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Scott Gabriel Knowles, Jacob A. C. Remes. Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 243–244, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.243
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Extract
We are today in the midst of an important historiographical revision in the role of disasters in American life. A new disaster history is imminent, and it is a welcome corrective to the instant histories and narrative case studies that have long dominated this genre. Historians are now examining disasters not as singular events, standing in for particular policy or leadership successes or failures. Instead, the new disaster history examines disasters as slow—linked across time and space—and provocative of new social and political processes, rather than only reflecting fixed identities and long-standing conflicts. Indeed, disasters are both: they are revelatory and generative, and as such, they deserve attention in their own right, especially through comparative analysis. Such is the methodology used by Jacob A. C. Remes in his sterling new book Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era.
Remes’s attention is focused on the capacity of the Progressive Era state to deliver disaster relief—a nearly constant challenge in a time marked by urban fires, floods, pandemics, violent labor conflicts, and war. “Disasters,” according to Remes, “exposed the tensions of the Progressive Era and the growth of the interventionist state. The state and its actors in the military and civilian relief bureaucracies sought to impose order on what they imagined to be a chaotic social landscape” (196). But the people in this landscape of suffering were not passive; in fact, they possessed substantial capacity for recovery. In such periods of disaster recovery, Remes argues, we should be attuned to an emergent “disaster citizenship,” visible through “contestations, negotiations, and compromises”—periods of struggle that did not uniformly sanctify nationalism or faith in experts (the twin poles of mainstream progressive aspiration) (196). The “disaster citizenship” Remes charts out had much more to do with heightening the existing (and sometimes invisible to experts/reformers) bonds of community for disaster victims—bonds the victims had forged as laborers, as immigrants, as members of a religious community, as women and men, and often as immigrants shuttling across national boundaries.
