Postwar Era Research Articles

THE OTHER: IDENTITY DIMENSIONS OF FEMININE ‘SELF’ IN DORIS LESSING’S SHORT STORIES COLLECTION “A MAN AND TWO WOMEN”

Short fiction by British women writers from the postwar era of the 20th century demonstrates an enduring focus on the essence of female identity. This paper examines short stories by Doris Lessing, a prominent figure in British literature, who has yet to receive proper attention in Ukrainian literary criticism. To address the issue of British female identity in the postwar period, the researcher employed new criticism methods, specifically close reading and feminist criticism, namely gynocritics (E. Showalter), as well as comparative analysis. The examination of selected short stories by D. Lessing revealed certain patterns in the author’s style. Her formal skill is marked by the principle of duplication, which includes: a) repetition of problems, such as marital crises and polygamy (e.g., “A Man and Two Women”, “Each Other”, “To Room Nineteen”); b) duplication of character names (“Each Other”); c) recurrence of plot situations, such as adultery (“A Man and Two Women”, “To Room Nineteen”), and characters’ unhealthy states, including personality disorders (“Dialogue”) and madness (“To Room Nineteen”); d) use of dual narrative perspectives (“To Room Nineteen”, “Dialogue”). The issues related to female identity in D. Lessing’s collection of short stories are presented within two broader contexts: marriage and extramarital relations. Accordingly, two main forms of female individuality emerge: a) the betrayed wife (“A Man and Two Women”, “To Room Nineteen”) and b) the mistress (“Between Men”, “Our Friend Judith”) and her modification, the free woman (“Dialogue”). Despite being mature, intelligent, and experienced, all these characters remain lonely and unhappy.

Racial Governance in Postwar Chicago: A Multiple Orders Perspective

Much theorizing about patterns of urban governance portrays urban governing arrangements as unified political orders of some kind, be they progressive, neoliberal, or defined by power structures such as urban regimes or growth machines. In this study of racial governance in postwar Chicago, I borrow from literature on American political development to advance a multiple orders perspective in which racial governance is conceptualized as combinations of overlapping elements, at times in conflict with one another. Examining three distinct periods during the postwar era, I show how intersections among multiple political orders resulted in change at certain times and stability, or the appearance of stability, in others. Against arguments that portray urban political development as long periods of equilibrium punctuated at times by brief episodes of change, I find seemingly stable arrangements to be more precarious than they appear, as multiple orders impinge on one another and create frictions that can be key sources of change.

“Peace Is Dangerous”: Toward a Du Boisian Theory of Colonial Post-fascism

This article asks: “How was the rhetoric of post or anti-fascism used to develop colonial projects in the inter and postwar period?” Through investigating the Du Bois archive, I answer this through producing a Du Boisian theory of colonial post-fascism. While many have written about the connections between European fascism and colonialism in theories of “colonial fascism,” a Du Boisian approach leads us to the concept of colonial post-fascism, demonstrating the array of colonial practices which were instigated in the name of world peace in the inter and postwar era. Colonial post-fascism is characterized by three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Finally, colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire increasing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace. This article makes several contributions. First, instead of highlighting the link between European fascism and colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism shaped European post-fascism. Second, I contribute toward the project of undoing bifurcated histories of the West which elide discussions of colonial violence. Finally, I highlight how Du Bois’s involvement in the peace movement was not just activism, but also generative to social theory.

The Genocide Convention is “Our Cause”: International Women’s Advocacy for the Criminalization of Genocide, 1945–1952

Abstract In 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was official recognized under international law. Few, however, understand the role of international women’s rights organizations in the politics of the convention, the ratification process, and its application in the immediate postwar era. Rooted in their knowledge of Nazi atrocities and wartime activism, women’s organizations supported Raphael Lemkin’s campaign, but also critiqued the convention’s failure to address sexual violence and political repression of certain vulnerable groups. This article explores how women’s rights leaders supported the Genocide Convention as a crucial mechanism for preventing a repetition of atrocities, how they committed early on to applying the law to intervene and protect human rights, and how fissures later emerged between these various international women’s rights groups in the Cold War era.

“A Failure. No One to Blame But Themselves”? The Media and the Abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission

ABSTRACT In 2004/5 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was abolished after 15 years of operation. The longest running and most innovative representative body in the postwar era, its abolition has reverberated to this day. 1 1 ATSIC was one of several elected Indigenous representative bodies of the postwar period. However, it remains the most innovative because it was a statutory body that had both representative and administrative functions and a national commission with a network of regional councils. This model has not been replicated since. This article explores the role of the media in its abolition. It shows how the non-Indigenous media created an image of Indigenous dysfunction such that ATSIC’s abolition was understood as the only viable option. It did so by perpetuating untruths about Indigenous capacity for governance and leadership, suggesting that ATSIC’s alleged failure was self-inflicted. Such representation, including deeply offensive caricatures, worked to support government aims and amounted to institutional bullying. By situating this representation within the wider policy landscape, I show how the media not only created ideational frameworks necessary to project ATSIC as unfit but also helped to deflect attention from the government’s own non-accountability in this space. As a counterpoint to what became a dominant view about ATSIC, I recover the representation of its abolition in the Indigenous media, allowing Indigenous views to be heard for the first time. This case study is of critical importance in the context of today’s concern with both truth-telling and truth-denying.

The Long-Run Impacts of Public Industrial Investment on Local Development and Economic Mobility: Evidence from World War II

Abstract This paper studies the long-run effects of government-led construction of manufacturing plants on the regions where they were built and on individuals from those regions. Specifically, we examine publicly financed plants built in dispersed locations outside of major urban centers for security reasons during the United States’ industrial mobilization for World War II. Wartime plant construction had large and persistent impacts on local development, characterized by an expansion of relatively high-wage manufacturing employment throughout the postwar era. These benefits were shared by incumbent residents; we find men born before WWII in counties where plants were built earned ${\$}$1,200 (in 2020 dollars) or 2.5 percent more per year in adulthood relative to those born in counterfactual comparison regions, with larger benefits accruing to children of lower-income parents. The balance of evidence suggests that these individuals benefited primarily from the local expansion of higher-wage jobs to which they had access as adults, rather than because of developmental effects from exposure to better environments during childhood.

A Catholic safe haven: University students from Eastern Europe in Spain during Francoism

In 1946, Madrid became home to a Catholic university residence, the colegio mayor Santiago Apóstol, which catered specifically to refugee students from Eastern Europe who had fled the aftermath of the Second World War and the creation of Communist regimes in their home countries. This residence hall, which housed about 800 students from 20 nationalities between its opening in the postwar era and its rededication in 1969, was part of the anticommunist governmental strategy to overcome the political isolation that Francoist Spain found itself in. It was also part of the efforts of the Catholic church to support refugees from Eastern Europe in the early Cold War. This article aims to bring these strands together, focusing on the founding of the residence hall as a Catholic and governmental endeavor. In a second step, the article focuses on the residence hall itself, considering the agency of the residence’s officials and its students, and contemplating the residence’s academic and exile networks both in Spain and internationally.

Developmentalism, technocracy and legitimacy crises of humanities: A Third World perspective

PurposeThe visible ill-effects of the developmental enterprises in the ex-colonies and the tendency towards technocratic totalitarianism, in many ways, have altered the way modern humans perceived the idea of “progress” and “development” historically since the Cold War. This paper presents a deconstructive-transdisciplinary critique of the pervasive ideology by focusing on three nodal points in the stages of “development”: (1) the rise of technocratic modern science; (2) the making of the Third World; and (3) de-legitimisation of its indigenous knowledge paradigms.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on the first-hand accounts of the researchers, social scientists, activists and environmentalists, this paper presents an extensive critique of the violence involved in the development enterprises and recommends possible ways to move beyond the developmental hegemony. This paper is a theoretical investigation that adopts an interpretative, pluralistic, transdisciplinary approach, in order to deconstruct the development ideology and analyse the ramifications of the developmental propaganda and practice as they unfolded in the Global South.FindingsThis paper highlights the need to decondition the social imaginary from the hegemony of developmentalism and its by-product scientism and “technological rationality” for an inclusive, pluralistic, democratic social order.Research limitations/implicationsThe focal area of this work is India in particular and Global South in general. It studies the era between the 1950s and 1980s when the major development enterprises took place and studies the consequences they entailed.Social implicationsThe scope of this paper encompasses every socio-economic, ecological and epistemological domain affected by the detrimental effects of the developmental enterprises in the Global South.Originality/valueThe originality of this work lies in its transdisciplinary approach. The scope of this paper is extensive and covers nearly every domain of human existence that has been affected by the development debacle and technocratic totalitarianism in the post-War era.

Features of "intellectual reparations" of the post-war era: German specialists at enterprises of the USSR

Features of "intellectual reparations" of the post-war era: German specialists at enterprises of the USSR

Rewriting the Heart Sutra: Buddhism and the (Geo)Politics of Symbols in Qiu Zhijie's Art

This article studies the Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie's (b. 1969) three experimental “rewrites” of the canonical text Heart Sutra and their geopolitical connotations within and beyond China. Examining Qiu's copious writings as well as curatorial and artistic practices over a decade, the article shows how the artist's evolving views of Buddhism have triggered, justified, and added nuances to his shifting positions in art and politics, including assertions of “native” identity and aesthetics, pursuits of non-elitist art and “folk” wisdom, and ambivalent takes on cultural colonialism. To contextualize Qiu's Buddhist-affiliated art, the article also traces how the modernized versions of Buddhism entangled with avant-garde art and politics in the postwar era, and how concepts like authenticity and cultural influence claimed not only aesthetic and thus market value, but also territorial ambitions. The citation of Buddhist doctrines and practices, the article argues, enabled Qiu to present his aesthetic maneuvers as ostensibly apolitical and hence more powerful as embodied ideologies. The artworks create “fragile” yet potent symbols of geopolitical connections that serve the discourse of a Sinocentric world, where China shares roots with “peripheries” such as Taiwan and Tibet and draws its soft power from a collectively created yet mystical and singular identity.

The National Ecology of the Carpathians in Soviet Ukrainian Cinema: Between Hutsul Ethnography and the Magic of the Mountains

This article frames the Carpathian Mountains in Ukrainian cinema within a broader discourse of “mountains and meaning,” both within Soviet Ukraine, and within global nationalisms during the first half of the 20th century. Within this discourse, mountains are simultaneously transcendent spaces imbibed with religious and national meaning, but also spaces of commerce and tourism. This article examines the intersections of those spaces in three different eras of Ukrainian cinema, during the Second World War; the post-war era; and the 1960s. I ground these films in global processes of mountain fetishism, within which the mountains move between containment and porousness.

Caught between two homelands: The dilemmas of the second generation of Europeans in Argentina during the great war

ABSTRACT On the eve of the Great War, European immigrants made up 27% of Argentina’s total population. This article examines the tensions surrounding the definitions of citizenship and its concomitant duties as this impacted on the mobilisation of the second generation of three immigrant communities in Argentina: the British, the French and the Italian. In particular it will analyse wartime debates around the controversial issue of dual nationality and national belonging, and the measures adopted in the post-war era to remedy ambiguities in the socio-legal reproduction of citizens.

The Italian Army in the Second World War: A Historiographical Analysis

Classical English language analysis of Italy's role in the Second World War has done poorly in its attempt to accurately the Italian military's contribution to the Axis cause. Basing their analysis on flawed sources, historians in the intermediate post war era got much incorrect. Many of the staples of the World War Two genre still base much of their writing on these writers. This paper concludes by exploring the two most important modern writers who specialize in this area of military history.

A generational shift: how partisan alignment and the rise of social issues have produced a generation of Democrats

ABSTRACT American political elites are today more neatly divided on a wider range of issues than at any other point in the postwar era. How have these trends affected the political socialization of American youth? We argue that two distinctive aspects of US polarization, namely ideological alignment and the emergence of non-economic issues, have formed the foundation of a generational shift in favor of the Democratic party. We find that Millennials and Gen Z display levels of ideological alignment across economic, civil rights, and moral domains that are equal to or greater than previous generations. Their liberal positions on moral and civil rights issues are not only strongly predictive of vote choice, but also tend to offset any conservative positions on economic issues – in contrast to the way previous generations resolved such ideological tensions. As such, the push for a non-economic political agenda – a popular strategy in the last few decades, especially among Republicans – might well benefit the Democrats electorally as older generations are replaced.

Were wages stagnant for decades? A revision of labor costs and net earnings in Spain (1900–1960)

ABSTRACT This paper presents a significant revision of the evolution of labor incomes in Spain, challenging previous assumptions about the effect of Francoist institutions in the postwar era. Administrative data reveal weaker wage declines in the 1940s and consistent growth throughout the 1950s, driven by the growing importance of allowances and family bonuses. This more positive evolution primarily benefited workers in regulated industries (such as manufacturing and private services), while agrarian laborers and civil servants experienced subpar earnings growth. Consequently, for the first group, effective compensation increasingly trended above legal compensation, as evidenced by the results of the 1957 wage survey. These findings suggest that labor markets under Francoism had a more flexible compensation structure than previously believed.

The Afterlives of Mental Hygiene: Psychiatrizing Society in Socialist Yugoslavia

Summary This article explores the ‘afterlives’ of the mental hygiene movement in Yugoslavia, by considering two periods of time (the immediate post-WWII period and the early 1960s onwards). Despite the favourable ideological conditions, during which authorities sought to refashion healthcare in the direction of social prophylaxis in order to build socialism, practitioners in the immediate post-war era did not embrace socially focussed psychiatry, instead retreating to focus on the clinic and the brain. From the early 1960s, however, many Yugoslav clinicians embraced the social psychiatry movement. In their work, they articulated the notion that improving the mental health of individuals could benefit society, and that refashioning society could equally prevent mental illness. This ‘second afterlife’ of mental hygiene thus proved much more successful than the first. Yet rather than seeing their discipline as a tool to support the state and its aims, social psychiatrists critiqued the conditions of life within socialist Yugoslavia.

“We Know What War Is”: Veterans, Soldiers, and Military Masculinity in the Soviet “Fight for Peace,” c. 1955–65

AbstractThe aim of this article is to bring the issue of peace more definitively into the increasingly complex vision we have of the postwar era and to give particular thought to the place of the military man within a society that was now supposedly orientated toward peace. To do so, the discussion will range across both lived experience and cultural representations—predominantly of a visual nature—that broached the issue of peace, paying close attention to the ways in which the legacies of the Great Patriotic War shaped how serving soldiers and demobilized veterans articulated the need for peace and their role in ensuring its preservation. What will be repeatedly demonstrated in what follows is that the shadow of the Great Patriotic War loomed large over both cultural representations and personal conceptualizations of the ideal of peace, and as such the military man—both real and imagined, serving and demobilized—was integral to the discourse surrounding this most pressing social concern.

On the shoulder of giants: A brief early history of leadership in the Department of Physiology of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine

A walk through our beloved Salcedo Hall, a pre-war era behemoth completed in 1927, allows glimpses of a reinvigorated past full of legacies left by our department’s forefathers. From Colonial to Post-war eras, those at the helm of the department have distinguished themselves in both realms of clinical medicine and scientific research. Beginning with studies on nutrition during the American period to the post-war introduction of innovative courses in medical training, each Chair directed efforts towards the relevant public health issues during their time. Now in our 70th year as a standalone department and the 2023 recipient of the Silver Cup for the Basic Sciences, Physiology remains formidable in the College of Medicine. With its newly modernized teaching and laboratory facilities, and recent reinfusion of new faculty, the department shall carry on its time honored tradition of excellence in education and research towards achieving optimal healthcare for all.

The Use of Up-to Date Analyses for the Temporary Bridges Application in the Present

Abstract Bridges are a critical element of the transport network. In case of neglected maintenance, war conflict or natural disaster, they may be damaged or destroyed. An alternative solution in the form of a detour is mostly feasible only in the case of ground communication. But even in this case, it can be a very difficult and lengthy solution. Therefore, temporary bridges are often used to replace the permanent bridge structure for a certain time. The history of temporary bridges is essentially as old as that of permanent bridges. The first patented temporary bridge was the Eifel Bridge, which had a span of up to 60.0 m in 1888. Before the Second World War, the most widespread structures were the German S-bridge with spans of up to 15.0 m, Herbert-brücke with a span of up to 25.0 m and the English Bailey bridge system. In the post-war era, the ŽM 60 temporary bridge was designed as a universal bridge structure, which was to serve to temporarily bridge obstacles of medium and long spans. As standard, it was to serve as a railway bridge with a span of up to 60.0 m and as a road bridge with a span of 84.0 m. The task of the study published in this paper is to approach the possibilities of deploying the ŽM 60 bridge at present in compliance with the requirements arising from currently applicable standards and regulations.

Licensing luxury fashion in transatlantic and colonial economies: beyond Paris and New York

During the postwar era, luxury fashion firms entered a new phase of their international growth with the licensing of their brands. The French haute couture firm Dior was pioneer in licenses, and established branches in a series of countries around the world. Inspired by the transatlantic successes of firms such as Jean Dessès, Christian Dior, and Norman Hartnell, French luxury firms registered their brands internationally and replicated the registration of trademarks in numerous countries. This paper further examines the reach of luxury fashion and beauty brands in the colonies of France and of Belgium. This shows that the fashion firms expanded their transatlantic expertise, and that this created newer transatlantic circuits in return.