Adapting Galeano’s “Magical Marxism”
Jefferson Cowie, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.”
“Memory of Fire”
Who is responsible for this forgetfulness? "It's not a person. It's a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten…. We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful." Interview with Eduardo Galeano
The great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) invented a genre for the exploration of place, history, memory, and forgetting. His haunting, Memory of Fire Trilogy (1982-1986), is a kaleidoscopic, mytho-poetic history of the Americas, a dizzying anti-encyclopedia of interwoven vignettes that tells stories of resistance, domination, and colonial dependency in Latin America. Galeano liked to call his new form “Magical Marxism”—a style he defined as “one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery.” His attempt to reclaim memory, to defy forgetting, to ground the past in place, and reconnect place to the past, required an artful history with a fresh sensibility. He took what Raymond Williams famously called “a structure of feeling,” and made it into what I would call a “structure of recalling.” “I’m a writer obsessed with remembering,’’ he once noted of his struggle to reclaim an “intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.”
At the RPW, I’d like to experiment with adapting Galeano’s style to my own approach to the past. Having devoted twenty-five years and many books to linear, methodologically rigorous, history, I now want to repair our understanding of the past by breaking it apart. Through the hard facts of the archive, I seek to explore the feelings, the ironies, and the forgotten but telling oddities of the past. This will be less a clinical history of causation, and more history as method of memory and the places the memories were made—and forgotten. Escaping the scholar’s cage requires transforming my historian’s voice and method from restricted to creative, from empirical to impassioned, from linear to lyrical, from cohesive to fragmented, from memories of lives to the life of memory.
A Chronicle of the Living Past
As a sort of anamnesis, a recalling to mind that which is lost, a chronicle of the living past, my new book will be told in moving snapshots, a restless documentary reader, a poetic collage of oddly coherent and historically accurate stories. Central themes will include the legacies of land dispossession, slavery, conquest, empire, working class agency, and capitalist discipline, all told through the odd story that opens up, like a magic box, onto larger historical themes often hidden behind the blinders of national constructs or densely researched academic history.
Structurally, this book will tell big stories by peering through small windows. I imagine this will be a single volume of archivally-based moments, written in an observational style, that builds toward a narrative of anti-narrative. As a collection of hundreds of tales of no more than seven hundred words—and as few as short as one hundred—arranged in chronological order, it will arc from Indigenous people’s encounters with Europeans to the rise of Black Lives Matter. It is not only Galeano’s “magic journalism,” that infuses this concept, but also the meditative fragmentary sense of history as Robert Frank’s The Americans, Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, Walker and Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or, more pretentiously, Wittgenstein’s fragmentary, Philosophical Investigations or Adorno’s Minima Moralia.
Spectacle of Democracy
While this project is inspired by Galeano’s work, my approach will be substantially different than his. He envisioned Latin America as having a “forced amnesia” as the result of conquest and colonization. The United States, in contrast, has a victor’s memory, largely based on the amnesia necessary to do what it took to win and maintain power. Here democracy is not always the romantic realm of resistance that Galeano celebrated, but more spectacle, more fatalistic, and presents different challenges as a subject. This book will be written from a different position in the world system, as well as a different cultural context and a different age.
I make no claim to be a master writer like Eduardo Galeano. My style is more detached and observational, allowing the stories to speak for themselves. My hope is not just to have the feeling of specific moments in the past, however, but the excitation of the movement and play of history itself. I will not be able to escape my scholar’s training, so this will also be rooted in the treasures found in the archival record, yet imbued, I hope, with some of the same glimmering qualities that made Galeano’s work shine.
Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman Chair in American History in the Department of History. Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, race, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. In 2023, he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic, 2022). He is also the author of The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton 2016); Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class(New Press 2010); and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor(New Press, 2000). His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Music, TIME magazine, Foreign Affairs, Chronicle of Higher Ed, American Prospect, Democracy, The New Republic, Dissent, and other popular outlets.