The Past is Not Dead: Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes

by Allan Pred
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2004
288 pp., illus. 9 b/w. Trade, $68.95; Paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4405-5; ISBN: 0-8166-4406-3.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, USA

mosher@svsu.edu

An attractive pastel portrait hangs in the Sweden's National Portrait Gallery. It is of Adolph Ludvig Gustav Albrecht Couschi, better known as Badin, an Afro-Caribbean man, who arrived in slavery at the Swedish court in the mid-eighteenth century and lived there until his death in 1822. One of his functions was that of a jester, and his name lives on in the term "badinage" for teasing and jest. There were rumors of his romantic dalliance with the Queen, less a result of Badin's virility than the supposed disinterest of King Gustave III. Besides the dignified portrait that inspires the author and appears on the book's cover, there were exaggerated contemporary caricatures of Badin published that showed him dwarfish, ape-like, grotesque.

Allan Pred teaches Geography at the University of California in Berkeley. A previous book examined the racisms, racialized spaces, and the popular geographical imagination in Sweden, and this book continues to study those topics. The Past is Not Dead provides evidence of how Badin negotiated his role in the court, often with selections from his memoirs or the writings of Badin's contemporaries like Linnaeus, the classification-minded scientist. The book shifts to unpleasant racial stereotypes that persist in a modern European nation that prides itself on its liberality while maintaining segregated suburbs and boneheaded ideas about people who simply don't fit the Swedes' image of themselves.

The author's postmodernist technique jolts the reader, but perhaps it is intended to decenter. Professor Pred credits Walter Benjamin for his inspiration to write aphoristically and to switch and juxtapose genres, as he feels necessary. Pred fashionably accessories his narrative with parenthetical insertions (sometimes fey puns) to subvert the text and its singularity. He inserts long poetical passages, free-verse meditations on Badin and his world. Suddenly we find the author writing a historical novel, putting thoughts in Badin's head. We eventually synchronize with the pace and direction of this seasoned scholar who is clearly enjoying his right to compose his case in the manner(s) he sees fit. Pred makes good use of his stylistic freedom, and we are given a difficult subject——the persistence of racism——investigated memorably through the life of an interesting historical personage and the society that dimly remembers him today.