This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
A cknowledgments
My research was hosted by institutions to which I am extremely grateful, and enriched by friends and colleagues to whom I am greatly indebted. It was at the Institut d’Études Avancées of Paris, an ideal haven for study and writing, that I could commence this book, and my home university, the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, granted me a sabbatical semester to accomplish it. Without those peaceful periods, it would have been very hard indeed to realize this analysis. Thanks to my fellow professors at the Atelier Department for European Social Sciences and Historiography I could enjoy the certainty that everybody is replaceable, which is a most reassuring feeling. I express my gratitude to Olivier Bouin for coaching me with care, friendship, and wisdom.
During the years of my research, I received a great deal of intellectual inspiration and support in the somewhat loosely defined fields connecting Social Sciences and Cultural Heritage, for which I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Isabelle Anatole-Gabriel, Isabelle Backouche, Maria Elena Barral, Ana Carolina Bierrenbach, Dorothee Brantz, Esteban Buch, Christina Cameron, Gábor Czoch, Péter Erdosi, Tamás Fejérdy, Ana Fernandes, François Hartog, Dominique Ionga-Prat, Rohit Jigyasu, Bruno Karsenti, Luda Klusaková, Zoltán Krasznai, Sabina Loriga, Melania Nucifora, MarieVic Ozouf-Marignier, Jacek Purchla, Kapil Raj, Jacques Revel, Joan Roca, Mechtild Rössler, Gino Satta, Gábor Soós, Philipp Ther, Laurier Turgeon, Nicole Valois, Nicolas Verdier, and Rosemary Wakeman. My thanks also go to Christopher Ryan for his valuable suggestions regarding the language of the text, and especially to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Kristin Purdy and Jessie Wheeler, for having steered me through the production process.
l ist of A bbrevi Ations
CDC Community-driven Conservation
CLUSHT Community-led Urban Strategies in Historic Town
CUD Comprehensive (Urban) Development
HUL Historic Urban Landscape
IUCH Intangible Urban Cultural Heritage
IUCHMP Integrated (Urban) Cultural Heritage Management Plan
LUH Living (Urban) Heritage
SC Sustainable City
VI Visual Integrity
l ist of f igures
Fig. 3.1 Number of recognitions of World Heritage Sites in the Europe and North America Unit of UNESCO in periods of five years
Fig. 3.2 Number of UNESCO World Heritage Commission reports on the seven cities per year (reports on Vienna in dark grey)
Fig. 3.3 Number of threats mentioned in UNESCO World Heritage Commission reports on the seven cities per year (threats to Vienna in dark grey)
Fig. 3.4 Urban programs (“practices”) acknowledged by the UN-Habitat Programme in Vienna per year
80
88
89
97
l ist of t A bles
Table 4.1 Opposing History and cultural heritage by perception of time
Table 4.2 Opposing History and cultural heritage by their ideological/ theoretical content
Table 4.3 Opposing History and cultural heritage by the role of the historian/expert
Table 4.4 Parallel evolution of History and cultural heritage
Table 5.1 Contemporary urban heritage conservation and management notions
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Historic urban landscape (HUL) is the most recently codified1 notion of international urban heritage conservation; it was conceived to cover the various forms of “contemporary interventions in and around (urban) World Heritage sites,”2 whose number is growing considerably, while those responsible for their management must face the symptoms of urban development as well as the integration of the conceptual novelties of cultural heritage preservation (intangible heritage, cultural diversity, and sustainability). HUL is more than a simple category of heritage preservation: its creators and its earliest proponents and leading proponents define it as an “approach,”3 and claim that it represents a milestone in the history of cultural heritage preservation and a paradigm shift in urban planning.
As an urban historian, I was intrigued by the unconventional denomination of this notion. “Historic” and “urban landscape” make an unusual compound, which lends itself to a great variety of interpretations. This may suit the diverse ambitions behind it, but it can also raise doubts about the possibility of their practical realization. Already, the adjective “historic” marks a significant stage in the continuous conceptual expansion of the notion of cultural heritage. It is the first time that one of its official denominations has evoked History. Although there is quite a clear difference between “historic” and “historical” in English, this notion— as an international term—functions in many other languages, including the other official languages of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in which this distinction cannot be expressed. The French historique, the Russian исторический, or the
G. Sonkoly, Historical Urban Landscape, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49166-0_1
G. SONKOLY
Spanish histórico refers to both “historic” and “historical”; therefore, the original distinction is easily blurred in translation, and consequently in international debates.
Thus, the title of this book, Historical Urban Landscape, is intended to convey the idea that a critical analysis is necessary if we are to understand the significance and the utility of such a compound. Moreover, HUL as an “approach” reveals academic aspirations, openly manifested in the two published volumes on the subject, that can arouse the interest of scholars involved in urban studies—specialists in urban planning and architecture, as well as social scientists and historians alike. HUL is part of the cultural heritage discourse, which suggests that these aspirations can be associated with the enormous number of academic initiatives that share the title of heritage studies. This shows that after approximately five decades the conceptualization of cultural heritage has reached the point of independent academic institutionalization. Whereas ethnologists and anthropologists widely discuss the effects on their own disciplines of intangible cultural heritage, codified only two years before HUL,4 historians and the representatives of other social sciences and the humanities are more reluctant to assess the effects of this recent development of cultural heritage on their respective disciplines. Nevertheless, they need to become more aware of the growing importance of cultural heritage in social, political, and even economic discourse. This is particularly true of historians, since many nonprofessional social actors and decision-makers confuse the two domains because they both refer to the past to construct present identities.
Like any international concept codified in standard-setting instruments, HUL is expected to achieve various tasks: it should (1) provide a conceptual framework for contemporary urban heritage conservation, (2) provide guidelines for urban heritage management, and (3) serve as a regulatory instrument implemented by different levels of political authorities. Accordingly, its analysis requires a methodological approach which considers these functions simultaneously, as well as the conceptual challenges and the societal novelties which created the need for the wording of the new instrument. The relatively short history of HUL is situated in the longer history of international urban heritage protection, as well as in the even longer history of urban planning. It can be considered as a manifestation of a new regime in both of these two partially interrelated processes. The expression “regime” is an often recurring denominator in contemporary social sciences in History, especially in relationship to the history of cultural heritage, since the term is considered to be suitable to frame the
periodization of cultural and social changes in relationship to the levels of the political Establishment from universal to local. In their Heritage Regimes and the State, the editors define “regime” as “a set of norms and rules regulating the relationship between a state-government and society, international regimes come about through negotiations among actors on an international level.”5 Due to the recent expansion of the notion of cultural heritage, its current regime can be characterized by means of intersections between heritage-making and “culture’s resource potential and the ensuing questions of ownership rights and responsibilities.”6 Thus, the first level of the HUL analysis is to regard this notion as the outcome of international debates about how to solve the current challenges of urban heritage management, as well as its impact on the different levels of governance of urban heritage. In this context, urban heritage appears not merely in its tangible form but also as a resource for development, as well as for local identity-construction, which questions the meaning of authenticity, the original decisive criterion for the selection of Cultural World Heritage Sites. This modification leads to the redefinition of urban heritage sites, which demands a new functional standard of authenticity suitable for the new regime.7 The original definition of urban cultural heritage sites—and the maintenance of their authenticity—is not only queried because of urban development and related governance issues but also due to the current complexity of the notion of World Cultural Heritage since the ratification of two crucial conventions in the early 2000s.8 These conventions represent the integration of more political voices into the universal definition of cultural heritage, but this diversity inevitably results in a less coherent and a more open-ended conceptualization. HUL was intended to channel this current complexity of cultural heritage, as well as to mediate between urban conservation and development. As we shall see later, it is not the only notion to fulfill this complicated mission. Moreover, it is in competition with the others, which makes it possible to identify diverse personal, professional, and group interests in contemporary urban heritage management. Among these concurrent approaches and concepts, HUL has proved to be one of the most appropriate to “find a balance between urban heritage conservation, socio-economic development and sustainability” according to Sophia Labadi and William Logan, who dedicated their recent volume to these three interrelated aspects of heritage cities and to their governance challenges between international and local levels.9 From this practical point of view, HUL is a toolkit designed to achieve sustainable heritage cities.10
G. SONKOLY
The number of heritage cities is growing exponentially not only among World Heritage Sites but also at lower levels of cultural heritage protection. It is not obvious, however, how HUL cities could be identified among them. Though this book cannot venture to identify all the specific characteristics of HUL cities and evaluate the degree to which they succeed in meeting the expectations of urban heritage conservation, development, and sustainability, some theoretical attempts will be made to determine their group. The first obvious choice of a HUL city must be Vienna, which hosted the conference where the notion was worded in 2005. Subsequently, HUL moved to Asia, more specifically to Shanghai, and its World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and the Pacific Region (WHITRAP) built up a system of pilot cities. These 11 cities could be currently regarded as the applications of the HUL principles.11 This is especially true of the Australian city of Ballarat, which not only published its own realization of the HUL approach in order to offer a model,12 but is also included in the previously mentioned book by Labadi and Logan to illustrate the application of HUL in a local context.13 Since this book enumerates most of the recent concepts of urban heritage management with corresponding examples, it is also useful to distinguish HUL cities—such as Ballarat or Vancouver—from other heritage cities determined and managed according to different concepts. Another possible way to define HUL cities is by derivation from the World Heritage Lists. Since HUL is also expected to link and unite the tangible and intangible aspects of urban heritage, cities which appear concurrently on both lists could be considered as fitting sites for research into the challenges related to HUL. According to a non-exhaustive survey, six such cities can be tentatively identified (Beijing, Bruges, Cordova, Marrakesh, Palermo, and most recently Vienna), out of which the proximity of the two kinds of heritage is the most obvious and best studied in Marrakesh.
The great variety of possible definitions of HUL cities makes it clear that the dozen years which have passed since the first announcement of HUL in 2004 do not provide sufficient historical distance to assess either the degree of success of its reception (in comparison to its peer concepts) or its utility to accomplish its original objectives. Its critical history within that of the conceptual development of international urban heritage protection, however, will differentiate the regimes of urban heritage and demonstrate its current specificities through the study of the genesis of HUL. These regimes not only serve to narrate the conceptual history of urban heritage, or cultural heritage in general, but also to position it in relationship
to History by applying the theory of Regimes of Historicity. Thus, the history of international urban heritage protection summarized through the emergence of HUL will be integrated into an evolution with a much wider scope. This book uses the example of HUL to demonstrate how the history of cultural heritage can be constructed as a historical problem, as well as why it is necessary to demarcate History from cultural heritage and what consequences the increasing popularity of the latter has for History. First, the conceptual history of urban heritage preservation—based on the standard-setting instruments of international organizations—reveals the fundamental elements of the current conception of urban heritage (Chap. 2). Second, this conception, as worded in the HUL approach, is investigated through the analysis of Vienna, which played a crucial role in the establishment of HUL (Chap. 3). Third, to complete the Historical Urban Landscape approach, a parallel history of historical science and cultural heritage will be constructed in order to establish a periodization which makes it possible to integrate the Cultural Heritage Regimes into a broader historical context (Chap. 4). The three analyses are linked together with the theory of presentism—an integral part of the Regimes of Historicity—according to which our period can be differentiated from the previous one by a new perception of time: future-oriented modernism has gradually been replaced by a present-based mentality, whose uncritical obsession with the past is exhibited in a set of fuzzy concepts, of which cultural heritage is the most influential and the best established. The particular methodology of each chapter is demonstrated in such a way as to show how it can be used in education, and each chapter is intended to trigger further debate and research about the relationship between social sciences and cultural heritage.
N otes
1. The following two standard-setting instruments of UNESCO defined the HUL: Declaration on the Conservation of the Historic Urban Landscapes (UNESCO, 2005b), Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. A New International Instrument (UNESCO, 2011).
2. UNESCO (2005c) 36.
3. The two begetters of HUL published two volumes to explain the intentions underlying the use of this term. The first is a general introduction, and the second edited volume is a description of its
G. SONKOLY
elements by various authors. Francesco Bandarin and Ron van Oers (2012) The Historic Urban Landscape. Managing Heritage in an Urban Century (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell); Francesco Bandarin and Ron van Oers (2015) Reconnecting the City. The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
4. Among several publications, the following volumes offer a comprehensive view on the problem: Regina F. Bendix, Aditya Eggert, Arnika Peselmann (eds.) (2012) Heritage Regimes and the State (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen); Chiara Bortolotto (ed.) (2011) Le patrimoine culturel immatériel. Enjeux d’une nouvelle catégorie (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme); Daniel Fabre, Anna Iuso (eds.) (2009) Les monuments sont habités (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme); Dominique Poulot (ed.) (1998) Patrimoine et modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan) 265–308; Laurajane Smith, Natsuko Akagawa (eds) (2009) Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge); and a special issue of the Flemish Volkskunde review entitled Brokers, Facilitators and Mediation. Critical Success (F)Actors for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Volkskunde 2014: 3.
5. Bendix et al. (2012) 12–13.
6. Ibid., 13.
7. Lucie K. Morriset attempts to describe this constant redefinition of heritage objects/sites according to her methodology determined by the “Regimes of Authenticity.” In her approach, these are the distinctive periods of the ongoing process of heritagization. Morriset, Lucie K. (2009) Des régimes d’authenticité. Essai sur la mémoire patrimoniale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes) 23–30.
8. These conventions are the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression (2005a).
9. Labadi, S., Logan.W. (eds.) (2016) Urban Heritage, Development and Sustainability. International frameworks, national and local governance (London-New York: Routledge) 7–8.
10. Bandarin, van Oers (2015) 203–316.
11. Because of the regional vocation of the WHITRAP, its 11 pilot cities are mainly in Asia (eight cities), while two are in the Pacific and 1one in Latin America. HUL (2015).
12. Ballarat (2013) Ballarat and UNESCO’s historic urban landscape approach (Ballarat: City of Ballarat).
13. Buckley, K., Cooke, S., Fayad, S. (2016) Using the Historic Urban Landscape to re-imagine Ballarat: the local context in Labadi, S., Logan.W. (eds.) (2016) Urban Heritage, Development and Sustainability. International frameworks, national and local governance (London-New York: Routledge) 93–113.
R efe ReNces
Bandarin, Francesco, van Oers, Ron (2012) The Historic Urban Landscape. Managing Heritage in an Urban Century (Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell).
Bandarin, Francesco, van Oers, Ron (eds.) (2015) Reconnecting the City. The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage (Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell).
Bendix, R. F., Eggert, A., Peselmann., A. (eds.) (2012) Heritage Regimes and the State (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen).
Bortolotto, Chiara (ed.) (2011) Le patrimoine culturel immatériel. Enjeux d’une nouvelle catégorie (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme).
‘Brokers, Facilitators and Mediation. Critical Success (F)Actors for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’ Volkskunde 2014:3. (Special issue).
Fabre, D., Iuso, A. (eds.) (2009) Les monuments sont habités (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme).
HUL (2015), http://www.historicurbanlandscape.com/index.php?classid=6043, date accessed 15 August 2015.
Labadi, S., Logan, W. (eds.) (2016) Urban Heritage, Development and Sustainability. International Frameworks, National and Local Governance (London-New York: Routledge).
Morriset, Lucie K. (2009) Des régimes d’authenticité. Essai sur la mémoire patrimoniale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes).
Poulot, Dominique (ed.) (1998) Patrimoine et modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan).
Smith, L., Akagawa, N. (eds.) (2009) Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge).
UNESCO (2003) Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ID=17716&URL_ DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, date accessed 7 January 2016.
UNESCO (2005a) Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ ID=31038&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, letöltve 2014.7.27
UNESCO (2005b) Declaration on the Conservation of the Historic Urban Landscapes, http://whc.unesco.org/document/6812, date accessed 7 January 2016.
UNESCO (2005c) Vienna Memorandum on World Heritage and Contemporary Architecture—Managing the Historic Urban Landscape (http://whc.unesco. org/document/6814/, date accessed 7 January 2016.
UNESCO (2011) Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape. A New International Instrument, Including a Glossary of Definitons, http://portal. unesco.org/en/ev.phpURL_ID=48857&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html, date accessed 7 January 2016.
CHAPTER 2
The History of Historic Urban Landscape
I ntroduct Ion
The concept of HUL has become an indispensable concept of cultural heritage preservation in the past decade. It not only represents a new stage in the ever-expanding notion of cultural heritage (from the tangible through landscape to the intangible), but it also means that the notion of cultural heritage is no longer a mere concept of preservation but is also conceived as an institutionalized form of knowledge to interpret and manage the social, economic, and cultural realties engendered by its own evolution over several decades. This form of knowledge describes and manages social and cultural realities according to the discourse of international— primarily UNESCO and International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)—legal texts of an administrative nature. These texts reveal a process which started with The Athens Charter in the 1930s and became increasingly intensive as time went by up to the last ten years, during which new instruments have emerged that do not simply attempt to find the most adequate ways to conserve urban heritage but are intended to frame all the aspects of the generated heritage cities and heritage quarters. Since HUL is the first officially defined notion with this purpose, its historical analysis could contribute to an understanding of why its definition is necessary, how it is rooted in the roughly eight decades of international heritage preservation, and whether it is sufficient to achieve its original objective, namely, to match the expectations related to the expansion of cultural heritage—as intangible heritage or as an organic element
G. Sonkoly, Historical Urban Landscape, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49166-0_2
of sustainable development—with those of concerned social actors, most notably heritage conservation experts and local decision-makers. Seeing that the story of HUL covers the last decade, the methodological question also arises: can such a recent and unfinished period be chosen as an object of contemporary history?
We started our analysis with the presupposition that history should not ignore the evolution of cultural heritage and its analysis requires the development of a special methodology that takes account of its contemporary nature. This evolution is a continuous expansion, in which increasingly wide sectors of the environment and of society are interpreted as heritage while the number of preserved sites is also growing spectacularly. At the beginning of the 2010s, World Heritage sites already numbered more than 1000, more than 500 of which are in urban settings: either entire towns and quarters or historic monuments in an urban environment. In addition to these World Heritage sites, there is a growing number of cities and towns under regional, national, or local protection, on which international regulations are often imposed, whether directly or indirectly. In this sense, the current concept of HUL, which was created to handle these entities, can be understood as an object of conceptual history, which is part of the longer history of urban heritage preservation and of cultural heritage conservation in general.
The choice of the conceptual history approach for the analysis of HUL can be explained by the fact that HUL belongs to the notion of cultural heritage, which is also the result of a long evolution and represents the most institutionalized member of the presentist quartet of fuzzy notions that will be discussed in Chap. 4. This approach is especially beneficial when clear concepts are missing, as is the case with contemporary cultural heritage.1 Furthermore, this approach is also useful to discern significant elements of a concept which can be traced back synchronically in time to comprehend its otherwise overwhelming complexity. This overwhelming complexity is reduced through the analysis of HUL in order to make it intelligible for research by (1) identifying the crucial events and personalities related to it; (2) distinguishing its specificities against other—mainly scientific—definitions of urban landscape; (3) discerning appropriate significant elements to effectively place its conceptual history into longer and wider contexts of modern and contemporary social and cultural developments; and (4) establishing a database of the most important standardsetting instruments of international urban heritage preservation in order to reveal those developments.
The chronology of the genesis of HUL will be examined in detail in Chap. 3, in which we analyze the confluence of different social levels and scales of the reception of the novelties of cultural heritage preservation. As we have already mentioned in Chap. 1, the initiators of HUL, Francesco Bandarin and Ron van Oers, can be identified more easily than those of any other earlier concepts of cultural heritage preservation. Bandarin, an architect of Venetian origin, the former director of UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre (2000–2011) and assistant director-general for Culture (2010–2014), was already one of its proponents during the wording of The Vienna Memorandum in 2005. Van Oers, a Dutch urban planner, was responsible for the Programme of World Heritage Cities between 2005 and 2009, and he was the deputy director of the World Heritage Training and Research Institute for the Asia-Pacific Region in China (2009–2015), which was established to propagate the HUL concept in that region. Bandarin and van Oers published an explicative volume on the concept of HUL soon after the UNESCO Recommendation on HUL of 2011 and co-edited a second one to prove the relevance of the concept a few years later.2 These two volumes and the great number of scientific events related to HUL since its first official wording in 2005 serve not only to indicate the noteworthy efforts of the UNESCO administrators to bring this notion close to the academic public but also to show that this public was receptive to this notion because of the earlier proliferation of the notion of urban landscape in their respective disciplines.
t he e mergence of the n ot Ion of u rban L andscape
Though the notion of HUL was not a conceptual invention of any scientific discipline dealing with the city, several such disciplines (mainly urban geography, urban studies, monument and heritage protection studies, history of art) applied the notion of landscape from the 1970s onward to understand and analyze the modifications of urban territory and society. After The Vienna Memorandum, these attempts multiplied, and reflections on this new notion were partially linked to the numerous scientific debates on the renewed notion of landscape. It is probably no exaggeration to say that by the 2000s landscape had become the notion most frequently used to examine the relationship between territory and identity. Michael Jakob, for example, starts his concise essay on the landscape with the expression of omnipaysage3 to express that the landscape is omnipresent “from journalism, through scientific publications to the screens … and to our
G. SONKOLY
thoughts.”4 From the 1990s onward, the notion of landscape has become an integral part of both administrative and scientific heritage protection, and, consequently, since then it has also affected the evolution of the notion of cultural landscape, which was the first attempt at UNESCO to bridge the inner division—cultural and natural—of World Heritage, which is often judged as non-universal because of its primarily Western origins.5
Current cultural heritage protection uses the notion of (cultural) landscape to determine and protect territories which are examples of traditional co-existence between nature and human society and which are threatened by modernization and/or by globalization.6 Associating landscape with tradition, however, is quite surprising in view of its longue durée conceptual history because the notion of landscape appeared in those Western European languages which later became the official languages of UNESCO7 only from the sixteenth century onward. It is generally classified as part of the vocabulary of modernization inasmuch as it is part of a new, objectivizing, and disenchanted approach8 in which nature emerges as landscape.9 Accordingly, the landscape did not appear originally to conserve the traditional perception of the world and space, but resulted in the abandonment of this perception in the ateliers of the increasingly individualistic arts and in the studios of ever-more professional science and administration.
Both the emergence and the prevalence of the notion of landscape particular to a given era usually indicate two important modifications: (1) the interpretation of nature and the relationship between nature and society are undergoing changes and (2) one—normally privileged—social group must face unavoidable consequences. All the three landscape-oriented periods in Western history (the Renaissance; the “Golden Age” between 1750 and 1860,10 and the current period starting in the 1970s) are good examples of this double principle. The Renaissance elite’s new interpretation of nature can best be grasped in the artilisation in situ and in visu11 of their regard. Our era tries to abandon the artificial separation between culture and nature through the notion of landscape, which can serve as a proper territorial reference for the ineluctable concept of sustainability. These interpretations of landscape, specific to the two endpoints of modernity, are linked by the Romantic definition of landscape, which is strongly connected to nineteenth-century nation-building and to the related mapping of national territories as well as to sciences dedicated to that mission. Owing to these activities, the preceding essentially artistic interpretations of landscape were becoming scientific. Obviously, other
significant differences could be mentioned about the interpretations of landscape in the three periods, but just now similarities are more important, since they can reveal continuities and shared principles in the history of landscape. For our present study, the most indicative continuous characteristic is probably that landscape is usually the construction of a—mainly urban—elite, which instrumentalizes this notion to express a threatened or already lost credibility and, consequently, to protect itself against unavoidable changes. Thus, urban/regional development in the form of landscape management does not have exclusively economic purposes, but also manifests moral and ideological contents. These contents are closely related to the role which landscape and landscape design “play as grand mnemonic devices.”12 From this point of view, current architectural usage of urban landscape is determined more by “memory-laden projects such as New Urbanism, postmodern historicism, site remediation, activist historic preservation, ecological re-creation,” which partially bring back the emulative characteristic of classicism and renounce the modernist “repudiation of externalized memory”13 in the practice of “architects and landscape architects.” Ecological recreation or ecological considerations in general extend the scale of memory from human/cultural to environmental/ climatic. Consequently, the contemporary definition of urban landscape meets the current tendencies to identify landscape with cultural landscape due to the heritagization of nature. According to François Walter, the latter process already begins in the nineteenth century when the protection of the fatherland and the natural environment are linked through landscape conservation, and, in consequence, both mutually convey each other’s memory.14 Though the protection of the natural environment was largely freed from its earlier ideological contents after the Second World War, it was still carried out according to aesthetic, later ecological and economic, considerations until the emergence of the principle of sustainability, which emphasized the organic reconciliation of nature and culture.
In the early modern Europe, the notion of landscape had different connotations in Germanic languages, in which it referred to territory, and in Romance languages, in which it referred both to the image and to the entity which was represented by the image.15 This bygone dichotomy is integrated into contemporary languages in such a way that all the original three meanings (territory, image, and representation) co-exist, though their significance may vary from one language to the other. The history of urban landscape depends on the language(s) which we take into consideration for its analysis. From the viewpoint of our current investigation, we
G. SONKOLY
do not analyze the national histories of urban landscape, but the period in which different national conventions are being conflated due to the intensification of the internationalization of urban planning and, later, because of UNESCO regulations of universal scope worded in English and French. The birth of HUL prompts scholars to understand this new notion in the context of the conceptual evolution of urban landscape. Hardly a year after the Vienna Conference, two scientific conferences were organized in March 2006 as an attempt at a comparative analysis of the emergence of HUL. The first conference was organized at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris in order to give an interdisciplinary definition of urban landscape reflecting on its “current importance.”16 The other bilingual conference took place in Montreal with the aim of bringing together scholars and specialists in heritage protection to interpret the newly defined notion of HUL.17 These two conferences reveal many similarities and complementary considerations, which provide an excellent starting point for the attempt to understand the complexity of the HUL.
Having analyzed the relevant scientific literature, Jannière and Pousin differentiate between two possible approaches to the interpretation of the urban landscape (paysage urbain): the first defines urban landscape within the general notion of landscape, whereas the second starts from urban materiality (matérialité urbaine).18 The first group includes approaches which use the notion of urban landscape to (1) determine urban territories by a gaze; (2) integrate different (architectural, geological, botanical, etc.) perceptions of cities following the practice of landscape architecture; and (3) understand the city aesthetically as a perceived (not just seen, but detected by other senses) entity, which is determined by the language. The second group incorporates approaches which regard the city as (1) an object of infrastructural development; (2) an expanding megapolis, which requires appropriate urban planning; and (3) a site of constant transformations, which need to be archived by means of photography. All these approaches share an inner tension because their definition of urban landscape encompasses reality and its perception, that is, both the referent and the representation.19
Different disciplines arrive at the definition of the townscape, the predecessor of urban landscape, loaded with this inner tension, more or less simultaneously. Though this notion served as early as the late nineteenth century to describe historical cities and quarters, it became widespread in England after the Second World War, when it was used in the
newly founded The Architectural Review to refer to developments in the eighteenth-century rural domains as an alternative to the modernist architectural movements for urban reconstruction.20 In the 1960s, the notion of urban landscape emerged in French urban planning and geography with a similar meaning, but with far more politicized connotations.21 In the two historically most urbanized regions of Europe, in Italy and Belgium, urban conservation initiatives already applied this term to the protection of historical cities in the 1880s and in the 1900s, respectively. The consequently aestheticized cities and urban landscapes, which become frequent in interwar history of art, are depicted as the “face of the patria,”22 as a significant representative element of national or regional identities.
The replacement of townscape by landscape, anticipating the emergence of HUL, is less evident in French since both terms are translated by paysage urbain. In English, however, it is easily detectable in the 1990s, and it suggests the gradual integration of approaches characterized by the notion of townscape into urban planning and (cultural) geography, which would lead to the new notion of urban heritage protection in the 2000s. Landscape urbanism, for example, first meant only the planning and management of green urban territories in the 1990s. Then, it progressively acquired environmental and ecological implications until it reached a point where it covered the whole of urban planning, regarded as a means of social mediation used to change the perception of the functioning of the city.23 Thus, the evolution of the notion of urban landscape is becoming crucial from “the perspectives of ecology, social co-existence (both social and symbolic) and those of the access to resources.”24 Similarly, the notion of “megaform” emerging from Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism based on his “landscape form,” in which the notion of landscape is required to perform at least three tasks: (1) to make cities greener; (2) to integrate different approaches, social and cultural perceptions, and so on; (3) to facilitate more comprehension and participation than the previous architectural paradigms.25
Some participants at the Montreal conference implicitly doubted whether the new notion of HUL defined in The Vienna Memorandum truly reflects the contemporary modifications of the notion of urban landscape. Comparably to the arguments of the Parisian conference, Gérard Beaudet emphasized that HUL should be determined by the gaze and not by the urban materiality, as the ICOMOS definition presumed. In consequence, HUL and the notion of cultural landscape would become incompatible, and this might lead to conceptual confusions.26 HUL’s definition
G. SONKOLY
by the gaze could seemingly conclude with the subsequent definition of the notion of visual integrity (VI).27 According to Gordon Bennett28 and Julia Gersovitz,29 the main challenge stemming from HUL, however, is not its operational implementation for heritage protection but its inbuilt outdated “modernist” view of urban planning. This idea is developed further by Julian Smith through an analytical framework based on a dichotomy between twentieth-century modern (object-observation-visuality-based) and twenty-first-century postmodern (rituals-experience-empathy-based) architectural paradigms.30 Smith concludes that The Vienna Memorandum implied a transfer between the two and, consequently, is characterized by both. The intention of keeping HUL within a modernist register can be detected from the fact that its definition focusses on the development of VI instead of concentrating on the establishment of the participative and cultural role of the heritage architect. Smith explains this by the defensive reactions of modernist architects. The identification of professional interests in the definition of HUL is an important result of his analytical framework. Smith’s approach, linking the definition of HUL to a paradigm shift in architecture, helps to comprehend its genesis and conceptual evolution within the history of heritage architecture and urban planning, the most significant disciplines in the management of urban heritage.
t he a na L yt Ica L f ramework of the c onceptua L h Istory of h Istor Ic u rban L andscape
Bandarin and van Oers define the HUL approach as “a new approach to urban conservation,”31 which belongs to “the urban development process.”32 In the process of urban development and in the related urban planning, urban conservation appears as a “modern utopia” threatened by “the rise of gentrification, tourism uses and real-estate pressures.”33 Accordingly, the concept of HUL is to be understood as part of the history of urban planning, formulated to solve its current problems in a form of a “modern utopia.” It is not surprising that the two architects define their concept as a utopia.
Already in the long prehistory of institutionalized urban planning, ever since Antiquity, the representation of an ideal society normally took the form of an ideal settlement—usually a city. The utopian thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inherited this tradition and infused it into the progressive institutionalization of urban planning,34 which brought together the practical needs of the central authorities and mod-
ernist utopian ideologies aiming at a brighter future. As urban planning became more institutionalized, the forms and images of the ideal urban settlement which represented the ideal society became more systematic, and the number of trained experts, who were expected to apply these forms and images during mass urbanization and successive industrialtechnical revolutions, grew exponentially. Similarly to the applied ideologies, the professionalization of urban planning did not, however, lead to the establishment of ideal societies in the planned cities and urban quarters. As a result, the schemes of previous generations were regularly frustrated, and the distance between the horizon of expectations and the historical experience grew continually. Consequently, urban planning had to undergo its own paradigm shifts, to the point where, from the 1970s onward, the link between the targeted society and the appropriate urban space was determined less and less by the original modernist ideologies and increasingly by the intention to grasp local identities and to comply with participative principles.35 As Fredric Jameson summarizes, “the fact is that traditional, or perhaps we might better say modernist, urbanism is at a dead end.”36 The phrase “modern utopia” is meant to express the idea that HUL is a new phase in the evolution of urban planning (“utopia”) because its recent paradigm shift corresponds to the current principles of urban conservation (“modern”).
Nevertheless, “modern” as a qualifier reveals a telling contradiction within HUL. On the one hand, it refers to the kind of urban conservation which befits the abovementioned new paradigm within urban planning; that is, it means “postmodern” or, rather, “contemporary.” On the other hand, this “modern” places urban conservation into the history of previously progressive urban planning in order to free it from the frequent criticism of hindering urban development by over-regulation in the name of heritage conservation. This latter is explained by Bandarin and van Oers as the replacement of static monument conservation by dynamic preservation, which is essential to the HUL approach.37 Here again, this “modern” designates a significant shift from monument-based conservation, which is very much embedded in the temporality of modernization based on a distancing rupture in the past. Moreover, although this “modern utopia” refers to a shift in urban planning as well as in urban conservation, the authors emphasize that their approach “is not designed to replace existing doctrines or conservation approaches, but rather is envisaged as a tool to integrate policies and practices of conservation of the built environment.”38 The inner contradictions related to the temporality
G. SONKOLY
of the definition of HUL are to be solved by attributing the same significance to the past (“urban conservation”) and to the future (“urban development”),39 which endows the present with the prerogative of being the constant arbitrator between the two. Hence, HUL as a “modern utopia” implicitly conveys a presentist approach. This recognition helps to comprehend its inner contradictions—being explicitly modern, implicitly presentist—and, consequently, to interpret the dilemma of contemporary urban heritage preservation oscillating between heritage conservation and urban development by the model of the Regimes of Historicity.
The inner contradictions of the “modern utopia of HUL” stem from the position of utopia in contemporary, or we might say presentist, urban planning and architecture. Utopia has always been an integral part of urban planning theories because of its ability to project the experienced reality into an ideal and imagined future through the propagation of the image of the latter. Current tendencies in urban planning, however, often blur the traditional distinction between reality and its fictitious representation. The most frequently cited examples are Edward Soja’s scamscapes, in which “image and reality become spectacularly confused, the difference between true and false, fact and fiction not only disappears, but becomes totally and preternaturally irrelevant”40 or the Disneyfication of cities, which is no longer “an American singleton”41 but rather a globalized phenomenon. In this context, rehabilitated historical urban centers are due to turn into elegant and/or touristic shopping areas, in other words, into spaces of consumption. As Rem Kolhaas notes, “to be saved, downtowns have had to be given the suburbian kiss of death.”42 The fading borderline between experienced reality and imagined ideals in contemporary urban environment does not only manifest itself in the unstoppable spreading of consumer spaces but also change the scale of reference of the ideals. Traditional utopias are based on a community or, later, on a society and, accordingly, project these entities onto an idealized future. Nevertheless, a presentist utopia must take into account responsibilities on individual and universal levels. The former is expressed in Soja’s thirdspace epistemologies, in which he judges that “the provocative shift back from epistemology to ontology and specifically to the ontological trialectic of Spatiality–Historicality-Sociality is the starting-point for a strategic re-opening and re-thinking of new possibilities.”43 In other words, urban space appears through its practitioners’ practice, which is like a “lived space …, where all histories and geographies, all times and spaces are immanently present and repeated.”44 On the other hand, the reference to the universal level is
necessary since environmental concerns channel every urban development project to the global scope of urbanization, which requires appropriate actions and precautions to avoid the threats of climate change, and the concomitant recognition of social, economic, and natural factors under the auspices of sustainability. The traditional zoning of urban planning is becoming less relevant, thanks to the recognition of the influence of personal use of urban territory as well as through the redefinition of urban space as a unity of built and natural components. The privileged status of the historical center, however, is the “nodality never disappears.”45 The current tendencies of urban planning can be quite easily identified by the conceptual novelties of cultural heritage protection: the appreciation of personal use of urban space may be associated with the prerogative of knowledge transmission embodied in the notion of intangible cultural heritage; the integration of the built and natural urban environment in a unified urban territory from the point of view of urban development relates to the notion of cultural landscape—uniting cultural and natural entities—as well as to the definition of cultural heritage as an intrinsic element of sustainability. Thus, the unifying directive of HUL in the field of urban cultural heritage conservation can be recognized in the complexities of contemporary urban planning. In this sense, the definition of HUL as a presentist utopia can not only reveal its place in current cultural heritage preservation but also shed light on the role of urban heritage in contemporary urban development.
As we will discuss in detail in Chap. 4, the model of the Regimes of Historicity allows a positive—presentist—definition to cultural heritage and, consequently, enables us to interpret its inner contradictions (“fuzziness”) in an evolution of historical mentalities expressed in the changing perception of time. In this sense, the evolution of cultural heritage protection is simultaneously characterized by a shift from the modernist monumental period to the dynamic presentist approaches as well as by the continuity of the fear of a future loss, which must be prevented in the present. The former—the changing perception of time—can be used as an essential criterion for the conceptual history of HUL. The latter—the commitment to secure continuity—serves to overcome the dichotomy between modernism and presentism by applying a proper theory of modernization, based on a new characteristic of modernization which so far can be interpreted and observed as a relentless professionalization.
The principle of security in Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower seems to fulfill this requirement. Foucault started his series of lectures entitled
G. SONKOLY
“Security, territory, population”46 at the Collège de France in the late 1970s with the explication of the significance of these three concepts in his theory of biopower.47 Foucault puts emphasis on the new “mechanism of power” through which the increasingly centralized authorities take control over the society, which is reinterpreted and reframed by the authorities themselves in the early modern and modern periods. This extremely complex evolution is described by three processes—corresponding to the three concepts in the title, which begin successively and continue simultaneously. It is important to note that these processes do not replace each other; rather, the earlier ones contribute to the complexities of the later ones, that is, to the professionalization of security.
To summarize in simple terms, the first and earliest process is the territorial projection of the sovereignty of the authorities, that is, the construction of the legally unified territory of the modern state. This is followed by the introduction of discipline into more and more domains of social existence. The third process is the gradual imposition of security as a guiding principle and as an ultimate goal. Sovereignty functions in the territory, discipline functions in the body, and security functions in the population. The three processes determine a certain historicity, which is revealed in the successive techniques of the management of space: for the sovereign, the selection, and the development of the exemplary capital is the most important, whereas discipline constructs new, mainly segregated territories and hierarchizes the territory of the state; finally, security lays its territorial systems onto already existing ones (channels, transportation, administrative hierarchies, etc.),48 by rendering serial indicators to these elements to be able to measure them and to decide on their eventual modifications. The management of security is based on the definition and the modeling of serial indicators, and their confluence can be measured in a special territorial unit. This unit is called the milieu, a term which is supposed to express an organic relationship between natural and human elements, which are investigated by the bureaucrats of the central authorities in order to produce better plans for the future and by researchers to produce better “data”49 for scientific analysis.
Thus, the ongoing professionalization of activities related to security provides a significant element of continuity between modernity and “beyond,” as well as between administrative and scientific domains. The idea of security and the history of its ever-growing complexity connect the considerations of the early modern and modern central authorities described by Foucault to the current obsession with preservation to avoid
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
The
Project Gutenberg eBook of John Jasper: The unmatched Negro philosopher and preacher
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: John Jasper: The unmatched Negro philosopher and preacher
Author: William E. Hatcher
Release date: June 6, 2022 [eBook #68205]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908
Credits: Charlene Taylor, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN JASPER: THE UNMATCHED NEGRO PHILOSOPHER AND PREACHER ***
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
JOHN JASPER
JOHN JASPER
The Unmatched Negro Philosopher and Preacher
By WILLIAM E. HATCHER, LL. D.
N Y C T
Fleming H. Revell Company
L E
Copyright, 1908, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
S :—T S C
XII. F C S
XIII. T S D M
XIV.
XV. J ’ P H
INTRODUCTION
Reader; stay a moment. A word with you before you begin to sample this book. We will tell you some things in advance, which may help you to decide whether it is worth while to read any further. These pages deal with a negro, and are not designed either to help or to hurt the negro race. They have only to do with one man. He was one of a class,—without pedigree, and really without successors, except that he was so dominant and infectious that numbers of people affected his ways and dreamed that they were one of his sort. As a fact, they were simply of another and of a baser sort.
The man in question was a negro, and if you cannot appreciate greatness in a black skin you would do well to turn your thoughts into some other channel. Moreover, he was a negro covered over with ante bellum habits and ways of doing. He lived forty years before the war and for about forty years after it. He grew wonderfully as a freeman; but he never grew away from the tastes, dialects, and manners of the bondage times. He was a man left over from the old régime and never got infected with the new order. The air of the educated negro preacher didn’t set well upon him. The raw scholarship of the new “ish,” as he called it, was sounding brass to him. As a fact, the new generation of negro preachers sent out by the schools drew back from this man. They branded him as an anachronism, and felt that his presence in the pulpit was a shock to religion and an offense to the ministry; and yet not one of them ever attained the celebrity or achieved the results which came to this unlettered and grievously ungrammatical son of Africa.
But do not be afraid that you are to be fooled into the fanatical camp. This story comes from the pen of a Virginian who claims no exemption from Southern prejudices and feels no call to sound the praises of the negro race. Indeed, he never intended to write what is contained within the covers of this book. It grew up spontaneously
and most of the contents were written before the book was thought of.
It is, perhaps, too much to expect that the meddlers with books will take the ipse dixit of an unaccredited stranger. They ought not to do it: they are not asked to do it. They can go on about their business, if they prefer; but if they do, they will miss the story of the incomparable negro of the South. This is said with sobriety and after a half century spent in close observation of the negro race.
More than that, the writer of this never had any intention of bothering with this man when he first loomed up into notoriety. He got drawn in unexpectedly. He heard that there was a marvel of a man “over in Africa,” a not too savoury portion of Richmond, Virginia,—and one Sunday afternoon in company with a Scot-Irishman, who was a scholar and a critic, with a strong leaning towards ridicule, he went to hear him preach. Shades of our Anglo-Saxon fathers! Did mortal lips ever gush with such torrents of horrible English! Hardly a word came out clothed and in its right mind. And gestures! He circled around the pulpit with his ankle in his hand; and laughed and sang and shouted and acted about a dozen characters within the space of three minutes. Meanwhile, in spite of these things, he was pouring out a gospel sermon, red hot, full of love, full of invective, full of tenderness, full of bitterness, full of tears, full of every passion that ever flamed in the human breast. He was a theatre within himself, with the stage crowded with actors. He was a battle-field;—himself the general, the staff, the officers, the common soldiery, the thundering artillery and the rattling musketry. He was the preacher; likewise the church and the choir and the deacons and the congregation. The Scot-Irishman surrendered in fifteen minutes after the affair commenced, but the other man was hard-hearted and stubborn and refused to commit himself. He preferred to wait until he got out of doors and let the wind blow on him and see what was left. He determined to go again; and he went and kept going, off and on, for twenty years. That was before the negro became a national figure. It was before he startled his race with his philosophy as to the rotation of the sun. It was before he became a lecturer and a sensation, sought after from all parts of the country. Then it was that
he captured the Scot-Irish and the other man also. What is written here constitutes the gatherings of nearly a quarter of a century, and, frankly speaking, is a tribute to the brother in black,—the one unmatched, unapproachable, and wonderful brother.
But possibly the reader is of the practical sort. He would like to get the worldly view of this African genius and to find out of what stuff he was made. Very well; he will be gratified! Newspapers are heartlessly practical. They are grudging of editorial commendation, and in Richmond, at the period, they were sparing of references of any kind to negroes. You could hardly expect them to say anything commendatory of a negro, if he was a negro, with odd and impossible notions. Now this man was of that very sort. He got it into his big skull that the earth was flat, and that the sun rotated;—a scientific absurdity! But you see he proved it by the Bible. He ransacked the whole book and got up ever so many passages. He took them just as he found them. It never occurred to him that the Bible was not dealing with natural science, and that it was written in an age and country when astronomy was unknown and therefore written in the language of the time. Intelligent people understand this very well, but this miracle of his race was behind his era. He took the Bible literally, and, with it in hand, he fought his battles about the sun. Literally, but not scientifically, he proved his position, and he gave some of his devout antagonists a world of botheration by the tenacity with which he held to his views and the power with which he stated his case. Scientifically, he was one of the ancients, but that did not interfere with his piety and did not at all eclipse his views. His perfect honesty was most apparent in all of his contentions; and, while some laughed at what they called his vagaries, those who knew him best respected him none the less, but rather the more, for his astronomical combat. There was something in his love of the Bible, his faith in every letter of it, and his courage, that drew to him the good will and lofty respect of uncounted thousands and, probably, it might be said, of uncounted millions.
Now when this man died it was as the fall of a tower. It was a crash, heard and felt farther than was the collapse of the famous tower at Venice. If the dubious, undecided reader has not broken down on the
road but has come this far, he is invited to look at the subjoined editorial from The Richmond Dispatch, the leading morning paper of Richmond, Va., which published at the time an article on this lofty figure, now national in its proportions and imperishable in its fame, when it bowed to the solemn edict of death.
(From The Richmond Dispatch)
“It is a sad coincidence that the destruction of the Jefferson Hotel and the death of the Rev. John Jasper should have fallen upon the same day. John Jasper was a Richmond Institution, as surely so as was Major Ginter’s fine hotel. He was a national character, and he and his philosophy were known from one end of the land to the other. Some people have the impression that John Jasper was famous simply because he flew in the face of the scientists and declared that the sun moved. In one sense, that is true, but it is also true that his fame was due, in great measure, to a strong personality, to a deep, earnest conviction, as well as to a devout Christian character. Some preachers might have made this assertion about the sun’s motion without having attracted any special attention. The people would have laughed over it, and the incident would have passed by as a summer breeze. But John Jasper made an impression upon his generation, because he was sincerely and deeply in earnest in all that he said. No man could talk with him in private, or listen to him from the pulpit, without being thoroughly convinced of that fact. His implicit trust in the Bible and everything in it, was beautiful and impressive. He had no other lamp by which his feet were guided. He had no other science, no other philosophy. He took the Bible in its literal significance; he accepted it as the inspired word of God; he trusted it with all his heart and soul and mind; he believed nothing that was in conflict with the teachings of the Bible—scientists and philosophers and theologians to the contrary notwithstanding.
“‘They tried to make it appear,’ said he, in the last talk we had with him on the subject, ‘that John Jasper was a fool and a liar when he said that the sun moved. I paid no attention to it at first,
because I did not believe that the so-called scientists were in earnest. I did not think that there was any man in the world fool enough to believe that the sun did not move, for everybody had seen it move. But when I found that these so-called scientists were in earnest I took down my old Bible and proved that they, and not John Jasper, were the fools and the liars.’ And there was no more doubt in his mind on that subject than there was of his existence. John Jasper had the faith that removed mountains. He knew the literal Bible as well as Bible scholars did. He did not understand it from the scientific point of view, but he knew its teachings and understood its spirit, and he believed in it. He accepted it as the true word of God, and he preached it with unction and with power.
“John Jasper became famous by accident, but he was a most interesting man apart from his solar theory. He was a man of deep convictions, a man with a purpose in life, a man who earnestly desired to save souls for heaven. He followed his divine calling with faithfulness, with a determination, as far as he could, to make the ways of his God known unto men, His saving health among all nations. And the Lord poured upon His servant, Jasper, ‘the continual dew of His blessing.’”
I
JASPER PRESENTED
John Jasper, the negro preacher of Richmond, Virginia, stands preëminent among the preachers of the negro race in the South. He was for fifty years a slave, and a preacher during twenty-five years of his slavery, and distinctly of the old plantation type. Freedom came full-handed to him, but it did not in any notable degree change him in his style, language, or manner of preaching. He was the ante bellum preacher until eighty-nine years of age, when he preached his last sermon on “Regeneration,” and with quiet dignity laid off his mortal coil and entered the world invisible. He was the last of his type, and we shall not look upon his like again. It has been my cherished purpose for some time to embalm the memory of this extraordinary genius in some form that would preserve it from oblivion. I would give to the American people a picture of the God-made preacher who was great in his bondage and became immortal in his freedom.
This is not to be done in biographic form, but rather in vagrant articles which find their kinship only in the fact that they present some distinct view of a man, hampered by early limitations, denied the graces of culture, and cut off even from the advantages of a common education, but who was munificently endowed by nature, filled with vigour and self-reliance, and who achieved greatness in spite of almost limitless adversities. I account him genuinely great among the sons of men, but I am quite sure that the public can never apprehend the force and gist of his rare manhood without first being made acquainted with certain facts appertaining to his early life.
Jasper was born a slave. He grew up on a plantation and was a toiler in the fields up to his manhood. When he came to Richmond, now grown to a man, he was untutored, full of dangerous energies, almost gigantic in his muscle, set on pleasure, and without the fear of God before his eyes. From his own account of himself, he was
fond of display, a gay coxcomb among the women of his race, a funmaker by nature, with a self-assertion that made him a leader within the circles of his freedom.
We meet him first as one of the “hands” in the tobacco factory of Mr. Samuel Hargrove, an enterprising and prosperous manufacturer in the city of Richmond. Jasper occupied the obscure position of “a stemmer,”—which means that his part was to take the well-cured tobacco leaf and eliminate the stem, with a view to preparing what was left to be worked into “the plug” which is the glory of the tobacco-chewer. This position had one advantage for this quickwitted and alert young slave. It threw him into contact with a multitude of his own race, and as nature had made him a lover of his kind his social qualities found ample scope for exercise. In his early days he went at a perilous pace and found in the path of the sinful many fountains of common joy. Indeed, he made evil things fearfully fascinating by the zestful and remorseless way in which he indulged them.
It was always a joy renewed for him to tell the story of his conversion. As described by him, his initial religious experiences, while awfully mystical and solemn to him, were grotesque and ludicrous enough. They partook of the extravagances of the times, yet were so honest in their nature, and so soundly Scriptural in their doctrines, and so reverential in their tone, that not even the most captious sceptic could hear him tell of them, in his moments of exalted inspiration, without feeling profoundly moved by them.
It ought to be borne in mind that this odd and forcible man was a preacher in Richmond for a half century, and that during all that time, whether in slavery or in freedom, he lived up to his religion, maintaining his integrity, defying the unscrupulous efforts of jealous foes to destroy him, and walking the high path of spotless and incorruptible honour Not that he was always popular among his race. He was too decided, too aggressive, too intolerant towards meanness, and too unpitying in his castigation of vice, to be popular. His life, in the nature of the case, had to be a warfare, and it may be truly said that he slept with his sword buckled on.
Emancipation did not turn his head. He was the same high-minded, isolated, thoughtful Jasper. His way of preaching became an offense to the “edicated” preachers of the new order, and with their new sense of power these double-breasted, Prince-Albert-coated, high hat and kid-gloved clergymen needed telescopes to look as far down as Jasper was, to get a sight of him. They verily thought that it would be a simple process to transfix him with their sneers, and flaunt their new grandeurs before him, in order to annihilate him. Many of these new-fledged preachers, who came from the schools to be pastors in Richmond, resented Jasper’s prominence and fame. They felt that he was a reproach to the race, and they did not fail to fling at him their flippant sneers.
But Jasper’s mountain stood strong. He looked this new tribe of his adversaries over and marked them as a calcimined and fictitious type of culture. To him they were shop-made and unworthy of respect. They called forth the storm of his indignant wrath. He opened his batteries upon them, and, for quite a while, the thunder of his guns fairly shook the steeples on the other negro churches of Richmond. And yet it will never do to think of him as the incarnation of a vindictive and malevolent spirit. He dealt terrific blows, and it is hardly too much to say that many of his adversaries found it necessary to get out of the range of his guns. But, after all, there was a predominant good nature about him. His humour was inexhaustible, and irresistible as well. If by his fiery denunciations he made his people ready to “fight Philip,” he was quite apt before he finished to let fly some of his odd comparisons, his laughable stories, or his humorous mimicries. He could laugh off his own grievances, and could make his own people “take the same medicine.”
Jasper was something of a hermit, given to seclusion, imperturbably calm in his manner, quite ascetic in his tastes, and a cormorant in his devouring study of the Bible. Naturally, Jasper was as proud as Lucifer,—too proud to be egotistic and too candid and self-assertive to affect a humility which he did not feel. He walked heights where company was scarce, and seemed to love his solitude. Jasper was as brave as a lion and possibly not a little proud of his bravery. He fought in the open and set no traps for his adversaries. He believed
in himself,—felt the dignity of his position, and never let himself down to what was little or unseemly.
The most remarkable fact in Jasper’s history is connected with his extraordinary performances in connection with his tersely expressed theory,—THE SUN DO MOVE! We would think in advance that any man who would come forward to champion that view would be hooted out of court. It was not so with Jasper. His bearing through all that excitement was so dignified, so sincere, so consistent and heroic, that he actually did win the rank of a true philosopher. This result, so surprising, is possibly the most handsome tribute to his inherent excellence and nobility of character One could not fail to see that his fight on a technical question was so manifestly devout, so filled with zeal for the honour of religion, and so courageous in the presence of overwhelming odds, that those who did not agree with him learned to love and honour him.
The sensation which he awakened fairly flew around the country. It is said that he preached the sermon 250 times, and it would be hard to estimate how many thousands of people heard him. The papers, religious and secular, had much to say about him. Many of them published his sermons, some of them at first plying him with derision, but about all of them rounding up with the admission of a good deal of faith in Jasper. So vast was his popularity that a mercenary syndicate once undertook to traffic on his popularity by sending him forth as a public lecturer. The movement proved weak on its feet, and after a little travel he hobbled back richer in experience than in purse.
As seen in the pulpit or in the street Jasper was an odd picture to look upon. His figure was uncouth; he was rather loosely put together; his limbs were fearfully long and his body strikingly short,— a sort of nexus to hold his head and limbs in place. He was black, but his face saved him. It was open, luminous, thoughtful, and in moments of animation it glowed with a radiance and exultation that was most attractive.
Jasper’s career as a preacher after the war was a poem. The story is found later on and marks him as a man of rare originality, and of patience born of a better world. He left a church almost entirely the creation of his own productive life, that holds a high rank in Richmond and that time will find it hard to estrange from his spirit and influence. For quite a while he was hardly on coöperative terms with the neighbouring churches, and it is possible that he ought to share somewhat in the responsibility for the estrangement which so long existed;—though it might be safely said that if they had left Jasper alone he would not have bothered them. Let it be said that the animosities of those days gradually gave away to the gracious and softening influence of time, and, when his end came, all the churches and ministers of the city most cordially and lovingly united in honouring his memory.
It may betoken the regard in which Jasper was held by the white people if I should be frank enough to say that I was the pastor of the Grace Street Baptist Church, one of the largest ecclesiastical bodies in the city at the time of Jasper’s death, and the simple announcement in the morning papers that I would deliver an address in honour of this negro preacher who had been carried to his grave during the previous week brought together a representative and deeply sympathetic audience which overflowed the largest church auditorium in the city. With the utmost affection and warmth I put forth my lofty appreciation of this wonderful prince of his tribe, and so far as known there was never an adverse criticism offered as to the propriety or justice of the tribute which was paid him.
It is of this unusual man, this prodigy of his race, and this eminent type of the Christian negro, that the somewhat random articles of this volume are to treat. His life jumped the common grooves and ran on heights not often trod. His life went by bounds and gave surprises with each succeeding leap.
II
JASPER HAS A THRILLING CONVERSION
Let us bear in mind that at the time of his conversion John Jasper was a slave, illiterate and working in a tobacco factory in Richmond. It need hardly be said that he shared the superstitions and indulged in the extravagances of his race, and these in many cases have been so blatant and unreasonable that they have caused some to doubt the negro’s capacity for true religion. But from the beginning Jasper’s religious experiences showed forth the Lord Jesus as their source and centre. His thoughts went to the Cross. His hope was founded on the sacrificial blood, and his noisy and rhapsodic demonstrations sounded a distinct note in honour of his Redeemer.
Jasper’s conviction as to his call to the ministry was clear-cut and intense. He believed that his call came straight from God. His boast and glory was that he was a God-made preacher. In his fierce warfares with the educated preachers of his race—“the new issue,” as he contemptuously called them—he rested his claim on the ground that God had put him into the ministry; and so reverential, so full of noble assertion and so irresistibly eloquent was he in setting forth his ministerial authority that even his most sceptical critics were constrained to admit that, like John the Baptist, he was “a man sent from God.”
And yet Jasper knew the human side of his call. It was a part of his greatness that he could see truth in its relations and completeness, and while often he presented one side of a truth, as if it were all of it, he also saw the other side. With him a paradox was not a contradiction. He gratefully recognized the human influences which helped him to enter the ministry. While preaching one Sunday afternoon Jasper suddenly stopped, his face lighted as with a vision, a rich laugh rippled from his lips while his eyes flashed with soulful fire. He then said, in a manner never to be reported: “Mars Sam
