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.     

Desire: A History of European Sexuality. By Anna Clark/Sexuality in World History. By Peter N. Stearns

ABSTRACT

The present article uses Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1963) to explore class, gender and the city in the 1960s. It focuses on three elements: the book's representation of post-war, urban working-class identity; the place of gender and sexuality within that representation; and, finally, Nell Dunn's own position as a middle-class observer. It argues for the continuing relevance and dynamism of class as a social referent in post-war, ‘affluent’ Britain. The article also explores the meaning of ‘slumming’ in the context of the mid-twentiethcentury city, against the background of ‘affluence’ and the emergence of the ‘permissive society’. What becomes particularly apparent in both contexts is the importance of femininity and female sexuality in the representation of mid-twentieth-century London, whether in terms of the portrayal of working-class women or the position of the middle-class author.     

The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo,Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960

Until recently the abundant literature on South African urban history has seen violence in towns and cities in terms either of anti-colonial protest or of labour consciousness. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined the urban violence with which it was concerned as exclusively political. More recently, however, questions of spatiality, township culture, generation, and gender have offered alternative or supplementary explanations.

This article moves from the South African historiography to the less well known history of Southern Rhodesian towns and townships. In particular it focuses on Rhodesia's main industrial centre, Bulawayo. Between 1929 and 1960 there were four dramatic events in Bulawayo which involved varying degrees of violence. These were the ‘faction fights' of December 1929; the railway strike of 1946; the general strike of April 1948; and the so-called zhii riots of 1960. There have recently been authoritative analyses of the 1946 and 1948 strikes. This article therefore concentrates on the events of 1929 and 1960.

The 1929 ‘faction fights' have been claimed for political economy by a classic article which sees them essentially as a response to changing patterns of colonial labour exploitation; the 1960 riots have been claimed as the first achievement of confrontational African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. This article argues that an alternative explanation can be found in internal African struggles for dominance of an emerging black urban culture. It analyses the 1929 violence as a struggle between ‘stylish’ young labour migrants and a longer established township elite. It analyses the 1960 riots as a ‘war’ between the township poor and the newly prosperous traders and rentiers. Both episodes greatly complicated the prospects for a unitary urban nationalism or for effective and combined labour action.     

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.     

Celebrity

ABSTRACT

Recent debates about the meaning and role of cultural history have focused on the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘society’. Some have taken this opportunity to position cultural history as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ explanations of human behaviour. In contrast, this article argues that ‘biological’ methodologies – particularly the perspectives of evolutionary psychology – can usefully contribute to the historical understanding of culture and social development. To this end, it outlines the fundamentals of Darwinist psychology, suggests options for interdisciplinary cooperation and uses the topic of interpersonal violence to explore the potential for uniting cultural, social and evolutionary psychological methodologies.     

Beijing,a garden of violence

Abstract

This paper examines the history of Beijing in relation to gardens — imperial, princely, public and private — and the impetus of the ‘gardener’, in particular in the twentieth‐century. Engaging with the theme of ‘violence in the garden’ as articulated by such scholars as Zygmunt Bauman and Martin Jay, I reflect on Beijing as a ‘garden of violence’, both before the rise of the socialist state in 1949, and during the years leading up to the 2008 Olympics.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.     

Tales of the Unexpected

ABSTRACT

Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I have refuted this principle and made an attempt to show its inherent contradictoriness. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives through the use of a research model which I call the ‘singularization of history’. In this article I show how the use of the traditional microhistorical methods blinded me in a research project. This blind spot in my research caused a major oversight in my findings – a shocking sequence of events was brought to my attention from an unexpected direction and revealed the weakness in my approach. The article deals with the need to rethink the whole concept of historical research and how the methods of microhistory can play a role there with the aid of what I call the ‘textual environment’.     

‘Envisioning the Past: Art,Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract

This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.     

Cultural Continuities

ABSTRACT

This article studies the Nazis' enthusiastic embrace of theatre in the period before and during the Second World War, and places this in a longer tradition of political power and the theatre in Germany. It argues that Hitler, Goering and Goebbels oversaw a ‘restoration’ of German theatre in the later 1930s, aiming to restore the emotional link between audience, Kultur and nation, for their own political purposes.     

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.     

Shared future – shared values? Taking stock of the peace process in Northern Ireland: teenagers’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

Although preceded by years of political and policy developments, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) in 1998 is generally regarded as marking the end of conflict and the beginning of the transition to peace. However, this transition has been neither linear nor straightforward. Divisions, both physical and symbolic, reflecting collective identities and ‘otherness’, remain resistant to change and continue to foster sectarianism, mistrust and outbreaks of violence. Despite some positive change, not least of which is the absence of sustained violence, the majority of neighbourhoods and schools remain either Protestant or Catholic. Drawing on data from the Young Life and Times (YLT) survey, an annual attitudinal survey of 16-year-olds in Northern Ireland that has been running since 2003, this article explores what young people's perspectives reveal about the complexities and the challenges involved in transitioning to a more shared society. Where relevant and possible, their attitudes are compared with those expressed by adults in the annual Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey. A primary focus on tracking teenagers' attitudes is important for a number of reasons. While often regarded as a ‘post-conflict’ generation, segregation and polarisation remain features of teenagers' everyday lives and the political landscape. Children and young people are one of the four key strategic priorities in the latest government strategies to build united communities and achieve change and are embedded in the Programme for Government 2016–2021. If these government commitments are to be realised, the voices of young people must become central rather than peripheral. It is important, therefore, that their opinions are not only sought, but also interrogated and fed into policy.     

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.     

Doing a literary journal in a divided country: Changbi,its history and projects

Abstract

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945–1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of ‘entertainment districts,’ and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth‐weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault's work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into ‘petitioning subject’ – subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory.     

Disentangling the ‘Native’ Guide

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences of nineteenth and early twentieth century Indigenous and Euroamerican men who worked as guides in the Adirondacks for urban, upper-class sportsmen. It also examines entanglements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Adirondackers in work and family contexts. The results create a complex understanding of the term ‘Native’ there as outsiders combined the two inhabitants to describe their wilderness vacation. This article argues that scholars who study the history of Indigenous societies should consider rural and urban culture alongside ethnicity, class and gender as important categories of analysis, especially in the nineteenth century and later.     

Korean military brides in New York

ABSTRACT

This article tells the stories of five Korean military brides in the predominantly middle‐class neighborhood of Newburgh, New York, focusing on their association with the American military bases in South Korea and their daily struggles in cross‐cultural marriages in the United States. It examines the particular contexts in which personal and sexual relations developed between American soldiers and Korean women in the ‘camp‐towns’ or ‘GI towns’ (kijich’on). It also looks at the ways in which some Korean women employed fraternization as a survival strategy in a war‐torn society, and in which they struggled to come to terms with the American mainstream society after their migration to the United States. These life histories provide us with a unique lens through which to explore the unequal power relations between the United States and South Korea within the dialectical framework of militarism, gender and migration.     

‘The Supposed Paradise of Pen and Ink’: Self-education and Social Mobility in the London Public Library (1880–1930)

ABSTRACT

Borrowing from prosopography, collective biography, sociology and genealogy, this article describes the ‘bookish’ workplace experiences of 90 chief and deputy public librarians to revisit debates around the upwardly mobile metropolitan lower middle class in the long nineteenth century. It finds that the border between the manual and white-collar classes was more easily (and enduringly) breached than previously supposed. It also suggests that those moving from the former group to the latter retained elements of their ‘working class’ origins and character across the late-Victorian period. These discoveries complicate historical assessments of the lower middles, but support sociological surveys that propose more fluid and open class borders from the mid-nineteenth century.