Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
Review of Jacob A. C. Remes’s Disaster Citizenship
David A. Beirne
The Progressive Era was largely a backlash to the widespread private-public avarice represented in The Gilded Age, as named after Twain’s 1873 book. The economic and cultural realities of the time can be identified in an incident in Jacob A. C. Remes’s Disaster Citizenship (2016) that a judge refers to as representing an “an overdose of ‘BUSINESS EFFICIENCY.'” (Remes 109) On the flip-side, progressive reformers have often over-espoused the virtues of the capacity of the state to solve problems. When the state says it wants to help its citizens or others, in particular providing them something for free, it is sometimes hard to see the downside from a purely theoretical sense.
Conservatives, apparently since Edmund Burke, have at least partially agreed with Reagan’s assessment that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Conservative questioning the state’s use of power to give and take resources is often perceived as simply mean-spirited and reactionary. Remes cites anarchist analyst Colin Ward in the book’s conclusion, in which he said that a “society which organizes itself without authority is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state.” (Remes 190) In a paper I wrote for Dr. McLain, Burke was a voice that decried what he understood to be a capricious use of power by the British state in India, in the name of benefit to all largely for this reason: communities have individual histories that can all too easily be overlooked by a distant governmental regime.
Disaster Citizenship reveals the positive good that state aid can have, but also the typically unintended consequences of accumulation of power in a state that does not always recognize what is truly best for local traditions and understandings. The ‘citizenship’ aspect of the title references the changing outlook on just what, exactly the state, armed with public resources, is supposed to do. Knowledge production is created to support this expansion and control, as Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathogens (2006) made evident. Community bonds, “organization without any organization,” and varying definitions of public and private responsibilities permeate different places. (Remes 22) In spite of often unhelpful interference, “everyday forms of solidarity” arose that provided different meanings to citizenship, and reflected in differing responses to disasters that ranged from policies to displays of “identity and empathy.” (Remes 10)
The work uses a transnational perspective comparing the two early twentieth century disasters at 1914 in Halifax, Nova Scotia and 1917 in Salem, Massachusetts, one that is highly reminiscent of the borderland perspective employed by Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Borderlands (2006). I appreciated Ms. yaremenkolena’s reference to Halifax disaster, where “the local order that allowed families to save their possessions was lost, and all that remained was confusion.” (yaremenkolena) Here, it was not so much citizen versus military that was critical to the effectiveness of relief as it was local versus distant, framing the debate over who was to have the civic power to react. Disasters additionally “exposed the economic value of labor that before had gone unremarked,” an argument feminists have long made about traditionally women’s household labor. (Remes 115) Rahm Emanuel had a great line in a 2008 Wall Street Journal conference that, when it comes to the state, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” and Disaster Citizenship shows how crises “do more than take a snapshot of a moment; they alter the direction of historical change.” Thus, these events can transform the way we look at what the state, as ‘the people,’ is supposed to be responsible for, as well as what is left to, well, the people to figure out. (Seib; Remes 5)
Bibliography
Remes, Jacob A. C. Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2016.
Seib, Gerald F. “In Crisis, Opportunity for Obama.” November 21, 2008. Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122721278056345271. Accessed November 28, 2016.