The Search for National Identity and Japanese Industrial Policy, 1950–1969

Abstract. Economic nationalism reflected in Japanese industrial policy experienced two distinctive stages during 1950–69. It was fragmented in the 1950s as political actors held competing perceptions of national interest and consequently asserted contesting strategies for industrial policy. The tensions between the conservative and the progressive eventually led to a clash in 1960 on the issue of the renewal of the Japan–US security treaty. Economic nationalism began to unify the country in the 1960s as political actors were able to build a consensus on national interest based on economic growth and united around a grand strategy of high growth and liberalisation of trade. During this transition, the perceived external threat to the nation was a major force in generating the momentum for economic nationalism in policy-making, while a fair distribution of economic welfare among social classes through industrial policy was indispensable for economic nationalism to obtain public support.     

Modernity and the Other Woman: Gender and National Identity in the Egyptian Women's Press: 1952–1967

This article looks at depictions of non‐Egyptian women in the Egyptian women's press during the Nasser period, from 1952–1967. A regular and recurring feature of the Egyptian women's press during the 1950s and 1960s, representations of foreign women were products of both global and local struggles. Enabled by a world order increasingly transformed by the political voices of colonial and post‐colonial subjects, such representations were also bound up in Egyptian debates about gender subjectivities, the consequences of state and nation building, and the boundaries of national identity. While they can be read as contributing to the creation of what Chandra Mohanty has called ‘an imagined community of third world oppositional struggles’, they also suggest much about how the liberating, emancipatory possibilities of post‐colonial/anti‐imperialist projects limit their own possibility for realisation.     

English Evangelicals,Protestant National Identity,and Anglican Prayer Book Revision, 1927–1928

This paper examines English Anglican and Free Church evangelical reactions to the Church of England's Prayer Book revision proposals in 1927–1928, arguing that their responses reveal the resilience of Protestant national identity and anti‐Catholicism within English evangelicalism during this period. The concept of a Protestant nation, reformed heritage and Protestant constitution remained integral to the English evangelical identity. The robust “no‐popery” response of evangelicals in 1927–1928 points to the durability of the Protestant national narrative in English culture and society beyond the nineteenth century and suggests that the liberal Anglican vision of a broadly Christian national identity had a significant ideological rival in the interwar period.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Feminism Against Neoliberalism: Theorising Biopolitics in Germany, 1978–1993

Recent scholars have argued that feminism is the handmaiden of neoliberalism. This article suggests otherwise, offering a study of West German feminists in the 1980s. Responding to the advent of reproductive technologies, these feminists were pioneers in critically assessing the relationship between reproduction and neoliberalism. Radical feminists like Maria Mies argued that global capitalism allied with the state to coercively structure reproduction for its needs. For disability rights feminists like Theresia Degener, however, the state did not coerce; it produced citizens who willingly regulated their reproduction under a new eugenics from below. In analysing the marketisation of reproduction, German feminists developed a more sophisticated understanding of neoliberalism than critics today who simplistically theorise neoliberalism as the mere retraction of the state.     

The Queen – A Middle–Class Tragedy: The Writing of History and the Creation of Myths in Nineteenth–Century France and Germany

This article is an interpretation of historical narratives written by nineteenth–century German and French historians (among them Johann Gustav Droysen and Jules Michelet) about the French Revolution and the biographies of notable queens. Central to this historical narrative are Marie–Antoinette of France, Louise, queen of Prussia, and Elizabeth, empress of Austria. The text is concerned with the process of transforming the executed queen of ancien régime France into the image of the nineteenth–century bourgeois ideal of women and monarchy. Thus the essay is also about the creation of myths and about male bourgeois and middle–class fantasies.