Trauma Of Defeat Research Articles

Photography and Invisibility: Indexicality and Performativity Asia-Pacific War Memory in Tsukada Mamoru'sIdentical TwinsSeries (2003) and Suzuki Norio's Photos of Onoda Hiroo (1974)

This manuscript engages with two central ideas: the first concerns issues related to the problem of truth value in photography, vis-à-vis issues of fictionality and the powers of the false. This discussion is set forth through the analysis of two photographic series—Tsukada Mamoru's Identical Twins (2003), a series of staged photographs of two young men dressed alternately in Japan's imperial military uniform and modern casual dress, posing in a jungle setting, coinciding with the public debates on Japan's possible involvement in the Iraq war in 2003. The author utilizes the ideas and questions raised through this series to understand the powers and position of the second series, Suzuki Norio's 1974 photographs of Onoda Hiroo, the Japanese straggler who stayed for three decades in the jungles of Lubang Island—photographs that were directly responsible for Onoda's repatriation to Japan. The discussion in the text also illuminates a second idea—how complex is Japan's position toward the trauma of defeat and the specters of war, reflecting the complicated emotions experienced toward war memory and its representation in photographs, films, art, and other visual forms. The analysis of the two series delves into issues of photography theory, on questions of indexicality and performativity, and the relations between photographic images in specific cultural climate. The author analyzes how these images may indicate the political fluctuations between the Asia-Pacific War, the 1970s, and 2003, looking at such issues as indexicality and performativity, ghostly presences and staged scenes, truth and fiction, using photography as an immediate visual reference. Through the text, political, social, and cultural questions concerning wartime Japan are intertwined with an analysis of the visual methods, creating a complex view of visual representation and its means and methods.

Out of the Ruins: Fashioning Berlin, 1945‒1952

In the politically contentious, materially deprived climate of post-World War II Berlin, fashion played a primary role in the decimated city’s revival, the occupiers’ policies, and the personal reconstructions that German women undertook. Given Berlin’s and Berliners’ long historical relationship with all things sartorial, it is unsurprising that fashion, which offered the opportunity to shed former identities and the trauma of defeat, figured prominently in their dual reconstructions. While scholarship has emphasized the roles that music and art played in the occupiers’ strategies as they competed for the hearts and minds of the occupied, an examination of their policies shows that they viewed fashion—its economic potency, employment potential, and transformative cultural power—as a site that warranted attention. The reemergence of fashion-related industries and media from the rubble offered a hopeful future in the midst of utter collapse. And, as German women sought to wrap a more acceptable external image around their defeated and demoralized bodies to defy and transform the wretched material and spiritual conditions surrounding them, they began to bridge the divide between occupier and occupied. It just so happened that the fashion project of the western occupiers aligned itself with the self-fashioning project of the occupied.

The Face of Battle without the Rules of War: Lessons from Red Horse & the Battle of the Little Bighorn

This essay analyzes the extraordinary drawings of Red Horse, a Minneconjou warrior who fought at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, to provide insights into what warfare was like without just war doctrine or the laws of armed conflict to place constraints on violence. The artist's candid vision of the battle and its aftermath portrays the indiscriminant brutality of the Great Sioux War, the disrespect given to a hated enemy, and the lingering desire for revenge. But the drawings also reveal the pride of victory and the trauma of defeat. In addition to providing a window into the past, the Red Horse drawings provide a lens to help us understand the atrocities committed by the Islamic State and Al Qaeda today and a mirror that can help us more clearly see ourselves.

"The Secret Sharer": A New Interpretation

"The Secret Sharer":A New Interpretation Jeffrey Meyers (bio) According to the traditional view, "The Secret Sharer" (1910) portrays the Poe, Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, and Wilde theme of the double—but without the evil side of the main character. In these works, the protagonist shares a split personality with a wicked man, the opposite of himself, who attempts to dominate and destroy him. Conrad's deviation from this pattern explains why the young captain so powerfully identifies with Leggatt, who has escaped from the Sephora, secretly boards his ship and is the mirror image of himself. I would argue that the conflict within the captain originates not from an exclusively literary model but from Conrad's agonizing relationship with his father, who is symbolically portrayed as his secret sharer. In October 1861 Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski—poet, translator, and failed revolutionary—was arrested by the authorities for trying to overthrow the oppressive Russian government in Poland. Seven months later he was sent into exile in Vologda with his wife and four-year-old son. That grim town, 250 miles northeast of Moscow, had arctic temperatures that fell to thirty degrees below zero in winter. Conrad inevitably shared his parents' grief, poverty, hardship, and sickness. After his mother died of tuberculosis in April 1865, the seven-year-old Conrad was thrown into morbid conjunction with his tormented father, who felt that his arrest and exile were responsible for her death. Apollo hopelessly lamented, "Poor child. [. . .] he looks at the decrepitude of my sadness and who knows if that sight does not make his young heart wrinkled or his awakening soul grizzled" (Meyers 23). In January 1868 the moribund Apollo was allowed to return to Poland. After he died of tuberculosis in Cracow the following year, the grieving orphan led the funeral procession, which turned into a patriotic demonstration by several thousand people. Cut into Apollo's gravestone were the caustic words: "Victim of Muscovite Tyranny." This, in essence, was Conrad's tragic childhood. Though Apollo died when Conrad was only eleven years old, they had established an intense, even harrowing, relationship. Their life was characterized by melancholy unhappiness, [End Page 247] poignant silence, and gloomy despair, and the father had a profound impact on the son. Apollo's legacy to Conrad was the bitterness of shattered hopes, the trauma of defeat, a volatile temperament, an anguished patriotism, and a deep-rooted pessimism. Somewhat puzzled by his own feelings, the captain in Conrad's story allows, "that man had somehow induced a corresponding [psychological and emotional] state in myself," and felt more at ease with himself and "less torn in two when I was with him" (128, 147). Like his connection with his ship at the end of the ordeal, he experiences with Leggatt the perfect communion of "silent knowledge and mute affection" (163). Through this paternal surrogate, Conrad finally achieves peace with his father. Like Apollo, Leggatt (his legacy) doesn't look like a criminal and has committed a serious crime for a higher cause. Apollo rebelled against Russian rule while fighting for Polish freedom; Leggatt has killed a sailor who refused to obey a vital order. In doing so, Leggatt saved the ship and crew during a violent storm at sea. (The gale that almost destroys the Sephora provides a striking contrast to the prevailing calm that impedes the progress of the young captain's ship.) Though the captain believes that Leggatt is not really guilty, he offers "a sufficiently fierce story to make an old judge and a respectable jury sit up a bit" (131). Both men were or soon would be unjustly convicted, expelled from their home and forced into exile. Like Apollo, Leggatt has been "driven off the face of the earth [. . . .] clean out of sight into uncharted regions" (154, 156). And like the harsh conditions of Apollo's exile, on the captain's ship "everything was against us in our secret partnership" (147) The captain, who had "an infinitely miserable time" (150) while hiding Leggatt from the crew and preventing Leggatt's discovery until he could sail close to the shore and give Leggatt his freedom, exonerates the symbolic sharer of Conrad's father's crime...

The pornographics of Japanese negrophilia

In 1974, a bizarre story, ‘Jigoku ni ochita wakamonotachi’ (‘Young Men Fallen into Hell’), appeared in the Japanese homo magazine Adon. It described in pornographic detail the sado-masochistic torture of Japanese men captured and forced to perform in a black circus troupe in American-occupied Japan. ‘Jigoku’ was unremarkable except that, in its stylised ‘pornographics’, it uniquely – for the homo imagination – configured sexual desire as a Japanese–black inter-racial intercourse. This article explores this imagination through a close reading of ‘Jigoku’. It traces a post-war ‘genealogy’ of blackness (Russell 2006), which finds affinity of meaning and value cutting across sub-cultural homo sexual fantasy, through mainstream-to-canon literature and arthouse cinema, across the post-war era. Many of the stereotypes are familiar, but there is a twist. The ‘libidinously liminal’ scenario that sees in ‘Jigoku’ a racial play of Japanese colouring-up and a minstrelsy of sorts upsets cultural narratives of Japan's post-war period. So too does the extremity of the sado-masochistic fantasy present in ‘Jigoku’. In its audacity, the world is expunged of white men. A new moral history is suggested in which the trauma of defeat and occupation can be re-membered and men (re-)masculinised in the pleasurable tortures they suffer at the hands of their black masters.

Dealing with the Trauma of Defeat: The Rhetoric of the Devastation and Rejuvenation of Nature in Ezekiel

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) The troops stole into the city that day as soldiers steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle. (2 Sam 19:3)1 In every war . . . the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty-of being debilitated for some period of time as a consequence of the stresses of military life- were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire.2 When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets hurt. (African proverb)3 In recent scholarship on Ezekiel, three interpretive perspectives have found an increasingly prominent place among the more standard approaches to the book.4 These newer perspectives, like many of the more traditional approaches, attempt to deal in some way with the idiosyncratic and sometimes strange character of the book and its elements.5 One recent interpretive approach emphasizes the cruciality of priestly perspectives and traditions for Ezekiel's identity, language, and actions.6 The prophet's words reflect priestly ideology and terminology similar to the books of Exodus and Leviticus, with emphasis on the holiness of God, the separation of clean and unclean, and the consequences of defilement or pollution. Alongside this priestly perspective, and in light of Ezekiel's apparent setting in the exile, recent scholarship has also suggested the use of trauma studies as a window into Ezekiel's language and theology.7 This way of reading need not make a psychological diagnosis of the ancient Judean prophet himself. Rather, it can foreground the traumatic nature of the experiences of war, destruction, and deportation suffered by Ezekiel and his audience in the early part of the sixth century b.c.e. as a possible explanation for some of the book's strange rhetoric and imagery.8 A third interpretive perspective recently brought to bear on the study of Ezekiel focuses on the depictions of nature in the book, particularly as they relate to ecological hermeneutics.9 This newer trajectory connects in many ways to the long-standing inquiry into the destruction of cities, territory, and agriculture during warfare and the ways such destruction is reflected in biblical and extrabiblical texts.10 Scholarship has not yet taken full account of the combined import of these emerging perspectives and the ways in which they intersect with long-standing elements of Ezekiel study. To that end, this article aims to explore a unique aspect of Ezekiel's rhetoric that may connect not simply to priestly theology, traumatic experience, and ecological hermeneutics, but more specifically to the ways these elements bear on the identity, theology, and even psychology of the defeated and victimized, two experiential categories that characterize the book's presentation of its protagonist and audience. The rhetoric of Ezekiel contains a distinctive use of nature terminology. The devastation and rejuvenation of nature-crops, trees, vines, etc.-is a common motif in the prophetic literature. Ezekiel also contains this motif, but it looks markedly different. The devastation and rejuvenation of nature in Ezekiel have a characteristic emphasis on God's direct, personal, and harsh treatment of the earth and on the land itself as sinful, guilty, and polluted. While a number of studies have noted these features,11 in what follows I attempt to show that Ezekiel's nature terminology takes on a new rhetorical significance when viewed in light of priestly perspectives and the trauma of defeat and destruction. In particular, the following analysis suggests that such language serves as part of Ezekiel's effort to reshape the understanding of those who are victims and thus to deal with, or at least give expression to, the trauma of defeat. Ezekiel adds, it will be argued, two priestly dimensions to the motif of the devastation and rejuvenation of nature in order to interpret the trauma of Babylonian actions against Judah12 as the outworking of divine holiness. First, Ezekiel's descriptions of destructive acts against nature in particular contain an explicit, overarching rationale not seen in other prophetic traditions, namely, that Yahweh undertakes these actions so that Israel and the nations will know or acknowledge his name and identity. …

The Nation as a Community Born of War? Symbolic Strategies and Popular Reception of Public Statues in Late Nineteenth-Century Western European Capitals

The genesis and development of Western European nationalism is widely connected to the notion of the nation as emerged from war. This paper focuses on that cultural combination in terms of the symbols and programmatic rhetoric employed in commemorative rituals surrounding public statues—mainly in honour of military personnel—in late nineteenth-century Paris, London and Berlin. As the experience of a total war lay still ahead, the national heroes elevated on plinths besides existing war memorials were not intended to express personal mourning or to manage bereavement. They were erected as morally charged expressions of specific national ideals. Based on a sample of some twenty public statues in Paris, London and Berlin, this paper identifies three strategies of intentional manipulation: compensating for military defeat by alternative interpretive patterns in France, overwriting the competing claims of different conceptions of nationhood in Prussia-Germany, and legitimising the nation-state on an imperial scale in Britain. Comparison of these three cases substantiates the claim that there were three ‘special paths’ for legitimising the nation through war, each dependent on historical contingencies (such as the trauma of defeat or experiences of victory). In all three cases, however, the experience of war served as a means of justifying national claims to power while omitting all reference to the inner make-up of each nation. At the same time, adequate historical assessment of metropolitan public statuary requires that public reception as well as official symbolism and rhetoric be taken into account. Responses to the statues indicate that the widespread popular appeal of national war myths was far from automatically achieved. Instead of fostering cohesion, the reception of cult figures occasionally came up against political controversies that served as factors limiting national propaganda.

The Trauma of Defeat: Ricarda Huch's Historiography during the Weimar Republic by James M. Skidmore

MLR, I02.2, 2007 57 from theHebrew, and the INRI and Hiob cycles, draw on deeper wells of experienc and contain poems which are moving testimonies to the anguish of abandonmen the empty heavens, the realityof suffering,and thepoet's role inmediation and pro nouncement (Die Stimme spricht). The long shadow of George himself and of th Master's mannerisms lies overmost of Wolfskehl's poetry, especially the Mittelmeer Zyklus. In those terms itoftenmakes claims togreatness thatcannot be sustained. TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ROGER PAULI] TheTrauma of Defeat:RicardaHuch's Historiography during the Weimar Republic.By JAMES M. SKIDMORE. (Canadian Studies inGerman Language and Literature, 50) Bern: Peter Lang. 2005. 215 pp. SwF 67; ?30.20; &46.20. ISBN 978-3 03910-760-5. Ricarda Huch's fame rests above all on her reputation as the best-known German woman writer of her day and a pioneer ofwomen's university education, and on her eloquent resignation from thePrussian Academy ofArts in I933. Her actual works, on the other hand, although ground-breaking, have remained in the shadows. She has been leftout ofmany studies of Weimar and modernist literature as herwritings do not fully fitany established literarypattern of the times; her ambivalent portrayal ofwomen has excluded her from the feminist canon. A fulledition of her correspon dence (current collections are patchy and, in some cases, problematic) and a scholarly study of her aeuvre are both overdue. Skidmore addresses thisdeficitwith awelcome emphasis onHuch's historiography, interpreting the changed accents of herwriting in the I920S as responses to contem porary events.Huch, he argues, believed thatdivision and decline had beset Germany since thedisintegration of themedieval world and had onlyworsened since i87 I, but itwas Germany's collapse in thewar and atVersailles that stirred her to construct an alternative national identitybymeans of positive figures from thepast. Skidmore firstanalyses her contradictory response to the First World War and its aftermath in her autobiographical and literary texts; he then turns to her studies Die Roman tik (I899-I902) and Entpersonlichung (I921) to establish comparisons between her thought before and after thewar. His examination of historical texts in the Weimar period concentrates on her idealization of theMiddle Ages (Deutsche Geschichte, i: Romisches Reich Deutscher Nation) and of nineteenth-century figureswho resisted general trends: Bakunin, Stein, and themarginal 'conservative revolutionaries' of I848. Two finalchapters locateHuch's historical thought in relation to thatof others, by comparison first with Nietzsche's concept of 'monumental' history, and thenwith the contemporary ideas ofMeinecke, Lukacs, and Kantorowicz. This is a valuable study, as Huch's historical writings have so far been under estimated and under-researched. By suggesting external causes forHuch's shifted emphases after I9 I8, itsuccessfully moves away from theone-track concentration on internal development (and on her turbulent personal life)which has often prevented scholarship from seeing her inwider contexts. It still leaves scope, however, for a fuller study ofHuch's historiography; itwould benefit on occasion from a sharper focus, and from correcting some inaccuracies and omissions, not least in the index and bibliography. The disproportionately brief discussion ofHuch's historical texts would be enriched by sustained comparison with other treatments of historical ma terial such as Der grofleKrieg inDeutschland, Wallenstein, and the later volumes of Deutsche Geschichte. Huch's view of Ranke could be treatedmore critically, and the comparisons with Meinecke and Kantorowicz could concentrate more precisely on individual texts, at the expense, ifnecessary, of the section on Lukacs, which 572 Reviews establishes hardly any common ground with Huch's ideas. None the less, this is a persuasively argued study of hitherto unmapped territory,and a useful contribution to the contextualization which Huch has been owed forsome time. THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD STEFFAN DAVIES On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. By ERIC L. SANTNER. Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press. 2oo6. XXii+ 2 I9pp. $20; ? I3. ISBN 978 0-226-73 503-0. Eric Santner's new book develops lines of thought pursued inhis study On thePsy chotheologyofEveryday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200I) and more recently in his contribution to The Neighbor: Three Inquiries inPolitical Theology, co-edited with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2oo6). The basic intuition at the heart of this 'psychotheology', he...

Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of the Vietnam War

After a latency period, the American cinema is processing the trauma of defeat in the Vietnam War. In these films, defeat is repressed but the defeated male is present. Central to the texts is a profound loss of self, incoherence at the gendered core of masculine identity, the failure to conform to the heteronormative mythical model, loss of traditional affiliations (representability of the social order, fatherhood, brotherhood), tortured body, and shattering of sexuality. All three models of post-traumatic masculinity subvert the identification between masculinity, patriarchy, and nationalism.

Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (review)

Reviewed by: Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies ed. by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn Julie M. Weise Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies. Edited by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. While it has become commonplace to study the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico in a “borderlands” framework, the map of these borderlands has remained remarkably stable. In Look Away! more than twenty literature and humanities scholars nudge the zone of cultural overlap eastward in an ambitious and wide-ranging collection of essays that challenges conventions of region and nation in the U.S. South and Latin America. The essays, which range in time period from the mid-nineteenth to late-twentieth centuries, apply comparative and transnational frameworks to highlight similarities and connections among the histories and literary subjectivities of two supposedly-disparate regions. In so doing, the contributors use Latin America as a counterpoint through which to evaluate the promises and problems of utilizing postcolonial theory in historical and literary analyses of the U.S. South. The Introduction, “Uncanny Hybridities,” sets forth a framework for interpreting the history and literature of the U.S. South through the lens of postcoloniality. The editors suggest that the Civil War could be viewed not as a rupture in the region’s history, but rather as merely one more step in Northern capitalists’ attempts to reap the economic benefits of the South’s black labor force and natural resources (3). In this sense, they expand earlier arguments by C. Vann Woodward to argue that the South has much in common with Latin America. Following the lead of theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rey Chow, they contend that studying the South as both conqueror and conquered, both U.S. self and U.S. other, highlights the need to move beyond binaries of “colonizer” and “colonized” in postcolonial studies. Thus, the globalization of Southern studies, more so than the globalization of Latin American studies, becomes the collection’s main goal. Part one, “The U.S. South and the Caribbean,” includes seven essays which seek to remap the U.S. South as part of the Caribbean, the Black Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico (22). For example, George B. Handley’s “A New World Poetics of Oblivion” calls for scholars to adopt a new region of analysis, “Plantation America.” Utilizing a comparative framework, Handley shows that the histories writers struggle in vain to recover from oblivion — histories of slavery and indigenousness which are often prominent in national narratives — are actually hemispheric, not national, in their resonance. Focusing on connections between the U.S. South and the Caribbean, Karen Silvia Gruesz and Gustavo Pérez Firmat focus on the intertwined processes of Southern and Latin American identity formation among Mexican and Cuban exiles in 19th-century New Orleans, and a “Carolina Cuban” writer in the 1990s, respectively. The five essays in the second section, “Rethinking Race and Region,” explore the limits and possibilities of utilizing a transnational, postcolonial framework for investigating race and identity formation in the U.S. South. For example, Scott Romine cautions that a postcolonial framework should not enable scholars to equate white Southerners with people of color in Asia and Africa, but finds it useful in investigating Southern identities born of trauma. Richard King’s essay re-conceives of Richard Wright in his later years as an intellectual not just of the U.S. South, but of the global black diaspora. Because of his importance to Latin American writers, William Faulkner becomes a critical site of literary investigation into U.S. South-Latin American connections in Part Three, “William Faulkner and Latin America.” The six essays in this section reveal Faulkner to be a multivalent influence on Latin American writers. Faulkner at once has enjoyed the privilege of whiteness and written through the trauma of defeat; his voice has both fortified and dominated the postcolonial voices of the Latin American writers who have come under his influence. For example, Helen Oakley shows how the U.S. government exploited Faulkner’s resonance with Latin American writers to give moral authority to the United States’ Cold War agenda in...

Vietnam syndrome: impact on US foreign policy

List of Tables - List of Figures - Acknowledgements - Introduction - PART 1: THE TRAUMA OF DEFEAT - The Shaping of a Syndrome - PART 2: THE HISTORY - Vietnam: The Turbulent Past - The United States: The Route to Hegemony - PART 3: THE VIETNAM WAR - Vietnam: A War at Home - United States: a War Abroad - PART 4: IMPACT ON US FOREIGN POLICY - Options and Issues - Appendices - Notes - Bibliography - Index

La légende du «coup de poignard» dans les manuels scolaires allemands des années 1920

The myth of the "stab in the back" in the German textbooks of the 1920s, Pierre Jardin. Faced with the trauma of defeat, most of German public opinion took refuge in the myth of the "stab in the back". The phenomenon is well known, but its weight is not always measured correctly. This analysis of the history textbooks in use in the 1920s shows the mechanisms and makes it possible to assess their potential effects.