Empire and Catastrophe

Front matter

Empire and Catastrophe

Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France Since 1954

Spencer D. Segalla

CHAPTER 8 Conclusion: Humanity and Environment 194 Notes 199 MAPS

MAP 1. The western Maghreb and southwestern Europe 8 MAP 2. Agadir before the 1960 earthquake 123

MAP 3. Reconstructed Agadir, c. 2000 145

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the tireless support of my partner and spouse, Prof. Amanda Bruce, and the foundation provided by my parents, Wendy and David Segalla. I also thank Charles McGraw Groh for tackling the enormous challenge of serving as the founding chair of our new department so that I could focus on this book. This book has also been made possible by support from an American Institute for Maghrib Studies research grant, University of Tampa David Delo research grants and Dana Foundation grants, and by Fred and Jeanette Pollock Research Professor grants. Digital access has been supported by a Mellon Foundation grant to the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.

A historical book such as this inevitably builds upon the scholarship of others, and the chapters that follow are particularly indebted to the work of El Djamhouria Slimani Ait Saada, Valentin Pelosse, Paul Rabinow, Janet Abu-Lughod, Marie-France Dartois, Thierry Nadau, and Yaél Fletcher. I am also grateful for the models and mentorship provided by Herman Lebovics and for the input provided by Brock Culter, Mitch Aso, Joomi Lee, Ahmed Sabir, Daniel Williford, Julia Clancy-Smith, Stacy Holden, Mohammed Daadaoui, James Mokhiber, Moshe Gershovich, and Shana Minkin, and by the members of the Florida Maghreb workshop group: Ann Wainscott, Adam Guerin, Amelia Lyons, and Darcie Fontaine. In Morocco, I received invaluable assistance and insight from Lahsen Roussafi, Yazza Jafri, Mohamed Bajalat, Rachid Bouksim, Jamila Bargach, Suad Kadi, Abdallah Aourik, Hassan Bouziane, Jacques Lary, and Mohamed Mounib. I am also immensely grateful to the archivists, librarians, and staff at archives and repositories of sources on three continents, without whom I would have been lost.

I offer special thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for the University of Nebraska Press, whose invaluable input on various manuscript drafts helped to improve this work, to UNP editors-in-chief Alisa Plant and Bridget Barry for their support of this project, to Erin Greb of Erin Greb Cartography, to Ihsan Taylor of Longleaf Services, and to copyeditor Bridget Manzella. Chapter 3 of

XIV Acknowledgments this volume expands on “The 1959 Moroccan Oil Poisoning and U.S. Cold War Disaster Diplomacy,” originally published in the Journal of North African Studies 17 (2012), 315-336, available online at https://tandfonline.com/. I am grateful to the journal editors for their support of my early work on this project. I thank Todd Shepard and Patricia Lorcin for their close readings and detailed comments on my contribution to their anthology, French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), a piece which eventually grew into chapters 5 and 6 of the present volume.

Finally, I thank the design and production teams at the University of Nebraska Press, and the indexer, for their work on the print edition of this book.

Introduction

We have always lived in the shadows like obscure cockroaches, powerless before the reading of a newspaper, babbling before the morose enemy who stole our crops, stripped our land, converted them from wheat into vineyards useless for our hunger. We receive the natural verdict with relief. It would finally break the monotony of servitude. And it is the native soil that will shake the rocks and that now opens, to bury us with our denouncers, these arrogant masters who know the pain that they inflict.

—“Old Man, in Henri Kréa, Le séisme: Tragédie

LMOST FOUR YEARS AFTER the French Algerian city of Orléansville

was devastated by an earthquake in September 1954, the Franco-Alge-

rian playwright Henri Kréa published a play that presented the seismic disaster as a harbinger of a painful but necessary decolonization. Kréa, a.k.a. Henri Cochin, son of a French father and Algerian mother, was an advocate of Algerian independence, and the struggle for decolonization was still underway when Kréa wrote Le séisme: Tragédie.! The Algerian Revolution, which had begun just weeks after the earthquake, would not achieve the independence of Algeria from French rule until 1962. In the intervening years, North Africa and France would be wracked by a series of disasters: seismic aftershocks and years of brutal warfare in Algeria, a dam collapse in France, a mass poisoning, and another catastrophic earthquake in Morocco.

Kréa’s play, begun in 1956 and published in 1958 in both Paris and Tunis, was explicitly anti-imperialist. The play builds on the synchronicity of the Orléansville earthquake and the nationalist revolution that began a few weeks later. Yet Kréa’s play purports to render chronology irrelevant: Le séisme opens with a recitation of major earthquakes of the 1900s, from Calabria in 1905 to Orléansville in 1954, and then juxtaposes these disasters, particularly the Orléansville earthquake, with an ancient narrative of anti-colonial resistance in North Africa: the second-century BC rebellion of the Numidian king Jugartha against Roman occupation.’ The geoenvironmental disaster of 195.4 was linked to colonial violence through the category of malheur (misfortune, woe); the revolution of 1954 was linked to antiquity through the theme of oppression and anti-colonial rebellion.

At the outset, the play’s portrayal of natural disasters is intertwined with its portrayal of Roman/French colonialism in North Africa. The prologue begins with a voiceover explaining geological theories of earthquake production and then turns to antiquity, with the Romans invading North Africa like “locusts that periodically swoop down to bring famine to fertile Numidia.”? After the prologue, however, the ancient setting abruptly dissolves, and the focus of the first act of the play (“Episode 1”) shifts to the 1954 earthquake as the play turns to the relationship between the seismic and political events in modern Algeria. Revising a trope that geographer El Djamhouria Slimani Ait Saada has traced back to the colonial discourses of the nineteenth century, Kréa portrayed a country battered by misfortune. Earthquakes, war, floods, locusts, and the tragedy of death in childbirth all converge in the suffering of the Algerian people. The choir chants in the final passage of the play:

This country, crucible of men of all origins of all poetic destinations Collides

With clatterings of fire

With the deaf rhythm of blood

Flowing in streams

Like a flooding river

Breaking the dikes of the narrow valleys...

The eternal wave of generations...

Crushed by the cosmic pestle

Of misfortune.*

However, this grim finale, as well as the play’s subtitle—Tragédie— contradicts the dominant narrative of the play, which portrays the earthquake as a vehicle of salvation.’

At first, the earthquake seems to sweep away the injustices of colonialism, offering death as the only liberation. However, the pessimism of the Old Man’s interpretation of the disaster is superseded by a vision of hope through catharsis, communicated at the end of “Episode 1” in a voiceover that reinforces the relationship between the seismic and political upheavals in Algeria: “Understand that the earth shook at the same time that the people arose from their torpor.” Thus the moral righteousness of the struggle for liberation gives meaning to all other forms of suffering. In Kréa’s play, the earthquake is not just a portent of the coming revolution, it is also retribution:

All the dead howl and stir in concert, these fields and these villages that were stolen from them. The trees open to battle the convoy of sacrilege. Nothing different, the insects, stones, man. Their planes like sharks are drowned by the welcome invasion of locusts. Their arms are of no use.’

One disaster avenges another, and if the colonized suffer, the colonizer is also weakened. The earthquake is a disaster not only for the long-suffering Algerians but also for the French; as such, it is the first strike against empire. The varieties of catastrophe that afflict humanity blur into one another: sharks and aerial bombardments; childbirth and epidemics; earthquakes and locusts. Yet there is order and meaning in this litany of suffering:

The great day has arrived With its procession of misfortunes

But misfortunes are good for something For example the general suppression of misery The resurrection of grand sentiments

Certainly

One must die of hunger .. . to be human?

The earthquake, and the war, serve a purpose: the liberation and redemption of the Algerian people.

Kréa’s association of French colonialism with natural scourges like sharks or locusts portrays individual human actors as overwhelmed by a situation they neither understand nor control. The French occupiers are confused, struggling to follow an imperial ideology but bewildered by the realities of colonial North Africa. Believing in the good works brought about by colonialism but pelted by children throwing potatoes “larded with razor blades,” the soldiers ask why their beneficence is welcomed with such hostility, even from the earth itself: “the stones themselves ruminate with menace”? Ultimately, the colonial situation leads the occupiers to extremes of evil. A soldier who was a surgeon in France, saving lives, becomes a torturer in Algeria, disemboweling prisoners. Another soldier speaks with regret of two children he slaughtered “like partridges”;

another gleefully recounts the story of a humanist professor who spoke ofethics until he came under fire, at which point he became “as savage as a cannibal,” getting drunk and “thinking only of raping little girls.” This brutality, the play suggests, stems from colonial occupation; French intentions and the idea of a civilizing mission are irrelevant: they cannot mitigate the brutal nature of colonialism any more than they can alter the movement of tectonic plates."

The dramatic turning point in the play is the radicalization of the older generation of Muslim Algerians. This occurs in the last section of the play, when the Old Man and the Old Woman break free from their tragic flaw, their resigned accommodation to colonialism, which Kréa portrays as characteristic of the older generation. Awakened from their “hypnosis”" by the earthquake, the old couple becomes politicized, and the Old Man leaves to take up arms for the nationalist cause. The sound of the rumbling earth fills the theater, and an image of a mask of Jugartha, symbol of anti-colonial rebellion, is projected onto a screen. Rather than representing the earthquake as an inexplicable, meaningless bringer of suffering, Kréa’s characters interpret it as a clarion call to revolution and asa sacrifice for the cause. In Kréa’s play, the earthquake-inflicted suffering of the people, like the violence of rebellion, is the price of salvation. In this vision of human politics and the physical environment, the two become one: the earthquake and the Algerian Revolution form an inseparable cataclysm.”

Decolonization and Disaster

Historians have increasingly recognized the role of environmental disasters in the expansion of colonial empires and the development of colonial states.” In the historiography of decolonization in North Africa, however, environmental events, no matter how catastrophic in scale or transformative for those involved, are often relegated to the background." For the average historian, “Algeria 1954 is shorthand for one thing: the beginning of the Algerian Revolution, a war which finally led to Algerian independence over seven years later. For the survivors of Orléansville, however, “Algeria 195 4” invokes not only the revolution but also the earthquake. For those who experienced environmental disasters in Morocco, Algeria, and France between 1954 and 1960, the consequent horrors were major events, not mere footnotes to the military and political upheavals of those years. However, the experience of empire and decolonization did not cease when environmental disasters erupted into the social and political lives of humans. The inseparability of the human and the environmental, of disaster and decolonization, was inscribed across a range of historical texts that can be examined by the historian: in archival documents, in architecture, in fiction, and in memoir. The interpenetrations of disaster and decolonization in these texts have often been obscured by the tendency of popular and academic historiography to separate narratives of political and military events and narratives of human culture and society from the history of the inanimate environment. Yet the evidence examined here reveals ways in which the environmental is lived and understood by humans through the experience of the political and the social.

The earthquake portrayed by Kréa was one of several environmental catastrophes that were bound up in the history, literature, and memory of decolonization in the French empire. This book focuses on four major environmental disasters that afflicted France, Algeria, and Morocco. These disasters occurred in the period of French A frica’s transition to independence, which came, formally, to Morocco (and Tunisia) in 1956; to much of sub-Saharan Africa in 1960; and, finally, to Algeria in 1962. Two of the disasters examined here are earthquakes: the September 9, 1954 earthquake and its seismic aftershocks in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, and the February 28, 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco. The other two are of overtly anthropogenic origins: the flooding of Fréjus, France, due to the collapse of the Malpasset Dam in 1959, and a mass outbreak of paralysis in 1959 Morocco, caused by the contamination of the food supply with jet engine lubricant from an American airbase.

These four disasters were interrelated in multiple ways. Refugees from the Orléansville earthquake found themselves in Fréjus when the Malpasset Dam collapsed, and Orléansville became a model for state responses to disaster in both Fréjus and Agadir. The experience of the 1959 poisoning altered the political calculus of both the US State Department and the Moroccan political opposition following the 1960 earthquake. The Fréjus flood was invoked by French, American, and Moroccan actors in the diplomatic wrangling, domestic politics, and great-power machinations that followed both the 1959 poisoning and 1960 earthquake. Due to these interconnections, these four events constitute a single object of study, impacting Algerian struggles for independence, French reckoning with the loss of empire, and Moroccans’ endeavors to extricate themselves, even after formal independence, from the continuing military and cultural legacy of French occupation.

These four disasters were not the only four horsemen of the French empire’s apocalypse in North Africa. Indeed, drought, famine, disease, torture, and massacres are all mentioned in the chapters that follow. Elinor Accampo and Jeffrey

Jackson have defined “disasters” as “extraordinary circumstances that force individuals, governments, and organizations to operate in unusual and stressful ways.”!> There were many such circumstances amidst the tumult of imperialism and decolonization. Nevertheless, these four catastrophes were distinct from the other calamities of the era in their interconnectedness and in that they were large-scale transformative events produced by “rapid-onset hazards,” the onsets of which were not intentionally initiated, thus fitting a narrower scholarly definition separating disasters from other infelicitous events.!

No great importance is placed here on the distinction between “nature-induced” and anthropogenic disasters.” Rousseau said of the 1755 earthquake that devastated Lisbon and Meknes that, if people did not build homes made of heavy materials, earthquakes would cause little damage.'* Rousseau’s argument becomes particularly relevant to the present study when one learns of the injuries to earthquake-stricken rural Algerians caused by collapsing tile roofs, an innovation that had replaced the mud-and-thatch used in decades past. More than two centuries after Rousseau, scholars now widely accept that the effects of so-called “natural disasters” are determined by historical processes and human actions. As Jonathan Bergman has put it, natural disasters constitute “a meeting ground or ‘human ecology’ between human and non-human worlds”! This is also true of unintentionally produced disasters such as the Malpasset Dam collapse in France and the mass chemical poisoning in Morocco, which were triggered by anthropogenically manufactured hazards.

Ted Steinberg has argued that the modern idea of a “natural” disaster is a technology of power, allowing elites to obscure the processes that produce disproportionate suffering among the disempowered.” In all four of the disasters addressed here, the colonized suffered more than did the colonizers, and the poor more than the rich, due to the unequal distribution of resources both before and after the disaster. In the case of the two earthquakes, the idea of “natural disasters” helped elites’ efforts to obscure the social determinants of this suffering. But all four of these disasters revealed the inequities and injustices of colonialism.

However, while recognizing the revelatory aspect of disasters, we must also recognize that disasters can also be transformative, creating abrupt changes in political, social, and cultural landscapes as well as physical ones. The present volume takes up the challenge posed by environmental historians to consider seriously the impact of the environment on human history.” Arguing against the notion of “natural” (or “accidental”) disasters in favor of the idea that the results of disasters are determined by human decisions and social arrangements, one runs the risk of denying the importance of the environment in history, repeating the notion of modern history as a story of humans shaping their own destinies using ingredients provided by nature.”

In the mythology of modernity, the environment begins as a problem but becomes a tool. This myth is shadowed by its inverse: the Frankenstein narrative of human hubris that places (inadequate) human rationality in opposition to (uncontrollable) nature. However, sources close to these events reveal a multivalent relation between the human history of decolonization and the environmental history of floods, chemical compounds, and earthquakes. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, the opposition between inanimate nature and active human rationality is problematic, a discursive tradition which itself ought to be an object of study, imposed upon a messy web of causality involving both human and non-human actors. In contrast to this hegemonic discourse, survivors’ memoirs and literary representations such as Kréa’s represent counter-hegemonic visions of what Mitchell calls “the ambivalent relation between the nonhuman and the human.”” Archival documents reveal how disasters disrupted colonial projects and undermined the propaganda of imperialist “civilization” that promised material and moral benefits for the colonized; disasters likewise undercut triumphalist nationalist narratives promising that political independence would bring salvation to the poor and oppressed. In other instances, however, the new circumstances created by disasters were mastered by the powerful, who forged new tools of colonial oppression, international diplomacy, anti-colonial propaganda, or authoritarian nation-building.

In Kréa’s creative vision, humans are not the only actors, and the distinction between the human and inanimate fades. Kréa’s narrator informs us that “earthquakes are subject to the same causes whether they be human or telluric.”™ Henri Kréa’s portrayal of the 1954 earthquake’s relation to the struggle for independence might be dismissed as “mere” metaphor, a literary device, if it were not for other types of documentary evidence revealing the effects of these disasters, as “both ecological facts and representational spaces,”” on the experience of decolonization, while also revealing the impact of decolonization on the experience of these disasters. This evidence includes French, Algerian, Moroccan, and American sources ranging from diplomatic cables and political polemics to memoirs and architectural reviews. These sources demonstrate that the intersections of disaster and decolonization affected not only memoirs and imaginative writing but also Cold War diplomacy, humanitarian medical missions, and the

Orléansville arae® o Meknes gc?

MAP 1. The western Maghreb and southwestern Europe. (Erin Greb Cartography.)

architecture and urbanism of post-disaster reconstruction. This archival record is replete with evidence that the processes of decolonization and disaster were not just related by a coincidental similarity in their effects on human bodies and built environments but that disaster and decolonization impacted each other in multiple ways, as the legacy of colonialism and the politics of decolonization shaped the distribution of harm and the distribution of aid, while the destruction of cities created new landscapes for the imagination and implementation of post-imperial visions.

Calamity, Empire, and Locality

The events described here all took place within a particular trans-Mediterranean region of the waning French empire, encompassing the western Maghreb and the Côte d’Azur. This book situates environmental disasters in the context of the processes of decolonization through which France, Algeria, and Morocco negotiated new relationships as separate entities rather than as components of an empire. However, the focus here is on localities rather than nation-states. To be more precise, the book centers on the study of disaster-afflicted provincial cities and the areas around them: Orléansville and the Chélif Valley, Fréjus and the Reyran Valley, Agadir and the Sous Valley, and, to a lesser degree, Meknes, the initial epicenter of the 1959 poisoning that afflicted much of Morocco. Scholars Gregory Mann and Emmanuelle Saada, among others, have urged their colleagues to integrate the study of particular localities into our understanding of imperialism in both metropole and colony and to explore the relation of localities to each other and to global and imperial institutions and networks.” In an article focusing on Fréjus, Mann seeks to push colonial studies to see beyond the colonial cultures and discourses of the imperial administrative centers (Paris, Dakar) to the varied and specific places that constituted the empire. This

»27 book follows Mann by working to “disaggregate”? the waning French empire by focusing on specific provincial localities—but it also explores what might be illuminated by re-aggregating these localities through the trans-local category of “disaster” (sinistre, cataclysme, catastrophe, karitha), a category neglected in academic historiography but dynamic in the popular press of the time, the archival record, and the remembered experience of those involved. Mann writes: “The town [Fréjus] and places like it offer immense potential for understanding the cultivation and evolution of historically grounded social and political formations, as well as the emergence of new ones.”** If we read “places like it” to mean other locales both transformed by decolonization and afflicted by disaster—i.e. Orléansville, Meknes, Agadir—we can then examine how disasters catalyzed the “emergence” of new “social and political formations” and how imperialism and decolonization shaped how people in these locales interpreted and responded to disaster.

The historiographic turn toward locality parallels efforts by Algerian scholars and memoirists to explore and remember local pasts, a trend which has produced complex treatments of the colonial era. Mostefa Lacheraf, in his 1999 preface to Dr. Belgacem Ait Ouyahia’s memoir Pierres et lumières, describes the attempt by Algerian writers to liberate Algerian history from the dominance of “abstract ideologies, ahistorical and without relation to reality past or present” through the writing of local histories of village life and of cities. Writing during the civil war of the 19905, Lacheraf argued that this localist turn could serve to counter not only “stereotyped ethnography” of Algerians (a legacy of colonialism) but also visions of Algeria promoted by Islamist radicals.” This historiography of the local also offers an alternative to nationalist narratives of heroic resistance to a uniformly destructive colonizer.* As Chapter 7 of the present volume will discuss, Ait Ouyahia’s memoir explicitly seeks to provide such an alternative through his self-deprecatory representations of his own tentative relation to the struggle for independence, and, less explicitly, through his ambiguous portrayals of French colonial education and medicine.

The turn toward local history in Algeria has also brought to light the relationships between local disasters and experiences of colonialism and decolonization. El Djamhouria Slimani Aït Saada has made the region of the Chélif Valley, including Orléansville (later known as El Asnam and today as Chlef), the focus of a study which “seeks to unravel the ties between physical and human geography and space, and economic, social, and cultural life” through an examination of memoirs, geographical works, and literature written from the time of French conquest to the late twentieth century.’ Ait Saada’s examination of the Chélif Valley details an enduring discourse about the violence of the environment in Algeria that has persisted from the time of French conquest through half a century of Algerian independence. French sources from the nineteenth century reveal that the Orléansville region was defined, in the minds of many French writers, by the environmental hardships inflicted on its inhabitants, as “the heat, the floods, and the earthquakes contributed to the construction of a strongly deprecatory imagination of the region.”*»” Since independence, Algerian writers have continued to reflect on the brutality of this environment. This discourse of the violent environment resembles the persistent narrative of human violence as the defining feature of Algerian history recently deconstructed by James Mc- Dougall in both its racist imperialist form (“imagined native ‘savagery” requiring repressive violence from the colonizer) and its nationalist reincarnation (“inflexible, unreformable, total oppression” requiring revolutionary violence from the colonized).* But these discourses about political and environmental violence are not separate, parallel strands. Ait Saada’s work reveals, with local specificity, a double helix of connections between discourses about calamity, colonial rule, and decolonization in the Chélif region.

Ait Saada explains that the association of natural disaster with the uprising of the Algerian people appeared not only in the work of Henri Kréa but also in that

Introduction II of other Algerian writers such as Habib Tengour and Belgacem Aït Ouyahia (both discussed at length in this book), as well as Jean Millecam and Mohamed Magani.** Aït Saada could also have included the leftist dissidents Boualem Khalfa, Henri Alleg, and Abdelhamid Benzin, who echoed Kréa in their memoir of the dissident newspaper Alger Républicain: “The autumn of 1954 opened with a cataclysm. As if nature wanted to be the herald of the hurricane that, for more than seven years, would tear apart and convulse the country.”® For these writers, as Ait Saada argues, the “political and telluric tremors” of the period could not be separated.*°

The intersections of colonialism and decolonization with environmental calamity are equally evident in writings about the disasters in Fréjus, Agadir, and Meknes. In Morocco, there has been much interest in distinct histories of localities long neglected in nationalist historiographies—particularly in the Tashelhit-speaking south, where Agadir is located. This interest is due both to the widespread perception, discussed in Chapter 6, that the 1960 earthquake had a deleterious and disorienting effect on Agadir’s relation to Moroccan heritage and identity and to the countervailing narrative of the Berber cultural movement that posits Agadir as the “capital” of Morocco’s Berber culture.’ In Fréjus, meanwhile, local notions of a particular identity have undergirded resistance to more inclusive notions of Frenchness from the time of the 1959 Malpasset Dam collapse to the present. The chapters that follow make the argument that, in these localities, the experience of catastrophe was inseparable from the upheavals of decolonization, and the shape of decolonization was crafted by catastrophe.

The Long and the Short of It

Decolonization and disasters were often tied together in survivors’ and observers’ interpretations and memories of events—that is to say, in the lived experience of events, for we live in realms of memory and interpretation. Was this merely an ahistorical psychological or linguistic phenomenon—a tendency to associate suffering with suffering, sometimes including other, more personal traumas? Does Kréa’s metaphor of disaster and decolonization have dramatic force only by means of a trick of the mind or linguistic sleight of hand through which the reader accepts the equation of one sort of woe with another? In Kréa’s play, the casualties of war and earthquake are intermingled with childbirth, death, and the suffering of famine.** In other accounts of disaster discussed in this book, an automobile accident, a geriatric medical crisis and a childhood sexual

12 CHAPTERI assault mingle with the violence of decolonization and of disasters. Meanwhile, the equation of environmental disaster with war had become commonplace in the twentieth century, as new technologies and methods of warfare—bomber planes and basket bombs— now leveled buildings and created carnage in a way that resembled the effects of earthquakes and floods.

This book argues that the survivors, novelists, and memoirists who associated the disasters of the period with decolonization were not merely suffering from a painful mental illusion or capitalizing on a coincidental resemblance or useful metaphor. They were invoking a literary trope, to be sure, but the power of that literary trope was based, as good literature is, on astute observation. These individuals recognized that distinctions between the natural and the social, the seismic and the political, are illusory. No environmental event is experienced outside of sociopolitical contexts, and no human story takes place in an environmental vacuum. The archival record reveals that the upheavals in Algeria, Morocco, and France that were triggered by the disasters of 1954-1960 were inseparable from the upheavals produced by the violence of colonialism and decolonization. The human relation to the environment is not separate from political history, and one cannot write the history of these disasters without writing the history of decolonization.

Unlike Mitchell’s Rule of Experts and Gregory Clancey’s Earthquake Nation, works which have deftly treated intersections of environment and Western imperialism, this book does not focus primarily on “experts,” although experts are certainly included here. Much of this book examines the disruption caused by disasters and the efforts to conceptualize and instrumentalize disasters among those whose claims of expertise lay elsewhere: mayors, legislators, bureaucrats, diplomats, journalists, novelists, dissidents, a fisherman, an obstetrician, a filmmaker. Some of the sources used here conform to the traditional definition of “hard” primary sources: written close to the time of the event, for purposes seemingly other than the representation of events to posterity, but collected by archivists for later use in the construction of historiography. However, the present volume also examines, as source evidence, texts written months, years, or decades later. These texts include not only imaginative writing and personal memoirs but also local histories. However, while written long after the onset of the disasters discussed here, such sources are no less “primary” to an examination of the long-term effects of these disasters and the meanings that humans ascribed to them.

This book examines disasters and decolonization as temporally extensive phenomena that do not occur in a “catastrophic instant” but that unfold over the course of time—not only weeks and years but also decades.” Cities, once destroyed, remain transformed evermore, even if rebuilt. Bodies that become paralyzed remain impaired for decades, even if some recovery occurs. And the dead remain dead, even if they do not all remain in their original graves. Therefore, sources that would usually be considered “secondary”— produced long after the initiating “event”—become “primary” in this analysis, revealing the disaster and decolonization in their temporally extended forms. Conversely, the “primary” sources produced soon after the onset of catastrophic events are no less representational than texts produced decades later, but they can represent only a temporally truncated version of the event; other sources must be consulted to understand catastrophic events as they unfold over a longer duration and are inscribed into built environments, histories, and memorializations.“°