![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper explores the remapping of the American landscape as a mass reproducible visual medium onto foreign territories - particularly Afghanistan - during the Cold War. A series of films produced by the US Bureau of Mines and later screened in these territories are the sites of analysis. These films were the source material that applied the American landscape in its many forms, climates and uses to the US’s physical infrastructure projects during the time. As sights, these projects of infrastructure building are indicative of the colonial gaze US technicians used to reproduce these landscapes and their underlying systems of power and class around the world.
Notes
1 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan. (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 24,
2 US Agency for International Development, Helmand-Arghandab Valley, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (Lashkar Gah: USAID, 1969), 55–59; Hafi- zullah Emadi, State, Revolution, and Superpowers in Afghanistan (New York: Praeger, 1990), 41.
3 Notes on terminology: This paper uses both “United States” and “America.” “United States” is a nominal identifier, whereas the paper makes a distinction with “America” as an ideological formation. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the United States government has invoked the use of the word “America” or “American” to, paradoxically, both universalize its identity, politics, and culture across both American continents, and make exceptional its unique role as an arbiter of freedom and democracy. The term “America” to describe the politics, culture, and economics of the United States reflects the imperialist dynamics with which the word is used in the United States, and how these dynamics construct the ideological formations of the mythic West and the frontier. “American” is also used to describe individuals from the United States. For a critical take on the image of “America” the United States sold through Cold War information programs, see Laura A. Belmonte. Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Likewise, the paper capitalizes “West” and “Frontier” to emphasize the terms as ideological inventions and not just signifiers of geographic space. The paper also makes use of the anachronistic term “Third World” in the context in which the U.S. government and Cold War diplomats used them as a part of the Point 4 program. I use the term in the way diplomatic historian Jason G. Parker explores the term, in terms of the effort to shape foreign public opinion in ways that served national strategic interest during the Cold War, both for global superpowers and for Global South countries. As outlined by Parker, its defining qualities were “a stance of Cold War nonalignment, a need for economic development to overcome the poverty that imperial rule had left behind; and an often implicit, vaguely romantic sense of nonwhite solidarity.” Any use of the term references the contemporaneous use of term as a “Third World” identity coalesced both through U.S. and Soviet public diplomacy and from Global South actors. When possible, the paper avoids the term and uses “Global South.” For more on the coalescence of the Third World as it relates to Cold War public diplomacy, see Jason G. Park. Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
4 This paper invokes travel as a binding force in the relationship between film, and the architectural ensemble. Giuliana Bruno notes that “Viewed through the lens of travel, the relationship between film and the architectural ensemble unfolds as a practice of mobilizing viewing space that invites inhabitation.” Travel culture provided the original tracking shot, where a culture of tourism consumed sites as sights, which the “tracking vision” of Rebecca Ansary Pettys references. Giuliana Bruno, “A Geography of Moving Images” in Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002) 56.
5 Journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts oral histories from residents of Lashkar Gah during the Cold War in Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Little America, 15-34.
6 The film library of the Bureau of Mines is largely kept as physical, un-digitized film reels at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. While the National Archives retains one copy each that is preserved closely to its original quality, the reels available to researchers are in decay. When unboxed, the film reels give off the vinegar odor of when plastic begins to break down and rot. Most of the colors have faded in the films. They have retained a reddish tone, given that the red dye used in film reels at the time deteriorates much slower than other colors. What is available to the public today is an extremely degraded screening of an otherwise triumphant vision of American progress in the Frontier. Arizona and Its Natural Resources, video Recording No. 306.6912,1955, records of the U.S. Information Agency, Record Group 306; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
7 Danika Cooper writes about the visual culture of the American desert in Arizona in Danika Cooper, “The Canal and the Pool: Infrastructures of Abundance and the Invention of the Modern Desert” in Landscape Research 47:1 (2022): 35–48.
8 W.J.T. Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 2.
9 “Little America in Afghanistan,” The Em-Kayan (May 1951), 11; Arizona and Its Natural Resources 23:67.
10 The film Arizona and its Natural Resources is a part of a larger library of films produced specifically by the US Bureau of Mines (BOM), which are available largely as physical film reels in the National Archives and Resources Administration in College Park, Maryland. While an archival research process in the US federal archives – which includes these film reels and contextual, textual correspondence between Point 4 and BOM officials – serves as the primary sources from which the paper considers the American desert as visual media, state archives do not paint the entire story, instead only exhibiting the settler colonial and imperialist gaze this paper critiques. The archival sources and framework present an Afghanistan seen from Washington; further accounting requires archives from Afghanistan itself, largely out of reach following the Taliban’s recent ascension. Oral histories from individuals, such as that of Pettys, involved firsthand in Point 4 projects in Afghanistan provide messy, often contradictory memories and visions that displace the primacy of archival evidence. The research draws from scholarly sources across film theory, environmental and diplomatic history, and architectural theory. However, scholarly research from Afghan or Central Asian scholars on development aid in Afghanistan are scarce. The paper thus turns towards scholarly work which, through or by addressing the shared anti- or de-colonial struggle in “Third World” and indigenous communities during the Cold War, further displace the primacy of western and state-based narratives on US imperialism during the 20th century.
11 Megan Black overviews the global reach of the US Department of the Interior, and its depoliticization of natural resource management in pursuing a civilian, foreign political strategy for the US federal bureaucracy. Megan Black, The Global Interior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018),
12 Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power, 2.
13 Cooper, “The Canal and the Pool,” 36.
14 Point 4 was US President Harry Truman’s fourth point in his inaugural presidential address, which declared the United States would “embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” As a general articulation of civilian foreign aid for Cold War foreign policy, the point encompassed a series of executive order and acts by the US congress. In 1950 the Department of State established the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) to administer much of the technical aid assistance programs, authorized under the Foreign Economic Assistance Act of 1950. The United States Agency for International Development, established under President John F. Kenndy, is the contemporary re-organization of the original TCA created as a part of Point 4.
15 For a short, general history of the Bureau of Mines film library and its international distribution, see Black, The Global Interior, 132-136; Business Screen Magazine 4, no. 7 (Feb 1943) cover.
16 Allan Sherman to Frederick Rocket, July 20, 1955, folder: July 1955, box 7499, Motion Pictures (087.2), RG 70, National Archives and Records Administration.
17 Michael Latham, “Modernization Theory, International History, and the Global Cold War,” introduction to Staging Growth, ed. David Engerman et al. (Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
18 Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse,” Feminist Review 30:1 (Autumn 1988) 61-88. On a greater agency over self-representation by formerly colonized peoples, see V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
19 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 5.
20 Giuliana Bruno, “Haptic Routes: View Painting and Garden Narratives” in Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2012) 56.
21 Iris Cahn, “The Changing Landscape of Modernity: Early Film and America’s ‘Great Picture Tradition,” Wide Angle 18:3 (1996): 85–100.
22 Nick Cullather. 2002. “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State,” The Journal of American History 89:2 (2002): 517.
23 Jawaharlal Nehru, Speech at the Opening of the Nangal Canal, July 8, 1954, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1958) 353.
24 Linda Nash’s research on the Helmand Province in Afghanistan specifically examined the transfer of U.S. technical experience in building dams in the U.S. to the Helmand Valley. See Linda Nash, “Traveling Technology?: American Water Engineers in the Columbia Basin and the Helmand Valley,” In Where Minds and Matters Meet, V. Janssen (United States: University of California Press, 2012) 135-164; For Megan Black’s historical scholarship on the international expansion of the US resource state, see Black, The Global Interior. For a detailed analysis of the use of film as a part of the United States propaganda machine during the Cold War, see Belmonte, Selling the American Way. On public diplomacy and the formation of the Third World through mass media-based public diplomacy, see Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices. Timothy Mitchell discusses the unforeseen ecological ramifications of built infrastructure in Egypt during the 20th century, namely the Aswan Dam. His approach encompasses a systems- and process- based approach to landscape research, as well as the focus on infrastructure as landscape that is prevalent in the field today. See Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kate Orff’s work in her book, Petrochemical America, is an example of contemporary landscape research that focuses on the cross-scalar, downstream effects of hard infrastructure. See, Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014); While discourse on infrastructure in landscape architecture has also focused on image-making, it has, in the context of US foreign policy, been relegated to the realm of geospatial analysis and mapping, see Pierre Belanger, Ecologies of Power: Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016); While an important call to arms to practitioners of landscape architecture in addressing the economic and environmental fallout of 20th century infrastructure and its enabling policies, Belanger’s book, Landscape as Infrastructure, only discusses their role in relation to novel processes of dispensing landscape form rather than as a critical re-evaluation of the original gaze of landscape architecture practitioners; See Belanger, Landscape as Infrastructure (New York: Routledge 2017).
25 Allan Sherman to Gov. Ernest W. MacFarland, October 25, 1955, folder 087.2, box 7499, General Files, 1955, RG 70, National Archives and Records Administration.
26 Giuliana Bruno analyzes the early picturesque pleasure gardens as a proto-filmic medium of touring in place. See, Bruno, “A Geography of Moving Images.”
27 On United States foreign political interests in Afghanistan through the Helmand Valley Authority, see Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan.”
28 Arizona and Its Natural Resources, video Recording No. 306.6912. There are previous versions of Arizona and Its Natural Resources, including a version from 1948, but were not widely distributed as a part of Point 4.
29 Arizona and Its Natural Resources. The film’s narrative structure is entirely based around distinguishing the U.S. resource state’s unique ability, more than that of the Spanish Conquistador or even the 19th century homesteader, to transform the desert in a productive garden:; US International Cooperation Division, Afghanistan Looks Ahead (United States: International Cooperation Administration 1956) 40.
30 Bruno references the early pleasure gardens as proto-filmic constructions of scenic space, drawing closely together the relationship between 19th century English gardens, film, and landscape. Bruno, “A Geography of Moving Images,” 62,
31 Giulana Bruno discusses the movies of Michelangelo Antonioni as a form of “spectatorship as fluid as the psychogeographic navigation his female characters are asked to participate in.” In films such as La Notte or L’avventura, the female protagonist embarks on wandering journeys, whose gaze and movements construct both the experience of the movie and one’s experience of the new Italian urban landscape. See Giuliana Bruno, “Traveling Domestic: The Movie House” in Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 99.
32 Bruno, “A Geography of Moving Images,” 70.
33 Chandrasekaran, Little America; Arizona and Its Natural Resources, 19:40.
34 Beatriz Colomina roots the relationship between film and architecture in the traveling technologies of the time, with trains conveying people from place to place. In this way, the world becomes a placeless emporium, where it is only possible to travel if one did not move. See Beatriz Colomina, “Archive” in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Arizona and Its Natural Resources.
35 Thomas Goutierre. Interview by Evelyn Ganzglass, January 11, 2022, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky, 2022.
36 Mitchell, Introduction to Landscape and Power, 2.
37 Jim Huylebroek, A Military Demonstration in Kabul, August 2020, photograph, in “Inside the Fall of Kabul” by Matthieu Aikins, The New York Times, last modified December 28, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/magazine/fall-of-kabul-afghanistan.html
38 Escobar, Encountering Development, 4.
39 Lyman Wilbur, 1957, photograph, Lyman D. Wilbur Papers, MS 205, Boise State University Special Collections and Archives; Video Recording No. 306.6912; “Arizona and its Natural Resources, 09:01.
40 Bureau of Mines Films were intended to be screened to both US and foreign technicians, with films released often in multiple languages. Chief Projects Engineer to William B. Young, January 22, 1954, folder Colombia, box 7205, General Files, 1954, RG 70, National Archives and Records Administration. Chandrasekaran recounts how the US and Afghanistan never commissioned a soil survey. When they did commission an outside consulting firm to do a study on the project, the firm issued no warnings, despite the apparent problems of the project. The firms, Tudor Engineering Co, was a subsidiary of the original engineering firm, Morrison Knudsen. Chandrasekaran. Little America, 15-34.
41 Arizona and Its Natural Resources, 00:50.
42 “Proposals for Mechanized Farming in the Helmand Valley,” September 21, 1953, folder Afghanistan – Projects – Helmand Valley, Correspondence Relating to U.S. Companies, Federal Government Agencies, Organizations, Foreign Entities and Individuals, Afghanistan, RG 70, National Archives and Records Administration.
43 “Proposals for Mechanized Farming in the Helmand Valley.”
44 “Proposals for Mechanized Farming in the Helmand Valley.”
45 “XV – Afghan Technical Cooperation,” June 3, 1954, folder Afghanistan - Programs, Correspondence Relating to U.S. Companies, Federal Government Agencies, Organizations, Foreign Entities and Individuals, Afghanistan, RG 70, National Archives and Records Administration.
46 “XV – Afghan Technical Cooperation.”
47 William Bach, “The Taliban, Terrorism, and Drug Trade,” US Department of State, October 3, 2001, https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/inl/rls/rm/sep_oct/5210.htm.
48 “US Pushes to Finish Afghan Dam as Challenges Mount,” Associated Press, January 6, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/01/06/us-afghanistan-dam-kajaki/1811773/.
49 Richard Lloyd Parry, “UN Fears ‘disaster’ over Strikes near Huge Dam,” Independent, November 8, 2001, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/un-fears-disaster-over-strikes-near-huge-dam-9159118.html.
50 This framework builds on Linda Nash’s assertion that “travel constitutes what we understand as technology.” She asserts that a continued focus on the linearity of the relationship between Western technology and their foreign aid applications doesn’t consider technology as a contested entity among many ecological entities. Linda Nash, “Traveling Technology?” in Where Minds and Matters Meet, 153.
51 Richard Weller, in response to the University of Pennsylvania’s Superstudio program, in which design studios focused on the Green New Deal, asserts that academic student work around the Green New Deal lacks a substantive, aesthetic, and formal vision for an alternate climate future. “The actual designs can be hard to find, and when they do appear, the hand of the designer tends only to offer outlines along with some optimistic Photoshop showing “the community” enthusiastically filling in the blanks.” Richard Weller, “The Green New Deal Superstudio: Designing the Impossible,” The Dirt, March 17, 2022, https://dirt.asla.org/2022/03/17/the-green-new-deal-superstudio-designing-the-impossible/.
52 Jim Huylebroek, “The front line between Afghan government forces and the Taliban on the edge of Kandahar City in early August.” August 2021, photograph, in “Inside the Fall of Kabul” by Matthieu Aikins, The New York Times, last modified December 28, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/magazine/fall-of-kabul-afghanistan.html; Arizona and Its Natural Resources, 22:04; Jim Huylebroek, “Farmers harvesting opium from poppies this month in Maiwand, Afghanistan,” November 2021, in “In Hard Times, Afghan Farmers Are Turning to Opium for Security” by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Taimoor Shah, The New York Times, published November 21, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/21/world/asia/afghanistan-crops-opium-taliban.html.
53 This refers to the Jean-Luc Godard’s famous 1959 quote, “Tracking shots are a matter of morality,” an inversion of the film critic Luc Moullet’s quote “morality is a matter of tracking shots.”
54 Escobar, Encountering Development, 6.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andy Lee
Andy Lee is the 2020 Charles Eliot Traveling Fellow at Harvard University and an assistant adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Architecture and Urban Planning. His current research explores the slippage between sight and site inherent to landscape, particularly in relation to American landscapes reproduced during the Cold War. Lee has worked at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in Brooklyn, the UN Development Programme in Dhaka, and Leupold Brown Goldbach Architekten in Munich. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BS in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis.