natural History of Quadrupeds, in 1657.
Although there are of course many ways to nuance this assertion, this shift from general history to
natural history is an event, to wit the sudden separation, in the realm of Historia, of two orders of
knowledge henceforward considered to be different.66 History had become the field of what would
become known as visuality. It was marked by a division of the sensible that produced the new slave
law codes, the creation of plantation maps, and the split within History itself around 1660.
Given that Jonston's book was published in Amsterdam, it is striking to read Charles Ford's
observation that the first Dutch racist text (and perhaps the first racist text in any language) is Johan
Picardt's Korte beschryvinge of 1660.67 Picardt created a genealogy that traced the division of
peoples back to Noah and to the story, which has since become notorious, that the blackness of
Africans was a punishment for Ham looking at Noah's nakedness. Here illicit looking was punished
by a visible distinction. Although centuries of racism have claimed that this story dates from time
immemorial, Benjamin Braude has recently shown that it was in fact an early modern extrapolation of
the Bible that has no basis in Genesis. The very convenience with which the story fits the new
paradigm of natural history should be enough to alert suspicion. Whereas the Elizabethan writer
George Best had argued that the dark color of African skin was the result of an infection, seventeenthcentury writers like George Sandys insisted on the curse of Ham. From a close reading of the elusive
texts, Braude concludes: Slavery seems to have been the new element that made Sandys's arguments
more persuasive than Best's.68 In properly genealogical fashion it can be concluded that rather than
modern visualized racism taking its cue from the story of Ham's punishment, the story was used to
justify a shift that had already taken place. Perhaps no objects so epitomize this shift than the casta
paintings created in Mexico, beginning in the early eighteenth century, to represent the different forms
of miscegenation between African, Spanish, and Indian residents of New Spain. These small
paintings were arranged in the form of a table, allowing the viewer to track the progression of a
particular kind of person. This tabulation might also allow for the nomination of tropical fruits,
vegetables, or other objects of curiosity to natural history. Casta paintings did not entirely essentialize
race, allowing the crossed child of a Spaniard to return to Spanishness in two or three
generations, but a reverse journey out of Africa was not permitted. Such paintings had not been
seen before, and they did not survive the era of natural history, disappearing before 1810.69
Natural history provided significant purchase for those trying to resist oversight. The botanical
knowledge and tastes of those in forced diaspora in the Caribbean changed the development of the
plantation system in numerous ways. The Africans on plantations knew to eat the berries of certain
trees, like the Black-heart Fiddlewood, while the fishermen among them ate the common sea crab as a
mainstay of their diet.70 They were held to be especially partial to avocado, leading to the extensive
cultivation of these trees. Plantains were a staple in the diet of the enslaved, but came to be an item of

choice for Europeans as well.71 The Jamaican Jews introduced to the island a number of fruits and
vegetables not usually eaten by gentiles, such as the Brown-Jolly (or eggplant, which was salted
and boiled in place of greens, although it was otherwise not eaten by gentiles in the Americas),
sesame seeds, and even tomatoes.72 The ambivalent interaction of European natural history and
African cultivation found its point of intersection in the cassava. The root of this plant was dried and
ground to make a form of flour that was a staple for the enslaved, bringing an African vegetable to the
Americas. Yet its juice was said to be extremely poisonousalthough some disputed the claimand
planters feared that the enslaved might introduce it into their food. Consequently, among the planters
was a widespread suspicion of any enslaved person seen to have a longer-than-average fingernail,
because that was held to be the method by which cassava poison could be carried and delivered.73
Soon the colonizers feared that there [were] hardly any slaveswho in [their] colonies [did] not
have knowledge of various plants containing poisons.74 However, African medical knowledge was
literally vital to the transplanted population. The British naturalist Hans Sloane, for instance, recalled
that an enslaved African had cured a swollen limb that had been bothering him for some time.75 The
enslaved also kept and maintained in oral form genealogical information about themselves and others.
Hughes recorded that on a Barbados plantation then belonging to Thomas Tunckes, one family of the
enslaved knew themselves to be descended from the first Negroes that ever came hither from
Guiney. They also remembered that before the land on which the plantation now sat was deforested,
there had been an indigenous settlement in the woods at a place that they still called the Indian
Pond. The Africans recalled that these Indians fiercely resisted what Hughes called Subjection by
the Whites and finally departed the island in canoes, rather than submit.76 Ethnographic research has
shown that these oral traditions are often substantially accurate. There is a more permanent record.
When the revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue achieved independence, in 1804, they named the island
Haiti, in memory of the indigenous population, a permanent memorial to the first Atlantic genocide.

FORCE OF LAW
The map and the table depicted an abstract field of visible nomination that was sustained by the force
of what was taken to be law, whether human or natural. The law, although invisible, thus formed the
ground for the possibility of representing space and species in distinct but exchangeable form. It
followed that because free men (predominantly whites) had rights over the enslaved, those so
subjugated could have no rights at all. Just as all persons could survey land, so did all slaveowners have a wide range of discretion over the treatment of the enslaved. While the law codes of
different colonial systems varied in degree, some measure of corporal punishment was permitted to
all slave-owners, racializing the function of the police in the plantation system. For example, the
Colonial Council in Saint-Domingue declared in 1770 that neither the royal prosecutor nor the judge
have the right to monitor the severity of the police that masters exercise over their slaves, even if
there is mutilation of limbs.77 Only a few years after the first natural history was published, a slave
code was passed in Barbados, in 1661, as part of the reestablishment of sovereignty entailed in the
restoration of the English monarchy, in 1660. This code was influential across the Anglophone
Atlantic world, being formally adopted later in Jamaica, South Carolina, and Antigua. Its declared
purpose was the better ordering and governing of Negroes. In order to separate and distinguish
them, the law defined Africans as a heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine dangerous kinde of
people, thereby justifying their being treated in the same way as men's other goods and chattels.78

Almost as soon as natural history had been defined, it was being used as a form of legal division
between legal subjects and other forms of people.
With the sugar trade growing in importance, Louis XIV published his Code Noir, in 1685, to
regulate the French slave trade and its plantations. Its preamble established the dialectic of dominant
discipline under the universalizing premise of Catholicism. Louis demands obedience to himself
and to the discipline of the Catholic Church, of which he is the protector. The code was intended to
overcome the physical separation of the plantations from the metropole by establishing the extent of
our power [puissance]. As Louis Sala-Molins points out in his exemplary commentary on the code,
the term slave is introduced without a line of judicial justification or theorization.79 Indeed, its very
title defined the subject of the code as the discipline and commerce of black slaves in the French
islands of America, further racializing the term slave.80 In the racialized Catholic commercial
discipline instituted by the code, the ngre is canonically a man, but he is juridically an item of
merchandise.81 Yet the ngre was no more defined than the esclave, creating an aporia that can
only be resolved by force of law: the slave is the person enslaved by the law, and the black is a
person enslaved, unless otherwise freed by law. Consequently, the code was careful to define the
legal outcome of marriages across the free-slave divide. In the version of the code that appeared in
1685, a free man who married his slave according to the rites of the Catholic Church thereby freed
her, a regulation rescinded in 1725, when all marriages between blanc and Noir were forbidden.
In order for planters to maintain control of reproduction, all marriages between the enslaved had to
be approved by their owners, while enslavement descended in the matrilineal line only. The force of
law, and its transparency, were above all questions of filiation, as Edouard Glissant has pointed out,
avoiding the opacity of all so-called miscegenation by the tactic of oversight.82 Here the immediate
and constant intermingling, whether forced or consensual, between Africans and Europeans was
deliberately overlooked in order to allow the divisions of the law to retain force. While it has been
repeatedly observed that the Code Noir and all other slave codes were rarely, if ever, followed in
detail, the proper purpose of such codes was above all to legitimate force in the minds of those using
that force. For all its manifest hypocrisies, the slave code was a necessary component to the
plantation system in order to sustain its reproduction at the biological and ideological levels.
Those on the margins of freedom, like Jews and free people of color, attempted from the very
inception of plantation slavery to use the colonial legal system to assert their claims. In 1669, only
nine years after the slave code was passed, Antonio Rodrigues-Rezio successfully petitioned that
Jews in Barbados should be allowed to give legal testimony, taking an oath on the Old Testament,
unlike the enslaved, whose testimony was banned.83 In 1711, it was the turn of John Williams, a free
African, to claim such testimonial rights. When he was denied, a further demarcation of the racialized
division between white and black came into being, vacating the term freedom of substantive
meaning.84 That is to say, these Africans were emancipated insofar as they were not chattel, but they
remained legally minors, unable to speak as an adult in court. In 1708, the Jamaican Assembly moved
to preempt any such action by decreeing that no Jew, mulatto, Negro or Indian shall have any vote at
any election of members to serve in any Assembly of this Island.85 As ever, such prohibitions imply
that some people were making precisely such claims. With the passage of the Plantation Act, in 1740
(13 Geo. II), Jews who had been resident in British colonies for seven years could be naturalized,
taking an oath on the Old Testament. Abraham Sanchez, who had become naturalized, took the logical
next step in 1750 and demanded the right to vote. After being refused by a returning officer in the
parish of St John, Kingston, he asked the assembly to overturn the decision. The parishes of St

Andrew and St Catherine presented opposing petitions, and the assembly ruled against Sanchez and
had the resolution printed in the Jamaica Courant.86 The public sphere, as manifested in the colonial
assembly and the newspaper, used its racialized consensus to suppress rights that were legitimately
claimed. That is to say, first, that the public was defined as white, meaning not Jew, mulatto,
Negro or Indian. Second, when one puts these traces from the archive together with the long history
of slave revolt, there was a consistent counterpoint of rights claims in the Atlantic world that long
preceded the Age of Revolution, so often held to be the agent of such actions.

AUTONOMY OF THE ENSLAVED

The confluence of a counter to oversight in mapping, natural history, and the force of law can be
illustrated through the remarkable history of Franois Makandal (d. 1758), a disabled, Islamic,
sexually promiscuous, African resistance leader and priest in the plantation economy. Makandal
incarnated what was and, in the current moment appears to remain, the nightmare of white
domination.87 Enslaved in Africa at the age of twelve, he was able to read and write Arabic and had
an extensive knowledge of medical and military botany. In maronnage for eighteen years, Makandal
created an extended network of associates across Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), as well as
establishing a mountain settlement in which cultivation was extensively practiced. He disseminated a
form of power-figure known as a garde-corps, literally body-guard, which contained various
elements that could induce forces from the dead to protect the living. These power-figures were the
syncretic product of Kongolese and Fon power-figures (minkisi and bo) together with colonial
practices that have become known as Vodou, a spiritual means of understanding and controlling the
relation of space, time, and causality. When Saint-Domingue was isolated by the outbreak of the
Seven Years War, in 1756, Makandal set his network to instigate an insurrection against the colonists.
The plan, as the French came to understand it, was to poison the water in all the houses in Le Cap, the
colony's capital, and then send bands of insurgents out into the countryside to liberate the enslaved. It
was believed that he intended to kill all the whites in the colony. In revenge, the French planters
instituted a veritable moral panic, burning dozens of people at the stake on the basis of the most
tenuous connection to the Makandal network. Makandal himself was arrested by chance and later
executed.
Under interrogation, Brigitte, Makandal's wife, described a magic phrase with which the powerfigure was invoked: May the good god give eyes to those who ask for eyes.88 This form of second
sight was the counter to oversight. In Kongo cosmology, the second sight was that used in the space of
the dead, normally invisible to the living. It is noticeable that Makandal used the term the good god
[bon Dieu], which was to become the dominant figure in the invisible spirit world as conceived by
Haitian Vodou.89 Makandal made this second sight available to his followers via the garde-corps. The
figures were invoked to perform a service, deal with a complaint, or even to harm others, and the
French judge Courtin accepted that it is indisputable that this brings harm to anyone one wants. That
is to say, the colonial powers accepted that minkisi makandal had power and therefore that the
balance of power in the colony had changed. Makandal was known for performing a symbolic
enactment of this transformation. He would stage a demonstration of his powers in which he pulled
out of water a cloth that was colored olive, for the original inhabitants of the island. At the next pass,
the cloth would be white, for the present rulers, and finally it emerged black, to indicate the future
passage of the island to African control.

By the end of Makandal's revolt, Saint-Domingue had two versions of visualized power in
contestation with each other, European oversight and Caribbean second sight. Makandal had
remapped the island as a kinship and commercial network. According to Carolyn Fick, Makandal
knew the names of every slave on each plantation who supported and participated in his
movement.90 His itinerant traders (pacotilleurs) traveled to the plantations from his mountain
sanctuary and remapped the French colony into a place of his own making. In the third element of his
contestation of oversight, Makandal directly challenged the force of colonial law by claiming a
liberty that instantiated the right to look. All sources are agreed that Makandal and his followers
sought liberty. From the perspective of the planters, the insurrection was caused because the enslaved
had noticed that masters offered in their wills to free their slaves after their own deaths, as a mark of
wealth and civility. The poisoning sought to hurry this process along, according to the official theory.
The view from the enslaved was far more direct. According to a man named Mdor, arrested for
poisoning at the La-vaud plantation, If slaves commit acts of poisoning, they do it in order to obtain
their freedom. Under interrogation as to whether she had poisoned her master, a rebel named Assam
testified that a free African named Pompe had encouraged her to do so. When she refused, he
declared: Well! So much the worse for you since you do not want to become free.91 The
involvement of Pompe and many other free Africans in the insurrection shows that the freedom
sought was not simply personal, because they were already free, but political. It practiced a view that
another's lack of freedom denatures one's own. At the famous meeting at Bois-Caiman, in 1791, that
instigated the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Vodou priest Boukman expressed this theory of
freedom to the Saint-Domingue masses: Listen to the voice of liberty, which speaks in the heart of us
all.92 The meeting was not far from the Le Normand plantation where Makandal had been enslaved.
The French authorities went to considerable lengths to demonstrate that they had defeated
Makandal, showing him to his associates after his capture and commissioning a portrait painted by a
Parisian artist named N. Dupont (d. 1765), as if to create their own counter power-figure. However,
the execution itself was botched, as Makandal was able to free himself from the pyre, and he tumbled
to the ground to the sound of the crowd shouting, Makandal is saved! In Moreau de St. Mery's
account, the terror was extreme, all doors were locked. Although Makandal was recaptured and
burned, many of the blacks believe even to the present day [1796], that he did not die in the
torture.93 The African population may have literally believed that Makandal escaped, or they may
have meant that he continued to be a powerful spirit within the world of the living although present in
that of the dead. Phrased in the terms that would become current during the revolutionary period,
Makandal had become and continues to be a hero. His revolutionary and magical powers remain part
of cultural memory in Haiti to this day, where his name is invoked in popular songs and in the
present-day genealogies of the gods.94 In Edouard Duval-Carri's powerful painting, La Voix des
Sans-Voix (1994), Makandal is shown as one of the revolutionary pantheon, alongside Toussaint,
Dessalines, and Ption, watching the coup against Aristide, who is represented as the latest such
figure to speak for those without voice, the spokesperson for the part that has no part, the people.95

COLONIAL AUTONOMY: REGENERATING OVERSIGHT

On the eve of the Atlantic revolutions, the planters in Saint-Domingue sought to restore each of the
different components of oversight within a structure less dependent on individual supervision,
whether free or enslaved. Having defined the borders of the colony, the planters intended to

strengthen the force of law by making power local, and to transform the production of sugar into an
automated, high-volume process. This strategy was itself a recognition that the supervisory regime I
have called oversight had broken down. Strikingly, the plantocracy envisaged a modernization of
government, cultivation, and the public sphere within the regime of slavery but independent of the
monarchy. In effect, they imagined an independent Saint-Domingue. The resistance of the enslaved
that became outright revolution in Saint-Domingue began as a strike over the new labor conditions
generated by the new production processes that then generalized into a revolt against the entire means
of production.
The key to the planter strategy was the formation of what the historians James McClellan and
Franois Regourd have called the colonial machine, which endeavored to automate oversight into
an autonomous form, governed locally. It was produced by the interaction of colonial learned
societies, botanical gardens, chambers of agriculture, hospitals, newspapers, and functionary
experts like botanists.96 This newly formed apparatus set out to enhance what it saw as the outdated
methods of colonial agriculture, botany, engineering, and medicine, all centered around the authority
of the state but acting independently of it. Whereas natural history in the colonies had been the
preserve of motivated individuals compiling texts, botanists were now directing the formation of
specific botanical gardens designed to enhance colonial production of cash crops. At the same time,
agriculture was being directed by new bureaucracies like the Chambre d'Agriculture established in
all the French islands in 1763. The first work in tropical medicine and disease took notable
initiatives, such as the vaccinations against smallpox carried out in Saint-Domingue from 1745,
including the mass vaccination of the enslaved after 1774, long before they were practiced in
metropolitan France.97 All of these activities came to be discussed by the self-styled enlightened
public of Saint-Domingue, ranging from grand planters to aspiring intellectuals among the small but
well-connected membership of its learned society, the Cercle de Philadelphes (1784), later the
Socit Royale des Sciences et Arts.
The impetus to independence was a peace agreement with the Maroons in 1785, defining a border
on the French and Spanish sides of the island. This new mapping promised to enable better control of
runaways with Maroon cooperation, as had been the case in Jamaica. The new colonial apparatus
could now be devoted to the creation of a disciplined, numerically regulated form of sugar
production, known as the vegetable economy.98 Dependent on a handful of printed guides,
traditional sugar production was an art not a science, a skill handed down from refiner to refiner,
incarnated in an obscure and specialized language. The planter Barr de Saint-Venant arranged for a
young naturalist named Jacques-Franois Dutrne la Couture (17491814) to come to SaintDomingue from Martinique, in 1784, in order to inculcate his new methods of cultivation.99 By the
time Dutrne's book on sugar was published in 1791, on the eve of the revolution, he had worked on
six plantations and had become a member of the Socit Royale des Sciences et Arts.100 Dutrne
sought to transform the techniques of a tactile and verbal artisanal craft into a visualized, modern
technology, all designed so that blacks of a very ordinary intelligence can direct [the work].101 In
short, he envisaged a Taylorism of the vegetable economy, by which the plantation could function as
an unskilled, automated factory visualized and regulated by numerical data.
First, he reorganized plantation labor by means of a tabulated form that allowed the overseer to tell
at a glance the monthly patterns of labor, production, and weather conditions (see fig. 16). Columns
identified the health, work detail, and status (Maroon, runaway, ill, etc.) of each enslaved person, as
well as specifying the quantities produced of sugarcane juice and each of the different forms of sugar.

Even the quantity of rain was to be recorded. Surveillance was improved, even as the individual
overseer was not required to be physically present to sustain it. This visualized and statistical
tabulation of labor accorded with the physiocratic principles of Franois Quesnay, who argued for the
use of graphs and tables to create an economic picture that was held to be unachievable by means
of discourse. Dutrne's system was designed to further reduce the difficulties of oversight's
surveillance by standardizing sugar production. The old inefficient iron boilers and cement basins
would be replaced with copper apparatus, better suited to heating without overboiling and not subject
to decay from the sugar. The established system relied on the expertise of the refiners, who had an
arcane vocabulary of artisanal terms designed to designate stages of readiness of the heated canejuice that would require transfer from one boiler to the next in a sequence of five, until the final stage
of readiness, in which the sugar would make a string between finger and thumb when drawn out.102
Readiness would now be simply determined by temperature. Sugar begins to form, according to
Dutrne, at 83 degrees Raumur, and the water remaining in the juice was entirely evaporated when it
had reached 110 degrees.103 The new laboratory could therefore work all night under the
supervision of one of the enslaved drivers, rather than having to be suspended between midnight and
the early morning as was traditional.104 In short, making sugar was far less complicated than had been
thought and could be achieved by a simple regulatory process. Furthermore, Dutrne claimed that the
use of his strategy at the de Ladebate plantation had raised net receipts of sugar by 80 percent, a
startling gain.105

His gains may have come from a change in the cane being cultivated. The sugarcane in use in the
Caribbean was known as the creole cane, one of several varieties of Saccharum officinarum, as
Linnaeus named it (see fig. 17). It grew to about six or seven feet tall and was easy to grind, although
relatively little bagasse, or trash as the English called it, was produced to burn for fuel. In the late
eighteenth century, planters across the Caribbean began to experiment with what they called

Otaheite cane, using the European misnomer for Tahiti. It was both taller, reaching thirteen feet, and
thicker, growing up to six inches in diameter. It was first planted in Cuba around 1780, the sources
being very unclear on these matters.106 At the same time, another even larger cane, known as the
Bourbon variety, from its presumed origin on the Ile de Bourbon, began to be widely used. According
to the Jamaica planter John Stewart this fifteen-feet-tall, eight-inch-wide cane came into use around
1790 and had taken over as the dominant variety by the time he was writing, in 1823. Although these
names were not used in Saint-Domingue, the new canes were clearly being cultivated there. Dutrne
called them strong canes, which he contrasted with the older weak canes, a reasonable
distinction in that all the plants were varietals of the same species. In 1799 a naturalist observing
abandoned plantations saw that some canes grew to five feet while others reached fourteen feet in
height, making it clear that different varietals had been in cultivation.107 The Bourbon cane was at
first far more productive than the older varieties, but it also required intense labor to maintain
because it exhausted the soil at a rapid rate, requiring extensive manuring.108 Given that the Bourbon
cane was three times the size of the older Creole variety, work in the cane fields trebled in quantity.
As the larger varietals spread around the Caribbean, from 1780 onward, one part of the heightened
resistance of the enslaved came from the greatly increased workload the new plants required.

These changes were not intended, however, to simply improve the cultivation of sugar. By
transforming the colonial machine, they implied a new mechanism of power. In the influential view of
Emmerich de Vattel, cultivation was not only the first responsibility of government, but it also
justified colonizing North America because the land was not being used.109 Dutrne implied a similar

theory of government in describing the administration of a plantation: The Master, being he who
governs and commands, must absolutely be present at all times. The Art of governing a Plantation is
necessarily tied to the art of cultivation. The Master must therefore be a Cultivator. Since the cares of
his government are very extended and multiplied, he shares them with trustworthy men, white and free
like himself, charged with transmitting his orders and seeing to their execution.110 This insistence
that oversight (commandement) must be both present and involved in cultivation was nothing short of
a call for a colonial republic.
These implied reforms were spelled out, in 1789, when the planters came to present their
grievances to the Estates-General, called in France to detail all such local concerns. While much
attention has been paid to the illegal election of these deputies and their rebuff by the Estates-General,
the content of their program has often been overlooked. It was, however, published in SaintDomingue, making their plans clear on the island itself.111 The leading planters were aiming for
functional independence, allowing the monarchy to retain direct authority only in military and
diplomatic affairs. They demanded free trade for their products and raw materials, especially in
forced African labor. With this new force of local law, the planters intended to reform what they
called the police of the island, especially as regards the enslaved. The costs of liberating an
enslaved person were to be raised, even as marriage between whites and nonwhites of all kinds was
to be severely restricted. The regulations, instituted in 1785, granting more free time to the
enslaved and a less onerous workday were to be repealed. Each district was to be allocated a new
judge lieutenant of crime and police, with wide authority over economic and police matters. The
complicated legal system was to be reorganized and codified. The planters envisaged what they
called the complete regeneration of the Colony in all aspects of its administration.112 Regeneration
was a privileged term among the reformers of the French Revolution, marking an understanding of a
physical need to repair the body politic. The colonists emphasized that local experience is more
certain than the best theory and set out as a result to establish permanent local assemblies, both
colony-wide and provincial, to administer this regeneration.113 As was later admitted, the move to
give power to the assemblies implied that Saint-Domingue is not the subject but the ally of France,
to quote an address to the Constituent Assembly in Paris in 1790.114 These Assemblies were, among
other functions, to replace the Chambres d'Agriculture and to reinforce their mission with greater
authority. Among the first tasks proposed was the production of a new topographic map of the island
and the precise determination of the boundaries of holdings by a surveyor.115 Taken together these
projects amounted to a local regeneration of oversight, with new formations of mapping and the force
of law sustaining the disciplined production of sugar.
The establishment of a plantation complex of visuality in the seventeenth century had entered into
crisis, challenged first by the enslaved themselves and now by the plantocracy. From the Makandal
period on, the enslaved had developed effective counters to the strategies of visualized domination
that had been forged in the settler plantation colonies. Far from being deterred, the plantocracy sought
to intensify their regime by automating production, increasing labor, and tightening restrictions on the
enslaved, even as they claimed autonomy for the island from the metropole. Both challenges to
metropolitan authority came at a time of external disruption: Makandal had used the tumult of the
Seven Years War to launch his revolt, while the planters adapted the rhetoric of liberty and
grievances against the monarchy that were prevalent in the first years of the French Revolution
(178690). Oversight had sought to frame its authority locally within the bounds of a given plantation
that was subject to the surveillance of a particular overseer. This authority gained force as the

surrogation of the omniscient gaze of the sovereign, even as it was granted an exceptional autonomy
from the procedures of judgment. By the late eighteenth century, this localized practice was
challenged from within and without by Maroons, abolitionists, rebel slaves, and finally even the
planters themselves. Unable to sustain its form, the plantation complex entered a period of crisis,
competing with a new visualized regime of liberty, whose counterpoint would be visuality.

TWO
The Modern Imaginary
Antislavery Revolutions and the Right to Existence

The revolutions of France (1789-99) and Haiti (1791-1804) challenged and overturned the ordering
of the plantation complex, defeating both monarchy and slave-owning authority.1 While the overthrow
of monarchs was not without precedent, nowhere had plantation slavery been reversed. The formation
of Haiti as an independent nation on what had been the richest plantation island of the Atlantic world
marked a decisive turning point in the ways that it was possible to imagine the relations of the people
and authority. The specter of African communism has haunted modern empires ever since. This
revolutionary geoimaginary was and is a central and indispensable part of modernity. However, as it
erupted into the plantation complex, it was also paradoxically unthinkable, even as it happened in a
series of radicalizing steps that challenged further the ontological order of the West and the global
order of colonialism.2 The existence of this new order within the old was constituted by a tension
between new liberty and old slavery in colony and metropole alike. Unlike the plantation
imaginary dominated by a single authority, this visualized revolution was therefore structured around
division. It was the modern form of dissensus, defined by Rancire as putting two worlds in one and
the same world, that constitutes the political. In the antislavery revolutions of the period, the
imaginary of this dissensus was the question of rights and the righting of wrongs. The decisive
intervention in a dissensus over rights comes when a person who does not have a given right claims it
as if they already do. It is a performative claim, validated only by the act of making it and visualized
as what I have called the right to look. The active imagining of that right and its visualization
produced modernity as the visualized contestation of right between authority and the people. So
effectively was this claim unthought by Carlyle and other apologists for autocracy that it is only
now fully being realized to what extent such diverse questions as sustainability and the concept of
universal history should be thought in relation to the antislavery revolutions. Far from being the
preserve only of specialists, footnoted as a gesture to diversity by grand theorists of the modern, it is
here that the modern imaginary was formed.
The process produced what one might call a new imaginary of the imaginary itself. For the division
and dissensus imagined and enacted by the Haitian Revolution was produced in the visualizing and
understanding of the psychic economy in equal measure with that of political economy. The first
moments of revolution were understood as an awakening, creating a vernacular form of what
Walter Benjamin would later call the optical unconscious. From the realms of sleep, popular
forces shook off the literal and metaphorical chains of slavery. In the metropole, this awakening
produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), designed both to recognize
certain gains, especially the end of feudalism, and to prevent new concessions. It was left to the
enslaved and urban radicals to revolutionize the revolution. Using the terminology of the African
diaspora, I call this new distribution of order the politics of eating, entailing both the literal

production and distribution of food (both staples and cash crops), and the resulting authority. This
politics challenged the big men of slavery and created embodied counterpoints in the revolutionary
hero and the people who authorized him. For the Saint-Domingue rank-and-file, sustenance and
sustainability were the key issues, named in France by the radical sans-culottes as the right to
existence. Against all hitherto existing concepts of history, the enslaved and their allies visualized
themselves not only as acting within history, but as making History. Invested in the hero was a willed
emancipation in which those absolutely without a part in the slave colony instituted their claim to be
seen, a claim that generated an embodied aesthetic. Those so designated as heroes would ultimately
choose to sustain the nation-state rather than those without title, creating a dissonance within the
revolution that allowed figures like Napoleon to emerge and remaster the popular imagination. For
this supreme act of self-fashioning, he would later become the prototype of the antirevolutionary, antiemancipation Hero for Carlyle. Nonetheless, the enslaved had renamed themselves as the people,
classified themselves as rights-holders, and aestheticized their transformation in the person of the
Hero and the concept of History. This was not just an act of revolt, but the inauguration of antislavery
as revolution.
The resulting symbolic forms were both a representation of the revolutionary process and an event
within it. Their rapid circulation caused them to condense, by which I mean that (for example) a
designation of the equality of the three Estates, or orders of French society, condensed from being
the subject of an entire representation to a symbolic triangle. In the contested new imaginary, relations
between the nation, the multitude and liberty were literally worked out and visualized. With the
collapse of royal censorship in France and its empire, revolutionary events were visualized as prints,
engravings, or even paintings, ranging from the anonymous vernacular caricature to works by pillars
of the Royal Academy of Painting, with some of the most interesting images being popular themes
rendered by elite artists.3 Further, the revolutionaries visualized new social agents, such as the Third
Estate (all the population who were not nobles or clergy), the sans-culottes (the vernacular term for
artisans and other middling groups), and above all the formerly enslaved. By 1800, we can identify
men and women descended from the enslaved engaged in visualization: Madame La Roche, a
silhouettiste, in Saint-Domingue (fl. ca. 1800), and the painter Jos Campeche (1751-1809), in Puerto
Rico. The revolutionary geoimaginary entailed new spatial imaginaries, such as the land of liberty,
the space in which rights were held to pertain. Colonial anthropology ventured into the South Pacific
in the hopes of locating a topographical origin for these rights. Ironically, these ventures served as the
beginnings of imperial visuality structured around a distinction between civilization and the
primitive. Taken as a necessarily contested whole, this imaginary was not all there was to the
revolution, but it was nonetheless a revolutionary form, as Lynn Hunt and Jack Censer have recently
shown: Artistic representation of events and people was integral to the conflict over the meaning of
the French Revolution.4 If art means visual representation and imagination in its broadest sense,
this position suggests that the visual image as a representation of visualization did revolutionary
work. Rather than merely illustrate decisive events, visualized power worked as one of several
epistemic apparatuses that were involved in producing the discursive practice of the reality and
realism of the Atlantic revolutions. Whereas monarchy was eternal (the King is dead, long live the
King), the sheer pressure of change transformed visual form, creating a legacy that defined the
contradictions of modernity. To render the production of this imaginary comprehensible, I have
highlighted five central moments of entanglement between the revolution against plantation slavery
and that against feudal slavery that produced the new imaginary with which we are still in some
senses engaged. Consequently, the fifth act is not a dnouement so much as a further intensification of

revolutionary authority that would spark the beginnings of both visuality and imperial visuality.

AWAKENINGS
It is the early days of the French Revolution, in August 1789. A technically accomplished print
produced anonymously shows a National Guardsman running from a burning pile of feudal insignia,
showing that the abolition of feudalism, on 4 August 1789, was its cue (see fig. 18). It was an
interstitial moment, after the setting aside of feudal droits de seigneur (rights of the lord), but before
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had been issued by the National Assembly. The
scene depicts a low-lying colonial island, with commercial ships visible sailing off the coast.
Outside the picture space, printed captions separated the Land of Slaves, at left, from the Land of
Liberty, at right, the direction in which the guardsman is running. In the land of slaves, some
plantation buildings can be seen flying a flag, whereas in the land of liberty, the sun shines on free
people, some of whom are people of color, dancing around a Liberty tree and having a celebratory
drink. No work is being done. A Greco-Roman temple in the background reinforces the allusiveness
of the Phrygian cap, better known as the liberty bonnet, on top of the tree. This awkward headgear had
been the symbol of emancipated slaves in the Roman empire. It was a visual icon of freedom in the
revolution in the North American British colonies, in 1776, and came to be a garment worn during the
French Revolution. Liberty in general was understood here as the abolition of colonial slavery,
bringing freedom first to the colonies and then to the metropole. The print created a universalized
figure of slavery to refer to abuses colonial and domestic that could never be restored once rectified.
The colonial setting thus recalled at once the slavery of feudalism and the beginnings of revolution in
the Americas that was to be completed in France. The caption reads, Once there, you never go
back, referring to the land of liberty. This is the new imaginary of revolution, visualized as a
postslavery colonial space.

This print displays a vivid range of intellectual and visual reference to represent the popular
metaphor of life under the ancien rgime as slavery. It captures the paradoxical frame of mind
described by Jean Jaurs (later cited by both C. L. R. James and Christopher L. Miller) in his
understanding of the relation of slavery and the French Revolution: The fortunes created at
Bordeaux, at Nantes by the slave trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and
contributed to human emancipation.5 This contradiction was that visualized in this print, strikingly
distinct from the formal means used either by the painters of the Royal Academy or popular
woodblock prints of the period. It captures the sense of transformation as described in a
contemporary newspaper: Finally, the moment has arrived where a great revolution in ideas and
things is going, so to speak, to transport us out of the mire of slavery into the countries of liberty.In
the new world, the brave inhabitants of Philadelphia have given an example of a people reclaiming
their liberty; France will give it to the rest of the world.6 From slavery via the Americas to freedom
has been visualized as from slavery to freedom in the Americas. This sense of permanent
transformation was also a revolutionary political aesthetic, later canonized in Thomas Paine's classic
Rights of Man (1791). Paine consistently referred to monarchic regimes as slavery, which were
vulnerable to the revelation of liberty: The mind, in discovering truth, acts in the same manner as it
acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to
put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.7 Once seen, one never goes back.

By extension, then, it is not possible to unknowknowledge, or unthinkthoughts. Once seen,

liberty cannot be unseen. Unfreedom, as slavery was euphemistically described in the late
eighteenth century, become freedom could not revert. This imaginary of the mind as physically
retaining an irreversible trace of intellectual ideas both anticipates Freud's idea of the unconscious as
a writing pad and also looks back to the Enlightenment goal of perpetual peace. Both were held to be
irreversible: the unconscious never forgets and universal peace cannot be disturbed. In keeping with
this psychic dimension to revolutionary imaginary, the visual impact of the print relies in significant
part on the disproportionate size of the guardsman relative to the background, as if he is intended to
be real, while the background is a metaphor. The background is a form of dream-work, given that it
is obviously imaginary and that the symbols at work are highly condensed. These impressions must be
registered and described in a form of archiving that is also the formation of a certain optical
unconscious.8
Such visualizations seem poised between the iconography of monarchy and Freud's interpretation
of dreams. Monarchy sustained a knowing distinction between the individual royal person, often frail,
old, or tired, and the unchanging glory of Majesty, visualized as the Sun itself, incorporating a set of
symbols, ranging from flags to coins and the paraphernalia of kingship, such as scepters and crowns.
For Freud, dreams condense the complex dynamics of the psyche into symbols. In his view,
condensation creates an intermediate common entity out of the conflicting elements that are subject
to being overdetermined, that is to say, used repeatedly with multiple associations. This
condensation is crucial for the dream-symbol to achieve the intensity to force it out of the unconscious
into dream-work.9 This condensation was achieved in revolutionary images by the intensity of social
conflict being represented, images that then circulated around the Atlantic world. The combination of
conflict and circulation produced the embodied form of the hero. This hero was not necessarily a
named individual so much as the visualized embodiment of revolution. The National Guardsman was
one such imagined hero in the moment of transformation, like Superman emerging from his phonebooth. Perhaps the best-known popular image of 1789 was of this kind, known as The Awakening of
the Third Estate (see plate 3). In this relatively simple lithograph, a then new technology designed for
mass reproduction, a figure representing the Third Estate awakes in the shadow of the Bastille, the
notorious royal prison that had been stormed on 14 July. The caption, written in popular argot, reads,
What a con, time I woke up, the oppression of these chains is giving me a nightmare that's a little too
strong. The popular print medium combined with the dialect made this in every sense a vernacular
image. The Third Estate was a vernacular hero, while the ancien rgime was now literally
represented as a bad dream from which the Third Estate was struggling to wake, laden down with
chains, creating the overdetermined reference to chattel slavery. As the Third Estate wakes, he finds
himself surrounded by weapons, causing fear and panic in the priest and the noble standing nearby.
The transformational experience of revolution was visualized as the awakening of a heroic popular
figure from a nightmare incarnated as slavery into a new possibility of liberty. Of course, the other
possibility is that this awakening was itself part of the dream and not yet achieved. The Third
Estate was an intermediate entity, whose identity was subject to intense questioning. In the bestknown account of the Third Estate by the abb Sieys, there is no need to have a monarchy to have a
nation, the very situation that the print visualizes.10
If monarchy was the Sun, which also made its power visible, it was in a certain sense blind,
insofar as it did not see specific events. As Foucault emphasized, sovereignty was the power to
withdraw life.11 It repaired damage to the body-politic by inflicting retributive violence on the body

of the condemned, but it did not see the crime as it was happening. By challenging royal authority,
forever symbolized by the storming of the Bastille, the popular forces claimed a different means to
see events and to administer justice. Both were expressed as the Lantern, literally meaning the
rvrberes, the mirror-based streetlights installed in Paris, in the 1760s, to illuminate the night. The
cry To the lantern! was a call for summary execution from the sturdy metal lampposts. The image of
the Lantern emerged as a visible symbol of popular justice, directed at the physical bodies of the First
Estate, or the nobility, and at the metaphysical body of Majesty and its claim to illuminate the world.
Writing in that summer of 1789, Camille Desmoulins proposed a new national holiday: Passover
will be celebrated on the 14th of July. It is the day of the liberation from servitude in Egypt.[I]t is
the great festival of lanterns.12 The proposed festival of popular liberation was a prophetic
celebration of the end of slavery in which the new Moses, showing the way to the promised land, was
the people itself, symbolized by the Lantern. The Lantern was the people and it was also a living
machine in the service of the revolution, always on hand to accelerate change and to eliminate
obstacles. It was shown with its own viewpoint on 14 July (see fig. 19). It was depicted flying with
wings to chase the enemy or as a walking machine labeled First Avenger of Crimes. This Avenger
marked the historical halfway point between the Golem and the Terminator as modalities of the
automated popular hero. Vernacular images, like that of the Lantern, now became political agents in
themselves. For instance, immediately after the passing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen, there was an effort to restrict the franchise to the wealthy, thereby refuting any claim to
universality. One such proposal was that only those who paid a marc d'argent in taxes could be
eligible to vote. As a silver mark was worth fifty-two livres, or pounds, that would have excluded
almost all the population. A similar proposal from Saint-Domingue specified that only those
identified in the census as owning twenty slaves would be allowed to vote.13 This exclusionary rule
failed, noted Condorcet, because the caricatures had made it ridiculous.14 For example, a print
entitled Balance Eligible du Marc d'Argent shows the Lantern supervising a balance between a
heavy boar, signifying the aristocracy, and the Third Estate, which it outweighs. The idea of a fat pig
outweighing the people was enough to make the careful phrases about property and responsibility
seem absurd.
Much of the politics of the revolution was enacted in direct action that also had profound symbolic
form. The prints and lithographs that survive were part of this extended performative drama. In this
case, the visibility of colonial slavery contradicted the claim that the revolution had created liberty
for all. In August 1789, the same month as the Declaration of the Rights of Man was made, a group of
the enslaved wrote to the governor of Martinique: We know we are free.15 Those who are slaves
cannot say we are free, except in dissensus. By the same token, Olympe de Gouges later claimed
civil rights for women because they were liable to legal penalties. Her point was that if women are
legal subjects when accused of crimes, they should be majoritarian legal subjects at all times.16 That
same hot summer of 1789, the Saint-Domingue revolutionary Vincent Og, a wealthy planter of color,
demanded admission to the National Assembly of white colonists from the island at the Hotel
Massiac. This address was in and of itself destructive of the colonial order of things, by its refusal to
acknowledge the colonial color line. As he attempted to cross it, Og declared that the union of
liberty and reason produces a uniform light, ardent and pure, which, in enlightening our spirits can
inflame all hearts.17 By his very embodiment, Og testified that the color line was more honored in
the breach than the observance. In speaking the metaphorical language of sexual reproduction, he
became unthinkable to the colonists, who denied him access. His assertion that revolution was so

pure a light that all became color-blind challenged the light of monarchy as well as the racialization
of slavery. Rebuffed, Og returned in secret to Saint-Domingue, where he launched an uprising, in
October 1790, for those he called the American colonists formerly known under the insulting epithet
mixed blood.18 Unable to support the enslaved, or recruit local people of color in force, he fled,
only to be deported back to Saint-Domingue, where he was brutally executed. Not all awakenings had
been realized. Once seen, it seems, one can still go back.

THE WALL OF RIGHTS

That possibility was produced in both practical and representational politics concerning the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, issued by the National Assembly of France in
August 1789. The Declaration (as I shall call it from now on) opened a visualized problematic as to
who was and was not included in the universal, limiting the right in rights. This performative
representation necessarily set limits, just as a perspective drawing shapes and directs the field of
vision. In another famous lithograph, from 1789, the figure of the Third Estate is again seen, now
reaching down to lift a bundle labeled the rights of man from a figure representing liberty, with
another argot caption: Ha, I'll be well pleased when we have all these here papers. Here progress
is represented as upward movement and the passing of legislation both from the netherworld into the
light and metaphorically from the visible to the sayable. The dream of transformation took on textual
form to prevent any regressions. The mythical space below ground was traditionally that of Hell or
the grave, but here it has become a popular zone, the land of the people, hitherto excluded, now
coming into view.19 The land of the people may have existed previously, but it was not a political

actor, or recognized as such. We need to distinguish between the people ruled over by a monarch
and the anti-state popular forces so detested by thinkers like Hobbes, who distinguished the two
senses: The People, stirring up the Citizens against the City, that is to say, the Multitude against the
People.20 In contemplating the French Revolution, the British conservative Edmund Burke similarly
condemned the swinish multitude. So this image might also be seen as the dream-world of the
multitude, moving from the nightmare of the ancien rgime to the imagined future of the rights of man.
This unconscious was necessarily in the dark, out of sight of the Sun (King). The question was exactly
what would or could be written on those papers. These are, then, literally dream images, the
formation of a group psychology trying to imagine different futures that seem to be at hand.21
When the actual papers reached the light of day, far from proposing a universalism based on
nature, the Declaration upheld a series of national claims and positions, inflected by race, gender, and
class. In the final text, there was no abolition of slavery; it limited the universal to those already
free, that is, the non-enslaved adult male citizen. This position was not simply one of omission, for
slavery had been much discussed. Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's leading minister, for example, spoke
against chattel slavery in 1789, noting these men similar to us in thought and above all in the sad
faculty of suffering.22 In many of the drafts proposed over the five weeks of debate, a clause would
have offered all citizens the property of their own person, thereby making slavery illegal. Such a
clause was in fact inserted by the Convention, in 1793, prior to the abolition of slavery, in February
1794. In 1789, one proposal, claiming to have been written by a peasant, made this the very first
article of the Declaration, and it was included in several others.23 Another proposal, by the noble de
Boislandry, declared that France is a country of liberty, where no man can be subject to mainmort,
be a serf or a slave: it is enough to live to be free.24 Indeed, a number of slaves had successfully
claimed freedom in French courts under this rubric during the ancien rgime. Now the land of
liberty was being recast as always and already France. During the 1789 debate, the liberal
aristocrat the Comte de Castellane reminded the National Assembly of this uniquely French quality of
rights: However, gentlemen, if you deign to cast your eyes around the world's surface, you will
without doubt shiver as I do to see how few nations have preserved not even what I would call the
totality of their rights, but some ideas, some remains of their liberty; without being obliged to cite the
entirety of Asia, or the unfortunate Africans who have found in the islands an even harder slavery than
that they experienced in their own country; without, I say, leaving Europe, we can see entire peoples
who believe themselves to be the property of some master.25 Despite recent assertions that the
Declaration granted rights by simple fact of birth, they were clearly limited, not universal even within
Europe, with boundaries delimited by slavery and the Oriental. In fact, many members of the
National Assembly argued against the Declaration altogether, saying that its principles were selfevident, that it should be accompanied by a list of duties, or that it should be postponed until a
constitution had been written. All these maneuvers had the more or less explicit goal of preventing a
declaration and it was not until the proposal to add duties to the articles of rights had been defeated,
on 11 August 1789, by the relatively close margin of 570 to 433 that it was clear that it would pass.26
For many delegates, even France was not to be imagined as a land of liberty so much as one of duty.
The Declaration should thus be understood less as a precisely formulated set of words and more as
a symbol, interpreted differently from place to place and person to person. A well-known print, from
1789, by Claude Niquet the younger placed the full text of the Declaration on a tablet supported by a
vaguely biblical palm tree, itself a symbol of regeneration (see fig. 20). The tablet was placed so as
to catch the light coming from the sun, which can be read as the monarchy in the tradition of the Sun

King. The regenerative power of the Declaration was symbolized by a woman showing a child the
text. In the light, a group of figures dance around a liberty pole, a symbol of the American Revolution
(itself a Dutch Protestant emblem) and thereby also an allusion to the concept of the American land
of liberty.27 In the dark shadows of Niquet's image, feudalism is laid low by lightning, an attribute
both of Moses receiving the tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai, and of the Ark of the Covenant.28 The
monarchy had long appropriated these biblical references, most notably in Louis XIV's personal
chapel at Versailles, decorated with bas-relief carvings of the Ark and the Tablets of the Law.
Niquet's print was dense with such reference, appealing to the educated rather than the vernacular
audience, with its final meaning being a monarchical endorsement of the Declaration as light over
shadow and thereby of monarchy as the savior of France. France was free by virtue of its subjection
to monarchy, which had offered rights to the people as a gift.
These complex allegories condensed into an intermediate form as the Tablets of the Law. This
image, which became hegemonic for the Declaration, was created by Jean-Jacques-Franois Le
Barbier (1738-1836), a history painter from the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, with the
print itself being made by Pierre Laurent (1739-1809) (see fig. 21).29 Le Barbier adapted quickly
from being a painter for the king to being one for the revolutionand later back again. His print of the
Declaration was first sold at the high price of four livres from the academy's own shop in Paris, in
August 1789, before being distributed nationwide.30 His image was thus formed and disseminated
within the institutions of the ancien rgime and literally contained radical interpretations. The picture
space was almost entirely taken up with the text of the Declaration, depicted as if carved into stone in
the shape of Moses tablets. As expected from the Academy, there was neoclassical imagery, such as
the fasces, together with the revolutionary liberty bonnet. The monumental size of the tablets formed a
wall, marking a limit to those with rights and those without, as if Niquet's tablets had been raised to
dominate the entire space of representation. Such projective and theatrical facades would have been
familiar to eighteenth-century citizens from Baroque churches. The device thus incorporates classical,
Jewish, and Catholic imagery into the emblem for rights, giving it visual authority and power.

A wall is designed both to keep something out and to keep something in. The wall of rights was
designed to serve as a reconfigured mode of separation within the continued monarchical order. The
Declaration was a structure to ensure the continuation and expansion of private property without the
encroachments of past feudalism or any future egalitarianism. Its exclusions were also questions of
boundaries and limits, denoted by the two allegorical female figures sitting on top of the wall. On the
left was France, holding the now obligatory broken chains of feudal slavery, and on the right a winged
figure of Law. Light comes from the Eye of Reason in a triangle above, itself a condensed form of the
three-sided balance that had become a symbol of the unity of the three estates in the National
Assembly. Further, the eye had been an attribute of the allegorical figure of Reason, which she would
carry on a scepter that quickly condensed to represent Reason, as it does here.31 The image was a
projection of the new terrain of a united France, held together by what the text called liberty,
prudence and the wisdom of government, rather than by the body of the King. It was also a taxonomy
of the tenets of that liberty, and as a decree of the National Assembly, it had the force of law. This
was an image designed to end debate and contain the radical potential of the Declaration and
vernacular imagery alike into recognizable forms within the framework of colonial monarchy. Widely
disseminated in France and still recognizable today, the Declaration as a wall of law named the
classifications of limited rights, separated those with right from those without, and aestheticized the
resulting visualization of the new form of France as an imagined community.

The separation was directed in no small measure to the French colonies and plantations, where the
revolution created expectations of radical change, leading images and texts to circulate in
unaccustomed and newly powerful ways. For example, on 28 May 1790, the colonial assembly at
Saint-Marc on Saint-Domingue claimed that the Declaration gave the planters the right to supervise
all the internal affairs of the colony, meaning above all their right to continue to own human
property.32 At the same time, they feared an awakening of the enslaved and would always claim that
it had been instigated from outside, ignoring a century of evidence to the contrary.33 In the first days
of the Saint-Domingue revolution, in August 1791, a planter claimed to have captured an enslaved
rebel with pamphlets printed in France [concerning] the Rights of Man.On his chest, he had a little
sack full of hair, herbs, bits of bone, which they call a fetish.34 The description of the fetish fits
that of the power-figures associated with earlier claims to liberty and figured the Declaration as
another primitive fetish. Another planter, named Flix Carteau, later went so far as to argue that

books and visual images had caused the revolution, especially the engravings that the enslaved could
look at and listen to the interpretation of the subject, which was repeated from mouth to mouth.35 At
the same time, if it did not create the idea of freedom, the Declaration gave support to the enslaved
and their claims. A mulatta woman named Dodo Laplaine was whipped and branded in Le Cap, the
capital of Saint-Domingue, at the end of 1791 for reading the Declaration to the enslaved.36 French
perceptions of the centrality of the Declaration were not met by the experience of the revolution itself.
When the French commissioner Sonthonax declared slavery abolished, in August 1793, the first
article of his Decree of General Liberty provided for the publication and display of the Declaration
everywhere it is needed.37 But, as it had become clear that the Declaration had not been intended to
grant liberty to the enslaved, Haiti's 1804 Declaration of Independence did not refer to it.38
If it was widely agreed that authority was now limited by a culture of rights, it did not necessarily
follow, as the Saint-Domingue planters argued, that chattel slavery had to be opposed. Rights were
always about boundaries and limits, the practicalities of the universal they claimed to be. An
important print produced in Paris after the festival of 14 September 1791, celebrating the passing of
the constitution, visualized these limits. It depicted the allegorical figure of the Nation carving the
Declaration and the Constitution, using the scepter of legislative power as a chisel (see fig. 22). The
symbol of the wall used to denote the Declaration had literally condensed, enabling its boundaries to
be made visible within the picture space. The land of slaves that bordered the land of liberty
could now be seen. On the far right is the tomb of Mirabeau, a hero of 1789, who had recently died,
evoking his claim that the Declaration should have abolished slavery: The distinction of color
destroys equality of rights.39 On the far left, an Asian despot looks on in fear, a familiar caricature
from sources as varied as Montesquieu's classic Lettres Persanes and the anti-Islam doctrines of
Christianity. In an interesting conflation, the text identifies him as a rich slave of Asia, who does not
know what all of this might mean: the poor thing, in his country even the name of liberty is not known
(see fig. 22a). The majoritarian Frenchmen who gained rights in 1789 insisted that universal liberty
was specific to their national territory, a form of ius soli (law of the soil) that could in no way be
exported or even explained to Asians or Africans, who were similarly defined by their unfreedom.
Awakening and the visualization of the land of the people had been met by walls and limits,
symbolized by the borders of France. Attempting to contain an explosion can, however, simply
magnify its effects.

THE POLITICS OF EATING

If rights had become a limit, the work of righting wrongs had to be reconfigured.40 The imaginary
centered on a land of liberty from which no retreat could be made had turned out to be simply an
awakening of expectations. These hopes might be summarized as the desire for the end of slavery and
the institution of a new ordering of eating. In West Africa and Kongo and their diaspora, the
politics of eating expresses a concept of social ordering:41 An ordered society is one in which
eating, both literal and metaphoricalis properly distributed.42 A ruler should eat, prodigiously,
but should also ensure that all the people do, entailing some negotiations with the spirits who need
feeding and ndoki (witches) that eat people. Eating is, then, the distribution of the sensible and its
resultant ordering to sustain itself. The subalterns of the Saint-Domingue revolution were above all
concerned to create a sustainable local economy outside slavery. Although it was the producer of the
greatest colonial wealth, Saint-Domingue was a place of extreme material deprivation for the
enslaved population, a situation attested to by its failure to reproduce itself. While over 800,000
enslaved Africans were brought to the colony during the eighteenth century, the resident population
was only just over 400,000 in 1788, a population loss caused partly by violence, but mostly by
deprivation. By the same token, the revolutionary unrest from below in France was linked to the
failure of the king to sustain food provision, the most fundamental function of sovereignty,
necessitating vengeance. The radical sans-culottes in Paris formulated this need into a political
project that they called the right to existence.43 Colonial produce was central to the food supply of
the Parisian multitude, linking the two modalities of eating. In the revolutionary crisis, a performative
iconography of eating explored power, the righting of wrongs, and the distribution of material goods
to create an imaginary of modernity.
A predatory, vampiric modernity was engendered by the slave trade across the Atlantic world that

persists until the present.44 The right to existence sought to right this wrong. In a brilliant
interpretation of witchcraft among the Temne people, in Sierra Leone, Rosalind Shaw shows that
witchcraft was at once produced by the slave trade and intensified it as an economy of power.
Before slavery, misfortunes were dealt with by making requests of the gods and spirits, which
Europeans called idols. The evils of slavery led Temne people to attribute their wrongs directly to
the actions of an individual, a witch, whose agency could be unmasked. Witch-finding allowed
those discovered to be enslaved in turn as a punishment for their own presumed eating of others.
This divination allowed for an eating in which the appearance and accumulation of new wealth
was engendered by the disappearance of people into oblivion.45 The witch was reputed to have four
eyes, two to see in the spirit world and two for material space. The witch-finder, too, claimed special
powers of seeing and interpretation. This symbolic order allowed for the righting of wrongs by
attributing them to the agency of specific individuals, known as witches, magicians, conjurors, those
who fooled the peopleor traitors, (counter-)revolutionaries, or any of the other categories of
wrong-doer referenced in the revolution. Such a person could be enslaved. One measure of the
politics of eating was literal and metaphorical size. A big man might be on the people's side against
the witches, but might also use witch-finding skills to enslave them. Witch trials in seventeenthcentury Europe and North America were, it should be remembered, followed by the creation of
modern circulation embodied in people reputed to be witches and sold into slavery. In the revolution,
the people responded by endorsing their own champions, those who became heroes or great men
(the French grand homme can mean big man or great man). Slave traders were also known as
big men, in the same way as the African leaders they dealt with, because both ate the people.46
Europeans in Saint-Domingue were known as big whites or little whites according to their social
and financial status. In 1791, the French Revolution had constructed a pantheon to its grands hommes,
beginning with the ashes of Voltaire, who had invested in the slave trade and even had a slave-ship
named after him, while on other occasions he had roundly condemned the institution.47 It was this
modernity that was challenged in Saint-Domingue and Paris alike.
To take an example of that imaginary, which featured largely in both Carlyle's history of the French
Revolution and Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities: early in the French Revolution, on 22 July
1789, the detested government minister Joseph Foullon, who had suggested that the hungry people eat
grass, was hanged from a streetlamp in the Place de Grve, Paris, scene of the spectacular execution
of the regicide Damiens forty years previously. The Lantern revenged the people against the Crown,
where the monarchy had previously restored itself. The mouth of Foullon's decapitated head was then
stuffed with hay and paraded through the streets, an apotropaic performance that visited the fate
intended for the masses on the minister.48 The artist Anne-Louis Girodet, later to paint Jean-Baptiste
Belley, an African delegate to the National Assembly from Saint-Domingue, was on the scene, and he
made some sketches after nature, or, more exactly, of the new reality created by the revolution.49 In
this new realism, Foullon's head was sketched from the front and the rear, showing the hay in his
mouth sprouting out beneath a handlebar moustache in a way that is unmistakably comic, albeit in a
terrible way (see fig. 23). It was one of a sheet of sketches of decapitated heads that also showed the
head of the marquis de Launay, governor of the Bastille, on a pitchfork, with a look of surprise on his
face, and the mutilated head and heart of Bertier de Sauvigny, intendant of Paris, on pikes. The last
was Foullon's son-in-law, executed on the same day, for the kin of a witch were also considered
witches. In a ritual symbolizing the reversal of power from kinship network to popular sovereignty,
Bertier was presented with Foullon's head on a pike to chants of Baise papa (kiss Daddy).50

Bertier's own symbolic eating was then made plain by the display of his heart as a trophy alongside
his head. While artists had long been urged to draw from classical sculptures showing the effects of
personal suffering, these drawings are evidence of a new revolutionary realism, trying to keep pace
with changing events. It is not what one might call naturalism, or an attempt to depict exterior reality
as closely as possible. In French, a still life is nature morte, dead nature. Revolutionary executions
prompted a debate about end of life and whether the head continued to live briefly after
decapitation. These are, then, studies after undead nature, an exploration of the interstitial, magical
zone that the revolution had engendered. The revolution did not create this vampiric eating, but
visited it in kind on those who had done so.

Indeed, the threat of decapitation entered into the dream-work of French citizens not as the now
standard Freudian formula decapitation = castration, but as itself, a fear of (and desire for)
execution.51 Dreaming and madness explored the new imaginary and exposed its limits. Philippe de
Pinel, the famous liberator of Bictre, is supposed to have cast off the chains of those detained as
insane, a widely celebrated liberation that metonymically replicated the revolution itself. Pinel
compared the former regime in what he called lunatic hospitals to that of despotic governments,
where the inmate was treated as an untameable being, to be immured in solitary durance, loaded
with chains, or otherwise treated with extreme severity.52 While this description seems designed to
recall slavery, Pinel emphasized that it would be ridiculous to treat everyone in the same way: A
Russian peasant, or a slave of Jamaica, ought evidently to be managed by other maxims than those
which would exclusively apply to the case of a well-bred irritable Frenchman.53 It seems that
breeding, mixing race and class together, trumps insanity. Further, as Foucault has emphasized,
Pinel's liberation of madness entailed a new enslavement, to the institution of the asylum.54 He
stressed that the notion of madness, such as it existed in the nineteenth century, took shape inside a
historical consciousness.55 For Pinel, slavery existed outside history, just as the French
revolutionary process had depicted it. By contrast, the revolution was everywhere in his asylum,
where there could be found a watchmaker who believed that he had been guillotined but then, having

had his sentence reversed, had been given the wrong head back. Another believed he was to be
executed, and still a third lived in perpetual fear that he might be tried.56 None of these men could be
persuaded otherwise, even in the case of the last, the tailor Poussin, for whom Pinel staged a mock
trial and acquittal. Such traumas, caused by what we call history, were understood by Pinel as
derangements of the imagination, whose excess was considered the prime cause of madness
throughout the eighteenth century.57 The intensification of the imagination caused by the revolution had
in turn engendered an explosion of madness.
For Freud, as Foucault goes on to say, madness was considered a moral and social question, the
hidden face of society. Nonetheless, revolutionary beheading did not necessarily symbolize
castration. Freud considered the experience of Maury, a French doctor and his precursor in the study
of dreams, who had dreamed that he had been tried, condemned, and executed by the guillotine, right
up to the point where he felt his head being separated from his body.58 It turned out that a piece of
wood from the top of Maury's bed had fallen and struck his neck in the place where a person might be
executed. Freud discussed the remarkable length of the dream from trial to execution in response to
this instantaneous stimulus. He concluded that the dream was a phantasy which had been stored up
readymade in his memory and was accessed because of the sensation on the neck. Freud indulged
himself in recreating this phantasy involving the gallantry and wit of the aristocrat on the scaffold,
bidding a lady farewellkissing her hand and mounting the scaffold unafraid! Or maybe ambition
was the key, a desire to picture himself as one of the Girondists, perhaps, or as the heroic Danton!59
No need here to explore the sexualized ramifications of all this, the erotics of picturing oneself a hero
at a century's remove from the scene of visuality's formation. It seems that the revolution retained a
capacity for mental damage by overstimulus to the imagination for Maury/ Freud and the countless
readers of Carlyle, Dickens, Anatole France, and the other dramatizers of the revolutionary scene in
the nineteenth century. Note also that one identification is impossible or at least inadmissible within
all this dream-work, mania, and phantasy: an identification with the revolution. The revolution was
the bad liberty that led to the tyranny of popular rule, opposed to the good liberty that
simultaneously unchained the well-bred mad, separated them from criminals and other subjects of
detention, and then inserted them into the institutional structure of the asylum.60 An entire imaginary of
modernity is condensed into these formulas of limit, fantasy, exclusion, excess, desire, and the dream.
In Saint-Domingue, the very outside of the European dream-world, the revolution that began in
August 1791 was a decapitation of the means of (sugar) production, led by the enslaved elite, such as
the drivers, most notably Toussaint from the Brda plantation, who took the name L'Ouverture, the
opening. The surrogates of the overseers revolted against the new forms of oversight, tending toward
the automation of production. The pattern of events in 1791 made it very clear that the enslaved
would no longer be eaten by the means of wealth production. The revolutionaries destroyed sugar
mills, burned cane fields, and killed such overseers and plantation owners as they could find, a
noticeable change from the traditional revolt in which the trash-house, where the dried cane fibers
used to fuel the burners were stored, was set on fire. Fields were even flooded to prevent any return
to full-scale plantation cultivation.61 In November 1791, Dutty Boukman, the first leader of the
revolution and a former slave-driver, was captured. He was beheaded, and his head was publicly
displayed to dispel the myth of his invincibility. The remaining leaders, such as Jean-Franois and
Georges Biassou, now sought a settlement. They proposed an amnesty for all the revolutionaries; the
banning of the whip and the cachot, or prison, on the plantations; freedom for four hundred of the
commandeurs; and the abolition of all attorneys and bookkeepers.62 In short, the labor hierarchy that

planter regeneration depended on was to be abolished, even if slavery was not. For the historian C. L.
R. James, these proposals were therefore nothing short of an abominable betrayal, one that has
more recently been castigated, by Robin Blackburn, as servile trade unionism.63 If these judgments
seem harsh, they also show that the long history of modernity is understood to be condensed into these
first revolutionary exchanges. However, other than the Maroon partitions of colonies, no revolt of the
enslaved had yet succeeded in making permanent gains. Indeed, the Le Chapelier law, of 1791, which
outlawed trade unions in France, had long-lasting negative consequences for the nineteenth-century
French labor movement. Finally, any negotiated settlement would have entailed a recognition of the
enslaved as rational human beings that was a critical gain in itself. For twentieth-century writers,
these gains would never have been sufficient, threatening to erase the possibility of revolution that
still seemed alive in their own time.
Unaware of this future to come, the rank-and-file of the revolutionary armed forces were above all
concerned to ensure their right to existence by winning their three days, meaning three days
during which they would not have to work on the plantation but could attend to their own cultivation.
These subalterns and their leaders were formulating what would have seemed unthinkable until
1791: vernacular demands on sovereign power.64 The planters rejected this interim proposal, further
radicalizing the enslaved under arms, whose slogan now became bout blancs, that is, an end to
the whites.65 The subaltern strategy countered planter regeneration by imagining a general selfsufficiency created by the allocation of small parcels of arable land to each person, reinforced by a
local market economy for non-essential and recreational goods and to exchange surplus. The
subalterns were in effect claiming the right to eat via ownership and extension of the slave gardens,
which already generated a good deal of revenue for the enslaved in Saint-Domingue at the Sunday
food market in Le Cap. The means of exchange was by barter or by pieces of sugarcane that in an
evocative fashion became a money-form for the enslaved.66 We can get a sense of what postslavery
cultivation might have looked like by comparing two surveys taken of Negro Gardens in Jamaica.
In a survey taken in 1811, with slavery in full vigor, each person was allocated a small plot of about
half an acre in a rigidly geometric pattern. By 1837, during the apprenticeship that led to full
abolition, in 1838, the area of each plot was much larger, reaching as much as sixteen acres, and the
cultivation was shared on each plot among men, women, and children of all ages (see fig. 24). Crops
grown ranged from staples like yam, cassava, and plantain to cash crops like sugarcane and guinea
grass.67 It seems reasonable to assume that this difference did not reflect the attitude of the planters in
these locations, but how the formerly enslaved envisaged their future. This style of cultivation could
certainly have supplied enough to eat and a surplus for local exchange. Even hostile observers
remarked on the diversity of the local markets, seeing products from hats and sculpted calabashes to
fish, fruit and game.68 The market during slavery and the garden after it, with their associated
economic and social structures, embodied the politics of eating in Saint-Domingue in all senses.

The very success of the revolution in Saint-Domingue generated in France shortages and price rises
of colonial products like sugar and coffee, which set off popular agitations and even riots, bringing to
a head the contradictions of national and social revolution. Sugared coffee had become a staple
foodstuff of the Parisian working classes, especially for breakfast, as it is today. When these
commodities seemed to be both rising in price and in short supply, the popular forces were not
inclined to accept these changes as a market response to the revolution of 1791, as merchants wanted
to present them. Rather, seeing well-stocked storage places, they intervened directly to ensure fair
prices. Even government officials described the merchants idea that prices should be set by the
consumer's fancy, that is to say, by demand, as nothing more than a sophism.69 The realism of the
market that is now all but unquestionable had yet to claim the definition of reality. The wall of
property rights that sustained the revolutionary leadership seemed on the verge of collapse, creating
the same fear of anarchy that the planters had experienced in Saint-Domingue. Such interventions
were justified as a protection of the indigent, the symbolic vernacular figure of poverty.70 From this
position, a society could be run to ensure the sustenance of the neediest, rather than the equality of
value offered by the market. Into this charged environment emerged new popular discourses. A
typical police report of February 1793 described an intervention at a sugar warehouse, beginning
with the dramatic cry of a pregnant woman: I must have sugar for my little one!71

The commissioners for the Arsenal section described another such event in detail.
There was a woman of fairly good appearance, unknown to me but whom we would recognize perfectly.She was about five
feet, one inch tall, thirty years old, with blonde hair, white skin and slightly red eyes. She wore her hair in a demibonnet to which a
rose-colored ribbon was attached. She was dressed in a dshabill made out of linen with a blue background and a standard
design on it. She wore a mantlet of black taffetta and a gold watch on a steel chain.This woman did everything in her power to
add to the sedition. She had gone on the inspection [of the warehouse]. And once they returned, it was she who set the price for
soap at twelve sous per pound and for sugar at eighteen.72

This passage attests to the observational power of the police, whose eye for detail makes the account
read like a realist novel, accruing its reality effect item by item. It creates a compelling image of
the seditious woman, stylishly dressed as bohemian, cutting sugar prices from sixty sous a pound to
eighteen, a rate even below the pre-speculation price of about twenty-five sous. Egalitarian price
control was the metropolitan equivalent of the land-sharing politics of the Saint-Domingue subalterns,
and it is appropriate that colonial produce should have sparked the dissensus. This combination of
colonial goods, popular agency in the market, the politicization of women's roles as mothers and as
consumers, and police observation is a dialectical image in which the egalitarian, vernacular forces
of the revolution can be seen for an instant.
For the sans-culotte movement of artisans, shopkeepers and laborers, the renewed Declaration of
the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in 1793, came to imply a right to live that surpassed the rights of
property.73 They condemned those who, using liberty and their rights as property-owners as an
excuse, think that they can squeeze the last drop of blood from the miserable and starving section of
the population.74 In the terms of the politics of eating, one might summarize this position as No
more vampires! or the more familiar bloodsuckers of popular discourse. This movement reached
its highpoint with the imposition of the maximum, meaning price ceilings for basic foodstuffs in the
Year Two (1793-94). Indeed, the price of bread was set by the state until 1978, a legacy of this
popular struggle. The sections of the Paris Commune referred directly to the Declaration in support of
price regulation, citing article 4's proposition that liberty consists in not hurting others and article 6 to
the effect that one does not have the liberty to harm others. Their opponents consistently referred to
the sacred right of property as trumping all such secondary concerns.75 Their fears were soon
realized as radical thinkers began to draw the conclusion that ownership of land itself should be
limited, to as little as twenty acres in some proposals.76 In 1804, independent Haiti would forbid all
property ownership for whites, and insistent political demands by the veteran soldiers led to an
extensive division of the former colonial estates (1809-19).77
The right to live came to be extended to the need for universal education. Michel Le Peletier (now
best remembered as a revolutionary martyr painted by Jacques-Louis David) argued that education
was the Revolution of the poor, but a gentle and peaceful revolution to be developed via the
meeting of citizens in popular societies, theatres, civic games, military evolutions and local and
national festivals.78 Combined with sustainable economy, this performative, collective sense of
education in the broadest sense was central to the imaginary of vernacular heroism. It was visible
because it was collective, open to debate, and shaped by performance, sport, and military training,
like the disciplinary society that would coopt its forms and supplant it in the nineteenth century. As the
radical pedagogue Joseph Jacotot emphasized in the early nineteenth century, any education that did
not subjugate the pupil to the schoolmaster was a form of emancipation.79 Consequently, it is not
surprising to see a strong emphasis on education in independent Haiti, beginning with the presidency

of Alexandre Ption (1770-1818) in the Republic of Haiti, established in the southern half of the
modern nation in 1806. Ption not only distributed small plots of agricultural land to former soldiers,
but established education for boys and girls. Combined with his assistance to Simn Bolvar, the
liberator of South America, in exchange for his support for the abolition of slavery, Ption's regime
(1806-18) endeavored to enact the full meaning of emancipation implied in the politics of eating. An
imaginary constructed around democracy (meaning here the place of the people as having title within
the state), sustainability, and education was in place, only to be dislocated by the massive indemnity
imposed by France in 1825 as reparations for their lost colony.

HEROES AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

Righting such wrongs came to take embodied form in the figure of the leader and the hero, who
became the image of the revolution in order to sustain the authority of a nation. The hero had the
avenging power of the Lantern and took on responsibility for the politics of eating. Heroes were first
the condensation of the popular movements, as in figures like Jean-Paul Marat or Toussaint
L'Ouverture, and later the means to contain them, epitomized by Napoleon Bonaparte, the paradigm of
the Hero for Carlyle. This investment in the hero was divided into two competing imagined futures,
which might be characterized as vernacular and national. The central tension within the
revolutionary movement over its mode of realization would echo down the long nineteenth century.
As early as 1793, Georges Biassou declared the revolution in Saint-Domingue to be a period that
will be forever memorable among the great deeds of the universe.80 Prints and engravings of
Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines, Ption, and other Saint-Domingue leaders circulated around the
Atlantic world, forming the figure of the African hero, bringing a new kind of memory into play, and
giving the enslaved everywhere a new weapon. This embodied heroism was able, like the imagined
figure of the Third Estate or the Sans-Culotte, to encapsulate a social movement.
In France, in 1793, the Committee of Public Instruction, directed by Lonard Bourdon, a follower
of Le Peletier, published a list of popular heroes in pamphlet and poster form. It was part of the
instruction in the Rights of Man, the Constitution and the list of heroic or virtuous acts now required
in the new state schools for children aged from six to eight.81 Bourdon's list of heroes for the age of
mechanical reproduction ran for only five editions, but was printed in runs of up to 150,000 copies in
1794. He argued for a realist style of writing in which the writer must entirely disappear, the actor
alone should be seen. These pure word pictures would replace the functions of the catechism,
which prepares children for slavery.82 The stories themselves present some sanctified accounts of
rank-and-file military heroism, including that of the drummer boy Joseph Barra painted by David, as
well as some intriguing slices of everyday life. We hear of a gardener named Pierre Godefroi, who
saved a little girl, Goyot, from drowning in a mill trace, or of a woman named Barbier, from Mery,
who, seeing that there were no horses to carry her grain, said, Eh bien, sisters, let's get sacks and
carry the wheat on our backs to our brothers in Paris. All were described as the actions of the sansculottes of regenerated republican society.83 Alternative histories come to light, such as that of Rose
Bouillon, who demanded a discharge from the army, in which she had served and fought as a man
for six months after her husband, Julian Henri, had been killed in action.84 These sans-culotte politics
echoed in the colonies, where the French commissioner Sonthonax justified his addition of a de jure
abolition of slavery, in 1793, to its de facto accomplishment by the revolution by arguing the blacks
are the true sans-culottes of the colonies, they are the people, and only they are capable of defending

the country.85 What was at stake in such claims around the Atlantic world was the transformation of
what Marat had called le menu peuple, the little people, into the people as such, the subject of the
revolution and its realization.86 The little people had become Big Men.
This imaginary of the people emerged in visualized form as the new subject of the Declaration. In a
striking print by the otherwise unknown Dupuis entitled La Chute en Masse (Paris, Bibliothque
Nationale [1793]), an idealized sans-culotte is seen turning the wheel of an electric generator, labeled
Declaration of the Rights of Man (see fig. 8, p. 43). His powerful musculature referred to the sense
that revolutionary regeneration had worked on the body of the people, transforming the figure of the
Third Estate into the sans-culotte. From the pole of the Declaration-Generator, decorated with a
liberty bonnet, a conducting cord leads to a sequence of European monarchs such as the pope, the
Emperor Joseph, and George III, all designated by unflattering nicknames. The shock throws them to
the ground as a caption says: Republican electricity gives Despots a shock that overturns their
thrones. That electricity was generated by the people using the force of rights to transmit an
insuperable message, spelled out along the cord: Liberty, equality, fraternity, unity, indivisibility of
the Republic.87 The chains of slavery had become an electrifying means of liberation. This metaphor
transformed Paine's rational and irreversible impression on the mind into a visualized medium that
has corporal and political power. This image of the electronic Declaration of Rights further
condensed into a composite symbol of the electrified Tablets of the Law, in the representation by
sans-culotte printmaker Louis-Jean Allais (1762-1833) of the Declaration and the 1793 constitution
as flashing lightning into darkness.88
This transitional moment produced not just new modes of representation but new collective means
of creating visual images. The royal academies, including the Academy of Painting, were abolished in
1793, leading to the creation of the Socit Populaire et Rpublicaine des Arts.89 In its brief span, the
society created a stir mainly by those it invited to sit in judgment on the arts, including a shoemaker,
Plato's symbol of the worker who should do his work and nothing else. Equally striking was the
reconfiguration of the map office in the reformed military and colonial office under the command of
General Etienne-Nicolas Calon. The Committee of Public Safety created a new Agency of Maps, on 8
June 1794, bringing army and navy maps into one unit that also took over a mass of maps from
private, that is to say aristocratic, hands. Recognizing mapping as the most useful science for the
communication of peoples, Calon purged the office of aristocrat artists and replaced them with
patriots, including the marine painter Genillon, a wine-seller named Macaire, soldiers, clerks, and
many sons of geographical engineers. Astronomers, engravers, professors of mathematics and
drawing were brought in to educate this unlikely crew, who were to contribute to a proposed museum
of geography, military topography, and hydrography in the Louvre.90 As quickly as such radical
changes were reversed after the fall of the Jacobins, they laid the ground for the transformation of
military mapping under Napoleon and therefore, ironically, for the defeat of popular heroism and its
replacement by the national Hero.
The revolutionary leaders in Saint-Domingue fully understood the importance of a heroic visual
iconography. Dessalines, while still a general under Toussaint, had a life-size portrait of himself
surrounded by his troops painted in oils at the house he had expropriated.91 When he took over
power, in 1804, Dessalines symbolically cut the white section out of the French tricoleur to make the
new nation's flag, a nation that he renamed Haiti in homage to the Indian ancestors.92 There was a
flourishing visual culture in Le Cap, before and after 1791, for the new order to draw on. In the
period of slavery, paintings of all genres were frequently offered for sale in Saint-Domingue,

including a purported Michelangelo. Resident artists included Nol Challes, a prize-winner at the
Royal Academy of Painting in Paris, while artistic education was available for both men and women
from artists such as Jubault and Madame de Vaaland respectively.93 Marcus Rainsford, a sympathetic
British witness to the revolution, noted that the theater, always so prevalent in St. Domingo,
continued in more strength and propriety than it had done before.94 While there were still some
French actors, the pieces were played mostly by black performers, who performed Molire, but
also a new piece called The African Hero (1797).95 This three-act pantomime was set in Kongo, but
other than that we know nothing of it. Sibylle Fischer has suggested that it was a deliberate riposte to
a pair of performances under the title The American Hero, staged by the French actor and future
revolutionary Louis-Franois Ribi in Le Cap during 1787.96 Certainly, the title of the 1797 piece
was highly suggestive of the strategy of the post-1791 revolutionary leadership to create African
heroes from the formerly subjugated ranks of the enslaved and people of color.
A common icon of Toussaint showed him on horseback in full uniform with raised sword against a
generically tropical background (see fig. 7, p. 42). In this image, Toussaint was depicted as having
mastered several codes of conduct that were typically held to be beyond Africans: control of a
rearing horse, the symbolic deployment of European modes of clothing to claim high rank, the use of
the cavalryman's saber, and indeed the command of disciplined soldiers. Seen from a European
perspective, the horseback pose seems to be derived from David's famous equestrian portrait
Napoleon at the St. Bernard Pass (1799), where the consul masters his rearing horse on the verge of
the conquest of Italy (see fig. 25). David painted the names of Charlemagne and Hannibal in the rock
under Napoleon's feet, to show his mastery of History. The painting further evokes the equestrian
statues of monarchs that had been destroyed in the early years of the French Revolution. If we look at
the Toussaint print in this light, his horse stands over both a colonial fortress and a ship, the essential
technology of the Atlantic triangle. Toussaint was visualized as having authority over colonialism and
slavery, in direct contrast to the subservient imagery of white abolitionists, such as the Am I Not a
Man and a Brother? motif showing a kneeling African man requesting emancipation. By contrast,
Toussaint is seen fighting for liberation. The visual homonym created an association between the two
leaders, one that Napoleon was determined to eliminate, leading to the French expedition to SaintDomingue, in 1802, and Toussaint's death in exile.

Srinivas Aravamudan points out that these images can also be understood in terms of Vodou: The
French law (loi) is a Kryole homophone for the personal deity (lwa), and the terms for the human as
the religious vehicle for the manifestation of the deity as chwal, analogical to a horse being mounted
by its rider. A more knowing interpretation of Toussaint's equestrian portrait may now come to
mind.97 Toussaint could be understood, then, as being a lwa, riding his people as the personification
of the law. The image is not just generically allusive but a specific visual homonym for the divinity
known as Sen Jak in Kreyl, St James in English, Santiago in Spanish, and Saint Jacques in French,
who always appears armed on horseback. Introduced into Kongo by Portuguese missionaries in 1480,
the saint was an important syncretic figure in Africa before Atlantic slavery. In Vodou, Sen Jak is a
key avatar of the Ogou family of warriors and fighters for justice, who is, appropriately enough,
depicted in present-day images in a mystical merger with Toussaint.98 This heroic visualization was a
final rebuttal to the force of law that had structured oversight. Joan Dayan has emphasized the
importance of such possession: To conceive of the image of the god in oneself is to be possessed. It

is a deed of the most serious conception. Thought realizes itself in the imaging of the gods.99 This
performative act of imagination was to allow oneself to be possessed by others, a voluntary
subjection made by people who were claimed as possessions. The dancer is not dominated by the
spirit, but performs it, discovering a new sense of self via this other in a body that the dancer had
not previously been at liberty to make available for this or any other purpose. This imaging, for all its
psychological and performative density, leaves no representative traces, being rather the product of a
trance. The embodied image of the gods produced in this performance was the subaltern hero.
For this second reading to be available, it is necessary to show that the image could have been
made or at least seen in Saint-Domingue. Aravamudan speculates in what he calls counterfactual
fashion about a potential woman reader for such images, whom he names as Toussaint's daughter-inlaw. The more intriguing possibility is that a woman may have made them, or at least something like
them. Rainsford, who met Toussaint, noted that around 1800 painting, from some recent specimens,
appeared to be encouraged, and cultivated as an accomplishment. By the latter phrase, Rainsford
meant that it was taught to women as a proper activity for them to pursue, an implication borne out
by his following sentence: A young lady of colour, of the name of La Roche, presented a large
company, of which the writer was one, in the course of a few minutes, with their likenesses, very
accurately cut in profile.100 He was describing the then fashionable practice of making silhouettes,
sometimes using a specially designed machine, which would show the subject's face in profile, cut
from black paper. Here we have perhaps the first named African diaspora woman artist, the
silhouettiste La Roche. Her work reminds us of Moses Williams, the enslaved silhouetteist of Charles
Wilson Peale's Philadelphia Museum.101 As far as we know, Williams cut only one silhouette of an
African American, although he was cutting over 8,000 portraits a year.102 Clearly, La Roche was
depicting the revolutionary society of Le Cap, a very different situation from that of Williams, who
used the money he earned to purchase his own freedom. A sympathetic eye might even discern that the
equestrian portrait of Toussaint has a formally flat feel, as if the French version had been adapted
from a silhouette. While the association is certainly unprovable, the fact remains that the free island
of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti, created a heroic iconography for its own cultural imaginary that
included work by women of color.

CRISIS: DIVIDING THE REVOLUTIONARY SENSIBLE

By 1801, the revolutionary imaginary was in crisis, divided against itself and uncertain of its
purpose. While this turning point is usually marked by the triumph of Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1799, I
identify the divide in the revolutionary sensible by means of a colonial counterpoint between the
crisis in Saint-Domingue and a French attempt to reinvent the land of liberty in the South Pacific. The
result of this counterpoint was simply discord, rather than a dissensus or even a transculturation.
From the beginning of his public career, Toussaint had asserted that in order to create a modern
nation-state, the revolution in Saint-Domingue needed to be forged from a balance of liberty, meaning
freedom from slavery, and responsibility, meaning continued agricultural labor on cash-crop
plantations for the majority.103 His goal was to render the revolutionary imaginary into an imagined
community of workers and leaders under the control of the army and pursuing Catholic observance.
By the same token, the subalterns had consistently imagined sustainability as their key goal, from the
three days campaign, in 1791, onward. Now Toussaint observed with concern that groups of
workers were banding together to buy a few acres of land, abandoning plantations already in use to

go and settle on uncultivated land.104 In the 1801 Constitution, he therefore required all those who
were capable to work on the land unless they had another profession. All were forbidden from
purchasing land in lots smaller than roughly 150 acres, excluding almost all people of color. The goal
was above all to generate exports, meeting the needs of the treaties signed in 1798 with the United
States, and to reinforce the place of the state and the army.105 It has perhaps only been very recently
that it has become possible to imagine that local, sustainable agriculture might have been preferable
to a modern nation, and that discussion is still controversial today. In 1801, workers were no
longer slaves, but they were tied to their plantation and under the watchful eye of the new police
Touissant had created and his own police gnrale.106 If slavery was over, it now seemed that the
plantation complex was not, and it was exactly such a going back that the subaltern classes had
feared.
These new rules provoked an uprising by the subalterns who had fought the revolution throughout
the north of the colony in October 1801. Their leader (whether by acclamation or intent) was the
formerly enslaved General Mose, not only an associate of Toussaint's, but his nephew and adopted
son. As the agricultural inspector for the north, Mose knew the aspirations of the workers and was in
favor of dividing the plantations among junior officers (literally, the subalterns) and soldiers from the
ranks.107 While rumors unfairly abounded that Toussaint was reintroducing slavery for all, as the
French had done in Guadeloupe, he had legislated the right to import workers from Africa, who
were unlikely to be volunteers. The tension within the imaginary of the revolution between subaltern
vernacular heroism and the national hero had now become an open conflict. With the support of the
army, Toussaint quickly defeated Mose and had him summarily executed. In an extraordinary
proclamation, which he ordered to be read after Sunday Mass, Toussaint railed against the entire
populace, describing the postslavery population as comprising bad citizens, vagabonds, thieves.
And if they are girls, then they are prostitutes.108 The historian Laurent Dubois has called this rant,
with its subsequent imposition of security passes and other surveillance techniques, a delirium.109
Pinel might have agreed: he saw delirium as a form of mania incited by strong and furious passions,
such as those that originate in fanaticism or chimerical delusion.110 What was Toussaint's delusion?
He believed that he could create what has been called egaliberty (equality and liberty in one) by
means of his own personality. It was, in short, the delusion of the hero. Heroes are not good for
popular movements, as we have had to learn time and again from, as C. L. R. James would have it,
Toussaint to Castro: and now, perhaps, Obama. By the same token, as the diffuse and inchoate revolt
of November 1801 showed, popular movements are unpredictable, hard to control, and likely to be
defeated by the persistent application of intense violence.
This moment has been much discussed. It inaugurates, from the perspective of this project, the
possibility of counterrevolutionary visuality, ironically incarnated in Toussaint's conqueror Napoleon.
For James and after him, Aim Csaire, it was the tragedy of revolution, a dialectical image that
jumped out of history. Both writers compared Toussaint's situation to that faced by Lenin after the
October Revolution of 1917, when tsarist officials and bourgeois economics had to be restored to
save the nascent state, known as the New Economic Policy. Although James shaped the conflict
between Toussaint and Mose in terms of race and imperialism, rather than political economy, he
acknowledged the severity of this crisis: To shoot Mose, the black, for the sake of the whites was
more than an error, it was a crime. It was almost as if Lenin had had Trotsky shot for taking the side of
the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.111 Not to mentionas James did notthe extensive and more
or less random execution of subaltern combatants on mere suspicion of having sympathies for Mose.

For James, Toussaint crossed an irrevocable line with these actions, but his proposed solution of a
campaign of explanation and mobilization is unconvincing: such proposals had been made to the
subalterns under arms since 1791, and they had always rejected them. David Scott has nuanced
James's position by arguing that Toussaint and others like him were the conscripts of modernity,
forced to involve themselves with its project.112 In this discussion, it seems that the entire scope of
one form of modernity became visible to the decolonial historians of Haiti in this moment. That
genealogy was encompassed by the Haitian and French Revolutions via the October Revolution of
1917 and perhaps ended in 1989. But why not, as Diana Taylor has suggested in a different context,
take the comparison from within Toussaint's terms?113 It might be said that Toussaint could no longer
ride the lwa/loi, the horse that had carried him through the revolution. If that horse was the people,
it seems that they had thrown him. Present-day accounts of spirit possession emphasize the total
exhaustion of the rider when the spirit departs.114 The people no longer imagined themselves as
Toussaint, who could in turn no longer imagine what it was that they needed.
In 1799, as if accepting that the Atlantic world revolution had faltered, the French had literally set
sail in search of a different narrative on history, rights, and the means of representation. The
Directory-sponsored Australian expedition of Nicolas Baudin (1754-1803) arrived in Van Diemen's
Land (modern Tasmania) in the decisive year 1801. Organized by the newly created Society for the
Observation of Man, in Paris, Baudin set out to literally explore the origin of human rights, a mission
to regenerate the French Revolution by means of knowledge transplanted from the South Pacific.115
On board was Franois Pron (1775-1810), a twenty-five-year-old member of the society, and the
first person ever to apply for a position as an anthropologistwhich he did not get (he was sent as a
zoologist). This curious venture was a fusion of Atlantic world slavery, the French Revolution, and
Pacific discovery. Baudin had served in the Caribbean and as a slaver in Mozambique, where he
learned some of the local language that he was later to try to use in Van Diemen's Land.116 He was a
convinced supporter of the revolution because its abolition of feudal privileges in the armed forces
had allowed him to be promoted to the rank of captain. Likewise, the naturalists and artists on the
expedition were all children of the revolutionary era, accustomed to acting on its principles. Whereas
oversight had been a general surveillance that often ignored details, Baudin's voyage was scrutinized,
catalogued, and collected in the pursuit of difference.117 Over 100,000 animal specimens were
collected, including live kangaroos and other species transported back to Europe. All of this was
depicted by the artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846) and Nicolas-Martin Petit (17771805) in minute, almost hallucinatory detail. The expedition sought to create a synthesis of
philosophical imagination with practical observation, a philosophical taxonomy characterized by
attention to detail.
A key question for the expedition was whether the aboriginals were in the state of nature and hence
the predicate of Rousseau's man is born free, to which the French had become the object of but is
everywhere in chains. While sailing off Maria Island, a small islet close to Van Diemen's Land,
Pron saw a fire and landed with a small party. The aboriginals he met were probably Tyreddeme
people of the Oyster Bay group.118 The Tyreddeme invited them to sit down, suggesting that they
interpreted the meeting as a friendly one for the exchange of goods, as was a common experience with
other locals and also a few European travelers. In what was one of the first pieces of anthropological
fieldwork, Pron proceeded according to the plan devised by the Society of the Observers of Man. In
nine subheads, the paper, drawn up by the society's secretary, Jauffret, emphasized that difference
and the place in the living scale of things was the key to observation.119 Pron attempted to

communicate in gesture, using signs that had been taught to him at the newly established Institute for
the Deaf in Paris, but it was the Tyreddeme's physical inspection of the genitalia of a young sailor,
causing him to get erect, that opened a field of exchange. Unsuccessful translations continued, as
Pron addressed the aboriginals in pidgin Polynesian and attempted in vain to test their strength on a
dynamometer.
Unlike earlier accounts of encounter in the South Pacific, Pron drew no parallels with classical
antiquity or European painting. In his notebooks, he adopted the role of philosopher, using the
encounter to imagine himself to himself, employing the indigenous people as a medium. Working hard
to acquire the habit of observation, Pron deployed a modern gaze that validated the self through its
mediation with what he called the zero point of civilization, projected onto the Tyreddeme. This
observational gaze sought to suppress the self in favor of a picturing from the outside, while being
confident of its superior state of culture. This was to become imperial visuality, coeval with the
visuality of the hero and that of the right to look. His sense of the encounter was disrupted by the
feeling that he was becoming the object of their gaze, restoring his sense of self: They seek to
interpret our looks. They observe us closely. Everything they see us do, they suppose to be something
mysterious, and always their suspicions of us are unfavorable. Pron's observation of difference
required that his object not look back, for to do so was a threat of violence. In apparently
contradictory fashion, he nonetheless argued that this Natural Man was the faithful trustee for the
fundamental rights of the human species, he preserves them intact in their basic completeness.It is
among these people, then, that we are able to discover those precious rights which we have lost
following the upheavals among peoples and the progress of civilization.120 Pron framed rights in a
hierarchical, stadial notion of history, in which natural rights were observable but lost. Uncertainty
abounded; he wondered whether this state of nature, so celebrated today, is truly one of innocence,
virtue and happiness. Perhaps, then, Tasmania was terra nullius, as the British colonizers would
later decide, leading to a genocide of the indigenous population.
The picturing of the revolution had failed to hold. I find myself haunted by three images, which I
imagine projected simultaneously, like Abel Gance's silent film Napolon (1927), about Carlyle's
prototype hero. At the left is Mose, the African general, being shot by African troops: He died as he
had lived. He stood before the place of execution in the presence of the troops of the garrison, and in
a firm voice gave the word to the firing squad: Fire, my friends, fire.121 In the center is the almost
farcical scene of Pron pointing his musket at an aboriginal man, who wanted to trade for his
waistcoat, while shouting mata, the Polynesian word for death. And on the right is Bonaparte as a
young artillery officer, mowing down Parisian radicals in the street in 1795, the scene that endeared
him to Carlyle. These are scenes of actual and potential violence, none of which could have been
imagined in 1789. A Corsican artillery officer was as unlikely as an African general in the
hierarchical world of monarchy. While Kant had lectured on anthropology since 1774, he meant by
that something called human nature, rather than Pron's empirical study of human beings. So
something had radically changed. But this was not yet the perpetual peace of the land of liberty, with
French slavery about to be restored, while British and U.S. slavery had decades ahead of them. The
revolutionary use of violence as a social actor, epitomized in the Lantern, had been intended to be a
singular or foundational event, like the burning of feudal insignia. But as Allen Feldman has shown,
Violence itself both accelerates and reflects the experience of society as an incomplete project, as
something to be made.122 Here we might understand that society as the very possibility of a
modern imaginary. The revolutionary era and its defeats had first engendered the possibility for the
transformation of the plantation complex into the modern imaginary. It was to be produced by heroes

for the people, who claimed their right to existence and a politics of eating. Not for the first or last
time, that moment ended in failure. The way was open both for what Carlyle would name visuality,
a perpetual conflict to prevent perpetual peace, and for the imperial visuality that would claim to end
that conflict in the Pax Britannica. That modern visualization was and is nonetheless haunted by its
unthinkable others. The next three chapters trace the dynamic unfolding of visuality from these
beginnings in the Atlantic revolutions. The following chapter shows how Carlyle appropriated the
revolutionary strategy of the hero for anti-emancipation goals, leading to an intense contestation over
the hero. As chapter 4 describes, this contest came to a head in the entanglement of the abolition of
slavery in the United States and the last Atlantic revolution that was the Paris Commune. Chapter 5
then shows how imperial visuality globalized and institutionalized the use of culture as an abstract
form of biopower.

Puerto Rican Counterpoint I

Jos Campeche y Jordan

The entanglements of the revolutionary challenges to slavery and the plantation complex were
visualized in the paintings produced by the remarkable Puerto Rican artist Jos Campeche (17511809), perhaps the first nameable painter to emerge from slavery in the Caribbean. Campeche was the
son of an enslaved gilder, decorator, and painter, Tmas de Rivafrecha Campeche, who had
purchased his own freedom (coartacin).1 As his father was of African descent and his mother was
deemed Spanish, Campeche was described as a mulatto under the precise racializing tabulations of
the day. He gained his training in part, presumably, from his father, in part from books and engravings,
in part from African artists among the enslaved, and finally from the fortuituous presence in Puerto
Rico of the exiled Spanish painter Luis Paret, in 1775-76.2 Campeche's earliest surviving works are
clearly directly indebted to Paret's rococo style, although Paret also used his time on the island to
paint a striking self-portrait in the costume of a jibaro, that is to say, a rural peasant, as well as some
depictions of the enslaved. Almost all of Campeche's known work was commissioned by the church
and colonial state, and so it had to operate within clearly defined limits. Nonetheless, he was able to
visualize both the operations of oversight and the alternatives to it in a series of meticulous works that
operated a colonial double vision.
Just after the outbreak of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Campeche was commissioned to paint
the portrait of the new governor of Puerto Rico (see fig. 26). Campeche's midsize canvas conveyed
the full range of oversight available to the new governor in the revolutionary moment. As the deputy
of the king in the colonies, the governor carried the powers of sovereignty, marked in the painting by
his combination of noble dress, sword, and the cane of office. On his desk are two forms of
cartography: a plan of the city of San Juan, showing its recent expansion, and an architectural
elevation of an ecclesiastical building, linking church and state as means of visualizing space. On the
other side of the governor is a display of books, arranged to be seen rather than read, another
instrument of power. Behind and above him, Campeche represented three alternative modes of
depicting colonial space. On the right, as we see it, is a bucolic landscape featuring a proposed
bridge for San Juan, represented as if spanning a romantic wilderness. Above billow the folds and
cords of sovereign drapery, the theatrical and antirealist shaping of space that marks the presence of
power. Perhaps the most widely commented on section of the painting is that seen to our left, through
what appears to be a window but might also be another painting. Here Campeche has depicted an
idealized scene of San Juan as an extensive modern city laid out on a grid, featuring commodious
two-storey buildings. On the street, there are a number of activities in progress. Some women street
vendors offer their wares from their broad hats. A funeral party proceeds down the street, carrying a
coffin. And an overseer directs a work party of enslaved Africans and indentured servants in
repairing the road. The overseer carries his cane, just as the governor does, so that the painting
visualizes the chain of authority from God to king, king to governor, governor to planter, planter to
overseer, and overseer over the enslaved.
Contemporaneous with the portrait of the governor was another of the bishop of Puerto Rico,

Obispo Don Francisco de la Cuerda y Garcia (Collecion Arzobispado de San Juan de Puerto Rico,
1791-92). Whether by coincidence or design, the portrait is much larger than that of the governor, but
it is not executed with the same level of skill, suggesting that much of it was executed by Campeche's
studio assistants. The painting is in a sense interesting for what it does not show. Although depicted in
the pomp associated with his office, Don Francisco was a Jansenist who preferred to live outside San
Juan, in the Cangrejos district of Santurce, a neighborhood of freed former slaveslike Campeche's
father.3 There seems to be a hint here that Campeche was more favorable to the (briefly) antislavery
church than to royal authority. Certainly, he was able to convey very different versions of the same
event for different audiences. After the Spanish repelled an English attack on the island, in 1797, in
which Campeche participated as a member of the militia, he created two different commemorative
paintings. One was a commissioned portrait of the then governor Don Roman de Castro (Museo de
San Juan, ca. 1800), showing him in dress uniform overlooking the defenses of Fort San Cristobal that
he had constructed. The portrait is a conventional depiction of the military and colonial officer of the
period, so much so that the individual is almost invisible.

The other commemorative image was made on his own initiative for the church as an Ex-voto of
the Siege of San Juan by the English (Collecion Arzobispado de San Juan de Puerto Rico, ca. 1798),
a very different image in style and intent. Painted in a nave fashion, the Ex-voto depicted the city
under siege from a high viewpoint, as if from the battlements of the fortress. It shows the course of the
military action across several engagements, rather than in a single moment. The text underneath
attributes the safety of the town not to the twenty-five-year fortification project, but to the presence of
a sixteenth-century Flemish painting of the Virgin of Bethlehem in the Dominican convent. Citing the
general opinion, pious and Christian, of the inhabitants of this noble island, Campeche wrote in the
text at the bottom of the painting that the retreat of the English was due to the continual prayers that
the faithful offered to the beloved image of the Virgin. In other words, the oversight here was divine,

not human, in response to the will of the people, directed by a power-figure. Similar vernacular
objects were found throughout Puerto Rico in the form of the santos, carved wooden figures of saints.
Whereas a depiction of a saint in a church might have offerings or prayers made to it, the santos were
kept in the home and were expected to intercede directly for their household. If they failed, they might
find themselves turned to the wall as a punishment, out of sight of daily life.4 These figures were
Kongolese in inspiration and often represented the African magus Melchior, one of the Three Wise
Men who attended the birth of Christ. In some surviving nineteenth-century versions, such as
examples made by Zoilo Cajigas Sotomayor (1875-1962), the three kings represent the Caribbean
diversity of white, brown, and black, suggesting that they were seen as symbols of syncretism
(Galleria Nacional, San Juan). Certainly Campeche's painting shows a doubled response to oversight,
like Makandal's second sight, creating images that depicted the world as subject to the sovereign gaze
of the colonizer for their consumption, but also depicting a popular syncretic vision of the made
object as a powerful agent for the oppressed. This second mode of visualizing is necessarily implied,
in the manner of all syncretic doubled imagery in the Americas, rather than literally depicted. For that
reason, Spanish imperial policy became increasingly suspicious of the indigenous and non-European
worship of images, leading the Spanish Academy of History to denounce even the cult of the Virgin of
Guadalupe as fanaticism, in 1794.5 In that context, Campeche's exaltation of the Virgin of
Bethlehem was certainly open to a range of interpretations.
A few years later Campeche further visualized this doubled sense of looking in the Atlantic world
in his extraordinary portrait El nio Juan Pantalen de Avils de Luna (Instituto de Cultura
Puertorriquena, 1808) (see plate 4). Campeche's portrait showed a twenty-one-month-old child who
had been born without arms and with diminutive legs. He did so giving the child a remarkable dignity,
modeled on depictions of the Infant Jesus. In the painted text, Campeche named the child and his
parents, Luis de Avils and Martina de Luna Alvarado, making Juan Avils one of the few among the
subaltern masses of the plantation system for whom we have both an identifiable image and a
genealogy. That right, denied to the enslaved, was visualized through the disabled body of a child,
literally labeled as being from the working classes in Campeche's text.6 Most accounts suggest that
the painting was made out of scientific curiosity, with hints of a possible Puerto Rican nationalism.7
Yet its very status as a necessarily colored painting, rather than a line drawing, as well as its
substantial size, suggests that other forces were at work here. By its very presence as a named portrait
of colonial subaltern disabled child, Juan Avils is a powerful syncretic image. The picture was a
power-figure, a local hero in an era of revolution but not in a revolutionary situation. I want to draw
out one possible interpretation that would have been available to some viewers in the period.
Although Puerto Rico had not been a significant sugar colony prior to 1760, its plantations were given
a dramatic boost by the decline in Saint-Domingue's sugar industry, especially after 1800. By 1815,
shortly after Campeche painted this piece, there were some 18,000 enslaved Africans in Puerto Rico,
most of whom had come from Dahomey and Kongo.8 Juan Avils was painted preternaturally white
for a working-class child in a slave colony, which in itself indicates that the painting was not intended
to be mimetic. In Vodou, any disabled child is part of the Vodou spirit group known as tohosu, whose
powers were described by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits: The to-husu are held able to
speak at birth, and to turn at will into men of any age, in order to pit their strength against giants,
sorcerers and kings.9 This way of seeing leaves its questions open. What is Juan Avils looking at,
away to his right? What did he want? An end to slavery, an end to monarchyor just the right to be,
to look, and to be seen?

Soon after Campeche made this painting, Cuban authorities were appalled to discover a volume of
some sixty pictures depicting religious, historical, and political subjects in the possession of a free
moreno (African) named Jos Antonio Aponte. Further, his pictures had been viewed by a number of
others arrestedall enslaved, would-be rebels.10 According to his sentence of execution, in 1812,
Aponte's book was part of an attempt to overturn the old and well-established submission of the
serfs.11 There were images in the book that were held to be depictions of the revolution in SaintDomingue, as well as representations of Africa and an image of a broken crown that Aponte said he
had acquired at the time of the French Revolution. Although he admitted having made portraits of
Toussaint, Dessalines, and Jean-Franois, Aponte claimed to have copied them from widely
circulating images available in Havana's harbor, together with one of Christophe as emperor.
Witnesses at his trial described the popularity of these images with the rebels, both free and enslaved.
As the insurrection plans unfolded, word spread throughout the African population that black
generals were coming from Haiti to set them free. As Sybille Fischer puts it in her discussion of
Aponte's trial and his book, The question of verisimilitude becomes a question of life and death.12
If we connect the visual production of Saint-Domingue to Campeche's art and the circulation of these
popular images, it becomes clear that there was an extensive revolutionary realism in the Caribbean.
We can go further. In response to the hallucinatory hierarchies of slave-owning sovereignty, realism
was revolutionary.

THREE
Visuality
Authority and War

The organizing conceit of slave-owning sovereignty, surrogated to the overseer, was its unopposed
visualized dominion, represented as light itself. This principle was appropriated by
counterrevolutionary visuality for its version of the hero, with the radical distinction that it was now
aware of being permanently opposed. This visuality visualized authority to cohere the chaos of the
modern. Visuality was permanent war against an enemy that had threatened the reality prized by
authority in the attempts to make revolution legitimate and to abolish slavery. The terrain of this war
that visuality visualizes is what we call history. Visuality extended its claims from actual battlefields
to assert that it was representation in and of itself, or ordering. This principle was embodied in,
and manifested as, the Hero celebrated by Thomas Carlyle, the theorist of visuality. The Hero
embodied the idea of the nation, overcoming the centrifugal forces of labor by means of Tradition. To
use Carlyle's capitalizations, the Hero was Tradition, could visualize visuality, and lead with
Authority. The mystical and unclassifiable hero was nonetheless separated from all others by his
ability to visualize history as it happened, thereby gaining an authority that was aesthetic. By this set
of maneuvers, the plantation complex was to be sustained, even though its literally and metaphorically
enslaved subalterns were assumed to be in permanent revolt. In the face of this reaction, a new
countervisuality claimed representation in all senses to be the work of the people, the really heroic
forces within the nation, its tradition, and of course its labor power. This countervisuality deployed
its own forms of anarchic authority, such as the Jubilee and the National Holiday (early forms of what
would become known as the general strike). At the same time, unwilling to abandon a successful
strategy, radicals and abolitionists continued to present heroes and heroism as a means of achieving
change. Given this swirling kaleidoscope of revolution, counterrevolution, abolition, restoration,
innovation, and tradition, it is perhaps not hard to understand that people felt modernity was hard to
see, let alone visualize.

WAR
The sense of visuality as war was concrete, not abstract. It referred both to the necessity for modern
generals to visualize a battlefield that could not be seen from a single viewpoint, as theorized by the
theorist of modern war Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), and to the revival of military painting that
constructed battle scenes from the perspective of the general. In both cases, the motivating hero was
Napoleon, Carlyle's bronze artillery officer, whose tactics and means of representing them
transformed modern warfare.1 In Clausewitz's theory, battle was a complex event that did not resolve
itself in a single moment. War now required the ability to grasp topography as an act of

imaginationimprinted like a picture, like a map, upon the brain.2 The commander-in-chief had to
keep a vivid picture of an entire province or country in mind, unlike the subordinate dealing with a
far smaller area. Each of these areas was a theater for the performance of war that was invisible to
its actors, discernible only to the leader. Clausewitz emphasized the necessity of what he called the
genius for war, like that of a painter or poet but understood as the capacity to take decisions by
deploying a power of judgment raised to a marvelous pitch of vision, which easily grasps and
dismisses a thousand remote possibilities which an ordinary mind would labor to identify and wear
itself out in so doing.3 Modern war was fought between armies so closely matched in weapons and
training that, other than sheer force of numbers, leadership was the primary cause of victory, or, by its
absence, defeat. Clausewitz called this capacity the sovereign eye of genius, bringing together the
ability to imagine with the absolute authority of monarchy.4 Further, this ability to decide was the
distinguishing mark of the leader: Boldness, governed by a superior intellect is the mark of a hero.5
Clausewitz's exemplar of the heroic leader was the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, subject of
a vast biography by Carlyle.
Carlyle would simply generalize (as it were) the principle by extending the battle to all aspects of
modern life, a battle that could only be won by the Hero. In 1840, eight years after the posthumous
publication of Clausewitz's work, Carlyle coined the terms visualize and visuality to describe this
dominant view of the Hero over History.6 Whereas Clausewitz had defined a military strategy of
rendering the battlefield as a mental picture, Carlyle generalized the visualizing of History itself as
being the means to order and control it. In so doing, he epitomized Michel Foucault's reversal of
Clausewitz's well-known aphorism that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means to
read, Politics is the continuation of war by other means.7 If the exceptional capacity for vision and
imagination was first formulated as a tactic for war, it was then reverse-engineered by Carlyle as a
mode of governance. In Carlyle's view, the agent of the war that is visuality was the Hero. He took
this tactic from the revolutionaries of France and Haiti, his epitome of all that was wrong with
modernity, and repurposed it to serve the counterrevolution. Its terrain was authority, a subject on
which Carlyle had little of originality to say. He was merely one of many Enlightenment and postEnlightenment thinkers to grapple with the dilemma of authority's continuance in a period in which
even monarchs could no longer claim absolute authority. In his little essay What Is Enlightenment?
Kant had gone to considerable lengths to emphasize that the emancipation of knowledge could not be
offered to the thoughtless multitude. Therefore he enjoined those who practiced public reason to
limit it to the private, meaning to the offices and business of the state. Here, obedience to
obligation, such as paying taxes, is required to stave off the multitude, leading to Kant's maxim:
Reason as much as you please, and on what you please, but obey!8 By the same token, Alexis de
Tocqueville worried, in 1835, that the principle of popular sovereignty in America was so extended
that there are no authorities except within itself, whereas in France the people despise authority
but fear it.9 The result was a strange confusion, as the old order seemed to be moving inexorably
toward equality and democracy. Even extreme proponents of the restoration of monarchy in France
accepted the transition to popular sovereignty.10 Determined to prevent such a revolution of
sovereignty in England, Carlyle turned its techniques against itself as heroic visuality.

Napoleon would come to be the defining example of such heroic visuality, a direct result not only
of his well-known propaganda but also of his bureaucratization of visuality as a tool of imperial
government. The revolution dismantled the state apparatus of mapmaking that had evolved as a
colonial resource under the ancien rgime. One of Napoleon's decisive changes as first consul was to
reintroduce and strengthen the ingenieurs gographes, geographer engineers, and to introduce a new
category, the ingenieurs artistes, artist engineers. These technicians were charged with creating
images of battles as seen from the point of view of the commanding general as a military resource.11
Bonaparte had seen both the military and political value of such images during his Italian campaign.
The Italian artist Giuseppe Bagetti (1764-1831) produced large-scale (50 x 80 cm) watercolors of
various engagements, accompanied by an outline to guide the spectator around the ideas represented
(see fig. 27).12 This outline allowed the viewer to experience the visuality that the general
demonstrated in the field. The Dpt de la Guerre issued the artists with precise descriptions of the
point de vue (point of view) to be used, so that Bagetti's view of the famous encounter at Arcola was
defined as being situated on the riverbank 140 meters away. These battle views were to be painted as
far as possible, in the words of the official instructions, to represent the terrain as the general
commanding the troops saw it at the moment of combat; therefore it should not be too much in
isometric perspective.13 If this form of perspective was used, the optical angle should be marked on
the canvas. Figures should be at least four centimeters high if in the main action, or two centimeters
otherwise.14 There is what would in the period have been understood as an ideological force of
belief in realism behind these instructions. Later these scenes were combined into a General Map of
Bonaparte's Campaign in Italy, which was sold for the substantial price of 140 francs. These
successful strategies were institutionalized as Bonaparte rose to power. After the Battle of Marengo
(1800), Bonaparte maintained his own topographic office, and by the end of the consulate, he had the
largest map collection in the world, estimated at some 70,000 individual sheets.15 Perhaps the most
monumental project undertaken in this imperial cartography was the mapping of Egypt, both ancient
and modern, in the wake of Napoleon's ultimately unsuccessful campaign, a project that was not
completed until long after Waterloo. The revival of military mapping had its corollary in the arts,
where the salon exhibition of 1801 saw a return to large-scale military painting, as Susan Locke
Seigfried has shown.16 These paintings, such as the work of the baron Gros, were interpretative

versions of the mass-produced battle views generated during the Napoleonic wars.

THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND QUESTION

Visuality marked a crossroads in the plantation complex. Throughout the Atlantic world, the
crossroads is a dangerous place. In many African religions, tricksters like the Yoruba divinity Eshu
await the unwary at the crossroads. In England, gibbets were placed there, like the infamous Tyburn
Tree, and the bodies of the condemned were buried on the spot to prevent them from returning to seek
vengeance. The spirit of this crossroads of visuality is William Blake, a trickster if ever there was
one. Blake created a world that would have been very recognizable from Saint-Domingue, one of
complex vision that was not restricted to the sense of sight and one of powerful spirit forces in
contestation. Blake's Four Zoas were the British lwa, divinities or spirits that contested the dogmatic
machine-reason of commodity capitalism (see fig. 28). He mapped space and time in the form of a
dialectic that centered on London, the capital, as the battlefield for and against Empire.17 In 1805, one
year after the new nation of Haiti had declared its independence, the year that Napoleon crowned
himself emperor, Blake created a series of biblical illustrations for the Scottish official Thomas
Butts. Blake knew what had come before, had a good sense of what could have happened next, and
what, unfortunately, probably would come to pass. He took the imagery of the Rights of Man and
reconfigured it for the emergent era of visuality in a drawing called God Writing on the Tablets of
the Covenant (National Gallery of Scotland, 1805) (see plate 5). In the drawing, God stands before
the tablets and begins to write the Law, whose first Hebrew character has just been inscribed by His
finger, the ur-digital culture. As the Second Commandment has not yet been written, Blake can depict
the form of God without being in breach of the Law. The space is a flowing series of curving flames,
which both contain and are the angels and seraphim, trumpeting the definition of the Law. God here is
light, devoid of color and shadow because He is illumination. For all the purple-darks of the picture,
there are no shadows, as there is nothing material to cast a shadow. At last one notices the huddled
figure of Moses, literally under God's feet on the top of Mount Sinai. Utterly unable to look, Moses
shows that under the regime of the Law, there is and can be no right to look.

In Blake's prophecies, the figure of the Law is Urizen, described by W. J. T. Mitchell as consumed
by a rage for order, system, control and law.18 Note that rage, order, and Law are the very
opposite of peace. That rage would consume Carlyle and his ilk. It was the self-proclaimed Party of
Order that would initiate the massacre of the Paris Commune, in 1871, for instance, at a cost of some
25,000 lives. Blake described how Urizen writes in the Book / Of Eternal brass / One curse, one
weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law. Blake knew that Law was as much visible in
the weight of sugar produced by the plantation as in the whip, and that its insistent claim to singularity
and noncontradiction marked out its dominance. For the historian E. P. Thompson, this passage
suggested both the drawing from the Butts Bible and the questionings of sovereignty made by the
seventeenth-century English radicals, the Diggers and the Ranters.19 Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger

leader, asked General Fairfax, the army commander, after the execution of Charles I in 1649,
whether all Lawes that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to
all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King's head? We affirm they ought.20 This
radicality was typical of Winstanley, who insisted on following through first principles, all of which
can be derived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group were beginning
to reclaim the common and waste land on St George's Hill, Surrey: In the beginning of time, the great
creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury.21 Divinity was expressed as rationality,
present in each individual, who had to reconcile that potential with the corrupting effects of
covetousness, whose agency was the bodily senses. Against these forces were arrayed vision,
voice and revelation, a trinity of rationalized and internalized understanding that motivated the direct
action of cultivating the land.22 The result was that the long slavery dating from the Fall of Man was
now to be overturned by a new age of righteousness.23 Winstanley's goal of restoring the
righteousness that pertained before the Fall entailed abolishing the Law that was not written until the
time of Moses. Blake's image is one of the beginning of the end of that possibility, as History begins
with the first character of the Law having been written. Fallen, the people are now subjected to the
Law. From Paradise, the wind begins to blow. It catches the wings of the Angel of History and
propels him toward the future, and unable to free his wings, he sees the first catastrophe, the writing
of the Law.
Blake's dark twin in what Saree Makdisi has called romantic imperialismhis Spectre, to use
his own termwas the mystical, dogmatic chronicler of History, Thomas Carlyle (see fig. 29). A
sufficiently contradictory figure that his Past and Present could be used as the name of a journal
founded by members of the British Communist Party History Group, in 1952, while also being
Hitler's favorite author in the Berlin bunker. In Carlyle's view, the upheavals of Chartism, Luddism,
and Captain Swing that shook Britain from the 1820s onward were all of a piece: a British equivalent
to the French Revolution in which the working classes were expressing their discontent. Unlike
Edmund Burke, Carlyle accepted that the French Revolution did have the merit of sweeping aside
corruption and opening the way for the best to prevail. That in no way implied a form of democracy,
for of all the rights of man, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or
forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.24 Carlyle felt the question of England's
future was one of heroic leadership, requiring a perfect clearness of the elites to dispel the popular
adherence to what he called an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated in the wonderfullest way.25
The Hero, or Great Man, was able to withstand the feminized hordes of the deluded masses and was
distinguished from such popular heroes as the Dogleech Marat. For the ordinary person, history is
invisible. At the beginning of his history of the French Revolution, Carlyle provided a panorama of
France at the death of Louis XV, in 1774: Such things can the eye of History see in this sickroom of
King Louis, which were invisible to the courtiers there.26 The narrator, and by extension the reader,
are allowed to know better. Visuality went one stage further, able to read Futurity into the present
moment. No sooner had the Bastille fallen, in Carlyle's account of the French Revolution, than the
popular forces were described as Sansculottism, a name that did not circulate in the revolutionary
period for four more years, in a very different moment. To the Eye of History, that futurity was present
as soon as the Revolution began: the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy
against corrupt worn-out Authority.27 The goal of heroic visuality was to contain anarchy and restore
Authority to the sovereign eye of genius. Great men are great by virtue of their ability to visualize
History while being in the midst of it, making them into Heroes. It is given that they are men, or

masculine, gendering all countervisuality as feminine. In the 1840s, all political tendencies in Britain
from Chartism to patrician aristocracy negotiated their strategies in relationship to the discourse of
Carlyle's visualized Heroism.28 The key questions about Heroic leadership and the visuality it
deployed were: how was the authority to lead conveyed? Was the nation itself Heroic? or its people?
a specific set of individual leaders? or the individual Hero? In other words, the emergence of
visuality was not a discourse about sight at all, but about power and its representation, now
conceived in visualized terms as part of a new division of the senses.

Carlyle's arguments in Chartism and On Heroes were a counterpoint to the charter's democratic
principles in general and the radical William Benbow's theory of the National Holiday in particular.
The charter called for universal manhood suffrage; a secret ballot; equal electoral districts; abolition
of the property qualification for members of parliament (MP s); salaries for MP s; and, latterly, for
annual parliaments. Several of these claims, like the last, were directly descended from the
seventeenth-century radicals. Like Thomas Hardy, the chair of the radical London Corresponding
Society, Benbow was a shoemaker by trade, precisely the worker whom Socrates had declared in
The Republic should make shoes and occupy himself with nothing else. Commenting on this
seemingly specific insistence, Jacques Rancire clarifies that shoemaker is the generic name for the
man who is not where he ought to be if the order of estates is to get on with the order of discourse.29
This insistence on staying in place, obeying the leaders and doing what one should and nothing else
was very much Carlyle's response to the radicalism of the shoemakers of his day. In his pamphlet
Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes (1832), the nonconformist
Benbow overturned any respect for traditional hierarchies, denouncing the preposterous right to
exercise a monstrous power over almost every man, claimed by those who thought of themselves as
the people of substance but were in fact no more than the pick-pockets, the plunderers, the

pitiless Burkers, referring in the last example to Edmund Burke's hostility to the French Revolution
and the culture of rights.30 Benbow challenged authority at the center of modern everyday life by
calling into question the absolute compulsion to work for a wage. He called for the working classes
to take a month away from work in pursuit of ease, gaiety, pleasure [and] happiness, expanding
Jefferson's inclusion of happiness as a right in the Declaration of Independence into a platform of
rights to enjoyment. As this phrase suggests, Benbow's strategy was a simple and potentially effective
withdrawal from the market economy of wage-labor and consumption. This refusal was intended to
cause the collapse of the commercial economy, establishing fair prices and fair labor practices as one
part of an egalitarian life composed of equal rights, equal liberties, equal enjoyments, equal toil,
equal respect, equal share of production.31 Benbow's vision of a fair economy, taking some
substance from the sans-culotte strategy of price maximums, was a politics for a commoditydominated society, an attempt to level not land ownership but the emergent capitalist political
economy.
The National Holiday was, like Blake's image, the product of a long history of Atlantic world
resistance to slave-owning authority. During the English Revolution, Winstanley called on all
labourers, or such as are called poor people to cease working for landlords and large farmers as
hirelings. He did not argue for dispossession of the rich, but instead encouraged laborers to refuse
to work for them, which would lead to the inevitable collapse of large farms and estates. The
historian Christopher Hill noted the repeated call to refuse to work for landlords for wages: he
advocated, that is to say, something like a general strike.32 Like the subsequent general strike, the
Digger action was opposed to the very form of wage-labor and was intended to spark a widespread
movement first in England, then globally. Accordingly, a former ironmonger named John Sanders was
reduced to the lower status of nailer by 1655, when he appeared on the streets of Birmingham,
dressed in rags, and calling on the nailers to hold together, by assisting and maintaining one another
one fortnight or a month, and forbear working.33 These ideas so exactly foreshadow Benbow's
National Holiday that it is difficult not to suspect an oral tradition had kept it in circulation in the
intervening century and a half. If so, it was literally a vernacular strategy. Benbow directly
acknowledged inspiration from the Jewish tradition of the seven-year Sabbatical, or release, and the
fifty-year Jubilee, at which all servants and slaves were freed and all debt rescinded. Jubilee had
spread around the Atlantic world as a radical image for the abolition of slavery and was now
becoming a figure for the refusal of the political economy of wage-labor that was replacing chattel
labor.34 The idea of the Jubilee gathered force in England during the early years of the nineteenth
century, promoted by the Newcastle radical Thomas Spence as a combination of Jacobinism and
millenarianism.35
The abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, son of the Jamaican plantation owner James Wedderburn and
an enslaved woman in his ownership, Rosanna, saw the possibilities of applying the Jubilee to the
British Caribbean colonies.36 Wedderburn was first a sailor, then a member of the radical London
Corresponding Society in the 1790s, leading to his becoming a Wesleyan preacher, fulminating
against slavery and oppression. In 1817 he began publishing a radical newssheet entitled The Axe
Laid to the Root, which supplied details of how to enact the Jubilee in slave-owning islands: My
advice to you is, to appoint a day wherein you will all pretend to sleep one hour beyond the
appointed time of your rising to labour; let the appointed day be twelve months before it takes place;
let it be talked of in your marketplace, and on the roads. The universality of your sleeping and nonresistance, will strike terror to your oppressors. Go to your labour peaceably after the hour is

expired; and repeat it once a year, till you obtain your liberty.37 This tactic of nonresisting resistance
was the hallmark of the general strike to come, but also of the past refusal in Saint-Domingue to
accept new labor conditions on the plantations, as Wedderburn made clear: Prepare for flight, ye
planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you.38 The threat of the appropriation of property was
close behind the Jubilee in these sentiments that Wedderburn claimed to be disseminating in Jamaica
via his sister Frances Campbell, a Maroon. A letter attributed to her was published in The Axe Laid
to the Root, in which she described her conversion to the Jubilee and her attempt to liberate her own
enslaved workers.39 Whether the letter was really from Jamaica or not, Wedderburn himself stands as
testimony to the transnational discourse of the Jubilee that fed into the Grand National Holiday. The
holiday brought together different strands of radical discourse from the Old Testament calls for
emancipation to antislavery activism, revolutionary practice in England, France, and Saint-Domingue
as collective action against a wage-labor economy visualized as both an extension of the plantation
complex and as interactive with it.
Although Benbow had only a rudimentary plan for the implementation of the holiday, the Chartists
called for one to begin on 12 August 1839, only to cancel it at the last moment.40 The moment
nonetheless arrived, in July and August 1842, when half a million workers were on strike, from
Dundee to Cornwall, in a series of actions that lasted longer than the better-known general strike of
1926.41 The principle at stake was what one Glasgow-based group had described as the workers
goal to desist from their labour and attend wholly to their Rights, and to consider it the duty of
everyone not to recommence until he is in possession of those Rights which distinguish the Freeman
from the Slave, viz. that of giving consent to the laws by which he is governed.42 Here rights, labor,
freedom, and slavery were linked by means of the idea of a general cessation of work into an idea of
representation. In similar fashion, Thomas Attwood declared, on presenting the first Chartist petition,
in July 1839: They would prove that the men of Birmingham were England.43 That is to say, the
Chartists and other radicals claimed that their political demonstrations represented a clear statement
of their desires and goals, to which the body-politic must respond, because the Chartists were the
nation. A political aesthetics was at work here, in which representation corresponded exactly to that
which it was supposed to depict, just as the new technology of the photograph was supposed to do. In
short, realism. In 1845, Friedrich Engels argued that the strikes and other strategies of the Chartists
would overthrow the sham existence of parliament. The assertion of real public opinion in its
totality would soon lead to the whole nation being represented in parliament. Once this old goal of
British radicalism, dating back to the seventeenth-century Levellers, had been accomplished, Engels
believed that the last halo must fall from the head of the monarch and the aristocracy, ushering in a
new Jerusalem.44 Engels deployed an anti-illusionist theory of representation, in which the body
politic would come to be composed by the body of people, rather than by the head of the hereditary
rulers. In a striking moment of optimism, Engels claims that Carlyle has sounded the social disorder
more deeply than any other English bourgeois, and demands the organization of labour. I hope that
Carlyle, who has found the right path, will be capable of following it.45 For Engels, writing like a
latter-day Blake, prophecy is nowhere so easy as in England.[T]he revolution must come.46
That it did not was due in some part to Carlyle, whose anticapitalism was no radicalism. Carlyle
understood that what he called the cash nexus of Victorian capitalism created condensations of the
social that enabled revolutionary change, as it had done in France. Produced in the same year that
Benbow's holiday had been called and cancelled, his rapidly written book Chartism denounced all
these changes. Carlyle sought a restoration of Heroic kingship, not revolution. He claimed that the

deep dumb inarticulate crowds of Chartist demonstrations were manifesting a desire that they could
not name, symptoms of a disease within what he famously called the condition of England.47 This
condition was mental, rather than physical, an examination of what he would come to call the
deranged condition of our affairs.48 The people and the modern were, then, literally insane, just as
Pinel had seen the French Revolution as accelerating madness. In this regard, Carlyle was a modern,
insofar as he recognized the existence of unconscious motivations and desires. Nonetheless, he
insisted that the workers could not represent themselves because their condition had to be diagnosed
by another. In the Platonic tradition, any representation was inadequate to the Ideal. As if in ironic
refutation of the concept of Chartism as the mobility, Carlyle's political solution to the problem of
representation was that the working-classes should emigrate to the colonies, making empire the cure
to the disease of England.49 He recognized that the problem was caused by a laissez-faire approach in
economy and government, but the Working Classes cannot any longer go on without government;
without being actually guided and governed.50 The solution he arrived at was a return to a real
Aristocracy formed of the Best and the Bravest, rather than to the hereditary aristocracy that
dominated British society.51 As befitted an admirer of Frederick the Great, Carlyle envisaged an
enlightened despotism, not a democracy. For having conquered the world, the second task of the
English People in World-History, as Carlyle put it, was how to share the fruit of said conquest.
The way not to accomplish it was such Benthamee (that is to say, Benthamite) ideas as elective
franchise, ballot-box, representative assembly.52 Following the publication of Foucault's Discipline
and Punish, Jeremy Bentham's reforming Panopticon has become understood as the epitome of
disciplinary surveillance in the period. However, panopticism was contested not just from the Left,
but also from the imperial Right. It might be thought that the observation of work was simply a
transposition of the overseer's work on the plantation to the industrial factory. The difference was not
in the practice of surveillance, but in the ethics of reform espoused by Bentham. In keeping with the
transition from owning labor power to regulating it in order to maximize production, panopticism
sought a transformation of the subject to what Foucault called the docile body, a person that
accepted the goals of the institution and embodied them. This form of production might be considered
a form of compromise between workers and employersin exchange for suitably concentrated work,
a diminished violence of the conditions of work. In the period 1801-71, such contracts, whether
actual or virtual, were far from universal, even in the factories or military barracks that were
supposed to be paradigms of panopticism, let alone in the colonies. Carlyle opposed any contractual
arrangement between the Hero and the mass in favor of the duty of obedience, and he saw all such
reform efforts as doomed to failure. Carlyle held that criminals, the Devil's regiments of the line,
were not to be dealt with domestically. A proper prison governor will sweep them pretty rapidly
into some Norfolk Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote domestic Moorland, into some
stone-walled Silent System.53 Norfolk Island was a penal colony within the penal colony, an island
off the coast of New South Wales, where truly draconian measures were applied to discipline
recalcitrant convicts from 1825 onward. Far from being the origin of human rights, as Pron had
hoped, the islands of Australia were now the site of penal punishment. The silent system was the
regime of compulsory silence in prison introduced in the nineteenth century over Bentham's vigorous
objections: This species of punishmentmay overthrow the powers of the mind, and produce
incurable melancholy.54 What Bentham saw as an occasional punishment came to be adopted as a
system, endorsed by Carlyle and other conservatives. Carlyle's visuality was, then, opposed to
panopticism both as a mode of visual order and as a specific system of controlling punishment.

Hostile to Chartism, and laissez-faire economics, to social reform and emancipation, it offered a
modern mode of picturing history, which contested panopticism and liberalism throughout the
nineteenth century with both theoretical and practical consequences.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE HERO

History, understood as a form of thought, took on a new centrality in the nineteenth century, when, as
Foucault has shown, philosophy was to reside in the gap between history and History, between
events and Origin, between evolution and the first rending open of the source, between oblivion and
the Return.55 Where history had been the chronicle of events, History was to speak of Origins,
causes and impersonal forces. The nature of this terminology also indicates the distance between this
form of History and the work done by present-day historians. For many reformers and
constitutionalists after the French Revolution, representation no longer represented other
representations, as it had done in the past, but had to be located in History, whose characteristics
were the subject of immense new efforts. Writing in 1827, the same year that Nicphore Nipce first
succeeded in fixing a plate with a light-sensitive image, Augustin Thierry described his ambition to
write a history of France that reproduces with fidelity the ideas, the sentiments and the customs of
the men who have transmitted to us the name that we carry, and whose destiny has prepared our
own.56 This history required the real production of a feeling of the national out of the divergent
materials to hand, rendering History into the very science of the Real. If oversight had marshaled the
material domains of the plantation complex, visuality orchestrated its place in time.
Thierry had argued, in 1820, that all French history had been that of a divide between GalloRomans and Germans: We believe ourselves to be a nation, but we are two nations within one land,
two nations which are enemies because of what they remember and because their projects are
irreconcilable: one once conquered the other.57 The nobility were the descendants of the conquering
Germans, whereas the majority of the Third Estate was descended from the serfs of the medieval
communes. Where Carlyle was to depict the French Revolution as a generalized war of all against
all, Thierry saw it as a reconciliation between these two warring races in which all inequalities
such as that between master and slave were eradicatedignoring plantation slavery as usual.
Indeed, he perceived the subsequent revolutions of 1848 (which did abolish slavery) as a
catastrophe, causing him to abandon his research for years.58 Looking back in 1866, Thierry
claimed that he had begun his work in 1817 to promote his constitutional politics, without regard for
his materials. But his manuscript and archival research generated a desire to understand the past for
its own sake, which, when he realized it in a piece of life or local color, I felt an involuntary
emotion.59 His history was intended to reproduce this physically felt love of country, which was
indispensable to the work of producing a single nation. Thierry warned his readers, in 1827, It
will not be enough in any sense to be capable of this mutual admiration for that which is called the
Hero; one must have a larger manner of feeling and judging, which entailed a sympathy for the mass
of men.60 If his warning was against the emergence of revolutionary Heroes, rather than the
aristocratic Heroes envisioned by Carlyle, the issue remained pertinent. For Thierry, the imagined
community of the modern nation required universal participation, making slavery impossible, even
as subjection to the Hero. For Carlyle, only such subjection could ensure the avoidance of chaos.
Carlyle's work was part of a dramatic reconfiguration of historical events into the metaphysical
narratives of History that involved both new technical procedures and new literary styles, derived

from German Romanticism.61 Carlyle did not follow those of his contemporaries, like Leopold von
Ranke, who famously claimed to write history to show what actually happened, albeit with a clear
bias to what he called the German race.62 Indeed, Carlyle's dramatic sleight-of-hand in Chartism
was to rewrite the Norman Conquest so that, rather than being a domination of French over Saxon, the
arrival of the Normans was a supplement of a French-speaking variety of Teutons to the already
resident Teutonic Saxons. The difference was only that the Normans were in a condition to govern,
while the Saxons were not.63 At once, Carlyle had refuted Thierry's theory of History and countered
one of the most enabling of radical narratives, the Norman Yoke, meaning the suppression of Saxon
freedom by Norman oppression. Whatever the difference between Saxons and Normans, the change
must have been, as Carlyle put it, rather tolerable or it would not have endured. As such rhetorical
maneuvers suggest, Carlyle also refused the new technical apparatus of historical research promoted
by Ranke, such as the use of documentary archives, or even libraries, seeing them as the product of
Mr Dryasdust.64
For Carlyle, History was far more than the accumulation of facts, and historians themselves were
often questionable because they presented events as successive, while the things done were often
simultaneous.65 To capture this simultaneous quality, Carlyle wanted to convey an Idea of the
whole, which he rendered by means of what he called a succession of vivid pictures.66 Unlike
Chartist representation, Carlyle's visuality was a counter-phantasmagoria that imagined modernity as
a Platonic cinema of Ideas, cutting backward and forward across the flow of time.67 By contrast,
Ranke aspired to a colorless history that refused to create a false sense of unity, even if that meant
becoming what he called disconnected. His contemporaries recognized the unusual nature of
Carlyle's writing. In a letter to Carlyle, written in 1837, his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson praised his
new style, asserting, I think you see in pictures.68 Emerson's remark implied that it was possible to
see otherwise than in pictures, meaning as a series of unconnected images or impressions, such as
those Paine had hoped would render rights irreversible. This pictorial vision was in a sense literally
History painting, that is to say, the leading genre of painting that was celebrated for its ability to
sustain a narrative within a single frame and reached its highpoint as official art in the nineteenth
century. In similar fashion, visuality ordered and narrated the chaotic events of modern life in
intelligible, visualized form into moving pictures. At the very moment in which natural history with
its reliance on visibility was becoming biology, based on what Foucault calls the internal
principleof organic structure, History took what we might now call a visual turn.69 Consequently,
Carlyle was explicitly opposed to the new physiology of vision in which seeing and understanding
was the same process.70 For example, the British scientist David Brewster explained, in 1832, that
the mind's eye is actually the body's eye and that the retina is the common tablet on which both
classes of impressions are painted, and by means of which they receive their visual existence
according to the same optical laws.71 The Hero, by contrast, was not to be limited to such external
impressions, as if no Reality any longer existed but only Phantasms of realities.72 The Hero was
marked by his effortless ability to combine sensory data and other information and intuition into a
picture visible to the inner or spiritual eye, which, once opened, rendered the observer into a
Seer.73 The homonym between see-er and Seer was part of Carlyle's intent to stress a spiritually
motivated vision of History, distinct from the conflation of vision with Reason that had dominated
Enlightenment discourse. The overseer was now simply the Seer: a prophet, a Hero, and a King.
This visualized history was contrasted to the Phantasmagories, and loud-gibbering Spectral

Realities that dominated popular understanding of history as it happened, locked into an unseeing
present.74 First incarnated as an entertainment projecting ghosts and other specters by Philidor, the
phantasmagoria became famous when Etienne Gaspard Robertson's version appeared in Paris, in
1797. Robertson created high camp Gothic performances in which various shades would be
resuscitated for the audience's delight, ranging from the revolutionary Marat to Virgil and famous lost
lovers, using effects ranging from magic lantern slides, to sound, and magnification. The
phantasmagoria quickly turned into a metaphor for the haunted qualities of modern life. Blake had
peopled his London with the Spectre, Marx saw commodity fetishism as a phantasmagoria, while
Benjamin made it a feature of his Arcades Project, and even today Slavoj iek warns us against the
fantasy of the real. In short, there is some agreement among critics of the modern that its form is the
phantasmagoria, an illusion of light and sound that displaces the real. For Carlyle, the modern was
dominated by the loud-roaring Loom of Time with all its French Revolutions, Jewish Revelations,
creating a phantasmagoria that obscured Tradition and the Seer.75 In counterpoint to this spectral
vernacular reality of everyday people, with their eternal tendency to amalgamate as Revolution,
Carlyle conjured a visualized form of History, dominated by Heroes.
Following his rebuttal of Chartism, Carlyle developed his ideas on visualized power in an
acclaimed series of lectures entitled On Heroes and Hero Worship, given in 1840 and published the
following year. In grand indifference to all possible objection, and as if being wholly original,
Carlyle's lectures described a tradition of Heroes running from the Norse gods, via Muhammad and
Dante to Cromwell and Napoleon. Carlyle consolidated and embodied his theory of History into the
Hero, who had the vision to see History as it happened, a viewpoint that was obscured for the
ordinary person by the specters and phantasmagorias of emancipation.76 The Hero that stood against
the modern tide of darkness was the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near.
The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world: and this not as a kindled
lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I
say, of native original insight, of manhood and Heroic nobleness; in whose radiance all souls feel that
it is well with them (23). The Hero was a projection into visuality, not visuality in and of himself.
This sense of light extending in a fountain was congruous withand perhaps appropriated fromthe
exactly contemporary sense articulated by John Williams, the London Missionary Society evangelist,
of his South Pacific mission as a fountain from whence the streams of salvation are to flow to the
numerous islands and clusters scattered over that extensive ocean.77 In both cases, the object of
visuality's work was the soul, in need of leadership or conversion. The visualized Hero was the
true source of light and enlightenment, his insight stemming from a quasi-divine nobility to which it is
pleasurable to submit, generating its sense of the aesthetic. Indeed, visuality was named as part of the
Christian Heroism of Dante. For Carlyle, the Divine Comedy was a Song, in which every
compartmentis worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality, that became a
painting (79). Interestingly, then, from its very conception visuality was a multimedia term,
connecting art, literature, and music, as Carlyle insisted that Dante's painting was not graphic only,
brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night (80). This form of language offered strong
visual metaphors, even as its meaning was opaque, perhaps unknowable. Carlyle created a visual
Platonism in which the shadows on the cave wall are all mere humans can see, yet they are nothing
but error.
The pleasure came from the binding of the mystical foundation of authority to the Hero in and as
visuality. The Hero has authority because he can perceive visuality and in mystical fashion thus

becomes the source of life-giving light in himself. His task is the making of Order (175). This order
was what Carlyle called Protestantism, a return to Reality that had to be carried out on three
occasions. The first was Luther making the Protestant Reformation and overturning the false idols of
Catholicism. Next came Oliver Cromwell, who was the one available Authority left in England and
saved it from anarchy (199). Finally came Napoleon, repeating the task with the French Revolution
but performing the necessary additional function of disposing of Divine Right and opening careers to
all the talents (205), creating a Democracy that was not Anarchy. On each occasion, authority
reclaimed its force. For Carlyle, this was a three-act play in which the defeat of the French
Revolution marked the final return to realityfor lower than that savage Sansculottism men cannot
go (203). The gaze of the Hero in the modern period was to be a form of Medusa effect, petrifying
the transformations of modernity into recognizable social relations. This castrating gaze was
paradoxically universal, affecting all men and women, leaving only the Hero capable of visuality. No
doubt the Great Man was the product of manhood alone, in keeping with colonial views of proper
masculinity, opposed to the feminized collective of the crowd, or as Carlyle usually put it, the mob.78
Visuality was embodied in the Hero, rather than the regenerated rights-bearing body of the French
Revolution, and the Heroic masculine body was worthy of worship. Now only the Hero stands
against the cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:the notes being all
false (12). For in the mimetic realism of representation by the people, there was no true means of
founding authority, leading instead to unrepresentable chaos. Implicit in this view is a parallel
between the Hero and the historian, who both stand against the chaos of modernity, for History is the
history of Heroes.79 Although Carlyle spoke of the Hero and Hero-worship as the one fixed point in
modern revolutionary history (15), he had here doubled that point so that it represented both the
Hero and his worshiper-chronicler the historian, making the Heroic viewpoint complex, even
paradoxical. Visuality had its double-vision as well.
Carlyle created a counterrevolutionary sense of past time by erasing the complex time of rights in
favor of a subjugating Tradition. Yet he continued to frame this conception of history in visual terms.
Writing just after Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot had announced the success of their
photographic devices, Carlyle declared: What an enormous camera-obscura magnifier is Tradition!
Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light shining in
the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a
madness and nothing, but a sanity and something (23). Whereas the Revolution relied on a
condensation of visual symbols, Tradition expanded the visual field from a single point of light, that
place where law and force joined together to found authority. In visuality, the future is always already
subjected to the past, when that past is codified into Tradition. Even then outdated as a physiological
model of perception, the camera obscura revealed rather than obscured those truths inherent in Time
that Carlyle called Tradition.80 This antitheoretical, antichronological History is a light penetrating
the darkness of the camera in the hope of preserving sanity, meaning that perception attested to an
actually existing reality and was not merely a hallucination. If, to adapt W. J. T. Mitchell's question,
we ask, What does visuality want?, Carlyle's answer is clear: order (175). Like Urizen, Carlyle
opposed Order to anarchy as the necessary movement of human life, understanding that movement
was the inevitable corollary of modernity, but insisting that it be toward order not chaos.

CHAOS, CULTURE, AND EMANCIPATION

Carlyle's work on Heroism was well received and his influence continued to grow, giving him a
long (and largely unremarked) legacy in reactionary thought.81 Yet his views became even more
pessimistic as he grew older, as he confronted the possibility that the French Revolution was not the
final act of Protestantism. For there was one more descent into anarchy that might transpire, namely
that the emancipation of the enslaved might lead to the dissolution of the British empire. If Carlyle's
first thoughts on visuality were prompted by the memory of the French Revolution, after the decade of
Chartism culminated in the revolutions of 1848, he then turned his attention to the state of the British
empire after emancipation in a series of essays, published, in 1855, as Latter-Day Pamphlets. The
eschatological tenor of his title was reflected in the tragic structure of modernity presented in the
essays that set the tone for the assumption of imperialism not as exploitation but as a titanic struggle
between the forces of Cosmos, of God and Human Virtue and those of Chaos.82 Carlyle denied
the very possibility of reform and emancipation: Yes, my friends, a scoundrel is a scoundrel: that
remains forever a fact.83 It was the central issue of emancipation, especially as regarded the
formerly enslaved, that led Carlyle's position to gain more adherents over time. In his notorious essay
in Fraser's Magazine (1849), reprinted as a pamphlet under the title Occasional Discourse on the
Nigger Question, Carlyle reiterated the impossibility of emancipation.84 The essay has been widely
cited for its revolting depiction of the emancipated Africans in Jamaica idling the day away with
their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins.85 This refusal of the colonized to labor, while
finding food all around, served as Carlyle's exemplary moment of the failure of what he called the
Emancipation-principle, that lowest of all sansculottisms. In short, Carlyle suggested that the
emancipated had refused to sell their labor-power and instead cultivated their own gardens. This
dialectic between national economy and local subsistence had structured the Saint-Domingue
revolution, and it played a central role in British debates over the abolition of slavery before and
after the fact.86 Carlyle's nasty parody would have been immediately recognizable to those familiar
with these debates and served to accelerate a growing consensus that the enslaved had failed to
become workers. That is to say, the plantation complex could not be reformed; it had to be reinforced.
In this view, abolition had instead turned the West Indies into a Black Ireland, meaning a place
where work was not properly carried out.87 Like many other commentators in the period, Carlyle
insisted that emancipation had failed to create a black working class in the Caribbean and had instead
produced lazy and immoral individuals. It was the other side of Chartism, a similar failure of the
vernacular to rise to the challenge of leadership. From the decline of the Jamaica plantations and the
experience of the Demerara rebellion of the enslaved, in 1823, Carlyle concluded: Except by
Mastership and Servantship, there is no conceivable deliverance from Tyranny and Slavery. Cosmos
is not Chaos, simply by this one quality, That it is governed. Where wisdom, even approximately, can
contrive to govern, all is right, or is ever striving to become so; where folly is emancipated, and
gets to govern, as it soon will, all is wrong.88 Order required governing, governing required great
men, great men visualized history as its sole actors.
The Occasional Discourse marked a transition in British public opinion in which, as Catherine
Hall has put it, the tide was running against abolitionist truths.89 In 1857, the aftermath of the socalled Indian Mutiny, or First War of Indian Independence, would mark the assumption of direct
colonial control in the subcontinent, suggesting that order could not be left to the market alone, as
represented by the East India Company. Order required government. This anti-abolition and procolonial shift had important political consequences in the aftermath of the Morant Bay uprising of
1865 in Jamaica: Months of tension between black people and white over land, labour and law

erupted after an unpopular verdict from magistrates led to a demonstration and attempted arrests.90
In the ensuing violence, eighteen officials and members of the militia were killed, leading Governor
Edward John Eyre to call out troops. More than 400 people were executed, another 600 flogged, and
1,000 homes were destroyed. In the ensuing furor, the Eyre Defence Committee was established in
Britain, with Carlyle being joined by such leading cultural figures such as Charles Dickens, Alfred
Lord Tennyson, and John Ruskin, the champion of Turner's work. The committee made its case so
well that Eyre was never prosecuted for his actions, and Jamaican home rule was rescinded in favor
of direct governance from Britain. Eyre explained, The Negroes are most excitable and impulsive,
and any seditious or rebellious action was sure to be taken up and extended. His belief that colonial
authority could not deal with Jamaicans in the way that one might treat the peasantry of a European
country was reinforced by the scientist Joseph Hooker, for whom it was self-evident that we do not
hold an Englishman and a Jamaican negro to be convertible terms.91 Abolitionism had posed an
enslaved man asking, Am I not a man and a brother? By 1865, the answer was no. Carlyle's view
of the necessity of mastery, far from being marginal, was now imperial policy. The Chartist goal of
total representation was firmly set aside in favor of a non-equivalence between different British
subjects.
This distinction within visuality was the move that would allow it to become a practical strategy of
imperial governance, concentrating on the separation and segregation of colonizer and colonized.
This additional dimension to visuality came from the addition of culture to the battlefield of the
social imagined by Carlyle. Just as there was a certain convergence around 1660 that permitted the
formation of oversight as a combination of mapping, natural history, and the force of law, so, too, did
the concept of culture become deployed very quickly, around 1870. In Matthew Arnold's foundational
account, culture meant trying to perfect oneself, whereas its opposite was anarchy, defined as
doing as one likes. Culture created light, which in turn enabled people to like what right reason
ordains and to follow her authority, then we have got a practical benefit out of culture. This chain of
visualized command was all the more necessary in an epoch of expansion, meaning industrial
development, population growth, and imperial expansion. If this pattern of explanation recalls
Carlyle's vision of authority and the ills of emancipation, that is not surprising, for it comes from a
passage in which Arnold was modifying Carlyle so that aristocracies did not gain their privilege by
birthright alone: The very principle of authority which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy
is right reason, ideas, light.92 Such principles were central to the Carlyle of 1840, who had become
somewhat obscured by the dyspeptic later writings. The key here is to note that culture and authority
have become synonyms. Culture thus came to be understood as what the ethnographer Edward Burnet
Tylor called the complex network of civilization.93 This network was locally divided and globally
staged into ranks of development. Tylor asserted that there was scarce a hand's breath difference
between an English ploughman and a negro of Central Africa, refining Hooker's refusal to convert
Jamaicans and English by a distinction of class. Among rural working classes, while there was a
distinction, it was narrow, whereas the gap between British elites and Jamaicans was so broad as to
be incommensurable. From this premise, Tylor drew the inference that if there was law at all, it was
universal, but actually existing among mankind in different grades that could be assessed by virtue
of the general improvement of mankind by higher organization of the individual and of society.94
This view of human progress as a uniform advance from barbarism to civilization, rather than the
present-day savage marking a decline from an originary state of culture, was endorsed by Darwin
in his Descent of Man, published in the same year, which made use of Tylor's researches.95 All these

opinions from Carlyle and the Duke of Argyll on the Right to Arnold's centrist position and Tylor
and Darwin's liberal opinion form what Rancire calls a consensus, meaning not a single point of
view, but a uniform range of views. In this case, it was agreed that culture was a temporal hierarchy,
existing in real space and time, in which a minority were advanced ahead of the majority and thereby
entitled to the authority to make choices and distinctions. This visualization of hierarchy over time
gave depth and spatial dimension to culture as an actually existing means of classification and
separation. In short, culture authorized empire.

COUNTER-HEROES
That imperial visuality will be considered in chapter 5, but we should not let Carlyle's sleight-ofhand deceive us. Emancipation and the imperial crisis were not supposed to happen in his scheme of
ordered reality. That is to say, if the Reformation, English Revolution, and French Revolution were,
against all appearances, nonetheless part of Visuality 1 and part of visuality's life-process, the selfdirected emancipation of the enslaved and the colonized was not. Any such imagining was held to be
insanity. Abolition and decolonization were the outside to Visuality 1's reality effect, creating a
plurality of realisms. Visuality 2 is composed of other ways of ordering reality that do not tend to
support a single authority. In the genealogy of visuality, then, realism cannot be contained to a period
in capital's early development. Precisely because such abolition realisms have not figured in the
standard accounts of modernity, the next chapter is devoted to them. Here I want to show first that
abolitionist and decolonial practice engaged with Carlyle's visuality throughout the nineteenth century
by contesting heroism at the heart of the still-existing plantation complex in the Americas. At first it
was not clear that promoting heroism implied rejecting abolition. In a telling moment, in September
1840, Carlyle spurned a delegation of American women to the world congress on the abolition of
slavery, who had thought that the author of On Heroes must be a supporter of their cause.96 He
insisted it was nothing to do with him, as he disparaged emancipation as a failure. That warning was
increasingly to dominate Carlyle's sense of the modern phantasmagoria, as revolution seemed to
spread around Europe from the Chartists to the radical year of 1848 with its final abolition of slavery
in French and Danish colonies. So central was Carlyle's visualized heroism in the period that even
those adamantly opposed to his system had to pass by it. I next consider some representative
examples of abolition heroes whose gender, sexuality or ethnicity would have excluded them from
all consideration by Carlyle.
Sojourner Truth's self-presentation as a hero of abolition in the United States challenged the
gendering of heroism as inevitably masculine.97 Truth, as Nell Irvin Painter has pointed out, was the
only woman who had been enslaved to take an active role in the emancipation movement (Harriet
Tubman's work being of a different character).98 Part of Truth's power as a spokesperson for
emancipation was her visual presence, as Olive Gilbert, who wrote her celebrated Narrative,
emphasized: The impressions made by Isabella on her auditors, when moved by lofty or deep
feeling, can never be transmitted to paper, (to use the words of another), till by some Daguerrian act,
we are enabled to transfer the look, the gesture, the tones of voice, in connection with the quaint yet fit
expressions used, and the spirit-stirring animation that, at such a time, pervades all she says.99
Gilbert persisted in naming her subject by using her slave-owner given name of Isabella van
Wagenen, rather than by the evocative name Sojourner Truth that she adopted in 1843. Nonetheless,
Gilbert's sense of Truth's heroism anticipated and created a desire for cinema in her wish to transfer

Truth's look to others. Truth herself was skilled in deploying her look as evidence of her own
right to look and right to be seen, by using photographs of herself to fund her activities. She
manipulated a series of carefully chosen signs, making full use of the rhetoric of the pose that was
already well-established by the 1850s (see fig. 30). In the best-known of these images, she is seen
dressed in respectable middle-class attire, posed as if caught in the middle of knitting. Her genderappropriate activity and dress allowed her to signify her engagement with ideas and learning, shown
by her glasses and the open book. The caption that she provided for the cards showed her awareness
of the ambivalences of photography: I sell the shadow to support the substance. Photography is
represented as a mere shadow, rather than the Truth that is the subject herself, the substance. Here the
emancipated woman makes her image the object of financial exchange in place of the substance, her
whole person, which had once been for sale. That commodification was justified by the substantive
use to which their sale was to be put, namely abolishing the ownership of people. At the same time,
by insisting on her own control over the financial process, Truth asserted a proper freedom that the
emancipated did not quite fully possess.100 As Kenneth S. Greenberg argues, An emancipation that
assumed the form of a gift from the master could only be partial, for a gift always implies an
obligation.101 It was for that reason that W. E. B. Du Bois would insist that the enslaved had freed
themselves, and it is why Truth put her image into the world in this way, claiming to own not just her
person but the substance of rights-bearing freedom.
Truth performed this freedom at an abolitionist meeting in Indiana in 1858, where she was directly
challenged over her right to be seen. The men in the audience claimed that Truth was a man and
demanded to see her breasts. That is to say, they recognized her claim to personify a Hero, but
asserted that any such person must be male. Here was a direct embodiment of the slave-master's
dominant gaze in the person of one Dr. Strain, a proslavery spectator.102 Following a voice vote that
upheld the doubters, according to the contemporary account of the Boston Liberator, Sojourner told
them that her breasts had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring; that some
of these white babies had grown to man's estate; that, although they had suckled her colored breasts,
they were, in her estimation, far more manly than they (her persecutors) appeared to be; and she
quietly asked them as she disrobed her bosom, if they too wished to suck!103 Truth rejected the
slaver's gaze by claiming the right to be seen as a human. Further she classified her own body as
exhibiting what Judith Halberstam has called in a different context female masculinity, upholding
both terms of the identification.104 Truth asserted that her body was certainly female, yet it was better
able to engender manliness than those men around her, whom she reduced to infants by offering them
her breast. This deployment of the body further contested anthropological ideas that the breasts might
index racial difference, white notions of beauty, and the symbolically revealed breasts of the
revolutionary figure of Liberty.105 For Liberty nurtures the nation at her symbolic breast, whereas
Truth revealed the known but hidden truth that enslaved African women actually nurtured white male
infants, who would become slave-owners. She claimed that men so suckled became more manly
men than her detractors, despite the fact that African breasts were taken as signs of degeneracy and
ugliness. Here she invented the other in one of the most direct ways possible, while claiming her own
right to look and to be seen.

Truth was constantly nomadic, always in pursuit of emancipation, generating a complex, even
chaotic, visuality out of the stale clichs of her time. As Daphne Brooks has put it: From the
darkness of the void which she creates, surplus Truths are put into play.106 This was Carlyle's
heroism reversed, a countervisuality of the hero. For whereas his camera obscura of tradition had
magnified a single point of light, Truth deployed an array of imagery to explore the tensions between
the shadows and the substances of embodied labor, reproduction, and representation. Sustaining that
complexity was the key, for merely gendering Carlyle's Heroism female could produce disparate
effects. Gayatri Spivak has shown, for example, how the contemporaneous practice in India of sati, or
widow immolation, was presented as a form of heroism that generated admiration for what one
commentator called the cool and unfaltering courage of Indian women. If imperialism rendered the
woman what Spivak calls the object of protection from her own kind, it also made them into heroes

for refusing that protection.107 Like visibility within the Panopticon, counterheroism was a trap as
well as a resource, one that mobilized an entire genealogy of nineteenth-century gender.
The impact of these refigured modes of heroic visuality in the Americas can be traced via an
apparently unlikely example of heroism: the figure of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.
In 1865, Carlyle considered writing a pamphlet in defense of Davis as a Heroic figure, a choice he
for once rejected as being too outrageous even for him.108 Both Oscar Wilde and W. E. B. Du Bois
pursued this untaken road, intending to authorize anti-imperial and antiracist heroisms respectively,
but by different means. Of course, these complex figures cannot be fully understood simply with
reference to their response to Carlyle's and Emerson's theory of the Hero, but as a line of inquiry it
has much to say about both of them. According to W. B. Yeats, Carlyle was the chief inspirer of selfeducated men in the eighties and early nineties, even including such unlikely figures as Vincent
van Gogh, who thought On Heroes to be a very beautiful little book.109 Wilde, prime mover of such
aspiring artists in Britain, was taken by the stormy rhetoric of Carlyle, whom he met in 1874 and
whose writing table he later purchased for his own use. Wilde was able to quote long passages of
The French Revolution by heart, and his own writing bears the marks of Carlyle's influence.110
On his tour of America, in 1882, Wilde appeared as an Elizabethan aesthete, as seen in the
photographs of Napoleon Sarony, a direct challenge to the aesthetics of the hero. His pose was that of
a member of a race once the most aristocratic in Europe, namely the Irish.111 Wilde assumed that his
class would sustain his pose as a hero, deflecting any other criticism, but his perceived effeminacy
created a clear sense of gender and sexual difference. However, as so often in the United States, this
difference was displaced into race as the most effective form of classification and separation. The
Washington Post invited its readers of 22 January 1882 to consider How Far Is It from This to
This?, which captioned two drawings: one of the legendary Wild Man of Borneo, the other of Wilde
holding a sunflower. This pseudo-Darwinian fear of so-called reverse evolution was condensed into
a composite visual symbol the next week by Harper's Weekly as a monkey admiring a sunflower.112
Far from seeming Heroic, Wilde's aestheticism was perceived as a reverse or inverted effeminacy
that was figured as racial degeneration. Accordingly, in Rochester, New York, students hired a
laborer to parody Wilde as a blackface minstrel, as if to suggest that his whiteness was forfeited by
his effeminacy.113 This caricature persisted throughout his career, as in Pellegrino's caricature of him
as The Ape (1884) and a Punch cartoon depicting the Christy Minstrels of No Importance (1893)
at the time of A Woman of No Importance.114 Wilde found that being a colonial subject did not make
him a white Englishman when questions of difference were being put. As if reinventing himself as
Carlyle, Wilde responded by making a public visit to none other than Jefferson Davis, in June 1882,
where he compared the struggles of the Irish for independence within the British empire to that of the
Confederacy: We in Ireland are fighting for the principle of autonomy against empire, for
independence against centralization, for the principles for which the South fought.115 The
countervisual claim to autonomy was staged against Carlyle's Protestant reality, even if it tended to
very different effect. If his being Irish could not be posed as Heroic aristocracy because of his
perceived embodied difference, Wilde repositioned it as a form of Heroic resistance to tyranny that
nonetheless endorsed the continuance of a decentralized British empire. He presumably did not know
that Davis's plantation had been repossessed from African Americans who had been bequeathed the
estate by the former Confederate president's brother. Nonetheless, Wilde was claiming the place of
the slave-owner as the one from which to see the Irish people free, an emphatic designation of the
place of the master in what he would elsewhere call Hegel's contraries.

For W. E. B. Du Bois, the legacy of Carlyle's visualized Hero had to be veiled rather than
appropriated. As a student at Fisk, Du Bois was much taken with Carlyle's writing, especially The
French Revolution, which remained a stylistic influence throughout his long career. When editor of
the Herald, the student newspaper at Fisk, Du Bois urged his readers to adopt Carlyle's viewpoint
and even to take Bismarck as their Hero.116 During his time at Fisk (1885-88), Du Bois heard the Fisk
Jubilee Singers, a group devoted to the performance of African American spirituals and other
vernacular music that celebrated the concept of the Jubilee; the group used revenues from their
performances to fund the university. Later Du Bois used quotations from such songs as the headings
for his chapters in The Souls of Black Folk, where he also elegiacally discussed the history of the
Fisk Jubilee Singers.117 From the beginning of his adult life, then, Du Bois experienced and thought
through the counterpoint of Carlyle's Hero and the Jubilee. Once at Harvard, in 1888, Du Bois
absorbed a further espousal of Carlyle's views on the Hero from William James. In 1890, he wrote
both an essay on Carlyle and a commencement speech for Harvard on Jefferson Davis as a
Representative of Civilization.118 The reference here was to Emerson's reworking of Carlyle in his
own lectures published as a book under the title Representative Men, in 1850. If Emerson was
opposed to slavery, he did not question the primacy of the Saxon race.119 Working in this context,
Du Bois noted that Davis's militarism and love of adventure made him a typical Teutonic Hero.
Unlike Wilde, Du Bois deployed Davis the Hero as a figure of failure, rather than of triumph, for as a
type of civilization, Davis's vision of the Strong Man had ultimately led to absurdity, the
peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free.
This was the step that Wilde had failed to make eight years previously, and it led Du Bois to
reconsider the entire system of the Hero. In casting himself as a Hero, Davisand by extension
proslavery culture as a wholehad come to adopt the overweening sense of the I and the consequent
forgetting of the Thou. In historical terms, the result had been the crushing of the Negro by the
Teuton. Du Bois argued, however, that the role of the Negro was not simply to provide grist for the
world-historical mill, but to challenge the Strong Man thesis with that of the Submissive Man,
exemplified by the Negro. The result would be the submission of the strength of the Strong to the
advance of all, a more perfect individualism that would assert the contribution of even the very
least of nations to civilization. This interaction would prevent the disastrous extremes of despotism
and slavery. Rather than being a simple refutation of Carlyle, Du Bois was attempting to meld his
discussion of the I and the Thou from Sartor Resartus with the Great Men thesis of On Heroes.
As Shamoon Zamir has pointed out, Du Bois's speech on Carlyle from the same year championed not
only the admirer of Bismarck and the author of Hero Worship, but also the critic of industrialization
and the advocate of ethical culture.120 Du Bois would later set aside this ultimately contradictory
project in favor of a more radical contestation of heroism.
Du Bois drew from Carlyle a sense of the necessary entanglement of past and present, but he
arrived at a very different conception of the intertwining of what he later called, in Souls of Black
Folk, the Old and the New, which made him glad, very glad, and yet.121 It is in that pause
marked by the dash that one can see Du Bois thinking through his own intellectual formation in
grammatological form, not quite ready to reject heroism, but not content to endorse its autocratic
form. His highly influential solution to the need for African American representative men was to hail
the leadership of those he called The Talented Tenth. Following Emerson's definition of the
Representative, Du Bois held that an aristocracy of talent and character was to perform a
necessary action on behalf of their fellows: The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by

its exceptional men.122 This formula was strongly derivative of Carlyle's and Emerson's Hero theory,
even if the former at least might have rejected this application.123 By rethinking the Hero within the
frame of race, Du Bois restated the tension between the individual and the collective that he had
highlighted in the Jefferson Davis speech, but now as an exchange within his own community. For
Carlyle, the very concept of the Hero was always opposed to Blackness in its racialized and
metaphorical senses, insofar as they can be distinguished. Wilde, Truth, and Du Bois tried in their
different ways to revisualize the domain of the hero, as an inclusive space. In each case, the
embodiment of the countervisual hero was the key figure that ultimately could not be sustained in the
face of persistent racialized classification and separation that famously led Du Bois to conclude that
one ever sees his twonessan American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings.124 Visuality dominated or converted souls, but countervisuality found itself with a doubled
vision, two souls. The alternative was to take the visuality imagined by antislavery and abolition and
attempt to instantiate a unified realism derived from it.

FOUR
Abolition Realism
Reality, Realisms, and Revolution

Modernity did not simply end the plantation complex, as is still evident in present-day America, with
its seemingly permanent state of racialized controversy, from Rodney King to Barack Obama. The
intensification of the plantation complex in its policed form interpenetrated the formation of selfproclaimed modernity in both colony and metropole. The policed plantation that emerged after
abolition had formally ended slavery was interactive with the reconstruction of Paris under state-ofemergency regulations. In response, the dynamics of abolition, colonization, and revolution formed a
new realism that, in affiliation with W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of abolition democracy, I will call
abolition realism. Abolition realism brought together the general strike and the Jubilee in order to
forge a refusal of slavery, such that abolition was observable and capable of being represented and
sustained. Consequently, it was important that it be legible as real to others, as well as to those
involved in making it. This abolition realism engaged with and shaped the realist means of visual
representation that were central to the painting and photography of the period. In this chapter I map
the confrontation of realisms created by this interpenetration of metropole and plantation from the
revolutionary year of 1848 as seen from the plantation, via the abolition of slavery in the United
States to a point of entanglement between them in 1867, whose terms were played out in the Paris
Commune of 1871. In short, I place the reality and realism of modern Paris, legendary capital of the
nineteenth century, in counterpoint with the reality and realism of the abolition of literal and
metaphorical slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas.
At the head of his prospectus (1935) for The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin placed a quotation
from Paris, capitale de la France (1897), the Vietnamese poet Trong Hiep Nguyen's now-obscure
volume, as if to suggest that it was the source of his own, now legendary title Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century.1 Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century not because it dominated
economically or politically, but because of its colonization of the imagination, which led the
Vietnamese poet to visualize it as a place where one goes for a walk. In The Arcades Project itself,
Benjamin returned to this theme, musing on the way that the Place du Maroc, in Bellevillesite of
some of the fiercest fighting during the Paris Communebecame a monument to colonial
imperialism, concluding: What is decisive here is not the association but the interpenetration of
images.2 If the modern imaginary was formed in the crucible of the Atlantic revolutions, now
modernity's image was formed in a contested process by which plantation, colony, and commercial
city confronted, constructed, denied, and displaced each other within the state of emergency. In his
essay of 1935, Benjamin later quoted an essay, which he (somewhat inaccurately) identified as having
appeared in 1831, from the Journal des Dbats to suggest the precariousness of capitalist
domination: Every manufacturer lives in his factory like a plantation owner among his slaves. The
quote in fact comes from the journalist Saint-Marc Girardin's summary (1832) of the consequences of

the silk riots in Lyons: Let us not dissimulate; reticence and evasion will get us nowhere. The
uprising at Lyons has brought to light a grave secret, the civil strife that is taking place in society
between the possessing class and the class that does not possess. [Y]ou will be frightened by the
disproportion: every factory owner lives in his factory like a colonial planter in the middle of his
slaves, one against a hundred; and the uprising at Lyons is to be compared with the insurrection at
Saint-Domingue.3 In this view, the real visualization of the class struggle in France understood it
not as the revival of 1789, or even of 1793, but of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, at once the first
anticolonial and proletarian uprising. Just as in the eighteenth century, this revolution was framed as
something that had been hidden now coming to light. As Carlyle's biographer and successor James
Anthony Froude often observed in relation to Haiti, what so concerned capital was not just the
independence of the island but the 1804 constitution, which prohibited white ownership of land.4 The
fear that the European planter would face not just revolt but a revolution in property relations was
something not to be dissimulatedit was the real conditions of existence.
To map the formation of this interpenetrated visualization of modernity, I consider the Danish
Caribbean colonies, where the entanglement of metropole and plantation was instantiated between the
two islands of St Thomas and St Croix during the revolutionary year of 1848, leading to the policed
plantation. That interpenetration was central to the reimagining of Paris as an imperial metropole in
the aftermath of 1848, when Louis Napoleon, nephew to the first Napoleon, became Napoleon III by
coup d'tat, in 1852. The metaphorical connection between the Danish Caribbean islands and the
French capital was embodied by Camille Pissarro, who witnessed the 1848 revolution of the
enslaved in St Thomas, where he grew up, and then moved to Paris, in 1856, to become one of the
now legendary Impressionist group, known for their visualization of Haussmann's modern Paris.
Abolition was intensified by the emancipation of the enslaved in the United States, especially as
Reconstruction mobilized a social imaginary centered on democracy, education, and sustainability
the right to look. Under this intensification, the tensions in Parisian modernity came to a head in the
last days of the empire and the brief interlude of the Commune.

1848: THE POLICED PLANTATION / THE SEGREGATED METROPOLIS

All we girls must keep heads together,
King Christian have sent to free us all,
Governor Sholten [sic] had a vote for us,
King Christian have sent to grant us all;
We have signed for liberty,
Oh yes! Oh yes! Hurra! Hurra!
All we girls must keep heads together.
Old Year's Night song recorded in St Croix, Danish Virgin Islands, 1845, two years before King Christian declared apprenticeship
would replace slavery.5

In 1848, St Thomas was a bustling commercial entrept, where all Royal Mail steamers from the
United Kingdom to the Caribbean made landfall. Its capital, Charlotte Amalia, was the second largest
city in Danish hands, after Copenhagen, with a population of 32,000, making it what one might call a
colonial metropole.6 There were nonetheless 3,500 enslaved people working plantations in 1846, and
the island experienced significant maronnage to independent Haiti right up to abolition, in 1848.7
Close by, to the south, was St Croix, a sugar plantation island, where, despite the gradual Danish
abolition of the slave trade in 1792, some 21,000 people were enslaved in 1848.8 In fact, Danish

slavery had increased since the revolution in Haiti, as plantation owners took advantage of the market
opportunity in sugar.9 The two islands thus formed a modernized plantation complex. Despite active
censorship, both islands had predominantly Anglophone newspapers, as English was the commercial
lingua franca, catering to the self-described urban intelligent middle-class, aspiring to what they
called, in 1848, at the height of the ferment, constitutional institutions and social progress, or, as we
might now put it, an imagined community.10 Members of this group included the Jewish dry-goods
merchant Frederick Pissarro, Camille's father, who advertised as the agent for the estate of Dalmevda
and Company.11 Despite the geographic location, news from Europe predominated in the papers, from
the famine in Ireland to the Chartist movement in England. All local aspirations to cultural
development were avidly reported, from violin recitals to theatrical performances by visiting groups
and art exhibitions. This last included a variety of realisms ranging from daguerreotypes displayed
and taken by the New York photographer Henry Custin to a Cosmorama, a form of magnified
panorama, showing views of Paris, Havana, and Vienna. For some months in 1847, the British
geologist and artist James Gay Sawkins was resident in Charlotte Amalia, offering his landscapes for
sale and art lessons. Sawkins showed landscapes of Mexico that impressed locals: The delicacy and
finish of his likenesses are in a style rarely seen in the West Indies.12 Sawkins's careful
anthropological style, evidenced in his surviving work from Cuba and Australia, concentrated on
observation rather than moral commentary (see plate 6).
A formal analysis suggests that his work influenced the young Pissarro, who had just returned to the
island from his school in France. Soon afterward, Pissarro began his own drawings of the local
African population in apparent imitation of Sawkins. These observations were sketches for a
postslavery imagination, detailing the actions of those who might become either laborers or
revolutionaries, such as the washerwomen, coalers, and journeying traders of the town, as well as
documenting the lush landscape that could provide alternative free means of subsistence. For
everyone knew that slavery was coming to an end. There was a perceived need among the Europeans
to acculturate those about to become the formerly enslaved to the disciplines of waged labor. On St
Thomas, the Rev. J. P. Knox and others therefore formed a savings bank with the aim of promoting
among the industrial classes of the community a desire to economize and accumulate the surplus
profits of their labor. By the summer of 1847 this bank had holdings of $114 (rijksdallers), dwarved
by the $1.2 million in the commercial Bank of St Thomas under the care of its president S.
Rothschild.13 The virtues of thrift and accumulation offered to the working classes and the soon-tobe-free were satirized by one correspondent to the newspaper, who pointed out that a saver would
have to wait decades until the 3 percent interest awarded on these microsavings would amount to
anything of use. Stern injunctions about the morality of work and the importance of virtuous habits
followed apace. In September 1847, Governor Van Scholten returned from Denmark with news that
slavery was being abolished in favor of a twelve-year apprenticeship, the necessity of which had
been amply demonstrated by the consequences of the precipitate measures which were a few years
since adopted in the British West Indies Islands.14 Carlyle's strictures about the failure to create a
laboring class from the formerly enslaved had been fully understood, even as the fears instilled by
Haiti remained active.
These gradual plans were challenged by the French revolution of February 1848, which brought
abolition to Guadeloupe and Martinique in March. While the Danish monarchy faced open revolt in
Schleswig-Holstein and war with Germany, St Thomas remained open to all ships for business,
placing commerce over patriotism. The enslaved on St Croix lost their patience. Under the leadership

of Gottlieb Bourdeaux, also known as Buddho, a general strike against slavery began on 3 July
1848.15 It can be called a general strike because the enslaved were at first determined to use no
violence other than the refusal to continue being enslaved. The only eye-witness account published at
the time, while very much opposed to the strikers, emphasized that, at the outset, as they advanced on
Frederiksted, one of the two towns on St Croix, their leaders [were] strenuously recommending and
ordering that there should be no bloodshed.16 Consequently, their song ran,
All we want we freedom
We no wan no bloodshed
Clear d'road
Le de slave dem pass.17

Later that day, Governor Scholten decreed the absolute abolition of slavery without apprenticeship.
Early the next morning, a detachment of troops under one Colonel de Nully encountered a band of the
now emancipated peasantryand their leader armed with a musket (who was shot). This
parenthetical killing changed the strike into a revolution. Hours later, thousands of rebels approached
Frederiksted, armed and with trash from the cane fields to set fire to the town, in open and warlike
array, sounding the Toksin [sic], by the blowing of shells and other never to be forgotten sounds.18
The Danish contingent were rescued by a detachment of six hundred Spanish troops, dispatched from
Puerto Rico by order of Governor de Reus, onboard the Eagle, a British Royal Mail steamer.19
European national rivalries were set aside at a time of war in the interest of maintaining international
colonial order with the means of communication becoming militarized. The Spanish troops remained
in St Croix until 26 November 1848, with the country under martial law. At least seventeen leaders of
the revolution were hanged in public, and other unofficial reprisals were carried out. The Danish
myth of the velvet abolition of slavery turns out to have been a screen for a violently suppressed
revolution.20 This transnational cooperation was enacted, as the new Danish governor Peter Hansen
put it in his official statement of thanks, to ward off the horrors of a successful Negroe [sic]
insurrection.21 The goal was not to preserve slavery as it had been but to maintain a modern form of
plantation colony using highly constrained wage-labor under a state of exception and thereby to avoid
a revolution in the manner of Saint-Domingue, which might echo in Europe.
In short order, Hansen established a structure to sustain this colonial government. He abolished the
burgher's council, a form of colonial representative assembly, and took on direct powers, a colonial
state of exception. Governing by decree, of which sixteen were issued in the first six months of 1849,
Hansen made field labor compulsory, except for those explicitly qualified for skilled work, just as
Toussaint had done, in 1801. All the conditions of slavery relating to place of work, length of the
workday, mandatory extra work at harvest, and even provisions grounds were to remain in force.
Laborers were to be paid fifteen cents a day, but a deduction of five cents could be made if meals and
herrings were provideda little Danish touch there. Most notable was the displacement of authority
from the overseer to the police. The eighty-four-square-mile island was now divided into four police
districts and the police were placed in charge of everything from licensing boats to certifying
marriages of the fieldworkers and dismissing the driver of the field gangs.22 All workers on the
plantations and in the towns were to be enrolled at the police office, and field workers required
passes to enter the towns. The state of exception was no longer localized to the plantation, as it had
been under slavery, but was nationalized and enacted under the supervision of the police, rather than
by overseers, who served at police pleasure. The functions of plantation oversight that foreshadowed

panoptic discipline were thus directly transferred to the police, but with no pretense that moral
reform was intended. Rather than relying on one individual, policing was depersonalized and
bureaucratic, forestalling insurrection in the manner of Haussmann's later disciplining of Paris.
Although the editors of the local press pointed out that in Denmark a constitutional monarchy with
freedom of the press had been established, censorship remained in force in the colonies. The result
was that over ten million pounds of sugar were exported from St Croix from January to May 1849,
almost all going to Denmark.23 Just as the revolutions of 1848 in Europe began in optimism only to
end in setback for the working classes, so did the colonial revolt transpire with all conditions for the
workers, other than their existential freedom, unchanged. On the commercial island of St Thomas, a
similar system was announced, but most of the fieldworkers had already abandoned the plantations
and headed into Charlotte Amalia, where they now worked day-to-day on the docks, the steamers, or
as best they could. Capitalized, trading St Thomas, with its new urban lumpenproletariat, confronted
and interfaced with the highly policed cultivation of St Croix. This counterpoint enacted the model to
be described by Marx, in 1852, as having defeated the revolutions of 1848an imperial order,
backed by the military, the clergy, and the violence of marginal urban groups, stood in tension with the
peasantry.24 Whereas Marx saw the French peasantry as divided between revolutionaries and those
who imagined themselves to benefit from the Second Empire, the colonial peasantry was under less
illusion but greater duress. The policed plantation allowed for the maintenance of cash-crop
colonialism until the riots of 1878, which, combined with the availability of sugar beet and Indian
sugarcane, finally ended the regime of bonded labor. The islands were sold to the United States, in
1917, and became the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The lives of the newly emancipated African working class on the metropolitan St Thomas side
became the central subject for Pissarro's drawing and sketching until he left the island, in 1852.
Recent scholarship has reattributed to Pissarro a large number of works formerly believed to be by
the Danish artist Fritz Melbye, with whom Pissarro was to travel to Venezuela in 185253. If one
accepts these sometimes controversial attributions, Pissarro also made drawings in Christiansted on
St Croix, and in Santo Domingo, the other nation on the island of Hispaniola, which it shared with
Haiti.25 Pissarro would have been well-informed about Haiti as his mother (and aunt: his father
married his brother's widow), Rachel Monsanto Pomi, was from Saint-Domingue, which the family
had abandoned in haste, in 1796.26 Rachel brought with her two formerly enslaved servants, who
continued in her employ even when she later moved to France. So Pissarro cannot have been lacking
in information or opinion about abolition and the revolutions of the enslaved. Furthermore, he had
grown up in a district of Charlotte Amalia that was as much African as Jewish. Edward Wilmot
Blyden, later a Liberian statesman and theorist of African diaspora, was born in this neighborhood, in
1832, and later recalled for years, the next-door neighbours of my parents were Jews. I played with
the Jewish boys and looked forward as eagerly as they did to the annual festivals and feasts of their
church.27 Blyden's continuing sense of African-Jewish affinity even led him to suggest that the
diaspora Jews of Europe should resettle in Africa to contribute their experiences of exile and cultural
accomplishment to the development of the continent.
Pissarro's Caribbean drawings and later paintings depicting life after abolition were by contrast
studiously without comment, whether sympathetic or hostile, leading to divergent critical responses.
Whereas one American critic has recently disparaged these works as fundamentally colonialist, a
Venezuelan curator has suggested that Pissarro's reproductions of the Antilles society's poorest class
did not intend to draw an exotic image from cultural difference.28 Elements of both views were

made available by the artist, as the poet Derek Walcott has seen.
The St. Thomas drawings have it, the taint
of complicit time, the torpor of ex-slaves
and benign planters, suffering made quaint
as a Danish harbour with its wooden waves.29

Take Pissarro's painting Two Women Chatting by the Sea (1856), made shortly after his arrival in
Paris that same year (see fig. 31). At first it seems a quiet rural scene. Two African women dominate
the foreground, pausing in conversation on their journey. In the background, other women can be seen
at the water's edge. To a St Thomas resident, it would have been clear that they were just outside
Charlotte Amalia, so that the painting's spectator would be looking, as it were, from the city. Here the
metropole looks at the newly emancipated (lumpen)proletariat, creating a range of possible meanings
in the aftermath of the slave revolution of 1848. There were over two thousand African women in
Charlotte Amalia, considerably outnumbering the men. While many were domestic servants, women
also served to unload and coal the steamers that plied the port. The women in the foreground of
Pissarro's painting were journeying traders, who had the greatest freedom of movement in the African
population before and after slavery.30 It was widely believed that they had in fact distributed
instructions for the insurrections of July 1848. Governor Von Scholten reported: Womendo the
same work that men do and their physical build and size render them formidable adversaries in a
fight. Throughout the disturbances, they were more aggressive, vengeful and altogether more violent
than the men.31 Pissarro's painting could be interpreted as showing the leaders of a successful slave
revolt to a Parisian public that had just experienced its own 1848 revolution one of whose
achievements had been the abolition of slavery. In that sense, these women were heroes of
countervisuality. By the same token, Pissarro could also be taken to have represented the
unimpassioned surveillance of the postrevolutionary policed plantation. It can be affirmatively said
that the painting does not participate in the racialized or sexualized caricature that was so common in
the period. Rather, in using Sawkins's anthropological distancing, Pissarro left it to the spectator to
choose what he or she believes is represented. While few French people knew about the events in St
Thomas, debates over the status and humanity of Africans relative to Europeans were well-known.
Are these women simply enjoying a break from work? Or are they idling away the day and refusing to
work, as the opponents of abolition maintained was endemic to all Africans? Or are they even
engaged in plotting the overthrow of colonial slavery? The small painting represents the ambivalence
in the metropolitan consideration of abolition and defers its own response by asking its audience to
make a decision as to what they see.

It is important that the painting was made in Paris, not in the Caribbean. The presumed audience
were, then, French subjects of the Second Empire (185270), rather than Danish colonials or
emancipated slaves. The painting had resonance not just as Orientalism but as an expression of the
new imperial condition. Baron Haussmann had instigated a transformation of Paris that drove long
straight avenues through the formerly narrow streets of the city center, displacing working-class
neighborhoods in order to aid troop movements, create lines of fire, and prevent traditional
barricades. These new clear lines of sight in Paris recalled the careful clearing of space around the
plantation house and the colonial militarization of everyday life. Benjamin reiterated Haussmann's
own view that the Baron succeeded by placing Paris under an emergency regime.32 Haussmann
suspended municipal government in Paris to prevent any objection to his radical project of
rebuilding, and by relocating the laboring population away from the city center to the suburbs, he
created what was known at the time as segregation, albeit on the lines of class rather than ethnicity.
Slavery's politics of policing and separation had now interpenetrated the metropole. Louis Napoleon,
the future Napoleon III, who some believed to have been inspired by Carlyle's vision of the Hero, had
occupied himself while in prison, during 1842, with writing an Analysis of the Sugar Question.33 His
vision of sugar as key to the Napoleonic idea led him to energetically support both the cultivation
of sugar beet and the maintenance of slavery. We may as well suppress the cultivation of the cane,
as proclaim emancipation.34 Deprived of slavery by the emancipation proclamation made in 1848,
Louis Napoleon nonetheless availed himself of its absolute sovereignty by means of the state of
exception. The first Napoleon had decreed that a city could be designated as under a state of siege
whenever circumstances require, a power that Napoleon III abrogated to himself in January 1852.35
Indeed, the state of exception is centrally concerned with space and its management, a practice with
which Haussmannization has become synonymous. In this context, the inside of the metropole

became interpenetrated with the outside of the colony, so that the maintenance of order became
equated with the necessity of sugar production, a commodity ventriloquized by Louis Napoleon as
saying, I organize and moralize labour.36 The order of the plantation was interfaced with the
reforming goals of the disciplinary institution in the framework of imperial capital. This blurring
produced the sensation of phantasmagoria identified by Marx, Carlyle, Benjamin, and Du Bois alike
as epitomizing the modern. Modernity was, then, the product of the real interpenetration of colony and
capital that realist means of depiction struggled to represent.

ABOLITION AND THE RIGHT TO LOOK

The modernist attempt to depict the real created by modern capital suffered from a permanent
disadvantage. Whereas the state of emergency permitted authority to act with a clear degree of
impunity and imprecision under the Roman law rubric necessity has no law, modernist realism
struggled to both represent that imprecision and to suggest some form of alternative, as Pissarro's
Caribbean painting and drawing illustrates. At precisely this moment, Marx summarized the dilemma
of revolutionary change as the creation of something which does not yet exist.37 In the terms under
discussion here, that creation took two forms. It was necessary, first, to name what was being created,
and then to give it visualizable and recognizable form. In short, this was a task of imagination. The
enslaved in the United States engaged in this representative labor immediately at the outbreak of the
Civil War. As soon as hostilities commenced, the Sea Islands of South Carolina were captured in a
swift attack by Union forces, in 1861, causing the plantation owners to flee in disarray. With the
Emancipation Proclamation still two years off, the status of the enslaved Africans left behind was
unresolved, in a kind of juridical no-man's-land or interregnum. It was clear enough to many African
Americans that this kind of freedom was better than none, and enslaved Africans from Savannah and
elsewhere made their way behind the Union lines. The nurse Susie King Taylor later described how
she joined the exodus with her uncle, his family of seven, and over twenty others. In June 1862 a
rumor circulated that the war might be settled and the Africans on the Union side would be sent to
Liberia. King told a chaplain that she would choose this expatriation over any return to Savannah.38
For Du Bois, writing in 1935, such expressions showed that this mass migration was not a casual
activity but a general strike of the enslaved, a decisive move to end forced labor: This was not
merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was
a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps half a million people.39 Even today one can
read historical accounts claiming that the abolition of slavery had been inevitable since 1776, as the
logical endpoint of the Declaration of Independence. King, Du Bois, and many others insisted to the
contrary that slavery was ended by the enslaved themselves.
Timothy O'Sullivan, who later became famous for his photographs of the American West, captured
the general strike against slavery as official photographer for the Army of the Potomac.40 At the Old
Fort Plantation, Beaufort, O'Sullivan took a group photograph of well over a hundred African
Americans (see fig. 9, p. 44).41 The group represented a mix of those on the move during the war and
those to whom the war had suddenly arrived where they were already located. There were African
Americans illegally volunteering for the Union army, known as contrabands, wearing soldier's caps
(most clearly visible at the extreme left of the image, third row back). The term was a legal fiction,
allowing the soldiers to serve as, in effect, spoils of war, reinforcing the paradox that these soldiers
fighting for freedom were not free and had stolen themselves. In O'Sullivan's photograph, many

people are carrying small bundles of personal property, all that they could bring with them from
slavery to this interstitial space. The camera was placed high up, seemingly on the roof of a former
slave cabin in order to get everyone into the shot in a bright sharp light that produced some strong
contrasts leaving some faces in white-out, others too dark to see. Others moved before the exposure
was complete, creating a ghost at the left edge and many blurred expressions. The long exposure
time prevented any overt displays of celebration, but the very event of the photograph itself suggests
that all the participants were aware of the historical significance of the moment. There was no leader
present, no suggestion of a hierarchy. Men, women, and children are gathered together in a collective
assertion of their right to look and therefore be seen. Under slavery, the enslaved were forbidden to
eyeball the white population as a whole, an injunction that was sustained throughout the period of
segregation and is active in today's prison system. So the simple act of raising the look to a camera
and engaging with it constituted a rights claim to a subjectivity that could engage with sense
experience. The photograph can therefore be seen as depicting democracy, the democracy so feared
by Plato and Carlyle, the absence of mastery. Under Roman law, an interregnum was a state of
exception that called for the appointment of an interrex, the king of the in-between. In O'Sullivan's
photograph we can see the interplebs, the in-between people. On the Sea Islands, the space between
regimes became a space without regime, democracy.
This interstitial space was further visualized by the New Hampshire photographer Henry P. Moore,
who accompanied the Third New Hampshire Volunteers to the Sea Islands during this interregnum
period. In his photograph Rebel General T. F. Drayton's House, Hilton Head, S.C. (186263), the
gates to the plantation house, which would formerly have been inaccessible to field hands, now stand
wide open, held apart by a Union soldier in uniform, on the right and an African American woman, on
the left, who wears the African kerchief and strong clothes typical of field hands.42 An unlikely
coalition of a New England soldier and a formerly enslaved woman opens the door to a new future,
even as they seem to keep the maximum distance between them. This doubtless posed scene has
attracted the interest of two other African women on the steps of the house itself, whether former
house slaves or curious outsiders. The house seems unforgiving, with its front door shut and much
of the faade obscured, as intended, by the hedges and trees at the edge of the garden. In another
striking photograph, J. F. Seabrook's Flower Garden, Edisto Island, S.C. (April 1862), Moore
appropriated the planter's hidden viewpoint from within the big house (see fig. 32). Taken from an
upstairs window in the mansion of the departed Seabrook, Moore's picture shows a world turned
inside out, but not, as the Confederates had predicted, reduced to chaos or disorder. The calm,
orderly transition made visible here put the plantation economy into the background, where the slave
quarters and open fields of the plantation are clearly visible. Indeed, the photograph shows quite well
how plantations were designed to be fully visible from the planter's viewpoint. In the foreground,
representing the present, the elaborate artifices of the planter's garden can be seen, with its paths now
peopled by a mixture of soldiers (including the commanding officer Colonel Enoch Q. Fellows, in the
right foreground, with folded arms), former slaves, and contrabands. On a pedestal that might have
been intended for a neoclassical statue, a young African American boy stands and salutes next to an
officer also posing elaborately. This satirical gesture of obedience to the planter's house would have
been impossible only weeks before, and its irony is mixed with a respect for the forces of liberation
represented by the camera. There is an unintended resonance with Marx's description of slavery as
the pedestal of wage labor and an anticipation of Barthes's famous analysis of another saluting
teenage African soldier during the liberation struggle in Algeria (see chap. 6). In these photographs,
men, women, and children; former slaves, contrabands, and Union soldiers all show an awareness of

the rhetorics of the photographic pose and their possibilities.

Moore also created staged photographs of enslaved life, lifeless tableaux such as Sweet Potato
Planting and the minstrel-titled G'wine to de Field (both AprilMay 1862). This latter would
become his best-known photograph despiteor because ofits hollow feel and the careful absence
of any soldiers, whether white or contraband (see fig. 33). It shows a line of some ten African
Americans, presumed to be former slaves because of their uniformly dark skin tone, centered around
a two-wheel cart hitched to a pony and being driven by a child. It was seen as sensational because it
represented a historic transition. When published in the Philadelphia Photographer, in 1865, the
caption declared: Such a one as we present in the issue can never more be taken. When they were
taken, they were slaves; now they are free men and women.43 In this view, abolition realism was a
single, never-to-be-repeated moment, rather than a division of the sensible. Against that snapshot
version of abolition, General Sherman's Special Field Order no. 15, dated 16 January 1865, imagined
what became known as Reconstruction. Under the command of General Saxton, inspector of
settlements and plantations, the islands were to be the exclusive site of resettlement for displaced free
people. When three or more families expressed the desire to settle, the inspector would allocate to
each group the famous forty acres of tillable land. Here oversight and the policed plantation were to
be reversed so that the police were now in charge of reallocating the land in small holdings to the
formerly enslaved, just as they had long desired. Sherman was responding to the revolutionary change
enacted since the fall of Port Royal, in 1861, and by institutionalizing and bureaucratizing a procedure
for Reconstruction, he opened the possibility of a distinctly different postbellum South.
The freed responded to the invitation with alacrity, creating new political, financial, and
educational networks that enacted the popular heroism of Atlantic revolutions. Just as in SaintDomingue and France, the franchise was expanded beyond people of means; new state-organized
education was created; and those formerly considered commodities were recruited into the capitalist
means of circulation. I am referencing here the research findings made by Du Bois, as both valid
information in themselves and evidence for the strategic use he made of them. He highlighted the
reforms enacted, in 1868, by the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, whose scandal was that
twenty-three of the whites and fifty-nine of the colored [delegates] paid no taxes whatever.44 It was,
argued Du Bois, singularly to the credit of these voters that poverty was so well represented (391).
At the state labor convention in 1869, workers demanded half the crop or a wage of seventy cents to a
dollar a day, depending on the nature of the task. At the heart of the freedmen's project was education.
Du Bois insisted public education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea (637).
A school had been opened in Port Royal as soon as it fell, and others followed in Beaufort and Hilton
Head as early as January 1862 (642). In South Carolina, the new State Constitution of 1868 provided
for universal education from the age of six to sixteen, as well as opening schools for the disabled. By
1876, when Reconstruction came to an end, some 123,000 students were enrolled (64950). In the
economic field, the Freedmen's Bank in Charleston, South Carolina, held over $350,000 in deposits
from 5,500 depositors by 1873, indicating that the laboring classes were the key to the bank (416).
Taken together with the homesteads, wage-labor rates, and the right to vote, South Carolina enacted a
radical alternative to slavery, replacing chattel labor with a rights-centered democracy. These forms
of abolition democracy so contradicted majoritarian concepts of representation and realism in the
United States that even today they sound unrealistic, unachievable, even hard to imagine. In part,
that difficulty is the legacy of D. W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation (1918), which depicted the South
Carolina legislature so scurrilously but so unforgettably that its images have overdetermined the
historical account.
Despite Sherman's field order, it was sharecropping that became the standard form of labor in

the postbellum South and kept the majority of African Americans in poverty. Sharecropping was a
system in which a group worked a given plot of land in exchange for a percentage of the crop, usually
to the marked advantage of the planters. The crop share was not made until the end of the year, so a
credit system emerged, making it difficult for the share croppers to ever lay their hands on money, let
alone accumulate capital.45 Du Bois represented this reversion as a second civil war, a determined
effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a
new class of capitalists on this foundation (670). During Reconstruction, farm workers organized to
try and improve their conditions, in which their crop shares ranged from a tenth to a third, while
wages were at no more than fifty cents a day, resulting in farm strikes in 1876 (417). However, the
Bureau of Freedmen insisted on the freed signing year-long labor contracts that locked them into
disadvantageous situations, and after the end of Reconstruction, no other redress was available.
Cotton was best suited to sharecropping, and by 1870 it was dominant across the South. So by the
time Winslow Homer depicted The Cotton Pickers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1876), there
was no reasonable doubt that their labor was unfairly rewarded. Homer's painting suggests as much in
the disengaged and abstracted quality that the African American women of the title bring to their
work, contrasted by the art historian Katherine Manthorne with Homer's The Veteran in a New Field
(Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1865), in which a former Massachusetts Union (white) soldier
sets about reaping wheat, a crop that implies his ownership of the land. By contrast, the cotton pickers
are overwhelmed by the field in which they find themselves, highlighting what Manthorne calls the
paradox of the plantation: images of harvest usually connote settlement, a stake in the earth, while the
plantation bespeaks the opposite.46 For the new plantation refused the freed the ownership of land
that they had wanted in order to create a new global class of cash-crop producers on whom industry
would depend. While the cotton pickers in Homer's painting are free, they certainly do not have
autonomy or manifest a right to look.

1867: ABOLITION ENTANGLEMENT

In 1867, Reconstruction was just beginning in the United States. It was also the year of Baudelaire's
death, marking the end of an era in Paris. The upheavals in the Americas came back to the capital of
the nineteenth century, in a series of interpenetrated cultural and political shocks. In this year,
Edouard Manet began his series of paintings depicting the results of French imperial adventurism in
Mexico; Pissarro developed a revolutionary new style of painting in dialogue with the Puerto
Rican antislavery painter Francisco Oller; and Marx finally published the first volume of Capital.
These events were more than coincidence. Rather, the plantation was a significant entanglement
within European modernity, to use Achille Mbembe's useful term.47 If one looks around the virtual
portrait gallery of the period's avant-garde created by Flix Nadar's photographs, in whose studio the
first Impressionist exhibition was held, in 1874, many had a direct relationship to the interpenetration
of the city and the plantation. First, there was Charles Baudelaire, seen by Walter Benjamin as the
poet of modernity because it embedded itself in his body, like a photographic negative.48 That
embodiment was itself in counterpoint to that of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's partner, usually
described as his mistress, an odd title for the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, whom
Baudelaire represented as a sex worker. Then there was Victor Schoelcher (180493), the leading
abolitionist campaigner in France, and Alphonse Lamartine, who decreed abolition. Alexandre
Dumas, pre, was, whether one thinks it relevant or not, very visibly the son of his African-descended

mother from Saint-Domingue (see fig. 34). When one sees the poet Charles Cros (184288), known
as a precursor to the surrealists, it is not hard to see why many people thought he was of African
descent. Others, at one degree of separation, would include Delacroix, painter of the French
occupation of Algeria, in 1832, and the anarchist Proudhon. There was Manet, whose antislavery
radicalism was part of his work.
By 1867 Pissarro was part of a group of younger artists struggling for acceptance, who were to
become known as the Impressionists, while he continued to socialize and work with Caribbean
acquaintances, like his cousin, the novelist Jules Cardoze, and the Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller
y Cestero.49 The two artists had very distinct conceptions of themselves. Pissarro was, and remained
throughout his life, a Danish citizen, a fact that he later used to free his son Lucien from the obligation
of French military service. Although he worked with the Danish artist David Jacobsen, Pissarro never
went to Denmark or otherwise expressed interest in his nationality of convenience, imagining himself
French in all but name. Oller by contrast was strongly invested in an independent postslavery
Puerto Rico. He clearly felt a strong identification with his predecessor Jos Campeche, as he copied
Campeche's self-portraitwhich unusually depicted the artist as a dark-skinned man, although one
cannot be sure that Campeche's original did soand later even lived in his house. This cross-ethnic
identification with the past was both nationalist and decolonial. Although he spent extended periods
of time in France and Spain, Oller predominantly lived and taught in Puerto Rico, to the mystification
of his European artist friends. The counterpoint between the two artists, who met only once after
1867, turned on the questions of slavery, abolition, and the politics of (national) representation.

Oller seems to have known Pissarro from 1859 onward, when they were taking classes in Paris,
with the juste-milieu artist Thomas Couture and the landscapist Corot respectively. A handful of
letters survive, giving us a fragmentary view of the friendly and intimate exchanges between the
emerging artists. In December 1865, writing in reply to Oller's letter from Puerto Rico, Pissarro
expresses relief at knowing Oller's whereabouts and jokes that he and Guillemet had assumed Oller
had disappeared into some corner of Paris in the company of some beauty.50 Although Pissarro
understood Oller's need to earn some money, he warned him away from official commissions,
especially from the church, following Oller's gift of his painting of the crucifixion Les Tnbres
(exhibited at the Salon of 1864) to the Jesuits.51 Strikingly, Pissarro encouraged Oller to begin a
study of a mulatresse, an apparently unlikely suggestion. However, both artists had become friends
with Paul Czanne at the Acadmie Suisse in 1861. According to Czanne's dealer Ambroise Vollard,
it was in 1865 that he painted his study of The Negro Scipio, a model at the Acadmie Suisse (see fig.
35).52 This substantial portrait, once owned by Monet, has been largely ignored by art history but
resonates with the abolition debates of the time. It shows Scipio seated, wearing only worker's blue
trousers, leaning forward onto a white mass. The painting exaggerates the length of his back and
creates a strong resemblance to the notorious photograph known as The Scourged Back (1863). The
photograph showed a man known as Gordon, who had escaped from slavery to enlist in the Union
Army, only to be recaptured and whipped on Christmas Day, 1862. As a result, his back was covered
in scars, which form the subject of the photograph, reprinted in Harper's Weekly for 4 July 1863. The
dates are significant: Christ was scourged before his crucifixion, lending the photograph its title,
while the publication of the photograph on Independence Day was surely intended to remind readers
of the justice of the Union cause. The textured surface of Czanne's painting of Scipio, with a red
suggestive of blood clearly visible in places seems intended to evoke Gordon's scars. Certainly his
unlikely classical namecontrasted with the Jeanne who was a model for Manet's Olympia, also
in 1865suggests that he was born into American slavery, where such naming practices were
common. In this context, the white mass might be read as a bale of cotton, emphasizing the American
dimension of the image. Whatever Czanne's politics in his later days, The Negro Scipio deserves to
be discussed in the context of Atlantic world abolition.

Certainly, Oller produced a painting more in keeping with abolition realism than with the
Caribbean ambivalences suggested by Pissarro. Oller's Negresse libre et mendiante (now lost) was
exhibited at the Salon of 1867, and to judge by the title, it did not depict a mulatta, but a free
African woman, forced to beg to support herself. Such scenes were taken to be an indictment of
slavery, still in force in Puerto Rico. Indeed, another painter from this group, Antoine Guillemet,
wrote to Oller, at Pissarro's suggestion, in September 1866, offering an unusually extended critique of
an abolition realist painting. While the painting had much character, Guillemet told Oller, Your
two figures do not agree with the background, you like Manet and will understand. The figures are

very well modeled but lack appropriate tches.53 This remark suggests that the woman was
accompanied by a child, perhaps lighter skinned to indicate the familiar scandals of miscegenation
under slavery. The tche, or patch, was the central idea of the new painting, seeking to develop form
by color, rather than by line drawing. Guillemet wanted Oller to reconfigure his entire style and treat
[figures] like landscape. He criticized the portrait as having an atrocious red background, why not
work in the open air, the famous plein air mantra of the 1860s group. He worried further that the
figure of the African woman did not stand out enough from the background. In a contradictory
passage, Guillemet continues: Your technique is good, we don't give a fuck about the rest, you know
that. See by patches, technique is nothing, pte and justesse [precision], those are the goals to
pursue. Guillemet argued that there is nothing more than the tche juste, blending the exactness of
justesse with the connotation of justice, as if color properly seen and described would in and of
itself entail justicean abolition realism accomplished by technique as much as subject matter.
For there was a strong sense that radical aims could be now achieved by formal visual means,
tending away from the content of the image toward a radicality of style. Courbet's famous claim that,
as a realist, he could only paint what he saw was now being broken down into the constituent units of
seeing, a riposte to those worldviews, like visuality, that claimed a unity of visual perception and
understanding. The novelist and journalist Emile Zola articulated the connections between radical
politics and the new aesthetics as what can be called corporal anarchy. In his review of the Salon of
1866, Zola hailed Pissarro as a fierce revolutionary, describing his painting in terms that evoked the
virtue espoused by the Jacobins of 1793: A painting austere and serious; an extreme concern with
truth and accuracy, a will fierce and strong.54 This realism was taken to be radical in and of itself,
whatever the subject matter. Against the heroism of empire, Zola deployed an individualism that he
called the free manifestation of individual thoughtswhat Proudhon calls anarchy.55 Rather than
accede to heroic visuality, Zola described a particularity of individual perception that could not be
fused into one grand vision, except as the stale and moribund production of the academies: It is our
body that sweats the beauty of our works. Our body changes according to climate and custom, and the
secretion changes accordingly.56 This desire to individualize, to break up the heroic imperial body
into its constituent parts, did not predicate a future reordering of the social. It was as pure opposition
to the empire that the aesthetics of national unity could be sustained, an illusion that ended even
before the conflict of the Commune.
This political aesthetic of individualized rebellion by formal means was less coherently expressed
by Guillemet in the conclusion of his (unpunctuated) letter to Oller.
Courbet has become classic. He does superb things next to Manet it is tradition and Manet next to Czanne becomes it in turn.
Try to come back. Borrow from your sister-in-law, get money there is only Pariswhat the devil, do you want to do in Porto Rico
[sic] what Pissarro did in St. Thomas, what I did in China we are painting on a volcano the 93 of painting is going to sound its
funeral toll the Louvre will burn the museums the classics will disappear and as Proudhon says, only from the ashes of the old
civilization can the new art come. Fever burns us; today is separated from tomorrow by a century. The gods today will not be
those of tomorrow, to arms, seize in a febrile hand the knife of insurrection, let's demolish and buildand exegi momumentum
aere perennius [I have built a monument more lasting than bronze, Horace].57

Guillemet saw his present as the returned Jacobin moment of 1793, now in painting not politics, and
thereby as the anarchist refoundation of societyZola's blend of Jacobin austerity and Proudhonian
individualism. Paris was capital of all revolution and all ferment, whereas the colonies, whether in
Asia or the Caribbean, were not even its suburbs. All this from the tche, from seeing color as it is,
from treating the body as a landscape and as the source of art. And the leading practitioner of this

revolution was to be Pissarro, who makes masterpieceshe even had the audacity to send a realist
slice of life to the Universal Exhibition.58
So what did all this realist revolution look like? Pissarro's painting The Hermitage at Pontoise
(Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1867) was by far the largest painting yet attempted by the artist,
suggesting that it sought to visualize the ambitious project Guillemet had described (see plate 7). It
renders what at first sight seems like a minor scene on the scale of a history painting. The painting
shows a little hamlet among some hills and fields with a few figures. The meeting between two
women from his St Thomas painting was now reworked and reduced in the foreground. These
meetings in turn foreshadow those he would paint in decades to come, extensively analyzed by T. J.
Clark.59 One woman, standing with a child, appears to be in authority, shading her face from the sun
with a parasol, which makes it clear that she does not work outdoors. She is speaking to a woman
who is darker-skinned, from field labor, standing with her arms deferentially held behind her back,
leaning in as if to hear her instructions. Here the encounter is between women of different classes, a
difference that is signified through the small patches of skin color. Yet Guillemet's direction should
send us to the landscape, for the corollary of painting the body as a landscape might be to paint the
landscape as a body, as Monet would later do. As one looks at Pissarro's landscape, it does not
represent a single body, but rather a division of the sensible appears. On the left-hand side of the
canvas, the smaller houses of the peasantry are jumbled together in a mass, with one open window
visible, high in the attic of a house. On the right, a larger collection of buildings, which can be
presumed to be that of the landlord-farmer or his local deputy, overlooks the entire hamlet through a
sequence of windows. Despite the heat, a fire is going in the main houseperhaps a meal is being
preparedwhile the peasant houses are closed up and quiet, in the middle of the working day. The
land on the right is dedicated to pastoral, whether as garden, uncultivated land, or fruit trees. On the
left, the working fields are visible, albeit at a vertiginous angle. The three working people and two
village children that can be seen keep to their side of the hamlet, marked by the unpaved path.
There is a zone of transition between the two spaces, a fiercely worked patch of brown paint that
perhaps represents a wall, but is really nothing more than paint. It is the color of the fields, of the
peasants skin. In its wet-painted-into-wet swirls and valleys, this patch of color suggests the violent
affect of rural class struggle in a deferential society, a threat that was always present, if rarely
articulated. The painting itself defers its explication of difference, with the transitional zone pushed
back in the picture space, just off the center that is taken by the white house. If this is 93 in
painting, it was displaced because Paris was under a state of emergency that was rendered here as
the plantation evoked by Girardin, a watchful waiting for a peasant insurgency that may be imminent
or may never come. One has to look hard to see this difference in the painting, a sign of Pissarro's
persistent hesitation to be too direct or unambiguous. Taken with Guillemet's enthusiasm, it perhaps
explains Czanne's cryptic remark that if Pissarro had gone on painting as he was doing in 1870 he
would have been the strongest of us all.60 It did not last long. In that same year, Guillemet wrote to
Zola: To put one violent tone against another as I did at Aix [with Czanne] leads nowhere. It is the
anarchy of painting, if I can call it that.61 The proud claims of 1867 had been renounced even before
the Paris Commune made such associations literally dangerous.
The short-lived aesthetic of corporal anarchy was the counterpoint to the disciplined body of the
newly policed plantation. Nor was this counterpoint distant from the radical art of 1867, for it was in
that year that Manet began his series concerning The Execution of Maximilian (see fig. 36).62 As part
of his project of heroic imperialism, Louis Napoleon installed Maximilian as a puppet in Mexico,

only for him to be quickly defeated and executed. Manet's paintings of this moment, iconographically
derived from Goya's The Third of May, 1808, were understood as critiques of Louis Napoleon, who
even appears to be depicted as part of the firing squad in one of the paintings.63 In these works,
Maximilian appears as a hero by default, paying the price for the follies of imperial adventure. Others
were less impressed. In Capital, published that same year, Marx noted that in Mexico, slavery is
hidden under the form of peonage. Juarez abolished peonage, but the so-called Emperor
Maximilian re-established it by a decree which was aptly denounced in the House of Representatives
in Washington as a decree for the re-introduction of slavery into Mexico.64 That being so, the studied
neutrality of the peons looking over the wall at Maximilian's execution in the third version painted by
Manet (now in Mannheim) takes on a different resonance.65 So did Manet know? It seems unlikely
that he did not. As a young man Manet had visited Brazil and seen slavery at first hand, visiting the
revolting spectacle of a slave market.66 He carefully studied newspaper accounts of Maximilian's
death and altered details of his paintings to be more exact. In 1864 he painted two scenes from the
American Civil War naval battle that had taken place off the coast of France, the well-known Battle
of the Kearsage and Alabama, and, to emphasize his support for the Union, a less well-known study
of the Kearsage in harbor in Boulogne.67 His work as a whole was understood as implicating
slavery's histories. For example, a caricature version of his solo exhibition during the Universal
Exhibition of 1867 featured a drawing of his scandalous painting Olympia (1865), in which the
African servant speaks to the white prostitute in Haitian Kreyol, as if it were a form of abolition or
revolution to paint the two women together.68 Above all, there is the evidence of the paintings
themselves. For why did Manet repeat this scene in three distinctly different ways if he did not feel
that there was something fundamentally wrong with his earlier versions? Did not that sense of error
stem from his knowledge that Maximilian was no hero, even in death, and that the real suffering lay
with the laboring poor? It was not until he found a way to include them in his piece that he finally set
the subject aside. All these debates were undoubtedly well-known to Pissarro and Guillemetand
thereby Ollerbecause, in 1868, Guillemet was the model for the cigarette-smoking man in Manet's
classic scene of modern life The Balcony.

Oller refused the lure of Paris's capital and remained in Puerto Rico, living in Campeche's house,
painting against slavery, which he called an institution which is an outrage to human nature.69
Slavery disrupted in this view the very workings of the body that so exercised Zola. In six years,
Oller created a corpus of antislavery work, known now only by their titles: A Slave Flogged; A Slave
Mother; The Punishment of a Slave in Love; A Beggar; Stonecutter; Rich Man's Lunch, Poor
Man's Lunch; and Negresse libre et mendiante. Together with his work as the founder and teacher of
Puerto Rico's Academy of Drawing and Painting, where he had eight students, both men and women,
Oller had decided to use art as abolitionist activism.70 For in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico the
enslaved population had tripled and production had increased by over one thousand percent. In 1870,
the Spanish government decreed a gradual abolition of slavery by emancipating those over sixty and
all newborn children. The Moret Law, as it became known after the foreign minister Don Segismundo
Moret y Pendergast, rendered the freed into a form of apprenticeship, the patronato. At the same time,
a forced labor regulation of the revolutionary era of 1849 was revived. The enslaved responded by
what the British consul called an outbreak of the slaves, or at least their refusal to work. This
general strike came to a head on the Hacienda Amelia, where the leader of the strikers was publicly
flogged in contravention of the Moret Law.71 So when Oller's next submission to the Paris Salon was
his Flogged Slave (187273, now lost), it was a gesture of protest. Known only through a mediocre
print that plays up the sexualized aspect of the African body in pain, the painting nonetheless wanted

to insist that what was real was not the patch but the violence of slavery. Rather than being a
generalized protest, as has usually been assumed, it depicted the scene at Hacienda Amelia, showing
the rebel tied to the ground as he is flogged by an overseer in the presence of other enslaved
witnesses and a protesting white woman. This corporal realism did not insist on a separation of
visual and physical perception in its assemblage of the real, including pain, especially pain inflicted
by others in the name of profit. One might say that there is nothing more real than pain as it is being
experienced, yet it resists representation.72 Oller's painting was refused by the Salon and ignored by
the press in the Salon des Refuss of 1875, where it was finally exhibited, two years after colonial
slavery had finally been abolished in Puerto Rico. In the Salon catalog the painting carried a caption
from Mirabeau: Is to defer anything other than to tolerate a crime?73 That deferral might have been
the system of apprenticeship at first proposed by the Spanish government or even the delay in
exhibiting Oller's work. The delay has consigned Oller to the status of a footnote in Pissarro's history
in most Western accounts of modernist painting.

With the emancipation of the enslaved in the United States, latter-day histories of modernity and
modernism have declared slavery to be over, and move on in the endless pursuit of the new. In the
period, matters were not so clear. One might point to the painting by Edgar Degas entitled A Cotton
Buyer's Office in New Orleans (1873) as an example (see fig. 37).74 A group of white men in New
Orleans examine cotton samples, read the newspaper the Daily Picayune, study ledgers, or merely
observe the proceedings. In Benedict Anderson's well-known analysis, the newspaper was central to

the imagined community of nineteenth-century print culture. Here it was being read by Ren Degas,
the artist's brother, at a time of crisis for the extended Degas family. The cotton business depicted was
on the verge of collapse because Michael Musson, seen in the left foreground examining cotton, had
invested heavily for ideological reasons in Confederate war bonds, which had now defaulted. New
Orleans was one of the most contested locations during Reconstruction. African Americans organized
politically from the beginnings of the war to be met with violence in the New Orleans riot of 1866,
which killed thirty-four African American and three white delegates to the recalled constitutional
convention.75 Degas's uncle was a leading member of the Crescent City White League, which would
defeat Republican militia and police in an open battle in New Orleans in September 1874.76 Two
years later, Degas's painting was exhibited at the second Impressionist exhibition, where it received
favorable comment. The African American labor that produced the cotton, the majority population of
New Orleans, or indeed the mixed-race relatives of the Degas family were again nowhere to be
seen. The abolition counterpoint between Scipio's scarred back and the smooth white bale of cotton
had been forgotten. For if the avant-garde artists now known as the Impressionists had engaged with
abolition politics against the Napoleonic empire and slavery, they had already set it aside in favor of
formal experimentation before the radical popular revolution of the Paris Commune.

THE PARIS COMMUNE (1871): ABOLISHING REALITY

Travailler maintenant, jamais, jamais; je suis en grve
[Work now? Never, never. I'm on strike]
Arthur Rimbaud, 13 May 187177

The Paris Commune was a moment of decentralized communal authority experienced in the wake of
national defeat, a general strike against reality. It was the last of the Atlantic revolutions that began
with the revolts of the enslaved, engendered the great revolutions in Haiti and France, and concluded
with the wave of refusals that linked abolition in the United States, the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in
Jamaica, and other post-abolition risings in the Caribbean. To briefly summarize the often retold
history: Napoleon's disastrous war against Prussia ended in defeat at Sedan and the proclamation of a
republic on 4 September 1870. Carlyle wrote a famous letter to the Times, in 1870, supporting the
Prussians and denouncing the French, that was held to have been influential in reducing British
sympathies for France. However, there was as yet no peace. Prussia besieged Paris throughout the
winter of 187071, turning the metaphorical state of siege declared by Napoleon III and Haussmann
into a literal conflict. The city refused to surrender, despite an almost absolute lack of supplies, until
28 January 1871. After an attempt to seize artillery pieces by the national government at Versailles
failed, the Commune was declared on 18 March 1871, defended by some 200,000 National Guards
and the armed citizenry. For several weeks, a unique experiment in communal administration in one of
Europe's largest cities played out, inspiring radicals and revolutionaries for over a century. It ended
in terrible reprisals during the bloody week of May in which some 25,000 people were killed.
Although the Commune was brief, its example has been endlessly considered by supporters and
opponents alike, keen to discern what kind of political moment it had represented. While much of this
discussion has centered around its relationship to the Bolshevik revolution, in the period parallels
between the Commune and the American Civil War abounded on both sides of the Atlantic.78 Victor
Hugo had denounced the execution of John Brown after the Harper's Ferry raid of 1859, and the future

Commune member Pierre Vesinier wrote a book placing Brown in a genealogy of revolutionary
martyrs that included Vincent Og of Saint-Domingue.79 In his report to the International, Marx
described the Commune as the war of the enslaved against the enslavers, the only justifiable war in
history.80 Marx repeated the metaphor of slavery throughout his text, turning the language of morality
against the self-styled party of order. After the Commune's fall, many of those who survived, like the
radical Louise Michel, were deported to the French penal colony of Nouvelle Caledonie, in the South
Pacific, a return to actual slavery. And for those opposed to the Commune, it meant what Lon Daudet
called Paris in the hands of the blacks.81 The lesson was not forgotten. In his play The Days of the
Commune (1956), Bertolt Brecht directed that the set incorporate a series of banners, evoking the
posters that were a key part of the ideological struggles of the event. The first poster read The Right
to Live, meaning a right to autonomy, a life lived outside the social death of literal and metaphorical
slavery.82
The claim that the Commune represented an opposition to slavery illustrated its enactment of a
different form of authority than the mystical foundation of law, as visualized by visuality. In the
struggle to form the Commune, new political bodies appeared, such as the Central Republican
Committee of the 20 Arrondissements, formed after the declaration of the republic. In a declaration
published 9 October 1870, the Central Republican Committee redefined authority as autonomy:
Citizens: in this supreme danger to the homeland, with the principle of authority and centralization
being convicted of powerlessness, we have hope only in the patriotic energy of the communes of
France, becoming, by the very force of events, FREE, AUTONOMOUS and SOVEREIGN.83 Here the law of
necessity, usually cited to reinforce absolute state authority, was reconfigured and invoked as the
force of events to institute an autonomous decentralization of all authority. When the events of 18
March 1871 required a response, it came from another new grouping, the Central Committee of the
National Guard (hereinafter the Central Committee). Formed from men hitherto unknown in French
or even Parisian public life, the Central Committee, as the Communard Prosper Lissagaray pointed
out in his history, was the only body that articulated the popular demand for communal authority. The
Central Committee organized elections and stepped down from power, declaring, You have freed
yourselves. Obscure a few days ago, obscure we shall return to your ranks.84 From this place of
obscurity, they had watched the most grandiose popular spectacle that has ever struck our eyes and
moved our souls. Paris is opening a blank page in the book of history and is writing its powerful
name therein.85 Rather than the visuality of the hero, the Commune deployed from obscurity a
dazzling popular spectacle that attempted to rewrite history not as the biography of great men, but as
the actions of autonomous Paris, a collective name for the diverse populations of the city. Paris
here updates the vernacular hero of earlier revolutions, such as the Third Estate and the sans-culottes,
but did so with a strong sense of its genealogy.
In its autonomous impulse to decentralize, the Commune had strong affinities with antislavery
revolutions in the Caribbean and the general strike against slavery in the United States. All these
popular movements envisaged communities of small producers, whether on the provisions grounds of
the formerly enslaved in the Caribbean, the forty acres of the United States, or the workshops of the
Commune. It is noticeable that, just as in Saint-Domingue in 1791, the first efforts of the Commune
were directed at working conditions, such as the regulation of night work, and the living conditions of
the citizenry, especially as concerned rents. The experience of the Commune was, as many have
remarked, one of a holiday or festival. It was the enactment of Benbow's Grand National Holiday, or
general strike, at the level of the metropolis. One famous account, perhaps by Villiers de l'Isle Adam,

declared: One enters, one leaves, one circulates, one gathers. For the first time workers can be
heard exchanging their appreciations on things that hitherto only philosophers had tackled. There is no
trace of supervisors; no police agents obstruct the street hindering passers-by.86 Here, then, in
Rancire's sense, was a different division of the sensible, in which circulation did allow for the
formation of a political subject of a kind appropriate to the demonstrative temperament of essentially
artistic people, as Jules Claretie put it.87 The object of their practice was what Kristin Ross has
called the transformation of everyday life, an autonomy from state power.88 When the Prussians
entered Paris, the streets were decked with black flags, the fountains were dry and lights not lit. On
the day after the elections for the Commune, by contrast,
200,000 wretches came to the Htel-de-Ville there to attend their chosen representatives, the battalion drums beating, the
banners surmounted by the Phrygian cap and with red fringe around their muskets. In the middle of the Htel-de-Ville, against
the central door, a large platform was raised. Above it towered the bust of the Republic, a red scarf slung around it. Immense red
streamers beat against the frontal and belfry, like tongues of fire announcing the good news to France. A hundred battalions
thronged the square. The banners were grouped in front of the platform, some tricolour, all with red tassels, symbolizing the
advent of the people. While the square was filling, songs burst forth, the bands played the Marseillaise and the Chant du depart,
trumpets sounded the charge, and the cannon of the old Commune thundered on the quay.89

Here the conscious echoes of the Commune of 179293 were performed in a context that made it
clear that a new cultural politics of the people was being practiced and celebrated. Alain Badiou's
assertion that the Commune is what, for the first and only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny
of popular and workers political movements properly evokes the palpable sense of rupture that the
Communards experienced (if it is too singular in its forgetting of those like the Diggers and SaintDomingue's radicals who had advocated a decentralized polity long before).90
That break can be characterized as a sense of being in history as an actor, rather than, as visuality
would have it, as a simple follower. In the group photographs of the Communards, one sees this
desire to be seen and acknowledged as part of the event in which the right to live evoked the right to
look. Often a group of National Guards, accompanied by civilians, stand in line to pose for the
camera on the barricades, recalling O'Sullivan's photograph in the Sea Islands. A trumpet can be seen
being played on the barricade in the rue Saint Sbastien, where one man supports his infant child so it
can be seen standing.91 On other occasions, the Commune's troops can be seen in the Htel-de-Ville
or the courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the people would not ordinarily have been
seen. There are many notorious photographs from the Commune, ranging from the staged destruction
of the Vendme column; to the photomontages created to show the outrages of the Commune, such
as the assassination of the archbishop of Paris, who had been held hostage against government attack;
and finally to the many images of Paris in ruins after the Versaillais had attacked. But it is these group
portraits, carefully arranged and posed as if for a holiday or wedding photograph, usually taken by
unknown photographers, that stay with me. The carefully arranged paving-stone barricades were no
match for modern artillery, especially now that Haussmann had arranged a clear line of fire, as they
must have known. The conviction that history was on their side, no matter what happened in the short
term, is what seems irrecuperable here, rather than the foretold and chosen deaths of those posing. I
am tired of mourning. I would like to know what it would feel like to feel so engaged with history
rather than death. Is there not a terrible suspicion at large in the West that did so much to prevent this
history from playing out that the defiance of death has passed to those imbued with the divine rather
than the historical?

Puerto Rican Counterpoint II

Mourning Abolition Realism

After the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, Francisco Oller worked on two dialectically related
series of works (see plate 8). The first depicted plantations under postslavery conditions, paintings
that seem to resist interpretation as either critiques or endorsements of agriculture.1 In counterpoint,
Oller made a series of paintings of locally grown fruits and plants, such as pineapples, plantains, and
bananas, as if suggesting that these offered the possibility of a sustainable agriculture that did not need
to rely on the international cash-crop market. In 1891 he painted a major canvas depicting Maestro
Raphael Cordero, a formerly enslaved tobacco worker of color who had founded a school in San
Juan which educated children of all classes and ethnicities. In this period of emergent nationalism,
Cordero was being claimed as a prototype nationalist hero by reformists and conservatives alike,
leading to Oller's painting being displayed in the conservative Ateneo club.2 The recuperative claim
to the subaltern project of education and sustainable agriculture that Oller had been exploring
provoked a new direction in his work. He returned to international exhibition, in 1895, with a
monumental painting, El Velorio, or The Wake, showing it first in Puerto Rico, then at two locations
in Havana, Cuba, and finally it was shipped to France.
Oller traveled with the painting, which he showed to Czanne in his studio and to Pissarro by
photograph.3 Neither artist liked Oller's new piece, but he sent it to the Paris Salon of 1895, where it
was accepted. It was also ignored there, because even Salon reviewers saw grande machine painting
as fit for nothing other than disappearing into some institution, where it would hang unseen and
unregarded.4 As if in anticipation of being overlooked, this was a painting of disillusion, mourning,
and coming to terms, both politically and artistically. Rarely even a footnote in Anglophone histories
of modernism, it has been a foundational painting for Puerto Rican art, literature, and even national
identity.5 It should be required viewing for any discussion of post-abolition representation. If this was
not a work of the avant-garde, measured in terms of style within a particular time period, it
nonetheless reflects on how advanced painting had become detached from the counterpoint of
visuality and abolition realism. Indeed, The Wake is in mourning for the failed project of abolition
and the realism that would have depicted it. If it is, as Nietzsche or Benjamin might have said,
untimely, that constitutes the grounds for its successes and failures.
The painting is so large, at some 13 x 7 feet, and so crowded with incident, that its very subject has
been obscured. It depicts a wake held to celebrate the death of a child, a formula whose oddity
indicates the disjunctured nature of the painting. The syncretic ceremony, known as baquine, blended
Kongo and Catholic beliefs that a deceased innocent child went directly to the spirit world or to
Heaven, respectively, and should not be mourned, as that would hinder their journey. Oller accurately
depicted the Kongo ceremonial, with an altar being made out of a table covered in a white cloth, with
its libations of food and drink, and with the performance of songs to help the journey of the spirit.6 At
the same time, this was also a Catholic ceremony, known in Spain as the florn, commemorating the
direct passage of the angelito, the little angel, to Heaven. Thus the child is surrounded by flowers and

dressed in white. Such acceptance indicates that the infant had been baptized despite its young age,
creating a visual memory connection with Jos Campeche's portrait of Juan Avils.
No reading hitherto has suggested that this was a syncretic ceremony, because all the authority has
been ceded to the text published in the catalog for the Salon of 1895.
Astonishing criticism of a custom that still exists in Puerto Rico among country people and which has been propagated by the
priests. On this day the family and friends have kept vigil all night over the dead child, extended on a table with flowers and laces.
The motherdoes not weep for fear her tears might wet the wings of this little angel on his flight to heaven. She laughs and
offers a drink to the priest, who with eager eyes gazes up at the roast pig whose entry is awaited with enthusiasm. Inside this
room of indigenous structure, children play, dogs romp, lovers embrace, and the musicians get drunk. This is an orgy of brutish
appetites under the guise of a gross superstition.7

Attributed to Oller himself, the text castigates the baquine as a clerically inspired orgy. Many
scholars have followed this lead, all noting the couple in full-fledged romance grabbing each other,
in the left foreground.8 But they are not (see fig. 38). As anyone who has seen the actual painting can
tell, the couple are grieving. The woman has her arm across her eyes and uses her other hand to fend
off the sight of the incoming sacrificial pig, while a man standing behind her holds her to offer
comfort. Another man empties a bottle over their heads, oblivious to their grief. This visual oversight
has the same cause in all cases. Whoever wrote the Salon entry in Franceclearly it cannot have
been the artistwas no doubt working from a photograph, such as that seen by Pissarro, who had no
hesitation in criticizing the painting as banal on that basis. In a photograph the dark corner becomes
obscure, so if one does not look closely, it can seem that the couple are embracing. The painting is not
a simple one. It offers a series of counterpoints, visual allusions, hesitations, and dramas.
The space of the painting constructs a series of interacting groups in an off-center and apparently
askew arrangement, using the pyramids and diagonals of classical composition. A pyramid links the
musicians at left to the roasted pig and the celebrating priest, which also dominates the attention of
one cheering man in the left background and another who reaches for a machete to carve it at the
extreme right. The dead child is linked to the other children in the painting by a diagonal from the
bottom left. Two children are seen having fallen down in the left corner and one standing, who can be
characterized as being white, brown, and black respectively, all connected by the invisible line
leading up to the dead child. He or she is illuminated by a stream of light entering through a hole in
the wall, visible next to the hat of the man standing at center, enhancing the atmosphere of divinity and
rendering the skin intensely white. The mourning couple are linked to two men at the extreme righthand edge of the painting, dressed as peasants, one of whom gestures across at them. At the center of
the painting stands an older African man, contemplating the dead child (see fig. 39). Finally, the
painting creates an empty space in the right foreground from which the implied spectator's viewpoint
is constructed. Located at the intersection of the gaze of the little dog at left center and the standing
woman at the right-hand side, the spectator is positioned very low, as if fallen on the floor, or from
the viewpoint of a child. This open space focuses our attention on the dead child, in sympathy with
the African man and the mourners, prompting us to condemn the celebrations going on all around,
caused by the entrance of the pig. That commotion distracts our attention from the real source of
authority in the picturethe disappearing landowner, seen out of the left-hand window, who has
retained power despite the formal end of slavery (see fig. 40). In mourning one individual, the
painting also mourns the artist's vision of a future that has failed to arrive, namely the future of
abolition, as symbolized by the children. In this realist painting, Oller was trying to visualize a crossracial society for Puerto Rico, only to collide with the unchanging realities of poverty and power in

rural life.

In this context, the confrontation between the dead child and the older African man is most
poignant. Whatever his personal status may have been, the elder would have been born in the period
of Puerto Rican slavery and was racialized as such. The prospect of a future in which society was not
divided by race, which might have been imaginable in the optimism of 1873, no longer seems
availableit was as dead as the child. If we assume the other children to be the dead child's siblings,
then it is also conceivable that the African elder is her grandfather or other relative. Certainly, his
presence is not only accepted; he is being ignored, almost as if he is a ghost. His attention is fixed
directly on the child, undistracted by the revelers and mourners alike. The intensity of this look
between the living and the dead across the invisible temporal disjuncture of abolition and
(apparently) across the color line is untimely because it should be the young mourning the old, and
not vice-versa. Nor should those of the era of slavery mourn modernity, yet they have cause. It is for
this reason that the painting constructs its unusual viewpoint. Either the spectator is a fallen adult, one
who has failed to do what should have been done, or s/he is a child, looking at the apparent chaos of
the scene and gradually deciphering its meanings. These viewpoints could be combined as that of an
adult who was nonetheless legally without personality and hence a minor.
More allusively still, there were a series of references within the painting to the visual conventions
of Realist style. To work across from left to right: the mourning woman on the left is derived from
Courbet's peasant figures, such as The Winnowers (see fig. 41). The empty Roman-style chair next to
the dead child recalls David's Brutus, as does the extended hand of the mourner at right and the
semantically significant empty space at the center of the painting (see fig. 42).
Centered on the conflict between private need, and grief, and public necessity, David's work had
been interpreted as revolutionary when it was first displayed, in 1789. The artful foreshortening on
the chair at extreme right recalls Caravaggio's similar (if more dramatic) trick in The Supper at
Emmaus, a painting concerning the Resurrection (see fig. 43). In the startled recognition of the
disciples in Caravaggio's painting was mingled the sight of the impossible become real and the
possibility of a Catholic Church that might enable that fantasy, both of which seemed unavailable in
the late nineteenth century. Finally, in an almost private reference, Oller's entire painting alludes to a
drawing made by Pissarro in Venezuela at the start of his career, in 1853, that is usually known as
Dance at the Inn, although Oller's allusion here makes it intelligible as a similar wake (see fig. 44).

Pissarro's drawing was also dominated by the figure of a grieving African man being comforted by
two children. Its relatively large scale suggests that he was considering turning it into a large-scale
painting, a choice he later backed away from in favor of French subjects like The Hermitage.
Oller, as it were, finished the job for him in another part of the Caribbean at a very different moment.
The implied reproach was not just a reflection on a single unfinished work, but a suggestion about the
road not taken, for all Pissarro's avowals of radicalism. There was also a measuring of differing
visualities being performed here. When Pissarro drew his sketch, slavery was about to be abolished
in Venezuela, meaning that the mourning of the father was for a child who would not experience
freedom. When Oller made his painting, Puerto Rico was about to be invaded by the United States, in
1898, inaugurating what is now over a century of occupation. While he could not have foreseen that
drama, his work mourned a freedom that had failed to materialize and a right to look that had failed to
perform as abolition realism. Despite the general strikes of 1848, abolition, and the Commune,
visuality had succeeded in becoming imperial.

FIVE
Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality, Ancient and Modern

In a sense, all visuality was and is imperial visuality, the shaping of modernity from the point of view
of the imperial powers. This chapter examines the formation of imperial visuality both in the colonies
and in the metropole at the interface of colonizing authority with the hierarchy of the civilized and
the primitive. Whereas visuality had been the prerogative of the individual Hero, imperial visuality
was an abstracted and intensified means of ordering biopower. It understood history to be arranged
within and across time, meaning that the civilized were at the leading edge of time, while their
primitive counterparts, although alive in the same moment, were understood as living in the past.
This hierarchy ordered space and set boundaries to the limits of the possible, intending to make
commerce the prime activity of humans within a sphere organized by Christianity and under the
authority of civilization. Imperial visuality imagined a transhistorical genealogy of authority marked
by a caesura of incommensurability between the indigenous and the civilized, whether that break
had taken place in ancient Italy with the rise of the Romans, or was still being experienced, as in the
colonial settlement of Pacific island nations. Thus it claimed an authority analogous to what it
(incorrectly) took to be the aura of mana (power or prestige) attributed to Melanesian and Polynesian
leaders. This universal authority derived from the primitive mind sustained the new modern
Caesarism called for by Carlyle's biographer and successor James Anthony Froude (181894). These
abstract modalities of authority were enabled and reinforced by the local endeavors of missionaries
who sought to bridge the ancient and the modern, as they saw it, by means of disciplinary religious
missions. The classification of ancient and modern cultures, overlaid with that of primitive and
civilized, designated a separation in space and time that was aestheticized by European modernism.
Despite the seemingly arbitrary nature of such formulae, the result was an effective suturing of
authority to the newly centralized modalities of imperial power. In response to the crisis of authority
after the First World War, there was nonetheless in some places a return to charismatic leadership in
the form of fascist dictatorship.
Just as visuality itself was an antagonistic response to revolutionary tactics, so was imperial
visuality an intensification of that visuality mandated by new tactics deployed by the indigenous. I
map this process in Aotearoa New Zealand, both because Froude imagined New Zealand as England
reborn in the empire, and because the theorizing of mana relied on fieldwork performed by
missionaries and their surrogates in the extended diocese of New Zealand. The Maori repurposed
Christian texts into a renewal movement that cast them as Jews to the missionaries Christians. This
claiming of an authority at once more ancient than Christianity and more modern than received Maori
belief served both to unify formerly antagonistic groups into one anticolonial force and to undermine
the missionaries credibility. This strategy forced the British Crown into a direct claim of sovereignty
in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which required ratification by Maori leaders, giving them legal
personality and hence authority. These challenges led to a further intensification of imperial authority.
Described by Froude as Oceana, this visualization of history projected specific notions of the

sacred into a generalized and abstracted necropolitics, demarcated into two zones. One was the
normal zone of imperial authority designated by the new science of statistics, describing patterns of
life and death. The other was the space of imperial exception in which all those excluded from the
normalhere the colonized and racialized bodywere subject to exceptional authority, epitomized
as the right of the imperial power to withhold life from the colonized. Or to kill them, in plain
English. That authority was legitimized by the discovery of mana as the primitive origin of
heroism, now rendered as Caesarism. Metropolitan imperial visuality was challenged from within by
a countergenealogy for authority, stemming from the ancient lowly, or the proletariat of antiquity.
Epitomized by the heroic figure of Spartacus, the ancient strikes against empire created an
alternative genealogy to authorize the modern labor movement. Such visualizations relied less on
realist visual media than abolitionism had done and turned instead to new visualized forms like the
Museum of Labor, the red flag, and the May Day campaign, culminating in the idea of the general
strike as an alternative means of picturing social totality. In the crisis of authority produced by the
combination of radical movements and the collapse of empires after 1917, Caesarism became a new
modality of dictatorial heroism.

MISSIONARIES AND JEWS: AUTHORITY AND COLONIZATION IN

AOTEAROA
Papa having to do with earth
huri with turning over
hia
Kendrick Smithyman, The World Turned Upside Down

It was the universalizing project of evangelical Christianity that engaged in the practical construction
of imperial visuality on Carlyle's model.1 If Carlyle and Froude were visuality's theorists, its labor
force was the massed ranks of global missionaries, busy in overturning idols, shipping them to
museums in Western capitals, and instituting the rule of private-property rights under regimes of
visualized surveillance. If missionaries were once decried as the running dogs of imperialism,
recent studies have sought to understand missionaries in the context of a globalizing modernity that
altered Western societies as well as non-Western ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
missionaries, in other words, were simultaneously agents of the spread of modernity vis--vis nonWestern societies, and products of its emerging hegemony.2 Nowhere was this more the case than
with imperial visuality as the agent and product of globalizing, capitalist modernity. Missionaries
envisaged themselves bringing light to darkness through a series of epistemically and physically
violent techniques, writing what David Livingstone famously called Christianity, commerce and
civilization over those blank spaces of the map that later so fascinated Joseph Conrad. Livingstone
was speaking precisely: Christianity was to be introduced first, creating a desire for commerce that
would in turn produce civilization.
Missionaries actively considered themselves to be heroic figures in the style of Carlyle. As Jean
and John Comaroff have insightfully argued, missionaries were the prototypical subjects of a modern
history as biography, producing a range of heroic texts whose linear progression gave putatively
sufficient account of human motives, actions, and consequences.3 For example, in 1837, the British
missionary John Williams published a best-selling account of his travels in the South Pacific,

highlighting his destruction of the idols, or tiki, on the island of Rarotonga, part of the present day
Cook Islands. The tiki were nonrepresentational figures, carefully wrapped to prevent their mana
from escaping or harming passers-by. Williams destroyed them all, excepting one specimen that he
sent back to London, now in the collections of the British Museum. The small woodcut frontispiece
shows Williams seated in public, every inch the Hero, accepting the public offering of the nowdisgraced power figures of the Rarotongans. With that indigenous visuality erased, his next act was to
promulgate a code of laws based on property rights.4 The missionary hero has brought light to
darkness, forced a recognition of that light, and thereby effected the moment of conversion.
Conversion is an internal process of the soul, precisely that object targeted by the new disciplinary
apparatus of normalizing modernity in which the soul is the prison of the body.5
Here I will take Aotearoa (Land of the Long White Cloud) as an example of the formation of
imperial visuality and indigenous countervisuality in the period in which it became the crown colony
of New Zealand, Froude's ideal colony. It was also the site of concerted Maori resistance to
colonialism, which led to the formation of an indigenous countervisuality. This countervisuality
sought to contest both the genealogy of imperial visuality and its symbolic forms, and to visualize its
own modality of power. British missionaries arrived in Aotearoa in 1814, but they did not succeed in
making their first converts until the 1830s. For example, in 1834 one leader, according to
missionaries, dismissed Christianity: This doctrinemay do for Slaves and Europeans, but not for a
free and noble people like the Ngapuhi, meaning the dominant confederation of peoples on the north
island.6 At this point, the indigenous remained confident of their strength in numbers and in ideas. The
missionaries took such remarks seriously and proselytized to the enslaved and other marginal figures
in Maori society. Around 1830, as the number of Pakeha (Europeans) increased, together with a high
Maori mortality rate caused both by war and disease, the level of Christian observance began to rise
dramatically.7 Scholars have variously attributed this progress to the missionaries role as
peacemakers in regional conflicts; to the perceived benefits of textual literacy that the colonizers
offered once printed texts in the vernacular became available, after 1827; the material goods, such as
blankets and muskets, provided by European commerce; and the devastation of indigenous
populations by exogenous disease. All these tended toward the accidental and deliberate effacement
of what contemporaries called the primitive communism of the Maori in favor of property-based
relations.8 First, the indigenous had to be made to realize the deficiency that attested to their
primitivism. One leading missionary, William Yate, found the Maori deficient above all in their lack
of lack, declaiming to the Church Missionary Society, in 1829, that there is no seeking after Christ
till the fetters of sin and satan [sic] gall the Spirit.9 He recognized the acute sense of dread caused
by tapu (Maori te reo equivalent to the Polynesian taboo), but claimed that its transient and human
forms made it an inferior form of subjection. Yate's sense of sinfulness was perhaps all the more acute
because of his purchased erotic encounters with young Maori men that were soon to lead to his
dismissal. Nonetheless, in a travel narrative of his time in New Zealand, published in 1835, Yate was
pleased to observe that the real and imaginary wants of the Maori had increased, so that industry,
regularity, and a desire to make improvements in their land, their habits, and customs, are upon the
increase.10 The Maori described this process as going mihanere, a homonymic spelling of
missionary.11 This cultivation of a sense of need where none had existed before epitomizes what
John and Jean Comaroff have called the missionary colonization of consciousness.12
In encountering Pakeha determined to settle, the indigenous found themselves confronted with a
group that homogenized all the different iwi (peoples) into one Maori whole and had designs on

their most fundamental cultural resource, the land itself. The tohunga (priest) Papahurihia responded
by creating the prophetic discourse of Te Atua Wera, the Red God, uniting the Maori in
counterpoint to the Pakeha (see fig. 45). In response to his understanding of the missionary teachings
and texts, Papahurihia claimed that the Maori were Hurai, or Jews, giving them ancient founding
authority in relation to the missionaries, rather than being subalterns. He celebrated the Sabbath on
Saturday, according to the Old Testament (rather than the Christian Sunday), and raised a symbolic
flag to testify to his actions.13 By moving the Sabbath to Saturday, Papahurihia and his followers
reclaimed the shaping of time that was an instrumental part of missionary settlement and their primary
evangelical claim. For Sabbath observance was the quantitative indicator by which the missionaries
marked their progress, prompting Henry Williams to denounce the missionary-educated rebels as
two-fold more the child of the devil than they were before.14 The missionaries themselves had
suggested that the Maori might be one of the lost tribes of Israel and had seen them as having
Jewish characteristics, such as greed and a propensity to business.15 So the Maori knew both why
Jews were considered important in Pakeha religion and how they were the object of systematic
racialized degradation.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Maori chose to identify with Jews because they knew
exactly how much it would annoy the Pakeha. Carlyle, wrote Froude, detested Jews, and his
description of Disraeli (cited in Froude's novel The Earl of Beaconsfield) as a superlative Hebrew
conjuror, echoes the missionary William Woon's puzzled description of Papaurihia [sic] who has
fallen in with some Jews and learned juggling etc. and on this account he is regarded as a wonderful
man.16 Unable to credit that he might have created this movement, the British believed that
Papahurihia had been corrupted by a Hebrew traveler. [H]e was a sea captain, and he had some
skill as a juggler and a ventriloquist.17 It was not altogether impossible, for there were a number of
Jewish settler-traders in the Hokianga region.18 Certainly, many writers believed that tohunga used
ventriloquism. What was meant by juggling is less clear. At the same period, Darwin used jugglery

to refer to his use of technology in South America, so Papahurihia may have had some knowledge of
Western technology.19 He was both a vernacular and a national hero, intent on the creation of an
imagined community. His movement was literally based on an against the grain reading of
Protestant doctrine translated into the vernacular, while his political goal was to forge something that
might be called a Maori nation. His appropriation of the double negative connotation of both
indigeneity and Jewishness thus marks an instance of what Stephen Turner has called native irony,
meaning the anamorphic distortion of an official reality, that which is already known, expected, and
elaborated in conventionalized form, through the interference of the affective consciousness of the
native or local.20 Papahurihia's movement, replete with appropriations, aporia, and performative
display seems always already postmodern, a fitting subject for Kendrick Smithyman's remarkable
deconstructive poem cycle Atua Wera (1997). Papahurihia's claim to be Jewish was repeated by later
renewal movements led by figures such as Te Ua Haumene (ca. 182066) and Te Kooti Arikirangi Te
Turuki (ca. 181491), which continue to have adherents today.21 Te Ua claimed descent from the
twelve sons of Jacob, while Te Kooti framed his dramatic escape from the prison of the Chatham
Islands and his march into the interior, in 1868, as an exodus to the Promised Land of Moses. This
nationalism was prophetic, contradictory, imaginative, and visualized.
If he claimed ancient authority as a Jew, Papahurihia was modern in his synthesis of tradition and
current circumstances. He conjured the spirits of the dead to speak and advise the people in their new
circumstances, as the tohunga had always done, but now he spoke of Te Nakahi, the serpent, who was
a syncretic combination of the serpent in Genesis, the fiery serpent on the rod used by Moses, and the
long-standing Maori lizard spirit.22 He raised a flag on his Jewish Sabbath, just as the British would
do on the Christian Sunday. The missionaries used a variety of flags to mark their missions, often
decorated with a text in Maori. The British resident John Busby had then imposed a New Zealand
flag on a gathering of rangatira (leaders or chiefs), in 1835, and the renewal movements all used
them.23 While Papahurihia's flag is now unknown, later flags used by Te Ua and Te Kooti suggest that
it would have had a combination of symbols, colors, and perhaps text. Te Ua had a flag with the word
Kenana (Canaan) written on it to indicate that he considered himself Jewish. One of Te Kooti's
flags used a crescent moon to indicate a new world, a cross, and the letters WI, referring to his
Sabbath. On another one of his flags, the quadrants of the Union Jack were colored green and brown
(rather than white and blue), as were the stars denoting the four islands of New Zealand.24 Te Kooti
seems to have imagined a postcolonial power-sharing in which the form of the colonial was blended
with the content of the indigenous population.25 In 1845, Papahurihia became the war tohunga during
Hone Heke's attack on the Pakeha settlers, which revolved around the repeated destruction by Maori
of the flagstaff at Kororareka (present-day Russell) (see fig. 46). A flag is inherently a militarized
object, and Papahurihia and other Maori leaders understood it as such. The flag attempted to perform
the authority of sovereignty. It indexically marked a territory as a new national possession,
symbolically designated the cultural history of the flagmakers, and iconically attested to the presence
of sovereignty. Such performances only work if received as intended by the indigenous audience. The
photographer William Lawes, the London Missionary Society's emissary to Papua New Guinea,
attended a proclamation of British sovereignty, as he called it, in 1888: There was not much
display, and it was well that there was not, for flag-hoisting must seem to the natives to be a white
man's amusement. The function of the 4th [November] was the tenth at which I had been present on
New Guinea. It is getting monotonous.26 Perhaps the index of the desire to colonize is the amount of
such ritualized boredom that can be tolerated.

Against the tedium of imperial symbol, Papahurihia deployed a complex visualized rhetoric in
keeping with Maori usage of metaphor and allusion. The French missionary Louis Catherin (or
Catherin Savant) offered a version of the imagery he was using around the time of the Treaty of
Waitangi.
Tanakhi [Te Nakahi, the serpent] has compared heretics to the aotea tree: this tree is placed in a straight line, another tree is
placed in a curving line, starting at the foot of the straight tree. This tree is called the tree of judgement. At the end of the curved
tree are the heretical Missionaries who pray: they take the road leading to Satan's fire and they go. Tanakhi, the new god,
appears under the bent tree and goes off to stoke up the eternal fire, then he comes up the straight tree, whose top touches
heaven; the heretics also try to climb up there but when they think they have reached heaven, heaven disappears above them and
they fall back into the abyss.27

For all the Christian language of heresy and heaven, Papahurihia's visual metaphor emerges clearly:
while the missionaries falsely claim a route to salvation, it is the renewal movement that really knows
how to find it. The use of indigenous plants and the question of direction-finding must have rung a
chord with local listeners, who would have noticed the difference between Pakeha ignorance and
their own designation of over six hundred plant species. The movement caused many Maori to
abandon the loose relationship they had with Christianity and to move into a form of opposition to the
colonizers. The missionaries blamed ships captains for convincing the Maori that their object is
only to gain possession of the land: that when they are made Christians we shall make slaves of
them.28 It was not an inaccurate forecast, if slavery is understood, as the Maori would have done, as
meaning reduction to a landless condition.29 In te reo, the indigenous population often called
themselves tangata whenua, meaning people of the land. Conversion prompted some agonies of
double-consciousness, as the missionary Yate recorded in a series of letters from Maori converts of
the period. Hongi, a married man living with Mr. Clarke, wrote that he sometimes thought: Ha!

What are the things of God to me? I am only a New Zealander: they will do very well for white and
learned people but as for us! Many other letters attest to such internal conflicts, disputes between
what Henry Wahanga called his native heart and his new heart.30 With due allowance for the
writers saying what they knew Yate wanted to hear concerning their awareness of the struggle against
sin, these dilemmas must have seemed very acute. While the missionaries spoke of the influence of
the devil and the decline in Sabbath attendance, the (as-it-happens Jewish) sailor Joel Polack
testified to the House of Lords in London of a more thoroughgoing transformation: There was a
Crusade at the Time among the Natives, so that everything was at a Stand-Still; they had no
opportunity of getting on with anything. That was occasioned by a new Religion, which has sprung up,
called Papahurihia.31 Labor at a standstill suggests a colonial general strike in religious dress, much
like the contemporary Chartist National Holiday.

SOVEREIGNTY OR KAWANATANGA
During the Papahurihia insurrection, Aotearoa formally became the British Crown colony of New
Zealand by means of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed on 6 February 1840 by British representatives and
Maori leaders. A Christian diocese was declared the following year with the appointment of an
Anglican bishop.32 Papahurihia and Waitangi were both part of the indigenous response to settler
colonization. The insurrection had forced the Crown to recognize the standing of indigenous authority
in order to defend its position. Polack told the House of Lords, in 1838, It is astonishing how the
Natives have gone back, meaning reverted to indigenous religion from Christianity.33 For
Papahurihia and his followers, going back was a challenge to the imperial future that he seems to
have correctly visualized. While it is usually said that the treaty followed the New Zealand
Association (later the New Zealand Company) proposal of colonization, in 1838, which had been
discussed in the House of Lords, it should be added that these hearings made it clear that British
authority was far from unquestioned.34 The association presumed that the Savages are to be dealt
with as children, meaning that they were legal minors, to be protected but without rights.35 The
Church Missionary Society objected that such a designation had no basis in law, because Britain had
no claim of Sovereignty or Jurisdiction whatever. When challenged that they themselves had sought
to buy land whenever possible, the missionaries pointed out that such purchase did not make a claim
to sovereignty.36 The Treaty of Waitangi was designed to end all such disputes and to give the British
a basis for expansion. At the same time, by seeking out indigenous consent and thereby presuming
their majoritarian legal status, the treaty marked an acknowledgment of indigenous participation in
sovereign claims and thereby ownership of a certain authority.
The question of sovereignty was the key issue in the Treaty of Waitangi and its subsequent history.
The treaty was prepared in English and in te reo (Maori), with Maori leaders signing or marking the
te reo version (see fig. 47). However, the two were significantly different. Article 1 of the treaty in
English has signatories cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England, absolutely and without
reservation, all the rights and powers of sovereignty. In te reo, it reads in Ranganui Walker's English
translation: The Chiefs of the Confederation and all the Chiefs not in that Confederation cede without
reservation to the Queen of England forever the Governorship of all their lands.37 The key term
sovereignty was rendered, in what the historian Ruth Ross has aptly called missionary Maori, as
kawanatanga, a neologism formed by taking the missionary word kawana, a transliteration of
governor, and adding the suffix -tanga, meaning things pertaining to, in order to render

governorship.38 At this point, Maori had no concept of governorship, so the signatories cannot
have been clear as to what they were conceding. In James Busby's earlier dealings with a smaller
group of chiefs, leading to what has been called the Declaration of Independence (1835), he had used
the important term mana. Walker concludes that had the treaty used the significant phrase mana
whenua (power over the land), it is highly probable that they [the chiefs] would not have signed the
Treaty.39 In Maori translations of New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer, kawanatanga
tends to refer to God's authority, suggesting that the signatories might have considered that they were
making a spiritual accommodation with Christianity.40 In one legal view, the practice whereby
documents should be interpreted contra preferentem, that is to say, against the person offering it,
means that the treaty should not be interpreted as ceding sovereignty. Others agree that kawanatanga
was an unclear concept, but that the right of the Crown to govern was ceded.41 Ironically,
kawanatanga has now come to be used to mean self-determination.42 In any event, scholars now
consider that because the treaty explicitly reserves to Maori te tino rangatiratanga, or the
customary authority of the chiefs over their own people, signatories would have presumed that their
traditional authority remained intact. The legal scholar Paul McHugh emphasizes that rangatiratanga
is a concept for which there is no simple Pakeha equivalent, for it is an integrated concept tied into
the mana of the individual and thecommunity.43 In other words, whether by accident or design, the
English version of the Treaty of Waitangi claimed Maori mana for the Crown, an imperialism of the
soul forged by imperial discipline. The treaty's colonization of all rights and powers anticipated
the imperial appropriation of mana itself.

It was not long before the treaty itself was set aside altogether. The Native Land Act of 1862
nullified the presumption of what in English law was known as aboriginal title in order to legalize
transactions between individual Maori and settlers, undermining the collective ownership of land.
The land grab that followed led to the outbreak of the New Zealand Wars (formerly known as the
Maori Wars), a protracted and serious conflict. Taken together with other colonial experience in the
post-emancipation period, such as the so-called Indian Mutiny (1857), the establishment of internment
camps for Australian aboriginals (1860), and the Jamaican Morant Bay revolt (1865), the wars led to
a reconfiguration of British self-representation in relation to indigenous and subject peoples. During
the period of emancipation, the state took a relatively expansive view of societies with whom it ought
to negotiate and settle by treaty any British settlement or colony. However, in the case Wi Parata v.

The Bishop of Wellington (1877), Chief Justice Prendergast devalued the treaty to what one might
call lex nullius [a nothing law]: So far indeed as that instrument purported to cede the sovereignty
it must be regarded as a simple nullity. No body politic existed capable of making cession of
sovereignty, nor could the thing itself exist.44 In this view, the Maori could not be considered
civilized enough to enter into legal relations with the Crown. It followed that Maori relations were
the business of the Crown in which the courts could not and did not interfere for the following
century. Prendergast was reverting to the legal fictions under which British imperial rule in Ireland
had been established and adding a new severity to them. Edward Coke had notoriously declared, in
1608, that non-Christian peoples were in law perpetui inimici, perpetual enemies (for the law
pressures not that they will be converted, that being remota potentia, a remote possibility) for
between them, as with the devil, whose subjects they be, and the Christian, there is perpetual hostility,
and can be no peace.45 By renewing this formula, Prendergast gave legal sanction to Carlyle's fears
that colonies were new forms of a black Ireland. In short, conversion was impossible and the
permanent war of visuality had to be supplemented with a permanent religious divide, understood as
that between the primitive or heathen, and the civilized or Christian.
Coke's opinion had been declared extrajudicial by Lord Mansfield, the same judge who declared
slavery to be illegal on British soil. Now Prendergast was reviving the doctrine of a permanent state
of exception for indigenous peoples, without even the possibility of redemption by religious
conversion. For the Maori renewal movements had convinced British authorities in New Zealand that
no such conversion could be trusted and that the Maori were always of the devil's party. In place of
negotiated sovereignty, the colonial assembly created what one modern legal scholar has called a
highly coercive system of confiscation, regrant and military settlementsimilar to the policies of the
English Government in 17th century Ireland, a resemblance also noted by critics in the period.46 The
treaty, already ignored de facto, was now de jure a nullity. By the time Froude visited New Zealand
in 1885, he did not even mention the treaty to disparage it. Maori rights to British citizenship, defined
in article 3, were also set aside by Wi Parata, placing Maori in a permanent state of exception,
subject to British Crown authority but with no legal standing to challenge that authority. Whereas
missionaries had set out to colonize indigenous consciousness, imperial authority designated the
native as a legal child, incapable either of being converted or of owning property. Under this new
hierarchy of the soul, it was now possible to imagine a different form of empire.

OCEANA
I shall take the transformation of James Anthony Froude, Carlyle's biographer and successor, from
self-styled radical to Caesarist imperialist as a guide to this emergence of imperial visuality, which is
not to say that he caused it. However, while we would now be hesitant to ascribe responsibility for a
major change in discursive practice to one historian, many who were both opposed to and supportive
of imperialism in the twentieth century did just that.47 Just as with Carlyle, I understand Froude as a
symptomatic interpreter of the discourse of power, certainly with personal influence, but significant
mostly as an indicator of the patterns of circulation that those supportive of imperialism could
perceive. Expelled from Oxford for his seemingly atheist novel, The Nemesis of Faith, in 1849,
Froude quickly abandoned his youthful radical views of the 1840s, under the influence of Carlyle's
On Heroes: The natural, Carlyle said, was the supernatural; the supernatural, the natural;he
showed how the great course of the world had been directed by gifted men who could see this truth

and dared to speak to it, and to act upon it; who had perceived the Divine presence and Divine
realitythe rule of gods being for a time or times made visibly recognizable.48 Froude sought this
connection in the history of the British empire and built his reputation on a monumental history of
Tudor England, published between 1856 and 1870. Over twelve volumes, he narrated England's rise
as a naval power, especially in the Americas, culminating with its defeat of the Spanish Armada. This
new power was in equal measure attributed to the virtues of Protestantism, to which Henry VIII had
committed the country in 1538, and to the sterling character of the English yeomanry. Although much
criticized by other professional historians, Froude's History of England was immensely popular and
helped reconfigure the popular history of Britain on the Tudor-Stuart period (such that there still
seems to be a new film about Elizabeth every year, usually featuring Cate Blanchett in the title role).
Visuality was now to be understood as History linked to the Divine by the agency of the British
empire. Froude's own history was in that sense an Old Testament foretelling the British seaborne
empire of his own day, for which he and Carlyle were the prophets. Indeed, after he had finished the
History of England, he began to advocate in journalistic essays published in Fraser's under his own
editorship for a wider federation of the colonies who are part of ourselves (meaning Canada,
Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand) with Britain.49 When a Conservative government was
returned to power in 1874, Froude carried out a diplomatic mission to South Africa, giving him the
opportunity to push his case for federation within government. In two subsequent travel accounts of
expeditions to the South Pacific (1886) and the Caribbean (1888), he mapped a global imperial
policy for a wider audience, updating Carlyle for the high imperial era. In his first such book,
Oceana, Froude looked at the ways in which Carlyle's heroism had entered its twilight but had
generated its successor in the global Anglophone empire. Froude claimed to recall how he had
imagined emigrating to New Zealand in the revolutionary time which preceded the convulsions of
1848, seeing his future as working on the land, rather than the scholarly life of a gentlemanhe had
in fact been offered a teaching position in Hobart Town, in Van Diemen's Land, present-day Tasmania,
then and now part of Australia.50 This displacement can be attributed to his sense that New Zealand
was a regeneration of England as it should be and had been in the past: England over again, set free
from the limitations of space.51 Space here was the key to a hierarchy of culture maintained without
recourse to chattel slavery. The Medusa effect of visuality, its attempt to petrify all attempts to
modernize, was deployed here to move a nation in space and time for a second effort at heroism.
On his travels Froude met some men who had taken the path of Antipodean regeneration, which led
him to conclude that the colonies in proportion to their population, have more eminent men than we
have, meaning the Hero as evoked by Carlyle.52 By contrast, he would soon write with his usual
distasteful racism that there had been no heroes in the Caribbean, unless philonegro enthusiasm can
make one out of Toussaint.53 Ironically, Froude's hostile account of the post-emancipation Caribbean
would create a tradition of vernacular heroes that has had global impact. The Trinidadian
schoolmaster John Jacob Thomas (184089) was so incensed by Froude's work that he wrote and
published in London a detailed refutation, wittily entitled Froudacity. Born just after the end of
slavery to a working-class family, Thomas was a product of the denominational and ward school
system in Trinidad, as he proudly declared, in 1884, in a dispute with a Catholic priest: I, who am
born of the people, and who belong to them, have better opportunities of knowing their feelings and
their needs than any outsider.54 Thomas was so much a vernacular hero that he compiled an
influential study of Creole, The Creole Grammar, which both validated the language and gave
fascinating insights into its use. For example, he documents how in allegorical stories cockroach

(ravette) was a term used to refer to the enslaved, while the chicken (poule) was the slaveowner.55 His critique of Froude similarly detailed how the British claim to fair play was in fact
undermined by such tactics as the use of Barbadian rowdies as policemen in Trinidad.56 Thomas
inspired his fellow Trinidadians, such as the world-renowned C. L. R. James, who re-read him in
1968 and concluded: From Toussaint Louverture to Fidel Castro, our people who have written pages
on the book of history, whoever and whatever they have been are West Indian, a particular social
product.57 James's remark, and personal example, show that vernacular and national heroes had
combined in the Caribbean as a counter to the persistent claim that European values and examples
were still the driving force in the region after emancipation.58
Returning to Froude's fantasy of England renewed in the South Pacific, we find him visiting Sir
George Grey, governor of New Zealand in 184553 and again in 186168, who was now playing the
part of an imperial minence grise. As Froude sat in Grey's study on the island of Kawau, surrounded
by medieval illuminated manuscripts, texts published under Cromwell's British Commonwealth, and
other obscurities, the two dreamed of a global Anglophone empire, bringing the United States back
into federation with Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.59 Yet Martin and Grey were men in
retirement, aware that their day was past and Froude hinted that, for all his devotion to Carlyle, the
era of the Hero was similarly in its twilight years. Froude's enthusiasm for the Anglo-Saxon life in
Australia and New Zealand was matched by his purported regret at the condition of the postemancipation Caribbean, which he saw as threatening to descend into anarchy on the model of
Ireland in terms of the British empire and that of Haiti in terms of the Caribbean.60 By contrast,
Froude claimed to find an already existing state of revived Englishness in the southern hemisphere.
These experiences in the colonies made him an advocate for a centrally controlled empire that would
build on the model of his new historical hero, Julius Caesar, rather than on that of even a limited
democracy.61 He was careful to say that the motive force of empire was the necessity of finding space
to restore the working population to rural activity and healthy living in order to sustain the native
vigour of our temperament.62 Whereas Carlyle had seen empire as the place to dispose of excess and
diseased portions of England, Froude gave expansion a vitalist tinge, while also claiming the status of
indigeneity for the English. In taking his title from James Harrington's seventeenth-century work of
constitutional theory, he made it clear that he was proposing a regeneration of the empire on the naval
model. That is to say, he wanted to see the colonies and the metropole recognized as one majestic
organism which may defy the storms of fate (15). In this way, Froude used the modern form of
biopower to reframe the traditional concept (as he saw it) of empire. Writing in the midst of the
perceived imperial crisis that followed the death of Gordon at Khartoum, Froude found the fault not
in individual ministers but in the parliamentary system (151), and while making careful use of syntax
to preserve what is now called deniability, he hoped for the coming of a new Caesar (152). He
attributed to Carlyle the idea that since the Reform Act of 1832, England had been under a spell that
had rendered it a nation of slaves, meaning that emancipation for the actually enslaved had
rendered the former masters into slaves. Now the ocean empire that Carlyle had dreamed of was at
hand (153), in which the nation was administered as a ship of war (183). Rather than divide the
empire into relatively autonomous nations with separate navies, Oceana would again become one
under a single command, operating to the codes of military discipline. Command would not be
bestowed in some imprecise way on Carlyle's mystical Hero, but the ship of state would instead be
subject to its captain, the new Caesar.

MANA AND BIOPOWER

The new imperial Caesar was empowered by an authority understood to be the modern counterpart to
the primitive theory of mana. The British missionary Robert Henry Codrington (18301922) began
the Western theorization of mana in Melanesia as part of a transformed missionary practice of the
Anglican diocese of New Zealand, established after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi under the
leadership of George Augustus Selwyn, an old Etonian and Cambridge don. Inspired by Newman's
Oxford Movement, like the young Froude, Selwyn envisaged a re-creation of the principles of the
early church, in its first three centuries, by aristocratic English missionaries in the islands of the South
Pacific.63 This imagined imperial community made use of Christian rather than capitalist notions of
simultaneity. Prefigured or prophetic events were in this view simultaneous with that which they
prophesied or with any future fulfillment of them, one of the capacities of Carlyle's visualizer.64
Selwyn's dream was enabled in 1861, when the Colonial Office agreed to allow Anglican dioceses to
extend beyond the borders of British sovereignty, thereby directly expanding the British imperial
sphere of influence. At this moment, missionaries literally became the foot soldiers of imperialism.
As a result, a new Bishopric of Melanesia was created, under the direction of another Etonian, J. C.
Patteson (182771), who created a missionary station named St Barnabas on the former penal colony
of Norfolk Island. In another curious coincidence, the island had recently become home to the
descendants of the Bounty mutineers against Captain Bligh, who had been moved from their refuge on
Pitcairn Island. Patteson established a classic disciplinary institution on the island, with life being
regulated by the ringing of bells in accord with a strict timetable. The station was intended to train
Melanesians in Christianity, who would then serve as missionaries to their home islandseven
conversion was a hierarchical process. In accord with Selwyn's heroic concept of the missionary,
there were no distinctions at the station, with all participating in some form of manual labor. Latenineteenth-century photographs of St Barnabas (too poor in quality to reproduce) show a recreation of
an Oxbridge college dining hall, with Gothic-style vaulting and gloomy oil paintings hung too high to
be seen in detail. In accord with the public-school ethos, physical exercise was conducted outside in
all weathers year round. Codrington arrived on the station in 1863, where he was to stay for twenty
years. Although remote, the islands were not excluded from global labor processes. The Queensland
parliament passed the Polynesian Labourers Act in 1868, allowing plantation labor recruiters to
visit the islands; in 1871 such recruiters took over fifty men and killed eighteen more from the
island of Nggela alone. In September of that year, Bishop Patteson was killed on the island of
Nukapu, most likely due to resentments over what Codrington accurately called the slave trade
which is desolating these islands.65 The British sent a gunboat and shelled the tiny island in
retaliation, completing the story's metonymic character as an illustration of high imperialism.
Codrington derived his understanding of Melanesian language and culture from the missionary
recruits that came to St Barnabas. However, he indicated that the majority of his sources came from
the small island of Mota Lava, in the Banks Islands, and the even smaller islet of Ra, fifteen
kilometers to the north of Mota.66 What these islands had in common was an established Christian
mission under local auspices. Sarawia, known to the missionaries as George, the first ordained
indigenous Christian priest, created a successful mission on Mota in 1869, complete with a church,
garden, and boarding-school. Codrington visited in 1870, commenting, with annoyance, They
assured me that they were quite enlightened and had done away with all bad customs and were just
like us.67 In fact he found his efforts at conversion satirized by a local man who, after a stint of labor

in Queensland, wore Western dress and smoked a pipe. In his extensive photographic work,
Codrington was careful to exclude all such contaminating evidence of modernity. Unsurprisingly, he
concluded that everything in this work depends on getting a native who can work on his people.68
However, a hurricane that struck in 1873, resulting in food shortages and epidemics, was blamed on
the new religion and the new recruits fell away, reverting by 1875 to a state that one British officer
found very dirty compared with those of Samoa or Fiji even.69 That left only the small station on
Ra, under the command of Henry Tagalad, where things continued to proceed quietly and orderly,
as a mission statement asserted in 1876, always to the sound of bells. The place of intersection
between the West and its primitive ancestry had become almost vanishingly small.
Codrington's theories need to be understood as the product of a certain form of imperial
Englishness, rather than as modern anthropological fieldwork, just as the revisionist historiography of
anthropology of the past twenty-five years would lead us to expect.70 To be fair, in his first article
(although much less so in the subsequent book to which most have referred), Codrington was aware
of the difficulties of establishing communications about indigenous beliefs: The young people among
the islands know very little indeed of what the elders believe, and have very little sight of their
superstitious observances. The elders are naturally disinclined to communicate freely concerning
subjects round which, among Christian converts, there hangs a certain shame; while those who are
still heathen will speak with reserve of what retains a sacred character.71 At the same time, his
theoretical understanding of religion was well suited to anthropological uses. He believed that no
religion was without value and that there was in all people the common foundationwhich lies in
human nature itself, ready for the superstructure of the Gospel.72
His findings on mana were presented first to the Royal Anthropological Society, in 1881, and then
published in his book The Melanesians (1891), where he defined mana as what works to effect
everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature; it is
present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons and things, and is manifested by results
which can only be ascribed to its operation.73 Mana was, then, the motivating power of life, that
which gave it direction. Properly harnessed, it would be a vital medium for modern biopower, in the
sense that a medium sustains a biological culture grown in it. When Codrington presented his theory
in London, his audience immediately extended his inference, in keeping with Tylor's contention that
what is law is law everywhere, drawing comparisons between mana and African, Australian,
Babylonian, and Egyptian beliefs. It was, said one, the ancient type of fetishism.74 In the imperial
worldview, there was now an ethnographic hierarchy of time in which people, living and dead, were
allotted places on the ladder of civilization. If that ladder allocated places to all, it did not mean that
all were capable of climbing it, but rather that History was now the means of distributing and
organizing the sensible. The zones of exclusion and inclusion crossed and divided geographical and
political borders, so that the metropolitan working class, or the inhabitants of the South within
Europe, such as the Italian mezzogiorno or the whole of Greece, were considered closer to the
actually existing primitives of the South Pacific than to the imperial elite because of their
regressive adherence to the collective form of life. What was being enacted in the high imperial
period, and is being revisited in certain quarters today, was a visualization of History that projected
specific notions of the sacred into a generalized, hierarchical, and abstracted biopower. Mana was
identified as majesty and force because the missionaries brought with them a strong sense of History
as being shaped by precisely such supernatural powers.
Two modes of social, cultural, and governmental classification rendered these abstractions

concrete. The first was the concept of the norm and the resulting predication of social laws from
what has been called the rise of statistical thinking.75 Understood as a form of observation,
statistics were first applied to the production of actuarial predictions for insurance companies.
Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian scientist, applied this probability theory to what he called social
mechanics in order to generate his concept of l'homme moyen, or the average man. As Lennard J.
Davis has shown, Quetelet's exaltation of the average, well suited to Louis-Philippe's monarchical
strategy of the juste milieu, was revised by the eugenicist Francis Galton to what was known as a
normal distribution in ranked order. This tabulation could then valorize desired characteristics, such
as height or intelligence, rather than tending to the average.76 The rankings were divided into
quartiles, allowing for a clear distinction to be made between those above and below average. It was
not for nothing that one account of statistics declared that humanity is regarded as a sort of volume of
German memoirs, of the kind described by Carlyle, and all it wants is an index.77 Galton believed
that his statistical method provided that index and sought to demonstrate that genius was hereditary
and limited to a very small number of people, numbering some 250 in every million. He studied
various categories of distinction, from judges to rowers and (oddly) hereditary peers, and concluded,
in the style of Carlyle, that no one who is acquainted with the biographies of the heroes of history,
can doubt the existence of grand-human animals, of natures pre-eminently noble, of individuals born
to be kings of men.78 Heroes were now a standard deviation. In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois named the
second institution of division predicated on the hierarchy of civilization as the color line. As
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently emphasized, the color line was global, reaching
from America to Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific as an institutional divide between the lighter and
the darker skinned. In an article entitled The Souls of White Folk (1910), Du Bois emphasized that
material advantage lay behind this division: Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and
ever, Amen.79 It need hardly be added that these two modes of division tended to overlap each other,
so that Galton argued for eugenic improvement of the racial stock both by excluding so-called
undesirables and by sustaining the color line to prevent social and sexual interaction between
races.
In the early twentieth century, leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, this hierarchy was
organized into a discursive structure, linking missionary activity and anthropology to classical
scholarship in a sharing of the imperial sensible. By the time of the first World Missionary
Conference, held at Edinburgh in 1910, there was majority support for the concept that animistic
religions had some points of contact with Christianity and were not, then, wholly false.80 Here
Codrington and his fellow aristocratic missionaries had developed Carlyle's vision of heroism as a
gradually accumulating form of Truth, which was known in some respects to the Norse legends and to
Islam. Now this accumulation was seen to be taking place in the same moment of time in different
places at separated levels of History, demarcated as the primitive and the civilized. Codrington's
concept of mana (as opposed to the Melanesian's own understanding of it) was vital as a form of
connection between these zones of culture, and as such it played a central role in the modern
theorizing of the primitive from Marcel Mauss to Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Claude LviStrauss. In a chain of intellectual reinforcement, these ideas found their way into interpretations of
Roman imperial power and from there into theories of the state of exception. Giorgio Agamben has
recently seen this sense of mana as being essential to the undefinability of the force of law and
authority: It is as if the suspension of law freed a force or a mystical element, a sort of legal mana
(the expression is used by Wagenvoort to describe the Roman auctoritas).81 In Agamben's view,

then, the modern use of mana has reinforced and transmitted the ancient slaveholding concept of
authority as power over slaves complemented by the interpretation of messages.
While that analogy was certainly made, what should be taken into account here are the very unusual
circumstances of Codrington's research and the resulting error in his conclusions. Far from being a
universal trope of the primitive mind, the idea of mana was an imperial genealogy of High Church
Anglicanism derived from what the missionaries believed to be the originary primitiveness of the
Melanesians. This idea was one so shaped by the imperial state of exception that it is hardly
surprising that it seems congruous with it. Agamben's historico-philosophical version of biopower
misses the critical genealogical lesson and takes effect for cause. It is important to emphasize that it
has now been established by the anthropologist Roger Keesing that mana is a stative verb not a
noun. Consequently, things that are mana are efficacious, potent, successful, true, fulfilled, realized:
they work. Mana-ness is a state of efficacy, success, truth, potency, blessing, luck, realizationan
abstract state or quality, not an invisible spiritual substance or medium.82 That being the case, there
is no sense in which a state of exception could be enabled by mana, given that the state of exception is
a crisis of governance. Precisely because terminology is the properly poetic moment of thought,
these issues matter greatly.83 For we are now being asked to accept that sacredness is a line of flight
still present in contemporary politics, a view that would have been congenial to the missionaries and
imperial administrators under discussion here. That is not to say that there is no place for religion in
understanding politics today, of course, but that there is not a persistent and consistent transhistorical
discourse of power that can be named as that religion. When former President George W. Bush
claimed wide-ranging authority after 9/11, it was under article 2 of the Constitution.
This sense of mana as a transhistorical source of authority nonetheless played a key role in modern
thought, precisely as engendered by its difference from the primitive. In Emile Durkheim's theory of
religion, published in 1912, mana was majesty, force, and the Hero rendered into a religious
principle: The idea of majesty is essentially religious. His example was taken from the select
number of souls or tindalo that were worshipped in Melanesia: Not every tindalo is the object of
these ritual practices. That honor goes only to those that emanate from men who, during their
lifetimes, were credited by public opinion with the very special virtue that the Melanesians call
mana.84 He then cited Codrington's definition of mana in full to complete his definition of what one
might call the primitive Hero, constructed in and as biopower. Durkheim developed his concept of
mana by arguing that totemism represents in imaginary forms taken from plants and animals all the
nonphysical forces that the diffuse and anonymous force of mana comprehends. He rhetorically
asked, Does a man win out over his competitors in the hunt or in war? It is because he has more
orenda, an Iroquois term that Durkheim proposed as yet another synonym for mana.85 Developing
Marcel Mauss's theory that all magic is mana, Durkheim argued that such social harnessing of force
was also seen in modern historical events, such as the Crusades or the French Revolution, thereby
crossing the divide between primitive and modern.86 The idea of the Hero that had taken the
missionaries into the South Pacific and shaped their sense of evangelism as a projection of light into
the space of early history had come full circle to its beginnings in Carlyle's choleric study of
revolutionary France.
Scholars and administrators of what Foucault called governmentality consequently became
interested at this point in what Robert R. Marett (18661943) considered to be the observable
phenomena of transition between the primitive and the modern. In this view, the types of human
culture are, in fact, reducible to two. One would be the subject of anthropology, which Marett

created as a degree field at the University of Oxford, in 1908, and the other that of the humanities,
with the latter finding its source in the literatures of Greece and Rome. Thus, anthropology could
help classicists interpret the ancient foundations of Greece and Rome in the period prior to surviving
textual sources in Latin. Trained as a classicist, Marett wrote extensively on mana and the Australian
aboriginals, despite making only one brief visit to Australia, in 1914. For, like Tylor, he presumed
that the ethnographer in his library may sometimes presume to decide, not only whether a particular
explorer is a shrewd and honest observer, but also whether what he reports is conformable to the
general rules of civilization.87 In order to determine those rules, Marett organized a lecture series on
Anthropology and the Classics at Oxford in 1908, including scholars like Warde Fowler (1847
1921), whose theories of homo sacer have recently become the subject of renewed attention.88
Fowler's own investigations into primitive Italy were predicated on a direct analogy between
Polynesian and Melanesian practice as described by Marett. He cited with approval Marett's thesis
that sacer was originally a form of taboo, although Marett had no experience of the South Pacific
whatsoever.89 Led by H. J. Rose, British classical scholarship continued to draw a close connection
with Codrington's view of mana until after the Second World War, by which time it had become an
element in texts aiming at the general book-reading public.90 This change at Oxford was not a simple
antiquarian diversion, but a shift in the mode of imperial discourse from what one might call
separate spheres, the radical distinction between the savage and the civilized, to a continuum
that extended from the primitive to the modern across an invisible but decisive break at the point
when the indigenous Italians began to become Romans under Greek influence. Imperial visuality
froze the implicit possibility of an ongoing progression in human society in this anthropological
model into a permanent separation.
The anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss was among the first to criticize such parallels between the
Polynesians and the ancient Romans, in 1950. Lvi-Strauss asserted that the mystification of the
concept of mana had obscured its general condition as an expression of the relationship of nonequivalencebetween signifier and signified. For Lvi-Strauss, mana functioned like the general
term truc in French, that is to say, as a notion that a person has something, as in the expression
that a woman has got oomph.91 His investment was in presenting mana as a universal and
permanent form of thought that, far from being divided by History, was in effect outside history
altogether. While this antiracist form was certainly preferable, the sexist choice of example was
unfortunate and perhaps revealing. It is by no means unsayable what oomph might mean, except that
it might breach the conventions of polite (sexist) society. Lvi-Strauss dismissed the religious concept
of mana as the sacred, but replaced it with the transcendental signified to which any signifier must be
in a relation of inadequation.92 The brilliance of this strategy is undermined when it is realized
that mana is not a thing (truc), but a verbit cannot therefore be a floating signifier or have
zero symbolic value, because it is a term concerning action. Even Lvi-Strauss's intervention did
not put the theory to rest within classical history. Ironically, when Georges Dumzil did finally
challenge the idea that mana was the key to understanding early Roman religion, he did so by means
of substituting another mythology, that of the perfect continuity of the Indo Europeans who became
the Romans, who preserved without a break, without a slump, the conception which had already
formed before their migrations and which is indicated everywhere and has been since the dawn of
history, that is to say, the idea of God.93 The concept of the Indo-European has gone out of favor in
recent years, but such transhistorical generalizations have a life of their own. So even though the
debate over the supposedly conservative nature of ancient Roman religion is now literally

academic, albeit with the leading scholars now seeing the historical process as far more complicated,
its deployment by Agamben and others within discourses surrounding the current state of exception
continues to make the issue contemporary.94 By using mana in the traditional fashion to indicate a
quality of the ancient West deduced from modern primitives, Agamben postulates a history of the
state of exception that of necessity has its own exceptionall those nations and legal systems that
are not posited on Roman law and its presumed universality. Further, this Western modernity,
however little he finds to praise in it, must be considered in a state of advancement over its
primitive origins. The discourse of the state of exception has thus ironically proved to be a
reinforcement to the idea of Western exceptionalism.

PROLETARIAN COUNTERVISUALITY
By contrast, nineteenth-century working-class and radical intellectuals created a decolonial
genealogy of the classical period that could inform and authorize resistance to modern imperialism as
a continuance of ancient class struggle. These activist scholars used modern scholarship to present an
alternative understanding of classical history that characterized the Romans as slave-owning
aristocrats, actively resisted by proletarian leadership. Just as the Maori had deliberately predicated
themselves as Jews to the British Christians, so did European radicals identify as the descendants of
Roman slaves in ongoing resistance to classicizing aristocrats. In this view, the proles of ancient
Rome had engendered the proletarian of industrial Europe, a Tradition from below to set against
Carlyle's Tradition of Heroes. Its primary strategy was the general strike, looking back to Chartism
and the Commune and anticipating a twentieth-century revolution that was yet to come. It was placed
in a genealogy beginning with Moses and the Israelites leaving Egypt, continuing with the slave
revolts of Antiquity epitomized by Spartacus, and revived in the modern period as the definitive
means of proletarian emancipation. As the counterpoint to the hierarchy of imperial visuality, the
general strike was a tactic for visualizing the contemporary by creating a general image of the social.
Often inspired by Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, such accounts
represented Christianity as a negative and destructive force, rather than as the epitome of the
civilized. Reviewing these efforts, the historian Raphael Samuel has suggested that the articulation of
the class struggle in Antiquitymay be said to have been the principal site on which the claims of
historical materialism were advanced.95 This alternative genealogy would produce the May Day
holiday, Georges Sorel's 1906 theory of the general strike, the Spartacists of 1918 in Germany, and
the radical Plebs League in early-twentieth-century Britain. The general strike is here understood
not simply as a work stoppage but as the right to look: to see and be seen by each other within a
historical moment and to know how things stood.
An early example of the linkage of ancient and modern class struggle was the collection of essays
by the Chartist leader James O'Brien, known as Bronterre O'Brien, published in 1885, some twenty
years after his death, in 1864, entitled The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery. O'Brien
offered a concise and compelling world history, arguing what are called the Working Classes are
the slave populations of civilized countries. Furthermore, the genealogy of these new slaves led
directly back to the slaves of the ancient world, for ancient Roman proletarians were the
descendants of manumitted slaves who had no property but their children (proles). These
emancipated slaves, whose sign, the so-called Phrygian bonnet, became the emblem of revolution and
equality in the modern period, formed the ranks of hired labor in the ancient world, as well as its

beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. In O'Brien's view, the modern period saw the development and
progress of Proletarianism, which was consequent upon the breaking up of the old system of slavery,
and has ever since gained more and more strength in every age, till, in our own times, it has made
Proletarians of three-fourths of the people of every civilized country.96 Ancient and modern slavery
had combined to produce the proletarian, a new name for an old figure in Western history.
Most influential of all such publications was C. Osbourne Ward's (18341902) two-volume
history, The Ancient Lowly (1888), originally printed and circulated privately, and then reissued, in
1907, by a co-operative publishing house owned by sixteen hundred socialist clubs and individual
socialists.97 Ward had been a member of the Working Men's Party in 1870s New York that later
became the People's Party, in 1874.98 He went on to work as a translator for the United States Bureau
of Labor, from 1885 until his death.99 His substantial history of the class conflict in antiquity was
presented as work in tune with the latest scholarship, inspired by the legendary German classicist
Theodor Mommsen. It was based on his reading and translation of the inscriptions he had gathered,
blended with his eclectic reading from modern anthropology and garnering of information from
encyclopedias and dictionaries. His philological concerns and explorations of the origins of certain
ancient rituals and practices seem curiously familiar in the wake of the classicizing impulse in recent
critical theory. At the same time, Ward offered his book as academic sociology and popular news,
information to motivate his readers in the present day, highlighting the simple existence of figures like
Eunus, Achaeus, and Cleon, whose army of rebel slaves in Sicily was composed of 200,000 men at
its height, in 140 B.C.E. According to Ward, under the self-created monarchy of Eunus, the formerly
enslaved dominated the region from 143 to 133 B.C.E., defeating Roman armies in numerous
encounters.100 He gave a lengthy account of the triumphs of the revolutionary gladiator-slave
Spartacus, composed from ancient and modern authorities, motivated by strong support for the rebels,
in contrast to the standard hostility.
Nonetheless, even in the case of Spartacus, Ward emphasized that all the general strikes of
antiquity met with the same ultimate fate of violent defeat and mass executions as a suggestive hint to
modern anarchists.101 It was also a new account in its presentation of the ancient past such that the
ancient collegii were described as trade unions rather than guilds or any such neutral term, and
the gaps in the historical record pertaining to the general strikes of ancient times were attributed to the
censorship of the slave-owning aristocracy. One assertion that particularly incensed those few
professional scholars who noticed Ward's work was that the red flag adopted by socialists in the
nineteenth century was the vexillum of ancient origin, generating the ineffaceable love in the strictly
proletarian class, for the beautiful and incomputably aged red banner.102 In support of this assertion,
Ward cited Tylor's Primitive Culture on the power of habit, just as the Caesarists used mana as
evidence of their case. In short, like C. L. R. James after him, Ward used the language and concepts of
the class struggle of his own time to offer a historical genealogy of conflict from within the very heart
of the legacy claimed by the ruling classes of his own day. This history from below in all senses
recognized that its task was to create an alternative mode of historical identification for the (wouldbe) revolutionary, entailing the creation of a countervisuality. The British anarcho-syndicalist J. H.
Harley even claimed the same origin for this politics, in 1912: The nineteenth century presented
itself to the great writer, Thomas Carlyle, who was the first to catch its syndicalist spirit, as primarily
a century of revolution.103 Revolutionaries must then express themselves in the terms set by Carlyle,
as the manifesto of the Plebs League, formed from British miners and railwaymen, declared, in 1909:
Inability to recognize the class cleavage was responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. Let

the Plebs of the 20th century not be so deluded. The clear seeing of the field of battle will alone save
us from the follies and tragedies of compromise.104
For over twenty years prior to this declaration, artists and activists in the European labor
movement had tried to realize this clear seeing. The countervisuality that the radical political
groups of the period were attempting to create came to use different tools than the traditional work of
art as its means of experimenting with both form and content. Anarchist newspapers, magazines, and
journals extensively discussed and debated art from the late 1880s onward. Yet writers often
expressed a perplexity as to the meaning of art or aesthetics in the context of modern social crisis and
were more forceful in denouncing the prevailing art establishment. The syndicalist activist and writer
Fernand Pelloutier (18671901) created a journal entitled L'Art Social, in 1891, to add to the
communism of bread, the communism of artistic pleasures, refering to Joseph Tortellier's practice of
distributing free bread in working-class districts.105 Pelloutier and others were by now convinced
both that the Rights of Man were permanently in default under the system of industrial capital, and that
the urban insurrections of 17891871 stood no chance of success against modern armies. In 1898,
when Pelloutier visited an anti-Dreyfusard meeting in a working-class area of Paris, he was disturbed
to hear chants of Long live the King! Down with the Jews! This experience prompted him to
imagine the creation of a museum of labor to counter such prejudices. His idea followed the
establishment of courses and libraries for those in search of work at the bourses de travail, and the
museums of the evening that the art critic Gustave Geoffroy had proposed to inspire industrial
design. The proposed Museum of Labor would have had as many sections as there were local unions
to display the history of their products, as well as the comparative situation of the capitalist and the
worker, which Pelloutier believed would be far more effective than yet more oratory.106 Unlike
other museums, the Museum of Labor was to visualize the present by making the class struggle known
through the silent eloquence of its displays, because in the general insanity that characterizes this
century, words themselves lose their meaning.107 Using the comparative method, Caesarism's mana
was to be countered with a visual display of the power of labor.
Like the Panopticon, the Museum of Labor was not actually built, but it was performatively created
by means of the struggle to establish an international holiday of labor on the first of May, now known
as May Day, widely understood across the radical movement as the first step toward a societychanging general strike. For Rosa Luxemburg, May Day was a festival [that] may naturally be raised
to a position of honor as the first great demonstration under the aegis of mass struggle.108 In its
nineteenth-century form, the May Day holiday, or mass refusal to work, was called in support of the
eight-hour working day. The eight-hour day had first been claimed by white trade unionists in the
colony of Victoria (now federated within Australia) as early as 1856.109 Radicals in Chicago
demonstrated for the shorter day on May Day 1886, leading to police violence and the retaliation
several days later that is known as the Haymarket Affair. The American example led the first meeting
of the Second International Working Men's Association of 1889 to call for a global observance of
May Day in 1890. On that day, Engels wrote the fourth preface to the Communist Manifesto and
observed: The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalists and landowners of all
lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united. If only Marx were with
me to see it with his own eyes!110 The May Day demonstration, like the general strike, was intended
to make the strength of the proletariat visible to itself and to visualize the class struggle.
In Milan, where the working week was some sixty-three hours, organized labor called a general
strike in support of May Day.111 Fully aware of what was at stake, the Italian army attacked the

demonstrators. The Italian artist Emilio Longoni painted the scene, including the army's assault, first
exhibited at the first Brera Triennale, in 1891, under the title May 1, now known by its later title The
Orator of the Strike.112 The painting is dominated by a mason in his work clothes addressing the
crowd while hanging loosely from a height of scaffolding. Longoni placed a red lantern at the corner
of the scaffold, evoking the French revolutionary imagery of the Lantern (the street lighting from
which those declared to be enemies of the revolution were hanged). While the Lantern harked back to
1789, Longoni painted it red, the color of modern socialism. The Lantern reframes the space away
from the edge of the canvas, offering only a blurry view of the main body of the crowd and the
intrusion of the army. Although he was experimenting with the divisionist brushstroke, that is to say
the dot technique associated with Seurat and Signac, May 1 is more notable for its unusual pictorial
space. The orator's body angles out over the crowd, supported only by his right hand, which grips the
scaffolding, and by his feet, which are precariously balanced on the top of a fence. His left fist thrusts
toward the spectator, and two other clenched fists rise from the crowd toward him, although only the
front row of men are distinguishable as individuals. The painterly innovations that Longoni used
paradoxically mitigated against a clear seeing of the strike as a collective action. Further, Longoni's
retitling of the painting called attention to the orator as the subject rather than to the collective
practice of the strike. By naming the speaker as an orator, Longoni referenced the classical tradition
of oratory as practiced in the Roman Senate and the French Revolution. If May 1 is a remarkable
evocation of the continuity between 1789 and 1891, it did not in itself manage to create a counter to
imperial visuality. That was the function of the great demonstrations themselves, as none other than
Lenin observed in an early pamphlet, written from prison in 1896, calling May Day a general
holiday of Labor. Leaving the stifling factories they march with unfurled banners, to the strains of
music, along the main streets of the cities, demonstrating to the bosses their continuously growing
power.113 For activists like Rosa Luxemburg, May Day was an internationalist, anti-imperial, and
antiwar tactic that showed that international laborers would never go to war against each other, an
illusion shattered in 1914.
In this moment of coming into visibility, proletarian countervisuality adopted the strategy of the
general strike as the means of creating a general image of the state of the class struggle. Since the
Chartist National Holiday, the general strike had emerged as a composite of revolution and messianic
hope for the future in the face of modern armed forces. In his address to the 1899 Congress of the
Socialist Party, Aristide Briand, a future government minister, argued that the general strike could
change the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen from words to realities, while
avoiding violence.114 This assertion of the revival of rights by means of the strike was a consistent
feature of radical propaganda. Consequently, the general strike was often described as utopian, a
characterization revolutionaries at different moments refused and embraced. Even in the syndicalist
newspaper La Grve Gnrale (The General Strike), it was argued, in 1894, that the general strike
was only a dream because the impoverished workers would not have enough food to survive the
weeks or months that the strike would take to prevail.115 Such was the outcome of a miners strike
depicted by Emile Zola in his novel of the same name. At the same time, a popular anarchist song
hailed the strike: Voila, voila, voila mon rve! [There, there, there it is my dream!], a tradition that
foreshadowed the 1968 slogan Take your dreams for reality.116
Following the successful agitation for May Day, the general strike seemed to have become a viable
strategy for French workers to attain specific goals. In 1906, the Confderation Gnrale de Travail,
the leading French trade union, adopted the general strike as its political strategy. Rosa Luxemburg

understood the Russian Revolution of 1905 as the enactment of the general strike that showed a
typical picture of the logical development and at the same time of the future of the revolutionary
movement on the whole.117 The mass strike could be used to visualize the proletariat and the class
movement as a key tactic of demonstration, whether or not it achieved an overall change in social
relations.118 The strikes she cited were often local, spontaneous actions, sometimes following the
state of exception that is caused by a holiday for a monarch's funeral or coronation. These strikes
were general not because everyone took part, but because their aim was a general transformation
and renunciation of domination. The effect was to transform the theoretical and latent class
consciousness imbued by the activities of political parties into a practical and active strategy on
what she called the political battle field.119 Here she mixed the metaphors of the dreamwork of
the general strike visualizing latent understandings with the long-standing sense of history itself as a
visualized conflict.
It was left to a retired civil servant and political theorist named Georges Sorel to draw all these
strands of activism and theory together in a series of essays written from 19057, published in book
form as Reflections on Violence, in 1908. Sorel endorsed the general strike as pure revolt, to be
enacted on the Greek model of selfless individual warfare, rather than that of the disciplined but
bloodthirsty modern army. The Homeric hero, or the foot soldier in France's revolutionary wars,
fought as an individual on whom all depended, in contrast to the modern war directed by generals as
theorized by Clausewitz. Against the lone Hero who could visualize the battlefields of modern life, it
was the collective visualization of the workers that enabled them to understand modern life as war.
Proponents of the general strike came to see it as a transposition of war into the social terrain, a
counter to visuality visualizing the social as a battlefield. Edouard Berth quoted Proudhon's definition
of war as applying to the general strike: A mixture of genius, bravery, poetry, passion, supreme
justice and tragic heroismtheir majesty astonishes us.120 For Sorel, the general strike was the
expression of individualistic force in the rebellious masses; it followed that we are led to regard
art as an anticipation of the highest form of production, an idea that has been fulfilled in today's
virtuoso and creative workforce.121 Thus the general strike formed by a series of individual choices
akin to that of the artist would create a complete picture of history as it then was. Sorel saw this
picture as incarnating the popular will to act inherent in the various declarations of the Rights of
Man, and thus as depicting a popular history of centuries standing.122 While radicals felt that the texts
of the Rights of Man were now ignored, this visualization was the means to restore their efficacy. The
general strike, notes Sorel, is the most effective tool available to radicals because it encompasses
all of socialism; that is to say [it is] an arrangement of images capable of evoking instinctively all
of the sentiments which correspond to the various manifestations of the war waged by socialism
against modern society. Strikes have inspired in the proletariat the noblest, deepest and most forceful
sentiments that it possesses; the general strike groups them all into a general unified image. Thus
we obtain that intuition of socialism that language could not give in a perfectly clear wayand we
obtain it as an instantly perceivable whole.123 Following Bergson's notion of the intuition of
reality, Sorel argued that it was through the general image produced by the strike that the movement
comes to a collective self-awareness that it otherwise lacks, albeit only for that moment.124 For Sorel
(quoting Bergson), the moments where we capture ourselves for ourselves are rare and that is why
we are rarely free.125 In short, the general strike creates countervisuality, a brief possibility of
seeing things as they actually are, who is with you and who against, just as Carlyle had claimed the
Hero could do. If visuality was the visualization made by a general, countervisuality emerged in the

modern period as the collective picture produced by the right to look claimed in the general strike.
It was nonetheless just a few years after Sorel had theorized the visualization of the general strike
that he joined Mussolini in search of a new Caesarism. Like many others, Sorel had been influenced
by Gustave Le Bon's tract The Psychology of Crowds (1895), which reconceptualized visuality for
the era of mass society and mass organization.126 Le Bon's work was extensively critiqued by Freud
and was hailed in 1954 as perhaps the most influential book ever written in social psychology.127 It
certainly grasped the balance of visuality and countervisuality that this chapter has attempted to
describe. Le Bon identified the then present as a key turning point in history, brought about by the
entry of the popular classes into politics. Here he was thinking not just of universal suffrage, but also
of syndicalism and trade-union activism, which would culminate in the politics of May Day and then
the general strike. Like Carlyle, Le Bon feared that such efforts in spite of all economic laws tend to
regulate the conditions of labor and wagesand amount to nothing less than a determination to
destroy utterly society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive
communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization.128
He thus equated the social egalitarianism of the Second International and syndicalist groups with the
primitive communism held to be endemic in undeveloped societies such as those of the South
Pacific. Against the new divine right of crowds could be found only the modern equivalent of the
world's masters, who fully understood the psychology and character of crowds. These new heroes
would offer up images to the crowd because [a] crowd thinks in images, and the image itself
immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first.129 This
irrational mode of thought led to the crowd having respect only for force as manifested by a certain
kind of hero: The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar.130 For
Le Bon, the crowd thinks in images, like the savage, the child, or women. Its desire for a return to
primitive communism can only be countered by a leader with sufficient power, or mana, to sway its
unconscious desires, namely a Caesar. Le Bon seemed to at once imagine and desire the Caesarism of
Italian fascism in particular and the charismatic dictatorship so pervasive in the twentieth century in
general. In Froude's view, the uniting force behind this single organic entity was the common stock,
the formation of a race of forty-five million Anglo-Saxons dispersed across the globe. Le Bon
shared this emphasis on the fundamental notion of race which dominates all the feelings and all the
thoughts of men.131 Visuality was now the imagining of this global racialization within a hierarchical
concept of civilization. With the collapse of the imperial age following the First World War, the
hierarchy of races was to become racialized war under fascism.

THE HERO AS DUCE

Fascism created a visuality closer to Carlyle than to Froude, an aesthetic glorification of the
leader.132 No moment more clearly enshrined the leader as a Hero with capacities exceeding those of
all others. The beholders of the fascist leader had two functions: first, to form a ground against which
the leader's brilliance could be seen; and, second, to serve as the raw material for the leader to work
with, as if he were an artist, but also to hate, motivating fascism's violence. Beginning with this
distance between the leader and the mass, fascism aestheticized separation and the separation of
bodies in physical space. Fascism is the highpoint of what Susan Buck-Morss has called the theme
of the autonomous, autotelic subject as sense-dead, and for this reason a manly creator, a self-starter,
sublimely self-contained.133 Many in the period saw this idea as originating with Carlyle's

encomium to the Hero. Carlyle had been cited with approval by Edouard Drumont, the French theorist
of antisemitism, in his defining text of modern reaction, La France Juive (1886), a reference later
expanded by Maurice Barrs, the anti-Dreyfusard writer and politician.134 Such connections led to
Carlyle being seen as a prophet of fascism in general and of Mussolini in particular. With fascism in
the ascendant in Italy, a professor named Guido Fornelli published a short biography of Carlyle in
1921, comparing his work to that of Marx: Carlyle had a more objective vision of the social
problem, he understood the complexity and instability of its aspects, and perhaps we shall see in the
very near future that he did not speak in vain.135 Once the fascist regime had been established, in
1922, another professor, named Licciardelli, published a similar comparative study of Carlyle and
Mussolini, proclaiming the former as the prophet of a new social order, which, at the distance of a
century, it has been given to Benito Mussolini to put on a solid footing, inaugurating the realization of
the work conceived by the great English idealist.136 Such views were also common in the
Anglophone world. A British literature professor named Herbert Grierson published a lecture entitled
Carlyle and Hitler, whose title tells all one needs to know of it. An American academic got into the
act by publishing a newspaper article of similar import under the title Carlyle Rules the Reich,
which wanted to show Anglophone readers that the strange philosophy of Hitler was in fact very
similar to the solutions proposed by Carlyle to the problems of our industrial civilization.137 These
ideas did not go unnoticed in Germany itself, where Carlyle was hailed a forerunner of Fuhrerthinking by academics in the newly purged German university system.138
The fascist leader was nonetheless by no means identical to the Hero. Fascist leadership required
that its self-containment be acknowledged by the masses. Consequently, the masses were needed as
the object of the fascist artist-leader's work, causing him to both need and detest them, as Mussolini
attested, in 1932: When I feel the masses in my hands, since they believe in me, or when I mingle
with them, and they almost crush me, then I feel like one with the masses. However there is at the
same time a little aversion. Doesn't the sculptor sometimes break the marble out of rage, because it
does not precisely mold into his hands according to his vision?Everything depends on that, to
dominate the masses as an artist.139
What the fascist wanted was to be seen but in an entirely passive modality. Whereas Bentham had
wanted his jailer to see without being seen, the fascist leader wanted to be seen without anyone
looking, if we take looking to be an active critical engagement with sense perception. At the
Nuremburg rallies, designed by the architect Albert Speer to create a cathedral of light, the mass
needed to be in attendance to create the proper environment for the Fhrer to be seen. This was in no
sense an exercise of the right to look by the mass, but rather its utter negation. The light pillars created
by Speer seemed to give material form to the concept of the Hero as what Carlyle had called a light
fountain, while the vassals of the Hero formed material shadows to put him into relief. In making that
darkness part of its bureaucratic policy, fascist terror tried to normalize genocide. In terms of fascist
visuality, if the presence of the mass created the shadow necessary to make the leader visible, the
victims of genocide were the invisibility against which fascist visuality visualized itself. The work of
genocide was to take those who it was believed should be invisible and render them hypervisible as
a means to make them properly, finally, invisible. Such measures as the Nuremberg Laws of 1934,
with the infamous requirement of the yellow (and other) stars, the street violence that culminated in
the Kristallnacht of 1938, and the segregation of Jews rendered these racialized Others into
hypervisible form. The work of genocide was to make the Other permanently invisible. As is now
well-known, the Nazis made every effort to keep their crimes secret and invisible. Among those who

remained, regardless of whether or not they knew, this invisibility of the Jews and other Others
was, as intended, intensely visible, following their previous hypervisibility. It was unspeakable in
both senses, unnameable and revolting, yet present. It was this rendering of racialization by means of
spacing, the massive bureaucracy of coordinated dispersal, dissemination, and secret regathering, that
epitomized the work of fascist visuality to create a ground against which the Leader might be beheld.

SIX
Antifascist Neorealisms
North-South and the Permanent Battle for Algiers

Confronted with the disasters of the twentieth century (and now those of the twenty-first), antifascism
has had two tasks. First, to depict the reality of fascist violence as violence, and not as an artwork.
Next it must offer a different possibility of real existence to confront the fascist claim that only the
leader could resolve the problems of modern society. It meant claiming a place from which there is a
right to look, not just behold the leader. For both W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonio Gramsci, writing in
the 1930s, that place was what they called the South, understood as the complex and difficult place
from which resistance had to begin and also as the emergent future. The mistake of the antifascist Left,
in this view, was to ignore the South as an atavistic relic of servile relations, failing to realize that
such relations were as much part of modernity as heavy industry. Fascism itself can be situated as a
South-North flow of colonial politics, sometimes literally, as in the case of Franco's use of Moroccan
armies in Spain, more often metaphorically in the installation of a police state, above all in Germany.
Antifascism did not fully succeed in creating a form of realism from the South until after the Second
World Warwhich was by no means the end of fascism, as Frantz Fanon made clear in his writing on
Algeria. Indeed, in thinking through how fascist visuality came to be the intensified modality of the
imperial complex, I kept coming up against the place of Algeria and the battle for Algiers during and
after the revolutionary war (195462). The Algerian War was a crucial turning point for European
and Third World intellectuals alike, a scission point that has reemerged in the present crisis of neoimperialism and the revolutions of 2011. Independent Algeria was further the site of a second
disastrous civil war, in the 1990s, between the army as the defender of the revolution of 1962 and
what has been called global Islam, which is ongoing. Both the country and the city were and are,
then, key locations on the border between North and South, as a place of oscillation between the
deterritorialized global city and the reterritorialized postcolony. Algeria is thus a metonym for the
difficulties of creating a neorealism that can resist fascism from the point of view of the South.
As an extensive literature has shown, fascist visuality was designed to maintain conflict. Like the
colonialism of which it was an intensified form, fascism is a necropolitics, a politics that
determines who may allocate, divide, and distribute death.1 Within colonial-fascist necropolitics,
there was always the possibility of genocide that represented the intensification of the imperial
complex. In 1936, Walter Benjamin made his now famous analysis that these strategies were the
aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.2 While the
first part of this proposition is widely understood as the cult of fascist leadership, its response as the
politicizing of art is still debated and indeed current. Although Benjamin's essay sought to formulate
revolutionary demands in the politics of art, he did not return to his earlier endorsement of the
general strike in his Critique of Violence (1921). Acknowledging Sorel and the German revolution
of 1919, led by Luxemburg's Spartacists, Benjamin had countered the state of exception with an

exception on the side of the multitude in the form of the (then) right to strike [which] constitutes in
the view of labor, which is opposed to that of the state, the right to use force in attaining certain
ends.3 By 1936, such rights had disappeared due to the triumphs of fascism over organized labor,
requiring a new modality of countervisuality. To take a decolonial perspective, antifascism first
refused the idea of the heroic leader, by describing him as a form of police function, then named the
South as a place to look, refusing the subjection of fascism. From that viewpoint, it became
possible to define a new realism that both described fascism as it was and predicated a different
possible means of imagining the real. Just as Benjamin had come to his proposition regarding fascism
from a reading of the impact of film, so I will consider how anticolonial cinema in Algeria explored
the possibilities of realism from the literally guerilla documentary to the Italian neorealist-style The
Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) and Algerian post-independence feature films. While
this book was in production, the region was swept by revolutions, whose outcome is at the time of
writing unclear, but whose lines of force were set down by the process described here.

THE SOUTH AND ANTIFASCISM

Both Du Bois and Gramsci proposed new realisms as a counter to fascism. Du Bois's Black
Reconstruction and Gramsci's prison writings undertook a detailed and archival description of their
historical moment. Du Bois's reconfiguration of Reconstruction ran against a revisionist Confederate
history that had portrayed the enslaved as loyal to their owners and Reconstruction as at best a
disaster and at worst a crime.4 Du Bois was therefore concerned to convey as many of the words of
the historical actors as he could and then contrast them with the then scholarly accounts that still
make shocking reading today.5 Gramsci was equally concerned to restore what he called the history
of the subaltern classes that the modern dictatorship tried so hard to eliminate from what he called
the culture of the period. It was nonetheless present in the phenomena that he called folklore,
ranging from popular culture to newspapers, gossip, and myth. From these strata, at once present and
invisible, the subaltern classes could act with an unpredictable spontaneity that cut against the grain
of fascism's rage for order. For Gramsci, this spirit of cleavagethat is the progressive acquisition
of the consciousness of one's historical identitywas the means by which antifascism could be
actively engaged.6 Fascist Caesarism by contrast held that the subaltern had no historical identity that
could be distinguished from the leader.
In 1918, soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, Gramsci had seen historiography forming a
dialectical pattern between Carlyle's conservative evocation of the hero and the bourgeois sense of
history as the measure of progress, which he connected to Herbert Spencer. He contrasted the
mystical synthesis in Carlyle and the inanimate abstraction of Spencer with Marx's sense of how
an idea becomes real.7 Within a few years, fascism had shown that the question of heroic
leadership could not be so easily set aside. Gramsci stressed that there was no essence of fascism.
Rather it should be understood as a particular system of relations of force that has succeeded in
creating a mass organization of the petty bourgeoisie.8 Given the Romanizing aspect of Italian
fascism, he called this organization Caesarism, which can be said to express a situation in which
the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner.9 In moments of social crisis there
was a possibility of mutual destruction that Caesarism held in check rather than resolving. While
Caesarism had traditionally been the domain of a great heroic personality, such as Napoleon, it
had become a bureaucratic system, expressed as much by Ramsey MacDonald's coalition

governments in Britain as by dictatorship. Crucially, Gramsci understood that modern Caesarism is

more a police than a military system.10 Fascism is when the boundary created by the police between
what they can see and what we can see extends to the totality of the social. It was not Caesar (the
Fhrer, the Duce) that created the police, but the police that created and sustained Caesar. Similarly,
W. E. B. Du Bois set aside theories of the Talented Tenth in favor of his defense of the Negro race
as a whole in the work of Reconstruction. He showed that the falsified history of the past produced
the current [1935] theory of democracythat dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal
education, equitable income and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for
narrower ends because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We
rule by junta; we turn Fascist because we do not believe in men.11 In the limited racialized
democracy of America in the 1930s, fascism was the potential outcome of a series of stopgap
policing measures that became permanent as a means of controlling space.
Gramsci felt it was essential to establish and fix this new reality from a new perspective, which he
named that of the subaltern classes, a new application of military terminology to everyday life.12
Subalterns were the junior officers introduced into European armies in the nineteenth century as a
means of communicating the leadership's commands to the rank-and-file. One might say that they were
the embodiment of visuality, enacting the general's superior visualization of the battlefield. In
Gramsci's view, the First World War had shown that armies now depended on these links, which he
compared to the interface between the mind (the generals) and the body (the soldiers), making the
subaltern a medium of transmission for what Descartes had called the mind-body hybrid.13 In the
general social context, visuality was that medium. If Gramsci retained the military name, he reversed
its intent so that the subaltern became an alternative way to mediate the war of the social itself.
Gramsci understood the subaltern classes as all those excluded from power, centered on industrial
workers, but including peasants, women, and other marginalized groups. He considered that the
Risorgimento (181461), which created the Italian state had, by contrast, retreated to a preNapoleonic consideration of the people as dispensable units of foot soldiers, rather than as thinking
men who could play an active part in the contest.14 The class struggle had to be understood in
advanced societies as having changed from a war of maneuver, that is to say a pitched battle in the
sense of Clausewitz, to a war of position, a more cautious, long-term engagement measured in
cultural form. The war of maneuver that inspired Carlyle's concept of visuality was the war of
movement waged by Prussian generals since the late eighteenth century, which led both to the
destruction of Louis Napoleon in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and to the Nazi-era concept of
blitzkrieg. Gramsci was recognizing, as many radicals had already done, that modern mechanized
warfare in the imperial bureaucratic states could not be defeated by traditional methods of
insurrection. By contrast, the war of position required a catharsis, as in classical tragedy. For
Gramsci this entailed a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be
intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing
reality.15 Du Bois expanded this countervisuality into a clear vision of a world without inordinate
individual wealth, of capital without profit, and income based on work alone, [which] is the path out
not only for America but for all men. Across this path stands the South with flaming swords.16 Here
he reiterated the long-standing effort to imagine a biopolitics designed for sustainability, rather than
for maximizing the exploitation of labor.
To deploy the medium of the subaltern against the police bureaucracy of Caesarism, a place of
articulation or transmission had to be defined. For both Du Bois and Gramsci that complexly

overdetermined space was the South, within and without the imperial nation-state. The South is not a
geographic location, but what Enrique Dussel has called a metaphor for human suffering under
global capitalism.17 The concept of the South emerged from the postslavery Atlantic world as a
means of thinking through the legacies of plantation slavery and of imagining an alternative future. In
Ption's Republic of Haiti, his education adviser, named Colombel, had reported on the success of
examinations at the new Lyce Ption in soaring terms: Haitians, you are the hope of two-thirds of
the known world.18 A group of intellectuals who graduated from the Lyce founded the journal Le
Rpublicain (later L'Union), in 1837, to examine the specificity of Haiti.19 For one of these writers,
the historian and politician Beauvais Lespinasse (181163), Haitian leadership could be
accomplished by emphasizing the African past common to all and imagining a future as part of the
global South. Relying on a social theory of evolution, Lespinasse mused,
Africa and South America, these great lands which have almost exactly the same shape, and which regard each other as twin
sisters,await their destiny. These two Southern continents, the Caribbean and the in-numerable islands of the Pacific will
continue the work of the civilization of the NorthThe time of the races of the South is not yet come; but it is firmly to be
believed that they will send to the current civilized world intellectual works along with their merchandise and the immense current
of hot air, which each year softens the climate of Europe.20

Such ideas were most likely known to Du Bois. Since the occupation of Haiti by U.S. forces, in 1915,
the affairs of the island had become a critical point of engagement for African American politics. Du
Bois met the former Haitian education minister and writer Dants Bellegarde at a Pan-African
Conference in 1925 and later published his work in the review Phylon. Du Bois himself summarized
for Phylon a speech given by Bellegarde on the development of autonomous Haitian literature,
including references to Lespinasse.21
Both Du Bois and Gramsci developed such nineteenth-century aspirations, that the South might be
the agent of global liberation, by examining how it was at the same time the key location for reaction.
While there were very significant differences between the North-South pattern of domination in Italy
and the United States, it may be more productive to think about the similarities. If the United States
was, of course, not ruled by a fascist party, its South had a clear pattern of racialization and
separation, which became known as segregation. As Du Bois convincingly argued, this violent mode
of domination constrained democracy both locally and globally. Although there was no single
autocratic leader in the American South, the ideologists of segregation spoke fondly and at length of
its principles of anti-industrial aristocracy, which they derived from British conservatives like
Carlyle.22 At the end of Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois outlined the discursive
formation of the post-Reconstruction South around the intersecting axes of whiteness, the penitentiary,
and sharecropping. These disciplinary institutions so effectively divided and separated the working
classes of the South that the distinction came to appear natural. Gramsci summarized the Northern
Italian view of the South in very similar terms: Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either
semi-barbarians or out and out barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is underdeveloped it is not
the fault of the capitalist system, or any other historical cause, but of the nature that has made
Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric.23 Looking back on the Fascist takeover of Italy,
which had seemed inconceivable even when Mussolini's party first dominated parliament, Gramsci
came to see this divide between the North and South as the key to the emancipation of the nation as a
whole because the South had become an internal colony: The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated
the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies.24 The South was then

reduced to a condition in which the only resistance it could imagine was a great undoing
(revolt).25 Nonetheless, it was precisely the spontaneity of this spirit of resistance that offered the
possibility of a transformation of political culture into a form that could not sustain the racialized
segregations of Caesarism.
In calling these approaches neorealist, I am evoking the Italian postwar cinema and photography
of that name without wanting to suggest a simple resumption of that tactic. While Neorealism was
antifascist, the director Pier Paolo Pasolini recalled, I also criticized it for remaining subjective and
lyricizing, which was another feature of the cultural epoch before the Resistance. So, neorealism is a
product of the Resistance as regards content and message but stylistically it is still tied to preResistance culture.26 If Italian neorealism was a product of the resistance to fascism, such stylistic
failures suggest that the project should not be still defined by it. Even the content of that neorealism
is no longer controversial, in that the European dictatorships, and indeed the Jim Crow South, are
now, quite rightly, among the most reviled political regimes. Indeed, the place of such regimes in
cultural work today is more often to express a sense of progress and the impossibility of recurrence.
Against that comforting consensus, antifascist neorealism understands the contradictory nature of a
conflicted reality held in place by the operations of the police. It wants to make the continuing
realities of segregationthe combination of spatial and racial politicsvisible and to overcome that
segregation by imagining a new reality.

BATTLING FOR ALGIERS

I decided against posing such questions to the fascism of the 1930s, which is both so extensively
documented and so reviled that it has almost ceased to have substantial contemporary meaning, as
evidenced by the accusation that the U.S. healthcare proposals of 200910 were fascist or Nazi.
Instead, I want to use the still controversial continuing struggle in and about the decolonization of
Algeria as a test case. From Delacroix's Women of Algiers to Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar, Algiers
was and is a key node in the network that has attempted to decolonize the real, to challenge
segregation, and to imagine new realities. It is not exactly the same as the historical Alger, or AlDjazar, but its visualization on the border between North and South, recalling Giorgio Agamben's
definition of the fascist state of emergency as a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not
exclude each other but rather blur with each other.27 The Algerian decolonization movement led by
the Front de Libration Nationale (FLN) and the revolutionary war of 195462, in particular the
contest for control of the capital city, Algiers, in 1957, radicalized a generation of European
intellectuals and was noted for the participation of the Caribbean theorist Frantz Fanon.28 It was
Fanon, having escaped from Vichy-controlled Martinique to enlist in the Free French Army, who later
posed the question in his decolonial classic The Wretched of the Earth: What is fascism but
colonialism at the heart of traditionally colonialist countries?29 This rewriting prefigures the recent
turn to understanding coloniality as the very being of power. By considering Algeria as a locale of
antifascist neorealism, I continue the decolonial genealogy that has motivated my entire project. The
Algerian War became a test case for the war in Iraq that began in 2003 and the subsequent U.S.
strategy of global counterinsurgency, so it is still worth concentrating on the battles for Algiers in
psychiatry, film, video, and literature that have raged since the end of the Second World War to the
present. Finally, many of the unresolved issues in the decolonization of North Africa dramatically
returned to global attention when autocratic regimes in Tunisia and then Egypt were overthrown by

popular revolutions in 2011. At stake throughout has been the imaginary of decolonization and the
postcolonial imperial power. Was decolonization a victory or a gift? Were the rebels terrorists or
nationalists? As for France, in the case of decolonizing Algeria, was it the moral victor of the Second
World War, the inventor of human rights, or just another tired European power trying to maintain its
dominion?
Algeria had been colonized by France, in 1832, and following the particular pattern of French
colonization, it was not considered separate or distinct, but as a department of France. At one level
the revolutionary war concerned a simple incompatibility between the French view that Algeria was
in all senses part of France and the indigenous claim for independence. Then and now it was clear
that there was no solution to this counterpoint: one side would have to dominate. However, the
country was entirely dominated by the French settler population, backed up by the military. By 1950,
1 out of 9 Muslim Algerians were out of work, 25 percent of the land was owned by 2 percent of the
(white) population, and only enough food was being produced for 23 million people, despite a
Muslim population of 9 million.30 The battle for Algiers refers to the events of 1957, in which the
FLN, which had begun the active guerilla war of liberation, in 1954, called for a general strike in
Algiers. The FLN included the French definition of human rights as an equality of rights and duties,
without distinction of race or of religion, in their charter (1954) and pursued them alongside the
armed struggle. They hoped for United Nations intervention on their behalf and claimed that their
action was justified by the right to strike under the French constitution. Led by the infamous General
Jacques Massu, French paratroopers repressed the strike and the FLN by the widespread use of torture
to extract information. Nonetheless, the battle of Algiers came to seem a turning point in the liberation
struggle, which was finally successful in 1962. Looking back on the events at a distance of forty
years, the communist activist and journalist Henri Alleg, who was disappeared and tortured by
French troops, reconfigured what had happened: In reality, there never was a battle; only a gigantic
police operation carried out with an exceptional savagery and in violation of all the laws.31 Just as
Gramsci understood the fascist Caesar to be the product of the police state, so, too, was the imperial
president sustained and produced by colonial policing under martial law. One felt the forceful echoes
of this history in the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, when the armies of both countries stood
by as the revolutionary populace contested the authority of the police. In this sense, the popular
takeover of the Egyptian secret police building and its archives in March 2011 marked the undoing
of former President Hosni Mubarak's autocratic police state.
The consistent and persistent return of the battle for Algiers in art, films, television, literature, and
critical writing in the period and subsequently as a figure for war, nationalism, the migrant, torture,
colonialism, and its legacies suggests that what was in the period known as the Algerian question
remains unanswered. Where is this Algiers? In Africa, Europe, or the Maghreb? And we shall ask:
where is where? Whose Algiers are we describing? How is Algiers separated in time and space,
now and then, and why does this battle continue? At the time of writing, the revolutionary wave that
began with demonstrations in Algeria against the rise in the price of food in January 2011 has
produced an end to the nineteen-year-old state of emergency, but has not transformed the regime. It is
precisely such questions that the cultural work on Algiers has raised from France to Finland, Italy, the
United States, and, of course, Algeria itself. At stake is the possibility of a movement toward the right
to look, the counter to visuality, against the police and their assertion that there is nothing to see here.
Less clear has been the question of what would come afterward. In Gillo Pontecorvo's film The
Battle of Algiers (1966), the resistance leader Ben H'midi says to Ali La Pointe that the hardest
moment for a revolution comes after its victory. If colonization means, as Albert Memmi put it, that

the colonized is outside history, outside the city, what does it look like when that viewpoint is
restored?32 How can a right to look, framed in the language of Western colonial jurisprudence, be
sustained as the place of the decolonized inside history and inside the city, whether that city is
Algiers, Paris, Cairo, New York, or the civis of civilization itself? As the case of Algeria itself
suggests, such questions have yet to generate sustainable answers, here or there. For the Algerian
insistence on a nationalist solution that would, in Fanon's famous phrase, create a new man set
aside questions of Islam as belonging to the past. If that new man was the image of decolonization,
the investment in a new imagined community, the independent post-colonial republic, was such that it
was felt to be capable of solving the questions of a postcolonial imaginary.33 The antifascist
investment in the spontaneity of the people was a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, it was
capable of evading and overcoming even the most dedicated repression as the French discovered to
their cost. At the same time, spontaneity was not invested in building institutions, allowing the FLN's
Army of the Frontiers to preside over what the writer Ferhat Abbas has famously called confiscated
independence almost as soon as the French had departed, in 1962.34 Still worse, as the world
knows, the Islamic Salvation Front won the elections of 1991, which were invalidated by the ruling
FLN and the army, unleashing a civil war that cost an estimated 160,000 lives, including some 7,000
disappeared by the government. The practice of disappearing antigovernment activistsmeaning
having them killed and disposed of in secretwas begun by the French during the revolution and
later exported by them to Latin America, most notably in Argentina and Chile.35 Such practices, far
from forming a decolonized visuality, epitomize the secrecy of the police in separating what can be
seen from what must be declared invisible.
Fanon had accurately defined this condition in colonial Algeria. As a counter to what he saw as
colonial fascism, he imagined the decolonization of colonial visuality as a process that transforms
the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose
fashion by the spotlight of History.36 The reply to the view of history as the plaything of the Hero
was to transform the spectator from the passive onlooker demanded by fascism into an active
participant in visualizing. The changes required were physical and mental. Fanon understood the
colonial as a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and
the police stations.37 These were, of course, the institutions that created Caesarism, and the border
was the line where there was nothing to see. Above and beyond the physical separation of native
sectors from European, these divides had come to produce aesthetic forms of respect for the status
quo.38 This aesthetic engendered a sense of what is proper, normal, and to be experienced without
question. In reading this passage, Achille Mbembe has stressed that the emphasis on the police and
the army means that behind this division of space lies a spirit of violence.39 The segregation of
colonial space was thus experienced as violence by the native, but also as the proper way of living
that was visibly right by the European. This legacy of separation has survived formal
decolonization and the end of legal segregation in the United States, for, as Mbembe shows,
segregation created a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries gave meaning to the
enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the
same space; in brief, the exercise of sovereignty. Space was therefore the raw material of sovereignty
and the violence it carried with it.40 It is this aestheticized segregation that antifascist neorealism has
set out to describe, define and deconstruct.
Fanon emphasized in The Wretched of the Earth that this aesthetics was a language of pure
violence, generating a sense that the native sector was superfluous with the result that the gaze

that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy (5).
Sexualized desire was displaced onto a desire for space, because that space represented possession
in every sense of the term. Separation by violence produced a mirroring desire for violence: To
blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination
of every colonial subject (6). While most discussion has centered on the question of violence, I want
to stay with Fanon's concept of the imagination, for this was an imaginary destruction. He was
intentionally using the language of Lacan's gaze here, as he had already done in Black Skin, White
Masks (1951), a text that he presented as a mirror with a progressive infrastructure, in which the
Negro could retrieve himself on the road to disalienation.41 Just as Sartre insisted that the antisemite
made the Jew and Beauvoir claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, Fanon did
not understand identity as being shaped only by private or family dynamics. Rather, all three socially
engaged critics shared Beauvoir's assumption that only the intervention of someone else can
establish the individual as an Other.42 Fanon has often been faulted on his use of psychoanalysis
here, with critics urging him to have read other essays by Lacan or pay more emphasis to the theory of
castration.43 Yet under the impact of the revolutions of 1968, none other than Lacan himself allowed
that for the colonized the unconscioushad been sold to them, along with the laws of colonization,
this exotic regressive form of the master's discourse, in the face of the capitalism called
imperialism.44 That is to say, there was a colonial Oedipus complex and related phenomena, such as
the gaze, but they had been instilled by colonial domination.45 In a surprising reversal, little noticed
among all the mathematical symbols of his often disrupted seminar at Vincennes, Lacan had come to
endorse the cultural construction arguments of Fanon and Beauvoir, whose goal was to understand the
constitution of inequality, rather than that of an eternally unchanging unconscious.46
The projected imago of the mirror stage theorized by Lacan was simply not available to the
colonized subject, according to Fanon, given that the ideal body in colonial culture was of necessity
white and that subaltern peoples were by definition not white. Indeed, in many fictional and
autobiographical accounts, subaltern people of mixed background are repeatedly represented as
staring into mirrors, trying to discern if that mixture is visible. In the racialized context, this looking
meant discerning whether or not African, Indian, or Jewish ancestry was visible, according to the
stereotypes of the time. This mirror anxiety was not limited to subaltern groups. Given the
widespread miscegenation of the Atlantic world, few white people were exempt. The mirror was
in this sense a scene of colonial dispersal, rather than identification. Further, Fanon insisted that
slavery and colonialism disrupted, and perhaps made impossible, Oedipal belonging, understood as a
technique of colonization. For, as Deleuze and Guattari later put it: To the degree that there is
oedipalization, it is due to colonization.47 That is to say, the divided self, or constitution by lack, is
not a transcendental human condition, but a historically generated division of the sensible. What
Fanon and others have looked for was a means of transition away from that division to another
possible mode of engagement with the self and with others. The goal is not some impossible
constitution of a whole, but the possibility of equality. Fanon's concept of looking was therefore
transitional, rather than foundational, a means of working through violence that could not but
acknowledge that the desire for equality between subaltern classes was the desire for the same, a
desire that the regime of Oedipus reduced to deviance. As Greg Thomas has emphasized, this desire
would lead Fanon away from the frame of the national to his support for pan-African revolt, as if,
even during the course of the nationalist revolution, he had come to realize its limitations.48 As events
have shown, the violence that was supposed to be instrumental in disposing of colonial rule has

become institutionalized through the place of the army in governing independent Algeria. Here arises
the interfaced question of what one might call, following Ngg wa Thiong'o, decolonizing the
imagination.49 While Ngg's concentration on using indigenous language remains a controversial
issue in Algeria, split between French, Arabic, Berber, and other indigenous languages, the politics of
the image have received less attention, but were no less significant.

COLONIAL MYTHOLOGIES, GUERILLA DOCUMENTARIES

One of the first steps in the French declaration of a state of emergency in Algeria, in April 1955, was
the assertion of powers to take all measures to ensure control of the press and of publications of all
kinds, as well as radio transmissions, showings of films and theatrical performances.50 This law
was revived during the riots and demonstrations in the French banlieux (suburbs) in 2005, indicating
that there is still a battle for a certain Algiers in Europe. This active censorship introduced an element
of ambiguity into French cultural work of the period. For instance, the critic Roland Barthes began his
now classic essay Myth Today, published in 1957, with an attempt to disrupt the naturalness, as
he called it, of media imagery. Waiting in a barbershop, he happens on a copy of Paris-Match,
published in June 1955, just after the law was passed (see plate 9). On the cover, a young Negro in a
French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolor. All this is
in the meaning of the picture. But, whether navely or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that
France is a great Empire that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her
flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown
by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.51 It took a certain daring for Barthes to use this
emblem of the French empire to present his theory of signification, that is to say, the combination of
the effect of what is seen, what it literally depicts, and what it implies. Paris-Match, a relatively new
magazine (founded in 1949), relied on scandalous and eye-catching photographs to attract its
audience. In this case, the saluting young soldier appears to be very young indeed, younger than
military recruitment age, as the caption the night of the army suggests. Further, if he was a soldier,
he was probably one of the notorious Zouaves, African troops who were used to carry out much of the
most violent work in Algeria and other French colonies.
Ignoring these connotations, Barthes developed his analysis to show that what he called myth
froze the historical meaning of the message and rendered it neutral as what he called depoliticized
speech. He suggested that myth was naturally at home on the Right, whose great cause Algeria had
become, and that an anticolonial interpretation would end the mythic status of the image. As complex
as that signification was, there was also an anticolonial signification at work in his use of the image.
In a footnote, he proposed, Today it is the colonized peoples who assume to the full the ethical and
political condition described by Marx as being that of the proletariat.52 If the French Communist
Party (PCF), and other leftist groups would not necessarily have agreed, the Right would have found
the proposal close to treasonous. Further, the picture had an unmentionable resonance. When the FLN
killed sub-Saharan African soldiers, they would sometimes fix them upright in a pose of saluting.53
The FLN knew that the French government were using these African troops symbolically (or as
Barthes would put it, mythologically) and countered with their own symbolism. While Barthes's antiimperial semiotics has been cited in countless academic texts, the counterperformance of the same
message by the FLN has been forgotten. A recurrent theme in Western discourse against political
violence waged by nongovernmental agencies is that violence is senseless, meaningless, and

pointless. To the contrary, as Allen Feldman has pointed out in the different context of Northern
Ireland, violent acts on the body constituted a material vehicle for constructing memory and
embedding the self in social and institutional memory.54 The place of violence in decolonizing
visuality is a place of difficulty, certainly, but not a discourse devoid of meaning.
Colonial mythologies of the type discussed by Barthes were actively disseminated by cinema. In
Algeria, twenty-four feature films were produced from 19111954, whose functions were later
defined by Hala Salmane: 1. To distort the image of colonized people in order to justify to Western
public opinion the policy of colonization; the natives therefore had to be portrayed as sub-human. 2.
To convince the natives that their colonial mother protected them from their own savagery.55 As
Fanon had described in Black Skin, White Masks, such cinematic fictions as Tarzan, cartoons set in
Africa, and well-meaning documentaries on poverty or disease also contributed to this colonial
cinema, whose aim was keep those in the colonies and in the colonizing nations invested in the
aesthetics of separation. Salmane argued for restoring African identity from the distortions of colonial
imagery. As a first step in this direction, the FLN established a film unit, in 1957, led at first by Ren
Vautier, a French documentary filmmaker and former Resistance fighter, and the Algerian Chrif
Zenati.56 Vautier's first films in French colonial Africa had led to his prosecution and sentencing
under still current Vichy laws, but he remained dedicated to the issue of ending and documenting
colonialism. Working undercover as a filmmaker during the Algerian War, using the pseudonym
Farid, Vautier trained a group of Algerian filmmakers, including Chrif Zennati and Abd el Hamid
Mokdad.57 Nine of these filmmakers died in the conflict. His own 16 mm short documentaries were
widely shown in the Arab world and in the Eastern bloc, beginning with Algrie en flames (1957),
which showed footage taken during actual combat, making it among the first decolonial combat
documentaries. Fanon met Vautier at this time, but opposed even allowing him to work in North
Africa because he was French and a communist to boot.58 Indeed, the filmmaker was later imprisoned
by the Algerian resistance on suspicion of being a spy. He nonetheless continued to work with them
after his release, participating in creating an unfilmed screenplay of The Wretched of the Earth.59
These projects generated the innovative short film J'ai huit ans (I Am Eight Years Old), officially
attributed to the Maurice Audin Committee, including the filmmakers Olga Poliakoff and Yann Le
Mason, commemorating a young French mathematician who had been tortured to death by the French
occupation forces. The film was attributed as being prepared by Frantz Fanon and R. Vautier,
despite their earlier disagreement.60 It was the product of a new therapeutic strategy of visualization
that Fanon was experimenting with in his clinical work with Algerian refugees in Tunis. Perhaps the
best known of these patients was the writer Boukhatem Fars, who became an artist and created a
series of works, called Screams in the Night, in the Tunis hospital.61 Fars later recalled that Fanon
had told him to visualize what was troubling him and gave him a book on Van Gogh to help advance
his artistic ideas. By 1961, when the film was made, there were 175,000 Algerian refugees in Tunisia
and another 120,000 in Morocco, many of them very young. At the children's house in Tunis, Fanon
asked the refugees to work through their experiences, in writing, speech, or drawing. Paper and
crayons were distributed to the child refugees, who created an extensive archive of the war in the
rural areas. Later published and translated into Italian by Giovanni Pirelli, a sympathetic wealthy
Italian, the children's accounts range from those of aerial bombardments to those of ground warfare
and torture (see fig. 48ae).62 For example, a line drawing by Mili Mohammed shows a French
soldier whipping a man who is shackled by the arms. Ahmed Achiri produced a detailed drawing
showing soldiers attacking a village, torturing men with fire and rounding up women and children.

While not all the works are attributed, at least two drawings were by girls, identified as Fatima and
Milouda Bouchiti, showing veiled women with children. Anonymous cutouts depict a man being shot
and another man being whipped. A drawing shows the corpse of a man being carried through a village
by cavalry horses. So if the torture and violence of the war were in some sense a secret in France,
although one preserved more by denial than by actual secrecy, it was well-known to the young people
of Algeria. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were all politically radicalized as a result. One sixteen year
old stated that France wanted Algeria for its oil, while an eleven year old dated the outbreak of the
revolution to the massacre in Stif in 1945six years before he was born. Another eleven year old,
an orphan, said that his ambition was to return to an independent Algeria.63 Collectively, these
documents form the archive against which the famous case study in The Wretched of the Earth,
describing the killing of a French child by two Algerians, should be judged, as we shall see.
In the period, it seems that Fanon or others realized the dramatic potential of these accounts,
leading to both the book publication and the film. According to the titles of one version, Ren Vautier
was responsible for collecting the images for the film. J'ai huit ans was made when the FLN's war of
liberation was eight years old, thus memorializing the war itself, as well as the children seen in the
film. It began with a minute-long sequence of filmed head-and-shoulder portraits of apparently eightyear-old children looking straight into the camera to the percussive sound of gunfire.64 The cut to
black-and-white paintings of violent scenes comes as a surprise, even a shock, enhanced by the
speeded-up gunfire. A narrative in voiceover by children speaking Algerian French in seemingly
deliberate monotones describes attacks on the villages by French troops and the subsequent rescue of
some of the children by FLN forces, illustrated with a series of the drawings, often seen in close-up.
Tanks and machine guns are accurately depicted. One French soldier appears with a tail. One drawing
is signed by Hadim, another by Madjid. As the film progresses, a variety of voices and stories
are heard, which all contribute to the theme of conflict and loss. A child says that a plane looked at
me, and then it proceeded to fire, while she hid under a large stone. Music is added. FLN guerillas
lead them to the border, cut the fence, and they find refugeone child even finds his parents. Suitably
happy images follow to the sound of a chant for an independent Algeria. These visualizations of the
hidden realities of the war became a form of accusation, in the classic format of Zola's J'accuse.

Short as it is, the film contains a range of potential looks to counter colonial visuality that were not
allowed expression in the colonial context. From the opening shot of the children facing the camera,
the central focus is the look of the child, usually ignored in such contexts. Now we are so inured to
repeated displays of impoverished children in underdeveloped countries that these images have
attained a new invisibility. In the period, they were both striking and a riposte to the idea that this was
a war for civilization. The children's story also made visible the French soldiers, who would rather
not have been seen at all, and the torture chambers, whose existence were officially denied until a
former general admitted to them, in 2002. In the period, those taken in for interrogation were known
as the disappeared, attesting to the importance of invisibility for, and as a means of, torture. These

looks became visible by means of the children's drawings, which were both a means for the children
to work through their own traumatic experience and, by the very fact of their authorship, an
unimpeachable source for the violence being carried out by the French. Finally, and
counterintuitively, the war itself uses the film, as it were, to claim an age and the right to be seen. By
emphasizing the duration of the conflict, the film reminded metropolitan viewers, who might have
been trying to forget, that the war persisted; to the Algerians and their allies, it showed that the full
might of colonial power had not succeeded in repressing the resistance. Realizing that this apparently
humanitarian content was also a history of the war, French police seized the film at least seventeen
times over many years. The French government replied by arranging some 7,500 showings of its own
propaganda films in venues such as rotary clubs and other such institutions in the six months
following the United Nations debate on Algeria during September 1957 alone.65 J'ai huit ans was
banned in France until 1973, whereupon it won a prize for best short film of the year.
This little-remarked collaboration between Fanon and Vautier marked a critical intersection
between radical psychiatry and activist cinema. Fanon had created a practice in which staff worked
with patients to address their conflicts, eating and socializing with them, rather than maintaining the
classic clinical distance. Drawing on the teachings of Fanon's professor, the Spanish antifascist
Franois Tosquelles, this now familiar strategy was then new, certainly in the colonial context, where
colonial psychology had claimed that all Algerians were in an infantile state.66 As late as 1952, the
Algerian School of Medicine declared in its handbook for physicians: These primitive people
cannot and should not benefit from the advances of European civilization.67 The spatialized and
separated hierarchy of culture created in the late nineteenth century continued to inform such
purportedly clinical judgments. Such pronouncements make it easier to understand the involvement of
certain psychiatrists in torturing Algerians. Indeed, during the revolution, Antoine Porot, founder of
the Algerian school, and one of his followers attributed the uprising to a pathological form of
xenophobia among Algerians against subjects belonging to an occupying race.68 Hence
revolutionary action was a form of madness, as Pinel had suggested in immediate aftermath of the
French Revolution of 1789. Fanon's innovative ethnopsychiatry refused such stereotypes and worked
to create culturally appropriate treatments, including creating a caf, a mosque, and a newspaper for
patients. Fanon endeavored to treat his patients on a day-clinic basis, meaning that they returned home
at night and some even stayed in work. This approach required those in treatment to deal with their
symptoms in everyday life as well as in the clinic.
In a lecture series he gave at the University of Tunis in 1959 and 1960, Fanon developed a
theoretical framework for his decolonial psychiatry. He recharacterized the insane person as a
stranger to society. Anticipating Foucault, Fanon saw that the internment of this anarchistic
element in society was a disciplinary measure that rendered the psychiatrist into the auxiliary of the
police, the protector of society.69 The segregation between the European and the native that had led
Fanon to revolutionary politics was both replicated and produced in and by colonial psychiatry.
Rather than segregate the patient, Fanon sought to achieve his or her resocialization, following his
emphasis on the dehumanizing effects of colonialism.70 Yet, Fanon asked, into what group was the
patient to be resocialized, and what are the criteria of normality? His answer was to create a
society in the hospital itself: this is sociotherapy.71 Fanon went on to discuss neurological and
psychoanalytic approaches, including Lacan's mirror stage, before turning to the psychological effects
of time discipline and surveillance. He considered the psychic impact of the time clock on factory
workers, of closed-circuit television on shop assistants in large American establishments, and of

auditory monitoring on telephone operators.72 He completed the circuit by casting the presumed
laziness of the colonized as a form of resistance to the idea that they could not be unemployed
because their function was to work as and when required. The colonial system thus visualized its
colonized subjects as the perfect Platonic workers, whose function was to do what was required of
them and nothing else. In this context, Fanon's engagement with children as social actors and as the
index of the Algerian revolution marked his commitment to the cultivation of a new man,
unconstrained by discipline or colonization. Read optimistically, had he lived longer, Fanon might
have moved away from his emphasis on masculinity to imagine new modes of postrevolutionary
gender identity, as part of this analysis of the racialized disciplinary society, a connection made by
many radical black feminists in the United States from Angela Davis to Toni Cade Bambara and bell
hooks.73
In this connection, it is noticeable that a number of early post-independence Algerian films, such as
Une si jeune paix (dir. Jacques Charby, 1964)explicitly inspired by Fanon's workand the multiauthored L'enfer dix ans (dir. Ghaouti Bendeddouche et al., 1968), featured the children of the
revolution as subjects, nonprofessional actors, and screenwriters. Film was a vital medium in
Algeria, where 86 percent of men and 95 percent of women were estimated to be illiterate at the time
of independence. Some 330 cinemas for 35 mm films were left behind by the colonial forces that now
showed both the new films produced by the independent government and Hollywood productions.
Vautier took a different approach, working with Ahmed Rachedi to create the Centre Audio-visuel
(CAV), in 1962. The center developed what were called cin-pops (popular cinema), building on
the cinema club tradition that Fanon had participated in while working at Blida.74 The cin-pops,
recalled Vautier in a later interview, were designed to initiate the people to progressive cinema with
the goal of supporting them in their march towards socialism, by semantically illustrating the aspects
of discourse proper to this form of socio-economic organization. Thus we always insisted on the
militant and political aspects of film rather than its human value.75 This agitprop form, recalling
early Soviet cinema, organized 1,200 screenings in 220 locations in their first six months, using two
projection vans taken from the old Psychological Service of the French Army. These films included
Chinese works like The Red Detachment of Women (dir. Xie Jin, 1961), shown to a large womenonly crowd just outside the Casbah; Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, screened for dockers in Alger,
who identified directly with the famous staircase scene because of a similar structure in their own
city; and locally made shorts, including J'ai huit ans. The postwar Algerian films were silent
montages accompanied by a live verbal commentary that became the basis for Peuple en marche (dir.
Ren Vautier, 1963), a documentary about the new Algeria shown at the first FLN post-independence
conference in Algiers.76 Despite gaining some 60,000 members, the cin-pops movement collapsed
as the government moved away from revolutionary politics, and the center was closed, in 1964. The
missed encounter to develop radical cinema and psychiatry as part of decolonial governance
continues to haunt attempts to visualize a postdisciplinary society.
By contrast, the FLN cadre and former businessman Yacef Saadi created Casbah Films, in 1962, and
later collaborated with Pontecorvo in filming The Battle of Algiers.77 As Pontecorvo had himself
been the leader of the youth section of the Italian resistance, in which the screenwriter Franco Solinas
had also been involved, the film was a collaboration between anticolonial and antifascist resistance
fighters. The Algerians financed 45 percent of the costs of the film, and Saadi helped Pontecorvo
identify the exact locations in the Casbah where the events on which those depicted were based had
taken place. For example, the house where the FLN resistance leader Amar Ali, known as Ali La

Pointe, died was entirely rebuilt so that it could be blown up for the film. In keeping with this desire
for authenticity, all the actors bar one, who played the paratrooper Colonel Mathieu, were amateurs,
recruited in Algiers. Saadi played himself, under the name Djafar, while Ali La Pointe was played by
a street hustler named Brahim Hadjadj, who went on to act in many Algerian films. Saadi was
concerned to produce an objective, equilibrated film that is not a trial of a people or of a nation, but
a heartful accusation against colonialism, violence, and war.78 In fact, Pontecorvo rejected his
original treatment as being too much like propaganda and instead worked with Solinas to generate a
neorealist film under a regime that he called the dictatorship of truth. Pontecorvo shot the film on
low-cost stock to enhance the grainy newsreel feel, while exposing for very strong black-and-white
contrasts in the Italian neorealist style.
As a result, The Battle of Algiers allows for different points of interpretation. It is clearly
anticolonial, but also antiwar, while arguing for the inevitability of armed conflict given the
intransigence of French colonial policy. The film depicts the story of the struggle for control of
Algiers in 1957. It begins just after torture has broken an FLN operative, who has revealed the hiding
place of the FLN leader Ali La Pointe. From these opening moments in a French torture chamber, the
viewer is plunged into the conflict. By its nature, torture is a practice that wants to be offstage,
literally obscene. To be confronted with the tortured body, even in the current era of official avowal
of so-called harsh techniques, is a visual shock. In using this shock in the opening, rather than as a
central moment, as in more recent films like Rendition (dir. Gavin Hood, 2007), Pontecorvo
visualized the normalization of torture. Henri Alleg, a French communist newspaper editor in Algiers,
who was tortured by paratroopers, described this as the school of perversion for the young French
conscripts and volunteers.79 The actor used to play the torture victim in The Battle of Algiers was
serving a sentence for theft in the notorious Barberousse prison, from where he was released to play
the part, no doubt accounting for his confused air. By the same token, the dramatic scene that follows
the titles, depicting the radicalization of Ali La Pointe in the same prison, showed the execution of an
FLN activist, a key intensification of the conflict in 1956. The actor was a man who, like Saadi
himself, had been sentenced to death by the French, but was not in fact executed. Pontecorvo further
implicates the implied viewpoint of the spectator with the FLN. When Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin),
the fictional representation of General Marel-Marice Bigeard, sets out his information strategy to his
colleagues, he shows them films taken at French checkpoints to point out that although surveillance
was in effect, Algerian activists were succeeding in evading the checkpoints.80 At that moment, a
woman that we already know to have to planted a bomb passes by, creating what Soviet director
Sergei Eisenstein called a montage effect in which the viewer creates knowledge that is not directly
presented by the film.

Mathieu presents to his staff a means of overcoming their inability to see by transforming people
into information. He demonstrates what Saadi called the pyramid scheme, in which each person in
the organization knows only two others. In order for the French to reach the top-level commanders,
information must be obtained that allows them to particularize the pyramid with names (see fig. 49).
This method is Mathieu's euphemism for torture, under the excuse that there was a twenty-four-hour
period to act before the organization modified its structure. This rhetoric is what is now known as the
ticking bomb justification for torture. Unlike present-day politicians, Mathieu does not shy away
from the realities of the question at stake. If, he demands, you want Algeria to remain part of France,
then this is the way to do itand he reminds the journalists that even L'Humanit, the French
communist newspaper, adhered to the notion of Algrie franaise. For Republican rhetoric insisted
that the country was one and undividable, unlike a federal nation like the United States, where one
state or another always seems to be contemplating secession. In interviews, Saadi argued that
Mathieu had to be played by a professional actor in order for this explanation of the pyramid system
to be convincing. Indeed, some have argued that it was precisely this professionalization of
bureaucracy that limited the radicality of the FLN to that of a nationalist revolt, rather than a socialist
or self-directed revolution. The French tactic rendered the body of the tortured into data, disguising
the erotics of violence that generated it, as part of an information flow that would have been
understood as cybernetic in the period. As N. Katherine Hayles has summarized it, Norbert Weiner
decontextualized information as a function of probabilities representing a choice of one message
from a range of possible messages.81 Thus the paratroopers find the leader of the organization (FLN)
by means of tracking messages around their information system. This rendering of information into
binary code was the reality that colonial authority now sought to find in its subject peoples,
abstracting their individual identities but ensuring the free flow of information. Its obscene
counterpart was that such information was for the most part obtained by the flow of electricity, the
predominant method of torture used in Algeria.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a gulf between the European and the Algerian experience of
realism in this and other filmed representations of the war. In later interviews, Jean Martin, the
French actor who played Mathieu, described the powerful affect of working with Algerians who had
experienced the revolution. Martin had come to prominence playing Lucky, one of the tramps in the
Paris premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). Ironically, he had been blacklisted for
supporting the FLN by signing the famous Petition of the 121 against the war, and The Battle of Algiers

itself would be banned in France until 1971. For Martin, the drama of the film came from the sight of
people reliving events, such that they were caught up in real emotions as they passed a French
checkpoint in the film because they had so often done so in reality. For Saadi, however, making the
film was a game compared to the reality. Pontecorvo seemed to understand that the lack of real
threat diminished the experience for his nonprofessional cast, and so he shot repeated takes of even
very short sequences, rendering the actors tired and frustrated. This real experience of irritation with
the filming process ended up creating a real effect of fear, exhaustion, or anger when seen in the
finished production. For many years, the film carried an opening disclaimer noting that no
documentary or newsreel footage had been used, even though it wanted to generate precisely that
sensibility. This decolonial dialectic of neorealism can be found across the range of cinema dealing
with the Algerian War. For instance, Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960) dealt with the
violence of the war under the rubric Photography is truth, cinema is truth twenty-four times a
second!82 But for the Algerian novelist Rachid Boudjedra, writing the first history of Algerian
cinema, in 1971, Godard's film was nothing more than a film of neo-fascist tendency because of its
sequences showing the FLN engaging in torture while quoting revolutionary texts.83
The women characters in The Battle of Algiers have an important role in terms of the action, but
have relatively little to say. In the dramatic scene in which women who are about to plant bombs in
the French quarter are disguised as modern, French-oriented women by means of hairstyle,
clothing, and make-up, the original dialogue was replaced by up-tempo drumming, much to the initial
shock of the scriptwriter, Franco Solinas.84 According to an interview with Pontecorvo, Solinas later
agreed that his dialogue had been weak, and he approved of the final version. Pontecorvo further
emphasized that even while he was making the film, the situation of Algerian women was noticeably
worsening, leading him to emphasize their place in the liberation struggle. The final scene of the film,
in which independence is achieved, is marked by the ululation of women in celebration, a sound that
might seem alien to many Westerners, in the way that the Islamic call to prayer has recently been
stereotyped in some quarters. It was taken as the key to Ennio Morricone's powerful soundtrack for
the film, or what Pontecorvo calls music-images. The final shot of the film is a close-up of a
dancing woman, in traditional dress but not veiled, which Pontecorvo intended as a symbol of the
revolution, in the fashion of Eisenstein (see fig. 50). Unfortunately, the process of segregating genders
has continued, rendering what the Algerian writer Assia Djebar has called the severed sound of
Algerian women when the heavy silence returns that puts an end to the momentary restoration of
sound.85 This silencing was an accompaniment to what she calls the forbidden gaze of women,
hidden behind the walls of the home and the reimposed veil. Sight and sound were and are
inextricably linked in decolonizing visuality, just as they had been in forming the concept.

REAL SPECTERS
Soon after the achievement of independence, a silence fell over the subject of Algeria in Europe.
Kristin Ross has emphasized, for example, how such erasures have distorted the understanding of
May 68, which she shows needs to be understood as beginning with the mobilization against the
Algerian war.86 For despite a seemingly endless series of books, essays, and films, the real subject
of the Algerian revolution was permanently displaced, namely the fundamental wrong of colonization.
Indeed, many former French settlers in Algeria have recently sought to create memorials and museums
to the culture of French Algeria, which they seek to separate from politics, meaning
decolonization. The politics that mattered were of course those of imperialism. It has returned in the
past decade as a correlative of the neo-imperialism with which we are all familiar, calling for a
renewed neorealism. The Battle of Algiers was notoriously screened at the Pentagon, in 2003,
advertised as a chance to see how to win the war on terrorism and lose the battle of ideas. While it
is unclear what lessons were in fact learned, the screening shows that neovisuality has come to trace
its own genealogy of counterinsurgency to Algeria. The interrogation and torture methods used by the
French in Algeria were disseminated by the notorious School of the Americas to Latin American
dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, and have been revived for use, since 2001, by the United States.
In recent years, the Algerian has come to be the figure of the non-Western immigrant to Europe, at
first needed and now reviled, which has led to a resurgence of fascist parties across Europe, matched
by anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment in Australia, Britain, and the United States. So do the
necessities of an antifascist neorealism reimpose themselves in the light of both the electoral success
of the far Right in Europe, from France (2002) to Italy (2007) and Austria (2008), and the
appropriation of powers by the Bush-Cheney administration (20002008) in the United States under
the cover of counterinsurgency. These questions continue to converge within the frame of global
cinema, from France to Spain, Finland, the United States, Mexico, and Algeria itself, indicating the
centrality of Algeria and its location as the border of North and South to the neovisuality of the
present. A recent group of films have returned to Fanon, the psychology of civil war and fascism, and
the viewpoint of the child.
Perhaps the best-known of these films in the West has been Cach (2005), made by the Austrian
director Michael Haneke, which deals with the controversial legacy of the Algerian War in France.
The film centers on Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche), two selfdescribed Parisian Bobos (Bourgeois-Bohemians), working in television and publishing. Their

comfortable lives with their son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), are interrupted by the arrival of a
series of anonymous videotapes showing their apartment under surveillance, accompanied by violent
drawings of a child vomiting blood or a chicken being slaughtered. As the mysterious tapes continue,
it gradually emerges that the drawings represent scenes from Georges's rural childhood, when his
parents employed as workers two Algerians, who lived at the farm along with their son, Majid. The
two workers disappeared after attending the now infamous demonstrations in Paris on 17 October
1961. Called by the FLN to show the support of Algerians in France for independence, the
demonstration was met with the most extreme police repression led by the former Vichy police chief
Maurice Papon. Hundreds were killed and deposited in the river Seine, a moment that seems to be
recurringly forgotten and remembered in France. Majid comes to live with Georges's family, causing
the six-year-old Georges to stage some clumsy attempts to have Majid sent away, which culminate in
success after he tricks Majid into slaughtering a rooster. These scenes are depicted in the drawings
that accompany the videos, which have now moved on to show Georges's family home. Enraged,
Georges tracks down Majid (Maurice Bnichou), who denies all involvement with the tapes as does
his son, Hashem (Walid Afkir). Nonetheless the tapes continue to arrive, and Majid, who has
continued to deny being their author, commits suicide by cutting his throat in Georges's presence, an
incident again videotaped and distributed.
For all its excellent intentions, Cach exemplifies what Walter Mignolo has called the
Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism.87 Indeed, much of the discussion of the film has centered on
the ever-elusive universal values it supposedly embodies. What matters for Cach is the impact of
Algeria on French lives and minds. Majid and Hashem are undeveloped as characters to the point of
being ciphers for immigrant victimhood and angry second-generation Frenchness respectively.
Majid's suicide is unintelligible except as a device to shock watching (Western) viewers. All the
videos in the film, from the opening shot of Georges's and Anne's apartment to the closing sequence of
Pierrot's school, use the same angle of vision. The camera is placed at a medium distance from the
events being watched, slightly to the right of center. Within the film, this place is identified as that
from which the child Georges watched Majid being taken away to the orphanage. It is the viewpoint,
then, of (colonial) guilt, betrayal, and later repression. One needs to qualify this knowledge,
because it comes, like all our visual understanding of the childhood drama between Georges and
Majid, from Georges's dreams. While allowing for the obvious fact that these dream sequences are
constructed, that construction was enacted by filmmakers very much aware of the mechanisms of
condensation and displacement that shape dream imagery. Michael Haneke suggested that the entire
film was designed to explore the collective unconscious of the West and that it had changed
Godard's formula from Le Petit Soldat into film is a lie, twenty-four frames a second.88 That is to
say, what Cach tries to do is undermine the cinematic consensus in which what is seen is true,
without any recourse to what Georges, in cutting an edition of his show about Rimbaud, disparagingly
calls theory. There may be a hidden reference here to Rimbaud's lapidary phrase Je est un autre:
for Georges there is no other, the I is all there is. Some have seen the drawings in the film as
reminiscent of J'ai huit ans but here the purpose and meaning of the drawings are obscure, and they
are also the agent of violence, rather than simply its record.89
Fanon had taken a strongly critical approach to this framing of Algeria. For example, in 1957,
Georges Matt published in Les Temps Modernes an essay arguing that the drafting of French youth
into Algerian service was teaching them to be reflexively racist and violent: What is going in
Algeria today is a large-scale attempt to dehumanize French youth. Fanon retorted: It is worth
thinking about this attitude. Such exclusion of Algerians, such ignorance about the men being tortured

or of the families being massacred constitutes an entirely new phenomenon. It is related to the
egocentric, sociocentric form of thought that has become characteristic of the French.90 Even more
characteristically, Cach centers on the exploration of the male ego. Conveniently, neither Hashem's
mother nor Georges's father appear in the film, allowing the drama to circle around male egos in
conflict, culminating in the dream/surveillance of the meeting of the two sons. Anne features as a plot
device to exemplify Georges's inability to trust and to set up Pierrot's oedipal rebellion when he
suspects her of having an affair. Cach invites the viewer to judge whether Majid or Hashem made
the tapes, whether Georges was objectively guilty of betraying Majid, whether Anne was having an
affair, and whether the sons were in league with each other. Like Freud and, all sophistication to the
contrary notwithstanding, like Fanon, Cach cannot ask what the women in its drama might have done
or wanted in their own right. Although it visualizes a France damaged by the police actions of 1961,
it cannot engage with a right to look, but offers instead a different form of (ego) policing.91
I want to develop these themes by counterpointing two recent treatments of one of the most difficult
sections in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, in which he transcribed an interview with two
teenage Algerian boys who had killed their French friend. The action was revenge for a preemptive
massacre of Algerians by French militia at Rivet, in 1956, in which two of one of the Algerian boy's
relatives had died.92 All three boys had gone out to play as usual, but the two young Algerians killed
their friend with a knife. Neither expressed remorse, because they want to kill us and because,
although Algerians were being killed on a daily basis, no French were in prison. Fanon offers no
commentary on the transcripts, in which he tried to emphasize that their friend had done nothing
wrong, with which they agreed, and that he did not deserve to die, which they denied. In short, the
boys acted on a theory of collective responsibility for which youth was no protection, just as children
were involved in French attacks like those seen in J'ai huit ans. As Fanon suggested, It is the war,
this colonial war that very often takes on the aspect of a genuine genocide, this war which radically
disrupts and shatters the world, which is in fact the triggering situation.93 While the specific
violence is acknowledged to be unjustified, the general political context made it seem that this was
the only action the boys could take, because, as they said, they could not overpower an adult and they
were too young to join the resistance. In response to the disaster of the post-1991 Algerian civil war,
UNICEF has sponsored children's activities such as drawing alongside group play, theatre and
sport.94 While worthy enough, such diversions cannot by their nature offer the children what Fanon's
patients were claiming in a displaced and perhaps even psychotic fashion: the right to be seen as
political subjects. Instead, their actions only attracted the gaze of the police and their auxiliaries, the
psychiatrists, a dehumanized form of their desire to be recognized.
In 2007, the Finnish video artist Eije Liisa Ahtila created a six-screen installation entitled Where
Is Where?, which dramatized Fanon's text as a fifty-three-minute film. Four screens showed the
dramatization, while two others, placed out of the room, showed newsreel footage of a French
massacre like that at Rivet. It was therefore impossible to see the entire film, or perhaps Where Is
Where? can be seen as a challenge to the concept of film in the digital-video era. In her account of
this project, Ahtila described how she began by writing a script that incorporated Fanon's words into
a poetic drama, revolving around what she calls words, death, space and time.95 Language implies
death that negates space and time, restored by the specificity of words to time and place. In the fourscreen main space of the piece, a Finnish woman, known as the Poet, has a series of meetings with
Death, dressed in the conventional black cowl and holding a scythe. She then finds Algeria literally
coming through the walls of her comfortable Helsinki apartment as an allegorical space of death. The

rather kitsch magic realism of these scenes and those of a mythic Algeria shadowed by death
contrast with the cinematic realism of the later scenes from Fanon's case study (see fig. 51). In a
sense, the Helsinki scenes prepare the viewer for what is to come, which dominates the experience.
The overlap of space and time culminates with the manifestation of the two Algerian boys in the
Poet's deserted swimming pool, sitting in a small rowing boat. Looking lost and alone, the boys have
become Algerian migrants, representative of the migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers whose
presence is challenging the homogeneity of white Europe. The space was darkened for the screenings,
but you were in no sense immobile like the spectator in a theater. As you turned from screen to screen
to see the action, you became a vigilant soldier, aware that what there is to see exceeds your capacity
to monitor it. The implied viewer is by implication, therefore, European or in the place of the
European. Consequently, the visitor experiences no sense of a right to look, let alone the traditional
dominance of the cinematic spectator. If there is such a place, it can only be that of the artist. Yet
given its length, Where Is Where? is more than just a video installation, being intentionally closer to
the immersive experience of classic cinema. If narrative cinema replicated the experience of
dreaming, Ahtila's piece was closer to that of the nightmare or hallucination.

This imagined clash of realisms can be interestingly counterpointed with the recent novel Fanon
(2008) by the African American novelist John Edgar Wideman, which used the same scene involving
the two Algerian boys as a central moment. It was inspired by a chance meeting between Wideman's
mother and Fanon, while she was a nurse in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where he was being
treated for his ultimately fatal leukemia. Wideman's novel is a complicated piece of writing,
deliberately hard to follow, featuring both a character called John Edgar Wideman and his brother,
who has been imprisoned for murder, as the writer's own sibling has been. Further, like the actual
Wideman, the fictional Wideman has lost his nephew, the son of his imprisoned brother, to murder at
the age of fifteen. Another layer in the novel contains a character Thomas, who is writing a book
about Fanon in a book written by Wideman. These complicated changes of authorial voice place the
engagement with Fanon behind a mask, explicitly in imitation of Black Skin, White Masks,96 as if
he cannot be directly approached precisely because the hegemonic narrative codes of realism forbid
such unlikely encounters. However, the characters in Fanon are African Americans making use of
character masks, whether white or otherwise. Indeed, Wideman has a country house in France,
emphasizing the country's dominant place in the modern imagination, but also a practice that reads

white, even if a residence in Paris might be read as black, given the long-term African diaspora
presence in the city. As Wideman's musing continues, it becomes clear that Fanon is not about
stepping back, standing apart, analyzing and instructing others but about identifying with others.97
In a striking change of voice, Thomas then shifts his proposed novel into a would-be screenplay for
a film to be set in the African American neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, which he pitches at great length
to none other than Jean-Luc Godard in a distinctively black voice. In the novel Godard is imagined
to retort: Images are slaves, prisoners. Images kidnapped, copyrighted, archived, cloned. Property
(80). Nonetheless, Wideman proposes a re-creation of the same scene from The Wretched of the
Earth as that visualized by Ahtila: the killing of the French child. Only in this case it is to be set in
counterpoint with Homewood, Pittsburgh, an underprivileged African American neighborhood. The
imagined film opens with a bird's-eye view of the corner of Frankstown and Homewood, placed
above a crawl of Fanon's text, which quickly dissolves into a re-creation of the scene (11314).
Dissolve back to Homewood, where a teenager, the same age as his murdered nephew, Omar, stares
at Mason's bar, watched in turn by Wideman's elderly mother from her assisted-living apartment as a
sign on the grid of streets below. The teenager waits and watches for a parent who seems
unlikely to emerge, placed in the streets not because of a revolution, but because a social order has
collapsed. The only person left to care for this childand teenagers, reviled as they are, are children
is a disabled senior citizen, who can offer only her benevolence. The disjunctured chain of looking
performed here neither protects nor prevents. In this context, Wideman wonders, Where do you go if
someone thinks of you as dead (116), rhyming with Ahtila's questions When you die where are you?
And where is where? There is a section break, indicated by an asterisk, and it emerges that the
teenager has been shot and killed (120). A long reminiscence from Wideman's mother about the
decline of the area culminates in her account of the murder, which she had heard but not seen, and her
witnessing of the police and family approaching the scene. Death negates the difference between
Helsinki and Pittsburgh, but the colonial difference of Algeria restores time and place. Both the
video piece and the novel present the Algerian experience as a direct intervention into their very
different present experiences, one in the comfort of Helsinki and the other in the impoverished
suburbs of post-industrial Pittsburgh. Where Ahtila finds the history of Algeria floating in her pool in
uniformly white Helsinki, Wide-man sees a parallel between colonial Algeria and what is happening
today in segregated Homewood with its 96 percent African American population. Both see that there
is an Algeria that marks the border between European space and that of the immigrant; and white
U.S. space from African American space. Ahtila claims that death takes away time, leaving only
space. What is left behind is the ghost or the specter. For Jacques Derrida, himself Algerian, the ghost
is that which sees us but which we do not see: It is still evening, it is always nightfall along the
ramparts, on the battlements of an old Europe at war. With the other and with itself.98 The ramparts
are those of Elsinore, in Denmark, a place now associated with its reductive cartooning of
Muhammad as an assertion of the rights of old Europe. Algeria is one name for that space that the old
Cold War alliance cannot escape on either side of the Atlantic, a space that returns.

In Algeria itself, civil war returned as an uncanny double of the FLN's war against the French, as
represented in Yamina Bachir's film Rachida (2002). Bachir studied at the National Algerian Film
School, first established by Vautier. Rachida was Bachir's first film, made in the face of what she
calls the dismemberment of the film industry in Algeria, after the elections of 1991. It evokes the
collapse of Algerian civil society by means of the story of a young woman teacher named Rachida
(Djouadi Ibtissem) (see fig. 52). Bachir developed her idea from an incident in which antigovernment
militants tried to compel a teacher to carry a bomb into her own school. When she refused, she was
shot, as is Rachida in the film. The film then imagines what might have happened next, as Rachida
goes into hiding in the countryside, having survived being shot, for fear that her assailants would
return to kill her. At first understandably depressed, Rachida returns to teaching and is attending a
wedding when the local version of the terrorists (the term used in the film) attack and devastate the
community. Bachir created what she calls a perfect victim as the center of her protest, and the film
suffers somewhat from this idealization. At the same time, the film was made against the background
of censorship; thus, for example, when a young woman is raped in the village and soldiers come to
investigate, her distress at the fact that her attackers also wore military uniforms is the only hint the
film can offer to suggest the army, as well as the terrorists, is committing outrages. The film gains in
texture when seen against its predecessor, The Battle of Algiers. Early in Rachida, the television
news declares that terrorists attacked a man in the Casbah, evoking the French propaganda of the
1950s, just as a bomb-making scene recalls the similar FLN activity in The Battle of Algiers.
However, in Rachida a woman has to be coerced into carrying a bomb, whereas in The Battle of
Algiers there were many volunteers. In another scene, Rachida watches a television news report of
the murder of several monks, an incident recently made into a popular French film, Des hommes et
des dieux [Of gods and men] (2010, dir. Xavier Beauvois). By contrast, Hors la loi [Outside the law]
(2010, dir. Rachid Bouchareb) caused widespread controversy for its story of three brothers who
witnessed the Stif massacre in 1945 and were drawn into the revolutionary struggle in different
ways. As an indication of French revisionism on the Algerian war, in part caused by the palpable
difficulties of the postcolonial state, there was even questioning as to whether Stif had really been a
massacre.
While there is a postcolonial state of denial in France concerning Algeria, Bachir was trying to
evoke what is repeatedly called in her film a mutual culture of hate operating between all sides in
the country itself. Rachida needs to hide not from a colonial army but from her own neighbors,
creating such great anxiety that she thinks she is going mad. A local woman doctor in the village

diagnoses post-traumatic psychosis, but adds that the whole country suffers from it. Rachida later
dreams that she will be assassinated by terrorists in the village in a very realistic scene that emerges
as a dream only in its aftermath. The level of persistent psychic damage in Algeria depicted in
Rachida reinforces the importance and necessity of the return of Fanon's case studies in The
Wretched of the Earth in Wideman's and Ahtila's projects. Indeed, the inaugural conference of the
Socit Franco-Algrien de Psychiatrie, in 2003, heard case studies that Robert Keller, who attended,
described as near replications of Fanon's from fifty years earlier.99 Fanon's clinic in Blida is now
within a center of the Groupe Islamique Arme, and the facilities are described as ruins, with the
wards reduced to a warehouse of bodies. During the revolutions of 2011, it was noticeable that
people in Tunisia and Egypt repeatedly referred to losing their sense of fear. Once that fear had been
set aside, it became possible to imagine a very different future. One of the most damaging legacies of
the civil war in Algeria has been that people still seem unable or unwilling to set aside that fear. To
be fair, if one considers the impact of under three thousand casualties on 9/11 in the United States, and
then bear in mind how much smaller Algeria is, it is perhaps not surprising that after so much death,
people are not yet ready for another experiment.
The village life evoked by Bachir has more texture than the simple peasant scenario sketched by
Ahtila. The one public telephone in the village, for instance, is constantly used by Khaled, a young
man who is in love with Hadjar, whose father, Hassen, will not sanction the match because Khaled is
too poor. Hadjar's arranged marriage ends the film, a counterpoint to the love match seen in The
Battle of Algiers. In Pontecorvo's film, the FLN official apologizes for the simple ceremony, but
evokes the possibility of a transformed future that Rachida suggests is still yet to come. The violent
scenes are shot with a hand-held camera, giving the realistic jerky feel pioneered by Pontecorvo,
but there are also long interludes in the separate spaces of the women, from the courtyard to the baths.
Here the lyricism of Ahtila's Algeria is matched by reveries such as one evoked by the scent of figs.
But Bachir brings us back to earth when in a subsequent scene a local man harasses Rachida,
gesturing with a carrot and saying he can smell the scent of a woman. There are only two moments in
the film that step outside the realism sustained by terror. As Rachida is teaching in the village, she
sees a bubble floating near her head. She turns and all the children in her class are blowing bubbles at
her (see plate 10). This moment is recalled at the very end of the film when, in what Bachir calls a
Brechtian moment, Rachida dresses in her clothes from Algiers, sets her hair loose, and heads through
the devastated village toward the school in order to teach. Several children emerge from nowhere,
and they sit down in a class held in a vandalized room. Strikingly (for a Western viewer), Rachida
begins the class by telling the students to take out their slates, a tool that evokes a remote past for
those in wealthier locations. Although she writes today's lesson on the board in Arabic, she does
not specify a topic. Since the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century, the education of the
working and subaltern classes has been central to the consolidation of the right to look. Although it
proposes no solution, the ending to Rachida imagines another reality, in which today's lesson is
always open to question, always about to be begun, and not yet foreclosed.
While that would be a satisfying place to conclude, it would overlook many more complex
realities. Algerian schools have been the subject of intense national controversy, first stressing Islam
and Arabic, and then returning to a curriculum that includes French and science. However,
journalistic estimates in 2008 suggested that, although there is 70 percent literacy (cited without
definition), only 20 percent of eligible children attended high school, with the majority dropping out
for economic, political, or religious reasons. After forty years of independence that figure seems very
low. During the revolutionary period, Fanon suggested that the FLN was not paying sufficient attention

to the peasantry or what he called the lumpen-proletariat, meaning the dispossessed urban
population, the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and all the petty criminals [who], when
approached, give the liberation struggle all they have got.100 Some of the characters in The Battle of
Algiers, for example, certainly fit this description. Like Gramsci, Fanon saw that the revolution
depended on the spontaneity of this group, but that the leading party was not thinking about how to
use that energy once independence was achieved. To put it briefly, the FLN stressed elements of the
North within Algeria, such as the small urban proletariat, and did not develop a theory or practice
to integrate the South, the peasants and the dispossessed. Fanon's own belief in the new man that
would be created by the revolution owed more to the regeneration theory of the French Revolution
than to modern politics and failed to think through the practicalities of transformation, hoping instead
that nationalism (or later pan-Africanism) would simply deliver them. Algeria's first difficult and then
disastrous post-independence history can be seen as a working out of this failure, the internal
contradiction between the FLN leadership and those in whose name the revolution was carried out.
By the same token, in 2002, the year that Rachida was released, French electoral politics came to a
dead end when the first round of the presidential election saw the avowed racist Jean-Marie Le Pen,
who had been a torturer during the Algerian War, win through to the second round, defeating the
socialist Lionel Jospin. The choice was now between the right extreme and the extreme right, as
the queer novelist Virginie Despentes put it.101 Diagnosing a French psychosis that one could put
alongside the Algerian post traumatic psychosis discussed above, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem went
further still. He called the situation fascist democracy, because no criticism of the democractic
system itself was permitted. Suggesting that any proper commitment to democracy would have led to
a refusal to participate in the second round, ending the Fifth Republic just as the Fourth Republic had
collapsed over Algeria, Kacem concluded that, in present circumstances, the extreme right is the
real.102 In his view, the riots of December 2005 were perpetrated by disaffected minority youth in
the French suburbs (banlieux), who had come to understand that their lives were being carried out in
what he calls the place of the ban (a pun on ban, meaning ban, and lieu, meaning place).103
Consistent with this analysis, Nicolas Sarkozy, who came to prominence by describing the rioters as
racaille [a mob], was elected president of France, in 2007. Soon afterward, he was declaring in
Dakar that Africa had not yet fully entered history.104 This parody of Hegel has at least had the
benefit of opening and extending academic debate of decolonization and postcolonial theory to wider
discussion. More accurately, it might be said that a history that can account for Africa within
modernity has yet to become accepted in the West. One key element of the crisis that is currently
afflicting visuality is, then, this refusal to acknowledge the persistence of imperial visuality in both its
normal and intensified (fascist) form. Time, that which visuality visualizes as History, is out of
joint. The effort to restore visuality has become global, leaving the nation behind as one element
among many in the pattern of global counterinsurgency.

POSTSCRIPT: 18 MARCH 2011

At the time of writing, the autocratic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia have fallen. There is open war
against the people by the autocrats in Libya and Bahrain, while Yemen seems set to be the next hot
spot of the extraordinary events of 2011. As I am working, the United Nations Security Council has
passed a resolution authorizing intervention in Libya. Safe to say, then, that this is not over.105 By the
time you read this, you will know what will have happened, whether the dramatic events of January

and February have been forgotten as globalized capital restores business as usual, or new forms of
governance and activism have continued to emerge. Nonetheless, whatever the outcome, and however
success is defined and by whom, it is clear that the entanglements of half a century of
decolonization, globalization, neo-colonialism, and counterinsurgency described in this chapter have
produced a striking challenge to the autocracies of the region. Often invisible to Western audiences,
in the sense that they rarely feature in news and media reporting, the oil-producing and -protecting
autocrats have nonetheless been indispensable to neoliberal geopolitics. These regimes operated a
classic form of imperial visuality. Their classification was simple: for or against the regime, whether
divided by family ties, religion, ethnicity, or political allegiance. Separation was effected by the
traditional means identified by Fanon, the barracks and the police station. In Tunisia, there was one
police officer for every forty citizens at the time of Ben Ali's fall. The Egyptian Army has over
450,000 men. Nonetheless, their regimes fell. The aesthetics of respect for the status quo described
by Fanon disappeared as young populationsit is often said that 70 percent of the region are under
30networking via globalized media and interfacing with destitute rural and urban underclasses,
decided that nothing was worse than the continuance of the regime.
Across the region the slogan has been, the people demand the fall of the regime. There is no
classification within the people, only one between the people and the regime. The performance of
the people has constituted a new political subject that refuses to see or hear the regime, except
when it resigns or falls. The mobilization of the army against the police in Tunisia, the popular
resistance in Egypt against the police, and the contest in Bahrain for Pearl Square, culminated in the
war of the state against the people in Libya in order to sustain the authority of the autocrat. Even in
Libya, no one believes in the status quo. It is no longer right; it no longer commands assent. The status
quo can be enforced but it will be a long time before it is once again invisibly normal. The security
states watched the subject populace and guarded the autocrat. Now the revolution is watching. That is
to say, the revolution is watching us and we are watching the revolution. It is also to say that there has
been a certain revolution in watching, although the casual use of revolution in such contexts is less
convincing now. Nonetheless, despite all injunctions to the contrary, to watch is a form of action. The
2011 revolutions are reconfiguring the places of the political and the everyday. It is a watching that
demands to see and be seen. It has formed a new distribution of the sensible to allow for the
emergence of a new political subject, a mobility whose characteristics are constantly updating. There
has been a radical reconfiguration of the attributes often associated with the private to the public
peace, security, a sense of belonging, and the absence of fear.
The location of this new sharing of the sensible has been the square, epitomized above all by
Cairo's Tahrir Square. The square was transformed from one of the banal public spaces of the
thirty-year state of emergency into a site of emergence, whose form became that of the revolution. The
square is not, in fact, square. It consists of a polyhedron, shaped something like a hatchet, with a
central circle and a large gathering space. The entrance used by the revolutionaries was via a
checkpoint on the Kasr al-Nil bridge, won in combat with the police on 29 January 2011. The January
25 movement called the square Free Egypt, sending up chants of these are the Egyptian people.
Food, medical care, and civility were all provided. The poor, destitute, middle ranks of business,
academics, lawyers, and filmmakers were all able to recognize each other. The guards, who greeted
each new member of this emergent Cairo commune, as if following the Commune of 1871, wore
improvised helmets made from kitchen bowls labeled the government of the revolution. Tahrir
Square became an alternative city within the city, a rival source of affiliation to the nation-state.
People lived there and treated it as a place of belonging. In popular discourse, the interim government

is held to account with the slogan We know the way to Tahrir Square, a line of force that was
sufficient to drive out the Mubarak holdover prime minister Ahmed Shafiq on 3 March 2011. In the
square, real and virtual, people are enacting wakeful watching: an active form, wide-awake,
concentrating and alert with intent. No longer subject to the police, the people move around, circulate,
and are very aware that there is something to see here. People read newspapers, talk, rest, but above
all they are present: alive, in the present, attesting to their presence, refusing to depart. It is simply the
sense that something has snapped into focus for the first time in ages. This watching is live and alive
it is of the present but an expanded present in which certain moments are again alive, not as
specters or echoes, but as actors in the new network. We shall always know the way to Tahrir Square,
even if we have not quite got there yet.

Mexican-Spanish Counterpoint
Pan's Labyrinth

The most successful attempt to frame antifascist neorealism in the present moment has come from
Guillermo del Toro, a Mexican film director working on a Spanish subject.1 The remarkable El
Laberinto del Fauno, or Pan's Labyrinth (2006), unexpectedly found a means to counter the
hegemonic violence of our own time by mixing a specific moment of antifascist resistance with
archetypes from fairytales and digital special effects created for horror fantasy films. The film is not a
template for antifascism, but an instance of it that crosses national boundaries both in its production
and its narrative. Pan's Labyrinth begins by setting the film as a retelling, a reinscription of history.
Set in 1944, the film recovers an often forgotten resistance to Franco that continued until 1948. While
France was still occupied, the resistance might have been taking comfort from the invasion of Italy
and the D-Day landings, hoping for an extension of the war to Spain. Our first sight is of the dying
child Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) at the heart of the labyrinth (see plate 11). At once the time reverses, the
blood flows back into her, and the camera enters her eye, the one eye capable of seeing the two
realities of the film, that of the fascist state and that of the netherworld, which are immediately in
tension (see fig. 53). That tension is visualized as blindness by means of a whiteout. In the cinematic
context, this focus on the eye cannot but recall Luis Buuel's famous scene, in Un Chien andalou
(1929), depicting a woman's eye being cut with a razor. The eye is not visuality, we are reminded,
either in the age of mechanical reproduction or in our present digital cinema. We cut (in the editorial
sense) from that blindness into the ruined city of Belchite, a densely overdetermined site of memory.
It was the site of a key battle in the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, when the Republican Army launched
a counterattack on the eastern front, seeking both to retake Zaragoza and to distract Franco in the
north. As well as regular troops, members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were involved in the
conflict, including some African American soldiers reported on by Langston Hughes for a Baltimore
newspaper. The town was taken and then lost, repeatedly bombed, and left in ruins by Franco as a
memorial to Republican brutality. It remains in that state today.

The ruins have become a film set on a number of occasions, such as for Terry Gilliam's Adventures
of Baron Munchausen (1987). In 1989, the Spanish artist Francesc Torres incorporated Belchite into
his controversial installation Belchite/South Bronx, which merged the damaged built environment and
social fabric from these two locations, but at fifty years distance. While the South Bronx has to a
certain degree recovered, Torres has recently documented the forensic excavation of the mass graves
of the victims of Spanish fascism, which are only now being documented, with great controversy.
Indeed, Franco's self-declared Crusade to conquer Spain, with its evocation of the Reconquest and
the Inquisition, sounds less archaeological now than it might have done in 1989, when the ancien
rgimes of Europe were falling all around. Given that the narrative departs from here, it is clear that
the film is an exploration of what one might call the historical present.

Ofelia finds and explores a counterreal to the world of violent domination in which she lives. Her
name is of course intensely suggestive, as the madwoman of Hamlet's desire, but the madness here is
political, not personal. Ofelia is accompanying her widowed mother (Ariadna Gil) to the mountains
where her new stepfather (Sergi Lpez), a captain in Franco's army, is fighting the Republicans. She
likes to read fairytales, and, guided by an insect that will turn out to be magical, she finds an ancient
statue that visually evokes a similar figure in the Spanish film classic Spirit of the Beehive (dir.
Victor Erice, 1973). In that film, Ana (Ana Torent), a seven-year-old girl, creates her own fantasy
world in the postcivil war Spain of 1940, after being intrigued by watching Frankenstein. Films,
del Toro seems to suggest, are our present-day mythology, which is not to say that they are without
meaning or politics. Ofelia discovers the existence of a netherworld, accessed by the labyrinth of the
title. It was here that she was born as a princess named Moana, but she later ran away, like a latterday Persephone, to experience the world of the living. Ofelia meets a faun (Doug Jones), who reveals
this story to her and sets her a series of tasks that she must accomplish in order to return (see fig. 54).
The faun is the Pan of the title, the Greek god of shepherds, but also the originator of panic, the fear
of open space, that has morphed into the moral panics that so characterize modern authoritarian
regimes. The character was created using animatronics, interfacing a real actor with costume and
computer effects. The present-day viewer is taken to be able to read the meeting of this composite
with a human character without difficulty. There are, then, at least three competing layers of
reference within Pan's Labyrinth: the specific historical references, a set of parallel associations
with mythology and archetypes, and, finally, carefully placed allusions to cinematic classics. This
density of reference, whether fully understood or not, is part of the film's compelling feel, making it

impossible not to watch.

For example, within the diegesis of the film, the netherworld is clearly not real in the material
sense, nor is it the same space as the above-ground experience of fascism: but it is not pure fantasy.
Events in the netherworld correlate to those experienced in the fascist world and interface with them
to material and embodied effect. The faun gives Ofelia a mandrake to place under the bed of her
mother, who is having a complicated pregnancy, and it breaks her fever, leading to her recovery, much
to the surprise of the doctor. However the Captain discovers Ofelia's intervention, and he blames
Ofelia's reading for her belief in magic, just as certain Enlightenment thinkers worried that reading
novels would corrupt women's morals. The mandrake dies in the wood fire, where the Captain
throws it. Although it is undecidable whether this would have been visible to people other than Ofelia
in the fascist world of the film, we the audience see it and are moved by it. Further, the mandrake's
demise quickly entails the death of Ofelia's mother in childbirth. This archetypal narrative sets up
subsequent confrontations between the Captain and, first, Mercedes (Maribel Verd), the undercover
resistance liaison who works as a servant in the barracks, and, then, Ofelia. Even after she has been
detected, Mercedes taunts the Captain that she was able to smuggle goods and information under his
nose because, as a woman, she was invisible to him, a consequence of fascism's segregation by
gender. He repeats this mistake by dismissing the guard as he prepares to torture her, which allows
her to attack him with her concealed knife. Hollywood's standard imaginary cannot think past
depicting a good violence to counter the bad violence of the irrational other. But del Toro shows
the quiet refusal of the doctor to participate in fascist torture, to the bafflement of the Captain, who
repeatedly asks why he did not obey. The doctor replies, Obeyingfor people like you that's all
there is. Authority here does not authorize and does not carry legitimacy. In 1944, countless
thousands went to their deaths at the hands of fascists with a quiet determination to remain in control
in a world gone mad. The Captain shoots the doctor, as his logic dictates, but the moral economy of
the netherworld has intruded into the fascist space and is set to disrupt the order of violence. By this
time, we are prepared to accept this fantasy of justice because we have already seen the materiality of
the netherworld in operation.
Perhaps the most incisive moment of Pan's Labyrinth is the end that is also its beginning: the death
of Ofelia. A modern Antigone, she sacrifices herself to the overweening Law represented by the
Captain (who would be equivalent to Creon in Sophocles's tragedy), but in this case she saves her
brother's life rather than burying him. As a child and as a woman under fascism, she is twice over a
minor, but here she achieves the ability to choose before the law and to represent. Her passing marks
the culmination of both antifascist narratives. In the world of fascist domination, the forces in the
border outpost have suffered a defeat, but Franco will remain in power, as the audience knows, for
over thirty years. The victory is twice bitter-sweet, for it has cost the life of Ofelia without leading to
the hoped-for better future. Further, if Ofelia has regained her place in the netherworld, it comes at the
cost both of her human life and of her resistance to patriarchy.2 For the netherworld is the domain of
her father, the king, and her resistance to her stepfather ends up reinscribing her in patriarchal
relations, whether willingly or not. For some, this conclusion is a disappointment, even a relapse.
Another view might see it as a corollary of antifascist realism. Gramsci argued that one of the reasons
that the subaltern classes could not be fully absorbed into the dominant hegemony, and thus retained
the potential for revolution, was their folklore. Folklore maintained an unstable and fluctuating
element in the nation-state that provided the potential for a spontaneous uprising, the great
undoing.3 It could offer something significant to the organic intellectual, who was charged with
overcoming the segregation between North and South: It is necessary to represent concretely to his

fantasy those human beings as beings who live and work daily, to represent their sorrows, the sadness
of a life they are forced to live.4 A tragic realism, then, but within the frame of fantasythat sounds
like Pan's Labyrinth. The frame of folklore nonetheless tended, as Gramsci also acknowledged, to
the mythology of patriarchy. Think here of Freud's peculiar fantasy, in Totem and Taboo, of the murder
of the primal father that inaugurates the social itself, understood as the ur-example of magical
thinking. Freud held that the so-called primitive belief in magic recurred in so-called modern children
especially insofar as the totem animal represents the father. You could read Pan's Labyrinth that way
if you wanted. I prefer to think that the primal father fantasy, the construction of the child as primitive,
even the subjugation by the male gaze are all really existing moments that are in themselves subject to
the division of the sensible that sustains the possibility of visuality as a system of power.
Pan's Labyrinth is, then, a key example of the tension between the right to look and the law of the
gaze, which it is prone to become. That is to say, the subaltern revolt tends to become reified as what
Gramsci called the modern Prince, or the centralized, hierarchical political party, a form of the police
technique that is Caesarism. If we rely on folklore, popular culture, call it what you will, to do the
undoing of visuality, the regime of the Hero, then the final undoing, that which folklore retreats from
as its condition of possibility, is that of undoing itself. The fear of undoing has been the greatest
motivator of visuality, beginning with the great undoing of Saint-Domingue into Haiti by the revolt of
the enslaved, which persuaded Britain to abolish slavery rather than risk a viral undoing of the
mystical foundations of sovereignty. The specter of emancipation in Jamaica and Chartism in Britain
prompted Carlyle to reassert the power of mysticism as visuality over that of unbinding. Without
proposing a last, the first undoing, as radical movements have known and then disavowed for
generations, must be the frame of the national that so effectively lends itself to the domination of the
police. In short, the mystical regime of visuality can be undone by magic, as long as the next thing
magic does is undo itself.

SEVEN
Global Counterinsurgency and the Crisis of Visuality

The first, the supreme, most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish the
kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its true nature.
Karl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), quoted by Col. Daniel S. Roper, Global Counterinsurgency
Politics is the continuation of war by other means.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

Visuality was a technique for waging war appropriated as a means to justify authority as the
imagining of history. The end of the Cold War, in 1989 might have been expected to create a
postvisuality era. Instead, the global Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has extended and
transformed visuality, using digital technology to pursue nineteenth-century tactical goals. The small
wars of imperial revolt, contrasted to the large wars against the national armies of other colonial
powers, have been digitally upgraded into a global insurgency that requires a matching global
counterinsurgency. It should be said that from the decolonial perspective, the Cold War was always
already a counterinsurgency, from Algeria to Indochina, Latin America, and now the Middle East.
Classifying a conflict, as Clausewitz emphasized, was the first task of the leader and therefore the
first step of visuality. As an index of the interaction of the first iteration of visuality theory and its
current intensification as global counterinsurgency, Clausewitz's passage was cited by Colonel Daniel
S. Roper, director of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, himself commenting
on then British Prime Minister Tony Blair's assertion, in 2007, that the definition of a global war
against insurgency was the first task in winning that war. By defining counterinsurgency as an
existential struggle, the stage is set to ensure that they must die so that we may live. This
asymmetric warfare is visualized as the Darwinian struggle for life, or, in Roper's words, as a
way to preserve and promote the way of life of free and open societies based on the rule of law,
defeat terrorist extremism and create a global environment inhospitable to extremists.1 Foucault's
assertion that politics is war by other means is now policy. It has entailed the adoption of population
control as military tactics. Counterinsurgency manages populations, not individuals, being a
population-centered approach, instead of one focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the
insurgents.2 Achille Mbembe has argued that such controls in the context of war should be
considered necropolitics, a question of who shall live and who shall die, entailing the
generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies
and populations.3 Mbembe derives the genealogy of sovereign right to kill from slavery and
colonial imperialism, where it could act with impunity and without rules. Expressed in today's

military format, this becomes the mantra of counterinsurgency: clear, hold and build, meaning
remove insurgents from a locality using lethal force, sustain that expulsion by physical means such as
separation walls, and then build neoliberal governance in the resulting space of circulation.
Counterinsurgency classifies and separates by force to produce an imperial governance that is selfjustifying because it is held to be right a priori and hence aesthetic. This governance is what I shall
call necropolitical regimes of separation.
The goal of such governance is not to produce disciplined, docile bodies, so much as to manage
what Deleuze called the society of control. In the parlance of counterinsurgency, this terrain is
known as culture, sometimes even defined and described using poststructuralist and cultural-studies
theoristsincluding Deleuze. This post-panoptic imaginary operates a control that seeks to separate
the host population from the insurgent, as if quarantining the former from infection by the latter.
This necropolitics is invisible to the insurgent, with no expectation of reforming or disciplining that
person, hence the sense that it is post-panoptic. For Bentham's Panopticon was designed above all to
reform and improve the inmate, pupil, or factory worker, while post-panoptic visuality centers on
population control. Despite an apparent but carefully stage-managed success in Iraq, which seems to
be coming unstuck after the failed elections of 2010, global counterinsurgency has struggled to deliver
basic services and public safety in its key areas of operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan and
Yemen. These quantitative shortcomings are perhaps the corollary of the qualitative failure to define
the practice of counterinsurgency beyond the classification and separation of the insurgent. Precisely
because this is the era of globalization, characterized by transnational migration and electronic media,
the digitized border between insurgent and host population consistently fails to hold. In the resulting
crisis, the very pattern that counterinsurgency is trying to sustain is unclear: a centralized nation, a
client state, or a global market? Although the U.S. military continue to use a moralized rhetoric of
nation-building, their practical administration of counterinsurgency has significantly shifted to the
management of disaster by means of targeted killing of insurgents using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAV), Special Forces, and private contractors. Ironically, perhaps, the Bush-era pursuit of
governmentality in regions like Afghanistan has yielded to Obama's necropolitics, in which killing
enemy leaders is the priority, epitomized by the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The long-standing project of defining the social from the perspective of militarized visuality has
been deliberately made incoherent. Today's technologically mediated means of material visualization
do not generate information about the presence of the human visualizer, if indeed there even is one. If
we look at the drawings made by Bagetti for Napoleon, and other such battlefield visualizations of the
Clausewitz era, the viewpoint of the commanding general was critical to the technical production of
the map. By contrast, a satellite image, or one taken from a UAV, tells us nothing at all about those who
wanted the visualization made. In a somewhat uncanny fashion, the Medusa effect, which I ascribed to
Carlyle's concept of visuality, has now found a technological analogy. By the Medusa effect, I
intended to convey visuality's politics of making the separation between autocrat and ruled so
permanent that it was, as it were, set in stone. A new military device known as the Gorgon Stare
has been devised to generate twelve separate visual feeds from one UAV platform, covering four
square kilometers of territory. Each feed can be viewed separately and concurrently. While the feeds
are low-grade, they can be used to direct the full-motion video feed to specific targets.4 With perhaps
surprising satire, the device is named after the mythical Gorgon, whose castrating stare turned people
to stone. It is intended in part, then, to intimidate and to make it seem that whatever insurgents might
do is visible and will be seen. Dehumanized weapons are certainly fear-inducing, for, in Thomas
Pynchon's famous phrase, a screaming comes across the sky.5 Journalistic reports indicate a similar

anger in present-day Pakistan, where airborne drone attacks have increased such that as many as
eighteen were launched in a few days after the failed Times Square bombing of May 2010. However,
it was precisely such attacks that some consider to have motivated the attempt to target New York in
the first place, forming a familiar asymmetric feedback loop: increased remote attacks of increased
sophistication provoke increased attacks against U.S. civilians using improvised and nonmilitary
materials, like fireworks. Any such attack generates further reprisals on both sides. Further, the chaos
produced by post-panoptic visuality is its condition of existence. Whereas Carlyle offered the Hero
and his visualization as the only defense against chaos, the counterinsurgent requires chaos, or at least
its possibility, as the means of authorization in all senses. Its gambit is simply that civilian
governance lacks both the authority and the imagination to resolve any of the crises that generate the
need for counterinsurgency. Increasingly, the result has been to create the seemingly contradictory
practice of counterinsurgent governance, the necropolitical regimes of separation.
It is at the borders of the United States and European Union that these asymmetric flows and
counterflows are worked out domestically. Other modes of separation and distinction, such as the
color line, are mobilized by this intensification because they are already there. For example, the U.S.Mexico border is a racialized distinction, just like that between Europe and Africa on Spain's
southern coasts and islands. Domestic segregation is complexly interactive with the global
counterinsurgency. It also visualizes its tasks as to clear and to hold, which is to say to classify
residents (as insurgent/illegal or legitimate resident) and separate them by physical means. In the
United States, the domestic use of counterinsurgency became apparent in the response to Hurricane
Katrina. In a (now deleted) article that appeared in the Army Times on 2 September 2005, Brig. Gen.
Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force, declared, This place is
going to look like Little Somalia. We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a
combat operation to get this city under control. The journalist understood this to mean that the
National Guard would be combating an insurgency in the city.6 In Spike Lee's powerful
documentary of the events, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), several
sequences demonstrate the practical consequence of this division of the sensible. We see then
governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco histrionically announcing the deployment of the National
Guard into the city with the remark that they have just returned from Iraq and will shoot to kill. We
see a reporter for the BBC, usually the most decorous of journalists, quivering with rage as law
enforcement near the Superdome surrounded one man accused of looting while dozens of others
struggled through the by then polluted waters unassisted. We see Lt. Gen. Russel Honor arriving in
New Orleans on Friday, 2 September 2005, telling the soldiers, Put those damn weapons down
and their palpable reluctance to do so (see fig. 55). We realize that for the past four days U.S. troops
have routinely been training their weapons on their own citizens. Ironically, the historian Douglas
Brinkley, featured in Lee's film, reports that the terrorism security apparatus slowed the Department
of Homeland Security's response because of all the background checks.7 This adaptation of domestic
politics to the regime of counterinsurgency has since gone viral. Opponents of gay marriage in the
United States refer to such couples as domestic terrorists. High-school principals describe their
work in inner-city schools as classic counterinsurgency. Border patrols in Nogales, Arizona,
follow the counterinsurgency mantra clear, hold, build as the guiding light for their enforcement of
immigration law. In April 2010, a strikingly unconstitutional state law was passed in Arizona,
requiring police to pursue those who appeared to be illegal immigrants and criminalizing any
immigrant at large without documentation. While the law may well be invalidated, it was widely
agreed that it was passed for domestic political reasons within the state. The intent is to intensify

the racialized divide between the citizen and the undocumented migrant worker, creating a nomadic
border that can be instantiated whenever a citizen looks at a person suspected of being a migrant.
Indeed, the UAV is now widely used in cross-border surveillance, flying first on the border and more
recently in Mexico itself.8 British police have advanced plans for the extensive use of drones as
domestic surveillance tools.9 Test flights in Liverpool produced a first arrest in February, 2010, only
for the drones to be grounded by the Civil Aviation Authority for lacking the requisite license.10

These imbrications of classic population-management discourses, from sexuality to education and

immigration, with low-intensity asymmetric urban warfare both produces, and is a product of, the
crisis in visuality. In 1990, Deleuze emphasized that Foucault had only been able to perceive the
constraints of the disciplinary society because they were coming undone as the society of control took
over. The coils of the serpent Leviathan, the state and its population management, had so extensively
succeeded in driving Marx's old mole of class struggle underground that population could now be
managed, rather than disciplined. The corollary here is that visuality itself has today become
visible at a point of intensification in which it can no longer fully contain that which it seeks to
visualize. That is to say, chaos is now not the alternative to visuality but its condition of necessity.
The so-called visual turn in the humanities since 1989 is, then, a symptomatic response to first the
neovisuality of the RMA, which followed the end of the Cold War, and now the intensified crisis of
that visuality. Take the axiomatic phrase Move on, there's nothing to see here, which I have
borrowed from Rancire. Under conditions of (counter)insurgency, everyone knows that not to be the
case. In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents and suicide bombers have often dressed in military and
police uniforms to further confuse relations of visuality. Circulation itself becomes dangerous when
roadside explosive devices and marketplace suicide bombings are the tactics of choice. The Chinese
artist Cai Guo-Qiang visualized this contradiction in his spectacular sculpture Nothing to See Here
(2006). It consists of a sixteen-foot-long fiberglass crocodile, impaled with bamboo spears and
hundreds of sharp objects confiscated by Chinese transport police, such as forks, chopsticks, and
scissors. The confiscations allow the passenger to keep circulating, but perhaps we are all missing
the five-hundred-pound crocodile in the room. With his trademark subtlety, Cai makes us question
whether the crocodile is the enemy insurgent or perhaps the body-politic of our own society, so
enmired in security as to have lost a sense of purpose. As the economic crisis has shown,
circulation is not always possible and is certainly not always an answer as to what to do next. If that

circulation is by car, as in the French circulation, meaning traffic, then it adds to the disaster of
climate change as well. Caught between the car crash, the car bomb, and the fossil fuelgenerated
climate crisis, it seems impossible to know which way to turn.

MILITARY REVOLUTIONS
One index of the present crisis is the difficulty of periodization. The claim that the entire planet is a
potential space for insurgency and thus requires a waiting counterinsurgent force indicates the attempt
to update and intensify the Cold War. In this view, if globalization has again become the global civil
war that was the Cold War in networked form, or has created a new state of permanent war, then
war is global politics.11 At the beginning of the Cold War, President Harry Truman denounced the
terror of the Soviet Union, creating a vocabulary that came readily to hand post-9/11. The militaryindustrial complex was designed to resist regression into its own colonial past of slavery and to
maintain the present condition of freedom. U.S. National Security Council doctrine held that it was
the implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom, meaning that Soviet
communism was slavery that must be resisted by the free.12 This conflict was thus to be engaged
wherever and whenever it manifested itself under the rhetoric of paying any price and bearing any
burden in order for things to remain exactly the same. Under the threat of nuclear war, as Donald
Pease put it, Hiroshima had turned the entire U.S. symbolic system into the afterimage of a
collectively anticipated spectacle of disaster.13 Given that there had never been a nuclear war (as
opposed to the single detonation of Hiroshima or later tests), this spectacle was paradoxically
imaginary despite its status as afterimage: a war that will have been. The endlessly discussed war
was always in the future anteriorthis will have been the nuclear war. For Derrida, the status of
nuclear war as fabulously textual generated the very status of the old words culture, civilization
[and] Reality.14 This Reality was understood as binary, structural, and violent. The future that
will (never) have happened was specular but textual, generating among its multiple side effects the
1980s era of reading images.
The counterinsurgency theory launched at the end of the Cold War as the RMA, however, has always
already happened and is always to be visualized as part of culture. Its academic creature was visual
culture. Military theorists presented the emergence of information warfare as the twelfth in a series
of military revolutions that began with Napoleon, following the genealogy of visuality. This is mythmaking of the first order, but its use of actual historical experience within a framework long dedicated
to making history tell the story of the West allows it to have the aura of reality. The term revolution
was not used idly. For the military have been devoted readers of revolutionary and guerilla theory
ranging from the French and Indian Wars of colonial North America to Mao and the Zapatistas.
Indeed, the RMA is widely considered to have been developed first in the Soviet Union, where it was
also known as the scientific-technical revolution. The RMA was designed to give the military the
advantages of speed and surprise usually held by guerilla and revolutionary groups. Consequently, the
new mode of war was said to involve dispersed ground forces, with the result that conventional
ground operations come to resemble high intensity guerilla warfare.15 Of course, the more effective
guerilla warfare is, the less visible its activities are to the opposing forces. The goal of this mode of
invisible war was to establish a permanent dominance in command, control, communications,
intelligence (C3I), and information that would in turn ensure military hegemony. U.S. military planners
envisaged a range of new weaponry, such as precision guided munitions, combat vehicles that

require no fuel or ammunition, directed energy weapons launched from platforms not yet invented,
infrasonic weapons, and computer viruses used as weapons.16 In 1999, when the Defense
Department budget was a relatively modest $263 billion, analysts questioned whether expenditures of
over $50 billion on these new weapons, exceeding in themselves the entire military budget of Russia
at that time, were necessary or affordable. The counterargument was that C3I dominance would
actually reduce costs elsewhere in land forces and other projects. Such worries seem quaint in an era
of defense budgets of some $680 billion, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
estimated as an additional $149 billion for 2010.17
In this incarnation, the RMA implied both new forms of weaponry and significant use of information
technology to control and destabilize the opponent.18 This intensification in military-industrial
visuality amounted to a revolution. It shifted focus from the counterpoint of spectacular (nuclear)
warfare and its documentation and classification by aerial photography to that of information and
disinformation. The assemblage of information was the primary tactic of colonial counterinsurgency
now applied to a global digitized warfare that had yet to be encountered but was assumed to be
imminent. The Information War strategy developed into the complementary tactics of cyberwar and
netwar. In the view of John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, the most prominent theorists of
Information War, cyberwar involved information-based military operations designed to disrupt an
adversary, whereas netwar is low intensity conflict at the societal end of the spectrum of war,
whose polar opposite was battlefield conflict.19 The network form of war, including but not limited to
the Internet, produced an opponent without leaders or with multiple leaders, making it hard to combat
by traditional means: Netwar is about Hamas more than the PLO, Mexico's Zapatistas more than
Cuba's Fidelistasand Chicago's Gangsta Disciples more than the Al Capone Gang.20 If this sounds
more like a cultural-studies paper (remember this was 1996) than a military think-tank, so it should.
Indeed, the RMA's height of ambition was to turn the military strategy into a cultural project. In a
essay published, in 1997, in the Marine Corps Gazette, one general argued: It is no longer enough
for Marines to reflect the society they defend. They must lead it, not politically but culturally. For it
is the culture we are defending.21 Cultural war, with visuality playing a central role, takes culture
to be the means, location, and object of warfare. In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell coined the
slogan War Is Peace, anticipating the peace-keeping missions, surgical strikes, defense walls, and
coalitions of the willing that demarcated much of the last decade of the twentieth century. It was
striking to observe the Israeli Defense Force making extensive use of poststructuralist thinkers like
Deleuze and Guattari, the situationist Guy Debord, or the deconstructionist architect Bernard Tschumi
in thinking about how to fight urban counterinsurgency warfare in the period following the al-Aqsa
intifada of 2000.22 If the conclusion was to begin walking through walls as a bizarre form of
nomadism, meaning literally piercing holes in building walls to gain the element of surprise, the
rhetoric of the Operational Theory Research Institute is nonetheless disconcertingly familiar to any
reader of critical theory.
The Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine (20016) intensified these modes of counterinsurgency into fullblown preemptive warfare as part of their declared Global War on Terror. While returning to the
rhetorics of the Cold War, the so-called war on terror relied on the counterinsurgency and information
war tactics of the RMA, creating a new hybrid. What W. J. T. Mitchell has called image wars were a
central part of this doctrine, which imagined decisively defeating its enemies in battle and in
ideology. The new techniques could not only visualize the battlefield, but also engage in it,
demoralizing the opponent by demonstrations of mastery, like the surgical strike with computer-

guided weapons that visualize their own targets. This moment was the high point of the RMA, quite
literally its reign of terror. Like Robespierre, Bush assumed that no opposition could be tolerated and
that all measures were permitted in defense of the republic. As secretary of defense, Donald
Rumsfeld implemented a strategy in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, marked by a high-tech, high-speed,
lethal force capable of accomplishing significant goals with a relatively small number of personnel. It
was supposed to be the apex of the RMA, integrating extensive use of smart weapons, dispersed
ground forces, and intensive use of information war. This Rumsfeldism added an additional
component to the war with the use of the image as a tactical weapon. As I have analyzed at length in
Watching Babylon, the first three years of the Iraq war (20035) saw images used as weapons,
designed to suppress dissent at home as well as resistance on the ground. These uses of the imageweapon were the culmination of a generation of Anglo-American information strategy, beginning with
the Falklands/Malvinas War, in 1982, where both images and information were subject to extremely
close state control. In Iraq, the strategy of embedding journalists with troops often led to them
identifying with the men and women they were working with, as well as enabling control of what
might be seen. One instance of the information-war policy was the creation of the Iraqi Media
Network by the Coalition Provisional Authority, in 2003. An initial $15 million no-bid contract was
awarded before the invasion took place, to the contractor Science Applications International
Corporation (SAIC) to generate television, radio, and a six-day-a-week newspaper. Against all the
odds, the renamed Iraqi Public Service Broadcaster did get on the air and opened its programming
with a verse from the Koran. That gesture was at once cancelled by Washington, which compelled the
network to broadcast instead an hour-long daily show called Towards Freedom, produced by the
British government. Unsurprisingly, six months after the war a State Department poll showed 63
percent of Iraqis watched al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya, but only 12 percent watched the government
station. The response was to award a new $95 million no-bid contract to the Harris Corporation, a
manufacturer of communications equipment with no television production experience.23

SADDAM EFFECTS
As a metonym of the stages of image war in Iraq, I want to consider here a variety of images of
Saddam Hussein. The war began with the famous shock-and-awe bombings, seen live on television. It
is less often recalled that the hope had been to kill Saddam Hussein with the first attack, based on
information received from Iraqi sources. It is possible that, had this attack achieved its goal, the war
might have unfolded differently. As it was, repeated claims of Saddam's death were soon refuted or
forgotten, so a substitute had to be found. In April 2003 newspapers and television-news programs
around the world led with the story of Iraqis in Baghdad demolishing a statue of Saddam. Such
demolition of the images of kings has a long and resonant history, most recently with the destruction of
socialist monuments in the former Soviet bloc post-1989. Americans might recall the overturning of a
statue of King George III in New York during the American Revolution. This mock execution seemed
to encapsulate the symbolic power of the American victory and locate it in a series of popular
revolts. And so it was intended by the unnamed marine corps colonel and his psychologicaloperations team who were commended by the army a year later for their quick thinking. Even at the
time, the event seemed a little too neat and the crowd seemed small for so symbolic an event. By
the time it became clear that the statue demolition had been an operation of information war, the
insurgency was starting to take the shine off the supposed triumph.

Aware that events were not moving quickly enough, military intelligence came under immense
pressure to discover Saddam's whereabouts in late 2003. This necessity was one of the motivating
factors that led to the intensification of interrogations in Iraqi prisons, known as Gitmo-izing, that is
to say, making them like Guantnamo Bay. That need to generate actionable intelligence was
directly responsible for the scandals that are now summarized by the name Abu Ghraib and that
have been widely analyzed. In other words, pressure for a flow of information led Americans in Iraq,
like the French in Algeria, to resort to torture in order to accelerate results. In this context, the capture
of Saddam was presented as a successful effort of information war, involving the use of layered
social-network analysis by Major Brian J. Reed.24 For all the social-science nomenclature, the tactic
was largely the same as that used by the French in Algeria: reach the head of the network from its
outlying points of contact, in this case, one of Saddam's drivers. Again, the initial impact was strong,
leading one CNN anchor to ask, What is there left to talk about in Iraq? As this comment illustrates,
the capture of Saddam was meant, like the declaration Mission Accomplished and the demolition of
the Saddam statue, to end what Mark Danner usefully called the war of the imagination.25 The war
had been imagined in Rumsfeldism as a Hollywood film, with a necessarily dramatic and heroic
ending.26 It now seemed that the scenario had changed from a John Wayne drama with a suitably
uplifting denouement into a self-referential independent picture in which every apparent ending turned
out to be the beginning of another episode. The capture of Saddam was another moment when the
democratic tsunami predicted by the supporters of the war could finally be unleashed without fear
of the return of dictatorship. It was also assumed that anticoalition resistance would soon collapse
without its leader. As we know, these predicted movements never took place. The insurgency in fact
accelerated dramatically after Saddam's capture, and the long-awaited enthusiasm for America never
materialized. The endlessly repeated video clip of Saddam being examined by a doctor presented the
United States as a benign power, concerned for the health of even its worst enemy. It may also have
been a search for poison or concealed information. More precisely, it represented modern biopower,
the use of power to sustain life even and especially when the state is on the point of withdrawing that
life.
On 30 December 2006 that moment was reached, when the chronicle of Saddam's foretold death
came to its inevitable conclusion on the gallows (see fig. 56). What surprised and shocked the world
was that it was not just told but seen. While the cell-phone video that was accidentally released
was not officially authorized (meaning known to the occupation), there was also an official version,
which lacked the soundtrack. So, unlike the disciplined execution presumed to be normative in the
West, it was always intended that the moment of Saddam's death be seen, just as the bodies of his sons
had been shown to the world media. It no doubt seemed important that, in the swirling, rumor-driven
climate of the occupation, some form of proof be made available. It was telling that the video was
first broadcast by the pro-occupation Fox News cable channel, known for their distribution of
officially sanctioned leaks. The video was always unlikely to be able to serve as proof, given that
the Internet was already awash with theories that the person being held was one of Saddam's doubles,
that he had not been arrested in March but six months earlier, as evidenced by some unripe dates in
one of the photographs of his so-called rat hole, and so on. Yet there was an older impulse at work
here: the desire of those appropriating sovereignty to show that it does not adhere to the living body
of the deposed sovereign. From the execution of Charles I, in 1649, via that of Louis XVI, in 1793,
and the counterspectacle of the assassination of too many slave owners and plantation managers to
name, the new power wants to claim that authority has passed from the dead sovereign and now
adheres not to the heir but to the executors. The double-meaning of executor, in which the modern

sense of legal performer has replaced the older sense of executioner, suggests a legal sleight of hand
following the executioner's coup de grce, in which the last will and testament of the executed is
rewritten by the will to power. In this tremulous moment, the social contract that sustains authority is
made dangerously visible, and, as Foucault liked to remind us, public executions are always therefore
double-edged moments, full of potential for riot and revolution. Sedated by the minimal contact
between the U.S. state and those it condemns to death by automatic injection, the occupation did not
think to police its own policemen, assuming they would adhere to their rules.

In fact, the cell-phone video of the execution was a palpable horror, a digitized rendition of the
realities of the quasi-judicial process. Abuse was hurled at Saddam by his guards, including a chant
of Moqtada! Moqtada! (referring to the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr). One person tried to calm
matters by reminding those in attendance that this was an execution, a legally ordained withdrawal of
the right to live. Ironically, this furor seemed to break the deposed dictator out of a state of shock,
provoking him to a sardonic rebuke and to carry out his final prayers. As if sensing that the spectacle
was not progressing as intended, the executioner opened the trapdoor of the gallows before the prayer
was complete. Nothing can mitigate what it means to have seen and heard an execution. It does not, of
course, condone or exonerate Saddam's excesses, which were first criticized by the global Left while
he was still the favored creature of Anglo-American machinations against Iran. Whatever this
execution was, it failed in its primary goals to emulate the Nuremberg trials and to both legitimize the
new regime and cast a pall over Baathism.

FROM WAR AS CINEMA TO DIGITAL WAR

The dissemination of the video was the culmination of the cinematic era of the RMA, a documentation
of war by its participants that was supposed to have been seen only by those participants and those
they trusted. In the era of networked communications, it was no longer possible to contain these
images within the circle marked out by the police, beyond which we are instructed to move on,
there's nothing to see here. In fact, we might say that if what a picture wants is above all to be seen,
what the digitized image wants is to be circulated, whether by copying, linking, or forwarding. Much
of the military video and photography from the Iraq war has reflected this uncertain status. Raw TIFF
files circulate with no means of contextualizing them, while unedited video footage of routine military

events is interrupted on shocking occasion by the eruption of violence. Explanations, context, and
consequences are rarely available, whether in U.S. or purported insurgent video.27 In one notorious
instance, digital images of the war in Iraq were bartered for access to an amateur pornography site,
the appallingly accurately named nowthatsfuckedup.com. Chris Wilson, the site's owner, recognized
that soldiers could not use their credit cards while serving, because their companies flagged their
locations as questionable. He therefore offered an exchange, whereby posted photographs of the war,
whether standard poses or those in the notorious Gory folder, would allow the user access to the
pornographic sections of the site. By the time the site was closed down, in 2004, by Florida sheriffs
on grounds of obscenity relating to the pornography, there were some 1,700 photographs on the site,
including two hundred gory images.28 It cannot have been important to the soldiers to see this
particular collection of pornography, given the plethora of such material online. Rather it seems that
they wanted to show their actions to a wider audience, mirroring the shock-and-awe philosophy of
their commanders and claiming a similar level of entitlement both to see and display and to be seen
and displayed.
In similar fashion, digitized images accumulate on sites such as Flickr and YouTube, hoping to go
viral, a metaphor derived from infectious disease that is very appropriate to this biopolitical
moment. Even the military have tried to get involved, creating a Multi-National Force Iraq YouTube
channel, which unsurprisingly attracted few viewers.29 To render the digital image into a cultural
virus, it must go into a frenzy of circulation, being copied, linked, and forwarded as fast as possible.
But for every Obama Girl, whose homemade video of a song called I've Got a Crush on Obama had
millions of viewings in 2008, there are thousands of YouTube clips that languish without circulation
and it is not yet predictable how and why certain scenes go viral. Visuality has always been violent
and expropriative, so there is a certain homology at work in the dominance of violent scenes in the
most notorious moments of twenty-first-century visual culture (9/11, Shock and Awe, Abu Ghraib, the
Danish cartoons, Hurricane Katrina: this list is also a barebones syllabus). However, it is important
to restate that the violence is inherent not to the content, but to visuality. While there may be a
distinction between a photograph of an American soldier giving a thumbs-up gesture while standing
next to an Iraqi child, and the same soldier repeating her gesture next to an Iraqi corpse, both scenes
represent violence. Nowhere was this made clearer than in Errol Morris's documentary on Abu
Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure (2008). In the film, the now notorious former Specialist
Lynddie England claimed that although she had been photographed holding a prisoner on a leash, that
leash had simply been handed to her, that she had not herself dragged the prisoner out of the cell.
Similarly Specialist Sabrina Harman, seen posing next to a corpse packed in ice, giving a broad
smile and a thumbs up, asserted that this was simply her automatic response to being photographed.
While this may seem like defensive rhetoric, at the end of the film the army's own investigative
officer Brent Pack declared that the repeated photographs showing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in socalled stress positions, with or without wearing women's underwear or hoods on their heads, were
not torture but the eponymous standard operating procedure.
Violence is the standard operating procedure of visuality. While setting out to distinguish between
when it is acceptable and when excessive in visual images is not my intent here, in the hands of
lawyers and NGO workers such distinctions can mitigate actual harm to people, and of course I
applaud such work. In the case of visuality, its violence has paradoxically, as the counterinsurgents
like to put it, turned on the materialized visualization itself. This perhaps final intensification of the
violence of visuality attempts to render the visible invisible, even within the zone of those authorized
to seeor at least so uncertain that it cannot be decided what has been seen. There is nothing to see

here, because it has been rendered undecidable, or even in a sense nonexistent. The Rumsfeld stage of
the RMA attempted to achieve this undecidability by generating so many images and visualizations that
no single instance could be decisive. The sovereignty of the visualizer shifted ground so that authority
was now derived from the ability to ignore the constant swirl of imagery and persist with a vision
above and beyond mere data. The justification for the invasion of Iraq centering on the weapons of
mass destruction purportedly held by Saddam Hussein has therefore survived the apparently clear
demonstration, by 2003, that there were none. Following an article by Ron Suskind that appeared, in
2004, in the New York Times Magazine, this attitude became celebrated as a contempt for the socalled reality-based community articulated by a senior adviser to Bush.30 Less remembered in that
citation was the commitment to continue creating other new realities, a policy that has become
enshrined as the counterinsurgency doctrine of necropolitical governmentality.

COUNTERINSURGENCY
The fall of Rumsfeld, in 2006, did not mean the end of the RMA, any more than the fall of the Jacobins,
in 1794, ended the French Revolution. In this new moment, the past excesses of the Global War on
Terror are ritually disparaged, much as the French Executive Directory of 1795 decried the Terror of
1793, but claimed to be continuing the revolution.31 Reframed as the long war, counterinsurgency,
COIN in the military acronym, has in no way diminished its ambitions. Its leading theorist, John Nagl,
has argued that as well as the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Departments of the
Treasury, and the Department of Agriculture need to be thinking in terms of counterinsurgency.32 The
project was repackaged as countering global insurgency (GCOIN), a project whose range and
ambition is every bit as grandiose as before.33 The premise is that if insurgency is global, then
counterinsurgency must be as well, taking the entire planet as its area of operations. The new
doctrine (a term of art in the military) was encapsulated in the publication of Field Manual FM324
Counterinsurgency issued by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, in December 2006, its first statement
on counterinsurgency since Vietnam.34 Written in great haste at the instigation of General David
Petraeus, in a single year from its first conception, in December 2005, this Field Manual aims at
nothing less than making counterinsurgency the primary responsibility of the military, a mission that is
described as both cultural and political. The project renders the biopolitical governance of
populations into a military mission, now known as population-centric counterinsurgency. It contains a
timeline for its predetermined success and continued application in the extended future, measured as
far as fifty years ahead. Here, counterinsurgency is explicitly a cultural and political war, fought as
much in the United States as it is in Iraq or elsewhere. As an indication of its significance, the new
Field Manual was downloaded from the Internet over two million times by 2007, making it something
of a digital global best-seller. In an extraordinary step, it was then republished by the University of
Chicago Press in a $25 hardcover edition, complete with an introduction by the Harvard professor
Sarah Sewall, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping in the Clinton
administration and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, now an adviser on
national security for Barack Obama.35
In Sewall's manifesto, she calls counterinsurgency paradigm shattering because it argues for the
assumption of greater risk in order to succeed, requiring civilian leadership and support for the
long war. Indicating a certain continuity with Rumsfeld, she claims counterinsurgency to be superior
to what she calls the Weinberger-Powell doctrine of overwhelming and decisive offensive force.36

The term doctrine is being used specifically here: it is the military term for the principles governing
fundamental choices about how and when to fight war. Colin Powell's theory was not limited,
however, to overwhelming force. In 1991, he was among those advising then President George H. W.
Bush not to occupy Baghdad on the so-called Pottery Barn principlethat is to say, you break it, you
own it. The radical RMA strategy espoused by the Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine overturned such caution
with results that engendered the new need for counterinsurgency tactics. Like all revolutionary
strategies, the RMA has taken the emergency presented by the disaster of the Iraq war as an
opportunity. The publication of the new counterinsurgency strategy, designed both for strategic
planning and for daily use in the field, was a tactical transformation of RMA and its strategic
continuation. General Petraeus has thus served as the Napoleon of the RMA, a hero figure whose
utterances were beyond question until the mission seemed to stumble in Afghanistan, which may serve
as his Waterloo.

COMMAND VISUALIZATION AND VISUALIZED INFORMATION WAR

has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to produce legitimacy. It
insists that the commander's visualization is the key to success in the conflict against insurgents, but
there is paradoxically less visual content (traditionally defined) to such visualization. It centers on
the cultural and historical elements of a particular place, imagined and accessed as a network within
a digital framework. Such paradoxical visualization seeks to generate legitimacy by means of
population control, blending imperial strategy with the governmentality of developed societies. The
doctrine is defined as a return to the cultural politics of war and to the concept of war as culture.37 A
digitally enabled military, using surveillance and information as its primary tools, seeks to dominate
culture using a networked leadership, in patterns set by imperial regimes, that is invisible to those
led. Unlike the Panopticon or plantation, the place of surveillance is not just invisible, but unknown,
what one might call its undisclosed location. This is post-panoptic visuality for a new era, a
neovisuality enabled by global digital technology that nonetheless understands itself to be part of a
centuries-old tradition. In the first pages of the Field Manual insurgency is defined as existing on a
continuum from the French Revolution of 1789, with insurgency as one extreme and a coup d'tat
as the other. Not by chance, figures from Napoleon on can now be presented as counterinsurgents, a
version of history that would have been congenial to Carlyle. Counterinsurgency, imagining itself
quashing all modern revolts from the French Revolution to the military coup, thus figures itself as
legitimacy. It seeks both to produce an acquiescent national culture and to eliminate insurgency,
understood as any challenge to power. It does so not simply by means of repression, but by the
progressive application of techniques of consent under the imperative culture must be defended.
The Field Manual offers an instrumental definition of power as the key to manipulating the interests
of groups within a society (355). But power alone is not enough: Victory is achieved when the
populace consents to the government's legitimacy and stops actively and passively supporting the
insurgency (114). Dominance must be accompanied by a consensual hegemony that generates the
legitimacy of counterinsurgency in thought and deed. This ideological idealism is still offered as a
political justification for the war, even as the tactics have become directed at a necropolitical
management of hostile populations.
While COIN wants to be framed as a heroic narrativea story of overcoming resistanceit can
best be analyzed as a set of related techniques. Resting on visualization as a military tactic enabled by
COIN

digital technologies, COIN seeks to render a culture in its own image that will actively want to be
subject to biopolitical imperial governance. Visualization is the key leadership tactic that holds
together the disparate components of counterinsurgency into what one might call visualized
information war. Indeed, according to the counterinsurgency manual, it is policy that the
commander's visualization forms the basis for conductingan operation (A-20). In the section of the
manual intended to be read by officers in the field, this visualization is defined as the necessity of
knowing the map by heart and being able to place oneself in the map at any time. Nowhere is the
legacy of the history of visuality described in this book clearer than in these instructions. Media and
other imagery are components of the visualization, rather than its substance. For instance, media
activities can be the primary activity of an insurgency, according to the army, while imagery
intelligence in the form of still and moving images are vital to counterinsurgency (397).
Visualization by contrast requires commanders to know the people, topography, economy, history,
and culture of their area of operations (77). The counterinsurgent thus transforms his tactical
disadvantage into strategic mastery by rendering unfamiliar territory into a simulacrum of the
videogame's fully rendered actionable space.38 Counterinsurgency cultivates optical invisibility in
support of a digitized surveillance and command structure. Its favored tactics include
disappearances, renditions, the invisible prison camp, no-fly lists, no-fly zones, electronic
surveillance, and non-accountable interrogators, known as Other Government Agency personnel.
When counterinsurgency deploys itself as a visualized field, it does so by means of representation in
which the place of observation is invisible or obscured, for the state of exception is a non-place, like
the mystical perception of Carlyle's Hero. Comprised of digitized images, satellite photographs,
night-vision goggles, and map-based intervention, post-panoptical space creates a 3-D rendition of
the insurgency that corresponds to the counterinsurgent's experience of space in a grid accessible only
to the commander, the modern-day Hero. Taken together, these abilities are summarized as the
commander's visualization, using Carlyle's own term, but this visualization is now comprised of
data and imagery invisible to the unaided human eye.
In this chaotic zone of neovisuality, counterinsurgency can allow the forbidden to emerge into
visibility, whether by choice or accident. So there was a deliberate revealing of the coercive
tactics used at the otherwise invisible Guantnamo Bay camp in order to strike fear into actual and
potential insurgents as to what awaited them if captured. On the other hand, the photographs from Abu
Ghraib emerged in a way that was clearly accidental, even if the army had taken no precautions to
prevent it. The revelations prevented neither the generalization of torture nor the expansion of the
counterinsurgency, although they have led to limitations on cameras among enlisted personnel. A good
example of the paradoxes resulting from this blurring can be seen in the new place of mapping.
Whereas mapping was for centuries associated with colonial power as a technology of visuality,
recent neocolonial occupations, such as that in the Occupied Territories of Israel/Palestine or in Iraq
have made mapping an oppositional practice.39 This indifference to what is known or unknown has
become one of the strengths of the counterinsurgency's aspiration to a totalizing vision. No
countervisualization can damage its claim to totality. The Field Manual embraces a fully sovereign
visuality: Soldiers and Marines must feel the commander's presence throughout the A[rea of]
O[perations], especially at decisive points. The operation's purpose and commander's intent must be
clearly understood throughout the force (718). Visualized information war is imagined as a perfect
signal-to-noise ratio, with messages conveyed perfectly from leader to field and back in real time.
Command visualization is the field version of the nineties-era RMA term full spectrum dominance,
the neovisuality of our times, based on dominating offense, defense, stability, [and] support.40

Counterinsurgency is thus legitimate because it alone can visualize the divergent cultural forces at
work in a given area and devise a strategy to coordinate them.
When soldiers refer to action as being like a videogame, as they frequently do, it is not a metaphor.
By turning the diverse aspects of foreign life into a single narrative, the counterinsurgent feels as in
control of the situation as a player in a first-person-shooter videogame. The commander thereby feels
him- or herself to be in the map, just as the game player is emotively in the game. This experience
is sufficiently real that videogames are now being used as behavioral therapy for psychologically
damaged soldiers. Numerous first-person accounts by rank-and-file U.S. troops testify to their
confusion as to where they were and what direction they were going during combat missions, perhaps
contributing to the high levels of suicide, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder experienced
by veterans. The popular videogame Full Spectrum Warrior, played using a virtual-reality helmet, has
become an effective therapeutic tool for soldiers suffering from such post-traumatic stress. In this
instance, a modified version of the game places the soldier back in a situation similar to that in which
s/he was traumatized as a behavioral tool to normalize response. While the game is quite well
rendered, you would not ordinarily mistake it for reality. However, a soldier engaged in visualized
information war can and apparently does take this rendition as equivalent to the interface experienced
in the insurgent environment. Re-performing the war can restore mental equilibrium in the shellshocked patient by dint of repetition. The medium-resolution 3-D digital videogame experience is
indistinguishable from the reality of counterinsurgency.
The counterinsurgent understanding of culture is, however, a reversion to imperial governance
under a model of cultural hierarchy: Cultural knowledge [is]essential to waging a successful
counterinsurgency. American ideas of what is normal or rational are not universal (180). This
cultural hierarchy is derived directly from nineteenth-century imperial practice. Consequently,
readers of the Field Manual are advised to consult such apparently unlikely works as Small Wars: A
Tactical Handbook for Imperial Soldiers (1890), by Charles E. Callwell, produced at the height of
British imperialism. The U.S. Army does not ask its soldiers to accept difference, but rather to
understand that Iraqis cannot perform like Americans. Such references reframe counterinsurgency as
the technical management of neo-imperial dominions, even as the notion that Iraq or Afghanistan are
small wars undermines public assertions that they are the moral equivalent of the Second World
War. Instead, it accurately locates these wars as a technique of imperial governance, rather than as an
existential struggle. The counterinsurgency manual often draws parallels with the imperial hero T. E.
Lawrence's experience in Arabia, citing his maxim Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you
do it perfectly (1155) as one of the paradigm shattering paradoxes that conclude the opening
chapter of the Field Manual. Against this lesson from the past, Lawrence himself had advised that his
Twenty-Seven Articles on working with Arab armies were intended only for those engaged with the
Bedu[ouin], and he was, after all, promoting an anti-imperial Arab revolt. He also advised borrowing
a slave as a manservant. On the other hand, for all his racialized characterizing of the dogmatic
Arab mind, Lawrence insisted that the would-be ally of the Arabs must speak their dialect of
Arabic.41 By contrast, the U.S. Army began, in 2007, offering soldiers a pamphlet with some two
hundred Arabic words and phrases, spelled out phonetically. Culture as the ground for
counterinsurgency is understood in this contradictory fashion as a totalizing system, governing all
forms of action and ideas, in an oscillation between Victorian anthropology and the first-personshooter videogame. The anthropologist Edward Tylor argued in Primitive Culture that Culture or
Civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man.42

The counterinsurgency strategy similarly understands culture as a web of meaning or as an

operational code that is valid for an entire group of people, acquired by all members of a
particular society or group by means of enculturation (337). According to the manual, culture
therefore conditions how and why people perform actions, distinguish right from wrong, and assign
priorities, as if it were a set of rules (338).

NECROPOLITICAL REGIMES OF SEPARATION

Counterinsurgency directly concerns itself with governance and the maintenance of life. The still
current Small Wars Manual (1940) argues that small wars are operations undertaken wherein
military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the affairs of another state whose government
is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are
determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.43 Here military intervention is again understood as
militarized necropolitics: the preservation of life, determined by foreign-policy interests. By
extension, lethal force may be used in the preservation of certain lives on the basis of judgments made
by the counterinsurgent. Command visualization thus generates legitimacy not just by military
operations, but by a militarized governmentality, as summarized in the diagram (see fig. 57).

Devised by then Major General Peter Chiarelli, in 2005, to illustrate his concept of Winning the
Peace, this visualization imagines security as one of a cluster of required information operations
that combine to produce legitimacy.44 The object of control has moved from being History in
general to the population, in this case the Iraqi population, whose security is now to be ensured by
means of a series of coordinated techniques, from the implementation of neoliberal economics to the
reestablishment of essential services and the retraining of security forces within the counterinsurgency
paradigm. The outcome is imagined to be legitimacy, or what I have been calling authority, that
moment when the government is simply obeyed because it is recognized as having legitimate
authority. Having achieved legitimacy, the theory goes, the war will have rendered a culture in its
own image with elections and a free-market economy. It is important to note the audacity of this

strategy, for legitimation is precisely the weak point of constitutional theories of the state in general
and the state of exception in particular. In a move typical of the radical Right, that potential weakness
is turned into a point of strength, as counterinsurgency assumes legitimacy as both its justification and
its mission. Perhaps the greatest success of such operations has been on what is still called the home
front, that is to say, domestic U.S. political opinion and mass media culture. Its success in these
domains is unquestioned: who in public life is against counterinsurgency, even if they oppose the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or interventions elsewhere? Ironically, there is significant dissent only
within the military, where many remain unconvinced by the new doctrine.
Tactically, COIN now considers its terrain to be what it calls the host nation population, a
militarized form of biopolitics.45 While the governance and services categories now included in this
Full Spectrum Operation were formerly understood by Foucault as part of civilian governmentality in
Western nations, the introduction of military and police components within the context of a
counterinsurgency visualized information war clearly represents a new formation. More exactly, this
means of controlling the population is a necropolitics, meaning the management of the withholding
of life. These benefits are offered to the occupied host population as a whole, not to insurgents. It
was notable that, in early 2010, it was announced that all Afghans were to be issued identity cards
with biometric date and that the military were maintaining a kill or capture list of those they
considered insurgents. Biometrics are here directly at the service of necropolitics.46 Accordingly, the
three stages of counterinsurgency are described as first aid, in-patient carerecovery, and the
final achievement of outpatient caremovement to self-sufficiency.47 Counterinsurgency now
actively imagines itself as a medical practice: With good intelligence, counterinsurgents are like
surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping other vital organs intact (1126). It is not a
perfect metaphor: most cancer patients would require chemotherapy or radiation treatment to prevent
recurrence, which impacts the entire system, precisely the kind of crisis counterinsurgency wants to
avoid. The use of cancer indicates here not a specific medical parallel, but an unmistakable threat to
life, requiring radical intervention. As cancer is a rapidly multiplying life-form, its (metaphorical)
eradication is a necropolitics: this parasitic life must be withheld so that the host can live.
Counterinsurgency's means of accomplishing such necropolitical transformations were developed
from the imperial hierarchies of sovereign and subject peoples. Although the manual disavows
biological constructs of race, it consistently emphasizes cultural difference, with a strong view that
Western democracy is the superior form of culture. The long-established model for such tactics is
that used by Israel in its governance of the Occupied Territories. Indeed, the de facto strategy of the
surge was to segregate Shia from Sunni by means of walls similar to that constructed on the West
Bank.48 These barriers reified the mass internal and external displacement of Iraqi citizens, estimated
at some four million of the twenty million Iraqi population. Just as in the colonial segregation of
Algeria, the resulting relative decline in violence has led Western audiences to accept this violent
divide of a formerly integrated population as normal. Writing in the context of Israel/Palestine,
Hilla Dayan argues that regimes of separationdevelop unprecedented mechanisms of containment,
with forcible separation and isolation of masses trapped in their overextended political space.49
Visualized information war produces necropolitical regimes of separation. These regimes are global,
just as the terrain of counterinsurgency is global, evidenced by the extensive construction of exclusion
barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border, between Spain and Morocco around the still-colonized cities
of Ceuta and Melilla, and elsewhere, not to mention a long list of states operating internal regimes of
separation. Such regimes are nomadic, requiring the immigrantand sometimes the citizento have

their identification cards available at all times, on threat of deportation.

The establishment of these regimes is a key goal of the counterinsurgency, both at home and in the
global occupied territories. The geographer Trevor Paglen has documented and tracked the extensive
network of invisible or black state operations in the United States, demonstrating that at least $32
billion is budgeted for such activities per year, more than the combined budgets of the Food and
Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration.50 The rendition of the war as counterinsurgency centers on the need for what is
known as actionable intelligence. Anglo-American governments have transformed this need into an
unparalleled surveillance of their own populations, largely in secret in the United States, but quite
openly in the United Kingdom. When the full extent of email and phone surveillance became known in
the United States, in 2008, a cowed Democratic Congress soon offered full immunity to telecom
companies and officials. On the other hand, in the United Kingdom, it was a Labour government that
presided over the erasure of rights. The United Kingdom has now become the surveillance capital of
the planet, with a staggering five million closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras estimated to be in
operation in 2006, one for every twelve citizens and 20 percent of the global total.51 By 2010, each
Londoner was thought to be photographed 300 times a day by CCTV. Not for nothing, it seems, was
George Orwell's vision of Big Brother set in Britain. Police procedural television dramas in the
United Kingdom now routinely center around the use of CCTV footage, rendering the emergency into
the new normal. So far have things deteriorated that the refusal of Parliament, in 2008, to extend a 28day detention period (in which a person that authorities declare to be suspected of terrorist activities
can be held without legal rights of any kind) to 42 days was presented as a victory for civil liberties.
It increasingly seems that a key goal of global counterinsurgency is to render legitimate this massively
extended domestic surveillance society that would formerly have been seen as illegal.
The necropolitical regime of separation has no hesitation in using torture and other forms of violent
interrogation, derived from Cold War counterinsurgency methods. French torture methods in Algeria
were transmitted to American instructors at the School of the Americas and then on to various Latin
American regimes. For instance, the methods used at the ESMA concentration camp, in Buenos Aires,
during the Argentine dictatorship (197382) have an unpleasantly familiar ring: hooding, sensory
deprivation, shackling, and electricity, all designed to dehumanize the victim in order to obtain
information. In congressional hearings and other forums, Bush administration officials repeatedly
described torture as the application of techniques. For all the doublespeak at work here,
counterinsurgency relies on the gradated use of force as a technique of legitimation. It is legitimate to
use torturing force on the recalcitrant body of the person designated as an insurgent because the
counterinsurgency is legitimation and the insurgency must acknowledge it to be so. In this sense, Iraq,
Afghanistan and other ventures of counterinsurgency, such as Iran, Palestine, or Pakistan, are technical
experiments in the production of necropolitical regimes of separation.

PARADOXES OF VISUALIZED WAR

The goal of these techniques is the sustained need for the regime of separation, meaning that the
ultimate paradox of counterinsurgency is that the measure of its success is its permanent continuation.
The more these paradoxes proliferate, however, the greater the uncertainty and hence the continued
need for counterinsurgency. This is a long-standing argument of counterinsurgents. In 1977, the Israeli
Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan declared that the issue of the Palestinian territories should be

reframed: The question was not, What is the solution? but How do we live without a solution?52
As Eyal Weizman has shown, the use of unmanned drone aircraft has been essential to this strategy in
Israel/Palestine. It is therefore not surprising that in the era of paradoxical global counterinsurgency
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), such as the Predator and the Reaper, are becoming the weapon of
choice in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. While the UAV certainly visualizes the area of operations,
it generates a paradox within the totalizing mission of Global Counterinsurgency (GCOIN) by being an
agent of violence alone. The UAV is launched by specialists in the area, but is then managed in flight
by operatives situated in Nevada or California. Far from being fully conversant with the cultural
map of the area of operations, these soldiers are on a different continent. Further, each individual
controls several drones at once, coordinating them via screens using a joystick familiar to videogame
players. Inevitably, this style of warfare has led to repeated civilian deaths alongside those of the
targets identified by the UAVs, bringing protests not just from local populations, but also from the
theorists of counterinsurgency like David Kilcullen: These attacks are now being carried out without
a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the
tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.53 In
short, they are not proper counterinsurgency. In April 2010, it was leaked that UAVs launched at least
fifty attacks in Pakistan during 2009, resulting in some five hundred casualties. By February 2011, it
was reported that, while 581 insurgents were claimed killed by UAVs in Pakistan in 2010, only two
were top-ranked targets.54 The UAV is emerging as the signature technology of the new paradoxical
visuality of global counterinsurgency, even being touted as environmentally friendly, relative to
ground operations. On the one hand, the UAV epitomizes what Derek Gregory has called the visual
economy of the American military imaginary.55 At the same time, it is clearly a departure from
conceiving counterinsurgency as armed social work.56 Further, the current results in Afghanistan
and Pakistan are unclear even by counterinsurgency standards. In asymmetric warfare, how does one
even measure success?
Military discussion, both official and unofficial, has centered this question on the way in which
digital visualization has in some sense become the mission itself. Today's junior officers spend much
of their time compiling PowerPoint presentations that digitally render their visualizations. The
advance on past modes of visualization was noted in the pro-counterinsurgency blog Small Wars
Journal: The graphics used in PowerPoint replace the massive campaign maps and problematic
acetate overlays which were used by armies for decades, allowing these documents to be easily
produced and mass-distributed with the click of a mouse.57 On the other hand, in 2009, an essay in
the Armed Forces Journal noted the dumb down effect of the bullet-point process of PowerPoint,
which often elides the key question as to who is actually going to carry out the tasks in a list.58 As has
been widely discussed in digital circles, PowerPoint is a marketing tool, designed to sell products.
An article in Small Wars Journal pointed to a PowerPoint made by the late Captain Travis Patriquin,
in 2006, during the campaign in Anbar Province, Iraq. It was circulated widely during the military
surge, including by national media outlets like ABC News, as an example of visual material that was
highly effective on the ground. Although he was an Arabic speaker, Patriquin's population centered
approach was more than a little reductive (see fig. 58). Insurgency here is reduced to an Islamic
slasher movie, in which the only extant motive is to cause chaos and gain power for oneself. It so
happened that the extreme violence of groups like the so-called Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia did lead
many Sunni leaders in Anbar to cease their support, making for a tactical alliance with the U.S. Army.
Using a standard phrase of Muslim piety like Allahu akhbar as the insurgent catch-phrase, however,

shows that Patriquin had no strong understanding of the Iraqi situation.

The reverse problem was manifested in a plan shown to General Stanley McChrystal in the summer
of 2009, aiming to show the flows of insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where he was
the U.S. commander. Some months later the slide was released to the New York Times journalist
Elisabeth Bumiller, previously best-known for her fawning coverage of George W. Bush (see fig.
59).59 The analysis presented here does not lack for sophistication. It would, however, be hard to tell
what one was supposed to do after examining it. The visualization shows only that there is no solution
available. The intent behind the leak is precisely that: to show that Afghanistan remains in chaos and
will need military presence for the foreseeable future. It was a continuation of the strategy whereby
McChrystal leaked his request for 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan in advance, giving Obama
the choice between declaring his own general insubordinate or alienating his own supporters by
sending more troops. This new leak was the first shot in the campaign over Obama's announced
withdrawal date of July 2011. Using this image, McChrystal might claim either that conditions justify
a longer mission or that he cannot be held responsible for any perceived failure of the mission.
McChrystal soon learned to his cost that media war needs to be waged intelligently, when his
insubordinate comments to a Rolling Stone journalist led to his dismissal in June 2010. His
successor, none other than Gen. David Petraeus continues to assert that victory in Afghanistan is at
hand but requires ongoing support.
Indeed, counterinsurgency has for some time deployed an apparently paradoxical coordinated
political and military strategy to sustain chaos as a means of requiring military intervention. Those
supporting the long-term occupation of Iraq claimed that future chaos would be the consequence of
withdrawal and current chaos was the necessity of remaining. Whereas Carlyle persistently raised the
specter of chaos as the alternative to heroic leadership, creating chaos is now a matter of technique
and strategy. In December 2006, an Iraqi woman who blogged as Riverbend described the
technique: You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming
apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There
were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders.60 If this seems excessive,
consider the facts documented by Oxfam in July 2007: in a population of some 27.5 million, 8 million
people were in need of emergency aid, composed of 4 million at risk of famine, 2 million internally

displaced people, and 2 million refugees outside Iraq. Forty-three percent of Iraqis lived in absolute
poverty, while 70 percent had inadequate access to water, and 80 percent lacked access to
sanitation.61 While violence had decreased by 2009, these indicators have remained strikingly bad. In
February 2009, the Brookings Institute compilation of Iraq-related statistics showed that 2.8 million
Iraqis were internally displaced and another 2.3 million were living abroad. Fifty-five percent of
Iraqis still lack access to drinkable water, and only 50 percent have what is described as adequate
housing.62 Afghanistan in 2010 remains a disaster area at all levels, from the narcoeconomy to
corruption and poverty. The brief resurgence of education for women has ended. According to the
CIA, Afghanistan has the second-highest rate of infant mortality worldwide and ranks 219 out of 224
for life expectancy. Forty percent of the population were unemployed in 2009, and per-capita income
was only $800.63 Figures of this kind indicate clearly that what is being enacted is a necropolitics,
rather than a biopolitics. If the priority was to sustain the population, rather than to allocate and
withhold death, such conditions would rightly be considered intolerable. In the game environment
created by counterinsurgency, the trick is to get to the next level, rather than to complete every action
at the current stage of play. For the goal of counterinsurgency is not to create stability, but to
naturalize the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war, not as politics, but as culture, the web
of meaning in a given place and time.64 Counterinsurgency is trying to produce the Middle East and
Central Asia as cultures of weak or failing states requiring permanent counterinsurgency. Indeed, the
new mantra of the GCOIN strategists is the need to engage with the global jihad, deriving from a
newly global Islama structureless, leaderless archipelago of communities whose energy is
aroused by a nervous system based on communications technology.65 Contrary to some assertions,
such protagonists of GCOIN assert a distinction with paranoia, such as that of the Cold War, and argue
the definition of the enemy is no longer black-and-white, but shaded.66

BEYOND COUNTERVISUALITY?
If counterinsurgency uses neovisuality as a strategy, can we construct a countervisuality to
counterinsurgency? Like all visuality, neovisuality is already a countervisuality. For it requires an
opposing insurgency as a means of legitimation and will seek it out if none is forthcoming, under the
slogan Bring em on! Further, its means of visualization are increasingly antivisual, making any
countervisualization likely to be ineffective. Above all, if the designation of counterinsurgency as a
necropolitics is right, then it cannot be opposed in its own terms. In the case of biopolitics, by
contrast, there have been a range of tactical responses, including a recent edited volume entitled
Tactical Biopolitics. Contributors working at the intersection of science, art, and questions of life
have created public biolabs, amateur science, tactical media projects, and theoretical critiques.67
Imagine a book or conference called Tactical Necropolitics. In fact, of course, we don't have to,
because violent terrorism, especially suicide bombing, is precisely such a necropolitics. As George
Bataille put it long ago, Sacrifice in reality reveals nothing.68 Consequently, those opposed to the
counterinsurgent formation of necropolitical regimes of separation can in no way identify with any
insurgency that uses a micro-necropolitics of separation. Nonetheless, this is a moment of
paradoxical emergency for authoritarian visuality, which requires a new mobility to refuse to move
on. While critics of visuality are not going to affect military policy as such, the continuing critique of
their claims to visualize remains salutary. Why would the Obama administration have so strenuously
resisted releasing the remaining Abu Ghraib photographs if they did not fear the reaction?

It is now time, however, to stop playing the second move to whatever deployment of militarized
information war comes next. The tools of democratization, education, and sustainability are to hand
and have not exhausted themselves. While democracy is part of the mission of counterinsurgency in
theory, the practice reveals otherwise. Rather than concern ourselves with such geopolitics as day-today politics, it will be more effective to consider combining democratization issues with education
and sustainability in the institutions of education, where most of my readers are, I presume, engaged.
As Rancire has long argued, how can the nineteenth-century hierarchies of most higher education
continue to be justified in the same space as calls for radical change? What are the goals of education
for a post-growth sustainable economy? Can universities democratize themselves or should there be
an emphasis on alternative modalities? All of these rethinkings will have to be accomplished, for
those outside China and India, in the context of disinvestment, unemployment, and the casualization of
labor. In short, it seems to me that the present conjuncture, as we used to say, bears more than a
passing resemblance to that in which the cultural-studies project was first formed. Once again it
becomes of the first importance to reclaim, rediscover, and retheorize the practices and spaces of
everyday life, but now in the context of permanent war. As the example of postKatrina New
Orleans shows, there is nothing banal or quotidian about this new everyday.69 At the same time, the
case of New Orleans shows that simple visibility or media coverage does not ensure any change in
political practice. Where once consumer and subcultural practices seemed to offer new modes of
resistance, the task now is more paradoxical. In a period in which we are all suspects, provisionally
guilty until proved otherwise, the need is to assert the continuance of an everyday that does not
require militarization to carry on. The everyday form created in Tahrir Square, Cairo, has been the
best example to date of the possibilities of a praxis of the everyday that is not found but made.
Nonetheless, the spectacular, spectral, and speculative traces of visuality continue to walk the earth. It
is the interim, a moment that could generate momentum for a new common, the mobility, or revert to
an interregnum for a new form of autocracy. Several outcomes seem possible from this swirling
crisis: a new authoritarianism, a perpetual crisis, or, just possibly, a time in which my claim to the
right to look is met by your willingness to be seen. And I reciprocate.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION. THE RIGHT TO LOOK

1 A claim that is continued on my blog at http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL.
2 Any such claim stands on the shoulders of the critical thinking about vision and visuality, which (in recent times) runs from Laura
Mulvey to W. J. T. Mitchell, Anne Friedberg, Martin Jay, and other theorists of the look and the visual. The phrase right to look was
previously used by Clare Whatling in a somewhat different context. See Whatling, Screen Dreams, 160.
3 Derrida, Right of Inspection; Derrida, Droit de regards, xxxvi. I have modified the translation used by Wills, rights of inspection,
because it attempts to bridge the gap between right and law, which I feel should be kept open.
4 For an insightful discussion of this text and its implications, see Villarejo, Lesbian Rule, 5582. On looking itself, see Sturken and
Cartwright, Practices of Looking.
5 Rancire, Ten Theses on Politics. Originally published as Dix theses sur la politique, in Aux Bords de Politique (Paris: La
Fabrique, 1998), 217.
6 For an analysis of visuality's use in visual culture, see my essay On Visuality. The term was widely referenced to Hal Foster's
Vision and Visuality, which did not refer to the earlier history of the term.
7 Compare Derrida's insistence that writing preceded speech (Of Grammatology, 14).
8 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, 34.
9 Rancire, Aux bords de la politique, 17.
10 Foucault, The Order of Things, 132.
11 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3.
12 Rancire, The Philosopher and His Poor.
13 Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 13. I would like to thank Kristin Ross for her brilliantly insightful introductions to
Rancire's work, in print and in person.
14 Rancire, Hatred of Democracy.
15 Rancire, Politics and Aesthetics, 13.
16 Moraa, Dussel, and Juregui, Colonialism and Its Replicants, 2.
17 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.
18 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 3.
19 Maldonado Torres, Against War, xii.
20 See Smith, Enwezor, and Condee, Antinomies of Art and Culture.
21 Enrique Dussel, quoted in Mignolo, Delinking, 453.
22 Wagenvoort, Roman Dynamism, 1723.
23 This approach differs from the distinction between bare life and social life proposed by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer:
here, bare life is the simple fact of living (1), whose politicizationconstitutes the decisive event of modernity (4). This production
of a biopolitical body is seen as key to sovereign power, especially under the regime of the society of the spectacle that produces a
convergence between modern democracies and totalitarian societies (10). The absence of slavery from Agamben's analysis creates an
odd and insurmountable lacuna, as indicated by Ewa Plonowksa Ziarek in Bare Life on Strike, 9498.
24 Rancire, Aux bords de la politique, 31.
25 See the monumental essay by Jacques Derrida, Force of Law, 93743.
26 Derrida, Force of Law, 943.
27 Timothy Taylor, Believing the Ancients, 3738.
28 Kathleen Wilson, The Performance of Freedom, 52.
29 Barrell, Imagining the King's Death.

30 Berry, Reckless Eyeballing.

31 Greenberg and Dratel, The Torture Papers, 1214.
32 On the world-generating optic, see Appadurai, Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, 9. On worlding see
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 11415, 228. On modernity's production as the West, see Timothy Mitchell, The Stage of
Modernity, 15.
33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 207, quoted in Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault, 32 (see 3253 for more detail on this
concept).
34 Raymond Williams argued that Victorian writers like Carlyle asked the right questions but supplied the wrong answers (Culture
and Society, 7577).
35 Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910), in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, 11:31.
36 iek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 57.
37 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 12.
38 John H. Hammond, quoted in Eudell, Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South, 30.
39 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 2:222.
40 Said, Orientalism, 41.
41 Seeley, The Expansion of England, 14.
42 Daily Herald, 13 August 1923, quoted by Dutt, The British Empire, available at the Marxists Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/.
43 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 30.
44 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 135.
45 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 5.
46 Ibid., 12.
47 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 8485.
48 Rancire, The Future of the Image, 47.
49 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 183.
50 See Parks, Cultures in Orbit.
51 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 58.
52 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (1961), reprinted in Pursell, The Military-Industrial Complex, 206.
53 Bosch, Pentagonism (1969), reprinted in Pursell, The Military-Industrial Complex, 298.
54 I owe the vocabulary of toggle and zoom to Tara McPherson's response to the Animating Archives conference held at Brown
University, 45 December 2009, and I thank her for allowing me to use it.
55 Derian, Virtuous War, 218.
56 See my blog, at http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL, for more on the 2011 revolutions and visuality.
57 Appadurai, Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, 6.
58 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 6364.
59 Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, 22224.
60 Terry Smith, Making the Modern.
61 Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production.
62 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 35.
63 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 15665.
64 Jones, Irrational Modernism, 24.
65 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 66, adapted.
66 Rancire, Introducing Disagreement, 6.
67 Casarino and Negri, In Praise of the Common, 8688.
68 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 12635. Agamben asserts that life becomes a political term with the formation, in 1789, of a
discourse of the Rights of Man, setting aside the entire question of slavery that is central here.
69 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 75.

70 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 64; see also Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy.
71 Rancire, Hatred of Democracy, 60.
72 Lotringer and Marazzi, The Return of Politics, 8.
73 See Oliver, The Look of Love.
74 Negri, Time for Revolution, 142.
75 Antliff, The Jew as Anti-Artist, 51.
76 Quoted in Haug, Philosophizing with Marx, Gramsci and Brecht, 153.
77 Ronel, The Test Drive, 69.
78 Viano, The Left according to the Ashes of Gramsci, 59.
79 Stoll, Toward a Second Haitian Revolution.
80 Yoo, Memorandum for William J. Haynes II, General Counsel for the Department of Defense, 2, 45.
81 Paul Edwards, The Closed World, 11.

ONE. OVERSIGHT
1 For pioneering work on the visual culture of slavery, see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement, and Kriz and
Quilley, An Economy of Colour.
2 See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; and James, The Black Jacobins.
3 Foucault, The Order of Things, 129. Subsequent page references appear in the text.
4 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 155.
5 See Paton, No Bond but the Law, 912 for a concise summary of the various historical revisions of Foucault's account from the
viewpoint of slavery and the plantation system. Ann Laura Stoler has also suggested the use of a colonial order of things in her Race
and the Education of Desire.
6 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 127.
7 See Gruzinski, Images at War, 3061.
8 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 8283.
9 Foucault, The Order of Things, 116.
10 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, 155.
11 See Drescher, Abolition, 147.
12 On surrogation, see Roach, Cities of the Dead, 23.
13 Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies.
14 Mbembe, De la postcolonie, 48. See 3993 for a full development of the concept of commandement.
15 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 25.
16 Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, 222.
17 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, 152.
18 Philip Gridley King to Sir Joseph Banks, Series 39.004 (8 May 1792), the Banks Collection, Mitchell and Dixson Collections at the
State Library of New South Wales, available online at http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/.
19 See Casid, Sowing Empire, 31.
20 Joel Weinstein, Memory and Its Discontents, in Sullivan, Continental Shifts, 5761.
21 Du Tertre, Histoire gnrale des Antilles Habites par les Franois, 2:107.
22 Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, 1:lvii.
23 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 1721.
24 Ibid., 419.
25 Grove, Green Imperialism, 68 and 276.
26 Moreno Fraginals, The Sugar Mill, 20.
27 Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, xlv. Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica, quoted by J. H. Galloway,

Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry, 336.

28 Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica, 61.
29 Ibid., 187.
30 Malenfant, Des Colonies (1814), quoted in Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Franaises, 116.
31 [Browne], The Natural History of Jamaica, 25.
32 See E. P. Thompson's classic essay Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.
33 Bernard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire, 4547.
34 For details of the different tasks in the ranks of oversight, see Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Franaises, 10534; and
Bassett, The Plantation Overseer.
35 Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation, 1056.
36 The Great Gang was the largest and undertook the heaviest labor, whereas the Second Gang mostly comprised women, and the
Third children. James, The Black Jacobins, 86.
37 James H. Hammond, Plantation Manual [1844], quoted in Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, xxxvi.
38 Letter of 1776, quoted in Craton, Testing the Chains, 172. For further details on the Hanover plan, see ibid., 17279.
39 Conley, The Self-Made Map, 1. See also Jacob, The Sovereign Map, especially chapter 4, The Cartographic Image, 269360.
40 See Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers and Maps.
41 Jacob, The Sovereign Map, xv.
42 Ibid., 11.
43 For a comparison with similar processes of colonization in Australia, see Terry Smith, Visual Regimes of Colonization.
44 On the development of the land survey, see Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze, 3839.
45 Quoted in Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 202.
46 Reproduced in Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation, 28.
47 Quoted in Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 20.
48 Nathaniel Wilson, Outline of the Flora of Jamaica.
49 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 4959.
50 Ibid., 78.
51 Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, 203.
52 Hennigsen, Dansk Vestindien I Gamle Billeder.
53 Du Tertre, Histoire gnrale des Antilles Habites par les Franois, 122.
54 Galloway, Tradition and Innovation in the American Sugar Industry, 346.
55 Quoted in Marin, The Portrait of the King, 174.
56 For a full account of Brunias's work, see Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 13973. On Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, see Lise,
Droits de l'homme et Abolition d'esclavage, 21 et seq.
57 See Kathleen Wilson, The Performance of Freedom.
58 Raynal, Histoire des Deux Indes, quoted in Aravamudan, Trop(icaliz)ing the Enlightenment, 54. Aravamudan includes (and
translates) these important lines, which are usually deleted from citations of the passage.
59 Casid, Sowing Empire, 31.
60 [Browne], A Natural History of Jamaica, 167; Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados, 171.
61 See Casid, Sowing Empire, 198.
62 Worthy Park took over 580 remote acres of the Cocoree for slave gardens in 1787 (Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican
Plantation, 105). Stewart noted that the 1787 law was not so strictly attended to as it should be (A View of the Past and Present
State of the Island of Jamaica, 64).
63 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 8083. For the individual plantation, see 84.
64 Foucault, The Order of Things, 163n3.
65 Ibid., 133.
66 Ibid., 12829.

67 Ford, People as Property, 14.

68 Braude, The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern
Periods, 13738.
69 For more on the casta paintings, see the full and interesting account by Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in
Eighteenth Century Mexico.
70 [Browne], The Natural History of Jamaica, 265 and 421.
71 Long, History of Jamaica, 3:120.
72 [Browne], The Natural History of Jamaica, 173, 175, and 270.
73 Long, A History of Jamaica, 3:779.
74 Letter of 1758, quoted in Fick, The Making of Haiti, 67.
75 On Sloane, see Kriz, Curiosities, Commodities and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane's Natural History of Jamaica.
76 Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados, 8.
77 Quoted in Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue Hati, 197.
78 Quoted in Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 239.
79 Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan, 90. The full text of the code in its 1685 and 1725 versions is included
along with commentary.
80 Code Noir, ou Receuil d'Edits, Dclarations et Arrts, Concernant la Discipline et le Commerce des Esclaves Ngres des Isles de
l'Amrique Franaise (1685), reprinted in Le Code Noir et autres textes de lois sur l'esclavage, 9. Both preamble and title were
omitted from Edward Long's translation (A History of Jamaica, 3:921). See Dayan, Codes of Law and Bodies of Color, 285.
81 Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan, 104.
82 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 61 and 19091.
83 Wilfred S. Samuel, A Review of the Jewish Colonists in Barbados in the Year 1680, 23.
84 Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies,
5:37.
85 Cited in Judah, The Jews Tribute in Jamaica: Extracted from the Journals of the House of Assembly In Jamaica, 153.
86 Cundall, Governors of Jamaica in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century, 198.
87 The details of Makandal's career are summarized by Fick in The Making of Haiti, 6072. Many documents relevant to the case
are reprinted by Pierre Pluchon in Vaudou, sorciers, empoissoniers de Saint-Domingue Hati, although as the somewhat
sensationalist title suggests, his interpretations are questionable.
88 Report of Jacques Courtin (1758), quoted in Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoissoniers de Sainte-Domingue Hati, 210.
89 Mtraux, Haiti, 60.
90 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 62.
91 Ibid., 71 and 257.
92 James, The Black Jacobins, 87. Fick quotes the Kreyol: Cout la libert li pal nan coeur nous tous (The Making of Haiti, 93).
93 Moreau de St Mery, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie franaise de l'isle
Saint-Domingue, 2:631.
94 Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 31.
95 Edouard Duval-Carri, La Voix des Sans-Voix (private collection, 1994), reprinted in Consentino, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou,
262.
96 McClellan and Regourd, The Colonial Machine, 35. See passim for further details.
97 McClellan, Colonialism and Science, 14445.
98 Dutrne la Couture, Prcis sur la canne.
99 Barr de Saint-Venant, Des Colonies Modernes sous la Zone Torride et particulirement de celle de Saint-Domingue, 393.
100 Dutrne la Couture, Prcis sur la canne, x and 152.
101 Ibid., xxv.
102 The boilers were named as running from Grande to Propre, Flambeau, Sirop, and finally Batterie (ibid., 13739). The chain of
sugar readiness was described as running from perl to liss, la plume, and faire la Goutte to faire le fil (ibid., 17779).
103 Ibid., 17783.

104 Here French colonial practice appears to be different from the English one of delegating authority to the drivers.
105 Ibid., 31.
106 For instance, Moreno Fraginals gives dates of 1780 and 1789 for its first use, both dates appearing in the same book, The Sugar
Mill, on pages 35 and 160n63, respectively.
107 Descourtilz, Voyage d'un naturaliste en Haiti, 54.
108 Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica, 6567.
109 Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, 3637.
110 Dutrne la Couture, Prcis sur la canne, 328.
111 Maurel, Cahiers de Dolances de la colonie de Saint-Domingue pour les Etats-Gnraux de 1789, 11.
112 Cahier des Dolances de la Colonie de Saint-Domingue, prsenter au Roy dans l'Assemble des Etats-Gnraux de la Nation,
par MM. les dputs de cette colonie (1789), reprinted in Maurel, Cahiers de Dolances de la colonie de Saint-Domingue pour les
Etats-Gnraux de 1789, 263. See 26382 for the full details.
113 Plan Propos par la Colonie pour la formation des Assembles Coloniales, Assembles Provinciales, et de comits
intermdiaires permanens tant dans la colonie qu' Paris (1789), reprinted in Maurel, Cahiers de Dolances de la colonie de SaintDomingue pour les Etats-Gnraux de 1789, 283.
114 Ption, Discours sur les Troubles de Saint-Domingue, 16.
115 Cahiers de Dolances de la Chambre d'Agriculture du Cap (1789), reprinted in Maurel, Cahiers de Dolance de la colonie
de Saint-Domingue pour les Etats-Gnraux de 1789, 305.

TWO. THE MODERN IMAGINARY

1 See in particular James, The Black Jacobins; Trouillot, An Unthinkable History; and Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti.
2 Trouillot, An Unthinkable History, 89.
3 Many thousands of prints circulated during the French Revolution, known to us now through collections at the Bibliothque
Nationale, the Muse Carnavalet, and other institutions, available in a five-volume collection, published under the editorship of the
distinguished historian Michel Vovelle, La rvolution franaise: Images et recit 17891799. See the online prints archive, Imaging the
French Revolution, available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/.
4 Censer and Hunt, Imaging the French Revolution.
5 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 58.
6 Quoted in Antoine de Baecque's Le choc des opinions, in his L'an 1 des droits de l'homme, 14.
7 Paine, The Rights of Man, 130.
8 See Derrida, Archive Fever.
9 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, esp. 383413 (quotation on 402; reference to overdetermination, 389; condensation in
dream-work, 75354).
10 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 218.
11 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 13537.
12 Desmoulins, quoted in Reichardt, Light against Darkness, 118.
13 Faits et ides sur Saint-Domingue, relativement la revolution actuelle.
14 Condorcet, Fragment de Justification (1793), in Oeuvres, 1:576.
15 Reinhardt, French Caribbean Slaves Forge Their Own Ideal of Liberty in 1789, 29. The anonymous manuscript letters are
accepted by historians as genuine, although some suggest that the authors may have been free people of color.
16 See Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 10941.
17 Motion Faite par M. Vincent Og, jeune, l'Assemble des COLONS, Habitans de S-Domingue, l'Htel de Massiac, Place des
Victoires, 2.
18 Vincent Og, Letter to the Provincial Assembly of the North, Sainte-Domingue, in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in
the Caribbean, 77.
19 Rancire, Short Voyages to the Land of the People.
20 Hobbes, De Cive, chap. 12, section 8, quoted in Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 23.

21 Freud observed of those of his contemporaries hostile to the crowd, like Gustave Le Bon, The characteristics of revolutionary
groups, and especially those of the great French Revolution, have unmistakably influenced their descriptions (The Standard Edition of
the Works of Sigmund Freud, 26).
22 Quoted in Csaire, Toussaint L'Ouverture, 171.
23 The text reads: Tout homme a la trs sre proprit de sa personne, de toutes ses facults personnelles, physiques et
intellectuelles, de tout ce qu'il possedait lors de son association, et de ce qu'il acquiert ensuite, in Project de dclaration des droits
naturels civils et politiques de l'homme fonds sur des principes vidents et des vrits incontestables par un paysan, reprinted in
Baecque, L'an I des droits de l'homme, 306. See also the proposal by the revolutionary leader Siyes, which offered tout homme est
propritaire de sa personne (ibid., 72), and another, by Target, giving each ownership of la vie de l'homme, son corps, sa libert (ibid.,
81).
24 De Boislandry, Divers articles proposs pour entrer dans la dclaration des droits (Versailles, August 1789), reprinted in
Baecque, L'an 1 des droits de l'homme, 285.
25 Quoted in Baecque, L'an 1 des droits de l'homme, 101.
26 Baecque, Le choc des opinions, 20.
27 Fisher, Liberty and Freedom, 42.
28 Claude Niquet Le Jeune, Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (1789, muse Carnavalet, Paris), reprinted in Vovelle,
La rvolution franaise, 2:299.
29 In the Salon of 1789 Le Barbier had shown a drawing of Harnone of the first to storm the Bastille, who had arrested its
governor, de Launayan example of the new vernacular hero. Pupil, Le dvouement du chevalier Desilles et l'affaire de Nancy en
1790, 83.
30 Collection Henin, vol. 119, no. 10428, Bibliothque Nationale, Paris.
31 Demange, Images de la Rvolution, 9.
32 Maurel, Cahiers de dolance, 63.
33 Speech given to the National Assembly by the deputies from Saint-Domingue, 3 November 1791, translated as A Particular
Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo (London: J. Sewell, 1792), 20.
34 Quoted in Fick, The Making of Haiti, 111.
35 Flix Carteau, Soires bermudiennes (1802), quoted in Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 105.
36 Benot, La rvolution franaise et la fin des colonies 17891794, 39.
37 Sonthonax, Decree of General Liberty (1793), in Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 123.
38 Dahomay, L'Esclave et le droit, 40.
39 Cited by Dorigny and Gainot, La Socit des Amis des Noirs, 243n43.
40 Spivak, Righting Wrongs, 525.
41 Bayart, The State in Africa, xvii. To those worried about anachronism, I point to Bayart's conclusion, where he suggests that Paul
Bois's classic study of peasants in the French Revolution, Paysans de l'Ouest, is an excellent methodological introduction to the study of
Africa (265). And vice-versa.
42 MacGaffey, Aesthetics and Politics of Violence in Central Africa, 70.
43 Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 5566.
44 Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade, 211.
45 Ibid., 223.
46 Rediker, The Slave Ship, 82 and 97.
47 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 77.
48 See Roberts, Images of Popular Violence in the French Revolution.
49 See the extensive study by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in her Extremities, 963. See also Crow, Emulation, 119.
50 Janes, Beheadings, 25.
51 From Notes on Medusa's Head, in Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
18:27374.
52 Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 82 and 89.
53 Ibid., 66.

54 Foucault, A History of Madness, 460.

55 Ibid., 378.
56 Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 69, 144, 22628.
57 Ibid., 73; Foucault, A History of Madness, 436.
58 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 88.
59 Ibid., 638.
60 Foucault, A History of Madness, 480.
61 Descourtilz, Voyage d'un naturaliste en Haiti, 55.
62 A demand made by Jean-Franois (see Fick, The Making of Haiti, 114).
63 James, The Black Jacobins, 106. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 194.
64 Trouillot, An Unthinkable History.
65 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 116; she translates bout blancs as end to the whites.
66 Moreau de Saint Mery, Description topographique de l'isle de Saint-Domingue, 1:43336.
67 Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, 26976.
68 Descourtilz, Voyage d'un naturaliste en Haiti, 125.
69 Charles-A. Alexandre, Parisian Women Protest via Taxation Populaire in February, 1792, 115.
70 Mathiez, La Vie Chre et le mouvement social sous la Terreur, 32.
71 Police Reports on the Journes of February, 1793, 134.
72 Ibid., 139.
73 Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 5566.
74 Ibid., 56.
75 Mathiez, La vie chre et le mouvement social sous la Terreur, 4042.
76 Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 67.
77 Lacerte, The Evolution of Land and Labor in the Haitian Revolution, 45859.
78 Respectively, Bourdon, Rapport de Leonard Bourdon au nom de la commission d'Instruction Publique, 8; quoted and
translated by Michael J. Sydenham in his Lonard Bourdon, 223. On David's painting, see Clark, Painting in the Year Two.
79 Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 17.
80 Quoted in Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, x.
81 Sydenham, Lonard Bourdon, 224. See 22333 for full details.
82 Bourdon, Recueil des action hroques et civiques des Republicains Francais, 3 and 6.
83 Bourdon, Recueil des action hroques et civiques des Republicains Francais, no. 3.
84 Thibaudeau, Recueil des action hroques et civiques des Republicains Francais, no 5.
85 Sonthonax (19 August 1794), quoted by Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 167.
86 See Vovelle, Marat, 21024.
87 Reprinted in Vovelle, La rvolution franaise, 2:296.
88 Reichardt, Light against Darkness, 124. Soboul documented at least fifty-two members of the comits civils of the Paris
sections that worked in the arts (The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 46). On Allais, see Roux, Inventaire du
Fonds Franais, 11751.
89 Detournelle, Journal de la Socit Populaire et Rpublicaine des Arts, 14. See Mirzoeff, Revolution, Representation,
Equality.
90 Berthaut, Les ingenieurs gographes militaires, 1:12638.
91 Descourtilz, Voyage d'un naturaliste en Haiti, 166.
92 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 3.
93 Jean Fouchard, Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue, 43.
94 Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 222.
95 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 186.

96 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 21012.

97 Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 322.
98 The painting of Toussaint is reproduced in Consentino It's All for You, Sen Jak!, 252.
99 Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, 72; she also makes the comparison of lwa and loi here.
100 Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 223.
101 Lillian B. Miller, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 5:321.
102 Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic, 71; Peale, Letter (17 December 1805), in Lillian B. Miller, The Selected
Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 2:916.
103 Toussaint L'Ouverture to his Brothers and Sisters in Varettes (22 March 1795), in Nesbitt, Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1315.
104 Quoted in Csaire, Toussaint L'Ouverture, 268.
105 Fick, The Making of Haiti, 2078. On the central place of war to the eighteenth-century state, see Brewer, The Sinews of
Power, and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People, 180204.
106 The full constitution is reprinted by Madiou, Histoire d'Haiti, 11:53955.
107 Madiou, Histoire d'Haiti, 14446. Incidentally, James's startling comment that Toussaint favoured the whites against the
Mulattoes (The Black Jacobins, 277) reworks Madiou's less incendiary comment that Toussaint wanted [Haiti] to become
independent by the union of Black and the white colonist (Histoire d'Haiti, 144). See Paul B. Miller, Enlightened Hesitations.
108 Toussaint L'Ouverture, Proclamation (25 November 1801), in Nesbitt, Toussaint L'Ouverture, 6667.
109 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 248.
110 Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, 157.
111 James, The Black Jacobins, 284, see 27688; Csaire, Toussaint L'Ouverture, 27375.
112 Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 16265 (on Hamlet) and 2036 (on Mose).
113 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 1415.
114 See the remarkable photographic essay by Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wambaugh, Crossing the Water: A Photographic Path
to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World, esp. fig. 99, pp. 11314.
115 For full details, see Mirzoeff, Aboriginality.
116 Horner, The French Reconaissance, 2425.
117 Carter, Looking for Baudin, 18.
118 Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 1617.
119 L-F Jauffret, Considerations to serve in the choice of objects that may assist in the formation of the Special Museum of the
Socit des Observateurs de l'Homme, requested of the Society by Captain Baudin appendix 8, in Baudin, The Journals of PostCaptain Nicolas Baudin, 59496.
120 Plomley, The Baudin Expedition, 89.
121 James, The Black Jacobins, 277.
122 Feldman, Formations of Violence, 5.

PUERTO RICAN COUNTERPOINT I

1 Hartup, with Bentez, The Grand Manner in Puerto Rican Painting 5. On coartacion, see Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery and
Freedom in Nineteenth Century Puerto Rico, 8485 and 22627n8.
2 Sibylle Fischer has pointed out that, in 1791, a correspondent to the Havana newspaper Papel Peridico attributed faults in church
frescoes to some blacksrecently arrived from Angola (quoted in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 61).
3 Ren Taylor, Jos Campeche y su tiempo, 160 and 160n1.
4 See Sullivan, The Black Hand.
5 Gruzinski, Images at War, 211.
6 The painting text reads: Juan Pantalen hijo legtimo de Luis de Avils y de Martina de Luna Alvarado. Vecinos labradores de la
Villa de/ Coamo en la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico. Naci el da 2 de julio de 1806, y conducido por sus padres a esta
Capital/ le confiri el Sacramento de la Confirmacin el 6 de abril de 1808 el Ilmo. Sr. Obispo Diocno D. D. Juan Alejo de Arizmendi por
cuya orden/ se hizo esta copia cogida del natural. Jos Campeche.

7 Taylor, Jos Campeche, 211.

8 Moreno Vega, Espiritismo in the Puerto Rican Community.
9 Quoted in Houlberg, Magique Marasa, 269. The tohosu are all water spirits, whose worship continues today in West Africa. On
disabled children as tohosu, see Blier, Vodun, 64.
10 For full details, see Childs, A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island.
11 Quoted in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 41.
12 Ibid., 43.

THREE. VISUALITY
1 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 3:319.
2 Clausewitz, On War, 109.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 112.
5 Ibid., 192.
6 Carlyle would later write of Clausewitz: a truly able man, of strong judgment, clear utterance,tho highly metaphysical (lost
frequently in definitions, theoretic hair-splittings); a visible contemporary of Kant. Except Lloyd; much more, except Napoleon, and
Fred[eric]k himself in the best moments, he is the cleverest man I have heard speak of War (letter to Lord Ashburton, 23 January 1856,
The Carlyle Letters Online, at http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/).
7 Clausewitz, On War, 87. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 48.
8 Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightening? (1784), reprinted in Eliot and Stern, The Age of Enlightenment, 25055.
9 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 60 and 15.
10 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 22932.
11 Berthaut, Les ingenieurs gographes militaires, 1:124.
12 Ibid., 1:286. See Godlweska, Resisting the Cartographic Imperative.
13 Berthaut, Les ingenieurs geographes, 1:125.
14 Ibid., 1:292.
15 Ibid., 1:28185.
16 Siegfried, Naked History.
17 Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 15672, especially his figure of Blake's map of the world (168).
18 W. J. T. Mitchell, Chaosthetics, 453.
19 Thompson, Witness against the Beast, 225.
20 Gerrard Winstanley, A Letter to the Lord Fairfax (1649), reprinted in Sabine, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 190. See the
discussion in Hill, Winstanley, 3542.
21 Winstanley, The True Leveller's Standard Advanced (1649), reprinted in Hill, Winstanley, 77.
22 Ibid., 84.
23 Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 106.
24 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839), in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 4, 157.
25 Ibid., 12223.
26 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1:15.
27 Ibid., 1:211.
28 Morris, Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, 287.
29 Rancire, The Philosopher and His Poor, 25 and 48.
30 Benbow, Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, 34. See also Rter, William Benbow's Grand
National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes. Benbow's pamphlet retained its original page numbers.
31 Benbow, William Benbow's Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, 8.
32 Hill, Winstanley, 41. Hill had long argued for this notion (see Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution 16401660, 63

93).
33 Quoted in Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution 16401660, 6566.
34 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 290300.
35 On Spence, see Chase, The People's Farm, chaps. 23.
36 Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery (1822), in Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert
Wedderburn, 4445.
37 Wedderburn, The Axe Laid to the Root (1817), in Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert
Wedderburn, 8182.
38 Ibid., 86.
39 Ibid., 1058.
40 Rter, William Benbow's Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes, 225. See also Prothero, William
Benbow and the Concept of the General Strike.
41 Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842, 21.
42 Ibid., 32.
43 Plotz, Crowd Power, 88.
44 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), in Marx and Engels, Marx and Engels 18441845,
518.
45 Ibid., 578n.
46 Ibid., 581. On Carlyle's influence on Marx and Engels, see Stedman Jones, The Redemptive Power of Violence?
47 Quoted in Plotz, Crowd Power, 97.
48 Carlyle, Model Prisons, 2.
49 Carlyle, Chartism (1839), in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 4, 23438.
50 Ibid., 197.
51 Ibid., 201.
52 Ibid., 214.
53 Carlyle, Model Prisons, 14.
54 Semple, Bentham's Prison, 132.
55 Foucault, The Order of Things, 219.
56 Thierry, Lettres sur l'histoire de France, 10.
57 Thierry, Sur l'antipathie de race qui divise la nation franaise (1820), in Thierry, Lettres sur l'histoire de France, 483; quoted in
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 226.
58 Thierry, Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrs du Tiers Etat, 4.
59 Thierry, Lettres sur l'histoire de France, 2.
60 Ibid., 11.
61 Stedman Jones, The Redemptive Power of Violence?, 89.
62 Quotations from Ranke in this paragraph are taken from Docker and Curthoys, Is History Fiction?, 5657.
63 Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 9495.
64 Carlyle, Past and Present. See also Rigney, The Untenanted Places of the Past; and Schoch, We Do Nothing but Enact
History.
65 Schoch, We Do Nothing But Enact History, 29.
66 Ibid., 38. On the idea of the whole, see Rigney, The Untenanted Places of the Past, 344.
67 See Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time.
68 Lavally, Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern, 12.
69 Foucault, The Order of Things, 227. On the visual turn of history, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 20.
70 Crary, Modernizing Vision. See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
71 Quoted in Smajic, The Trouble with Ghost-seeing, 1115.

72 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1:212.

73 Smajic, The Trouble with Ghost-seeing, 1118.
74 Carlyle, The French Revolution, 1:189.
75 Carlyle, Goethe.
76 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Subsequent page references appear in the text.
77 John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands, 2, quoted in Hilliard, God's Gentlemen, 2.
78 Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race. See also Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 25859.
79 Rigney, The Untenanted Places of the Past, 351.
80 Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
81 Plotz, Crowd Power, 95.
82 Carlyle, Model Prisons, 16.
83 Ibid., 42.
84 Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.
85 Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, 295.
86 See Holt, The Problem of Freedom.
87 Ibid., 298.
88 Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, 306. On the Demerara rebellion, see da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears
of Blood.
89 Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 353. See also her analysis of the interplay of race and colonial masculinity in Occasional
Discourse, 34753.
90 Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 23.
91 Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 3056.
92 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5557.
93 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 16.
94 Ibid., 2223.
95 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18184.
96 Heffer, Moral Desperado, 208.
97 See Morris, Heroes and Hero-Worship in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, 285307.
98 Painter, Sojourner Truth, 13.
99 Gilbert, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 31.
100 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 11524.
101 Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 66.
102 Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 15860.
103 Painter, Sojourner Truth, 139.
104 Halberstam, Female Masculinity.
105 On racial difference, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, 17789. On white notions of beauty, see Dyer, White. On the
revolutionary figure of Liberty, see Pointon, Naked Authority.
106 Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 160.
107 Spivak, A Critique of Colonial Reason, 29091 and 294.
108 Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 186n60.
109 W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1927), and Vincent van Gogh, Letters to His Brother (1883), quoted in Carlyle, On Heroes, lxiv.
110 For a full account, see Mirzoeff, Disorientalism.
111 Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 225.
112 Blanchard, Oscar Wilde's America, 33.
113 Lewis and Smith, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 157.
114 O'Toole, Venus in Blue Jeans, 80.

115 Lewis and Smith, Wilde Discovers America, 372.

116 Zamir, Dark Voices, 2367. See also David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 11516.
117 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 8793.
118 Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, 81114. All references to this speech are from these pages.
119 Emerson, Representative Men, 13.
120 Zamir, Dark Voices, 65.
121 Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois, 412.
122 Ibid., 847 and 842.
123 Zamir, Dark Voices, 65.
124 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5.

FOUR. ABOLITION REALISM

1 Benjamin, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, 32. Trong Hiep Nguyen's book is preserved in the Bibliothque Nationale,
where Benjamin must have read it, but it is not listed in WorldCat or other online catalogs.
2 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 518.
3 Quoted and translated in Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 266. One wonders whether Benjamin omitted the telling last sentence of
the passage for reasons of space or because twentieth-century European Marxisms no longer used the colonial model after the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
4 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 89.
5 Quoted in Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 119.
6 Paiewonsky, Special Edition, 12.
7 Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 5 and 133.
8 Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 429.
9 Drescher, Abolition, 169.
10 St. Thomae Tidende, 20 November 1848.
11 St. Thomae Tidende, 17 May 1848.
12 St. Thomae Tidende, 26 June 1847.
13 St. Thomae Tidende, 17 July and 28 August 1847.
14 St. Thomae Tidende, 25 September 1847.
15 Hansen, Islands of Slaves, 370.
16 Saint Croix Avis, 18 July 1848.
17 Paiewonsky, Special Edition, 14.
18 Ibid.
19 St. Thomae Tidende, 5 August 1848.
20 See Drescher, Abolition, 280.
21 Saint Croix Avis, 21 September 1848.
22 Provisional Act to regulate the relations between the proprietors of landed estates and the rural population of free laborers, Saint
Croix Avis, 29 January 1849. See also regulations published 2, 4, and 29 January 1849.
23 Saint Croix Avis, 14 June 1849.
24 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, esp. 12532 on the peasantry and 7376 on the lumpenproletariat.
25 Brettell and Zukowski, Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 22 and 39.
26 Cohen, Through the Sands of Time, 1213, 38.
27 Blyden, The Jewish Question (1898), 209.
28 Respectively, Brettell, Camille Pissarro and St. Thomas, 16; Carlos Ledezma, Chronological Reading of Camille Pissarro's
Political Landscape, 26.

29 Walcott, Tiepolo's Hound, 16.

30 Matos-Rodriguez, Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop-Owners and Domestics.
31 Quoted and translated in Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 226.
32 Benjamin, Arcades, 128. Taken from a speech delivered by Haussmann in 1864.
33 See the remarks of the Comte de Ludre, Le Correspondant, 25 June 1883, and Carey Taylor, Carlyle et la pensee latine, 8:119
21.
34 Napoleon, Analysis of the Sugar Question, 2:8283.
35 Agamben, State of Exception, 4 and 12.
36 Napoleon, Analysis of the Sugar Question, 88.
37 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 146.
38 Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (Boston, 1902), reprinted in Collected Black Women's Narratives, 12.
39 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 67.
40 Horan, Timothy O Sullivan, 3435.
41 J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, catalogue number 84.XM.484.39, reprinted in Jackie Napolean Wilson, Hidden Witness, n.p.
42 See Bolster, Strange Familiarity.
43 Quoted in Bolster and Anderson, Soldiers, Sailors, Slaves and Ships, 81.
44 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 390. Subsequent page references appear in the text.
45 See Foner, Reconstruction, 1068, 16474, 4029.
46 Manthorne, Plantation Pictures in the Americas, 345.
47 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14.
48 See Jennings, On the Banks of a New Lethe.
49 Cardoze's novel Lina, histoire vraie was published in 1860. On Oller, see Lloyd, Camille Pissarro and Francisco Oller.
50 Pissarro to Oller, 14 December 1865, reprinted in Venegas, Francisco Oller, 224. Translations by the author, unless specified.
These letters were not included in the Pissarro correspondence, being located in Oller's papers.
51 Ibid., 126.
52 Vollard, Paul Czanne, 28. Art historians dispute the dating for formalist reasons, due to Czanne's use of the palette knife,
already begun in 1865, and to the purported resemblance to the dusky seducer in The Rape (1867). The latter is quite invisible to me,
but even if it is there, it has no deciding authority. See Gowing et al., Czanne, 130.
53 Quoted and translated by Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting, 37. All references to this letter come from this source.
54 Quoted and translated in DeLue, Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition, 720. I have benefitted from DeLue's important
emphasis on Zola's understanding of Pissarro.
55 Quoted and translated in Athanassoglou-Kalmyer, An Artistic and Political Manifesto for Czanne, 485.
56 Quoted and translated in DeLue, Pissarro, Landscape, Vision, and Tradition, 726.
57 Quoted and translated by Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting, 37.
58 Ibid.
59 T. J. Clark, We Field-Women.
60 Quoted and translated by Joachim Pissarro, Pioneering Modern Painting, 38. There is a question as to whether Czanne meant
by 1870 the way in which Pissarro had been painting up until 1870, around 1870 specifically, or the decade of the 1870s as a whole. I
have taken the first meaning to be most likely, because 1871 was such a radical break in French history that any date prior to it would
have been taken as referring to the earlier period.
61 Quoted and translated in Peter Mitchell, Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet 18411918, 11.
62 See Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian for full details.
63 Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, 1045.
64 Karl Marx, Capital, 271n3.
65 Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, 137.
66 Manet, letter dated February 1849, Lettres du Sige de Paris, prcds des Lettres de voyage Rio de Janeiro, 23.
67 See Wilson-Bareau with Degener, Manet and the American Civil War, which nonetheless does not mention slavery.

68 G. Randon in Le Journal Amusante, 29 June 1867, reprinted in Armstrong, Manet Manette, 12.
69 Quoted and translated by Delgado Mercado, The Drama of Style in the Work of Francisco Oller, 69.
70 Haydee Venegas, Oller Chronology, 133.
71 See Luis A. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, 4849 for figures; 11317 for the
Moret Law, 115.
72 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.
73 See the reprinted catalog in Salons of the Refuss (London: Garland, 1981), n.p.
74 Brown, Degas and A Cotton Office in New Orleans.
75 Foner, Reconstruction, 26264.
76 Ibid., 551; Lemann, Redemption, 7678.
77 Quoted and translated in Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 59.
78 See Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, esp. 85117.
79 Drescher, Servile Insurrection and John Brown's Body in Europe, 52223. Drescher misspells Vesinier's name throughout.
80 Marx and Lenin, The Civil War in France, 77.
81 Paris au pouvoir des ngres, quoted by Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 149.
82 Brecht, The Days of the Commune, ii.
83 Quoted in Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune, 188.
84 Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, 83.
85 Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune, 362.
86 Quoted by Badiou, The Paris Commune, 261.
87 Jules Claretie, Histoire de la rvolution (1872), quoted by Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune, 25.
88 Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 38.
89 Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, on the Prussian entry, 55; and the elections, 105.
90 Badiou, The Paris Commune, 272.
91 Dittmar, Iconographie de la Commune de Paris de 1871, 357. No sources are supplied by Dittmar for his photographs.

PUERTO RICAN COUNTERPOINT II

1 See Katherine Manthorne, Plantation Pictures in the Americas.
2 Cubano Iguina, Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, 13637.
3 Czanne, Letters, 24243.
4 Roger Marx, Salon de 1895.
5 The current budgetary crisis in Puerto Rico has restricted access to the painting and made it impossible to have new photographs
taken for this book, which I regret.
6 Moreno Vega, Espiritismo in the Puerto Rican Community, 34850.
7 Quoted and translated in Delgado Mercado, The Drama of Style in the Work of Francisco Oller, 50.
8 Soto-Crespo, The Pains of Memory, 450. Soto-Crespo's piece has many strengths, and I cite it only because it is recent and in a
major refereed journal.

FIVE. IMPERIAL VISUALITY

1 Clearly, there is an implied need to consider the related and contrasting work of Catholic missionaries, especially in South America,
for the syncretic visual work of Catholicism leads in interestingly different directions.
2 Dunch, Beyond Cultural Imperialism, 318. See also van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities.
3 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:35; on Carlyle, 1:5253.
4 John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands, 3034.

5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30.

6 H. Williams, Diary, 514.
7 In Aotearoa New Zealand it is now conventional not to italicize the words in te reo, or Maori, because it is a bicultural society.
8 See Binney, Christianity and the Maoris to 1840.
9 Quoted in Binney, Whatever Happened to Poor Mr Yate?, 113.
10 Yate, An Account of New Zealand, 247.
11 Quoted in Binney, Christianity and the Maoris to 1840, 158. This essay clearly outlines the process being described here.
12 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 1:8 and passim.
13 See Ormond Wilson, Papahurihia: First Maori Prophet.
14 Quoted in Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 40.
15 Binney, Papahurihia, 325.
16 Froude is quoted in Markus, J. Anthony Froude, 268. Woon (1836) is quoted in Ormond Wilson, Papahurihia, 477.
17 Quoted in Eric Ramsden, Marsden and the Missions, 160.
18 See Rosenthal, Not Strictly Kosher, 16. Gluckman, Identity and Involvement, 7576.
19 Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 38.
20 Turner, Sovereignty, or the Art of Being Native, 87.
21 See Binney, Redemption Songs.
22 See Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 3749; Binney Papahurihia, Penetana.
23 See Flags and Untitled, in Smithyman, Atua Wera, 4546.
24 These flags can be seen today in Te Papa, the national museum of Aotearoa New Zealand. Unfortunately it was not possible to
obtain permission from the relevant iwi to reproduce them here.
25 Binney, Redemption Songs, plates following 198.
26 Quoted in Moore, New Guinea, 133.
27 Servant, Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 183842, 5657.
28 William Williams, Diary, 515, entry for 17 March.
29 See Rosenfeld, The Island Broken in Two Halves, 5152.
30 Letters published in Yate, An Account of New Zealand, 253 and 259. See 249281 for more such accounts.
31 Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 87.
32 Annals of the Diocese of New Zealand.
33 Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 88.
34 Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, 2526.
35 Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords, 133.
36 Ibid., 243 and 263.
37 Walker, Nga Pepa A Ranginui, 5253.
38 See Durie, Te Mana te Kawanatanga, 12.
39 Walker, Nga Pepa A Ranginui, 53.
40 Brookfield, Waitangi and Indigenous Rights, 103.
41 See ibid., 99106, for a summary of the different positions.
42 Durie, Te Mana Te Kawanatanga, 16.
43 McHugh, The Maori Magna Carta, 9.
44 Quoted in McHugh, Tales of Constitutional Origin and Crown Sovereignty in New Zealand, 77.
45 Quoted in McHugh, The Maori Magna Carta, 88.
46 Boast, Recognising Multi-textualism, 556.
47 Evans, The Victorian Age, 360; Newton, A Hundred Years of the British Empire, 2067; and Trevelyan, British History in the
Nineteenth Century and After, 410. Cited by Willy, The Call to Imperialism in Conrad's Youth, 40n3.
48 Quoted in Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 1:73.

49 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 3. For a partisan account favorable to Froude, see Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony
Froude, 1:25160.
50 Froude, Oceana, 241. Froude lost the job when his controversial novel Nemesis of Faith was publishedrather different from his
fantasy of living off the land (Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 1:131 and 1:137).
51 Froude, Oceana, 86. See Young, The Idea of British Ethnicity, 21519.
52 Froude, Oceana, 180.
53 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 347.
54 Quoted in Faith Smith, Creole Recitations, x. See 3840 for Thomas's education and passim for the intellectual context of his
work.
55 Ibid., 99.
56 John Jacob Thomas, Froudacity, 9697.
57 James, The West Indian Intellectual, 27.
58 Although this chapter does not take this path, it would be perfectly possible to expand this brief paragraph into a detailed exegesis
of a similar pattern of imperial visuality and countervisuality in the Caribbean to that described here in the South Pacific.
59 Froude, Oceana, 312.
60 Froude, The British in the West Indies, 360.
61 Froude, Julius Caesar.
62 Froude, Oceana, 9. Subsequent references by page number appear in the text.
63 For full details of the Melanesian mission, see Hilliard, God's Gentlemen.
64 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.
65 Hilliard, God's Gentlemen, 68. See 6568 for the full account.
66 Codrington, Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia, 26667.
67 Codrington, manuscript letter dated 11 September 1870, in possession of the Melanesian Mission, Watford, U.K.; viewed on
microfilm at the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales.
68 Codrington, manuscript letter dated 15 September 1871, in possession of the Melanesian Mission, Watford, U.K.; viewed on
microfilm at the Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales.
69 Hilliard, God's Gentlemen, 61. See 5961 for the full account.
70 See Knauft, From Primitive to Postcolonial in Melanesia and Anthropology.
71 Codrington, Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia, 262.
72 Ibid., 312.
73 Codrington, The Melanesians, 118. For a parallel case, in which anthropologists attributed a Supreme Being to the Maori, see
Simpson, Io as Supreme Being.
74 Codrington, Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia, 31516.
75 Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking.
76 Lennard J. Davis, Constructing Normalcy, 2349.
77 Quoted in Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 16.
78 Galton, Hereditary Genius, 24.
79 Quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line, 2.
80 Hilliard, God's Gentlemen, 191.
81 Agamben, State of Exception, 51.
82 Keesing, Rethinking Mana, 138.
83 Agamben, State of Exception, 4.
84 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 5859.
85 Ibid., 196. See Lvy-Bruhl, The Soul of the Primitive, 1620, for an elaboration of these ideas in French anthropology.
86 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 21213.
87 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 9.
88 Marett, Anthropology and the Classics. Fowler, The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer. The homo sacer was a person

who, although sacred, could be killed with impunity, but not sacrificed. Agamben has influentially compared homo sacer to the Jew in the
Nazi concentration camp. His methods of analogy and inference are directly derived from the interface of classics and anthropology
being discussed here. He describes Lvi-Strauss's characterization of mana as the excess of the signifying function over signifieds and
adds: Somewhat analogous remarks could be made with reference to the use and function of the concepts of the sacred and the taboo
in the discourse of the social sciences between 1890 and 1940 (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 80).
89 Fowler, The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer, 22, referencing Marett, The Threshold of Religion, 9092.
90 See Jennings Rose, Ancient Roman Religion, 1214, where Codrington is extensively quoted.
91 Lvi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 5556.
92 Ibid., 62.
93 Dumzil, Archaic Roman Religion, 31.
94 See Beard, The Roman Triumph.
95 Raphael Samuel, British Marxist Historians, 5.
96 O'Brien, The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery, 30710.
97 Charles Kerr, Publisher's Note, in Osborne, The Ancient Lowly, 1:iii.
98 Working Men's Party: Their Platform, New York Times, 9 October 1871. City and Suburban News, New York Times, 25
January 1874.
99 Obituary: C. Osbourne Ward, New York Times, 21 March 1902.
100 Ward, The Ancient Lowly, 1:151204.
101 Ward, Ancient Lowly, 1:ix.
102 Ward, Ancient Lowly, 1:427.
103 Harley, Syndicalism, 14.
104 Quoted in Raphael Samuel, British Marxist Historians, 6.
105 Pelloutier, L'Art et la Rvolte, 5.
106 Fernand Pelloutier, La muse du travail (1898), reprinted in Juillard, Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme
d'action directe, 9297.
107 Pelloutier, L'Art et la Rvolte, 18.
108 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 47.
109 Rae, The Eight Hours Day in Australia, 528.
110 Friederich Engels, Preface to the Communist Manifesto, May 1, 1890, available at the Marxists Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/.
111 Huberman and Minns, The Times They Are Not Changin, 545, table 1.
112 See Gines, Divisionism, Neo-Impressionism, Socialism.
113 Alexander Trachtenberg, The History of May Day (1932), available at the Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/.
114 Briand, La Grve Gnrale et la Rvolution.
115 La Grve Gnrale, 13 January 1894.
116 La Grve Gnrale, 3d annee no. 1, 1 March 1899.
117 Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, 42.
118 Ibid., 66.
119 Ibid., 67.
120 Berth, Les Nouveaux aspects du Socialisme, 6061.
121 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 23844.
122 Ibid., 2529.
123 Ibid., 118.
124 Ibid., 121.
125 Bergson, Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience (Paris, 1889), quoted in Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 26.
126 See Thiec, Gustave Le Bon, prophte de l'irrationalisme de masse.
127 Gordon W. Allport, quoted by Robert K. Merton in the introduction to Le Bon, The Crowd, v. The French title of Le Bon's work

was Psychologie des Foules, but it has become known as The Crowd in English.
128 Le Bon, The Crowd, 1617.
129 Ibid., 41.
130 Ibid., 55.
131 Ibid., 54.
132 See, for Germany, Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics, 38; and for Italy, Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle.
133 Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics, 10.
134 Drumont, La France Juive, 436 and 529. On Barrs and Carlyle, see Carey Taylor, Carlyle et la pense latine, 33032.
135 Fornelli, Tommaso Carlyle, 19.
136 Licciardelli, Benito Mussolini e Tommasso Carlyle, 32.
137 James Ellis Baker, Carlyle Rules the Reich, Saturday Review of Literature, 25 November 1933, 291.
138 Liselott Eckloff, Bild und Wirklichkeit bei Thomas Carlyle (Konigsberg and Berlin: Ost-Europa-Verlag, 1936).
139 Quoted in Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 21.

SIX. ANTIFASCIST NEOREALISMS

1 Mbembe, Necropolitics.
2 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, 122.
3 Benjamin, Critique of Violence, 243.
4 For a concise summary of this historiography, see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century,
35256.
5 See especially Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 71129.
6 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 53.
7 Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 37.
8 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 260.
9 Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 269.
10 Ibid., 272.
11 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 382.
12 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, 15.
13 Urbinati, The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony, 14041.
14 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 88.
15 Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, 98.
16 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 707.
17 Mignolo, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, 66.
18 Quoted in Logan, Education in Haiti, 414.
19 Bellegarde, Ecrivains Haitiens, 3839.
20 Lespinasse, Histoire des affranchis de Saint-Domingue, 2021.
21 Du Bois, A Chronicle of Race Relations.
22 John Crowe Ransom, Reconstructed but Unregenerate (1930), in [Ransom et al.], I'll Take My Stand, 15.
23 Gramsci, The Southern Question, 33.
24 Ibid., 71.
25 Ibid., 59.
26 Sillanpoa, Pasolini's Gramsci, 133n34.
27 Agamben, State of Exception, 23.
28 See Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, and Le Sueur, Uncivil War.

29 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 48n7.

30 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 62.
31 Quoted in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 300.
32 Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonis (1957), quoted in Ramdani, L'Algrie, un diffrend, 10.
33 I use post-colonial to mean after the colony and postcolonial to mean the rethinking of the colonial.
34 Abbas, L'indpendance confisque.
35 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 299 and 320.
36 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 2.
37 Ibid., 4.
38 Ibid., 3.
39 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 175.
40 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 26.
41 Quoted and translated in Vergs, Creole Skin, Black Mask, 580.
42 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 281.
43 Vergs, Creole Skin, Black Mask, 58990.
44 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 92. See also Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 21.
45 See Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, 7173.
46 See Clemens and Grigg, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, wherein sixteen essays on the seminar let this
passage pass without comment.
47 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 169.
48 See especially Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power, 76103.
49 Ngg wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind.
50 Stora, Algeria 18302000, 52.
51 Barthes, Mythologies, 116.
52 Ibid., 148n25.
53 Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 135.
54 Feldman, Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory, 60.
55 Quoted by Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 107. For more on the films produced from 191154, see Kenz, L'Odyse des Cinmathques,
73.
56 The Cinema in Algeria, 914. Kenz, L'Odyse des Cinmathques, 79.
57 Vautier, Camera citoyenne, 142.
58 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 103. Vautier, Camera citoyenne, 14647.
59 Mohamed Bensalah, Tbessa: Premiers journes cinmatographiques, El Watan, 17 April 2008.
60 The Cinema in Algeria, 13. Vautier, Camera citoyenne, 16566.
61 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 321.
62 See Racconti di bambini d'Algeria. Discussed by Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 128. The originals are said to be with the Red Crescent
in Tunis. There are references to a French translation, but I have not been able to locate it.
63 Racconti di bambini d'Algeria, drawings from 1014, testimony cited from 4755.
64 See Boudjedra, Naissance du cinma algrien, 40.
65 Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, 13839.
66 Macey, Frantz Fanon, 14652.
67 Manuel alphabtique de psychiatrie (1952), quoted in Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 65.
68 Keller, Colonial Madness, 152.
69 As Foucault worked in Tunis, during the 1960s, it is not impossible that he was aware of Fanon's work.
70 Fanon, Rencontre de la socit et de la psychiatrie, 2. See Keller, Colonial Madness, 171.
71 Fanon, Rencontre de la socit et de la psychiatrie, 3.

72 Ibid., 89. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 326.

73 Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power, 77.
74 Cherki, Frantz Fanon, 56.
75 Quoted in Kenz, L'Odyse des Cinmathques, 146.
76 Vautier, Cinema citoyenne, 17988.
77 Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 107.
78 Ibid., 108.
79 Alleg, La Question, 65.
80 Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 293.
81 Hayles, How We Became Post-Human, 89.
82 See Stora, Imaginaires de guerre, 135.
83 Boudjedra, Naissance du cinema algrien, 25.
84 Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 132.
85 Djebar, The Women of Algiers, 151.
86 Ross, May 68 and Its Afterlives, 26.
87 Mignolo, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, 63.
88 Porton, Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility, 5051.
89 Austin, Drawing Trauma.
90 Quoted and translated in Macey, Frantz Fanon, 351.
91 See Gilroy, Shooting Crabs in a Barrel.
92 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 199201.
93 Ibid., 183.
94 Austin, Drawing Trauma, 135.
95 Durand, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, 24.
96 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 36.
97 Wideman, Fanon, 99. Further page references appear in the text.
98 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 14.
99 Keller, Colonial Madness, 22326.
100 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 82.
101 Cited in Kacem, La psychose franaise, 13.
102 Ibid., 15 and 5662.
103 Ibid., 1619.
104 Quoted in Coquery-Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de l'histoire coloniale, 11.
105 See my blog, at http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL, for ongoing thoughts about these developments.

NOTES TO MEXICAN-SPANISH COUNTERPOINT

1 Paul Julian Smith, Pan's Labyrinth.
2 Kim Edwards, Alice's Little Sister: Exploring Pan's Labyrinth.
3 Respectively, quoted in Urbinati, The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony, 142; Gramsci, The Southern
Question, 59.
4 Urbinati, The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony, 145.

SEVEN. GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY

1 Roper, Global Counterinsurgency, 101.

2 Sewall, A Radical Field Manual, xxv.

3 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 14.
4 Michael Hoffman, New Reaper Sensors Offer Bigger Picture, 16 February 2009, available at the Air Force Times website,
http://www.airforcetimes.com/.
5 Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1.
6 Quoted in Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans, Army Times, 2 September 2005, which itself is quoted in Al-Cajun?
Army Times calls NOLA Katrina Victims the Insurgency, posted by Xeni Jardin, on 3 September 2005, at the boingboing website,
http://www.boingboing.net/. The link to the Army Times provided in the boingboing post generates the message The story you are
looking for cannot be found.
7 Brinkley, The Great Deluge, 412.
8 Ginger Thompson and Mark Mazzetti, U.S. Drones Fight Mexican Drug Trade, New York Times, 16 March 2011.
9 Paul Lewis, CCTV in the Sky: Police Plan to Use Military-Style Spy Drones, Guardian, 23 January 2010.
10 Joseph L. Flatley, UK Police Drone Grounded for Flying Without a License, 16 February 2010, http://www.engadget.com/.
11 On global civil war, see Arendt, On Revolution. On the new state of permanent war, see Retort, Afflicted Powers, 78.
12 National Security Council Resolution 68, quoted by Paul Edwards, The Closed World, 12; for a thorough account, see 1012.
13 Pease, Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, and the Gulf War, 563.
14 Derrida, No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives), 23.
15 Vickers, The Revolution in Military Affairs and Military Capabilities, 30.
16 Williams and Lind, Can We Afford a Revolution in Military Affairs?, 2.
17 See U.S. Department of Defense, DoD Releases Fiscal 2010 Budget Proposal, news release no. 30409, 7 May 2009, available
at the website for the U.S. Department of Defense, http://www.defense.gov/.
18 See Pantelogiannis, RMA.
19 Arquilla and Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar, vii.
20 Ibid., 5.
21 Murphy, Are We Rome?, 83.
22 Weizman, Hollow Land, 187200.
23 Chandarasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, 13336.
24 See the report Sociological Skills Used in the Capture of Saddam Hussein, by Victoria Hougham, available at the American
Sociological Association's online journal Footnotes (JulyAugust 2005), http://www.asanet.org/.
25 Danner, Iraq.
26 Gregory, The Colonial Present, 21113.
27 For an annotated selection of military video, see Jennifer Terry, design by Raegan Kelly, Killer Entertainments, available at the
online journal Vectors, http://www.vectorsjournal.org/. For insurgent videos, see the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/, under
Iraq War: Non-English Language Videos, such as the video IED Attack in Samara [sic], which purports to document an attack on
U.S. forces in Samarra, but could easily be staged.
28 Karen J. Hall, Photos for Access: War Pornography and U.S. Practices of Power, paper presented at the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies Annual Conference, Vancouver, 2006. My thanks to Professor Hall for sharing her work.
29 Payne, Waging Communication War.
30 Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.
31 Arquilla, The End of War as We Knew It? This essay marks an effort by the leading theorist of information war to reframe
COIN in his paradigm.
32 McElvey, The Cult of Counterinsurgency, 21.
33 Kilcullen, Countering Global Insurgency.
34 Field Manual 324: Counterinsurgency (Washington: Headquarters Department of the Army, 2006); republished, in 2007, as
The U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
35 Sewall is a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project's Agency Review Working Group responsible for the national security
agencies (see Working Group Members for the National Security Policy Working Group, available at the Change.gov website,
http://change.gov/).

36 Sarah Sewall, A Radical Field Manual, xxv.

37 Gray, Recognizing and Understanding Revolutionary Change in Warfare, 1923.
38 Alexander Galloway, Gaming, 63.
39 Weizman, Hollow Land, 262.
40 Ricks, Fiasco, 152.
41 Lawrence, Secret Despatches from Arabia, 15360.
42 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1.
43 Small Wars Manual, 1.
44 Burton and Nagl, Learning as We Go, 311.
45 Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror.
46 Coll, War by Other Means.
47 Gregory, The Rush to the Intimate. This important essay provides a close reading of counterinsurgency that is similar to mine,
but phrased more in the language of geography and anthropology.
48 Niva, Walling Off Iraq.
49 Hilla Dayan, Regimes of Separation, 285.
50 William J. Broad, Inside the Black Budget, New York Times, 1 April 2008.
51 Brendan O'Neill, Watching You Watching Me, New Statesman, 6 October 2006.
52 Quoted by Eyal Weizman, Thantato-tactics, in Ophir et al., The Power of Inclusive Exclusion, 565.
53 David Kilcullen, Death from Above, Outrage Down Below, New York Times, 16 May 2009.
54 Greg Miller, Increased U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan Killing Few High-Value Militants, Washington Post, 21 February 2011.
55 Derek Gregory, American Military Imaginaries, 68.
56 Ibid., 75.
57 Blog post by Starbuck, The T. X. Hammes PowerPoint Challenge (Essay Contest), 24 July 2009, available at the Small Wars
Journal website, http://smallwarsjournal.com/.
58 T. X. Hammes, Dumb Dumb Bullets, Armed Forces Journal, July 2009, http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/.
59 Elisabeth Bumiller, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Powerpoint, New York Times, 26 April 2010.
60 Riverbend, End of Another Year, blog post, 29 December 2006, Baghdad Burning, http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/.
In July 2007, Riverbend herself left Iraq for Syria.
61 Rising to the Humanitarian Challenge in Iraq, Briefing Paper no. 105, Oxfam/ NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, 2007.
62 O'Hanlon and Campbell, Iraq Index, 3.
63 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, available in the Library section of the CIA website, https://www.cia.gov/.
64 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 16.
65 Mackinlay and al-Baddawy, Rethinking Counterinsurgency, 41.
66 Ibid., 56.
67 Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics.
68 Bataille, quoted in Mbembe, Necropolitics, 38.
69 This is the name of a Media Commons project that I edit. See http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/the-new-everyday/about/.

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INDEX

Numbers in italics indicate illustrations

ABC News, 304
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 272
Abu Ghraib, xiv, 8, 29, 28896, 308
Achiri, Ahmed, 247
aesthetics: anarchy and, 14, 17679, 224; Fanon on, 3, 242; fascism and, 229, 233; visuality and, 34, 1112, 15, 1719, 2123, 7879,
123, 135, 141, 151, 246, 278
Afghanistan, 1921, 279; metrics for, 307
Africa, 5, 10, 18, 68, 109, 111, 122, 146, 240, 24446, 280; communism of, 77; diaspora from, 13, 75, 78, 9495, 110, 16263, 172, 176,
19095, 237, 262; in history, 268. See also Algeria; Sierra Leone
African Americans, 33, 110, 13233, 16671, 183, 237, 26263, 272
Agamben, Giorgio, 24, 217, 220, 239, 312n23
agriculture: colonial, 31, 5354, 7071, 75, 111; counterinsurgency and, 293; sharecropping, 171; sustainable, 29, 188
Ahtila, Eise-Liese, 263, 265; Where is Where? (Ahtila), 26062, 261
al-Aqsa Intifada, 285
Algeria, 172, 263; 1991 civil war in, 241, 260, 26467; revolution in, 12, 1820, 33, 169, 23233, 23942, 25860; state of emergency in,
244
Algrie en flammes (Vautier), 246
Algiers, 23941
Alleg, Henri, 240, 253
Analysis of the Sugar Question (Napoleon III), 165
Ancient Lowly, The (Ward), 22223
antifascism, 27176. See also neorealism
Antigone, 275
Aotearoa New Zealand, 13, 2627, 32, 197, 199212; diocese of, 21315
Aponte, Jos Antonio, 122
Argentina, 18, 241, 302
Arizona, 282
Armed Forces Journal, 304
Arnold, Matthew, 1415, 14546
Arquilla, John, 285
Australia, 51, 113, 137, 158, 208, 210, 212, 215, 219, 257, 315n43; Queensland, 214; Victoria, 224
authority, xivxv, 26, 810, 2326, 2934, 58, 7578, 118, 160, 165, 240, 280, 289, 292, 299; auctor and, 7; fascism and, 274; imperial,
19698, 255; indigenous, 2059; mana and, 213, 21718; Papahurihia and, 198; Paris Commune and, 18387; visuality and, 12354
autonomy, 14, 1112, 2426, 30, 32, 50, 57, 152; colonial, 7076; of the enslaved, 6770; Paris Commune and, 18486
awakenings, 7986
Azoulay, Ariella, 25
Bachir, Yamina, Rachida, 26467, 264, pl. 10

Badiou, Alain, 186

Bagetti, Giuseppe, 12627, 126, 279
Bahrain, 269
Bambara, Toni Cade, 251
Barbados, 53, 5859, 56, 67; Slave Code (1661), 11, 49, 6566
Barthes, Roland, 28; on French colonialism, 169, 24445
Bataille, Georges, 308
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), 33, 46, 23334, 241, 25253, 26465; information pyramid in, 254; women in, 25556
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 252
Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 172
Baudin, Nicolas, 113
BBC News, 281
Beauvois, Xavier, 265
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, 255
Belchite, 272
Belchite/South Bronx (Torres), 272
Beller, Jonathan L., 23
Ben Ali, Zine el Abidine, 268
Benbow, William, 13234
Bendeddouche, Ghaouti, 251
Benjamin, Walter, 32, 39, 78, 146, 154, 172, 233
Bentham, Jeremy, 13637, 230, 270
Bergson, Henri, 228
Berth, Edouard, 227
Biassou, Georges, 99, 104
biopolitics, 236, 307; biometric IDs, 300; as counterinsurgency, 300; Tactical Biopolitics, 308
biopower, 7, 116, 196, 21218, 288
Blackburn, Robin, 100
Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 44, 148, 17072
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 14, 262
Blair, Tony, 278
Blake, William, 12730, 128, 133, 135, 140
Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 162
Bosch, President Juan, 19
Bouchareb, Rachid, 265
Bouchiti, Fatima, 247
Bouchiti, Milouda, 247
Boujedra, Rachid, 255
Boukman, Dutty, 69, 99
Bourdeaux, Gottlieb, 159
Braude, Benjamin, 63
Brecht, Bertolt, 28; The Days of the Commune, 184
Brinkley, Douglas, 281
Britain, 1319, 59, 13031, 145, 151, 205, 21012, 221, 235, 257, 276, 312
Brooks, Daphne, 150

Brutus (David), 193, 194

Buck-Morss, Susan, 229
Buisseret, David, 58
Buuel, Luis, 271
Bush, George H. W., 294
Bush, George W., 218, 286, 29294, 3025
Cach (Haneke), 25760
Caesar, Julius, 21213
Caesarism, 24, 32, 19698, 209, 21213, 22324, 22829, 23442, 276
Cai Guo Qiang, Nothing to See Here, 28283
Cairo, 241, 26970, 309
California, 303
Callwell, Charles E., Small Wars, 297
Campeche y Jordan, Jos, 31, 11722, 119, pl. 4
Capital (Marx), 172, 179
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, The Supper at Emmaus, 19395, 194
Carlyle, Thomas, xiiixiv, 3, 12, 139, 280; abolition of slavery and, 147; Chartism, 13538; on condition of England, 130, 212; on Dante,
141; Engels on, 135; fascism and, 130, 230; The French Revolution, 13, 13133; Haiti and, 13; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 14346;
Occasional Discourse, 14345; On Heroes and Hero Worship, 14043, 199, 209, 21719; Paris Commune and, 183; syndicalism
and, 223; visuality and, 141
carnival, 6061
Casid, Jill, 62
Casta painting, 6364
Catherin, Louis, 204
Censer, Jack, 79
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 307
Centre Audio-Visuel, 251; cin-pops at, 25152
Czanne, Paul, 177, 179, 188; The Negro Scipio, 17475, 175
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2223
chaos, 16, 123, 167, 193; in Carlyle, 13844; counterinsurgency and, 28082, 3045
Charby, Jacques, 251
Charles I, 52, 54, 289
Charles I at the Hunt (Van Dyck), 52, 54
Chartism, 13236, 14344, 226, 276
Chartism (Carlyle), 13538
Chiarelli, Peter, 299, 299
Chile, 18, 241
Christianity, 16, 50, 92, 19699, 2046, 213, 217, 221
Chute en Masse, La (Dupuis), 43
cinema, 39, 147, 238, 27280, 288; in Algeria, 25156, 26467; colonial, 233, 246; digital-era, 260, 271; postcolonial, 25767
cinematic mode of production, 23
classics, 21920; historical materialism and, 221
classification, visuality and, 34, 11, 14, 18, 21, 33, 146, 15154, 197, 216, 26869, 27880, 285
Clausewitz, Karl von, 3, 12, 12425, 236, 27779; Carlyle on, 324n6; On War, 37, 227
closed-circuit television (CCTV), 20, 302

Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq), 286

Code Noir (1685), 11, 49, 66, 317n80
Codrington, Robert Henry, 21314, 21719; The Melanesians, 21516
Cold War, 278, 28283, 307
Comaroff, Jean, 199200
Comaroff, John L., 199200
command, control, communications, intelligence (C3I), 284
Commune, Paris, 31, 183, 18587, 270; slavery and, 184
complex, 3, 5; Freud and, 910; imperial, 1318; military-industrial, 8, 1822; plantation, 1013, 49
condensation, of images, 79, 92
Conley, Tom, 58
Conrad, Joseph, 24, 38, 198
Copernicus, Nicholas, 7
Cotton Office in New Orleans, A (Degas), 18283, 182
counterinsurgency, 1822, 40, 239, 257, 268, 277309; as asymmetric warfare, 278; Full Spectrum Information Operations in, 299300;
global, 1823, 34, 239, 268, 27780, 293, 3023; legitimacy and, 299, 299; in United States, 28082; visuality in, 29597
countervisuality, 45, 2225, 41, 12324, 3089; as feminine, 131; of general strike, 22628; indigenous, 4445, 199205; proletarian,
22129. See also realism; neorealism
Courbet, Gustave, 28; The Winnowers, 193, 194
culture, 1315, 1920, 153, 197, 210, 238, 250, 307; Carlyle and, 14346; counterinsurgency and, 278, 28485, 294301; cultivation and,
5255, 114; popular, 23436, 276; print, 182. See also visual culture
Curtin, Philip, 10
Dance at the Inn (Pissarro), 194, 195
Danner, Mark, 288
Darwin, Charles, 1415, 146, 202, 278
David, Jacques-Louis, 107; Brutus, 193, 194; Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 108
Davis, Angela Y., 251
Davis, Jefferson, 150; Du Bois and, 15253; Wilde and, 15152
Davis, Lennard J., 216
Dayan, Hilla, 301
Dayan, Joan, 109
Dayan, Moshe, 303
Days of the Commune, The (Brecht), 184
De Beauvoir, Simone, 243
Debord, Guy, 23, 285
decapitation, 9799
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 8485, 103; in Saint-Domingue, 7879, 9192; visualized, 8694
Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 25
Degas, Edgar, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 18283, 182
Deleuze, Gilles, 243, 277, 278, 285
del Toro, Guillermo, 27176
democracy, 125, 212, 235, 301; abolition and, 26, 155; Carlyle and, 130, 136, 142; in France, 267; as goal of countervisuality, 45, 12, 29,
34, 104, 157, 167, 308; in Reconstruction, 171
Denmark, 59, 159, 161, 173, 263
Derrida, Jacques, 1, 5, 7, 263, 284, 311n3, 311n7

Des hommes et des dieux (Beauvios), 265

Despentes, Virginie, 267
Dessalines, 12, 70, 107
Dickens, Charles, 96
Diggers, 129, 186
disability, 67, 121, 170, 263. See also Campeche y Jordan, Jos
Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 13637
Djebar, Assia, 239, 256
Drumont, Edouard, 229
Du Bois, W. E. B., 16, 26, 31, 216; Black Reconstruction in America, 44, 148, 17072; on Carlyle, 150, 15254; on Haiti, 237; on the
South, 27, 23437
Dumas, Alexandre, pre, 172, 173
Dumzil, Georges, 220
Dupuis, 105; La Chute en Masse, 43
Durkheim, Emile, 16, 21718
Dussel, Enrique, 6, 46, 236
Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, 36, 36, 5153, 53, pl. 2
Dutrne la Couture, Jacques-Franois, 7175, 72, 74
Duval Carri, Edouard: The Indigo Room, 51; La Voix des Sans Voix, 70
eating: enslaved and, 99101, 11112; politics of, 5, 78, 9496
education, 107, 282; in counterinsurgency, 306, 307; as goal of countervisuality, 4, 12, 29, 1034, 157, 266, 308; in Haiti, 23536; in Puerto
Rico, 188; in Reconstruction, 170
Egypt, 27, 84, 126, 215, 221; 2011 revolution in, 23940, 265, 26668
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 8, 19
Eisenstein, Sergei, 253, 256; Battleship Potemkin, 252
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 139, 15153; Representative Men, xvi
Engels, Friedrich, 135, 225
England, Lynddie, 291
Estates-General, in Saint-Domingue, 75
everyday, the, 2, 309
Execution of Maximilian (Manet), 17981, 180
Eyre, Edward John, 145
Falklands/Malvinas Islands, 286
Fanon, Frantz, 3, 10, 1718, 33, 268; on Algeria, 267; Black Skin, White Masks, 14, 262; Lacan and, 243; lectures in Tunis, 25051;
psychiatry of, 25051; work represented, 25767; Wretched of the Earth, 23947, 26063, 265
Fanon (Wideman), 26263
Fars, Boukhatem, 247
fascism, 5, 1718, 2728, 3233, 22931, 27180
Feldman, Allen, 115, 245
Fick, Carolyn, 69, 317n92
Field Manual FM 324 Counterinsurgency, 29398
Fischer, Sybille, 122
Ford, Charles, 63
Fornelli, Guido, 230

Foucault, Michel, 3, 9, 11, 16, 25, 63, 98, 125, 219, 282, 314n5, 338n69; Discipline and Punish, 13637; on history, 13738; The Order of
Things, 4851, 139; Society Must Be Defended, 277
Foullon, Joseph, 9697
1492, shocks of, 7
Fowler, Warde, 219
Fox News, 289
France, 18, 100101, 125, 131, 137, 170, 17273, 180, 271; Algeria and, 23968; Oller and, 18890; Paris Commune and, 18484;
Pissarro and, 15658; revolution of 1789, 10, 13, 30, 7594, 9699, 1026, 134, 29094; revolution of 1848, 158. See also Carlyle,
Thomas
France Juive, La (Drumont), 229
Franco, Francisco, 28, 33, 232, 27175
Frankenstein, 273
French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 13, 13133
Freud, Sigmund, 9, 28, 82, 9799, 217, 228, 259; Totem and Taboo, 275
Front de Libration Nationale (FLN), 23941; Barthes and, 245
Froude, James Anthony, xvi, 26, 132, 156, 201, 213; History of England, 230; Nemesis of Faith, 209; Oceana, 21012
Galton, Francis, 216
Gance, Abel, 115
garde-corps, 68
Gilliam, Terry, 272
Girodet, Anne-Louis, 9697, 97
Godard, Jean-Luc: Le Petit Soldat, 255, 259; in Wideman's Fanon, 262
Gordon, Charles George, 212
Gouges, Olympe de, 25, 85
Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 2728, 33, 267, 275; Carlyle and, 23438; fascism and, 23440; modern Prince and, 276; subaltern and, 23536
Greenberg, Kenneth S., 148
Gregory, Derek, 303, 341n47
Grve Gnrale, La (newspaper), 226
Grey, Sir George, 21112
Grierson, Herbert, 230
Guantnamo Bay (Cuba), 29, 34, 287, 296
Guattari, Flix, 243, 285
Guillemet, Antoine, 17678
Hadjadj, Brahim (Ali la Pointe), 25255
Haiti, 1013, 67, 11113, 15859, 276; Du Bois and, 23637; earthquake in, 29; Manet and, 180; Pissarro and, 162, 172; revolution in, 10,
31, 42, 6162, 65, 1034, 113; Vodou in, 6870, 7778. See also Saint-Domingue
Halberstam, Judith, 150
Hamlet, 5, 273
Hammond, John, 11, 56
Haneke, Michael, 25760
Hansen, Peter, 16061
Hardt, Michael, 24
Harley, J. H., 223
Harman, Sabrina, 291

Haussmann, Baron, 157, 161, 16465, 184, 187

Hayles, N. Katherine, 254
Haymarket Affair, 226
Hegel, Georg, 49, 152, 268
Helsinki, 261, 263
Hermitage at Pontoise (Pissarro), 17879, pl. 7
hero: Carlyle and, 12326, 14043, 21719, 280; counterhero, 14654; as Duce, 22931; revolutionary, 4243, 10410
Herodotus, 7
Hiroshima, 283
history, xivxvi, 26, 913, 1721, 184, 220, 284, 299; Africa and, 268; Blake and, 130; British Communist Party Group of, 130; Carlyle
and, 30, 96, 13043; Chakrabarty and, 2223; colonized and, 24142; Du Bois and, 23445; Du Tertre and, 5159; Froude and, 210;
imperial visuality and, 19699, 21519; James and, 211; Napoleon, Toussaint, and, 10912; in nineteenth century, 137; Paris
Commune and, 18487; Pinel and, 96; radical of Antiquity, 33, 22124; shift around 1660 in, 63; Spanish Academy of, 121; stadial,
113; subaltern, 78; Thierry and, 13738; visuality and, 12325, 223, 277
History of England (Froude), 230
Hitler, Adolf, 231; Carlyle and, 130, 230
Homer, Winslow, 17172
Honor, Russel (Lieutenant General), 281
hooks, bell, 251
Hors la loi (Bouchareb), 265
Hughes, Langston, 272
Hughes, Patrick, 5253, 65
Hunt, Lynn, 79
Hurt Locker, The (Bigelow), 2122
Hussein, Saddam, 28790; execution of, 28890, 289; statue of, destroyed, 287
Inconvenient Truth, An (Guggenheim), 47
India: Mutiny, 13, 31, 144, 208; women in, 150
indigo, 5153
Indigo Room, The (Duval Carri), 51
information, 23, 12, 17, 19, 3334, 65; command, control, communications, intelligence (C3I), 284; Hero and, 140; visuality and, 279;
visualized information war, 294303, 308, 341n31; war, 240, 25355, 28488
insurgency, 277, 283
intensification: Foucault and, 9; visuality and, 912, 1721, 33, 35, 76, 98, 15557, 197, 23233, 268, 282
Iraq, xiv, 8, 19, 26, 33, 239; metrics for, 307; war in, 27982, 285307
Iraqi Media Network, 28788
Ireland, 2089; compared to Jamaica, 144; compared to South, 151; famine in, 158; Northern, 245
Islam, 7, 67, 92, 217, 233, 241, 256, 26566, 304; global, 307; Sunni, 305
Israel, 21, 285, 296, 3013
Jacob, Christian, 58
Jacotot, Joseph, 104
J'ai huit ans (Maurice Audin Committee), 24650, 248, 260
Jamaica, 8, 13, 33, 5562, 71, 100101, 13334, 183, 276; Morant Bay uprising in, 14346, 208
James, C. L. R., 56, 81, 99, 112, 211, 223
Jews, 7, 27, 224; in Caribbean, 51, 54, 67, 158, 162; Carlyle and, 140, 201; Maori self-fashioning as, 32, 192, 197, 200205; Nazis and,

231; Sartre and, 243

Jospin, Lionel, 207
Joyce, James, xiii
Jubilee, 31; Jewish origins of, 133
Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj, 267
Kant, Immanuel, 125
Katrina (hurricane), 291, 309; counterinsurgency response to, 28081
kawanatanga, 2068
Keesing, Roger, 218
Keller, Robert, 265
Kilcullen, David, 303
Kipling, Rudyard, 15
Kongo, 68, 94, 1079, 12021, 189
Kororareka, 203, 203
Lacan, Jacques, 910, 17, 243, 251
Lake, Marilyn, 216
Lantern, 84, 85
La Roche, Mme, 79, 110
Las Meninas (Velazquez), 49, 51
Latter-Day Pamphlets (Carlyle), 14346
law, 78, 10, 14, 275, 278, 282; Brown v. Board of Education, 4; colonial, 2089, 240, 244; force of, 49, 57, 60, 6567, 70, 7576,
21517; of the gaze, 276; Moret, 181; Roman, 165, 167, 220; slavery and, 11, 51, 63; Tablets of, 88, 9192, 12930, 196; Wi Parata
v. Bishop of Wellington, 2089
Lawes, William, 203
Lawrence, T. E., 33, 298
Le Barbier, Jean-Jacques-Franois, 8891
Le Bon, Gustave, 22829, 319n21
Lee, Spike, 281
Lenin, V. I., 19, 112, 226
Le Peletier, Michel, 1034
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 267
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 16, 217, 220
Libya, 26869
Linnaeus, Carl, 62
Livy, 7
Locke, Susan, 126
London, 14, 51, 13233, 14041, 199, 2035, 211, 215, 302; Blake on, 127
Longoni, Emilio, May 1, 45, 22526
Louis XVI, 87, 289
Louverture, Toussaint, 12, 62, 99, 104; Carlyle and, 211; crisis of 1801 and, 11013; print of, 42, 10710, 122
Luxemburg, Rosa, 27; on general strike, 22426
Makandal, Brigitte, 68

Makandal, Franois, 11, 30, 57, 61, 120, 317n87; portrait of, 69; revolt led by, 6770. See also Maroons
Maldonando Torres, Nelson, 6
mana, 1617, 32, 19697, 2068, 21321, 229
Manet, Edouard, 31; Execution of Maximilian, 17981, 180; slavery and, 17980
Maori, 27, 32, 197, 199209
mapping, 3, 1011, 37, 5762, 106, 126, 145, 296
Marett, Robert R., 219
Marine Corps Gazette, 285
Maroons, 11, 61, 7172, 100, 134
Martin, Jean (Colonel Mathieu), 25355, 254
Marx, Karl, 22, 225, 230, 245, 282; Capital, 172, 179; on Paris Commune, 184; phantasmagoria and, 161, 165
Massu, Jacques, 240
Mat, Georges, 258
Mauss, Marcel, 218
Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico), 17980, 180
May Day, campaigns for, 22425, 228
May 1 (Longoni), 45, 22526
May 1968, 257
Mbembe, Achille, 56, 51, 172, 242, 278
McChrystal, Stanley, 305
McClellan, James, 70
McHugh, Paul, 206
McPherson, Tara, 313n54
Melanesians, The (Codrington), 21516
Melbye, Fritz, 162
Memmi, Albert, 241
Mexico, 21, 64, 158, 17980, 257, 271, 28085, 301
Mignolo, Walter, 46, 258
migrants, 52, 261, 282
Miller, Christopher L., 81
missionaries: in Aotearoa New Zealand, 198206; as heroes, 199, 217; in Melanesia, 21317; World Missionary Conference (1910), 217
Mitchell, W. J. T., xiv, xv, xviii, 15, 49, 129, 143, 286
mobility, the, 29, 136, 269, 3089
Mohammed, Mili, 247
Mose, General, 11113, 115
Mokdad, Abd el Hamid, 246
monarchy, symbolism of, 8284
Montaigne, Michel de, 7
Moore, Henry P., 16770
Moreno Fraginals, Manuel, 53, 318n106
Morocco, 247, 301
Morricone, Ennio, 256
Morris, Errol, Standard Operating Procedure, 29192
Mota Lava, 214
Mubarak, Hosni, 240, 270

Museum of Labor, 224

Mussolini, Benito, 228, 230, 238
Nagl, John, 293
Napoleon I, 37, 115, 12627, 129, 284, 294; Carlyle and, 1213, 31, 104, 124, 141; painted by David, 1078; Toussaint and, 1079
Napoleon III, 157, 164; Analysis of the Sugar Question, 165; Maximilian and, 179; Paris Commune and, 18384
Napoleon Crossing the Alps (David), 108
National Holiday, 31, 124, 13234, 185, 205, 226
Native Land Act (1862), 208
natural history, 811, 30, 49, 52, 59, 6267, 71, 139, 145
Nazism, 231
necropolitics, 34, 197, 233, 27879, 299300, 3078
Negri, Antonio, 24, 25
Negro Scipio, The (Czanne), 17475, 175
Nemesis of Faith (Froude), 209
neorealism, antifascist, 28, 46, 23270
neovisuality, 257, 278
Nevada, 303
New Orleans, 281, 309
New York Times, 292
New Zealand. See Aotearoa New Zealand
Nicquet, Claude, 88, 89
North Carolina, 8
Nothing to See Here (Cai), 28283
Nuremberg, trials at, 290
Obama, Barack H., 6, 34, 112, 305, 308
Obama Girl, 291
O'Brien, James (pseud. Bronterre), 222
Occasional Discourse (Carlyle), 14345
Oceana (Froude), 21012
Oedipus complex, 910, 17, 24344
Og, Vincent, 8586, 184
Oller, Francisco, y Cestero, 17377; slavery and, 18182; syncretism in, 18990; El Velorio, 18895, 191, 192, pl. 8
On Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle), 14043, 199, 209, 21719
On War (Clausewitz), 37, 227
Order of Things, The (Foucault), 4851, 139
orientalism, 87, 92
Orwell, George, 285
O Sullivan, Timothy, Untitled, 44
overseer, 2, 10, 35, 5056, 72, 99, 118, 16061, 181
oversight, 1011, 3031, 3536, 4877, 99, 109, 113, 11718, 120, 137, 315n34
Oxfam, 307
Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, 82, 106, 139

Painter, Nell Irvine, 148

Pakeha, 199206
Pakistan, 21, 279, 303
Palestine, 296, 3013
panopticon, 3, 13637, 150, 161, 17277, 224, 290; post-, 1820, 40, 27880, 294, 296
Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro), 33, 27176, 272, 273, pl. 11
Papahurihia, 27, 44, 200205, 201
Papon, Maurice, 258
Paris, xviii, 32, 60, 75, 84, 140, 158, 163, 181, 224, 241, 262; in Cach, 25860; in French Revolution, 9096, 1027, 113;
Haussmannization in, 15557, 161, 164, 179. See also Commune, Paris
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 28, 238
patriarchy, 275
Patriquin, Travis, 304
Patteson, J. C., 21314
Peale, Charles Wilson, 110
Pease, Donald, 283
Pelloutier, Fernand, 224
Pentagon, 257
people, the: in French Revolution, 86; in North African revolutions, 269
Pron, Franois, 11315
perspective, 3, 39, 59, 86; military use of, 12426
Ption, Alexandre, 70, 104, 236
Petit Soldat, Le (Godard), 255, 259
Petraeus, David, 19, 293, 305
Peuple en marche (Vautier), 252
phantasmagoria, 13940, 147, 165
photography, 137, 14243, 29091; aerial, 39; of Paris Commune, 18687; of Sojourner Truth, 148; in U.S. civil war, 16669
Picasso, Pablo, 15, 26
Pinel, Philippe de, 9799, 250
Pirelli, Giovanni, 247
Pissarro, Camille, 31, 188, 190; Dance at the Inn, 194, 195; in France, 17274; Hermitage at Pontoise, 17879, pl. 7; in St. Thomas,
15764; Two Women Chatting, 16364
Pitcairn Island, 21314
Pittsburgh, 26263
plantation, xv; complex, 1013
Plato, 4, 26, 106, 136, 141, 167, 251
Plebs League, 223
Plissart, Marie-Franoise, 12
Polack, Joel, 44, 205
police, 183, 248, 25860, 276, 28283; Algerian revolution and, 24142, 263; in Britain, 302; colonial, 810, 75, 211; in Egypt, 26970;
fascism and, 17, 23338; in Iraq, 290; Paris Commune and, 186; plantation and, 16164, 170, 179; in Rancire, 1; in Saint-Domingue,
65, 75, 111; in Tunisia, 26869
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 33, 46, 234, 241, 25256, 266
pornography, Iraq war and, 29091
Porot, Albert, 250
Powell, Colin, 294

PowerPoint, 3045, 304, 306

Prendergast, Sir James, 2089
primitive, 27, 91, 250, 275; civilized and, 10, 1418, 24, 79, 19697, 21321; communism, 200, 22829
proletariat, derived from proles, 221
Proudhon, Pierre-Paul, 227
psychiatry, 265; colonial, 250. See also Fanon, Frantz
Puerto Rico, 11722, 160, 18894
Pynchon, Thomas, 280
Quetelet, Adolphe, 216
Rachedi, Ahmed, 251
Rachida (Bachir), 26467, 264, pl. 10
Rancire, Jacques, 45, 7, 15, 25, 77, 132, 146, 186, 282, 308
Ranke, Leopold von, 138
Raynal, Abb, 6162
realism, 5, 8, 25, 135, 142, 147, 190, 26162; abolition, 26, 3233, 44, 58, 90, 15587, 189, 195; nuclear, 284; in Pan's Labyrinth, 275; as
revolutionary, 35, 9697, 122. See also neorealism
Red Detachment of Women, The (Xie), 252
Reed, Brian J., 288
Reflections on Violence (Sorel), 22728
Regourd, Franois, 70
Rendition (Hood), 253
Representative Men (Emerson), xvi
Revolution: American, 287; in Egypt and Tunisia, 23940, 265, 26869; in Military Affairs, 33, 277, 28284. See also Algeria; France;
Haiti
Reynolds, Henry, 216
rights, 1, 2430, 6567, 7792, 1023, 106, 115, 130, 13234, 2069, 240, 242, 263, 3012; general strike and, 22627; property, 19899
Rights of Man (Paine), 82, 106, 139
right to look, 16, 2526, 29, 34, 114, 129, 157, 232, 241, 249, 261; abolition and, 16572, 215; in Algeria, 232, 241; Cach and, 260;
education and, 157, 266; general strike as, 221, 228; negated by fascism, 231; Pan's Labyrinth and, 276; in Saint-Domingue, 69;
Sojourner Truth and, 14850; sustainability and, 78, 157
Rimbaud, Arthur, 183, 259
Riverbend (pseud.), 305
Rivet, 260
Robespierre, Maximilien, 286
Rolling Stone (magazine), 305
Ronfeldt, David, 285
Roper, Daniel S., 27778
Rose, H. J., 219
Ross, Kristin, 186, 257, 312n13
Ross, Ruth, 206
Royal Anthropological Society, 215
Rumsfeld, Donald, 286, 29394
Saadi, Yacef, 252; Battle of Algiers and, 25255

Sadr, Moqtada al-, 290

Said, Edward, 13
St. Croix, 5962, 15762
Saint-Domingue, 11, 3031, 42, 50, 5557, 6569, 84, 9496, 99102, 12122, 127, 134, 180, 276; in Carlyle, 13; crisis in revolution,
11113; Pissarro and, 162, 172; planters autonomy movement in, 7076; revolution in, 7779, 8586, 10310, 144, 156. See also
Haiti; Makandal, Franois
St. Mery, Moreau de, 70
St. Thomas, 15764
Saint-Venant, Barr de, 71
Sala-Molins, Louis, 42
Salmane, Halla, 246
Samuel, Raphael, 221
sans-culottes, 43; Carlyle and, 13, 131, 142; former slaves as, 105; right to existence and, 7879, 95
Sarawia, George, 214
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 26768
Sarony, Napoleon, 141
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 243
Sawkins, James Gay, 158, 164, pl. 6
School of the Americas, 257
Scott, David C., 49, 11213
Scythians, slavery and, 78
Seeley, J. R., 14
Selwyn, George Augustus, 213
sensible, 25; division of, 3, 23, 47, 63, 94, 186, 246, 276, 281; imperial, 217, 24344; Pissarro and, 178; in revolution, 11016, 269
separation, 34, 1018, 21, 26, 28, 33, 63, 66, 93, 164, 197; counterinsurgency and, 27880; decolonization and, 24246, 268; fascism and,
229; necropolitical regimes of, 298302, 308; as segregation, 14546, 15154, 237, 280
Stif, 18, 247, 265
Sewall, Sarah, 293
Shafiq, Ahmed, 270
Shaw, Rosalind, 9495
Sherman, William Tecumseh, 170
Sierra Leone, 9495
slavery, 23, 68, 4876
Sloane, Hans, 5253, 64
Small Wars (Callwell), 297
Small Wars Journal, 304
Small Wars Manual, 29899
Smith, Terry, 315n43
Smithyman, Kendrick, 198, 202
Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), 277
Solinas, Franco, 256
Sorel, Georges, 27; on general strike, 45, 22728; Reflections on Violence, 22728
South, 27, 217; antifascism and, 23337; in Italy, 23738; in U.S., 237
sovereignty, 2, 8, 10, 12, 25, 31, 5052, 83, 9596, 118, 12326, 242, 312n23; in Aotearoa New Zealand, 197, 203, 2059; in
counterinsurgency, 292, 296, 300; in Iraq, 289; right to kill and, 278
Soviet Union, 284, 287

Spain, 7, 33, 64, 173, 189, 232, 257; borders of, 280, 301; civil war in, 27276
Spartacus, 31, 198, 22123
Speer, Albert, 230
Spinoza, Baruch, 2425
Spirit of the Beehive (Erice), 273
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 150
Standard Operating Procedure (Morris), 29192
Stewart, John, 53, 55
Strachey, Lytton, 13
strike, 18, 27, 32, 41, 4445, 13334, 22128, 233; adopted by Confderation Gnrale de Travail, 226; in Algiers, 240; against
colonization, 205; Paris Commune as, 185; against reality, 181; against slavery, 15960, 166, 181. See also Luxemburg, Rosa; Sorel,
Georges
Sturken, Marita, 311n4
subaltern, xv, 34, 121, 123, 188, 243; in Gramsci, 23536; hero, 110; in military, 12, 235; in Saint-Domingue, 31, 6061, 94, 103, 11012;
visuality and, 235, 266, 275
sugar, 60, 7174, 161, 165; in the French Revolution, 1023
Supper at Emmaus, The (Caravaggio), 19395, 194
surveying, 59
Suskind, Ron, 292
Tactical Biopolitics (Costa and Philips), 308
Tadman, Michael, 56
Tahrir Square, 26970, 309
Taylor, Diana, 113
Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, 2023
Terry, Jennifer, 340n27
Te Ua Haumene, 202
Thierry, Augustin, 13739
Thiong'o, Ngg wa, 244
Third Estate, 79, 8386, 1056, 138, 185
Thomas, Greg, 244
Thomas, John Jacob, 211
Times Square, 280
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 125
Torres, Francesc, Belchite/South Bronx, 272
Tortellier, Joseph, 224
torture, 29, 70, 240, 24649, 25359, 267, 274, 288, 294, 296, 302
Tosquelles, Franois, 250
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 275
Trouillot, Michel-Rolphe, 12
Truth, Sojourner, 31, 14750, 149
Tschumi, Bernard, 285
Tunisia, 24647, 25051; 2011 revolution in, 23940, 265, 26869
Two Women Chatting (Pissarro), 16364
Tylor, Edward, 15, 146, 223, 298
Tyredemme, 11415

UNICEF, 260
United Kingdom, 157; surveillance in, 3012
United States, xvi, 4, 6, 12, 18, 2021, 2634, 212, 222, 254, 288; abolition of slavery in, 15557, 171, 18283, 185; Army, 27778; borders
of, 280; civil war in, 16572; COINTELPRO program of, 19; counterinsurgency in, 280, 293; feminists in, 251; Haiti and, 111;
National Security Council of, 283; 9/11 attacks, 257, 283; nuclear policy of, 283; Puerto Rico and, 195; race in, 15157;
Reconstruction in, 17072; segregation in, 242; South of, 237; surveillance budget of, 301; Virgin Islands of, 161
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, 40, 40, 279, 282, 303; Gorgon Stare, 27980
Van Diemen's Land, 11314, 210
Van Dyck, Anthony, Charles I at the Hunt, 52, 54
Van Gogh, Vincent, 247; Carlyle and, 151
Vattel, Emmerich de, 74
Vautier, Ren: Algrie en flammes, 246; Fanon and, 24647; J'ai huit ans, 24650, 248, 260; Peuple en marche, 252
Velazquez, Diego, Las Meninas, 49, 51
Velorio, El (Oller), 18895, 191, 192, pl. 8
video, 24, 28, 33, 239, 25863, 280, 29091; of Saddam's execution, 28889
videogame, 295303, 340n27; Full Spectrum Warrior, 297
violence, 233; in Fanon, 242. See also torture
visual culture, 14, 26, 48, 107, 284, 291, 311n6
visuality, xiiixvi, 134, 116, 228, 276; as battle, 37, 12426, 23536, 277; Carlyle and, 12354; complexes of, 310, 35; counterinsurgent,
29498; counterrevolutionary, 112; crisis of, 268, 277310; fascist, 23134; imperial, 38, 76, 114, 196231, 242; Medusa effect of,
142, 211, 279; military-industrial, 39; plantation complex of, 4867, 76, 12728; statistics and, 216; violence and, 29192; visuality 1
and visuality 2, 2224, 14647. See also countervisuality; neovisuality; panopticon: postVodou, 61, 6869, 109, 12122
Voix des Sans Voix, La (Duval Carri), 70
Wagenvoort, Hendrik, 217
Waitangi, Treaty of, 27, 119, 2058, 207
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 255
Walcott, Derek, 162
Walker, Ranganui, 206
war, xiv, 38, 1013, 17, 2022, 2632, 34, 3739, 45, 15960, 218; Cold War, 1819, 33, 263, 27778, 28283; digitally mediated, 277;
First World, 9, 197, 217, 226, 229, 235; Full Spectrum Information Operations, 299; global, on terror, 286; in Gramsci, 23536; New
Zealand, 199203, 208; paradoxes of visualized, 3029; Second World, 219, 232; Seven Years', 68, 76; Sorel on, 22728; U.S. Civil
War, 16571, 18084; visuality as, 12327. See also Algeria; information; Iraq
Ward, C. Osbourne, 222; The Ancient Lowly, 22223
Wedderburn, Robert, 13334
Weiner, Norbert, 255
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Lee), 281, 281
Where is Where? (Ahtila), 26062, 261
Wideman, John Edgar, 33, 26263, 265; Fanon (Wideman), 26263
Wilde, Oscar, 15153
Williams, John, 141, 199
Williams, Moses, 110
Wilson, Kathleen, 5051, 314n10, 312n28, 316n57, 322n105, 326n78, 327n105
Winnowers, The (Courbet), 193, 194
Winstanley, Gerrard, 12930, 133

Worthy Park, 5859

Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 23947, 26063, 265
Xie Jin, The Red Detachment of Women, 252
Yate, William, 200, 2045
Yemen, 268, 279, 303
Yoo, John, 2930
YouTube, 291
Zennati, Chrif, 246
iek, Slavoj, 9, 140
Zola, Emile, 17677, 179, 226, 249

Nicholas Mirzoeff is professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He is the author of An Introduction to
Visual Culture (1999; second edition, 2009); Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005); Bodyscape: Art,
Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (1995); Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France (1995), and the
editor of The Visual Culture Reader (1998; third edition, 2012); Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews
(2000). He is a contributing editor of Media Commons, and a member of the Social Text collective.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 1962
The right to look : a counterhistory of visuality / Nicholas Mirzoeff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-4895-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-4918-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mass media and world politics. 2. Communication and culture
Political aspects. 3. Mass mediaPolitical aspects. 4. Visual
communicationPolitical aspects. I. Title.
P96.W62M57 2011
302.2'22dc23 2011027508