Yes, we have no pupusas. Because, as it turns out, we had no masa harina in the drawer of many flours. I don’t know why: I would have sworn by my action figure collection that I had a big bag of it.
Oh well. The not-lamb banh mi were really great. They were basic banh mi (though not in a baguette, in a brioche roll): sriracha mayo, sliced cucumber, sliced jalapeno, venison cooked in a cast-iron pan, and pickled julienned vegetables (daikon, carrot, bell pepper). Plus cilantro, though I went light because 50% of my diners are in the cilantro-is-soap camp.
Way back when I first started cooking, the instruction to “julienne” vegetables was I think the first bit of cooking lingo that I had not even the faintest intuitive idea about when I came across it. (Pre-Internet, folks: I had to call my mom and ask what that meant.) After some exhausting knife work, I remember thinking: how on earth do people do this in restaurants? The answer much of the time turns out to be a mandoline, and this banh mi prep saw mine getting a workout. My mandoline is, however, easily the scariest piece of cooking equipment I have—I wear a glove when I use it. It’s kind of the table-saw-of-the-kitchen, just as happy to slice vegetables thin or take a fingertip off.
I’ve skipped a few weeks of The Read now. Hopefully none of you are feeling deprived. Some busy weeks have kept me from reading anything long-form except what I have to for work.
In that category, however, I’ll recommend (with a BIG caveat) Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou’s A Past of Possibilities, translated by Stephen Sawyer. It’s a very readable new synthesis of arguments among historians about writing counterfactual histories. Combined with Catherine Gallagher’s excellent Telling It Like It Wasn’t, the two books do a great deal to overcome the limitations of the strange brawl that broke out after Niall Ferguson published his pugnacious introduction to the anthology Virtual History.
I’ve taught a class on counterfactual history for many years, and one of the humps I always had to work students over was Ferguson’s essay. It’s by no means as dumb as some of the polemical things he’s shoved out the door since but it still builds a really crude kind of “conservatives like contingency, leftists like determinism” opposition. More frustratingly in terms of teaching the essay ends up proposing a really weird, jury-rigged constraint for valid scholarly counterfactuals, namely, that historians should only write counterfactuals if there is explicit archival evidence that specific influential actors in the past actively considered alternative courses of action. It’s pretty clearly an attempt to limit counterfactuals to “great man” history. In the historiographical scrum that followed, literally nobody, no matter how bullish they were on counterfactuals, accepted Ferguson’s peculiar rule-set as a basis for going forward.
Gallagher and Deluermoz & Singaravélou do a great job of summarizing that older historiography and moving past some of its less productive dead-ends while also overcoming the ways in which the previous discussion sought to marginalize or exclude counterfactual historical thought in literature, political philosophy, and popular culture. Deluermoz & Singaravélou also, finally from my perspective, push a few missing pieces into the mix. First, they probe at the degree to which counterfactuals have been largely an Anglo-American preoccuption. Second, and far more importantly, they tackle a major problem, which is why counterfactuals are seemingly never applied to non-Western histories.
I think that issue is another side of the critique laid out by Priya Satia in Time’s Monster, which is how imperialism and slavery get narrated in most historical analysis as the inevitable price of progress and liberal modernity, thus indemnifying both individuals and societies of responsibility for what happened at the largest scales. Deluermoz and Singaravélou don’t use the texts I would use but they make the same point that I would: there’s a big range of anti-colonial writing and thought that has counterfactuals strongly embedded within it, that assumes that had there been no imperialism or slavery, the societies colonized by Western Europe would have turned out differently—and better. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Olúfémi Táíwò’s How Colonialism Pre-Empted Modernity in Africa are both counterfactual histories in their way. Clapperton Mahvunga’s The Mobile Workshop is an attempt to produce knowledge as if it existed in a counterfactual, a Shona-inflected understanding of tsetse fly.
So what’s the issue with A Past of Possibilities, my own caveat? Basically, while I really appreciate that the authors pushed the book into this space in particular, their reliance on some really old and really troubled scholarship at times in that endeavor is pretty embarrassing in a few parts. Most notably, they take up the question of whether counterfactualism is dependent on a Western linear and teleological sense of time, and whether other temporal subjectivities in world history might not have invited counterfactual reasoning in any form. That’s fine, but I knew I was in trouble in that section when the first example is China-as-cyclical-time and the source is a French sinologist from the 1930s. The second is the Nuer, with the scholarly source being Evans-Pritchard. And worse of all, the third is the old chestnut of the-Hopi-have-no-future-tense, but not even citing Benjamin Lee Whorf, the originator of this claim. Instead they cite Jamake Highwater’s book (and TV series) The Primal Mind; Highwater is one of the most notable (and damaging) cases of a “pretend Indian”. The general discussion is a valuable one—and an opportunity to link up the way cognitive science, history and philosophy divergently talk about counterfactual reasoning. But wow, find some better examples supported by more recent scholarship.
Other readings that I may write about soon: Eric Lach’s article on Lamor Whitehead and Eric Adams in the Jan. 14 New Yorker, which stirred a lot of contradictory feelings in me.
Two strong Substack recommendations: Sam Kriss in general, but now specifically on Roald Dahl; and Adam Mastroianni’s remarkable account of how it feels to be mentally unwell, which really struck a strong chord with me. However you feel about Substack, it’s definitely supporting some really distinctive writing at the moment.