Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Dehexing Postwar West Balkan Masculinities: The Case Of Bosnia, Croatia, And Serbia, 1998 To 2015, Marko Dumančić

History Faculty Publications

Focusing on Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, this article examines film and music that emerged in the region since the end of the Yugoslav Wars of Succession. We analyze how the uncertainties of the postwar era facilitated a dynamic field of cultural contestation in which the music and film industries simultaneously challenge and affirm normative masculine sociocultural roles. Although traditional norms have not lost their primacy in public life, we emphasize the fact that attitudes toward masculinity have, in general, become increasingly ambiguous and multivalent. While local sociological studies accurately observe that violence and intolerance constitute central traits for the majority …

Paper Rights: The Emergence Of Documentary Identities In Post-Colonial India, 1950–67, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

This essay contextualises the emergence of a document regime which regulated routine travel through the deployment of the India–Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme in 1952. It suggests that such travel documents were useful for the new Indian state to delineate citizenship and the nationality of migrants and individual travellers from Pakistan. The bureaucratic and legal mediations under the Scheme helped the Indian state to frame itself before its new citizens as the sole certifier of some of their rights as Indians. In contrast, applicants for these documents viewed them as utilitarian, meant to facilitate their travel across the new borders. …

Heroes Of Berlin Wall Struggle, William D. Bowman

History Faculty Publications

When the Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, on Nov. 9, 1989, symbolically signaling the end of the Cold War, it was no surprise that many credited President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for bringing it down.

But the true heroes behind the fall of the Berlin Wall are those Eastern Europeans whose protests and political pressure started chipping away at the wall years before. East German citizens from a variety of political backgrounds and occupations risked their freedom in protests against communist policies and one-party rule in what they called the "peaceful revolution." [excerpt]

Is Russia A Block Of Ice Floating Back Into The 16th Century, Marko Dumančić

History Faculty Publications

Editorial published in The Moscow Times and The Huffington Post

Empire's Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, And The Decline Of The British World, 1869-1967 (Book Review), Christopher Bischof

History Faculty Publications

Empire’s Children is far from the now well-worn tale of imperial decline. It locates the shifting fortunes of the child emigration movement at the heart of the reconfiguration of identities, political economies, and nationalisms in Britain, Canada, Australia, and Rhodesia. Though Britons eventually had to face the diminishing importance of Britishness as either a cultural or racial ideal in the eyes of even their settler colonies, on the whole the story of the child emigration movement’s shifting fortunes testifies to the malleability and resilience of Britishness.

An Unconventional Challenge To Apartheid: The Ivorian Dialogue Diplomacy With South Africa, 1960-1978, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

This article focuses on the dialogue diplomacy that Ivorian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny initiated in the late 1960s to engage apartheid South Africa. Although contemporary observers and subsequent scholars (have) derided the scheme as an act of acquiescence and even betrayal, I argue that Ivory Coast's dialogue diplomacy was neither accommodationist nor dependent on the prodding of neocolonial powers such as France. A Pan-Africanist extension of the home-grown neotraditional practice of Dialogue ivoirienne, the diplomatic initiative never got the backing of other African states. A close analysis of the Ivory Coast's maneuvers in the context of an increasing radicalization of …

The Soviet State As Imperial Scavenger: "Catch Up And Surpass" In The Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950-1960, Austin Jersild

History Faculty Publications

THE BIGGEST PRIZE SOUGHT by the Soviet Union in its newly acquired postwar territory was the bomb itself—or initially the defense‐related industries, research specialists, and scientists in the German zone deemed useful to achieving this goal.1 The Soviets similarly made arrangements to benefit from uranium deposits in Jáchymov, Czechoslovakia, from the fall of 1945.2 The effort to develop the bomb, however, was merely the most visible expression of the Soviet state at work in what would eventually become the socialist bloc. The Soviet technical and managerial elite routinely engaged in a similar search for useful forms of industrial …

Rebirth Of A Strategic Continent?: Problematizing Africa As A Geostrategic Zone, Abou B. Bamba

History Faculty Publications

At a time when the U.S. Department of Defense is putting the finishing touches to the establishment of a military command for Africa (known as AFRICOM) and the People’s Republic of China’s influence on the continent seems to be on the rise, a detour through the history of America’s past geographical imaginations of Africa appears as a necessity. This is especially crucial since the current constructions of the African continent as a strategic place in both policy and military circles seems to echo the geodiscursive representations of Africa during the Second World War. In fact, it was in the early …

The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War In The Communist World, Austin Jersild

History Faculty Publications

A reader of both Russian and Chinese, Lorenz M. Lüthi provides fascinating depth and detail to an unstable Sino-Soviet alliance shaped by strong and ambitious personalities, nationalist sensitivities, cultural misunderstandings, and the perhaps inevitable clash between two societies at very different stages in “socialist” history.

Race, Nation, And Religion In The Americas, Edited By Henry Goldschmidt And Elizabeth Mcalister, R. Bryan Bademan

History Faculty Publications

Book review by R. Bryan Bademan.

Goldschmidt, Henry and Elizabeth McAlister, eds. Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

ISBN 978-0195149197

The Creative Intelligentsia And The Rise Of Official Russocentrism Under Stalin, David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

In the mid-to-late 1930s, Soviet society witnessed a major ideological about-face as party propaganda and mass culture assumed an increasingly patriotic, Russo-centric orientation. Heroes, imagery, and legends from the Russian national past were deployed to bolster the legitimacy of the Soviet state and provide a complement to the reigning Marxist-Leninist ideology, then in a trend threatening to eclipse the stress on revolutionary class consciousness that had characterized the Soviet experiment for nearly two decades.

This shift away from proletarian internationalism toward Russo-centric etatism has been a source of considerable scholarly controversy. Some have linked this phenomenon to nationalist sympathies within …

Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, And Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Book Review), David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

The Kremlin tête-à-tête and the iconoclastic revival of the Russian Orthodox Church that followed have long intrigued those writing about ideological change in the USSR under Stalin. Many believe that the concessions to the church were an exigency of war designed to increase the party’s ability to rally support from among even the most reluctant members of Soviet society. Others consider the revival of the church to have been part of a more thoroughgoing Russiªcation of the USSR in the mid- to late 1930s that rehabilitated aspects of the Russian national past for mobilizational purposes well before 1941. In Stalin’s …

Stalin As Symbol: A Case Study Of The Cult Of Personality And Its Construction, David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

Although the cult of personality certainly owed something to Stalin’s affinity for self-aggrandisement, modern social science literature suggests that it was designed to perform an entirely different ideological function. Personality cults promoting charismatic leadership are typically found in developing societies where ruling cliques aspire to cultivate a sense of popular legitimacy.² Scholars since Max Weber have observed that charismatic leadership plays a particularly crucial role in societies that are either poorly integrated or lack regularised administrative institutions. In such situations, loyalty to an inspiring leader can induce even the most fragmented polities to acknowledge the authority of the central …

Stalin's Secret Pogrom:The Postwar Inquisition Of The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Book Review), David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

Stalin’s Secret Pogrom is a fascinating volume that presents many challenges as a historical source. Much of the information about the JAC and its associates contained in the transcript ought to be treated with great caution. Not only were the charges trumped-up, but the defendants were tortured, and their testimony was coerced. Nor should the transcript itself be studied as an orchestrated spectacle of Stalinist propaganda, inasmuch as the trial was held in secret and lacked much of the hyperbole characteristic of the show trials of the 1930s. Instead, the transcript testiªes to the bravery of many of the defendants, …

Chinese Foreign Policy During The Cultural Revolution (Book Review), Thomas D. Curran Ph.D.

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Thomas D. Curran.

Barnouin, Barbara and Yu Changgen.Chinese Foreign Policy during the Cultural Revolution. London: Kegan Paul International, 1998. ISBN 0-7103-0580-X

Proletarian Internationalism, “Soviet Patriotism” And The Rise Of Russocentric Etatism During The Stalinist 1930s, David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sostavlenie I Publikatsiia Ofitsial'noi Biografii Vozhdia--Katekhizisa Stalinizma, David Brandenberger

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Soviet History, Daniel T. Orlovsky

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.