Rethinking the Katangese Secession

This article, in analysing the Katangese secession of 1960–63, argues that it should be primarily understood not simply as the result of external machinations but, at least as importantly, as the initiative of indigenous Katangese political leaders. It charts the development of the Katangese national project among self-consciously ‘indigenous’ Katangese leaders, who responded to what they saw as an imposed and illegitimate Congolese nation-state by constructing a national imagery rooted in a mythico-historical reconstruction of a usable Katangese past. The article explains how this was utilised by the Katangese state during the secession to perform an ‘authentic’ Katangese national identity. In so doing, the article draws attention to the parallels between the Katangese nation-state project and attempts by post-colonial states to perform nationhood elsewhere in Africa.     

NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.     

Occurrence of Euowenia grata (De Vis, 1887) (Diprotodontidae,Marsupialia) from the Pliocene Spring Park Local Fauna,northeastern Queensland

Mackness, B.S., Black, K.H. & Price, G.J., 1.10.2014. Occurrence of Euowenia grata (De Vis, 1887 De Vis, C.W. [In Anon.] 1887. Untitled. The Brisbane Courier 9224 (44) (8 August), 6. [Google Scholar]) (Diprotodontidae, Marsupialia) from the Pliocene Spring Park Local Fauna, northeastern Queensland. Alcheringa 39, 000?000. ISSN 0311-5518

Ten specimens including several dentaries and maxillae, recovered from the Pliocene Spring Park Local Fauna, northern Australia, are referred to the diprotodontine Euowenia grata (De Vis). The fossils exhibit minimal dental wear and reveal new characters that are unrecognizable in the holotype. The remains represent at least three animals, effectively doubling the previous number of individuals known for this rare megaherbivore. The new records also provide a significant northern geographic range extension for the species and allow an assessment of intraspecific variation, sexual dimorphism and phylogenetic relationships for the species. Euowenia grata is most similar in morphology to the monotypic Pliocene diprotodontid Meniscolophus mawsoni.

Brian S. Mackness [deceased] and Karen H. Black [k.black@unsw.edu.au], School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, NSW, 2052, Australia; Gilbert J. Price [g.price1@uq.edu.au], Department of Earth Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia.