‘It’s in the Blood,isn’t it?’ The Contested Status of First World War Veterans in Second World War Civil Defence

This article examines how ex-servicemen’s memories of the First World War shaped their experience of working in civil defence during the Second. In response to ongoing public criticism of civil defence as a whole and a dismissive attitude towards veterans in particular, these men expressed a distinct form of ‘useful masculinity’, rooted in their combat experience and developed within the particular context of civil defence. I will argue that through the group setting in which remembering took place, veterans were able to oppose dominant cultural narratives and to develop and express these alternative narratives about their value.     

Anti-Communist moving images and Cold War ideology: on the Malayan Film Unit

The Malayan Film Unit (MFU), a film organization affiliated to the British colonial government, produced a large number of anti-communist films accompanied by multilingual recordings and commentaries. The ultimate goal of the MFU was to interpellate Malayan identity in order to eradicate the threat posed by communist ideology during the Cold War era. This article considers films made by the MFU alongside Cold War archival materials gathered from the UK and Singapore, and reportage on the MFU in the US, UK and local newspapers of the time. It will explore how Malayan communists and Chinese New Villages settlers were represented in semi-realistic/semi-fictional moving images during the Cold War period. This article aims to reconsider the question of whether the aim of the MFU really was to hasten the end of empire, or if it was an extension of the imperialist machinery of state in South-East Asia.     

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films: pursuing and escaping history

Abstract

This article situates Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films in the post Cold‐War global setting. It discusses two common interpretive approaches to Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films – French auteurism and ‘national allegory’ – and puts these two approaches within their historical context of Cold‐War and post Cold‐War global politics. The article places the rise of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films parallel to the rise of the mainland fifth generation of film directors, pointing out that their apparently opposite directions – Hou Hsiao‐Hsien going political in his Taiwan trilogy and the fifth generation film directors going apolitical – are part and parcel of the same phenomenon of alternative politics in its particular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics. Particular attention is given to Hou’s Taiwan trilogy, Flowers of Shanghai, and Coffee Jikou.     

Special Needs,Cheerful Habits: Smoking and the Great War in Britain, 1914–18

This article applies an interpretive anthropological and phenomenological approach to the Great War in Britain, 1914–18, focusing on the cigarette as a cultural artefact and material commodity, and smoking as a cultural motif and social practice. The primary material featured includes personal correspondence from soldiers and civilians, newspaper articles, advertising and fictional literature. The fundamental task carried out by this study is the connection of developments in technology and distribution accelerated by the Great War, with smoking as a practice bound up with the social, cultural and material conditions in which those on the front found themselves.     

Culture Wars

Abstract

In Revel, Riot and Rebellion, David Underdown reasserted the importance of the concepts of social change, revolution and puritanism to an understanding of the English Civil War. Regional cultures provided the framework through which the fracturing of England into opposing societies, cultures and, ultimately, armies could be explained. The book contributed to a re-thinking of puritanism as a cultural phenomenon. If the intensity of puritan feeling helps to explain the division of England, so also does the strength of support for the Established Church identified by recent research. Further micro-studies are needed to understand the dynamics of local cultural and religious conflicts before and during the Civil War.     

The camera in pain: memories of the Cold War in East Asian independent documentaries

Abstract

This article begins with a discussion of the changing topography of cultural production in East Asia over the last 25?years, especially as it concerns the genre of independent documentary film, and then it turns to three independent documentaries filmed in Japan and North Korea, South Korea and Japan, and China, respectively: Yang Yong-hi's Dear Pyongyang (2005 Dear Pyongyang. 2005. Directed by Yang Yong-hi. Busan International Film Festival. [Google Scholar]), Mun Jeong-hyun's Grandmother's Flower (2007 Grandmother's Flower. 2007. Directed by Mun Jeong-hyun. Busan International Film Festival: [Google Scholar]), and Wang Bing's He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2006). Erased from the official historical record and excluded from public commemoration, the alternate history of pain traced by these documentaries resubmits the Cold War to examination from deep inside its most private wounds. In the process, the filmmakers encounter not only the memories of the earlier generation that lived through the most violent episodes of the Cold War, but also come to question their own history and identities within the process of the Cold War's decomposition.     

Fear and Rumour in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The article explores the nature of popular fears during the early years of the People's Republic of China by examining two types of rumour: those of a ‘secular’ type that told of China's defeat in the Korean War, a third world war or an imminent nuclear attack; and those of a ‘supernatural’ type that told of demons out to snatch vital organs or the end of the world. These rumours testified both to the resilience of ancient cosmological beliefs and values and to their capacity to fuse with elements of ‘modern’ politics. The article asks what they tell us about the relationship of the party-state to the populace.     

The construction of national identity in South Korea and the tradition of masculinity in Korean Abstract Painting

ABSTRACT

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the ‘evolution’ of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and ‘ending’ with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea’s ultimate ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ art form, a ‘Korean’ painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of ‘Scholarly Painting’ (muninhwa). Japanese‐influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910–45) are rejected as ‘non‐authentic.’ The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre‐modern Korea, and thus its revival as an ‘ultimate modern’ and ‘Korean’ form has the consequence of locating traditionally‐gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South’s modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign ‘Koreaness’ in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an ‘ultimate Korean sign’ and how its use of anti‐Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War.     

Refugee,returnee, borderland: the accidental activists and Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

ABSTRACT

Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.     

The ‘Welsh’ Pimpernel: Richard Llewellyn and the Search for Authenticity in Second World War Britain

ABSTRACT

Achieving worldwide success in 1939 with his bestselling novel, How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn became indelibly linked with a particular vision of Wales and Welshness. Yet, when it posthumously emerged that Llewellyn was not Welsh but an Englishman of Welsh parentage he faced accusations of fakery. Mapping Llewellyn’s military service in the Welsh Guards and work with the BBC, this article traces his complex negotiation of selfhood during the Second World War. By highlighting how Llewellyn was embraced as a cultural representative of transnational Welshness, it underlines the potential of dual identifications in underpinning constructions of wartime Britishness.     

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.     

Anti-communist films sponsored by the US government in Singapore and Malaya: on the New York Sound Masters Inc.

This article examines anti-Communist films made by Hollywood in Cantonese and Malay in Singapore and Malaya in the Cold War context of the “Campaign of Truth.” In the early 1950s, the United State Information Agency, an arm of the State Department, secretly commissioned and funded New York Sound Masters Inc. to produce and shoot several anti-Communist films in Singapore and Malaya. In 1953, cinemas across Malaya and Singapore screened Singapore Story and Kampong Sentosa, two Cold War products of the “Campaign of Truth.” In addition to analysing the ideology of these films, this article also combines declassified archive material from the US and Singaporean National Archives with primary materials from UK, US, Singaporean, and Malayan periodicals from the Cold War era in order to explore how these two films use Malay and Cantonese to narrate a Hollywood’s version of the Singaporean story. As these two films have been largely passed over in scholarship and the films and archives have not been regularly accessible, records of these films are absent from histories of film and television in the US, Singapore, and Malaya. This article aims to remedy this absence.     

Middle-Class Fathers,Sons and Military Service in England, 1914–1918

The figure of the hyper-patriotic middle-class father, happy to sacrifice his sons to the war, while remaining snug at home, was a recurrent feature of post-First World War literature. This article places this view of wartime fatherhood under scrutiny, suggesting that middle-class fathers with sons of military age rarely behaved as straightforward enforcers of the state’s call to arms. Alongside expressions of vocal pride in sons who conformed to the manly ideal by volunteering, there were resistance, silence and fear, while support for sons who sought to avoid enlistment was a good deal more evident than any determination that sons should do their ‘bit’ at all costs.     

'I still remain one of the old Settlement boys': Cross-class Friendship in the First World War Letters of Cardiff University Settlement Lads’ Club

This article examines the letters sent from former members of Cardiff University Settlement Lads' Club to two settlement workers, Amy and Edward Lewis, during the First World War. It argues that affective relationships developed within the settlement house prior to the war were subsequently utilised by working-class soldiers in their imaginings of home and community. The letters are used not only to demonstrate the interpersonal relationships that developed between settlement workers and settlement attendees, but also more broadly how the university settlement movement's concept of cross-class friendship worked in practice.     

What does “an open body” say: the body and the Cold War in the early 1980s theatre of Taiwan

ABSTRACT

The early 1980s marks a significant period for modern theatre in Taiwan. It is often heralded as the “renaissance of modern Chinese/Taiwan theatre” through the reinvention of Chinese theatrical traditions, such as the Peking opera. This paper examines the connotations and denotations of “the West,” which serves as an important reference or counterpart in theatre practice of the period. An “open body” on stage was highly appraised and requested for theatre practitioners during the time. By historicizing the West in tandem with the concept of the “open body,” this paper calls attention to the socio-historical and the geopolitical aspects of the Cold War in Taiwan’s “theatrical renaissance.” “An open body” was emphasized in the first year of “Experimental Theater Exhibition” in 1980. Wu Jing-jyi, who had experienced working and directing in one of the most famous Off-Off-Broadway theatres, LaMaMa E.T.C in New York, led a series of workshops and training courses in “Lan-ling Theater Workshop” and created a new performing method on the basis of what they coined as “an open body.” Lee Kuo-hsiu, Liu Ching-min, Chin Shih-chieh, Lee Tien-ju – most of whom were and still are the leading actors and actresses in Taiwan – among others were all trained and influenced by this method. The magnificent production of the play Hechu xinpei was an example that followed the “open body” performance method. In this paper I make two main arguments. First, without examining closely what an open body signified at the time, the discursive formation of the body in the 1980s theatre renaissance cannot be fully comprehended. Second, I propose that the modern Taiwanese body that is open is simultaneously imbricated in relation to geopolitics, knowledge of Area Studies, and modernity – categories that the United States invented, led and developed throughout the Western bloc in the Cold War.     

Fantasy island: oceanic imaginings in Paul Yoon's Once the Shore

Paul Yoon's short story collection, Once the Shore, recently won the fiction award at the 13th Asian American Literary Awards, sponsored by the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Once the Shore is set on the fictional Solla Island, the inspiration for which came from time Yoon spent on the real Jeju Island. Solla is an abstract or heterotopic space through which Yoon describes specific moments in the lives of local islanders as they are shaped both directly and indirectly by the brutal histories of colonialism and the Cold War, past and present, in the region. Yoon imagines Oceania from below, from the perspective of farmers, divers, fishermen, orphans, renegades, and castaways who form strange friendships across barriers of age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. While Once the Shore can be read in relation to several overlapping literary traditions – Asian American, Korean, Pacific Islander – I situate the collection at the intersection of Epeli Hau'ofa's utopic vision of Oceania and the Islands of 20, an emergent organization based out of the World Peace Program at Cheju National University, which aims to move the G20 toward recognition of the uneven and disastrous effects of globalization, climate change, and militarism on small islands.     

Defining Early Modern Automobility

ABSTRACT

Automobility lies at the heart of contemporary analysis of the social relations of mobility. Thus far, however, it lacks a history. This article seeks to rectify that omission by interrogating the road traffic accident crisis which afflicted Manchester in the early years of the Second World War. The article proposes a provisional chronology for automobility in twentieth-century Britain: a lengthy phase between 1920 and 1970, dominated by the interests of private motorists, and a modern sub-period between 1970 and the near present. The latter era witnessed a gradual, and then an increasingly rapid, movement towards meeting the needs of non-drivers.     

‘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.     

‘Read for Victory’: Public Libraries and Book Reading in a British Naval Port City during the Second World War

In 1942, a library official in Portsmouth, UK appealed to the city’s inhabitants to ‘read for victory’, believing that they had a duty to use their reading time productively as part of their wartime activities. This article argues that long-standing desires among the country’s political and civic elites to encourage the nation’s readers to spend their leisure time prudently intensified during the Second World War. The public library service was utilised by civic leaders, library officials and publishing trade personnel to aid the country’s war effort. The article argues that negative attitudes regarding mass reading tastes remained largely static, despite recognition that the conflict drew people to the written word for relaxation and escapism. Using the naval city of Portsmouth as a case study, this article charts the activities of the city’s public library authorities and the borrowing habits of its readers to reveal that while many people borrowed books in order to distract themselves from the conflict, the city’s strategic importance ensured that many citizens also read in order to facilitate their preparedness for war service, whether that be on the home front or overseas. The article argues that while, in common with national trends, many of Portsmouth’s citizens used libraries to obtain books to help distract them from the war, many remained eager to make use of the service for educational purposes, unlike the majority of the nation’s library users, whose interest in this aspect of library provision rapidly waned as the war progressed. The article concludes that the public library service was viewed as a central plank in the war effort and that library officials worked continuously to ensure that it remained so.