Rupturing Salem, Reconsidering Subjectivity: Tituba, the Witch of Infinity in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

The Salem witch-hunt, invoking the “red hunt” analogy of the McCarthy era, has been a persistent metaphor for persecution, a symbol of fanatic excess in policing the community boundaries. In American cultural history, however, Salem is regarded American only insofar as it proves un-American—as an exception to American exceptionalism. In particular, Tituba, the only non-white “witch” of the trials to whom the unleashing of the hysteria itself has often been attributed, embodies what is negated in Salem against which Americanness is to be affirmed. Maryse Condé’s 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem recuperates Tituba from this darkness not only to reconfigure American identity but ultimately to reconsider human subjectivity. In Condé’s Salem, New England Puritanism showcases the primal scene of American identity formation, in which the personal, national, and religious subjectivities are fused to form the American self as the autonomous self-possessed individual. Tituba, in contrast, exemplifies an alternative subjectivity as an embodied being constituted in relation to others. Similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical subject, Condé’s Tituba highlights the primacy of the other in the formation of the human subject, ultimately rupturing the totality of history with a counter-history of silenced voices or the infinity of the other.

Losing the Ground

This chapter centers on the relationships between acoustic projection and cinematic space. I start with Cage’s rhetoric on the medium of magnetic tape as the second transformation of sound materiality. Building on Julia Robinson’s notion of “symbolic investiture,” I survey the divided interpretations of Cage’s platform between musicologists that decode his music according to style analysis that established a compositional logic for his move to indeterminacy and the larger debate among art historians on the split between Neo-Avant-Garde and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics. I argue that Cage’s interaction with film and filmmakers provides a meeting ground for these debates within cinematic space in two films: Cage’s score for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder and colleague Morton Feldman’s score for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Last, I examine a film collaboration I discovered with the sculptor Richard Lippold that documented his monumental wire sculpture, “The Sun,” in which Cage and Lippold applied chance procedures to the editing process. Lippold’s commission came about as a result of his split with the so-called Irascible 18 collective of New York artists, and the history of its commission and reception reflects both an ideological divide on the materiality of sculpture and larger postwar McCarthy-era politics of passivity and resistance.

A Declaration of Interdependence

Our context is one of growing threats, resilient critique, and deeply rooted alternative forms of inclusive and expansive social life. We are now experiencing a rise of authoritarianism in the United States that is as dangerous as the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, potentially as deadly as the eradication of basic political and human rights for African Americans after the Reconstruction period following the civil war. We are also witnessing a resurgence in authoritarianism not seen in Europe since the rise of fascism in the 1930s. What is missing in much of the literature on authoritarianism is a recognition that what fuels interdependent creativity and expansive civic engagement is not emancipated individualism but openness to the new grounded in the solidity of the same. The ‘same’ is generative connections between adults and youth, and community practices of resilience, acknowledging and learning from both mistakes and successes. This book is meant to enable readers to take on this challenge with honesty and creativity, aware of the particularity of our experiences as members of different racial and social groups, and as members of different economic classes. First, we must be honest, acknowledging the scale of racist exploitation and its ongoing impact. Will we learn from the past and present structures of white exploitation and violence? Will we learn how to check these practices in the present?

Existentialism in America

This chapter examines the transformation of postwar liberalism by identifying the development of an American idiom within the existential thought that became influential after the Second World War. I frame the concerns and historical development of American existentialism through the work of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face (starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire). Contrasts are drawn between Ellison and two other writers: Carlos Bulosan and Ann Petry. In addition, the chapter discuses Cold War containment politics, McCarthy era anxieties about communism, changes in perceptions of organized labor, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and cultural attitudes regarding the American welfare state and political action.

Faith and Compromise

Chapter 6 follows Rusch’s work in army intelligence, where he was in close contact with a number of Japanese prime ministers and high officials. Many officials were cooperating with the American effort to ferret out Communists, and Rusch was part of an administration that bent the rules of democracy by supporting pro-American Japanese candidates while hindering their opponents. At the same time, Rusch was working to restore institutions of the Nippon Seikokai, the Episcopal Church of Japan, and he used his authority as an army officer to forward his various projects, including the rebuilding of Seisen-Ryo. He was accused by his superiors of abusing his power to help the church and rebuild the lodge. Rusch covertly aided the heiress Miki Sawada in caring for mixed-race children born of sexual liaisons between Japanese women and Allied personnel, and he routinely raided American supplies to help Sawada feed the displaced children. Rusch also played a minor role in ushering in the McCarthy era in America, providing anti-Communist intelligence to his superiors and helping defend the army and his boss, General Charles A. Willoughby, against charges that Willoughby’s operatives smeared an American citizen as a Communist agent.

“Physicists and ‘Fellow Travelers’: Nuclear Fear, the Red Scare, and Science Policy in Occupied Japan”

This essay presents a microhistory of U.S.-Japanese relations during the years of the Allied Occupation (1945–1952), describing how policies the United States enacted in the context of Cold War era national security concerns negatively affected the experiences of Japanese scientists. The Red Scare of the McCarthy Era ran along parallel tracks in the United States and Japan, and during those years, Japanese scientists—especially physicists—were the targets of surveillance and intense scrutiny, initially for fear they might abet diehard militarists in exacting revenge for the war, but later out of concern that they would pass “atomic secrets” to Communist nations. In the agenda to reform Japan, a “schizophrenic” science policy emerged, where, on the one hand, U.S. Occupation authorities under the Economic and Scientific Section assisted in the reconstruction of science institutions in Japan and facilitated international outreach, while on the other, the Civil Intelligence Division (G-2) frequently obstructed these efforts, as it imposed a regime of surveillance and penalties against those whom it suspected of being Communists or left-wing sympathizers. Toward this end, U.S. Occupation officials used travel visas as both a carrot and stick to influence the political behavior of Japanese scientists with mixed outcomes.