Robert Gregg

Class, Culture and Empire: E. P. Thompson and the Making of Social History

In this article, the author asks: How has the legacy of E.P. Thompson helped shape the emergence of Social History in the United States? How have ideas about race, gender and empire, largely absent from Thompson’s work, been incorporated in writing on labor, immigration, and American exceptionalism? Is it now possible to synthesize race, class, and gender? Or, have histories based on class analysis so elided race and gender that such grafting has been foreclosed? With a bit of gossip here, a gesture to historiography there, and as little charm as possible, the author wonders: Is there any justice for “the Subaltern” in this profession? Or, is it just another “Organization Man” gone West?

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Three-quarters of the way up Putney Hill (a stone’s throw, I like to think, from where the great debates were held), down a side road, misnamed ‘Avenue’, several detached houses stood in a row facing towards a council estate. Inside one of these, up the stairs, was a room from which emanated the noise of Eliot Comprehensive schoolkids meeting in their lunch break. The room was dark, a little dingy, and smelled of incense to cover the pot and cigarette smoke. The walls were covered with posters - one an advertisement for the movie ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, another a silkscreen of Che, and many homemade commentaries on 1970s Britain. Nothing much new there, I suppose. The sounds of music, usually of psychedelic rock, were the standard accompaniment to all that went on within. Not much new there also.

6 Beyond Boundaries, Beyond the Whale

C. L. R. James would have insisted that Americanists ask the question, ‘What do they know of America who only America know?’2 The importance of asking this question is made clear in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which highlights the contribution of Africa to the formulation of ideas about culture.3 Such ideas, embodied in particular in the modern concept of race, prevail in both the global academy and American society. To comprehend the genealogy of these ideas, from their invention to their current stranglehold on American political discourse, an understanding of the interaction between Africa and America is vital.

Valleys of fear: Policing terror in an imperial age, 1865–1925

In The Valley of Fear, Arthur Conan Doyle returned to a theme he had explored in his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, namely, the linkages between crimes in London and events occurring elsewhere in the world. The precipitating events of these two novels occurred in the United States. A Study in Scarlet revolves around the emergence of Mormonism in Utah, and The Valley of Fear builds upon the Molly Maguires episode in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. However, there was a noticeable change of tone between the earlier work, written in 1887, and the later work, Doyle’s last Holmes novel, written on the eve of the war in Europe, then serialized in The Strand after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914.

Apropos Exceptionalism: Imperial Location and Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States

The artist and anti-apartheid activist Breyten Breytenbach has described his forebodings about the direction in which South Africa has been moving recently. In a nutshell, these stem from his fear that having concentrated their efforts on racial oppression radicals may now be unable or unwilling to combat the dangers of a centralized nation state. Breytenbach believes that the fight against apartheid and the hierarchical division of peoples on the basis of race and ethnicity in some ways allowed the notion of the State to go uncontested.

Homelands, Harlem and Comparative History

Taking popular culture as his subject in Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, Rob Nixon reveals ‘the diverse ties between South African culture and the world beyond its borders’, and highlights ‘the [South African] discourses of absolute rupture, authenticity, racial purity and ethnic nationalism on the one hand and, on the other, the idioms of cosmopolitanism, transculturation, hybridity and internationalism’. Nixon argues that ‘the culture of apartheid and the resistance to it cannot be understood outside their international entanglements’. By focusing on the perceptions of Harlem and the United States among white and black South Africans, the countervailing images of South Africa on American screens, the transnational dynamics of cultural and sports boycotts of the apartheid state, and finally the transformation of South Africa in the aftermath of the Cold War, Nixon begins to sketch in the outlines of a new comparative history.2 This history uncovers the myriad connections existing between societies which help shape the way our comparisons are formulated.

Beyond Nation. Beyond Methodism

Like Rob Nixon’s work, James Campbell’s Songs of Zion contributes to the new impulse in comparative history of uncovering the connections between societies under comparison. Campbell describes the conduit between two societies acting as a ‘looking glass in which Africans and African Americans examined one another, and, in the process, reexamined themselves’.2 Campbell’s focus is the connection between the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and the Ethiopian Church in South Africa. Aware that historians have ‘paid insufficient attention to Africa’s pervasiveness in African American intellectual and imaginative life’, he undertakes ‘a study of transplantation, showing how a creed devised by and for African Americans was appropriated and transformed in a variety of South African contexts’.

Class, Culture and Empire: Making Social History

In early 1968, about the time of the Tet Offensive, a leading member of the fraternity of South Asian historians wrote a 30-page prospectus for other members of his coterie outlining what American scholars needed to do to open the door to the subcontinent and to establish their own school of South Asian history.2 The Cambridge School in England was apparently too obsessed with theories of Nationalist conspiracy to be left unchallenged, while the failings of the historians from the subcontinent lay in their obsession with the work of great men, resulting from a conception ‘of their own recent history, which tends to be seen in terms of “giants,”’ and insufficient attention to social historical concerns.

A Common Wind

In E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the central character, a black musiciannamed Coalhouse Walker, Jr., is driven to rebellion against white society by the actions of members of a volunteer fire brigade. Walker is a successful, self-respecting black man. He is driving his Model T. Ford past the fire station when he is stopped and his car is dismantled as part of a racist practical joke. The firemen are saying, in effect, you may be successful but in America you are still black.2

The Sound of Silence

Horace Pippin, apparently, used light very differently from most artists. While others usually start with a white canvas and then gradually fill it with color and shade, Pippin started by coating his canvas with black paint and then added lighter colors on top. This gave his paintings a heavily layered texture, providing a sense (intended or otherwise) that there was something lying beneath the surface image. For an artist who, among other things, wanted to reveal the hypocrisies underlying American propaganda in the World Wars (fighting against intolerance abroad, condoning lynching at home), this approach may have seemed most fitting.