Macpherson, Anne S.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Histoire sociale  Social History, vol. XXXVII, no 73 (mai-May 2004)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 107canevas, voire dun texte divin plus ou moins arrêté » (p. 210) dont ils révèlentlintrigue.Ouvrage touffu, dune grande érudition, qui a le mérite de faire une analyse glo-bale du genre, basée sur une dizaine douvrages et non sur un texte spécifique. Mal-heureusement, le style est parfois déconcertant, sacrifiant la clarté au profit deléloquence. Ce livre analyse toutefois avec finesse les contextes intellectuel et poli-tique de production des oeuvres ce qui permet à lauteur dinsister sur leur caractèrepolémique, qualité déniée par plusieurs. Cet ouvrage sadresse surtout aux cher-cheurs qui connaissent le genre des mémoires. Ils y trouveront de nombreux outilscritiques.Lyse RoyUniversité du Québec à MontréalJuanita De Barros  Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle andResistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889–1924. Montreal and Kingston:McGill-Queens University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 251.Juanita De Barross urban study contributes to several historiographies: that of Guy-ana, that of the British Caribbean in the century between the abolition of slavery andthe rise of mass nationalist movements (1830s1930s), and that of cities across thecolonized worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. De Barros draws widelyon reports emanating from the Colonial Office, British Guianese administration, andGeorgetowns municipal government, as well as on censuses, laws, newspapers, andsecondary literature of the period. In so doing, she has written a pioneering full-length study of one Caribbean city that is both comparatively and theoreticallyinformed.The succinct introduction situates De Barross study in the emerging body of cul-tural histories of colonial societies influenced by a Gramscian conception of hege-monic struggle and negotiation. It highlights the popular classes deployment ofcultural practices in public urban struggles, particularly the riots that bracket herperiod. It also emphasizes the Victorian racialized fear of urban filth, particularly incolonial cities, as a central force in shaping the elite and local middle-class sanitar-ian approach to Georgetown. Chapter 2 provides the economic and demographiccontext needed for non-specialists, including a very good section on the police andpublic health staff operating at the municipal level. It is somewhat less clear on thestructure and evolution of colonial executive and legislative power. Chapter 3 con-vincingly argues that the legislature increased government responsibility for urbansanitation in the nineteenth century, but that local officials and property owners col-luded to ignore the laws, especially in popular-class wards. The press then joined inthe general condemnation of the poor for living with dirt and disease, specificallydenouncing Indo-Guianese scavengers for poor work. Chapter 6 furthers the analy-sis of elite sanitarianism by examining attempts to regulate the milk-vending sector,dominated by the Indo-Guianese. While the authorities were undoubtedly informed108 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale  Social History, vol. XXXVII, no 73 (mai-May 2004)by a sanitarian and racist discourse (p. 122), here De Barros gives rather short shriftto the ameliorative side of regulation, given that the adulteration of milk was evi-dently rife. One is struck less by governments heavy-handedness than by its inabil-ity to control the urban economy.Chapters 4, 5, and 7  in dealing with popular life on the streets and in the publicmarkets and with the riots of 1889, 1905, and 1924  richly flesh out the picture ofa non-elite urban population that strove to live according to its own needs, values,and evolving traditions. Chapters 4 and 5 make the clearest case for understandingAfro-Guianese women as central actors in this struggle. The labouring people ofGeorgetown used their creole language in festive and contentious ways, celebrateddaily and annual events with noise and colour, and frequently responded to chronicunemployment and low pay by organizing centipede gangs that challenged theelites control of public space. De Barros presents Georgetowns public markets askey sites in the wider struggles between working people and municipal authorities,as well as among ethnically defined groups of both vendors and consumers. Sheconvincingly argues that Guianese riots  and West Indian riots as a whole should be understood as popular cultural forms extending to a range of more quo-tidian but carnivalesque practices. Yet the complex interactions between routinesubaltern oppositional culture and more dramatic political actions need further scru-tiny. In particular, we cannot assume that more ethnically inclusive actions like the1924 riot came out of a shared popular culture, though they may have fostered one.Using ethnicity to avoid the elite, colonialist connotations of race (pp. 1415), De Barros draws on Richard Burtons and Nigel Bollands recent interpretationsof creolization as comprehending tension and conflict to document evidence of pop-ular inter-ethnic acculturation. One of her central arguments is that the history ofnon-elite urban social and cultural life (p. 6) in Georgetown challenges M. G.Smiths cultural pluralist explanation of Guyanese history, in which ethnic groupsremain separate if not hostile. Yet the evidence for urban cultural miscegenation(p. 5) or cultural fertility (p. 12) is frustratingly slim. Ward census data show nostrict ethnic residential segregation, yet Georgetowns diverse ethnic groups ...tended to cluster in particular wards (p. 33). East Indians seem to have been moreconcentrated in particular wards than most other ethnic groups and were of coursevastly under-represented in the urban population as a whole. De Barros providesevidence of urban East Indians occupational specialization  as scavengers andmilk vendors, for example  that tends to undermine her cultural miscegenationthesis. On the issue of whether the centipede gangs of unemployed or casuallyemployed urban youth were ethnically mixed, she refers carefully to intriguinghints that they might have been (p. 93). Likewise, she suggests that both Afro- andIndo-Guianese could have drawn on each others traditions of stickfighting(p. 151). Some of her more certain evidence of cultural miscegenation comes fromrural areas. She finds a foo-foo band  an Afro-Guianese term  accompanyinga mostly Indo-Guianese plantation crowd in a protest. Tadjah, the Guianese versionof a Shiia Muslim festival, attracted both Muslim and Hindu Indians and also Afro-Guianese, but does not seem to have been uniquely or even predominantly urban incharacter (p. 92). Finally, the chapters on public markets, milk vending, and riotsHistoire sociale  Social History, vol. XXXVII, no 73 (mai-May 2004)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 109reveal significant ethnic divides, tensions, and conflicts among non-elites in George-town. Creolization was not only contention, but also the negotiated creation of ashared culture.Nonetheless, De Barross cultural miscegenation thesis is important and bears fur-ther investigation. For example, in the period covered, two generations of childrengrew up in Georgetown and the number of East Indians increased 56 per cent, to11.7 per cent of the total urban population (p. 34). Did the multi-ethnic population ofchildren share the experiences of colonial education and urban pastimes to anydegree? Did rates of ethnic inter-marriage or births of mixed-race children increasebetween the 1890s and the 1920s? If such processes could be documented, De Bar-ross picture of a shared non-elite social world could be more vivid and persuasive.Scholars of Guyana will find this book indispensable. As a historian of twentieth-century Belize, where much political action focused on Belize City, I found De Bar-ross book extremely thought-provoking. Order and Place in a Colonial City willalso broaden the new comparative historiography of the British Empire, in which theCaribbean is too frequently marginalized.Anne S. MacphersonSUNY College at BrockportRoger V. Des Forges  Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese His-tory: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003. Pp. xxi, 422.Roger Des Forges has told us everything we could ever want to know about north-east Henan during the final years of the Ming dynasty. In this feat of research DesForges has mined an array of gazetteers, genealogies, memoirs, and biographies andcultivated a rich historical landscape peopled by noble scholars, profligate elites,virtuous women, vile bandits, and heroic rebels. One might ask whether these histor-ical figures actually did justice to their romanticized biographies, and so questionthe accuracy of this account, but this would be missing the point. Des Forges arguesthat, beyond simply embroidering historical memory, narrative ultimately causeslife to imitate art, and the present to imitate the past.Des Forges builds his thesis around the idea of centrality in Chinese history andfittingly concentrates his study on northeast Henan  a region long associated withthe heartland of Chinese civilization. Contrary to academic trends that have calledfor a decentring of master narratives and universal theories, Des Forges argues thatChina cannot be understood without reference to the many levels of centrality thatdefine and sustain the Chinese state and civilization. In China, Henan has historicallybeen regarded as the Central Province, and Des Forges sets out to illustrate thetruth of that perception by demonstrating factors such as the regions disproportion-ate number of resident Ming princes and accomplished literati. The sense of histori-cal centrality is also supported through reference to the writings of these elites, whoconsistently represented their experiences in terms of Chinese tradition and sought

Juanita De Barros — Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889-1924

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Juanita De Barros — Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889-1924

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)