Racial Time and the Other

The “Chronopolitics” of Travel and the Free World

Since the Cold War era, the trope of travel in the United States has not only invoked temporalizing narratives of spatial distance to produce historically and geopolitically contextualized knowledges of self and other, but also connected these framings of time and space to chart the contours of the free world. Because Communist countries limited their citizens’ right to go abroad, during the Cold War prohibitions on travel became emblematic of the Eastern Bloc’s unfreedom and imprisonment behind the Iron Curtain.13 Consequently, travel was one of the major ways through which U.S. citizens realized their freedom as workers in a capitalist system, enjoying their hard-earned money and leisure time while developing firsthand knowledge of the rest of the world.14 Henry Luce perhaps most famously formulated the association between travel, mobility, and capitalist free markets in the context of Cold War geopolitics when he deployed travel as a metaphor for U.S. commerce and global economic interests. In his famous “American Century” article, Luce wrote, “Americans—Midwestern Americans—are today the least provincial people in the world. They have traveled the most and they know more about the world than any other people of any other country. America’s worldwide experience in commerce is also far greater than most of us realize.”15 Luce thus linked the possibility of travel in the American Century with U.S. citizens’ economic and epistemic command of the globe.

The Cold War association between capitalism, mobility, and U.S. freedom made travel a readily accessible frame through which to recount the demise of communism. Travelogues circulated intertextually alongside political and media figurations of transition to reorder American knowledge about Eastern Europe and, consequently, about the “free” and “unfree” parts of the world. Additionally, the correspondence between travel and the temporal imaginaries necessary to apprehend the phenomenon of Eastern Europe’s “transition” in regional and global terms also made recourse to a longer history of travel as a metaphor for time (past, present, and future) and temporality (whether as progress, development, or degeneration). As Johannes Fabian argues, since the eighteenth century, the idea of travel in Western European culture has produced a “temporalizing ethos.”16 Writing from the era, for instance, imagined “‘the philosophical traveller, sailing to the ends of the earth, [as] in fact travelling in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age.’”17 Referencing these early portrayals of travel, Fabian makes the case that although travelogues’ primary preoccupation is, of course, with “the description of movements and relations in space,” the preoccupation with time was a precondition for portraits of spatial distance in modernity. As travel became a source of Western secular knowledge about the world, it led to a reconceptualization of time itself. Travelers’ “radically immanent vision of humanity at home in the entire world and at all time” crystallized the shift from sacred to secular time, in which “relationships between parts of the world [could] . . . be understood as temporal relations. Dispersal in space reflects directly . . . sequence in time.”18

Distinguishing secular from sacred time, Fabian notes that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, “Time was . . . celebrated as a sequence of specific events that befall a chosen people.”19 During the Middle Ages, “the Time of Salvation was conceived as inclusive or incorporative: The Others, pagans and infidels (rather than savages and primitives), were viewed as candidates for salvation. Even the conquista, certainly a form of spatial expansion, needed to be propped up by an ideology of conversion.”20 In contrast, modern secular conceptions of time are both expansive and exclusive:

The pagan was always already marked for salvation, the savage is not yet ready for civilization. . . . Evolutionary sequences and their concomitant political practice of colonialism and imperialism may look incorporative; after all, they create a universal frame of reference able to accommodate all societies. But being based on the episteme of natural history, they are founded on distancing and separation.21

In European imperial knowledge about the world, the “savage . . . lives in another Time” even as “secularized time [became] a means to occupy space, a title conferring on its holders the right to ‘save’ the expanse of the world for history.”22 With the advent of postsocialism, U.S. conceptions of saving the world for history (and historical progress) refigured the Cold War paradigm of saving the world from communism to that of saving the world from humanitarian atrocities. The temporal association of difference as distance played out in the Euro-American imaginary through a new geopolitical demarcation of successful and failed democratization and, concurrently, through the mapping of spaces of human rights, the universal frame of reference for freedom, and spaces of atrocity. Even as the demise of the U.S.S.R. signaled the potential for the global expansion of liberal democracy without opposition, travelogues continued to produce the universality of liberal and humanitarian principles through exclusions—places “not yet ready for civilization” and mired in ethnoreligious conflict. As racial freedom and liberal democracy came to represent the fulfillment of secular progress, religious zealotry displaced Communist oppression as the sign of Eastern European backwardness. Spaces where the transition from communism to capitalism appeared to fail were portrayed as outside of a secular as well as a Western Judeo-Christian (linear) conception of time. The commonplace understanding of ancient hatreds, resurging in the absence of Communist management of difference, produced places like the Balkans and Chechnya as current-day examples of a pagan, cyclical vision of time that was completely antithetical to the time of progress.

Fabian’s insight that “geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics” is crucial for thinking through the temporal and spatial distancing of postsocialist Eastern Europe through the political and academic languages of “transition.”23 The conceptual device of “transition” uses temporal change (as a marker of national progress or regression) to produce new knowledge about the world in the absence of communism as an ideological and ethical limit to capitalist expansion. According to Anita Starosta,

re-imagining Eastern Europe in the present [entails] the double question of exchange value (on the market of ideas) and of timeliness. For, just as in the economic and political registers reforms have been directed at drawing Eastern Europe out of its imputed backwardness and isolation from the West, so on the discursive and epistemological registers the manifest task has been to update the terms in which we think about this object in transition. But successful inscription into the global, which is the ostensible goal of any such updating, also contains an irreducible ambivalence: it signals liberation and finally grants the region visibility by forging—in the double sense of establishing and simulating—its continuity with the rest of the world, while at the same time it subsumes it to an order not of its own making.24

Starosta’s insights about Eastern Europe’s perpetual belatedness underscore the epistemological and temporal crisis that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, not just for Eastern Europe but for the United States and the West. If the terms by which the free world was defined in the Cold War years took shape through and against the Communist other, then after 1989 the subsumption of Eastern Europe into such a “free world” not of its own making would also entail the redefining of freedom itself in a new historical frame. At this time, ethnic, racial, and religious conflict emerged as the prevalent way in which Eastern European refusal of U.S. promises of freedom reaffirmed its backwardness and ideological distance from the West—a belated racism reemerging. That the U.S. nationalist mythology of racial progress, and the association of racial freedom with free markets and democracy, was already well established during the Cold War facilitated the racializing of failed transition in terms of religious conflict. In other words, the time of transition has been narrated dually as the progressive expansive racial time of U.S. liberalism and the regressive, cyclical racial time of the other.

Whereas during the early years of the Cold War the United States had to address the inherent contradictions between legally sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination and its international stance as leader of the “free” world—including the nonwhite Third World—by the late 1970s and in the 1980s, the apparent fulfillment of civil rights in the law increasingly worked to authorize U.S. claims to defending freedom globally, connecting the mythology of domestic racial progress to the aspiration of global interventionism. The Carter administration, for instance, explicitly prioritized international human rights over the earlier Cold War model of “containment.” Having supposedly achieved racial equality at home, the nation could turn its attention to pursuing rights for the racially oppressed throughout the world, as was evident in the rigorous critique of South African apartheid.25 Although Reagan’s 1980 election brought about a decidedly more conservative rhetoric that linked U.S. foreign policy with nationalist interests, it nevertheless built on the associations between U.S. militarism and international justice to mask U.S. neoimperialist ambitions.26

The rise of multiculturalism as the prevalent mode of understanding U.S. race relations as the enlightened counterpoint to ethnic violence must be contextualized within the regressive economic and social policies of the 1980s.27 The rearticulation of racial meaning that took place in the United States at this time marked a shift from the rhetoric of civil rights, which demanded institutional inclusion, to the rhetoric of multiculturalism, which flattened out ongoing racial disparities through the compensatory language that celebrated diversity for its own sake. Numerous scholars have pointed out that the ideological appeal of multiculturalism was based in abandoning the promises of the civil rights movement. According to James Lee, multiculturalism as an ideology attempted to “reorganize the heretofore unequal representation of American life”; however, it failed to correct the material disparities based in the effects of racial difference and, in fact, exacerbated them.28 In the 1990s, multicultural ideology masked the incoherence between investing in free markets and promoting substantive equality against racial discrimination. As Peter McLaren notes, liberal multiculturalism in the context of free markets is based on the assumption that the “cognitive equivalence or the rationality imminent in all races . . . permits them to compete equally in a capitalist society.”29 The 1990s U.S. appeals for ethnic and racial equality in Eastern Europe reveal that recourse to multiculturalism as a narrative of transition ultimately subordinated the material effects of racial discrimination to the ideal of capitalist development. Turning to an analysis of travelogues, the sections that follow trace the transnationalization of U.S. racial ideologies, particularly multiculturalism, in portrayals of capitalist progress toward freedom, and the coconstitutive racialization of religious difference as a signal of spatial and temporal distance from freedom in the postsocialist world.

“Double Lives”: Color Blindness and the Racial Past

In the winter of 1990 the New York Public Library presented a lecture series entitled “The Art and Craft of Travel Writing.” One of the invited speakers was Andrea Lee, a black American journalist and fiction writer, who spoke about her book, Russian Journal, a collection of entries written during the ten months Lee spent in the U.S.S.R. between 1978 and 1979. At the time of its original publication in 1981, U.S. critics were particularly interested in gaining insight into a black American’s perspective on the characters and landscapes of the U.S.S.R.30 In her 1990 New York Public Library lecture, however, Lee concluded that “given what has happened in Eastern Europe since then, I might as well have written a book about dynastic Egypt, or about Beirut in its palmy days as ‘little Paris.’”31 Lee’s description of her travelogue as a “period piece”—a fossilized vision of “that past Russia that’s frozen in . . . Russian Journal”—framed her Russian writings as part of “an epoch that has vanished.”32 Lee’s portrait of the Soviet Union as a land from long ago, akin to ancient Egypt, might seem surprising considering that the U.S.S.R. did not officially cease to exist until 1991. Nevertheless, her discussion is representative of the way in which in the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States redefined and asserted its political and symbolic leadership in the postsocialist region by demonstrating the irrelevance of Soviet political and cultural formations to present-day politics, in which new Eastern European nations were imagined as fledgling democracies to be molded in the U.S. image.

In contrast to Lee’s 1990 portrayal of the Soviet Union as “frozen” in the past and immaterial to present-day U.S. culture and politics, her travelogue, Russian Journal, dramatized the importance of the Soviet Union in the American imaginary in the years preceding the Reagan-era reescalation of Cold War tensions. Rather than reading Lee’s travelogue as a historically isolated “period piece,” as she suggests, her narrative invites a more complex analysis of the tremendous racial, geopolitical, and cultural reorganizations that linked the late Cold War years to the postsocialist era through the trope of travel. Upon Lee’s publication of Russian Journal, cultural critics’ interest in her racialized perspective on the U.S.S.R. foreshadowed the rise of multiculturalism as the predominant U.S. racial ideology in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, as an important evaluative lens through which the United States and Western Europe judged the successes and failures of Eastern European nations’ transition to liberal democracy. Thus in spite of the way in which U.S. political and cultural discourses proclaimed the extinction of the Soviet Union, travelogues encapsulated the ways in which the United States’ conceptions of Eastern Europe throughout the 1990s continued to be informed by the political and racial dynamics of Cold War history. In particular, the displacement of a U.S. racist past onto the construct of Soviet totalitarianism during the Cold War, exemplified in Lee’s travelogue, was foundational to the subsequent postsocialist racialization of Eastern European transition.

Lee’s Soviet travelogue first appeared in two consecutive installments of the New Yorker in the summer of 1980, which coincided with the reescalation of Cold War tensions in the United States to a level unprecedented since the 1950s.33 American concerns that a new Cold War was afoot began following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, an action that was interpreted as overtly imperialist and seen as a direct threat to the United States. In the words of William Pfaff, a regular contributor to the “Reflections” column in the New Yorker, this Soviet act was seen as the start of a “Second Cold War.”34 Soon thereafter, George Kennan, the original architect of the Cold War “containment” policy, stated that this moment in U.S. history marked the “greatest ‘militarization of thought and discourse’ since the Second World War.”35 By the time Lee’s work was published as a collection of essays in 1981, the United States had already boycotted the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Then California governor Ronald Reagan, who was waging an intense campaign for the presidency, urged the nation to discontinue diplomatic initiatives and to cut off all communication with the U.S.S.R.36 In the New Yorker, Pfaff argued that U.S. and Soviet interests in the “Second Cold War” were “substantial rather than symbolic” because Middle Eastern oil was at stake. He urged that U.S. policy address the Soviets’ new and aggressive imperialist position in the Third World with a military stance.37 Though Pfaff described U.S. foreign policy in the Third World as a stabilizing presence in contrast to the Soviets’ militant threats in the region, he contended that the new Soviet expansionism pushed the limits of the American “virtues of liberalism, [which] are not warlike.”38 In this perspective, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan exceeded the bounds of liberal tolerance, not because of U.S. political and economic interest in Middle Eastern oil but, rather, because Soviet imperialist expansion into the Third World threatened the just and liberal ambitions of the United States in the region.

The post–civil rights reordering of U.S. racial ideologies, occurring as it did in the context of the Cold War, was worked out in part through cultural and political knowledge produced about the U.S.S.R. This association between U.S. racial thinking and the U.S.S.R. had its roots in an earlier moment in U.S. history. In her work on radical African American thinkers who traveled to the U.S.S.R. during the first half of the twentieth century, Kate Baldwin argues that

the conceptual aid of internationalism enabled an exposure of the ways in which the major antagonisms with which the early Cold War period was associated—a fear of Soviet imperialism—had a genealogy in U.S. attitudes towards race. A fear of blacks transgressing the racial status quo of white supremacy characterized by Jim Crow was restated as a fear of outside infiltration and contamination of the national polity during the 1950s.39

In contrast to the politics of racial segregation that motivated Claude McKay’s, Langston Hughes’s, W. E. B. Du Bois’s, and Paul Robeson’s interest in Russia and the Communist experiment, the racial ideologies contextualizing the revival of U.S. fears about Soviet imperialism in the period between 1979 and 1980, which framed Andrea Lee’s Russian journey, stressed that domestic racial equality had been achieved. Building on Baldwin’s insightful connection between the fear of Soviet imperialism and the color line in the early part of the century, it is suggestive to consider the resurgence of U.S. anxieties about Soviet imperialism in the Middle East alongside changing racial paradigms in the United States at this time.

Andrea Lee’s Russian Journal, though well received by the reviewers, troubled most critics who expected a uniquely black look at Russia. Of the journal entries spanning the ten months she spent in Russia with her husband, who was a student of Russian history, only one of Lee’s entries reveals that she is a black American. The disjuncture between the critics’ obsession with Lee’s absent racial point of view and Lee’s narrative effacement of her racial difference in the Soviet Union parallels the tension between the official policies of the post–civil rights ideal of integration and color blindness and the emergence of multiculturalism in the 1980s. My reading of Russian Journal and its critical reception concentrates on how these two racial paradigms worked in tandem to write African Americans into citizenship over and against the Cold War construct of Soviet illiberalism. With the resurgence of the Cold War in the 1980s, cultural depictions of the United States as democratic and racially just rationalized U.S. militarization and interventionism in the Middle East, particularly Afghanistan, as democratic and anti-imperialist in contrast to Soviet imperialism in the region.

Returning to Lee’s 1990 lecture, in which she reflected back on the now-spent global imaginary of which Russian Journal was a part, it is striking that she calls on the numerous conventions of the European imperial travel narrative to explain her fascination with the U.S.S.R., “a culture theoretically alien to her own.”40 Lee confesses, “Russia all my life represented the farthest possible psychological and cultural distance from home.”41 Her acknowledgment that being brought up in the United States determined the contours of how she perceived Communist Russia’s difference before she ever set foot there in 1978 provides the context for her conscious acceptance, and rejection, of particular European modes of travel. Lee provides a dramatic example of an entry that she eventually chose to exclude from Russian Journal:

European and European-American artists have so often been drawn to the exoticism of darker-skinned, simpler cultures and warmer climates. The exposure to something so clearly defined as alien, as the furthest limits of “other,” gives a jolt of energy that propels inspiration many steps along. It’s logical that an artist should feel like a foreigner. As for me, a writer with mixed African and European blood, I find that I am interested in primitivism but uninterested in Africa or the warm countries. My own impulse toward what is alien has attracted me instead to an exotic northern country of white-skinned barbarians.42

While “primitivism,” limits of otherness, exoticism, and “barbarians” represent the tropes and characters that have structured European imperial travel writing, as Lee points out, her point of entry as a traveler lies in her experience of racial difference in the United States. Refiguring conventional European travelogues’ language of racial otherness as savagery and whiteness as civilization, Lee’s interest is in “white-skinned barbarians,” the exotics from the north. The rejection of this “embarrass[ing]” passage from the final manuscript, while it is indicative of Russian Journal’s refusal to directly reproduce the European imperialist vocabulary, nevertheless points to the traces of the racial reordering of these temporalizing conventions in the Journal’s frame for sketching Russian characters and places.

Lee’s self-consciousness about the conventions of travel writing leads her to speculate that her attraction to Russia as the place most psychologically and culturally distant from home was, in fact, an attraction to the similarity between herself and Russians under Communist rule—both led “double lives.” In the lecture, Lee offers certain biographical details that she had excluded from the book itself. She reveals that she grew up in a “middle class Afro-American family,” who, in spite of their deep commitment to the civil rights movement and integration, felt separate from both the poorer African Americans and the white Americans. “Double lives,” Lee notes, meant both “double knowledge and double insecurity.” She explains that in a racially divided society, “we grew up adept at assimilation without absorption . . . and developed an esprit de corps of a tiny garrison of spies.”43 The metaphor of the spy, one that has inspired so many depictions of the Soviet Union in Cold War culture, refigures Lee’s position as a traveler in the U.S.S.R. in terms of reporting her findings on the “Other” to U.S. audiences. She implies that her experience of growing up as an African American in the United States directly prepared her for her role as a spy and traveler, for she was able to recognize that “the Soviet Union at that time specialized in double lives. Almost everyone we met had a public persona and a radically different private one.”44 She thus concludes, “the psychological effects of a totalitarian system and of racism in a democratic country have a certain amount of overlap.”45 Lee’s explanation figures Russia’s story as one that Americans can best understand through the U.S. national experience and history of racism. Yet the overlap between U.S. racism and Soviet totalitarianism was not a coeval one, since Lee projects an earlier civil rights U.S. history onto the Soviet Union’s present in 1979.

Lee’s perspective on the affinity between totalitarianism and racism inspired her 1984 autobiographical novel, Sarah Phillips, which explores the difficulties of growing up middle class and black in the U.S. civil rights era. In her 1990 lecture, Lee suggests that she now sees “Russian Journal and Sarah Phillips as a diptych, complementary variations on the same theme.”46 For her, “it was this kind of glimpse, this momentary flash of understanding, that had always made traveling worthwhile . . . [as a way of] seeing oneself in another person, and comprehending that person.”47 In other words, it is by conjuring up a U.S. racial past that readers can experience a “momentary flash of understanding.” The recognition that Americans and Soviets share common experiences can only be imagined through temporal distancing. Thus although Lee decided not to write “‘a black look at Russia,’” she understood the process of writing Russian Journal as enabling her to consider the racial history of the United States while in the U.S.S.R.48 Ironically, even though Lee reads her own work in Russian Journal as the inspiration for critically considering U.S. racial history, her lack of racial transparency as the narrator of the Journal and the absence of biographical details within its narrative led critics of the book to claim that these were flaws in an otherwise well-constructed travelogue.

Russian Journal’s critical reception, which both praised Lee’s representation of Soviet difference and demanded full disclosure of her experience as a black American in Russia, is indicative of the extent to which (presumably) white Americans continued to be troubled by not having been granted access to Lee’s racial perspective on the U.S.S.R. In his “Books of The Times” review, John Leonard was mystified as to why it is only two-thirds of the way into Lee’s Journal that we find out she is black. Leonard laments:

She says she is black, and drops the subject. It is a daring strategy, because we want to know more: was it better or worse for her, being black? Does it help account for her critical intelligence, her wait-and-see skepticism, her lyrical exactitude, as though Henry James had gone to St. Basil’s?—Not a word. Miss Lee has been to Harvard and to Paris. She will leave Moscow for the Aegean. In “the logical light,” she will miss her dark tower and despise the clumsy spies. Only a remarkable writer could throw away such a badge of identity and insist on our seeing, anyway, precisely what she saw, on her austere terms.49

While Leonard can praise Lee as a “remarkable writer” and recognize the “daring strategy” of not mentioning her blackness, his introduction of these few lines of praise is framed by his exploration of how readers have been if not misled at least kept in the dark about Lee’s true identity. His obvious discomfort with “seeing . . . precisely what she saw” without knowing ahead of time that he is seeing from a “black perspective,” indeed, without being granted access to knowing the black subject as fully as the Russian subject of her travelogues, indicates that Lee’s observations in the U.S.S.R. cannot stand for an American perspective without referencing her racial perspective. In fact, Leonard reviewed Lee’s book alongside a book by Elizabeth Pond, a white American who had written From the Yaroslavsky Station: Russia Perceived; not once does Leonard mention Pond’s race or the lack of biographical information in her exploration of contemporary Soviet society. If the “self-effacing producer of information is associated with the panoptic apparatuses of the bureaucratic state,” Leonard’s review suggests that a black American’s perspective, in spite of Lee’s narrative strategy of racial effacement, cannot be a proper apparatus of the U.S. state without announcing and making transparent her blackness to a presumed white audience.50

In another review, Susan Jacoby, herself an expert on Russia and Yelena Khanga’s coauthor in Soul to Soul, found Russian Journal “subtly crafted” and perceptive, though she also described Lee’s decision to not discuss her black perspective on Russia as a serious “omission.”51 While Jacoby suggests that merchandising the book as an “ethnic curio piece” would limit the scope and audience of the work, she also speculates that Lee, who is “so light skinned,” with “a freckle-spattered, sand-toned complexion,” would not have needed to identify herself in Russia as a black American and would thus be able to avoid the “extremely rigid racial and ethnic stereotypes” most Russians held. Jacoby goes on to propose that “the sight of a black person immediately arouses fear of the dark” in Russian people. Jacoby’s emphasis on Lee’s light skin relies on the familiar American trope of racial “passing” to explain Lee’s narrative strategy. Even then, Jacoby speculates that Lee’s perspective must have been skewed, for though she does not foreground being black in the Journal, Lee’s exposure to Russian prejudice must have “affected [her] . . . in some way.” Jacoby’s figuration of the Russians’ literal state of being unenlightened—of being afraid of the dark when they see a dark-skinned person—draws attention away from the more immediately obvious discomfort with racial ambiguity on the part of a U.S. readership. Her emphasis on Russian racism in relation to black Americans suggests that while Lee’s racial difference might only be coincidental in the United States, in the U.S.S.R. it affected every aspect of daily life—a proposition that Russian Journal does not bear out.52

Reviews of Russian Journal can be read as expressing a tension between the ideal of “color blindness” in the United States and the desire to project a narrative of U.S. racial progress onto an imagined landscape of Soviet intolerance. According to legal scholar Patricia Williams, “the liberal ideal of color blindness is too often confounded. . . . The very notion of blindness about color constitutes an ideological confusion at best, and denial at its very worst.”53 In the reviews, Lee’s decision to not provide a black perspective on Russia was read as a refusal made possible by her light skin, which supposedly allowed her to “pass” as white in the U.S.S.R. This reading implied that in the United States, Lee could be both a black American and have a choice about whether she wanted her race to matter in her writing; meanwhile, Russia was imagined as a space where race matters a priori, and thus, where if she had been darker, Lee would have inevitably faced prejudice. By implying that color blindness might work in the United States but that it certainly could not be possible in the unenlightened and racist U.S.S.R., where people were still afraid of the dark, Lee’s critics reproduced the “ideological confusion” of color blindness in a transnational context. At the same time, the New York Times review of Russian Journal, with its emphasis on Lee’s Harvard education, her mobility across Russia and Europe, and her middle-class background, casts Lee as a success story of the civil rights struggle and affirmative action era. That Lee is made to embody U.S. racial progress implies that she should have acted more explicitly as an ambassador of U.S. liberalism in the U.S.S.R. Regrets that Lee did not analyze the conditions of racial prejudice in the U.S.S.R. by explicitly addressing Russia’s backwardness in relation to the United States in matters of racial equality suggest a desire for Lee to stand along the East–West divide as a model for the success of U.S. civil rights and democracy—to provide a look at Russia that at once celebrates U.S. “diversity” and participates, through a representation of racial difference, in the refueling of 1980s Cold War tensions.

Though Lee did not write a black American perspective on the U.S.S.R., her Journal constructs a racialized and temporalizing opposition between freedom and unfreedom. Her Russian landscape is a dark frontier at the edge of Europe from which one might assess the East–West divide. In the chapter “Running,” Lee traverses the whole of Moscow.54 After reaching the top of the Lenin hills, she observes the city’s expanse:

From a distance, Moscow gives most of all an impression of denseness—not height—and industrial vigor. Barges and riverboats move constantly up and down the broad, dull waters of the Moskva; watching them, I thought of the historical importance of this river, which from medieval times has linked Moscow to trade routes leading to Central Asia and the Baltic. Back then, the city must have been scarcely visible from these bluffs about the river. This was true even in 1914, when Baedecker described the same view. . . . Well, the vegetable fields, the churches, and the poorhouse have vanished, and many-towered Moscow has spread to the other side of the river.55

From the Lenin hills, Lee takes in the architectural layout of Moscow and dwells on the historical importance of this city that links Europe to Central Asia. The prerevolutionary Baedecker guide, with its mention of churches and poorhouses as points of orientation, functions as a signpost of the pre–Communist past, for now the landscape is darkened with industrial and Stalinist Gothic towers, which appear “sinister.”56 In Lee’s description, Communist industrialization does not lead Russia toward the West, but it orients it toward the East. Whereas in earlier times the Moskva River represented trade routes, Lee’s topographic view portrays the city’s literal eastward expansion across the river. The passage foreshadows the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and seems to gesture to Soviet imperialist ambitions.

Later in the book, Lee contrasts the Moskva with the Mississippi, which stands for the United States as a space of freedom. Lee recalls the Mississippi as it was described in Huckleberry Finn, a book that has made her “painfully homesick, not for family and friends, but for the entire country, as if it were something I could embrace with a single thought.”57 In this passage, homesickness for the United States from the U.S.S.R. figures the meaning of nation within the Cold War context as subordinating the binding ties of blood and community to that of ideology—a nation can be embraced “with a single thought.” Lee writes:

What I like about America is amazingly simple: that I can talk there without stopping to censor my thoughts, and that I can wander freely without passport or identification, without concern for entering a zapretnaya zonai (forbidden zone). Minor-sounding things, but they bear on the most important liberations in life: from confinement and fear. It’s impossible to imagine Huck Finn and Nigger Jim floating down the Neva, the Volga, or the Moskva—difficult to think of a great Russian work that so directly celebrates freedom.58

Lee’s vision of freedom and of liberation from her perspective as a traveler in the Soviet Union draws on the imagined “expanse” of U.S. landscapes that has come to symbolize U.S. nationalist self-definition since the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which shaped the nation’s imperialist westward expansion through the nineteenth century. With the belief that in the United States freedom is represented by the spaces that Americans can “wander freely,” Lee imagines her fundamental difference from the Russians she encounters through her mobility. Moreover, while Lee’s earlier description of the Moskva highlights the west to east flow that symbolizes the U.S.S.R. encroaching into the Middle East, the Mississippi’s north to south flow alludes to the historical movement to freedom that slaves undertook when escaping from bondage in the U.S. South. Although Lee’s choice of a canonical U.S. literary work such as Huckleberry Finn, which has been highly criticized for its racist portrayal of Jim, might be interpreted as an indirect commentary on the incomplete project of liberation within the United States, when read from the context of the Soviet Union, as Lee does, this reference to Twain’s novel becomes an allegory for the continued upward mobility made possible for people of color within the United States by the civil rights struggle.

Alongside contrasts, such as the one Lee makes between the Moskva and the Mississippi Rivers, that draw on the racialized symbolism of darkness and freedom to oppose the Soviet and U.S. landscapes, Russian Journal is at times even more direct in ascribing the United States’ racial past to the U.S.S.R.’s present. For instance, the entry entitled “Cleopatra” describes the opening of the movie Cleopatra, a U.S. “antique,” in Moscow theaters:59

Instead of Egypt in circa 40 B.C., it was America in 1962. . . . While the unquestioning arrogance of the assumption that Taylor, with her white Celtic skin intact, could rule over a country of Egyptians showed the innocence of the time, when none of our ideas about race, about sex, about leadership had been shaken, and we still rejoiced in heroes. . . . I thought about the last time I’d seen it, when I’d shared as much as a child can in the boundless material self-confidence of the country—when Russia lay, a clearly articulated evil, on the other side of the world. Now here I am in Russia, and that particular innocence and arrogance have departed from me and from other Americans, probably forever. Strangely enough, it’s this lost America that Russians seem most to admire, although they denounce it: the dream landscape made up of our big cars, big wasteful meals, sprawling suburbs, tough military stance.60

Lee’s post–civil rights, post-Vietnam vantage point did not foresee the near future revival of Cold War rhetoric and the longing that would emerge in the United States itself for “lost America.” Viewing Cleopatra from the Soviet perspective, Lee reads the movie’s representation of the United States (Egypt) in 1962, and especially of sex and race, to be “innocent” and “arrogant.” Russian Journal thus takes the civil rights movement to be a turning point in U.S. history and a collective, national learning experience that has allowed the nation to move forward. Lee’s own crossing of the East–West divide that had once represented “a clearly articulated evil” parallels the U.S. national crossing of the color line through the struggle for civil rights. According to Russian Journal, the United States’ past, and in particular its racial past, can now only be replayed within the Soviet imagination of a United States that was big, sprawling, and wasteful.

Just as in the United States the south to north movement has historically evoked the movement toward liberation, the end of Russian Journal indicates that in the U.S.S.R. the road westward brings with it a sense of freedom. When she describes her departure from Russia, Lee focuses on the moment her train crosses the Brest–Litovsk border with Poland. She feels a “lightening of the mood” and a “sense of celebration.”61 She reports experiencing “a crazy sense of freedom; we felt released from a subtle and deadly confinement, which, we only now realized, had sapped our spirits for ten months.”62 After a short stay in Poland, she “traveled south to the Aegean, to awaken further from Russia in the purest, most logical light in the world.”63 Though Lee would later miss “life in the tower,” her movement westward is described in terms of an enlightenment, moving from imprisonment to liberty, from darkness to light. The “logical” light recalls one of her earliest descriptions of Russia’s monuments that sought to evoke “raw emotion,” in contrast to the “measured rationality” of U.S. ones.64 If, as Kate Baldwin suggests, earlier instances of African Americans traveling across the East–West divide exposed the connection between the United States’ fears of Soviet imperial expansion and domestic racial transgression, in the post–civil rights context of the late 1970s, Lee’s Russian Journal reveals that the United States’ concerns with Soviet expansion in the Middle East, articulated in U.S. foreign policy as a human rights concern, displaced American racial inequalities and imperial ambitions onto the U.S.S.R. Lee’s reflections on the “measured rationality” of U.S. liberalism, which had nominally fulfilled the promise of racial equality under the law, no longer imagined the U.S.S.R. as a place from which to launch a critique of U.S. racial politics.

Because Lee’s Russian Journal did not explicitly depict racism in Russia, her observations about the U.S.S.R. stand in contrast to her later reflections, expressed in her 1990 lecture, about her attraction to Russia as linked to her personal memories of U.S. racial politics during the civil rights era. Reading Russian Journal side by side with Lee’s lecture, in which she described the book as a relic of the past, also speaks to a particular cultural amnesia about the Cold War, one that naturalizes the dominant U.S. presumption of itself as the foremost democracy by decontextualizing it from the Cold War logics that underwrote such claims. Lee’s connection between totalitarianism in the U.S.S.R. and U.S. domestic race relations, while gesturing toward the mutually defining discourses of the Cold War and racial progress, also implies that U.S. racism stands as a relic of the past alongside the nation’s Cold War vision of the U.S.S.R.

Transitional Aspirations: Multicultural Futurity and Reconciliation

Whereas Lee’s portrait of the U.S.S.R. as an incarnation of the racist past emerged in a late Cold War moment when geopolitical tensions were escalating, the Afro-Russian journalist Yelena Khanga’s journey to the United States in the late 1980s and the publication of her memoir Soul to Soul in the early 1990s coincided with the excitement surrounding the fall of communism and the disintegration of the U.S.S.R.65 Reversing Lee’s spatial and temporal orientation by writing about the United States from a Soviet perspective, Khanga’s travelogue, though focused on recounting her family’s history, espoused a future-oriented outlook for the possibilities of multiculturalism as a way to heal past racial incursions and as a model for the Soviet transition to liberal democracy. Khanga captured the interest of the U.S. media after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. because through her Soviet upbringing and her African American heritage, she embodied the hope that former enemies would come together in a global celebration of democracy.

In 1988, at the height of glasnost during the Gorbachev years, Khanga traveled to the United States on behalf of Moscow Weekly News as part of a professional exchange with the American paper the Christian Science Monitor. Since this was the first exchange between journalists from a Soviet paper and a U.S. paper, Khanga was carefully selected as one of the participants because she traced her family’s lineage to the United States. The granddaughter of American émigrés Oliver Golden, an African American son of a slave, and Bertha Bialek, a Polish Jew, Khanga’s professional journey as the first journalist to officially represent the Soviet Union in the United States was intricately linked to her personal journey of discovering the complexities of her own racial and national identity. Her presence as a Soviet journalist in the United States evoked the liberalization of the U.S.S.R. because it stood for the possibility of a free press. In addition, as a black Russian, she represented the multiplicity of voices—including those with historical ties to the United States—coming to the fore with glasnost. Khanga thus became a minor media celebrity during her year at the Monitor in Boston.66 The Washington Post article “A Child of Many Cultures” noted that of “the contemporary characters who straddle the mighty distance between Russia and America [and who constitute] a colorful and eclectic group . . ., none of them has a saga more poignant than Yelena Khanga.”67 The piece went on to specify that Khanga’s “coffee color” skin and “the cultural heritage that comes along with it” make her the most “poignant” figure for bridging the “mighty distance” between East and West. Ebony, a monthly magazine that is aimed at a black readership, headlined its review “How a Black/Jewish/Polish/Russian/African Woman Found Her Roots.”68 Calling Khanga’s book a “weave” of “multicultural strands,” the article, and especially its title, implied that Khanga’s mixed ancestry produced a story that, in and of itself, could recommend the memoir as an exemplary text of post–Cold War diversity. Essence, another monthly magazine targeted at black readers, praised the “multicultural saga, extending from American Slavery to glasnost, [as] an insightful and ironic journey not only into racial attitudes, but also into the profound cultural gulf separating Russian and American society.”69 By connecting U.S. progress toward racial “equality” and multiculturalism to Russia’s progress toward democracy, the U.S. media implied that Khanga’s embodied multiculturalism was the ideal allegory for Russia’s post–Cold War potential for liberal tolerance.

Khanga’s grandparents, who met through the Communist Party in New York City during the 1920s, set sail for the U.S.S.R. in 1931 along with sixteen black agricultural experts from the United States in search of professional opportunities unavailable to them in the United States due to racism. Their daughter, Lily Golden, Yelena’s mother, grew up in Moscow, where she married Abdullah Khanga, who was an exchange student from Zanzibar (later called Tanzania).70 Khanga’s 1988 trip to her grandparents’ homeland was momentous, since no one in her family had set foot on U.S. soil since 1931. The process of uncovering her family’s roots, her experience of meeting her U.S. relatives for the first time, and U.S. media enthusiasm over her family’s diverse history elucidate the connections between the shifting racial paradigms within the United States during the transitional moment of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the changes in U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc. It is no coincidence that Yelena Khanga became an embodiment of multiculturalism at this time. Her reunification with her black and white American families became symbolic of U.S. domestic and geopolitical reconciliation. Khanga was first “discovered” in the United States as she was waiting, amid hundreds of reporters, to hear that Gorbachev and Reagan had signed a tentative strategic arms control agreement. In Soul to Soul she explains that, for the U.S. media, she “was more interesting than boring old arms control—a young black woman talking casually about ‘we Russinas.’”71 This young black Russian’s rediscovery of her family’s American ancestry seemed to parallel the cautious beginnings of conciliation between the two global superpowers in the arms control agreement.

Khanga’s initial trip to the United States as a reporter was soon followed by a second visit, made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded her to chronicle her family’s “roots” in the Mississippi delta and Chicago. In 1992 Khanga published the memoir based on her research, Soul to Soul, which was an exploration of her perceptions and experiences of being black in the Soviet Union and in the United States, set against the backdrop of her family’s history. “Soul to soul,” a Russian term used to describe intimate friendships, is deployed throughout the text as a metaphor not just for Khanga’s reunion with the black and white sides of her family in the United States but also for the potential of a renewed U.S.–Soviet friendship. The term soul itself, as Dale Peterson points out, is evocative of the parallels between Russian and African American cultures’ conceptions of ethnic soul as “essentially multicultural and syncretic.”72 Khanga’s use of “soul” as the framing mechanism for her memoir resonates with the term’s “ethnic” connotation, which is especially evident in the book’s focus on how Khanga found a multicultural connection with African American and Jewish American cultures in the United States.

On the level of allegory, Soul to Soul envisions the transformation of the post–Cold War global order and U.S.–Russian cooperation through Khanga’s reunification with the Goldens—the black side of her family—and the Bialeks—the white Jewish side of her family. In the spring of 1988, Khanga taped an interview with the weekly ABC News magazine 20/20, after which her African American relatives contacted her. Khanga writes, “I gradually came to understand what it meant to belong to a large African American family with a proud history. We were of the same blood; we shared a past even though we had been separated by time, language, and culture.”73 Overcoming the prejudices and intolerances of the “past,” whether in the U.S. civil rights struggle or through “democratization” in the U.S.S.R., laid the foundation for new racial and historical frames. Khanga’s familial reconciliation, however, could not be complete without an encounter with the Bialek family. Khanga’s great-grandparents had disowned her grandmother, Bertha, for having married a black man. In the memoir, Khanga confesses that she was reluctant to find the Bialeks until Frank Karel of the Rockefeller Foundation urged her to complete the story of her family by meeting her white Jewish relatives. Though Jack, Bertha Bialek’s brother, had concealed from the rest of the family that they had black relatives living in Russia, by the time Khanga met the younger generation they seamlessly integrated Yelena’s blackness into their conception of the family: “You mean the big secret is that we have a black cousin? So what?”74 The cousins’ insistence that race no longer matters resonates with Soul to Soul’s perspective on changes in U.S. race relations on the level of the family; what was understood as miscegenation in the 1930s, when Khanga’s grandparents left for the U.S.S.R., became a sign of multicultural unity in one family in the 1990s. A 1992 Essence review of Soul to Soul completed this narrative by recounting how at a Thanksgiving reunion of the Golden and Bialek families Khanga and her Polish American cousin, Nancy Bialek, performed a rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory.”75 The concluding lines of Soul to Soul rearticulate the dual processes in the “perfect harmony,” as the song goes, of multicultural (domestic) and post–Cold War (geopolitical) healing: “We need a common language through which we can accept differences while embracing common humanity; that was my grandparents’ real dream, and I have shared it since the day I first heard Martin Luther King’s voice on a scratchy tape in a Moscow elementary school—a black, Russian, American, human dream.”76

Although Soul to Soul invited its U.S. readers to imagine the possibilities of reconciliation between former enemies in the immediate post–Cold War moment, the memoir nevertheless unwittingly perpetuated the Cold War binaries it proposed to tear down. In spite of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for Khanga to explore her family history on her father’s side in Zanzibar, Soul to Soul’s limited treatment of her African heritage excludes Africa from the possibility of progress that it imagines for post-Communist nations should they succeed in overcoming their illiberal prejudices in order to pursue the politics of tolerance, diversity, and free-market capitalism. Khanga writes that immediately after her birth, “the cultural rift between [her] parents grew into a chasm.”77 Yelena’s mother never moved to Zanzibar with Abdullah Khanga because “his attitudes towards women were the product of a culture very different from our own. She did not criticize that culture but emphasized that she, brought up with a very different way of thinking about women’s possibilities, could not adapt to his attitudes.”78 Even after Khanga herself visited Zanzibar as part of her research, she discovered that the instinctual and intimate connection she had with her American family was completely lacking in Africa. Khanga writes, “I can’t claim to have experienced any special revelation about my African ‘roots’ during this journey. Walking along the streets of Dar, I kept waiting for a click, the sense of recognition and identification I’ve felt so many times among black Americans.”79

Khanga’s sense of alienation from “Tanzania, a country strongly influenced by Islam,” in which she describes the exclusion of women from public participation that is still prevalent, thus imagines Africa as apart from, if not antithetical to, her future-oriented fantasy of reconciliation through tolerance and diversity.80 Soul to Soul’s self-proclaimed feminist critique of Yelena’s father, as well as of Africa, suggests an insurmountable cultural difference between Africa and the U.S.S.R. that, even though it is not yet Western, is seen to espouse modern notions of equality shared by Western Europe and the United States. The temporal distancing of Africa from the progress narrative of postsocialist transition is here articulated through the figuring of unreformed, and therefore intolerant, Islamic formations. Soul to Soul thus exemplifies multiculturalism’s dual movement of incorporating racial difference into a story of progress and transition while displacing fears of illiberalism onto religious difference. In order to include Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. in a narrative of historical progress, religious intolerance, here located in Africa, becomes the new landscape through and against which U.S. citizens can understand themselves as a nation that has shed its past of racial intolerance, and citizens of the U.S.S.R. can understand the present-day need to shed their past of totalitarian intolerance. Africa, in other words, functions in the travelogue as the container of past prejudices.

The figuration of Yelena Khanga as a multicultural emblem who could stand as a bridge between former ideological rivals in the East and West is indicative of the shift to the transnational marketability of difference in the realm of the global free-market economy celebrated in the post–Cold War transition. Shortly after the publication of her book, Khanga capitalized on her multicultural value to become an entrepreneur. She invited black professionals to travel to Russia and to teach Russians how to shed the vestiges of the Communist state-run economy. Khanga observed:

Right now, Russia is one of the biggest markets in the world. Hotels are filled with foreign businessmen who are planting the roots for various spheres of business. But when I mention this to black business people, they say it is too expensive. They are afraid they might be rejected because they are black. Russians want resources and profits. If you can do that, there is no problem.81

Khanga’s invitation to black businesspeople represents a historical irony in light of the radical Afro-American diaspora’s past in the former Soviet Union, of which her grandparents were a part. Oliver Golden and Bertha Bialek left the United States both because they wished to escape racism and because they believed in building an alternative to the capitalist model of national development. In contrast to her grandparents, Khanga herself returned to the U.S.S.R. (as hers is not an immigrant’s story of coming to the United States) and urged black businesspeople to travel to capitalist Russia because race no longer mattered—only profit. Kate Baldwin has suggested that in the context of post-Communist Russia, “Khanga’s embodiment of [the] unusual routings [of the black diaspora] reads through the screen of earlier black Americans in the U.S.S.R. But her Soviet upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s also shifts the image broadcast to new interpretive frames.”82 The rearticulation of Khanga’s complex family history also reflects the new interpretive frames of the post–Cold War moment in the context of the United States, in particular, the racialized currency of multiculturalism within the global free-market economy. In conflating multiculturalism with the ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality, Khanga’s vision for black businesspeople reflects how the celebratory rhetoric in the United States during the 1990s failed to substantively address the changing forms of racism and discrimination in the domestic context.

Through their focus on developing Eastern Europe economically, politically, and culturally, these U.S. post–Cold War discourses in fact worked to displace U.S. racial anxieties by positioning the United States as a model for liberal tolerance. They did so by eliding domestic histories of racial inequality and uneven development in favor of marketing multiculturalism and difference to promote the free market as a stand-in for democracy. Indeed, U.S. knowledge of Eastern Europe as a region in transition established a connection between freedom and diversity as minority civil rights are used alongside capitalist development to measure the spread of “freedom” and democracy. According to the “Freedom Rating” published by the Freedom House, a nonpartisan organization that provides a metric for classifying countries as “free,” “partly free,” or “unfree,” there are three clusters of conditions for ranking the formerly Communist “nations in transition” that follow economic variables: (1) “freedom,” which encompasses civil liberties and political rights; (2) the competitiveness and institutionalization of political parties and elections, as well as the accountability of politicians to the electorate; and (3) the rule of law.83 The Freedom House, founded in 1941 to encourage support for U.S. intervention in World War II, originated in the idea that the United States could spread freedom abroad.84 The Freedom Rating classifications were developed in 1973, after civil rights were enshrined in U.S. law, thus establishing the United States as a model of what “freedom” looks like. In the postsocialist period, the Freedom House expanded its on-the-ground-projects in Eastern Europe. The Freedom Rating took on a new significance, establishing a developmental narrative within which Eastern European nations strive to overcome the legacy of communism in the transitional period—understood here in terms of the lack of civil liberties and rights due to Communist legacies of intolerance—and to achieve legitimate democracy and tolerance exemplified by the U.S.-led West. Political imaginaries like those produced by the Freedom House, and like Khanga’s perspective on Soviet transition, imply that capitalist development breeds tolerance, justice for minorities, and modernity. Postsocialist “freedom” in Eastern Europe has thus meant not only participation in the U.S.-dominated free-market economy but an espousal (even if only a nominal one) of multicultural values.

“A Journey through History”: Religious Legacies, Ancient Hatreds, and the Balkans

While Khanga’s travelogue, as an allegory for the former Eastern Bloc’s transitional aspirations, promoted multiculturalism as the racial promise of liberal democracy and civil rights in Eastern Europe, already by the early 1990s the rise in ethnic and religious nationalism in some formerly Communist countries suggested that multicultural reconciliation would not be the fate awaiting the entire postsocialist world. In the Cold War era formulation of historical progress, the fall of the Berlin Wall should have led to the incorporation of the former Eastern Bloc nations into the realm of political and economic freedom. Yet in the former Yugoslavia, which came to epitomize the failures of transition, conflict and civil war only escalated as the decade wore on, moving eastward from Slovenia and Croatia (1990–1992) to Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and, eventually, to Serbia and Kosovo. In contrast to the future-oriented fantasy of liberal multiculturalism, U.S. media and politicians portrayed instances of ethnoreligious violence in the Balkans as a contemporary enactment of primordial hatreds and ancient grievances. “Ethnic conflict,” the commonplace descriptor of postsocialist troubles, was construed as the greatest threat to the progressive vision of the new world order. Thus the Cold War era’s racialized opposition between U.S. freedom and Communist totalitarianism gave way to a new opposition between multicultural tolerance and ethnoreligious hatred. In the temporal refiguring of racial geopolitical imaginaries in the postsocialist era, multiculturalism came to represent the fulfillment of U.S. domestic racial progress, while ethnoreligious nationalism became a sign of the racial time of the other—those landscapes that were not yet, and might never be, ready for freedom.

Perhaps the best-known book that contributed to shaping the U.S. postsocialist racial and temporal imaginary is Robert Kaplan’s travelogue Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. Balkan Ghosts is widely believed to have influenced first Bill Clinton’s policy of inaction during the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later, in a seeming contradiction, his decision to lead the first purely “humanitarian” war, the 1999 Operation Allied Force in Serbia and Kosovo. The well-known association between Kaplan’s travelogue and U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s exemplifies the intertextual circulation of postsocialist knowledge about the world produced in travelogues, as well as the interconnectedness of cultural and political discourses about transition. Kaplan’s record of his journey in the late 1980s and 1990 across Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece narrates the Balkans as a region distinct from Europe as a whole. Depicting the Balkans as steeped in a backward religiosity that is incompatible with liberal democratic reform, he sums up the territory as “a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions and ecstasies.”85 Emphasizing that Americans need to rethink regional histories and geopolitics in the part of the world that had been known as the Eastern Bloc, he writes, “the Cold War and the false division of Europe were over. A different, more historically grounded division of Europe was about to open up, I knew. Instead of democratic Western Europe and a Communist Eastern Europe, there would now be Europe and the Balkans.”86 Arguing that the United States and the West must no longer consider Eastern Europe to be outside of Europe proper, Kaplan proposes subsuming the Balkans into what he calls the “New Near East” in order to grasp the social and economic “drifting from the Second to the Third World” that occurred in some, but not other, parts of formerly Communist nations.87 Separating the Balkans from Europe was essential for dismantling the alternative economic and social vision symbolized by the Cold War designation of the “Second World.” In the new global map, nations were either already modern, capitalist, and democratic (First World), or failed and in a state of perpetual crisis (Third World). The 1990s reframing of global crisis, which no longer signaled the threat of Communist infiltration but, rather, the inherent failings evident in both the nature and culture of some “Third World” nations, was central in morally underwriting new modes of U.S. and Western military and economic interventionism.

The spatial and ideological reorganization of postsocialist geopolitics thus produced new fantasies of otherness that would take the place of communism as a foremost sign of Eastern alterity. Comparing Kaplan’s work to print and visual media that represent the victims of famine and war, Cynthia Simmons addresses the way in which the otherness of suffering bodies is “intimately tied to issues of political policy and, by way of that, to issues regarding human rights.”88 She argues that works like Kaplan’s, which are at best Orientalizing and at worst examples of “Baedeker Barbarism,” eliciting and justifying “barbaric apathy” toward the other, have at times of war “affected policies that resulted in human rights disasters.”89 In this connection, Simmons suggests that “the insidiousness” of Balkan Ghosts lies not in its Orientalism but, rather, in its “confusion as to its genre, and therefore, its claim to serious discourse on the tragic events in the former Yugoslavia.”90 As a “politicized travelogue,” a “genre somewhere between serious journalism and travelogue,” Kaplan claims for himself an unwarranted expertise on the region that proved quite dangerous in relation to U.S. policy.91 Particularly troublesome for Simmons is Kaplan’s misrepresentation of religion as the root cause of the wars. She herself emphasizes that, contrary to Kaplan’s claims, most former Yugoslavs, including Bosnians, Albanians, and Serbs, were adamantly secular.

While Simmons’s analysis astutely foregrounds the importance of religion in the narrative of Balkan Ghosts, her emphasis on the book’s inaccuracies and her ensuing claim that a more truthful portrait of the Balkans would have led to better U.S. policy in the region miss the broader shift in the U.S. transnational racial imaginary occurring in the early 1990s. Whether correct or not, Kaplan’s vivid depiction of religion as the driving force of Balkan barbarity was one cultural cornerstone of the emergent post-Communist racial fantasy portraying monstrous religiosity as the new great evil threatening global development and the liberal ideal of freedom. An analysis that insists on separating cultural works from policy, such as Simmons’s, neglects the interconnectedness of the two in the production of global imaginaries. Ironically, Kaplan himself agrees with Simmons. Reacting to accusations that Balkan Ghosts affected Clinton’s foreign policy, he stresses that he never imagined his “travel book on a region in its last moments of obscurity might later be read as a policy tract.”92 Opposing what he sees as a predominant tendency in the United States to politicize all works, Kaplan presents his view of the travelogue genre as a narrative record and a portrait of an individual traveler’s experience of his or her surroundings and encounters occurring in a particular time and place. One should not, according to Kaplan, read travelogues as “‘progressive’ or ‘illiberal,’ ‘deterministic’ or ‘humanistic,’ ‘interventionst’ or ‘noninterventionist.’ . . . The real questions should be: do the characters and descriptions come alive.”93 As Kaplan concludes, “realists know this. They don’t need to idealize a region, a people, or a history in order to take action, and so they don’t need to see a book through a filter of what they want to believe: whether it be a President searching for an excuse to do nothing in 1993, or for inspiration to do something in 1999.”94

The “confusion” about the political circulation of Kaplan’s book (and travel literature more generally) with which Kaplan and his critics are concerned points to the controversial yet productive role of travelogues in bringing to life geopolitical imaginaries in which political acts are narrated as moral or amoral, ethical or unethical, and just or unjust. In spite of the predominant critique of Balkan Ghosts as a book that, through its political influence, exacerbated human rights violations, its portrayal of temporal, racial, and religious otherness was in fact constitutive of a postsocialist imaginary that divided the globe between landscapes defined by human rights violations and those defined through minority rights and tolerance. In order for citizens in Europe and in the United States to understand their nations as spaces of rights and as humanitarian actors, there was a need for images of humanitarian crises. In other words, there was a demand for answers to the question Robert Kaplan asked himself while traveling in the Balkans: “What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities?”95 Throughout the 1990s, U.S. and Western European cultural and political discourses produced ethnoreligious conflict in the Balkans as an exemplary site of atrocity. Through the region’s confounding location both within and outside of Europe, the postsocialist human rights catastrophe of ethnic and religious warfare in the Balkans that played out throughout the decade conjured the need for military intervention in the region so as to bring it into the fold of Euro-American modernity. The presumption within the United States that it had, as a liberal multicultural nation, achieved human rights for its diverse citizens, meanwhile, morally authorized U.S. interventionism as humanitarian.

Against spectacularized portraits of ethnic and religious rivalries, in the postsocialist era U.S. Americans distinguished their nation’s power from earlier European imperial ambitions by conceiving of their national present not just as humanitarian but as antiracist. The racialization of religious difference, such as in the narrative of Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, signaled the emergence of a new racialized imaginary in the United States that produced “unreformed” religious formations as the ideological other, distinguishing those parts of the former Eastern Bloc that were fit for liberal democracy from those that were not. In Balkan Ghosts, Kaplan makes the case that to grasp the significance of the Balkans in the new world order, U.S. and Western readers must come to terms with two regional realities: the first, that nonmodern religious beliefs were foremost in the resurgence of Balkan nationalism; the second, that Balkan people espoused a fundamentally different and opposing view of history from Western citizens. He suggests that whereas in the West, the Protestant Reformation led to the separation of church and state, in the Balkans, unreformed religiosity precluded the development of secular history, democratic institutions, and the principles of tolerance. In this view, communism, rather than revolutionizing religious worldviews and instituting modernity in the East, had simply repressed religious feeling. This is why, as the argument goes, religious clashes erupted so violently in the 1990s.

Kaplan’s travelogue proposes to describe the cycles of repression and return in the Balkans, which led to a perspective on history that has little in common with the Western belief in progress. In the book’s prologue, he explains that in the Balkans, the Western traveler can grasp how “an entire world can be made out of very little light.”96 Balkan Ghosts develops a connection between physical darkness—the book’s overarching metaphor for Balkan unenlightenment persisting through the eras of Ottoman imperial rule, Communist rule, and nationalist self-rule—and ethnicized and nationalized religious identification, which makes Balkan worldviews incompatible with democratic values and tolerance. Kaplan begins his journey in a Serbian Orthodox monastery in Peć, Kosovo (then a province in Serbia): “Inside the Church of the Apostles, painted in A.D. 1250, my eyes needed time. The minutes were long and, like the unbroken centuries, full of defeat. I carried neither a flashlight nor a candle. Nothing focuses the will like blindness.”97 Framing his account, Kaplan contrasts his own ability to see in the darkness with the blindness of Balkan natives, whose wills and minds have been stunted by religion and defeat through the “unbroken centuries.” Describing the church’s painted apostles and saints, who “all appeared through a faith’s distorting mirror” as the “haunted and hunger-ravaged faces of a preconscious, Serb past,” Kaplan explains that “the distance these monumental forms had to travel while my eyes adjusted to the dark was infinite: through Ottoman centuries, the most evil wars, and communist rule. Here, in this sanctum of dogma, mysticism, and savage beauty, national life was lived. Only from here could it ever emerge.”98 Kaplan is explicit that the Western traveler who truly wants to understand the region must journey through history as well as across space. Only in doing so can the Western observer reorient his entire mind-set: “Superstition? Idolatry? That would be a Western mind talking. A mind that, in Joseph Conrad’s words, did ‘not have a hereditary and personal knowledge of the means by which an historical autocracy represses ideas, guards its power, and defends its existence.’”99

In order to associate the Western mind, from the era of high British imperialism in which Joseph Conrad was writing to the present day, with a fundamental belief in the freedom of thought and conscience, Kaplan displaces recent instances of Western barbarity onto the Balkans.100 In his interpretation of the historical record, “Nazism, . . . can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously.”101 Austria, however, is no longer Balkan. As Kaplan enters Croatia at the Austrian border, he ruminates that “the offspring of the SS” are now safely “tucked away in middle-class box houses.” Kaplan proposes that as advanced capitalism and consumerism render anti-Semitism unacceptable and fully displaced from the public sphere in Western Europe, emblematized by the fact that Israel has become “just another winter destination for local sun worshippers,” “the Balkans no longer begin at the gates of Vienna, or even at those of Klagenfurt.”102 The new landscape of atrocity begins, instead, with the former Yugoslavia, at whose border men with “grimy fingernails” crowd the train, shouting at each other, “slugging back alcohol,” and working “their way quietly through pornographic magazines.”103 Kaplan, himself Jewish, uses ongoing anti-Semitism in the Balkans as an example of racial and religious hatred that transcends differences between the Balkan nations he visits. From the nationalist rehabilitation of the World War II era Croatian fascists in the late 1980s, to the renewed popularity of the Legionnaires of the archangel Michael in Romania, who executed “one of the most brutal pogroms in history,” Kaplan recounts the death of communism as having reawakened an unchanged form of fascism in the Balkans.104 After all, he writes, communism was simply “fascism, without fascism’s ability to make the trains run on time.”105 Like Lee, who referenced her experience of racism in the U.S. pre–civil rights era to racialize Communist totalitarianism, and Khanga, who built on her multiracial background to portray multiculturalism as a future-orientated frame for Eastern European transition, Kaplan uses his position as a Jewish American from a nation that values religious freedom to assess contemporary religious animosity and prejudice in the Balkans through the familiar referent of anti-Semitism. At the same time, Kaplan’s positionality as a U.S. religious, rather than a racial, minority also demonstrates the shift to the privileging of religion over race as a foremost signifier of conflict and freedom in the postsocialist era.

In addition to associating the Balkans with the European evils of Nazism, in his geopolitical remapping Kaplan points to the Balkans as the historical locus of all the world’s evils: “Whatever has happened in Beirut or elsewhere happened here first, long ago, in the Balkans. The Balkans produced the century’s first terrorists. . . . Hostage taking and the wholesale slaughter of innocents were common. Even the fanaticism of the Iranian clergy has a Balkan precedent.”106 Kaplan’s displacement of U.S. and Western readers’ fears of terrorism and irrational death dealing onto the Balkans produces a new racial geography that extends the “Third World” to encompass the Balkans, a part of the former Eastern Bloc that cannot adapt to liberal reform: “The Balkans were the original Third World, long before Western media coined the term . . . in an age when Asia and Africa were still a bit too far afield.”107 Using his experience of writing and reporting from Africa, Kaplan liberally draws comparisons between the Balkan landscape and the “dark continent” to illustrate the region’s difference from the rest of Europe. In Transylvania, Kaplan describes how “there was so much dust and garbage in the vicinity that I felt as if I were back in North Africa.”108 In another part of Romania, taking a boat to Sfintu Gheorghe along the Danube, Kaplan admits, “conditions exactly like these had scared me away from taking riverboats up the Nile in the Sudan and down the Zaire (Congo) river in Zaire.”109 Citing the British traveler E. O. Hoppe, he adds that the Danube delta consists of “Conrad-like stretches—the Conrad of Heart of Darkness.”110 Indeed, Kaplan elaborates, “The passengers around me intensified my feeling of having passed beyond Europe. . . . Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expression of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.”111

The new racial geography described by Kaplan, in which the Balkans are portrayed as akin to Africa and not of, or in, Europe, can no longer be apprehended through physical differences. After all, Romanians look Italian; their buildings French. Rather, the new racialized landscape can only be mapped through an exploration of interiorized difference of feeling and mind-set. In Croatia, for instance, Kaplan notes, “since Croats are ethnically indistinguishable from Serbs—they come from the same Slavic race, they speak the same language, their names are usually the same—their identity rests on their Roman Catholicism. Therefore, the Croatian crowd symbol might be the Church.”112 In the new geopolitical environment, where the differences that matter are not visible on the surface, Kaplan implies that religious beliefs and institutions are the essential modes of difference that must be excavated and explored. Ultimately, however, Balkan Ghosts locates Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam, not the Croats’ Roman Catholicism, as the root of Balkan backwardness and irrationality—the region’s core difference from the West. As he explains:

Because Catholicism arose in the West, and Orthodoxy in the East, the difference between them is greater than that between, say, Catholicism and Protestantism, or even Catholicism and Judaism (which, on account of the Diaspora, also developed in the West). While Western religions emphasize ideas and deeds, Eastern religions emphasize beauty and magic. . . . Even Catholicism, the most baroque of western religions, is, by the standards of Eastern Orthodoxy, austere and intellectual.113

The division between Western and Eastern religions in Balkan Ghosts allies Western religions (including Protestantism, Judaism, and Catholicism) with the mind and, less directly, with the political and economic systems of liberal democracy and capitalism that follow rational thought and foster individuals’ desire for freedom of “ideas and deeds.” For instance, in Transylvania, where Kaplan encounters a large Protestant Saxon minority, he is shocked at how unlike the rest of Romania the people and place are. In the town of Sibiu, he finds that everything is clean, and people are hard at work doing their jobs. “It was like coming up for air. The clay tiles and metal spouts in the bathroom had been polished to a shine. . . . The Romanian waiters, like the Romanian maids who attended my room, worked quietly and efficiently, and didn’t whisper in my ear about exchange rates and prostitutes.”114 Unlike Romanian waiters and maids in the rest of the country, who do not adequately perform the tasks for which they are paid, in Sibiu Kaplan discovers Romanians who value work similarly to how it is valued in the West. According to Kaplan, these Romanians adopted their work ethic from the Saxons, who strengthened their German identity after the Protestant Reformation. Though the Saxons migrated to this part of Transylvania in medieval times, Kaplan notes that their post-Reformation conversion to Lutheranism led them to create a town in the middle of Romania where “the hotel, plus many of the shops and eating places, operated at (for Romania) an unusually high standard of efficiency. . . . It had clearly helped the Romanians a great deal.”115 Reiterating a belief in the benefits of a Protestant work ethic, Kaplan implies that unlike Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestant values are conducive to making capitalism and democracy function. He thus concludes that the Balkans must turn westward and accept tutelage in order for real change to occur, change that would involve a conversion of the Orthodox heart and mind. He writes:

The Saxons, along with the Jews, were the only people in Romania with a tradition of bourgeois values. . . . The era of Soviet domination in the Balkans was about to give way to an era of German domination. German economic imperialism, I realized, offered the most practical and efficient means of bringing free enterprise, democracy, and the other enlightened traditions of the West to Romania.116

As Kaplan’s hopeful affirmation of German economic imperialism indicates, in Balkan Ghosts, religious distinctions are never simply about identity, faith, or practice. They are, instead, conceived of as a mind-set and value system produced through political, economic, and ideological systems. As such, Kaplan’s engagement with the religious is simultaneously a commentary on old imperial legacies and new postsocialist geopolitical shifts. In this context, what he calls Eastern religions, described as mystical and tied to the body rather than to the mind, are conceived of as incompatible with how the West might imagine capitalist transformation in the postsocialist world. In spite of the Balkans’ Christian majority, Kaplan enfolds the region into the Muslim world because Orthodoxy developed under Ottoman rule. In Jassy, a town in the Romanian province of Moldavia, he describes worshippers in the Metropolitan Cathedral:

I watched a throng of Romanians wait in line to touch and kiss the skeleton [bones of St. Friday]. What struck me was the fervor and terror of the faces waiting in line. Not merely were the people repeatedly crossing themselves, but they were doing so with their knees on the floor, and some of them were sweating profusely. . . . Only in Shiite holy places in the Middle East had I experienced such a charged and suffocating religious climate, rippling with explosive energy. It frightened me.117

The embodied practices of Orthodoxy, which remind Kaplan of Islamic rituals in their “fervor and terror,” frighten him because they are unrestrained, “suffocating,” and “explosive.” Privileging the body and not the mind, Orthodoxy counteracts the Balkans’ possible connections with Germany, in which Kaplan finds hope for democratic and economic progress. Meanwhile, Orthodoxy’s associations with Islam and the East provide Balkan Ghosts with its explanation for why time and history are experienced differently in the Balkans than in the West.

According to Kaplan, five hundred years of Ottoman rule are to blame. He writes that, following the Serbian defeat at Kosovo Polje in 1389, “as the living death of Ottoman Turkish rule began to seep in, with its physical cruelty, economic exploitation, and barren intellectual life, the Serbs perverted the myth of noble sacrifice.”118 In Kaplan’s perspective, Orthodox Christianity became “perverted” through its encounter with and subjection to Islam. Serbs “filled their hearts with vengeful sadness and defeat: feelings whose atmospheric effect bore an uncanny resemblance to those that for centuries propelled the Iranian Shiites.”119 For this reason, “like Shiites, unreconstructed Serbs . . . granted no legitimacy to their temporal rulers. . . . They ignored the physical world.”120 In contrast to the Reformation, which led Protestants and, by extension, religious practitioners in the West to live and work on developing the ideals of religious freedom, tolerance, and the betterment of life in this world, Kaplan proposes that Orthodoxy, like certain sects of Islam and the formerly Ottoman world, bypasses the human drive to work for a political and economic system that would allow for individual self-realization and national development. “While the plain of Athens below the Parthenon—not to mention Moldavia and Wallachia—dozed under an Oriental, Ottoman sleep, Transylvania was proclaiming the Enlightenment, with freedom and equality for both Catholics and Protestants.”121 In spite of the fact that the Ottoman Empire is generally known for its tolerance of religious minorities, Kaplan imagines that Ottoman rule has led to historical stagnation and a view of history and temporality that is antithetical to Enlightenment values. Thus he concludes that in the Balkans, “history is not viewed as tracing a chronological progression as it is in the West” but is instead cyclical and productive of mythology.122 In short, Eastern religiosity, consolidated under Ottoman rule, continues to influence a stagnant conception of temporality antithetical to the forward momentum of democratic transition.

As Kaplan argues in his sequel to Balkan Ghosts, Orthodox Christianity and Islam are both “oriental” rather than European religions because they neither engage, nor seek to change, the world as it is.123 Moreover, he posits that Ottoman and Communist rule both encouraged and exacerbated the religiously motivated tendency of Balkan natives to ignore life in this world. According to Kaplan, the Ottoman Empire had never stimulated modern development, while communism “was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion.”124 Balkan Ghosts ultimately racializes religious formations in the Balkans through a narrative that distinguishes Christian development under “Western” and “Eastern” rule. The travelogue suggests that any possibility for historical progress in the postsocialist era depends on the reshaping of stagnant Ottoman/Oriental and Communist mind-sets through Western dominance. Importantly, for Kaplan, imperialism is not in and of itself the key historical problem manipulating Balkan politics. Rather, the central problem in the postsocialist era is the kind of belief and value systems promoted by imperial formations opposed to modernization and human and economic development and progress. Whereas the Ottoman Oriental Empire and the Communist empire promoted defeatism and despotism, precluding the development of infrastructures necessary for the emergence of liberal capitalist nation-states for Kaplan, other imperial formations can not only engender such change but also humanize previously tyrannical and illiberal parts of the world. Indeed, in his chapter on Transylvania, Kaplan celebrates German economic imperialism as the hope for the future. Similarly, in his chapter on Croatia, he recounts how, in spite of the Austrian exploitation of Slavs, “to the modern Croats, the Habsburgs represent the last normal and stable epoch in Central European history prior to the horrific detour through Nazism and Communism.”125 In this sense, in Balkan Ghosts, secular historical progress depends on the reformation (or Western reorientation) of “unreconstructed” Orthodox Christians and Muslims, a conversion of their inner being and belief to make them suitable for capitalist transition.

Balkan Ghosts thus reframes the idioms of otherness used to justify imperial domination. This is evident in the book’s focus on describing interiorized differences of being and feeling (made manifest in this world as religion) rather than racial differences legible on the skin. As such, the travelogue should be read as part of a shifting racial imaginary of the 1990s that facilitated the consolidation of new imperial projects. The Balkan postsocialist landscape, with its complex, overlapping imperial histories and often confusing mix of religious practices, became laden as a site in which U.S. political and cultural discourses narrated ideological and imperial life and death, and the meaning of humanity and inhumanity in the aftermath of communism. The book begins with an epigraph from Rebecca West’s famous Yugoslav travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else.” Paralleling its opening frame of the Balkans as a twentieth-century landscape of imperial death, Balkan Ghosts concludes by comparing the “decline of the Ottoman Empire and the decline of the Soviet Empire.”126 Implying that the decade of the 1990s represents a similar moment to the 1910s, in which the rotting remains of an empire continue to shape regional politics, Kaplan writes that the ethnic conflicts that proliferated in the Balkans were “inflamed by the living death of Communism.”127 With certain regions emerging as places where life was not life but living death, and in which inhumanity was as much a part of the landscape as the architecture, it seemed clear that the United States’ task was no longer just to defend freedom against communism but to defend humanity and life itself through a mode of imperialism very much alive in the present day.

A New Imperial Fantasy

Whereas Cold War geopolitics coincided with massive decolonizing movements in the Third World, the postsocialist era can be thought of, as Shu-mei Shih has suggested, as ushering in a post-postcolonial moment.128 In light of emergent temporal and racial fantasies morally underwriting the need for Western intervention, it is crucial to contextualize the post-1990 proliferation of U.S. and Western European political and cultural discourses celebrating certain forms of imperialism alongside the demise of communism. In popular accounts of geopolitical transformation like Balkan Ghosts, past empires, such as the Ottoman Empire and Western European colonial empires, are portrayed as ideologically out of time with the present moment. When the Ottoman Empire does enter the U.S. imaginary of the European continent, it is remembered as having fallen apart with the advent of modern nationalism and capitalist expansion. The Western European colonial empires, meanwhile, though viewed as modernizing projects, are nonetheless criticized for their racist policies, which are incompatible with the ideals of freedom, equality, and tolerance made manifest in the transnationalization of U.S. multicultural racial logics. Through popular critiques of dead empires and bygone eras, economic imperialism and humanitarian imperialism are experiencing an afterlife in the postsocialist moment as they become linked to progress, a capitalist work ethic, and enlightenment ideals. Since the demise of the last “empire” that was out of sync with the capitalist conception of individual freedom and the “free world,” the Communist empire, imperialism no longer in and of itself has a negative connotation. Instead, economic and humanitarian forms of imperialism are seen as the only possible way to incorporate certain regions, like the Balkans, into the secular historical time of capitalist and democratic progress.

Robert Kaplan’s trajectory as a journalist and popular travel writer exemplifies the shift in the temporal frame through which global “trouble spots” enter the U.S. national imaginary as a foremost power in the world and, consequently, how this shift affects public perceptions of imperial ideologies. During the last years of the Cold War, in the 1980s, Kaplan portrayed the Second and Third Worlds’ potential for historical progress quite differently than in Balkan Ghosts and his subsequent writings. He argued in both his 1988 book on the famine in Ethiopia and his 1990 book on the Soviet–Afghan War that communism, a morally and economically bankrupt political and ideological system, was to blame for the humanitarian and refugee disasters.129 Following the demise of communism, however, Kaplan began to write travel and journalistic accounts of Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans that no longer blamed a form of government. Rather, in texts like Balkan Ghosts and his infamous dystopic piece on Africa, “The Coming Anarchy,” Kaplan suggests that contemporary global conflicts, wars, and famine are rooted in nature, ancient and unchanging civilizational clashes, and religious systems antithetical to modernity and democracy.130 Framing conflict and suffering as ahistorical, forever rooted in those regions that have, due to “unreconstructed” religion or untamed nature, never entered modernity, the post–Cold War temporalizing of the globe fundamentally changed the view of historical progress dominating U.S. interventionism since the Second World War. Whereas during the Communist era, regions such as the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East were portrayed as having the potential to enter the temporality of progress as part of the “free world” once communism was defeated, the postsocialist era produced a fissure in interventionist progress narratives by depicting these regions as forever outside of modern time. This has, ironically, strengthened the feeling that the United States has arrived as a nation that now represents the timeless and universal values of human rights and humanitarianism—values applicable across time and space, even in those nether regions of the world where history is cyclical.

Although Kaplan has ardently denied supporting or believing in the successes of Western humanitarian interventionism in global trouble spots, he, just like liberal thinkers supporting humanitarian intervention, has explicitly endorsed U.S. imperialism, particularly in the post-9/11 era.131 The understanding that contemporary U.S. imperialism no longer represents the “white man’s burden” but, rather, a universal human burden has in large part supported liberal and “realist” conservative imperial apologists.132 As public intellectual Michael Ignatieff argues, “America’s empire is not like empires of times past . . . [but] an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy.”133 Three developments, exemplified in the travelogues I have analyzed in this chapter, have been crucial to giving old empires their “afterlife” as the new enlightened, antiracist, human rights empire built by the United States in the postsocialist era. The first, the consolidation of multiculturalism in the late years of the Cold War, was essential to the fantasy of the United States as an antiracist nation where people of different colors and creeds have the same access to rights and equality. The second, the shift in the racialization of otherness, ranging from the racialization of unreconstructed religious formations to the racialization of nature and the environment in the case of Africa, enabled novel depictions of difference that did not, at least on the surface, repeat the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, these emergent modes of racialized difference depend on the fantasy of distinct yet coexisting temporalities, which divide the globe between nations such as the United States and those of Western Europe that have reached the end of history, and nations mired in ancient traditions, if not nature, that have remained sites of atrocity. In the chapters that follow, I trace these three developments through distinct instances of U.S. warfare and military intervention in the late Cold War years and the postsocialist era. The seeming contradiction of promoting universal humanitarianism and rights through war needed a new landscape of otherness—a landscape that works such as Lee’s, Khanga’s, and Kaplan’s helped produce in the popular U.S. imaginary.