militant tropicality: war, revolution and the reconfiguration of ‘the tropics’c.1940–c.1975

Militant tropicality: war, revolution and thereconfiguration of ‘the tropics’ c.1940–c.1975

Daniel Clayton

The critical literature on ‘tropicality’ – the colonising discourse that constructs the tropical world as the West’senvironmental Other – focuses chiefly on its historical links with colonialism and on the agency of Western col-onisers. Scant attention has been paid to the trajectory of this discourse between the 1940s and 1970s, or to howit has been resisted by the ‘tropicalised’. This paper teases out how, in this post-war era of decolonisation andCold War, there arose in Western experience a potent image of the tropics as militant – as combative, belligerentand revolutionary. The term militant tropicality is deployed to recall this image and identify a suite of counter-hegemonic knowledges, practices and experiences emanating from the tropical world that challenged the waythe West judged the tropics against the presumed normality of the temperate north. The paper dwells on twosites in the promulgation of this militant tropicality – the Caribbean during the 1940s and 1950s, and Vietnamduring the 1960s – and probes some of its salient imaginative and material geographies using a range of sources(literature, art, journalism, revolutionary thought, and government and military records). The paper underscoresthe (little studied) martial quality of tropicality and how, by the 1960s, militant tropicality had become closelyassociated with guerrilla wars in jungle settings that fractured the West’s ‘temperate’ model of war.

Key words tropicality; resistance; imperialism; guerrilla warfare; Caribbean; Vietnam War

School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9ALEmail: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 22 September 2011

Introduction

The term tropicality has been deployed within andbeyond geography to denote a discourse (or suite ofrepresentations, practices and experiences) that con-structs the tropical world as the West’s environmentalother and has been deeply implicated in colonialismand Western dominance (for geography, see Hecht2009; Power 2009). David Arnold formatively arguedthat ‘the tropics’ need to be seen ‘as a conceptual, andnot merely physical, space’ – as ‘invented quite as muchas they were encountered’ – and that tropicality denotesthe attitudes and experiences ‘of northern whites mov-ing into an alien world – alien in climate, vegetationand disease’ (1996, 142–3; 2005, 5–6). The tropicalworld has been exoticised in dualistic terms, as paradisi-cal, luxuriant and redemptive, but also as primeval, pes-tilential and debilitating to Westerners. Yet on bothcounts, Arnold explains, tropical lands have beenviewed and judged against ‘the perceived normality ofthe temperate lands’ (1996, 143). Tropicality imbuesdiverse practices and disciplines – art, exploration,adventure fiction, colonial planning, plantation andpenal systems; anthropology, architecture, botany, geo-graphy and medicine (see Driver and Martins 2005) –and the literature on it dwells on how it has served as anadjunct to Western colonialism through to the 1940s.1

Scant attention has been paid either to tropicality in the

post-war era, or to how this discourse has been received(adapted, resisted, recast) by the ‘tropicalised’ (afterAparicio and Chavez-Silverman 1997, 10).2

Research into this neglected period and problem-atic revealed that while a domineering Western tropi-cality persisted after World War II, what also arose inWestern experience was a potent image of the tropicsas militant – as combative, belligerent and seditious;and as seductive to the post-war Left, offering an exo-tic contrast to the greyness of East European andSoviet communism. This image began to coalesce dur-ing the 1950s and I will use the term militant tropical-ity to recall it. I will start by explaining how this termcomes into view as an object of study, and then(albeit with selective strokes3) explore two pivotalsites in its promulgation: the Caribbean in the 1940sand 1950s, from whence came attempts to expose thecomplicity of Western representations of the tropicsin colonialism; and second, 1950s and 1960s junglewarfare (with a prime focus on the Vietnam War) andhow it undermined what the West (and especially theUnited States of America – hereinafter US) took tobe the ‘normal’ way of waging war.

Militant tropicality

The idea of militant tropicality coheres in three ways.First, it does not pertain to a single problem, approach

Citation: 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00510.xISSN 0020-2754 � 2012 The Author.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers � 2012 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

or source. Like tropicality, it needs to be construed asboth a conceptual space (a relational space of resis-tance to dominant imagery and processes of othering)and a physical space (a geographic zone and realm ofexperience). I will muster this idea with themes andexamples from art, literature, journalism, anti-colonialthought, revolutionary theory, and political (govern-ment) and military records. A style of critical inquiryis also at stake: one nested in the story told – in thework, for example, of the Argentine-born Cuban revo-lutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1995, 152), whoregarded himself as ‘the eclectic dissector of doctrines’(Marxist, nationalist and cultural), and the Martinicanthinker Aime Cesaire, who saw the opening up ofalternative axes and framings of difference, and press-ing of inquiry against dominant categories and under-standings, as key to challenging ossifying anddemeaning tropes of otherness.

Second, militant tropicality can be identified as aspecific phase in, and variant of, tropicality: one thatunderscores its martial qualities, which have notreceived the historical or critical attention they deserve(see Anderson 2006). My title is adapted from EdwardSaid’s fleeting remarks in Orientalism about how earlytwentieth-century Arab revolt turned the Orient ‘fromunchanging ‘‘Oriental’’ passivity into militant modernlife’ (1978, 240). T.E. Lawrence’s (‘Lawrence of Ara-bia’) guerrilla wisdom not only figures in Said’saccount; it also left a deep impression on North Viet-nam’s celebrated military leader, Vo Nguyen Giap.Indeed, guerrilla warfare was one of the defining expe-riences of the post-war era, and as a US Army Majorpointed out in 1961, ‘most of the ‘‘hottest’’ troublespots are located in tropical regions’ (Berger 2008;Jennings 1961, 22). Militant tropicality finds it mostintense – and for Westerners, negative and troubling –expression in guerrilla wars in the tropical environ-ments of British Malaya (1948–1960) and Kenya(1952–1960), Portuguese Guinea (1956–1973) andAngola (1961–1975), the Belgian Congo (1959–1966),Cuba (1956–1958), and the French and American warsin Indochina ⁄Vietnam (1945–1954, 1959–1975). Guer-rilla warfare was not confined to the tropics, of course,nor restricted to the post-war period. Nonetheless, apotent image of militant tropicality is of the guerrillafighter springing from the tropical bush, promisingwhat Guevara (who many see as the epitome of thisimage) envisioned as a tri-continental struggle against(especially US) capitalism and imperialism (Kunzle1997).4 In their well-known manuals of guerrilla war-fare, Guevara (1961) and Giap (1962) emphasised thatthe ability of the small valorous guerrilla band todefeat considerably larger and better equipped regulararmed forces was rooted in its connection with ‘thepeople’, and they accorded great tactical significanceto tropical mountains, jungles and swamps.

Third, the paper spotlights the resistance of thetropicalised – a theme that is muted in the tropicalityliterature, which tends to focus on the agency of tropi-calisers (although see Agrawal 2005) – and tracks itacross multiple sites. Colonising discourses like tropi-cality are not inexorable. They can and have beenchallenged; and while they have some core propensi-ties (such as to construe otherness in binary and essen-tialist terms) they also shift their bearings ascircumstances change. Militant tropicality was not theonly counter-hegemonic framework available to thetropicalised, and I do not regard it simply as a questfor a non-western, indigenous or autonomous configu-ration of ‘the tropics’.5 The idea of development had apowerful sway in the decolonising world, and tropicali-ty (as a facet of this idea) could be adopted quiteuncritically.6 The idea of a militant tropics alsorevolved around post-colonial elites – thinkers andleaders who had a strong belief in their calling toguide ‘the masses’. Nor should revolutionary violencebe romanticised. At the same time, it would be histori-cally naive not to recognise that Guevara’s executionin 1967 in the Bolivian jungle at the hands of the USCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) spurred the roman-ticisation of him as the embodiment of revolution.

Finally, c.1940–c.1975 is in some ways an arbitrarytime frame. There was not a single event or spark ofresistance that ignited militant tropicality, and someof the phenomena discussed outlive the 1970s. How-ever, the former date marks the beginnings of a note-worthy shift of tropicality into more pronouncedmilitary and anti-colonial modes, and the latter datesignifies the end of the Vietnam War, and whatGerard Chaliand saw as the passing of ‘the myth ofthe invincibility of guerrilla warfare’ (1977, 42) and ofthe US as well.7 Christian Parenti (2011) dates to the1970s the formation of a ‘tropic of chaos’ – culturesof violence and war in the tropical world, stemmingfrom decades of colonial and Cold War militarism, inwhich guerrilla tactics and modern weapons that hadonce been used to repel foreign aggressors reboundedhorribly, most horrifically in Cambodia (1972–1978)where the Khmer Rouge waged a jungle war againstits own people. By the 1980s, Daniel Bensaıd (2007)notes, the gory excesses associated with ‘revolutionaryviolence’ (and not just in Cambodia) had made it a‘taboo subject’ in Marxist debates.

The tropics and anti-imperialist struggle:from Tropiques to Che Guevara

In 1955 Cesaire coined the term ‘tropicalite’ tocapture how the French geographer Pierre Gourouhad placed a ‘geographical curse’ on the tropics,representing this ‘world’ in his tropical geography asincapable of generating a civilisation comparable to

2 Daniel Clayton

Citation: 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00510.xISSN 0020-2754 � 2012 The Author.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers � 2012 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

that of temperate Europe (1955, 32–5).8 Yet if Ces-aire thus made tropicality a figure of anti-colonialthought, it was the lesser known surrealist journalTropiques published in Martinique between 1941 and1945, which he co-edited with his wife Suzanne Rous-si and Rene Menil, that we might regard as an inau-gural text of militant tropicality.

Caribbean and Cuban connections andcounterpointsTropiques brought French surrealism and negritude tothe French Antilles and had a complex relationshipwith metropolitan systems of thought – especiallyprimitivism – that configured the tropics as a sceneand source of redemption for the pathologies ofmodernity (Arnold 1981). One of the unifying aims ofthe essays, poems and polemics in this publicationwas to question the way Vichy France had wovenimages of tropical grandeur and excess into its patri-archal imagining of a ‘greater France’ and fascist volk(see Tropiques 1978 I, x–xiii [1941]). Tropical floraand fauna appear in many of Cesaire’s contributions,as both emblems of an imprisoning Western gaze andpointers to an alternative Caribbean identity. PierreMabille (friend of the French surrealist Andre Bre-ton) extended this line of enquiry in an essay entitled‘La Jungle’ (Tropiques 1978 II, 187 [1945]), observingthat ‘tropical paradises suppose the existence of pris-ons’ and seeing

an absolute opposition between the jungle where lifeexplodes everywhere, free and dangerous, the most luxuri-ant vegetation being ready for all kinds of mixtures, trans-mutations and trances, and that other sinister jungle wherea Fuhrer, perched on a pedestal, watches, along the neo-Greek colonnades of Berlin, the departure of mechanisedcohorts that are ready, after having destroyed all otherliving things, to annihilate themselves in the rigorousparallel lines of endless cemeteries.

Richard Tucker (2000) argues that by the twentiethcentury, the US had an ‘insatiable appetite’ for tropi-cal land and resources, and as Mabille intimated, theterm ‘jungle’ had become associated with the brutal –disciplinary and annihilatory – drives of capitalism aswell as fascism.9 Similarly, Roussi (Tropiques 1978 II,267–72 [1945]) deployed the expression ‘le grandcamouflage’ to examine how, on the one hand, Vichyrepresentations disguised ‘the flowers of humandebasement’ (realities of colonial racism and vio-lence), but how, on the other hand, ‘Poets who sawthe tropical flames [of oppression] fanned by hunger,fear, hate and ferocity’ might use this enmity torecover a ‘beautiful Antilles’ (see Rabbitt 2008).

Tropiques was thus filiated with tropicality’s visionof personal and cultural enrichment through artisticexpression, and toyed with exoticism. But Cesaire(Tropiques 1978 I, 3 [1941]) insisted that the journal

was insurrectional – challenging, through the embraceof wonder and symbolic language, colonialism’s alien-ating value system, which had turned the Caribbeaninto a ‘mute and sterile Earth’ where ‘the tam-tam inthe bush’ could no longer be heard. If ‘to tropicalize. . . means to trope, to imbue a particular space, geog-raphy, group, or nation with a set of traits, imagesand values’ (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman 1997, 8),then Tropiques established that this process did notjust emanate from the West. Yet as Michael Dash(1998, 21–35) suggests, we can also locate in Cesaire’s(and later Derek Walcott’s) re-imagining of a colour-ful, lush, sonorous Caribbean tropics a major problemfor anti-colonial thought: the prospect of only beingable to counter colonial discourses like tropicality byusing and potentially reinforcing their imagery andbinaries. Tropiques should be seen as an ambivalentcritical project, and as Cesaire himself declared in1945, a radical poetics of tropical knowledge was noteasily translated into concrete projects of social trans-formation.10

The Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 Cubancounterpoint also promised a less Western-dominatedand essentialist tropicality. His study revolves aroundthe contrapunteo (variously meaning duel, dialogueand controversy) between two leitmotivs of tropicality,the commodities of tobacco and sugar, and how theirhistories capture the contrasting careers of large-scaleforeign plantation capitalism (especially in westernCuba) and local agricultural ingenuity and small-scalepeasant production (in eastern Cuba). ‘From sugar,which is mass’, Ortiz argued, Cuba ‘received its force,and from tobacco, which is distinction, its power ofinspiration’ (1995, 93). Moreover, tobacco, brought byIndians from Central and South America had ‘alwaysbeen more Cuban than sugar’ and provided revolu-tionary stimulus – sown, as it was, ‘with a clenchedfist, like the symbolic Communist gesture’ (Ortiz1995, 61, 289). However, both commodities wereindicative of ‘ajiaco’, a history that was always ‘cook-ing’ – comprised of transient and overlapping black,white and Indian influences – rather than based onfixed traits (Ortiz 1995, 98–103).

The problematic of tropical otherness that Europeanand Caribbean writers and artists saw in the work ofOrtiz and Cesaire was sometimes articulated with theidea of (what became termed) the ‘black Atlantic’(Font and Quiroz 2005). The work of the black Cubanartist Wilfredo Lam is indicative of this intersection(Sims 2002). But others journeyed with the notion of amilitant tropicality in different directions. Ortiz’s vener-ation of campesinos (peasants) became central to Guev-ara’s revolutionary ideology, and the hope spawned byTropiques of finding new – indigenous and emancipatory– representations of tropical difference lived on inmyriad ventures. 1960s Cuban poster art – which was

Militant tropicality 3



closely associated with Tricontinental Magazine (thequarterly publication of the Organization of Solidarityof the People of Asia, Africa & Latin America, OS-PAAAL, founded in Havana in 1966) – was one suchproject. The late 1960s Brazilian Tropicalia musicalmovement, which, as one of its exponents, Nelson Mot-ta, declared, revelled in a ‘living tropicality and thenew, still-unknown universe that it contains . . . [and]abandons foreign influences’ (1968, np), was another(also see Dunn 2001).

Che Guevara’s ‘new scale of values’Cuban poster artists used images of tropical fruit,plantations, slaves and guerrilla fighters – as well asGiangiacomo Feltrinelli’s ubiquitous graphic of ‘Che’derived from Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph ofhim – to highlight American imperial designs.11

Tropical motifs were amenable to stylistic montageand fostered a political art in the service of anti-Americanism. Take Plate 1, Antonio Marino’s ‘Day ofworld solidarity with the Cuban Revolution’, a posterfolded into the May 1970 issue of Tricontinental Maga-zine. It avoids both American and Soviet visual stereo-types of Cuba, and seeks to furnish a revolutionaryiconography by depicting a mountain in cross-section,the peak banded with different shades of green to addsymmetry (‘zing’), which was common practice in thisart genre (see Cushing 2003). The caption is providedin Spanish, English, French and Arabic to facilitatethe magazine’s internationalism, and the revolutionaryallusions the mountain solicits are palpable. For it wasin the densely forested Sierra Maestra Mountains ofeastern Cuba that Fidel Castro and Guevara honedtheir guerrilla plans, and daily hikes in the mountainssurrounding Mexico City had also formed an impor-tant part of their preparations. In a wider frame, wemight infer that Marino’s revolutionary mountain alsosubverts the iconography of a post-Enlightenment tax-onomic tropicality incarnated in Alexander von Hum-boldt’s 1807 cross-section of Mount Chimborazo inEcuador (see Dettlebach 2005).

It was during his 1950s treks across South and Cen-tral America that Guevara (cited in Anderson 1997,126) encountered American ‘capitalist octopuses’ likeThe United Fruit Company, their continent-wideexploitative practices stretching back to the so-called‘banana wars’ of 1898–1934, and saw a strong correla-tion between the attempt by the United Nations to cre-ate a body of international law averting and regulatingwar, and the growth of US ‘covert’ military operationsgeared to overthrowing so-called ‘undesirable regimes’,such as Jacobo Arbenz’s in Guatemala (Deutschmann1997, 311). Guevara declared the ‘progressive’ and‘democratic’ American way in business, war and inter-national relations a sham, and argued that armedstruggle was appropriate when other – political and

diplomatic – means of protest had been exhausted.The guerrilla method advocated by Guevara threa-tened American business, and attempts by Americanadvertisers to further ‘inscribe Latin Americanness astropicality’ – that is, to represent the continent as stilla safe investment for American fruit, coffee, mining,rubber and timber companies – were fraught (Lopez1993, 71; Tucker 2000, 125–31, 184–91).12

‘Cuba’s rich sub-soil, which has been a field ofmonopolist voracity’, Guevara (Deutschmann 1997,296) argued, was a soil shared with his ‘tropical broth-ers’ elsewhere in Central and South America, andfighting such voracity meant fighting not just foreignYankee land owners and their political puppets, butalso the North American imperial wish image of itssouthern neighbour as a tropical garden after the Fall:as abandoned yet ripe for the taking.13 The key taskof revolution, he proclaimed, was to reclaim ‘anapple’ that had been ‘torn away from Spain’ only tobe placed in ‘a long chain of [US] continental aggres-sion’ (Guevara 1996, 81–2). But he insisted that revo-

Plate 1 Antonio Marino ‘Day of world solidarity withthe Cuban Revolution’ (1970)

Source: � OSPAAAL Poster Archive, Cat. No.CUB020. Poster image provided by Lincoln Cushing ⁄

Docs Populi

4 Daniel Clayton


lution would not come just from defiant words,images and slogans. It was also an inherently visceralproject.

At the heart of Guevara’s revolutionary praxis –and his militant tropicality – was the drive to ‘get theenemy out of its natural environment, and force it tofight in regions where its own life and habits will clashwith existing reality’ (Guevara 1985, 208–9). By ‘real-ity’ Guevara meant both a conceptual reality of mili-tary doctrine, and physical reality of combat, andthere are affinities here not only with the writings ofMao Zedong but also with those of the Nazi-leaningGerman philosopher Carl Schmitt who, in his 1963Theory of the partisan, wrote of how the guerrilla‘forces his enemy into another space, a darker dimen-sion, a dimension of depth’ (2004, 49).

For Guevara, this drive sprang from a particulartype of space, the insurrectional foco: the guerrillaband located in the mountains, on the territorial andsymbolic fringes of economic and political oppression(Guevara 1995, 152; Reid-Henry 2009, 170–3).Guevara argued that a small group of dedicated guer-rillas could work as ‘catalyzing agents . . . creating theconditions for revolution’ (rather than vice versa, thusturning Leninist lore on its head), and fostering a‘new man’ (1997, 202) – women were pivotal to guer-rilla insurgency, as fighters and providers of food,sanctuary and care, yet they were generally side-linedfrom guerrilla historiography, including Guevara’s.

The Cuba Revolution succeeded, Guevara (1996,155) argued, because of a primary bond between ‘theguerrillas and the peasantry’ in ‘the rugged territory’of the Sierra Maestra mountains. Yet he was alsointent on turning what Schmitt saw as the intrinsically‘telluric’ (soil-rooted) nature of guerrilla insurgencyinto a tri-continental revolutionary venture that wouldgenerate a ‘new scale of values’ (Deutschmann 1997,198). In a 1965 speech to the Afro-Asian Conferencein Algeria he proclaimed that

The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colo-nial or neo-colonial shackles . . . is not separate from thestruggle against backwardness and poverty

and

If there were no other uniting factor . . . [connecting]underdeveloped peoples and socialist countries then thecommon enemy [the US] should be enough. (Deutsch-mann 1997, 342)

Yet this ‘new scale of values’ was illusory. Guevara’sfoco was not easily brought down from the mountainsand projected elsewhere.14 Regis Debray, who was inBolivia in 1967 as a reporter for the French leftistpublisher François Maspero, pinpointed how ecologi-cal factors as well as blind idealism had acceleratedGuevara’s downfall. Guevara had ‘painted a canvaswhose vast scope was ludicrously out of proportion to

the precariousness of the situation’, and his ‘relianceon characteristics of terrain alone’ was perilous,Debray (1977, 223 1968, 62) surmised. Bolivian peas-ants were concentrated in high rocky plateaus andenclosed valleys, leaving tropical areas near the bor-ders of adjacent friendly countries, where Guevarawas based, deserted.

‘Foco theory’ or ‘foquismo’ – the primacy accordedto rural armed struggle launched from the mountains– attained a central place in the historiography of theCuban Revolution, marginalising important debateswithin the Cuban (and other) rebel movements aboutthe role of the urban underground. Historians (e.g.Sweig 2002) have now documented the extent towhich Guevara and Castro obscured the role of urbanguerrillas. In Guevara’s case, this can be put down, inpart, to his strong misgivings about Leninist models(of the urban proletariat and vanguard party – ratherthan his rural guerrilla and vanguard foco – as keyrevolutionary agents) and embrace of more eclecticrevolutionary teachings, including those of 1920sNicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino, whoserebels fled the cities to escape US air strikes and usedthe mountains and tropical terrain as a strategic ally(Anderson 1997, 242–53; Craven 2002, 9–14).

In a wider context, Amilcar Cabral, recounting hisstruggle against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau,argued that while

everyone knows that in general the guerrilla force uses themountain as the starting point for the armed struggle . . .we had to convert our people themselves into the moun-tain needed for the fight in our [flat tropical] country, andwe had to take full advantage of the jungles and swampsof our country to create difficult conditions for the enemy.(1974, 111–12)

In his Minimanual for the urban guerrilla, the Brazil-ian Carlos Marighella (1971, 26) argued that to ‘leavethe enemy bewildered in areas he doesn’t know’ wasnot an inherently rural quest. Using urban terrain asan ally also meant knowing ‘how to use with intelli-gence its unevenness, its high and low points, itsturns, its irregularities, its regular and its secret pas-sages, abandoned areas, its thickets’. And the Marxistphilosopher Louis Althusser (in Debray 1977, 261–2)criticised Debray (his former student) and Guevarafor fashioning a spurious spatial binary, with ‘thestruggle in the hills’ valorised as the primary space ofrevolution and ‘life in the cities’ deemed the deriva-tive space.15

Finally, Guevara’s militant tropicality did noteschew everything Western. He embraced Westernideals of science and discipline, and the modernistdrive to ‘master nature and technology’, and fre-quently positioned himself as a ‘temperate’ actor,using medical and surgical metaphors (reflecting histraining as a doctor) to describe the tasks of




revolution (e.g. Deutschmann 1997, 349; Saldana-Por-tillo 2003, 91–4). In his diary of his 1965–6 guerrillaadventure in the Congo, for instance, he criticisesCongolese rebel leaders for being ‘indolent’ andlacking ‘revolutionary seriousness’, in contrast to him-self, whom he portrays as bearing the ‘temperate’qualities of dedication and restraint (Guevara 2000,227–32).

The diverse critical undertakings considered in thissection challenged and fragmented the US’s imperialwish image of its tropical neighbour. Yet this militanttropicality was compromised. Struggles over represen-tation were not easily translated into political action,and Guevara struggled to overcome the isolation andlocal interests of different rebel movements. While itwas from Caribbean quarters that an image of themilitant tropics sprang, the dangers that this imageposed were felt most viscerally elsewhere, in Vietnam(and Cambodia and Laos) between the early 1960sand the Tet Offensive of 1968 (when the VietnamWar shifted from a guerrilla to a more conventionalphase).

The jungle environment of the VietnamWar

American geopolitical and military discourse had longbeen imbued with environmental assumptions abouthow climatic extremes of cold and hot mapped on tobinaries of good and evil, progress and backwardness,and the Korean War cemented the associationbetween the problems of fighting in frigid environ-ments with the ‘evil’ of communism (see Farish 2010;McClintock 1992). By the early 1960s, however, theexperience of Americans moving into the alien tropi-cal environment of Vietnam had become inextricablylinked with what Franklin Lindsay (1962) termed‘unconventional warfare’.

‘Unconventional warfare’Americans had experienced jungle warfare in thePhilippines (1898), Panama (1916), and in the Pacificand Southeast Asia against the Japanese duringWorld War II. However, a US Army Field Manualdealing with jungle warfare was not released untilDecember 1941 and was based largely on CentralAmerican experience. As subsequent iterations of thismanual acknowledged, it was the British and Com-monwealth armies that had got to grips with this typeof warfare more decisively, through long and painfullearning ordeals in Burma, Malaya and New Guinea(Moreman 2005, 2–14). When the Geneva Accords of1954 failed to deliver elections of reunificationbetween the Republic of South Vietnam and theDemocratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the US,which vowed to protect the former against communist

North Vietnam, was gradually drawn into an uncon-ventional jungle war.

The crux of the combat challenge can be located ina 1960 Pentagon brief for President John F. Kennedy.On the one hand, the report reads, it was an ‘estab-lished military fact that well trained soldiers, withgood leadership and plans, can successfully fight anykind of enemy on any kind of terrain’ – Americantroops being committed to this ‘anywhere’ strategy,pushing them away from defensive coastal enclavesand into tropical highlands and jungle north and westof Saigon, and into the Mekong Delta to the south,in June 1965; but on the other hand, the ‘more openand fluid type of warfare’ encountered in these tropi-cal realms posed unique problems (United StatesGovernment nd a, doc. 167). Indeed, American ‘lead-ership’ and ‘plans’ proved to be no match for whatthe American observers saw as Giap’s operationalgenius.

Giap had been taught by Gourou (who recalled hisstudent’s close interest in modern European warfare)and led the DRV’s military campaign against theFrench, adapting tactics gleaned, not least, fromNapoleon, Lawrence and Mao (Duiker 2007). Heblended conventional and guerrilla tactics of mobility,speed, surprise, concealment and deception, and ofonly ever committing a guerrilla force to combatwhen victory was assured, to chase French troops ‘allover the place’, weakening their fighting capacity atany one point, until his forces were able to ‘take theenemy by the throat’ at Dien Bien Phu (a remote for-tified camp near the mountainous Vietnam ⁄Laos bor-der) in 1954 (Giap 1962, 95, 155–8; Giap and Dung1976, 22–40). The French, seeking to preserve theircolonial possession of Indochina, were stunned by theway Giap’s forces hid in and shuttled between thedelta and mountains, and used the jungle hills sur-rounding the fort as concealed artillery positions.France’s cataclysmic defeat sent shockwaves aroundthe Western world.

Giap (1962, 28–43, 157) explained how his ‘people’swar’ was part of an ancient double struggle againstforeign occupation and an unruly tropical nature, andthat a ‘people’s army’, carrying forward the aspirationsof the whole nation, was fashioned by communistparty cadres committed to the ‘painstaking education’of peasants in the ways of ‘protracted war’. TheAmericans coined the term ‘Viet Cong’ (in 1957) todescribe the communist guerrillas and army regularsoperating in South Vietnam (the National LiberationFront – NLF) and the People’s Army of NorthVietnam. Giap was Commander-in-Chief of the latterand his use of Vietnam’s tropical landscapes for trans-port, refuge and camouflage (the densely forested HoChi Minh Trail, a maze of paths and roads connectingnorth and south along Vietnam’s mountainous borders

6 Daniel Clayton


with Laos and Cambodia, being the key logisticalsystem), and extensive use of booby-traps, becamestaples of the war (Giap 1962, 17–23, 163–84).

Changing American perceptionAmerican military commanders struggled to cope withthese tactics. Consider Plate 2, taken by rookie Asso-ciated Press photographer Art Greenspon in April1968 of a US paratrooper guiding a medical helicop-ter through a jungle clearing to evacuate casualtiesfrom the frenzied Battle of Hue in Central Vietnam.It was run on the front pages of many Americannewspapers. Initially, photographers and journalistsstruggled to capture the meaning of the Vietnam Warfor an American public that had a thin Orientalistunderstanding of the region. In short order, however,photographic images, newspaper reports and televi-sion news coverage of the tropical setting in whichthe war unfolded became integral to American per-ception of the conflict (Moeller 1989).16 Between1965 and 1968 – the peak years of the ground war –less than 20 per cent of American personnel inVietnam were engaged in combat operations. Butjournalistic coverage of US Army units nervouslypatrolling dense jungle, paddy fields and swamps, andof troops being deployed and withdrawn from combatzones by helicopter, undermined the notion that anomniscient American war machine was bearing downon a transparent, knowable or compliant battlefield(Rollins 1984). American daily newspapers, mass-cir-culation weekly news magazines (such as Newsweek,the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Time and Life)and television news went to great lengths to exposeand question what historians see as deliberate andconcerted attempts by American presidents to deceivethe public over Vietnam (see Proctor 2011).

In 1961 French President Charles de Gaulle (citedin Karnow 1983, 248) warned Kennedy of the dangerof ‘sinking, step by step, into a bottomless militaryand political quagmire’ in Vietnam, and in 1965Spain’s General Franco similarly warned PresidentLyndon Johnson that ‘War in the jungle is an unlim-ited adventure’ with many unpredictable twists(United States Government nd c, doc. 184). The VietCong exploited rigidities in US military strategy, andas Freyre (1967) intimated in the London Times, theidea of ‘the jungle’ compounded American ‘supersti-tion’ regarding the menace of the tropics. Tropicalitycould no longer be used, as it had been in the past,to deny the enemy its humanity (invest it with prime-val qualities). There was nothing primitive aboutGiap’s guerrillas. ‘They are a far cry from the tabloidimage of an ignorant peasant on a senseless rampage’,a 1967 Time Magazine article admitted. Indeed (andwhile the advice was not followed), in 1962 the Direc-tor of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligenceand Research, Roger Hilsman, advocated ‘adopt[ing]the tactics of the guerrilla himself. Conventional mili-tary tactics are ineffective . . . There are no Siegfriedlines in the jungle’ (United States Government nd b,doc. 42).

Sir Robert Thompson, a British veteran of Burmaand Malaya, who advised American PresidentsKennedy, Johnson and Nixon, criticised the US mili-tary for instigating a war of attrition that gambled(ill-advisedly) that the enemy could be found and van-quished in ground and aerial ‘search-and-destroy’ mis-sions faster than it could be replaced. He alsorecognised that Viet Cong ties with the South Viet-namese peasantry were too strong and complex to becut in a quick or enduring fashion by ‘strategic ham-let’ programmes that relocated villagers to Americanpatrolled compounds. When it came to fighting a warthat had no clear front, and a scattered enemy thatwas largely invisible, that deployed hit-and-run tactics,that turned open terrain into a death trap for Ameri-cans, and that could evidently restore its fightingcapability overnight, Thompson (1969, 9) mordantlyremarked at the height of American involvement inVietnam (with over 500 000 military personnel there),few US Army commanders were ‘able to see thewoods for the defoliated trees’ – a reference to theway biological and chemical weapons such as AgentOrange and napalm were used to denude the VietCong of its jungle cover and push it into a more con-ventional battlespace.17

Thompson’s concerns were shared by senior USMarine Corps officers but received only a partial Pen-tagon and White House hearing, especially duringGeneral William Westmorland’s tenure as com-mander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam(1964–1968). In 1966 Time Magazine quoted Westmor-

Plate 2 Art Greenspon – ‘No. 13’ (1968)Source: � Associated Press 1968




land as saying that ‘We’re going to out-guerrilla theguerrilla and out-ambush the ambush’ (cited in Hamil-ton 1998, 5). However, by 1968 he acknowledged thatthe US Army was strategically ill-prepared for ‘fightinga counter-insurgency war in the tropics’ (Westmorland1968, 241). As American soldiers’ letters home, andlatterly memoirs and films, attest, US troops had afatal attraction to the jungle, viewing it as a dark spaceat the verge of death but also as a space promising anorgiastic release from social norms and military con-ventions (Edelman 1985). The Vietnam War wasdubbed ‘the rock and roll war’ because the physicalityof adrenalin-fuelled rock music was ‘the closest musi-cal equivalent to running through a jungle with gunson automatic fire’ (Herzinger 2010, 258).

The Pentagon struggled to come to terms withwhat the reporter David Halberstam (1965, 81) sawas the ‘marvellous outlaw country’ of Vietnam, andAmerican war journalism is animated by the tropicali-ty of this failure. As William Tuohy explained:

This is a war in which countless hours are spent vainlytracking an elusive quarry through almost impenetrablejungle, muddy rice fields and blazing sand dunes. Friend isoften indistinguishable from foe. Napalm and fragmenta-tion bombs sometimes fall on defenceless peasants . . . Tomany Americans, the war in Vietnam seems bewilderinglysavage. Yet there seems to be no other way to wage it.Despite the U.S. attempt to make the struggle more con-ventional, it is still basically a guerrilla war and, by defini-tion, dirty. . . . It is a war fought by Asian standards,without even lip service to the niceties of war prescribedby Western convention. (Reporting Vietnam 1998, 188[1965])

For Tuohy and many others, tropicalist imagery wasoverlaid with Orientalist stricture (here about war ‘byAsian standards’, elsewhere about the ‘Oriental’s lackof fear of death’). Frances FitzGerald (Reporting Viet-nam 1998, 316–7 [1967]) used Orientalist imagery ofan eternal and harmonious, if inscrutable, Vietnam,writing in Vogue in 1967 of a country that ‘is silent,complete within itself’. But it was the image of Viet-nam as what Ward Just (Reporting Vietnam 1998, 351[1968]) described as ‘a bewildering and hostile envi-ronment’ and Michael Herr (1977, 50) termed ‘theshrieking jungle’ that pervades American writing fromsome radically different positions – from reporters,policy advisers, and troops and commanders.

Of course, Washington sought to fathom this envi-ronment. The US Army’s 1940 Small Wars Manualmorphed into a series of new ‘Special Operations’manuals. The Department of Defense produced ahandbook Counter insurgency operations in 1960, not-ing that ‘people’s war’ had ‘no precedent in WesternEuropean or American history’, and warning that theuse of ‘foreign (to the area) troops to suppress guer-rilla ⁄ terrorist operations is neither practicable from a

military viewpoint nor psychologically feasible’(United States Joint Chiefs of Staff Office of Strate-gic Plans and Policy 1960, 3, 69). The US Air Forceadded new chapters on tropical weather hazards to itsaircrew manuals, and the US Army’s field manual onSurvival evasion and escape instructed: ‘Do not expectto elude the enemy and remain alive in the jungleareas unless you keep your body strong’ (1969, 204).What made the Viet Cong such a formidable enemy,Know your enemy added, was the enemy’s determina-tion and ability to ‘wage an unconventional war underconditions that would seem hopeless to the averageorthodox soldier’ (United States Army 1966, 7).Finally, laying at the heart of the Army’s field manualon Jungle warfare, which was updated three times dur-ing the 1960s, was the observation that the ‘thorough’and ‘unexpected’ use that the Viet Cong made of thetropical environment was a key ‘obstacle’ to Americancombat effectiveness and placed a ‘hypnotic spell’ onthe ‘physical resolve’ and ‘mental discipline’ of UStroops (United States Army 1965, 31, 136).

All manner of specific advice about What a platoonleader should know about the enemy’s jungle tactics(United States Military Assistance Command,Vietnam 1967) was generated: in operational Lessonslearned (United States Army 1967); in a series titledNotes and documents, comprised of captured Viet-namese intelligence; and in a CIA Situation appraisalseries that scrutinised Viet Cong tactics. Such intelli-gence was geared to the elucidation of what USDefense Secretary Robert McNamara (cited in Ham-ilton 1998, 10) called a ‘war by numbers’ – of ‘terri-tory won and lost’, ‘enemy killed and captured’ andVietnamese ‘hearts and minds’ turned to the Ameri-can cause. But over half of the US field commandersin Vietnam had little faith in McNamara’s accoun-tancy, and American counter-insurgency efforts stum-bled because top Pentagon officials had not studiedGiap and grasped how guerrilla warfare worked aswhat he termed a ‘synthesised [economic, political,military] strategy’ by which ‘the war’s goals’ become‘the people’s goals’, and with foreign occupation andaggression being futile means of winning confidences(1962, 13–26). FitzGerald suggested that US counter-insurgency needed to be calibrated at the village leveland trained on the Viet Cong’s generation of a spaceof flows (of people, weapons, equipment, leaflets,instruction, concealment, medical relief and so on).US marines fire-bombed peasant villages but failedto find the maze of tunnels that were pivotal toVietnamese resilience, prompting FitzGerald toremark that an awesome military outfit had literally‘walked over the political and economic design of theVietnamese revolution’ (1972, 178).

In short, the Vietnam War fractured the idea thatthe ‘normal’ – regular or conventional – way of

8 Daniel Clayton


waging war was in a temperate environment, ideallyon an isotropic plane, and through the heavy deploy-ment of military materiel, a Cold War showdown inEastern Europe being the quintessence of this vision.As Andrew Krepinevich and others have argued, theUS Army’s commitment to ‘conventional operations’persisted in ‘the service’s psyche’, in Army doctrine,to its great detriment (1986, 165, cf. 4–5, 75–80, 258–75). Giap proclaimed that the Americans were nei-ther strategically nor psychologically equipped to fighton the ‘tropical battlefield’ of Vietnam (1970, 70),and Guevara declared that the US had literally got‘bogged down in Vietnam and was unable to find away out’ (1985, 207).

President Richard Nixon was scornful of his mili-tary commanders’ ‘obsession’ with ‘doing things theway they have been taught to do in the book’ (UnitedStates Government nd d, doc. 147). EnvironmentalistArthur Westing, who led a 1970 team investigatingthe effects of chemical weapons on Vietnam for theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Sci-ence, concluded that ‘leveling the jungle’ was Nixon’sresponse to the ‘realization that the forest functionsas a key ally of guerrilla fighters’ (1971, 6). Indeed,the President launched air campaigns over Cambodiaand Laos (1970) and North Vietnam (1972), the lattercampaign (the largest aerial bombardment, by pay-load, in American military history) soliciting the criti-cal ire of French geographer Yves Lacoste (1972),who, in the American leftist monthly The Nation,sought to relate from first-hand observation (as amember of a 1972 International Commission investi-gating the bombing) that the US Air Force hadsought to systematically destroy the dike system ofthe Red River Delta, threatening catastrophic flood-ing. Westing and Lacoste attest to the fact that by theearly 1970s wanton environmental destruction (whatWesting termed ‘ecocide’) had become integral toanti-war protest within the West.

Analysts have further argued that Nixon’s air warcan be construed as a violent reflex of the recognitionthat ‘a regular command structure’ could not be‘transplanted into a guerrilla environment for which itwas not suitable’ (Greveld 1985, 258); and Americanhistorians now count the US military’s longer-termneglect of ‘‘‘irregular’’ military challenges’ as a ‘stun-ning failure of both imagination and common sense[that should be] traced back to the Vietnam War’(Dower 2010, 130).

Conclusion

At the height of the student demonstrations in Parisin May 1968, the French poet Pierre Peuchmaurddeclared that radical movements had learned much,and yet still had more to learn, from the ‘other cli-

mates’ of Cuba and Vietnam (cited in Ross 2002, 80).While the promise of tri-continental revolution thatsprang from these ‘other climates’ was fleeting, weshould not trivialise either what these pivots of resis-tance augured, or the climatological terms in whichPeuchmaurd described this hope. He was pointing towhat I have delineated as an eclectic body ofcounter-hegemonic thought and practice which, fromWorld War II, brought ‘the tropics’ into the air ofrevolutionary discourse and anti-imperialist struggle,and challenged the West’s construction of the tropicalzone as an exotic and bountiful space at its behest.This paper has sought to examine the nature of thischallenge, and its overall contribution is perhapstwofold.

First, and historically, it has attempted to open upa neglected period in the history of tropicality andexplore how it was enmeshed with wider post-wardynamics of war, revolution, imperialism and ColdWar aggrandisement. Militant tropicality has beenconstrued as both a conceptual and physical space ofopposition and struggle, and I have attempted toshow how it eroded the presumptive power of tropi-cality to distinguish between a ‘normal’ and superiortemperate world and an ‘exotic’ and inferior tropicalworld. Critical endeavours emanating from the Carib-bean (and then South America) were important inexposing and challenging the complicity of tropicalimage-making in the armature of Western dominance.But Western perceptions were tested most acutely inthe Asian tropics, where (and again from World WarII onwards) Western armies became embroiled in tax-ing and disorienting jungle wars. A tropicality thathad long fixated on how a wild and unruly tropicalnature either hampered Western advance or could betamed and overcome by technology was humanised:tropical nature was turned into a menacing space ofwar. The war in Vietnam tropicalised American per-ceptions of the Orient and ripped through the USArmy’s mental map of war.

Second, and analytically, the paper has sought tofurnish a broad framework and some indicative vign-ettes with which to think about resistance to tropicali-ty during this period. Resistance took theconventional forms of state, national and ideologicalconfrontation. But it operated in a much wider rangeof ways too, and made the epistemology and ontologyof tropicality bleed – quite literally – into oneanother. The question of how tropical regions wereexperienced as combat zones, and as crucibles of anti-Western and anti-American feeling, impacted on howthey were represented and judged (whether theycould or should be labelled as fruitful, comfortable orhazardous). Western tropicality was turned in onitself. Its power to install a temperate or ‘regular’ selfby fixing and holding an exotic or ‘irregular’ tropical




world at a distance and in its thrall was dissipated. Asthe American playwright Arthur Miller surmisedwhen he had dinner with Castro in the Palace of theRevolution in 2000, ‘the jungle’ had attained specialrevolutionary obstinacy and durability:

Surrounding the [dinner] table was a plastic garden beauti-fully lit, possibly to suggest [to Castro] the sort of junglefrom which the Revolution had sprung. (2004, 5)

As a contribution to work on geographies of resis-tance, this paper has investigated how tropical envi-ronments made resistance possible, and how spaces ofresistance like Guevara’s foco and Giap’s ‘people’swar’ were both created by revolution and made toexpedite it. Space has this twin status in our story asboth facilitator and product of attempts to make ‘thetropics’ a scene and source of militancy, and we haveseen that these attempts were routed through dispa-rate – geographical, cultural, political, military andideological – sites of resistance and margins. We havealso seen that such sites were articulated with variouscentres of power and orthodoxy (Washington andMoscow, Soviet and Chinese doctrine), and that mili-tant tropicality generated its own centres and margins(Cuba and Vietnam, Havana and Hanoi, the countryversus the city).

The projects and sites discussed above might alsobe seen as part of the broader post-war narrative ofhow totalising (liberal and Marxist) theories of socialtransformation and revolution came to be surmountedby the 1980s by an awareness of the multifaceted nat-ure of domination and resistance. As Bensaıd (2007)helps us to see, Guevara’s and Giap’s contrastingvisions point to a wider tension in Marxist debates ofthis era concerning ‘struggle’ and ‘strategy’: between,on the one hand (Guevara, Debray and Althusser areillustrative), the vexed search for a transposablemodel of revolution and means of generating a globalinsurrectional strike; and on the other hand, Giap’sconcentration on the struggle for national liberationand view that ‘the art of insurrection is to know howto give the struggle the form appropriate to the politi-cal struggle . . . in a given place, at a given time’(1962, 42).

Lastly, the kinds of practices ruminated over in thispaper contrast starkly with those that characterisedthe post-war discipline of geography (in its Westernhegemonic forms). While it has now been revealedthat geography was complicit in post-war imperialismand Cold War geopolitics in myriad ways, the disci-pline presented itself as a rational, peaceful enterprisegeared to finding and restoring spatial order, truthand progress in the wake of a devastating global war.On-going earthly destruction, and the post-war mili-tarisation of the tropical zone, barely reached its vis-tas (Lacoste was an exception). Geography was out of

sync with what the French thinker Michel Foucault,in a 1975 lecture series delivered in Brazil, saw as thecritical imperative to treat knowledge – about ‘thetropics’, for example – not as having an ‘essence’ or‘universal structure’ but ‘as always the historical andcircumstantial result of conditions outside the domainof knowledge’ (2002, 13). As Parenti (2011) relates,the practices and dynamics we have reviewed hadlasting effects on both the tropical world and Westernunderstandings of war and counter-insurgency. It ishoped that the idea of militant tropicality facilitatesthe attempt to historicise and analyse this legacy.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences in Belfast and London(the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2007), to GavinBowd, Lincoln Cushing, Steve Legg, David Living-stone and Carol Medlicott, and to Alison Blunt andthe journal’s three anonymous referees for helpfulinput and comments on earlier versions. I owe a par-ticular debt to Joe Doherty, not least for allowing meto rummage through his remarkable collection ofpost-war radical literature.

Notes

1 There is also growing interest in its recent inflections ininternational development and securitisation discourses,and biodiversity conflicts.

2 Geographers’ interest in post-war tropicality dwellschiefly on its entanglement with the disciplinary nichesof tropical geography and development geography (seeBowd and Clayton 2005; Power and Sidaway 2004).

3 The paper skirts around the African tropics (see Gibson1972). By ‘the West’, I mean, for this period, chiefly thecountries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation(Western Europe and North America).

4 The wax model of Guevara in the Museum of Revolu-tion in Havana portrays him in this way (thanks to oneof the referees for pointing this out).

5 Nor do I preclude Westerners from contributing to thisframework (see remarks below on Debray and Schmitt).

6 For example, in aspects of the Brazilian sociologist Gil-berto Freyre’s ‘luso-tropicalism’, and tropical architec-tural and agricultural projects in India.

7 Chaliand had in mind Guevara and the 1960s guerrillawars waged, but without lasting victories, in Peru, Vene-zuela, Colombia and Mexico as well as Bolivia.

8 I am grateful to Gavin Bowd for help with translationsfrom French.

9 For instance, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The jungledeploys the term as a metaphor for the abuses of laissez-faire capitalism in Chicago’s meatpacking industry.

10 In 1945 Cesaire moved into politics, becoming a Deputy(for Martinique) in the French National Assembly.

11 Google image search ‘Che’ for this iconic image, andvisit the OSPAAAL website (http://www.ospaaal.com/)

10 Daniel Clayton


(Accessed 12 December 2009) to see the myriad ways itwas adapted. On how Cuban poster art departed fromboth the pre-revolutionary bourgeois-consumerism andpost-revolutionary Soviet socialist realism in Cuban gra-phic art see Rubio (2006).

12 On the significant role that the tropical kitsch of flam-boyant Brazilian actress Carmen Miranda played in thisdiversionary process, see Cook et al. (2004).

13 Hecht (2009) begins to reconstruct a different Iberiantradition of tropicality.

14 Attempts by the Red Army Faction in Germany and theWeathermen in the US to model urban guerrilla warfareon rural–tropical–guerrilla insurgency had run theircourse by the mid-1970s.

15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987, 384) locatetheir pure space of nomadology (the emergent proper-ties of social transformation embedded in spatial prac-tices, like guerrilla warfare, that counter statecalibrations) between the mountain ⁄ forest and plain.

16 Greenspon’s image is reincarnated on the poster for Oli-ver Stone’s 1986 film Platoon. During the 1960s, theAmerican news agency Associated Press supplied newsto around 1700 daily newspapers with a collective circu-lation of around 70 million (Proctor 2011).

17 Over 15 million gallons of defoliants were dispensedfrom planes, helicopters and riverboats, destroying 6 mil-lion acres by the end of the war. Between 1965 and 1975over 1 million Vietnamese people, and over 50 000Americans, lost their lives in the war (Appy 2003).

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