Participation In World War Research Articles

Colonial Citizens of a Modern Empire: War, Illiteracy, and Physical Education in Puerto Rico, 1917-1930

Abstract The year 1917 marked a critical moment in the relationship between the United States and its Puerto Rican colony. It was the year the U.S. Congress approved the Jones Act, which further consolidated the island’s colonial relationship to the empire. Through the Jones Act, U.S. Congressmen granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. In turn, Puerto Rican men were asked to fulfill the obligations of their new colonial citizenship and join the U.S. military. The Porto Rican Regiment provided 18,000 colonial military recruits to guard the Panama Canal during the war. How did historical actors make sense of this new colonial citizenship? How did they interpret, debate, and adapt to the newly consolidated colonial status? This essay examines how local teachers and educators defined colonial citizenship. Puerto Rican teachers struggled to promote a citizenship-building project that cultivated student commitment to the patria (the island), while acknowledging the colonial relationship to the United States. In the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s, teachers debated military participation in World War I and the rights and obligations of U.S. citizenship. At the core, these debates were informed by anxieties over broader changes in constructions of gender. In the 1920s, Puerto Rico women aggressively and persistently challenged traditional gender norms. Working-class women joined the labor force in ever larger numbers and led labor strikes. Bourgeois women became teachers, nurses, and social workers. Both groups were committed suffragists. The historiography on citizenship and gender in the 1920s has focused on women’s emerging role in public spaces and their demands for just labor rights and the franchise. In this article, I propose we look at teachers, as intermediate actors in the colonial hierarchy, and examine their anxieties over changing gender norms. They debated men’s capacity to serve in the U.S. military and promoted modern physical education for the regeneration of boys and girls in the service of their patria. Debates among teachers in the 1920s sought to define the new category of colonial citizenship. As they did so, they helped liberalize some gender norms, while ultimately reinforcing patriarchy.

Nothing Less than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I

Justus D. Doenecke, best known for his classic study of the anti-interventionists just before World War II (Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941, 2000), turns his attention here to the domestic controversy leading to American participation in World War I. This is a thrice-told tale, and Doenecke does not aim to break new archival ground. Instead, he offers a comprehensive and elegantly written synthesis of existing scholarship, informed by his own use of the Woodrow Wilson Papers, the Congressional Record, and the contemporary press. In scarcely more than three hundred pages of text, Doenecke chronicles the debates over German and British violations of neutrality that persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to intervene in April 1917—not as an ally, but as a reluctant associate of the entente powers. Graduate students seeking to master the topic quickly will find Doenecke an informed and generally dispassionate guide. In an era when the United States repeatedly sends forces abroad without a formal declaration of war, Wilson's concern for the niceties of neutral rights a century ago seems anachronistic, even quaint. Yet Doenecke confirms the consensus view that, in the American public mind, violations of so-called international law by German submarines and British surface ships loomed larger than either commercial interests or the bonds of sentiment. Although Wilson made a point of not reading the newspapers, he believed in his own genius for leadership and, according to Doenecke, “possessed an uncanny ability to articulate the fears and aspirations of his people” (p. 4). This may be true; still, public discourse and Wilson's interpretation of it remained astonishingly unsophisticated. In retrospect it is astounding that the president stood convinced that “nothing in particular” except a disembodied interlacing of alliances had started the war and that the two sides sought virtually the same objectives (pp. 230, 304).

‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier’ The Impact of War in Eugene O’Neill’s The Sniper

Eugene O’Neill is one of the most important American dramatists. He began his writing career at the start of World War I and ended it at the conclusion of the Second. No doubt, the two World Wars profoundly and permanently affected the lives of people all over the world. As his country became increasingly involved in these wars, O’Neill reacted in his own way to the horrors, dehumanization and monstrosity of war experiences. O’Neill’s The Sniper sheds light on the shattering impact of the outbreak of armed conflict on the lives of simple ordinary people-Rougon’s family in this case. Since The Sniper is written in 1915, section one of the present study is devoted to the American participation in World War I, section two to O’Neill’s attitude toward war while the third section deals with the play per se. The study is rounded off with a Conclusion in which the most important findings are stated.

Somewhere in Europe (1947): Locating Hungary within a shifting geopolitical landscape

ABSTRACTSomewhere in Europe/Valahol Európában (Radványi, 1947) was one of the first films made in Hungary after 1945. Financed by the Hungarian Communist Party (MKP), it loudly proclaimed a broad European pertinence in an effort to privilege the universal narrative of childhoods disrupted by the war over narrowly national political concerns. The film's story of a gang of half-starved children battling for survival in a bombed-out Central European landscape places it squarely within a transnational post-war film-making tradition. Similarities with both Italian neorealism and Soviet socialist realist cinema indicate a shared European experience of the war, but is also attributable to the international training and experience of the film's personnel. The director Radványi had worked in the Italian industry, while the scriptwriter was the well-known film theorist Béla Balázs, who had worked in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. This article argues that in spite of its ostensible commitment to a communist and humanist ideology, the film gives an insight into the Hungarian national obsession with territorial integrity. Hungary's participation in World War II on the side of the Axis, and its position as a defeated nation under Allied occupation, are seen to complicate the film text. This article contends that in spite of its transnational flavour, the film's focus on lost children wandering in a borderless Europe suggests a preoccupation with the country's uncertain position within a shifting geopolitical landscape. In turn, the film's official reading by Nemeskürty shows an eagerness to accept the film's representation of Hungary as a blameless victim of the war, and gives evidence of a need to insert a (false) break between the country's wartime past as a member of the Axis, and the country's 1968 present as a member of the Communist world order.

D'ANNUNZIO'S ICARIAN MYTHOPOESIS

Some of D'Annunzio's works reflect the poet's fascination with airplanes taking shape in the incarnation of Icarus the aviator. This essay explores how the references to the Icarus Myth are interconnected. It deals first mainly with D'Annunzio's novel Forse che sì forse che no. Then, it shows how the theme resurfaces during the poet's participation in World War I and his interest in aviation. Finally, it illustrates how the different patterns of meaning continue to evolve during the last stage of the poet's life to become ultimately, through a synthesizing creative act, D'Annunzio's Icarian mythopoesis.

Asymmetrical Contribution of Brain Structures to Treatment-Resistant Depression As Illustrated by Effects of Right Subgenual Cingulum Stimulation

Major depressive disorder is one of the most common psychiatric disorders, with a worldwide lifetime prevalence rate of 10%-20% in women and a slightly lower rate in men. While many patients are successfully treated using established therapeutic strategies, a significant percentage of patients fail to respond. This report describes the successful recovery of a previously treatment-resistant patient following right unilateral deep brain stimulation of Brodmann's area 25. Current therapeutic approaches to treatment-resistant patients are reviewed in the context of this case with an emphasis on the role of the right and left hemispheres in mediating disease pathogenesis and clinical recovery.

“Our Gratitude to Our Soldiers”: Military Spouses, Family Re-Unification, and Postwar Immigration Reform

The perceived need to re-unite military families after World War II, initially addressed by ad-hoc war-brides legislation, played a key role in the reformulation of U.S. immigration policy. The large number of military spouses, especially from Asia, pushed policymakers to revise their notions of racial admissibility, thus helping to establish family re-unification as the driving force behind immigration reform. Though unnoticed at the time, the combination of wartime service, patriotism, and marriage formed an inadvertent road map for the family-centric, and ultimately racially neutral, admissions policies that would dominate U.S. immigration law after 1965. The importance of Asian war brides in shaping the contours of U.S. policy stands in even stronger relief when compared to the relative unimportance of the issue in Canada, another major participant in World War II, which also pursued immigration reform during the 1960s.

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

Reviewed by: The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro Stacy Reardon (bio) Whalan, Mark. The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. 400,000 African American soldiers participated in World War I within a segregated military that in large part consigned them to service roles: building roads, digging trenches, and unloading cargo. Nevertheless, prominent African American intellectuals in the early-twentieth century pushed for African American inclusion in the military as an opportunity for social progress and a means for African American men to acquire the trappings of masculine honor and respect so long denied them. When the 369th regiment, "The Harlem Hellfighters," paraded up 5th Avenue into Harlem, 250,000 people came to greet them. Yet the prevalence in 1919 of race riots and lynching—including of African American veterans still in uniform—cut into the optimism. Meanwhile, white America went busily about memorializing the war as one fought exclusively by whites. Almost a century later, the memory of World War I remains a contested site in American culture, particularly in the arts, where the relationship of the Great War to African American literature and culture has gone virtually undiscussed. While many of the prominent histories of the Harlem Renaissance, including When Harlem Was in Vogue by David Levering Lewis (1989), The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White by George Hutchinson (1995), and Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance by Cary D. Wintz (1998), touch on World War I, Mark Whalan's The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro is the first full-length work to examine in detail how African American participation in World War I played out in the cultural sphere. Recognizing that a critical focus on battlefield narratives as the defining texts of war literature has failed to document the way the War interwove with the New Negro movement, Whalan expands his investigation to cover writings of the "talented tenth" not normally considered to be war literature. By examining texts ranging from fictive representations of African American soldiers, such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), to popular war poetry exhorting African American soldiers to victory, such as Roscoe Jamison's "Negro Soldiers," to the influential [End Page 1140] photography and soldier portraits of James VanDerZee, Whalan unveils the tensions generated within African American culture at the prospect of participating in an imperial war on behalf of a racist state in which racialization of the enemy was a dominant ideological strategy. Whalan persuasively theorizes that African American participation in the War, however oppressive, energized the New Negro movement and helped shape its models of manhood and resistance. Whalan opens with a thoroughly grounded history of the experiences of African Americans in the War and at home. He outlines the social debates framing race and the military, showing that a central question for African Americans was whether the possibility of social advancement through military service could offset the costs and contradictions of serving in a segregated military during a time of widespread racial violence and oppression. At the same time, white America "deplored the thought of militarily trained black men in their communities" and was conflicted as to whether the need for men was urgent enough to risk training and arming a group so long held in subjugation through violence (1). Whalan traces how these issues funneled into the practical but contentious disputes taking place on a national level about military segregation, black military roles, and officer training. The book's major project, however, is to offer a cultural thematics of African American engagement with the cultural implications and memory of the Great War, particularly adumbrating the internal debates within the New Negro movement about the role of African Americans in the military, its implications, and how that participation should be represented. In the second chapter, "'Civilization has met its Waterloo': The Great War, Race, and the Canon," Whalan brings into focus the way African American intellectuals negotiated a precarious position between demanding that African Americans be acknowledged as rightful participants in American culture on the one hand and celebrating African American culture as an attractive refuge...

Cracks in the Inexorable: Bourne and Addams on Pacifists during Wartime

There is general consensus that Randolph Bourne was right in his criticism of Dewey’s support for U.S. participation in World War One. Bourne’s central argument against Dewey was that war is inexorable. War cannot be controlled; pragmatist method becomes inoperable. Jane Addams largely agreed with Bourne, but would question his claim that war’s inexorability is absolute. I will use Addams’s participation with the U.S. Food Administration to show cracks in the inexorability of war and also to raise questions about the pragmatist grounding of Bourne’s attack on Dewey. I argue that although Addams’s participation with the Food Administration was in some ways morally ambiguous, it also demonstrated a more throughgoing, pragmatist understanding of democracy than Bourne’s critique contained.

Winning the War: A Historical Analysis of the FFA During World War II

The United States' participation in World War II affected millions of men, women, and children, both at home and around the world. The war effort also affected the Future Farmers of America (FFA). FFA members, agriculture teachers, and national FFA officers all volunteered to serve their country during the war. Local FFA chapters and individual FFA members joined with other citizens to support the war effort. The national convention of the FFA and local FFA chapter operations were affected during the war years. Thousands of former FFA members left their homes and farms to enlist in the armed forces. Many gave the last full measure of sacrifice, their own lives, to the call of liberty. The gallantry of several FFA members was recognized with military honors, media features or commemorated in song following the war. This historical study researched the activities of local FFA chapters, the national FFA organization, and individual FFA members during World War II. Historical events were documented with primary and secondary sources including books, magazines, personal letters, personal communications, and reports available from the National FFA Archives.

Self‐Determination and the Difficulty of Creating Nation‐States: the Transylvania Case*

ABSTRACT. In the lead‐up to the World War I Paris Peace Conference the United States convened The Inquiry‐a group of leading scholars‐to propose equitable terms, including new borders, for the final peace settlements. In many areas throughout Europe, among them Transylvania, coming to a settlement that fully accounted for Woodrow Wilson's principle of self‐determination proved difficult. Hungary's populace comprised many nationalities, some very hostile toward Romania, the state that eventually acquired the entire region. In this article I analyze how the American plan differed from that finally adopted at the conference and how closely The Inquiry's plan for Transylvania followed the principles laid out by President Wilson in his famous “Fourteen Points,” which provided the basis for American participation in World War I. The ethnic mix within Transylvania made it an especially difficult region in which to apply Wilsonian principles.

The Crisisin the Great War: W. E. B. Du Bois and His Perception of African‐American Participation in World War I

This study explores the innate tension over African‐American participation in the Great War. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, as revealed by his writing in The Crisis, held the paradoxical notion of African‐A...

Argumente für die ‘Gestalt’ des ‘neuen Soldaten’? Musils Mann ohne Eigenschaften und Jüngers Der Arbeiter im sprachlich-rhetorischen Vergleich

The study of literary modernism continues to be faced with a recurring methodological deadlock: Whereas literary scholars tend to explore the aesthetic and epistemological potential of the models of language and identity advanced and practiced by modernist writers, interpreters ranging from disciplines as diverse as cultural studies and the history of science and technology point out (especially in more recent times) the passive complicity of these writings with more mundane contemporary ideologies. In the specific case of Musil’s magnum opus, this claim is often reinforced by the suggestion that the man without qualities displays affinities with Junger’s (politically problematic) position during the interbellum. This claim is loosely based on shared terminological backgrounds (the psycho-technical method of experimental psychology, the pervasive “Gestalt”-terminology) and on a vague sense of similarities in the biographical profile (the support of and active participation in World War I). This article argues, however, that such ‘history of ideas’-reconstructions need to be supplemented by a rhetorical analysis of the way in which concepts and ideas are mediated in narrative and argumentative structures. The article hence reassesses the Musil-Junger comparison thoroughly. But beyond that it also advances a terminology that is able to explore the way in which programmatic statements (concerning the new speeds and intensities of post-war modernity and the experiment to grasp their epistemological consequences) are framed argumentatively so as to constitute different discourse tactics.

The Overlooked Jewish Identity of Roy Cohn in Kushner's “Angels in America”: American Schmucko

Hannah Arendt, describing the marginalization of as outside society first articulated this liminal space which exposes them to suspicion, hostility, and discrimination (70; Ginsberg 7). The land of liberty, indeed, proved no different in its treatment of Jews. By the mid twentieth century, American achieved, at best, a tenuous stance in both political and cultural American life. Successive waves of anti-Semitism, particularly in the 1930s and 1950s, periodically resurged as if to test Jewish loyalty to the American way of life.1 These waves primarily served to attack liberal regimes: anti-Semitism was used, in part, to delegitimate liberal democracy by exposing it as a creature of, or cover of, the Jews (Ginsberg 6). Of the 1930s wave, political members of the right crudely renamed the New Deal the Jew Deal, in an anti-Semitic attempt to discredit Roosevelt's policies. Writing of the years before Pearl Harbor and American participation in World War II, Morton Horwitz notes anti-Semitism's increase in volume and virulence as well; between Charles

‘Japan Fight. Aboriginal People Fight. European People Fight’: Yolngu Stories from World War II

Abstract Did you know that a Bathurst Islander captured the first Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil? Or that a crucifix saved the life of a crashed American pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria? These are excerpts from the rich array of oral histories of Aboriginal participation in World War II. This paper presents “highlights” from Yolngu oral histories of World War II in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Using these stories, the paper begins to explore some of the following questions: Why did Yolngu participate in the war effort? How did Yolngu see their role in relation to white Australia? In what ways did Yolngu contribute to the security of Australia? How integral was Yolngu assistance to defence of Australia? Although the answers to these questions are not finite, this paper aims to survey some of the Yolngu history of World War II.

Patton's Fighting Bridge Builders: Company B, 1303rd Engineer General Service Regiment (review)

Reviewed by: Patton’s Fighting Bridge Builders: Company B, 1303rd Engineer General Service Regiment Ron G. Prichard Patton’s Fighting Bridge Builders: Company B, 1303rd Engineer General Service Regiment. Edited by Joseph C. Fitzharris . College Station: Texas A&M University, 2007. ISBN 78-58544-550-9. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Index. Pp. xviii, 238. $35.00. Engineers played a vital role in the US Army's global effort during World War II. A wide range of specialized engineer units were organized to support and sustain operations in all regions of the globe. In order to create some flexibility, many units were structured to fulfill a diverse array of roles in supporting the logistical tail of the US Army. This type of unit, the General Service Regiment, was crucial to the success of the US Army's Northwest [End Page 273] Europe campaign. Without this type of support unit and particularly the work it performed to maintain the transportation network, combat operations could not have been sustained for the duration. As there have very few engineer unit histories available as commercial publications, this book addresses new aspects of the effort to defeat Germany in France after the Normandy invasion. This book is based upon a combat diary. It was brought to light by Earle E. Hall, an officer who served with the 1303rd for the duration of the war, who contributed pictures and the foreword to the book. While the diary's author is unknown, internal evidence indicates that it was someone within the Headquarters of Company B, 1303rd General Service Regiment. This format has its limitations: the range of items which attracted the interest of the author are all that show in the entries. As a result, the text often leaves unanswered many questions about what the unit was doing. Also, the quality of the information varies across the timespan covered, and often there are errors. However, these limitations were recognized by the editor, whose contribution was to provide a contextual basis that expanded upon the information, and provided additional insight. The book really comprises stories. The first is the diary of an engineer unit, from its inception, through training and movement to theater, and then through several support and combat actions in Northwest Europe. The second story is how the book came into being. Both are interesting for historians. The latter story is delivered through the preface, foreword, and introduction. The origins were assembled and edited through the efforts of several individuals, the absence of any one of which would have prevented this publication. This illustrates that while so much has been written about the war, there still are valuable data waiting to be discovered. It is clear that the diary provided the editor with an opportunity to enter an unexplored element of US participation in World War II. Joseph Fitzharris took a variety of pieces of information, and has done a good job assembling them into a coherent story. However, his task involved more than just putting the pieces together. Recognizing that there were gaps and problems in the documents he had, Fitzharris added substantial historical information. This addition is helpful in that it takes the information, dates, and actions discussed in the diary, and puts them into a context. This expanded explanation, done through a well documented historical examination of primary documents, puts the engineers' activities in the perspective of what was happening in the bigger picture of the war following the U.S. landings in France in July 1944. As Earl E. Hall, a participant in the unit from start to finish, says in his foreword, Fitzharris "got it right." The only troublesome aspect of the weaving of historical text with original entries is that the publisher did not make the type differences sufficiently clear. As a result, it is sometimes became a problem in noting which was which. Still, it was a good story, well told, and worth the read. [End Page 274] Maps were included to connect the locations identified in the text to the on-going operation. Unfortunately, they lack sufficient detail and thus were not particularly useful to follow the action. More basic topographic detail, and some expanded explanation would have made...

Comics and war: transforming perceptions of the Other through a constructive learning experience

During World War II the United States and Japan experienced what Rouhana and Bar‐Tal described as ‘a clash of narratives between two societies’. The Japanese envisioned themselves as heroes saving Asia from western colonisation, while the Americans felt the need to defend the West from the ‘Yellow Peril’. In the research reported below, US students at Grinnell College studied the Japanese national narrative of World War II by viewing Japanese graphic novels about the war and role‐playing Japanese characters from 1945. The role‐playing exercises, based on an experiential learning model, are designed to encourage students to alter perceptions of war through reliving the war experience of another people in a past time. Vicarious participation in World War II Japanese society leads role‐playing participants to go beyond their accustomed frame of reference and see themselves as part of a ‘larger self’ in a ‘wider common world of rational beings’ (Habermas). This study suggests that war experience as mediated by role‐playing is a promising methodology for peace educators.

Loyal Patriot? Traitorous Collaborator? The Yun Ch'iho Diaries and the Question of National Loyalty

Loyal Patriot? Traitorous Collaborator?The Yun Chiho Diaries and the Question of National Loyalty Mark E. Caprio In August 2004 Republic of Korea (South Korea) President Roh Moo Hyun called for the creation of a parliamentary commission to identify Koreans who had collaborated with Japan during its thirty-six years of colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula. The crimes of these collaborators, Roh explained, constituted “[a]cts of betrayal in support of imperialist Japan and colonial rule at the time our patriotic forefathers were staking their lives in the fight for the nation [and remain] hidden in the shade of history.”1 Critics accused Roh of attempting to rectify the past “through a political initiative” and warned that his inquiry “would have an explosive and inflammatory effect on the country that might well be hard to control.”2 Disregarding this warning, one year later the Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities compiled a list of 3,090 collaborators, and promised to add more names in the near future.3 The term “collaborator,” as used pejoratively to describe someone whose actions or attitudes in support of a foreign occupation can be considered treasonous,4 is controversial primarily because it judges suspect individuals based on a context politically different from that which they committed their alleged crimes. It fails to consider the fact that the accused held a different sense of state and nation than that held by their accusers. It also attempts to render a judgment based on the activities of the accused, and fails to consider the pressures, reasoning, or circumstances that influenced the decisions they made. Timothy Brook notes, “those who appear to have chosen the reality of collaboration may have been engaging in a calculus of options and risks different from the simplicities that hindsight, and the nationalist narrative that thrives on it, hands to us.”5 In the case of Korea, few of the people listed as traitors remain alive to explain their case. A fairer assessment of their alleged betrayal requires a more comprehensive inquiry into the cognitive reasoning and ambitions behind these activities. The case of Yun Ch’iho (1864–1945) offers an appropriate example to test the justice of a collaboration charge precisely because of the complications and ambiguities it presents. Yun’s extensive contacts with Japanese nationals, and the support and assistance he offered to the Japanese colonial government during Japan’s participation in World War II, led to placing his name on various lists of collaborators. But there was an earlier phase in Yun’s life, when previous to Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula in 1910 he encouraged political, social, and cultural reform in Korea that established his qualifications as a Korean patriot. A review of his extensive eleven-volume diary that he maintained primarily in English throughout the pre- and post-annexation phases of his life provides a unique insight into his actions and the motivations that influenced them. Collaboration Examined Efforts by Koreans to identify collaborators predate President Roh’s recent campaign. The first post-war attempt to identify pro-Japanese collaborators was brought to a halt in 1949 by the first South Korean President, Syngman Rhee (1948–1960). Over the next four decades, which included the long period of autocratic rule by Park Chung Hee (1961–1979), investigations into collaboration became taboo. The democratization of South Korea starting in the late 1980s, however, helped to revitalize efforts to address collaboration. A three-volume set of biographies of ninety-nine members of the “pro-Japanese faction” (ch’inil p’a) that appeared in 1993 constituted a fresh effort to finally address this issue. Published on the 74th anniversary of Korean people’s most ambitious effort to drive the Japanese from their homeland—the March First (1919) Independence Movement—this project identified the most notorious Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese colonial administration.6 The root of the problem, however, is found in the days that surrounded Japan’s surrender and after the United States and the Soviet Union divided the Korean peninsula. Kim Pong’u, in his introduction to the ch’inilp’a volumes, blames the U.S. administration for Korea’s present plight: In addition to dividing...

Imagined Innocence, Endlessly Mourned: Postcolonial Nationalism and Cultural Expression in Timothy Findley’s The Wars

A POSTMODERN INCREDULITY toward master narratives has been celebrated as sign that Canadian literature and letters not only survived the paraphrase of thematic criticism and arrived at new stage of cultural maturity but did so on an international footing. Timothy Findley's work has played significant role in the making of postmodernism in Canada, yet such apparently ex-centric texts as Findley's can also tell some very centric stories when read not for their play between historiography and fiction but for material unconscious encoded in the figural level of the text. The Wars, fictional biography of the reluctant coming-of-age of Canadian soldier, encodes the story of Canada's initiation into the rights of nationhood and state power through the rites of military, technological, and familial participation in the Great War. The evolutionary narrative of historical continuity that Homi Bhabha theorizes as necessary to the pedagogical reproduction of the nation is questioned by the novel's narrative method (and amply documented in scholarship on historiographic metafiction). More specifically, however, the consolidation of the narrative of as sturdy colonial youth in affairs, seeking independence and maturity by participation in world war, is also questioned through the novel's reliance on figures of innocence, childhood, and pastoral, pre-industrialized world. The figurative register of the text subtly represents the predicaments of colonial desire to be modern in ways that limit both the novel's thematic and formal critique of progress. Childhood as space and time before bildung, and the pastoral as space and time before industrialization, are scripted in Findley's novel to play other to the nation's progress, but they also figure an innocence that as nation-in-the-making could never have, an innocence that is lost at origin, available only in the space between vehicle and tenor, and in the temporality of mourning and melancholia. Figures of childhood and the pastoral perform contradiction that structures not only the story of Robert Ross's loss of innocence but also the needs and expressions of second-world (Slemon 30) post/colonial cultural nationalism and its settler subjects (Lawson 20). Following Diana Brydon's early worry that postmodernism's universalizing tendencies would obliterate important Canadian specificities (5), worry revisited at intervals by Larry McDonald (39) and Renee Hulan (441-42, 456-57), among others, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of development and maturity, embraced and espoused in the colony's desire for public statehood and cultural independence, is both part of the script of modernity that defines Canada and that which makes the nation's development continuous with empire. Canada's youthfulness in affairs and the desired progression from colony to nation occur in the same historical space and time as the nation's building through such uniquely Canadian forms of modernity as the Canadian Pacific Railway. Glenn Willmott has demonstrated for us how the bildungsroman itself signals Anglo-Canada's particular relation to modernity (15-39), but there is further specifically Canadian manifestation of modernity in this novel that is far less mythologized than the CPR and that has yet to be excavated from Findley's work: this buried sign figures both an inheritance and amnesia that need to be decoded in Robert Ross's biography insofar as his story allegorizes story of Canada's development. I refer here to what was, by the time of the Great War, the world's largest manufacturer of agricultural implements, the Massey-Harris (and later Massey-Ferguson) company, sign of the direct passage in Anglo-Canada's development from a pre-modern resource economy to modernized agricultural and industrial one (Willmott 24). Both the CPR and Massey-Harris were crucial to the war effort that led to Canada's recognition among mature nations, and both are written into the story of Canadian Soldier, Robert Ross, in particular ways. …

The State at War in South Asia (review)

Reviewed by: The State at War in South Asia Douglas M. Peers The State at War in South Asia. By Pradeep P. Barua. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8032-1344-1. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvi, 437. $65.00. The State at War in South Asia offers a timely, ambitious, and occasionally provocative account of the interplay between political and military developments in the Indian subcontinent over the past four millennia. In just over three hundred pages of text, Barua, at times breathlessly, goes from speculating about whether the walls that archaeologists have uncovered at Mohenjadaro and Harappa served a defensive purpose to itemizing recent purchases by the Indian Army, Navy, and Air Force at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In between, he makes brief forays into the nature of military power in medieval India, deploys the Anglo-Maratha, Anglo-Mysore, and Anglo-Sikh campaigns as examples of colonial warfare in India, jumps to [End Page 566] India's participation in World War II and its legacies for developments in post-independence India and Pakistan, and ends with capsule histories of recent clashes between India and Pakistan. This somewhat idiosyncratic approach is matched by an eclectic selection of sources, ranging from well-worn classical histories, a smattering of colonial records, published memoirs, to journalistic exposés and published assessments of recent developments in the Indian armed forces, all of which are intended to provide an assessment of how well South Asian states have managed their military affairs over a huge sweep of time. In his own words, he has written a study "not on warfare's role in state building but on how the state from prehistory to modern times has managed to wage war" (p. xi). Moreover, his intention, a wholly laudable one, is to unshackle South Asian military history from the constraints imposed by deeply-ingrained Eurocentric traditions of reading and assessing military history. In tackling four thousand years in three hundred pages, it comes as no surprise that Barua has had to be selective, and for the most part he has chosen his case studies well. Experts in particular epochs will no doubt quibble over why he chose to look at some states and their armies and not others, but readers will nevertheless be treated to many fascinating observations and vignettes. But there is little here on the Afghan Wars and Frontier Wars of the nineteenth century which were so instrumental in determining the tactical orientation not to mention the culture of the Indian Army, and which have been so ably dissected by Tim Moreman and others. I was also surprised that a number of other key studies were missing from the bibliography. Books and articles by Jos Gommans on warfare in the Mughal era were apparently not consulted, nor was Apurba Kundu on civil-military relations, which can shed further light on the command and control issues that Barua highlights in his chapter on the Indo-China and Indo-Pakistan wars. More curiously, given his scrutiny of the military history of the Marathas, there is no discussion of or engagement with the debate between John Pemble and Randolf Cooper over possible explanations for the deterioration in the military efficiency of the Marathas. And in his discussions of the apparent combat superiority of the East India Company and British armies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his reliance upon contemporary chronicles written by the likes of G. B. Malleson and others leads him into using their estimates of the numbers of combatants as well as assuming some of their prejudices, both of which are fraught with peril as James Belich and others have shown. Of more significance, however, is that Barua is confronted with a paradox that has and will continue to bedevil writing the military history of South Asia, and that is once you have identified military effectiveness as the chief criteria, some kind of metric is required to perform the analysis, and that often leads back into the assumption that European military history is the norm against which others are assessed. Consequently, in places the differences between European and Indian ways of warfare are overdrawn as for example when...