Cross-cultural contact in Manchuria: approaches to lives in between, 1900s–1950s*

ABSTRACT

This article aims to uncover the lives of some of the individuals who, through the occupational and personal choices they made, moved between the Chinese and Russian societies of Manchuria (Northeast China) in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese Eastern Railway, which passed through the region and was central to its economy, provided the main framework for Chinese–Russian contact. Headquartered in Harbin, the Railway generated a need for interpreters and translators, while it also offered opportunities for commercial go-betweens. Russian schools employed Chinese teachers for language instruction. After a change in the balance of power, by the 1920s, Manchurian warlords hired former tsarist officers and soldiers into their armies. The article compares the functions of intermediaries in this region to the better-known examples of Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. Research on ‘compradors’ has been more often conducted in these geographical settings, whereas the roles of cross-cultural intermediaries in late imperial and republican China still remain relatively unexplored.     

Mobility,farmworkers, and Connecticut's tobacco valley, 1900–1950

By the early decades of the twentieth century, southern New England's Connecticut Valley had become a center of shade tobacco production and a destination for seasonal farmworkers drawn from sources inside and outside of New England. This paper explores the history of three groups of seasonal workers—children from area cities and towns; white southern high school students; and young African American men from southern high schools and black colleges—with an eye to assessing the impact of their presence on the form and meaning of the Connecticut Valley. My first goal is to add depth to the historiography of twentieth-century New England farming by drawing attention to the largely overlooked story of non-rural and extra-regional seasonal farmworkers. My second goal is to frame the case of Connecticut tobacco labor according to the study of mobility and its relationship to landscape. The mobility of workers into and within the region, I suggest, made possible the success of the shade tobacco economy while at the same time posing challenges to popularized cultural conventions about regional identity. For this reason, I argue, the history of Connecticut's shade tobacco landscape was informed by the efforts of shade tobacco growers to direct and control a confluence of environmental conditions, group and place-based identities, and the mechanics and meanings of mobility among seasonal workers. By hiring non-local, seasonal workers and by attempting to control their mobility, large-scale, corporate growers and their spokespeople ultimately sought to maintain control over the development and identity of the valley's rural landscape.     

Introduction: Historical geographies of internationalism, 1900–1950

This introduction to a special issue on historical geographies of internationalism begins by situating the essays that follow in relation to the on-going refugee crisis in Europe and beyond. This crisis has revealed, once again, both the challenges and the potential of internationalism as a form of political consciousness and the international as a scale of political action. Recent work has sought to re-conceptualise internationalism as the most urgent scale at which governance, political activity and resistance must operate when confronting the larger environmental, economic, and strategic challenges of the twenty-first century. Although geographers have only made a modest contribution to this work, we argue that they have a significant role to play. The essays in this special issue suggest several ways in which a geographical perspective can contribute to rethinking the international: by examining spaces and sites not previously considered in internationalist histories; by considering the relationship between the abstractions of internationalism and the geographical and historical specificities of its performance; and by analysing the interlocking of internationalism with other political projects. We identify, towards the end of this essay, seven ways that internationalism might be reconsidered geographically in future research through; its spatialities and temporalities; the role of newly independent states; science and research; identity politics; and with reference to its performative and visual dimensions.     

Divide and Rule: Israel’s Tactics Regarding the Jerusalem Question and America’s Response, 1949–1950

In 1949–1950, an interesting diplomatic affair took place for which details have not yet being disclosed. The Israelis who were unable to reach an agreement with the Jordanians over Jerusalem, advanced solutions in which the latter will pay the major price. However, the US was not interested in forcing a solution on the Jordanians nor to see them internationally isolated. Preventing such a development was far more important for them than promoting the internationalization plan. Thus US acted to sabotage Israelis maneuvers believing that putting the blame of failure on both sides suit best their interests. Therefore, the belief that the Americans took a passive and neutral stand over the Jerusalem question does not conform to reality. Instead, they were engaged vigorously, although mostly behind the scene, undermining the 1949 resolution.     

«Nature's workshop» industry and urban expansion in Southern California, 1900–1950

Scholars and pundits have cast Los Angeles as a prototype for the twentieth century North American metropolis. Most accounts focus primarily, if not exclusively, on residential development and rely on stock suburban theses for their interpretation. Regional expansion has been presented as a new landscape order where precise location is a secondary concern, development proceeds without planning, and the result is a homogeneous sprawl. Studies of manufacturing and industrial location in southern California often share these conventions. An historical investigation reveals that industry and industrial location have been key determinants of urban form, and that industrial, commercial, and residential development have been co-ordinated, complementary, and highly planned. These coincident enterprises recast the region during the first half of the twentieth century. There were three interrelated but qualitatively distinct types of industrial zones in Los Angeles during this period: a mixed-use, home-market district adjacent to the central business district; an industry-only, mass-production, branch-plant zone in Vernon and the eastside; and a series of oil, film, and aircraft satellites on the urban periphery. This finding challenges the received wisdom regarding industrial geography, a progressive narrative of technological innovation and production regimes that chronicle ascension, transformation, and succession.     

Forgiveness and reconciliation in Hobbes’s natural law theory

Thomas Hobbes’s laws of nature dictate the making and keeping of the social contract. In addition, Hobbes’s natural law theory considers traditional moral virtues, such as mercy and gratitude, as being conducive to peace. Some Hobbes scholars have argued that these other natural laws call for ‘forgiveness’ and facilitate ‘reconciliation’. However, as this essay shows, Hobbes does not use these terms to mean the reparation of broken relationships between victims and perpetrators. Rather, Hobbesian reconciliation refers to efforts to propitiate enemies in order to win their favour, while forgiveness is a synonym for pardon, in the sense of punishment-forbearance. It is argued that neither of these requires true remorse and reparation of the wrong done. By contrasting Hobbes’s conception of anger with that of Aristotle, the article provides an explanation for why Hobbes maintains that the rage of enemies could be appeased by instrumental calculations of expected benefits, thus ignoring more deep-seated resentments caused by moral wrongs.     

A Blessing in Disguise: Nanxun and China’s Small Town Heritage

This article analyzes Nanxun, a lower Yangzi delta town known for its silk products, as a case study of China’s development and underdevelopment. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a booming silk trade linked Nanxun to the global market and made it an extraordinarily wealthy town, yet little was achieved in terms of urban development. Scholars have attributed the underdevelopment of Nanxun to economic factors, and perceived it as entirely undesirable. This article argues that a largely overlooked cause of Nanxun’s underdevelopment was the conformist culture of Nanxun’s ruling elite. The merchants who created the wealth of the town by their very natures preferred to create a safe and secluded zone in which the familiarity of their living environment could be preserved and the comfort of a traditional lifestyle assured. The underdevelopment of Nanxun turned out, however, not to be completely negative. The town did not sustain its status as a trading center, nor develop into a major city, but its arrested development preserved much of its original layout and, moreover, its culture. From a cultural and environmental point of view, Nanxun’s underdevelopment may have proved to be more valuable than if the town had become an indistinguishable industrial site.     

Embodied and sensory encounters: death,bereavement and remembering in children’s family and personal lives

ABSTRACT

Whilst children’s ‘significant’ death and bereavement experiences have received considerable attention as constituting a family trouble, this article examines children’s rarely considered perspectives on encounters with death, bereavement and remembrance which are intrinsic to family and personal lives. Family homes are a site for younger children’s previously unexplored embodied, sensory and material engagements with death, bereavement and remembrance. These engagements occur through children’s treasuring and displaying of keepsakes and photographs, and through children bearing witness to dying pets and deceased bodies. Via these temporally and spatially located practices, familial and cultural values are passed on to children, family is constituted, and children are embedded in a broader kinship group. The article illuminates how children vividly recount experiences of death, bereavement and remembering, invoking ‘home’ and other private spaces as places in which death is experienced and retold.     

Nonsense and possibility: ambiguity,rupture and reproduction in children’s play/ful narratives

ABSTRACT

Play has been widely acknowledged as a site of important processes in children’s lives, ranging from socialisation to subjectification. Little empirical work, however, has focused on the particular features of play that mobilise criticality and contestation, or that alternately enable the micro-politics of exclusion. This article draws on school-based research in the west of Ireland with young children from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds. Centring on understandings of generational, gendered and raced belongings, it examines children’s narratives of play and playful narratives that de/reconstruct positionings in peer contexts and in broader societal spaces. More specifically, it explores how the in-between and ambiguous character of children’s play practices and playful speech contribute to such multiple sites of becoming. It concludes with a suggestion for further adult engagement with these play/ful political practices, and for consideration of potential links to ‘large p’ politics in children’s lives.     

Revolutions in music and physics, 1900–30

Abstract

The period 1900 to 1930 saw fundamental changes in the basic laws of physics. The discoveries of the special and general theories of relativity and those of quanta and quantum mechanics transformed profoundly physicists' understanding of the nature of space and time, as well as the fundamentals of physics at the atomic level, which have no counterpart in classical physics. Almost coincidentally, major changes took place in the processes of musical composition – that same period seeing the development of atonality, the liberation of rhythm, and twelve-tone music. This essay reviews in non-technical terms the profound changes in the thinking of physicists and compares the intellectual struggles involved with the extraordinary parallel changes in the approaches of composers to musical composition. No causal connection is suggested, but the common theme of the processes of innovation and creativity within very strict sets of rules in both physics and music is emphasised.