bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Nader Laura
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses a world of letters that reveals how a man on death row thinks, how scientists feel about their controversial workplaces, and how an anthropologist ponders issues of American survival. It elaborates how letters humanize life in a technologically driven world and connect academics to life outside the Ivory Tower. It also describes letters as a primary source for historians to document history in a culture where history is considered an absurdity. The chapter provides inside information about the growth and merging of an anthropologist's professional and public careers. It covers letters that illustrate how collegiality works, whether as constructive critique or supporting possibilities.
Getting Started in the Sixties
Authors: Nader Laura
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at letters that reflect the 1960s as a decade of concurrent movements, such as civil rights, Vietnam War protests, Native American and women's movements, consumer movements, and environmental movements. It focuses on the letter of E. R. Leach, who brought the concept of power into the ethnographic picture of highland Burma. It also refers to Leach's awareness of tensions between generations and of class variants and their impact on the sociology of knowledge. The chapter recounts the author's work with Shia Muslims in South Lebanon in the summer of 1961 to learn about dispute settlement in villages and examined whether it was secular or religious. It mentions exchanges of letters with Professor G. E. von Grunebaum from UCLA, who awarded the author a grant to go to Lebanon.
Reinventing Anthropology in the Seventies
Authors: Nader Laura
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about Dell Hymes, who put together a book of collected essays called Reinventing Anthropology at the invitation of Pantheon Books' “anti-text” series. It describes Reinventing Anthropology as a volume about racism, ecology, community and disciplinary censorship, which was not universally well received as noted by the Chicago anthropologist Fred Eggan. It also looks at the letter that was written in response to a query to the Columbia University sociologist Robert Merton about Thorstein Veblen and his use of the concept of trained incapacity. The chapter questions the role of sociology in understanding the way in which white-collar crime escaped the national crime index. It mentions the sociologist James Short, who wrote and document the paradigms used that allowed corporate criminals to escape crime statistics.
Uncovering Academic Mindsets In the Eighties
Authors: Nader Laura
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses Syrian physicist, Dr. Bizri's confirmation about science mindsets for his country after he read the author's “Barriers to Thinking New about Energy” piece. It cites Professor Clark Bullard, who wrote that the “Barriers” paper is useful in teaching engineering and George Wald, a well-known Harvard biologist, who spoke of changing attitudes in science since the beginning of the twentieth century. It also refers to Asher Peres, An Israeli physicist who conflated support for solar energy policies to ancient beliefs in “sun gods” and dismissed concern over nuclear energy safety. The chapter follows the author's letter to the economics Professor Roger Noll that followed attendance at a conference on regulation during the Reagan years. It analyses the four-page letter from the Wisconsin law professor Stewart Macaulay, which was a comprehensive argument for why a wide angle was important as reviewers lacked understanding of the private government.
The Asia Foundation’s Motion Picture Project
Authors: Lee Sangjoon
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates how and to what extent the Asia Foundation (TAF) and its field agents covertly acted to construct an alliance of anticommunist motion picture producers in Asia. It explores how US government–led Cold War cultural policies influenced the Asian regional film industry in the 1950s. It also scrutinizes the ways TAF agents responded to the various needs of local film executives and negotiated with the constantly changing political, social, and cultural environments in the region during the project's early activities. The chapter reviews the origin of TAF, the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA), which is intended to advance US foreign policy interests in Asia. It discusses the CFA's core activities, which include the broadcasting of Radio Free Asia.
Projecting Asian Cinema to the World
Authors: Lee Sangjoon
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Unheeded Cries, South Korea's official submission to the fourth San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) in 1960, which tells the story of postwar orphans in the slums of Seoul. It discusses the Berlinale, San Francisco, and Asian Film festivals that consistently invited South Korean films to their competition sections during the first half of the 1960s. It also mentions the occupied force's cultural representative, Oscar Martay, who promoted Berlin as the Western cultural showcase of the East. The chapter reviews how SFIFF was organized and managed by Irving “Bud” Levin, whose ultimate aim was to raise his profile to become an international-level figure. It elaborates the Asia Foundation's (TAF) attempt to use SFIFF to showcase non-communist and ideologically correct Asian films for mainstream American society.
Hong Kong, Hollywood, and the End of the Network
Authors: Lee Sangjoon
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the Hong Kong film industry, which has been guided by the principle of positive non-interventionism. It describes the Shaw Brothers, which was built under the Hong Kong version of laissez-faire economic policy in the 1960s. It also discusses the flexibility and relaxed atmosphere that led studios to experiment with the Hong Kong film industry's unique need to satisfy transnational Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia, which helped it quickly gain global currency. The chapter emphasizes Hong Kong as one of the competing media capitals due to its status as a nexus for economic and cultural flows within and between Chinese societies through the twentieth century. It explores how the unprecedented growth of the Shaw Brothers in the 1960s paralleled Hong Kong's rising status as a financial center in the region.
Introduction
Authors: Christensen Joel P.
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Homer's Odyssey. It is no secret that the Odyssey relates more than a simple tale of a journey home; it is about the re-creation of a man and an investigation into what comprises an identity. Odysseus is marked out as a suffering figure from the beginning of the epic — his story is both figuratively and literally about pain experienced for the sake of pursuing and obtaining a return home. In a way, his state echoes or even anticipates the modern term nostalgia, once an official psychopathological diagnosis. Narratives about the past that convey nostalgia can similarly have positive and negative outcomes. Storytelling in the Odyssey, as many have shown, is a type of intoxication that has the potential to harm and to prevent one from achieving an actual homecoming. The book explores Homeric analogs for modern psychological theories or frameworks and their effect on the structure of the epic.
Escaping Ogygia, An Isolated Man
Authors: Christensen Joel P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter uses studies in social isolation, especially among prison populations, and clinical and theoretical approaches to Learned Helplessness to elucidate how the Odyssey depicts Odysseus's mental state. Like Telemachus, Odysseus appears to be in a state of Learned Helplessness, but for somewhat different reasons. Odysseus's return from the edge of the world to Ithaca is also a return from a type of defeatist mental state. Odysseus's helplessness, however, derives from different sources from his son's: not only has he suffered many actual setbacks and traumas, but he is also depicted as isolated and depressed. This depiction resonates with modern studies in social isolation and solitary confinement. However, the narrative provides Odysseus and Telemachus with rehabilitative responses through a series of actions that function therapeutically to change the way the characters view their agency.
Marginalized Agencies and Narrative Selves
Authors: Christensen Joel P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter evaluates the impact that the Odyssey's projected narratives of agency has on those who are not the returning hero, in particular, on the enslaved people who make up a significant part of Odysseus's world. It employs frameworks and insights from Disability Studies in an attempt to understand the general impact of Homeric discourse on the people represented within the narrative and its possible impact on audiences outside of it. The chapter argues that the Odyssey ultimately uses the authorizing force of cultural discourse to marginalize, to dehumanize, and even to render certain types of violence acceptable. After outlining some basic concepts from the field of Disability Studies appropriate to Homer, it explains how this framework informs the way slaves, in particular, are treated by the Odyssey and, especially, provides structural and cultural motivations for the mutilation of Melanthios and the hanging of the enslaved women. In particular, Disability Studies illustrate how certain characters and bodies are marginalized to define an ideological center and how this marginalization relies on cultural processes of infantilization and vilification.
Penelope’s Subordinated Agency
Authors: Christensen Joel P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter offers a longer reading of Penelope alone to examine the ways in which her own agency is curbed by the expectations of social roles and varying levels of internalized oppression. It considers how the Homeric depiction of Penelope may be understood as relying on and re-enforcing psychologically damaging discourse about women. Even though Penelope is easily the most complex woman depicted in Homeric poetry, readings that emphasize her complexity tend to overlook the way her “behavior is imposed on her by her impossible role as faithful wife of a man who is absent.” The chapter then argues that Penelope's characterization is limited to traditional roles and hemmed in by cultural discourse about the weakness of the female body. In addition, Penelope's suffering is instrumentalized: the emotional cost of Odysseus's absence increases the value of his homecoming and delimits idealized behavior for a woman separated from her husband.
The Politics of Ithaca
Authors: Christensen Joel P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents an analysis of the political situation in Ithaca. A clearer picture of the political situation may allow one to see the Ithacan people as suffering from a collective trauma, which partly explains their behavior before and after Odysseus's return. Of utmost importance is that the families of the suitors assemble, debate, and about half decide to avenge themselves on Odysseus. This conflict contains the overlay of several types of discourse that touch upon justice, the nature of politics, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The reading offers a new extended treatment of the politics of the Odyssey, which forces one to reconsider the heroic presentation of Odysseus by the poet (and by himself). The chapter then examines the sudden surprising closure of the epic from the perspective of modern studies in political amnesties.
Toward a Concrete Philosophy
Authors: Immanen Mikko
Published: May 2021

This book explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. The book provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical voices. By reconstructing their overlooked debates with Heidegger and Heideggerians, the book argues that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse saw Heidegger's 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, as a serious effort to make philosophy relevant for life again and as the most provocative challenge to their nascent materialist diagnoses of the discontents of European modernity. Our knowledge of Adorno's “Frankfurt discussion” with “Frankfurt Heideggerians” remains anecdotal, even though it led to a proto-version of Dialectic of Enlightenment's idea of the entwinement of myth and reason. Similarly, Horkheimer's enthusiasm over Heidegger's legendary post-World War I lectures and criticism of Being and Time have escaped attention almost entirely. And Marcuse's intriguing debate with Heidegger over Hegel and the origin of the problematic of “being and time” has remained uncharted until now. Reading these debates as fruitful intellectual encounters rather than hostile confrontations, the book offers scholars of critical theory a new, thought-provoking perspective on the emergence of the Frankfurt School as a rejoinder to Heidegger's philosophical revolution.
Introduction
Authors: Immanen Mikko
Published: May 2021

This chapter begins with the publication of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927, which made the philosopher Martin Heidegger become one of the most discussed figures in German intellectual life. It explains that Being and Time thoroughly questions the scientifically minded philosophical and cultural self-understanding of modern Europe. It also suggests that Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse saw in Heidegger the most provocative challenge and competitor to their own analyses of the discontents of European modernity. The chapter focuses on the years between the publication of Being and Time and Heidegger's notorious embrace of National Socialism in 1933. It examines what Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer saw as the merits and the blind spots of Heidegger's philosophy before its contamination by Nazism.
The Frankfurt Discussion
Authors: Immanen Mikko
Published: May 2021

This chapter recalls Theodor W. Adorno and Martin Heidegger's reputation as archenemies because of their political antagonism and Adorno's unanswered polemics against Heidegger after World War II. It examines Adorno and Heidegger's emphasis on the philosophical significance of art and their concern over the allegedly diminished capacity of moderns to experience the world beyond the technical domination of nature. It also investigates the role played by Heidegger in the emergence of Adorno's critical theory between the publication of Being and Time in 1927 and Heidegger's Nazi turn in 1933. The chapter reconstructs the Frankfurt discussion between Adorno and his Heideggerian opponents in the University of Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933. It elaborates that Frankfurt discussion was a debate over the significance of Heidegger's revolutionary philosophy and its implicit diagnosis of the crisis of modernity.
Demythologizing Heidegger’s Thrownness
Authors: Immanen Mikko
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews Theodor W. Adorno's criticism that revolves around Martin Heidegger's notion of historicity, at the core of which lay an understanding of the human being after the temporal scheme of thrownness and projection. It mentions Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and Ludwig Klages's TheSpirit as Adversary of the Soul as the popular doomsday prophecies of the Weimar era. It also analyses Heidegger's insight about moments, history and nature that were essential in understanding human life. The chapter explores the central elements of Adorno's lecture and illuminates its status as immanent critique. It connects Adorno's lecture to a doctoral thesis on Heidegger by Dolf Sternberger, who was after an immanent critique of Being and Time.
Critical Theory as a Reply to Heidegger, Scheler, and the Frankfurt Heideggerians
Authors: Immanen Mikko
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Martin Heidegger's role in Max Horkheimer's programmatic formulations of critical theory in the early 1930s as the director of the Institute for Social Research. It highlights Horkheimer's sublation of philosophy into multidisciplinary social criticism that opened a third post-metaphysical path along Heidegger's philosophical hermeneutics and analytical philosophy. It also refers to Jürgen Habermas, who judges Horkheimer's early critical theory as an original, anti-Heideggerian response to the end of metaphysics. The chapter investigates Horkheimer's critical theory as an alternative to the hegemonic teachings of Heidegger and Max Scheler as well as to the neo-metaphysical doctrines of the Frankfurt Heideggerians. It reviews Horkheimer's debates in the Frankfurt discussion with Kurt Riezler and Paul Tillich.
Radical Ecology’s Mindfulness
Authors: Trask Michael
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that radical ecology offers less a rebuke to neo-idealism than a hyperbolic extension of its crucial conceits. One can begin by noting the large number of its practitioners who believe that ecology's task is to raise not merely human awareness of ecosystems but consciousness as such. In the view of these ecologists, the environment, if not quite sentient, confers a heightened sentience on persons. The chapter also details a dramatic example of the period's tendency to look to the past in the enthusiasm of many ecologists for what can be called the “paleo-republic.” For such thinkers, the future of civilization was not merely the preindustrial but the preagricultural past, an era before malignant overpopulation and bureaucratic inertia steered our species off its evolutionary path.
“Ashamed of the Inkpot”
Authors: Corbett Mary Jean
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews how Virginia Woolf criticized those women who wrote for money, especially in her representations of two elder female contemporaries, Lucy Clifford and Mary Augusta Ward. It analyses letters, diary entries, and reviews that reference Clifford or Ward, which evince a complex mix of emotions and beliefs about commercial success and mass-market popularity. It also traces the overlapping of sexual and market exchange in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, where the prostitute figures an array of socioeconomic relations for unmarried and married women. The chapter refers to Catherine Gallagher's classic 1986 essay on the prostitute and the Jewish question in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which examines the historical associations between the female author and the whore. It mentions Rita Felski, who argued that the fin-de-siècle division between elite and popular culture gradually acquired an explicit gender subtext.
“To Serve and Bless”
Authors: Corbett Mary Jean
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews epigraphs taken from letters written about a year apart that provide evidence for Virginia Stephen's first foray into political advocacy. It looks at Stephen's short-lived involvement with the People's Suffrage Federation (PSF), which was inaugurated sometime in 1909 and housed at 34 Mecklenburgh Square. It also refers to Virginia Woolf's stance that supports Hermione Lee's claim that she was ambivalent all her life about women philanthropists. The chapter talks about Clara Jones who argues that Woolf remained ambivalent about the value of her own political and social action throughout her career. It demonstrates how Woolf intensified her hostility to what she perceived as the politics of philanthropy among her late-Victorian foremothers.
“A Different Ideal”
Authors: Corbett Mary Jean
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses Beginning Again in 1963, where Leonard Woolf describes how in his first year of marriage he was induced to join a Care Committee of the Charity Organization Society (COS) branch in Hoxton. It recounts how Marny Vaughan and Stella Duckworth carried on the mission of their mothers' generation through her ongoing participation in the COS. It also highlights Virginia Woolf's refined ideas about philanthropy in relation to her husband's emerging political interests and her developing sense of women's political activism. The chapter refers to Ray Strachey's biography of Frances Willard in November 1912, which accompanied Leonard on a fortnight's research trip to factories and cooperative stores. It talks about the maternal–imperialist strain of women's political work that continued to exasperate Woolf.
“I’m just a laborer”
Authors: Jeske Christine
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates how people make meaning of their lives in low-wage, low-status jobs, often by distancing themselves and the good life from work by calling themselves “just laborers.” It defines the word “laborer” as someone who is “working without skill,” “just doing the work,” not doing things that people aspire to do. It adds that treating oneself as just a laborer is a way of demanding a certain bargain, which is saying, I'm in a job that does not offer dignity or a good life, and I will not offer my life to the job either. It explains that for people in disappointing jobs, calling themselves just laborers communicates that their jobs are just a way to earn money; it is not a determinant of their identity, their status, their dignity, or the good life. In some sense, they have strategically estranged themselves from work. They are embracing some degree of alienation by intentionally separating their identity, purpose, and social ties from their acts of productive labor. In doing so, they can define their identity by their communities and interactions at home, not by their working life.
The Neoliberal Republic
Authors: Vauchez Antoine , France Pierre , Moyn Samuel
Published: May 2021

This book traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, the book analyzes how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades. Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, the book explores how the always blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.
The Public-Private Foundations of the Neoliberal State
Authors: Vauchez Antoine , Moyn Samuel
Published: May 2021

This chapter maps out the rapidly growing field of public–private brokerage by assessing the scope and breadth of French revolving doors. The media discussion stirred up by the so-called pantouflages — a slang word for the practice of civil servants and politicians joining the private sector — focused almost entirely on politicians and the rising risks of conflict of interests. It therefore failed to adequately reflect the breadth and diversity of the movement that started in the 1990s between the politico-administrative elite and major business law firms in Paris. By drawing a collective sociological portrait of these pantoufleurs, the chapter reveals a structural view of the new pattern of relationships that have been consolidated at the interface between the state and markets: the type of public positions and resources that are prized by the business bar, and also the type of companies and law firms that hire from the public sector, and the sectoral pathways followed by recruits. As we are able to map out the total social space in which these crossovers move, on either side of the public–private border, it is possible to sketch the field of intermediation and influence that has developed over the course of two decades of the French state's neoliberalization.
On the “Public-ness” of the State
Authors: Vauchez Antoine , Moyn Samuel
Published: May 2021

This concluding chapter explains that far from having fulfilled the trumpeted promise of clarifying the respective roles of the state and the marketplace, the neoliberal turn has given birth to a space of mingling and exchange that has no precedent. An extraterritorial zone has grown up at the margins of business, politics, and government. In this new framework, confusion of roles and mixing of genres are not individual deviations from the norm or symptoms of occasional administrative anomalies. On the contrary, they constitute the new normal when it comes to the functioning of the state in its relationships with the market economy. This book, in the end, tells the story of a “black hole” that has appeared at the very heart of our democracies: its birth in a blind spot hidden from the view of professional regulations and political oversight, the expansion of its gravitational pull at the core of the state, and the ensuing political and democratic costs that we face today.
Afterword / Macron, the Nouveau Monde, and the Crowning of the Public-Private Elite
Authors: Vauchez Antoine , Moyn Samuel
Published: May 2021

France is blocked by the self-serving tendencies of its elite. And I’ll tell you a little secret: I know it, I was part of it.

Emmanuel Macron, Rally in Pau, April 2017

As the French edition of this book was barely making its way into bookshops and libraries, a major political breakdown suddenly hit France. Thirty-nine-year-old Emmanuel Macron, who was virtually unknown to the general public up to three years earlier, and had never before run a single campaign large or small nor been democratically elected to any political position, unexpectedly won the presidential election on his first try. As a victor over France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, he immediately became the object of liberal admiration throughout a world that saw Macron’s France as an island of resistance in a global context of the rise of populisms. As he claimed to govern France “neither at the left, neither at the right,” Macron’s political positioning that combined promarket, socially liberal, and pro-European ideas profoundly broke away from France’s past political coordinates. Within only a few months, his political movement ...
Normative Gatekeeping (1863–1921)
Authors: Mantilla Giovanni
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates how the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) faced important hurdles in its early years which threatened its position as a humanitarian broker and locked a certain conservatism inside it. It recounts the history and politics of international debate on the international regulation of armed conflict until 1921. It also discusses proposals regarding humanitarian conduct in internal conflict from 1863 to 1921 and highlights the elements that generate the social pressure that is essential to rule making. The chapter refers to the importance of norm entrepreneurs, who forcefully seize on the creation of new rules, and bring and promote rules in public forums, such as rallying others around a common cause. It describes the norms of sovereignty that prevailed in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and militated against the emergence of legal proposals regarding internal conflicts.
A Revolution in Lawmaking? (1968–1977)
Authors: Mantilla Giovanni
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes Additional Protocols (APs) as complicated and fascinating instruments that encapsulate most major aspects of global politics, such as the Third World's struggle to legitimize national liberation conflict through international law. It discusses Western efforts to manage the end of formal decolonization while containing damage to their security, image, and alliances. It also highlights the shifting of Cold War politics and proxy warfare, as well as the correlated intensification of government repression and defense of the principle of nonintervention in Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America. The chapter explains how tensions, interests, and demands all contentiously crystallized within the APs. It explains how the new rules for national liberation war and internal conflict contained within the APs constitute face-saving, contested international law.
Introduction
Authors: Lewis Robert
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Chicago's industrial decline and the response of the city's place-dependent bourgeoisie to its fading fortunes. It charts the history of industrial change between 1920 and 1975 and looks at the creation of industrial redevelopment programs in the city of Chicago in the postwar years as city leaders responded to these industrial changes. It also argues that the city of Chicago experienced industrial decline from the 1920s and city leaders implemented several industrial renewal initiatives in the postwar period in an attempt to reverse industrial decline. The chapter explains how the industrial renewal failed, emphasizing on the place-dependent coalitions of developers, financiers, politicians, small business owners, and industrial managers that worked to counter deindustrialization were fighting a losing battle. It mentions alliances that consisted of people from real estate, health, education, finance, and government that pushed a new vision for Chicago.
Reinventing Industrial Property
Authors: Lewis Robert
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates the Mayor's Committee for Economic and Cultural Development (CECD) that substituted the Chicago Land Clearance Commission's (CLCC) strategy of using government funds to replace razed blighted space with new industrial districts. It examines the methods used by the CECD to modernize the practices that induced industrial firms to invest in city property. It also points out how the CECD was instrumental in shaping how city leaders viewed industrial property through the 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter recounts CECD's work to resituate industrial property as a space for science-led industrial development and the rejuvenation of existing factory areas between 1961 and 1976. It cites how the CECD contributed to the government-led economic development policies that became increasingly common in the United States since the 1970s by forcing the city and industrial institutions to rethink how to promote industrial growth.
Black Market Business
Authors: Firpo Christina Elizabeth
Published: May 2021

This book is a grassroots social history of the clandestine market for sex in colonial Tonkin. It explores the ways in which sex workers, managers, and clients evaded the colonial regulation system in the turbulent economy of the interwar years. The book argues that the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin created spaces of tension in which the interwar black-market sex industry thrived. The clandestine sex industry flourished in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural–urban division, and demographic shifts. As a nexus of the many tensions besetting late colonial Tonkin, the black-market sex industry serves as a useful lens through which to examine these tensions and the ways they affected marginalized populations. More specifically, an investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished women — a group regrettably understudied by historians — experienced the tensions. Drawing on an astonishingly diverse and multilingual source base, the book includes detailed cases of juvenile prostitution, human trafficking, and debt-bondage arrangements in sex work, as well as cases in Tonkin's bars, hotels, singing houses, and dance clubs. Using GIS technology and big data sets to track individual actors in history, it serves as a model for teaching new methodological approaches to conducting social histories of women and marginalized people.
The Geography of Vice
Authors: Firpo Christina Elizabeth
Published: May 2021

This chapter is a spatial analysis of Tonkin's black market sex industry. It investigates how the area's physical, administrative, economic, and political geography shaped the ways that unregistered sex was sold in Tonkin. Some of the areas discussed here include the Red River Delta, Hanoi, Hanoi's suburbs, Hai Phong City, the military bases, the border towns, and the coast of Tonkin. The chapter discusses how the geographic and political landscape of Tonkin enabled traffickers and clandestine sex workers to evade colonial police. It talks about how colonial land policies, the tax system, and the government's neglect of the suburbs further impoverished peasants, leading women to seek alternative income through sex work.
Conclusion
Authors: Firpo Christina Elizabeth
Published: May 2021

This chapter concludes that Tonkin's flourishing black market for sex during the interwar years owed its success in large part to French colonial rule. Colonial rule gave rise to sites of tension — economic disparity, an urban–rural divide, an uneven distribution of colonial law, and cultural shifts — and it was within them that the black market thrived. The colonial state's blind spots allowed this market to flourish. For one thing, colonial officials miscalculated the unintended effects of their strictly regulated “tolerance” system. In marginalizing certain colonized populations — in this case impoverished Vietnamese women — the French colonial state lost much of its ability to monitor and control them. Despite numerous regulations and ordinances, as well as exhaustive policing efforts, sex workers easily sidestepped the reach of the government and found ways to make money in an informal economy. The chapter also states that the stories of the women and girls in this book reveal a close relationship between choice and coercion. Taken individually, it is tempting to reduce these people's experiences to a binary of either agency or victimhood. But placing their stories within the context of larger historical trends such as mass poverty, migration, and cultural change reveals that this binary is misleading.
Introduction
Authors: Firpo Christina Elizabeth
Published: May 2021

This chapter introduces the black market sex industry in late colonial Vietnam. It argues that the interwar black market sex industry thrived in spaces of tension, which were created by the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin. Tension developed in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural–urban division, and demographic shifts, brought about by colonial policies. An investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished women — a group regrettably understudied by historians — experienced the tensions. Marginalized by the colonial economy and swayed by new cultural trends, these women came to participate in black market sex work by choice, by force, or, more often, by some combination of the two.
Toward International Accountability for All Dependent Territories
Authors: Heiss Mary Ann
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on how the two most prominent Western nations, the United States and Great Britain, dealt with the push for accountability. It explains that Washington adopted a flexible approach to UN interest in the territories it administered and encouraged its allies to do likewise. It also refers to the administrations of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy that proclaimed their desire to pursue a middle-of-the-road approach that favored neither side in the evolving battle over mandated accountability for dependent territories. The chapter investigates that the British position for dependent territories was rooted in the nation's status as the world's leading colonial administrator. It explains Britain's approach to UN activism in the nontrust dependent territories that sought to protect its national prerogatives while also recognizing limited international interest.
Taking Off the Gloves
Authors: Heiss Mary Ann
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates how the issue of the UN authority on determining a particular territory's status dominated the Committee on Information's third term. It talks about the claim of new member-states Portugal and Spain that they were not administering powers under the terms of the Charter. It also analyses repeated efforts through 1958 to empower the United Nations to declare specific territories non-self-governing and fall victim to the Western states' ability to manipulate procedure. The chapter discusses the Committee on Information's limited terms of reference, balanced composition between administering and nonadministering states, and lack of representation that moderated its tone and prevented it from pushing for the sort of international accountability the anticolonial majority desired. It highlights that the wholesale changes in UN membership began during the Tenth General Assembly in 1955 and made clear the impossibility of forever forestalling the drive for international accountability.
Crossing the Rubicon
Authors: Heiss Mary Ann
Published: May 2021

This chapter covers the momentous events of 1961, when implementation of the colonialism declaration dominated UN discussion of colonial questions. It discusses the US efforts to paint the Soviets as imperialist and Soviet appeals for support for their attacks on US neocolonialism that did not gain much traction as the anticolonial faction held tightly to the neutralism of the newly founded Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It also highlights how the anticolonial faction worked to ensure that the Decolonization Committee embodied an internationalist vision that sided with neither East nor West and sought to assign primacy to the interests of the nontrust dependent territories. The chapter explores the growing power of the anticolonial bloc at the United Nations during 1961 through the admission of former nontrust dependent territories. It recalls the UN involvement to eradicate colonialism that occurred with the creation of NAM.
Palestinian Postcoloniality
Authors: Sen Somdeep
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyzes the historical geopolitical events that led to the introduction of postcoloniality in Palestine. It argues that the Oslo Accords ensured that the postcolonial lives alongside the anticolonial in a still-persistent colonial condition in the Palestinian territories. Specifically, this is an outcome of two relevant legacies of the Accords. The first and most palpable legacy is the Accords' failure to end Israel's military rule over the Palestinian territories and establish a sovereign State of Palestine. The second legacy is evident in the manner in which the Oslo Accords introduced and incentivized postcoloniality, encouraging Palestinian factions to refrain from an anticolonial political conduct and instead operate in a manner as if the colonizer had already withdrawn. It is these two legacies of the Oslo Accords which Hamas navigates by means of its dual role. As an armed resistance movement, Hamas exemplifies a response to what the Accords failed to do, namely establish a sovereign Palestinian state and dismantle Israel's settler colonial rule. However, as the government in Gaza, it also embodies postcoloniality as instructed by the Oslo Accords.
The Palestinian Moment of Liberation
Authors: Sen Somdeep
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses the Palestinian moment of liberation. It recognizes that Hamas presents an extreme case because Palestinian postcoloniality has, to an extent, been concretized by way of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its accompanying institutions under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the case of Hamas shows that liberation is not entirely contingent on the singular moment when the colonizer withdraws from the lands of the colonized. Instead, the colonial subject begins the process of conjuring up a liberated peoplehood while still in a colonial condition. Thus, in the case of Palestine, this means that Gaza is not just a story of siege, war, and the challenges Hamas faces while maintaining its dual role or its growing authoritarianism. If one considers the long moment of liberation to have begun already, one also notices that a Gaza Strip under the canopy of a single Palestinian leadership becomes, albeit minimally, reminiscent of the eventual liberated State of Palestine as a single territorial unit, inhabited by the Palestinian people and ruled by a Palestinian government.
Time in 1:72 Scale
Authors: Golubev Alexey
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the scale model hobby in the USSR, focusing on models as objects that made manifest the historical imagination inherent in Soviet technopolitics. Models, especially when assembled in collections, challenged Marxist interpretations of history and helped organize the Soviet historical imagination along national lines. As with their prototypes, scale models were also affective but in a different way, because of their ability to showcase Soviet industrial and technological capabilities and to stand as a synecdoche for historical progress. The miniaturization of history in its particular technocentric and national understanding made models performative, as they organized history into a spectacle for the educated male gaze of Soviet model enthusiasts. The chapter also addresses the themes of the public space, performativity, and visuality.
The Men of Steel
Authors: Golubev Alexey
Published: May 2021

This chapter continues the exploration of the marginal urban spaces of late socialism from a slightly different perspective, as it examines the peculiar phenomenon of basement bodybuilding in the late USSR. Driven by the transnational imagery of the cultured male body as hypermuscular, many Soviet teenagers and men turned to weightlifting equipment with its power to help achieve muscle gain and transform their bodies into cultured bodies. At the same time, the failure of Soviet bodybuilding to become part of the official sports system led to its social marginalization, which became visible in social topography. The Soviet press repeatedly denounced basement bodybuilding as a criminal activity. But for most people who engaged in it, it was a form of acquiring strength, health, self-assurance, and — through it — social agency, which many of them interpreted as loyalty to the dominant symbolic and political order.
Disruptions of Daily Life
Authors: Mitchell Arthur M.
Published: May 2021

This book explores the mass-media landscape of the early twentieth cspecific authorsentury to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. The book examines the literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, the book locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century, such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. It unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East versus West. The book expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, it reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed — and how those realities can be changed.
Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Mitchell Arthur M.
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how literary modernism operated in Japan, looking at the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Contrary to prevalent conceptions of high modernism as art-objects sequestered from the utilitarian language of capitalist society, modernist literature was highly enmeshed in the language of the mass print media, one of the major sources of social ideology since the beginning of the twentieth century. The works of the four Japanese authors disrupt the ideologies that made daily living appear seamless and comfortable. They did so to expose the way such norms were bolstered by narrow, constrictive, and essentialist notions of gender, ethnicity, society, and nation; to reveal the way such norms were employed to discipline the minds and behaviors of Japanese citizens; and finally to provoke cognitive and sensational liberation from the supremacy of these norms. The chapter then considers the emergence and establishment of the I-novel genre in Japanese literary history, as well as the phenomenon of modanizumu.
Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and the Narrative of the Present
Authors: Mitchell Arthur M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates the engagement of Kawabata Yasunari's novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa with the language of earthquake reconstruction as it reached a climax in the late 1920s. In the latter half of the decade, the major Japanese newspapers sought to track the progress of post-earthquake reconstruction efforts through a language of science and objectivity. These reports collectively announced and anticipated the finalization of these efforts in the spring of 1930 when municipal and national government bureaus had planned an extravagant festival to celebrate the successful renovation of the “imperial city.” The serialization of Kawabata's novel spanned the time period both before and after this festival with a suggestive hiatus during the few months in which the festival actually took place. The novel assimilated the language of this mass media reportage, reproducing statistical analyses and even reprising some of the exact language being used to describe the new bridges and parks. But the story is rendered through a kaleidoscopic narrative that shuffles and reshuffles a bric-a-brac of details and events into momentary patterns of coherence. Ultimately, Kawabata's novel subverts national attempts to suppress the traumas of the recent past, insisting on an alternate way of narrating the psychology of the city.
Against the National Literary Narrative
Authors: Mitchell Arthur M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explains how the modernist works treated in the previous chapters can be juxtaposed in their response to the formation of gender and narration in the modern novel. It demonstrates how modernist fiction can and should be extracted from the nationally inscribed literary histories, or in fact how the works themselves contain the seeds of these narratives' deconstruction. National literary histories exaggerate the power of the literary works while simultaneously circumscribing their literary value within the chronologies of history. At work in the elaboration of national literature is a forgetfulness of how and why modernist works were so perverse. Recovering the radically disruptive essence of modernist fiction by delineating its contortions of social ideology allows us to activate anew its critical capacity and bring it to bear upon our own daily lives.