RACE AND SOCIAL MOBILITY Racial discrimination is an impediment to upward social mobility, but it is not always easy to measure its effects in relation to competing factors. The first essay argues for the importance of history in making this determination.

A considerable debate has surrounded the question of Afro-Caribbeans and their social mobility in the United States, much of it based on or written in response to the work of Thomas Sowell. The polemical purpose of a large portion of this literature has diminished its value: designed to deny or excuse American racism or to lay the blame for the sorry predicament of Afro-America on Afro-Americans themselves, it has operated in a historical vacuum as far as Afro-Americans are concerned. Equally so Afro-Caribbeans, whose history—largely ignored in studies of American and Afro-American history—is also, inexplicably, neglected in the large literature on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American immigration. The debate over Afro-Caribbean social mobility and Sowell's controversial arguments has been dominated by anthropologists and sociologists with little expertise or apparent interest in the history of Afro-Caribbeans and their immigration to the United States and little acquaintance with the historical experience of Afro-Americans. This historical vacuum must be filled if we are ever to make sense of the Afro-Caribbean experience and, in particular, the social mobility of black immigrants in the United States.

For many historians, personal writings—whether correspondence, diary, or autobiography—are primarily of value as testimony. They become interesting to the scholar in proportion as they relate events (revolts, wars, celebrations, etc.) that the witnesses themselves often knew to be part of history. Personal papers can also illustrate the stages of a life that reveal shared experiences of members of a profession, a community, or some other group. The historian characteristically, though not always, tries to work with the text to reach the experience and its interpretation by the writer.

Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, “very much like the sky above our head,” in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers.Another variant of this story has been corroborated by Chaudhuri himself.

George Lipsitz, reflecting upon a growing body of American studies scholarship on whiteness, claims we now have a better understanding of “how people who left Europe as Calabrians and Bohemians became something called ‘whites' when they got to America.” As a summary of whiteness studies the statement is accurate. The verb “to become” in Lipsitz's assertion emphasizes the importance of deconstructing race in order to analyze it as an ideological and historical process. The statement implies, however, that European society did not also employ unstable hierarchical racial taxonomies. Indeed, the notion that it was in the United States where people defined by a European region or nation of origin became a race, isolates American racial thought from its Euro-American matrix.George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White' Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 43, 3 (Sept. 1995): 370.

Archives are, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, “the institutional sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process.”Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52. How this mediation structures the production of meaning, on the one hand, and historical knowledge, on the other, is the major problematic of this article. I focus on how certain textual models and modes of representation impart a particular sense of purpose to the archives. That is, I am concerned with investigating how it is that texts are construed as documents that are destined for state archives. This project requires questioning how documents are made credible and authoritative in their myriad social contexts, in order to understand the relation between historicity and power relations. To study the potential impact of archival documents thus requires re-evaluating the uneasy relationship between documentary practices, canons of representation, politics, and scholarship.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how in the wider context of capital expansion and accumulation in the late twentieth century development initiatives in general, and family planning in particular, have helped to train and produce new bodies and selves.Development projects are primarily geared toward changing the traditional practices and habits of the people in the developing world, in order to help them make the transition to lifestyles of the globalizing model of the West. The “West” here is used as a historical term rather than a geographical construct. It is, as Akhil Gupta (1997:321) argues, a conjugation of place, power, and knowledge (Gupta 1997:321) that has historically imposed its rationalities onto other societies. Using the Egyptian case as an example, I argue that family planning programs do not just reduce the number of children and regulate reproduction; they also introduce or foster notions of individual choice and responsibility, risk aversion, and personal independence. In short, they help to construct a new kind of individuality which is guided by legal constructs of citizenship rather than by communitarian and familial control. Such a construction must be further situated within the global political economy that reorganizes markets and labor relations, and subsequently requires individuals to abstractly self-regulate themselves and respond to the pressures of want and self-interest (Scott 1995:211).

This essay addresses recent scholarship on Colonial Cuzco, focusing on the complexity of imperial relationships at the colonial interface. Encounters between Europeans and Andeans in highland Peru involved considerable complexity at any given moment, and changed significantly over time. Exploring this complexity through historiography, ethnohistory, art, and anthropology, the four books reviewed here describe Colonial Cuzco as a contested interculture, in which a multiplicity of self-interested individuals and groups exploited inequalities between colonial government and those governed. As Dean (1999) observes, this divide developed out of the innate ambivalence of colonialism, in which colonizers sought to subordinate through enculturation, yet maintain discrete cultural categories. Native resistance to foreign enculturation and periodic rebellions and revitalization movements acted to maintain these categories. Still, the quotidian operation of the colonial system allowed (and even required) the mediation of the colonial interculture, a creative blurring of such categories as government/governed, urban/rural, sacred/secular, and even past/present. Fundamental to appreciating how Spaniards, Andeans, and others wove a variegated social fabric in Colonial Cuzco is the Quechua notion of tinku (or tinkuy), described by Dean, Stavig, and others.

Ann Anagnost's National Past-times is a collection of exceptionally perceptive essays addressing issues of governmentality: the language, workings and limits of state power; the formation of revolutionary subjects; the representation of national history in contemporary post-socialist China. The essays in this rich collection interrogate state discourse in a myriad of ways, drawing upon newspaper accounts, films, literature, and fieldwork encounters. Subtle changes in the language of state discourse are discussed in relation to how transitions from the superstructural determinism of the Maoist era to evolutionary notions of modernity in the post-Mao era are used to structure normative practice and transform the population into a disciplined labor force ready for global investment. An analysis of governance at the local level reveals how political rituals, such as the bestowal of status awards, actually distribute people into a moral hierarchy while simultaneously creating the appearance of the party and the people speaking in a unified voice. The controversial one-child family policy is interrogated in terms of state and popular understanding of ‘population quality,' a notion drawing on eugenics, commodities as markers of social evolution, fears of disorder, and national progress. A film tracing a rural woman's search for justice is the departure point for probing the workings of rural governance structures, personalized power, and forms of agency enabled by the market economy. The contemporary theme park “Splendid China” is analyzed as a narration of national identity that erases the Maoist era and presents a seamless continuity between symbols of imperial antiquity and the socialist state.

Frontier Fictions begins with the now famous scene of Muhammad Riza Shah's departure from Iran on 16 January 1979. It recalls his father's departure thirty-seven years earlier, and the similar reported stories, that each monarch “departed with a box of Iranian soil tucked away in their belongings”(3).

To an Italian, la questione meridionale, “the Southern question,” is as inescapable as racism is to an American, or “the troubles” are to an inhabitant of the British Isles. But what do foreigners see when they look at the troubled relationship of the Italian South with the rest of the peninsula? In his interesting book, Darkest Italy, Dickie reminds us, first of all, that we face several “questions,” if we wish to use this term at all (13–14). The Mezzogiorno itself was, during the period he considers, 1860–1960, and remains to this day, comprised of diverse geopolitical, cultural, and social components. These appear to have become one in the minds of liberal modernizers, northerners and southerners alike (for example, Pasquale Villari, 55–63). They believed that building the Italian nation required changing cultural attitudes and values in the populace as much as in the elites (4–7); and they assessed the difficulty of their task in the degrees of deviance of various parts of the country from their own normative view of nationhood. “The South” was seen as highest on this scale.

Recent scholarship on twentieth-century Syria has thrown new light on the popular movements that opposed the Arab nationalist government of King Faisal and then resisted the imposition of the French mandate in 1920, on state economic policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and on the workers' organizations and radical parties that emerged as major political actors during the Second World War. Elizabeth Thompson offers a stimulating synthesis of this literature, and supplements it by devoting explicit attention to the way in which gender dynamics interacted with other factors. Specifically, she argues that a “crisis of paternity” (37–38) set the stage for French rule over Syria and Lebanon following the First World War; the mandatory authorities subsequently established a complex “paternalistic colonial civic order,” in which state officials manipulated the disbursement of material benefits to “a mediating elite” of local notables as a way of exerting “control [over] the unprivileged majority” (66). This system led to the emergence of a full-blown “colonial welfare state” by the late 1930s, which entailed an extensive network of state-funded schools and clinics, along with rights of popular expression and association (163–69). Key elements of the mandate order even outlived the French presence: “Paternal republicanism—the refusal to democratize and expand the colonial welfare state, and the persistence of heterogeneous citizenship rights—would contribute to the causes of Syria's successive coups beginning in 1949 and to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in 1958” (286).

This book, part of the “Ideas in Context” series printed under the editorship of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, is an important contribution to the better understanding of Emile Durkheim's sociology and social philosophy.

Ida Altman has written a book that both probes deeply the significance of tying together Iberian and American domains under a common Crown government and brilliantly demonstrates how the comparative history of the first global age ought to be approached. Several recent works have shown the importance of bullion flows, especially those of silver. But for the development of a truly world economy and history, the resulting networks did not have the same impact on all of the localities that they increasingly connected. Altman does an outstanding job of exploring such differences, and their relationship to the interface between the macro-history of the period's new economic and political domains and the micro-history of locality, in ways that highlight human agency.