Spoilerific tl;dr reading roundup
One nonfiction, one fiction.
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995). Referring, of course, to the Irish in America (US-centrism FTW everyone). When my dad saw the cover he asked me if the Irish had been black to begin with or something. Having read the book, the answer is definitely “or something.”
Drawing heavily on labor history in antebellum Philadelphia, Ignatiev argues that whiteness was something the Irish did rather than something they were. This isn’t about the performativity of race on an individual level. Being light-skinned certainly mattered, yet not necessarily moreso than being Anglican, or being a mechanic, or being from County Cork. Becoming white was a process by which Irish emigrants learned to adopt “whiteness” as the primary marker of their identity. Igantiev notes that this process was neither inevitable nor unidirectional - the Irish shaped nineteenth-century American race relations as much as they were shaped by it.
This is a difficult book to read. It’s difficult because it contains a lot of difficult truths about the complicity - in fact, the crucial role - of organized labor in the oppression of African-Americans. It’s difficult because even though it’s not a work of historiography, the choice of subject matter is a direct response to labor historians’ tendency to elide the issue of race, ie. by celebrating pan-racial working-class solidarity. It’s difficult because the final 1.5 chapters are badly written as all get-out (but I was warned of this via Amazon so I was prepared). And finally, it’s difficult because I’m reading it through the filter of my own immigrant experience. For me, growing up outside of Boston where half the people you meet are of Irish ancestry (very few of whom are first- or second-generation) I tend to think of them as thoroughly assimilated into the power structure of American society (cf. John F. Kennedy). When I hear people say “I’m Irish” and “I’m Iraqi,” those are, to me, fundamentally different statements. Because being Irish comes with a set of privileges which the other does not. But the Irish didn’t arrive on these shores a privileged group; quite the opposite; and the process by which they became privileged is the process by which they became white, and incidentally helped define the term “white.”
Sometimes the process (and the logic) seems circular. For example, an important step in establishing the whiteness of the Irish was excluding African-Americans from occupations which the Irish monopolized, which could then be known as “white men’s work.” But how did they kick the blacks out? Why, by claiming that “white men will not work with them” - when it was the “whiteness” of the Irish that was on trial in the first place! My head starts to hurt when I try to follow the argument in passages like that.
This book is assuredly worth reading. It’s short and straightforward and strikes a good balance between scholarly and journalistic writing - as an ex-history major, I cannot stand badly done popular histories like The Basque History of the World. I also had quite a few misconceptions shattered, viz. that the vast majority of Irish immigrants were poor, and Catholic, and agrarian (the demographics changed somewhat with the Famine, but as a rule the really destitute were unable to scrape together the cost of passage). Igantiev goes so far as to compare the structure of racial oppression that crystallized in nineteenth-century America, to the Protestant supremacy which the Irish left behind back home. While I’m wary of sweeping claims like “Anglo-America … is Ulster writ large,” I found other claims more persuasive - that the hardening of the color line was a product of Jacksonian democracy, for instance. This might sound counterintuitive but I guess a simple way of looking at it would be to say that the Whigs were aristocrats who cared more about class than race; by contrast, the Irish were mostly unskilled workers and they whole-heartedly embraced egalitarianism, along with the inherent racism it entailed. And at this point I'm more or less regurgitating the Afterword so here is a quote that slapped me upside the head:
“In short, people from Africa were not enslaved because they were black; rather, they were defined as black because they were enslaved.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). I prefer books about characters to books about ideas - although if the characters and the ideas are a package deal there’s nothing wrong with that either. This is a book about ideas. What I have been discovering somewhat belatedly is that ‘character’ and ‘plot’ are not such discrete entities as our high school English teachers would have us believe; that maybe when people talk about how great GRRM is with ‘characterization’ this is in fact inseparable from his deft hand with plot. I bring up GRRM because he is the finest example I know of when it comes to engaging characters + compelling plot = unputdownable book. The Years of Rice and Salt has neither characters I care about nor a plotline I am invested in, yet at no point did I feel that finishing the book would be a chore. This is a testament to (a) Robinson’s worldbuilding and (b) Robinson’s technical wizardry as a writer, but only peripherally (c) Robinson’s ideas. Because yes, while they're progressive and movingly articulated and I mostly agree with them, they're not particularly new ideas.
In the fourteenth century, the Black Plague wipes out 99% of the population of Europe. The novel charts the major events in world history over the next seven hundred years through the eyes of two main characters, who are reincarnated a dozen or so times, so that it reads more like a series of vignettes than a novel. And therein lies the first snag - for me anyway, because how am I supposed to care about these characters if you keep killing them off every 80 pages? True, the underlying personalities of the protagonists remain constant, so that B is ever the optimist while K is an ill-tempered cynic (their names in each life always start with B and K). The common theme that runs through all of their reincarnations is the fight against oppression in whatever form it might take; the struggle to free the greater part of humanity from the stranglehold of emperors, khans, sultans, shahs, religious fundamentalists and military dictatorships. In that order.
It’s a very modern novel, which is both good and bad. It’s good because Robinson treats issues of gender with great care and there is much implicit and explicit critique of patriarchy. It’s bad because - well, it’s anachronistic to be putting some of these ideas into the mouths (minds?) of people who lived six hundred years ago. The intimate connection between social justice and environmental sustainability, for instance. Which I grant is a legitimate connection, but I doubt they even had a word for social justice six hundred years ago, because the concept as we use it today just didn’t exist. In essence, my complaint is that sometimes it feels like Robinson is trying to promote a message rather than tell a story, and he’s not being overly subtle about it.
I can’t decide what to think about the path scientific knowledge has taken in this alternate universe. Apparently they have carbon dating, continental drift theory, the Periodic Table and their very own Einstein (who was born in Southern India, but E still = MC^2). So maybe these discoveries are supposed to be like Easter eggs for readers who paid attention in physics? Alternatively, Robinson could be trying too hard to make events in his alternate timeline mirror our own. This time the Enlightenment originates in Uzbekistan, but we still get movable type, Snell’s Law, and (eventually) the eugenics movement. I’m just not convinced that all of these things were inevitable. Yes, sooner or later someone was going to investigate Stonehenge, and when they did they would discover all the interesting implications for ancient astronomy, but the development of calculus was such a messy and multi-participant affair that it’s highly unlikely it would have gone down the same way twice. (Which, okay, Robinson doesn’t go into that much detail, but he strongly implies it with a monologue which handily highlights all the reasons that Fermat started working on differential calculus.)
The tension between science and religion is a recurring theme within the novel, and this is one area where I think Robinson excelled. With the relegation of Christianity to a historical footnote, two major centers of power emerge: China and dar-Islam (which stretches from al-Andalus in the west to roughly modern-day Pakistan in the east). As the rational supersedes the supernatural in humanity’s collective consciousness, Robinson devotes less and less time to B and K’s adventures in the bardo - a sort of cosmic limbo where souls await reincarnation. By the end of the book neither of them even believes in the idea of reincarnation. This is not to say that Robinson doesn’t have profound things to say about faith, because he does, but for the most part, the reason they’re profound is because he restricts himself to asking questions rather than supplying answers. In this sense the book is more philosophy than religion, even though philosophical theories are rarely mentioned (except for this one passage, quoted from a “historical” text, that could have been lifted straight out of The Social Contract).
This is a novel of hope. Robinson believes in progress - not unbridled economic progress, I think we covered that already - but scientific progress contributing to social progress, until world peace reigns and each individual’s soul can achieve nirvana. (It sounds less cheesy in his own words.) Nowhere is this more evident than in the journey of K, who overcomes his destructive tendencies and channels his impotent anger against the establishment into revolutionary fervor. In addition, both K and B are repeatedly identified with the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kali. One gets the feeling that if there is a God, it is the disembodied god of Buddhism rather than the shepherd figure of the Abrahamic religions.
Another point for Robinson: He tailors his writing style to the particular time period or genre, so that his war stories about men in the trenches read like … well, like WWII war stories (his version of WWII lasted sixty-odd years). I was particularly impressed by the way he paid homage to the structure of Chinese classics like Journey to the West, whose chapters end on cliffhangers like the following: “What happened next to B, I do not know. To find out more, read the next chapter.” In fact, I think Robinson absolutely NAILED the Chinese - not any particular incident in our history, but certain aspects of our national character. (Yes, we have a national character. So do you.) He satirizes our obsessive penchant for enumerating things with lists like “The Six Great Errors,” “The Three Incredible Fuckups,” and “The Nine Greatest Incidents of Bad Luck.” He is just an all-around amazing writer, and some of his more lyrical passages had me in tears. I hate long descriptions of scenery - I always skip over them - and yet I wouldn’t have missed Robinson’s descriptions for the world.
Okay, let’s talk about the romanticization of the American Indian. It’s not the exoticization of their way of life I’m concerned about - to be fair, Robinson keeps that to a minimum - it’s the idea that indigenous peoples are still rooted in a lost Golden Age that the rest of us (read: the Muslims and the Chinese) have no access to. In this alternate history, the majority of North America is ruled by the Hodenosaunee League, with only the east and west coasts being colonized successfully by Old World settlers. Much is made of the egalitarian institutions and the gender equality that prevails among the Hodenosaunee. And yet, we only get one chapter devoted to the Hodenosaunee, and a short one at that, and the hero of this chapter is an ex-samurai monk who fled Japan during the Chinese invasion. He’s here to warn the League to take a hard line with any foreigners who come to their shores - not just the Chinese, but the Muslims too. Oh and btw, you guys should probably inoculate yourselves against smallpox! … Can we say White Messiah, anyone? This man/monk/b.a.m.f may be yellow rather than white, but he has all the hallmarks of a White Messiah (see also Dances With Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, The Last Samurai). The plot of this chapter consists entirely of the ceremony by which Hodenosaunee raise him to chief (made possible by his kicking everybody’s asses at lacrosse). At the core of my dissatisfaction with Robinson is a problem of historical perspective: The American Indians are presented as subject peoples - maybe not subject to the authority of a colonial power, but they are nonetheless subjects rather than authors of their own history. I’m thinking of another chapter, where members of a Chinese fleet are lured into the Andes by a tribe of apparently friendly natives who then proceed to ritually sacrifice their guests. This is a scene straight out of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Robinson may not subscribe to the racial dichotomy that Poe did, and he is clearly not saying that all Indians are backstabbing sycophants, but there is still a sense that the inner workings of “primitive” societies are inscrutable to those of us in the “civilized” world. So whether they’re shown to be admirable (the Hodenosaunee) or despicable (the Inka), the bottom line is that we just don’t understand them. I'd say Stanley avoids the Noble Savage stereotype, but only by the skin of his teeth. In seven hundred years of world history, we travel to North America once, South America once, Africa 0 times, and Australia/Pacific Islands 0 times. We spend the rest of the time in Eurasia.
The final thing I want to consider is the relationship between the two main protagonists. There are other recurring characters, reincarnated alongside them, but the focus is on B and K’s personal journeys. In none of their lives do these two form a romantic relationship. Well, actually, they do, once, but I am inclined to discount their stint as avant-garde intellectuals in postwar Paris because (1) it was a brief, casual liaison rather than a long-term union, (2) the attraction was chiefly emotional rather than physical, and (3) any kind of sexual encounter between two women was going to be at least as much about rebelling against patriarchal, heteronormative society as about the actual lovemaking. And indeed it is strongly implied that K has difficulty enjoying sex because as a child, she underwent female genital circumcision. Which is sick and disgusting, and maybe this is the point of them having sex in the first place, so we can see how sick the practice of circumcision is? Anyway now that I think about it, emotional intimacy should not be subordinated to physical intimacy, the bond that B and K share is in no way inferior to a romantic bond, and in fact, a romantic subplot might have distracted us from the important issues in B and K’s lives. And I guess that’s where Kim Robinson and I differ about what’s more important. As a not-very-original manifesto against colonialism, slavery, imperialism and all the large or small atrocities that human beings have perpetuated upon each other since the dawn of time, The Years of Rice and Salt is a resounding success. As an epic tale in the tradition of the fantasy classics among which it is shelved; as a story - and in the end that is what alternate history is - it succeeds perhaps less well.
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995). Referring, of course, to the Irish in America (US-centrism FTW everyone). When my dad saw the cover he asked me if the Irish had been black to begin with or something. Having read the book, the answer is definitely “or something.”
Drawing heavily on labor history in antebellum Philadelphia, Ignatiev argues that whiteness was something the Irish did rather than something they were. This isn’t about the performativity of race on an individual level. Being light-skinned certainly mattered, yet not necessarily moreso than being Anglican, or being a mechanic, or being from County Cork. Becoming white was a process by which Irish emigrants learned to adopt “whiteness” as the primary marker of their identity. Igantiev notes that this process was neither inevitable nor unidirectional - the Irish shaped nineteenth-century American race relations as much as they were shaped by it.
This is a difficult book to read. It’s difficult because it contains a lot of difficult truths about the complicity - in fact, the crucial role - of organized labor in the oppression of African-Americans. It’s difficult because even though it’s not a work of historiography, the choice of subject matter is a direct response to labor historians’ tendency to elide the issue of race, ie. by celebrating pan-racial working-class solidarity. It’s difficult because the final 1.5 chapters are badly written as all get-out (but I was warned of this via Amazon so I was prepared). And finally, it’s difficult because I’m reading it through the filter of my own immigrant experience. For me, growing up outside of Boston where half the people you meet are of Irish ancestry (very few of whom are first- or second-generation) I tend to think of them as thoroughly assimilated into the power structure of American society (cf. John F. Kennedy). When I hear people say “I’m Irish” and “I’m Iraqi,” those are, to me, fundamentally different statements. Because being Irish comes with a set of privileges which the other does not. But the Irish didn’t arrive on these shores a privileged group; quite the opposite; and the process by which they became privileged is the process by which they became white, and incidentally helped define the term “white.”
Sometimes the process (and the logic) seems circular. For example, an important step in establishing the whiteness of the Irish was excluding African-Americans from occupations which the Irish monopolized, which could then be known as “white men’s work.” But how did they kick the blacks out? Why, by claiming that “white men will not work with them” - when it was the “whiteness” of the Irish that was on trial in the first place! My head starts to hurt when I try to follow the argument in passages like that.
This book is assuredly worth reading. It’s short and straightforward and strikes a good balance between scholarly and journalistic writing - as an ex-history major, I cannot stand badly done popular histories like The Basque History of the World. I also had quite a few misconceptions shattered, viz. that the vast majority of Irish immigrants were poor, and Catholic, and agrarian (the demographics changed somewhat with the Famine, but as a rule the really destitute were unable to scrape together the cost of passage). Igantiev goes so far as to compare the structure of racial oppression that crystallized in nineteenth-century America, to the Protestant supremacy which the Irish left behind back home. While I’m wary of sweeping claims like “Anglo-America … is Ulster writ large,” I found other claims more persuasive - that the hardening of the color line was a product of Jacksonian democracy, for instance. This might sound counterintuitive but I guess a simple way of looking at it would be to say that the Whigs were aristocrats who cared more about class than race; by contrast, the Irish were mostly unskilled workers and they whole-heartedly embraced egalitarianism, along with the inherent racism it entailed. And at this point I'm more or less regurgitating the Afterword so here is a quote that slapped me upside the head:
“In short, people from Africa were not enslaved because they were black; rather, they were defined as black because they were enslaved.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). I prefer books about characters to books about ideas - although if the characters and the ideas are a package deal there’s nothing wrong with that either. This is a book about ideas. What I have been discovering somewhat belatedly is that ‘character’ and ‘plot’ are not such discrete entities as our high school English teachers would have us believe; that maybe when people talk about how great GRRM is with ‘characterization’ this is in fact inseparable from his deft hand with plot. I bring up GRRM because he is the finest example I know of when it comes to engaging characters + compelling plot = unputdownable book. The Years of Rice and Salt has neither characters I care about nor a plotline I am invested in, yet at no point did I feel that finishing the book would be a chore. This is a testament to (a) Robinson’s worldbuilding and (b) Robinson’s technical wizardry as a writer, but only peripherally (c) Robinson’s ideas. Because yes, while they're progressive and movingly articulated and I mostly agree with them, they're not particularly new ideas.
In the fourteenth century, the Black Plague wipes out 99% of the population of Europe. The novel charts the major events in world history over the next seven hundred years through the eyes of two main characters, who are reincarnated a dozen or so times, so that it reads more like a series of vignettes than a novel. And therein lies the first snag - for me anyway, because how am I supposed to care about these characters if you keep killing them off every 80 pages? True, the underlying personalities of the protagonists remain constant, so that B is ever the optimist while K is an ill-tempered cynic (their names in each life always start with B and K). The common theme that runs through all of their reincarnations is the fight against oppression in whatever form it might take; the struggle to free the greater part of humanity from the stranglehold of emperors, khans, sultans, shahs, religious fundamentalists and military dictatorships. In that order.
It’s a very modern novel, which is both good and bad. It’s good because Robinson treats issues of gender with great care and there is much implicit and explicit critique of patriarchy. It’s bad because - well, it’s anachronistic to be putting some of these ideas into the mouths (minds?) of people who lived six hundred years ago. The intimate connection between social justice and environmental sustainability, for instance. Which I grant is a legitimate connection, but I doubt they even had a word for social justice six hundred years ago, because the concept as we use it today just didn’t exist. In essence, my complaint is that sometimes it feels like Robinson is trying to promote a message rather than tell a story, and he’s not being overly subtle about it.
I can’t decide what to think about the path scientific knowledge has taken in this alternate universe. Apparently they have carbon dating, continental drift theory, the Periodic Table and their very own Einstein (who was born in Southern India, but E still = MC^2). So maybe these discoveries are supposed to be like Easter eggs for readers who paid attention in physics? Alternatively, Robinson could be trying too hard to make events in his alternate timeline mirror our own. This time the Enlightenment originates in Uzbekistan, but we still get movable type, Snell’s Law, and (eventually) the eugenics movement. I’m just not convinced that all of these things were inevitable. Yes, sooner or later someone was going to investigate Stonehenge, and when they did they would discover all the interesting implications for ancient astronomy, but the development of calculus was such a messy and multi-participant affair that it’s highly unlikely it would have gone down the same way twice. (Which, okay, Robinson doesn’t go into that much detail, but he strongly implies it with a monologue which handily highlights all the reasons that Fermat started working on differential calculus.)
The tension between science and religion is a recurring theme within the novel, and this is one area where I think Robinson excelled. With the relegation of Christianity to a historical footnote, two major centers of power emerge: China and dar-Islam (which stretches from al-Andalus in the west to roughly modern-day Pakistan in the east). As the rational supersedes the supernatural in humanity’s collective consciousness, Robinson devotes less and less time to B and K’s adventures in the bardo - a sort of cosmic limbo where souls await reincarnation. By the end of the book neither of them even believes in the idea of reincarnation. This is not to say that Robinson doesn’t have profound things to say about faith, because he does, but for the most part, the reason they’re profound is because he restricts himself to asking questions rather than supplying answers. In this sense the book is more philosophy than religion, even though philosophical theories are rarely mentioned (except for this one passage, quoted from a “historical” text, that could have been lifted straight out of The Social Contract).
This is a novel of hope. Robinson believes in progress - not unbridled economic progress, I think we covered that already - but scientific progress contributing to social progress, until world peace reigns and each individual’s soul can achieve nirvana. (It sounds less cheesy in his own words.) Nowhere is this more evident than in the journey of K, who overcomes his destructive tendencies and channels his impotent anger against the establishment into revolutionary fervor. In addition, both K and B are repeatedly identified with the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kali. One gets the feeling that if there is a God, it is the disembodied god of Buddhism rather than the shepherd figure of the Abrahamic religions.
Another point for Robinson: He tailors his writing style to the particular time period or genre, so that his war stories about men in the trenches read like … well, like WWII war stories (his version of WWII lasted sixty-odd years). I was particularly impressed by the way he paid homage to the structure of Chinese classics like Journey to the West, whose chapters end on cliffhangers like the following: “What happened next to B, I do not know. To find out more, read the next chapter.” In fact, I think Robinson absolutely NAILED the Chinese - not any particular incident in our history, but certain aspects of our national character. (Yes, we have a national character. So do you.) He satirizes our obsessive penchant for enumerating things with lists like “The Six Great Errors,” “The Three Incredible Fuckups,” and “The Nine Greatest Incidents of Bad Luck.” He is just an all-around amazing writer, and some of his more lyrical passages had me in tears. I hate long descriptions of scenery - I always skip over them - and yet I wouldn’t have missed Robinson’s descriptions for the world.
Okay, let’s talk about the romanticization of the American Indian. It’s not the exoticization of their way of life I’m concerned about - to be fair, Robinson keeps that to a minimum - it’s the idea that indigenous peoples are still rooted in a lost Golden Age that the rest of us (read: the Muslims and the Chinese) have no access to. In this alternate history, the majority of North America is ruled by the Hodenosaunee League, with only the east and west coasts being colonized successfully by Old World settlers. Much is made of the egalitarian institutions and the gender equality that prevails among the Hodenosaunee. And yet, we only get one chapter devoted to the Hodenosaunee, and a short one at that, and the hero of this chapter is an ex-samurai monk who fled Japan during the Chinese invasion. He’s here to warn the League to take a hard line with any foreigners who come to their shores - not just the Chinese, but the Muslims too. Oh and btw, you guys should probably inoculate yourselves against smallpox! … Can we say White Messiah, anyone? This man/monk/b.a.m.f may be yellow rather than white, but he has all the hallmarks of a White Messiah (see also Dances With Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, The Last Samurai). The plot of this chapter consists entirely of the ceremony by which Hodenosaunee raise him to chief (made possible by his kicking everybody’s asses at lacrosse). At the core of my dissatisfaction with Robinson is a problem of historical perspective: The American Indians are presented as subject peoples - maybe not subject to the authority of a colonial power, but they are nonetheless subjects rather than authors of their own history. I’m thinking of another chapter, where members of a Chinese fleet are lured into the Andes by a tribe of apparently friendly natives who then proceed to ritually sacrifice their guests. This is a scene straight out of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Robinson may not subscribe to the racial dichotomy that Poe did, and he is clearly not saying that all Indians are backstabbing sycophants, but there is still a sense that the inner workings of “primitive” societies are inscrutable to those of us in the “civilized” world. So whether they’re shown to be admirable (the Hodenosaunee) or despicable (the Inka), the bottom line is that we just don’t understand them. I'd say Stanley avoids the Noble Savage stereotype, but only by the skin of his teeth. In seven hundred years of world history, we travel to North America once, South America once, Africa 0 times, and Australia/Pacific Islands 0 times. We spend the rest of the time in Eurasia.
The final thing I want to consider is the relationship between the two main protagonists. There are other recurring characters, reincarnated alongside them, but the focus is on B and K’s personal journeys. In none of their lives do these two form a romantic relationship. Well, actually, they do, once, but I am inclined to discount their stint as avant-garde intellectuals in postwar Paris because (1) it was a brief, casual liaison rather than a long-term union, (2) the attraction was chiefly emotional rather than physical, and (3) any kind of sexual encounter between two women was going to be at least as much about rebelling against patriarchal, heteronormative society as about the actual lovemaking. And indeed it is strongly implied that K has difficulty enjoying sex because as a child, she underwent female genital circumcision. Which is sick and disgusting, and maybe this is the point of them having sex in the first place, so we can see how sick the practice of circumcision is? Anyway now that I think about it, emotional intimacy should not be subordinated to physical intimacy, the bond that B and K share is in no way inferior to a romantic bond, and in fact, a romantic subplot might have distracted us from the important issues in B and K’s lives. And I guess that’s where Kim Robinson and I differ about what’s more important. As a not-very-original manifesto against colonialism, slavery, imperialism and all the large or small atrocities that human beings have perpetuated upon each other since the dawn of time, The Years of Rice and Salt is a resounding success. As an epic tale in the tradition of the fantasy classics among which it is shelved; as a story - and in the end that is what alternate history is - it succeeds perhaps less well.