Clayton, D. (2013). Militant Tropicality_ War, Rend the Reconfiguration of 'the Tropics' c.1940- c.1975 - Unknown

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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’s

environmental 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 how

it has been resisted by the ‘tropicalised’. This paper teases out how, in this post-war era of decolonisation and

Cold War, there arose in Western experience a potent image of the tropics as militant – as combative, belligerent

and 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 way

the West judged the tropics against the presumed normality of the temperate north. The paper dwells on two

sites in the promulgation of this militant tropicality – the Caribbean during the 1940s and 1950s, and Vietnam

during 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 underscores

the (little studied) martial quality of tropicality and how, by the 1960s, militant tropicality had become closely

associated 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 9AL

Email: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 22 September 2011

Introduction

The term tropicality has been deployed within and

beyond geography to denote a discourse (or suite of

representations, practices and experiences) that con-

structs the tropical world as the West’s environmental

other and has been deeply implicated in colonialism

and Western dominance (for geography, see Hecht

2009; Power 2009). David Arnold formatively argued

that ‘the tropics’ need to be seen ‘as a conceptual, and

not merely physical, space’ – as ‘invented quite as much

as they were encountered’ – and that tropicality denotes

the attitudes and experiences ‘of northern whites mov-

ing into an alien world – alien in climate, vegetationand disease’ (1996, 142–3; 2005, 5–6). The tropical

world has been exoticised in dualistic terms, as paradisi-

cal, luxuriant and redemptive, but also as primeval, pes-

tilential and debilitating to Westerners. Yet on both

counts, Arnold explains, tropical lands have been

viewed and judged against ‘the perceived normality of

the temperate lands’ (1996, 143). Tropicality imbues

diverse practices and disciplines – art, exploration,

adventure fiction, colonial planning, plantation and

penal 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 an

adjunct to Western colonialism through to the 1940s.1

post-war era, or to how this discourse has been received

(adapted, resisted, recast) by the ‘tropicalised’ (after Aparicio 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 in

Western experience was a potent image of the tropics

as 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 and

Soviet 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 term

comes into view as an object of study, and then(albeit with selective strokes3) explore two pivotal

sites in its promulgation: the Caribbean in the 1940s

and 1950s, from whence came attempts to expose the

complicity of Western representations of the tropics

in colonialism; and second, 1950s and 1960s jungle

warfare (with a prime focus on the Vietnam War) and

how it undermined what the West (and especially the

United States of America – hereinafter US) took to

be the ‘normal’ way of waging war.

Militant tropicality

The idea of militant tropicality coheres in three ways.



or source. Like tropicality, it needs to be construed as

both 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 of

experience). I will muster this idea with themes and

examples from art, literature, journalism, anti-colonial

thought, revolutionary theory, and political (govern-

ment) and military records. A style of critical inquiry

is also at stake: one nested in the story told – in the work, for example, of the Argentine-born Cuban revo-

lutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1995, 152), who

regarded himself as ‘the eclectic dissector of doctrines’

(Marxist, nationalist and cultural), and the Martinican

thinker Aime Cesaire, who saw the opening up of

alternative axes and framings of difference, and press-

ing of inquiry against dominant categories and under-

standings, as key to challenging ossifying and

demeaning tropes of otherness.

Second, militant tropicality can be identified as a

specific phase in, and variant of, tropicality: one thatunderscores its martial qualities, which have not

received the historical or critical attention they deserve

(see Anderson 2006). My title is adapted from Edward

Said’s fleeting remarks in Orientalism about how early

twentieth-century Arab revolt turned the Orient ‘from

unchanging ‘‘Oriental’’ passivity into militant modern

life’ (1978, 240). T.E. Lawrence’s (‘Lawrence of Ara-

bia’) guerrilla wisdom not only figures in Said’s

account; 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 Major

pointed out in 1961, ‘most of the ‘‘hottest’’ trouble

spots are located in tropical regions’ (Berger 2008;

Jennings 1961, 22). Militant tropicality finds it most

intense – 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) and

Angola (1961–1975), the Belgian Congo (1959–1966),

Cuba (1956–1958), and the French and American wars

in 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, a

potent image of militant tropicality is of the guerrilla

fighter springing from the tropical bush, promising

what Guevara (who many see as the epitome of this

image) envisioned as a tri-continental struggle against

(especially US) capitalism and imperialism (Kunzle

1997).4 In their well-known manuals of guerrilla war-

fare, Guevara (1961) and Giap (1962) emphasised that

the ability of the small valorous guerrilla band to

defeat considerably larger and better equipped regular

armed forces was rooted in its connection with ‘thepeople’, and they accorded great tactical significance

to tropical mountains, jungles and swamps.

Third, the paper spotlights the resistance of the

tropicalised – a theme that is muted in the tropicality

literature, which tends to focus on the agency of tropi-

calisers (although see Agrawal 2005) – and tracks it

across multiple sites. Colonising discourses like tropi-

cality are not inexorable. They can and have been

challenged; 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 the

only counter-hegemonic framework available to the

tropicalised, and I do not regard it simply as a quest

for a non-western, indigenous or autonomous configu-

ration of ‘the tropics’.5 The idea of development had a

powerful sway in the decolonising world, and tropicali-

ty (as a facet of this idea) could be adopted quite

uncritically.6 The idea of a militant tropics also

revolved around post-colonial elites – thinkers and

leaders who had a strong belief in their calling to

guide ‘the masses’. Nor should revolutionary violencebe romanticised. At the same time, it would be histori-

cally naive not to recognise that Guevara’s execution

in 1967 in the Bolivian jungle at the hands of the US

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spurred the roman-

ticisation of him as the embodiment of revolution.

Finally, c.1940–c.1975 is in some ways an arbitrary

time frame. There was not a single event or spark of

resistance that ignited militant tropicality, and some

of the phenomena discussed outlive the 1970s. How-

ever, the former date marks the beginnings of a note-

worthy shift of tropicality into more pronounced

military and anti-colonial modes, and the latter date

signifies the end of the Vietnam War, and what

Gerard Chaliand saw as the passing of ‘the myth of

the invincibility of guerrilla warfare’ (1977, 42) and of

the US as well.7 Christian Parenti (2011) dates to the

1970s the formation of a ‘tropic of chaos’ – cultures

of violence and war in the tropical world, stemming

from decades of colonial and Cold War militarism, in

which guerrilla tactics and modern weapons that had

once been used to repel foreign aggressors rebounded

horribly, most horrifically in Cambodia (1972–1978)

where the Khmer Rouge waged a jungle war againstits own people. By the 1980s, Daniel Bensaı d (2007)

notes, the gory excesses associated with ‘revolutionary

violence’ (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’ to

capture how the French geographer Pierre Gourou

had placed a ‘geographical curse’ on the tropics,representing this ‘world’ in his tropical geography as

incapable of generating a civilisation comparable to

Militant tropicality 181



that of temperate Europe (1955, 32–5).8 Yet if Ces-

aire thus made tropicality a figure of anti-colonial

thought, it was the lesser known surrealist journal

Tropiques published in Martinique between 1941 and

1945, 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 to

the French Antilles and had a complex relationship

with metropolitan systems of thought – especially

primitivism – that configured the tropics as a scene

and source of redemption for the pathologies of

modernity (Arnold 1981). One of the unifying aims of

the essays, poems and polemics in this publication

was to question the way Vichy France had woven

images 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 flora

and fauna appear in many of Cesaire’s contributions,

as both emblems of an imprisoning Western gaze and

pointers to an alternative Caribbean identity. Pierre

Mabille (friend of the French surrealist Andre Bre-

ton) extended this line of enquiry in an essay entitled

‘La Jungle’ (Tropiques 1978 II, 187 [1945]), observing

that ‘tropical paradises suppose the existence of pris-

ons’ and seeing

an absolute opposition between the jungle where life

explodes 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 where

a Fuhrer, perched on a pedestal, watches, along the neo-

Greek colonnades of Berlin, the departure of mechanised

cohorts that are ready, after having destroyed all other

living things, to annihilate themselves in the rigorous

parallel lines of endless cemeteries.

Richard Tucker (2000) argues that by the twentieth

century, the US had an ‘insatiable appetite’ for tropi-

cal land and resources, and as Mabille intimated, the

term ‘jungle’ had become associated with the brutal –

disciplinary and annihilatory – drives of capitalism as well as fascism.9 Similarly, Roussi (Tropiques 1978 II,

267–72 [1945]) deployed the expression ‘le grand

camouflage’ to examine how, on the one hand, Vichy

representations disguised ‘the flowers of human

debasement’ (realities of colonial racism and vio-

lence), but how, on the other hand, ‘Poets who saw

the tropical flames [of oppression] fanned by hunger,

fear, hate and ferocity’ might use this enmity to

recover a ‘beautiful Antilles’ (see Rabbitt 2008).

Tropiques was thus filiated with tropicality’s vision

of 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 embrace

of wonder and symbolic language, colonialism’s alien-

ating value system, which had turned the Caribbean

into a ‘mute and sterile Earth’ where ‘the tam-tam in

the 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, images

and values’ (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman 1997, 8),

then Tropiques established that this process did not just 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 problem

for anti-colonial thought: the prospect of only being

able to counter colonial discourses like tropicality by

using and potentially reinforcing their imagery and

binaries. Tropiques should be seen as an ambivalent

critical project, and as Cesaire himself declared in

1945, a radical poetics of tropical knowledge was not

easily translated into concrete projects of social trans-formation.10

The Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 Cuban

counterpoint also promised a less Western-dominated

and essentialist tropicality. His study revolves around

the contrapunteo (variously meaning duel, dialogue

and controversy) between two leitmotivs of tropicality,

the commodities of tobacco and sugar, and how their

histories capture the contrasting careers of large-scale

foreign plantation capitalism (especially in western

Cuba) and local agricultural ingenuity and small-scale

peasant production (in eastern Cuba). ‘From sugar,

which is mass’, Ortiz argued, Cuba ‘received its force,

and from tobacco, which is distinction, its power of

inspiration’ (1995, 93). Moreover, tobacco, brought by

Indians from Central and South America had ‘always

been more Cuban than sugar’ and provided revolu-

tionary stimulus – sown, as it was, ‘with a clenched

fist, like the symbolic Communist gesture’ (Ortiz

1995, 61, 289). However, both commodities were

indicative of ‘ajiaco’, a history that was always ‘cook-

ing’ – comprised of transient and overlapping black,

white and Indian influences – rather than based on

fixed traits (Ortiz 1995, 98–103).The problematic of tropical otherness that European

and Caribbean writers and artists saw in the work of

Ortiz and Cesaire was sometimes articulated with the

idea of (what became termed) the ‘black Atlantic’

(Font and Quiroz 2005). The work of the black Cuban

artist Wilfredo Lam is indicative of this intersection

(Sims 2002). But others journeyed with the notion of a

militant tropicality in different directions. Ortiz’s vener-

ation of campesinos (peasants) became central to Guev-

ara’s revolutionary ideology, and the hope spawned by

Tropiques of finding new – indigenous and emancipatory – representations of tropical difference lived on in

myriad ventures. 1960s Cuban poster art – which was

182 Daniel Clayton



closely associated with Tricontinental Magazine (the

quarterly publication of the Organization of Solidarity

of the People of Asia, Africa & Latin America, OS-

PAAAL, founded in Havana in 1966) – was one such

project. The late 1960s Brazilian Tropicalia musical

movement, which, as one of its exponents, Nelson Mot-

ta, declared, revelled in a ‘living tropicality and the

new, 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 as

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s ubiquitous graphic of ‘Che’

derived from Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of

him – to highlight American imperial designs.11

Tropical motifs were amenable to stylistic montage

and fostered a political art in the service of anti-

Americanism. Take Plate 1, Antonio Marino’s ‘Day of world solidarity with the Cuban Revolution’, a poster

folded 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 revolutionary

iconography by depicting a mountain in cross-section,

the peak banded with different shades of green to add

symmetry (‘zing’), which was common practice in this

art genre (see Cushing 2003). The caption is provided

in Spanish, English, French and Arabic to facilitate

the magazine’s internationalism, and the revolutionary

allusions the mountain solicits are palpable. For it was

in the densely forested Sierra Maestra Mountains of

eastern Cuba that Fidel Castro and Guevara honed

their guerrilla plans, and daily hikes in the mountains

surrounding Mexico City had also formed an impor-

tant part of their preparations. In a wider frame, we

might infer that Marino’s revolutionary mountain also

subverts the iconography of a post-Enlightenment tax-

onomic tropicality incarnated in Alexander von Hum-

boldt’s 1807 cross-section of Mount Chimborazo in

Ecuador (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’ like

The United Fruit Company, their continent-wide

exploitative 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 regulating

war, and the growth of US ‘covert’ military operations

geared to overthrowing so-called ‘undesirable regimes’,

such as Jacobo Arbenz’s in Guatemala (Deutschmann

1997, 311). Guevara declared the ‘progressive’ and

‘democratic’ American way in business, war and inter-national relations a sham, and argued that armed

struggle 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 American

advertisers to further ‘inscribe Latin Americanness as

tropicality’ – that is, to represent the continent as still

a safe investment for American fruit, coffee, mining,

rubber and timber companies – were fraught (Lopez

1993, 71; Tucker 2000, 125–31, 184–91).12

‘Cuba’s rich sub-soil, which has been a field of

monopolist voracity’, Guevara (Deutschmann 1997,

296) argued, was a soil shared with his ‘tropical broth-

ers’ elsewhere in Central and South America, and

fighting such voracity meant fighting not just foreign

Yankee land owners and their political puppets, but

also the North American imperial wish image of its

southern neighbour as a tropical garden after the Fall:

as abandoned yet ripe for the taking.13 The key task

of revolution, he proclaimed, was to reclaim ‘an

apple’ 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 with

the Cuban Revolution’ (1970)

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

Docs Populi




lution would not come just from defiant words,

images and slogans. It was also an inherently visceral

project.

At the heart of Guevara’s revolutionary praxis –

and his militant tropicality – was the drive to ‘get the

enemy out of its natural environment, and force it to

fight in regions where its own life and habits will clash

with existing reality’ (Guevara 1985, 208–9). By ‘real-

ity’ Guevara meant both a conceptual reality of mili-tary doctrine, and physical reality of combat, and

there are affinities here not only with the writings of

Mao Zedong but also with those of the Nazi-leaning

German philosopher Carl Schmitt who, in his 1963

Theory 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 particular

type of space, the insurrectional foco: the guerrilla

band located in the mountains, on the territorial and

symbolic 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 the

conditions for revolution’ (rather than vice versa, thus

turning 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-lined

from guerrilla historiography, including Guevara’s.

The Cuba Revolution succeeded, Guevara (1996,

155) argued, because of a primary bond between ‘the

guerrillas and the peasantry’ in ‘the rugged territory’

of the Sierra Maestra mountains. Yet he was also

intent on turning what Schmitt saw as the intrinsically

‘telluric’ (soil-rooted) nature of guerrilla insurgency

into a tri-continental revolutionary venture that would

generate a ‘new scale of values’ (Deutschmann 1997,

198). In a 1965 speech to the Afro-Asian Conference

in Algeria he proclaimed that

The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colo-

nial or neo-colonial shackles . . . is not separate from the

struggle against backwardness and poverty

and

If there were no other uniting factor . . . [connecting]

underdeveloped peoples and socialist countries then the

common enemy [the US] should be enough. (Deutsch-

mann 1997, 342)

Yet this ‘new scale of values’ was illusory. Guevara’s

foco was not easily brought down from the mountains

and projected elsewhere.14 Regis Debray, who was in

Bolivia in 1967 as a reporter for the French leftist

publisher François Maspero, pinpointed how ecologi-

cal factors as well as blind idealism had acceleratedGuevara’s downfall. Guevara had ‘painted a canvas

whose vast scope was ludicrously out of proportion to

the precariousness of the situation’, and his ‘reliance

on characteristics of terrain alone’ was perilous,

Debray (1977, 223 1968, 62) surmised. Bolivian peas-

ants were concentrated in high rocky plateaus and

enclosed valleys, leaving tropical areas near the bor-

ders of adjacent friendly countries, where Guevara

was based, deserted.

‘ Foco theory’ or ‘ foquismo’ – the primacy accorded

to rural armed struggle launched from the mountains– attained a central place in the historiography of the

Cuban Revolution, marginalising important debates

within the Cuban (and other) rebel movements about

the role of the urban underground. Historians (e.g.

Sweig 2002) have now documented the extent to

which Guevara and Castro obscured the role of urban

guerrillas. In Guevara’s case, this can be put down, in

part, to his strong misgivings about Leninist models

(of the urban proletariat and vanguard party – rather

than his rural guerrilla and vanguard foco – as key

revolutionary agents) and embrace of more eclecticrevolutionary teachings, including those of 1920s

Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino, whose

rebels fled the cities to escape US air strikes and used

the mountains and tropical terrain as a strategic ally

(Anderson 1997, 242–53; Craven 2002, 9–14).

In a wider context, Amilcar Cabral, recounting his

struggle against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau,

argued that while

everyone knows that in general the guerrilla force uses the

mountain 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, and

we had to take full advantage of the jungles and swamps

of 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 ‘leave

the enemy bewildered in areas he doesn’t know’ was

not an inherently rural quest. Using urban terrain as

an ally also meant knowing ‘how to use with intelli-

gence its unevenness, its high and low points, its

turns, 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 Guevara

for fashioning a spurious spatial binary, with ‘the

struggle in the hills’ valorised as the primary space of

revolution and ‘life in the cities’ deemed the deriva-

tive space.15

Finally, Guevara’s militant tropicality did not

eschew everything Western. He embraced Western

ideals of science and discipline, and the modernist

drive to ‘master nature and technology’, and fre-

quently positioned himself as a ‘temperate’ actor,using medical and surgical metaphors (reflecting his

training as a doctor) to describe the tasks of

184 Daniel Clayton



revolution (e.g. Deutschmann 1997, 349; Saldana-Por-

tillo 2003, 91–4). In his diary of his 1965–6 guerrilla

adventure in the Congo, for instance, he criticises

Congolese rebel leaders for being ‘indolent’ and

lacking ‘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 imperial

wish image of its tropical neighbour. Yet this militant

tropicality was compromised. Struggles over represen-

tation were not easily translated into political action,

and Guevara struggled to overcome the isolation and

local interests of different rebel movements. While it

was from Caribbean quarters that an image of the

militant tropics sprang, the dangers that this image

posed were felt most viscerally elsewhere, in Vietnam

(and Cambodia and Laos) between the early 1960s

and the Tet Offensive of 1968 (when the VietnamWar shifted from a guerrilla to a more conventional

phase).

The jungle environment of the VietnamWar

American geopolitical and military discourse had long

been imbued with environmental assumptions about

how climatic extremes of cold and hot mapped on to

binaries of good and evil, progress and backwardness,

and the Korean War cemented the association

between the problems of fighting in frigid environ-

ments with the ‘evil’ of communism (see Farish 2010;

McClintock 1992). By the early 1960s, however, the

experience of Americans moving into the alien tropi-

cal environment of Vietnam had become inextricably

linked with what Franklin Lindsay (1962) termed

‘unconventional warfare’.

‘Unconventional warfare’ Americans had experienced jungle warfare in the

Philippines (1898), Panama (1916), and in the Pacific

and Southeast Asia against the Japanese duringWorld War II. However, a US Army Field Manual

dealing with jungle warfare was not released until

December 1941 and was based largely on Central

American experience. As subsequent iterations of this

manual acknowledged, it was the British and Com-

monwealth armies that had got to grips with this type

of warfare more decisively, through long and painful

learning ordeals in Burma, Malaya and New Guinea

(Moreman 2005, 2–14). When the Geneva Accords of

1954 failed to deliver elections of reunification

between 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 in

a 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, with

good leadership and plans, can successfully fight any

kind of enemy on any kind of terrain’ – American

troops being committed to this ‘anywhere’ strategy,pushing them away from defensive coastal enclaves

and into tropical highlands and jungle north and west

of Saigon, and into the Mekong Delta to the south,

in June 1965; but on the other hand, the ‘more open

and fluid type of warfare’ encountered in these tropi-

cal realms posed unique problems (United States

Government nd a, doc. 167). Indeed, American ‘lead-

ership’ and ‘plans’ proved to be no match for what

the American observers saw as Giap’s operational

genius.

Giap had been taught by Gourou (who recalled hisstudent’s close interest in modern European warfare)

and led the DRV’s military campaign against the

French, adapting tactics gleaned, not least, from

Napoleon, Lawrence and Mao (Duiker 2007). He

blended conventional and guerrilla tactics of mobility,

speed, surprise, concealment and deception, and of

only ever committing a guerrilla force to combat

when victory was assured, to chase French troops ‘all

over the place’, weakening their fighting capacity at

any one point, until his forces were able to ‘take the

enemy 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 Dung

1976, 22–40). The French, seeking to preserve their

colonial possession of Indochina, were stunned by the

way Giap’s forces hid in and shuttled between the

delta and mountains, and used the jungle hills sur-

rounding the fort as concealed artillery positions.

France’s cataclysmic defeat sent shockwaves around

the Western world.

Giap (1962, 28–43, 157) explained how his ‘people’s

war’ was part of an ancient double struggle against

foreign occupation and an unruly tropical nature, andthat a ‘people’s army’, carrying forward the aspirations

of the whole nation, was fashioned by communist

party cadres committed to the ‘painstaking education’

of peasants in the ways of ‘protracted war’. The

Americans coined the term ‘Viet Cong’ (in 1957) to

describe the communist guerrillas and army regulars

operating in South Vietnam (the National Liberation

Front – NLF) and the People’s Army of North

Vietnam. Giap was Commander-in-Chief of the latter

and 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 connecting

north and south along Vietnam’s mountainous borders




with Laos and Cambodia, being the key logistical

system), and extensive use of booby-traps, became

staples of the war (Giap 1962, 17–23, 163–84).

Changing American perception American military commanders struggled to cope with

these tactics. Consider Plate 2, taken by rookie Asso-

ciated Press photographer Art Greenspon in April

1968 of a US paratrooper guiding a medical helicop-ter through a jungle clearing to evacuate casualties

from the frenzied Battle of Hue in Central Vietnam.

It was run on the front pages of many American

newspapers. Initially, photographers and journalists

struggled to capture the meaning of the Vietnam War

for an American public that had a thin Orientalist

understanding of the region. In short order, however,

photographic images, newspaper reports and televi-

sion news coverage of the tropical setting in which

the 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 in

Vietnam were engaged in combat operations. But

journalistic coverage of US Army units nervously

patrolling dense jungle, paddy fields and swamps, and

of troops being deployed and withdrawn from combat

zones by helicopter, undermined the notion that an

omniscient American war machine was bearing down

on 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 expose

and question what historians see as deliberate and

concerted attempts by American presidents to deceive

the public over Vietnam (see Proctor 2011).

In 1961 French President Charles de Gaulle (cited

in Karnow 1983, 248) warned Kennedy of the danger

of ‘sinking, step by step, into a bottomless military

and political quagmire’ in Vietnam, and in 1965

Spain’s General Franco similarly warned President

Lyndon Johnson that ‘War in the jungle is an unlim-

ited adventure’ with many unpredictable twists

(United States Government nd c, doc. 184). The Viet

Cong exploited rigidities in US military strategy, andas Freyre (1967) intimated in the London Times, the

idea of ‘the jungle’ compounded American ‘supersti-

tion’ regarding the menace of the tropics. Tropicality

could 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 about

Giap’s guerrillas. ‘They are a far cry from the tabloid

image of an ignorant peasant on a senseless rampage’,

a 1967 Time Magazine article admitted. Indeed (and

while 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 Siegfried

lines in the jungle’ (United States Government nd b,

doc. 42).

Sir Robert Thompson, a British veteran of Burma

and Malaya, who advised American Presidents

Kennedy, 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 also

recognised that Viet Cong ties with the South Viet-

namese peasantry were too strong and complex to be

cut in a quick or enduring fashion by ‘strategic ham-

let’ programmes that relocated villagers to American

patrolled compounds. When it came to fighting a war

that had no clear front, and a scattered enemy that

was 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 fighting

capability overnight, Thompson (1969, 9) mordantly

remarked at the height of American involvement inVietnam (with over 500 000 military personnel there),

few US Army commanders were ‘able to see the

woods for the defoliated trees’ – a reference to the

way biological and chemical weapons such as Agent

Orange and napalm were used to denude the Viet

Cong of its jungle cover and push it into a more con-

ventional battlespace.17

Thompson’s concerns were shared by senior US

Marine Corps officers but received only a partial Pen-

tagon and White House hearing, especially during

General 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

186 Daniel Clayton



land as saying that ‘We’re going to out-guerrilla the

guerrilla and out-ambush the ambush’ (cited in Hamil-

ton 1998, 5). However, by 1968 he acknowledged that

the US Army was strategically ill-prepared for ‘fighting

a counter-insurgency war in the tropics’ (Westmorland

1968, 241). As American soldiers’ letters home, and

latterly memoirs and films, attest, US troops had a

fatal attraction to the jungle, viewing it as a dark space

at the verge of death but also as a space promising anorgiastic release from social norms and military con-

ventions (Edelman 1985). The Vietnam War was

dubbed ‘the rock and roll war’ because the physicality

of adrenalin-fuelled rock music was ‘the closest musi-

cal equivalent to running through a jungle with guns

on automatic fire’ (Herzinger 2010, 258).

The Pentagon struggled to come to terms with

what the reporter David Halberstam (1965, 81) saw

as the ‘marvellous outlaw country’ of Vietnam, and

American 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 vainly

tracking an elusive quarry through almost impenetrable

jungle, muddy rice fields and blazing sand dunes. Friend is

often indistinguishable from foe. Napalm and fragmenta-

tion bombs sometimes fall on defenceless peasants . . . To

many Americans, the war in Vietnam seems bewilderingly

savage. 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 prescribed

by Western convention. ( Reporting Vietnam 1998, 188[1965])

For Tuohy and many others, tropicalist imagery was

overlaid with Orientalist stricture (here about war ‘by

Asian standards’, elsewhere about the ‘Oriental’s lack

of fear of death’). Frances FitzGerald ( Reporting Viet-

nam 1998, 316–7 [1967]) used Orientalist imagery of

an 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 ‘the

shrieking jungle’ that pervades American writing from

some 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 Manual

morphed into a series of new ‘Special Operations’

manuals. The Department of Defense produced a

handbook Counter insurgency operations in 1960, not-

ing that ‘people’s war’ had ‘no precedent in Western

European 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 Force

added new chapters on tropical weather hazards to its

aircrew manuals, and the US Army’s field manual on

Survival evasion and escape instructed: ‘Do not expect

to elude the enemy and remain alive in the jungle

areas 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 under

conditions that would seem hopeless to the average

orthodox soldier’ (United States Army 1966, 7).

Finally, laying at the heart of the Army’s field manual

on 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 the

tropical environment was a key ‘obstacle’ to American

combat effectiveness and placed a ‘hypnotic spell’ on

the ‘physical resolve’ and ‘mental discipline’ of UStroops (United States Army 1965, 31, 136).

All manner of specific advice about What a platoon

leader should know about the enemy’s jungle tactics

(United States Military Assistance Command,

Vietnam 1967) was generated: in operational Lessons

learned (United States Army 1967); in a series titled

Notes and documents, comprised of captured Viet-

namese intelligence; and in a CIA Situation appraisal

series that scrutinised Viet Cong tactics. Such intelli-

gence was geared to the elucidation of what US

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (cited in Ham-

ilton 1998, 10) called a ‘war by numbers’ – of ‘terri-

tory won and lost’, ‘enemy killed and captured’ and

Vietnamese ‘hearts and minds’ turned to the Ameri-

can cause. But over half of the US field commanders

in Vietnam had little faith in McNamara’s accoun-

tancy, and American counter-insurgency efforts stum-

bled because top Pentagon officials had not studied

Giap and grasped how guerrilla warfare worked as

what he termed a ‘synthesised [economic, political,

military] strategy’ by which ‘the war’s goals’ become

‘the people’s goals’, and with foreign occupation and

aggression being futile means of winning confidences(1962, 13–26). FitzGerald suggested that US counter-

insurgency needed to be calibrated at the village level

and trained on the Viet Cong’s generation of a space

of flows (of people, weapons, equipment, leaflets,

instruction, concealment, medical relief and so on).

US marines fire-bombed peasant villages but failed

to find the maze of tunnels that were pivotal to

Vietnamese resilience, prompting FitzGerald to

remark that an awesome military outfit had literally

‘walked over the political and economic design of the

Vietnamese revolution’ (1972, 178).In short, the Vietnam War fractured the idea that

the ‘normal’ – regular or conventional – way of




waging war was in a temperate environment, ideally

on an isotropic plane, and through the heavy deploy-

ment of military materiel, a Cold War showdown in

Eastern Europe being the quintessence of this vision.

As Andrew Krepinevich and others have argued, the

US 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 fight

on 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 a

way out’ (1985, 207).

President Richard Nixon was scornful of his mili-

tary commanders’ ‘obsession’ with ‘doing things the

way they have been taught to do in the book’ (United

States Government nd d, doc. 147). Environmentalist

Arthur Westing, who led a 1970 team investigating

the effects of chemical weapons on Vietnam for the American Association for the Advancement of Sci-

ence, concluded that ‘leveling the jungle’ was Nixon’s

response to the ‘realization that the forest functions

as a key ally of guerrilla fighters’ (1971, 6). Indeed,

the President launched air campaigns over Cambodia

and Laos (1970) and North Vietnam (1972), the latter

campaign (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 a

member of a 1972 International Commission investi-

gating the bombing) that the US Air Force had

sought to systematically destroy the dike system of

the Red River Delta, threatening catastrophic flood-

ing. Westing and Lacoste attest to the fact that by the

early 1970s wanton environmental destruction (what

Westing termed ‘ecocide’) had become integral to

anti-war protest within the West.

Analysts have further argued that Nixon’s air war

can be construed as a violent reflex of the recognition

that ‘a regular command structure’ could not be

‘transplanted into a guerrilla environment for which it was not suitable’ (Greveld 1985, 258); and American

historians now count the US military’s longer-term

neglect 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 Paris

in 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 that

sprang from these ‘other climates’ was fleeting, we

should not trivialise either what these pivots of resis-

tance augured, or the climatological terms in which

Peuchmaurd described this hope. He was pointing to

what I have delineated as an eclectic body of

counter-hegemonic thought and practice which, from

World War II, brought ‘the tropics’ into the air of revolutionary discourse and anti-imperialist struggle,

and challenged the West’s construction of the tropical

zone as an exotic and bountiful space at its behest.

This paper has sought to examine the nature of this

challenge, and its overall contribution is perhaps

twofold.

First, and historically, it has attempted to open up

a neglected period in the history of tropicality and

explore how it was enmeshed with wider post-war

dynamics of war, revolution, imperialism and Cold

War aggrandisement. Militant tropicality has beenconstrued as both a conceptual and physical space of

opposition and struggle, and I have attempted to

show how it eroded the presumptive power of tropi-

cality to distinguish between a ‘normal’ and superior

temperate world and an ‘exotic’ and inferior tropical

world. Critical endeavours emanating from the Carib-

bean (and then South America) were important in

exposing and challenging the complicity of tropical

image-making in the armature of Western dominance.

But Western perceptions were tested most acutely in

the Asian tropics, where (and again from World War

II onwards) Western armies became embroiled in tax-

ing and disorienting jungle wars. A tropicality that

had long fixated on how a wild and unruly tropical

nature either hampered Western advance or could be

tamed and overcome by technology was humanised:

tropical nature was turned into a menacing space of

war. The war in Vietnam tropicalised American per-

ceptions of the Orient and ripped through the US

Army’s mental map of war.

Second, and analytically, the paper has sought to

furnish a broad framework and some indicative vign-

ettes with which to think about resistance to tropicali-ty during this period. Resistance took the

conventional forms of state, national and ideological

confrontation. But it operated in a much wider range

of ways too, and made the epistemology and ontology

of tropicality bleed – quite literally – into one

another. The question of how tropical regions were

experienced as combat zones, and as crucibles of anti-

Western and anti-American feeling, impacted on how

they were represented and judged (whether they

could or should be labelled as fruitful, comfortable or

hazardous). Western tropicality was turned in onitself. Its power to install a temperate or ‘regular’ self

by fixing and holding an exotic or ‘irregular’ tropical

188 Daniel Clayton



world at a distance and in its thrall was dissipated. As

the American playwright Arthur Miller surmised

when he had dinner with Castro in the Palace of the

Revolution in 2000, ‘the jungle’ had attained special

revolutionary obstinacy and durability:

Surrounding the [dinner] table was a plastic garden beauti-

fully lit, possibly to suggest [to Castro] the sort of jungle

from 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 of

resistance like Guevara’s foco and Giap’s ‘people’s

war’ were both created by revolution and made to

expedite it. Space has this twin status in our story as

both facilitator and product of attempts to make ‘the

tropics’ a scene and source of militancy, and we have

seen that these attempts were routed through dispa-

rate – geographical, cultural, political, military and

ideological – sites of resistance and margins. We have

also seen that such sites were articulated with various

centres of power and orthodoxy (Washington and

Moscow, Soviet and Chinese doctrine), and that mili-

tant tropicality generated its own centres and margins

(Cuba and Vietnam, Havana and Hanoi, the country

versus the city).

The projects and sites discussed above might also

be seen as part of the broader post-war narrative of

how totalising (liberal and Marxist) theories of social

transformation and revolution came to be surmounted

by the 1980s by an awareness of the multifaceted nat-

ure of domination and resistance. As Bensaı d (2007)helps us to see, Guevara’s and Giap’s contrasting

visions point to a wider tension in Marxist debates of

this era concerning ‘struggle’ and ‘strategy’: between,

on the one hand (Guevara, Debray and Althusser are

illustrative), the vexed search for a transposable

model of revolution and means of generating a global

insurrectional strike; and on the other hand, Giap’s

concentration on the struggle for national liberation

and view that ‘the art of insurrection is to know how

to 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 this

paper contrast starkly with those that characterised

the post-war discipline of geography (in its Western

hegemonic forms). While it has now been revealed

that geography was complicit in post-war imperialism

and Cold War geopolitics in myriad ways, the disci-

pline presented itself as a rational, peaceful enterprise

geared to finding and restoring spatial order, truth

and 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 the

critical imperative to treat knowledge – about ‘the

tropics’, for example – not as having an ‘essence’ or

‘universal structure’ but ‘as always the historical and

circumstantial result of conditions outside the domain

of knowledge’ (2002, 13). As Parenti (2011) relates,

the practices and dynamics we have reviewed had

lasting effects on both the tropical world and Westernunderstandings of war and counter-insurgency. It is

hoped that the idea of militant tropicality facilitates

the attempt to historicise and analyse this legacy.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to audiences in Belfast and London

(the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2007), to Gavin

Bowd, Lincoln Cushing, Steve Legg, David Living-

stone and Carol Medlicott, and to Alison Blunt and

the 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 me

to rummage through his remarkable collection of

post-war radical literature.

Notes

1 There is also growing interest in its recent inflections in

international development and securitisation discourses,

and biodiversity conflicts.

2 Geographers’ interest in post-war tropicality dwells

chiefly on its entanglement with the disciplinary nichesof tropical geography and development geography (see

Bowd and Clayton 2005; Power and Sidaway 2004).

3 The paper skirts around the African tropics (see Gibson

1972). By ‘the West’, I mean, for this period, chiefly the

countries 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 one

of the referees for pointing this out).

5 Nor do I preclude Westerners from contributing to this

framework (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 guerrilla

wars 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 translations

from French.

9 For instance, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The jungle

deploys 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, and visit the OSPAAAL website (http://www.ospaaal.com/)




(Accessed 12 December 2009) to see the myriad ways it

was adapted. On how Cuban poster art departed from

both the pre-revolutionary bourgeois-consumerism and

post-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 this

diversionary process, see Cook et al. (2004).

13 Hecht (2009) begins to reconstruct a different Iberian

tradition of tropicality.

14 Attempts by the Red Army Faction in Germany and the

Weathermen in the US to model urban guerrilla warfare

on rural–tropical–guerrilla insurgency had run their

course by the mid-1970s.

15 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987, 384) locate

their pure space of nomadology (the emergent proper-

ties of social transformation embedded in spatial prac-

tices, like guerrilla warfare, that counter state

calibrations) 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, the

American 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 dispensed

from planes, helicopters and riverboats, destroying 6 mil-

lion acres by the end of the war. Between 1965 and 1975

over 1 million Vietnamese people, and over 50 000

Americans, lost their lives in the war (Appy 2003).

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192 Daniel Clayton



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