The Legacy of Bernard Narokobi and the Melanesian Way

ABSTRACT

This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making ‘the Melanesian Way’ an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period.     

The veterans' movement and First World War memory in Portugal (1918–33): between the Republic and Dictatorship

The lack of consensus regarding Portugal's participation in the First World War's European front, combined with the post-war political and economic crisis, highlights the difficulty of integrating a large number of mobilised men, mainly rural workers, who now found themselves unemployed and physically and psychologically traumatised. The return, reaction and insertion of soldiers would configure the social and political milieu in which, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the first images of the conflict were built, based on interactions between veterans and the political authorities, not always on an equal footing. This study will first seek to identify the context and external elements so as to trace a concrete and immediate profile of the veterans. Secondly, it will analyse the creation and intervention of associations – their active social ‘intervention’ – amidst their internal activities and attempts to shape public opinion – actively making demands – in order to influence State policy. Finally, this text will attempt to shed light on the relationship between veterans and contemporary political dynamics, especially keeping in mind the eventual militancy of their actions.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

War Trauma and Alcoholism in the Early Writings of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë

During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.     

Lady Gregory's The Gaol Gate,Terence MacSwiney and the Abbey Theatre

In September 1920, a French translation of Lady Gregory's 1906 play The Gaol Gate was staged in a Parisian drawing room. The play's original setting outside the gate of Galway Gaol was transferred to Mountjoy Prison at a time of republican hunger strikes. The drama's central character of Denis Cahel – refusing to inform on his neighbours and hanged as a consequence – gained contemporary currency with Terence MacSwiney's hunger strike and impending death as both men had turned their bodies into a political tool. With a focus on the concept of the political body, this article illustrates the power of The Gaol Gate by tracing the play's provenance and production history, demonstrating its flexibility through performance in a particular historical context.     

Marginal or mainstream? Migrant centres as grassroots and official heritage

Abstract

Migrant heritage, as a grassroots practice seeking to commemorate pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to grow. It now receives, in some form, state sanction and is policed by the same state and national legislation as other cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. This article seeks to complicate understandings of migrant heritage as a marginal practice, specifically by interrogating the use-value of particular narratives in the Australian context – that is, how do individuals, communities and other groups (the grassroots) draw on sanctioned and publicly circulating narratives to mark their site as heritage-worthy? Ideas of what constitutes official and unofficial heritage can be mutually inclusive – a dialectical process. I analyse this in relation to the commemoration of former post-war migrant reception centres in Australia.     

The Political Consecration of Community in Mauritius, 1948–68

The paper is concerned with the problem, amelioration and contestation of a ‘majority community’ in a decolonising political culture. The late-colonial administration in Mauritius employed repeated and increasingly elaborate constitutional innovation to counter-balance the perceived inability of Mauritians to distinguish between political preference and community affiliation. These measures raised the constitutional profile of the ‘community’, ostensibly in order to offset it politically. The colonial state's determination to derive community definitions from census data was soon frustrated by the calculated identification and sensitisation of corporate identities by political entrepreneurs. The definition and defence of community became a compelling preoccupation of post-war political campaigns on the island. However, this communalism – misunderstood and condemned by Imperial social science as apolitical or even antithetical to politics – concealed a political culture of considerable flexibility and pragmatism. At no point did the colonial administration address the fact that the locus for the generation of communalised political propaganda lay in a political rivalry for leadership of one community – that of the Hindu Indo-Mauritians.     

The United States,Great Britain,and the Creation of the Iranian Oil Consortium, 1953–1954

This article examines the attitudes of US, British, and Soviet policy-makers as they planned for the forthcoming peace during the Second World War. It charts how they moved from planning a ‘peace by dictation’ of the great powers, to planning one which would be based on a model of collective security involving all members of the United Nations alliance. The latter plan would reflect both the great powers’ special responsibilities for maintaining international peace and security and the stake which lesser powers had in such a venture. In addressing these historical developments the article employs two concepts familiar to International Relations scholarship, namely concert and hierarchy. It shows how the understandings which the principal post-war planners had of these concepts – and crucially of their inter-relationship - changed over time and the consequences of these changes. The article makes two core claims: firstly, that as post-war planning progressed, the attitudes of the Big Three towards the acceptable nature of the great power–lesser power hierarchy changed radically; and secondly, that the structure and nature of today's United Nations Organisation is in significant part a consequence of these changes.     

Arguing for a worldwide perspective: Italy and the reform of the international monetary system between transatlantic cooperation and European integration (1971–73)

The end of the Bretton Woods system, following the US decision of August 1971, and the simultaneous re-launch of the European integration with the enactment of the Werner plan came at a critical moment of internal weakness for Italy. This article highlights how the Italian government and the monetary authorities – while not always on the same wavelength – tried to tackle these challenges with a view to preserving the principles of multilateral cooperation that had promoted the country's recovery in the post-war years. By launching the project denominated ‘Global Approach’ in the summer of 1972, Italy tried to interconnect the modification of the Werner plan with the reform of the international monetary system within the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to restrain the growing trends towards unilateralism. However, despite all efforts, both initiatives were doomed to failure while the country entered a dramatic period of political instability and social unrest.     

Talking about bodies online: Viagra,YouTube, and the politics of public(ized) sexualities

The development of Viagra in the late 1990s ushered in a new age of conversation about sex and sexuality, as men's bodily abilities were put on display for all to discuss. In 2005, the video-sharing technology YouTube was launched. Taken together, these technological innovations – both biomedical and representational – have produced debate around sex, sexualized and gendered bodies, and sexual health. This article interrogates Viagra-related representations posted on YouTube and analyzes sexuopharmaceuticals as a set of intertextualities that create space for both normative discourses and social critiques. Three analytic themes illustrate how Viagra-related YouTube videos (1) reinforce a regime of self-care within a wider context of individualized responsibility for one's sexual health, (2) highlight the values attached to the pharmasexed gendered body for men and women in the age of Viagra, and (3) provide disruptions, in the form of criticism, to the assumption that healthy bodies and relationships need pharmasexual enhancement. The article concludes by suggesting that social networking sites such as YouTube are managed public spaces through which one can interrogate the intertextualities that link discourses related to bodies and sexual health to the virtual and material spaces of everyday life.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Blessed are the Peacemakers: Canada,the United Nations,and the Search for a Korean Armistice, 1952–53

Abstract

Canada's post-war role as a middle power within the UN system and a strong advocate of negotiated settlement of international disputes focuses on Lester Pearson's role in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and dates Canada's new diplomatic stance from that time. This article argues that Canada's emerging diplomatic stance in fact is grounded in the diplomacy surrounding the Korean War at the beginning of that decade.     

‘The Danger is Two-Fold’: Decolonisation and Cold War in Anti-Communist Asia, 1955–7

This article examines the intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation in anti-Communist Asia in the 1950s. Drawing on the papers of former South Korean President Syngman Rhee housed at Yonsei University, the article explores both the motivations behind as well as the constraints upon South Korea's efforts to cultivate a military alliance in what it called ‘Free Asia’. Articulating some of the concrete political differences between South Korea and its potential partners in Asia, the article argues that Rhee's hardline views of the Cold War were interwoven with his ambivalence about Japan's reintegration in the post-war world. As a result of this intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation, the South Korean President was unable to achieve consensus with the rest of anti-Communist Asia. In exploring this chapter of South Korean diplomacy, the article calls on Cold War diplomatic history to integrate non-Communist Asia and for the historiography of decolonisation to investigate the legacies of Japan's empire in post-war Asia. It also suggests that scholars ought to reflect more deeply on the interrelationship between the Cold War and decolonisation.     

The invisible man: body and ritual in a fifteenth-century noble household

Ritual and gesture were central to medieval political cultures, yet few documents survive which attest to daily comportment in non-royal elite households. This article examines the late fifteenth-century ‘Harleian Ordinances’ (from British Library Harl. MS 6815), which describe in rare detail the ceremonies and servants' gestures used in an unnamed earl's house. It focuses on the para-liturgical elements of the household ceremony (notably the use of ritual kisses), argues that the Burgundian court provided direct inspiration for the ordinance, and suggests a connection to Richard, earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’). More broadly, it explores aspects of the relationship between lord and noble servant in the later fifteenth century and contends that nobility – an essentially invisible quality – was in part conjured up through the gestures and deportment of a nobleman's servants. In their attempts to portray power and prestige, noblemen such as the invisible earl of this ordinance established secular household rites which required that their bodies be attended to with an almost religious reverence.     

Rebuffing Royals? Afrikaners and the Royal Visit to South Africa in 1947

This article traces the responses of Afrikaners to the symbolism and political purposes of the 1947 royal visit to Southern Africa, the first post-war royal tour and the first visit of a reigning sovereign to the Union of South Africa. Taking place in the aftermath of a war that had caused bitter political divisions within Afrikaner ranks and stimulated radical populist nationalism, a royal tour intended to express the crown's gratitude for South Africa's participation in that war was bound to be contentious. Drawing on press accounts, biographies, autobiographies and archival sources, this article argues that the layered reactions of Afrikaners demonstrate that, even on the eve of the National Party's electoral victory on a republican and apartheid platform, attitudes towards monarchy and the British connection were more fluid and ambiguous than either contemporary propaganda or recent accounts have allowed. The diverse meanings attributed to this iconic royal tour reveal a process of intense contestation and reflection about South Africa's place in an empire that was in the throes of post-war redefinition and transformation, and confirm recent characterisations of the 1940s as one of manifold possibilities such that outcomes, like the electoral victory of the National Party in the following year, was far from predetermined.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

From Commonwealth Responsibility to the National Interest: Australia and Post-war Decolonisation in South-East Asia

This article re-examines the drivers of post-war Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The central argument is that the motive of Commonwealth responsibility has not been given sufficient explanatory weight in interpreting Australia's post-war engagement with South-East Asia under both Australian Labor Party and Liberal-Country Party (Coalition) governments. The responsibility expressed by Australian policy-makers for the decolonisation of the Straits Settlements, Malayan Peninsula and British Borneo Territories cannot be adequately understood within a cold war ideological framework of anti-communism. Nor can it be explained by the instrumental logic of forward defence. The concept of responsibility is theorised as a motivation in foreign policy analysis and applied to Australian involvement with British decolonisation in South-East Asia between 1944 and 1971. The article finds that in its approach to decolonisation, Australia was driven as much by normative sentiments of responsibility to the Commonwealth as it was by instrumental calculations of cold war strategic interest. This diminished with the end of Indonesia's ‘Confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1966 and subsequent British commitment to withdraw from East of Suez. Australia's policy discourse becomes more narrowly interest-based after this, especially evident in Australia's negotiations with Malaysia and Singapore over the Five Power Defence Arrangements from 1968 to 1971.     

Child migrants and deportees from Poland and Ukraine after the Second World War: experience and memory

This article aims to compare the biographical experiences and individual memories of child deportees and migrants from Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a field study of over 100 biographical interviews in two local communities situated in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to post-war displacement, resettlement and population exchange: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland. The author claims that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, contemporary memory of being a refugee/deportee/forced migrant, losing one's home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of one's new place of residence bear many similarities. While analysing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their experiences as children, as well as explain the differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on post-war socialisation and the Polish and Ukrainian memory culture. The author also strives to show how and why the children's memories differ from those of their parents.     

Associations of people with disabilities in Italy: a short history

Voluntary associations of persons with disabilities have played an important role in bringing issues related to disability onto the national agenda in Italy in the absence of effective provision by the state or representation by other bodies, such as the political parties and trades unions. At the same time, the nature of Italy's welfare state – weak, clientelistic, particularistic – and its way of conceiving disability as a set of bodily deficits has also shaped the character of disabled persons' organisations in Italy and the ways in which they have framed their demands and policies. These organisations have tended either to represent fragmented subsets of people with disabilities or, more recently, to form large federations that, while they reflect a more comprehensive understanding of disability, have left some categories of people with disabilities feeling excluded or under-represented     

Australian reactions to Britain's declining presence in Southeast Asia, 1955–63

This article examines Australia's long-held doubts about Britain's willingness and ability to maintain a significant military presence in Southeast Asia, where Australia's main strategic interests lay. The article argues that Australian concerns long predated the Wilson government's attempt to disengage from east of Suez in the mid-1960s. In doing so, it shows that the Menzies government had since the mid-1950s become increasingly concerned about Britain's resolve and capacity to station substantial forces in the region. In illustrating the extent to which policy-makers in Canberra became suspicious of British long-term strategic aims in Southeast Asia, this article reveals some interesting aspects of the changing nature of Anglo-Australian relations in the post-war period.