Cuba in the American Imagination

Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos

Louis A. Pérez Jr.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780807872109, 9780807832165
• eBook ISBN: 9780807886946
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images — Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Pérez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Pérez argues that these charged and coded images of persuasion and mediation were in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba.

1 Metaphor between Motive and Meaning

Midway between the unintelligible and the commonplace, it is a metaphor most which produces knowledge.

—Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3:10

There is a very different tradition associated with the notion of metaphor, . . . one which treats metaphor as central to the task of accounting for our perspectives on the world: how we think about things, make sense of reality, and set the problems we later try to solve. In this . . . sense, “metaphor” refers both to a certain kind of product—a perspective or frame, a way of looking at things—and to a certain kind of process—a process by which new perspectives on the world come into existence.

—Donald A. Schön, “Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-Solving in Social Policy” (1979)

The astute and the designing may make a skillful use of a metaphor to mislead an easily led public. The mind naturally likes to note resemblances, delights in generalizations and simplifications. The unthinking . . . are content with the crudest generalizations and will readily accept a picture for an argument. Counting on this, [many] . . . will tacitly assume that such and such a resemblance or analogy is complete in all points and will begin to draw arguments therefrom.

—Stephen J. Brown, The World of Imagery: Metaphor and Kindred Imagery (1927)

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. . . . The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predisposes certain choices of interpretations.

—Edward Sapir, Culture, Language, and Personality (1962)

It is not only capital, in the strict economic sense, which is subject to appropriation, manipulation, and exploitation, but also cultural capital in the form of symbolic systems through which man may extend and change the boundaries of his experience.

—Basil Bernstein, “Social Class, Language, and Socialization” (1972)

Language is as it is because of its function in the social structure.

—Michael Halliday, Explorations in the Function of Language (1973)

Paradigms of power dwell in the realm of metaphors. Power seeks moral subsidy and social validation within those representations of higher purpose so readily provided by metaphorical depiction, those figurative constructs where the terms of representation are arranged to provide the perspective desired. Metaphor serves principally as a hortatory device, to persuade and to prevail upon, a way to mediate perception of reality: to see something as other than what it is, and thereby enable conduct for a purpose other than what is professed.

The concept of metaphor insinuates itself into virtually all facets of the culture: in aesthetic production and popular vernacular, in religion, philosophy, and science, to mention only a few. Metaphors constantly evolve; their meanings change; sometimes they become literal; sometimes they get lost altogether. As a mode of discourse in the service of power, metaphors discharge a special function to enable domination and induce submission. That is, they act to articulate the premise of power and therein offer insight into the larger logic of imperial paradigms.

The depictive efficacy of metaphor is contained within the larger moral system from which it originates, whereby the exercise of power deemed proper and proclaimed appropriate in one domain obtains validation by association with another. The exercise of power derives normative plausibility best by way of everyday forms, principally from familiar cultural models represented as a matter of the commonplace and common sense: that is, metaphor as a means of cognitive access to conceptual realms in which the premise of power assumes the guise of propriety. “Figurative language,” psychologist Catarina Cacciari correctly suggests, “is arguably the most powerful source for meaning creation and sense extension.” Indeed, Cacciari argues, metaphors “force us to see things in a different perspective and to reconceptualize them accordingly.”¹

But it is also true that the purpose of power informs the function of metaphor: it is intrinsic to the very act of selecting one figurative depiction and not another. Metaphor creates new knowledge by way of old information and thereby shapes perceptions, precisely the circumstances under which decisions are made and actions are taken. Once situated within a moral system, with its attending codes of cultural conduct and social convention, metaphor transforms moral-to-live-by into prescription-to-act-upon. Its very use must be understood as a matter of intent and purpose, for to choose to mediate reality by way of one set of cultural representations is also and at the same time necessarily to prompt a culturally determined—and politically desired—course of conduct. It suggests the condition of possibility. The options are inscribed in the very production of metaphor; it is meant to imply intent of purpose as a condition intrinsic to its selection. Metaphor does not necessarily reveal similarities as much as it creates them, and thereupon suggests a range of reasonable inferences intended to inform opinion and influence behavior. “Metaphors bring about changes in the ways in which we perceive the world,” philosopher Earl MacCormac observes, “and these conceptual changes often bring about changes in the ways in which we act in the world.”²

That metaphor works at all, that the premise of its representational reach provides a plausible basis of justification for action, is itself a function of a self-confirming logic. Figurative representations, linguist Raymond Gibbs argues persuasively, “are not linguistic distortions of literal mental thought but constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world,” which in turn “underlies the way we think, reason, and imagine.”³ In proposing a point of view, metaphor propounds a course of action. Indeed, the cognitive power of the metaphor must be understood to lie in its capacity to predispose attitude as a condition to dispose conduct, or acquiesce to the conduct of others. “We define our reality in terms of metaphors,” linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest, “and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.”⁴ Meaning and moral converge on each other in dialectical engagement: indeed, the interaction is intrinsic to the conceptual efficacy of metaphor. To paraphrase anthropologist Edward Sapir, as soon as the image is available and readily accessible, the concept becomes easy to handle.⁵ It remains only to expand its implications into accessible domains—and to act upon it. Metaphorical representation depicts a condition for which the desired response assumes the appearance of self-evident plausibility.⁶

The use of metaphor is more than a matter of rhetorical flourishes and stylistic embellishment. Metaphors have consequences. They are supposed to. And never more than when they are summoned in the service of power. They serve to fix more than perspective and point of view. They also possess causal properties. Metaphorical representations are instrumental in shaping the cognitive context in which people apprehend the world about them, the way they arrive at an understanding of their time and place, often the very reason they choose one course of action among others. “Metaphorical activity occurs in sites of difference,” linguist Gunther Kress has written, “whenever there is contention of an ideological kind, whenever an attempt is made to assimilate an event into one ideological system rather than another,” and adds, “The ubiquitous action of metaphor is one force in the discursive and ideological process of ‘naturalising’ the social, of turning that which is problematic into the obvious.”⁷ To confront metaphor is not only to engage a mode of thought but also to contend with a means of moral validation, specifically the way that systems of domination normalize the internal moral logic of power.

* * *

Metaphor has been central to the premise of empire. It has served as a source of plausible purpose by which the colonial polity imagines the creation of empire as self-explanatory and self-confirming, thereupon transacting the exercise of power as an obligation of duty and a deed of disinterest. To invoke the figurative was to assemble a stock of usable imagery of power hierarchies, usable in the sense that it propounded the rationale of domination as a matter of self-evident propriety. Metaphor concealed the ideological content of language, a process that purported to persuade without the need to explain and validate the propriety of power as a premise of normality, what anthropologist Christopher Tilley suggested metaphors “utilized as vehicles of power in the sense of social domination and control.”⁸ The very raison d’être of colonialism was inscribed within pretension to plausibility, derived from time-honored representations of mission civilatrice: with domination depicted as deliverance, self-interest represented as selfless purpose, and subjugation rendered as salvation.

The choice of metaphor hence offers insight into political purpose. Metaphorical constructs as modes of representation were intrinsically self-confirming and provided normative plausibility to the exercise of power. Insofar as the use of metaphor involved choice, it necessarily implied purpose and suggested means, and more: to choose one metaphor—and not another—was to propound a perspective on the nature of the world, to call attention to some attributes and ignore others, not as a matter of serendipity but as a function of intent. Metaphors have their politics, and their politics consist of either disguising differences or suggesting similarities. That is their purpose. The use of figurative representations, sociologist Mary Douglas notes, acts to “create to some extent the realities to which they apply.” ⁹ It thus becomes necessary to approach metaphor as a function of its political meaning, that is, from the perspective of the implications it was designed to suggest and the inference it sought to invite, purposefully, as a cognitive process by which it acted to narrow the choice of perception to the one desired. Point of view was inscribed within the metaphor, which is to suggest that the politics was embedded within the image.

There were discernible elements of surreptitious purpose associated with the production of metaphor and its development as a discursive framework within systems of domination. The relationship between metaphor and the exercise of power was drawn by philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara, who observed that “attention could be profitably directed away from the classic instruments of social control” and to “the everyday workings of our linguistic and educational tradition.” This implies a new emphasis on what Fiumara characterized as “the unnoticed indoctrinating influence of the ongoing discourses, which necessarily reverberate in life-shaping experiences more secretly and surely than any form of overt authority,” something akin to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s suggestion that metaphor “by virtue of what it hides, can lead to human degradation.”¹⁰ Metaphorical constructs served to inscribe the logic of power within established cultural models as a means to create the normative plausibility of empire. It was to draw upon what Wallace Stevens identified as “the familiar world of the commonplace” through “sense of the analogy.”¹¹

The depictive resonance of metaphor lay in its capacity to shape a narrative of moral validation in the service of power. This is not to suggest, of course, that power holders were averse to the use of violence as a means through which to exact submission to their will. Attention to the function of metaphor does not imply a disregard for the use of force. Nor does it reduce the importance of economic, political, cultural, and psychological forms of coercion. To call attention to the activity of metaphor, rather, is to argue that power functioned best within systems of domination in the form of moral suasion and normative inducement, where the logic of authority obtained legitimacy from those cultural models through which the powerful and the powerless together derived more or less their understanding of the rightful order of the world. It is to argue for the need to understand the circumstances in which the use of metaphorical representation acts explicitly as a function of power, and thereupon situate its role within symbolic systems and value networks as a factor in the social production of knowledge. It is, lastly, to suggest that the premise of power was transmitted within established social practice in which representation conveyed ideological perspective and point of view, and thereupon proceeded to shape the political function of knowledge. Power sustained itself best in the interaction between domination and subordination with only minimal—and infrequent—need to resort to force and violence as a means by which to exact compliance.

Metaphor in this instance must be seen as a function of social arrangements, culturally derived and ideologically driven that, when turned in on itself, can be made to reveal the normative premise of power and yield insight into the moral assumptions by which systems of domination acquired logic and legitimacy.¹² This was a process of choice, and the discursive context in which that choice functioned provides perspective on the moral pretensions by which empire sustained itself. The observations on language offered by linguists Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress have particular relevance to metaphor: that is, to contemplate metaphor “as the medium of consciousness for a society,” the study of which offers insight into “consciousness and its ideological bases.”¹³

That metaphorical depiction was at once self-confirming and self-serving does not, of course, reduce its usefulness as a source of insight into the larger ideological purpose for which it was summoned. On the contrary, precisely because metaphor involved both process and product, because it often acted to arrange an otherwise incongruous proposition into a plausible premise, it offers a means with which to examine the workings of domination as a moral system. Integral to this scheme of things was the need to create discursive realms deemed appropriate to the purpose of power, which meant, too, the need to articulate new representations of social relationships and the development of new sources of cultural knowledge.

The prerogative of power was enacted most typically by way of figurative depictions derived from normative models. Metaphors of gender relations, for example, imputed strength to male and weakness to female, further differentiating between the rational and the emotional, between virility and vulnerability, and always asserting patriarchy as rationale to protect and pretext to rule. Racial hierarchies offered another readily comprehensible set of discursive markers with which to represent civilization and barbarism, with white people depicted as modern and black and brown people portrayed as primitive, with the duty of the former to uplift the latter as rationale to exercise power. Age differentials provided still another usable model to validate a hierarchy of power, with wisdom associated with adulthood and innocence assigned to childhood, creating dichotomies of maturity and immaturity, independence and dependence, and always the authority of adults over children understood as right and proper. These were not mutually exclusive categories, of course, and indeed they were often interchanged and exchanged as circumstances warranted and needs dictated.

The plausibility of power was thus inscribed in those cultural arrangements otherwise deemed normal and normative. Metaphorical constructs were put to political use through social practice, as in those arrangements, for example, in which women were expected to submit to the authority of men, where blacks were presumed to be subordinate to whites, and where children were subject to the authority of adults, thus providing the normative models that validated systems of domination as a matter of the rightful order of things. They shared a common vernacular of hierarchical role-specific functions, readily inferred and easily understood. Metaphorical representations served as a means of persuasion: that is, to create categories of meaning and arrange them into patterns of purpose. It could hardly be otherwise. The depictive credibility of met...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Cuba In the American Imagination
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Idea of Cuba
• 1 Metaphor between Motive and Meaning
• 2 Imagining Self-Interest
• 3 Metaphor as Paradigm
• 4 On Gratitude as Moral Currency of Empire
• 5 Shifting Metaphors, Changing Meanings
• 6 Through the Prism of Metaphor
• Notes
• Index