Hamilton Historical - Volume II, Issue II

Hamilton Historical An Undergraduate Journal est. 2020

Volume 2, Issue II: Spring 2023

Peer-reviewed by undergraduates for undergraduates Celebrating rigorous studies in diverse fields of historical inquiry Based out of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY

Hamilton Historical Volume 2, Issue II Spring 2023 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Emma Tomlins LAYOUT CZAR Brian Seiter

LAYOUT ASSISTANT Jack Ritzenberg EDITORIAL CONSULTANT Eric B. Cortés-Kopp PEER EDITORS Isabella Roselli Brooks Bradford Maddie Schink Lydia Gross Nick Fluty Erick Christian Miko Newman Philip Chivily Felix Tager READERS Sammy Smock Miki Worzel Tim Murray Angela Escalante Zarco Annie Kennedy Peter Hinkle

Editor’s Preface Dear readers, I am so glad to introduce our second issue of this year, officially making us a biannual publication. This issue is also my final as Editor-in-Chief. I would like to thank all of our readers and editors, as well as Brian Seiter, for their efforts in the creation of this publication. I would also like to take a moment to announce and congratulate next year’s leadership, with Quinn Brown as Editor-in-Chief and Jack Ritzenberg as Layout Czar. I am so grateful to all of them for their contributions to this journal, which I hope will continue to provide a space for history students to engage with one another and share their work.

We are thrilled to continue to publish work both from within and outside of Hamilton. Our publications in this issue come from Vanderbilt University, Kenyon College, Connection College, Manhattan College, and Hamilton College. They cover a wide range, both temporally and thematically. We begin with a compelling investigation of the concept of community museums. Then we transition into a discussion of Robert Malthus and the manner in which he conformed to contemporary ideologies. From there we take a look at the origination of the ABG and their development as a community. After which, we are brought back to the 20th century to examine the concept of han under the lens of Japanese and Korean colonial relations. Remaining at the turn of the 20th century, we are taken to America to witness the rising prevalence of natural light in scientific discourse and we conclude this issue with a close analysis of Alain of Lille’s convoluted and multilayered The Plaint of Nature.

Thank you for continued readership and support of the Hamilton Historical.

Sincerely, Emma Editor-in-Chief, 2022-2023

Table of Contents Community Museums: Preserving Silenced Histories Through Material Culture

1

May Kotsen

Political Myth and Malthus: Re-evaluating an Essay on the Principle of Population 12 Reese Hollister

Asian Baby Girls: The Maliced Experiences of Southest Asian American Emigrants, 1980s and Onward Jan Niño T. Nguyen

18

Untangling Han

24

Kyumin Kyung

Increasingly Positive Attitudes Towards Sunlight in American Society at the Turn of the Century 30 Joshua Weingarten

Alternative Intolerance: Alain of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature Tay Meshkinyar 36

Community Museums Preserving Silenced Histories Through Material Culture May Kotsen Connecticut College - Class of 2023

In recent years there has been much dialogue in the History community about “decolonizing” histories. Many historians, especially white historians, have been trying to “reinvent” the historical method without acknowledging the reasons why the historical method is the way it is today. Many American historians operate under the assumption that History must be approached “scientifically” and that the best way to do so is through using written documents as evidence.

In reality, this method is prioritized not because it is the most scientifically pure form of historical preservation, but because it has given white Americans a way to write or display American history in a way that leaves out our true history of settler colonialism and enslavement. Instead of trying to look for a different type of written source, historians should elevate and honor pre-existing historical methods centered around oral histories and material culture. This chapter is part of a larger thesis entitled “Un-Writing American History: Reimagining What Constitutes Evidence in the Historical Method,” which emphasizes this idea and explores six different methods of non-written historical preservation using case studies to emphasize their effectiveness.

This paper will provide some context as to the origins of Community Museums, and then highlight two exemplary case studies of Community Museums.

Case Study #1, or the Wing Luke Museum, focuses on a more traditional Community Museum. The Wing Luke Museum is the only pan-Asian art and history museum in the country. It is an extremely significant Community Museum because of how successful its Community Advisory Committee has been and also because it is a Community Museum that is able to honor multiple separate cultures in one space, something necessary but challenging for these spaces. Case Study

#2 focuses on an Indigenous museum, which technically falls under the category of a Community Museum, but in many ways was also developed entirely separate from the framework of an official Community Museum. I chose to include Case Study #2, or the HimDak Ak-Chin Ecomuseum in my Community Museum chapter because not only does it fall under the genre of a Community Museum, but because due to Indigenous frameworks and conceptualizations, it is even more radical and transformative than traditional Community Museums. I believe that non-Indigenous and traditional Community Museums should turn to museums such as the one created by the Ak-Chin community, to make their museums even more community-oriented.

What is a Community Museum?

“Community Museum.” You may have heard that term used to describe the small historical society in your hometown, or maybe you just assumed that it described a museum that tells the histories of a particular community. The term “Community Museum” still has not been officially defined by the American Alliance of Museums or the International Council of Museums, yet Community Museums have existed since 1967 with the founding of the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum.

While an official definition of a Community Museum evades textbooks and Google, there is a collection of practices that all Community Museums share, which many critical museum scholars and New Museologists have consolidated. One of these central tenets is the idea that the curator serves a role as a facilitator rather than a figure of authority.1 Community Museums serve as a space where community groups can choose what 1 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Psychology Press, 2003), 79.

2 they want an exhibition to be about, curate the exhibition, select their own objects, and mount it as they please.2 In traditional history museums, such as the National Museum of American History, curators have no relation to the content and objects they are displaying.

In a Community Museum, this is the opposite.

In fact, Community Museums take this one step further and emphasize ideas rather than objects. This is because the framework developed by and practiced by Community Museums challenges the idea that objects are inherently objective. Instead, they shine a light on the ideological basis of a museum and all of the work that goes into making an exhibition. Focusing on narrative instead, “objects are understood to be mute unless they are interpreted.”3 In a traditional museum, exhibition makers and curators need to assume what the audience will bring with them regarding their identity, past experiences, and personal histories. Many exhibition creators do not even attempt to postulate this though, and instead automatically create exhibitions with a “mainstream,” or white, audience in mind. By recognizing that it is impossible to predict a unitary audience, Community Museums allow the script to be flipped, and for past experiences, histories, and identities to shape the exhibitions themselves.4 Why is it important to see yourself accurately and proportionally represented in a museum? If you are going to disagree with an exhibition, or not be represented in one, why even go to the museum? Many New Museologists and critical museum theorists argue that communities often look at museums as a space in which their identity can be articulated.5 Museum professional Faith Davis Ruffins argues that historical narratives and interpretations are “simultaneously operative” and that their historical, political, and economic implications are inextricably linked with preservation interests. For example, exclusion in society through segregation, political discrimination, or social racism is directly linked with how and how much a group is represented in a museum. How a group is treated in society and how a group is represented in a museum influence each other. If a group is not represented or 2 Ibid, 82.

3 Ibid, 86.

4 Steven D. Lavine, “Audience, Ownership, and Authority: Designing Relations between Museums and Communities,” in Museums and Communities, n.d., 139-140.

5 Christine Mullen Kreamer, “Defining Communities Through Exhibiting and Collecting,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, 2013, 371.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 inaccurately represented in a museum, it is not only because of societal pressure influencing the exhibition, but the museum’s representation influences how society views and thus treats the group.6 Not only is it vital for all groups to be represented in a museum, but how they are represented is just as important. Anthropologist and curator Adrienne Kaeppler argues that museums are often regarded as “historical treasure houses,” a place where public perceptions are influenced by linking material cultures to their history. The way an object or material culture is displayed affects the way an object is interpreted.7 In displaying a musical record, for example, there has to be a decision on whether the record will be displayed to demonstrate how the record changed history when it was released, if it told a history through its lyrics that were significant, or if it is a work of art, signifying the start of a new genre. If this decision is made by someone who did not experience the impact of this material object, a new narrative, and an often false one, is automatically created. That is why it is so important for communities to not only see their history as worthy of being remembered in a museum but to have agency over how their histories are told.

Case Study #1: The Wing Luke Museum The Wing Luke Museum is a Community Museum that has been extremely successful in its community-centered mission. Established in 1967, the Wing Luke Museum is an art and history museum located in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The museum focuses on the culture and art history of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, and is the only pan-Asian Pacific American Community Museum in the United States. The museum is named after Wing Chong Luke, the first person of color elected to the Seattle City Council and the first Asian American elected to public office in the Pacific Northwest.8 Luke was born in Guangzhou China in 1925 and moved to Seattle with his family in 1931. Along with joining the army in 1944 and serving in the Philippines, Luke also received degrees in political science, public administration, and law from the University of Washington and received a graduate degree from American University. In 1962, Luke decided to run for political 6 Ibid, 375.

7 Ibid, 372.

8 “About Us,” Wing Luke Museum, accessed January 12, 2023, https://www.wingluke.org/about.

3 office, running on a platform focused on urban renewal and Civil Rights. Despite several smear campaigns and accusations of communist ties, Luke won, largely due to the immense community support he received from other Chinese American and Asian American residents.

Luke had been discussing with friends and family his idea to create a local museum before his unfortunate death in 1965 in a tragic plane crash. He had explained to his sister that “there were enough museums for jade and silks…It was the living culture that was going to die off, and there needed to be something to preserve it.”9 In 1967, the Wing Luke Memorial Foundation was created in honor of Wing Luke and the Wing Luke Memorial Museum was opened in a small storefront on 8th avenue.10 The museum initially focused on Asian Folk Art but in the 1980s it made the transition to be more community-based, opening up a trio of galleries. One gallery was dedicated to the International District histories, one space for exhibitions relating to the interests of the pan-Asian community, and a third gallery that could be rented out to the community. This thematic transition, location change, and change in name to the Wing Luke Asian Museum was led by local journalist Ron Chew, a huge advocate for a community-based model of exhibition development that the museum would soon adopt.11 This was the first space of its kind for members of the pan-Asian community in the Northwest, along with one of the first museums of its kind in the whole country. In 1993, the museum formed the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) which allowed local artists, community leaders, and staff to develop exhibitions, curate artifacts and create their own exhibitions. In 2008 the Wing Luke Museum moved to its current location on South King Street and became a National Park Service Affiliated Area. It also became the first Smithsonian-affiliated organization in the Pacific Northwest.12 The Community Advisory Committee or the CAC is one of the best-executed community advisory groups out of any Community Museums in the country. The museum functions under the idea that instead 9 Sherry Stripling, “Wing Luke: The Man behind the Museum,” The Seattle Times, February 25, 2005, https://www.seattletimes. com/entertainment/wing-luke-the-man-behind-the-museum/.

10 “About Us,” Wing Luke Museum.

11 Cay Lane Wren, “The Wing Takes Flight: How the Wing Luke Museum Built a Home for the Asian American Community,” n.d., scholarworks.seattleu.edu/wing-luke-museum, 7-9.

12 “About Us,” Wing Luke Museum.

Community Museums of the museum staff telling the community what the museum is about, community members tell the museum what they are about. The CAC works collaboratively with museum staff (many of whom do not have museum degrees) to determine the main messages and themes in exhibitions, direct the content selection and “personality” of the exhibition, and to guide the educational programming. The guidelines, themes, and ideas that are established by the CAC become the basis of the educational programming that the museum staff then develops. Staff are chosen not because of their educational achievements or degrees, but by their position in their community.13 Many critiques of Community Museums argue two things. They argue that there will always be a divide among staff members and community members, and they argue that an entirely community-participant model is impractical and does not allow for the necessary roles in a museum to be filled. The Wing Luke Museum perfectly counters these two critiques by employing and training community members as staff, eliminating the divide with the community while still fulfilling the necessary roles in a museum.

One of the most well-known community exhibitions that the Wing Luke museum displayed was Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, which opened on February 19, 1992, exactly 50 years after the federal order was instated. Executive Order was the first of its kind for the museum, as well as the first of its kind for the nation. Despite being repeatedly warned by “museum experts” that a community-designed exhibition would not work, Ron Chew, the newly appointed director of the Wing Luke Museum decided to create an exhibition that would give voices to those who were imprisoned in concentration camps and their children. He wanted the exhibition to not only tell the histories during imprisonment, but to also tell the histories of the loss of property rights before, and the struggle to rebuild lives and heal afterward.14 The exhibition took over a year to create, with over 100 Japanese Americans working collaboratively 13 Emily Utt and Steven L. Olsen, “A Sense of Place in Museum Public Programming: Three Case Studies,” The Journal of Museum Education 32, no. 3 (2007): 295–302.

14 I use the words “imprisonment” and “concentration camps” throughout this case study intentionally, despite “evacuation” and “internment” being the most used terms historically. I use the first two terms to be more accurate in what I am describing, to use the words preferred by survivors, and to avoid using the words the federal government used to justify their actions.

4 at the museum to not only create the exhibition together but to form deep relationships across age gaps and political differences, and perhaps most importantly, to heal. The exhibition “affirmed the restorative power of the oral tradition and the first-person voice of ordinary people.” As Chew described, the exhibition gave agency back to the people whose history the exhibition was about, giving them the power to dictate their own histories, instead of being “token advisors.” The exhibition ended up being the most successful exhibition in the museum’s history, drawing in over 50,000 visitors in the span of seven months and receiving several awards and national acclaim from museum critics.15 In history textbooks or when Japanese “internment” is talked about in the public narrative, not much effort is put into describing the history of Japanese Americans in the U.S., along with what occurred pre and post-imprisonment. Because Executive Order was entirely created by people who survived the concentration camps, and by the descendants of survivors, the exhibition portrays a much more holistic and comprehensive narrative. Starting with immigration to Hawaii in 1868, and more wide scale immigration to mainland U.S. in the 1890s, the exhibition displays pictures of families who were immigrating, along with pictures of everyday acts, such as food delivery and barbershops.

Discussing the implications of railroad work and farming (over 75% of California’s vegetables were supplied by Japanese farmers at this time), the community members who created the exhibition were able to undo the narrative of immigrants being a burden to the United States, and instead rightfully demonstrate that the United States would not be what it is today without the tireless labor of immigrants.16 The exhibition then goes on to tackle the real estate covenants that existed in Seattle which caused ghettos to be formed for Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. It is important to recognize that this started in 1891 with the creation of Nihonmachi, as racial covenants are often inaccurately contextualized as something that only started with the Great Migration of African Americans. Nihonmachi was the first forced Japanese (and eventually other south Asian countries) neighborhood that was created in Seattle. The neighborhood was extremely lively and populated, with dozens of businesses including restaurants, barbershops, 15 David A. Takami, Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press : Wing Luke Asian Museum, 1998), 4-5.

16 Ibid, 16-22.

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Figure 1: The Kato, Hanada, and Miyoshi families pick berries, 1918.17

Figure 2: Japanese farmers sell produce at the Pike Place Market, 1910.18

bathhouses, laundries, hotels, etc. Nihonmachi became the center of Japanese American life in the Pacific Northwest, a place that represented the conglomeration of multiple identities. Studying this neighborhood (and choosing to feature it as the community members did) is essential in understanding American history because it is one of the best examples of where Japanese American identity was created and how it flourished.

Journalist Kazuo Ito recorded a map of the neighborhood in the 1920s that the community members chose to display. It details the many stores that existed, reflecting the wants and needs of community members, along with the significance of spaces such as “union rep.” and “employment agencies.”19 17 Courtesy of Mae Iseri Yamada, “The Kato, Hanada, and Miyoshi Families Pick Berries” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, 1918).

18 Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry, Webster/ Stevens Collection, “Japanese Farmers Sell Produce at the Pike Place Market” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, c 1910).

19 Takami, Divided Destiny, 25-27.

5

Community Museums

Figure 4: Seattle Times Article, 1942.22

Figure 3: Map of Nihonmachi in the 1920s.20

After discussing the origins of Japanese American life in the United States, the exhibition goes on to display the history of how forced removal and eventual imprisonment occurred. This history is often left out in histories of Japanese “internment” but is absolutely vital for Americans to know. Without knowing what societal actions and choices lead up to the creation of concentration camps, we will never be able to stop concentration camps from being created in the future. On Tuesday, April 21, 1942, “evacuation” announcements were posted throughout Seattle. Most Japanese/Japanese-American businesses were forced to sell everything they owned in their stores, creating wide-reaching impacts before imprisonment and when they were finally released. In the newspaper shown below, Japanese American business owners describe white competitors buying out their stock at five or ten cents on the dollar. The other photo displays a white man looking in on a window with a 50% “evacuation sale” sign.21 20 Kazuo Ito, “Map of Nihonmachi in the 1920s” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, 1920s).

21 Takami, Divided Destiny, 48-50.

Figure 5: Photo of storefront, 1942.23

22 “Whites Try to Buy Them Out at Low Price, Say Japanese,” Seattle Times, March 6, 1942, Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After.

23 Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, “Storefront of Japanese-Run Business” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, April 1942).

6 Community members chose to show these images and newspaper clippings to remind viewers that concentration camps can only be created by white passivity and apathy, that while these “evacuation sales” might not have seemed like the beginnings of something horrific, it in fact was. It is important to be able to recognize these signs because the U.S. government has consistently put racial groups into concentration camps. One of the first examples of this is the Indian Removal Bill of 1830, and one of the most recent examples of this is the Central American immigrants who are being detained at the border in cages. These imprisonments have been and are ordered by the federal government, but have been allowed to occur because of a lack of protest from white Americans. This will only change when smaller injustices, such as the “evacuation sales” are challenged.

Camp Harmony was another name for the Puyallup Assembly Center or a temporary “camp” where over 7,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned before being relocated by the War Relocation Authority to nearby concentration camps. The exhibition provides an extremely personal look at what life at “Camp Harmony” was like. Oftentimes when reading about the history of Japanese American imprisonment, students look at photos of the “camps,” and of large groups of people. Not only were these photos often staged, but they provide no agency to the people whose histories are being displayed. In the painting seen below, artist Hisashi Hagiya portrays an image of despair and an image of reality. Three women, at least one heavily pregnant, stare at a sign that reads “next bath, 4 pm.”

By displaying not only photos from the “camp,” but artistic interpretations of the “camp,” the community members are allowing for a new and more accurate history to be viewed.24 Another image that is often excluded when this history is written about in history books is the fact that the U.S. government exploited the labor of those it was imprisoning. The image below shows that Japanese Americans were forced to farmland adjacent to the Minidoka camp. This image is especially significant for two reasons. For one, it reminds the viewer of the fact that America needed Japanese immigrants to come to the U.S. because of their labor.

The image is also significant because forced prison labor is still a common practice today, even though this black-and-white image is reminiscent of the past.

24 Takami, Divided Destiny, 51-54.

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Figure 6: Photos of Japanese American inmates being forced to farm, 1943.25

Figure 7: Camp Harmony Latrine, 1942.26

Another big part of the exhibition that community members decided to focus on was a questionnaire that was sent out in February 1943 to the prisoners. As shown below, the first question asks if the survey-taker is willing to serve in the U.S. Army and the second asks if the survey-taker swore absolute allegiance to the United States. These two questions caused massive conflict among those in the Minidoka concentration camp. Question 28 was especially contentious because, at this point in time, U.S. law did not allow Japanese Americans to become naturalized U.S. citizens.

If they were to answer yes to the question, they would be essentially stateless, but if they answered no, they could be tortured or killed. Out of the 78,000 who were imprisoned, 75,000 filled out the questionnaire and only 6,700 answered no to question 28. While some 25 Courtesy of the Maeda Family Collection, “Japanese American Inmates Farm Land Adjacent to Minidoka Camp” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, c 1943).

26 Hisashi Hagiya, Camp Harmony Latrine, 1942, Courtesy Wing Luke Asian Museum, Jack Kudo Collection.

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Community Museums

answered yes to question 27 in hopes of improving the status of their families, most were extremely conflicted. Displaying the survey below demonstrates how contradictory the U.S. government’s imprisonment of them was, and also demonstrates the complexities of the choices that imprisoned Japanese Americans had to make.27 Fifty-six Japanese American soldiers from Washington state would die from serving in the U.S. military while their families were imprisoned, because of this questionnaire.28 Figure 9: Photo of Lotus Skyliners, 1955.31

Figure 8: A government-issued questionnaire, 1943.29

Along with displaying photos, paintings, and objects that illuminated the histories before imprisonment and during, community members at the Wing Luke museum also included photos that celebrated the success and survival of Japanese Americans after imprisonment. In the photos seen below a Japanese community queen contest is displayed, the Lotus Skyliners, a popular jazz band is displayed, and the produce of Seiji Hanada is displayed, one of the few Japanese Americans who resumed truck farming after the war.

These photos illustrate themes of resilience, survival, and culture, something the narrative of passivity so widely taught negates. It was important for community members to claim these events as historic, because not only was it remarkable that these communities survived imprisonment, but this time period also reflects a great growth in the development of Japanese American culture. Community members chose to not only display images and histories that reflected what was done to them, instead also highlighting what they were able to do despite it all.30 Lastly, the exhibition highlights the incredible effort by survivors and activists to begin the process of reparations and redress. In 1976 activists were able to get President Ford to issue a formal apology and rescind Executive Order 9066. Soon thereafter the “Day of Remembrance” was created and 2,000 Japanese Americans gathered at the Puyallup Fairgrounds, 27 Takami, Divided Destiny, 66-68.

28 Ibid, 71.

29 “Government-Issued Questionnaire” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, February 1943).

30 Takami, Divided Destiny, 76-78.

Figure 10: Japanese commuity queen contest, 1950 and Photo of Seiji Hanada with his produce.32

where they had been forcibly imprisoned decades earlier. In 1979 a bill was proposed to pay $15,000 to every survivor and although it did not pass, in 1980 another bill was passed that established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. While proposals of reparations were controversial among survivors, the commission served as a place where testimonies could be heard, serving as one of the first spaces of its kind. Because of the tireless efforts of activists, the Civil Liberties Act was signed by President Reagan in 1988 which acknowledged that the imprisonment of Japanese Americans was “motivated largely by racial prejudice and wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” $20,000 was given to each survivor and a fund was created to educate the public. Washington state soon followed by paying $5000 to 38 Japanese Americans who lost their state jobs during World War II and in 1986 26 Japanese 31 Royal C. Crooks photo, “Lotus Skyliners, a Popular Band, Board a Bus for a Concert Tour” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, August 1955).

32 Courtesy Shigeko Uno, “Japanese Community Queen Contest” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, 1950); Joseph Scaylea photo, Seattle Times, courtesy Mrs. Seiji Hanada, “Seiji Hanada Displays Produce in Front of His Pike Place Market Stall” (Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After, August 1963).

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American school clerks were paid 5,000 each.33 The histories that were displayed in Executive Order were purposeful, powerful, and empowering.

The photos and artifacts that were chosen to be displayed were chosen because of what they said about history, but also because of their implications in the present. By contextualizing Japanese American imprisonment with the pressing need for labor, the racial covenants that created ghettos, and the refusal to grant American citizenship, much more can be understood about why the concentration camps were created. By also allowing the community members to tell their stories of survival and resilience after imprisonment, the exhibition not only gave agency back to the people whose history was displayed but a more accurate and comprehensive history was told. Whether we acknowledge it or not, museums legitimize history. They tell viewers that this history is important enough to be mounted on a wall. However, when museums tell inaccurate histories or tell histories for communities, they legitimize a false history and tell the community that their version of their own history is not legitimate.

By allowing this exhibition to be entirely created by community members, the Wing Luke museum let community members know that their history, the way they experienced it and remember it, was worthy of being remembered by everyone. The museum created a space for healing, a space for remembering, and a space to help the public not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Case Study #2: Ak-Chin Him-Dak Ecomuseum “Our ecomuseum is intended to be a place for exchange between generations, each teaching and learning from one another’s special perspectives. Our culture, ever evolving, will continue to be rich and international, crossing borders geographically and through time. The most important part of having our own ecomuseum is that we will be in charge.”

- Wendy Aviles, a member of the Ak-Chin Community.34

The Ak-Chin Indian Community is a community 37 miles south of Phoenix, in what is now known as Arizona. As of the 2020 census, the Ak-Chin Community has 1,070 residents on just over 22,000 acres.

In 1512, Spanish colonizers forced a colonial govern33 Takami, Divided Destiny, 82-85.

34 Nancy Fuller, “The Museum As a Vehicle for Community Empowerment: The Ak-Chin Indian Community Ecomuseum Project,” in Museums and Communities, 2019, 344.

ment over the Ak-Chin and nearby nations but the area was “ceded” to the United States in 1848 following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Maricopa reservation that the Ak-Chin now resides on was created by President Taft in May of 1912, in which he “gave” the Community 47,600 acres, half of which was reduced to the current acreage in under a year. In 1961 the AkChin Indian Community government was “recognized” by the federal government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.35 The Ak-Chin have always been farmers who have lived in permanent settlements in this region but many white historians disagree and say that they practiced hunting and gathering instead. The Ak-Chin, or people at the “mouth of the wash” are a combination of two nations, the Tohono O’odham and the Pima, who combined to protect themselves from Apache raiders.36 Not much else is publicly known about pre-colonial life among the Ak-Chin, but their history is preserved among community members internally.

The 20th Century was filled with much success and turmoil for the Ak-Chin people, largely defined by challenges presented by technology, economic development, and the Civil Rights/AIM movement. All of these issues came to a head in the late-1980s, with the community needing to come to a consensus over the new economic transformations while simultaneously preserving unique cultural practices. The chair of the council Leona Kakar proposed a museum or archive would be a good way to help younger generations know about their history and encourage them to be proud to be Ak-Chin.37 With recent archaeological discoveries in the 1980s, the community was able to rally around their objection to the artifacts being removed by nonAk-Chin archaeologists to a climate-controlled facility in Tucson. Government officials agreed to return the artifacts if proper storage facilities could be built, which helped foster the idea of creating a Community Museum.

Two community members, Carol Antone and Eloise Pedro attended museum training classes in August of 1986 at Arizona State University, and with the help of Museum Studies students from that university, and staff at the Pueblo Grande Museum, they were able to develop a few archaeological exhibitions. As com35 “Ak-Chin Indian Community | Inter Tribal Council of Arizona,” accessed September 25, 2022, https://itcaonline.com/member-tribes/ak-chin-indian-community/.

36 Stokrocki, “The Ecomuseum Preserves,” 35.

37 Fuller, “The Museum as a Vehicle,” 337-338.

9 munity members began visiting these exhibitions, and as they started to develop educational programming for the local students, the community realized that they wanted to build a museum that would serve the needs of the Ak-Chin community, not as a space to inform tourists about the history of the Ak-Chin.38 With the knowledge that they wanted to build a museum unlike any other tribal museums in the area, the Ak-Chin reached out to the Smithsonian Institution for advice, who recommended the idea of the structure of an Ecomuseum. Ecomuseums are a type of Community Museum that are defined by their geographic area and the audience they serve, not by a single brickand-mortar building, or institution. All Community Museum’s Collections are organized according to the community’s relationship with them, but Ecomuseums take that a step further and organize them around the community’s interrelationship with its cultural and physical environment.39 Ecomuseums also take things a step further in that they do not force all Collections to remain in a storage repository in one of their buildings, but rather usually allow items to stay in their respective homes in the community. Community members are trained on how to best take care of these objects in their homes. Instead of creating an end exhibition or a final physical product, Ecomuseums often focus on giving community members the skills necessary to achieve daily goals.40 For example, if someone is interested in running for local political office, the “exhibition” of the Ecomuseum would be to provide that individual with the historical context necessary of what running for political office has looked like in that community.

Oftentimes, communities that have an Ecomuseum see the museum building as just a meeting space, not as a space to exhibit material culture.41 Ecomuseums flip what we understand to be an exhibition upside down.

Historian Nancy Fuller writes about the development of the Ak-Chin ecomuseum in her chapter, “The Museum As a Vehicle for Community Empowerment: The Ak-Chin Indian Community Ecomuseum Project.” In that chapter, Fuller gives a rare glimpse into 38 Ibid, 346-347.

39 Alyce Sadongei, “Connectedness and Relationship: Foundations of Indigenous Ethics Within the Tribal Museum Context,” ICOFOM Study Series, no. 49–1 (December 18, 2021): 150–58, https://doi.org/10.4000/iss.3447.

40 Fuller, “The Museum as a Vehicle,” 330-331.

41 Mary Stokrocki, “The Ecomuseum Preserves an Artful Way of Life,” Art Education 49, no. 4 (1996): 35–43, https://doi. org/10.2307/3193631, 40-41.

Community Museums how the museum came to be. Fuller explains that with funds from the Administration for Native Americans of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the project was able to create an ecomuseum project board consisting of community members and museum experts.42 The board had to both figure out what the museum would look like, and also figure out a way to communicate to the community that the museum was a space that would be able to serve community needs.

Thirty Ak-Chin community members visited Community Museum and ecomuseums over the continent over the next few years, drawing on ideas and practices developed at these museums.43 There was still some resistance in the community over the function of a museum. Some said it reinforced settler colonial structures.

Some were unsure of why the community needed it.

Elaine Boehm, one of the community members trained in ecomuseums addressed this conflict by writing: In our Indian community, our view of a museum is an idea of a closed culture in a box. This is a problem for us as museum technicians and we try to eliminate this type of conflict. So we say, ‘Yes, we can say the word museum, but it has a totally different function.’An ecomuseum can be interpreted the way we want to and we can change it anytime.

This is a start to help our community in preserving today’s information for tomorrow’s generation and along with this, our culture. Though a museum might not be our traditional way of preserving and passing on our culture, our beliefs will always remain the same. The ecomuseum-type concept is a different, modern method that can be used with our traditional ways of life, which has been escaping our community slowly.”44

While it ended up taking several more years than expected to build the museum’s space after the initial staff training, due to shifts in leadership and funding, the Ak-Chin community officially broke ground on November 17, 1990. The staff decided to name the ecomuseum the Ak-Chin Him Dak which translates to “our way of life.” The opening exhibitions consisted of historical objects and artifacts that were excavated on Ak-Chin land, along with the stories of how those objects were able to get to the point of being displayed.

While the museum has gone through many changes over the last few decades, especially with the unique challenges presented by COVID-19, the museum is 42 “All Active ANA Grants,” accessed October 1, 2022, https:// www.acf.hhs.gov/ana/grant-funding/all-active-ana-grants.

43 Fuller, “The Museum as a Vehicle,” 349.

44 Ibid, 340.

10 still open and running. It displays crafts, exhibitions, and photographs of Ak-Chin community members.45 Exhibitions in homes and public spaces are also still a large part of the museum’s functioning. These exhibitions are usually not advertised to people outside the community. The Ak-Chin community does not rely on the Ecomuseum as a source of income, instead focusing on cultural revitalization and social development.46 Because of that, little can be found about the museum online and much of the content is not available to nonAk-Chin citizens.

In an exhibition entitled, “Through the Eyes of our Youth” which was opened to the public in April of 2017, community members were able to describe the changes they’ve seen in the Ak-Chin community over their lives. Both the perspectives of Elders and youth were included and compared to highlight disparities created by technology, policies, and traditions.

In the process of curating this exhibition, youth in the community indicated that they wanted to know more about what life was like for the elders, highlighting the powerful truth that museums are more than spaces that just preserve histories in the past, but are spaces which allow connections between the past and the present to grow, creating very real present-day implications. The exhibition contained objects from elder community members, such as traditional dress, wooden telephones, and basketry. Not only does the museum represent the difference between the material culture of the past and the present, but it tells the story of the transformation in education– with elders being forced to attend boarding schools and present-day youth attending nearby public schools.47

45 “Ak-Chin Him-Dak Eco-Museum,” Visit Arizona, accessed September 25, 2022, https://www.visitarizona.com/directory/akchin-him-dak-eco-museum-american-indian/.

46 Mustafa Doğan and Dallen Timothy, “Beyond Tourism and Taxes: The Ecomuseum and Social Development in the Ak-Chin Tribal Community,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 18 (March 26, 2019): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2019 .1593994.

47 Carolyn Sostrom, “Ak-Chin Him-Dak Eco-Museum Looks to Past and Future with New Exhibit,” Cowboy Lifestyle Network, August 24, 2017,

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2

Figure 11: Photos from the 2017 Exhibition.48

Looking Beyond: The Unique Capabilities of Museums In 2012, only 24% of Americans aged 18 or older had visited a historic site in the previous year, and this number only decreases with age.49 Why are attendance numbers so low, especially as people get older, with so much of our public tax dollars being spent on these “meaningful institutions?” Museums have failed us, a fact that is not surprising when you learn about the origins of museums as institutions. From the very first Cabinet of Curiosity in the 16th Century, during the dawn of settler-colonialism and European expansion, museums have served the interests of those in power.

This might explain why museum attendance numbers are so low, with a concentration on students who attend museums through school field trips. Not only are museums often inaccessible, costly, poorly located, or physically intimidating, but the content inside often discourages people from visiting. What would it look like if you could walk out of a museum feeling empowered, and proud of your heritage? Wealthy white 48 Mustafa Doğan and Dallen Timothy, “Beyond Tourism and Taxes: The Ecomuseum and Social Development in the Ak-Chin Tribal Community,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 18 (March 26, 2019): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2019 .1593994.

49 Bob Beatty, “Running the Numbers on Attendance at History Museums in the US,” Hyperallergic, March 1, 2018, http://hyperallergic.com/429788/running-the-numbers-on-attendance-athistory-museums-in-the-us/.

11 people don’t have to imagine that feeling. They experience it every time they walk into a museum. People of color, queer people, women, and working-class people most often don’t experience that feeling though.

History museums, spaces that deem what histories are important, have historically only legitimized certain white-washed histories.

The irony of museums existing as such an exclusive space for so long is that museums allow for historical evidence to be displayed in non-traditional ways. History museums can be the perfect space for histories that are not written down– either because of intentional marginalization or because of a lack of emphasis on writing– to be exhibited. The Community Museum model, a museum that features silenced histories by allowing silenced voices to tell those histories, has existed for decades. With the founding of the Anacostia Community Museum in 1967 and the global uptick in community-centered museums that thus followed, a framework that allows all histories to be told has slowly been developed. This is not to say that Community Museums are the be-all and end-all solution. Under the current system of capitalism that the United States functions in, it is impossible for privately and publicly owned institutions not to have corporate interests. Even the Anacostia Community Museum, a model Community Museum, receives funding from Nestle, a corporation that practices child slavery, trafficking, and labor exploitation.50 Although perfection is not possible, progress can be made. The most important change that history museums must make is shifting who is creating the exhibitions and why. What is the point of learning about a history that has absolutely no relation to you, when you don’t have access to clean drinking water when you leave the museum? How can a history be accurate if the curator has no lived/passed down knowledge of the cultural and spiritual implications of a specific object or narrative? Community Museums are essential not only because their exhibitions are more accurate than traditional museums but because just as the historical method excludes certain communities and cultures more often than others, museums do the same.

Museums usually have one of two problems. Either the exhibition is telling the story of a victor (most often a white, wealthy, man) or they are telling the history of 50 Smithsonian. “Corporate Sponsorship.” Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian, https://anacostia.si.edu/ Support/CorporateSponsorship. Accessed 26 October 2021. Now deleted.

Community Museums a marginalized community from an outsider’s perspective, which is equally problematic. In both cases, marginalized communities, or communities which do not place as much emphasis on written evidence as white/ European cultures do, are being actively silenced. It is through changing who has a say in what narratives are told, through shifting who has that power, that museums can begin to serve as a space for accurate and representative histories to be told, and for present-day problems to be contextualized in the past.

Political Myth and Malthus Re-evaluating an Essay on the Principle of Population Reese Hollister Manhattan College - Class of 2023

Stemming from English political economist Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’s (1766-1834) theory in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), the term Malthusian in modern economics is synonymous with fears surrounding overpopulation. As a conservative response to William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which used utilitarian arguments to outline his vision of a perfectible anarchist society, Malthus’ Essay refuted Godwin’s claim, arguing that a population trap would get in the way of man’s perfectibility.1 In his Essay, Malthus outlined his theorem that the exponential power of population growth was “infinitely greater” than the Earth’s ability to produce food, and when the means of subsistence falls below the supporting population, the “population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.”2 Aligning himself with Edmund Burke and other conservatives in the wake of the French and Industrial Revolutions, Malthus was a formidable intellectual opponent for his contemporaries, addressing his critics and expanding his Essay until he released his sixth and final edition in 1826.3 While his many critics were incredibly vocal about how his work could be used to discriminate against the English poor, seemingly none refuted his dark anthropological analysis of indigenous peoples’ supposed ‘savagery.’ Unsatisfied with the scope of the first edition, Malthus subsequently expanded on anthropological analysis. In the 1803 edition, he attempted to extrapolate a universal human history from his 1 Winch, Donald, Malthus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 16-17.

2 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition, ed. Shannon C. Stimson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 2-473.

3 Winch, Malthus, 19.

studies on population. Malthus anthropologically categorized indigenous peoples as living in low stages of civilization, reflecting the attitudes, beliefs, and methods of stadial theorists from the turn of nineteenth-century Britain and France.

The central point of Malthus’ argument was the idea that the failure to subsist was the leading cause of suffering among so-called ‘savages.’ Malthus blamed this failure on indigenous peoples’ apparent indolence, alcohol abuse, and diets, sometimes citing natural and genetic causes. When looking for metrics that separated indigenous and what he referred to as civilized society, Malthus subscribed to the commonly held belief that indigenous societies inflicted violence and servitude upon their women, leading to low birthrates and rampant infanticide. Malthus also made use of the “man-eating myth,” using accounts of cannibalism from contemporary explorers across the globe to suggest that native men were in a war against all, which his society accepted as truth. However, Malthus’ perceptions of ‘savage’ peoples––focusing on their supposed indolence, infanticide, and cannibalism––were commonplace in his metropole. His creation of and views on the binaries of ‘civility’ and ‘savagery’ were typical for his society, as he developed his knowledge of non-European peoples not by traveling but by reading widely published accounts of the Americas, New Holland, and elsewhere around the globe.

Malthus’ first requisite of a “savage society” lay in having a ‘primitive’ mode of subsistence. By his definition, Malthus considered pre/non-pastoral societies that focused on hunting and gathering to be ‘savage.’4 He tended to look down on indigenous peoples’ diets, only briefly mentioning foods already accepted 4 Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 96.

13 in the British culinary canon like fish, yams, and berries.5 Instead, Malthus sensationally described their foods that disgusted him: “From a piece of water-soken wood, full of holes, [a native man and his child] had been extracting and eating a large worm. The smell of both the worm and its habitation was in the highest degree offensive.”6 This passage demonstrates how Malthus purposefully selected evidence that would disgust his audience, instilling prejudices against both the hunter-gatherer diet and indigenous lifestyles.

Malthus blamed much of the suffering in the ‘savage’ condition on the perceived indolence and laziness of indigenous men, a commonly believed myth when he released the second edition of his Essay. Being a reverend, Malthus believed that by God’s design, the Earth did not provide ample food for humanity. He therefore viewed labor, especially agricultural labor, as a virtue designed by God.7 To Malthus, people living in nonagricultural societies were self-evidently unvirtuous, and he found that “Indians lived improvidently by hunting, the concern of men who were otherwise lazy and careless about finding provisions, even as native American women were somehow incredibly busy to the point of perpetual exhaustion.”8 Historian Joyce E. Chaplin noted that Malthus saw illustrations and read accounts of women busy growing maize in Joseph François Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages Américains, but neglected to include these accounts of women engaged in agricultural labor because it was detrimental to his thesis in the Essay.9 Malthus, believing that idleness was an innate and “natural defect” of indigenous men, convinced his audience of this idleness as well.10 However, the myth that indigenous men were indolent was by no means a new concept. An earlier and influential Enlightenment thinker, Montesquieu, believed there was a near-constant aversion to labor and cultivation among indigenous men. Furthermore, Montesquieu believed indig5 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 25.

6 Ibid, 26.

7 Shino Konishi, “Idle Men: The Eighteenth-Century Roots of the Indigenous Indolence Myth.” In Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, edited by Ann Curthoys, John Docker, and Frances Peters-Little, Canberra, (Australia: ANU Press, 2010), 101.

8 Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 125.

9 Ibid, 126, 10 Konishi, “Idle Men,” 113; Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 30.

Political Myth and Malthus enous women to be lazy as well, preferring abortion to childbirth.11 The French natural historian, Comte de Buffon, crudely claimed that the North Americans “were all equally stupid, ignorant, and destitute of arts and industry.”12 In analyzing the origins of this myth, indigenous Australian historian Shino Konishi argued that commercial and imperial interests saw many eighteenth-century philosophers trying to explain indigenous men’s supposed laziness and ignorance by utilizing faulty biological and religious evidence.13 These sources corroborate the idea that Malthus’ belief on indigenous indolence was typical before the release of his Essay, which helped keep the myth alive.

In his Essay, Malthus blamed American indigenous peoples for their helplessness against the vices of alcohol, making his picture of ‘savage’ life even more desolate. He cited the early accounts of French historian of the Americas, Charlevoix, claiming that “the insatiable fondness of the Indians for spirituous liquors…is a rage that passes all expression.”14 He then went on to elaborate that alcohol furthered their supposed laziness and perpetuated fatal quarrels. Malthus made it seem as if all indigenous people in America were constantly and drunkenly fighting with each other. Malthus made indigenous society look lawless, with Indian men being so under the influence of spirits that they must be saved from themselves.

While Malthus was not considered a scientist on race, he certainly engaged in genetic debates, especially surrounding the supposed genetic inferiority of indigenous people. He physically characterized the “wretched” inhabitants of Terra del Fuego as short in stature with disproportionate limbs and bloated stomachs, a standard signal of malnutrition.15 He also cited an anecdote as told by David Collins from his voyage to New South Wales that implied inbreeding among the Co-le-be, whose population was decimated to three persons after the introduction of small-pox.16 They were able to prevent their utter extinction, but there is little evidence to support this claim. Regardless, Malthus actively selected this passage to show his audience how disease was a preventative check that ravaged ‘savage’ societies. He also strongly supported infanticide, citing 11 Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 39.

12 Konishi, “Idle Men,” 100.

13 Ibid.

14 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 44.

15 Ibid, 24.

16 Ibid, 28.

14 the supposed birth defects of children within indigenous societies who did not allow infanticide, such as those in Spanish controlled provinces, as evidence in favor of this practice.17 Malthus heavily implied that the indigenous man was physically inferior, putting him and his assumptions on indigenous genetics in line with the rest of his contemporaries. Most Europeans believed that race and human difference was rooted within the body, yet many disagreed on whether their metropoles should act according to this belief. Some stadial theorists went further. Lord Kames, an influential stadial theorist in Malthus’ canon of research, for example, believed “that nature dictated which people were doomed to savagery and which destined for commercial civility.”18 While Malthus disagreed with Kames on whether a ‘savage’ man could become civilized with assistance, the discourse in his Essay suggests that he, to some degree, believed that humans were naturally stratified.19 A significant index in Enlightenment historiography Malthus utilized to differentiate between ‘savage’ and civilized society was the treatment of women.

He agreed with the assumptions of his contemporaries’ that indigenous societies abused their women with violence and servitude, which he used as his main explanations for low birthrates and high rates of infanticide among the ‘lowest stages’ of society. During his time, most historians of humankind had the treatment of women as a core metric on whether a society was considered civilized or not.20 Malthus used this metric as well, stating that “one of the most general characteristics of the savage is to despise and degrade the female sex.”21 He then used popular accounts of indigenous societies to continue to paint his dire and gloomy picture of ‘savage’ life. As mentioned above, Malthus saw illustrations of indigenous American women tending to maize fields, and he imagined indigenous women always to be put to work, while the aforementioned indolent men would lie in wait. In the Americas, he says, “their condition is so peculiarly grievous, that servitude is a name too mild to describe their wretched state. A wife is no better than a beast of burden. While the man passes his days in idleness or amusement, the 17 Ibid, 32.

18 Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 39.

19 Ibid, 168.

20 Ibid, 163.

21 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 31.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 woman is condemned to incessant toil.”22 In describing indigenous gender dynamics, Malthus would categorize women as being in a similar position to that of slaves, having to endure the labor without reaping the benefits they quite literally sowed.

As his thesis was dependent on presenting indigenous birth rates as low, Malthus was concerned with the homonymous definition of labor. He believed that the entire child-rearing process in indigenous societies was horrid for women, beginning with violent courtship and ending in miscarriage or infanticide.

However, modern historians refuted the credibility of Malthus’ sources on high rates of infanticide, suggesting that Malthus accepted and perpetuated the political myth of indigenous infanticide. According to Malthus, the cruel prelude to love among the indigenous people of New South Wales was violence, and he appealed to emotion and shock when describing their courtship. For example, Malthus told of an indigenous man of New South Wales stealing his intended wife from a rivaling group, “and having first stupefied her with blows of a club, or wooden sword, . . . he drags her through the woods by one arm.”23 Malthus presented love between indigenous peoples as unrecognizable, abusive, and foreign, helping him later support his thesis by explaining low “passion between the sexes” and lower birth rates among indigenous peoples.24 In selecting this anecdote, Malthus drew a connection between physical abuse, miscarriages, and infertility. His image of life for women under a ‘savage’ state of nature was nothing short of tragic, hoping to manipulate and control his readers’ emotions. Going beyond painting miscarriages as a tragic aspect of indigenous life, Malthus described intentional acts of infanticide among them, making their societies look simultaneously look pitiable and evil. Often, Malthus presented infanticide as a necessary evil in his state of nature.25 Yet, Malthus went further, arguing that the indigenous peoples of Tahiti killed newborns not out of necessity, but out of want: infanticide’s “prevalence, among the higher classes of the people, has removed from it all odium, or imputation of poverty, it is probably adopted, rather as a fashion, than a resort of necessity, and appears to be practised familiarly and without reserve.”26 Whether due to a limited availability of sources 22 Ibid.

23 Ibid, 26.

24 Ibid, 27.

25 Ibid, 31.

26 Ibid, 50.

15 or intentional ignorance of counterevidence, Malthus perpetuated the political myth of rampant infanticide among indigenous peoples’ societies. Modern anthropological evidence of precolonial Hawai’i suggests that the descriptions of infanticide that Malthus cited were falsely founded. First, early nineteenth century Hawai’i had a high female-to-male sex ratio, the reverse of what occurs in infanticidal societies. Further analysis suggests that the infant mortality rate in precolonial Hawai’i was one-ninth of what was normal in mid-eighteenth century England.27 While it does not appear that Malthus was conscious of the untruthfulness of the infanticide myth, as Collins’ and Cooks’ accounts were believed to be unexaggerated and credible, his abridgement of Collins’ Account of the English Colony in New South Wales in his Essay painted an even more negative picture of indigenous womens’ lives than the firsthand account.28 In perpetuating the infanticide myth, Malthus’ depiction of a state of nature through these new worlds was hopeless for women and newly-born children.

In Malthus’ analysis, it was not just the indigenous women and children whose lives were defined by violence against them. The men in Malthus’s state of nature were also constantly at war. Malthus believed that indigenous men were cowardly and helpless within this purported “war of all against all.” He did not present these wars as the effects of diplomacy and disputes between groups, but as unwarranted, animalistic violence.29 To Matlhus, these wars were essential to population control, and therefore central to his thesis.

To Malthus, the indigenous American peoples’ “object in battle [was] not conquest, but destruction.” He drew differences between the territory-oriented battles of Europe, and the small-scale skirmishes between indigenous peoples. Yet, his thesis was dependent on high 27 Stannard, David E, “Recounting the Fables of Savagery: Native Infanticide and the Functions of Political Myth,” Journal of American Studies 25, no. 3 (December 1991): 381-417, 398-400, http://www.jstor.org (Accessed November 11, 2020). This study found that 60 out of the 1,500 (4%) skeletons discovered to be from precolonial Hawai’i as being from people who died before the age of one. Stannard noticed that the study had a possible undercount, but suggested that there was no evidence for higher rates of child mortality. Still, positive evidence argues that infanticide was not a common practice.

28 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 47; Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 104.

29 Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 127.

Political Myth and Malthus checks to low populations, so he ignored how pre-1778 warfare among indigenous American peoples saw “relatively few combatant or civilian deaths.” Few major American Indian conquests occurred before Europeans began commonly supplying them with firearms.30 Again, Malthus supported his thesis by perpetuating existing myths about indigenous peoples and their relationships with violence and omitting or twisting evidence to support his claims.

In describing American Indian mens’ ‘savage’ and ‘violent’ natures, Malthus also made them look cowardly, claiming that it was a “point of honour with the American” to “fly from an adversary that is on his guard.”31 These descriptions peddled myths of indigenous American peoples’ inferiority towards Europeans in the same way aforementioned claims of “indigenous indolence” functioned. Malthus simultaneously created stereotypes of indigenous men as animalistically violent and cowardly in response to this violence. In Malthus’ natural world, indigenous men were treated as having neither rational abilities nor agency.

Malthus also heavily promoted the stereotype of indigenous as cannibals, drawing heavily on the voyages of Captain Cook. These accounts gave credence to his argument that the lowest stages of human society occurred when subsistence was not available, so these ‘savage’ societies allegedly had to resort to eating their own to survive. Malthus advanced a rumor from Captain Cook’s voyage to New Zealand: “The people of Nootka Sound appear to be cannibals, and the chief of the district Maquinna is said to be so addicted to this horrid banquet, that, in cold blood, he kills a slave every moon to gratify his unnatural appetite.”32 The discourse on cannibalism in new worlds was heavily driven by exoticism, and Cook’s third voyage cemented the Pacific’s fame in Europe for being cannibalistic and alien.33 In the passage above, Malthus described cannibalism as an addiction, akin to the aforementioned alcoholism that saw indigenous peoples as helpless and without the agency needed to fight it. However, Malthus did not invent this angle.

In Cook’s writings on his discovery of “Feejee,” he 30 Stannard, David E, “Recounting the Fables of Savagery,” 381-417 and 392).

31 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 36-38.

32 Ibid, 37.

33 Banivanua-Mar, Tracey, “Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Fiji,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 2 (April 2010): 255-81, 261, https://www.jstor.org.

16 described the indigenous people as addicted to eating their enemies, yet they “did not deny the charge” when asked.34 This apparent absence of denial gave credibility to Cook’s claims, and Malthus did not believe that Cook was “inclined to exaggerate the vices of savage life.”35 Robert Malthus trusted Cook’s accounts of the Pacific, so by incorporating these passages into his Essay, Malthus perpetuated the political-myth of cannibalism in both his state of nature and the real world.

Malthus’ sources on cannibalism were not limited to the voyages of Captain Cook. For the Americas, he cited an account by the merchant Samuel Ellis from William Robertson’s 1777 History of America. Here, Malthus retold an account of how nature forced a set of poor Native American parents who had to support themselves on their two children’s flesh.36 These claims of cannibalism were impactful and accepted during his time. However, modern historians have proved the falsity of these claims, especially after the influential release of W. Arens’ The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy in 1979. Arens argued that no reliable first-hand account of cannibalism exists as a regular and socially acceptable custom.37 It would be wrong to assert that Malthus intentionally placed false accounts of cannibalism into his Essay, but that does not mean that the inclusion is not prejudiced. Malthus’ readiness to accept these anecdotes on cannibalism suggests that his society and greater academic community believed, or wanted to believe, them as well.

The question of typicality is essential to studying Robert Malthus’ attitudes towards indigenous peoples, as his work could act as a microcosmic indicator of how his society viewed these people. The majority of the sources Malthus used in his Essay made sure to distinguish between ‘savage’ and ‘civil’ peoples, but analyzing the views of his metropolitan audiences is more telling. According to independent historian Nathanial Wolloch, the industrial revolution made the rising middle class of eighteenth century England conscious of the fact that they were a part of civilization, trying to make both material and political progress.38 So, the origins of societal progress was on many of their minds, 34 Banivanua-Mar, “Cannibalism and Colonialism,” 261.

35 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 47.

36 Ibid, 41.

37 Stannard, “Recounting the Fables of Savagery,” 415.

38 Wolloch, “The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 246. http://www.jstor.org.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 especially because Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality were up for violent debate across the English Channel in France.

Popular reviews of Malthus’ 1803 Essay gave insight into how well-read Englanders viewed his analysis. The December 1803 release of The Monthly Review, an English periodical founded and edited

by Ralph Griffiths, placed Malthus’ Essay as the first review, suggesting that the 1803 Essay was a critical release at the time. This review looks upon Malthus’ expanded Essay in a positive light, and accepts most of what Malthus had to say at face value, never once refuting Malthus’ biases towards those in ‘lesser states’ of human civilization. In fact, the reviewer reflected Malthus’ sentiment of Euroamerican supremacy, himself using the word “savage” to describe the people and nations of Asia and Africa.39 This review demonstrated how metropolitan citizens viewed future colonial subjects as needing saving from living in inhuman conditions, citing Malthus’ synthesis of Captain James Cook’s accounts of extreme patriarchy, endless warfare, lack of manners, and ignorance.40 Tellingly, the author of the review wrote in passive voice when writing about European total war, revolution, and depopulation, yet used an active voice when reflecting on ‘tribal warfare.’41 That distinction placed blame on the indigenous people who needed to be saved from themselves, while allowing Europeans to get away with their own acts of barbarity. This source heavily emphasized how the Essay was foundational towards the English’s interest in demography: “[Malthus] was destined to introduce . . . political arithmetic; to render it a ground furnishing new questions of vast importance to society, to civil government, and to domestic happi39 “Review of An Essay on Population, or a View of its past and present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Enquiry into our Prospects respecting the future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it occasions. A new Edition, very much enlarged,

by Thomas Robert Malthus,” The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal 42 (December 1803): 337-57, 330, http://www.haithitrust.org (Accessed 12 October, 2020); Regrettably this source proved difficult to grapple with as its authorship remains unclear.

While Ralph Griffiths founded and authored The Monthly Review during his lifetime, he died just over a month before this issue’s release in December 1803. However, The Monthly Review does not lack all credibility, as it was well-established and prolific at the time of this review’s release, demonstrating how literate Londoners found his text worth reading and his discourse on indigenous peoples acceptable.

40 Ibid, 339-340.

41 Ibid 352 and 339-340.

17 ness.”42 According to the author, Malthus popularized demography by turning it into human history, and after the release of his Essay, many Londoners became interested in studies on population.

Responses by his many critics give more insight into the question of typicality than the glowing and popular Monthly Review. Malthus’ biggest critic, David Ricardo, usually lambasted Malthus’ analysis, yet he commended Malthus’ “historical analysis of the barriers to economic growth in the European past, and as diagnosis of the difficulties that had to be overcome in Africa, Asian, and Latin America.”43 The academic community supported Malthus’ positions on peoples in ‘lesser stages’ of civilization because stadial theory was essential to and accepted in Enlightenment historiography. Taking Malthus’ discourse on indigenous peoples at face value suggests that his society agreed with his ideas, but his state of nature does not have much significance in isolation.

Similar to how Rousseau’s conjectured State of Nature supported the General Will against his contemporaries, viewing Malthus’ Essay and historical state of nature as an implicit critique of his society gives him and his critics an abundance of historical significance. Malthus wrote extensively against the existence of the welfare state, and he equated poverty with moral failing.44 He interestingly removed a passage after the 1803 edition which stated that those who came to “nature’s mighty feast . . . without the means of paying for their meal had no right to sit at the table.” Malthus’ historian, Donald Winch, believed that Malthus removed this passage not because he disagreed with this statement, but because he wanted to prevent such critical readings of his text.45 Naturally, however, these critical readings still existed.

The most exemplary critique of Malthus lies in the openly published letters from writer William Hazlitt in response to the 1803 Essay. Hazlitt’s scathing and brutal diatribe went beyond disputing Malthus’ core argument and numbers. Hazlitt sided with the more radical thinkers of the French Revolution and Enlightenment: “Mr. Malthus somewhere talks of a man’s having no right to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it. This word fairness conveys to my ears no such meaning but that of a struggle be42 Ibid, 338.

43 Winch, Malthus, 89.

44 Ibid, 2.

45 Ibid, 100.

Political Myth and Malthus tween power and want.”46 Similarly, Hazlitt’s claims that Malthus allotted misery to the poor but vice to the rich demonstrated how Malthus failed to recognize the rights of the poor.47 Hazlitt feared that Malthus’ Essay would influence the legislature towards gradually abolishing the English Poor Laws, and his fears were warranted, for they became reality.48 Despite his scathing critique of Malthus’ treatment of the disadvantaged in English society, Hazlitt tellingly did not address Malthus’ criticisms of indigenous peoples. This again demonstrates the pervasive view of indigenous peoples as ‘lesser’ and ‘savage’ among European society.

Robert Malthus’ 1803 Essay perpetuated multiple political myths about indigenous peoples. This essay has argued that he did so due more to his acceptance of European popular beliefs about indigenous peoples than due to a targeted, malicious intent. Whether the myth at hand was indigenous indolence, infanticide, or cannibalism, Mathus unconsciously supported them in his aim to create a universal human history where population was the solely important variable, similar to how his contemporary stadial theorists wrote their histories. Because his sources on indigenous peoples were popular, accepted, and respected in his society, Malthus’ discourse on indigenous peoples did not divert from his society’s norm. While Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population is no longer a reputable work of demography, it instead offers insight into how English society around the turn of the nineteenth-century viewed the people who lived in ‘distant’ worlds.

46 Hazlitt’s tone towards Malthus entertainingly shows how vehemently he disagreed with Malthus’ analysis: “Oh! my good Sir, spare your calculations. We do not wish to be informed what would be the exact proportion of the imaginary means of subsistence to the imaginary population at a period, . . . if it had been possible for it to have gone on only half so long as you suppose, the whole race would have been long ago actually extinct.” From Hazlitt, William, A Reply to the Essay on Population by the Rev. T. R. Malthus in a Series of Letters to which are added Extracts from the Essay with Notes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807; repr., New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967), 83-4 and 285.

47 Ibid, 263.

48 Smith, The Malthusian Controversy, (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 71.

Asian Baby Girls The Maliced Experiences of Southeast Asian American Emigrants, 1980s and Onward

Jan Niño T. Nguyen Vanderbilt University - Class of 2023

Beyond her black pocket switchblade and large hoop earrings lies her undermined spirit, one that has been battered by the toils of an impoverished refugee background and by a jagged transition into the American way of life. Her parents sought refuge, freedom, and comfort upon their arrival to the United States.

She, too, was always in pursuit, although she did not know what exactly she was pursuing. Her very identity as an American was defined by this aimless journey, the “Asian Baby Girl” (“ABG”), thus became a symbolic pennant representing the formative experience of a maliced group of new Americans. …

In the 1990s and 2000s, certain Southeast Asian American girls adopted the “ABG” identity as a statement of their rebellion against the expected standards of American society. While few have explicitly studied ABGs in formal scholarship, there exists an established array of academic narratives that provide necessary context to understand who ABGs were, as well as how and why they came to be. Today, ABG refers to an Asian American girl who possesses a distinct appearance and behavior: long fake eyelashes paired with dyed hair, an obsession with “boba” or bubble tea, and a tendency to party hard and consume recreational drugs.1 In contrast, the ABG of the past—of the original cohort of Southeast Asian American girls in gangs—went beyond a mere alteration of the timid Asian American female stereotype. These original ABGs presented themselves as hustlers who embraced crime as income, gangs as families, and a lack of con-

1 Chow Mane, “ABG (Asian Baby Girl),” YouTube video, 3:14, March 16, 2018.

crete life goals as a source of happiness.2 Their image, in effect, was nothing short of negative.

By the late 1980s, the term ‘Southeast Asian’ took on an increasingly negative connotation as an identification for poorer Asian immigrants in the United States.3 Not only was this trend seen in general American society, but also in academia. Even acclaimed scholars, for instance, employed the term ‘Southeast Asian’ to refer only to Indochinese refugees. Most noticeably, these scholars left out the rather affluent Filipino Americans, the largest Southeast Asian ethnic group in the US whose median household incomes are consistently one of the highest in the country.4 Further, the US’s role in military intervention and in meddling with political institutions in Southeast Asia not only pushed refugees towards the US, but also perpetuated the narrative that these countries and their cultures lacked the significance of China, Japan, and Korea.5 This forced many Southeast Asian immigrants to cater 2 Kaliyah (@.kalihay), “I remember growing up the women in my life didn’t really take being an abg as a compliment!! #fyp #southeastasian #abg #seas.” TikTok, 2022; Sonni Efron, “Violent, Defiant Vietnamese Form Girl Gangs: Crime: Brawling, knife-carrying female groups are a recent addition to Orange County’s Asian gang scene,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1989.

3 Chia Youyee Vang, “Southeast Asian Americans,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2015).

4 Ibid; Bic Ngo and Stacey J. Lee, “Complicating the Image of Model Minority Success: A Review of Southeast Asian American Education,” Review of Educational Research, Vol. 77, no. 4, 415–53 (Washington, DC, United States: American Educational Research Association, 2007).

5 Huping Ling, Emerging Voices: Experiences of Underrepresented Asian Americans (New Brunswick, NJ, United States: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

19 to this narrative, like in California’s Little Saigon, the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. The name of its main business conglomeration, Phước Lộc Thọ, alludes to three Vietnamese deities. In English, however, it takes the general name of “Asian Garden Mall,” depreciating its cultural significance as a consequence of the American trivialism of Asian cultures beyond East Asia.6 Its Vietnameseness vanished amid an Anglo-American point of view, as it appeared to be just another product of the general Asian American population, an attitude that fed into a slow erasure of the unique story of Southeast Asian Americans. They were more than just immigrants. They carried a trauma-filled refugee experience, plagued by the horrors of Southeast Asia’s crumbling and repressive institutions that stretched from the 1960s to the 1990s and, in some circumstances, to the present day.7 This included the brutal two-decade Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, Suharto’s anti-communist and anti-Chinese purging that massacred one million Indonesians in the late 1960s, and the suppressive military junta in Burma led by the autocratic Ne Win from 1962 until his death in 2002.8 Most consequential to the Southeast Asian story in the US, however, was the Vietnam War, in which the United States government was heavily invested.9 The chaotic aftermath of the Vietnam War catalyzed the arrival of Southeast Asian migrants into the United States, especially after 1975. In the two decades following the Fall of Saigon and the installation of authoritarian governments in Indochina, desperate and

6 Phuong Nguyen, “Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon, California,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2015).

7 Vang, “Southeast Asian Americans”; Ngo and Lee, “Southeast Asian American Education”; Ling, Experiences of Underrepresented Asian Americans.

8 M.D. Litonjua, “The State in Development Theory: The Philippines Under Marcos,” Philippine Studies, Vol 49, no. 3, 368-398 (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University, 2001); Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesia Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Journals, 2018); Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps — Histories of Burma (New York City, NY, United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

9 Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York City, NY, United States: Penguin Group, 2003).

Asian Baby Girls impoverished refugees left en masse.10 These included the well-known Vietnamese boat people, as well as Laotian, Hmong, and Cambodian asylum seekers.11 The perceived motive of the American government set them apart from other immigrant groups of similar stories.12 In attempting to “salvage its image,” the US more willingly took in these desolate peoples to make up for its humiliating defeat in Indochina, without genuine regard for the conditions that awaited these refugees.13 They would go on to live harsh lives during their transition, as their lack of wealth restricted their access to comfort.14 In pursuit of survival in their new homes, many children of the refugees formed “predatory” gangs, where cultural boundaries held no power in preventing intra-ethnic crime.15 They also intertwined themselves with drug abuse, with empirical models having suggested high rates of usage as a result of their traumatic backgrounds.16 Survival, nonetheless, was just one dimension of Southeast Asian American gang formation.

They engaged in cohesive delinquency in an attempt to mitigate the psychological stress of living in a paradox: American society’s high expectations of them despite the immense adversity they overcame.17 This 10 Steve Denney and Ginetta Sagan, “Re-Education in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering, and Death,” (Berkeley, CA, United States: The Indochina Center of the University of California, Berkeley, 1982); Ben Kiernan, “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80” (Milton Park, United Kingdom: Taylor and Francis, 2003); Norihiko Yamada, “Legitimation of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party: Socialism, Chintanakan Mai (New Thinking) and Reform” (Milton Park, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2018).

11 Vang, “Southeast Asian Americans.”; Ngo and Lee, “Southeast Asian American Education.”

12 Heather Marie Stur, “‘Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label’: Refugees, Repatriates, and the Rebuilding of America’s Benevolent Image After the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 39, no. 2, 223–244 (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014).

13 Ibid 14 Vang, “Southeast Asian Americans.”

15 Andrew Diamond, “Street Gangs in the 20th-Century American City,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018); Nguyen, “Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon, California.”

16 Thomas O’Hare and Thanh Van Tran, “Substance Abuse Among Southeast Asians in the U.S.” Social Work in Health Care, Vol. 26, no. 3, 69-80 (Philadelphia, PA, United States: Taylor and Francis, 1998).

17 Ngo and Lee, “Southeast Asian American Education.”

20 highlighted the problematic nature of the “model minority myth” for Asian Americans, as it homogenized the vastly diverse group under one umbrella, assuming that all Asian Americans began their American Dream journeys on equal socioeconomic footing. 18

Expanding and Nuancing the Asian American Story The aforementioned trends allow for a comprehensive analysis of Southeast Asian Americans’ identity in American society. The literature, however, could benefit from an explicit analysis of the birth of the ABG identity itself. This will allow Asian American scholarship to expand its scope to more actively account for the heterogeneity of the Asian American community, especially as it pertains to socioeconomics and their external foundations. It will also introduce a rudimentary overlap of gender with ethnicity and socioeconomics.

Overlooking the importance of ABGs as a bellwether for the plight of Southeast Asian Americans has only contributed to the silencing of the group’s stories. Despite the rich differences between different Southeast Asian ethnicities, the American chapters of their story are shared, largely defined by their more disadvantaged roads to transition in American society. This includes the more prosperous Filipino Americans, who have personally “experienced poverty or been sheltered from it” back in the Philippines and have seemingly perfected the “rags-to-riches” formula.19 By lumping them in with the Asian American narrative, dominated

by East Asian cultures and figures, their opportunities to succeed in the American system have been further derailed. Thus, this paper will delve deep into the ABG identity to emphasize the disadvantaged circumstances of Southeast Asian Americans that are often neglected.

It will particularly rely on California’s context, given that the state has held the largest Asian American pop-

18 Guofang Li, “Other People’s Success: Impact of the ‘Model Minority’ Myth on Underachieving Asian Students in North America,” KEDI Journal of Educational Policy, Vol. 2, no. 1 (Jincheon County, South Korea: Korean Educational Development Institute, 2005).

19 Rocco A. Cimmarusti, “Exploring Aspects of Filipino-American Families,” in Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Vol. 22, no. 2, 205-217 (Hoboken, NJ, United States: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2007), 206.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 ulation.20

Southeast Asian Emigrants, Not Immigrants There is a mischaracterization of Southeast Asian Americans as ‘immigrants,’ when in fact identifying them primarily as ‘emigrants’ is more appropriate. They were a people that saw America as a place of necessary refuge, standing in stark contrast to other Asian groups who actually desired relocation. Further, the ABG identity emerged out of that mischaracterization of Southeast Asian Americans as immigrants rather than emigrants, as they demonstrated through their powerful violations of the traditional image of an Asian American: studious, reserved, systemically-successful American. These girls internalized the identity of an ABG and became representations of the larger misattribution and misunderstanding of Southeast Asian Americans and their stories.

While the terms ‘emigrant’ and ‘immigrant’ are, by definition, both correct for Southeast Asian Americans, ‘immigrant’ indicates an attraction to the United States. The latter term, therefore, better reflects other Asian groups, particularly the Chinese, the Japanese, and Indians, who immigrated to pursue the wonders of American societal life rather than escape their homelands out of necessity. When analyzing the Chinese American immigrant story, the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s takes on a pivotal role.

For instance, ten-year-old Wong Ming-Chung, alongside his uncle, left China in 1852 for the US in hopes of becoming rich in the crazed California Gold Rush.21 After tumultuous episodes of being ridiculed by White companions for searching for “nonexistent gold,” the pair finally achieved their goal of acquiring gold and sending that wealth back to China.22 Wong, along with the 20,000 other Chinese immigrants that year, saw the opportunity for economic elevation in the US, specifically in California.23 The potential to accumulate gold 20 US Census Bureau, “Population Estimates, July 1 2021, (V2021) — California,” Quick Facts (Suitland, MD, United States: Census Bureau, 2021).

21 Laurence Yep, The Journal of Wong Ming-Chung: A Chinese Miner, California, 1852 (My Name is America) (Wilkinsburg, PA, United States: Scholastic Inc., 2000).

22 Ibid.

23 “From Gold Rush to Golden State,” California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849 to 1900 (Washington, DC, United States: Library of Congress).

21 served as a powerful pull factor for immigration from China. Railroad laboring attracted even more Chinese immigrants, whose importance was emphasized by railroad magnate Leland Stanford. In 1865, he wrote to President Andrew Johnson that “without [the Chinese] it would be impossible to complete the western portion of this great national enterprise, within the time required by the Acts of Congress.”24 Multitudes of Chinese would immigrate to the US until the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, essentially halting almost all human entry from China.25 Thereafter, Japanese immigration filled the void at a time when the island nation saw strong economic growth. Many Americans embraced Japanese immigration, so long as they received “a better class of immigrants.”26 This meant restricting American open arms to “students” and “business men,” while outright rejecting “Japanese laboring men... of the Coolie class,” with “Coolie” meaning unskilled.27 As Japan modernized, its population became more educated and sought to utilize their newfound productivity in the US. In more recent years, this trend has been epitomized by skilled and higher-class Indians who seek the expansive opportunities offered by US universities, pulling them to immigrate and to consistently top almost all socioeconomic metrics.28 The American pull has been so strong that, while there are 1,325 Americans for every one Indian American doctor, there are a staggering 2,400 Indians for every Indian doctor.29 Southeast Asian Americans, meanwhile, were pushed out of their ancestral homes, turning them into ‘emigrants.’ In particular, the deadly instability during the aftermath of the Vietnam War made it necessary for the Hmong, the Cambodians, and the Vietnamese 24 Leland Stanford, “Statement Made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior, of Progress of the Work,” Central Pacific Railroad (Sacramento, CA, United States: H. S. Crocker & Co., 1865).

25 Congress of the United States, Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, in “Milestone Documents” (College Park, MD, United States: National Archives, 2022).

26 “Influx of 1906 Exceeded by 184,614 — Japanese Pour In,” New York Daily Tribune, 1907.

27 Theodore Roosevelt, Letter from President Theodore Roosevelt to his Secretary of Commerce and Labor, in Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907-1908 (Minneapolis, MN, United States: Immigration and Ethnic History Society, 2019).

28 M.R. Iravani, “Brain drain Problem: A Review,” International Journal of Business and Social Science, Vol. 2, no. 15 (New York, NY, United States: Center for Promoting Ideas, 2011).

29 Ibid.

Asian Baby Girls to leave their homes. Beginning in 1975, the stateless Hmong people endured an attempted genocide at the hands of Laos’ newly-governing communist Pathet Lao regime, who ferociously declared Hmongs’ “[extermination] to the last root.”30 Seeking refuge in neighboring Thailand brought more pain for the Hmong, as Thai authorities placed them in detention camps and refused to see them as legitimate refugees, ultimately forcing almost all of them to be deported back to Laos if US resettlement failed.31 Along with other stateless minorities in Thailand, the Hmong lacked a standardized Thai ID, effectively suppressing their ability to pursue jobs and healthcare services.32 This extended to the intense scrutiny they had to face. Unsolicited labels like “illegal immigrants” haunted their daily lives and consistently marked them as second-class people, as evidenced by checkpoints blocking “stateless people from traveling outside the living area,” with “many police there to detect illegal migrants.”33 Similar to the Hmong experience, Cambodians faced genocide from their new government, despite being the majority ethnicity in the country.34 Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime killed between 1.17 million and 3.42 million Cambodians in pursuit of an agrarian egalitarian utopia.35 They violently de-urbanized Cambodian cities, especially the capital Phnom Penh, deceivingly promising a return “after three days.”

As a result, many “did not pack enough food to eat,” while others “did not trust them” and “delayed [their]

30 Larry Clinton Thompson, Refugee Workers in the Indochina Exodus, 1975–1982 (Jefferson, NC, United States: McFarland, 2010), 54.

31“Hmong ordered from Thai camp,” BBC News, 2004; “Thailand: Stop Deportation of Hmong Refugees to Laos,” Human Rights Watch, 2006.

32 Siwarak Kitchanapaibul, “Status of the stateless population in Thailand: How does stigma matter in their life?” PLOS One, Vol. 17, no. 3 (San Francisco, CA, United States: Public Library of Science, 2022).

33 Ibid.

34 Patrick Heuveline, “The Demographic Analysis of Mortality Crises: The Case of Cambodia, 1970–1979,” in Forced Migration and Mortality, 102-129 (Washington, DC, United States: National Academic Press, 2001).

35 Ibid.

22 journey.”36 The journey itself to their new rural homes already exposed the grim reality of Pol Pot’s rule to Cambodians, with one survivor recalling the sight of “dead bodies along the road.”37 In a perserved diary, Poch Younly, a fatal victim of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide, wrote, “how sad I am to die in a place that does not belong to us,” in reference to his forcible transfer to rural Cambodia, a place so unfamiliar to him and his family.38 To the west in Vietnam, from 1975 to the end of the 1980s, the victorious communist Hanoi government retaliated through the torture of around one million South Vietnamese in reeducation camps, “where men and women silently endured, night after night, grasping at hope that someday they might see their children again.”39 Former South Vietnamese soldier Thanh Ta endured this feared fate, but he was able to connect with his family by writing poems through smuggled paper. While imprisoned thousands of miles away from his loved ones in northern Vietnam, he declared in his piece titled “Thao Thức,” or “Restlessness:” “loving and remembering a lot of images from my home village.”40 Upon his release, Thanh Ta sought refuge in the US, carrying baggage of violent trauma from these camps.41 Southeast Asian Americans came to the US not as immigrants, but as emigrants, leading to implications that ABGs epitomize. These girls’ violation of the traditional Asian American image arose as a consequence of the mischaracterization of Southeast Asian newcomers. Their divergence away from that idealized image was embodied by their congregation into violent gangs and their desire for a conspicuous scarification 36 James A. Tyner et al., “The Evacuation of Phnom Penh during the Cambodian Genocide: Applying Spatial Video Geonarratives to the Study of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, Vol. 12, no. 3, 163-176 (Williamsburg, VA, United States: International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2018), 168.

37 Ibid, 172.

38 Poch Younly, Diary detailing life under the Khmer Rouge in the period 1975-1976, in “Rare diary gives details of life under Khmer Rouge,” edited by Todd Pitman (New York, NY, United States: Associated Press, 2014).

39 Anh Do, Tran Phan, and Eugene Garcia, “Camp Z30-D: The Survivors,” Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (New York, NY, United States: Columbia Journalism School, 2002).

40 Thanh Ta, Poem written in a Vietnamese reeducation camp, in “The secret diaries my grandma snuck out of a Communist prison in Vietnam,” edited by Hong Ta (Puget Sound, WA, United States: KUOW, 2019).

41 Ibid.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 of their physical attributes. In recent years, however, the once-negative descriptors that came to define ABGs, such as “ghetto” and “hood rat,” have been whitewashed by non-Southeast Asian groups, pushing the maliced experiences of Southeast Asian Americans into a corner to be forgotten and undermined.42

A Southeast Asian Emblem: Asian Baby Girls The Southeast Asian diaspora’s synonymy with delinquency, especially gang culture, tainted its image and led to the dominant facet of the ABG identity. Within the Asian American community, to call a girl an ABG in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant “to describe [her as being] involved in gangs, criminal activities and drug use.”43 This description, however, was not entirely unwarranted. By the late 1980s, Asian American girl gangs had already been prominent in Orange County, California, particularly those of Vietnamese descent.44 Sixteen-year-old “Tomboy” demonstrated key characteristics of the gangs’ dynamics, as she engaged in bloody fights using the main weapon of choice: pocket knives.45 Data during this period shows that forty Asian American gangs, both male and female and mostly Vietnamese, were based in Garden Grove and performed their main assaults through burglary.46 In assessing the growth and popularity of these gangs, scholars and journalists alike have suggested that “gangs offer a sense of belonging that school, family and a wounded community have not been able to provide.” In other words, it was not because of “adolescent rebellion” but “despair.”47 The girl gangs complemented larger Vietnamese American gangs, with grievances from their refugee experiences playing a major role in their delinquent activities.48 For instance, in 1991, thirty people were taken hostage in Sacramento, California by a Vietnamese American gang who wanted transportation to Thailand in order 42 Kaliyah (@.kalihay), “i remember growing up.”

43 Zoe Zhang, “What the ‘ABG’ identity says about ESEA femininity,” The Michigan Daily, September 15, 2021.

44 Efron, “Violent, Defiant Vietnamese Form Girl Gangs: Crime.”

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ken Kashiwahara, “Sacramento, California / Hostage Situation,” ABC Evening News, ABC News Network (New York City, NY, United States: ABC, April 5, 1991).

23 to “shoot Viet Cong.”49 Grievances against the communist-backed, southern-based Viet Cong militiamen persisted within the Vietnamese American community, composed mainly of South Vietnamese refugees who saw the Viet Cong as traitors who sold them out to Ho Chi Minh and his northern forces during the war.50 Zooming out to the general Southeast Asian population, the prominent “Asian Boyz” gang spanned many Southeast Asian refugee communities, especially Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, striving “to become the most feared Asian gang in Los Angeles.”51 The US Department of Justice itself described the gang as “one of the more violent gangs encountered by criminal justice professionals.”52 Their high-profile crimes include a 2006 Massachusetts birthday party shootout with a rival gang, as well as the fatal beating of a tobe member in that same year.53 In pertaining to ABGs, the Asian Boyz worked hand-in-hand with its female affiliate “Asian Chicks,” who were also composed of Southeast Asians. These girls served great importance to the Asian Boyz’s domination of Southern California, as they were the main carriers of substance and weaponry contraband.54 The girls composing Asian Chicks, then, were ABGs who arose as the lifeline of Southeast Asian American gang networks.

ABGs, moreover, imposed themselves physically through scarification that revolved around violating the standard attributes of the traditionally inconspicuous Asian American. This preconceived portrait of timidness was especially inflicted on Asian American girls, who faced a constant struggle of being stuck in between the model minority concept and the stereo-

49 Kashiwahara, “Sacramento, California / Hostage Situation.”

50 Nghia Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992 (Jefferson, North Carolina, United States: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006).

51 Evelyn Larrubia, “Asian Boyz Face Group Trial in Spate of Killings,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1998.

52 Al Valdez, “Asian Boyz,” Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine (Washington, DC, United States: US Department of Justice, 2001).

53 Lisa Redmond, “Lowell murder trial set to begin this week,” Lowell Sun, December 2, 2008; Nate Crossett, “Nguyen Pleads Guilty to Manslaughter,” WKTV, December 2, 2013.

54 Valdez, “Asian Boyz.”

Asian Baby Girls type of being submissive.55 As a consequence, there is very little scientific analysis on their mental well-being, despite Asian American girls “between ages 15 and 24 years” having “the highest rate of completed suicides compared with all other racial and ethnic groups,” as recently as 2014.56 For Southeast Asian American girls, in particular, high expectations coupled with their disadvantaged backgrounds led to predisposed failure in the pursuit of the American Dream. Carol, a Vietnamese and Laotian American from Southern California, formerly worked in the admissions department at her undergraduate institution and was specifically tasked with increasing representation of minority groups such as Southeast Asians.57 She breaks down the “model minority myth” by contrasting the migratory circumstances of Southeast Asian Americans and other Asian groups. While groups like the Chinese came for “specialized labor” in “STEM and engineering” during the 1950s to 1970s, Southeast Asians fled from war in the 1980s and 1990s.58 Another dimension to the ABG scarification was dyed hair. Asian American girls, especially those who identified as ABGs formerly and presently, dyed their hair blonde in order to assimilate better into American society, or to better the assimilation process in the eyes of others.59 Dyed hair “[was also] often linked with other forms of body modification, such as piercing and tattooing, and therefore reflects a rejection of mainstream and old-fashioned femininity norms.”60 It had been a way to stand out, as it was a “very simple declaration” for ABGs: “Here I am. Pay attention to me. See me.”61 A likely outcome of the conditions, therefore, that propagated the ABG identity was the desire to numb the stresses of the Southeast Asian refugee story and to impose themselves into American 55 Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, Eun Jeong Yang, and Jessica Henderson Daniel, “Asian American Adolescent Girls: Navigating Stress Across Multiple Contexts,” in Multicultural Feminist Therapy: Helping Adolescent Girls of Color to Thrive, edited by Thema Bryant-Davis, 113–154 (Washington, DC, United States: American Psychological Association, 2019).

56 Ibid, 116.

57 Carol (@saltycarolmel), “raised by vietnamese and laotian grandparents, always proud to be SEA #southeastasian,” TikTok, 2022.

58 Ibid.

59 Andrea Cheng, “Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond.” New York Times. April 9, 2018.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

24 society with a distinct, rebellious identity.

Starting at the end of the 2000s, the negativity surrounding the ABG identity pivoted for the better as more systematically-successful Asian groups essentially “gentrified” or “domesticated” the ABG persona, eroding the difficult experiences of the original cohort of Southeast Asian American ABGs in the decades prior. In recent years, according to Asian American blogger Zoe Zhang, the ABG identity has been “appropriated by East Asians, and the rise of social media’s glorification of the trendy ESEA women gradually solidified the term as a reference to internet-famous women and shifted away from its origin.”62 As she, an East Asian woman herself, repeatedly emphasizes, the seizing of this term by East Asians has only perpetuated the one-dimensional view held by Americans that all Asian Americans are East Asian, regardless of whether or not one is Chinese, Korean, or Japanese.

Another Asian American blogger, Vicki Li, makes a contrasting argument that “ABG” is actually a modern term, only coming into existence a few years ago.63 She cites the growth of California rave culture, as well as the increasing desire of Asian American women to wear fake eyelashes, dye their hair, and use electronic cigarettes.64 Pushing back on Li’s notion, a commenter on her blog by the name of “Brian Zhu” expressed his dismay at the dismissiveness of the author’s tone and her misattribution of the ABG as a modern phenomenon, silencing the fact that the term had been deliberately given to gang-affiliated girls from impoverished Southeast Asian American communities.65 In contemporary mainstream Asian American culture, many Southeast Asian Americans demonstrate contempt for the supposed hypocrisy by East Asian Americans who identify as ABGs. TikTok has been the main medium of this outcry, where claims of East Asian Americans coining ABG as a term “to [distinguish] themselves from the ‘ghetto’ and ‘hood rat’” Southeast Asian Americans are widespread.66 Ne62 Zhang, “What the ‘ABG’ identity says about ESEA femininity.”

63 Vicki Li, “The Rise of the ABG,” The F-Word Magazine, March 7, 2020.

64 Ibid; NextShark, “15 Things ABGs Know All Too Well,” December 5, 2018; Muriel Tewes, “What Is an Asian Baby Girl (ABG)?” Bellatory, August 5, 2022; Alex Tran, “How to Be an ABG + How to Spot an Asian Baby Girl,” Schimiggy Reviews.

[65] Li, “The Rise of the ABG.”.

65 Li, “The Rise of the ABG.” 66 Kaliyah (@.kalihay), “i remember growing up.”

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 pali and Hmong American Iridessa argues that “real” ABGs were “not rich East Asian girls with blond balayages that only [date White] men,” but instead came from a life of shared hardships and collective delinquency.67 She puts forth images of gangster Southeast Asian American girls, showcasing gang signs and bandanas.68 A more powerful condemnation comes from Vietnamese American Catherine Chi, who, in response to a Chinese American user ridiculing her as a “TikTok activist abg,” angrily declares that “East Asians need to learn to stay out of Southeast Asian business.”69 She further elaborates that Southeast Asians have endured the stigma of being called “ABG” paired with discriminatory terms like “brown” and “dirty” in the past.70 In her predominantly Southeast Asian Southern California neighborhood, Chi states that “people had to do a lot of illegal s––t to survive,” a necessity likely not faced by the more affluent East Asian groups.71

A New Chapter Emigration constructed the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian American communities beginning in the 1980s, plagued by a harmful disconnect between external expectations of structured success and internal realities of unstable inequity. The assumption that the US enticed Southeast Asian Americans, like their other Asian American counterparts, for their affluence in wealth and skills, created a dangerous outcome. By default, pressures to succeed fell heavily on the disadvantaged Southeast Asian American groups.

Their propensity to succeed was dwarfed by their propensity to fail, epitomized by the rapid growth of the Southeast Asian American culture of delinquency and illicitness. Asian Baby Girls, particularly, demonstrated the clearest deviation: from the perception of timid and unbothered to the reality of daring and sensitive.

These maliced Southeast Asian American girls of the 1990s and 2000s exemplified the jagged story of the new chapter in the American novel: the Southeast Asian American emigrant story. It was defined by the shock it induced in the general American psyche and 67 Iridessa (@makimaphobee), “#southeastasian #SEAsian #hmong #viet #lao #cambodian,” TikTok, 2022.

68 Ibid.

69 Catherine Chi (@pinkstellaire), “Replying to @airislaeurent.

EAs need to find a newer derogatory insult for Viet women than ABG,” TikTok, 2022.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

25

Asian Baby Girls

system, a system of insurmountable obstacles and inevitable shortcoming. …

The girls dressed in business casual attire at the high-end restaurant in Orange County that she served in may have looked like her. Despite their identities as Asian American, she felt no inner inclination to relate to them. While their lives were set for structure and stability, hers was spontaneous, dependent on the temperature and wind patterns of each day. But she never once halted her journey, even though she genuinely saw no certain end point to it. From her first day as an American, socioeconomic and psychological fog were already in place to prevent her from doing so. What was certain, though, was that the Asian Baby Girl needed to replace her blunting pocket switchblade and her rusting hoop earrings.

Untangling Han Kyumin Kyung Kenyon College - Class of 2024

Is han becoming the new “minzokubyō” (racial disease) of Korea? The simplest translation being grudge, han shaped Korean society since the Choson dynasty (1392-1910). Although the origin or the exact meaning of han is unclear, folk songs like Arirang, which is estimated to be more than 600 years old, confirm a long tie between this sentiment and society. Han still plays an important role in contemporary society as han became the defining characteristic of the Korean nation and its people. For instance, in The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World through Pop Culture, Euny Hong, a Korean-American journalist and writer, referred to Korea as the nation of han and credited han as the major driving force of the rapid economic development of Korea after the Korean War (1950-53).1 Ever since Korea’s independence, the nation has been challenging its former “master,” demanding apology and reparation. After its independence, the Korean media focused on nationalizing han of “victims,” like comfort women, Chinese and Korean women and girls subjected to sexual slavery as part of brothels operated by the Imperial Japanese Army during its participation in global wars (1937-45). In effect making this resolvement of their han a way to win political fights against Japan. Yet, this portrayal and usage of these “victims,” in contemporary society further removes agency, individuality, and humanity from these individuals who already suffered the loss of identity during the Japanese colonial rule in Korea.

Moreover, this portrayal has a greater impact on the entire Korean society as it belittles the humiliation and colonial experience of the majority. Despite the mutual humiliation every Korean suffered under 1 Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How one Nation is Conquering the World through Pop Culture, (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

Japanese colonialism, due to the erasure of Korea as a nation, only people like comfort women and Koreans whose suffering can be financially calculated, by being depicted as “victims” as they served, and serve, as a site of national han and a political tool of Korea.

Although han is a unique concept or invention of Korea, by equating the han of “victims” as national han the modern Korean government is behaving like Japanese imperialists who diagnosed Korea with various “minzokubyō” (racial diseases), like husband murder, based on a small population of socially vulnerable women in colonial Korea.2 In other words, although the loss of a nation was a universal sentiment felt by the colonized (every Korean during the colonial era), only those who experienced quantifiable and visible inhumane treatment during the colonial era are counted as “victims” or to be infected with han. This portrayal of victimhood requires subscription to a modern capitalistic understanding of suffering, with suffering calculated in terms of labor and rightful compensation for that labor. Moreover, these blurred boundaries between individual and national han makes individual han unresolvable. The nation becomes an actor and victims’ ability, desire, and agency to resolve han, as individuals, is denied. In other words, victims’ demonstrations of han and emotions can only be viewed and used as a political tool, not as an expression of individuality.

Yet, individual life has a greatly different relationship to the world and time, when compared to human inventions or humanity as a whole. The indelible connection between individual life and death demonstrates the limits of this dehumanizing process as han of comfort 2 Jin-Kyung Park, “Husband Murder as the ‘Sickness’ of Korea: Carceral Gynecology, Race, and Tradition in Colonial Korea, 1926-1932” in Journal of Women’s History 25, 3 (2013): 116140.

25 women can only be manifested into reality during their lifetime. In other words, “natural” human processes like the aging and death of surviving comfort women greatly hinders the Korean government’s attempt to gain more political power. The Korean government has been attempting to reconcile the dichotomy between human life and inventions through continuous modernization and technological advancements. New technologies like AI or even continuous improvement of filming techniques allows the government to forever preserve the han of comfort women and portray both their han and individual comfort women to be alive and real.

Defining Han As Sarah Soh points out in “Aspiring to Craft Modern Gendered Selves: ‘Comfort Women’ and Chongsindae in Late Colonial Korea,” the lives of surviving comfort women in contemporary South Korea are always depicted as “a life filled with much han” or a “life knotted in han.”3 In this article she claims that in contemporary Korea han is understood as “a Korean ethno-psychological term, [which] refers to a complex of long-held negative emotions and sentiments such as sadness, regret, anger, remorse, melancholy, and resignation.” There can be a variety of social and/or psychological factors that cause han and it can be inflicted by others (Tasang) or self (Jasang). There are two ways in which this tasang (hurt by others) can be inflicted.

The first way is when another person, social system, environment, etc… frustrates the desire or will of the person, and this frustration causes a catastrophe, han, in life. The second way is when one’s life is unilaterally forced to rupture by others. When han is inflicted by self it is known as Jasang (hurt by self). One may cause jasang by doing something remorseful and regretting it. However, the infliction of jasang or tasang does not always result in han, as it is one’s obsession and desire to hold onto the hurt that causes han.4 Nevertheless, those who have been afflicted with han usually lack social and political power to resolve its cause.

These tangled emotions cause han to fester inwardly, developing feelings “such as resentment, regret, anger, 3 Sarah C. Soh.“Aspiring to Craft Modern Gendered Selves: ‘Comfort Women’ and Chongsindae in Late Colonial Korea,” Critical Asian Studies 36:4 (2004): 175-198.

4 The Academy of Korean Studies. “han,” https://terms.naver.com/entry.naver?docId=532214&cid=46655&categoryId=46655.

Untangling Han resignation, longing, and sorrow.”5 Moreover, if han continues to fester inward without any resolution it can cause sickness or death of an individual.6 Simply put, han is caused by emotions that one did not resolve, but decided to hold onto. Thus, it can be defined as an expression or “infection” of unresolved and intensified emotions that can even result in death.

Yet, just like any human emotions, han can be resolved. It is possible to “untangle” han by oneself or by relying on others who are “possessed” with the same han.7 Nevertheless, what is unique about han is its connection to Confucianism and its customs, such as ancestral worship, allow one to resolve han, emotion, even after their death. For instance, Jeolla-do Ssitgimguth, a Jeolla region’s form of Ssitgimguth that started in Joseon dynasty, the last Korean dynasty found in 1329, and continued to post-colonial Korea, is a ritual that prays for the deceased to resolve han and become a free being to go to the underworld. Participants believe that the deceased are brought back to life through mudang (female shamanism priest) and Ssitgimguth.

Sstigimguth is a guth (Shamanism ancestral rituals influenced by Confucianism) performed after death. Just like the name suggests, Sstigim means “washed,” and a mudang washes the “body” of the dead. She creates the body of the dead by rolling the deceased’s clothes with a carpet and creates the head by capturing nuck, the most important energy that dwells in a living body and makes life possible, in Siggi (tableware). Then Mudang puts sotttukkeong (pot lid for an old Korean rice cooker) on top of Siggis, that captures the nuck (spirit) of the dead, and then wears it as a “hat,” while sweeping and singing muga (song of mudangs).8 Although rituals performed by mudang can bring the “physical body” back to life, it is the living’s belief in the tangibility and reality of han that brings life to the body. The ritual 5 Sarah C. Soh, “Aspiring to Craft Modern Gendered Selves.”

6 Also known as hwa-beyong meaning diseases caused by anger/ han.

7 Tangled thread has been used as a metaphor to describe the tangling and detangling process of han. Han causes thread to get tangled but it is also possible to detangle this knot.

8 The usage of household and agricultural goods in this ritual demonstrates the influence of Confucianism; It’s unclear what this act of using sottukkeong as a hat symbolizes. Some believe that it signifies direct possession of mudang’s body. When others believe that it merely represents mudang’s ability to communicate with the ghost. Regardless of the differences, both interpretations recognize mudang’s body as a medium between the dead and the living; Doopedia. “Ssitgimguth).” https://terms.naver.com/entry.naver?docId=1120234&cid=40942&categoryId=39201.

26 wouldn’t have occurred in the first place if the living did not believe in the deceased’s ability to feel and express han and desire to resolve it. Moreover, through the possession of this “body” and interaction with mudang, one restores agency, making the expression, or products, of “negative emotions” (han) “beautiful.”9

Han as Modern “Racial Diseases” of Korea Although han, just like any human emotion, can be shared, the ways in which comfort women’s han became a national one in contemporary Korea mirrors ways in which the Japanese colonial government used socially vulnerable women to diagnose Korea with “racial diseases.” In “Husband Murder as the ‘Sickness’ of Korea: Carceral Gynecology, Race, and Tradition in Colonial Korea, 1926-1932,” Jin-Kyung Park demonstrates how science and statistical data were used by Japanese scientists to diagnose “husband murder” as “minzokubyō” (racial disease) of Korea.

Takeki Kudō, a public state-hired Japanese physician in colonial Korea from 1910 to 1945, conducted a gynecological study on female criminals in Japanese prisons and “diagnosed husband murder as ‘minzokubyō’ (racial disease)... the unique ‘sickness’ of the Korean race (Chosen minzoku).”10 Takeki Kudō conducted research on sixty-six Korean female inmates imprisoned for husband murder. Despite the clear occurrence of sampling error, ‘scientific’ data collected and research conducted by Takeki Kudō established ‘husband murder’ to be true. Moreover, the setting of this research presented the researcher with unique opportunities in which his research subjects were ‘willing’ to answer highly personal and invasive questions. This ‘willingness’ to answer highly invasive questions was reflective of their colonial experience. Takeki Kudō was a Japanese individual in a position of power and these women were of Korean nationality. In other words, the 9 Beauty does not lie in “aesthetic” quality or appeal but rather one’s ability, who has been afflicted with han, to resolve han by self. For instance, Arirang, a Korean folk song that best represents han of a lover, wishes for the immediate death of the lover who has left them. Despite the horrific nature of the lyrics, it is one of the most celebrated folk songs as it is viewed as an expression and resolvement of han, making Arirang to be “beautiful.”

10 Jin-Kyung Park. “Husband Murder as the ‘Sickness’ of Korea: Carceral Gynecology, Race, and Tradition in Colonial Korea, 1926-1932,” Journal of Women’s History 25, 3 (2013): 116-140.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 conditions, namely imprisonment and colonization, that forced these sixty-six Korean female inmates into a vulnerable position enabled Japan to establish “husband murder” as a “racial disease.”

Similarly, contemporary Korea heavily relies on eleven surviving comfort women to infect Koreans with their han, which can be seen as another kind of racial disease, by evoking shared memory and han towards Japan. In other words, they rely on emotion rather than science to establish han of comfort women as “racial diseases.” For instance, a state sponsored report on comfort women in the North Jeolla province, 2004 The Story of a Survivor of Japanese Military Comfort Women in North Jeolla Province, created a highly emotional and evocative narrative of how Choi Seonsun became a comfort woman.11 Such statements like “she was kidnapped on her way to buy medicine for her father. And her sick father died worrying about her, never knowing where she went” provokes traditional Korean values and memories. Korea, traditionally a Confucian society, places great emphasis on family and the role individuals play as a family member. This concept of family extends beyond the limits of the household as every relationship and activity can be explained in terms of hierarchical family structure and the role the individual plays within the family.12 Thus, by demonstrating how Japan kidnapped a “dutiful daughter” on her way to perform her “daughtery” duty, this caused the daughter to commit sin by causing the death of her father, and inhibited her from performing further Confucian duties (witnessing and performing rituals for the father). Simply put, Confucian understanding of society and family blurs the boundaries between private and public life, making the inability or hindrance to perform Confucian family roles a threat to society. It also makes han of comfort women into a private duty Koreans must remember and untangle as ‘children’ or ‘grandchildren’ of these han filled grandmothers and as “family members” of Korean society. Moreover, it is this shared memory of having a “kidnapped family,” either during the time of Japanese colonization or Ko-

11 All Korean names are written in the Korean way (last name, first name).

12 Confucian scholars have compared the relationship between the ruler and subject to be that of father and son. For instance, if the Ruler, as a father, protects and provides for his subjects and the subject, as a son, respects and follows the ruler, society is in perfect harmony just like a functional family.

27 rean war, that makes their stories empathetic.13 In other words, it is this shared social knowledge that makes han of comfort women highly infectious.

Han of Comfort Woman Moreover, this narrative, explaining comfort women’s lives in a linear timeline makes han of comfort women to be highly infectious. Yet, this narrative requires continuous manifestation of helpless and vulnerable individuals since it relies itself on the imagery of and the creation of a tie between innocent young girls who were tricked by the Japanese colonial government to become comfort women and dying grandmothers who are filled with han in contemporary postcolonial Korea. Comfort women became an icon and symbol of national han against Japan and this iconization makes it impossible for former comfort women to become, or to be viewed, as anything but comfort women. When depicting comfort women in contemporary media, there is an almost universal formula that every news media abides by. News articles begin by depicting the life of an innocent daughter or young girl whose dreams and life were shattered by Japan. To further dramatize, these articles are often accompanied by photographs of innocent, young girls in the Comfort Women unit and suffering grandmothers. Their tangible vulnerability, both physical and social, demonstrated in photographs and writings highlights urgency and the need to resolve their han, not the grandmother’s but the young girl’s.

At the same time, their identity as an individual is removed as both their childhood and adolescence is encapsulated by the term “Comfort Women,” the identity that was forcefully assigned to them by the Japanese colonial government. This belief was directly filtered when creating the Comfort Women’s Memorial Statue, as the statue represents comfort women as a young girl, not as a grandmother. However, any public representation of comfort women, like this statue, that highlights the connection between young girls and fragile grandmothers, denies the individuality and achievements of former comfort women as the label assigned by the Japanese colonial government becomes the only label to describe the whole of their life.

Nevertheless, the sufferings faced by these women serve as a site of national power. Takeki Kudō, the Japanese scientist who diagnosed Korea with ‘hus13 A common “myth”/ shared story / reality in Korea in which their family members (especially young males) were kidnapped during the Korean war by North Koreans.

Untangling Han band murder’ blamed the patriarchal nature of Confucianism as the cause of husband murder in Korea, as it forced young girls into early-marriage. This research aided Japanese imperialism as racial shortfall and ‘barbaric racial customs’ were identified to be the source of crime and social vice in Korea. Therefore, the intervention by another ‘race’ (Japanese) was depicted as a necessary means to combat this ‘racial disease.’ In the case of Korea, comfort women’s physical and social fragility serves as a site for the Korean government’s intervention, escalating individual struggle against Japan as a political fight between two nations. However, this national involvement causes both han and the label of comfort women to become something that an individual can never get rid of, even after their death.

Moreover, the Korean government’s effort in postcolonial Korea to escalate han of an individual to that of the nation, reduces the status of nation to that of colony as just like its colonial time, Korea becomes a land filled with ‘racial diseases.’ It also removes the possibility for individual comfort women to claim agency as the initial concealment of the sexual nature of the labors performed by comfort women and the Korean government’s focus on financial reimbursement distorts han of comfort women and makes personal resolvement of han in postcolonial society nearly impossible.

Over the course of sixty years, the depiction of comfort women changed drastically in postcolonial news media. Comfort women first appeared in Korean news in 1925 under the section of “Introducing Women’s Organization in Units.” The news article was published in ‘old Korean’ on newspapers issued by Dongailbo, one of the major Korean newspaper companies established in 1920.14 In colonial Korea, along with other western women institutions that were established by Japan, the article claimed that units for comfort women were created to provide “comfort” and liberate married women and young ladies of Korea. It compared units for comfort women to female Christian schools founded by Japan, claiming that both organizations will liberate and educate women.15 This representation of comfort women and the fact that the article was written in Korean corroborates the postcolonial Korean gov14 Also known as hanja, a language that has its roots and resembles Chinese. Was used as the only language of Korea, until king Sejong (1397~1450) invented Hangul. However, Hangul was seen as commoners’ language and was not accepted by yangban (t. nobleman).

15 Anonymous, “Introducing Women’s Organizations in Units,” trans. by author, Dongailbo, January 01, 1925.

28 ernment’s claim that the Japanese government made conscious efforts to trick Koreans into ‘slavery.’ This narrative quickly changed with Korea’s independence from Japan, at which point comfort women became the source of national han. In a 1948 copy of The Chosun Ilbo, the oldest newspaper company in Korea, an article entitled “700,000 Unpaid Wages of 3 billion won for Koreans Drafted to the Pacific War” claimed that Japan lied to 700,000 Koreans and forced them to work as either nurses or comfort women during the Pacific War. It also argued that Japan owed Korea 3 billion won, as Japan neglected to pay these workers during the wartime. Moreover, when talking about the cause of suffering in contemporary Korea, the article stated that “the sadness families of the dead feel when they see or cannot find their family corpses” cannot be calculated. Nevertheless, despite the difference in labor, the article equated the suffering of comfort women to that of nurses and victims of Japanese forced labor by evoking Confucian values and views on family. It also claimed that the negotiation, which aimed at compensation to Korea initiated by General MacArthur, the U.S. general who administered postwar Japan during the Allied occupation after the World War II, would resolve han of these individuals, as compensation by Japan would give “salvation” to the families of the dead and contribute to the economic development of Korea.16 The sexual nature of labor performed by comfort women was only revealed in 1991 when Kim Hacksoon, a former comfort woman, testified in a press conference. Although Korea blames Japan and their attempt to conceal their past as colonizers as the cause of secrecy in regards to comfort women until the 1990s, societal pressure caused both comfort women and the Korean government to conceal the sexual nature of the labor performed by them. Yet, not knowing the cause of han, meant that Koreans were not infected with han of comfort women but of the nation. In other words, they were infected by the need for financial reimbursement for Korea’s colonial past. After the 1991 testimony, the Korean government started the registration of comfort women to protect and restore ‘honor’ and ‘comfort’ to former comfort women. However, as Sarah Soh pointed out, they were still grouped with Chongsindae (forced labor) until 2006. Moreover, lawsuits against the Japanese government, aided by the Korean government, 16 Anonymous, “700,000 Unpaid Wages of 3 billion won for Koreans Drafted to the Pacific War,” trans. by author, The Chosun Ilbo, September 14, 1948.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 focused on economic reimbursement. Yet, as Hwang Keunju, a former comfort woman, testified in the 600th protest against the Japanese government, financial reimbursement was not the way to untangle han. She demanded an apology from the Japanese government and stated: “I’m 85 years old. I don’t know when I will die. I don’t even want money. So, can Japan just please hurry and apologize?”17 However, the complicated political relationship between Japan and Korea and the ongoing lawsuits against the Japanese government demanding financial reimbursement, delays the delivery of the apology. In other words, this negative emotion continues to get tangled, both within bodies of comfort women and the nation, due to national desire to gain political and economical power, making han of comfort women to be unresolvable.

Untangling Han after Death Modern technologies like AI replaced traditional roles performed by mudang and became a medium to connect the world between the living and the dead.

The development of technology makes han of comfort women tangible and real even after their death. Deceased comfort women and their han are brought back to life through digital records and interviews. Moreover, it no longer requires the living’s belief in han of comfort women as their han is forever encapsulated, not only in writing, but also in videos, making their experience appear self-representative. For instance, in 2021, the Korean government presented Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology which allows one to have a direct conversation with comfort women as part of Eternal Testimony, an exhibition that demonstrates the history of comfort women. In an interview, Kim Juseob, the director of this exhibition, claimed that through AI “we can really have personal interaction, as human to human. We can meet as humans and share the sufferings and remember these sufferings as personal experience.”18 Moreover, the creation process enables comfort women to assert their individuality as AI requires numerous interviews and interaction with comfort women to develop code and patterns. However, unlike Jeolla-do Ssitgimguth, the interview and AI 17 Videomug. “The ‘1,400th Wednesday Rally’... How Was the Last ‘Wednesday’ for These Grandmothers?” trans. by author, YouTube, Videomug, 14 Aug. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=H6cyajHnupg.

18 MBCnews, YouTube, 16 Aug. 2021, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=I_A-OQNjj7k.

29 focuses only on the tangling process of han. AI technology limits individual comfort women, who are represented by AI technology, to be merely reflective of the whole. As AI, they can only answer questions that have been asked before and their replies are limited by digital codes that are based on their past. In other words, contemporary Korean society is focusing on continuous manifestation of han rather than resolvement. Modern technologies like AI, that can facilitate more ‘real human interaction,’ enables this manifestation by once again forcing comfort women into this frame of ‘innocent girl,’ forever a victim, even after their death. Moreover, regardless of how authentic or real these deceased comfort women appear to be, the interaction between living and dead is only facilitated through artificial or non-human mediums. Compared to the past where mudang, a person, acted as a medium between the living and the dead, this modern way to detangle han of comfort women appears to be artificial and inhuman. In other words, Korea’s desire to remember their han only exacerbates han of comfort women, as even after their death, their life is depicted as that of “Comfort Women” tangled in han.

Conclusion As a Korean myself, I share this han with these grandmothers and feel like it is my duty as their ‘granddaughter’ to remember and resolve these emotions. I do not want to be overtly critical nor claim that Korea should forget about them to allow these grandmothers to untangle han by themselves. Instead, I want to claim that this national han echos the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique in the 20th century. Although Fanon’s study focused on revealing the impact and aftermath of European colonialism, the study of comfort women expands these boundaries and demonstrates that even Japanese colonialism had, and still has, similar impacts in colonial and post-colonial societies. In A Dying Colonialism, Fanon claimed that once a colonizer imposes its value and itself with violence “the very life of the colonized can manifest itself only defensively, in a more or less clandestine way.”19 In a conversation with decolonial studies, Korea, as a former colony, can only manifest itself in relation and reaction to Japan and harm done by Japan. Moreover, 19 Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” A Dying Colonialism (1959): 121-145.

Untangling Han this national han demonstrates the remains of Japanese colonialism as it removes individual identity from Korean bodies and, just as in colonial times, Korea becomes a land filled with ‘racial diseases.’

Former comfort women’s past, present, and future identity and achievement as an individual is erased by their past identity as “Comfort Women,” the label they attained during Japanese colonialism. In other words, usage of lingering labels from colonial times makes it impossible for these individual grandmothers to truly untangle their han. Additionally, the national effort to cement han of ‘innocent girls’ and political tension between Japan and Korea in contemporary society exacerbates the problem. Hence, any national attempt to resolve han on behalf of comfort women becomes an expression of negative emotions, rather than an act of claiming agency, due to the absence of individuality, self-resolvement, and national interest in detangling han. Modern technologies, like AI, only furthers our obsession with and unwillingness to let go of these negative emotions. This limitation exacerbates Korea’s unwillingness to progress and resolve han of both living and deceased comfort women. Thus, Korea never progresses past this colonial mindset, as han is continuously manifested and becomes unresolvable due to a national desire and obsession to hold onto han of ‘innocent, young girls.’

Sunlight at the Turn of the 20th Century: America’s Increasing Embrace of Natural Light Joshua Weingarten Vanderbilt University - Class of 2024

While the advent of the Industrial Revolution brought about dramatic transformations, especially with the increase in urbanization, this golden age quickly proved not to be as glorious as it seemed. Diseases like tuberculosis, cholera, and influenza sprang up as urban tenements proved detrimental to human health.

Another less discussed, but equally important, consequence of industrialization was a lack of sunlight. As quarters became more cramped, workers transitioned from fields to factories, and skyscrapers towered over previously sunlit cities––the amount of sunlight people received dropped significantly. The increase in light obstructions augmented awareness around insolation, and it became a growing topic in public health, social, and business spheres. Urban planners began accounting for sunlight when designing cities and doctors started using sunlight to treat Rickets and many other diseases.

From the 1860s to the 1920s, attitudes towards insolation shifted, resulting in monumental changes across the medical community, urban architecture, and other facets of life aimed at reincorporating sunlight into urban environments.

It was in the mid-19th century that reduced exposure to sunlight was first recognized as a potential factor in human wellbeing. The first time it was recognized as such was during the 1860s, when it was seen as a societal problem. An 1869 editorial in the New York Evangelist said the following: “Ladies who will persist in keeping darkened rooms, and gentlemen who will shut the sun from their dwellings, will find themselves at the head of enervated, languishing, complaining households.”1 Some believed that there was a relationship between a lack of sunlight and dysfunctional households. The editorial also touched on aspects of

physical health, commenting that people lacking exposure to sunlight will feel drained of energy. This editorial represented some of the first commentary emphasizing the importance of sunlight to human health.

A decade later, an article written in the Prairie Farmer introduced a biological perspective on sunlight. The article’s speculation on human health derived from watching other lifeforms. The author wrote: “Everyone has observed the effects of sunlight upon vegetales. Plants that are kept in a dark room, do not grow or blossom freely if at all… In the animal kingdom, no less than in the vegetal, the light of day gives color and vigor.”2 The author used intuitive reasoning to declare that if sunlight was needed for plants and animals then certainly it must have been indispensable for humans as well. It was not surprising that those in the farming community were some of the first to recognize the effect sunlight had on humans, as part of their job was to investigate and utilize the means through which they could cultivate healthy and productive animals. The article appeared in a smaller newspaper and represented the early seeds of a movement towards increasing insolation that took off around the turn of the century.

In 1890, a discovery by Theobald Palm regarding insolation caused a seismic shift in the medical community. Palm conducted a global study analyzing how the sun impacted the prevalence of Rickets, a disease that stems from soft, weak bones and causes problems with early childhood development. After comparing the prevalence of Rickets in Northern European countries to Japan and tropical areas, Palm concluded that Rickets “was more common where there

1 The Farmer’s Department: SUNLIGHT, (New York Evangelist (1830-1902) 40, no. 32 (1869)).

2 GOOD HEALTH: SUNLIGHT (Prairie Farmer (1843-1877) 48, no. 2 (1877, Jan 13)).

31

Sunlight at the Turn of the 20th Century

was less sunlight.”3 His discovery was the first from the medical community that used scientific evidence to link Rickets with reduced exposure to sunlight. Around the same time of Palm’s discovery, scientists began to identify Vitamins such as Vitamin D. In this manner, a clear relationship was established between Vitamin D deficiency and Rickets, and therefore between sunlight and Rickets as well. Thus, scientists had evidence to conclude that Vitamin D and sunlight were connected, although exactly how would not be known until the 1970s.

Palm’s discovery of the linkage between sunlight and Rickets was instrumental for the American medical community as Rickets was exceedingly prevalent in early 20th-century America. In fact, in 1921 “Rickets was considered the most common nutritional disease of children, affecting approximately 75% of infants in New York City.”4 Due to the new medical perspective on sunlight and the importance of exposure to it, Vitamin D deficiency was considered the most important dietary deficiency in America in the 1920s.5 With extraordinarily high rates of Rickets amongst children, Americans began to recognize the importance of sunlight. The alarming rate of Rickets in American society and its link with decreased sunlight spurred significant dialogue around the sun and led to positive attitudes towards insolation.

Towards the end of the century, darkness was discussed in an increasingly negative manner in public discourse. In 1894, New York City’s Architectural League President George B. Post described a city lined with skyscrapers like the “bottom of a canyon, dark, gloomy, and damp.”6 To people like Post, dark urbanized centers were perceived as unattractive places.

Concerns also arose around darkness’ preponderance for immorality. As the historian Daniel Freund argues, “progressive reformers worried that dark places became centers for human debasement, where children

could not grow into good people and immigrant parents, isolated from the benevolent care of Americanizing natives, became bad citizens who kept unhygienic homes.”7 Adequate sunlight was viewed as necessary to preserve morality. By the 20th century, positive opinions on sunlight were expressed by health experts, architects, and social reformers.

Renewable energy advancements such as solar power continued to bolster these increasingly positive attitudes towards sunlight. In 1880, Samuel Langley invented the bolometer, an instrument used to measure light and heat exuded by the sun. This invention demonstrated the societal interest in measuring the sun, especially in terms of measuring its products that would benefit the population, in essence the heat and light emitted by it. In 1891, Clarence Kemp created the first commercial solar water heater.8 This remarkable advancement further demonstrated the ways in which the sun could be utilized in urban spaces. In 1903, Niels Tyburg Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his invention of the Finsen Lamp, which used the ultraviolet light from the sun to cure the skin disorder lupus.9 The Finsen Lamp established the potential curative effects of sunlight from a medical perspective.

Moreover, Finsen’s receiving of the Nobel Prize for this invention demonstrated that sunlight as a curative medicine was accepted and appreciated by the scientific community. Among many other developments, these three inventions illustrated from technological and medical perspectives how the sun could be used as a positive force to produce energy and cure disease.

As the 20th century progressed, American scientists examined the role urbanization played in an increase of medical problems associated with a lack of Vitamin D. In 1800, when the Industrial Revolution in America was just beginning, the urban population was around 5%.10 As factories sprung up in major cities, many emigrated to find work. A little over a century

3 Theobald Palm, The geographic distribution and etiology of rickets, (Practitioner, 1890) 45, 270-279, 321-342.

4 Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Safer and Healthier Foods, (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, October 15, 1999) https://www. cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4840a1.htm.

5 Daniel Freund, American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 47.

6 Daniel Freund, American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 9.

7 Ibid, 11.

8 The History of Solar, (US Department of Energy: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy), https://www1.eere.energy.gov/ solar/pdfs/solar_timeline.pdf.

9 Annie Jameson, More Than Meets the Eye: Revealing the Therapeutic Potential of ‘Light’, 1896―1910, (Social History of Medicine : the Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 26, no. 4 2013), 715–37.

10 Leah Platt Boustan, Devin Bunten, and Owen Hearey, Urbanization in the United States 1800-2000, (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013), 33. https://scholar.princeton.edu/ sites/default/files/lboustan/files/research21_urban_handbook.pdf.

32 later, the urban population jumped astronomically to 45%, reaching 70% in the Northeast.11 Utilizing a report from the Collective Investigation Committee of the British Medical Association, Theobald Palm examined the heavily industrialized society of America, concluding that diseases such as Rickets were more commonly found in “large towns and thickly peopled districts.”12 This correlation between urban centers and increased disease led to the radical transformation of urban cities.

By the 1910s, planners of major industrialized cities realized that close-quarter housing with no sunlight had disastrous effects. In 1916, the City of New York Board of Estimate and Apportionment passed a monumental zoning law. A major emphasis of this law was to ensure that people were able to receive a proper amount of sunlight. Section 17 of the bill states: “If a room in which persons live, sleep, work or congregate receives its light and air in whole or in part directly from an open space… there shall be at least one inner court, outer court, side yard or rear yard upon which a ventilating skylight opens from such room.”13 This law assured that any new buildings built would not block sunlight from reaching rooms that already received light. This was a monumental step, demonstrating that the importance of sunlight was recognized even at the governmental level.

The next step New York City took was to ensure new buildings were designed to receive maximum sunlight. In 1919, they commissioned Herbert Swan and George Tuttle to study how to increase the amount of light New York City receives. They released a report titled “Planning Sunlight Cities” which discussed various aspects of planning “sunlight cities” including skyscrapers, ensuring buildings and roads work in congruence, and the orientation of streets as measured by degrees. Every detail of city planning was considered to ensure there was sufficient sunlight. The report began as such: “Sunlight cities must be planned from the start. The width and arrangement of streets the length and breadth of the lot, the type, height and use of building… all of these have to be considered in laying out 11 Ibid, 34.

12 Theobald Palm, The geographic distribution and etiology of rickets, (Practitioner, 1890) 45, 270-279, 321-342.

13 Building Zone Resolution (Adopted July 25, 1916) (City of New York Board of Estimate and Apportionment), March 2004. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/ city-planning history/zr1916.pdf.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 a sunlit town.” 14Sunlight was so important that it impacted how wide streets were being built, the curvature of buildings, and the placement of tall and short buildings. Architects now had to consider sunlight with every new project they designed. Positive opinions on sunlight had now permeated society to the extent that it influenced the design of New York City.

The work of Tuttle and Swan helped pave the way for redesigning New York City in a way that met the regulations stipulated by the Zoning Law of 1916.

Figue 1: The photo shows four sketches from the New York Times edition published on March 19, 1922.15

The sketches were meant to illustrate how the design of skyscrapers would transform over time to receive adequate light. The sketch in the top left shows an architectural design that inhibits light from receiving the building as demonstrated by the dark building. The sketch in the top right receives more light, followed by the bottom left which has even more light until the skyscraper in the bottom right sketch is fully lit up. If one looks closely, the sketches on the bottom reveal a staggered structural design that allows more sunlight to reach every window whereas the buildings on the 14 Herbert S. Swan and George W. Tuttle, Department of Architectural Engineering: Planning Sunlight Cities, (The American Architect (1909-1921) 115, no. 2256 (1919)), 427.

15 Hugh Ferris, The New Architecture, (The New York Times, March 19, 1922), 9, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1922/03/19/103583322.html?pageNumber=53.

33 top remain rather dark. These illustrations demonstrated the projected evolution New York City skyscrapers would undergo in the coming decades to allow more sunlight inside buildings. Furthermore, they illustrated how the public perceived New York City skyscrapers would change in the coming decades to increase sunlight in buildings.

In 1933, a coalition of architects met from across the world to discuss how sunlight could better enter houses and buildings. At the end of the summit, they released a report dictating guidelines for building new urban settlements. One of the guidelines was as follows: “builders must show plans proving sunlight enters a house for ‘a minimum of two hours on the day of the winter solstice.’”16 The report demonstrated that sunlight was important enough for human health to demand strict timelines on how much sunlight should enter a home even during the darkest of seasons. Furthermore, it illustrated the global awareness surrounding insolation. Architectural trends continued to emphasize constructing buildings and houses with the importance of sunlight in mind until the 1960s.17 As sunlight gained positive traction throughout the 1920s, emphasis returned to its involvement in medical treatments. In the 1920s, doctors began treating patients who showed signs of Vitamin D deficiency with sunlight. However, before long, medical practitioners began experimenting with the effects sunlight could have in curing those with serious diseases not directly related to the skin. Sunlight “was widely prescribed as a possible remedy for tuberculosis, with programs of monitored sunbathing in the open air as one of the treatments offered in European sanitoria.”18 In fact, sunlight started to be used as a treatment for influenza and even wounds for soldiers in World War I. The wide variety of illnesses for which sunlight was prescribed demonstrated how the sun began to be seen as somewhat of a cure-all.

As the curing effects of sunlight were touted across the medical community, a new form of therapy was developed––Heliotherapy. Heliotherapy is the practice of daily exposure to direct sunlight in order 16 Sara Jensen Carr, The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 4.

17 Ibid, 4.

18 Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Medicalization of Sunlight: D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and the Sun Cure.

Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.) 23, no. 2 (2016): 423–41.

Sunlight at the Turn of the 20th Century to treat a medical problem and it “came to be known as one of the many early twentieth-century therapies based on the idea that nature was itself healing.”19 The societal view of the sun as a source of healing demonstrated its new role as a necessity for good health. Heliotherapy was also used to cure tuberculosis, one of the deadlier diseases of the early 20th century. The following is a table showing the results of Heliotherapy used to treat tuberculosis.

Roland Hammond, Providence, Rhode Island Total number treated: 70 in 1911 and 60 in 1912 Number of weeks of sun bathing: 14 in 1911 and 13 in 1912 Average age of patients: approximately 7 years Range of gain in weight with heliotherapy: 3–4.2 pounds Range in percent of gain in hemoglobin values: 0.8–17%20

In this study, Heliotherapy effectively treated 130 patients in a two-year period. These reports helped establish sunlight’s validity as a healing power in the scientific community.

Figure 2: This photo depicts a Heliotherapy treament center in Denver.21

The beds faced the windows in order for patients to receive the most sunlight. Moreover, the patients remained fairly uncovered by their bedsheets to achieve maximum exposure to the sun. Heliotherapy was more common in locations with a high altitude such as Denver due to the higher concentration of UV light, which 19 Ibid, 423.

20 Rachel Eu, Sunlight and Gaslight: Mapping Light in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City (Barnard history.

Journal of Urban History, 2020) https://history.barnard.edu/ sites/default/files/inline-files/RachelEu_Sunlight%26Gaslight_ JUH2020%20%282%29_0.pdf.

21 Heliotherapy Treated Children – 1926 (Vitamin D Wiki) https://vitamindwiki.com/Heliotherapy+treated+children+–+1926.

34 produced more Vitamin D. Heliotherapy treatment facilities like this opened across the United States as Heliotherapy grew in practice. The dramatic increase in Heliotherapy centers further demonstrated how sunlight was accepted as a healing power throughout the medical community and society at large.

As sunlight had become a popular curative, American companies began to capitalize on this, utilizing the sun in their advertisements. In 1929, the National Carbon Company published a “Sunshine Map’’ which showed how many hours of sunlight were possible each month in fifty cities and then how many hours actually occurred after the obscuring effects of clouds.22 The contrast was meant to show a significant amount of natural light was lost every month. This was part of their advertising campaign for their Eveready Sunshine Lamp which claimed to produce sun-like rays. A line from a one-page advertisement stated: “The value of this lamp lies in its reproduction of all the essential rays of sunshine in their natural proportions. It is like sunshine itself, warming, strengthening, tanning with moderate exposures.”23 At the top of the lamp is a light source where sun-like rays come from. Products like this sprung up across America and were a sign that positive opinions on sunshine were commonplace enough to create a consumer market for sunlight-producing products. In this manner, sunlight evolved into an accepted part of popular culture.

As the 1920s progressed, technological advancements led to alternative cures for American society’s biggest health problems. In 1923, a major medical breakthrough occurred with Vitamin D fortification.

Dr. George Speri invented a device that could irradiate milk in order to add Vitamin D.24 In 1929, Harry Steenbock improved on Speri’s creation and made a milk fortification machine that could be used commercially.25 Thus, in the 1930s fortifying milk with Vitamin 22 Daniel Freund, American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 35.

23 1929 Ad Eveready Sunshine Heat Lamp Medical Quackery Health Tan Twenties, (Period Paper, 2022), https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1929-ad-eveready-sunshine-heat-lamp-medical-quackery-health-tan-twenties-ygh1-228609-ygh1-032.

24 Allison Ford, A Short History of Vitamin D (Sperti), https:// www.sperti.com/a-short-history-of-vitamin-d/.

25 David Bishai and Ritu Nalubola, The History of Food Fortification in the United States: Its Relevance for Current Fortification Efforts in Developing Countries (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 41, https://web1.sph.emory.edu/users/hpacho2/ PartnershipsMaize/Bishai_2002.pdf.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 2 D occurred on a large scale. Almost every American, most of whom lived in urbanized areas, was now acquiring the daily Vitamin D necessary to maintain adequate physical and mental shape. By the 1940s, milk fortification led to an almost complete eradication of Rickets across the United States.26 Due to this widespread curing of Rickets, the importance of sunlight in medical discourse waned. Without the threat of disease, society became less focused on receiving exposure to sunlight and it quietly exited the public dialogue.

Figure 3: photo of the Eveready Sunshine Lamp.27

Many of the changes made over these decades to increase exposure to sunlight and intake of Vitamin D are still around today. Milk is still fortified with Vitamin D, as well as several other dairy products such as margarine. If one walks around Central Park in New York City, they can see the staggered structural design on top of many of the city’s tallest skyscrapers, even including those more recently built. Many people now venture to the beach and other sunlit areas to improve their mood and health as they did in the 1920s. Sunlight therapy is still used to treat cases of Rickets and 26 Allison Ford, A Short History of Vitamin D (Sperti), https:// www.sperti.com/a-short-history-of-vitamin-d/.

27 Ibid, 1.

35 other skin disorders. However, some of the positive dialogue and advancements regarding sunlight from this era didn’t last. Doctors now warn of sunlight causing skin cancer rather than curing skin diseases. This has led to a sharp rise of sunscreen and other tanning products. Much as the historical discourse surrounding the sun was multifaceted, ebbing and flowing throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it seems that society and the medical community’s relationship to the effects of sun exposure will remain complex as the 21st century moves forward.

Sunlight at the Turn of the 20th Century

Alternative Intolerance: Secondary Title Allain of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature Tay Meshkinyar Hamilton College - Class of 2023

Sometime in the mid-twelfth century, the French theologian and poet Alain of Lille wrote De Planctu Naturae (The Plaint of Nature), a long and rather crude hybrid of verse and prose decrying sexual perversion, and more specifically, homosexuality.1 Likely a professor in Paris, we know very little of Alain beyond what we can infer from his texts. Of course, Alain’s works as a source of understanding him and his motives should not be discounted. His work illuminates his motives, how he was influenced by his environment, and his extraordinary skill as an author. The Plaint of Nature is a difficult work, dense with figurative devices and masterfully complex Latin, and is among the most advanced works of Latin literature in the Middle Ages.2 Within its pages, Alain wove a Menippean satire, alternating verse and prose to illustrate an encounter between himself and a personified Nature.3 A key focus of The Plaint of Nature was, as the historian David Rollo wrote, “an ostensibly universal yet transgressive proclivity of like to seek out like.”4 Alain constructed this cosmic framework to lament the tendency of man to pursue same-sex relations. As such, this was no simple treatise against the sin of sodomy, as was Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah. Instead of offering a direct condemnation of homosexuality, Alain demonstrated—within his own philosophical system—the fundamental incompatibility of the validity of queer identi1 Alan of Lille, Literary Works, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press, 2013).

2 David Rollo, ed., Medieval Writings on Sex between Men: Peter Damian’s The Book of Gomorrah and Alain de Lille’s The Plaint of Nature, Explorations in Medieval Culture 19 (Boston: Brill, 2022), 77–78.

3 Rollo, Medieval Writings, 77–78.

4 Ibid, 78.

ties and the coherence of meaning itself.5 To Alain, the repression of queer desire was thus an embrace of the greater pleasure of rationality.

The Plaint of Nature was particularly remarkable for the nature of its argumentation. While theology defined the boundaries of Alain’s thought, it did not play a significant technical role. John Boswell took this argument further, writing that The Plaint of Nature presented an entirely philosophical argument, with “no specifically Christian theology” informing its reasoning.6 As Boswell notes, Alain was influenced considerably by the wave of “hostility to nonconformity which was sweeping Europe in his day,” and even participated in the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which was itself notable for its novel condemnation, novel in that it was an official condemnation and outlawing, of homosexuality.7 Boswell argued that Alain consciously constructed the framework on which The Plaint of Nature rested to fit these prejudices, and not as a mere

5 That is, the medieval, not modern, conception of identities that transgress traditional gender and sexual norms. For example, the sexual voracity of men today may be seen as rooted in (potentially toxic) masculinity, but in Medieval Europe this would more likely be considered a product of femininity. See: Karma Lochrie. “Configurations of Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Europe.” Chapter. In The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, edited by E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, 9091. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Valerie Allen, “Alain of Lille on the Little Bits That Make a Difference,” in Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Marla Segol, 1st ed., The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 34.

6 John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 310.

7 Boswell, Chrstianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 310.

37 exercise in literary invective.8 Alain’s exclusive use of philosophy also suggested an appeal to the increasing desire for faith-neutral validation of Christian morality.9 As Boswell noted, The Plaint of Nature was largely a project of “the thirteenth-century Scholastic effort to rationalize the Christian faith in accordance with principles of Greek philosophy.”10 Thus, The Plaint of Nature was very much a product of the attitudes and intellectual tastes of the time, if not more so than the literary tradition that it built on.

Given Alain of Lille’s overt opposition to homosexuality, The Plaint of Nature had peculiar literary roots. The work took the form of a “Boethian dialogue,” a literary format introduced by Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, in which Boethius discusses certain philosophical issues such as ethics and the nature of God with a personified and feminine version of ‘Philosophy.’11 Alain’s definitions of “nature” (that is, in the physical sense) were based on the definitions given in the Consolation, which made no explicit exclusion of homosexuality.12 Alain’s personification of Nature as a sort of quasi-goddess is a tradition likely invented by the 12th century Platonist philosopher Bernard Silvestris, who, as Boswell argued, focused little on matters of homosexuality.13 Why, then, did Alain draw so heavily on literary tradition that made little reference to it? For one, the pagan figure of Nature was largely irrelevant to the effectively ubiquitous force of Christian morality, and thus allowed Alain to remain at least somewhat faith-neutral in his argumentation.14 Mainly, however, Alain was influenced by contemporary works that idealized the natural order.15 The Nature of Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia denounced a wide range of sexual and nonsexual offenses. Alain merely narrowed the scope to queer practices.16 The Plaint of Nature can be understood as a relatively schematic dream vision that took place over

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Winthrop Wetherbee, “Alan of Lille, De Planctu Naturae: The Fall of Nature and the Survival of Poetry,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 21 (January 2011): 224.

12 Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 312.

13 Ibid, 309.

14 Ibid, 311.

15 Ibid, 310.

16 Ibid.

Alternative Intolerance roughly four distinct parts.17 First, the Dreamer (Alain himself) lamented the condition of humanity, which he saw as sinful and increasingly antinatural. In the first section of verse, Alain established his target of queer sexuality, as well as his mode of criticism: Nature weeps, morality is silenced; modesty, an orphan, is wholly banished from her once noble station. The active sex is horrified that it thus falls disgracefully into the passive role. Man become woman demeans the dignity of his sex; the art of a Venus turned sorcerer renders him hermaphrodite. He is both predicate and subject; a single term assumes a double role, and extends the rules of grammar too far. He denies that he is a man, for he has become a barbarian in the grammar of Nature. The art itself does not satisfy him, only troping. But a translation of this kind cannot be called a trope; this figure is better defined as a vice.18

Alain represented homosexuality as a sort of grammatical abomination resulting from the absence of natural gender. This figure, rendered “hermaphrodite” by Venus, rejected natural art for the vice of trope. Alain continued with a rather bizarre, obscene metaphor for anal sex: The man for whom a simple conversion destroys the laws of Nature’s art is too much the logician. He strikes an anvil that mints no seed; the very hammer detests its anvil. No idea sets its seal on the matter of the womb; instead the plow makes furrows in barren ground. Thus the dactylic practice of Venus becomes a crude iambic, in which the long syllable does not accept the short.19

In addition to a clear detestation of the physicality of queer sex, this passage exposed the strange and sophisticated nature of Alain’s attitudes. Here, Alain represented the anus in the context of sexual intercourse as a non-reproductive vagina, or one “that mints no seed.”20 This focus on the physicality of gender roles in sex echoed a distant, classical essentialism, by which the receptive partner was principally a social inferior, and not necessarily female.21 Alain modified this framework, with reproductive purpose taking the place of complementary social classes as a necessary condition 17 Larry Scanlon, “Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius,” The Romantic Review 86, no. 2 (March 1995): 14.

18 Alan of Lille, Literary Works, 23.

19 Ibid, 25.

20 Scanlon, “Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius.”

21 David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Routledge, 1990), 30–31.

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for “natural” sexual intercourse. This exchange thus pigeonholed a male receptive partner into not merely being a social inferior, but a woman altogether. This perversity therefore not only transgressed the natural order, but the meaning of gender roles altogether.

Valerie Allen noted that queer identities obfuscate meaning by denying what she terms as “the little bits” of gender and sexual differentiation: Just as little bits of words differentiate whole words from each other and make more words when put together in the right way, so the “little bits” bestowed by Natura signify sexual difference and, when lined up correctly, prove equally productive. Erase this sexual difference, suggests Alain, and meaning itself can no longer be generated.22

These “little bits” of grammar paralleled the anatomical “little bits” bestowed by Nature upon man and woman, and manifested mainly through grammatical gender. Masculine and feminine suffixes, much like reproductive organs giving meaning to sexual intercourse, actually “generated” meaning in literature.23 Allen further argued that this distinction between masculine and feminine was “identified with rationality,” with sodomy representing a breakdown of reason.24 Hence, these “little bits” of grammar—and therefore the “little bits” of human anatomy—provided the basis for human thought.

A key passage of The Plaint of Nature saw Nature reveal herself to Alain and begin her own condemnation of humanity’s sins. The sins of grammatical perversity and homosexuality now converged to one:25 Man alone, scorning the music of my harmonious governance, is deluded by the lyre of a delirious Orpheus. For the human race, fallen away from its noble origin, is barbarous in its construction of gender, and practices a most irregular metaplasm that inverts the rules of Venus. Thus a male, Tiresias-like in his strange practice of love, transforms direct predication into composition of an irregular kind. Abandoning the orthography of Venus in his truancy, he shows himself a writer of sophistic falsehood.26

Alexandre Leupin noted that Orpheus, to whom Ovid attributes the origins of pederasty, “emblematize[d]” 22 Allen, “Alain of Lille on the Little Bits That Make a Difference,” 34.

23 Ibid, 38–39.

24 Ibid, 47-48.

25 Scanlon, “Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius.”

26 Alan of Lille, Literary Works, 95.

both homosexuality and the perversity of language.27 Scanlon noted that Alain extended this perverse association to Orpheus’s lyre, preventing the instrument from producing natural harmony. Nature’s use of dense wordplay and metaphor in this passage, as well as her homoerotic “troping” of the Augustinian tradition, echoed the same perversion that Alain described in his initial lament. Nature indirectly acknowledged this contradiction, remarkably suggesting that poetry was fundamentally queer. Alain’s tendency to produce these seemingly self-contradictory passages highlighted many aspects of his novel approach to the problem of queer sex and the exceptional sophistication of his homophobia. As Scanlon argued, The Plaint of Nature advocated for the repression of queer sexuality by the Church, but in doing so recognized that regulation of homosexuality is fundamentally an exchange of pleasure. Rather than a rejection of worldly desire, the repression of homosexuality to Alain instead represented “an embrace of the pleasure of the power in regulation.”28 There exists a wealth of enormously different interpretations on the purpose of The Plaint of Nature.

My analysis contemplates whether The Plaint of Nature was definitively written to regulate queer sexuality, and how Alain’s framework sought to regulate it.

Scanlon, Rollo, and Allen have each demonstrated that Alain was clearly hostile to queer sexuality. However convoluted the approach of The Plaint of Nature, Alain certainly suggested that homosexuality was a practice that must be corrected. Winthrop Wetherbee turned this argument on its head, instead arguing that The Plaint of Nature was a treatise on the purpose of poetry and its limited capacity to express all forms of human desire.

Queer practices were instead symptoms of a deeper, fundamental crisis concerning the binding of sexuality and language.29 Wetherbee mainly contrasted this view with that of Peter Godman, who argued that Alain was simply advocating legal punishment for sexual deviance, straying rather far from the above mentioned authors. Nevertheless, Wetherbee reminds us that the world of literary scholarship is seldom monolithic, The Plaint of Nature being no exception.

Throughout The Plaint of Nature, there remains a lingering question of whether the text contra27 Alexandre Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality, trans. Kate Cooper, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

28 Scalon, 6.

29 Wetherbee, “Alain of Lille, De Planctu Naturae.”

39 dicts itself. If metaphor is itself used as a metaphor for corruption, then where does that leave The Plaint of Nature? Alain continually used the corruption of language itself as a metaphor for meaning. But if language was, in fact, used as a metaphor, then we are led to believe by its own logic that The Plaint of Nature, as a fundamentally corrupted text, is not to be trusted.

Has Alain then constructed a system of meaning, that, when utilized to understand queer sexuality, actively denounced itself? Regardless of its logical consistency, however, The Plaint of Nature was a novel call for sexual reform that paradoxically transcended Church morality while attempting to influence it.

Alternative Intolerance

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