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 PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ARAB CINEMA
Series Editors: Samirah Alkassim and Nezar Andary

ARAB FILM
AND VIDEO
MANIFESTOS
Forty-Five Years of the
Moving Image Amid
Revolution

Kay Dickinson
 Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema

Series Editors
Samirah Alkassim
The Jerusalem Fund for Education
& Community Development
Washington, DC, USA

Nezar Andary
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Zayed University
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
This series presents new perspectives and intimate analyses of Arab cinema.
Providing distinct and unique scholarship, books in the series focus on
well-known and new auteurs, historical and contemporary movements,
specific films, and significant moments in Arab and North African film his-
tory and cultures. The use of multi-disciplinary and documentary meth-
ods creates an intimate contact with the diverse cultures and cinematic
modes and genres of the Arab world. Primary documents and new inter-
views with directors and film professionals form a significant part of this
series, which views filmmakers as intellectuals in their respective historical,
geographic, and cultural contexts. Combining rigorous analysis with
material documents and visual evidence, the authors address pertinent
issues linking film texts to film studies and other disciplines. In tandem,
this series will connect specific books to online access to films and digital
material, providing future researchers and students with a hub to explore
filmmakers, genres, and subjects in Arab cinema in greater depth, and
provoking readers to see new frames of transnational cultures and
cinemas.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15594
 Kay Dickinson

Arab Film and Video

Manifestos
Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid
Revolution
Kay Dickinson
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Concordia University
Montreal, QC, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema

ISBN 978-3-319-99800-8    ISBN 978-3-319-99801-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99801-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018960350

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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 Acknowledgements

The authors of the five manifestos collected in this book all recognize
“their” writings as profoundly communal endeavours. The words around
these manifestos derive, similarly, from collective effort, only a fraction of
which can be attributed by name. Gary Crowdus, Yasmin Desouki, Alisa
Lebow, Scott Mackenzie, Khalil Maqdisi, Kamran Rastegar, Philip Rizk,
Stefan Tarnowski, Nadia Yaqub and Mohanad Yaqubi variously shared pri-
mary documents, helped with permissions, pointed out pertinent direc-
tions and sharpened the arguments and analyses. I could not have hoped
for more able and politically committed translation collaborators than
Samiha Khalil and Fadi Abu Ne’meh. For their patience, support and
guidance, thanks to this book’s series editors, Samirah Alkassim and Nezar
Andary, as well as Glenn Ramirez and Shaun Vigil at Palgrave. My heart-
felt gratitude extends to everyone at SPi Global who contributed to the
copy-editing, type-setting and production of this book.
Chapter 1’s ideas about the manifesto form were test run at the
Populism: Seminar in Media and Political Theory at Concordia University
and the Konstanz Feminist Forum. My appreciation extends to everyone
who participated, offered insightful feedback and gamely chanted slogans
or speed-wrote manifestos there.
I would not wish the completion of a book in little more than six
months on anyone, and yet, in no small way, I did. I am immeasurably
obliged to Rosalie Amanda Alston, Luca Caminati, Christine Dickinson,
Lee Grieveson, Sima Kokotović and Masha Salazkina for reading this man-
uscript at break-neck speed so I could meet my deadline. I hope I have

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

honoured their insightful suggestions. I do not know what I would have

done without them, in this respect and many others.
Lastly, this book comes from and is dedicated to the “Arab Revolutions”
MA Film Studies class at Concordia University, past, present and future.
We conduct this praxis together, you always more boldly and imaginatively
than me.
The following manifestos are reprinted here with permission from pre-
vious publishers:
“Resolution of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting Algiers,” Dec.
5–14 (1973). Cineaste Pamphlet No. 1 (1974).
Mosireen. “Revolution Triptych.” In Uncommon Grounds: New Media
and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, edited by
Anthony Downey, 47–52. London: I.B.Tauris, 2014. I also thank
Mosireen directly for their permission.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) made the
political choice not to copyright “The Cinema and the Revolution.” I am
nevertheless very grateful to everyone at PFLP English for their assistance
and solidarity.
 Praise for Arab Film and Video Manifestos

“Making clear the connections between pan-Arabism, tricontinentalism, the Non-

Aligned Movement, and anti-imperialist struggles of the region, these five mani-
festos help us understand the longue durée of radical cinema movements in the
Middle East and their global interpenetrations. For those of us who consider our-
selves students of radical and militant cinema, this collection of previously unpub-
lished manifestos from the Arab world is like encountering a mythical beast: we
had heard of their existence but few of us had ever seen them. This book is both
resource and inspiration and Dickinson’s well-researched and beautifully written
essays help to contextualise these precious documents. A timely publication for our
troubled times.”
—Alisa Lebow, author of Filming Revolution

vii
 Contents

1 Why the Manifesto?  1

Manifest History, Manifesto History   4
Style as Substance   7
The Time Is More Than Now  11
Mobilizing an “Us”  15
What Next?  19
Further Reading Suggestions  21

2 The Naksa’s New Cinema: New Cinema Group, “Manifesto

of New Cinema in Egypt” (1968) 23
Film and Social Change in Egypt  25
Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt  27
Learning from and During the Naksa  33
Film Culture: Global and Local  41
Further Reading Suggestions  46
Further Viewing Suggestions  47

3 Cinematic Third Worldism: “Resolutions of the Third

World Filmmakers Meeting” (Algeria 1973) 49
The Spirit of Bandung  52
Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algeria
1973)  57
Algeria, from Colonization to Non-Alignment  68
Algeria’s Revolutionary Film Culture  71

ix
x Contents

After the Third World Filmmakers Meeting  78

Further Reading Suggestions  79
Further Viewing Suggestions  80

4 Cinema Within Armed Struggle: “Manifesto of the

Palestinian Cinema Group” (1972) and Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, “The Cinema and the
Revolution” 81
Guerrilla Warfare, Guerrilla Cinema  85
The Film Units Unify  89
Manifesto of the Palestinian Cinema Group (1972)  92
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine  94
The Cinema and the Revolution  95
The Two Manifestos Side by Side and in Context  97
Further Reading Suggestions 105
Further Viewing Suggestions 106

5 “The Images are the Revolution’s”: Mosireen, “Revolution

Triptych” (2013)107
Why Revolution? 110
The Media Amidst Revolution 113
Revolution Triptych 118
Representation, Participation, Preservation 123
Further Reading Suggestions 130
Further Viewing Suggestions 131

References133

Index143
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 The Sparrow: Bahiyya and Johnny watch Nasser’s resignation
speech36
Fig. 3.1 The Pan-African Festival of Algiers: Performers and audience
unite in dance 75
Fig. 4.1 The Palestine Film Unit 90
Fig. 4.2 They Do Not Exist: Guerrilla fighters read letters from the
refugee camps 102
Fig. 5.1 Why Riot?: Molotov cocktails are distributed 128

xi
 List of Boxes

The Sparrow (Youssef Chahine, 1972) 36

The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (William Klein, 1969) 74
They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974) 101
Why Riot? (Mosireen, 2013) 127

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Why the Manifesto?

Abstract This chapter explores how the manifesto form aims not to inter-
pret the world, but to change it. It investigates how the manifesto became
a popular format in the Arab world, one with particular commitment to
anti-colonial liberation. The rousing stylistic potential of the manifesto
genre receives attention, as does the group authorship of the five docu-
ments collected within the subsequent chapters. These manifestos inter-
weave different temporal registers in order to challenge a debilitating
conceptualization of history. They also invoke a sense of “the people” so
vital for collective struggle. By presenting highly practical suggestions,
these manifestos suggest how that struggle might be enacted and what
sorts of brighter futures they can bring into being.

Keywords Manifesto • Revolution • Arab historiography • “The people”

• Communal writing

What can writing about the moving image accomplish? The five film and
video manifestos compiled in this volume hold high hopes for the answer
to that question, as well as for the moving image’s own capacity to foment
profound change. Not for the manifesto the small-scale modesty or nar-
rowly evaluative focus familiar from academic or critical expression. These
documents ask: what can film do for society? And vice versa? Although they

© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestos,
Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99801-5_1
2 K. DICKINSON

span a forty-five-year period (1968–2013) and hail from a range of different

places (Egypt, international gatherings in Algeria, Palestine in exile), each
urges, and puts faith in, a radical role for film or video’s role in culture and
politics. Their authors hitch their ambitions to a particular genre of writing
that they deem laden with possibility. To fully grasp the promise they find in
it, this introductory chapter examines the capacities of the manifesto form
itself, its ways and means, as well as its particular status in the Arab world.
First and foremost, a manifesto is a public declaration of intentions.
The five upcoming documents decline to cower in reticently analytical
registers because they have serious political work to accomplish. They
compel us to see things as they are and as they should be, to convert, to
act and, in the particular examples selected for this anthology, to join the
revolution, through cinema and all other ways. They are nourished by a
deep rooting in the political openings of their times and in their discern-
ment of the transformative facilities of mass culture. Their writers stand up
as committed militants in the wars against colonization, trade inequality
and social injustice. They challenge the unjust means by which moving
images circulate as commodities, and the confining pronouncements and
misrepresentations in which they transact. They pull us straight to the
heart of how film workers themselves understand the medium; its tradi-
tions, processes, practices and industries; its methods of communication
and dissemination.
In reaching further than most writing about cinema, they surpass
criticality for revolutionary intention. They do not stop short at emphat-
ically pronouncing what is wrong. In almost the same breath, they com-
pel practical means for change and concrete plans for acting otherwise.
Their avowed participation in broader politics stimulates their concoc-
tion of correctives and solutions, dreams and perfect scenarios, simulta-
neous to their onslaught against oppression. As a genre, the manifesto
denounces past mistakes and tragedies, fidgets uneasily and impatiently
in an inadequate present and dares to project an unambiguous, tangible,
preferable future. These five manifestos help formulate alternative social
imaginaries of which a new horizon for cinema is merely one feature.
Film workers here decisively articulate what they want from and for their
medium; its capacity as a weapon in the struggle for freedom; how, in
the immediate, it can function otherwise; and its place when that free-
dom is attained. Rarely is writing about cinema so dedicated to reform.
Rarely does it call on us so unequivocally to join collective forces to
demand what is due us all.
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 3

Doing justice to the manifesto’s reach into the future, this book advo-
cates for something more than appreciating writings from the past as a
window into bygone days. For certain, these five manifestos unlock,
through their direct participation, valuable insights into broader liberation
movements, from pan-Arabism and Third Worldism to the Palestinian
struggle and the so-called Arab Spring. Yet the very circumstances prompt-
ing these mobilizations, the injustices they remonstrate, largely persist.
This being the case, these manifestos remain vibrantly pertinent in their
proposals about everything from decolonization and governmental
oppression to the nuts and bolts of financing, distribution, audience acti-
vation, intellectual property and the social purpose of the filmmaker. The
futures they model still have much to offer and hence the drive to bring
them new readers.
Their infectious fighting spirit rouses us to explore the potential writing
itself can activate. If manifestos contribute to more ambitious political
mobilization, can historical analysis (of them) too? From within the dis-
courses of revolutionary Arab historiography, the response to this ques-
tion would be a resounding “yes.” As just one proponent of such activity,
the Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui, coming to the fore as part of
the national liberation efforts of the 1960s, latches onto the past’s “insta-
bility, that constant changing of historical perspective,” the same restless-
ness familiar from the manifesto (Laroui 1970: 66). Laroui refuses to
conceive of history as finished or as a static picture. For him, this interpre-
tation colludes with the pinioning objectives of imperialism, its ambition
to detain the Arab world in a stagnancy that is altogether easier to dismiss
and control (see, for instance, Laroui 1970: 131, 136, 166–168). Instead,
historiographers of his ilk throw themselves into history’s dynamism, par-
ticularly the forces that pit themselves against foreign domination (also a
primary aggressor for our five manifestos). Another scholar, Youssef
M. Choueiri, summarizes Laroui’s approach as one that “unleashes [his-
tory] into the turbulent passage of becoming. Its qualities are constantly
changing in the whirlwind of conquests, invasions, and uprisings”
(Choueiri 2003: 193). History simultaneously reveals, informs, reinforces
and enacts struggle as it takes shape and transmogrifies. Through history,
through its manifestos and fuelled by their vitality, entreaties from the past
can open us to liberation as active participants within that history and
what lies ahead of it.
Accordingly, this introduction first gauges how the manifesto became a
popular format in the Arab world and assesses how these specificities of
4 K. DICKINSON

regional history might energize the present and future. The chapter then
spends time within what the manifesto’s style of writing can induce, the
potential surging-out of the form itself. Further in, the temporalities that
the manifesto draws together are assessed: its interrelationship of past,
present and future. Amidst all this, how does the manifesto fashion an
“us” so vital for collective struggle? How does it speak out to but also cre-
ate publics against and through which to achieve its objectives? All five
manifestos compiled here were written communally. They thus fundamen-
tally challenge individualistic expression in favour of speaking collectively
about how an expansive implied “we” should act. Lastly, the closing sec-
tion involves itself in how manifestos present their objectives as achievable
through highly practical suggestions. They do so by encouraging at the
same time as embodying filmmaking and writing praxis (the integration of
theory and practice). In so doing, they fold their own activities into their
desired templates for social, cultural, political and economic life. This
introduction suspends the urge to discuss the role particular movies have
played in these activities in order to dedicate its energies to the much less
studied capabilities of the manifesto itself. As each primary document is
introduced in the subsequent chapters, case study films will be drawn in so
that cinematic output can be recognized as, of course, a central contribu-
tor to these manifestos’ revolutionary milieux.

Manifest History, Manifesto History

The Arab world is a place where manifestos have gained strong purchase
historically. Indeed, a number of popular accounts of the ancestry of the
manifesto cite the Baghdad Manifesto of 1011 as the genre’s genesis
point. In reality, this text is more of an edict: the Abbasid caliphate declaim-
ing the divine ascendancy of the Fatimid dynasty. All the same, tracing the
manifesto’s lineage from this point encourages an acknowledgement of
the genre’s sustained and efficacious presence across this part of the world.
Manifestos, as will become apparent, have proven themselves a central
component of political operations in the region.
From the outset, we have to concede that “manifesto” is not an Arabic
word. We find an opening here, rather than a closure. What, in English
(and other languages), we would ascribe to the manifesto is work typically
done in the region by the term bayan, whose semantics are more capacious
and enabling. Bayan means not just manifesto but also declaration, state-
ment, communiqué and even inventory. This constellation insinuates and
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 5

formally encourages the listing of objectives that these types of documents

embrace. Like so many Arabic words, bayan derives from a three-­letter
verbal root that proliferates an array of associated connotations. In this
case, the root is b-y-n, a designation from whose kernel spring a number of
other related connotations: to be evident, totally separate, make clear (form
2 of the verb, for Arabic speakers), to set forth, and discriminate (form 3),
as well as further nouns implying rhetoric and eloquence. All these sibling
meanings stoke manifestos’ clarity, flourish and demarcation of severance as
they spiral outwards from its Arabic iterations. They offer expanded possi-
bilities for the genre as a tool of revolution, cinematic and beyond.
Etymology here cultivates various qualities that become exceedingly advan-
tageous to the formulation of political gesture. Pronouncement binds with
itemized stipulation and ideals with concrete backing.
It is no wonder, then, that recent Arab history is awash with manifestos,
from Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book of 1975—part political agenda, part
jumble of aphorisms, an everyday presence in media and education during
its author’s dictatorship—to Hezbollah’s of 2009. Practically every political
presence in the region has entered public discourse via this format and a not
infrequent number mention the media. The Constitution of the Ba‘ath
Party of 1947, at that point a manifesto, but latterly a founding discourse
of governance, even explicitly petitions for media usage “which will be
nationalist, Arab, free, progressive, comprehensive, profound, and humane
in its goals” and thereby “improve the lot of the people” (“The Constitution
of the Arab Resurrection. (Ba‘ath) Socialist Party of Syria,” 1959: 199,
200). Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, also
drew film into his public declarations. His 1947 open letter statement,
“Toward the Light,” for instance, encompasses a call for “The surveillance
of theatres and cinemas, and a rigorous selection of plays and films” into a
thirty-point list of what needs to be done regarding “the social and educa-
tional” (Al-Banna 1978: 127). Here we stray far from the beliefs of the five
manifestos compiled in this volume, their writers often in direct confronta-
tion with these parties and figures. The aim of citing them is to underscore
the concentration and diversity of manifestos, not their similarities.
Yet, all these declarations, and many more, stem from the particular
shape of modern Arab history, one that confirms Laroui’s insistence on
immanence and struggle. This is not a region marked by slow, plodding
democratic evolution. Instead, it has been wrought by imperialism and
other despotisms, where revolutions are conjured in the mind, on paper,
then enacted. Sometimes the manifesto even converts to doctrine via
6 K. DICKINSON

successful ascendance to power, as has been the case in Syria. However

precarious or risky, these situations-in-waiting propagate a common peo-
ple and a common ground into and for which rebellious proclamations
can be dispatched. The planning of revolutionary action is well rehearsed
in the Arab world and finds its iterations in the realms of filmmaking too,
as well as the arts more generally (for a fuller account of the Arab literary
manifestos, see Halim 1991; for the arts movements of the mid-twentieth
century, LaCoss 2009–2010 and 2010; and for primary visual arts docu-
ments, including manifestos, Lenssen et al. 2018).
Once in power, many of the region’s regimes have then followed pro-
grammatic, statist inscriptions for the future: the sort of long-term projec-
tions that a stable government (often through refusal of meaningful
elections) can envision without more democratic negotiations, blockages
and compromises. These plans are regularly delivered in manifesto-like
forms that reiterate incipient declarations. An example here would be
President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt’s National Charter, which pro-
posed constitutional, political, social and economic reforms that soon fol-
lowed on from its publication in 1964. Throughout the mid-twentieth
century, centralized planning reigned with the governments of Egypt
(under Nasser), Algeria and Syria, redistributing agricultural land and
reforming education, healthcare and labour according to scientific socialist
principles. Even regimes much further to the right, such as those in the
Gulf, have coordinated life from the top down (although certainly not
through manifestos), with the state insisting itself as the primary organizer
of public life. From all corners, the development, progress and good of the
citizen have thereby been sculpted according to a staged rolling-out of a
calculated and calculable future. This understanding of time overlaps in
many ways with how temporality is characterized in the manifesto’s sense
of practical change. When the film and video manifestos to come rise up
against these political formations, they pointedly do so by way of a format
that is common to both sides. Some manifestos explicitly affiliate with
political organizations (as is the case for one of the Palestinian documents
found in Chap. 4), and here they can work to propagate party programmes
across the cinematic realm.
Indeed, the post-independence regimes of the mid-twentieth century
significantly impacted cinema, including through nationalization of its
industries in countries like Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Egypt. Further details of
this process will be elaborated in subsequent chapters. These circumscrip-
tions of cinema in some of the major film-producing countries of the region
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 7

reveal not only how the moving image regularly supposed itself to be a
direct tool of the people but also how close filmmakers and their output
have resided to the forces of anti-colonial national liberation. By the same
token, the lull in manifesto writing witnessed from the 1980s to the 2000s
tellingly occurs in parallel to a wholesale onslaught by supranational orga-
nizations like the International Monetary Fund (through their Structural
Adjustment Programs) and the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), to whom countries such as Egypt are hamstrung
for disbursements. Both enforced similarly top-down privatization and
deregulation that fractured civic cohesion and socialist planning, the alto-
gether more fecund environment for manifesto writing. Making “unrea-
sonable” demands sits low on the list of attributes encouraged by such
neoliberal ideology. It should not go unregistered, though, that broader
civil society movements, such as the “Damascus Spring” of 2000, were
spearheaded by the intelligentsia. The Damascus Spring’s two public proc-
lamations (bayan in name)—the “Statement of 99” and “The Statement of
2,000”—demanded legislative, electoral, political, gender and freedom of
speech reform along with the rescinding of emergency law of then newly in
power Bashar al-Assad. Both documents were signed by a roster of the
country’s most eminent (and heretofore state-sponsored) filmmakers.
Taking stock of this period, if the twentieth century was anyway a time
when artists the world over issued manifestos, the Arab countries’ histori-
cal parameters provided the scope for film manifestos to hammer up some
particularly political demands. These have been guided, as each chapter
will reveal, by liberation movements of often a socialist, anti-capitalist,
anti-colonial, anti-autocratic Third Worldist and/or pan-Arab persuasion.
The sorts of film movements to which they contribute—such as militant
or Third Cinema—comprehensively conscribe filmmaking as committed
revolutionary action. The propulsions of the unfinished national libera-
tion, internationalist and Global Southern solidarity struggles to which
they dedicate their efforts prevail. These manifestos can therefore con-
tinue to spur change through their especially compelling propositions.

Style as Substance
But how, precisely, are such messages, which leap into an incalculable
public space but with lucid projections for its future, delivered? What are
the particular tonalities and contours that distinguish and impel the mani-
festo format? As this section will elaborate, the very means by which the
8 K. DICKINSON

manifesto communicates seeks to call its demands into being. The art of
writing (and the filmmaking it imagines) is imbued with and imbue actual
aspirations for the grander scheme of life.
The manifesto issues both proclamatory and directive messages written
coherently for public digestion. From Mosireen, whose “Revolution
Triptych” appears in Chap. 5, we hear:

we too must take over the decrepit world of image creation.

The images are not ours, the images are the revolution’s.
How dare we trade in images of resistance to a system that we would feed
by selling them?
How dare we perpetuate the cycle of private property in a battle that calls for
the downfall of that very system?
How dare we profit from the mangled bodies, the cries of death of mothers
who lost their children?

The manifesto’s daring, provocative claims arrive with urgency, even exu-
berance, as well as ultimatum. Assumptions are contested, a move that
alienates the reader from a comfortable status quo and hastens them
towards the horizon of the manifesto’s demands. With this first gesture,
the manifesto categorically establishes what is wrong (an accusatory voice
can prevail). Then typically follows what needs to be done, why and for
whom. A later section of this chapter traces how this “us” unfurls beyond
simply its authors to a greater sense of the people, the dimensions of whom
vary from text to text.
Clarity stands as one of the manifesto’s abiding and imperative charac-
teristics. A manifesto gets nowhere if it obfuscates its aims or what we are
compelled to do, if it does not speak intelligibly to its intended audience.
Lists, bullet points and ultimata feature regularly, while brevity and direct-
ness guide us to endpoints at greater speed. Delivery might be reiterative
to drive home certain points, and replication of format itself becomes stra-
tegic. As Janet Lyon, a scholar of manifestos, illuminates:

the repetition of these structures and locutions across myriad political

epochs attests to the form’s capacity to serve as a multiaccentual ideological
sign, one that can be evoked in any number of struggles, on any number of
sides. Such ‘multiaccentuality’ contributes to the manifesto’s continued use
as an emblem of political combat: to write a manifesto is to participate sym-
bolically in a history of struggle against dominant forces; it is to link one’s
voice to the countless voices of previous revolutionary conflicts. (Lyon
1999: 3–4)
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 9

Repetition, then, serves not only the emphatic compulsions of any given
manifesto but also the quest to find inspiration and solidarity from kindred
prior efforts. All the while, it avails itself of the received implications built
up by the genre over time.
Concurrently, the manifesto is captivated by hybridity of expression,
drawing on the best from multiple modes and engrossing them in genera-
tive conversation. Analysis and prognosis synthesize, biting criticism meets
utopia, straightforward expression locks with the imagination. The mani-
festo’s encompassing nature is laden with possibilities that its writers hope
will bear political fruit. The goal is more than co-existence: the manifesto
is cognizant of how each mode of communication will be driven by the
other, or how any given reader could be attracted by one mode yet will
need to reckon with another. Dialectically, the interchange of outwardly
different types of address can dissolve the boundaries ascribed to each,
repudiate limitations and instead draw on the multiplying outcomes of
their meeting to propel social change. Combined counterforces mirror the
prerequisites of a revolution too: frenetic urgency and forceful motion
advance what is achieved by poised calm, sage judgement and readying for
the steps ahead, and vice versa. In these respects, manifesto form produces
and reproduces the necessary actions.
Furthermore, the manifesto often knowingly assumes and tempers the
artist’s role within revolution at the level of style. What culture can offer
rings forth from flourishes atypical to other political writing, while also
conforming to rational argumentation and practical itemization.
Manifestos refuse any hierarchy that would divorce plain speech from
flights of fancy. For Scott MacKenzie, the compiler of Film Manifestos and
Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, these documents con-
sciously foreground:

the dialectical relationship between questions of aesthetic form and political

discourse, raising salient questions about how cinematic form is in and of
itself a form of political action and intervention in the public sphere. Indeed,
one of the defining characteristics of film manifestos could be understood by
the maxim “aesthetics as action.” (MacKenzie 2014: 16)

Through such manoeuvres, any eye-catching elements do not merely

serve as indulgent adornment; they seek to forthrightly claim design as a
political agent. Moreover, style refuses to be sequestered to the arsenals
only of artists, but instead asserts its ubiquity and efficacy within the
10 K. DICKINSON

machinations of revolution in its totality. Never shy of emotional turns, for

instance, the manifesto knows full well that hope and change demand
desire and will, often best sparked by appeals to the heart and the imagina-
tion that are then anchored in reason. When manifestos seem to over-
reach, they consequently prod us, in the name of change and aspiration, to
question the confines we place around the possible or the logical. The
sorts of confidently creative gestures they make stand their ground as a
necessary component of revolutionary ethos. We need to both think and
act beyond our current constraints.
Accordingly, manifestos not only lay out principles, they also seek, through
their very means of expression—its conviction as carried by both enthusiasm
and clear-sightedness—to conjure them. What is not in place already is
strongly called forth, envisioned in detail, through comprehensive descrip-
tion of what needs to be done and what those ends would be. All such work
is projection. Martin Puchner, in the shrewd analyses of the formal structures
of manifestos and their capabilities he proffers in his book, Poetry of the
Revolution, identifies two stylistic turns that aid this conveyance from present
to future. They are theatricality and performativity (Puchner 2005: 5).
Allusions to theatre carry the swagger highlighted a moment ago, but
they also help set a scene and flesh out a proposed scenario. Following
Puchner’s suggestion, the manifesto’s theatricality involves casting: an
enemy and new types of protagonists to date underrepresented, most likely
the people or the multitude. Theatre gives us both fiction and liveness
(another generative dialectic), just as writing of the revolution is not quite
revolution itself, but certainly does not stand aloof from it. Performativity
and theatricality also allude to the activities of rehearsal. Jean Genet, in
Prisoner of Love, his account of time spent amongst the Palestinian freedom
fighters, frames this eloquently when he observes how, “Even when they’re
serious, revolutionaries are only playing, hatching schemes to be worked
out properly later. It’s all a question of style” (Genet 2003: 258). Style he
deems integral, as the manifesto form also believes, to experimenting with
and trialling alternative futures. Such games are at once the crucible for
revolution and an insistence on the fundamental right to incorporate artful
expressiveness and inventiveness in (planning) post-struggle life. Manifesto
writing and the film cultures they plot absorb themselves fully in the pro-
cesses and embodiments of revolution, both now and to come. At the level
of delivery style, therefore, the manifesto stages leaps across periods of
time. Temporal shifts bind frustrating past, the intolerable present and the
wishful future, no mean feat in such a succinct format. It is to this concern
for time that the current chapter turns.
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 11

The Time Is More Than Now

As well as being of the times, the manifesto is, itself, a genre of time.
Manifestos deserve, indeed need, to be read historically, but with a par-
ticular eye to how they emphatically aim to intervene in that very history.
Frequently presented as “history-in-the-making,” some of the most suc-
cessful ones achieve this in comprehensive terms. In part, their loud asser-
tiveness about the schism they impel establishes this sensibility. Chapter 2’s
“Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt,” for example, leans heavily on a
developmental conception of history to rationalize its proposals. It attacks
Egypt’s film industry as one “that now lags behind on all fronts,” that
clings to “unvarying artistic forms that have now become outdated, even
laughable.” The manifesto’s authors then campaign for an alternative that
“digs deep into the commotion of Egyptian society, breaks down new
relations, and reveals the meaning of life for individuals amidst them.”
Manifestos often marshal history in these ways to produce a step-by-step
lineage intended to assure the reader of the validity, necessity and feasibil-
ity of their present and future.
The Communist Manifesto (which Puchner labels “credo plus history”)
serves as a textbook exemplar of such manoeuvres, as well as inspiration
for how to approach the documents compiled in this anthology in a rela-
tional fashion (Puchner 2005: 21). Attentive to and summoning revolu-
tion, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels assert that history itself is revolution:
no mere plodding progression, but the dialectical tumult whose very
momentum drives us to that event. Elsewhere, in The German Ideology,
Marx and Engels categorize history as “a sum of productive forces…
handed down to each generation from its predecessor,” batting us this way
and that towards the aspirations and premonitions of revolutionary strug-
gle (Marx and Engels 2004: 59). For the purposes of the current volume,
such an approach stresses how manifestos accrete momentum across time
and space, running into each other too, fuelled by and fuelling the driving
energies of history(making).
This dynamism replenishes when encountering the Arab world’s histo-
riography and the omnipresent legacy of colonial and neocolonial vio-
lence. Here the appreciation of how social, economic, natural and political
forces shape history is long seated. Belief in these determinations colours
the manifesto’s sense of where to lay blame and what to attack, as well as
its own historical agency. These now-everyday principles were laid down
by Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Tunisian thinker and rightful
12 K. DICKINSON

progenitor of established historical method. Several hundred years ago,

Ibn Khaldun warned the historian, in the very opening passages of his
foundational tome, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, that:

If he trusts historical information in its plain transmitted form and has no

clear knowledge of the principles resulting from custom, the fundamental
facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the conditions governing
human social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate remote
or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary mate-
rial, he often cannot avoid stumbling and slipping and deviating. (Ibn
Khaldun 1967: 11)

Of note here is the inevitable interweave of present and past. Scholarship

ignites from the forces of conjunction.
Likewise, the resonance of the Middle East’s nahda (meaning: renais-
sance) movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can also
be sensed and harnessed. In direct response to European colonization,
nahda thinkers (Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi and Rashid
Rida, to name three) drew on glorious or purer local pasts through which
to combat an imperial present. In various ways, these writers established a
through-line between what the Arab world had once been and how it
might regain such status. The palpability of future freedom, the mainstay of
any manifesto, courses with vigour through nahda studies and treatises.
And the past is far from dead. In fact, by circling back through it, the nahda
gainsays how imperial history presumes its own course as “progress.”
Moving into the period in which this anthology’s manifestos were writ-
ten, Laroui, as noted and as a Marxist, also stresses how history’s vitality
cannot be quarantined or pronounced finished (see Laroui 1970: 157–8,
164). The past rejects a status of self-contained unit simply there for the
studying. Moreover, Laroui then explicitly critiques how any such rendition
of a solid, completed past emboldens the colonizer to feel knowledgeable
and masterful over it. These colonial attitudes potently enable sensibilities
that justify domination (see, for example, Laroui 1970: 67–8). Fortified by
specific reference to the region’s history and history-writing, he avers that:

The language, the imagery, the mental structure, which has guided the
mind towards a dialectical apprehension of itself are by no means unknown
in our cultural past; we simply need to reactivate it in the light of our present
experience. (Laroui 1970: 163)
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 13

Laroui here affirms the insistent presence of the future in the past and
present, a proposition integral to the manifesto form, as well as to our
engagement with it. He actively undermines history-writing that traffics in
“development,” most particularly in how it nourishes implications of
“backwardness” or “underdevelopment,” which function as imperialist
tools for portraying certain regions as somehow inferior and therefore ripe
for intervention.
These accusations meet their counterparts in Afrofuturism, an enthrall-
ing intertwining of science fiction and Afrocentrism that can become a
ready comrade for the Arab manifesto. Afrofuturism exposes with a keen
clarity that what has been framed as “modernity” is fundamentally pre-
mised on the violent exploitations wrought by slavery and colonization.
Those subjected to these actions, Afrofuturism argues, were the first mod-
erns, who have been wrongly condemned to modernity’s peripheries,
including through the priorities of history-writing (see Eshun 2003: 297
for a strong summary of this argument). In the words of the “Resolutions
of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting,” the subject of Chap. 3, these
biased historical accounts “justify the definite paternity of European civili-
zation, sublimated and presented as being eternally superior to other civi-
lizations.” Kodwo Eshun discerns the reinvigoration of this prejudice in
current financial “futures” markets and other such invasions into the
Majority World’s destiny. In Afrofuturism, he identifies (as Laroui might
of Arab historiography) a necessarily contradictive recasting of history that
reviles the whitewashing of struggle and agency. In tandem this can enlist
the future as it seeks out “the possibilities for intervention within the
dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned,
the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional” (Eshun 2003:
293). The film and video manifestos of this anthology resonate as exam-
ples of such operations. As was abundantly obvious to nahda thinkers, the
future should be sullied not by biased, stagnating and deterministic histo-
ries, nor by a vanquished present when a vigorous, realizable way ahead is
at hand. The fact of the manifesto’s clear directives forces this point, tak-
ing ownership of how planning for the future, anticipating it and spotting
its possibilities, is, after all, part of the texture of any present.
Concurrently, the manifesto’s rhetorical efforts include a simultaneous
distancing from the present. The manifesto acts thus to stimulate the leap
into the imagined future for which it fidgets and which it pictures with
such luminosity. Here it concocts a dialectic between now and a projected
to-come. Although the manifesto resides more in the former (for the
14 K. DICKINSON

moment), it uses all the tools available from both to build for an actual
revolutionary future. Through our acquiescence to their analyses of the
past and present, they lead us with more assurance to manifestos prognos-
tications. Immediacy of style and forthrightness help forge these pathways.
So too the efforts the manifesto puts into crafting a demonstrable rupture
that evidences the shortcomings of now. All of the upcoming manifestos
complain bitterly about present conditions, exposing the politically mate-
rial impositions that have sustained the status quo. They then offer a dif-
ferent means of proceeding and being. Their alternatives, ironically, come
from the present and past (how could they not?) and, by these means,
serve at least a dual purpose. They rally the conscious dissatisfaction
required for greater mobilization and then exemplify, through radical
divergence, a schema for the present’s substitution. The objective is to
revitalize while and through dismissing and refusing the current situation.
Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work pithily summarizes that “it is the
combination of estrangement and provocation, critique and vision, nega-
tion and affirmation that packs the punch” (Weeks 2011: 208). The con-
ceptual schism concocted by these interplays implores us that now is the
time to act. When the break is conceived with successful vim, we are,
indeed, left with no option but this.
The past and present are thereby ripe with incipient potential at the
same time as they are intolerable. By the same token, the envisioned future
must be inviting enough for us to take its lead. None of these temporalities
are arrested, all proffer the means to suppose an otherwise, which the
manifesto catalyses as best it can for upcoming change. While it is com-
mon to dwell largely on the immediacy the manifesto insists, and necessar-
ily so for its injunctions that we are at some “point of no return,” its sense
of history is crucial. Concentrating on the manifesto’s play of temporali-
ties opens us out to one of its most enticing attributes: that it is a particu-
larly revolutionary form of history-writing, the type that bears real
use-value for an ameliorated future. We would do well to ride this dyna-
mism into how we read the five assembled film and video manifestos, doc-
uments that all now come “from the past.” Change, manifestos emphasize,
derives from past legacies, current circumstances and how both drawing
on and contravening them forge a future. So far, both content and style
have proven central to these gambits. Yet their efficacy only runs as far as
they serve socio-political circumstances. It is to this context—this people,
ultimately—that the manifesto is obliged. Who is the “us” for and with
whom the manifesto throws itself onto the barricades?
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 15

Mobilizing an “Us”
The parameters of any “us,” we will notice, stretch or contract for each
separate manifesto. Some refer more closely to a filmmaking community
and others to citizenry at large. Nonetheless, every one, through the man-
ifesto’s generic insistences, calls upon a grouping larger than merely the
authors. As extrapolated above, a manifesto aims to galvanize, to speak to
an assembly that it also helps forge. More generally, a revolution rides on
such expectancies and projections of a collective. The common chant of
the revolutions commencing in the region in 2011, to pick just one exam-
ple, began “al-sh‘ab yureed”—“the people want/demand.” By joining in
this unanimous shout, one interpellates oneself within “the people,” mul-
titudinous and diverse though it is, united by common goals. Clearly, this
un-polled mass will have to conform, accommodate, negotiate and even
suffer manipulation when it confronts complex quandaries. Before that, as
any public musters around open declaration and participation (chant or
manifesto), it simultaneously abides by a historical notion of what “pub-
lic” can stand for in any given time or place. Guided by these somewhat
abstract sensibilities, the group are at once at odds with current inscrip-
tions of “the public” and their treatment by the powers that be. Yet they
still invest in this very perception as their means for change. Manifestos
audaciously vest themselves as a common voice of some kind. Their theat-
rical claims are tenanted through a casting process that is both inclusive
(us, the people) and antagonistic (an enemy or set of faults which we can
immediately grasp). Each has its historical coordinates, which shape the
manifesto’s invitation.
These coordinates need to be understood historically and in accordance
with the Arab world’s liberation movements and post-independence gov-
ernments. After all, these uprisings could not have succeeded without such
mechanisms of collectivity, necessary as they are to ousting or establishing
regimes. One central characteristic to note here is the extent to which the
past has been mobilized to formulate the public. In his study of Egypt,
Gatekeepers of the Arab Past, Yoav Di-Capua registers the potent enlist-
ment of partisan popular history to shore up national liberation. This has
included creating believable links between the contemporary moment and
heroes from the past who have stood up to colonial rule, through monu-
ments and street names, say, or epic government-supported films like
Saladin the Victorious (Youssef Chahine, 1962). These initiatives help nat-
uralize a historical continuity recognizable from the temporal logics of the
16 K. DICKINSON

manifesto. Even after the crushing defeat of the Arab world in the Six-Day
War of 1967 (the subject of the next chapter), historical reference surfaced
to bind the people. Mohammad Malas, the Syrian director of a number of
fiction films set in moments of struggle (such as Dreams of the City (1983)
and The Night (1992)), has highlighted how “Our desire to return to the
past through the cinema is not simply a matter of expression. It is an abso-
lute necessity if we are to stand on our feet again. We must go on despite
doubts about our future” (Mohammad Malas interviewed in Caméra
Arabe (Férid Boughedir, 1988)). These specificities of context give rise to
a sense of “the people” whose constancy and cohesion derives from his-
tory, then purposefully reasserted in popular culture and everyday life.
More particularly, within the period under consideration (1968–2013),
the nation has maintained a status as a primary apparatus of collectivity in
the Arab world. Its purchase is immediately understandable as both a mus-
cular and legible claim for sovereignty and a means of insisting unity in the
face of dispossession. It figures thus, for example, in how Chap. 4’s mani-
festos aim to unite a Palestinian people who have been forcibly dispersed
in their millions. Confronting violent and actual geopolitical fissures, con-
scriptions into a nation, including through manifestos, work to bond
­populations as they extend into quotidian politics. In everything from fic-
tion to posters and through Arabic epithets like “son of the people,” the
patently abstract assemblage that is “the nation” has been brought down
to earth. Frequently, it is depicted allegorically, often as a woman (see
Baron 2007; Di-Capua 2009: 229–30, 246–7). The encompassing loose-
ness of these everyday emblems welcomes involvement, given how they
can stand for something broad and trade in a rhetorical “we” through
ready comprehensibility that is also common to the manifesto. Like an
allegory, the manifesto, as an over-determined template, populous on the
Arab world’s political landscape, generically insinuates a long uninter-
rupted practice in which we might be able to place our trust.
Solid though these bindings are made to seem, they cast their lots in an
unknowable future. Bishnupriya Ghosh, drawing on Antonio Gramsci,
identifies such renditions of the people “as the point of anchorage, their
particularity unifying the dispersed collection of agents. Historical becom-
ing reorders the social as a ‘people to come’” (Ghosh 2011: 21). Within
this anthology’s manifestos, a (mostly revolutionary) subject is in similar
formation, thanks to a potent chemistry of the actual, the wishful and the
rhetorical. While few manifestos truly achieve the demands they issue for
the benefit of this “us” (although some have), they certainly contribute to
 WHY THE MANIFESTO? 17

the fray of other revolutionary actions by imagining, rehearsing, gathering

and consolidating. Ghosh is astute here in her recognition of how a fore-
cast transfigures the now.
It has already been established that manifestos institute differences—a
“them” or enemy—so as to rouse their readers through enmity. In many
instances (and this is fundamental to the patterning of a people), the
aggressor is constituted as disenfranchising and hostile governance, the
very entities that are supposed to be taking care of us. The relationship,
therefore, is not one of totally divorced antipathy. As Janet Lyon remarks,
the manifesto is “the genre of the broken promise” (Lyon 1999: 31). It
does its best work in an environment where some contract regarding pub-
lic provision or ethics (of whatever scale) has been forged and where a citi-
zenry, its audience, can lay claim to and challenge authority for its rights
(Lyon 1999: 34). Chapter 2’s “Manifesto of New Cinema in Egypt”
repeatedly takes its government’s inadequacies to task. In this frame, the
insistence and impatience of a manifesto measures itself against something
that is expected but has not been delivered. At the same time as its dis-
tance from governance eschews the typical channels of democracy or has
been denied them, the manifesto as a format acknowledges the possibility
of speaking to power (however dangerous, whether heard or not).
Recourse to this genre exposes how something has gone awry, but its writ-
ers’ tenacity has, meantime, insisted a recognized space for marginalized
discourse. The manifesto, then, by pointing out failings of governance,
claims its own legitimacy and upends political hierarchies, but all the while
honours, as Lyons points out, “the idea of a universal political subject”
(Lyon 1999: 3).
As is the case with the manifesto’s cunning use of temporalities, ten-
sions between inclusion and exclusion, articulation and rejection, are pro-
ductively dispatched but in languages readable by power. These moves, in
turn, problematize any relegation of the manifesto’s “us” to absolute
outsider-dom. Key to the manifesto’s approach is how it seeks to represent
in two senses of that verb: it delineates a collective, but also speaks for it.
The latter demands legible tones and a meaningful connection between
the writing-we who takes on this responsibility (or privileged claim) and
the abstract inclusive-we. A sense of this relationship is crucial to both
political efficacy and manifesto analysis, and each of the coming chapters
ponders such specificities. Even though the inclusive-we remains some-
what unknown (and usefully so for the purposes of mass mobilization),
the authors of all five of these manifestos direct their voice from a position
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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES.
 Chief Associate State Term of Years Born. Died.
Justices. Justices. Whence Service. of
Appointed. Service.
1 John Jay[117] New York 1789– 6 1745 1829
1795
John South 1789– 2 1739 1800
Rutledge[117] Carolina 1791
William Massachusetts 1789– 21 1733 1810
Cushing 1810
James Wilson Pennsylvania 1789– 9 1742 1798
1798
John Blair[117] Virginia 1789– 7 1732 1800
1796
Robert H. Maryland 1789– 1 1745 1790
Harrison[117] 1790
James Iredell North 1790– 9 1751 1799
Carolina 1799
Thomas Maryland 1791– 2 1732 1819
Johnson[117] 1793
William New Jersey 1793– 13 1745 1806
Patterson 1806

2 John South 1795– 1739 1800

Rutledge[118] Carolina 1795
Samuel Chase Maryland 1796– 15 1741 1811
1811

3 Oliver Connecticut 1796– 5 1745 1807

Ellsworth[117] 1801
Bushr’d Virginia 1798– 31 1762 1829
Washington 1829
Alfred North 1799– 5 1755 1810
Moore[117] Carolina 1804

4 John Marshall Virginia 1801– 34 1755 1835

1835
William South 1804– 30 1771 1834
Johnson Carolina 1834
Brockh’t New York 1806– 17 1757 1823
Livingston 1823
Thomas Todd Kentucky 1807– 19 1765 1826
1826
Joseph Story Massachusetts 1811– 34 1779 1845
1845
Gabriel Maryland 1811– 25 1752 1844
Duval[117] 1836
Smith New York 1823– 22 1767 1845
Thompson 1845
Robert Kentucky 1826– 2 1777 1828
Trimble 1828
 John McLean Ohio 1829– 32 1785 1861
1861
Henry Baldwin Pennsylvania 1830– 16 1779 1846
1846
James M. Georgia 1835– 32 1790 1867
Wayne[119] 1867

5 Roger B. Taney Maryland 1836– 28 1777 1864

1864
Philip P. Virginia 1836– 5 1783 1841
Barbour 1841
John Catron Tennessee 1837– 28 1778 1865
1865
John McKinley Alabama 1837– 15 1780 1852
1852
Peter V. Daniel Virginia 1841– 19 1785 1860
1860
Samuel New York 1845– 27 1792 1873
Nelson[117] 1872
Levi Woodbury New 1845– 6 1789 1851
Hampshire 1851
Robert C. Pennsylvania 1846– 23 1794 1870
Grier[117] 1869
Benjamin R. Massachusetts 1851– 6 1809 1874
Curtis[117] 1857
John A. Alabama 1853– 8 1811
Campbell[117] 1861
Nathan Maine 1858– 1803 1881
Clifford
Noah H. Ohio 1861– 1805 1881
Swayne[117]
Samuel F. Iowa 1862– 1816
Miller
David Illinois 1862– 15 1815
Davis[117] 1877
Stephen J. California 1866– 1816
Field

6 Salmon P. Ohio 1864– 9 1808 1873

Chase 1873
William Pennsylvania 1870– 10 1808
Strong[117] 1880
Joseph P. New Jersey 1870– 1813
Bradley
Ward Hunt[117] New York 1872– 1811

7 Morrison R. Ohio 1874– 13 1816 1887

Waite 1887
John M. Kentucky 1877– 1833
Harlan
 William B. Georgia 1880– 1826
Woods
Horace Gray Massachusetts 1881–
Roscoe New York 1882– .
Conkling[117]
Samuel New York 1882–
Blatchford

8 Melville W. Illinois 1887–

Fuller
Lucius Q. C. Mississippi 1887–
Lamar
David J. Kansas 1890–
Brewer
 TOTAL NUMBER OF TROOPS CALLED INTO
[120]
SERVICE DURING THE REBELLION.

The various calls of the President for men were as follows:

1861—3 months’ men 75,000

1861—3 years’ men 500,000
1862—3 years’ men 300,000
1862—9 months’ men 300,000
1864—3 years’ men, February 500,000
1864—3 years’ men, March 200,000
1864—3 years’ men, July 500,000
1864—3 years’ men, December 300,000

Total 2,675,000
LENGTH OF SESSIONS OF CONGRESS, 1789–1891.
No. of Congress. No. of Session. Time of Session.
1st March 4, 1789—September 29, 1789
1st 2d January 4, 1790—August 12, 1790
3d December 6, 1790—March 3, 1791
1st October 24, 1791—May 8, 1792
2d
2d November 5, 1792—March 2, 1793
1st December 2, 1793—June 9, 1794
3d
2d November 3, 1794—March 3, 1795
1st December 7, 1795—June 1, 1796
4th
2d December 5, 1796—March 3, 1797
1st May 15, 1797—July 10, 1797
5th 2d November 13, 1797—July 16, 1798
3d December 3, 1798—March 3, 1799
1st December 2, 1799—May 14, 1800
6th
2d November 17, 1880—March 3, 1801
1st December 7, 1801—May 3, 1802
7th
2d December 6, 1802—March 3, 1803
1st October 17, 1803—March 27, 1804
8th
2d November 5, 1804—March 3, 1805
1st December 2, 1805—April 21, 1806
9th
2d December 1, 1806—March 3, 1807
1st October 26, 1807—April 25, 1808
10th
2d November 7, 1808—March 3, 1809
1st May 22, 1809—June 28, 1809
11th 2d November 27, 1809—May 1, 1810
3d December 3, 1810—March 3, 1811
1st November 4, 1811—July 6, 1812
12th
2d November 2, 1812—March 3, 1813
1st May 24, 1813—August 2, 1813
13th 2d December 6, 1813—April 18, 1814
3d September 19, 1814—March 3, 1815
1st December 4, 1815—April 30, 1816
14th
2d December 2, 1816—March 3, 1817
1st December 1, 1817—April 20, 1818
15th
2d November 16, 1818—March 3, 1819
1st December 6, 1819—May 15, 1820
16th
2d November 13, 1820—March 3, 1821
1st December 3, 1821—May 8, 1822
17th
2d December 2, 1822—March 3, 1823
1st December 1, 1823—May 27, 1824
18th
2d December 6, 1824—March 3, 1825
19th 1st December 5, 1825—May 22, 1826
2d December 4, 1826—March 3, 1827
1st December 3, 1827—May 26, 1828
20th
2d December 1, 1828—March 3, 1829
1st December 7, 1829—May 31, 1830
21st
2d December 6, 1830—March 3, 1831
1st December 5, 1831—July 16, 1832
22d
2d December 3, 1832—March 3, 1833
1st December 2, 1833—June 30, 1834
23d
2d December 1, 1834—March 3, 1835
1st December 7, 1835—July 4, 1836
24th
2d December 5, 1836—March 3, 1837
1st September 4, 1837—October 16, 1837
25th 2d December 4, 1837—July 9, 1838
3d December 3, 1838—March 3, 1839
1st December 2, 1839—July 21, 1840
26th
2d December 7, 1840—March 3, 1841
1st May 31, 1841—September 13, 1841
27th 2d December 6, 1841—August 31, 1842
3d December 5, 1842—March 8, 1843
1st December 4, 1843—June 17, 1844
28th
2d December 2, 1844—March 3, 1845
1st December 1, 1845—August 10, 1846
29th
2d December 7, 1846—March 3, 1847
1st December 6, 1847—August 14, 1848
30th
2d December 4, 1848—March 3, 1849
1st December 3, 1849—September 30, 1850
31st
2d December 2, 1850—March 3, 1851
1st December 1, 1851—August 31, 1852
32d
2d December 6, 1852—March 3, 1853
1st December 2, 1853—August 7, 1854
33d
2d December 4, 1854—March 3, 1855
1st December 5, 1855—August 18, 1856
34th 2d August 21, 1856—August 30, 1856
3d December 1, 1856—March 3, 1857
1st December 7, 1857—June 14, 1858
35th
2d December 6, 1858—March 3, 1859
1st December 5, 1859—June 25, 1860
36th
2d December 3, 1860—March 4, 1861
1st July 4, 1861—August 6, 1861
37th 2d December 2, 1861—July 17, 1862
3d December 1, 1862—March 4, 1863
38th 1st December 7, 1863—July 4, 1864
 2d December 5, 1864—March 4, 1865
1st December 4, 1865—July 28, 1866
39th
2d December 3, 1866—March 4, 1867
1st March 4, 1867—March 30, 1867
„ July 3, 1867—July 20, 1867
40th „ November 21, 1867—December 2, 1867
2d December 2, 1867—July 27, 1868
3d December 7, 1868—March 4, 1869
1st March 4, 1869—April 23, 1869
41st 2d December 6, 1869—July 15, 1870
3d December 5, 1870—March 4, 1871
1st March 4, 1871—April 20, 1871
42d 2d December 4, 1871—June 10, 1872
3d December 2, 1872—March 4, 1873
1st December 1, 1873—June 23, 1874
43d
2d December 7, 1874—March 4, 1875
1st December 6, 1875—August 15, 1876
44th
2d December 4, 1876—March 4, 1877
1st October 15, 1877—December 3, 1877
45th 2d December 3, 1877—June 20, 1878
3d December 2, 1878—March 4, 1879
1st March 18, 1879—July 1, 1879
46th 2d December 1, 1879—June 16, 1880
3d December 6, 1880—March 4, 1881
1st December 5, 1881—August 8, 1882
47th
2d December 4, 1882—March 4, 1883
1st December 3, 1883—July 7, 1884
48th
2d December 1, 1884—March 4, 1885
1st December 7, 1885—August 5, 1886
49th
2d December 6, 1886—March 4, 1887
1st December 5, 1887—October 20, 1888
50th
2d December 3, 1888—March 4, 1889
1st December 2, 1889—October, 1890
51st
2d December 1, 1890—March 4, 1891
 CIVIL OFFICERS OF THE UNITED STATES

Number Employed in the several Departments of the Government, July 1st,

1882.

Executive Office 7
Congress 280
State Department 419
Treasury Department 12,130
War Department 1,861
Post-Office Department 52,672
Navy Department 128
Interior Department 2,813
Department of Justice 2,876
Department of Agriculture 77
Government Printing Office 1,168

Total 74,431
THE STATES AND TERRITORIES—when Admitted or
Organized—with Area and Population.
 STATES. Date when Area in Population nearest
[First thirteen admitted on Admitted. square census to date of
ratifying Constitution—all miles at admission.
others admitted by Acts of time of
Congress.] admission. Population. Year.
Delaware December 7,
2,050 59,096 1790
1787
Pennsylvania December 12,
45,215 434,373 1790
1787
New Jersey December 18,
7,815 184,139 1790
1787
Georgia January 2,
59,475 82,548 1790
1788
Connecticut January 9,
4,990 237,496 1790
1788
Massachusetts February 6,
8,315 378,787 1790
1788
Maryland April 28, 1788 12,210 319,728 1790
South Carolina May 23, 1788 30,570 249,033 1790
New Hampshire June 21, 1788 9,305 141,885 1790
Virginia June 25, 1788 42,450 747,610 1790
New York July 26, 1788 49,170 340,120 1790
North Carolina November 21,
52,250 393,751 1790
1789
Rhode Island May 29, 1790 1,250 68,825 1790
Vermont March 4, 1791 9,565 85,339 1791
Kentucky June 1, 1792 40,400 73,077 1892
Tennessee June 1, 1796 42,050 77,202 1796
Ohio November 29,
41,060 41,915 1802
1802
Louisiana April 30, 1812 48,720 76,556 1812
Indiana December 11,
36,350 63,805 1816
1816
Mississippi December 10,
46,810 75,512 1817
1817
Illinois December 3,
56,650 34,620 1818
1818
Alabama December 14,
52,250 127,901 1820
1819
Maine March 15, 1820 33,040 298,269 1820
Missouri August 19, 1821 69,415 66,586 1821
Arkansas June 15, 1836 53,850 52,240 1836
Michigan January 26,
58,915 212,267 1840
1837
Florida March 3, 1845 58,680 54,477 1845
Iowa December 28,
56,025 81,920 1846
1846
Texas December 29,
265,780 212,592 1850
1845
Wisconsin May 29, 1848 56,040 305,391 1850
California September 9,
158,360 92,597 1850
1850
Minnesota May 11, 1858 83,365 172,023 1860
Oregon February 14,
96,030 52,465 1859
1859
Kansas January 29,
82,080 107,206 1860
1861
West Virginia June 19, 1863 24,780 442,014 1870
Nevada October 31,
110,700 40,000 1864
1864
Nebraska March 1, 1867 76,855 60,000 1867
Colorado August 1, 1876 103,926 150,000 1876
District of Columbia March 3, 1791 60
North Dakota July 4, 1889
149,100 135,177 1880
South Dakota July 4, 1889
Montana July 4, 1889 146,080 39,159 1880
Washington July 4, 1889 69,180 75,116
Idaho 84,800 32,610 1880
Wyoming 97,890 20,789 1880
TERRITORIES. Dates of Present
organization. area, Census
Population.
square of
miles.
Utah September 9,
82,090 143,963 1880
1850
New Mexico September 9,
122,580 119,565 1880
1850
Arizona February 24,
113,020 40,440 1880
1863
Indian 64,690
Alaska Unsurveyed
SPEAKERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
 Name. State. Congress. Term of Service.
F. A Muhlenberg Pennsylvania 1st Congress. April 1, 1789, to March 4, 1791
Jonathan Trumbull Connecticut 2d „ Oct. 24, 1791, to March 4, 1793
F. A. Muhlenberg Pennsylvania 3d „ Dec. 2, 1793, to March 4, 1795
Jonathan Dayton New Jersey 4th „ Dec. 7, 1795, to March 4, 1797
„ „ „ 5th „ May 15, 1797, to March 3, 1799
Theodore Sedgwick Massachusetts 6th „ Dec. 2, 1799, to March 4, 1801
Nathaniel Macon North Carolina 7th „ Dec. 7, 1801, to March 4, 1803
„ „ „ 8th „ Oct. 17, 1803, to March 4, 1805
„ „ „ 9th „ Dec. 2, 1805, to March 4, 1807
Joseph B. Varnum Massachusetts 10th „ Oct. 26, 1807, to March 4, 1809
„ „ „ 11th „ May 22, 1809, to March 4, 1811
Henry Clay Kentucky 12th „ Nov. 4, 1811, to March 4, 1813
„ „ „ 13th „ May 24, 1813, to Jan. 19, 1814
Langdon Cheves S C., 2d Sess. 13th „ Jan. 19, 1814, to March 4, 1815
Henry Clay Kentucky 14th „ Dec. 4, 1815, to March 4, 1817
„ „ „ 15th „ Dec. 1, 1817, to March 4, 1819
„ „ „ 16th „ Dec. 6, 1819, to May 15, 1820
John W. Taylor New York, 2d Sess. 16th „ Nov. 15, 1820, to March 4, 1821
Philip P. Barbour Virginia 17th „ Dec. 4, 1821, to March 4, 1823
Henry Clay Kentucky 18th „ Dec. 1, 1823, to March 4, 1825
John W. Taylor New York 19th „ Dec. 5, 1825, to March 4, 1827
Andrew Stephenson Virginia 20th „ Dec. 3, 1827, to March 4, 1829
„ „ „ 21st „ Dec. 7, 1829, to March 4, 1831
„ „ „ 22d „ Dec. 5, 1831, to March 4, 1833
„ „ „ 23d „ Dec. 2, 1833, to June 2, 1834
John Bell Tennessee, 2d Sess. 23d „ June 2, 1834, to March 4, 1835
James K. Polk „ „ 24th „ Dec. 7, 1835, to March 4, 1837
„ „ „ „ 25th „ Sept. 5, 1837, to March 4, 1839
Robert M. T. Hunter Virginia 26th „ Dec. 16, 1839, to March 4, 1841
John White Kentucky 27th „ May 31, 1841, to March 4, 1843
John W. Jones Virginia 28th „ Dec. 4, 1843, to March 4, 1845
John W. Davis Indiana 29th „ Dec. 1, 1845, to March 4, 1847
Robert C. Winthrop Massachusetts 30th „ Dec. 6, 1847, to March 4, 1849
Howell Cobb Georgia 31st „ Dec. 22, 1849, to March 4, 1851
Linn Boyd Kentucky 32d „ Dec. 1, 1851, to March 4, 1853
„ „ „ 33d „ Dec. 5, 1853, to March 4, 1855
Nathaniel P. Banks Massachusetts 34th „ Feb. 2, 1856, to March 4, 1857
James L. Orr South Carolina 35th „ Dec. 7, 1857, to March 4, 1859
William Pennington New Jersey 36th „ Feb. 1, 1860, to March 4, 1861
Galusha A. Grow Pennsylvania 37th „ July 4, 1861, to March 4, 1863
Schuyler Colfax Indiana 38th „ Dec. 7, 1863, to March 4, 1865
„ „ „ 39th „ Dec. 4, 1865, to March 4, 1867
„ „ „ 40th „ March 4, 1867, to March 4, 1869
James G. Blaine Maine 41st „ March 4, 1869, to March 4, 1871
„ „ „ 42d „ March 4, 1871, to March 4, 1873
„ „ „ 43d „ Dec. 1, 1873, to March 4, 1875
Michael C. Kerr Indiana 44th „ Dec. 6, 1875, to Aug. 20, 1876
Samuel J. Randall Penna., 2d Sess. 44th „ Dec. 4, 1876, to March 4, 1877
„ „ „ „ 45th „ Oct. 15, 1877, to March 4, 1879
„ „ „ „ 46th „ March 18, 1879, to March 4, 1881
Warren B. Keifer Ohio 47th „ Dec. 5, 1881, to March 4, 1883
John G. Carlisle Kentucky 48th „ Dec. 3, 1883, to March 4, 1885
„ „ „ 49th „ Dec. 7, 1885, to March 4, 1887
„ „ „ 50th „ Dec. 5, 1888, to March 4, 1889
Thomas B. Reed Maine 51st „ Dec. 2, 1889, to March 4, 1891
 Table, exhibiting, by States, the Aggregate Troops
called for by the President, and furnished to the
Union Army, from April 15th, 1861, to close of War of
Rebellion
 Aggregate Aggregate
States and
Quota Men Paid Total reduced to a 3
Territories
furnished commutation years’ standard
Maine 73,587 70,107 2,007 72,114 56,776
New Hampshire 35,897 33,937 692 34,629 30,849
Vermont 32,074 33,288 1,974 35,262 29,068
Massachusetts 139,095 146,730 5,318 152,048 124,104
Rhode Island 18,898 23,236 463 23,699 17,866
Connecticut 44,797 55,864 1,515 57,379 50,623
New York 507,148 448,850 18,197 467,047 392,270
New Jersey 92,820 76,814 4,196 81,010 57,908
Pennsylvania 385,369 337,936 28,171 366,107 265,517
Delaware 13,935 12,284 1,386 13,670 10,322
Maryland 70,965 46,638 3,678 50,316 41,275
West Virginia 34,463 32,068 32,068 27,714
District of 13,973 16,534 338 16,872
11,506
Columbia
Ohio 306,322 313,180 6,479 319,659 240,514
Indiana 199,788 196,363 784 197,147 153,576
Illinois 244,496 259,092 55 259,147 214,133
Michigan 95,007 87,364 2,008 89,372 80,111
Wisconsin 109,080 91,327 5,097 96,424 79,260
Minnesota 26,326 24,020 1,032 25,052 10,693
Iowa 79,521 76,242 67 76,309 68,630
Missouri 122,496 109,111 109,111 86,530
Kentucky 100,782 75,760 3,265 79,025 70,832
Kansas 12,931 20,149 2 20,151 18,706
Tennessee 1,560 31,092 31,092 26,394
Arkansas 780 8,289 8,289 7,835
North Carolina 1,500 3,156 3,156 3,156
California 15,725 15,725 15,725
Nevada 1,080 1,080 1,080
Oregon 1,810 1,810 1,773
Washington 964 964 964
Nebraska 3,157 3,157
2,175
Territory
Colorado 4,903 4,903
3,697
Territory
Dakota 206 205 206
New Mexico 6,561 6,561
4,432
Territory
Alabama 2,576 2,576 1,611
Florida 1,290 1,290 1,290
Louisiana 5,224 5,224 4,634
Mississippi 545 545 545
Texas 1,965 1,965 1,632
Indian Nation 3,530 3,530 3,530
Colored 93,441 93,441 91,789
Troops[121]
Total 2,763,670 2,772,408 86,724 2,859,132 2,320,272
 STATEMENT SHOWING THE EXPENDITURES,
As far as ascertained, necessarily growing out of the War of the Rebellion, from
July 1, 1861, to June 30, 1870, inclusive.