DISPLACED PERSONS Territorial states create population displacements, if only by drawing boundaries. The longing that links displaced peoples and the places to which they seek to return is a potent force in history. The first two essays concern themselves with situations of return and re-emplacement, the first in Germany, the second in Rwanda.

Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, one of the most pervasive media images consisted of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. For many western Germans, as well as for much of the world, the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy seemed to be reflected and confirmed in the “consuming frenzy” (Konsumrausch) of the “Ossis” (East Germans). Although these images of consumption following the collapse of socialism were new, they were structured by and contributed to a dominant narrative of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human rights, but for consumer rights (e.g., Bauman 1992; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991). They were also, I would add, about consumer rites—about the making of citizen-consumers.

Over the 1990s, Western images of Africa became dominated by a social landscape of mobile people fleeing disaster. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1994 genocide in Rwanda, refugees and IDPs (“internally displaced people,” the term used for uprooted individuals within a state) were especially visible in Central Africa, but West Africa also was the locus of a series of complicated refugee movements (from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and elsewhere), and northeast Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) generated many more. Such flight from fear, however, was not new to Africa. Many people had fled colonial extractions or had been forcibly moved for purposes of colonial labor; many more were caught up in precolonial relocations. Of course many were forcibly moved as well in the massive displacement of slaves from and within Africa, and voluntary movement was also common, for land, trade, or religious duty. Consequently, while in the West, Africa is often thought of as a continent in stasis, with the rural poor tied to their land, in fact, the historical record indicates that Africa has always been a continent of enormous mobility.

As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, from fin-de-siècle scientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond. The complexities of Brazilian race have not always been in the forefront of these debates. For much of the period up to the 1970s, scholars focused on debunking Brazil's vaunted myth of racial democracy—the national ideology claiming Brazil to be free of racial prejudice (Costa 1985). The effort was roundly successful. From this literature, we learned not only how wide a gap there has been between the ideal of racial democracy and the reality of racial and color prejudice in Brazil, but also the role elites have played in manipulating the myth to defuse racial and other social tensions (Hanchard 1994). Recently, some scholars have suggested that it is high time to look beyond the debunking agenda and take up once again the complexities of the Brazilian situation. Anthropologists have led the way, seeking to reveal “the range of contemporary understandings” of racial democracy and to explain something of its persistence as a tangible “dream” in the face of ongoing discrimination and prejudice in everyday Brazilian life (Sheriff 2001:8).

Of Edward Said's many passions, Joseph Conrad was among the most persistent. That a Polish-English writer of nineteenth-century colonial fiction should be the hero of the author of Orientalism might challenge those, among both Said's friends and enemies, who misread his work as a condemnation of major Western writers and thinkers who shared their period's Eurocentric prejudice. Said fully recognized Conrad's “uncompromising Eurocentric vision,” yet discovered in it, perhaps paradoxically, a “felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it.” With the passage of time, what speaks to us is not Conrad's prejudices, but the way his texts “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints.”

Revolutions have provoked not only important social changes and bloody civil wars, but a huge literature. There is controversy and confusion on how to integrate seemingly disparate modes of explanation into a coherent analysis: social structure, the decisions and policies of key actors (be they leaders or organized entities like parties and assemblies), and the choices made by ordinary people. Structural theories have proven useful for describing revolutionary situations; choice theories are useful in clarifying the revolutionary process; how to integrate the two to explain revolutionary outcomes remains contentious.

To date, only a handful of scholars, most notably C.L.R. James and Eugene Genovese, have seen slave rebellions and peasant revolts as having anything in common. Fewer scholars still would be prepared to accept the assumption that slaves and peasants were agrarian working classes that shared significant characteristics. Yet, the issues of rural unrest and class formation continue to haunt the historiography of both slave and peasant societies long after James' and Genovese's studies, and have forced several historians to revise and broaden their definitions of class conflict as a means to describe the social transformations of several rural regions. In this essay, I focus on the American South as a case study of a slave society and on the Italian South, or Mezzogiorno, as a case study of a peasant society. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between the social structures of these two regions, in both cases debates on the class character of rural workers began when leftist historians raised the possibility of applying Marxist categories to their particular historical conditions. In both cases, they were dealing with a ‘south’ characterized by a preeminently agricultural economy and a persistent social and political conservatism. In both cases, too, the debate has moved from broad theoretical positions to the explanation of specific instances of class conflict in a rural setting—the slaves' resistance to their masters and the peasants' resistance to their landlords, respectively—and then on to a criticism of the Marxist approach to the problem.

Creating Germans Abroad is clearly inspired by the work of Benedict Anderson (1983) and written in the spirit of the work of Ann Stoler (1995; 2002). In this work, Walther suggests the idealization of the possibility of a German homeland outside of the European territory in colonial Southwest Africa. The emphasis on agriculture, climate, and landscape countered the increasing push towards industrialization in the Fatherland. Here, there was not just a nostalgic longing for an imagined German past that is pastoral as opposed to industrial (a longing used and manipulated by Nazi ideologues), but an actual place where the idealized Heimat (homeland) could be realized in practice. The problem, however, became the presence of so many non-Germans, in this case not only “Black” Africans, but also “White” Afrikaners. In this sense, an appropriate title for the book might also be “Creating Germany Abroad.”

Egypt of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has long been a focus for study by social scientists and humanists of various disciplines. To an extensive bibliography is now added a unique work of social history that explores the lives of Egypt's poor and the shifting attitudes toward them over 150 years. Mine Ener has written an account of how the poor of Cairo and Alexandria negotiated assistance from traditional institutions and government agencies alike, and how the nature of institutions offering assistance changed during this time. She posited that, for much of this period, the attitude of successive Egyptian governments toward the poor was one infused with an Islamic ethos of charity and informed by shifting political concerns. Continuous evidence of government behavior—from Mehmet Ali Pasha in the early nineteenth century to King Farouk in the mid-twentieth—demonstrates that the source of charity was never thoroughly depersonalized. Each one claimed to be the source of assistance and couched his claims in the language of the concerned and conscientious Muslim ruler.

Peter Mark's “Portuguese” Style is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on the history and development of Atlantic world cultures. In particular, Mark examines the evolution and proliferation of “Portuguese”-style domestic architecture, primarily in Senegambia, but also in other parts of the Portuguese colonial world, including Cape Verde and Brazil. For Mark, “Portuguese”-style is an amalgamation of Jola and Manding architectural forms, and to a lesser extent, those of the Portuguese. This architectural style—sun-dried brick houses, rectangular in shape, with whitewashed walls, and a continuous veranda or vestibule at the entry—was most closely associated with Luso-Africans working as middlemen in the trade between the African interior and Portuguese traders on the coast.