Rethinking the Rural Idyll

ABSTRACT

This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerk's experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.     

Empire and nation revisited: 50 years after Bandung

Abstract

I wish to propose a general definition of empire that does not tie it with annexation and occupation of foreign territories and, therefore, is able to capture the new forms of indirect and informal control that have become common in recent decades. The imperial prerogative, I suggest, is the power to declare the colonial exception. Everyone agrees that nuclear proliferation is dangerous and should be stopped. But who decides that India may be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and also Israel, and may be even Pakistan, but not North Korea or Iran? We all know that there are many sources of international terrorism, but who decides that it is not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan but the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq that must be overthrown by force? Those who claim to decide on the exception are indeed arrogating to themselves the imperial prerogative.     

Late Colonial Estrangement And Miscegenation

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to reassess the work of two contemporary writers in the 1930s: Gilberto Freyre in Brazil and E. du Perron in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Their famous narratives (respectively, Casa-Grande e Senzala and Het Land van Herkomst) present a (post) colonial world where inequality, violence and racism are almost as conspicuous as mixing and contact across the colour lines. In fact, although one work is a sociological and historical interpretation of colonial and imperial Brazil and the other a literary reworking of personal reminiscences related to Indies society in the early twentieth century, both construct worlds that present several important similarities.     

Contesting Popular Dancing and Dance Music in Britain During the 1920s

ABSTRACT

This article examines various reactions to new forms of dance music and dance in Britain during the 1920s. It shows how these new cultural forms were part of broader social and economic changes, and notes how they are seen to represent a considerable break with previous cultural forms. In particular, such changes have been seen as symbolic of the widespread ‘Americanization’ of British culture. This article questions the degree to which this was true. It thus examines attempts by ‘professionals' to fashion ‘British’ versions of both dance music and social dances. In addition, it examines how audiences resisted and exacerbated these developments.     

Imperial Plots? Shugborough,Chinoiserie and Imperial Ideology in Eighteenth-Century British Gardens

This article examines the place of the Chinese House (c. 1748) at Shugborough, Staffordshire, within the context of the mid-eighteenth-century craze for chinoiserie architecture in British gardens, and within the longer history of Sino-British encounters more generally. Drawing on evidence from published and archival sources, it argues that the expression of imperial ideology manifest in the garden at Shugborough represents an exceptional case for the period, during which more nuanced and ambivalent attitudes towards Britain's expanding presence in Asia generally prevailed. Attention is drawn to the need to locate the specific social settings of art objects within their wider historical contexts.     

A Question of Trousers: Seafarers,Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress,c. 1600–1800

Trousers have a history. The British-imperial biography of this garment reveals the significance of ready-made clothing production for naval and merchant administrations with global reach. This history demonstrates the significance of male sartorial experiments in colonial settings. And it also confirms the rising importance of imperial and maritime cultures in shaping masculine ideals and habits of dress. Ultimately, middle ranked and elite male Britons came to rethink their allegiance to breeches and hose, a mnemonic of the ancien régime. Social cross-dressing ensued, with men of higher status adopting the garb of nautical working men, at a time when mariners were increasingly esteemed. The study of trousers opens new vantage points from which to assess the forces altering British masculinity, forces that also reshaped material norms.     

Caught between empire and occupation: censorship,deimperialization, and Koreans in postwar Japan

ABSTRACT

The collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 plunged East Asia into a state of flux and upheaval, making necessary the redrawing of geopolitical borders and the redefining the “boundaries” of nationality, language, and legal status. As part of this broader process, Koreans in occupied postwar Japan, via the platform of the magazine Democratic Korea (Minshu Chōsen), advocated for a joint process of decolonization and deimperialization whereby both Koreans and Japanese could construct a society free of imperial hierarchies. U.S. Military Occupation policy and censorship, however, thwarted these efforts and disallowed the possibility for the inclusion of a Korean subjectivity within the space of the Japanese nation. Facing intense political pressure, Koreans in Japan started to shift toward a “non-national” Zainichi Korean subjectivity distinct from the two Korean-nation states established in 1948. Further, through analyzing the case of Koreans in occupied Japan, this article sheds light on the broader impact of occupation censorship on postwar Japanese society and how the post-imperial transition to a nation-state model was a tumultuous one.     

Remembering the atrocities of their ancestral lands: reading Korean American “comfort women” novels in Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the significance of reading two Korean American novels which address the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery (known as the “comfort women” system) in the context of Japan: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. I will explore how this act can facilitate the understanding of the militarized sexual violence in the present social and discursive context of Japan, where the issue suffers from a strong backlash. Lee’s A Gesture Life with its critique of multiple militarized imperialisms challenges the Japanese revisionists’ effort to deny the egregious wrongs of Japan’s military sexual slavery; it also responds to popular criticism in Japan that Korean/Americans disregard the practices of Western imperial and military violence and only condemn Japanese war crimes. The paper in turn also reads Keller’s Comfort Woman through the frame of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a Japanese Canadian novel which remembers the internment and U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. My aim here is to examine both the risks and possibilities which this reading can generate. While it can help us see the comparable acts of remembering war sufferings from the standpoint of diasporas, it can also erase the non-equivalence between the two histories.     

Nations in shame and art’s shame: towards a radical politics of image and affect around “Okinawa”

ABSTRACT

This article first examines the resurgence of popular, semi-academic nationalist discourses that solidify the figures of “Japan” and “Okinawa” within post-1945 U.S.-led formation of nation-states across the Asia-Pacific. It critiques two discourses that are symptomatic of such a return to the figure of the nation: developmental economist Matsushima Yasukatsu’s thesis of “Ryukyu’s independence” and philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya’s call to relocate the U.S. military bases from Okinawa to mainland Japan. These symptomatic instances of the mutually transferential nationalisms in Okinawa and mainland Japan rely upon crudely culturalist assumptions about the self and the others and are thus surprisingly oblivious to how the very nation-forms have been instituted as part of imperial modernity. Their implicit figurations of the exemplary national subjects partake in the biopolitical assumptions as to whose lives must be “made to live” and “made to die” within and outside the border of the national. Ultimately, such nationalist discourses about Japan and Okinawa engage in a zero-sum exchange of imperial shame and colonial shame, a process that further stabilizes the co-operative placement of local nation-forms within the U.S.-led inter-state regime of warfare and biopolitics. But insofar as these discourses require the images of the nations that they seek to represent, their (re)production of what Naoki Sakai calls “a schema of co-figurative” nationalities needs to be critiqued through an exploration of a radical aesthetics and affect that pertain to image production.

The second part of the article presents my interpretation of artist Nema Satoko’s recent book of photography titled Paradigm, a work in which both bodies and objects explore their potential transformations in the midst of their precarious exposure to one another. I argue that Nema’s images of fragile bodies and objects in the present landscape of Okinawa are poised on the cusp between the past that invokes a sense of shame and this past’s potential future that necessitates an ethical posture of humility. In the vicinity of Adorno’s notion of “art’s shame,” Nema’s photographic images illuminate an amorphous realm of fragile beings, whose linkage and exposure to one another opens a space of viability that is obscured by the biopolitical imaginaries of nation-forms.     

The religious,the plural,the secular and the modern: a brief critical survey on Islam in Malaysia

Abstract

The embedization of Islam in Malaysia has gone through a long and complex process that involved an interaction with three major world civilizations (Indian, Chinese and European) and two colonial systems (Dutch and British) during which many aspects of its practices were reconfigured. This paper provides a brief critical survey of the evolution of the said embedization process during which Islam and the Muslims in Malaysia were moulded by a series of sociological realities, namely plural society, secularism and modernity. This has resulted, we argue, in the creation of 'moderate' Islam in Malaysia, one that is quite different from the fundamentalist image of Islam profiled in the contemporary worldwide discourse on global Islam     

Inherited Memories

ABSTRACT

This article explores the creation and transmission of second generation memories concerning the 1947 Partition of British India. The research is based on oral interviews with Punjabi families who migrated because of Partition and now live in Lahore and Delhi. It explores how Partition memories have been transmitted across generations within these families, and also examines similarities and differences between how the second generation interviewees from Delhi and Lahore remember Partition. It demonstrates that the second generation have not passively accepted everything that the first generation, or the state, has told them about Partition. The second generation's memories are also shaped by their age, nationality, religion and class, and the nature of contemporary politics.     

Her-Story Untold

ABSTRACT

This article examines the intersections of prostitution and race in Cardiff, and shows that racialized concepts of predatory sexuality framed ideas of prostitution in twentieth-century British ports. These were linked to wider concerns over miscegenation in the dockside district of Butetown, a space historically linked to prostitution and seen as distinctly ‘foreign’ and ‘contagious' by the interwar years. These debates were informed by local demographics and geographies, and were dominated by continuities in nineteenth-century ideas over race and sex. This evidence demonstrates the ongoing fractured development of sexual knowledge and ideas of multiculturalism in twentieth-century Britain.     

Darts in England, 1900–39: A Social History. By Patrick Chaplin

ABSTRACT

This article examines the status and meanings of heterosexual love in post-war Britain. It is situated within the burgeoning field of the history of emotion and draws upon recent work on interiority and modern selfhood. It argues that love became a central plank in the quest for self-actualization in this period. It explains why love triumphed over pragmatism in the remaking of British matrimony and how this impacted upon the institution of marriage itself. The article posits the immediate post-war years as a time of significant discursive change and emotional instability: expectations rose and critical introspection deepened. The ways in which love was fashioned in the 1940s and 1950s were central to the dramatic social and cultural changes that occurred in the decades that followed.     

Chains of Gold: Portuguese Migration to Argentina in Transatlantic Perspective. By Marcelo J. Borges

ABSTRACT

The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and its subsequent publishing success sparked intense debate at the time and have come to exemplify a clash of worlds, one Victorian, repressed, deferential, restricted by class assumptions and hopelessly out of touch, the other progressive, open, liberated and, above all, permissive, that most value-laden and controversial of terms. Yet examining popular responses to Lady Chatterley's Lover reveals complex attitudes and raises questions about the permissiveness of the 1960s.     

Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay identifies the major themes of the special issue, emphasizing both indigenous peoples' anticipation of how imperial modernity hailed them and their determination to work with as well as against it. The mobility, and restlessness, of the actors examined in the essays that follow helped to guarantee this defensive agency and to produce a shared grammar of engagement and resistance across disparate native communities in the nineteenth and twentieth-century worlds they travelled through.     

Reynolds' New Masterpiece

ABSTRACT

Joshua Reynolds' 1775 portrait of Mai [Omai], the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain, has attracted much public attention since 2001, when it sold for a near record-breaking £10.3 million. Omai's recent celebrity is based on the view that it is not only an ‘icon’ of British art but also of crucial significance as a reminder of an enlightened world we have lost. The critical heritage of Reynolds' Omai, however, indicates a rather more complex aesthetic and historical assessment. This article analyses the sources of the disjuncture between past judgements and today's soaring esteem. In doing so, it introduces for comparison another much-neglected Reynolds portrait of a New World traveller, entitled Scyacust Ukah.     

An Empire Gone Bad: Agatha Christie,Anglocentrism and Decolonization

Recent scholarly accounts of early post-war society have emphasised the importance of positive and self-congratulatory narratives of decolonisation – whereby the end of empire was the inevitable result of a pro-active British beneficence – or have suggested that society was shielded from a sense of imperial decline. Such accounts are complicated by Agatha Christie’s immensely popular crime novels, which constructed a narrative of British decline rooted in a sense of departure from pre-war ideals of imperial masculinity, but whose Anglocentrism nevertheless offered up the potential for imperial renewal pending a ‘rediscovery’ of such characteristics.     

Feeling freedom: Japanese and American wartime films on the liberation of the Philippines, 1943–1945

ABSTRACT

This article juxtaposes the Japanese wartime film Dawn of Freedom and Hollywood films on the Philippines during WWII as a method to analyze the representational strategies by which the U.S. and Japanese empires tried, respectively and in opposition to the other, to nurture the feeling that the peoples of the Philippines and beyond would enjoy freedom under their stewardships. Under pressure from the twin crises of colonialism and capitalism, the two empires sought to establish hegemony in the Asia-Pacific by fashioning a new model of empire that disavowed imperialist intentions and territorial aggrandizement while promising freedoms that included but went beyond national self-determination. The article focuses on four overlapping freedoms that run through the Japanese and Hollywood films: namely, political self-determination/consumerist freedom, freedom of self-sacrifice or the freedom to die, freedom in romance, and freedom from racism. Despite their differences, the author argues that the two sides in the imperial film wars shared much more than what is commonly realized and that the new strategy that advanced and yet disavowed imperialist ambitions while promoting the feeling of freedom, has great relevance for understanding the militarized world today.     

Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants,Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

ABSTRACT

Far from being a trivial detail, clothes fundamentally define who we are and how we are perceived by others. Drawing on a large sample of French and British servants’ memoirs, this article explores how dress served a crucial but contrasting role in the way French and British servants articulated their identities within and outside the home between 1900 and 1939. It argues that servants’ dress was deeply linked to the nature of the occupation in each country and the structure of their respective female labour markets.     

Distinctive Citizenship

ABSTRACT

The refugee, in India's Partition history, appears as an enigmatic construct – part pitiful, part heroic, though mostly shorn of agency – representing the surface of the human tragedy of Partition. Yet this archetype masks the undercurrent of social distinctions that produced hierarchies of post-colonial citizenship within the mass of refugees. The core principle of the official resettlement policy was self-rehabilitation, that is, the ability to become a productive citizen of the new nation state without state intervention. Thus, the onus of performing a successful transition – from refugee to citizen – lay on the resourcefulness of the refugees rather than the state. This article traces the differing historical trajectories followed by ‘state-dependent’ and ‘self-reliant’ refugees in the making of modern citizenry in post-colonial India.