A Season of Stories 8: Journeys

This special episode combines all the stories from Season 8…

“A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey to the City” – Dr. J. T. Roane, Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies at Arizona State University

“Cotton: Connecting the Atlantic World” – Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University

“Soju: A Liquor’s Global Journey” – Dr. Hyunhee Park, Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center

“The Columbian Exchange” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Associated Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz

“Hotel Owners and the Shape of Japanese Transpacific Migration” – Dr. Yukari Takai, Research Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research at York University and Visiting Research Scholar at the International Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan

“Chinese Migration and the Shaping of Costa Rica” – Dr. Benjamín Narváez, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Morris

“A US Consul on the Road to a Coup” – Dr. Abby Mullen, Term Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and Host/Executive Producer of the Consolation Prize podcast

“Using Astrology to Plan Journeys” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston

“The ‘Conflict Thesis’: A Resilient Idea’s Journey” – Dr. James C. Ungureanu, Humanities Teacher at Trinity Classical Academy in Santa Clarita, California

Transcript

90 Second Narratives

Season 8: “Journeys”

Episode 10: “A Season of Stories 8: Journeys”

Sky Michael Johnston: 

Welcome to 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that brings you “little stories with BIG historical significance.” I am the host and creator of the podcast, Sky Michael Johnston. Today marks the conclusion of Season 8 of the show. As usual, that means this is a special Season of Stories episode which brings together all of the stories from the past season. The common theme of these stories is Journeys.

Let’s jump right in to the first story which comes to us from Dr. J. T. Roane. Listen now to the story, “A Black Woman’s Spiritual Journey to the City.”

J. T. Roane:

Crossing the thresholds between worlds toward a Black migrant phenomenology of the city, just before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mrs. W, a black woman in her early thirties moved from a rural community in Virginia to Philadelphia. One day while still new to the city she discovered a group of men gambling in front of her stoop and was dismayed by her encounter of the world of the city’s underground, here materializing as mobile and temporary instantiation of the illicit economic order outside sanctioned exchanges. Perhaps it frightened her because she had witnessed or heard about the potential for physical violence and coercion in unregulated speculative financial arranges like dice games. Perhaps her rearing in the church of her upbringing in the South set specific prohibitions against gambling that she maintained after her relocation. Whatever the nature of her alarm, Mrs. W recalled how her experience with the crap shooters prompted a prophetic vision and an experience with the formless but transformative Holy Spirit. “I felt myself lifted high on a mountain, so high I could see, I could look and see over the world.” The sun which was going down right at her back cast a transfiguring light over the urban landscape. Suddenly, the endless rows of dense housing gave way to open fields. “It looked like it does in the country, like if you went to the end of the field you could touch it,” she recalled. “This represents the Son of God,” a voice rang out to her. The disembodied voice went on to charge her with an earthly mission, “You must warn men and women to be holy,” it demanded. As she recalled, Mrs. W took to heart the work of spreading holiness, for her an ecstatic feeling, “Just like an electric shock,” as well as its attendant doctrine of purity and sanctity in anticipation of the imminent second coming. 

By the time Black folklorist, Arthur Huff Fauset, interviewed Mrs. W in the early 1940s, for his book, Black Gods of the Metropolis, she had made her spiritual home as “an ardent worker” as part of a holiness group praying for the end of the world. Through her spiritual mission, Mrs. W elaborated a vision for transformation, interpreting the displacement of an agricultural field as a sign that she must work to draw more people into the fold of holiness, a temporal and spatial pocket defined by proximity to divinity, healing and righteousness, a world of anticipation, a state yet to come yet already practiced in the bonds of the community that she forged in the storefront holiness church. Critically, the multiple social, geographic, and temporal registers operating within Mrs. W’s recollection provide an opening for outline the complex cartography Black migrants built of the city and the distinctive phenomenology of the city they wrote in their practices, actions, discourses, inscriptions, and efforts. Even through its cartographic registers, Mrs. W’s memory is not a one-to-one reproduction of the series of events, a proven inscription in the archive unshaped by her rendering of it to Fauset and his interpretive rubrics as a folklorist, or a straightforward linear mapping of a space. Rather, the architectonics of her memory-scape suggest the meaningful nature of this juxtaposition of what I call dark agoras, this encounter with the gamblers punctuating her cognizance of the competing modalities of living in the city shaping her and her collective identity formation as well as the narratability of experiences in the city.

Sky Michael Johnston:

When we think of who takes journeys, we are usually think of people. But our next stories remind us that material objects and creatures of all kinds also travel. The journeys that things take also shape our world.

Our next three stories are “Cotton: Connecting the Atlantic World” told by Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson; “Soju: A Liquor’s Global Journey” told by Dr. Hyunhee Park; and “The Columbian Exchange” told by me.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson:

I am looking at a square cotton canvas about 10 cm by 10 cm. A grid of black and white tiles – they look like domino counters - have been painted on it in alternating patterns. This canvas was given to me by the wonderful artist and Turner Prize winner, Lubaina Himid CBE. It is one segment of a larger, more extensive work called Cotton.Com that Lubaina made in 2002. The art work consists of about 100 similar anvases to the one I just described, all painted in black and white, with different patterns inspired by 19th century textile sample books. 

Installed in a gallery, the canvases would spread across the wall, while below or across from them is a brass plaque that reads, “He said I looked like a painting by Murillo as I carried water for the hoe gang, just because I balanced the bucket on my head.” This quote is written from the perspective of an enslaved woman, as she goes out to offer water to the enslaved people picking cotton and it was inspired by a description Himid read in Frederick Olmstead’s account of his travels to the US South in the 1850s, just before the beginning of the US civil war. 

The artwork draws quite specifically on two aspects of the trans-atlantic cotton trade: the mobility of cotton and the ways the trade connected different people and places within a global capitalist network, particularly enslaved people in the United States and cotton factory operatives in Lancashire, England – a region known as Cottonopolis in the 19th centuy. 

The artwork foregrounds its close connection to these histories, but it also uses cotton as an archive – each canvas stands in for the transatlantic journey of cotton as it moved from plantation to factory, which she imagines to be like a form of communication – hence the title which alludes to digital communications. Lubaina describes how she speculated that pieces of hair, or skin or blood may have clung to the cotton, physically bringing the live of enslaved people and white workers into contact. The black and white paint on each canvas stands in for these moments of physical interaction. She is also references the actual passage of letters from abolitionist factory operatives in the UK who wrote to Abraham Lincoln in support of the Emancipation Proclamation. What I found in researching this work was that abolitionists, particularly Black abolitionists, also used cotton to make these connections, to emphasize how transatlantic slavery underpinned the social and economic structures of British and North American society, and to call for its abolition. I began to see how cotton was not only a central commodity in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, it also had important ideological significance, as a material whose use and representation could frame meanings about the value of people and their labour. 

Lubaina’s work is central to my book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, in which I use cotton – its trade and its centrality to slavery and colonialism – to consider how art, commerce and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. I trace cotton’s movement between the US, the UK and later West Africa to consider its relationship to constructions of race and geography, to forms of value and to meanings of vision and visuality. As with Cotton.com I pay close attention to the forms of cotton that moved between places and how cotton materially influenced meanings and values about Blackness, and Black people as resources. As Frederick Douglass liked to remind his audiences, when the price of cotton rose, so too did the value of an enslaved person. Returning to Cotton.com, remember I mentioned how Lubaina includes a quote about a young woman, who is imagined only through her labour addressing the commodification of Black life in slavery. In my book too I explore this relationship of commodification to suggest how it became part of the way Black people are visualized in the nineteenth century, and still today. While the book is based in the 19th century through cases studies, it also uses the work of contemporary artists like Lubaina Himid and Hank Willis Thomas, I also focus on how Black communities, artists and intellectuals dismantle these white supremacist frameworks, and create other ways of seeing and valuing each other that can redesign how we interact today. 

Hyunhee Park:

For those who have not yet tasted soju, or heard about it, soju is the distinctive national spirit of Korea, a clear and colorless distilled liquor similar to vodka. It was only available inside Korea in the twentieth century, but soju is now one of the world’s most popular drinks, largely thanks to the phenomenon of Korean Wave (Hallyu). This is common knowledge. Less well known is soju’s long journey to become what it is today, a truly global journey. Before the mass-produced, industrial soju of the twentieth century, Koreans made soju using traditional distillation techniques, coming to Korea via broad Eurasian connections, along with Chinese distilled liquors and Mongol arak, during the era of Mongol dominance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  

The word soju is the Korean reading of Chinese shaojiu, “roast liquor,” “cooked liquor,” but another distilled liquor arriving in Korea about the same time, was called arak, arkhi in Mongolian, which is from the Arabic word ‘araq, “sweat” or “perspiration,” essential drops created by vapor during distillation. 

Early Eurasian societies, including China and those of the Middle East, as well as the Mongols, had their own distilled liquors, adapting existing technologies to produce them. In the case of the Mongols, they produced their own variant arak easily spread throughout Eurasia and beyond using a portable technology. Shaojiu and arak came to Korea, along with many other things, during the period when Korea was connected to the Mongol empire and Mongol China as a “vassal” and “son-in-law” state. Once in its new Korean environment, soju, which was often identified with arak, went through localization. It became popular as hard liquor, but also for official gifts, in medicine, in ritual, taking advantage of soju’s preservability. After new transformations in the tumultuous twentieth and twenty-first centuries, soju started its global journey to a wider world. 

Soju’s global history brilliantly demonstrates that, along with the people traveling cross-cultural networks, goods and ideas like distilled liquors and technology went too, with significant impact on lives. We continue to be amazed that so many things we enjoy have only developed after long historical transformations. We can enjoy various foods and liquors like soju only thanks to global journeys.  

Sky Michael Johnston:

One of the most famous, and consequential, journeys in the history of humanity was Christopher Columbus’ fateful journey across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Think for a second about all the things named “Columbia” or “Colombia,” a word derived from the name Columbus. Companies, cities, universities, and even a nation come to mind.

Commemorations of Columbus’ journey, as extravagant as they have historically been, do not exaggerate the historical significance of the journey. It was the catalyst for sustained contact between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, a defining feature of our world ever since.

It wasn’t until 1972, however, that the historian, Alfred W. Crosby, attached Columbus’ name to a new term that shapes how many conceptualize the journey and its aftermath today. The term is the “Columbian Exchange.” It denotes that travel between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres involved the exchange of much more than people, ideas, or cultures. Animals, plants, metals, and diseases also travelled. Some things crossed the Atlantic to become firmly entrenched in the ecologies and human societies of their new homes, like tomatoes in Italy or the free-roaming mustangs of North America. 

More importantly, tangled interactions across the Atlantic, and then around the globe, have given cover to the naturalization or veiling of processes of conquest. In fact, the name Columbus itself has been used to link Europeans to the lands they sought to possess. The idea of the Columbian Exchange, however, reminds us that there was a process by which the Eastern and Western Hemispheres were melded into what they are today and that it didn’t happen inherently on its own.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Our next two stories offer unique perspectives on transpacific migration from Asia to the Americas in the early twentieth century. Here is Dr. Yukari Takai with the story, “Hotel Owners and the Shape of Japanese Transpacific Migration” and Dr. Benjamín Narváez with the story, “Chinese Migration and the Shaping of Costa Rica.”

Yukari Takai:

At the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Japanese migrants left their island nation, landed in Hawai’i, only to depart for Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver, or Victoria. They went to the continental destinations after having spent days, weeks, or months in Hawai’i. Many workers, Japanese born, first-generation immigrants, chose to move to the continental United States or Canada in search of higher wages and better working conditions. The extent of transmigration of Japanese depleted the much-needed labor supply in the sugar cane fields in Hawai’i. Their departure alarmed white plantation owners, Japanese diplomats, and immigration authorities and policymakers—Japanese, American, or Canadian. 

I examine the role of Japanese immigrant hotel owners and boarding house keepers in Honolulu and Vancouver who shaped the transpacific circuits of workers in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This was the very time when Tokyo, Washington, and Ottawa sought to curb the mobility of allegedly undesirable foreigners or nationals on the basis of race, class, or gender. I suggest that at the center of the Japanese transmigration were the Japanese immigrant hotels and boarding houses which undercut, acquiesced, or collaborated with the power of the state authorities and Hawai’i’s economic powerhouse, that is sugar plantation owners on the islands. Situated between migrants and state regulators, the two more familiar parties of migration, immigrant hotel keepers at port cities illustrate an important, yet little studied, aspect of the migration process. Drawing on transpacific perspectives and through an in-depth analysis of these brokers of labor migration, I seek to complicate our understanding of the power, capital, and nation states as they relate to the movement of Japanese immigrant workers across the Pacific Ocean.

Benjamín Narváez:

On November 20, 1930 the Ulúa arrived in Limón, Costa Rica with four Chinese passengers carrying Costa Rican passports. However, after they disembarked, officials became suspicious and detained two of them while the other two escaped. Investigators discovered that their papers were fraudulent and that the men had obtained them with the help of Chinese in Costa Rica and Panama. The former had also bribed some Costa Rican officials. The Chinese involved in this case may have broken Costa Rican law, but they were responding to a racist Chinese exclusion law in the pursuit of community and economic opportunity.

The story of Chinese migration to Costa Rica challenges the country’s myth of exceptionalism—or the idea of a white nation, with a democratic, egalitarian tradition rooted in a smallholder past. During the nineteenth century, approximately one thousand Chinese migrated to Costa Rica. However, from 1897 to 1943 the country banned Chinese immigration. While Chinese exclusion was hemispheric, Costa Rican elites were also using the Chinese as a foil in their efforts to create a hegemonic vision of Costa Rican whiteness that could mask rising social inequalities. 

The Chinese responded to Sinophobia and exclusion by creating a transnational sub-community, while integrating. They turned to each other and the larger diaspora to maintain family and community, create businesses, protect themselves, and circumvent exclusion as another 1000 Chinese immigrated during the ban. That said, Chinese immigrants also culturally adapted, forged business relationships, friendships, and family with Costa Ricans, and they participated in Costa Rican patriotic events, and even naturalized. They also sought help from powerful outside figures. Ultimately, the Chinese contributed to Costa Rica’s economic and social formation, turned the country into an integral part of a larger network of overseas Chinese, and slowly carved out their own space as Chinese-Costa Ricans.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Now, Dr. Abby Mullen, the host of the Consolation Prize podcast, shares a story about one particularly ill-fated journey from the history pages of United States involvement abroad. Here she is with the story, “A US Consul on the Road to a Coup.”

Abby Mullen:

When American soldier William Eaton started his search for Hamet Karamanli in late 1804, he had an audacious plan. His goal: find Hamet in Egypt, bring him to Tripoli, and fight a battle to place Hamet Karamanli on the throne. Hamet would dethrone his younger brother Yusuf, who had been fighting a war against the United States since 1801. Eaton had been on the front lines of this war since the beginning, as consul to Tunis, and after he saw the navy fail time after time, he decided to take matters into his own hands—and stage a coup. In order to pull this off, Eaton assembled a company that included Hamet and his entourage, Christian Greek mercenaries, Bedouin chieftains, and many others, along with a few U.S. Marines. Despite lack of food, lack of funds, and constant fights between members of the company, somehow Eaton managed to make it to Derna, a city in Tripolitania, where the company took the city in a matter of hours. It wasn’t quite the throne of Tripoli yet—but Eaton felt certain that from Derna, he and Hamet could make their move. But for Eaton, the victory turned sour, when the Americans made peace with Yusuf before Hamet could take the throne in Tripoli—and Hamet was left out in the cold.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Up next is my second story from the season, “Using Astrology to Plan Journeys.” It tells the story of some of the considerations that went into planning a journey in the sixteenth century.

Sky Michael Johnston:

What factors do you take into consideration before going on a journey? Do you have any sense of when is a good time for a journey? Or, a good time for a specific type of journey? In sixteenth-century Germany, people had a way of systematizing the good and bad times for many of life’s activities, including travel.

The system they used relied on the calendar and the time of day and was animated by a belief in astrology. One popular sixteenth-century book informed its audiences that during the month of May when the sun was in Gemini, it was a good time to take a trip by land. The month of June when the sun was in Cancer, the book also advised, was a good time to work on the water. What if you were interested in hiking? September and Libra offered an ideal time for that kind of trip. But, if you wanted to hike during other times of the year, you might wish to do so during the hour of Jupiter, which also happens to be a good time to travel by ship.

While forms of astrology remain popular today, we have lost the universe in which this book was printed and originally received. Back then, the earth was still at the center of the universe and the heavens were understood to physically influence the material elements of the world. The universe was still a unified whole, and checking the travel conditions before a trip wasn’t merely a local question, it was a matter of cosmic scale.

Sky Michael Johnston:

To conclude today’s episode, I have special extra-long version of Dr. James C. Ungureanu’s story, “The ‘Conflict Thesis’: A Resilient Idea’s Journey.”

James C. Ungureanu:

When historians of science and religion write about the “conflict thesis,” what are they talking about?

Well, in a nut shell, the “conflict thesis” is the idea that science and religion are fundamentally in conflict. Always have been and always will be. This is a history of war. In that sense, it is an historical argument. Most proponents of the conflict thesis maintain if you look back in history (particularly Christian history but not exclusively Christian history), if you look back, at every moment in the advance of science or new learning, religion has attempted to oppose, oppress, deny scientific progress.

The conflict thesis has been used by many as a meta-narrative, an overarching view that encompasses the entire course of Western civilization. It attempts to explain how modern secular man (i.e., us) came to be.

For several decades now, historians of science, philosophers, and theologians have tried to make sense of this belief that science and religion are at war.

They typically trace the origins of the conflict thesis to the late nineteenth century, specifically among Anglo-American writers. For instance, many scholars point to the scientific naturalists, a Victorian clique made up of biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1828-1895), physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893), and evolutionary philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), among others, who supposedly employed the thesis in their attempt to professionalize and secularize the sciences. More precisely still, most scholars see New York University chemist John William Draper (1811-1882) and historian and first president of Cornell University Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) as co-founders of a philosophy of history that has endorsed the belief that science and religion have been and always will be at odds.

There is a great deal of truth here. But the story is a bit more complicated, and we are only now beginning to recognize that many of the accused did not, in fact, envision a conflict between science and religion. Including Draper and White. The “conflict thesis” itself has had an incredibly complex journey.

To a certain extent, however, these historians of science themselves are guilty of myth making. While it is true that there are many “myths” about the conflict between religion and science, the idea that the nineteenth century witnessed the inception of the “conflict thesis” is not entirely accurate either.

Let me make a few observations here. First, what is often missed in their discussions of Draper and White is an appreciation of the wider religious context in which such historical narratives appeared.  We must appreciate the wider religious context in which such historical narratives appeared. Advances in the natural and historical sciences, whether intentional or not, seemed to many a direct assault on orthodox Christian belief. Debates about the character of religion raged both inside and outside the church during the nineteenth century, and out of these debates emerged new ways of thinking about God, the nature of Christianity, and the historical Jesus. In short, the nineteenth century witnessed a theological revolution.

Secondly, while this new expression of Christianity was deeply contested, many men and women in the nineteenth century believed that the reconciliation of science and religion depended on it. Significantly, those who promoted a more diffusive version Christianity at the end of the century turned the term “theology” into a pejorative. By contrasting the idea of a free, progressive scientific inquiry against the authoritative, reactionary methods of theology, many intellectuals imagined dogma as the obstacle of modern thought, not faith. Thus “conflict” occurred, they believed, not between scientific truth and religious truth, but between contesting theological traditions.

The scientific naturalists Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, and the even Draper and White, all made just such a distinction between theology and religion. What enabled them to make such distinctions were the changes in religious thought that occurred during the century. Draper, for example, argued in his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, which was published in 1863, that Christianity had been “paganized” under Emperor Constantine. Interestingly, he believed that early Christianity was a gift of God whereas ecclesiastical organizations, the church, in other words, were the product human invention.

With the paganization of Christianity, Draper argued, came what he called the “tyranny of theology over thought.” He declared that those “who had known what religion was in the apostolic days, might look with boundless surprise on what was now ingrafted upon it, and was passing under its name.” Even his notorious History of the Conflict, under closer inspection, continues to make such distinctions, as when he argued that he would only consider the “orthodox” or “extremist” position, and not the moderate ones.

White shared much of the same sentiments. By separating religion from theology, White could denounce that the “most mistaken of all mistaken ideas” was the “conviction that religion and science are enemies.” While science has conquered “dogmatic theology,” he argued, it will “go hand in hand with Religion.” For White, science was an aid to religion, encouraging its “steady evolution” into more purified forms.

In short, Draper, White, and the scientific naturalists did not see the conflict as one between science and religion but between “dogmatic theology and science.” More precisely still, the conflict was between contending theological traditions. They believed that theology was not only in conflict with science but also with religion.

Upon deeper reflection, then, the arguments and the history these nineteenth-century scientists and historians promoted is nothing new. They have a long Protestant pedigree. As far back as the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers used history, reason, and natural philosophy in their attack on the Catholic Church. But this history of polemic also demonstrates that these rhetorical strategies quickly backfired. More liberal Protestants used the same polemic of history, reason, and science against their orthodox opponents. By the seventeenth century, an anti-Catholic polemic had transformed into a Protestant self-critique. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, however, religious skeptics, freethinkers, and atheists had appropriated the polemic and used it against all religion.

Thus, the notion that science and religion are inherently at war with one another did not emerge from secular society but from conflicting religious traditions. Having a more accurate understanding of the origins of the “conflict between science and religion” as one that emerged within contending religious traditions will not only give us a better understanding of how it developed, but also why it continues to persist despite decades of scholarship telling us it is false.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the stories you hear on 90 Second Narratives, please give the podcast a great rating and spread the word to your friends.

Season 9 begins in one week with a whole new set stories and a new theme: Friendship. Come back and join us then.