Mid-twentieth Century Research Articles

Extractivism in the Anthropocene

This month's Review of the Month by John Bellamy Foster illuminates the idea of extractivism, a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth's resources since the mid-twentieth century, Foster notes, threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet.

Broken promises and transoceanic fragments: Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, 1935–46

This article examines the personal experiences and memories of Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria in the years leading up to and immediately after the Second World War, revealing the tensions between migration and movement, on the one hand, and memory and loss, on the other. By engaging with the ideas surrounding tairiku (‘continents’) in early to mid-twentieth century Japan, this article moves away from triangulating the transoceanic movements of Japanese tango musicians and musical commodities across Japan, China and Latin America at this time. Instead, it considers such movements as the sonic manifestation of the island/continent dichotomy that framed Japanese maritime thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, in offering a Japan-reflexive scholarship for the study and writing of global music histories, this article argues for the need to move beyond a geo-oceanic approach in examining transoceanic circulations.

‘Resonating across Oceanic Currents’: Special edition editorial

Preoccupied with the historical contradictions of seawater as manifested in the early to mid-twentieth century popular music history surrounding Japan, the Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents: Maritime Histories of Popular Music in and from Japan, 1920s-60s’ addresses a potentiality of the maritime frame as a method for moving away from historical periodization in popular music studies, and for reconsidering the approaches to ‘the global music history’. Above all, by contributing to the growing scholarship that engages with the oceanic frames as methods ripe for deconstructing music histories, it argues for the potencies of the maritime frame that, in many respects, brings to centre personal narratives, shifting geopolitical positionalities and subjectivities of musicians, listeners and creators in the study of popular music history.

The Evolution of the Russian Diaspora in Northeast China (Late 19th – Mid‑20th Centuries)

Based on the fundamental statement that the Russian immigrant community in Northeast China in the late nineteenth – mid-twentieth centuries was a diaspora, this article examines the process of transformation of the nature of the Russian diaspora and the peculiarities of its functioning at certain stages of its existence. The research is based on the conceptual ideas of Imperial and Diaspora Studies. There are four stages of the existence of the Russian diaspora in Manchuria, which differ in the nature of the interaction of Russian immigrants with a foreign cultural environment, due to the sociolegal, economic, and political situation of the diaspora, as well as sociopolitical and sociocultural conditions of the living environment. The Russian immigrant community was formed as an imperial diaspora during the period of Russian domination in Manchuria. Despite the decline of the political and legal status and the marginalization in the early 1920s and later the split into politically antagonistic Soviet and Emigrant colonies, the diaspora retained elements of imperial consciousness and the desire for national and cultural autonomy. In the case of the Soviet colony, this was accompanied by attempts at a new “imperial” expansion in the form of Sovietization of the former alienated zone of the CER. In its turn, focused on the Sinification of the former alienated zone, the policy of the Chinese authorities led to a conflict of interests and hindered the process of integration of Russian immigrants, which was already complicated by the cultural and religious alienation of the living environment. The capture of Manchuria by the Japanese and the creation of the state of Manchukuo, which led to the disappearance of the Soviet colony, actualised the problem of the Russian diaspora’s integration into the multinational community of Manchukuo. Implemented within the framework of the Japanese pan-Asian national policy, the integration led to the strengthening of national defence tendencies and a significant numerical decline of the Russian diaspora. After 1945, the Russian diaspora, which was subjected to political repression, experienced intensive Sovietization and turned into an instrument of Soviet policy in Northeast China. The history of the diaspora ended with mass repatriation and remigration of 1954–1961.

Театр как «наблюдение второго порядка»: опыт Никласа Лумана

The article describes a viewpoint on theatre arts from the perspective of the Systems theory developed by the social philosopher Niklas Luhmann. The target of the study is theatre as a part of the social system. The theatre, being extremely dialogical and “demonstrative” kind of art, is described in terms of communication: self-reference, hetero-reference, autopoiesis, operational closure, first-and second-order observation. The paper aims to consider the theatre as a subsystem of the social system “art”, focusing on the notion of “second-order observation” which presumably can be a key to understanding the contemporary theatre form. Despite its social significance theatre has rarely been an object of social and philosophical studies. One of the aims of this article is to attempt to fill this gap. Luhmann avoided the political bias which was not always possible for social philosophers of the mid-twentieth century, so his view on the space and structure of theatre may also be of interest to contemporary researchers.

Changing land and labour relations on cocoa farms in Sefwi, Ghana: Continuity and change

Ever since the late 1880s when cocoa began to be grown commercially in Ghana, land and labour has been mobilized to expand the area under cocoa trees and cultivate the crop. The first cocoa farmers ingeniously used and adapted existing social norms for land acquisition and recruitment of labour from both the extended family and from migrants. The resulting development of cocoa was a remarkable story of African innovation and enterprise that made the then Gold Coast one of the most prosperous parts of Africa by the mid-twentieth century. We look at how land and labour has been mobilized for cocoa in Sefwi, western Ghana, from the start of cocoa growing in the region in the 1940s through to 2019. We ask what current norms are, how they have evolved, and why changes to them have been made. Changes in land and labour relations in the area have not followed the linear evolutionary theory of land tenure change neither have they remained as unique immutable customary structures. We note a flexible, reversible and highly pragmatic logic in tandem with the ruling exigencies that account for patterns of change over time.

Food structure revisited

BackgroundWe eat tasty and nutritious foods produced by nature and transformed through processing including cooking. Their unique microstructures started to be unveiled by food scientists in the mid-twentieth century and their relationship with sensory properties, nutritional and health benefits is of recent occurrence. Scope and approachThis article describes how the study of food structure evolved from plain curiosity (microscopy) to become a major field of research in food science, nutrition and health. Up-to-date articles and books on food microstructure are reviewed. Key findings and conclusionsFood structure research has evolved into the concept of the food matrix that studies the functional behavior of chemical components confined in discrete domains. Today, knowledge of food structures and food matrices is key to understanding the effects of foods on nutrition and health, the efficacy of digestion and bioavailability of nutrients, the impact of a healthy microbiome, the design of novel foods for personalized needs, and the development of sustainable plant-based products. Future developments in food structuring and design will require moving from a multidisciplinary effort (food science and nutrition) to a transdisciplinary approach that effectively integrates advances in related disciplines spanning environmental sciences to health sciences.

Oppressive Even As It Inspires

Abstract In this article, we trace the evolution of the connections between Black America and (Black) Europe since the mid-twentieth century and the study thereof. We do so through the lens of ‘Black American centrality,’ referring to the ways in which perceptions of Black America serve as an outsized reference point in European understandings of race, ‘Blackness,’ and Black (European) emancipation struggles. This allows for exploring the dilemmas that the, at times overwhelming, visibility of ‘Black America’ poses to Black Europeans, particularly during the current moment of flourishing Black European culture, politics, and scholarship. In that context, we show how both U.S.- and Europe-based scholars of Black American history and Black European history have approached Black American-European connections differently. The article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.

Population structure and migration in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, a region impacted by the kuru epidemic

Populations of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (EHPNG, area 11,157km2) lived in relative isolation from the rest of the world until the mid-20th century, and the region contains a wealth of linguistic and cultural diversity. Notably, several populations of EHPNG were devastated by an epidemic prion disease, kuru, which at its peak in the mid-twentieth century led to some villages being almost depleted of adult women. Until now, population genetic analyses to learn about genetic diversity, migration, admixture, and the impact of the kuru epidemic have been restricted to a small number of variants or samples. Here, we present a population genetic analysis of the region based on genome-wide genotype data of 943 individuals from 21 linguistic groups and 68 villages in EHPNG, including 34 villages in the South Fore linguistic group, the group most affected by kuru. We find a striking degree of genetic population structure in the relatively small region (average FST between linguistic groups 0.024). The genetic population structure correlates well with linguistic grouping, with some noticeable exceptions that reflect the clan system of community organization that has historically existed in EHPNG. We also detect the presence of migrant individuals within the EHPNG region and observe a significant excess of females among migrants compared to among non-migrants in areas of high kuru exposure (p= 0.0145, chi-squared test). This likely reflects the continued practice of patrilocality despite documented fears and strains placed on communities as a result of kuru and its associated skew in female incidence.

The dress and commercial image of the American ‘Fat Lady’, 1850–1920

In this article, I analyse the genre of ‘Fat Lady’ photographs popular between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. I assert that there is an archetypal appearance that developed in the 1860s and was standardized by the 1880s, consisting of certain dress, grooming and posing practices that emphasized their subjects’ sizes and presumed social status. Fatness was a performance that these women were employed to embody – one that straddled the lines between corporeal deviance and normality. Freak shows reveal cultural anxieties about bodies. The way Fat Lady performers were costumed reflected concerns about fatness taking up too much space and visibility as well as fatness rendering people immature and androgynous, thereby challenging established sex-role differences; it also revealed the potential erotic allure of extreme body size. Over a century of popularity, Fat Lady performers came to rely on costumes inspired by evening dress, childrenswear and then lingerie, all of which grew scantier as time progressed. Existing cartes de visite, cabinet cards, posters, advertisements, reports from journalists and side show insiders, and rare interviews with the performers themselves provide material for close analysis.

Quantifying Subsurface Tar Volumes at Three Former Manufactured Gas Plants

Manufactured gas plants (MGPs) were a staple of the Industrial Revolution, operating in the US primarily on the East Coast, starting in the early 19th before phase-out in the mid-twentieth century. Their legacy includes the release of copious quantities of subsurface tar, and when located adjacent to waterways, tar in sediment due to direct discharge and leaking bulkheads. Computing the depth and extent of tar impacts is a three-dimensional problem required to facilitate appropriate remediation efforts. At three former MGPs, 306, 223, and 254 boreholes with 1452, 544, and 276 intervals were coded and %saturation attributed to saturated (Sn = 70%) and residual (S Nr = 20%) tar. These data were incorporated into the 3-D krieging software EnviroInsite to estimate the spatial extent of tar and oil impacts and their affiliated volumes. At the former Citizens, Fulton, and Metropolitan MGPs, the model estimated a most probable volume (MPV) of 7.21, 4.36, and 0.8 million gallons of tar. As a sensitivity analysis, Sn was decreased to 60%, reducing the MPV to 6.3, 3.4, and 0.6 million gallons, respectively, Regardless, it is irrefutable that a large amount of tar remains in the subsurface ∼70 years after the facilities ceased operating.

Shadow Lives: Disrupting Gender Patterns in Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle and Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor

The decades that followed Irish independence witnessed a doubling down of efforts to reinforce established gender roles and conservative systems of power in the fledgling state. The tensions that emerged between the cosmopolitanism outside of Ireland and the increasingly isolationist policies within found suitable expression in the contradictory treatment of Kate O’Brien’s work, lauded outside of Ireland, yet subjected at home to the stringent censorship laws that saw both Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) banned upon publication. While, across the Atlantic, Maeve Brennan, then at the very outset of her career, was undergoing a form of self–censorship writing her first extended work, later to be published as The Visitor (2000). In the mid-twentieth century, Brennan and O’Brien explored depictions of women living on the margins of normative domestic life, beyond the institutions of marriage and motherhood. And in this, they paved the way for the radical cultural and spatial re-formations that would signal a new Ireland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this essay, I consider Kate O’Brien’s novel Mary Lavelle (1936), alongside recently uncovered drafts of Brennan’s roughly contemporaneous novella, as a challenge to the patriarchal hegemony that emerged in the newly conceived Free State. And I suggest that in drafting her first extended work of fiction, Brennan was conscious of the proscriptions that O’Brien had fallen foul of in Ireland.

Understanding Rural Migration in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Examining Dimensions of Social Change and their Effects in Cisternino, a Southern Italian Town

Abstract This article examines the migration transition in Cisternino, a rural town in Southern Italy, after the Second World War, and analyses the social changes that influenced the observed migration shifts. Based on archival research, statistics and primary data, the article presents the town and its migration patterns before and after the Second World War. It then examines the town’s main social changes over the 1950–1990 period, and shows that three processes explain the changing migration patterns: the expansion of the state, cultural transformations and the restructuring of the local economy. The article shows that, after the war, migration became an adaptation strategy in reaction to rapid societal changes, including new aspirations among local residents. Therefore, migration became of vital importance at a time of high uncertainty. The article also shows the many ways in which, at crucial moments of transition, the state affected local livelihoods and people’s decision to either adapt locally or migrate.

Local Fabric: Mid-Century Modernisms, Textile and Fashion Design, and the Northwest Coast, 1940–1967

In the mid-twentieth century, growing North American textile and ready-to-wear industries vigorously appropriated Native American aesthetics to cultivate a commercial and design identity apart from Europe. Most studies of the circulation of Indigenous idioms in these industries focus on Southwestern or South Pacific regionalisms, and scholarship on studio and commercial fabric and fashion design from the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century is limited. This paper contributes by raising Indigenous and non-Indigenous use of Northwest Coast design forms during the politically turbulent 1940s–1960s and analyzing the impact of this aesthetic vocabulary within broader North American textiles and fashion. Throughout, I engage with the approaches of critical fashion theory and multiple modernisms, considering the frictions of property and power relations within settler-colonial states, then and now. Drawing from study of objects, periodicals, and archival materials as well as first-person perspectives, I contextualize these representations within entangled art, museum, and design worlds in the Northwest Coast, New York City, and the Southwest. My examination illustrates that Northwest Coast artists and art ideas asserted a peripheral but locatable role in mid-century textiles and fashion, facilitating the development of today’s robust Indigenous fashion network on the Northwest Coast and its cultural politics.

Public–Private Partnering in Nuclear Reactor Development—Historical Review and Implications for Today

Abstract The dominant nuclear reactor technologies that comprise the current global operating fleet were developed and deployed over a relatively short, midtwentieth century, period spanning the 1950s and 60 s. Four of these technologies were deployed at fleet scales and commercially exported. The historical record indicates a remarkably consistent process of phased technology development that enabled the commercialization of designs that would define the global nuclear marketplace, beginning with research and development (R&D) and advancing through test reactors, small and large demonstration reactors, and first commercial-scale units. Following proof-of-principle R&D, historical commercialization lead times (from decision to construction of a demonstration reactor to first commercial launch) ranged from 12 to16 years for these four commercial technologies. Key factors contributing to successful commercialization included durable government support for early R&D and varying degrees of public–private partnering through commercial launch. This partnering included arrangements for technical support, siting, facility ownership, nuclear material provision, and cost sharing. The policy environment was characterized by unambiguous government support; stabile, effective and informed government program management and oversight; and flexibility in the public–private partnership arrangements to promote technology development and demonstration. Government advocacy was structured to support progressively increasing industry independence and self-sufficiency. This experience is documented and analyzed in this paper to provide salient lessons and example program elements for contemporary efforts to stimulate development and commercialization of a new generation of advanced nuclear technologies through collaboration and public–private partnerships.

Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Abstract John Rechy is not interested in representation. Yet Rechy’s refusal to engage with identity using the terms offered to ethnic and queer writers has puzzled critics of his work. This article contends with John Rechy’s evasive novel, City of Night (1963), to reconsider Rechy’s attachment to refusal as a formal and political project that confounds any effort to portray a stable transparent minority subject. Through the novel’s rejection of disclosure and recognition, City of Night moves against forms of political stability (normative coupling, categorical identification, and property ownership) to feature ephemeral spaces in which minoritized people gather and shift around at the very moment the US state is restricting and criminalizing Mexican movement and sedimenting heteronormativity into law. By attending to evasion and refusal, I push the boundaries of Rechy criticism that have found City of Night devoid of politics or attachments to ethnic identity. Rather, I argue that the novel moves against individuation to offer ephemeral moments of entanglement with queer racialized Others through the composite form and figure of the “outsider.” Located in the unincorporated mass or crowd, City of Night’s attachment to the “outsider” thinks across difference to reveal the ways racialization underpins the policing of movement, heteronormativity, and citizenship in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, Rechy’s aesthetics of refusal registers the under-examined affinities between migrant, laborer, queer, and brown at the very moment the United States sought to restrict how we think about identity and politics in public.

The Holistic Effects of Mystical Union with Christ in the Soteriology of Dhanjibhai Fakirbhai

Abstract This article addresses the relationship between eschatological and present issues in Christian soteriological debates of the mid-twentieth century, particularly in post- colonial India. It focuses on the writings of Dhanjibhai Fakirbhai. As mystical views of Christian salvation can be criticized for their irrelevancy to secular society, Dhanjibhai presents a contrast to this in a type of mystical soteriology that breaks such critiques and complicates the usual categories of South Asian understandings. According to Dhanjibhai, “salvation” means to be in union with Jesus Christ, a spiritual faith-based relationship that extends into eternity but is also practically experienced in the world today. This article proceeds according to four key features of Dhanjibhai’s writings that demonstrate the holistic effects of union with Christ in his soteriology. I argue that Dhanjibhai alleviates the perceived problems of mystical approaches by presenting a soteriology that envelopes personal, social, and even ecological ramifications of salvation within a contextual evangelical framework.

Joseon-Soviet Culture (Jo Sso Munhwa) and Baek Seok’s translation

ABSTRACT Baek Seok, who returned to his hometown Jeongju via Manchuria after 1940, is a poet who experienced liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule (1945) and the Korean War (1950) in North Korea. During this period, he worked on translation rather than creating poetry. For this reason, researchers who attempt to examine Baek’s activities during his time in North Korea have focused on discovering and studying his translation works. As this article will elaborate, during the mid-twentieth century after his return home, Baek Seok also published a large number of translated poems in Joseon-Soviet Culture (Jo Sso Munhwa), the journal of the Joseon-Soviet Culture Association. Joseon-Soviet Culture, which was published from 1946 to 1963, is a major channel for investigating how North Korea’s so-called “official” literature was established through the influence of the Soviet Union. Baek Seok’s translation works have been largely understood as “indirect writing” during the period when creation was directly and indirectly banned. It is expected that, by reviewing various translations by Baek in Joseon-Soviet Culture, Baek’s literary activities in North Korea before writing freely was banned, can be confirmed more empirically. In this article, I will show how Baek Seok’s literary longing during this period can be traced through the analysis of his translated poem I want to say to you “You are my wife!” … by Konstantin Simonov. I argue that this poem shares an atmosphere similar to Baek’s existing creative poetry and translation practices are linked to reading practices.

The Early Black Printmaker(s) in Ilanga Lase Natal, 1903–1905

Art historians trace the history of printmaking as a creative endeavour among Black people in South Africa to the mid-twentieth century. While these genealogies are valuable, they exclude and are silent on the deep history of printmaking as both an artistic and trade skill within the black press. Using a polyphonic art-historical framing, I tap into the Black archive to demonstrate how printmaking was cultivated as both a creative and a visual communications strategy by Black artists during the early 1900s. By examining printed images published in the Ilanga Lase Natal newspaper from 1903 to 1905, I propose a revised chronology of printmaking as a creative endeavour among Black people. The formative Black printmaking tradition I discuss was enabled by colonial-era multinational pharmaceutical enterprises that commissioned many of the etchings and engravings that appeared. A speculative art-historical approach is used to analyse and interpret the various visualisations of New Africans created by these early Black printmakers.

«Философия беспорядка»: рецепция работ Н.А. Бердяева в арабской печати середины ХХ в.

The article is devoted to the Arabic reception of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev works in the mid-twentieth century. The author demonstrates the influence of Berdyaev’s theories on a number of Arab intellectuals (e.g. ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (1917–2002), ʻAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʻAqqād (1889–1964) and Anṭūn Saʻādah (1904–1949)), and also reveals the influence of the work “Slavery and Freedom” on the political press of the 1940s. The popularity of Berdyaev’s existentialism in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and Egypt is explained as a natural consequence of its manifestative nature and terminological simplicity. The study is preceded by a brief summary of the translations of Berdyaev’s works into Arabic, completed in 1960–2019.