To Make a Revolutionary Cuisine: Gender and Politics in French Kitchens, 1789–1815

This essay investigates the political significance of gender in French kitchens and cuisine during the French Revolution. Integrating a wide range of published and archival sources, it highlights the brief moment when women's work as cooks symbolised republican virtues, before examining the forces that ultimately retrieved male cooks’ reputations from association with their aristocratic employers to be considered artisans emblematic of a new nation that integrated the past glories and the present ideals of France.     

Masculinities,Race and Nationhood – Critical Connections

Books reviewed in this article: Hazel V. Carby, Race Men Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in aWhite‐Collar Union, 1944‐1994 Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and theImagined Fraternity of White Men     

Women,Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre‐Colonial Tunisia,c.1815–1870

This paper investigates gendered mechanisms for regulating migrants and migration in a pre‐colonial Muslim state, Tunisia, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of colonialism. Trans‐Mediterranean migration to, and permanent settlement in, nineteenth‐century Tunis, the capital city, constituted a major stimulus for political, cultural and social transformations that endured into the colonial period. Employing diverse documentation, the case study analyses this Mediterranean migratory current of ordinary women and men to test the theoretical literature based primarily on trans‐Atlantic movements, which has emphasised the ‘diversity of social positioning’ for women migrants. The paper argues that for pre‐colonial Tunisia, a state that was both an Ottoman province and a part of the larger Mediterranean world, the system of diplomatic protection represented a critical form of positioning. Moreover, Mediterranean states, both European and Muslim, had a long tradition of controlling the movements of women in port cities. Two distinct historical moments in the settlement of women from the Mediterranean islands in pre‐colonial Tunisia are compared. This approach not only enables an assessment of whether women's movements across international borders can attenuate, if only momentarily, patriarchal authority, but also encourages reflection on how gender explains historical variations in global migratory displacements as well as to what extent colonialism serves as an satisfactory explanatory framework for the gendering of communal boundaries.     

Constructing national identity in Canada's capital, 1900–2000: Confederation Square and the National War Memorial

Ottawa's Confederation Square was initially planned to be a civic plaza to balance the nearby federal presence of Parliament Hill. A century of federal planning, with the direct involvement of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, repositioned it as a national space in the City Beautiful style. Recent renovations have improved its pedestrian amenity and restored much of the original plan by French urban designer Jacques Gréber. The square contains the National War Memorial and the National Arts Centre, yet is a weak public space due to weak edge definition, animation, and spatial enclosure. The war memorial design was selected in a 1925 international competition won by Britain's Vernon March. The Great War monument was not installed until the 1939 Royal visit, and Mackenzie King intended that the re-planning of the capital would be the World War II memorial. However, the symbolic meaning of the Great War monument gradually expanded to become the place of remembrance for all Canadian war sacrifices. The National War Memorial is more successful as a symbolic object than Confederation Square is as a public space, yet both have evolved into important elements of the Canadian capital's national identity.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

Missionary Masculinities,the Homoerotic Gaze and the Politics of Race: Gilbert White in Northern Australia, 1885–1915

The considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender has rarely focused on missionary masculinity, or on the relationship between missionary homoeroticism and the defence of the rights of the colonised. This paper argues that homoeroticism played a part in the humanitarianism of Gilbert White who, from 1900 to 1915, was Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria in northern Australia, a heavily male frontier where inter‐racial tension and violence were common. White's attraction to the Aboriginal male body indirectly assisted all Aborigines by drawing attention to the ill effects of colonisation but his ambivalence to the female body left him uninterested in the plight of Aboriginal women, who suffered ‘extraordinary brutality’ on the frontier.     

‘The Men Have Come’: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86

This article explores the gender implications of the militarisation of the Mengo neighbourhood of Kampala. It analyses how the hyper‐militarisation under post‐colonial regimes, particularly those of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, marked a significant gender reversal. The military presence in Mengo emasculated civilian men, who were attacked and abused by soldiers, and led women to assume the roles of ‘protectors’ who safeguarded men, children and their homes. Women volunteered for the most dangerous tasks at the household and community levels and faced constant dangers, including rape, violence and other forms of abuse. Using oral histories collected from the residents in Mengo in 2014, I examine this reconfiguration of gender roles and its reverberations in contemporary Mengo. Interviews with the women and men from Kampala describe the various ways women protected people and spaces and at the same time stress men's vulnerability. This article therefore challenges popular conceptions of women as weak and vulnerable and in need of men's protection in militarised situations.