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The United States at the Center of the Action

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10418385-9395323

1938-8020

Jane Komori,

Japanese History and Culture

Mark W. Driscoll’s second book from Duke University Press, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven, is a historical monograph concerning English, French, and US imperialism and resistance in late Qing China and late Edo and early Meiji Japan (roughly 1800–1920). The book builds on and significantly extends the focus of Driscoll’s previous work on Japanese imperialism. These include his first book, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (2010), as well as his translation of Katsuei Yuasa’s 1934 and 1935 novels concerning the culture of Japanese imperialism, Kannani and Document of Flames (2005). With his first book, Driscoll made his name for an idiosyncratic writing style and the application of diverse concepts from critical theory—especially biopolitics and necropolitics—to interpret the expansion of Japanese imperialism in the early twentieth century and challenge the boundaries of his field. The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven maintains and fortifies these hallmarks, but to considerably less effective ends. While it offers some of the witty, counterintuitive analysis of imperialism that makes Driscoll’s earlier work such a pleasure to read, the new book is overwhelmed by his adventurist use of theory and cluttered neologisms.Before examining the organization and contents of the chapters, consider this example of Driscoll’s style of prose and theorization. In the introduction to the book, Driscoll adopts the term superpredator, infamously used in Hillary Clinton’s 1996 speech for Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign. There Clinton decried the racialized, gang-affiliated “kinds of kids that are called superpredators” to promote the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill and related FBI initiatives to “launch a concerted effort against gangs everywhere.”1 In what is meant to be an ironic reversal, Driscoll uses the term to describe nineteenth-century English, French, and US American imperialists in China and Japan. To do so, Driscoll recounts at length the atrocities committed by English and US American sailors, soldiers, and statesmen marauding in newly “opened” Japanese port cities and in China during and after the Opium Wars. Murders, beatings, rapes, and other attacks on Chinese and Japanese workers were so quotidian, and so ignoble to the tastes of high-ranking English and US American officials, that these officials were moved to condemn them in public rebukes that Driscoll cites extensively. Of course, Chinese and Japanese officials responded as well, and Driscoll frames these condemnations of imperialist violence as follows: Echoing the terms of tough-on-crime leaders in the 1990s like Bill and Hillary Clinton defaming African American teenagers, Euro-whites in China and Japan exhibited “no conscience, no empathy.” However, to displace the Clintons’ racist profiling of Black youth as “superpredators,” when we consider the problem of Euro-white predation . . . it’s clear the denunciation of Qing officials and British diplomats didn’t go far enough. (CC, 42).Further “displacing” Clinton’s use of the term superpredator, Driscoll calls the English, French, and US Americans in China and Japan “Superpredators” with a capital S: just one dismal god in the pantheon of neologized racial archetypes that come to reign over the book.This passage is representative of a persistent problem for the reader of The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: where to draw the line between playful inversion and confounding analogy. Consider also this claim: “Like the black teenage ‘superpredators’ that Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton rawfared [sic] in the 1990s as bereft of ‘all conscience and empathy,’ white capitalist scum in Japan ignored all morality and routinely resorted to ‘violence and lawlessness’ in their quest for short-term riches” (CC, 66). By identifying “white capitalist scum” in nineteenth-century Japan with those “kids” whom Hillary called “superpredators,” what is meant to be a cheeky critique of US American racism comes to sound all too much like its confirmation. Not unlike Hillary, who said of “superpredators” that “we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel,” Driscoll seems primarily concerned with the opportunity for comparison based on the violence of the alleged crimes, rather than the political and intellectual implications of such a comparison. For both, it seems, the historical and intellectual rigor necessary for a structural analysis of violence can come later, after moral condemnation.This review begins with such extended attention to these lines from Driscoll’s book because they neatly illustrate the conceptual problems that undermine the insights of the book. First, the “Superpredator” is emblematic of Driscoll’s ahistorical and undertheorized treatment of race. Second, conceptual moves like these raise a host of questions about the analytic position of scholars like Driscoll who study Asia (and other “areas” the world over) from within the US American academy. In particular, Driscoll’s approach to race in nineteenth-century Asia and the contemporary United States suggests the growing influence of theories from ethnic studies, Black studies, and critical Indigenous studies beyond the fields with which they are typically identified. While we may in many cases consider this a promising development, Driscoll’s particular treatment of theories of race, colonialism, and indigeneity in The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven leads to serious conceptual and political pitfalls.☾ ☾ ☾The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven unfolds through six chapters, with alternating focuses on either China or Japan. The first chapter treats English and US American abuses of Japanese sex workers as well as resistance to imperial domination among the samurai class.2 These samurai, Driscoll argues, organized a “J-hād” against their oppressors: “While not an Islamic jihād, a Japanese jihād or J-hād against whites and their local collaborators was erupting in the erstwhile fairyland” (CC, 58). The following chapters, crisscrossing the East China Sea, follow this general pattern: an elaboration of atrocities committed by the English, French, and US Americans followed by attention to local resistance movements.The second chapter expands Driscoll’s definition of the “Superpredator” to include French Catholic missionaries in Sichuan, whom he calls “Ecclesiastical Superpredators” and who share with French colonial officials a “white fragility” that causes them to carry out “drive-by shootings” of Qing government buildings (CC, 89, 109). It is here that Driscoll introduces Gelaohui (GLH), a poor and working-class riotous political movement that organized rebellions against French missionaries in Sichuan while also confronting Qing repression. Chapter 3 likewise introduces Genyôsha, a western Japanese organization composed of disenfranchised samurai and other diverse figures involved in efforts to oppose early Meiji oligarchs. Chapter 4 provides further discussion of the growth of GLH and its various operations, especially as they revolved around opium rooms, which were key sites of membership recruitment. Through opium rooms, as well as robbing and pirating schemes, the organization carried out a “G(LH)-hād” on imperialists, the Qing government, factory owners, and landlords (CC, 183). The final two chapters of the book persist with the histories of Gelaohui and Genyôsha through both groups’ conversion from radical social movements to organizations thoroughly implicated in the state apparatuses and industries they had initially opposed. Driscoll narrates Gelaohui’s development into an organization that encompassed wealthy classes and staked out its own profits in the opium trade. Meanwhile, in Genyôsha, a virulent nationalism and various coal-mining projects overtook the heterogeneous group that had first gathered to oppose what they perceived as Meiji oligarchs’ uncritical embrace of imperial domination.This is, without a doubt, an admirably ambitious approach to the history of the region that immediately sets The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven apart from other recent monographs in East Asian studies. It may come as a surprise, however, that Driscoll’s six chapters are meant to evidence this exhilarating opening claim: “While Climate Caucasianism [was] built on the conquest of the Americas and the subsequent trafficking of nearly 13 million African slaves across the Atlantic, it ultimately achieved planetary preeminence by military subjugation of the prosperous polities of China and Japan in the Asia-Pacific” (CC, 3). Indeed, at the book’s outset, Driscoll stakes his primary intervention on relabeling the “Anthropocene,” a term meant to denote the overwhelming impact of human activity on the present geological epoch, as “Climate Caucasianism.” In this account, English victory in the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) and the US invasion of Japan in 1853, rather than the events typically identified as precipitating the end of the Holocene, are held up as the most important conditions for today’s “climate breakdown” (CC, ix).At the same time, Driscoll curiously disavows the growing interest in East Asian studies in historical and contemporary Chinese and Japanese relationships to the natural world—a trend particularly strong in Japan studies as scholars in the field grapple with the devastation wrought by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster as well as accelerating ecological degradation across the region. Driscoll does state that “I need to clarify that nonrelational, extra-active postures and extractive operations preceded the arrival of Euro-American capitalists to East Asia,” while he perfunctorily acknowledges Mark Elvin’s Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (2004); Brett L. Walker’s Lost Wolves of Japan (2008); Ian Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas, and Walker’s anthology Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (2013); and Federico Marcon’s Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (2015), just a few of the works that have sought to understand present climate issues within the context of precolonial human interventions in the environment. But to clear these arguments aside and make way for Climate Caucasianism, Driscoll writes, “At an entirely different scale, . . . Climate Caucasianism should be seen as a global power wielding unprecedented force to both directly intervene in, and less directly, interfere with the planet’s biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere” (CC, 16). Readers seeking an environmental history that might actually argue such a claim, rather than state it as self-evident, should look to the works listed above. There is little effort in The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven to substantiate this argument, let alone with the persuasive force required to displace the Anthropocene from center stage of academic vogue.The relevance of “Climate Caucasianism” to the structure and logic of the book actually has more to do with several separate and unintended features of its argument, in particular the preference for neologism over analysis and a hackneyed attention to race. Most illustrative of these problems is the loose taxonomy of neologized racial archetypes and features that Driscoll devises to open the book. Over just a few short sections of the introduction, he defines the English and US American Climate Caucasianists (typically treated as a single entity, interchangeably termed “Euro-Americans” or “Euro-whites”) as the “Speed Race(r).” Punning on both the clipper vessels by which they transported opium and Facebook’s erstwhile corporate motto, “Move fast and break things”—which also serves, bizarrely, as one of the book’s epigraphs—Driscoll seeks to define the “race” of the imperialists according to their lightning quick, sci-fi technologies. Driscoll juxtaposes the “Speed Race(r)” with what he calls the “Stopped Incarce-Races” (CC, 25). To explain, Driscoll offers only the following, in parentheses: “(think stop and frisk, stopped or “arrested” development, racist traffic stops, etc.)” (CC, 25). The “Stopped Incarce-Races” are produced and exploited by systems of warfare, “lawfare,” and “rawfare,” in which “nonliving minerals, most women, nonwhite humans, and extrahuman nature are all alienated and reduced to ‘raw’ materials” (CC, 4). These operations are part of the structure of “CO2lonialism,” which, combined with “white racial capitalism,” is defined by “an epistemic logic” of “extra-action—the domination of ‘inferior’ humans and nonliving extractables from outside and above” (CC, ix). Their function of “extra-acting” allows for a third elaboration of the Climate Caucasianist’s racial type: they are “$ubjects” who use their “extractiv-eyes/Is” to regard and “extra-act” value from Asians and all other nonwhite peoples, who, in stark contrast, inhabit their world by peaceful “intra-action” (CC, 2–16).Beyond creating an irksome reading experience, Driscoll’s neologisms allow him to cherry-pick concepts and theories from the fields of ethnic studies, Black studies, and critical Indigenous studies without substantively engaging them. By translating these concepts into his own zany vocabulary, Driscoll elides the complexities of the divergent approaches to race, colonialism, and indigeneity in each of these fields. Neologism, in other words, becomes a mask for dilettantism. Further, by introducing the neologisms in binaries, like Superpredator and Stopped Incarce-Races, Driscoll scaffolds a rigidly Manichaean racial schema through which he oversimplifies the play of imperial power and local resistance. In the universe of The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven, there is only CO2lonial extra-action dominating a harmoniously intra-acting, monolithic, and ahistorical Asian indigeneity. There are the Superpredators, be they Mark Zuckerberg or Queen Victoria’s opium dealers, and there are the Indigenous ecological protectors, “arrested” in time.The problems generated by Driscoll’s argument made through neologism are therefore threefold. The first is anachronism, and the second is a highly embellished but conceptually impoverished understanding of race. Take, for another example, Driscoll’s translation of Aizawa Seishisai’s phrase son’nō jōi (尊皇攘夷), from his 1825 text Shinron (新論). Son’nō jōi, which became a slogan for resistance to the late Tokugawa shogunate and European and US American imperial domination, is typically translated as “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians.” In his iconoclastic fashion, Driscoll renders the term as “Revere the Emperor, Fight the Whites” (CC, 23). This is not simply a translation that takes significant liberties; it also raises a set of questions about what whiteness is as racial identity, both historically and in terms of Driscoll’s own analysis (CC, 23). Driscoll makes no effort to historicize the term whites, which, to paint in very broad strokes, was produced in the context of US American settler colonialism and the enslavement of African peoples and their descendants, and especially the capitalist class’s manipulation of such a social arrangement.3 (It is worth mentioning again that these are the precise histories that Driscoll sought to displace from the Anthropocene-cum-Climate Caucasianism.) Scholars like David R. Roediger have argued that the category of “white” was subject to significant revision in the United States during the period of Aizawa’s writing, making Driscoll’s referent doubly unclear: “the whites” who were to be fought could by no means be assumed on either side of the Pacific.4In substituting whites for barbarians, Driscoll also excises Aizawa’s phrase from the protonationalist context in which it was produced. Aizawa was responding to early US American naval incursions in Japanese waters, and his “barbarians” were inaugural figures in a complex set of Japanese accounts of difference linked to a racially inflected, burgeoning nationalism. In particular, Shinron articulated a vision of the supremacy of the Japanese nation and people, expressed in the concept of kokutai (国体), or the “national body,” which informed subsequent Japanese imperialist exploits. Aizawa argued that the transforming Japanese state must adopt Western military technologies so as to enter the global competition of imperialist expansion. This is a nuance of son’nō jōi that is effaced if read through the contemporary category of “whites.” The anachronistic translation of Aizawa’s term guts Driscoll’s analysis of regional and historical specificity, only to reinforce a pat notion of “whiteness.”The third and final problem with the neologisms that structure The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven is that they tend to conflate all racialized and Indigenous peoples, flatten Indigenous relationships to land, and narrow the possibilities for resistance to colonialism. For example, to fill the absence of environmental historical analysis in his argument for Climate Caucasianism and “Asian Ecological Protection,” Driscoll stretches concepts from feminist science studies and object-oriented ontology. Driscoll takes up Donna Haraway’s “multi-species democracy” and Karen Barad’s “intra-action” as his central concepts for understanding Chinese and Japanese relationships to the natural world, but details about what practices and beliefs constitute these arrangements are not forthcoming (CC, 7). Instead, Driscoll ontologizes the Asian human and Asian nature by positing them as perfectly static prior to encountering the destructive effects of colonialism, displacing the North American settler colonial trope of the “Vanishing Indian” onto Asian “eco-ontologies” (CC, 18). Dodging the reality of Chinese and Japanese interventions in the natural world for centuries prior to imperial incursion, from massive hydraulic projects in China to deforestation and elimination of indigenous species like wolves in Japan, Driscoll substitutes a calcified, nature-loving figure of the Asian “ecological protector” for the richly conflicted and complex material histories and practices of the region. Of course, this understanding of East Asian history and culture cannot account for the transition to carbon-intensive economies, even while this is the ostensible purpose of the concept of Climate Caucasianism. Furthermore, Driscoll plots the Asian indigene with twentieth-century anticolonial and antiracist struggles in the United States as his primary coordinates. From the Black Panther Party to #NODAPL, Driscoll prefers constant recourse to US American referents over analysis of how, exactly, Chinese and Japanese societies interact with the ecologies they are embedded in, and how these interactions were transformed by imperial intervention.Finally, the transformations of the early, radical forms of Gelaohui and Genyôsha into conservative and imperialist organizations, detailed in chapters 5 and 6 of the book, lead Driscoll to wrap up The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven not with conclusions drawn from the analysis of the preceding chapters but with the hurried presentation of a philosophy and political orientation drawn from critical Indigenous theory. Seeking to redeem Gelaohui’s and Genyôsha’s early political agendas (and, perhaps, the arc of the book itself) by way of yet another oblique comparison, Driscoll closes the book with the following: “Describing the intra-active connection the past has with the future, Native American scholar and artist Elizabeth LePensée [sic] explains that Indigenous Futurism emphasizes both the dynamism provided by the past to futures to come and the ultimate inseparability of the what she calls ‘past/present/future—the hyperpresent now. . . . We look seven generations before and seven generations ahead” (CC, 309). Indigenous futurism, LaPensée, and associated thinkers like Grace Dillon make no other appearance in the book.The profound problem here is that where Driscoll seems to want to use analogy to establish grounds for solidarity, he instead displaces the nuances of Chinese and Japanese history, politics, philosophy, and ecology in favor of an analysis so deeply steeped in the grammar of twenty-first-century US politics and academe that it is more instructive of the structure of its mother tongue than its objects of study. While there would be significant political and intellectual benefits to research that clarifies the relationship between the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples against US settler colonialism and the struggles of peoples in Asia and the Pacific confronting US imperialism, Driscoll’s analysis does not get us very far toward this goal. In fact, his overreliance on superficial comparisons actually causes him to divide the phenomena he is concerned with, rather than analyze their structural inseparability. Genocide of Indigenous peoples at home and devastation of Asian and Pacific Islander communities abroad come to simply bear some resemblance, rather than constitute interlocking elements of the historical process by which the United States has ascended to global hegemony. In the end, the effect of the cascade of analogies and neologisms that structure The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven leaves the reader to wonder whether, if the peoples and histories that Driscoll details could not be refracted in the lexicon of the US American academy, they would be of any value at all.☾ ☾ ☾The year 2021 marks ten years since the Obama administration declared its strategic “Pivot to Asia,” most famously articulated in Hillary Clinton’s article “America’s Pacific Century.” There Clinton wrote that “the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”5 Championing her “forward-deployed diplomacy” to both established US American footholds and “emerging powers” in the region, Clinton raised Pacific-facing foreign policy as the remedy to internal economic crisis and an increasingly embattled position in the Middle East.6Besides advocating for the fortification of US military strongholds in Asia and the Pacific, Clinton’s statement reads like a forecast for the arrival of The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven. Indeed, her declaration could almost be a description of the brand of area studies that Driscoll represents. By reading the stakes of East Asian histories through the intellectual and political problems of twenty-first-century US American politics, Driscoll performs a thoroughly imperial operation of his own. His theoretical speed racing, rather than celebrating racialized and Indigenous peoples as agents of resistance to capitalism, colonialism, and climate change, renders them simply as fodder for academic profiteering. And all the while, the radical histories that one might have hoped to find in The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven lie in waste somewhere in the Pacific, like the military detritus that promises only to grow now that the United States has once again pivoted its attention to Asia.