Category Archives: dissertating

On the imagery of “racist bodily imaginary”

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Disclaimer: this blog post is based on my rather sloppy notes from a talk we attended, some direct quotes, some my own mid-talk ramblings in my head. I take full responsibility for any misrepresentations of the speaker’s intent / content, and must point out that to truly understand him, that you read his work. 

We attended a talk last night, “Apartheid’s corps morcele” by Derek Hook, from Birbek. It was intriguing and stimulating in all the right ways, and left me thinking about a possible paper for publication. At root of his talk was the question of the “racist bodily imaginary.” Specifically he was speaking last night about images of black bodies in states of destruction and mangling in South Africa (though he did also touch on, for instance, the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of Kevin Carter). And while this kind of imagery is not limited to apartheid culture, he points out that the same does not hold for white bodies – the desecration of black bodies does not, he asserts, invoke the same outrage by whites that we see, for instance, in the ban on images of even the caskets of dead U.S. soldiers (see Judith Butler for an excellent discussion of this). There is a kind of “global vulnerability of the black body.” But even after apartheid, there is, what he calls “an uncanny persistence” of this particular form of visualizing atrocities.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon asserts that the exaggerations are an expertise of reading white fantasies – striking just under white fantasy that may be surprising if it comes too close to him.  For Fanon, many caricatures contain admirable qualities that are morphed into vice. Hook has been working with the Apartheid Archive Project, and brought up a quote from an interview with a white male about his experiences with racism. Within his own understanding of these moments – the interviewee invokes the imaginary of the hardy, sturdy black male – impervious to damage, enduring, less psychologically damaged by violence, yielding to “an inability to identify with a black suffering body.” So it is that the black body, then is both strong and broken, simultaneously – it is both a symbol of strength in its own right and of white power. Thus, the image of what he calls the “broken” or “destroyed black body”  is both of physical perfection and destruction.

There is in these images, then, a kind of confluence (as i understood Hook to explain) of hyper-sexuality / excess corporality, where fantasy see-saws between castration and a scene which protects against such notions. There is a dehumanization of the body, no respect for the dead. Yet, in referencing a two-page spread in Rapport on a suicide bomber of a limpet mine in South Africa [my notes read: Kamakazi Bom (Selfmoord Terro's)], he points to this commemorative treatment (what other news gets a two page spread with large pictures? royal weddings, jubilees, etc. – and now this, with images of a “black body in pieces”) which functions not to inform but to underline an event, a statement of history – the dehumanization acts to affirm it and to endow it with permanence and importance.

In his concluding remarks, Hook asks, “Did the outrage reflect the anger that the image was so gruesome, or that it took the images too far?” Did it render too clearly the body in pain? Fantasy works best when it is just under-stated and not too obvious. Pointing to Judith Butler’s use of Susan Sontag’s “let the atrocious images haunt us”, he asks further, how do we adapt? To simply be haunted by these images is not enough, as this implies a resolution where in fact there is (or ought to be?) a historical persistence of the haunting.

I was left with two rather nagging thoughts:

1. In all of this, there is an absence of an explicitly stated audience. There is a presumed whiteness to the audience, i think one that perhaps in some ways then re-inscribes the notion of powerlessness of blacks, particularly in South Africa. This is not a critique of his work, so much as a question, a sort of wonderment about how these thoughts travel beyond the confines of an intellectual pursuit of the psychoanalysis of race and racism. To his credit, Hook was remarkably self reflexive in his own draw to this subject and took responsibility for the fact that it may well be just a re-inscription of a white fascination with “broken black bodies” – a self-responsibilization that i wholly appreciated, but which did not, in the end, help to clarify the question of the audience of the photos. I bring this up because:

2. The first uprisings against the U.S. Occupation in Haiti were caco uprisings, peasant uprisings, led by a rather charismatic elite, Charlemagne Peralte. Whether he retired from the military before the Occupation, chose to retire up on the Occupation, or was forced by the U.S. forces is still a bit up for debate (must get back into the Archives for a closer inspection of the communiques). At that time, the US had sent in Southern military personnel, thinking they, better than anyone, would know “how to handle the negro Haitians” (direct quote from a 1965 declassified report on constabulary operations) – a major misstep and misunderstanding that has had reverberating effects on the USM’s understanding of a responsibility to understand a culture before “winning hearts and minds.” Regardless… my point is that the original uprising was mostly peasant, the elite still holding out hope that the US administrators would understand the long history of race and class politics in Haiti. Peralte was assassinated on October 31, 1919. On November 1, a photo of his body propped up on a door, the Haitian flag draped around his head, was circulated in the hopes of disheartening the anti-Occupation movement.

Perhaps it was because of the practice of circulating pictures of lynchings in the US south that someone got this idea? I can’t know… but the outcome was entirely different than expected. Rather than a petering out of the uprising, there was a marked shift created by the outrage of this photo (by some accounts, because of his “crucifix-like pose, creating a kind of martyr of him in his Jesus-likeness – but i’d be curious to find the original source of this – was this just a white imaginary of the turn? or is this a truly Haitian reading of the image?) – a shift toward a deeply intellectualized crisis of national identity. It was no longer a peasant uprising – the barbarity of the treatment of a Haitian instigated a new understanding of the Haitian self which was reflected in the numerous political newspapers, the literature, and speeches that emerged in the aftermath, which eventually led to the strikes that ballooned into a general strike in 1930, which prompted the Hoover Commission and the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

There is, then, an intensely important question of not only the white gaze on images of black death, but also their effects on the Black Consciousness – a question that is intimately tied to place (why, hello, Geography!). All deaths are not read all the time and in all places and by all people in the same way.

The talk last night was timely. I have been writing about Peralte this past week, and the supposed a-politicalness of Haitians at the time of the Occupation. I found the original photograph in the National Archives this summer and took a scan of it, wondering if i would ever use it. I have struggled with this question because, frankly, i’m not sure showing the picture is appropriate. It is peppered all over the web, it is printed in almost every book about Haiti, but in truth – what is the purpose of showing the picture? I don’t know that it serves anything more than a morbid fascination with death and particularly the death of a black man. I had already decided to not use the picture, either in a blog post or in my final dissertation, but the talk last night helped to solidify this choice. But what i still struggle with is my privilege in being able to make that choice. And so the question comes around again – who is my audience and what is it that i hope to illicit in them?

There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly

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I‘m skipping to my dissertation conclusion today because i’m reading Birth of Biopolitics - Foucault always makes me want to write – which is why i don’t read him before bed.

Shamelessly stolen from: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/brain/ideas

Shamelessly stolen from: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/brain/ideas

 

Regardless…

In my quest to reframe the “number of precise ways of governing with their correlative institutions” (F, 5) for the 21st century and what i’m sussing out as a new mode of capitalist production (i will, by golly, get Marx and Foucault into bed together, once and for all), i landed at the Department of Homeland Security.

 

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DHS came into existence just 11 days after September 11, 2001 attacks on NYC and the Pentagon. It came into being as a stand-alone in November 2002 (Public Law 107-296). This genealogy, is important. That was 13 months until it was an official department. The mandate, in 2001 and today, of DHS is to “secure the nation from the many threats we face.” Those threats, today, are managed through 22 additional departments an agencies that come under DHS. They span across several functions of government – from military (the U.S. Coast Guard no longer comes under DoD, but under DHS), Treasury, Justice, Transportation, Agriculture, FEMA, Energy, FBI, and the Secret Service. Each of the individual organizations have their own sets of directives. For instance, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center ”has oversight and program management responsibilities at the International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEA) in Gaborone, Botswana, and Bangkok, Thailand. The FLETC also supports training at other ILEAs in Hungary and El Salvador.”

 

Interestingly, the Department of Health and Human Services was dragged into DHS, then pushed back out in 2004. However, there is still an Office of Health Affairs, which “serves as the Department of Homeland Security’s principal authority for all medical and health issues.” I’d be curious to learn the reasonings… I landed on this page while writing about the National Strategy for Pandemic Flu.

In 2005, Homeland Security released the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza – a guide and strategy for preparedness against a possible avian flu (or other variation, though the focus is largely on a strategy against avian flu) linking “a farmyard overseas to a living room in America” (Homeland Security Council (U.S.) 2005, 3). Six months later, the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza – Implementation Plan was released. The 227 pages document attempts to tackle the entire range of necessary responses to the potentiality of an influenza pandemic from medical to geopolitical, from economic to zoonotic. Like all good outbreak stories, the Plans’s outbreak narrative begins innocuously enough with tales of illness and deaths in exotic places, transmitting between exotic animals and their exotic caretakers. There is then the slow encroachment on Europe, and finally, through the imagined future possibilities, “[u]ncertainty will drive many of the outcomes we fear, including panic among the public, unpredictable, and unilateral actions by governments, instability in markets, and potentially devastating impacts on the economy” (Homeland  Security Council (U.S.) 2006, 19–20). This potential for total breakdown of society leads, then, to an obvious outcome:

While the initial events leading to a deliberate or natural outbreak of infectious disease are dramatically different, the actions necessary to prepare, provide early warning, and respond are nearly identical. We should make this principle explicit in our planning for outbreaks and ensure, to the extent possible, that the mechanisms that we put in place are mutually supportive. This has clear implications for the manner in which the Federal Government directs its biodefense resources, but it similarly places responsibility upon the public health community to ensure that the infrastructure established at the State, local, and tribal levels to support traditional public health priorities is configured to meet our biodefense requirements (2006, 20–21).

First among the “Necessary Enablers of Pandemic Preparedness” is the need to “view pandemic preparedness as a national security issue” (Homeland  Security Council (U.S.) 2006, 18).

In the event of a pandemic, the transmissibility of influenza viruses, the universal susceptibility of the world’s population to viruses that have not previously circulated, and the mobility of human populations mean that every corner of the globe and every element of society are likely to be touched. This has ramifications not only for the health and well being of populations, but for the national and economic security of nations, and the functioning of society (Homeland  Security Council (U.S.) 2006, 18)

Chief among the responses, throughout the Strategy plan are various ways in which the pandemic will be contained via quarantine and travel restrictions.

This plan followed closely on the heels of a much larger policy turn. The 2005 DOD Directive 3000.05,[1] Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations[2] marked a major strategic shift in U.S. military policy in that stability operations[3] were given equal importance to combat operations, stating “a core U.S. military mission that the Department of Defense shall be prepared to conduct with proficiency equivalent to combat operations.”

And here is where we begin to tie these threads together – the policing function and the military-diplomatic function of the state, or at least its attempts to govern according to its raison.


[1] DoD directives are broad policy documents which establish or describe policy, programs, and organizations; define missions; provide authority; and assign responsibilities. DoD Instructions implement the policy or prescribes the manner or a specific plan or action for carrying out the policy, operating a program or activity, and assigning responsibilities.

[2] Previously, these were known as Complex Contingency Operations under the 1997 PDD/NSC 56.

[3] The Department of Defense, in the 2009 Instruction, defines stability operations as, “an overarching term encompassing various military missions, tasks, and activities conducted outside the United States in coordination with other instruments of national power to maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief” (1). These missions, tasks, and activities, according to the 2011 JCoS Stability Operations doctrine, come in three broad categories: initial response activities, transformational activities, and sustainment activities (vii-viii).

 

 

Internal exiling in the face of imperialism

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On August 8, 1915, Rear Admiral William B. Caperton, Commander in Chief, Atlantic Reserve Fleet, arranged a meeting at the American Legation in Port au Prince with the two most prominent candidates for election as President to Haiti. He intended to ascertain their feelings toward the United States, and, in truth, to choose who would be the next President. Before the meeting took place he already had a sense of where each stood, but he wanted to hear their intentions directly. Relying on his chief of staff, Captain E. L. Beach, to translate, Caperton began when the two men arrived:

Gentlemen, it seems likely that one of you will be elected President of Haiti. Haiti is in great trouble; she has suffered much. The United States has come to Haiti as a good friend, interested only in Haiti’s welfare, in her happiness, in her prosperity. The United States has determined that revolution and disorder and anarchy must cease in Haiti; that unselfish and devoted patriotism must characterize hereafter the acts of the Haitian Government. Senator Dartiguenave and Dr. Bobo, realizing this momentous crisis in Haitian history, with the eyes of Haiti and the United States upon you, do you promise that if elected President of Haiti you will, in your official acts, be guided solely by earnest devotion to Haiti’s honor and welfare?[1]

Both men replied emphatically in the affirmative, and Admiral Caperton continued:

Senator Dartiguenave, in case Dr. Bobo should be elected will you promise that you will exert every influence in your power to assist him for Haiti’s good; that you will join with him heartily and helpfully and loyally?

To which Dartiguenave responded:

If Dr. Bobo is elected president I will give him the most loyal, earnest support in every effort he may make for Haiti’s welfare.

Admiral Caperton repeated the question to Dr. Rosalvo Bobo:

Dr. Bobo, if Senator Dartiguenave is elected president, will you help him loyally and earnestly in his efforts to benefit Haiti?

No: I will not! Dr. Bobo shouted. If Senator Dartiguenave is elected president I will not help him. I will go away and leave Haiti to her fate. I alone am fit to be president of Haiti; I alone understood Haiti’s aspirations, no one is fit to be president but me; there is no patriotism in Haiti to be compared with mine; the Haitians love no one as they love me.

It was decided in that moment, that Senator Dartineguave would be President. Admiral Caperton explained his decision thusly to the Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, six years later:

My idea was that the man most suitable for the Haitian presidency was one in whom the Haitians confidence, one whose animating purpose would be Haiti’s welfare, to which purpose he would give unselfish devotion; and also, one who combined such qualifications with confidence in the United States. There was never any bargaining of any kind whatever with Dartiguenave, as far as I know.

Three days after the meeting, Dartiguenave was elected in a landslide by the National Assembly. This conversation, held in private, but which had very public implications, marked the beginning of the new diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Haiti and her people. In the U.S. political imaginary, the political subjectivity of Haitians had become only legible in their acquiescence to the U.S. Individual actors within the political sphere, and the political actions of the population at large, were not only subsumed to the needs and agenda of the U.S., but were in fact written with a pre-determined structure of what constituted a “proper” political subjectivity.

It is precisely in redefining political subjectivity for those under control – a denial not only of a sophisticated sense of political subjectivity, but also a resistance to recognizing legitimate enactments of citizenship – that citizenship of the Haitian governing body and its constituents was negotiated from across an ocean, transnationalizing citizenship, as an extension of an imperial project. When Dr. Bobo threatened to leave Haiti forever, he was not having a moment of “theatrics” (as it is described by Admiral Caperton), but rather, he materialized what was both discursively and politically occurring – an exiling. Like so many Haitians before him,[2] Dr. Bobo faced exile if not elected President, but he also faced a much deeper exile – an exiling from his own country even if he stayed.

What does it mean to be exiled while still in one’s own country? And what does it have to do with citizenship? I’ve been chewing on this problem for quite some time. In re-reading Said’s “Reflections on Exile”, what does come clear is the “unhealable rift” required of any man who would accept the Presidency under the U.S. occupation – the rift between not only himself and his country, but of his own citizenship to Haiti – which would be a much deeper estrangement from his political subjectivity.

But i think, at root, is a deeper exiling – one of the Haitian people, more generally. This happens at multiple levels, but i am interested in two: political and body. On the one hand, Haitians were systematically stripped of their rights, coming under martial law within weeks of the U.S. marines landing, coming under severe censorship within months, and finding that the hearings that were held through the court martial system were neither fair nor productive. This was partially dependent upon the imaginative construction of Haitian bodies in the eyes of the commanding forces, the U.S. State Department, and the Secretary of the Navy. Repeatedly, Haitians are configured as dirty and diseased – both reasons to instantaneously disregard them as political subjects or citizens. Their citizenship is diminished in the eyes of the Americans, as written through disease.

But how does this, the reading of bodies, come to symbolize a kind of exile? When i think of exile, i immediately think of casting out – a cutting off of that which is deemed “diseased.” People are not exiled for being “healthy” toward a government or ruling class – they are cut out, like a cancer. They represent the possibility for something else, they pose a threat to what is. They must be written and understood as diseased to be cast out, to be divided from their citizenship. What is humbling about Bobo’s defiance, in what he knew to be a defining moment, was his unwillingness to give in quietly. He knew that he was lost, either way, and so he stood there, in utter truth and without apology. 

[1] This conversation is taken from Admiral Caperton’s testimony in the Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States Senate, Sixty-Seventh Congress.

[2] Beginning with the fourth President of Haiti, Jean Pierre Boyer, who was overthrown and exiled first to Jamaica and then France, 13 of 26 Presidents since independence had been in exile – most of them in Jamaica.

 

Toying with French Enlightenmentists

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Health and disease are powerful tropes in the construction of hierarchies in global geopolitics. Health stands in as a marker of civilization, sanitation as a sign of modernity just as disease denotes barbarism and uncleanliness is an indicator backwardness (Eamon 1998; Goudsblom 1986; Rothschild BM 2005). While the mobilization of these frames of health and disease elide the deeper social, political, and economic disparities, or the outcomes of uneven development (D. Harvey 2006; Smith 2008), historically, they have undergirded, sometimes as pretext, sometimes as defense, U.S. interventions across Latin America, the Caribbean, the island nations of the Pacific and beyond (Amador 2008; Anderson 2006; Barbour 1899; Briggs 2002; McBride 2002; McCoy and Scarano 2009; Moran 2007; Robinson 1905).

Deeply tied to these notions of modern and uncivilized are Enlightenment era theories of progress that emerged, particularly, from the writings of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857).[1] According to both Turgot and Comte, at root of development and progress are man’s conquest or control of nature through human faculties, power of will, and natural law. Anticipating Comte’s three stages law, Turgot suggested that scientific (cultural) progress unfolds in three phases: religious, speculative, and scientific. Progress, as he defines it, is an inevitable consequence of the power of the human mind to learn from its own history[2] – to find the trajectory of causation through an understanding of history. Unlike the cyclical progressions and declines of nature, the progression of human kind is on a continual trajectory toward perfection.

All things perish, in this narrative of the natural, and all things spring up again; and in these successive acts of generation through which plants and animals reproduce themselves, time does no more than restore continually the counterpart of what it has caused to disappear. The succession of mankind, on the other hand, affords from age to age an ever-changing spectacle. Reason, the passions, and liberty ceaselessly give rise to new events: all the ages are bound up with one another by a succession of causes and effects which link the present state of the world with all those that have preceded it (2010, 41).

This unfolding can be nurtured and, Turgot suggests, the role of economic relations acts as a form of motivation for this development (Livingstone and Withers 1999).  In his later works, this relationship is more clearly outlined and progress becomes more intimately tied to laws of social (economic) stages transforming into fourstages of human development that reflect human interaction with nature: age of hunters, shepherds, agriculture, and commerce (Groenewegen 1983; Heffernan 1994; Turgot 2010). These four stages do not (did not) unfold evenly across the globe, as evidenced (again and again) for Turgot in the “savages of America” (Turgot 2010, 66, 89, 147). And while he did not believe in the environmental or geographical determinism that was popular at that time, for him, progress would triumph through human ingenuity and anyone may be brought out of savagery and into enlightenment (Heffernan 1994). In this, Turgot argues not only for the perfectibility of human kind, but the universal perfectibility of all human kind – a continual march toward utopian scientific message of an “enlightened world with a uniform culture and civilization” (Heffernan 1994, 337).

Comte, too, imagined a utopic world of equality and freedom. For him, history follows three stages of development: theological (ruled by kings and priests, guided by religious thought and feelings), metaphysical (ruled by lawyers and churchmen, and governed by law through the emergence of critical thought), and positive (ruled by industrial administrators and guided by laws of nature discovered through science) (Lee 1983). His theory of progress is intimately tied with order – reconciling order and progress – as older forms of order were dependent upon staidness, rendering it stationary (Cowen 2003). His progressivist theory sought to find natural laws of science with which to understand variations of human progress across the globe (Comte 1875; Dean 1994).

The evidence of the stages of progression, Comte insists, is both in the history, itself – seconding spontaneous change – and in the cognitive stages of individual human beings. This is not to say that development is a predetermined path along a perfect tempo of time to a particular goal, but rather that the present is a result of the past (Vernon 1978). In fact, he accedes that human kind can encourage or delay development consciously. The key, Comte believed, is that in finding these laws of society, there could, then, be a system through which to manage progression – most uniquely imagined as the management of social welfare by the state, which inevitably concedes from political domination to self government and by technical and scientific administration (Marcuse 2004, 1:127; Ray 2010).

However, while Comte envisioned a utopian society, one in which all people would come to be progressive (though, unlike Turgot, never perfect) and equal, without racial or geographical discrimination, his laws of development were most deeply flawed in that they were based upon European, and particularly French, social, political, and economic progress. In attempting to define a universal theory of human progress, both Comte and Turgot inadvertently legitimized imperial and colonial rule through the enforced homogenizing frame that they and other enlightenmentists developed (Bonnett 2000; Marcuse and Neumann 2004; Patel and McMichael 2004).

While philosophers like Turgot and Comte struggled to define what a universalist future might look like, there was imbedded in this conception of progress, an invitation to totalitarianism (Marcuse and Neumann 2004). Mastery over nature and society meant a rulership through science (and by extension, scientists) and technological administration. If classical liberal democracy can be said to have succeeded in Europe as the dominant social and political organization of society, vestiges of Comteian development theories lingered to varying degrees across the populations governed through this new-found liberalism. This “administrative ordering of nature and society” James C Scott tells us, “undergird[s] the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare” (1998, 4). Modern liberal citizenship,[3] for the attendant celebration of its emergence in the 18th century, was only truly conferred in the tiniest of increments – increments laden with social, racial, economic, and political particularities that worked furiously to, on the one hand limit who may be a citizen, and on the other, craft who may yet become a citizen (or in the case of the colonized, may never be, but require close social ordering) – dependent upon social engineering.

Everywhere, from the emergence of public health within European states to the administratively articulated domination of non-European populations through colonization, was heavily informed by this new form of social engineering, employed as a necessity for the development of backwards people and for the legitimation of a new form of biopolitics through, among other things, public health and subsequently tropical medicine. At root is the formation of the appropriately participating individual – a participation which requires at the very least a healthful body with which to produce and contribute. And it is through health, that the administration of the body politic reaches down into the level of the individual bodies of the administered group – that the political subjectivity of individuals is written through the reading of the health of persons.

[1] Many authors tie Turgot and Comte together as part of a series of French enlightenment philosophers who founded a history of science and philosophy that includes Marquis de Condorcet, Voltaire, Saint-Simone, and Fourier. I have limited myself to the two as Turgot is noted as a strong influence on Adam Smith’s doctrines of liberal economics and Comte is closely tied to the founding of sociology – a term he coined – as a science of human sociality whose legacy on linear human progression continued to be felt through Durkheim, Marx, and Rostow. These two philosophers’ impact on (though greatly reconfigured into much more complex and elaborate positivist projects) on theories of development can not be under-stated.

[2] Interestingly, this pattern closely mirrors Turgot’s as his early work, On the Historical Progress of the Human Mind (1750), was written while a theological student at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, while Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766) was written during his tenure as Comptroller of Finances of France.

[3] As opposed to older and non-European Enlightenment / Renaissance forms of citizenship – for example Toltec toltecáyotl (For a discussion of AmerIndian forms of citizenship, among others, see: W. Mignolo 1995; W. D. Mignolo 2006).

On Moving Away

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When my partner was accepted to Oxford University’s Geography Department, i was ecstatic. I had visions of hanging out at the Bodleian Library or the Radcliffe Camera. I thought i might bury myself in the David Nicholls Memorial Collection in Regent’s Park College (Jason’s assigned college).

Instead, i have been desperately seeking a home for Monkey, my 14 year old, indiscriminately peeing, ornery, smelly, dirty, cranky cat (found!) and struggling to settle into a home. I’ve had four addresses this year. And i’ve spent two months of the last 10 traveling or living away from one of those four addresses. I’m not complaining. By the end of this year, i will have traveled to or lived in seven amazing cities. I love to travel.

But it has made writing my dissertation next to impossible.

I’m already a week late with Chapter One, and am just starting to get a grapple on what i’ll be writing. Don’t be fooled – i’ve been working furiously. It turns out that i took over 500 pages of notes in five weeks at the National Archives – all of which need to be coded – which i insist on doing by hand with highlighters and pens and archaic little indexing systems. I also took 2000+ pages of scans and have downloaded another 500 pages of scans from the University of Wisconsin’s Foreign Relations of the United States series scans. These were the things i couldn’t get to at NARA and NARA II. Thank goodness they’re online!

But it’s amazing how long it takes to settle into simple things like, “Where do i buy toilet paper in a pinch?” or “Where do i find stamps and mail that letter of recommendation for my student?” or, or, or… In DC (my second to last address), that wasn’t such a big deal. Five weeks in an apartment that is rented mostly to researchers and interns is properly equipped with the things that are needed and only a few blocks from Target. But i find my self asking, “Is Sainsbury’s the UK’s Walmart?” and “Can i shop there in good conscience?”

You wouldn’t think these things could possibly take up so much energy and time, but they do, weirdly.

Or maybe i’m doing what all academics do and finding excuses not to work…  procrastinate. procrastinate. procrastinate.