Camp Followers Research Articles

Exploring Human Rights in East Asia

1 My Life and Human Rights 1.1 War and Colonial Occupation In 1928 my grandparents moved to Kyoto from the mid Korean Peninsula. After the annexation in 1910, Japan looted various resources from the Korean Peninsula, and especially in the rural areas, the Japanese Colonial Government of Korea and Japanese landowners took Koreans’ land through the land survey. Having been driven off their land, Koreans left through the North for Manchuria and through the South for Japan. On April 3, 1945, right after the U.S. forces landed on Okinawa Island, I was born in Keihokuchō, which was called Shūzan at that time. The town was located in an obscure area between the mountains. Roads were rough and unpaved, with buses sometimes plunged off steep mountain roads. Now it is only a half hour’s drive from Kyoto, and we can go there without any difficulty. In Japan my grandparents lived first in Tokiwa, Kyoto city. Shortly after my parents’ marriage, the Second World War started, and Koreans too were drafted for a camp follower. My father was the eldest of six siblings. In those days he was the only wage earner of his family of nine, including my grandparents and my elder brother. If my father had been drafted, my family would have starved to death. So my mother asked the Uzumasa ward mayor to seek an exemption for him, and he was allowed to farm and pay a stipend of rice in lieu of serving as an army civilian employee. Although we had one chō (2.45 acres) of farmland, a size double that of the average farmer, we had to submit all the harvested rice to the government, while all the barley produced as a subsidiary crop at winter season was taken by the landowner as rent. So our family income consisted of only rice bran, a byproduct after milling, and soybeans, planted on the dikes of the rice

Are “Griefs of More Value than Triumphs”?: Power Relations, Nation-Building, and the Different Histories of Women’s Wartime Contributions in Postwar South Sudan

In this article, the author examines the roles of women during the second civil war of South Sudan (1983–2005) and how their contribution to the liberation struggle led by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is advertised by the new state in the postwar era. Pinaud analyzes the reasons behind the promotion of the women’s battalion’s history in the postwar era by the state, in contrast with its disregard for camp followers. Highlighting the different categories and socio-ethnic origins of female actors in the war, she subscribes to the idea developed by other authors that advertised myths and official state history are the products of an ideological selection operated by the group dominating the state. This article illustrates how, by silencing the history of the camp followers (particularly in the Equatorian region), the state effectively censors the wartime experiences of an entire segment of the population. The state fails to engage a negotiation of beliefs, which is formative of a collective memory that shapes a group’s sense of shared experience and identity. The article thus brings new material to reflect on the social and political dynamics behind the formation of state history, collective memory and nationhood in South Sudan, a relatively new stream of research.

Famines of War: The Red Sea Grain Market and Famine in Eastern Sudan, 1889–1891

Abstract During the first few months of 1890, thousands of destitute, starving Bija-speaking semi-pastoralists from Eastern Sudan made their way to Sawākin in search of food. Though the region was plagued by both drought and locust swarms during the 1889-1890 cultivaaon year, ecological hazards are insufficient to explain the famine that precipitated this refugee migration. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Eastern Sudanese semi-pastoraluts produced less than half of the grain that they consumed. These communities depended on trading pastoral products for grain imported from India via Red Sea ports. The 1889-1890 famine was not caused by a reduction in grain imports; during this time Eastern Sudanese grain markets were kept well stocked and the price of durra (Sorghum bicolor) remained stable. Rather, at the end of 1889, semi-pastoral communities suddenly lacked the capital to purchase and the goods to trade for diet sustenance, suggesting that a rinderpest epizootic depleted their cattle stocks. Famine continued to plague Eastern Sudan during the 1890-1891 cultivation year. Unlike the famine during the previous year, this famine was, in fact, caused by a grain shortage. By July 1890, the Mahdht garrison at Kassala was unable to provide adequate provisions for both its soldiers and camp followers. Consequently, thousands of malnourished camp followers migrated from the Gash Delta, north of Kassala, to the Tawkar Delta, on the Red Sea coast, thereby increasing the demand for grain in the Red Sea hills. At the same time, the British military leadership stationed at Sawākin decided to starve the population of the Red Sea hills into submission. British officers prohibited all commerce between Sawākin and the interior and ceased all forms of food aid—which resulted in a rapid rise in the price of grain in Eastern Sudan and to widespread starvation, banditry, and death in the Red Sea hills and the Tawkar Delta.

Famines of War: The Red Sea Grain Market and Famine in Eastern Sudan, 1889–1891

During the first few months of 1890, thousands of destitute, starving Bija-speaking semi-pastoralists from Eastern Sudan made their way to Sawākin in search of food. Though the region was plagued by both drought and locust swarms during the 1889–1890 cultivation year, ecological hazards are insufficient to explain the famine that precipitated this refugee migration. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Eastern Sudanese semi-pastoralists produced less than half of the grain that they consumed. These communities depended on trading pastoral products for grain imported from India via Red Sea ports. The 1889–1890 famine was not caused by a reduction in grain imports; during this time Eastern Sudanese grain markets were kept well stocked and the price of durra (Sorghum bicolor) remained stable. Rather, at the end of 1889, semi-pastoral communities suddenly lacked the capital to purchase and the goods to trade for their sustenance, suggesting that a rinderpest epizootic depleted their cattle stocks. Famine continued to plague Eastern Sudan during the 1890–1891 cultivation year. Unlike the famine during the previous year, this famine was, in fact, caused by a grain shortage. By July 1890, the Mahdist garrison at Kassala was unable to provide adequate provisions for both its soldiers and camp followers. Consequently, thousands of malnourished camp followers migrated from the Gash Delta, north of Kassala, to the Tawkar Delta, on the Red Sea coast, thereby increasing the demand for grain in the Red Sea hills. At the same time, the British military leadership stationed at Sawākin decided to starve the population of the Red Sea hills into submission. British officers prohibited all commerce between Sawākin and the interior and ceased all forms of food aid—which resulted in a rapid rise in the price of grain in Eastern Sudan and to widespread starvation, banditry, and death in the Red Sea hills and the Tawkar Delta.

Honouring The Wound: War and Performance in the Lives of Hannah Snell, Deborah Sampson and Pauline Cushman

AbstractThis essay investigates three women’s cross-dressed service in the military. Hannah Snell (1723-92) served as a British marine and fought the French in India. Deborah Sampson Gannet (1760-1827) fought the British in the American Wars of Independence and Pauline Cushman (1833-1893) claimed to have disguised herself for the Union during the American Civil War. These three are, by no means, the only women to claim action and remuneration as male combatants (Jelinek 53-62),1 when the legal extent of women’s engagement was as unpaid camp followers. However, all three gave accounts of their military exploits to the public through biographies and solo performances on stage.

Is Luis Cervantes Queer in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo ?

Is Luis Cervantes Queer in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo? David William Foster One of Luis Cervantes’s many problems in becoming an accepted member of Demetrio Macías’s band of revolutionaries in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (serialized 1915 in newspaper form in El Paso, Texas; first Mexican book publication 1916) concerns his relationship with the soldaderas, the women camp followers who provide the revolutionaries with logistical support (often on the battlefield itself) and, to be sure, the entire spectrum of female companionship. Cervantes insouciantly fends off the love-sick advances of Camila, and in the end only pretends to seduce her in order to place her at the disposition of the band’s leader, Demetrio; Camila in the end seems to find the substitution far from disagreeable (“¡Hum, pos no le paraba la boca de tan contenta!” [Azuela 1.94]), although she will go on to complain bitterly of having been betrayed by Cervantes. Meanwhile, the men react in a significantly pointed way: –¿Y el curro [Cervantes]? Callado como siempre: igual a como es él. –Yo creo –opinó con mucha gravedad Venancio– que si Camila amaneció en la cama de Demetrio, sólo fue por una equivocación. Bebimos mucho. . . ¡Acuérdense!. . . Se nos subieron los espíritus alcohólicos y todos perdimos el sentido. –¡Qué espíritus alcohólicos ni qué!. . . Fue cosa convenida entre el curro y el general. –¡Claro! Pa mí el tal curro no es más que un. . . –A mí no me gusta hablar de los amigos en ausencia –dijo el güero Margarito–; pero sí sé decirles que de dos novias que le he conocido, una ha sido para. . . mí y la otra para el general. Y prorrumpieron en carcajadas. (Azuela 1.94) One does not know for sure how a reader from the mid-teens would have completed the ellipsis following the phrase “No es más que,” but [End Page 61] the contemporary reader, accustomed to being aware of the sexualized nature of popular conversation, has little trouble in completing the phrase: “maricón.” Yet it is difficult to envision the reader of the novel of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which brought to the fore so many of the harshest realities of life and the body, of completing the sentence in any other way. After all, the function of ellipsis is not to hide an asserted meaning, but to refrain, for a number of reasons, including conventions of discretion, what is likely to be known by the speaker’s audience. Or, to put it differently, in one prevalent use of ellipsis, the rhetorical device only functions if what the speaker elides is what can be counted on to easily be filled in by the audience; in this sense, the ellipsis only serves to emphasize the phrase that has been elided, not to mask or withhold it. Throughout Azuela’s novel, Cervantes, who goes on to betray the meaning of the revolution he had previously endorsed (see his letter to Venancio that opens the third section of the novel), is barely tolerated by the men of the band. Cervantes is useful to them for his medical knowledge, which he uses to treat the men who have been wounded, including, in one important moment in the novel, Macías himself. Yet it is abundantly clear that he really does not fit in, and the word curro is frequently attributed to him, as in the quote above, a word that means “elegante,” especially in the sense of “presumido.” Cervantes is different in his social class and manners, his education, and, above all else in a novel marked by the significant attempt to capture the colloquial texture of the speech of the revolutionaries, in his language and discourse structure: indeed, the latter reduplicate significantly those of the narrator. But was Cervantes really a maricón?1 The answer to this question is [End Page 62] key to his status in the world of the revolutionary men and their women. There can be no question of the weighty sanctions against homosexuality in the Mexico of the day, as witnessed by the case, only a few years prior to the writing of the...

Psychological and Political Crisis: George Washington and Susan Danforth

Through several meetings in the fall and winter of 1776, General George Washington and Susan Danforth, the wife of an officer from Pennington, NJ, become close friends. They sympathize with each other's family and social responsibilities, they dread the outcome of the war, they admire each other's knowledge and leadership, and they warm and cheer one another as cold and dangerous times approach. But in camp before the Battle of Trenton in late December, when Susan fails to break up an affair between her husband and a camp follower named Cleo, when her husband turns violently on her and a friend, Susan despairs of their marriage, of her place in society and her whole future. She commits suicide.

Securitization and Desecuritization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone

This article focuses on the construction of “soldier” and “victim” by post-conflict programs in Sierra Leone. Focusing on the absence of individual testimonies and interviews that inform representations of women and girls post-conflict, this article demonstrates that the ideal of the female war victim has limited the ways in which female combatants are addressed by disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs in Sierra Leone. It is argued that titles given to female soldiers such as “females associated with the war,” “dependents,” or “camp followers” reveal the reluctance of reintegration agencies to identify females who participated in war as soldiers. In addition, I argue that men and masculinity are securitized post-conflict while women—even when they act in highly securitized roles such as soldiers—are desecuritized and, in effect, de-emphasized in post-conflict policy making. The impact of this categorization has been that the reintegration process for men has been securitized, or emphasized as an essential element of the transition from war to peace. In contrast, the reintegration process for females has been deemed a social concern and has been moralized as a return to normal.

The Structure of Alliance Networks in Nascent Organizational Fields: The Case of Nanotechnology - Executive Summary

In Feburary, 2001, while attending a conference of internal venture capitalists, I noticed that the conference organizers were putting on a concurrent conference on investing in nanotechnology at the same venue. Intrigued, I stayed to see what it was all about. What I saw convinced me that I was at ground zero for the birth of a new organizational field.The atmosphere at the conference was likened by one participant to the onset of the California gold rush. In place of prospectors looking to strike it rich, there were venture capitalists, scientists, university technology transfer officers and regional economic development agency representatives trying to capitalize on these futuristic technologies. Instead of camp followers, prostitutes and merchants, there were lawyers, accountants, headhunters and consultants all hustling for their piece of the action. In both events, the U.S. government was trying to keep order and exert influence over the final outcomes. During the gold rush, this took the guise of the army. For nanotechnology, representatives of government labs and funding agencies were present in abundance. In short, I seemingly had all of the organizational populations necessary for the birth of a new organizational field.

America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (review)

Reviewed by: America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire Ron Robin America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire. By Mark L. Gillem. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. Mark Gillem has produced a compelling study of the planning and execution of the American empire's diasporic communities the sprawling military bases that have mushroomed in response to the imperial reach of the United States. The intrusive nature of these military outposts, tempered by the occasional fitful desire to address the concerns of the host society, are in Gillem's mind, an incisive reflection of the more problematic aspects of the American empire. Much like the foreign policy that has engendered the presence of troops across the globe, the nation's America towns are introspective re-creations of problematic American social and political arrangements. The America towns of his study are auto-focused, segregated and imperiously oblivious to local surroundings; they are dominated by franchises and banally standardized. A fundamental addiction to sprawl has been exacerbated in recent years by fears of terrorism. Buffer zones surround variations of these Green Zones, all of which vacillate between obliviousness and ignorance in their inevitable clash with host societies. Avoidance rather than interaction is the most salient quality of these domineering outposts. Goodwin begins his study with a survey of empires past, implying that despite periodic nods toward American exceptionalism, the American empire is mostly a modern version of prior practices. Gillem judiciously shares the blames for the pathological aspects of these outposts. Ambitious politicians, officious military commanders, as well the pervasive economic entities that have accompanied America's global reach in the civilian realm are all culpable in his mind. In fact, Gillem sees the malignant spread of such military outposts as a dialogue in which powerful forces in the host society willfully collaborate in the creation of these sprawling, wasteful enclaves. Occasionally there are erratic attempts to produce harmony with local mores and customs. But for the most part, America towns induce avoidance rather than interaction, extravagance rather than prudence. A variety of political and economic forces in host societies collude with, and profit off, these sprawling enclaves of America. Much like the dystopic exemplars of American suburbia, these military facsimiles have produced widespread environmental problems, crime, and blight, all of which are construed by host societies as affronts to local cultural mores. The sordid communities of camp followers that grow in the shadow of these outposts provide examples for some of the most troubling aspect of the uneven relationship between the military-suburban complex and its surroundings. It is here that power relations are expressed in a particularly unsavory gendered manner. Prostitution appears to be most the most sought-after commodity in the uneven exchange between host societies and American interlopers. Goodwin's study vacillates between an academic inquest and a journalistic expose'. Some might find this vacillation between different genres to be a weakness. I personally find it to be the major strength of his work as it supplies multiple angles for understanding the cultural and political impact of these outposts of the American empire. Ron Robin New York University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Foreword

Reading the manuscript of this history was a real trip down memory lane for me. I enjoyed following the account of the changes that I had witnessed since joining as a foundation member, and later as an avid ?stuffer? of conference satchels, a joiner of its committees (branch and federal) and camp follower of annual conferences ever since (to my enlightenment and enjoyment).

The Middle Power Project: Canada and the Founding of the United Nations (review)

Reviewed by: The Middle Power Project: Canada and the Founding of the United Nations David Webster (bio) Adam Chapnick. The Middle Power Project: Canada and the Founding of the United Nations University of British Columbia Press. xiv, 210. $29.95 Canadians are much taken with the idea that our country has a mediating middle power tradition, with a consequent higher moral stature than more self-interested powers. The idea has been promoted in the press and in books that lament the decline of Canadian foreign policy since its 'golden age.' The figure of Lester Pearson stands above it all, a symbol of a more glorious time when Canada both did good, and did better than successor governments. This story also gives tremendous deference to an idealized United Nations. Adam Chapnick's delving into the actual Canadian role in founding the un reveals this self-image as mostly imagined, contrasting pragmatic and deferential policymakers led by Prime Minister Mackenzie King with more idealistic figures like Pearson. The government of Canada took a reactive and limited role, while the Canadian public 'adopted a vision of their country in the world that was more perceived than real.' Chapnick zeroes in on a foundational moment in the Canadian 'middle power project,' the construction of the un system in the late wartime years and its formal creation at San Francisco in 1945. Careful archival research in Canadian records is supplemented by a close look at British and American records, allowing him to keep Canada at centre stage, while avoiding the common tendency to over-estimate Canadian influence. What emerges is a very different picture from the popular image of an outgoing internationalist Canada. Chapnick grapples with the origins of the middle power idea by examining the 'functional principle' advanced by Canadian diplomats searching for enhanced status during the Second World War. With the war driven by an Anglo-American partnership that saw other countries as little more than compliant camp followers, Canadian policymakers sought more input. They resisted doing so as part of a Commonwealth represented by a single voice in London, and also sought a bigger say than minor allies. The solution was the 'functional principle,' in which countries were entitled to a voice in accord with their contribution to various functions. Canada thus campaigned (unsuccessfully) for more status at the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1942–43. There were those in the Canadian diplomatic corps, with Pearson featuring prominently among them, who saw a greater role for Canada as [End Page 547] the leading 'middle power' – a term being defined at the time to include countries a level below the great powers, but with more to contribute than the small states. Yet diplomats operated in a severely constrained setting. Chapnick demonstrates that visions of Canadian policy as guided by 'enlightened diplomacy' were first enunciated not as a bold proactive vision, but as a defensive reaction to a British suggestion that there would be three postwar world powers: the us, the ussr, and the Commonwealth. That vision of Canadian dependence was anathema in King's Ottawa; the middle power project offered an alternative approach. However, Canadian diplomats lacked the will or capacity to follow it through. They failed to act in concert with other middle powers. At the un founding conference, they went along with great power desires in most matters, abdicating the role of middle power leadership to a more spirited Australian delegation. Canadian aims for the un's structure proved mostly abortive, and Canada failed to secure election to the Security Council despite its economic and military pre-eminence. However, the public embraced the middle power project in a way policymakers did not. A nationalist myth was born. Chapnick suggests it was further reinforced by early histories of Canadian foreign relations, usually written by diplomats in the Pearsonian mould and their admirers. This has served Canada poorly, creating expectations that its government should behave in ways that, in fact, never guided policy. Chapnick has effectively punctured a self-important myth about the years in which Canada first identified itself as a middle power. Yet his portrait of these foundational years is not all bleak. There were substantial Canadian contributions, he...

Cavalier Giovanni Battista Buonamente: Franciscan Violinist. By Peter Allsop. pp. xii + 252. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2005, 55. ISBN 1-84014-627-3.)

When the original edition of New Grove appeared in 1980, it attracted attention from critics for the space awarded for the first time to Italian composers of the seventeenth century—figures who had emerged briefly from the pages of such writers as Wasielewski, Torchi, Schering, Apel, and Newman and from time to time had been chosen as the subject of an academic thesis but whose marginality had hitherto remained unquestioned. Since then, the process of rehabilitation has proceeded apace, so that we are today no longer surprised when a former mere ‘name’ is proposed to us as a ‘voice’ in his or her own right and no longer just a stepping stone or camp follower. The emergence of Buonamente (c.1600–1642) as the subject of a published monograph is long overdue, since his music has qualities that are rare, distinctive, and valuable. He is exceptional both for the unusually large dimensions of his compositions and—fortunately—for the skill with which he organizes their thematic material and thereby prevents them from becoming discursive or incoherent. In the words of Peter Allsop (p. 20): ‘His complex through-composed designs often achieve proportions not equalled before the end of the seventeenth century, by comparison with which much of the music of the 1660s appears short-winded and undeveloped.’ Later (p. 153), Allsop justly eulogizes Buonamente’s ‘unique structural approach based on thematic integration’.

The Gender Trouble with Wilderness

Having traveled over hill and dale, environmental historians have struck out into new territory: cityscapes and spatial segregation, the body, climate change, energy, consumption, genetically modified flora and fauna, the technological reinvention of nature itself.' They have also probed the cultural and political construction of the wilderness idea, laid bare its class, gender, and racial prejudices, and opened room for investigations of environmental justice in the past.2 They have jettisoned the impulse to tell past environmental history as a dramatic conflict pitting man against nature. Environmental historians now search for a more complicated narrative, one that probes the social and cultural differences in the category of man and shows how they matter if we are to truly understand the role and place of nature in North American history. Environmental historians are as likely to look at human health as they are to look at efforts to preserve bison, redwood trees, or wild rivers; they are as likely to trace the connections among cockroaches, asthma, and an urban ecology of inequality in Harlem as they are to trail a John Muir into the Sierra Nevadas.3 An earlier generation of environmental historians often did just that, becoming camp followers of a sort hoping to inspire themselves and others with the great cause of environmentalism by sanctifying a heroic few who found a way to rise above the industrial din of their day.4 In our changed historiographic context, Susan Schrepfer's Nature's Altars may seem to be a throwback. She is concerned with those landscapes certain Americans designated as wilderness. The activities of the Sierra Club and other mountaineering groups are at the center of her narrative. John Muir and David Brower have a prominent role. The nature experience of America's elite are given a certain pride of place. Upon finding that gender is in the subtitle, we might believe that we will get another side of the tale, one that puts relatively unknown figures like Marion Randall Parsons (the first female member of the Sierra Club's board of directors) alongside the well-known male leaders. And we do. But the book is not a tired retracing of wilderness environmentalism,

Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence

Revolutionary Mothers uses a topical, biographical approach to introduce a general readership to women's experiences during the American Revolution. Eight chapters on specific groups of women are bookended with chapters that look at women's status before and after the war. Carol Berkin's conclusion is that after a brief interlude of extraordinary activity during the Revolution, women settled into a new role that offered them expanded authority as intellectual beings and the moral arbiters of the new age in exchange for a reduced recognition as participants in the economy. Those who were poor or of color lost the most in this transformation. The opening chapter paints a gloomy version of women's lives before the Revolution. Prescriptive descriptions of women's roles are given more weight than the actual lives that women lived. The tight focus of the interior chapters on wartime participation provides little insight into the postwar changes in role definition Berkin discusses, but biographical profiles provide a lively human face on women's activities not only on the home front but also as protesters, spies, soldiers, wives of soldiers, escaped slaves, and Indian leaders. The stories are often bittersweet—women who escape slavery only to die of smallpox, women made homeless by war, hungry camp followers barely tolerated by the army. There are exceptions, resourceful spies and generals' wives who create a home in camp despite heavy odds, but overall Berkin notes time and again how women had to settle for less or were marginalized or domesticated.

The Dutch Guardroom Scene of the Golden Age: A Definition

This study aims at defining a particular genre formula known to contemporaries as a Cortegaerdje — a guardroom scene. It was created and developed by a group of so-called minor masters in the Dutch Golden Age. The purpose is to reach an optimal agreement between a certain visual formula and this contemporary title or its variants. This is done through a systematic comparison with various martial and other relevant genre themes and assigning each its designated contemporary title. The guardroom scene is a genre painting depicting an interior of a temporary nature, hosting soldiers and their camp followers passing the time in various activities. It is free of any violent action, and it usually appears respectable and in some cases even merry. It might, however, include the results of violent actions, such as beseeching hostages and booty. The guardroom scene usually does not revolve around a clear subject matter, but is a collection of motifs, anecdotes, and notions. The guardroom scene gave the middle-class man, nesting safely at home, a restrained drama devoid of violence while touching his social sensitivity.

Marcia Reynders Ristaino. Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xxxi, 369 pp.

This book compares two uneasily related exile communities in early twentieth-century Shanghai: the Russians and the Jews. Although traders, including some Jews, had drifted down from Siberia from the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians in Shanghai, for a time the city's largest foreign community, were mainly remnants of Admiral Kolchak's “White” army who fled Vladivostok in 1922–23, with a rag-tag group of camp followers, aboard what remained of the former imperial fleet. Most settled in the French Concession district and worked as small shopkeepers. The Jewish refugees from Germany and Central Europe who followed in the period 1938–41 had little in common with the Russians, some of whom regarded the Jews as commercial rivals, and many of whom were deeply infected by the traditional anti-Semitism of the Russian extreme right.

Jeanne d'Arc, and: The Black Arts

Jeanne d'Arc A creature in the form of a woman with a man's impatience, in a man's doublet and tunic, she refused to don clothes "suitable to her sex . . . and to womanly duties," having left the farm without permission, drawn on by Saint Michael, whom she had seen not solely in her imagination but indeed with "the eyes of her body." Instead [End Page 44] of the usual malady suffered by women, Meniere's disease would do the trick to light and chime her way into history: it's a rare girl who leads men to their death. Undeterred when an arrow pierced her shoulder on the long, bloody march as chef de guerre, she let her women dress it with olive oil, then drove off les pucelles, "camp followers," with warning blows from the flat of a sword to keep her company as pure as the Lord's. Imprisoned in a tower, she leapt, yet her captors simply picked her up, a broken marionette. Warrior or symbol? Virgin or wanton? Leader or mascot? Man or woman? Pressed by their questions, she wept bitterly and silently. How could she answer them? She did not want to burn. She did not need that consummation of her uncorrupted body. Christ himself quailed as he foresaw his ending, yet I hear not a saint but a girl crying, "Rouen, Rouen, am I to die here?" Youth believes most of all in its immortality. [End Page 45] The Black Arts Her sister called during office hours. "Is she saying anything in her poetry?" As if I were a doctor or a priest, I said, "I'm afraid that's confidential." "We cruised the mall," her sister told me. "But she only chose black things." I didn't confess that my half-cracked girl had out-blacked even me, a charcoal down coat burying her bones. Her advisor called me in the evening. "Is she saying anything in her poetry?" "I'm not qualified to analyze her psyche," I said, thinking of the headless marionettes, visions of martyrdom, and usual longing for oblivion. Considering my position as poet/professor, I referred her to the counseling center before abdicating responsibility. After graduation, she sent a letter: Since my mother's sudden death, you've meant so much to me. I wrote back my standard upbeat note (Take care! Good luck! Keep writing!) and never heard from her again. [End Page 46] I am left with the apple on my desk. "Go ahead," I'd said. "Please. Feel free." This offer of food hung between us like sex or drugs: the envious queen tempting Snow White to take a bite. Then she drew my lure to her side.

Sepoys and the Siege of Kut-al-Amara, December 1915-April 1916

This article examines the role of Indian soldiers and camp followers during the siege of Kut-al-Amara, from December 1915 to April 1916. Historians have traditionally attributed the demise of the British garrison at Kut to the suspect decisions of its commander, Charles Townshend, and his superiors. This article argues that the conduct of the Indians attached to Towns-hend’s force contributed significantly to its defeat. It also demonstrates that many of the difficulties faced by the Kut garrison were a product of the delicate relationship between Indians and the British command structure of the Indian Army during the First World War.

Spaces for Races: Ordering of Camp Followers in the Military Cantonments, Madras Presidency, c. 1800-64

Spaces for Races: Ordering of Camp Followers in the Military Cantonments, Madras Presidency, c. 1800-64