Letter from the editors

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon-celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers-Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield-who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today. Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers-as well as their gender-affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as middlebrow, despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination. The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

The role of educational developers (or academic developers) has become increasingly important in national and transnational contexts, in parallel with efforts to elevate the status of learning and teaching in higher education. In this chapter, the role of educational developers in driving institutional learning and teaching agendas is explored, with a specific focus on a transnational and interdisciplinary context in China. The case study will be drawn from experiences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU). The status of educational developers as professional staff is analyzed, as well as its consequent impact on their ability to drive learning and teaching strategies in a transnational context with high levels of diversity among staff backgrounds and a high turnover of academic staff. The data for the case study is drawn from interviews with educational developers and a survey with a range of academic staff at XJTLU. Based on the analysis, a set of recommendations that are transferable is provided and will benefit educational developers working in transnational contexts.

From Bollywood to K-Pop, fromCrazy Rich Asiansto YouTube stars and Boys’ Love media, this book brings together leading scholars to explore “bromance” in celebrity culture across Asia.Celebrity Bromance and Comradery Capital in Asiademonstrates how celebrity bromances are used as global promotional tools in different national and transnational contexts, including China, Thailand, India and beyond. Across chapters written by leading international scholars, the book demonstrates how a “comradery capital” develops as Asian bromances become not just a promotional tool but commodities in their own right in contemporary celebrity culture.

Journal Article Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts. Ed. by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke Get access Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts. Ed. by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke. New York: Berghahn, 2016. 378 pp. £24.00 / $34.95. ISBN 978–1–78533–105–3. Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 54, Issue 3, July 2018, Page 376, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqy040 Published: 16 July 2018

Reviewed by: Documenting First Wave Feminisms, vol. I: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents ed. by Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell Bonnie S. Anderson Moynagh, Maureen and Nancy Forestell (eds.) – Documenting First Wave Feminisms, vol. I: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. 405. This impressive anthology is a welcome and needed addition to the field of feminist studies. Focusing chiefly on the period between 1880 and 1940, it provides a number of documents from the global south and East Asia which are often underrepresented in such collections. Aimed primarily at professional historians and their students, the editors “seek to make more readily available some of the documents of first wave feminism that make especially evident its international linkages and its engagement with categories of social location other than gender that were and continue to be so central to women’s organizing and feminist theorizing” (p. xxi). These categories include race, colonial status, and class. The editors use examples of both Western women and non-Western men to good effect to illumine the lives of indigenous women when primary testimony is unavailable. The English missionary Edith Emily Jones, writing on aboriginal women in Australia (pp. 97–101), provides a useful insight into otherwise understudied lives. Female communists like Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai illustrate the views of the Second International. This collection contributes to global studies as well as feminism and internationalism. The general introduction to both volumes (the second will be on Canada: National and Transnational Contexts) argues rather defensively for using the somewhat discredited concept of the “first wave” and, more successfully, for using the word “feminism” before the protagonists employed it. The volume′s introduction stresses the “imperial legacy” and “the other kinds of geopolitical and ideological tensions that either marked or thwarted transnational collaborations” (p. 3). To that end, the editors have organized the material into eight sections, or as they call them, “thematic rubrics.” These are (1) Slavery, Abolition, and Women’s Rights, (2) Imperial Feminisms, (3) Suffrage, (4) Nationalism/Internationalism, (5) Citizenship, (6) Moral Reform, Sexuality, and Birth Control, (7) Work, and (8) Peace. The units on Nationalism/Internationalism, Citizenship, and Peace succeed best. The first of these draws extensively on documents from the Latin American, Asian, and Pacific women’s organizations which developed between the world wars. It ends with Virginia Woolf’s segment on the “Society of Outsiders” from Three Guineas. Citizenship begins with the African-American Frances Ellen W. Harper, segues gracefully to a petition from the “Native and Coloured Women of the Orange Free State,” and goes on to include writings from Hawaii, Native America, Ghana, India, and Egypt. It also surveys key international debates and efforts to allow women to keep their original citizenship after marriage, to retain their own names, and to establish gender equality in numerous venues. Peace includes a number of documents from the Middle East, as well as a lengthy statement by Jane Addams from the 1915 Hague Conference. It ends, poignantly, with a resolution from the All-India Women’s Conference in the fatal year of 1939: “We appeal to the women of the world to unite on the platform of non-violence and actively demonstrate that by this power alone can the forces of hatred and the desire for possession be brought under control and a real and lasting peace established” (p. 304). [End Page 248] Each section is preceded by an introduction of the material as a whole; each selection has a paragraph on the author(s), when information is available. I found other sections less helpful, primarily because of some problematic document choices. In too many instances, these did not focus on feminism or transnationalism and showed an unfortunate lack of familiarity with U.S. sources and debates. Section I, on Slavery, Abolition, and Women’s Rights, for instance, has a seven-page segment from the English reformer Harriet Martineau on “Negro Slavery” which contains nothing about women at all. The same problem applies to the selections from Mary Ann Shadd Carey and Sarah Parker Remond. Unfortunately, the editors take Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage’s History of Woman Suffrage as a neutral source...

In 2006, a three-volume joint history manual will be published for use in secondary schools in France and Germany, beginning with Volume III on the period from the Second World War until the present-day. This project illustrates not only the prominence of the Second World War and contemporary history in historical education in these countries, but will also aim to fulfil two functions: to analyse this event in a way that is commensurable to the two historiographical traditions and to provide an adequate foundation for pupils’ future memories of this event in relation to social contexts that have been largely distinct, but whose analogies and overlaps are becoming increasingly apparent. In anticipation of the joint history manual, this article sketches some of the analogies and overlaps between French and German memory cultures of the Second World War in a transnational context.

Reviewed by: Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War by Miriam Gebhardt Jean H. Quataert (bio) Miriam Gebhardt, Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War (Nick Somers trans., Polity Press, 2017), ISBN 978-15-09511-20-4, 252pages. Beginning in the 1990s, global women’s human rights mobilizations have helped redefine wartime rape as a crime against humanity and of genocide and turned women’s vulnerability to sexual violence in war and peacetime into a matter of grave, if not contested, international concern. These movements in transnational and national venues provide support for a public airing of long repressed and silenced memories and also a context for accountability and even financial compensation. Demonstrating the intricate connections between past and present, this new milieu has emboldened scholars to challenge and reshape long-held historical narratives. The human rights culture of protection might be challenged in today’s climate of wars and terrorism; however, it has profoundly impacted the work of historians and memoirists. Miriam Gebhardt is a German journalist and historian who situates her popular, rather than strictly academic, study in the context of German national history. It is purposefully directed at German audiences, addressing the complex ways that the German public has sought to come to grips with the past—although in Gebhardt’s case, not the Nazi past. Rather, she raises questions about how Germany’s gender culture, despite change over time, contributed to silencing a full accounting of the rape of German women by the invading and occupying armies of the victorious allies—East and [End Page 997] West. What are, she asks, the “distorted representation[s]” that have “kept us in ignorance.”1 Hers is as much a study of sources and historiography specific to the German case as it is an effort to piece together the facts, figures, and contexts of the rape of German women and, to a lesser extent, of men at the war’s immediate end and subsequent decade. If her purview is national history, this study also can be placed in a transnational context, making it of interest to readers of this human rights journal. She is cognizant of the changing definitions of rape over the timeframe of her study, although surprisingly loath to engage creatively with contemporary notions affecting historical interpretation. Offering extracts from police reports in immediate postwar Berlin,2 she wonders “what it would look like if we applied today’s standards for sexual aggression?”3 Gebhardt is driven by a complex agenda to right historical wrongs after roughly seventy years. “My aim,” she says in no uncertain terms, “is to cast new light on this difficult subject and to untangle the half-truths and traditional prejudices”4 that have hidden the extensive rape culture that goes well beyond the hitherto documented and debated aggressions of the invading Russian army. Thus, she draws considerable attention to what has been overlooked in the literature: the actions of Western liberators—the Americans, British, and French—who “followed precisely the same script of plunder and rape” as the Russians.5 Her case studies and evidence, then, come not only from Berlin, but are drawn from women’s vulnerabilities throughout southern and western Germany as well. She also is concerned with the historiographical and present-day difficulty of Germans to claim their experiences as victims without somehow relativizing German responsibility for Nazi and Wehrmacht crimes. Her work carefully unpacks this historiographical minefield. Gebhardt’s attention to sources and historiographical debates makes the book particularly compelling for readers already well versed in postwar German history and historiography. But it also finds its counterpart in the highly acclaimed although controversial recent publication by Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, which Gebhardt cites.6 Roberts addresses the centrality of sex in the American campaign to liberate France during the final allied push east against the Nazis, a perspective which angered many in the American reading public holding on to the notion of the Second World War as the country’s “good war.” From this and other sources, Gebhardt raises an...

This study of Guatemalan refugees and returnees contributes to the small corpus of work that interrogates gender and migration/exile from the vantage points of women's political consciousness and empowerment. In taking up these issues, it also seeks to broaden feminist thinking about citizenship by engaging not only local and national contexts in which women's citizenship are forged, but also transnational ones.

While International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) convergence has been the face of the global accounting standardisation movement for the past few decades, accounting reforms in the public sector had started to gain momentum from the late 1990s. This paper examines the reasons for the adoption of public sector accrual accounting reforms in India. It explores the various sources of pressure influencing these reforms and the ways in which these pressures are balanced and addressed by key decisionmakers in the national and transnational contexts of an emerging economy like India. This study finds that demands for greater accountability from the public in the national context (demand pressures) as well as requests for greater transparency from international financial institutions in the transnational context (supply pressures) are two major sources of pressure that are balanced by the state in its quest for greater legitimacy. This is demonstrated through a triggering event such as political scandals evoking responses from the government to reinforce its weakened legitimacy by adopting public sector accounting reforms. Extant literature on public sector accounting reforms, mostly focuses on the phases where the standards are being actually implemented by the country. Studies exploring decision‐making processes that lead to actual implementation of accrual accounting reforms are limited. This study contributes to existing literature by examining the decision‐making process that ensues before the actual use of international standards in public sector accounting reforms and demonstrates the significant role that institutional influences play in defining such decision‐making processes. The role of these institutional influences also draw attention to the probable disparities between rationales and actual reasons for government accounting reforms undertaken by developing countries.

This article is about the experiences of three Chinese men who were involved in smuggling between India and China during the Second World War. Chen Mengzhao's rise as a leading figure in India-China smuggling in Calcutta uncovers the hidden links between the black markets in India and China during the Second World War. Gao Wenjie disguised himself as a Chinese army officer and utilized this fake identity to facilitate his smuggling business. Wang Li-an was sent to Calcutta to undertake smuggling for a Chinese government department. In telling these stories, this article argues that most smuggling in modern India and China was undertaken in transnational contexts that resulted in transnational effects. Ironically, the Nationalist government's state-building project to contain India-China smuggling ended by facilitating it. This project was further perceived by the British authorities as a Chinese conspiracy against India's sovereignty. The misunderstanding between the Chinese and British authorities led to the end of Chinese immigration to India in 1945. Overall, this article provides a new perspective to make sense of the tensions between the Chinese, Indian, and British governments during the Second World War.

The belief that women secretly hate other women is one with a long history. This article highlights the role that idea played in the myriad of literature produced about women of the “criminal classes” from the early Victorian period through to the end of the First World War, as interest in female crime and prostitution was at its height. The trope that women are each other’s worst enemies was evident in criminal discourse across transnational contexts; in particular, I explore how such narratives were received from the European and Anglo-American worlds and perpetuated in the Australian colonies during this period. It is shown that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commentators portrayed criminality as a moral contagion communicated by women—often deliberately and maliciously—to each other. The crimes most often associated with females were also depicted as being based upon the exploitation of women by other women. Descriptions of the female criminal persona emphasized their incapacity for friendship or suggested they were capable only of perverted interactions that tended towards mutual destruction. Moving across time and transnational contexts, various permutations of criminal discourses thus promoted an image in the popular imagination of female relationships as sites of danger and latent animosity, and moreover suggested that this reflected an underlying dynamic among women as a whole.

Analyzing figures of national religious memory of the orthodox Southern Slavs, we focus on the changes concerning the temporal horizon, the contents, carried and brought to mind by the figures, and the forms of collective identity that were produced or reinforced by these realisations in their specific social or 'national' situation. This essay outlines as examples changes in the veneration of Cyril and Methodius, and shows how they became, within the framework of national movements, important crystallisation points for national identities, although initially their traditional veneration was to a high degree Slavonic, or transnational. National identity was more and more isolated from the transnational context - until then reference to the other Slavonic peoples served only to demonstrate the historic importance of their 'own' nation's mission. One can distinguish more or less clearly a secularisation of the saints in the 19th century, within the context of historicism and nationalism; while during the 1930s and World War II they served the sacralisation of

The article explores the possibilities of application P. Bourdieu’s social topology in the studying of inequality in science in national and transnational contexts. It is argued that in the conditions of globalising science, discussions about its egalitarianism, which began approximately in the middle of the last century, are moving beyond national borders. For the purposes of studying global inequality in science, scholars often apply the theoretical frameworks of world-systems analysis, neo-institutionalism, and the theory of global governance. However, these theories often lead to reductionism which ignores the symbolic dimension of scientific activity. The article suggests reassessing the heuristic potentiality of P. Bourdieu’s social topology, which mitigates the mentioned drawback of other theories. The article aims to demonstrate the relevance of this theoretical framework for the study of inequality in different scales of scientific activity due to the fact that the French sociologist focused mainly on national academic systems. The article defines the general provisions of P. Bourdieu’s topological concept of the field and the units of the social order of the scientific field. It also demonstrates the role of various forms of capital in determining the structure of social space. Based on the case of social sciences, the article explores the formation of scientific fields, their interaction with other fields, and their structure in different scales. The structure of the scientific field on the national scale can be defined as a dichotomy of dominant – dominated or centre – periphery. On the transnational scale, this dichotomy is also relevant but it is represented by national fields. Among them, the dominant position is occupied by the United States and Great Britain, which have the largest amount of symbolic power. The structure of the transnational scientific space, however, is more complex and includes overlapping fields of national, regional and more global dimensions. The article argued that applying the theoretical framework of the field to the study of the transnational scientific field will remain tied to the definition and explanation of the peculiarities and the interaction of national scientific fields as long as national states keep their institutional boundaries in scientific activity.

Marvin A. Lewis. Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts.

Author(s): Ellison, Mahan L. | Abstract: Lewis, Marvin A. Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts. University of Missouri Press, 2017. 252 pp.