War Stories Research Articles

Lost in Translation?

The PT-109 story is a mainstay of popular and academic narratives. Scholars tell the sinking of John F. Kennedy’s patrol torpedo (PT) boat as a U.S. story, focusing on Kennedy’s heroism, his incompetence, and how it launched his public career. This article, however, reveals the PT-109 story as co-constructed in Japan and the United States. Kennedy went to Japan in 1951 to craft a narrative of forgiveness and friendship that would help his political career. His visit led to a remarkable letter exchange with the captain of the destroyer that sunk his boat, Hanami Kōhei. These letters, and Hanami’s exaggerations to his story in the following decade, courted a controversy about the remembrance of the past that influences how the incident is viewed today. The war story—constructed on both sides of the Pacific—in turn affirmed and strengthened the narratives of “forgiveness” and “friendship” that defined the postwar U.S.-Japan partnership.

Gandasari Gandawangi Dance: The Transformation of Legendary Form Into Tourism Arts in Jalawastu Brebes

This article traces the transformation process of the legend of the characters Gandasari and Gandawangi into Gandasari Gandawangi Dance, created as a tourism performing art in Jalawastu Traditional Village, Brebes, Central Java. The legend narrates the story of a civil war among prominent figures embracing Islam in that region. From this narrative, a dance and music performance with an innovative tourism package highlighting Jalawastu Traditional Village's local wisdom was realized. The research methodology employed in this study is qualitative with an ethnographic approach. Data collection techniques encompassed interviews, documentary studies, and field observations. Observations were conducted to gather data, which was subsequently analyzed to formulate the transformation process and understand the significance of the Gandasari Gandawangi Dance. This article concludes that Gandasari Gandawangi Dance is adapted from the legend and further developed with creative dance movements, thereby serving as a tourism performing art that is expected to enhance the tourism potential of Jalawastu Traditional Village.

Implementasi Kurikulum Merdeka Belajar Berwawasan Moderasi Beragama di Sumenep

The emergence of intolerant understanding is due to the belief that only one's religious understanding is the most correct, while other beliefs are wrong. This phenomenon causes some people to feel "deserved" to give strict warnings, and not a few feel entitled to punish others who disagree. Therefore, intolerant understanding cannot only be resolved through seminars or workshops, but needs to be carried out massively in learning activities. The content of learning materials that have nuances of violence in religion must be balanced with an understanding to respect and care for each other. This community service activity seeks to instill the spirit of religious moderation in the learning process in the classroom which begins with compiling learning modules with nuances of moderation. Religious teachers who have been familiar with religious studies are trained and equipped with the values and character of moderation in order that they can implement independent curriculum learning based on moderation. The impacts of this community service include the preparation of Document 1 of the Independent Curriculum, the Draft Module for Religious Learning for Independent Curriculum based on Religious Moderation, and mapping of several discussions in religious materials that have the potential to give rise to extreme thoughts, including jihad, stories of war, prohibition of befriending non-Muslims, and leadership selection in Islam.

Show that we exist: Iraqi women’s stories, Rita Leistner, and her seeking human(ity) in the images of conflict

This article presents an analysis of one of the socio-artistic projects of the Canadian photographer Rita Leistner. Her work focuses mainly on how humans function during conflict and crises, including internal ones, but also includes initiatives related to environmental protection and fortitude displayed by her characters in everyday life. By focusing on the human condition and the situation of humanism today, Leistner demonstrates concern and a profound sense of empathy. Our reflections focus on the Safer here project, which tells the story of women incarcerated against their will in a Baghdad psychiatric hospital. Leistner presented their daily struggle for survival, their dignified lives, and how they come to terms with their plight. It was originally part of Unembedded, a project of four photojournalists stationed in Iraq. Our aim is to place Leistner’s story in a broader context that considers how war stories are created and presented to the world. We also consider the demanding and difficult role played by artists in this process, who try to find a balance between being interpreters and being historians. Leistner’s work shows her as, above all, an activist fighting for public attention and empathy for war victims. We use storytelling and visual analysis in our empirical investigations.

<i>Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade</i>, by Jonathan W. White

<i>Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade</i>, by Jonathan W. White

Book Review: Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond by Lorenzkowski Barbara, Kristine Alexander, and Andrew Burtch

Book Review: <i>Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond</i> by Lorenzkowski Barbara, Kristine Alexander, and Andrew Burtch

Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade by Jonathan W. White (review)

Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade by Jonathan W. White (review)

The Women: A Rarely Told War Story.

A gripping read about U.S. Army nurses during the Vietnam War.

The Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"

The Vietnam War had an irreversible negative impact on the United States, Vietnam, and the world at large. Its effects extended beyond geopolitics and seeped into the domain of literature, where numerous works have profoundly depicted and contemplated the conflict. Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" stands as a prime example of such literature, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Drawing on Jean-Franois Lyotard's theory of postmodern metanarratives, this paper examines how O'Brien employs postmodern narrative techniques that diverge from traditional grand narratives to articulate the essence of his war fiction. Upon analysis, the paper contends that Tim O'Brien adopts the narrative mode of metafiction, blending narrative and commentary texts alongside real and fictive elements. By doing so, he seeks to alert readers to the constructed nature of both the textual and real worlds, encouraging them to perceive war through the lens of individuals' traumatic war experiences.

Battling Binaries: The Psychosocial Endurance of Gender Constructs in West Asian War Fiction

The archetypes of the heroic soldier and the caring mother, which dominate thesocial imaginary of war, reflect the essentially gendered nature of war discourse. However,violent masculinity and gentle femininity, though essential to the war discourse, are notbiological qualities but cultural constructions. The hegemonic “war story,” as Miriam Cookerefers to it, is built on these binaries of masculinity/femininity, civilian/combatant,home/front, etc. However, in postcolonial wars, these binaries are complicated by both theinclusion of women as combatants and the technological advancements that enable thepervasion of war into homes, endangering civilians just as much as combatants. In thisarticle, I will examine how select contemporary West Asian fictional narratives depict the warexperience of gendered subjects in occupied or war-torn territories like Iraq and Palestine.Exploring these texts in the light of war studies conducted by Miriam Cooke and Joshua S.Goldstein reveals that, despite the changing face of the new wars and the subversion ofgender binaries, psycho-social impacts of conventional gender roles persist. Men depicted inthe selected fictional texts continue to bear the pressure to protect and to resist violence usingviolence. Women’s changing roles in the new wars expose them to similar violence ascombatants, but the lack of social recognition metes out a double jeopardy, whereby they aresurvivors of war’s violence yet are denied the honour or aftercare received by malecombatants of war.

A SEMIOTIC INVESTIGATION OF THE MEANINGS ABDUCTED FROM THE CHILDREN’S DRAWINGS OF WAR: STORYTELLING THROUGH DRAWINGS

Drawing is a vital tool used in understanding people, especially children, with the use of visual media as a means of expressing their emotions, as well as the use of different forms of images that emerge on a drawing surface. Therefore, it is significant to understand that children can use different forms of drawing media to articulate their inner feelings as well as making their thoughts understandable to others. This study, based on the belief that the art works of child survivors furnish materials for analysis, focuses on meaning-making of the drawings of the child survivors of war through semiotics investigation, thereby exposing the stories of war through the lens of the child survivors. This made use an analytical research design to investigate the poster narratives drawn by the participants who were living in the two temporary shelters of Marawi last September 2020. The researcher had meaningful meaning-making of the drawings and the findings of the study include: conceptualization of the masjid (mosque) as a sanctuary during war; definition of religion as a wellspring of resiliency, demarking peace as the absence of war, and highlighting the role of kambangsa (clanship) amidst danger, and from all of these, a grand narrative of the child survivors of Marawi Siege was written. The meanings abducted from the drawings led to the narratives of the child-survivors- narratives that may have been left unspoken and unheard after all these years of trying to live a normal life as young, gentle and innocent children of the city. This supported the claims that children are thinkers with knowledge of their own sensations, thoughts, beliefs and other mental states. Finally, this study implied that drawings are rich sources for semiotic discourse despite the limitations at hand.

BREAKING SILENCE, SHAPING HISTORY: UNVEILING MARGINALIZED FEMALE WAR-CRIME SURVIVORS’ VOICES

This paper is the synopsis of an ongoing qualitative research project on an intersectional and biopolitical analysis of selected war memoirs written by marginalized female war crime survivors. The primary object of this research is to explore the layers of subjectivity as expressed through the memoirs by women who, in different corners of the world, were subjected to different forms of war crimes during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. The research paper aims to find whether these life-writings should be recognized only as chronicles of their silent sufferings or as bold proclamations of their resistance against the biopolitical oppressions they were exposed to. In order to do so, a theoretical framework comprising intersectionality and biopolitics will be used according to which the selected memoirs will be critically analyzed. The proposed research will follow a research methodology that is descriptive, correlational, analytical, and exploratory in approach. The primary findings reveal the historical trajectory of women's autobiographical writings related to war and conflicts, identifying the scarcity of such narratives that underscores the challenges faced by survivors in documenting their experiences. The expected outcome is to offer a counter-narrative to official war stories, demonstrating the efficacy of testimonial life-writings from marginalized individuals as human rights activism tools, with potential implications for policy-making, advocacy against sexual violence in conflict zones, and contributing evidence for prevention, justice, and support initiatives, while also highlighting ethical challenges and paving the way for further studies on the intersectional and biopolitical dimensions of sexual violence.

“I Almost Died”: Knowledges of Pain in a Finnish School for Refugee-Background Adults

This critical ethnographic study investigated how knowledges of pain (KoP) surfaced and were negotiated in the classroom discourse of a Finnish adult basic education (ABE) context, more specifically, a school for adult learners with forced migration experience. The emergence of students’ KoP, for instance, their stories of war, violence, and injury, are analyzed through the framework of Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP), which aims to validate and center the experiences of people of color (POC) in educational settings. Conceptualizing KoP as world knowledges, as invitations for self-reflection and re/positioning, and as interruptions, allows for an examination of their pedagogical and transformative potential. The findings show that a variety of KoP came to the fore, claiming and receiving different amounts of space and attention, including instances when they complemented the lesson content. KoP tended to cause minor interruptions to traditional power dynamics and classroom roles, which could nevertheless be entry points for developing ABE-specific CRP. Also, instances of teacher-imposed KoP were documented, which raises the question of how antiracist education can legitimize and incorporate students’ desire for peace and belonging.

Mythical Realities in Nepali Writings Mahabharata Mythic in Krishna Dharabasi’s Radha

This paper analyses Krishna Dharabasi’s Radha and zooms mythic realities of Krishna-Radha relationships. It is based on the Archeological study method of the Hindu scripture written on metallic plates and kept inside the iron box that was found in Braja. The plates can be unburied historical proofs of the buried memories. Written documents historicize Krishna-Radha relationships and Krishna’s Rasa Lila on the one hand and Kunti-Madri’s maternity on the other hand. Documents also historicize the love stories of Krishna on the one hand and war stories of Kauravas and Pandavas on the other hand, and so this paper is prepared in a comparative method. This paper makes a comparative study with an archaeological investigation in some mythical places of Eastern Nepal: Bhadrapur- Mechi and Keechak Badh Jhapa in connection to the mythic realities of Pandu’s wives Kunti and Madri’s experiences and myth makings. Claudio Guillen, Marshall Sahlins, and Susan Bassnett’s ideas are applied for theoretical support. The objective of this paper is to excavate on mythical realities of Radha-Krishna love, war, and renunciation. The finding of this paper is that Dharabasi’s Radha interlinks with conceptual knowledge of Ramayana and Mahabharata that can be studied from mythical and historical perspectives, too.

Doomscrolling evokes existential anxiety and fosters pessimism about human nature? Evidence from Iran and the United States

The media's adherence to “if it bleeds, it leads” has resulted in global dominance of negative news (e.g., stories of corruption, fraud, shootings, terrorism, and war). The appetite for negative news is fueled by negativity bias, which compels people to prioritize negative over positive stories. This cross-cultural study, inspired by media effect theories such as Cultivation Theory, explored the links between problematic consumption of negative news (doomscrolling), existential anxiety, pessimistic views about human nature, and belief about a just world in two distinct cultures. Participants included convenience samples of Iranian (n = 620) and American (n = 180) university-student social media users. Doomscrolling was associated with elevated levels of existential anxiety in both samples. Additionally, misanthropy was positively associated with doomscrolling only in the Iranian sample. Aligned with the Media-induced PTSD Hypothesis and the Shattered Assumption Theory, our findings suggest that prolonged exposure to negative news can contribute to the development of existential anxiety. Current news framing with its overemphasis on negativity could fuel doomscrolling-inspired existential concerns.

Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Blockade-Running and the Slave Trade

Historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. Using Oaksmith’s case as a lens, White takes readers into the murky underworld of New York City, where federal marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan in search of evidence of slave trading.

Amirkhan Eniky’s frontline diaries in the mirror of Russian-Tatar literary relationships

The article systematizes information on the history of the diary entries “Front daftarlarennan” (“From Frontline Notebooks”, 1941–1944) by Amirkhan Eniky, which served as a starting point for the creation of his war stories. They were published in the media half a century later, on the 50th anniversary of the Great Victory. In his brief comments, the writer admits that he kept notes secretly while working as an HQ clerk, serving in the guard, in between battles, and he decided to publish them in his declining years, considering their content to be instructive for a new generation. Our analysis of the diary entries reveals their genre and stylistic features. The article proves that their narrative is of discrete nature: it is not a picture of military everyday life that is brought to the fore, but a man’s image of the inner world, pictures of nature, which leads to the transformation of psychologism. In his “notebooks” the writer reflects on life and death, on war as a phenomenon and on human behavior in critical circumstances. The process of national self-knowledge in these frontline notebooks is associated with the process of personal self-knowledge. The artistic fabric of A. Eniky’s diaries includes episodes with prophetic dreams, excerpts from wartime letters, Tatar legends, Turkic proverbs and quotes from the books he had read.

Queer and/or Lesbian?: Amazons in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra

In Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984), Wolf retells the Trojan War story from the perspective of the seer Cassandra, taking the Trojan War as a parallel to issues of her day. She uses the Amazons as important secondary characters, representing them as both woman-loving women and warriors. Wolf believes their valor in battle is only a version of men’s militarism and thus provides no solution to the problem of war, her primary concern.

A Study of Global Trade War and Its Impact on Indian Economy

A Study of Global Trade War and Its Impact on Indian Economy

War’s Implications: Missionaries and the Global War Novel

Abstract: This article argues that US war literature hinges on nationalistic, exclusionary narratives that are inadequate for the complexities of globalized warfare. Drawing on theories of the global novel, with its focus on individual action within complex systems, this piece considers Phil Klay’s Missionaries as a global war novel that foregrounds how an embrace of chaos and contingency enables new ideas of responsibility and destabilizes the categories “combatant” and “war story.” Klay forces a confrontation with individual and shared culpability, conceptualizing war as a process of implication, laying the groundwork for ethical local action within global systems.