Understanding Of Nationalism Research Articles

'A Human Treasure': Europe's Displaced Children between Nationalism and Internationalism

In 1948 the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide labelled ‘forcibly transferring children of one group to another group’ enacted ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such‘, a form of genocide. A year later, Vinita A. Lewis, a social worker with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Germany, insisted, ‘The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe … Even if his future destiny lies in a country other than that of his origin, he [the displaced child] is entitled to the basic Human Right of full knowledge of his background and origin.’ Children, it seems, enjoyed a ‘human right’ to a nationality after World War II. Where did this strikingly nationalist understanding of human rights come from? And what does post-war activism around displaced children reveal about the broader relationships between nationalism and internationalism in the process of post-war reconstruction?

Untidy Life

Untidy Life Kerri Arsenault (bio) In Envy Country. Joan Frank. University of Notre Dame Press. http://undpress.nd.edu. 184 pages; paper, $20.00. Feeding Strays. Stephanie Freele. Lost Horse Press. http://www.losthorsepress.org. 268 pages; paper, $16.95. The short story collections In Envy Country by Joan Frank and Feeding Strays by Stefanie Freele tackle the universal subjects of domesticity: marriage, babies, husbands, wives, meals, and work. Dirty diapers and disillusioned homemakers still exist; however, housewifery clichés do not. Freele and Frank explore the complexities of human emotion and action with humor, nuance, and acuity, using slightly unconventional narrative constructs. While Frank employs a voyeuristic tack, Freele re-imagines the emotional states of ordinary people with quiet gestures in tiny universes. In both collections, we meet the brokenhearted, the jealous, the attention-starved, the murderous, the obsessed, the static. The characters are complex and layered, as are their stories and the methods used to tell them. They are imperfect. They are human. They are us. Without being alarming, Joan Frank's stories still manage to alarm us. Frank escorts her readers on an expedition across the IED-stricken terrain of envy. Her characters are Madame Defarge-esque, chronicling the steps and missteps of others with no less bloodlust than the French Revolutionary herself. What's clever is that the storytelling is both vitriolic and detached, wonderfully demonstrating the tension of concealed yet seething jealousies. To wit: Merin, from "A Note on the Type," is a receptionist where her job is "simply letting people in and out of Gerald's building." Merin accepts her fate as Gerald's clerical dilettante simply because he "plucked" her "from the daily floodtide of the lost and lonely—a tide still visible out the office windows." Enter Rochelle, Gerald's fledging hire. Merin details Rochelle as would a stalwart spy: "Her eyes were Betty Boop's: huge and black. Eyes eager to persuade you of their natural sympathy without revealing the least trace of a thinking agency behind them…. Rochelle's behavior made the same warrant of empty-vesselhood as did her eyes and even her voice, a piping sing-song." Eventually, Gerald provides Rochelle with services such as daycare, a housekeeper, and an accountant (things not provided to Merin). Merin considers, "What did that leave Rochelle to do? It left her free. Free to arrange things…. Bikini waxes, psychic readings, makeovers. Scuba lessons. Spanish lessons. Acting lessons. Singing lessons. Yoga. Home and garden shows. Car shows. Rebirthing sessions. Deep tissue massage," while rhetorically asking herself, "For myself?… My little place was a handy block from the main streetcar line. I thought of it as a second-floor shoebox, with holes cut in the lid." These small oblique explosions unmask Merin's feigned objectivity for what it really is—malevolent envy—and her narrative neutrality is diluted by the precise rhetoric used to construct it. Lena, in the title story, is a radio broadcaster, and visits the home of Karen Ryerson, a TV anchor and local celebrity. Lena tells herself that Ryerson's "Turkish rugs over the polished hardwood floor. Two deep sofas; two puffy armchairs piled with extra cushions, all in rich creams and autumn golds" are "distastefully shrill." The three-page, detailed description of such a home is possibly an inventory of all that Lena wants but does not have. But does she want the riches that come with celebrity success, or does she want the celebrity? One night Lena and her husband Phil are eating dinner at the Ryersons when the Ryersons step outside to finish an argument they began inside. Lena was enchanted. Phil! Come look!… They're fighting, breathed Lena without taking her gaze from the window. She said it the way a small girl might have said, a mermaid. Yeah? Lemme see. Why's that so nice? Because they never fight, said Lena softly, moving over for him on the couch. They're always perfect. It appears that what Lena really wants is the undoing of Karen Ryerson. This oscillation between desire and jealousy raises the question, are envy and aspiration intrinsic to one another? In the nine stories in Frank's collection, we watch others...

From Sympathy to Empathy: Anzia Yezierska and the Transformation of the American Subject

The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy. Yezierska's deployment of what Mikkelsen terms “aesthetic empathy” draws on an emergent discourse about empathy that defined this concept quite differently from current usages. Rather than designating an interpersonal dynamic, this discourse considered empathy as a relation among bodies, objects, and desire within capitalism. Yezierska's fashion-conscious characters reveal a United States constituted by economically, socially, and culturally mobile, not to mention aesthetically pleasing, bodies. Both Jewish and American, these bodies serve as touchpoints for their own desiring gazes, positing a model of assimilative empathy for “native” and immigrant alike in which “looks” refer to both an act and its object, the agent blurred with the process of her continual self-invention as a hybrid of multiple cultures. Meditating on relations between subject and object, viewer and vision, consumer and commodity, Yezierska makes plain the role of citizen as consumer. Her work crystallizes the dominance of technologies that infused the public sphere with art and beautiful images of human forms, leading the modern spectator to see others as potential reflections of herself. Mikkelsen's examination begins with a reading of the short story “Wings”; continues with a discussion of Jewish American involvement with the garment industry and high fashion as imagined in Salome of the Tenements (1922); and concludes with early theorizations of aesthetic empathy's role in motion pictures such as Hungry Hearts (1922), the film made of Yezierska's short stories.

"In fact, one cannot see it without laughing"

This cultural biography of the kangaroo in eighteenth-century Britain is concerned with the meaning and spectacle of the kangaroo in animal merchants, menageries, museums, and anatomical collections at the end of the long eighteenth century. In this paper, the kangaroo is featured both living and dead—as taxidermy, spirit preparation, or living, leaping kangaroo. The changing meaning or status of the kangaroo in these different collections contexts is narrated through individual kangaroo biographies and as a coherent whole is also a prosopography—a collective cultural biography of the kangaroo in Georgian Britain. Living kangaroos in this period held a very specific attraction for their spectators and we will see how this appeal was linked to contemporary British political culture. Understandings of nationhood, climate, the political economy of gathering, naturalizing, and disseminating plants and animals throughout the Empire, and the politics of natural history during the Napoleonic Wars were significant in constituting perceptions and meanings of the kangaroo in Britain. In addition to charting a series of relationships between sites and practitioners in Georgian Britain, this paper uses the kangaroo as a subject for articulating the changing practices of natural history, anatomy, and zoology in Britain between 1770 and 1830. The kangaroo in this period can be understood as consisting of many different cultural species of kangaroo created by differing practitioners—naturalists, anatomists, or exhibitioners, and different spectators. The politics of nation and natural history, and the negotiation of exhibitionary and disciplinary boundaries are particularly significant to the biography of the kangaroo. In this paper, I trace different sites, methods. or ways of encountering and knowing the kangaroo. For the early nineteenth century, I use the kangaroo to narrate a context for the establishment of expertise in the field of zoology, particularly marked by the emergence of the museum and menagerie of the London Zoological Society. This paper, though specifically concerned with the kangaroo, is then intended to resonate more widely with contemporary scholarship within the history of science and museum studies that is centered on the changing creation, perception, and utility of the "specimen" as a category of object.

American public philosophy and the mystery of Lincolnism

Although he is revered as one of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln seems to lack the legacy of others like Jefferson or Jackson who brought about new conceptions of American political life. In this study of Lincoln's political thought, Eric Sands blends political science, history, and political theory to offer a fresh perspective on Lincoln, his thought, and the politics of Reconstruction. In this new consideration of Lincoln's 'public philosophy' - the nation's understanding of itself - Sands seeks to determine why the spirit that successfully led the Union through the Civil War was unable to sustain itself during Reconstruction. He defines Lincolnism as a rededication to the principle of natural rights, a narrative of Divine Providence, a sentiment of brotherhood, and an augmentation of founding principles. He then explains how Lincoln's assassination, Johnson's succession, and developments in philosophy and science worked to undermine this philosophy after the war.Sands investigates why the Republican Party was unable to sustain Lincoln's ideas and why neither Republicans nor Democrats were able to formulate a compelling substitute public philosophy for Lincolnism. He describes how Radical Republicans and Purist Democrats battled for control over America's public philosophy, then how Moderate Republicans and Legitimist Democrats abandoned battles over first principles completely. By the end of Reconstruction, public philosophy politics were rejected altogether, ultimately frustrating efforts to move the nation toward the realization of full equality under the law. By reflecting on public policy formation and change, Sands evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of public philosophy politics and shows that the most inspiring and noble kind of politics, even if oriented toward moral principles, can also be dangerous and divisive.His work lends new insight into the role of ideas in politics and offers readers a new understanding of the consequences of Lincoln's actions and death of Reconstruction policies - and of why no concept of a 'Lincolnian democracy' survived during the Reconstruction Era.

Race, music, and national identity: images of jazz in American fiction, 1920-1960

Race, Music, and National Identity is the first book-length study to examine closely the portrayal of jazz in American fiction during the most critical and dynamic years of the music's development. The principal argument suggests that the discourse on jazz was informed largely by a broad range of anxieties endemic to the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century. As the United States faced a new crisis in either foreign or domestic policy, writers and intellectuals often used jazz as a forum to change both the public's understanding of the musical tradition as well as the nation's understanding of itself. In many ways, the rise of jazz from low to high art was a product of this discourse. The study relies on a close reading of several notable authors including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac but also responds to a broad range of popular writers from the decade whose contribution to the discourse on jazz has been largely forgotten. This book provides an insightful glimpse into how the United States negotiates and ultimately understands its own cultural artifacts. Paul McCann is an English Professor at Del Mar College.

Consortium Tells Congress Why It's Crucial to Boost MH Funds

Consortium Tells Congress Why It's Crucial to Boost MH Funds

“An Enemy, I suppose, that Nature has made”: Charlotte Smith and the natural enemy

This essay traces the history of the expression “natural enemy,” and finds the most rigorous, though subtle, investigation of the term in Charlotte Smith's final poem of 1807, Beachy Head. Joining John Thelwall's attempt to critique the popular British epithet for France by questioning its claim about “nature,” Smith begins her final “nature poem” with a figure keeping watch from the historic military site of Beachy Head, a site rife with anxiety about a possible French invasion. What emerges in the poem, however, is not the aggressive arrival of the invading enemy, but the geological history of Britain's prior union with France, a natural history that subverts the idea that the two nations were ever naturally enemies, since it suggests that, according to Smith, “we can trace our origin no farther than to the people we hate and despise.” Resisting the arguments of both a natural antipathy and a natural sympathy with France, Smith's poem focuses instead on the phenomenality of the border and the forms of watchfulness and attention demanded by war, to ask what relations to the foreign the rhetoric of the “natural enemy” might foreclose.

Teaching Ethics via Sympathy

Given the specific educational, psycholoqical, and socioloqical factors of juvenile inmates, I developed a course to teach such students moral concepts and reasoning without high level theorizing. I combined Hume's account of sympathy with current philosophical and psychological research to develop the students' natural sympathy as an aid in developing emotional, contextual, and moral literacy. In this paper, I explain (1) how the course developed the students' natural sympathy, (2) how sympathy can provide a simple and familiar process of moral deliberation, (3) how sympathy aids in learning moral concepts, and (4) some interesting implications for public policy regarding moral education and recidivism, early childhood moral education, and teaching ethics courses generally.

Art and Empire: On Oil, Antiquities, and the War in Iraq

I. VIEWING THE PLIGHT OF IRAQI ANTIQUITIES It is undoubtedly a sign of our times that Matthew Bogdanos, the reserve Marine Corps colonel who led the investigation into the April 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, has become somewhat of a celebrity spokesperson for the cause of Iraqi antiquities. Bogdanos, who earned an M.A. in Classical Studies and a Law degree from Columbia, served as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Living near the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, his family narrowly escaped the devastation of the attacks, making their way on foot through the chaos and confusion uptown, like many other New Yorkers on that dreadful day. The events prompted Bogdanos to return to active military duty, and he joined a counter-terrorism force in Afghanistan, eventually becoming part of a military team that helped draft plans for the early phases of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. 'I love the action and the challenges I experience in the military--I make no bones about that', he stated in his 2005 book describing these events, which claims to be a serious account of the investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum, titled Thieves of Baghdad. The book's subtitle, One Marine's Passion for Ancient Civilisations and the Journey to Recover the Worlds Greatest Stolen Treasures, however, announces the true spirit of the work: part military autobiography, part Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt, and part wartime thriller--even the Washington Post viewed the book as 'symptomatic of a new hubris in certain military and political circles'. (1) Although Bogdanos is donating the royalties from the volume (co-written with 'ghost-writer', William Patrick) to the Iraq Museum, he sold the story rights to a Hollywood production company that, in partnership with Warner Brothers, has been responsible for such contemporary releases as Terminator 3 and Superman Returns. 'This is one of the most dramatic stories of the war in Iraq', the producer of the soon-to-be-film version of Bogdanos' book explained in the showbiz journal, Variety. 'It's a compelling adventure, with intrigue, grit and pathos'. (2) Meanwhile, President Bush personally rewarded Bogdanos with the National Humanities Medal in 2005, an award that honours individuals whose work 'has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities'. What is immediately striking about Bogdanos' book, and his range of efforts--some of them successful--to recuperate objects that were looted from the Baghdad Museum, is the way in which his mission to protect Iraqi antiquities feeds and sustains the larger premises and procedures of the American 'liberation and rescue' of Iraq. Bogdanos, paradoxically, does not oppose the conditions that gave rise to the destruction of material culture in Iraq in the first place. On the contrary, he is a loyal proponent of military culture, and he defends the American failure to protect the museum on those fateful days following the invasion on the tactical grounds that it was 'too dangerous' for American soldiers. Moreover, his personal story, proceeding from the assault on Manhattan to the retaliation in Afghanistan to the necessity of 'regime change' in Iraq, reinforces the fictional links between the events of 9/11 and the rule of Saddam Hussein, however oppressive, so actively promoted by the Bush administration. In the meantime, the real story--a human tragedy of epic proportion--remains only partially narrated: the story of damage to the ancient material culture of Iraq through looting and the destruction of archaeological sites resulting from the first Gulf War, the economic conditions caused by UN imposed sanctions, and the current occupation, now entering its sixth long year, that has unleashed a series of catastrophic civil wars in the country. Given these contexts, it seems both predictable and unacceptable that a military spokesman like Bogdanos has come to represent the face of the humanities at a national level. …

Indeterminate Geographies of Political Violence in Southern Thailand

Geographies always contain more than they claim to represent, and there is always a politics involved in this excessive representation. This article examines how such indeterminate geographies structure popular, academic, political, and nationalist understandings of the current wave of political violence in southern Thailand.

An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (review)

Reviewed by: An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania Otilia Baraboi Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005, 332 pp. The translation of Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania enhances the existing approach to the formation of ideological extremisms throughout the twentieth century, regardless of their left or right orientation. This oversight of Romania’s geopolitical crisis in the Balkans calls into question the role that the interwar Romanian intelligentsia played in the elaboration of the doctrine of the “Iron Guard” (right extremist movement), also known as the “Legion of the Archangel Michael.” Alimented by the discussion of “Romanianism,” a term that sums up a constant quest for identity often seen as the burden of belonging to a downtrodden country, Petreu’s insightful work conjoins an ethical personal drive to account for an “infamous” historical heritage and the epistemological imperative to contribute to the worldwide scholarship on the birth of violent ideologies in general. Furthermore, as Norman Manea notes in his foreword, the close examination of the Iron Guard’s highly problematic claim to ground its political agenda of self-sacrifice in Christian Orthodox spirituality sheds new light on fundamentalist religious terrorism at large. Accordingly, in a passage added to the American edition, Marta Petreu compares the “Legionnaire’s death” confined only to Romanian territory with today’s borderless “suicide bombers” (45). While serving the immediate purpose of capturing the attention of the reader preoccupied by the currently unequal dynamics of power in the world, this parallel needs to be carefully contextualized. Thus, Petreu orchestrates an impressive series of sources (newspaper articles, letters, pamphlets, unpublished personal archives, historical and philosophical writings of both European and Romanian thinkers) on a minutely detailed historical background. To further illustrate her argument, she places at the center of her inquiry the Romanian and French philosopher E. M. Cioran. In so doing, Petreu develops her case study from the vantage point of a work enshrouded by controversy—The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and several newspaper articles and personal letters that testify to the ups and downs of Cioran’s support of the far right between 1933 and 1941. Petreu thus sets forth the extent to which Cioran’s biography [End Page 225] echoes the dialectical process of transfiguration that the young philosopher wanted for his “primitive” country. Convinced that all his personal achievements were conditioned by the national failure to equal the other leading European countries in power, Cioran believed that the far right violence against older politicians and intellectuals would save him from collective mediocrity. Thus, the Iron Guard’s vision of a dictatorial regime in Romania was in accordance with his plea for a dialectical leap into History, as opposed to a gradual adaptation to the Western European standards preferred by the older generation. Not only does Marta Petreu bring us closer to the parallel between Cioran’s personal turmoil and the political instability of interwar Romania, but she also highlights the significance of his “heretical” stands (pro-Occidentalist and anti-Christian Orthodox) within a group that eventually ceased to acknowledge him as one of its own. Moreover, her analysis of Cioran’s controversial stance regarding Romania’s minorities, especially Jewish and Hungarian minorities, further enriches our understanding of nationhood. In sum, this study is a remarkable and long-awaited attempt to fill in several epistemological ruptures still in place within post-Soviet identity narratives. With this in mind, Marta Petreu first lays the philosophical foundation for Cioran’s view on history as tributary to Spengler’s vitalism, as well as to Hegelian dialectics. Second, by establishing a close connection between Cioran’s “national collectivism” (a mixture of “state socialism” and the Bolshevik agenda) and Ceausescu’s dictatorship, she unravels the continuity between Romania’s Communist regime and the doctrines promoted by the autochthon intelligentsia. Third, by reading the apolitical French Cioran in the light of his endorsement of the Iron Guard, Petreu rightly traces his gradual process of disenchantment and detachment from his early political views in Romania, which culminates in his disapproval...

The Lineup for Meat: The Stalin Statue in Prague

In Prague a debate is taking place over whether an aquarium ought to be built on the site that once housed the largest monument to Stalin. The site is difficult to contend with, not only because it is a physical reminder of the atrocities committed during the Communist rule but also because of the monument's bizarre history, one plagued by absurd events. The monument's history is preserved in obscure historical and fictional narratives. I explore these narratives in terms of monumentality, foreign imposition, socialist-realist aesthetics, power, and humor. I concentrate on the dual function the absurd served in the history of the statue. Reliance on humor, while enabling the Czechs to undercut the monumentality of this emblem of the imposition of foreign power, also fostered a forgetting of the statue's history and political significance. Thus, the Czechs' propensity for the absurd, even if temporarily freeing, ultimately undermines the nation's understanding of its past.

<b><i>Reconstructing American Historical Cinema</i></b> (review)

Reviewed by: Reconstructing American Historical Cinema Tom Kemper (bio) Reconstructing American Historical Cinema by J. E. Smyth; University Press of Kentucky, 2006 Click for larger view View full resolution Dexterously researched, alive with acute attention to the nuances and ripples in films, and fresh with new perspectives, J. E. Smyth's Reconstructing American Historical Cinema is itself a reconstruction of 1930s American cinema, yielding novel insights into a seemingly well-trodden field. Smyth examines the ways in which particular Hollywood films from this period engaged in writing history and the [Begin Page 56] tremendous influence and attention these works gained in constructing the nation's understanding of its own past. That Hollywood exerted (and continues to do so) a heightened perspective on the public imagination may not represent headline news. But the originality of Smyth's approach—amongst many exciting analytical angles, both on the films and in her own methodology—comes through in the way she balances the public discussion of the various historical films and the debates and struggles forming their production process with an investigation of academic histories published during the time period. She treats both films and more "legitimate" histories with equal scrutiny, so that archival research on the production process and film reviews interweave with an overview of academic trends in history, 1930s professional historiographical conferences, and the journalistic and popular reception of history texts from the time period. Smyth's work represents part of a minor field in film and literary studies investigating how artworks not only represent or misrepresent history but also more significantly how artworks practice history, how they work alongside more traditional history texts and professional historians, and how much of our understanding of history comes through engaging with artistic representations of the past. Academic studies, journals, and anthologies have sprung up in this new scholarly arena. Smyth's work is both an original contribution to this field—original not only in her analysis but also in her solid and imaginative approach to research—and, more significantly, to a reinvestigation of the classical Hollywood era. She treats most of the films in her book not as symptoms of a hegemonic hypnosis of mass society, not as artistic exemplars of a formal paradigm, and not as discursive forces of subversion or transgression evident only to academics trained in Zizakian hieroglyphics or some equally trendy scholastic spin-game. No, she treats the texts as the products of various inputs—sometimes conflicting and sometimes complementary—from willful acts by different individuals. This intelligent approach deepens our understanding of the classical Hollywood era, offering a much more varied perspective on the creative possibilities, challenges, and achievements in this time period. In her "Introduction," Smyth even offers a fresh take on The Birth of a Nation—talk about a dead horse!—presenting new angles on the film and uncovering pertinent archival documents to introduce her book's governing thesis. She demonstrates how critics objected not only to the film's racial politics, but also and equally to its historiographic practices. These critics were perhaps the first, in our media age, to express concern over the powerful mixing of film and documentary practices of history. And along the way, Smyth offers a devastating critique of that fetish object of 70s film academia: Cahiers du cinema's article on Young Mr. Lincoln, that excruciatingly comical and canonical analysis that no one teaches anymore, still manages to stay in print (what would become of articles like this one were it not for anthologies?). Her deft research on the film, its production process, its sources, the construction of the film's screenplay, and its reception, all marked by her rigorous use of memos, drafts, and primary material, makes a mockery of Cahiers' sloppy theoretical mishmash, even if she offers up analytical angles that remain controversial. (Are those Cahiers-semiotics days over? You better believe it. But just as you will find hippies lingering on Haight Street, surely you will still find a small handful of scholars imitating the impenetrable esotericism of Comolli and Company.) Smyth's overall goal is to show the continuities between historical filmmaking and traditional historiography in the historical films from classical Hollywood. Smyth categorizes this genre...

Speaking National: Nationalizing the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1939

In this article Theodora Dragostinova examines the interplay between official policies and popular demands in the nationalization of the Greek minority in Bulgaria. She explores why national activists and ordinary people chose to “speak national” in the context of the conflicting national interests and territorial aspirations of Bulgaria and Greece. At the official level, the national discourse and practice showed the co-existence of essentialist and constructionist understandings of nationhood; while the rhetoric of the primordial nation was ubiquitous, politicians realized that certain policies could “improve” the national body. At the popular level, the profuse use of national rhetoric functioned as an “emergency identity,” or a discursive strategy that allowed individuals to claim social legitimacy in emergency situations. Thus, despite the fact that people were forced to adopt clear-cut national allegiances, national side-switching remained a frequent phenomenon.

Hermanns Schlachten: Gender, Culture and the German Nation in the Long Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACTThis article investigates treatments of the ‘Hermannsschlacht’ motif in the long eighteenth century, focusing particularly on works by Johann Elias Schlegel, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Heinrich von Kleist. In particular, it considers how these authors represent the relationships between gender, culture and the German nation in their plays. It is argued that the development of the ‘Hermannsschlacht’ motif is not driven primarily by a search for models of masculinity (Hans Peter Herrmann), but rather that the gender roles portrayed in these works are shaped by a rapidly changing socio‐political and intellectual climate which saw profound shifts in the understanding of nationhood as a cultural and political construct and in the relationship between gender and nationhood. The article proposes a broader framework of investigation, which on the one hand takes account of the changing relationships between intellectuals and power in Germany and on the other considers intertextual relationships between Kleist's play and the earlier versions of the ‘Hermannsschlacht’ in order to examine the dialogue between different generations of writers.

Organized Innocence and Exclusion: “Nation-States” in the Aftermath of War and Collective Crime

Vlasta Jalusic Organized Innocence and Exclusion: “Nation-States” in the Aftermath of War and Collective Crime But it is only an illusion that nationalism’s goal is a state. Although “organic” national states look like a natural prod­ uct of the idea about an “organic” nation and defensive nationalism seems to be the only guarantee of preserva­ tion of its “authenticity,” that state is only a prerequisite of nationalism. Olivera Milosavljevic (2002: 44-45) INTRODUCTION: BUFFERS AGAINST RESPONSIBILITY IN THE YUGOSLAV CASE Much has been said and written by now about the critical issues of tran­ sitional justice in the post-Yugoslav situation, and about the problem­ atic (non)dealing with the recent war and criminal past in Serbia and elsewhere. Yet the failure to deal with the past, especially its crimes, is only one mark of the persistence of a deeper problem that helped to create the circumstances in which collective crimes were made possi­ ble —circumstances that still persist, even though the war is over. As Arendt remarked when analyzing the elements of totalitarian domina­ tion, these phenomena can, in the form of several “temptations,” not social research Vol 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 1173 only survive a system that has been defeated but can persist further and crystallize in one form or another (Arendt, 1986: 459). W hat are these circumstances? I have argued elsewhere that the Yugoslavwar and massive crimes, especially in the case of Srebrenica, cannot be under­ stood by a single-cause explanation, such as calling nationalism the origin of all subsequent evil (Jalusic, 2007). In addition to many precipi­ tating human actions and omissions, a specific climate and mentality had to be created in order to prepare people to participate in, commit to, or tolerate the crimes that occurred. This extended process of prepara­ tion can be described as the creation of what I call the “organized inno­ cence syndrome.” There are three main ways ofapproaching the recent war and mass crimes and their consequences in some of the most involved regions of the former Yugoslavia-like Serbia, but also beyond. The first primarily involves denial and silence about the criminal past and an attempt at “forgetting,” at leaving it to oblivion. The second represents an attempt at exonerating oneself by being a victim the violent structures, propa­ ganda, and powerlessness, and blaming nationalist politicians and corrupt elites. The third and most problematic is a thorough “contextualization ” of crimes and their apologia in the context of the new state building, sometimes also as an open justification ofwhat has been done, which can serve to legitimate further exclusion ofgroups from member­ ship in the state, insofar as it is not based on excessive violence or mass killing. This last way of approaching the criminal past is a substantially new development since the Nazi crimes ofthe Second World War and the subsequent postwar attempts to come to terms with them. The novelty is that, for the first time since Hitler, total exclusion from the state is considered unproblematic in a part of Europe—provided it did and does not involve the violent and uncivilized evil of mass killing. This tribal, nationalist understanding of the nation-state and its function in the region after the collapse of socialism began to prop­ agate with the growth of Serbian tribal nationalism and was used to “justifjy] ethnic cleansing with the goal of the protection of territory for one’s own people” (Devic, 2003:1; V. Dimitrijevic, 2003). Understanding 1174 social research this new climate is crucial to learning the lessons of the post-Yugoslav outcomes, which are much broader than the local or regional conse­ quences. While taking place within regional borders, these events pose questions similar to those arising from the crisis ofthe European nation­ state in the first half of the twentieth century, although the answers might be different. The problem is thus not only that one is rendering irrelevant the past and the crimes committed in the name of something, someone, or someone’s identity (N. Dimitrijevic, 2006a), or that such a “culture of silence” accompanied by an attempt at this kind of “forgetting” does not lead to oblivion but instead corroborates the wrong past...

Eugenie: The Empress and her Empire

This sympathetic and lively biography of the Empress Eugénie claims not to be a definitive study based on new source material, but a reinterpretation based in the main (though by no means exclusively) on published documents and studies. It is well informed, wide-ranging, fair in its judgments, and intensely readable. Seward conjures up an image of the Second Empire as France's version of the high Victorian age, and he shows that, in a period of huge prosperity and social progress, Eugénie wielded more power and influence than any woman in France since the sixteenth century. Despised by many as a meddler in the affairs of State, frequently belittled as ‘the Spanish woman’ or disparaged as a temperamental gold-digger who married above her station, Eugénie none the less comes across as someone who had a responsible and highly tuned interest in political policy, and who also felt a natural sympathy for the feminist cause. Understandably, Seward concentrates much of his attention on the glamorous, glitzy years of the Second Empire, but there are also excellent sections here on the days prior to Napoléon III's abdication, and in particular on the years spent in exile in England, first at Chiselhurst and then in Farnborough. As one might expect of a biography that aims for a wide readership, there is sometimes (especially in the early pages) a temptation to supply a compelling narrative where the material itself is deficient. The detailed account of the wedding of Eugénie to Louis Napoléon in January 1853, for example, says much that is unverifiable, though it certainly ‘tells a good story’. However, this small defect is also testimony to the liveliness and persuasiveness of Seward's style, and in any case, his account becomes noticeably more nuanced as he warms to his subject. His use of unpublished sources gives this biography genuine authority (for example, various correspondences held in the Archives Nationales and, for the English phase of Eugénie's life, the Royal Archives at Windsor and the Public Record Office at Kew). It is further enhanced by a number of fascinating cameo portraits. Stendhal, Mérimée, George Sand, Rosa Bonheur, Mr Worth the couturier and Dr Evans the influential dentist, all shimmer briefly yet convincingly into life here, along with many others. The excellent final pages of this study are a reminder that, for all the judgments that may have been proffered, the complex and charismatic figure of Eugénie continues to defy historians' attempts to pigeonhole her.

Fractured Family Tales

Is it possible to say something fresh and interesting about divided family during Civil War? At first glance topic does not seem promising. After all, Americans have been talking about-and writing about-the brothers' war since shortly after Fort Sumter, or so it seems. As Amy Murrell Taylor points out, people love to tell family tales, both real and imagined, about ancestors who fought on opposite sides of conflict. And certainly those stories are a staple in popular culture. But although topic is familiar, there has been little scholarship that directly confronts issue. In this, the first sustained historical study of divided family in American Civil War, Taylor has cast her empirical and theoretical net wide, producing a monograph of far-reaching significance, suggesting importance of both human experience and cultural metaphor (p. 2). Divided families are defined broadly, ranging from classic stories of brothers in blue and gray, to distant cousins emerging to assist prisoners of war, to a few best friends who were not real siblings, to imagined interracial families of plantation South. Multiple themes recur throughout this deeply researched volume. At one level, Taylor is interested in uncovering lives of families that were literally divided by Civil War. Who were they, and how did they cope with complex personal and public challenges that followed when they divided over war? Time and again frustrated and befuddled men turned to language of gender and generations to explain their loss of political control. Taylor is also concerned with metaphorical power of family in midst of Civil War. How did flesh and blood experience of divided families in border states inform nation's understanding of war's larger meaning? Finally, Taylor considers meaning of family in war's popular fiction. Authors in both North and South turned to fictional stories of seduction and romance to process meaning of sectional conflict and subsequent sectional reconciliation. In creating these fictional families, popular writers wrestled with larger meaning of national

Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave" and My Bondage and My Freedom

While Frederick Douglass a slave employed in a shipyard in Baltimore, he endured a highly public attack. Diminishing employment opportunities and consequent salary pressures had led white workers to resent competition of black workers, and managers were all too willing to scapegoat blacks in order to take pressure off themselves. One day, in sight of at least fifty white men who stood by, four white workers pummeled Douglass with a brick and hand-spike and kicked him in eye. The attack aroused sympathy of his owners. When Douglass got home, Sophia Auld was again melted in pity toward me. My puffed-out eye, and my scarred and blood-covered face, moved dear lady to rears. (1) Mrs. Auld took care of him so tenderly that, as Douglass writes, It almost compensation for murderous assault, and my suffering, that it furnished an occasion for manifestation of ... kindness (BF, 235). But although she almost maternally kind and loving towards Douglass, Mrs. Auld nonetheless not politically transformed by episode. She did not come to understand role of racism in economy, and she did not convert to anti-slavery. Her sympathy with Frederick's suffering did not bring her to a position where she understood conditions of her slave's life, his extraordinary intellect, his deeply felt aspirations for his life. Jeannine DeLombard interprets this scene as encapsulating inaccessibility for blacks of Emerson's ideal of a transcendental eyeball. (2) As an anti-slavery advocate Douglass seeks Emersonian role of all-observing critic with comprehensive knowledge and without partiality inherent in a subjectivity grounded in corporeality. However, that role is unavailable to him; his would-be transcendental eyeball is always already burst because of his race, his body. Living in South, he is both brutalized and silenced. But in North too, he cannot attain respect accruing to one with transcendent vision but rather is constrained into an identity defined by his experiences of physical violence. The legitimacy of his vision and consequently his voice are limited. The only contribution to cause abolitionists seek from him is that of witness to sufferings. DeLombard traces how Douglass rejects this role of eye-witness and chooses metaphors of speaking and voice over vision and body to represent his role as anti-slavery author. What Lacan calls the scopic consigns him to mere corporeality; an aural regime does not. DeLombard thoroughly documents Douglass's turn from a visual sense of his own authorship to an aural sense of it, and she explores certain aspects of why such study of visual culture matters. But she fails to address critique of sympathy embedded in scene. Mrs. Auld is moved but not changed, and nature of sympathy that this fact implies is a primary cause of dramatic shift in Douglass's writing. In his writings, Douglass indicates that sympathy gained through listening and speaking is superior to sympathy grounded in visual signs of physical suffering, providing a more nuanced, sensitive, and generous relationship to other and a greater likelihood of political and psychic transformation. Aural forms of knowledge avail a more genuinely connective form of interpersonal relations than visual forms of knowledge can. They are more truly sympathetic. In rejecting visual and corporeal foundations for knowledge, Douglass also rejects sentimental abolitionist misconconceptions regarding sympathy that were prominent in his era. He suggests that certain sentimental definitions of sympathy are insufficient at best and politically regressive at worst. In turn, he gives voice to a definition of sympathy as an emotion rooted not in universality of physical experience but instead premised upon difference and rooted in dialogue. Douglass places a high value on true sympathy and strives to conceptualize how speaking and listening connect people in ways that get beyond surface signs and establish interpersonal contact in ways that feel authentic and significant to individuals involved. …