Onset Of War Research Articles

Regionalism as Complement of Globalization:Promoting interests and influences through Indo-Pacific Regional Construct

The concepts of “Region” and its corresponding “Regionalism” became eminent by the end of Second World War and the onset of Cold War. The post-Cold War globalized world has transformed the “Regionalism” to suit increasing interdependence of nation-states, over and above increasing bilateral and multilateral institutional arrangements, through which nation-states intend to promote and assert their interests calculating on „relative gain‟ rather than „absolute gain‟ in the ensuing International Liberal Order. Regionalism ensures preservation and promotion of both national and regional interests internationally/globally, thereby serving as insurance to the pacing globalization. The emergence of Indo-Pacific encompassing the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean in a geostrategic regional construct from that of Asia-Pacific can be studied from the very essence of this global transformation. It is also no denying that the theatre of Indo-Pacific attracts several great powers interests. The geostrategic stakes of India and China with their interests and claims over territorial waters in the Indian Ocean and South & East China Seas respectively, provide for an important sphere to study in the Indo-Pacific. At this backdrop, the paper tries to study regionalism vis-à-vis globalization, with specific reference to India‟s geostrategic stakes, challenges and advantage in the Indo-Pacific. Keyword : Indo-Pacific, Regionalism, Globalization

The Optics of MAGIC: FDR’s 1941 SIGINT Stumbles and Japan’s Hidden Plans for America (1940–1941)

Abstract Since the 1941 Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor, numerous politicians, government analysts, and scholars have questioned how the Roosevelt administration could have been caught so unawares and incurred such heavy casualties at the onset of the Second World War. The postwar disclosure that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his senior advisers had access to Japan’s diplomatic message system through a small joint Army–Navy cryptologic program, called MAGIC, further complicated the search for answers. Although many historians have cited the value of MAGIC linked to Pearl Harbor, few have looked at the overall intelligence value of Japan’s American targets for data collection beyond the first strike situation. Marshall’s ordered comprehensive review of the MAGIC cables in the days following the December 7 attack failed to explain the reason for a Japanese data dump of several hundred messages in length. What did military intelligence miss? What does Signals Intelligence show us about Japan’s post-Pearl Harbor plans for the United States? A deep read of the material contextualized by other intelligence reports reveals administrative optics likely blinded the American nation to Japan’s intended wartime game plan, setting up the potential for a disaster as great as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 by Jessica M. Kim

Reviewed by: Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941 by Jessica M. Kim Joseph L. Scarpaci Jessica M. Kim Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865–1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. photographs, map, tables, appends., notes, bibl., index, (paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6624-2), $27.95. The publishing parentage of historian Jessica M. Kim’s book is as varied as the topic examined. A consortium forged by the David J. Weber Series in New Borderland History at Southern Methodist University, and the University of North Carolina’s already well established Latin American focus, birthed this interdisciplinary book. Already acclaimed with the Kenneth Jackson Award awarded by the Urban History Association, the work should interest students of economic, cultural, urban and regional geography. It dives headfirst into the much-used notion of core-periphery by anchoring the discussion on how Los Angeles’ growth in the post-Civil War Era, extending through the Porfiriato Era (1876–1911), and up to the onset of World War II, was intricately tied to southern California’s capital tentacles that reached deep into Mexico. This growth in empire comes to [End Page 208] life in vivid detail to convince readers (who might not otherwise accept the notion) that geopolitical borders are mere lines in the sand. Savvy strategies used by Los Angeles investors cajoled U.S. and Mexican governments to manipulate race, class and labor to extract value in agriculture, the petroleum industry, and real-estate. Think Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system’s theory or Saskia Sassen’s world city. At its core, this book shows the frenetic pull of investment that became a “marriage of capitalism and the nineteenth century city” (p. 9). It was driven by such “lumi-nary” Los Angeles iconic empire builders such as Griffith J. Griffith, Lewis Bradbury, Edward L. Doheny, Thomas Bard, Henry Workman Keller, Henry A. Crabb, Senator John A. Miller (CA), General William Starke Rosecrans (ret.), the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, the Colorado River Land Company, and Harrison Gray Otis, among others. The prevailing winds at their backs were the Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, victories in Havana and Manila, and the expectation that the role of U.S. and Mexican governments –the latter encouraged to facilitate liberal development through the support of these projects— would create favorable tax credits, build infrastructure (e.g., The Pan American Highway, or IPH: International Pacific Highway), military conquest, ideas of racial superiority, and American settler colonialism, among other forces. Mexican, Japanese, Native American, and Chinese laborers who toiled in anti-union and open-shop settings in Mexico and the United States helped alleviate the “white man’s burden.” Southern California investors hustled across the border to invest in agricultural and petroleum projects, keeping race, class, and labor lines in order. White managers and foremen stayed on top of brown-skin workers. And middle-class investors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century stock market cared little whether their investments were in sugar fields in Cuba or the Philippines, or agricultural projects in Mexico. Six chapters and an epilogue develop these and related themes. Historian Kim weaves personal letters, newspaper reports, archival materials, and copious materials to show how this cross-border web of elite alliances thrust Los Angeles into the pilot’s seat of empire building. Even after the Mexican Revolution, the legal framework allowed Los Angeles’ investors to hold considerable control over core-periphery trade. Chapter Two’s review of the Quimichis Colony of large-scale farming along the Pacific coast offers a granular look at how local settlements had little choice but to acquiesce to truck farming and U.S. consumer tastes. Chapter four’s discussion of lessons learned in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 and afterwards portrays an ethos that revived and legitimated American expansion. While the late nineteenth century bravado and risk-taking grew out of a post-Civil War Manifest Destiny ethos, the 1898 war rekindled the ideology that empire was good for the world. The Mexican Revolution (possibly kindling revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere), created an anti-Americanism and strong sense of nationalism that forced...

Woomera’s Women: camera operators on the Anglo-Australian rocket range 1947–1970, a case study of Laurine (Hall) East

ABSTRACT After WW2, with the onset of the Cold War, by virtue of an Anglo-Australian Joint Venture, Australia became a centre for scientific research into rockets and long-range weapons (including Britain’s atomic warheads) testing. By the mid 1950s a new outback town - Woomera had been created in the Australian Desert to conduct the tests. Each test generated 1,000s of images and 50,000 pictures could be generated per trial. Women’s roles at Woomera were initially expected to be traditional – supportive wives and mothers. This research based on archival records, documentary film and oral histories with those who worked on the range during 1947-1970, reveals women undertaking roles operating the kinetheodolites that filmed and tracked the rocket firings and female “computers,” who assisted in the production processes. These women recorded and analysed the data from filming and can be considered Australia’s “hidden figures”. Previous Woomera histories exclude any detailed mention of this industrial phenomenon – women as camera operators and data analysts/computers. This article examines the work of one of these women as revealed through film, archival records and oral history drawn from a broader study that examined the work of 12 former camera operators and four “computers” on the Woomera rocket range.

‘Foreign armies are functioning on Asian soil’: India, Indonesian decolonisation and the onset of the Cold War (1945–1949)

ABSTRACT This article studies the role of non-aligned India in the global diplomatic effort that surrounded the Dutch recolonisation conflict in Indonesia (1945–9). It argues that its role was significant, especially in light of its own transition to independence over this period. It draws on material sourced from the National Archives of India and the Netherlands, diplomatic memoirs and published primary material. In demonstrating how decolonisation was complicated by the onset of the Cold War, this article illustrates the intersections between two phenomena that greatly informed the transition of global order from one pinned on European imperialism for centuries.

Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo by Kenneth Morrison and Paul Lowe

Reviewed by: Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo by Kenneth Morrison and Paul Lowe James Gow Morrison, Kenneth and Lowe, Paul. Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2021. xxvii + 231 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00; £76.50 (e-book). This is a fine history of international journalism inside besieged Sarajevo. It is. of course, also a history of the siege itself through the prism of international journalism — not so much the output, but the experiences and dilemmas of practitioners, their recollections and views. It is a richly detailed volume that goes well beyond the ‘media and conflict’ literature to examine in rich detail how international journalists came to their mission to report on Sarajevo, how they and the organization around them evolved, and how they dealt with a range of challenges, not least of which was the array of ethical questions they faced at different stages. The book progresses through seven chapters, beginning with a solid and broadly reliable account of the immediate historical context for the onset of war in Bosnia and Herceogovina, and the siege that was a central feature in that conflict. The work develops through examination of the early days of reporting — in effect, a kind of ‘wild West’, as the relatively easy access to a European country saw a range of freelancers, stringers and some more established journalists find their way to the city. In the next chapter, we see the fascinating tale of how organization and infrastructure — and, crucially, greater protection and security, came to be. This is one of the truly significant contributions to emerge from the book, interpreting the emergence of the famed Holiday Inn as a hub for international reporting that became organically cooperative and eventually a ‘pool’, as well as the established use of local TV and post-telegraph facilities, and, crucially, the developed use of armoured vehicles and training in operating in hostile environments. These last features were to become essentials in all subsequent reporting from areas of armed conflict. This is an acutely important contribution — beyond the book’s focus on Sarajevo — in the history of journalism and war reporting However, in the treatment of the emergent reporting infrastructure, the single most important feature is the work of locals — stringers and fixers and interpreters, without whom the international journalists would largely have struggled. Indeed, perhaps the only significant disappointment in this book is that this aspect does not get discrete treatment in a chapter of its own. If many of the international journalists, well known and not, were to be credited with some kind of heroism, their local aids were surely the true heroes of the story. More on them would have made for an even richer history, in my judgement. Beyond this, the authors look at how reporters — and, as a sub-text, Sarajevans — lived under siege conditions, and how they reported on that experience to the wider world, and finally, they interrogate [End Page 388] the ethical, as well as practical, issues of witnessing life and death in the Bosnian capital. This last element is a sharply interesting analysis of the issues — summarized in one of the section titles: ‘Vulture, Voyeur, Saviour.’ Those three words brilliantly summarize the identities and roles, as well as the questions faced by international news and image makers. They clearly exploited the situation — as the volume notes, many names were made in Bosnia. And all who witnessed the suffering were indelibly engaged in a questionable form of voyeurism — capturing and making a spectacle of suffering. And, yet, despite the element of vanity that it reflected, the reporters were, and were seen as, saviours — in many respects, their words and images in the wider world, while changing nothing substantively, were a lifeline of hope for those trapped in the city and a thread of attention (as the Bosnian government surely hoped for and appreciated) around the globe, ensuring neither the city, nor the country for which it was a great synecdoche were forgotten. Moreover, the book exposes some of the strong ethical concerns surrounding acts of saving that exceeded reporting, contrasting two parallel events involving saviours. The first notes the discomfort that many...

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF STATES AND SOCIETIES IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL WORLD PROCESSES

The article is devoted to the study of issues of sustainable development of the state and society, in the context of global processes taking place in the world. Very often most researchers, when considering the problems of SD, single out such spheres of the modern world as ecology, socio-political, economic and cultural. Based on the analysis of the factors influencing the provision of "SD", the author believes that the characteristic of all studies is the emphasis not on the stable state of a particular community, but on the potential of this community to implement qualitative changes that should ensure the survival of this community. In turn, the issues of practical implementation of SD require research and development of effective risk and security management mechanisms aimed at achieving the “development goals of the millennium”. The author in his article emphasizes that the existing concept of sustainable development does not give an answer on how to protect humanity from the economy of uneven growth, which in interstate relations leads to the onset of wars between them, and the uneven, one-sided distribution of income within the country between rich and poor leads to destabilization of the internal political situation. The time and reality of today, the challenges of today require new approaches to the development of criteria and mechanisms for sustainable development of countries and people, which were defined in the 2002 Action Plan in Johannesburg. The author notes that the current development of economic and socio-political processes in the world is characterized by a state of instability. Periodic financial and economic crises are typical in the field of economics. Theoretical concepts of the global social crisis, which were predictive before, have become a reality, and in different parts of the world they develop into political ones. Today, humanity is alarmed by the state of ecology, which has become a victim of consumeristic, unreasonable use of the biosphere. In this situation, the study of the problems and prospects of sustainable development (SD) is of great relevance and significance today.

U.S.-Pakistan Alliances in Afghanistan: Policies, Costs and Implications

With the onset of the cold war, the United States (U.S.) had played a crucial role in ensuring the containment of the communist cause, and limiting the global influence of the Soviet Union. The U.S., through the implementation of its foreign policies, allied with the nation-states having similar goals and objectives. However, the result expected from such relations has never been achieved in its complete spirit, primarily because some or most of such alliances were complementary alliances[1]. Accordingly, this study has made an attempt to have a critical review of the motives that ultimately led to the U.S. and Pakistan nurturing, funding, developing, and fighting the Mujahedeen and Taliban groups during the Soviet-Afghan war and War on Terror (WOT). Conclusively, this study mirrors the impact of these alliances on both countries determining that Pakistan ultimately received the bitter end of the deal with its economy failing and country near collapse, while the U.S. remains in an advantageous situation.

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Queer Korea

Queer Korea

Ринок праці України в сучасних умовах: проблеми та напрями їх вирішення

The purpose of the article is to identify problems in the labor market of Ukraine in the difficult conditions of today, to find effective directions for their solution and conditions for optimizing the supply and demand of labor. To solve the set tasks, general scientific and special research methods were used, i. e.: generalization, analysis and synthesis, comparison and systematization, observation. The article considers the factors that influenced the emergence of disproportions in the labor market before the war, and expands the list of factors due to those added to the indicated ones after the onset of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation and negatively affect the labor market of Ukraine. A number of functions that the labor market performs during its formation and functioning are listed. The problems that have arisen in the situation with work and internship among the population of Ukraine since the onset of the full-scale war have been identified. The difficulties faced by the respondents when looking for a new job are considered; the priority of actions for the possibility of further employment is specified. Uneven indicators of demand and supply of vacancies in the labor market are indicated. The performance indicators of the State Employment Service after the onset of the war are analyzed and compared with the indicators of the previous period. The article substantiates the importance of a quick reaction on the part of the State, employers and the population to uncontrolled environmental factors. Directions for solving problems to reduce unemployment, achieve a balance between demand and supply of vacancies, and adjust the employment system are proposed.

War in Ukraine from the Perspective of Polish and Slovak University Students

In the aftermath of the Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outburst of conflict in the eastern part of Ukraine in 2014, thousands of Ukrainian migrants came to Poland. Many of them settled down and found jobs. On the onset of war in 2022, Ukrainian students were the most populous group among foreigners at Polish universities. The war in their home country had an impact on their families and friends. Young Poles, who made friends with Ukrainian students, take the war personally. Due to its unique nature, the perception of the conflict among young people has attracted the authors’ research interest. Additionally, it seems to be an added value when we compare attitudes of Polish students with those of Slovakian ones, as the latter do not share the same experience. The main goal of this article is to analyse opinions about the war in Ukraine among students studying in Poland and Slovakia, and their attitudes and behaviours towards refugees expressed online and offline. Results presented in the article have been taken from a questionnaire survey involving a group of 459 students. The survey took place in Spring 2022. The quantitative analysis of data is designed to provide answers to the following research questions: What sources of information about the war do young people use? What do young people think about the war in Ukraine, its causes and consequences? What forms of refugee-oriented activity do young people resort to? Have students encountered any form of resentment towards particular nationality groups in connection with the outbreak of the war?

Sicilian Bandits and the Italian state: Narratives about Crime and (in)Security in the Post-War Italian Press, 1948 – 1950

ABSTRACT The article examines how Italian newspapers and illustrated magazines reported the life and crimes of the notorious Sicilian bandit, Salvatore Giuliano. Articles and special features on Giuliano reflected more widely upon Italy’s ability to embrace democracy after the fascist dictatorship, as well as the historic North-South divide. Sensationalist narratives often presented the outlaw as a mythical figure. On occasion, however, they revealed the persistence of late-nineteenth-century racial concepts of Southern ‘difference’. Press coverage of police action against Giuliano, while often critical of the Italian government, also mirrored ideological conflict which had intensified with the onset of the Cold War.

Antiracism as War

Racial liberalism, which dominated racial thought from the onset of the Second World War to the Brown v. Board decision, inherited from that war an enduring figurative frame: racism as world-historical event, the struggle against it a war. That frame, which liberal anthropologists introduced, undercut nonstatist and radical antiracisms (states wage war), militated against enduring change (wars shouldn’t last forever), and contradicted the anthropologists’ own theories of human difference. Though often described as a hard turn from race as hierarchical biological difference to race as normative cultural difference, World War II marked not a transition from a hard-edged scientific racism to a more subtle cultural racism but the moment at which anthropologists biologized culture—not a racial break but a racial bridge.

Solidarity and Fragmentation in Libya’s Associational Life.

This article is a sociohistorical analysis of two regions of Libya, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, following independence in 1951. Building on Pierson (2004), it focuses on path dependent trends in solidarity and the fragmentation of Libya’s associative space. It argues that associational life has played a twofold role in Libya’s political and social history. First, it actively contributed to the strengthening of resistance against colonialism and tyranny, the development of state institutions and the domestication of state power. Second, it contributed to processes of bonding within groups that compromised the development of a Libyan state, which was a factor in the onset of the Libyan civil war (2014–2020). This dual nature of the associative space is an important point of inquiry for Libyan historiography and something that is important for policymakers presiding over the country’s state, nation building and economic development to understand.

Can Education Reduce Violent Crime? Evidence from Mexico before and after the Drug War Onset

ABSTRACT Existing theories relate higher education to lower crime rates, yet we have limited evidence on the crime-reducing effect of education in developing countries. We contribute to this literature by examining the effect of education on homicide in Mexico, where homicide rates decreased by nearly 55 percent from 1992 to 2007, before the surge of drug-related violence. We argue that a large amount of this reduction followed a compulsory schooling law at the secondary level in 1993, when the government undertook key education reforms to promote development and economic integration. We employ different empirical strategies that combine regression analysis, placebo tests, and an instrumental variable approach, and find that attendance in secondary and tertiary schools has a negative effect on homicide rates before the onset of the Drug War, although the evidence for secondary enrolment is more robust. This effect vanishes after the drug war onset, indicating that school attendance has different effects on different types of criminal activity. These findings suggest that policy makers can reduce crime and traditional forms of interpersonal violence by strengthening the education system.

Do perceptions of economic well-being predict the onset of war and peace?

While material deprivation is an important determinant of civil conflict, psychological factors can also explain the incentives for warfare. This paper considers whether and to what extent civilian perception of individual economic well-being, possibly influenced by hearts-and-minds tactics that are employed by insurgents, predicts war and peace onset. Using unique micro data bracketing the onset of the Nepalese Civil War, we find that perceived income inadequacy is associated with earlier war onset during periods of rebel recruitment, and with later peace onset in general. These results are mainly driven by the effect of perceived deprivation among marginalised communities on rebel-initiated violence, and hold regardless of whether we account for actual economic circumstance. Our results suggest that civilian perception of economic well-being ought to be considered seriously as a determinant of war and peace.

Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850-1939, by Victoria Kelley

Reviewed by: Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c. 1850–1939 by Victoria Kelley Judith R. Walkowitz (bio) Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c. 1850–1939, by Victoria Kelley; pp. xiv + 224. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, $118.00. In Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850–1939, a well-written and richly illustrated book on London street markets, Victoria Kelley challenges conventional narratives of Victorian street markets as imaginative and material relics of the past. She points to major surveys on poverty, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth to the New London Survey of the 1930s, which successively documented the vast expansion of street markets in the metropolis between the 1850s until the onset of the Second World War. Throughout this period, market stalls were essential food distribution spaces for London’s poor. Market sellers continued to purvey the basic staples of fruits, vegetables, and fish that were available in the 1850s, although a distinctive minority of stalls diversified into nonperishables, thus offering poor Londoners access to the cheap luxuries commodity market. The fact that these barely regulated sites of exchange proliferated amid the brick-and-mortar retail revolution of the Victorian era is just one of many historical dialectics identified by Kelley. Following the lead of cultural theorists and historians, Kelley shows how street markets occupied space on the ground in defiance of urban planning and developed in tandem with a rationalized urban economy. She also establishes the cultural impact of the markets, tracing printed descriptions and music hall performances that ultimately configured the street trader as the quintessential “Cockney,” a small entrepreneur who resisted authority but remained committed to mutual support and self-regulation (133). Thanks to powerful stage renditions, along with what Kelley calls “popular memory,” market people and their performances helped to frame how certain plebeian Londoners saw themselves (139). The first chapter offers a “narrative history” (12) of the street market’s “informal economy” (9). While metropolitan inspectors kept a sharp eye on authorized food markets engaged in wholesale trade and occupying off-street premises, municipal authorities virtually ignored street retail trading to the poor. As a result, street market traders might be subject to sporadic policing, as established in the Metropolitan (Streets) Act of 1867, but they paid no rent and enjoyed a steady yet fragile tenure on urban space. The disregard of municipal authorities ended in 1927, when street markets became subject to a licensing system that concentrated on space, time, and activity (meaning the type of commodity for sale). Even so, most of the informal conventions of the street markets continued until wartime conditions disrupted them. Subsequent chapters of the book are ordered thematically and devoted to “Things,” “Streets,” and “People.” In these sections, Kelley gives some attention to diachronic shifts in the commodities purveyed, the increasing Jewish presence in the East End markets, the growing reputation of the street markets as tourist attractions, and the cultural popularity of market types in music hall performances. Overall, however, her emphasis is less on differences over time or between markets than on enduring patterns and configurations. Kelley’s astute discussion of the architecture of market street represents her most original contribution to the history of the street market. Exploiting her skills as a design historian, she outlines the “fragile architecture” constructed out of the street’s barrows and stalls (95). Even though the street market was transient, appearing and disappearing from day to day, with no permanent facilities, the double line of barrows assembled [End Page 451] along the street afforded a cumulative sense of enclosure and “filled a customer’s field of vision” (97). This fragile architecture shaped the bodily experience of visitors. Visual representations of the markets predominantly reproduce the perspective of shoppers immersed amid crowds and stalls. Compared to the “scopophilic effects” of the shopping emporia of the West End, with their bright lights and shining glass, a visit to the market represented a multi-sensory experience of sounds, smells, and sights (103). As Kelley notes, Cheap Street is the first book-length scholarly study of London’s modern street markets. It builds...

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles

The Disillusionment of “Home” in Abla Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles Nancy M. Arenberg Born in Lebanon, Abla Farhoud is recognized as a prolific author who, at the young age of five, immigrated to Quebec with her family in the early 1950s. Over the years, she has attracted considerable critical attention as a successful playwright, but is also celebrated for her prose works in which she explores the plight of migrants, often women, who find themselves opposed to traditional cultures and values in Canada.1 Most notably, Farhoud concentrates on a Lebanese woman’s struggle to adapt to life in Montreal in Le Bonheur à la queue glissante (1998), a seminal text that places many of her literary productions within the category of écriture migrante. It is Farhoud’s focus on nomadism, identity, and problematic homecomings that establishes a connection to other migrant writers located in Montreal, such as Dany Laferrière, Régine Robin, Ying Chen, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Émile Ollivier. At a later stage of her career, Farhoud published Toutes celles que j’étais (2015), an autofictional work in which the author’s avatar, Aablè, moves to Montreal with her family as a young girl. But after fourteen years in Quebec, Aablè’s family travels to Lebanon, which sets the stage for the second novel in this projected trilogy. Farhoud’s Au grand soleil cachez vos filles (2017) reprises some key immigrant issues seen in the previous text, mainly the themes of disenfranchisement, nostalgic longing, and exile. In this work, the father of the Abdelnour clan makes the decision to repatriate the family to Lebanon, thus uprooting the children from their comfortable lifestyle in Montreal. As seen in Toutes celles que j’étais, this novel also channels many of Farhoud’s actual experiences, for the narrative is situated in the pre-civil war period of the 1960s. In fact, Farhoud did return to Lebanon at the age of twenty in 1965 but fled to France before the onset of the Six-Day War in 1967. Since the Abdelnour family’s migration emphasizes travelling across significant geographical boundaries, the first part of this article examines the complex representation [End Page 337] of the homeland, a distant mirage on the horizon. At the nexus of the family’s journey is the crisis of radical displacement, as they cross borders to arrive “over there,” but struggle to establish roots to create a sense of “home” in this unfamiliar place. To delve into this intricate notion of returning “home,” Salman Rushdie’s perspective on imaginary homelands is interpolated into the discussion in concert with Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography. Although the narrative unfolds from the alternating viewpoints of several family members, the main part of this study focuses on the problem of disillusionment, stemming from the difficult experiences of the two older daughters, Ikram and Faïzah. Seen through a feminist lens, the overarching crisis of disillusionment is also manifested on a corporeal level. To clarify, the bodies of the two sisters demonstrate resistance, at times, to cultural traditions and norms in Lebanon. Most importantly, Farhoud concentrates on the two sisters’ struggles to assimilate into the restrictive and foreign customs of Lebanese society, a challenge for independent women accustomed to mobility, freedom, and vast opportunities in Montreal. The concluding part of this article briefly considers Farhoud’s perspective on the plight of immigrants who live in a perpetual state of exile in search of a place to call “home.” According to Sara Ahmed, “home” can be defined as a place with fixed, stable boundaries, signifying the notion of belonging. However, in migrant narratives, this conception is unattainable, as immigrants are perpetually dislocated from a place or a space to call home (see Ahmed, “Home and Away” 339). It is useful to begin this study by looking at the family’s path of migration, a key component of Farhoud’s textual production. At first glance, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is the author’s reversal of the more traditional path, often seen in Québécois migrant narratives, in which immigrants move across borders in search of better lives in the new world...

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response