The representation of ‘Asia’, ‘occupational forces’ and ‘women’ against the backdrop of post‐war Japanese culture: from the system of censorship to the present

This paper is one of the attempts to show how each East‐Asian regional country’s memory of the war has been related to the post‐war literatures and movies restricted by the structure of the Cold War. In particular, this paper takes up the issue of how the structure of Japanese culture after World War II was heavily influenced by the Cold War. When Japan was under the Occupational Forces, Japanese writers and film directors settling on the subject matter of the war were not free from the strain of the systematic censorship by GHQ. Translating into mechanisms of their works using the body or woman (comfort woman) by squarely facing the facts of the East‐Asian history, this paper reconsiders the body of post‐colonial Japan.     

‘At Some Point in the 1960s,Hell Disappeared’: Hell,Gender and Catholicism in Post-War England

This article explores changing understandings of Catholic hell in post-war England, focusing on how questions of sex and gender intersected with beliefs in the afterlife. It uses oral testimony from Catholic laypeople alongside the pronouncements of the clerical hierarchy to challenge the pervasive notion that ‘hell disappeared in the 1960s’. Hell did however, change in constitution during the post-war decades, transforming from a material ‘place’ to an abstract ‘state’ in the lay and institutional imagination. Rather than being about a straightforward ‘liberation’ from a coercive theology of damnation, the changing constitution of hell spoke of the way certain religious beliefs became re-categorised in late-modern England.     

‘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.     

‘We want everybody’s salvage!’: Recycling,Voluntarism, and the People’s War

ABSTRACT

This article reveals the role of volunteers in the British government’s campaign to increase recycling during the Second World War. It uses their experience to deconstuct the idea of a 'people's war', showing how this concept was invoked in several different ways. The article demonstrates that voluntary recycling schemes were led from the bottom-up, shifted the balance of power between private citizens and local authorities, and highlighted difference based on age, socio-economic status, gender, and geographical location. It concludes that official appeals may have invoked the ‘people’s war’, but the way that these messages were received was of most importance.     

‘Not Just the Ideas of a Few Enthusiasts’: Early Twentieth Century Legal Activism and Reformation of the Age of Sexual Consent

In July 1885, a reluctant House of Lords was eventually persuaded to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Bill after three years of intense Parliamentary debate and prompted by W.T. Stead’s shocking expose of the Maiden Tribute scandal. The 1885 Act finally, and controversially, settled the age of sexual protection for young girls at 16 years but this threshold would be repeatedly contested over the next four decades. Moral campaigners continually sought to exert pressure on the Home Office to reform what we now recognise as a legal age of consent. But their contradictory demands to impose repressionist measures to punish young girls for sexual immorality while simultaneously lobbying for a more protectionist stance against sexual defilement made any legislative consensus impossible. This article explores and teases out the associated socio-legal complexities of such contradictions which, somewhat ironically, served as a stark rehearsal for the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1922. An Act which did no more than simply reiterate the 1885 determination that 16 years should be the age of consent, a provision that has endured well into the twenty-first century.     

The Left and Indonesia’s 1960s: the politics of remembering and forgetting

Abstract

This article examines a pivotal decade in the recent history of Indonesian society: the 1960s. It examines the context within which the Left came to be decisively, and violently, defeated as a social and political force. It then studies the consequences of this defeat for Indonesia’s subsequent historical trajectory. The article also suggests that history‐writing anywhere is nothing less than the politics of remembering (and forgetting). What is at stake in these exercises is ultimately tied up with the legitimacy of entire social orders and systems of power. Thus, in Indonesia, the trauma of 1965 and its aftermath banished, from the collective memory of Indonesians, the political role of the Left – except in the form that runs through New Order‐era discourse on Indonesian communism. For Indonesians born or raised after 1965, the ‘communist treason’ became, arguably, the most critical element of the grand narrative of post‐colonial Indonesian history, which was so important in legitimising New Order authoritarianism. The current inability of Indonesian society and its elites to acknowledge and confront the reality of the horrors of the 1960s might prove to be a major impediment to a more genuine and substantive democratisation process.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

The left‐wing movement in Malaya,Singapore and Borneo in the 1960s: ‘an era of hope or devil’s decade’?

Abstract

The 1960s was a period of Leftwing resurgence in the world. As Britain was disengaging from its empire, the ethnically plural societies she had generated within her protectorates and colonies in Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei threw up anti‐colonial movements that began struggling towards self‐determination and national independence. These movements manifested the ideologies of communism, socialism, nationalism and communalism. As British imperialism began planning its retreat, the competition for power among the local movements became intense. In Malaya, the largest of the five colonial territories, the communist party launched an armed rebellion in 1948 in the name of national liberation and independence, but made little headway. As Singapore and Malaya were closely linked and ruled, Britain introduced emergency rule in both territories. Most leftwing parties disappeared. Nationalist and communalist parties in Malaya emerged and eventually succeeded in securing national independence from Britain in 1957. Singapore was given a measure of limited self‐government in 1955, while Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei were gradually awakened towards self‐government. Leftwing parties re‐surfaced in Malaya, and in Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei in the 1950s and 1960s, and made some headway in parliamentary elections. This paper presents a historical account of their resurgence, which was however short‐lived.     

‘Dad's Back’: Mapping Masculinities,Moralities and the Law in the Novels of Margery Allingham

Crime fiction was, in its ‘Golden Age’ form, a new product of the interwar middlebrow. It was a particular and very popular way in which conservative-modern problematics about the domestic and about human emotional relationships but also about criminality and the law were talked through. This article examines the novels of Margery Allingham as an exemplar of this genre with reference to her own professional and gender identity as well as the broader cultural context. Crime fiction was one of several kinds of crime (particularly murder) stories, both fictional and ‘real life’, which circulated between the official discourses of the law and middle-class culture. This discussion explores Allingham's treatment of masculinities and of sexuality. It argues that narrative techniques that used the Gothic problematized the interrelationships of morality, modernity and history, and also inflected the pleasures of leisure reading with wider ‘middlebrow’ concerns about the gendered status of the modern citizen and more diffuse cultures of punishment and social responsibility.     

‘The Talke of the Towne’: News,Crime and the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century London

This article reconsiders ideas of the public sphere in the seventeenth century, by focusing on how public opinion is shaped by the movement of information between media and between receivers. It contends that the scholarly preoccupation with a public sphere viewed exclusively in terms of politics obscures the fact that contemporaries did not distinguish between politics and subjects such as crime in their newsgathering. Examining the case study of James Turner, a burglar in the 1660s who became a cause célèbre in London and beyond, this article shows how crime news were eagerly exchanged, informing discussions and constructing public opinion.     

Wartime Holidays and the ‘Myth of the Blitz’

Published histories of the British home front during the Second World War, both academic and popular, say little or nothing about civilian holidays; the implication is that for most people they did not exist. This article disputes that reading. Complementing earlier work on officially sponsored ‘Holidays at Home’, the article first looks briefly at 1930s holiday expectations, then summarizes government measures to restrain ‘unnecessary’ wartime travel. Using rail-travel statistics, memoirs and diaries, contemporary novels, local press reports, Mass-Observation and other surveys it shows that throughout the war large numbers of people took holidays much as they had in peacetime. This apparent contradiction is then discussed in relation to, for instance, ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘wartime’, the survival of class in Britain, the wartime economy and the debate on the ‘myth of the blitz’ view of civilian behaviour.     

‘Enculturation’, not ‘acculturation’: Conceptualising and assessing identity processes in migrant communities

Following a critique of Berry's model of ‘acculturation strategies’, the paper considers the relationship between heritage culture and ethnic identity. Analysis of processes of development, maintenance and redefinition of identity in contexts of alternative cultural norms contends with the assumption of conscious choice or strategy towards mainstream and heritage cultures. From the perspective of identity issues, enculturation of cultural elements rather than acculturation is often the more significant process. Going beyond critique to consider issues of the persistence of ethnic identity and processes of cultural reformulation, brings attention to the origins of primordialist sentiment within ethnic identity and the possibilities for generating situationalist perspectives. Reference to empirical investigations using Identity Structure Analysis (introduced as a conceptual framework for explicating complex identity processes) provides evidence for different identity processes and structures according to socio-historical context and the greater malleability of situationalists compared with primordialists in their empathetic identifications with alternative cultural groups.     

J.B. Priestley,the ‘Modern’ and America

ABSTRACT

J.B. Priestley has often been seen as representative of a nostalgic Englishness which rejected the modern world and, in the process, embraced anti-Americanism. However, as this article suggests, Priestley had a more complicated relationship with both America and modernity than has been accepted. Focusing on the 1930s, it shows how Priestley travelled widely in the United States and came to admire the democratic and collective aspects of American culture, whilst also developing a critique of what he saw as the lack of individuality and creativity in other elements of the ‘mass' society, anticipating arguments he would develop after 1945.     

Enchanted Modernity,Anglicanism and the Occult in Early Twentieth-Century Oxford: Annie Moberly,Eleanor Jourdain and their ‘Adventure’

In August 1901, two respectable, unmarried Edwardian ladies travelled backwards in time. On a sightseeing trip to the Court of Versailles, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were transported back to 1792 where they encountered the soon-to-be-executed Queen Marie Antoinette. In 1911 they recounted their experiences in An Adventure, a book that was widely reviewed and ran to many editions. Throughout these episodes and their telling Moberly and Jourdain held the positions of Principal and Vice Principal of St Hugh’s Hall, one of Oxford’s newly established colleges for women. Later historians and members of St Hugh’s tended to dismiss them as ‘potty’ or attempted to protect their reputations as pioneers of women’s education from (what was subsequently perceived to be) the embarrassment of An Adventure. This article revisits Moberly and Jourdain’s “Adventure”, historicising rather than pathologising or seeking to explain it away. Alongside the sceptical responses, there were many who believed Moberly and Jourdain, and the two women did not lose social or professional standing as a result of telling their story. In trying to understand why this should have been the case, the article draws upon two bodies of recent scholarship. Firstly, it examines An Adventure in light of work that has rejected older formulations of modernity as necessarily ‘disenchanted’, and instead argues for the blurring of boundaries between occult and scientific discourses. In many ways, the case of An Adventure exemplifies and furthers this thesis, showing how it was possible for two educated, professional, “modern” women to believe they had entered into “an act of memory” by Marie Antoinette that transported them backwards in time. Yet, while most scholarship interested in the relationship between modernity and enchantment focuses on the relationship between science and heterodox/occult religions, An Adventure brings another element to the discussion: orthodox Christianity, and the Anglican Church in particular. Moberly and Jourdain came from clerical families and were devout adherents of the Church of England. Their “Adventure” also, therefore, speaks to recent histories of Christianity in modern Britain, which have argued against an overly polarised and oppositional understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the occult, or Christianity and secular science, pointing to the churches’ capacity for adaptation and incorporation. The article traces the reception of An Adventure as a way to explore further the basis upon which such claims could be both made and judged as credible in a rapidly modernising early twentieth-century Oxford. While highlighting the interconnections between the occult, Anglicanism and secular/scientific scholarship, the article argues that people at the time nevertheless carefully policed the boundaries of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” belief systems, a process informed by both gender and class.     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.     

Of Fighters and Frames: Femen’s Corporeality Between the Old,the New,the Yellow and the Blue

In this essay, we examine corporeality, its discursive framings and the salience of cultural contexts in the interpretation of embodied protest rhetoric on an example of originally Ukrainian and by now international feminist group Femen. We analyse the embodied rhetoric of Femen’s activism from various angles, with a special focus on the pivotal role of cultural locations in the interpretation of Femen’s embodied activism, in particular, and corporeal resistance, in general. With our findings, we hope to extend the existent knowledge on corporeal framing and politicalization of the body as a culture-specific site of resistance and social change.     

Caroline Ware,Consumer Activism and American Democracy During the New Deal, 1933–45

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how the New Deal consumer activist Caroline F. Ware crafted an ambitious consumerist vision for the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. This vision aimed to end the Depression and bring post-war prosperity and to create a new kind of American democracy and citizenship, one suited to the promises and perils of an industrialized, urbanized America. One member of a loose cohort of like-minded intellectuals, and self-styled consumer ‘experts', Ware made one of the most persuasively articulated intellectual contributions of the period to a particular kind of liberal consumer activism.     

‘Enthusiasm,Experiment and Gallantry in Action’: Developing Light Entertainment on the Fledgling BBC, 1922–1932

This article explores the working culture of early BBC radio, programming decisions and the challenges faced in recruiting professional stage and music hall entertainers. These challenges led to the BBC’s reliance on amateur acts during the first decade of its existence. Early acts developed successful microphone techniques and content that appealed particularly to the domestic listening audience, and thus influenced radio and television entertainment for the rest of the century. Several of these early acts are discussed, with a primary focus on the works of two early pioneers of radio comedy, Norman Clapham (aka John Henry) and Mabel Constanduros.     

‘Now the Scene Appears Chang’d’: Amabel Countess De Grey,Lifecycles and the Visitor Experience of English Watering Places, 1775–1826

This article examines the visitor experience of England’s watering places during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the diaries and correspondence of Amabel Countess De Grey, it explores the ways in which the motivations, expectations and activities of elite female visitors changed as they reached different stages in their lifecycle. Discussion focuses on the use of mineral waters as a medical treatment; how patterns of sociability differed between spas and seaside resorts; and how attitudes and habits changed with age.