Race-ing Rape: Representations of Sexual Violence in American Combat Films

Abstract

Although portrayals of the rape of Asian women in American combat films are associated with the Vietnam War movie, such scenarios first became an established trope of the combat genre in films made during and about World War II. While pre-Vietnam War films used rape as a narrative device to justify US foreign and military policy, Vietnam combat films later used it as metaphor for US imperialism. Notwithstanding this difference, the combat film’s representation of sexual violence both pre- and post-Vietnam has always thrived on its confirmation of an American hegemony predicated on the subjugation of peoples (and, in particular, women) of colour.     

Cultural Nationalism,Anti-Americanism,and the Federal Defense of the Canadian Football League

ABSTRACT

During the 1960s nationalism flourished in Canada as did American influence, both cultural and economically, as well as separatist sentiment in Quebec. The Canadian federal government became more interventionist to combat threats to Canadian sovereignty: internal threats from Quebec and external threats from the United States. The federal government used sport as a nation-building tool and eventually acted to protect the Canadian Football League (CFL) as a display of resistance to Americanization and in an attempt to unite French and English. Canadian football had become a symbol of the nation and therefore could be used by the government in a symbolic way to resist cultural imperialism and promote national unity. On two occasions the federal government acted to ensure the CFL preserved its Canadian identity; first, to prevent Canadian-based football teams from joining an American professional football league, and second, to prevent American-based teams from joining the CFL. John Munro was the key Canadian politician who formulated policy to protect Canadian football.     

Trading Sentiments

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially oriented critiques of cross-cultural friendship transformed into unbridled enthusiasm in the second reprint. I explain this shift as both a consequence of a shift in genre, from commercial voyaging to scientific voyaging, and as a reflection of two competing ideas of the relationship between friendship and commerce. The first version reflects a Smithian ideal, where friendship is excluded from commerce, while the second version shows a natural law conception of friendship as commercial imperialism in its ideal, and morally virtuous, form.     

GIs and “Jeep girls”: sex and American soldiers in wartime China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.     

Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Situating al-Qaeda and the Global War on Terror within Geopolitical Trends and Structures

Two North American political geographers situate contemporary terrorism in the world within broad historical trends and geopolitical structures. They employ Rapoport's "four waves of terrorism" to illustrate the changing geography of terrorism (from an intrastate to an international phenomenon) and place it within the context of broad historical shifts in modes of warfare that envisages terrorism as a form of war stemming from imperialism and state-building. The authors broaden the structural setting of terrorism to include geoeconomics and the concept of relative deprivation, using empirical analysis to argue that contemporary terrorism is primarily a feature of the semi-periphery of the world-economy (middle-income countries). Specific characteristics of the Global War on Terror are interpreted by relating processes of imperialism and state-building to a situation in which the U.S. is facing geopolitical challenges and a possible decline in global-power status. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I390, O100, Y900. 3 figures, 1 table, 52 references.     

The Canadian Rebellion,the American South,and Slavery

ABSTRACT

In the past few decades, thanks in large part to the work of several historians that appears in my edited collection, Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion (2019), there is a growing trend to consider the Canadian Rebellion within an American historical and historiographical context. Despite this exciting new research, most studies on the Rebellion and the United States continue to focus on the northern borderland. However, the Canadian Rebellion was a significant event that gained attention all over the United States, including the American South. Similar to the North, the American South was also invested in the outcome of the Rebellion. This was due to one reason: slavery. By specifically focusing on the American South and, more importantly, its influence on American foreign policy during the period, I want to encourage historians to take a more definitive stance; that slavery—just like the Panic of 1837, the Anglo-American rapprochement of thepost-War-of-1812 period, or the fear of British retaliation—played a major role in the United States Government’s official opposition to the Rebellion.     

Take me up,I want to go: Captivity,disorientation and affect in the neurosphere

ABSTRACT

Captivity narratives have been a core American genre for centuries. This paper suggests that some American captivity narratives are opening into emergent attempts to articulate social feeling at a moment of precarity. I treat captivity here not just as a narrative, genre or trope but also as an affect. I explore how neurodivergent young people evoke disorientation and captivity on Tumblr as an expression of identity. I show how the bloggers share a feeling with UFO abduction narratives in creating an atmosphere of difference.     

‘Navigating sovereignty under a Cold War military industrial colonial complex: US military empire and Marshallese decolonization’

Abstract

As World War II unsettled the global balance of power ushering in a wave of decolonization, the postwar period also saw the expansion of US military imperialism into Micronesia. In this central Pacific region, a new colonial era began rooted in US strategic concerns and mandated under a 1947 United Nations Trusteeship Agreement. During the Cold War, the United States buttressed its nuclear arsenal by testing its deadliest weapons of mass destruction (nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile) in the Marshall Islands, residing on the eastern edge of Micronesia. This weapons testing program would inform Marshallese struggles towards self-determination, ultimately shaping the contours of Marshallese sovereignty as the region achieved formal decolonization through a Compact of Free Association in 1986.     

Appalachian Anxiety: Race,Gender, and the Paradox of “Purity” in an Age of Empire, 1873–1901

Abstract

This article positions emergent interest in the southern mountains at the end of the nineteenth century within the broader context of U.S. imperialism and immigration. In these years, observers proclaimed that the Appalachian South was a reserve of “pure American stock.” Accordingly, Appalachian people were said to have provided a bulwark to the effects of immigration within the nation, but equally as crucial, the region was protected from the supposedly dangerous racial contamination that occurred from exposure to, and contact with, colonized peoples abroad. However, other observers recorded dangerous levels of moral and behavioral decline in the mountain South. This article exposes the tension of an allegedly superior population that is perceived to have declined into abject poverty and moral depravity. Doing so provides insight as to why Appalachia looms as a contradictory place of much fascination in the U.S. cultural imaginary.     

An Ojibway Artifact Unraveled. The Case of the Bag with the Snake Skin Strap

Abstract

It is rare to come across a work of Native American textile art that is as intriguing for its aesthetic attributes as for the history with which it is associated. Sadly, the reason for this infrequency is not for lack of historical interest, but rather the deplorable deficiency of documentation for most Native American museum artifacts. It was fortuitous then, when I encountered a bag in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Toronto, whose striking appearance is matched with documentation of its extraordinary history with Ojibway Chiefs Maungwudaus and John Tecumseh Henry. Recovering the bag's history required detective work. What follows is the story of emerging clues, surprising discoveries and the insights that they facilitated for the artifact 'detective'.     

‘As imperialistic as our masters’? Relations between British and Irish communists, 1920–1941

ABSTRACT

Soon after its formation, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was tasked by the Communist International with assisting their Irish comrades to develop their organisation. This article outlines the relations between British and Irish communists from 1920 to 1941 and argues that, notwithstanding the selfless work of some British communists, the CPGB on the whole exhibited a patronising and paternalistic demeanour towards the Irish that failed to consider the latter’s perspective on an equal footing to its own, even in their own affairs. This attitude, combined with its position within the heart of the British Empire, is indicative of ‘cultural imperialism’.     

‘Faced With Courage’: Interpreting and Presenting Sites of African American Heritage to the Public

Abstract

Archaeological sites involving African American history and life often remain un-interpreted or are poorly interpreted because it can be difficult for Americans to confront a deeply painful history of enslavement, racism, segregation, exploitation of labour, disenfranchisement, and displacement. In this article, I discuss specific case studies of archaeological sites representative of great injustices in American history and efforts to present these events, and the people who lived through them, through public interpretation.     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.     

Fast food/organic food: Reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow'

Organic food consumption is one of several new trends in eating read as active opposition to industrialized food provision. While fast food consumption is characterized by compulsive gluttony, manifest in fat bodies, alternative consumption practices are seen to be driven by conscious reflexivity, such that consumers monitor, reflect upon and adapt their personal conduct in light of its perceived consequences. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. One is to examine the evolution of organic food from what Belasco called the 'counter-cuisine' to what organic growers call 'yuppie chow', to show how organic salad mix was the carrier of major changes in the organic system of provision, thereby calling into question the notion that organic food is necessarily an antidote to industrialized food. The other is to problematize the facile dichotomies between fast and slow, reflexive and compulsive, fat and thin, and, hence, good and bad eaters, to show where there is slippage and instability in these categories, in addition to a troubling politics of class and gender. To these ends, I showcase the changing provision of a particular organic commodity (salad mix, or mesclun) in California.     

Commentary: In the shadow of liberalism? Comments on Neil Smith's “The Endgame of Globalization”

In this commentary, I respond to Neil Smith's essay “The Endgame of Globalization.” Smith's analysis of the three rounds of U.S. administrations' attempts to complete a project of global economic dominance and the recurrent nationalism that undermines such a project is an important and insightful contribution to understanding the workings of American imperialism and current national politics. However, I argue that his critique of liberalism and theorization of globalization in this essay are weakened by, on the one hand, a narrow definition of liberalism and a failure to address some key philosophical and political questions that arise as a result of its critique, and, on the other, a notion of power that obscures the paradoxical nature of globalization and the centrality of gender and other markers of difference to its operation. In line with critical feminist and postcolonial scholarship, I suggest that important theoretical insight is lost by neglecting conflicting accounts of liberalism, neoliberalism and globalization from alternative perspectives.     

Church and Empire: Free-Church Ecclesiology in a Global Era

Abstract

Jesus was cruelly executed as the alleged "king of the Jews" because of his efforts for grassroots religious renewal and resistance to Roman rule in Palestine through local religious-political elites. By the fourth century CE, however, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman imperium. An ambiguous account of both resisting and supporting imperialism has shaped all church history. Today the United States of America is widely recognized as the central power in a new global empire.     

Religion and Violence: A Challenge to the Unity of the Churches

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between religion and violence—both in the role religion has played in overcoming violence and in sometimes being at the heart of violence. Recent Indian history of religiously fuelled violence is the case study in this article. Additionally, the history of Christianity is dotted with violence—imperialism and colonialism have been justified by some historians. This should be the basis for a challenge to the imperial and implicitly ‘Christian’ designs that accompany the present war against Iraq.

The Bible and Christian theology contain violent images. There is ambiguity in defining violence, because sometimes it is difficult to name the more subtle forms of violence. The authority of the Church is questioned as it has sometimes been silent about the violence within its own life.

The Churches need to engage in intra-Christian dialogue so as to mutually focus on the ministry of reconciliation and healing. The Churches need also to engage in inter-religious dialogue, recognizing a common spirituality of non-violence present in all religions.     

Selling civilization: toward a cultural analysis of America's economic empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This essay builds on work that is exploring the convergence of economic and cultural approaches to understanding imperialism through an examination of the particular case of American commercial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on my archival research into the promotional and practical strategies of five of the largest American companies that were international in sales, I suggest some of the ways that an analysis of commercial imperial representations of, and knowledges about, race, gender and civilization adds to our understanding of the multiplicity of imperialisms. I argue that examining these multiplicities can help contribute to a critical postcolonial perspective.     

Patagonian Cinnamon and Pepper: Blending Geography in Alonso de Ovalle’s Tabula Geographica Regni Chile (1646)

ABSTRACT

The context and conditions under which early modern Europeans created images and maps that blended Asian and American geographies have recently received the attention of scholars. In this article I explore an example of this practice in the Chilean Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle’s mapping of Asian spices as it affected the southern region of his Tabula geographica regni Chile (Rome, 1646). I examine Ovalle’s inclusion of cinnamon and pepper in the Patagonian landscape as a persuasive allusion to the crucial role of the Strait of Magellan in his proposed revision of the trade route of the Spanish galleons.     

It's safe: food as a way of expression for children in Warsaw

ABSTRACT

The role of food in family relations is often discussed with a focus on discipline and control. This paper shows how food can also be used to create children’s safe spaces, defined as the social conditions that allow relatively independent expression of opinions, emotions and practices. Based on ethnographic research conducted with families in Warsaw in 2012–2013, I discuss different ways in which food is used to create and express such safe spaces. Firstly, I look at how children use food to create their own, personal and hidden safe space, in opposition to parental rule. Secondly, I analyse how food is used to build a safe space between adults and children. I argue that within often antagonistic family food relations there is in fact a space for children’s expression. Thirdly, I discuss the role of food in creating safe spaces for children during the research process. This paper takes a relational approach to the concept of safe space, and considers what kind of social relations and processes enable children’s autonomous expression with the means of food.