Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

287 Pages·2012·2.748 MB·English

by  Michael Laffan (editor), Max Weiss (editor)

Facing Fear
Publications in PartnershiP with the shelby cullom Davis center at Princeton university
The Spaces of the Modern City, edited by Kevin Kruse and Gyan Prakash
Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, edited by Gyan Prakash
Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective, edited by
Michael Laffan and Max Weiss
Facing Fear
The History of an Emotion
in Global Perspective
E M l M W
ditEd by ichaEl affan and ax Eiss
Princeton University Press
Princeton and oxford
copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William street,
Princeton, new Jersey 08540
in the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 oxford street,
Woodstock, oxfordshire ox20 1tW
press.princeton.edu
cover art: Julian Laffan, Hanging Dingo at Rocky Plain, New South Wales, woodcut,
2004.
all rights reserved
Library of congress cataloging-in-Publication data
facing fear : the history of an emotion in global perspective / Michael Laffan
and Max Weiss, eds.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-0-691-15359-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—isBn 978-0-691-15360-5 (paper :
alk. paper) 1. fear—social aspects—History. 2. fear—Political aspects—History.
3. History, Modern. 4. World politics. i. Laffan, Michael francis, 1969- ii. Weiss,
Max, 1977–
d210.f23 2012
152.4’609—dc23 2012002674
British Library cataloging- in- Publication data is available
this work is published in collaboration with the davis center, Princeton University.
this book has been composed in Palatino
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United states of america
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
introduction: fear and its opposites in the History of emotions
Max Weiss 1
1 Fear of the Thirty Years War
DaviD LeDerer 10
2 Conceptions of Terror in the european enlightenment
ronaLD sCheChTer 31
3 “When Fear rather than reason Dominates”: Priests behind
the Lines in the Tupac amaru rebellion (1780–83)
CharLes WaLker 54
4 Fear in Colonial California and within the Borderlands
LisBeTh haas 74
5 Weimar Cinema between hypnosis and enlightenment
anDreas kiLLen 91
6 italian Fascism’s Wartime enemy and the Politics of Fear
MarLa sTone 114
7 The Persecuted Body: evangelical internationalism, islam, and
the Politics of Fear
MeLani MCaLisTer 133
8 Danger, Media, and the Urban experience in Delhi
ravi sUnDaraM 162
9 Fear of the Past: Post- soviet Culture and the soviet Terror
aLexanDer eTkinD 183
vi •  contents
10 White hajjis: Dutch islamophobias Past and Present
MiChaeL LaFFan 202
notes 217
contributors 265
index 267
Preface
Fear is everywhere, it is measurable, and it is reportable. Or so the viewer
is apprised in countless media broadcasts designed to draw one in to the
latest fragmentary and predigested roundup of global news. Such certainty
about an omnipresent and scalable emotion seems to accord with the
consensus of the analyses now available that ruminate on the supposed
failure of the Enlightenment project to free us from so elemental a condi-
tion. As Jan Plamper has noted, fear sells, and this marketability, which
apparently reflects the daily concerns of the modern consumer, meshes
with Zygmunt Bauman’s observation that we choose stubbornly to fear
everything, from the weather to strangers and even our own memories.
Life surely abounds in peril, and terrors can be racked up, one upon the
other, to create a hierarchy of worry to be treated both by the technicians of
modernity— particularly the psychoanalysts and insurance agents whose
industries are examined by Joanna Bourke— and by the more traditional
religious mechanics of destiny.1
Even if it is experienced in the present moment, one might argue that
fear is inherently of the future; that it is the pervading sense of uncertainty
about an inherently unknowable condition that could potentially visit pain
on the body or loss of what one holds dear. As a result the modern subject
is potentially rendered utterly insecure, perhaps more so than her/his an-
cestors. After all, it has even been observed that the states that can claim
the most sophisticated security systems are those that identify the greatest
number of threats.2 Yet has it always been thus? If the Enlightenment was
supposed, by the inculcation of universal reason, to free everyone from
fear and thus remove the Divine as an imagined agent of history (which
so clearly has not happened), then how different have the fears of the past
been? Is the overwhelming and constantly reiterated Islamophobia of to-
day the same as that of previous epochs? And how, and indeed whom,
might we fear in times to come?
These seemed but a few of the potential questions to be posed when, in
October of 2006 and under the direction of Gyan Prakash, the Shelby Cul-
lom Davis Center for Historical Studies issued a call for applications from
scholars working on the subject of fear in all its manifestations. Over the
course of the 2007– 8 academic year, a wide- ranging set of conversations
explored specific histories of fear in various settings. In many instances
the discussions did indeed proceed from debates over the meaning of
viii •  Preface
Enlightenment claims to free the individual from the fears born of igno-
rance, superstition, and perhaps even religion itself. Moreover it became
clear how such fears were often invested in the body, or visualizations of
bodies that transcended the individual to include the formative nation-
states of which she or he was a member. With this transition in mind we
found it fruitful to move the discussion toward how fear could be rational-
ized, mobilized, or even visualized by the state and its agents as a naturally
chaotic enemy of order and, consequently, of the future.
Of course this set of conversations hardly developed in isolation, and
there are already numerous works that offer different perspectives on what,
how, and why we have feared. The aim of this volume is both to build upon
and connect with those other works, and perhaps serve as a somewhat
broader discussion of the topic for those interested in the intersections of
emotionology and history. The contributions that were generated from our
discussions, presented chronologically, provide snapshots of histories and
historically laden presents in which fear has played a decidedly powerful
role. We commence with David Lederer’s recounting, by way of the con-
tents of sometimes garishly illustrated broadsheets, of how early modern
German literati envisioned their nation as a monstrously deformed beast,
while commoners of the period anticipated possible starvation or penury
and reflected on the bloody executions and tortures so often witnessed
during their childhoods. Contrasted with this last gasp of the Old Order in
Europe, Ronald Schechter shows that fear, or more specifically Terror, was
not simply cast as a doomed condition to be banished by hope, but rather
was conceptualized in Enlightenment discourse as a tool to be deployed by
the rational overseer, and in ways akin to those of great princes past that
were to be no less shocking to the populace.
Fear can have a convenient past too. In Charles Walker’s chapter, set far
from the domains of the philosophes but in the same Age of Revolution, we
learn how clergy suspected of collaboration with the Peruvian rebel Tupac
Amaru II (1742– 1781) resorted to claiming that their apparently treach-
erous actions had been motivated solely by fear—a situation reluctantly
allowed under Canon Law. For her part, Lisbeth Haas suggests that Span-
ish missionaries in the California borderlands a few decades later tried to
mask their incomprehension of indigenous responses to their presence by
ascribing fear to them, even as she contends that the Indians themselves
appear to have come to celebrate the fears of their conquerors as a means
of valorizing their own resistance.
If anything, the first four chapters contribute to a discussion of fear, ra-
tionality, and religion in the absence of modern technologies now seen as
essential to its projection or aversion. In our first foray into the emergent
embrace of film, mass suggestion, and fear in the twentieth century, An-
dreas Killen opens his account with a Nazi censor’s assessment of Fritz
Preface • ix
Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, whose hypnotic powers were perceived as having the
potential to break down rational social order in Germany. Such images
were all the more terrifying, it seems, because they were projected via a
medium that was deemed hypnotically subversive in and of itself, having
been deployed in a society awash with itinerant, Caligari-e sque hypnotists
who had cut their teeth on the ranks of traumatized veterans of the Great
War. Still, as Killen closes his account, it is clear that this medium offered
as much promise as peril. Similar themes may be seen in Marla Stone’s
exploration of how and what faithful Italians who had embraced the cin-
ema were expected to fear when a state desired them to do so. In her case
moviegoers—while doubtless optimistic of a hopeful resolution to films
about the recent Spanish Civil War of 1936–39—would find their particular
fears for social disorder embodied in the disheveled and merciless Soviet
officer, a figure who some might argue only briefly displaced the betur-
baned jihadist and his veiled counterpart. Such a transition is explored by
Melani McAlister, who writes the history of the U.S. evangelical movement
that embraced rights talk in the 1990s while simultaneously engaging with
a global(ized) Christian body that was viscerally encouraged to fear Islam
in much the same way the Communist enemy had once been feared, in
hopes of thus combating and similarly defeating it.
From these mediations we then move rapidly to two different sites of
fear and imagination. First we have the apparent chaos of a modern Delhi
that defied the prescriptions of colonial and postcolonial planners. Ravi
Sundaram demonstrates how the urban cacophony has been rendered as
a fertile playground for hybrid animals of the imagination, or yet machines
able to deal out yet more fear in an already confusing nexus of apparent
disorder that had defeated modern planners set on vanquishing the unruly
(or indeed the monstrous).3
Monsters, meanwhile, are a prominent feature in the popular culture
of post– Soviet Russia as excavated by Alexander Etkind. Taking a rather
different approach influenced by film studies and psychoanalytic theory,
Etkind argues that the memories, or ostensible memories, of the gulag,
and of lost parents and grandparents, are yet to be settled by memorials,
and walk the earth instead in the form of the Freudian uncanny, some-
times even as zombies combated at times by the lycanthropes that were
so feared by the subjects of David Lederer’s contribution. Regardless of the
manner of its representation in so many books and films, however, Etkind
argues that such fear is as much of a future repetition of the past as it is a
function of memory.
In the final chapter of the volume I offer my own longue perspective
on the culture of Islamophobia in the Netherlands, a modern European
nation not- so- long sundered from “its” India, or Nederlandsch Indië, as In-
donesia was once known to its Atlantic colonizers. I argue that by more
x •  Preface
forcefully situating the seemingly transcended colonial past within the all-
too- threatening present, one understands how Islam creates a Dutch sense
of the uncanny, even as many regard the dress and imagined thoughts of
their fellow citizens as inexorably alien.
Taken as a whole, then, these essays cover a great deal of ground and
time, generating conversations that both topically and disciplinarily cross-
pollinate. As should be the case with edited volumes, these essays can be
read in any order to set up other parallels of experience and interpretation.
What truly matters, though, is that we can gain some small insight into
pasts whose experiences still resonate with us today.
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to express their deepest appreciation here to the succes-
sive directors of the Davis Center, Gyan Prakash and Dan Rodgers, for
having brought together the contributors in the first place and then for
offering unstinting advice to bring this project to fruition. Thanks are cer-
tainly due too to our colleagues at Princeton, to the ever amenable staff
of the Department of History and the Davis Center (especially Jennifer
Houle, Carla Zimowsk, and Brooke Fitzgerald), to the board of Princeton
University Press, and to the reviewers of the work, who made it clear what
was needed to cut to the chase, and indeed what to cut altogether. We
are also profoundly indebted to Jan Plamper, who went beyond the call
of most reviewers and offered rich and helpful insights derived from his
parallel project on interdisciplinary perspectives on fear, which is due out
from the University of Pittsburgh Press shortly.
Michael Laffan