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Chapter 6: “Foreign in the Domestic Sense”: Tropical Fish and the Transnational Aquarium
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chapter 6 “foreign in the domestic sense”: tropical fish and the transnational aquarium With the introduction of so-called tropical ‹sh in the 1910s, the American home aquarium gained the potential to contain the global south and a whole new set of relationships, tropes, and visual af‹nities . Its prior associations were not abandoned. On the contrary, the garden, the window, the stage, the home, the seeming immutability of biological difference , slippage between the tank and the sea, the restorative antimodernity of manageable nature, and the queer alterity of the ‹sh themselves were all part of the crucial conceptual infrastructure for the new transnational tank. As increasingly global networks transformed the nineteenthcentury “happy family” into a community of specimens from “Egypt, Australia , Asia, India, China, Siam, . . . and South America,” aquarists drew on the full measure of their existing rhetorical repertoire.1 But they were also innovative, further demonstrating the tank’s representational capaciousness by reactivating old imperial clichés and setting these alongside new iterations of familiar genres. In their efforts to imagine the hobby within a set of expanding global networks, aquarists operated as a domestic microcosm mirroring the geopolitical movement of the United States as it asserted itself on the world stage and inserted itself into imperial logics with increasing vigor. The aquarium bene‹ted from these imperial logics and returned the favor by domesticating and naturalizing them, rendering them part and parcel of daily routines. The home tank was both a product of the consumers’ imperium and an agent of its reproduction. It stretched the hobby’s elastic, ambivalent relationship to cosmopolitan modernity—particularly its “incomprehensible size” and increasingly global interconnections—even further.2 As indicated in chapter 5, aquarists themselves decried the perils of an increasingly global consumer capitalism as early as the 1930s. In their view, relentless 193 pursuit of cheaper stock cast worthy native breeder/retailers as vulnerable little ‹sh left to the tender mercies of predatory aquarinomic networks based ‹rst in Europe and later in the global south. This increasingly transnational modernity was a pernicious and deleterious force. It required a personal water world as a palliative, even as it provided the necessary preconditions for organizing and displaying “nature” as a mass-market middle-class consumable. But the idea of transnational modernity itself was also a way of celebrating racial and national superiority under the rubrics of technological and scienti‹c prowess. The con‹guration of the tank as container/world and the representational fungibility of toy ‹sh domesticated an imperial chronopolitics wherein colorful ‹sh from the global south stood in for the hemisphere ’s “colorful” peoples—alien, primitive or outside of time, docile or curiously aggressive, requiring the care of benevolent and technologically superior custodians.3 In the home and on the pages of hobbyists’ magazines, the tropical tank relied on transnational networks to minister to the very dislocations those networks produced. The tropical aquarium relied on global networks to offer even more ways to revel in modernity while disavowing it at the same time. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing proposes “friction” as a metaphor for examining “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” that characterize contemporary global exchange .4 By the mid-twentieth century, tank water was a powerful lubricant for the frictions required to sustain transnational modernity. It relieved anxieties about the consequences of geopolitical expansion and adventures by substituting manageable Edenic water worlds for the messy complexities of terrestrial ones and, often, by substituting ‹sh for the vexing alterity of native peoples. The title of this chapter is taken from Amy Kaplan’s analysis of Downes v. Bidwell (1901), an important element of the legal framework justifying American imperialism.5 The case established that Puerto Rico was a possession of the United States, not part of it, and thus was not covered by the U.S. Constitution. Justice Edward Douglas White reasoned that “whilst in an international sense Porto [sic] Rico was not a foreign country since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”6 The circumlocution “foreign in the domestic sense” is ideal for describing the ways the tank alleviates imperial anxieties while reinforcing imperial logics, through a visual and rhetorical legerdemain that exposes the leaky borders between “foreign” and “domestic” while upholding their pu194 parlor ponds [18.209...