Yearly Archives: 2012

“The Infernal Ride”

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In his 1996 study Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Michael Kimmel describes the invention of the cowboy, a “mythic creation” with origins in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper; this creature of the nineteenth century imagination, as Kimmel points out, “doesn’t really exist, except in the pages of the western, the literary genre heralded by the publication of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian in 1902” (Kimmel 149—150).  Kimmel describes the hero of the western as a character who is “fierce and brave,” a man “willing to venture into unknown territory” in order to

tame it for women, children, and emasculated civilized men.  As soon as the environment has been subdued, he must move on, unconstrained by the demands of civilized life, unhampered by clinging women and whining children and uncaring bosses and managers.  (149)

In The Virginian, and in the other novels, magazine serials, films, comic books, and television shows it inspired, this hero, of course, as Kimmel points out—a being who is “free in a free country, embodying republican virtue and autonomy”—“is white” (Kimmel 151).  Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained, however, asks us to imagine a different sort of Western hero, one whose history returns us to the origins of African-American cinema.

Django poster
Image from IMDB

Like Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino’s new film is a vision of an alternate history.  Jamie Foxx’s title character joins forces with Christoph Waltz’s German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz on a series of adventures which culminate in the attempted rescue of Django’s wife Hildy (Kerry Washington).  Unlike the characters Kimmel describes, Django is not running to the territory to escape the clutches of civilization.  His journey is an inversion of the hero’s trajectory in the traditional western.  At every step of the narrative, Django embraces civilization and demands the dignity which has been denied to him and his wife.

The fantasy of an escape into the wilderness, as Kimmel describes, was the invention of a writer from “an aristocratic Philadelphia family”; Owen Wister created a genre which “represented the apotheosis of masculinist fantasy, a revolt not against women but against feminization.  The vast prairie is the domain of male liberation from workplace humiliation, cultural feminization, and domestic emasculation” (Kimmel 150).  In Tarantino’s film, however, Django’s journey returns him to civilization, the violent, decadent world of Calvin Candie’s Mississippi plantation.  It is not a feminized space which seeks to emasculate Django, but one of Candie’s henchmen, Billy Crash (Walton Goggins), in a hellish scene which alludes to the infamous torture sequence from Tarantino’s first film Reservoir Dogs (1992).  This time the torture scene, stripped of the bloody glamour and outrageousness of Michael Madsen’s performance and the Dylanesque humor of “Stuck in the Middle with You,” is brutal and ferocious, a reminder to the audience of the horrific consequences of the plantation system for both the slavers and those who have been enslaved.

What animates the blood and the violence of this world?  Greed drives Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie and his loyal servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).  In a sly reference to Greed, Eric Von Stroheim’s 1924 silent adaptation of Frank Norris’s 1899 naturalist novel McTeague, Tarantino’s Dr. King Schultz masquerades as a dentist, his wagon crowned with an enormous molar dancing on the end of a spring.  In the logic of the film, greed is not a simple desire for wealth and property but is a form of anxiety caused by a perceived loss of control: Calvin fears he is not as wise as his father; Stephen is afraid of the new world Django represents.  Both Calvin and Stephen are terrified of the freedom which Jim Croce celebrates in “I Got a Name” (written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox), the 1973 hit which provides the soundtrack as Schultz and Django ride out the winter and collect the bounties which will enable them to return to Mississippi to rescue Hildy: “And I’m gonna go there free/Like the fool I am and I’ll always be/I’ve got a dream/I’ve got a dream/They can change their minds but they can’t change me.”

Django is not searching for freedom from the feminized spaces Kimmel describes.  Instead, Django’s journey is one of return, of reclamation.  He is a western hero who abandons the John Ford-like expanses of the territory, which, as figured by Tarantino, are a series of illusions: over the course of the film, sometimes within the same sequence, Django journeys from what appears to be the deserts of the southwest; to the Rocky Mountains; to the live oak trees and bayous of Louisiana; to the mud-clotted streets of a Jack London-like frontier town (with Tom Wopat, Luke Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard, as the Marshall); to the hills of Topanga Canyon, the backdrop of most of the westerns filmed for American television in the 1950s and 1960s.

In Tarantino’s imagined southern landscape, Mississippi is just miles away from the golden hills just outside Los Angeles, and those hills are filled with extras from the Australian outback.  As Candie and Stephen employ every means of violence and torture at their disposal to protect Candyland, Django comes to understand that the stability of place is an illusion; what is real is the world which has been denied to him, the vision of his wife Hildy which repeatedly haunts him until he finds her again in Mississippi.

There is a long history of African-American westerns, dating back to the late teens and early 1920s.  Like Django Unchained, these early films reverse the trajectory of Wister’s original myth, but movies like Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 The Symbol of the Unconquered should not be called revisionist westerns.  Instead, both films, like their heroes, make demands on the genre itself: if the western is a form which celebrates freedom, Tarantino and Micheaux suggest, what better hero than an African-American fighting the evil embodied by the Ku Klux Klan?  Pioneer African-American filmmaker Micheaux’s silent masterpiece, which was restored in the 1990s, can now be seen on YouTube with Max Roach’s masterful score (for more on the restoration of the film, see Jane M. Gaines’ Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era, page 331, and Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences).

1920-Symbol-of-the-Unconquered
Image from The Museum of African American Cinema

While Hugh Van Allen (Walker Thompson) is the hero of The Symbol of the Unconquered, Eve Mason, the heroine portrayed by the luminous Iris Hall, is the focus of most of Micheaux’s attention.  Having inherited a plot of land from her grandfather, “an old negro prospector,” she “leaves Selma, Alabama, for the Northwest” in order to “locate the land.”  When she arrives, she falls in love with Van Allen, a black homesteader whose property borders her grandfather’s land.  The subtitle of the restored version of the film, “A Story of the Ku Klux Klan,” indicates the dangers Eve will face as The Knights of the Black Cross threaten Van Allen.  When the film’s villain, Jefferson Driscoll (Lawrence Chenault), discovers that Van Allen’s property possesses tremendous oil reserves, he enlists Old Bill Stanton to drive the black homesteader away.

Warned of the impending danger, Eve promises, “I’ll ride to Oristown and bring back help.”  A title card then asks us to imagine “The infernal ride” as Eve returns in what appears to be a rodeo costume.  In her fringed buckskin jacket and white hat, she mounts a horse and rides in daylight, as Micheaux cuts to images of the hooded knights, riding in darkness, their torches blazing, their faces eerie and obscure.  In the fragments of the film which are left to us, it is impossible to tell if they are pursuing her, or if they are gathering to torch Van Allen’s tent; the climax of the film in which, as the title card tells us, these midnight riders are “annihilated” is also missing, but the resolution of the story remains intact.  Eve and Van Allen, now an oil baron, fall in love and, in the movie’s final scene, embrace.

The most powerful image of Micheaux’s film is not this final embrace but the shot of Eve Mason on her horse, riding furiously to Oristown to raise the alarm.  Like Django’s journey, hers is a return, and her presence is a demand, not for control but for justice.  While the white cowboy’s privilege lies in his ability to choose between a quiet life in civilization or an escape to the territory, Django and Eve exist in a world in which this choice has been denied to them.  They must reclaim the ability to make this choice, and when they do so, both choose in favor of the domestic spaces which inspired them to take this “infernal ride” in the first place.  Perhaps, then, we can read both Django Unchained and The Symbol of the Unconquered not as westerns but as comedies in the Shakespearean sense, in which the forces of evil are contained, and a world of chaos is redeemed as our heroes—and heroines—marry their beloveds and, like dime-novel cowboys, ride off into the sunset.

References

Django Unchained.  Dir. Quentin Tarantino.  Perf. Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington.  The Weinstein Company, 2012.  Film.

Gaines, Jane M.  Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.  Print.

Kimmel, Michael.  Manhood in America: A Cultural History.  New York: The Free Press, 1996.  Print.

The Symbol of the Unconquered.  Dir. Oscar Micheaux.  Perf. Iris Hall, Walker Thompson, Lawrence Chenault, Mattie Wilkes, E.G. Tatum.  1920.  Film.

 

I Am Bart Beaty! — Slight Return

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A couple weeks back I noted that in his Comics vs. Art book, Bart Beaty hadn’t cited a number of essays of mine that were relevant to his arguments. I suggested that such was often the fate of bloggers. Beaty responded in comments by confirming that he did not in fact read blogs. (The exchange was somewhat more heated than that, so click through to the links if you find that sort of thing entertaining.)

Anyway, I was poking around the internets, and much to my surprise discovered that this essay of mine, which Beaty does not mention, though it parallels a number of his thoughts on Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown — is actually cited in the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature by Charles Hatfield in his essay about Peanuts. (The book was published in 2011.)

My essay was originally published in 2005 in TCJ, so it’s maybe a bit tangential to my point about blogging often not being on the radar for academics. And, of course, the fact that someone else read my piece and Beaty didn’t doesn’t mean that Beaty committed some sort of sin against scholarship — no one can read and cite everything. Still, it was funny to find the mention so soon after I’d talked about the essay not being mentioned.

On the other end; Corey Creekmur, my editor on the Wonder Woman book I’m working on, recently read my ms and mentioned a couple of books that I should probably read and cite as relevant to portions of my discussion. One of the books he said I needed to look at? Bart Beaty’s volume Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. (Which I’ve just started, and which, in its initial pages, discusses the significance of the fact that academics in mass culture studies often don’t cite Fredric Wertham.)

Utilitarian Review 12/29/12

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On HU

Somewhat shortened week with the holiday, but here’s what we had:

Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on Ellen Raskin’s Christmas illustrations.

My nine-year-old drew a Santa Tiger.

I talked about Nigerians invading London in John Christopher’s The Long Winter.

I suggested it might be worthwhile to think of comics as a genre rather than a medium.

I posted about Trollope and capitalism and lazy lordlings.

Kim Thompson on Tintin in the Congo.

 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice I argue that, contra Mike Huckabee, Jesus really would not have blamed children for getting shot.

At the Atlantic I talk about Jared Diamond’s new book and child-rearing among traditional societies.

 
Other Links

Karen Swallow Prior on Mary’s radical declaration of consent.

C.T. May detourns an HU comments thread.

Andrei Molotiu on abstract comics and systems theory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates with a great post on living prepared for violence or prepared for non-violence.

And I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s worth linking again to this nifty romance comics blog.

sequential_crush_header01

 
This Week’s Reading

I finished a preview copy of Bee Ridgway’s River of No Return; read Jason Mittel’s Genre and Television; read Trollope’s The Claverings, and read the second dreadful Fifty Shades of Grey book.

Kim Thompson on Tintin in the Congo

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Domingos Isabelinho’s post on the Belgian courts and Tintin in the Congo provoked an interesting discussion in comments. I thought in particular I’d highlight Kim Thompson’s comment:

(1) At this date I think it’s irresponsible to publish TINTIN IN THE CONGO in kid-friendly formats without a warning or contextual introduction of sorts. (I specify “kid-friendly formats” because I don’t really have a problem with the expensive, black-and-white facsimile ARCHIVES format version, either the French one or the now-out-of-print Last Gasp English language version.)

(2) That said, I’m very, very, uncomfortable with the idea of legally enforcing the addition of this material under threat of a ban (and I have the American free-speech-libertarian’s extreme discomfort at European and Canadian “hate-speech” bans).

(3) That said, I can well see why someone who was sensitive to the material becoming so frustrated with the adamant refusal of those who control it to concede to this very reasonable request that they take legal action.

(4) And it’s somewhat unfair to accuse Mondondo of wanting to flat-out ban the book when it seems pretty explicit that he’s looking for the contextual warning and the ban is more of an if-they-can’t-agree-to-that threat that is part of the lawsuit.

(5) TINTIN THE CONGO is clearly not harmless, and I suspect those who minimize its toxicity, whether journalists or judges, do so to justify their own squeamishness on point 2.

(6) My guess is that if Hergé was still alive he’d either ask that the book be withdrawn (as it was at certain times) or insist on that kind of contextual material himself.

(7) It’s nice that later in life he was publicly and vocally mortified at the content of TINTIN IN THE CONGO himself, although maybe a little creepy that he seemed more genuinely distressed at Tintin’s bloodthirsty hunting rampage.

(8) I love TINTIN IN THE CONGO.

(9) I recognize TINTIN IN THE CONGO is evil.

(10) But I think in creating it Hergé was at worst misguided and naïve.

250px-TinTin_Congo

Lady Ongar Goes to Market

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A while back I wrote about the gentlemanly ideal in Trollope. Specifically, I argued that, while the idea of a gentleman might be used as a way to criticize or undermine the ideals of capitalism, it also seemed inseparable from traditional prejudices, like anti-semitism. So in Trollope’s novel The Prime Minister, the evil capitalist who cares only for money is also a Jew. Capitalism may promote a corrosive individualism, but what’s corroded is in no small part traditional social arrangements and prejudices, such as those against Jews. From the perspective of Trollope’s novel, there doesn’t seem to be any way to retain a communal ethics without preserving a nativist and explicitly inegalitarian homogeneity.

Trollope’s novel The Claverings also contrasts capitalism with gentlemanliness, though to somewhat different effect. The action of the novel begins when Julia Brabazon jilts her lover, Harry Clavering, in order to marry a dissipated duke. Julia says, straight out, that she is marrying for money — a choice that she soon comes to see, and which the novel very much sees, as a sin. The business of the book becomes, to no small degree, that of punishing Julia for her mercantilism. This is accomplished by smearing her good name; the Duke dies within a year, but before doing so he falls out with his new wife, and spreads it about that she has been unfaithful to him. As a result, and thanks to the norms of the day, she is viewed as a fallen woman, and no one will speak to her. She is left almost entirely alone with her money, a pariah punished (albeit for the wrong crime) by social ostracism.
 

Lady Ongar and Harry Clavering by Mary Ellen Edwards
Harry Clavering and Lady Ongar by Mary Ellen Edwards

 

The market destroys Julia…but other characters aren’t so unfortunate. Julia’s first lover, Harry Clavering, for example, seems pretty much as perfidious as his ex — but instead of chastisement, the book bends over backwards and then some to make sure he gets everything he wants. After Julia leaves him, he makes another engagement to a bland angel-in-the-house type named Florence Burton — the daughter of a civil engineer, from whom Harry is learning his trade. Because Harry is poor, the marriage must be delayed for some time — and in the meanwhile, Julia returns with her husband dead and however many thousands and thousands of pounds in hand. Harry all but proposes to her again, effectively jilting Florence as he himself was jilted. But whereas the first jilting makes Julia miserable forever, the second barely slows Harry down. He soon decides to stay true to Florence, no one holds his vacillation against him — and then Trollope improbably uses a storm at sea to kill off all the people between Harry and a lucrative baronetcy. All of which is especially frustrating since, as Trollope admits at several points, Harry is a weak and characterless nonentity, whose main talent is making himself pleasing to women of greater worth than himself.

To some degree, it seems like Harry’s saving grace is in fact his very worthlessness; or, to put it another way, his very incapacity for measuring things through the market. While he sets himself on the path to becoming a civil engineer, it’s soon clear that he has little capacity for work or for pinching pennies. Though he himself is not wealthy, his family is related to nobility. Harry is good in a drawing room, and lovely to talk to, but everyone from his fiancees to his coworkers can see that the life of a capitalist go-getter will make him miserable, poor, and bitter. Indeed, Julia refused to marry him not just because she wanted money herself, but because she felt that without money he would be miserable himself.

It is, then, Harry’s hereditary laziness, the in-bred upper-class parasitism, which makes him a hero. His snobbish inability to provide for himself is why Providence (in the form of Trollope’s storm at sea) shines upon him. On the other hand, Julia’s pragmatism, and, indeed, her ability to withstand adversity (she stays by her husband’s side even while he is calumnating her and dying horribly of drink) is why Providence is against her. She is much the more attractive character of the two — she suffers and loves and fights against great odds, and with all her heart, while Harry’s emotions all seem filtered through a whining tremulous half-assedness. But it is the half-assedness of God’s landed Englishmen, while Julia’s capacity smells of thrifty bankers and brimstone.

There are other competent men of business in the novel; Thomas Burton, Harry’s eventual brother-in-law, is a hard-working civil engineer who has a happy family and is in nowise punished for his ambition or his efficiency. A man who turns his hand to the making of money is forgivable, at least, even if a woman is not.

Trollope has a great deal of sympathy for Julia as well; he takes care to insist that she has been wrongly accused, and even more care to have us feel her loneliness, her love, her remorse, and her pain. But for all that, she is punished, and punished (even by her own estimation) justly.

Which, as with The Prime Minister, leaves the modern reader with something of a dilemma. Trollope’s traditional world, with its rules of conduct, is able to condemn acquisitiveness and the logic of consumption and capitalism. But that criticism seems to be inextricable from traditional class hierarchies and (in this case) traditional gender roles. The Claverings rejects the cutthroat morality of the market, but in doing so, it has to plump for a world in which society and God ruthlessly work to maintain Harry Clavering in the style to which he is accustomed.

Of course, capitalism has its own lazy plutocrats, and the egalitarianism of hard work and opportunity is mostly a cynical myth. But is the myth more cynical, or more harmful, than the worship of tradition for tradition’s sake? If we reject the market, does that mean Lady Ongar has to lose and Harry Clavering has to win? There’s nothing quite like 500 pages of Trollope’s conservatism to make me feel like maybe modernity is worth keeping after all.

Comics As A Genre

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I’ve been reading Jason Mittel’s book “Genre and Television” over Christmas break. In many ways, his take on genre is similar to John Rieder’s. That is, Mittell argues, like Rieder, that genres are constituted not by formal traits, but rather by social or cultural agreements or discourses. So (for example) it might make sense to call something a “comic” even if it were entirely text with no pictures, if the text was written by Dave Sim and came in a floppy format and was sold through a comics store and was part of an ongoing series that people thought of as a comic. Along those lines, a while back I defined comics as those things which are accepted as comics.

I still stand by that definition…but Mittell puts some interesting twists on it. Specifically, when I talk about what things are accepted as comics, I tend to think of the accepting as being done by folks in the comics world, who care about comics. That is, comics is defined by what comics folks (whoever they may be) think of as comics. That can be scholars, fans, readers, or whatever. But to participate in the process of definition, I was assuming, you need to want to be participating in the process of definition. People who don’t care about comics don’t care about comics — someone who has never read or seen a comic is not the person you want to go to for a definition.

Mittell isn’t so sure. For him, television genres are constructed socially, by everyone — even, and sometimes especially, by people who are not fans, or scholars, or even by people who have never watched or thought about the genre in question. Instead, genres are often shaped, or defined, by institutional forces or regulators…or even just by people who have heard something about a show and formed uninformed opinions about it. Thus, early television quiz shows were strongly shaped by federal regulations against lotteries. Even though the Supreme Court eventually determined that game show giveaways were not in fact lotteries, the federal scrutiny of the shows had a strong effect on which shows were made and how, and on public perceptions of the genre, which long had a whiff of scandal and illegitimacy associated with it — perhaps handed down to its progeny, the reality show. (The parallel here with the comics code is fairly obvious.)

As another example, Mittell argues that the genre of talk shows, and especially of daytime talk shows, was importantly shaped and understood through the opinions and ideas of people who did not watch those shows. That is, discussion of the genre — which is in many ways the genre itself — was based on an image of those shows as lowbrow, white trash fare for morons. That’s the vision of those shows that largely circulated as a genre marker in public perception.

Comics, then, is neither constituted by formal elements nor by fan or expert practices or discourses. Rather, it is constituted at least in part by those who do not necessarily read comics at all. And if that’s true, it’s possible that comics are, in fact, in many ways a genre — rather than a medium, which is what most fans and scholars and people who care about comics prefer to think of them as.

Certainly, in the world outside comics-centric blogs, I think there’s little doubt that comics tend to be treated as a genre. For instance, at Netgalley, where book critics can see previews of forthcoming books, comics is one option among many genres, listed as a search option alongside “mystery” or “nonfiction” or “science-fiction”, or what have you. On Amazon, too, there is no separate category for comics; they’re simply subsumed in books, rather than being broken out into their own larger block like movies or music.

Of course, the distinctions between genre and medium is fairly arbitrary anyway. There’s no real formal or ideological reason to think of television as its own medium, for example — it could just as easily be thought of as a genre of film, or both film and television could be thought of as subgenres of “screens,” or even of theater.

Still, the cultural subdivisions are what they are, and the fact is that film, and theater, and even television, are all much more firmly established — institutionally and culturally — as mediums than comics are — a fact which becomes especially clear if you start looking at places and people who maybe don’t care about comics that much to begin with.

So what does it matter if comics are a genre rather than a medium? To some degree, it probably doesn’t matter at all; a comic by any other name will smell as sweet, or as putrid, as the case may be. But, on the other hand, it seems like seeing comics as genre could in some cases shift the context in which comics are discussed, or point towards different questions.

For instance, Mittell talks about the Simpsons as a genre mash-up, in which the genre suppositions of sit-coms, and the genre suppositions of cartoons, are used to undermine or question each other. The formal potential and expectations of cartoons made it possible to create a sit-com with more characters and more venues; the genre expectations of sit-coms made it possible to see a cartoon as aimed at adults (and programmed outside of Saturday morning.)

220px-Bone-completeMany comics could be talked about along similar lines. For example, Maus might be seen as a mash-up of memoir and comics, using tropes of each to create a crossover audience that appeals to a greater number of people than either memoir or comic might have been able to attain on its own. Bone could be seen as mixing comics genre and fantasy genre in a similar way — and/or to tweak the conventions of both. And/or, a television show like Heroes might be seen as combining comics genres with serial evening soap opera.

None of these ideas are necessarily innovative or undiscussed or anything. But I think they might be inflected differently, and perhaps more central, if there were less concern with comics’ medium specificity, and more willingness to think of comics as one genre among many. In particular, there might be less focus on comics’ definitional project, and more focus on how comics has functioned, or been thought of, or been used at specific moments or in specific situations.

Seeing comics as genre might also help to explain, or help in a discussion of, the way that comics often seems to function in popular discourse as a kind of novelty. The “Bang! Biff! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” meme might be seen not so much as an insult to the comics medium, but rather as what the comics genre is most often perceived as offering the mainstream. Just as the Simpsons cartoon form, with its connotations of flexibility and childish freshness, helped reinvigorate the sit-com, so comics’ associations with wild fantasy and childishness may be precisely why people are so interested in a comic book Holocaust memoir, or a comic book fantasy epic, or a comic book piece of journalism, or what have you. Instead of “how is the medium of comics defined?” the question might be, “what pleasures or interest does the comics genre offer?” Rather than trying to figure out how to separate comics from everything else, it might be more useful to look at the many ways in which comics shamelessly and continuously hybridizes.

The Nigerians Invade London

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screen-shot-2012-06-03-at-4-30-20-pmJohn Christopher’s novel, The Possessors, is (among other things) a metaphor of imperial reversal, in which Westerners have the tables turned on them and become colonial victims of space invaders. Christopher’s fantastic Tripods Trilogy also flips colonialism, this time more specifically focused on Christopher’s native England.

Christopher’s “The Long Winter” from 1962, though, seemed like it would be different. I’d heard that it was an apocalyptic tale of a new ice age. No invading aliens; no imperial metaphor.

Shows what I know. The Long Winter is indeed about a new ice age; due to some typically vague scientific gobbledygook, the sun’s rays start to weaken, temperatures plummet, and the British isles, not to mention a large portion of the rest of the world, becomes so cold as to be virtually uninhabitable. Fuel stocks are used up, food becomes scarce, and civilization quickly and efficiently collapses into savagery.

But all of that is really just a set-up for the heart of the novel — which is an elaborate, gleefully mean-spirited excuse to shuffle the English center and the colonized periphery. As Britain disintegrates, all those who can flee desperately to warmer climes — especially Africa. The influx of wealth in that continent creates a new, flush black upper-class. The white immigrants, meanwhile, have, in most cases, lost everything, and become a despised, racial underclass — living in filth and poverty, eking out menial jobs as maids or laborers or prostitutes.

Christopher’s detailing of this reversal is both remorseless and brilliant. In one sequence, the protagonist Andy and his lover, Maddy, having just discovered that their currency is worthless, spend a night on a Nigerian beach rather than pay for lodging they can’t afford — only to be almost arrested under a newly passed white vagrancy law. In another passage, Christopher describes several white boarding school boys talking among themselves with a “fencing unsureness…[a] glib pretense of acceptance into a society which, they knew at heart, would always deny them.” Andy, overhearing them, connects their attitude instantly to that of some Jews he had himself known at boarding school in England.

What’s best about the book, however, is that Christopher is smart enough about the workings of empire to know that it can’t simply be inverted. Oftentimes, narratives which flip power relations simply assume that those on the bottom will behave like those on the top if given the chance. The “moral” ends up being that everyone would misuse power if given the chance — which may be true, but is certainly banal.

Christopher, though, knows that empire can’t be separated from history. Africa in his world is on top…but it wasn’t always so, and that fact matters a lot. Whites may be discriminated against just as blacks used to be, but the exact inflections of that discrimination are slightly different. Sometimes, this difference makes the whites’ situation even worse. Many of the Nigerians that Andy meets clearly relish the Europeans’ come-uppance — they remember suffering under the English boot, and they are eager for payback.

In other ways, though, the legacy of colonialism is a boon for the fallen Europeans — or at least gives them more options in some situations. Andy’s ex-wife, for example, is able to attach herself as a mistress to a wealthy Nigerian in part, Christopher implies, because European beauty standards remain in force. Similarly, many white men who served in European colonial armies are wanted as trainers by the Nigerian military, which is perpetually preparing for war against the white regime in South Africa.

Perhaps Christopher’s smartest reversal, though, is saved for the end of the book, when a Nigerian expedition travels north to colonize England. Andy goes along on the expedition, which is (after some power struggles) led by his Nigerian friend and benefactor, Abonitu. Abonitu repeatedly says that Andy serves as a kind of totem; a sort of living good luck charm. In some ways, this mirrors the manner in which European narratives often rely on a magic Negro — a black marker of authenticity, who provides the hero with spiritual, earthy wisdom. Andy, however, serves a slightly different purpose; he is not a marker of authenticity, but rather an icon of empire. He represents the shining white city of civilization, the position Abonitu, and Nigeria, is trying to occupy. Abonitu dehumanizes Andy, but the dehumanization functions differently than the way that, say, Tonto is dehumanized. Power is inflected by history; for the Nigerians the magic of conquest is not a seductive, humid heart of darkness, but a seductive, cold heart of white. Thus Abonitu describes his desire to take over London:

“I am excited by the idea,” Abonitu said. “And disgusted with myself, a little. When the princesses and queens of ancient Egypt died, they used to keep the bodies until putrefaction set in before handing them over to the embalmers. That was because they found that otherwise the embalmers used them for their lust. London is a dead queen.”

But London isn’t quite as defenseless as a dead queen. Again, history matters; the English — who, after all, still have modern technology, including guns — are able to fend off the Nigerian invasion. On the one hand, I enjoyed the way that Christopher made Abonitu so much more appealing than the English, so that you (or at least I) end up essentially rooting for the colonizer. But still, it is hard to avoid noticing that, in his imperial set pieces, Christopher pretty much always finishes up with a happy ending in which the plucky English throw off their oppressors. However clever his reversals, and however clearly he sees their hypocrisy and their faults, Christopher’s English background is determinative — his people still, somehow, always have to be the good guy. Even if you know how history works, I guess, it’s extremely hard to keep it from working on you.